A savage colonial past comes home to haunt the streets of modern France

6 Jul 2023

The past never just disappears. About five million people living in France today – both French and Arab – have a personal link to the savage conflict in colonial Algeria, and feelings of anger and resentment and the desire for revenge have never been assuaged.

Sometime in the mid-1980s Alistair Horne’s acclaimed and definitive history of the Algerian war of liberation, A Savage War of Peace, became required reading in the senior ranks of the ANC.

Faced with the intransigence and violence of the apartheid state, some in the liberation movement were questioning the tactics of the armed struggle and wondering whether it was time, in the language of the day, to strike “soft targets” – unleashing the kind of revolutionary terror that had won for Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN) one of the most brutal anti-colonial wars.

Thankfully the ANC stuck with restraint, and international geopolitics and the National Party leadership bent in such a way that a negotiated settlement became possible in South Africa. Horne’s account of Algeria is a cautionary tale of how extreme violence and terror can blast a hole through a nation’s psyche from which it can take generations to recover.

It was striking how quickly both countries chose to forget – the Algerians because it was too painful and the French because it was an almost unbearable national humiliation.

The savagery told in the numbers is astonishing. Up to a million Muslim Algerians were killed between 1954 and 1962. An equal number of Europeans – the so-called pieds noirs – were forced to flee their homes and washed up on the shores of France, destitute, abandoned and resentful.

Both sides committed atrocities, but the greater burden of guilt lies with the colonial power which was responsible for mass torture, rapes, massacres, the napalming of civilians, the destruction of 8,000 villages and the detention of two million people in internment camps.

French President Emmanuel Macron has acknowledged that it was a “crime against humanity”.

Algeria gained its independence in 1962 under the FLN but it was a shattered and traumatised nation of ghosts and dead villages in which just about every family had lost members. For France the eight years of war led to the fall of six governments, including the demise of the Fourth Republic in 1958 that brought General Charles de Gaulle back to power.

It was striking how quickly both countries chose to forget – the Algerians because it was too painful and the French because it was an almost unbearable national humiliation.

By 1975 France and Algeria had restored relations, and many young Algerians, lacking prospects at home, found their way to jobs in France.

But the past never just disappears. About five million people living in France today – both French and Arab – have a personal link to that conflict, and feelings of anger and resentment and the desire for revenge have never been assuaged.

After he became president in 2017, Macron became the first French leader to speak openly about this terrible history and try to treat the wound. He commissioned a report under the respected historian Benjamin Stora which was published in January 2021 and which neither satisfied the Algerians nor the French right.

Algeria is conducting its own parallel research into the colonial past that has not yet been published.

Unfinished business

This week, as images of burning French cities flashed across TV screens around the world, I spoke to a leading French academic who was adamant that in the background of this cauldron of despair and anger is the unfinished business of the colonial past – especially the Algerian war.

It was not a direct cause of the unrest that erupted in France on 27 June after the cold-blooded shooting in Nanterre of Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old rugby-playing, rap- and motorbike-loving youth of Algerian and Moroccan origin, by a police officer at a traffic stop.

Police brutality, racism, immigration, Islamophobia, youth delinquency and the deleterious effects of social media all played a role. The rioters, mostly aged between 12 and 19, were not exclusively of North African origin: black Africans and even some white youths joined the teenage free-for-all.

But many of the looters waved the Algerian flag and chanted the slogan of Algeria’s football team – “one two three, viva Algerie” – providing a distinctly Algerian cast to the events.

Everyday prejudice

Some speculated that this was related to the political manoeuvring between the Algerian and French governments, which are trapped in a kind of love-hate relationship.

Others scoffed at Algeria’s FLN denouncing police violence when Algeria’s repressive government has itself used extreme violence against demonstrators.

But my friend the academic said that where the legacy of that Algerian past is most intensely felt is in the everyday prejudice that North Africans face – certainly more than those people who originally came from west and central Africa.

The shooting of Nahel is itself symptomatic of the problem. We know from the US that police brutality reflects a wider view by a dominant group that members of a minority community, especially the young, are suspect and criminal almost by definition.

What it does clarify is that one of the fault lines in French politics is the question of who is French. In grappling with the past the very identity of France is in question.

The French police union denounced the rioters as “savage hordes” and “vermin” and the French right was incensed that the officer who shot Nahel had been detained and charged with voluntary homicide. A fundraiser for his defence raised four times more donations than for Nahel’s mother.

The historian Stora says that “although the Algerians who live in France have become French, they identify with their parents’ and grandparents’ past. The French, on the other hand, ask themselves why the Algerians, whose forefathers fought for independence, are now living in France. So there is a gulf that generates a huge amount of bitterness or even hostility on both sides.”

All of this is fanned by the National Rally, the far right-wing party whose existence is rooted in the Algerian war and its aftermath. Jean Marie le Pen, the founder of the party’s predecessor, the National Front, was an intelligence officer in Algeria, and many of its senior leaders such as 80-year-old José Gonzalez grew up in colonial Algeria or are children of the pieds noirs.

Le Pen’s daughter, Marine le Pen, now leads the National Rally, which has called for some Algerians to be repatriated. In European Parliament elections next year it is possible that Le Pen’s party will get more votes than any other – though she will have to wait until 2027 for a rematch with Macron.

One of the more positive images of the past weeks is of the multicultural World Cup-finalist French football team led by their captain, Kylian Mbappé, calling for the kids to stop rioting. That is the France that the rest of the world can fall in love with again.

What it does clarify is that one of the fault lines in French politics is the question of who is French. In grappling with the past the very identity of France is in question.

The unrest has arguably created a new urgency for the reckoning of the Algerian war to proceed through a truth commission that Macron has promised.

But with Le Pen breathing down his neck this could be politically toxic for Macron. And yet the past will not disappear on its own. Instead, it grows more menacing as groups from the extreme left and the extreme right, failing to learn the lessons of history, continue to advocate violence.

Alistair Horne quotes the French-Algerian author Albert Camus’s prophetic book The Plague written seven years before the war:

“He knew what these jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books, that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years in furniture and linen chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and enlightening of men, it roused up its rats again and sent them forth to die in a happy city.” DM

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Unfinished business

Everyday prejudice