Yacine Benhalima

Yacine is researching the 'Free French' in the South Pacific and their relations during the Second World War.

Qualifications

MA in History, EHESS (Paris, France), 2020
Dissertation : “Du lagon au désert: le Bataillon du Pacifique dans la Seconde Guerre Mondiale (1940-1946)”

Double BA in History and Modern Literature, Paris-Est Créteil University (Créteil, France), 2018

Graduated from high school at the Lycée Lyautey (French high school) of Casablanca, Morocco, 2015

Profile

After completing a master’s degree at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS, in Paris, France) where he wrote a dissertation on the Pacific Battalion, a unit of the Free French Forces whose volunteers came from French Polynesia and New Caledonia, Yacine decided to keep working on these two French territories of the South Pacific during World War Two by focusing this time on how people lived and led the war there, under general de Gaulle’s authority.

Yacine’s research aims to study what it meant to be a “Free French” in the South Pacific, what kind of relations these people entertained with the Americans, the Australians and the New Zealanders as well as with the central institutions of Free France (in London from 1940 to 1943, then in Algiers), and how the Second World War was a major turning point in these territories’ history.

Supervisors

Publications

Benhalima, Yacine, Le Bataillon du Pacifique, 1940 – 1946, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2021

Yacine Benhalima, « La “neutralité partiale”. Félix Broche et le ralliement des Établissements Français d’Océanie à la France Libre (septembre 1940) », Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains, 291-3, 2023, p. 69‑89, doi.org/10.3917/gmcc.291.0069