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Jean-Philippe Ould Aoudia has lived through the century, never failing to fulfill the mission he had set for himself when he left adolescence. He was exactly 20 years, six months and eleven days old when on March 15, 1962, at around 10:30 a.m., his father was assassinated by the OAS.
Salah Henri Ould-Aoudia was executed in the courtyard of the Château-Royal, a stone’s throw from the Cité des Asphodèles (Ben-Aknoun), at the same time as five of his colleagues, all inspectors of the Social Educational Centres: Mouloud Feraoun, Max Marchand, Ali Hamoutène, Marcel Basset and Robert Eymard.
A trademark of the terrorist organization of sinister memory, the six-time murder at the Château-Royal was committed three days before the signing of the Evian Accords and four days before the ceasefire came into effect. Against a backdrop of increasing OAS crimes, it was the most high-profile killing of the “scorched earth policy” that Salan, Jouhaud, Godard, Susini and other Lagaillardes had put into effect.
Since that tragic and sad day, Jean-Philippe Ould Aoudia has engaged in what, seen in the rearview mirror of history, is indeed the fight of a lifetime, his own. As he moved into adulthood, the young orphan tried – painfully – to grieve by cultivating the memory of his father and his companions and, above all, to immortalize the episode of the Château-Royal in the collective memory and in the historical narrative on both sides of the Mediterranean.
After having successfully completed his medical studies and defended a doctoral thesis in Paris in 1971 entitled “External Ganglion Tuberculosis in Algeria”, the native of Algiers – a city ravaged by the OAS but liberated – put on the doctor’s coat. Alongside his professional life and family obligations, he threw himself into book writing and historical research. Clearly, the tragic story of his father and his five companions is at the heart of his overflowing activism. Jean-Philippe Ould Aoudia chairs “Les Amis de Max Marchand, de Mouloud Ferouan et de leurs Compagnons”, an association created in the mid-eighties to honor the memory of the “Six”, cultivate it in the collective memory and protect this history from being forgotten.
In 1992, a few years before inheriting the presidency of the Association, Jean-Philippe Ould Aoudia signed, with Tirésias editions, a first remarkably documented book: “The assassination of Château-Royal”. Coming at the right time to fill a gap on this tragic sequence of the end of the Algerian war, the opus was introduced by Germaine Tillon, friend of the ”Six” and initiator of the Social Educational Centers. ”A son investigates for thirty years to know all the causes and circumstances of the death of his father victim of an organized and premeditated crime”, greeted the ethnologist in his introductory remarks. The preface writer answers to the name of Emmanuel Roblès, the writer and playwright who published “The Journal” held by Mouloud Feraoun between 1955 and the day before his assassination. Building on this first-born, Jean-Philippe Ould Aoudia has since published seven other books with the same publisher on the Algerian war and the colonial page.
The latest book, “OAS. Unpublished Archives, Revelations” (171 pages, 20 euros) was released in bookstores at a time when the party that defends the memory of the OAS and has been trying, since 1962, to rehabilitate it almost settled in Matignon and governed. ”The title chosen by Jean-Philippe Ould Aoudia faithfully reflects the content of the book. Because “unpublished”, yes, the archives that he publishes and comments on here are”, argues, in the preface, historian Sylvie Thénault. Director of research at the CNRS, specialist in colonization and the Algerian war of independence, S Thénault is known in the academic world for having signed a founding work on French justice in the face of colonization and the Algerian war.
A page that has not revealed all its secrets
Far from changing his tune, Jean-Philippe Ould Aoudia believes that there is still, and more than ever, room to persevere and research into the Château-Royal episode. A page that, in his eyes, has not delivered all its secrets or revealed all the unsaid things. Salah Henri’s son seized on the publication in the Official Journal of an interministerial decree dated December 22, 2021 – replaced and supplemented by that of August 25, 2023 – to rush into the archives and glean everything that can be gleaned on the six-fold assassination of March 15, 1962.
