The maquis: the place of the forest in the nationalist movement

Based on the postulate that a word rarely designates a single reality and that its meaning depends on the context in which it is used the term maquis is a good illustration of this. Indeed in the polysemic treatment of this term we are marked by its referential plasticity. Sometimes it is perceived as an event or a time in the sense that it can easily be assimilated to the period of nationalism in the case of Cameroon in particular and what happened there and sometimes as a place. This last conception suggests even more a multitude of semantic contents that must govern the decoding. At the observation when one apprehends the scrubland as a geographical space it indicates a bushy ground a very dense shrub formation of Mediterranean region. But very quickly this vision in the botanical field is exceeded when this vegetable formation is transformed into a territory of combat. In this last case the maquis means here the place where the nationalist fighters hide an island of resistance against an invader.