Claudine Chaulet

Claudine Chaulet (in Arabic: كلودين شولي), born Claudine Guillot in Longeau, France on April 21, 1931 and died on October 29, 2015 in Algiers, Algeria, is an Algerian personality of French origin, former moudjahida of the Algerian Revolution and sociologist director of the National Center for Research in Economics and Rural Sociology. Her husband was Pierre Chaulet.

Claudine Chaulet is the daughter of a gendarmerie officer and a teacher, she lived, as a child, in 1939, the exodus to the south of France. "I still don't really know why reasonable people took to the roads those days, but I know very well, even now, that that's where my uprooting, my irremediable tearing away from the land and memories, from home, from life, dates from," we read in the book written with Pierre Chaulet, Le Choix de l'Algérie, published by Barzakh in 2012.

The first contact with Algeria took place in 1942, in Oran, where her father had been appointed. She stayed there until 1944, the year when, she notes, "the situation improved: we found our high school again, the Jewish comrades who had been expelled by Vichy returned."

After a short return to France, the family returned to Algeria in 1946. At the Faculty of Letters in Algiers, the young woman's professor was the very charismatic André Mandouze, an outspoken resistance fighter, an early defender of Algerian independence, a signatory of the "Manifesto of the 121" (a text signed in 1960 by French intellectuals who denounced the war), who would end up being expelled from Algeria by the colonial authorities.

An exhilarating period during which she participated in the creation of the magazine Consciences algériennes. It was again at André Mandouze's, on December 21, 1954, a few weeks after the start of the war of independence on November 1, 1954, that she met Pierre Chaulet, a medical intern, a Catholic very involved in social action, in contact with the separatists. That day, the emblematic Chaulet couple was formed. The marriage was sealed on September 12, 1955, at the church of Hussein-Dey, held by the charismatic Father Jean Scotto.

The couple, strongly influenced by this social Catholicism, a minority in the Church, would go all the way with their commitment. In September 1955, Abane Ramdane, leader of the National Liberation Front (FLN), asked them "the question of trust": "'Can the organization count on you?' We answered together and separately 'yes'", they recount.

Claudine and Pierre Chaulet had decided: there was no "Algerian problem", there was a "problem posed by the presence of France in Algeria". They decided to get involved "because of what had to be changed, radically: the contempt and humiliation of man, the shanty towns of Algiers".

Claudine Chaulet, already involved in student union action, says she understood that "November 1st was an extraordinary event that would finally give meaning to the struggles". "So it was quite natural that [she] got involved alongside Pierre." She campaigned, conveyed leaflets, and exfiltrated wanted activists. She carried, hidden in her baby's diapers, the text of the "Soummam platform" of 1956, which would have great importance in the history of the Algerian revolution.

On February 27, 1957, Pierre Chaulet was arrested by the police of the Territorial Surveillance Directorate (DST). She would accomplish, alone, the delicate mission of evacuating Abane Ramdane, while Algiers was surrounded by paratroopers. This would be followed by exile and a fight that continued from Tunis.

At independence, while her husband worked in the health sector, Claudine Chaulet joined the National Institute for Agronomic Research, then worked as a teacher at the Institute of Sociology and as a researcher at the Center for Applied Economics Research.

The couple was forced, in the mid-1990s, in a context of violence in Algeria, into a new exile of a few years. Of European origin, of French culture, Claudine and Pierre Chaulet considered themselves fully Algerian. Their commitment earned them great respect in the country.