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Two series of texts by the author from Lorraine Louis Bertrand (1866-1941) throw a unique light on the impact of 1870-1871 events. His ‘African novels' (1899-1904), arising from a decade spent in Algeria between 1891 and 1900 during which he was to play a key role both in the launch of a French-language Algerian literature and in the legitimization process of French colonisation by means of the concepts of ‘Latin Africa' and a ‘neo-French' nation. This non-metropolitan perspective, which treated the Algerian Muslim as an implacable enemy, reinforced the ambiguous view of Germany revealed by the works of the period 1925-1939. The primary stress in these works is on the claim that his generation is the ‘fruit of the defeat' of 1870, and that his hero ‘like all those of his age […] had been raised with the idea of revenge'. Through a detailed diagnosis of a key moment in his upbringing, his autobiography (Une destinée) analyses the collective intellectual and cultural currents of the years 1870-1914 to show that the real danger faced by the country came less from these hereditary ‘external' enemies than from Republican France itself, its decadence and lack of any ‘awareness of the enemy' (title of a collection published in 1917, Le sens de l'ennemi). We investigate how, in his role as ‘novelist and archaeologist', Bertrand perceived the neo-French of Algeria (seen as Latin, hence Catholic) as a model of ‘energy and sometimes heroism, of physical, intellectual, national and social regeneration' that could halt the decline of a post-1870 France seen as weakened and defeatist.