Presidential: how the memory of the Pieds-noirs resurfaces in the campaign

Europe 1 with AFP 4:46 p.m., March 18, 2022

The 60th anniversary of the Evian Accords brings back to life in the presidential campaign the memory of the Pieds-noirs still cultivated among the returnees.

But even on the far right, where it still finds refuge, it is withering.

By refusing to "flagellate in front of Algeria" and by denouncing the choice of March 19 to commemorate the end of the war, the candidate RN Marine Le Pen chooses without surprise to wink at the French repatriated from Algeria, intimately linked to the history of his party co-founded by supporters of the OAS, a clandestine organization opposed to Algerian independence.

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A speech against "repentance" declaimed by Zemmour

"This date (...) was not the end of the Algerian war, because there were tens of thousands of harkis who were savagely murdered" thereafter, criticizes Marine Le Pen.

Mayors of RN municipalities or close to the RN have already chosen to rename their streets "March 19, 1962".

This speech against "repentance" is also regularly declaimed by Eric Zemmour, from a family of French Jews from Algeria.

For researcher Emmanuelle Comtat, author of a thesis on the Pieds-noirs and politics, "Marine Le Pen is less interested today in those who were marked by the end of the empire than in the losers of the globalization. As for Eric Zemmour, he exploits this past to show that cohabitation between different groups is not possible".

In Perpignan, where, like everywhere in the Midi, there is a large Pied-noir community and their descendants, Mayor RN Louis Aliot will inaugurate an exhibition on Saturday paying tribute to the Pied-noir and Harki victims.

"A story that will die out", warns Louis Aliot

In total, 800,000 Europeans left Algeria after the Evian agreements.

Some argue that they and their descendants today represent between two and three million French people.

A number impossible to verify.

"In a city like mine, it matters," says Louis Aliot, whose mother was repatriated.

Several controversial monuments were erected under the mandates of his right-wing predecessors.

However, the elected official agrees: the Pieds-noirs vote "counts less than it counted".

"The generations who have experienced this tragedy are fewer and fewer. It's a story that will die out," laments Louis Aliot.

President of the Algerianist circle, an association which intends to "safeguard and defend the culture and the memory of the French in Algeria", Suzy Simon-Nicaise judges that "the elected officials on the right and in the center are nevertheless attentive to the memory of the French in Algeria ".

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Four candidates answered a questionnaire on the Pieds-noirs

Via her association, the one who was deputy to the former LR mayor of Perpignan, Jean-Marc Pujol, sent a questionnaire to the presidential candidates.

Four answered him.

All right or far right: Valérie Pécresse, Marine Le Pen, Eric Zemmour and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan.

On the other hand, she castigates Emmanuel Macron, whose comments she has still not made on colonization as a "crime against humanity" during the 2017 campaign.

On January 26, she had chosen not to come to the Elysée where the Head of State, pursuing his project of memorial reconciliation, had recognized the "massacre" of the shooting in the rue d'Isly in Algiers, in which dozens of supporters of French Algeria were killed by the army on March 26, 1962, seven days after the ceasefire came into effect.

She denounces the "at the same time" of Emmanuel Macron who will preside over a ceremony on Saturday at the Elysée for the 60th anniversary of the Evian agreements.

Emmanuel Macron pushed a text on the recognition of harkis

"My parents stopped voting in 1962, they never registered on the electoral lists", recalls the deputy (UDI) of New Caledonia Philippe Gomès, whose family fled Algeria.

But this one is grateful to Emmanuel Macron for having put "words on things on which words have never been put" and pushed a text for the recognition and repair of harkis.

"The generation that is now disappearing was extremely marked by decolonization. Some who had experienced the shock of repatriation were also more intolerant of immigration," observes Emmanuelle Comtat.

But the pied-noir vote "never existed", "it was very diverse like that of their children", adds the researcher.

According to her, it is "a memory of the loss that has been transmitted".

Not a political legacy.