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Sixty-two years ago, Algeria recovered its national sovereignty after a long colonial night. 132 years of dispossession, alienation, massacres and crimes that colonial France committed with a clear conscience, supposedly in the name of a pseudo civilizing mission!
More than sixty years after the victory of the Algerian people over a colonial system created to last, the thorny question of the collective memory of the two Algerian and French peoples is now controversial.
If the Algerians, strong in their triumphant national revolution over colonialism, continue to denounce the crimes of France in Algeria, calling on the French side to recognize its crimes in order to understand the future, the French, for their part, remain in denial when it comes to Algeria.
Three lobbies are at work to fuel official revisionism: the pieds noirs lobby, that of the Harkis and finally, the Zionists.
The weight of lobbies
The first anti-Algerian pressure group, the pieds noirs lobby, brings together those nostalgic for French Algeria, who either themselves or their parents were born in Algeria during the colonial period.
This colonization party is mainly supervised by the former ultras of the Secret Armed Organization (OAS) which practiced the scorched earth policy against the Algerians after the Evian Accords of March 19, 1962.
Many leading figures of the OAS, including Roger Holeindre, were in the hard core of the party created by Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Front (FN), in 1972.
The second lobby is none other than that of the Harkis, these auxiliaries of the French army who renounced their homeland to join the colonial forces in the vain and chimerical desire to stifle the Algerian revolution.
After Algeria regained its sovereignty, these auxiliaries found themselves penned in camps in mainland France, far from the ideal they had cherished by betraying their country of origin. And the height of irony is that these Harkis took up the cause of the revisionist discourse that never accepted Algeria’s independence.
As a result, they continue to fuel controversy and denigrate Algeria through powerful networks in the media, the economy and the associative movement.
The third, the Zionist lobby, fueled mainly by French people of Jewish faith and generally from Algeria.
This lobby, whose figurehead is none other than the singer Enrico Macias, uses the media and business circles to sabotage any attempt at Algerian-French rapprochement. Obviously, this group is riding the wave of unconditional support for the Zionist entity and the condemnation of any support for the Palestinian cause.
This lobby uses and abuses the comparison between Algeria and Morocco to vilify Algiers and praise Rabat, described as a sincere friend of both France and Israel.
Macron’s ups and downs
This overview of the anti-Algerian lobbies having been made, it is now important to look at the yo-yo game played by official France with regard to Algeria, particularly on questions of memory.
Notwithstanding the statements made by candidate Macron in 2017 regarding the criminal nature of colonization, once elected to the Elysée, the same Macron who made the question of memory a cardinal point in his policy towards Algeria, has not stopped coming and going according to the pressures of the different lobbies.
While there have been appeasement gestures, including the return to Algeria of the remains of the martyred resistance fighters in 2020, the recognition of colonial France’s responsibility in the assassination of Ali Boumendjel and Maurice Audin, and the publication of the Stora report, there have been many backtrackings.
In 2021, and addressing young people, in a cleverly orchestrated and above all leaked staging, Emmanuel Macron declared that the Algerian Nation never existed and that if it exists now it is thanks to France. Worse, he accused Algeria of living on a memorial rent. Words that do not go down well!
Macron’s visit to Algeria in August 2022 helped somewhat to overcome this memorial discord, thanks to the establishment of a dual Algerian and French commission which is working simultaneously on the issue of archives, but this seems to be failing, particularly on issues relating to the personal effects of Emir Abdelkader, an issue which contributed to delaying, according to the head of Algerian diplomacy, Ahmed Attaf, the state visit that President Abdelmadjid Tebboune was to make to France.
On this issue and on many others, the French are playing for time through legal tricks. An object declared national heritage, for example, cannot be the subject of discussions on its restitution. The same goes for privately owned objects.
These defects, both in substance and in form, are dragging out discussions to close the work of the Zeghidi and Stora commissions.
What about the RN and Bardella?
The question that still needs to be asked is the one relating to the future of the memorial dispute with the already announced victory of the National Rally (RN), successor to the National Front (FN) in the second round of the legislative elections next Sunday and the probable nomination of Jordan Berdella to the post of Prime Minister.
This great-grandson of an Algerian worker apparently has self-hatred. And even with the obligations of a State and the domain reserved for the President of the Republic for foreign and defense affairs, the memorial issues between Algeria and France risk dragging on further if the channels of discussion and reflection on this issue are not broken.
In any case, the anti-Algerian lobbies mentioned above will be able, in the event of a Macron-Bardella cohabitation, to work hand in hand to sabotage any attempt at memorial appeasement between Algiers and Paris.
France will probably be one of the rare European countries with a dark colonial past to refuse to acknowledge its crimes in order to open a new page of history with an Algeria that is several thousand years old.