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Emmanuel Macron is the first French president to come to terms with the painful and long-suppressed history of the Algerian war.
To this day, this taboo has repercussions in French society, because seven million French people have a direct relationship with Algeria, one in ten.
Macron, born in 1977 after Algeria's independence, commissioned the historian Benjamin Stora to write a report on the subject.
His book “Les passions douloureuses” (“Painful Passions”) is a reckoning with repression and an appeal to work on a common narration of the story that includes all groups.
WORLD:
Monsieur Stora, when the presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron in 2017 during his election campaign during a visit to Algiers described colonization as a crime against humanity, an outcry went through France.
what happened there?
Benjamin Stora:
I found that extremely bold.
Macron has shaken a taboo in French history.
Here in France you can compare the Algerian war with a family secret that everyone knows but that nobody talks about.
For the French, colonization brought civilization and education to the people of Algeria, but for decades they did not want to hear about torture and massacres.
Never before had a candidate raised such sensitive and serious issues during the election campaign as the “Battle of Algiers”, the kidnappings of the freedom fighters, the many disappeared with whom we historians have long been concerned.
It was daring and radical to use this term, also because it has legal consequences: crimes against humanity do not become statute-barred.
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WORLD:
Did you think at the time that that would cost Macron the election?
Stora:
I was sure of that.
That this was not the case shows how French society has changed in the meantime.
Even with the Rassemblement National, only very few praise the colonization.
The young generation in France quite naturally condemns slavery and the colonial system.
In fact, I have a feeling that one is tired of this secret.
Those who grow old, who have death in mind, want to get rid of what burdens them.
General Jacques Massu confessed to what he had done shortly before his death in 2002
(he was responsible for mass shootings and torture in Algeria, Paris covered him; the editor)
.
40 years ago that was still impossible.
At some point you just get tired of it.
Today there is a clear need to pass the story on to future generations.
Dealing with this painful past has become more relaxed.
WORLD:
Do you basically agree with Macron in his analysis, were they crimes against humanity?
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Stora:
To characterize 132 years of colonial history, the term struck me as exaggerated.
There were war crimes and crimes against humanity during the conquest of Algeria in the 19th century, no question about it.
But the history of colonization is a complex matter.
The French have not carried out massacres for less than a century.
The conquest between 1832 and 1871 was terribly brutal.
But then Algeria was administratively part of France.
For example, Algerian nationalists went to school and internalized the principles of the French Revolution in the School of the Republic in order to then make their own revolution.
WORLD:
How was your report received in France?
Stora:
It's the fourth report I've written for a government.
When Macron asked me to do this, I thought: another piece of paper for the drawer.
I was totally surprised that this report received so much attention and interest.
France is now clearly ripe to come to terms with the history that it has been repressed.
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WORLD:
What do you advise the President?
Stora:
First and foremost for me is the recognition of the torture and murder of lawyer and independence activist Ali Boumeljel, simply because his son, who recently passed away, was my friend.
Acknowledging this guilt and bringing this taboo to light is important.
It would mean talking about everything else: the fate of the civilian population, torture, murders, bombs, people who disappeared and whose bodies never showed up.
A second concern is the opening of the archives.
Thirdly, I would like a “Truth and Remembrance” commission which, on the one hand, collects eyewitness reports and, on the other hand, should follow up on the report's demands.
WORLD:
How was this chapter of French history treated in school books?
Stora:
The subject was taboo.
A whole generation of French people born in the mid-1960s and early 1970s didn't even go through this in school.
It was not until the beginning of 2000 that the Algerian war was discussed in school books, wedged between two chapters, until ten years later a dedicated one was dedicated to it.
But the question of why there was the Algerian war has not been clarified.
The process of conquest during the 19th century is still missing from French history books today.
WORLD:
The suppressed history is still a burden on French society.
Why is it so painful, why is it different from other former colonies?
Stora:
There are three reasons for that.
First, Algeria was not a colony but part of France; it was part of the republic like the Savoy or Corsica.
In every village in Algeria there was a town hall, opposite the school, a bandstand, avenues of plane trees.
But the residents did not have citizenship, they were second class citizens.
Immigrants from Spain and Italy had them, the Jews got them in 1870, but not the majority of the Muslim population.
You could vote for the first time after World War II.
It's easy to imagine what kind of resentment that sparked.
Third, Algeria was of great geopolitical importance: France's borders ended in Mali until 1962.
In the mid-1950s, oil and gas production began in the Sahara, after which the world's largest desert was used for nuclear tests.
For French politicians, even for the left, the independence of Algeria was unthinkable and inconceivable.
They did not consider negotiating with the Algerian independence fighters.
That explains the tremendous severity of this war.
WORLD:
Which explains why there was even a military coup against the then President Charles de Gaulle.
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Stora:
Right.
The independence of Algeria meant giving up part of France.
That triggered a serious nationalist crisis.
At that time, the French did not experience decolonization as a turnaround.
They only agreed to de Gaulle's referendum because they wanted the French soldiers to come home.
WORLD:
Until the turn of the millennium, France spoke of "the events".
It was not until 1999 that the Algerian war was recognized as such.
How was that possible?
Stora:
I am ruthless with my view of France's president: from Charles de Gaulle to Valéry Giscard d'Estaing to François Mitterrand, there was not a single point of self-criticism.
It was Jacques Chirac who dared to address the painful chapters of history and to lift the lid.
He faced the annihilation of the Jews, slavery and the colonial past.
With Nicolas Sarkozy it went back again.
François Hollande felt his way cautiously.
Only 60 years later does a young president have the courage to face the past.
But when you've lost that much time, you pay for it.
The repressed always returns, often in a very brutal way.
These taboos had an impact on society, on French youth.
Many of the problems facing France today, the fragmentation of society, are related to this.
WORLD:
In your book you write that apologies and remorse have historically been of no use and you give a few examples.
There is a counterexample: Willy Brandt's kneeling in Warsaw.
Why don't you suggest that France officially apologize to Algeria?
Stora:
You can't compare that.
In Germany there was consensus about the genocide of the Jews, and German society has done a colossal coming to terms with it.
There was the Nuremberg Trials, nothing was concealed in the school books.
We missed all of that.
We lost an awful lot of time in France.
Macron has made a clear change of course and is expecting the French for the first time to face this story and stand by it.
That is enormous, but only the beginning of a process.
WORLD:
That means it's too early to make excuses?
Stora:
In any case, you can't skip any stages.
In the end, why not, an apology may be given, but it is impossible to begin with.
The question of repentance triggers passionate debates that ensure that people no longer talk about what happened: the torture and murder of Boumeljel;
the school books in which the process of colonization does not exist;
the nuclear tests in the Algerian desert;
the theft of the archives.
None of this is ever talked about.
Many French are only now discovering all this because they previously had ideological blinkers on and only argued about whether or not to apologize.