In the summer, the imagination shines in France and the shade acquires different shapes in the light of the sun, but some French people may only see their shadows when the summer days are long and scorching.
After the long summer day, the warm evenings come under the clear blue sky, and as the shadows disappear in the evening, its traces remain, but it remains a taboo that only a few talk about.
The French shadow - according to the description of the report of the British magazine The Critic - is Algeria and an undeclared, uninterrupted and unending war that tied the French for decades to a place most of them do not know. The war gave France the Fifth Republic and the framework of its government today, and unless this war ends, the Republic cannot Never move forward, and the success of Emmanuel Macron's presidency depends on it, as the cycle of social unrest and politically polarized elections in France has its roots in the colonial era of Algeria.
James Noyes says in the report that on the evening of his re-election Macron said "I will be president of all of us", but he was supported by only 38% of the electorate, making him the least supported president in the "Fifth Republic", and many of his votes came from urban areas, while Far-right candidate Marine Le Pen voted from the countryside, favored by white-collar (office workers) and blue-collar (manual workers), something we find similar patterns in many countries and other political contexts, and reflected in the June legislative elections. These divisions echoed last June, as Le Pen's National Rally and Jean-Luc Melenchon's left-wing coalition won enough votes to deny Macron a majority in the National Assembly.
These divisions are familiar enough to be cliched, yet hidden in their banality a secret history unique to each context, including the taboos and truth that make each "tribe" different from the other, as Noyes puts it.
French "tribe"
The writer says that France is a closed “tribe” linked to its mysterious inner logic, completely impenetrable to outsiders, and often mysterious even to the French themselves, this logic moves in slow and seasonal cycles, during the long summer months a period of calm and apparent contentment hangs over the cities Drugged and lively countryside, followed by sudden shocking mass violence in winter when farmers strike and set fire to piles of rubber tires on main roads, yellow jackets appear in Paris and begin to pull curbstones, they are beaten by police, and in the suburbs children set cars on fire Then all of a sudden it all came to an end and spring came again.
The elections in France and the usual ritual of giving votes to the extreme right is a political continuation of this cycle, and most people believe that Le Pen will never be president exactly, as they know that the yellow vests will never succeed in storming Macron’s palace and turning it into the new Bastille prison, but within the framework of common sense In the French interior, this impossibility does not matter, the symbolism of the explosion is sufficient and necessary for the quiet summer months.
Violence using the words of the French historian René Girard (1923-2015) is a respite, a short moment of intense abuse that brings the tribe together around its unfathomable purpose, for peace to be possible a sacrifice must be made, and thus the French Republic became a scapegoat for the survival of France , according to the author.
This is the mystery that lies at the heart of the French paradox, a country both revolutionary and very conservative, both ungoverned and technocratic, a country in which the Republic has not really taken root, and therefore has had to preserve itself in it, the symbolism of the administrative system, it is a country of equality and not integration, according to the author.
The result - as the report sees it - is as follows: In 2017, Macron said that by the end of his first term there would be no other reason to vote for extremism. In 3 of the past 5 elections, and it is possible to see the same thing happen in 5 years between Macron's successor and Marion Marine Le Pen (granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the National Front and niece of Marine Le Pen)
From the point of view of history, this cycle of performance and paradox cannot be broken, because its cause has not really been identified, it is a taboo, a secret history of the long struggle for the soul of France between republicanism and nationalism marked by more than a century of dark landmarks - the Dreyfus Affair and the Vichy French government ( pro-Nazis at the time of World War II) and the Battle of Dien Bien Phu (in which France surrendered to the Vietnam Liberation Union in 1954) which came to an end in Algeria.
Algeria and France
When the war began in 1954, Algeria was an "inseparable part of France", and unlike the colonial territories of Indochina and North Africa, Algeria was - in the words of the Franco-Algerian philosopher Saloua Lust-Boulbina - the exception that confirmed the rule "a private colony precisely, because it did not be integrated into the colonies”, a principle echoed by François Mitterrand when he addressed the National Assembly - in his capacity as Minister of the Interior - and said: “Algeria is France, and which of you - ladies and gentlemen - would hesitate to use all the means available to you in order to preserve France?”
This was the "Algeria of France" of the imagination as well as the French administration the bottle of "Orangena" juice you see on the balcony table outside the usual Parisian café, and next to it is a book by Albert Camus, like many of the titans of French philosophy, including Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida and Bernard-Henri Levy who were born in Algeria.
Many of these figures have Jewish roots as the far-right politician Eric Zemmour "the Arab Jew" (as the historian Benjamin Stora called him) whose family came from Setif (eastern Algeria) the scene of the infamous pogroms in 1945, which some historians have described as the real beginning of the Algerian revolution for independence.