These two regulatory texts concern the opening of archives relating to the Algerian War. They are intended as a “derogation” from the provisions of the Heritage Code (archives section). A derogation order intended to facilitate – for the benefit of citizens, researchers and the administration – access to public archives produced in the context of cases relating to acts committed in connection with the Algerian War between November 1, 1954 and December 31, 1966.
The exemption applies to all documents, whether they are archives kept in the National Archives, the National Overseas Archives (ANOM of Aix-en-Provence), in departmental archives services, in the archives service of the police headquarters, in archives services under the Ministry of the Armed Forces and in the archives department of the Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs.
Jean-Philippe Ould Aoudia consulted in particular the documents deposited in the National Archives in Pierrefitte-sur-Seine (northern suburbs of Paris). There were documents, and in abundance: some forty files from the central file of the judicial police. Dated March 15, 1962, they list the crimes committed by the OAS on this day of terror, one of the bloodiest since the start of the “scorched earth policy.”
Signed by General Salan, instruction no. 29 dated February 25 is revealing of what happened against the backdrop of the last rounds of Evian. “It would be desirable that between March 15 and 20, the entire territory be marked out and gridded by insurrectional zones,” the supreme leader of the OAS recommended to his killers. Jean-Philippe Aoudia also sifted through the hearing reports in the police station of the 13e district (El-Biar), reactions recorded in documents from the Rectorate of Algiers and the Ministry of Education, documents from the Prefecture of Algiers and the Attorney General at the Court of Algiers, archives of two judicial police services in Algeria, the SRPJ and the detachment of the judicial police on mission in Algiers (DPJMA).
”Files, linked to judicial investigations carried out by the police and/or the gendarmerie, make it possible to trace the itinerary of criminals representing the civil and military factions of the OAS” until their deaths, the author specifies. In addition to these archives ”studied in detail”, Jean-Philippe Ould Aoudia also consulted other pieces. This allowed him to broaden his study on ”little-known aspects” of the OAS and on the itinerary and motivations of many of its elements. ”These archives definitively deconstruct the patriotism of the story about the OAS as it contains multiple and strong distortions with regard to the sources, but still magnified today by its admirers”, an allusion to the different movements of the extreme right at work in France in 2024.
When the book’s preface writer asks the author about what he learned from reading the files consulted after 2021, the date of publication of the interministerial decree, Salah Henri Aoudia’s son answers him in one word and with accents of insistence: “Everything”. Among other things learned, this “everything” underlines “first of all the very existence of the investigations following the attack”, specifies Sylvie Thénault, paraphrasing Jean-Philippe Ould Aoudia. A man, she succinctly portrays, who “devoted his life to trying to find out the truth about the assassination of his father and the five other victims of this attack; then, once the time for tears and mourning had passed, to remain mobilized against the extreme right and the threats it poses to our freedoms”.
Jean-Philippe Ould Aoudia ”has the defense of the Republic in his body, argues Sylvie Thénault, eyes fixed, putting the crimes of the OAS and its ideology into perspective in the light of post-1962 France. ”This is how we must read the chapters returning to political and memorial questions, after the chapters focused on the investigation and its key documents; with at the heart a contradiction that is all the more difficult to understand since today, faced with another terrorism, which Jean-Philippe Aoudia evokes, the Republic shows no ambiguity. Why and how did killers and their diehard supporters of French Algeria end up being amnestied or sometimes even rehabilitated or at the very least defended? Why and how must their victims then fight to be recognized as such?”
As a historian, Sylvie Thénault claims to have “many beginnings of answers” to these questions. Beginnings of answers “to be drawn in particular”, she believes, “from the history of French political cultures, in particular those of rights and their recomposition”. Unlike Vichy and Collaboration, explains the preface writer, “French Algeria has never been the subject of a consensual disavowal.
In this way, it does not constitute any solid bulwark whereas at the time of the war of independence (and at least in the 1960s if not later: until Sarkozysme?), French Algeria served as a marker to separate the right and isolate the extremes within them”.