France to open Algeria archives
Macron admits to systematic use of torture during war in former colony
President Emmanuel Macron yesterday said France will open the archives concerning those who disappeared in France’s brutal colonial war in Algeria.
He also recognised the French state was responsible for the disappearance of a dissident mathematician in Algeria in 1957, and admitted for the first time to the systematic use of torture in the former colony. “It is important for this history to be known, to be looked at with lucidity and courage,” the 40-year-old president said in a statement.
Visits dissident’s widow
Macron, the first French leader born after Algeria’s independence in 1962, yesterday visited the widow of Maurice Audin, a young mathematician, communist and anti-colonial activist, who was arrested in Algiers more than 60 years ago. Audin, a member of the settler community who supported the fight against colonial rule, was tortured and killed by French authorities, according to a witness.
Conquered by France in 1837, Algeria was a colony but also cast as an integral part of the country. By the 1950s, it was home to millions of French settlers. When the country revolted in 1954, the suppression was savage. During the 1954-62 war, which claimed some 1.5 million Algerian lives, French forces brutally cracked down on independence fighters.
Macron said the state will open its archives to allow the search for information about other people who disappeared during the war.
France formally recognised yesterday the French military’s systemic use of torture in the Algerian War in the 1950s and 1960s, an unprecedented step forward in grappling with its long-suppressed legacy of colonial crimes.
President Emmanuel Macron announced his watershed decision in the context of a call for clarity on the fate of Maurice Audin, a Communist mathematician and anti-colonial militant who was tortured by the French army and forcibly disappeared in 1957, in the midst of Algeria’s bloody struggle for independence from France.
Audin’s death is a specific case, but it represents a cruel system put in place at the statelevel, the Elysee Palace said. “It was nonetheless made possible by a legally instituted system: the ‘arrest-detention’ system, set up under the special powers that had been entrusted by law to the armed forces at that time,” a statement by Macron’s office said.
Benjamin Stora, a leading French historian of Algeria who has authored more than 20 books on the subject, said that Macron’s decision represented a step away from “the silence of the father” that has characterised France’s relationship to its colonial past for decades.
“It permits us to advance,” he told The Washington Post. “To exit from denial and to advance in the service of truth.” Stora accompanied Macron yesterday afternoon on an official visit to Audin’s widow, Josette Audin, now 87.
Macron, 40, has shown a rare willingness to wade into the memory of Algeria, arguably the most sensitive chapter in the French experience of the 20th century and one that has had a profound influence on the country’s current political institutions.
Conquered by France in 1837, Algeria was a colony but also cast as an integral part of the country. By the 1950s, it was home to millions of French settlers, and when France was forced to give up overseas possessions in West Africa and Southeast Asia, it always held on tightly to Algeria.
When the country revolted in 1954, the suppression was savage. The shadow of the Algerian War on French society has often been compared to that of Vietnam in the US, but even more divisive.
‘Crime against humanity’
On a visit to Algeria in February 2017, Macron, then a presidential candidate, went so far as to call French colonialism “a crime against humanity,” a remark that reignited a bitter national debate.
In addition to recognising state-authorised torture, Macron also called for the opening of archives concerning those who disappeared, such as Audin.
“A general dispensation, by ministerial decree, will be granted so that everyone — historians, families, associations — can consult the archives for all those who disappeared in Algeria,” the statement read. “We’re putting the issue of the missing in the centre.”
Macron’s decision drew immediate hopeful comparisons to the last time a French president publicly atoned for the sins of the past — Jacques Chirac’s 1995 apology for France’s collaboration in the Holocaust, specifically in facilitating roundups of its own citizens who were then handed over to the Nazis.
Chirac’s speech represented a major shift in the way the French public and political establishment understood its past. In the years that followed, a more nuanced picture of France’s role in the Holocaust was taught in national schools, and memorials were erected around the country, including a prominent Holocaust memorial museum in central Paris.
Some wonder if similar action on Algeria, once unthinkable, could now be in the cards.
The two events are vastly different, said Stora, who was born in Algeria in 1950 to a Jewish family that then left for France in 1962, in the midst of the upheaval. But Macron’s decision nevertheless presented many former colonial subjects, he noted, including French Muslims of Algerian origin, “the sentiment of being respected in their history.”
For Yasser Louati, a Muslim community organiser and prominent activist against Islamophobia in France, Macron’s decision is a “historic moment” but one that does not go far enough.
If the French president has now drawn attention to colonial crimes that occurred in Algeria, there is still a reluctance to confront the legacy of colonial violence that occurred in France itself, such as the brutal October 1961 massacre by French police of pro-independence Algerian protesters in Paris.
Historians estimate that as many as 200 were killed in that event, but the exact figure remains unclear.