On the two shores of the Mediterranean, Marseille and Algiers stand on opposite shores, much of the construction of Algiers was carried out under the supervision of Frédéric Chassereau, the former chief architect of Marseille, and both cities are crowned by the cathedral built at the same time in a similar neo-Byzantine style: Notre Dame de la Garde in Marseille. , Notre Dame Afrique in Algiers.
war and independence
These two cities were also twin cities during the war. It was a horrific struggle, in which the fight for independence and occupation was defined by atrocities: the destruction of communities, the rape of women, and summary executions in the streets.
In France, the war brought different factions together under one banner and, in the words of historian James Shields, became a recruiting ground, not only for soldiers and army veterans but also for colonial settlers, pro-Catholics and anti-communists, as well as for those nostalgic about the old anti-foreign hierarchy of the Vichy government. And the head of the French Vichy state (1940-1944) Marchel Pétain.
The writer says that the "traditionalists" considered the return of French President Charles de Gaulle to power as a solution to the Algerian issue in their favor, and the army considered him one of them when he stood in his military uniform on a balcony in Algiers and told the crowds that filled the square, "I understand you, from now on France considers that there is only one type From the population all over Algeria: there are only French, long live French Algeria”, yet 4 years later de Gaulle signed the Evian Accords and declared a ceasefire between Paris and the National Liberation Front, paving the way for a referendum on Algerian independence.
French Algeria is not more than a century old, the traditionalists were astonished by what they considered treason, Paris sent troops from the mainland to Algeria to monitor the population of European origin, from the "black feet" (European settlers who lived or were born in Algeria during the French occupation and some of their organizations committed heinous crimes against Algerian civilians in refusal to cease-fire in 1962), many of whom were increasingly seen as rebels against their government.
When "Black Feet" soldiers marched in a demonstration towards the main post office in Algiers on Rue Disley, troops recruited from the mainland opened fire on them, and French soldiers shot French citizens in a North African city.
This story is essential to understanding the internal dynamics of today's French elections, and realizing that they faced a choice between saving their lives or their homes (they said "the choice, the bag on the coffin"), were forced into a mass exodus from Algeria alongside the Arab "harkis" who fought for the French government and were considered Later traitors by the Algerians.
Nearly a million people moved across the Mediterranean during the summer of 1962 to start a new, uncertain life in France. Almost all of them landed in Marseilles, and many of them ended up in bleak compounds - such as the Camp du Grand Arenas - in a rocky valley south of the city. .
From these camps the "black-footed" community spread throughout southern France, and so did the newcomers of Arab immigrants, and it is no coincidence that the number of votes for Zemmour this year was higher in southern France than in any other region in many ways, the Cote d'Azur (Department of Southern France) is the last battlefield of the Algerian War.
When he won re-election, Macron told the people “I got you,” just as de Gaulle once did on the balcony of Algiers, but like de Gaulle, Macron has the same tendency to project that understanding on the international stage rather than focus on the ordinary at home. Macron is more appropriate The role of an American-style foreign minister is more than that of a head of state that tends to turn inward in times of crisis, yet the foreign and the domestic in France are inseparable, according to the author.
history hostage
In 2017, when he paid an official visit to Algeria, Macron said that he would not be "a hostage of history", but that he would remain a hostage, the writer says. When Le Monde newspaper reported in 2021 that he questioned the existence of the Algerian state before French colonial rule, Algeria recalled its ambassador. It banned French military flights from using its airspace in operations against jihadists in the Sahel region, and Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune said that Macron had harmed the dignity of the Algerians, and according to Der Spiegel, he refused to receive Macron's calls.
Macron's way of assuaging these wounds is to make symbolic gestures of reconciliation, apologizing for past crimes committed by the French state against blacks, harkis, and Algerian independence fighters alike.
Many of these gestures are taken from recommendations in the Stora Report commissioned by Macron and written by French (Algerian-born) historian Benjamin Stura to promote “memory, truth and reconciliation.” They do promise greater French investment in Algeria, but what about the structures that led to the war in the first place? The first and which remains unresolved today, in particular the constitutional framework for the Fifth Republic established by de Gaulle in 1958 in response to the Algerian crisis?
The writer says that both Marine Le Pen and her niece Marion Le Pen believe that the constitutional framework is not fit for the purpose for which it was created, and the radical socialist presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon also agrees, who describes the Fifth Republic as "a dated constitution designed by one man, General de Gaulle who He died 52 years ago, because of outdated conditions and for a country like France in 1958, everything has changed."
For all their other differences, each of these politicians knows that the endless cycle of paradoxes that has defined French politics for the past 20 years must end if their country is to transcend its shadow.
Having lost his majority in the National Assembly in June of this year, only Macron knows whether he is now brave enough to bring the continuation of the 1958 constitution to the public's eye.
And if, instead, he continues to hide behind mere symbolism of change, the signs will be clear: soon the summer will be over, the tables will be removed from the stands and the swallows will disappear, the autumn rains will come and then people will return to the streets again to protest, scream and smash, but not fully aware why they are up With this, the writer concludes.