How France’s colonial legacy poisons its current political debate
Lyse Mauvais, lmm348@cornell.edu
By affirming that colonization was a “crime against humanity” during his visit to Algeria, the French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron attracted the hostility of the French right and summoned a battle of conflicting memories. For anyone unfamiliar with the complex relationship between France and Algeria, former French colony and department, the ensuing outrage may be difficult to understand, but this controversy says a lot about some persisting divisions within French society that impact our political debate to this day.
This history still pervades our political landscape, much as it pervades the memory of many French families, including my own. For historians, “the war of Algeria” is a decolonization war, while for my grandmother it is the name of a civil and personal tragedy. This war tore apart two nations, creating deep wounds on both sides. Officially, the conflict ended in 1962 with the independence of Algeria and the exile of about one million persons to “mainland” France. This means that we are today on the brink of a generational turnover, one in which we must seize the opportunity to sincerely recognize and heal the wounds created by the conflict, or witness the embitterment and consolidation of historical divisions.
I speak of a generational turnover, because this conflict belongs to our grandparents, and should be buried with them — despite all the efforts they may make to pass it on. Algeria, for my family as for my nation, is a place of crystallized tensions and conflicting narratives. My paternal grandmother was raised there, in a family of white, mainland colonists known as the “pied-noirs”. Her own grand-father was sent there for political dissent. Peculiar ambivalence characterizes the pied-noirs repatriated to France after the war. They have this consciously dramatic way of looking out to the other side of the sea, longing for “their country”, coupled with a fierce refusal to “see what it has been turned into”. The repatriates formed political associations, stayed in touch, and many root their identity in the magnitude of their loss. My grandmother inhabits a world of nostalgia and magnified memories. She sees not Arab immigrants but “those who kicked us out and now want to live here”. Algeria was the uninvited guest of many family dinners, during which all evils of the earth would ultimately boil down to repatriation. The weather? Better in Algeria. The economy? The French built Algeria’s. Terrorism? “It’s what they did to us in Algeria”. Politicians? “Corrupt and cowardly, like the ones who sold us in Algeria”. De Gaulle? A traitor to French Algerians.
As for my generation, the wounds of history were consciously passed down to us, grand-children of a conflict we never knew. When my grandmother and I argued she was quick to bring up the pain “we” had suffered, the friends “we” had lost, and on with stories of rapes, attacks, exiles, and slaughters. I have every reason to believe that on the other side of the Mediterranean, an Algerian grand-mother was also passing down stories to her own grand-daughter. Yet in reality, the distance between memories was much shorter than a sea. Across the street, a former freedom fighter was perhaps showing his torture scars to his own grand-children, now citizens of the country their grand-father had fought against. One floor under our apartment, the wife of a harki, the Arab Algerians who fought for the French government against the independence movements) could be telling the story of her husband’s assassination by Algerian liberation forces in 1962, when the French government decided that its loyal Arab soldiers were not all worth a boat trip back.
Refusing this legacy of resentment, some of my relatives (and much of our society) played the card of detachment. My father half-laughed, half-shouted: “Stop it, with your war! Should we stop living because France lost the war? Is everything over because we lost Algeria?” Like the other 1962 repatriates’, my grandmother’s bitter story was an inconvenience in our collective history. Just as the mainland had shunned repatriates, so could my cousins and I shun my grandmother. Detachment was perhaps the only way to escape conflicting narratives, family resentment against national guilt. Erasing our own ties to colonial history is the simplest way to process it, which is probably why I rarely introduce myself, to Algerian friends, as someone familiar to their culture through the experience of my family. However, political statements like Macron’s violate the law of silence, pressing us out of detachment.
The typical French family, even without the direct experience of colonization, often has difficult stories to tell and burdens to carry. In my maternal family, two great-uncles spent their extended military service in the war of Algeria. At least one of my relatives worked in intelligence services (i.e. torture) at some point during the war. In this regard, I imagine that America’s experience of Vietnam (and the traumatic experiences it left on many GIs) provides a useful bridge from which to peer into the French experience of decolonization. The war remains a taboo for many who served in Algeria, but it left behind psychological and political wounds. By all standards, the war was particularly atrocious, one of torture, exactions, civil slaughters, forced disappearances, terrorism, and unrevealed archives. On either side there remain intentional obscurity and the reluctance to recognize in full the crimes that were committed. Every year, national commemorations raise the same question: when will we open our archives, face our history, and process our past? Whose death is France waiting for before it finally tries cleaning the slate for future generations?
French collective consciousness treads the same fine line I treaded growing up between individuals whose war experience and imaginaries collided. On one side, I could not deny my grandmother’s pain, the reality of her tragedy, and her sincere belief that French Algeria was more than a story of abuse– an intimate experience of the colonial times that cannot be reconciled with the brutality of colonization as a historical phenomenon. Neither could I ignore the mutism of my maternal family and their hostility to an “overseas” conflict that had broken so many in their generation. Over fifty years later, France is still divided on how to write and teach a history of its relationship to Algeria: one that does justice to its complexity and its violence, that speaks to the grandchild of the Harki and the grandchild of the Pied-Noir but also to the son of the first-generation Algerian immigrant and to the grand-daughter of the soldier dead in Oran. To give you a sense of how uneasy to teach this history remains: when I was in high school, the teacher asked us to read the chapter on Algeria at home rather than dealing with such a “sensitive” topic in class. My best friends (both Algerian) and I laughed at her as we read the textbook, wondering what we had done to make her think we couldn’t handle our own history.
This is in essence the question raised by Emmanuel Macron: will we remember the French presence in Algeria only as a crime? This would be a last blow to repatriates, whom we shipped there and then took back unwillingly, and on whose shoulders we could drop all the evils of our colonial history. 150-years of their history would be reduced to a “crime against humanity.” It is not surprising that the right would make a last plea on their behalf. Macron’s statement opens afresh the wounds of a community whose identity was built on “betrayal” by France, and whose losses were not fully acknowledged by Algeria. On the left, however, both ethics and the convenience of a progressive electorate point towards the need to “clean the slate.” The cultural genocide of colonization, the mass deportations, murders, and acts of torture sit uneasily with the relationship we would like to build with our Algerian neighbors, immigrants, dual citizens, and heritage citizens.
This piece is an attempt to untangle, through the typically complex experience of one family, the typically complex relationship that France and Algeria still hold to their shared history, two generations later. There is a war of memories that still resonates in our political landscape today, as written-over history seeps through the present and rots between communities. The current decade is a generational turning point we must not miss. This requires confronting the evidence of our archives, and recognizing the abuses and horrors of colonization, while acknowledging the contributions, transfers and complex individual experiences that marked a hundred and fifty years of common history.
Photo: Emmanuel Macron [center], candidate to the 2017 French presidential elections, is received February 14, 2017, by the president of the Algerian employers’ association (FCE), Ali Haddad. © Bechir Ramzy / Anadolu Agency
