Roman de la brèche : Sabri Louatah’s 404 as a Separatist Dystopia and a Fiction of Independence

Sabri Louatah’s Citation2019 novel 404 envisions a dystopia where nationalist and Islamophobic fears materialize, revealing fractures created by France’s colonial amnesia regarding Algeria. The novel imagines “un pays qui se creuse dans le pays,” a Franco-Algerian ethnostate in rural France’s center claiming independence from “une France blanche et gracieuse” that denies colonization’s legacy. This article argues that 404 exposes how France’s deliberate forgetting of colonial history creates conditions for the extremism and separatism the Republic opposes. It rewrites spatial and political relationships between younger Franco-Algerians and the French Republic, underscoring ongoing identitarian divisions in postcolonial France. The novel’s central metaphor of technological erasure, embodied by the ephemeral 404 platform, parallels deliberate forgetting of the colonial past while enabling fabricated historical narratives—fictions of independence establishing a new regime. 404 satirizes contemporary political discourse around communitarianism while questioning how money and rhetoric cynically influence targeted groups toward extremism. The breach undermining Franco-Algerian history moves from allegorical to concrete, leading to separatism—another fiction of independence—that twenty-first-century technologies and identity narratives encourage and accelerate.