‘Inglorious past’: France’s rightward shift fuels denial of colonial crimes in Algeria
M'hamed Kaki is a tireless activist. For nearly half a century, the 65-year-old French-Algerian man has fought for the recognition of France’s colonial crimes.
Arriving in the country at the age of one with his parents, he was inspired in his fight for the truth by his mother's stories. During his childhood, she told him, among other gruesome testimonies, how she once saw French colonial soldiers throw her father into a deep well from which he never emerged.
"My grandfather was killed because he was supplying the Mujahideen [Algerian fighters] during the war of independence," Kaki told Middle East Eye.
The incident took place in Setif, a city in eastern Algeria which, along with neighbouring Guelma and Kheratta, was the scene of massacres perpetrated by the colonial army on 8 May 1945, at the very moment Europe was celebrating the end of World War Two.
On that day, thousands of demonstrators - around 45,000 according to Algeria, between 1,500 and 20,000 according to France - were murdered for demanding their country's independence.
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"Even today in France, many people don't know this past. For them, 8 May 1945 marked the victory over the Nazis, while the worst atrocities were committed in Algeria on the same day by France,” Kaki said.
‘Beautiful moments’
To shed light on this dark episode of French colonisation and other colonial crimes, Kaki has chosen to don his theatre costume.
A year ago, he wrote a play, The Other 8 May 1945, I Remember, in which he plays the lead role. It followed another one on the 17 October 1961 killings of Algerian protesters in Paris.
In theatres and schools alike, Kaki exhumes a shameful past that is granted very little space in French textbooks and that political leaders continue to deny.
Last September, rightwing politician Bruno Retailleau, who would soon become interior minister, declared that “colonisation also included beautiful moments”.
‘Even today in France, many people don't know this past’
- M'hamed Kaki, playwright and activist
His remarks encapsulate the content of a law proposed 20 years ago by former President Nicolas Sarkozy, which extols the benefits of colonial rule for colonised people.
The legislation, which was tabled under pressure from circles nostalgic for French Algeria, was adopted in February 2005.
Its most controversial paragraph, which stated that "school curricula recognise in particular the positive role of the French presence overseas, notably in North Africa”, was repealed by decree a year later.
But the rest of the text remained, notably asserting that France had brought civilisation to Algeria by building schools, roads and hospitals.
"The roads were built for the use of the settlers and to transport raw materials [taken from the Algerians] to France," Green Party MP Sabrina Sebaihi told MEE.
"As for the schools, they were mainly used to educate French children. During colonial rule, 90 percent of the Algerian population was illiterate,” she added.
“There were massacres, famine, and entire villages were destroyed."
On 8 May this year, Sebaihi and a group of other leftwing MPs travelled to Algeria to commemorate the Setif, Guelma and Kheratta massacres.
There, she stated that a request had been made to French President Emmanuel Macron to recognise these killings as a state crime.
Shame and nostalgia
Two years ago, Sebaihi, who is of Algerian immigrant descent, drafted a resolution to qualify as a state crime another bloody crackdown, that targeted hundreds of Algerians in Paris on 17 October 1961, a year before Algeria’s independence.
Protesting against a curfew imposed on them, immigrant workers were thrown into the Seine by the police. Others were arrested and disappeared.
To honour their memory, Sebaihi wanted the state's responsibility for the massacres to be clearly established.
But she had to give in to right and far-right MPs’ opposition. Ultimately, only Maurice Papon, then Paris police chief, was named as the person who ordered the killings.
While Macron had called colonisation a “crime against humanity” during his first electoral campaign in 2017, he, too, had to backtrack.
In seven years in power, he acknowledged the involvement of the French army in some incidents, including the assassination of French and Algerian independence activists Maurice Audin, Ali Boumendjel and Larbi Ben M'hidi.
Macron also described the October 1961 massacres as "inexcusable crimes for the Republic".
However, he never held the state responsible for crimes committed during the colonial era. For instance, he considered Papon the only official culprit for the October 1961 massacres.
"Even though Macron takes an external look at colonisation, which he did not experience, he is restrained in his memorial policy by previous political generations," Sebaihi said.
Historically, she points out that unlike Tunisia and Morocco, which were governed by the protectorate system and where far fewer French people settled, Algeria underwent a settler colonisation that fostered bonds of attachment within the French community in Algeria towards the colony - and the feeling of a paradise lost at independence.
‘When you are a state that colonised and massacred, it's harder to admit it’
- Sabrina Sebaihi, green party MP
"We are used to saying that one in four French people has a connection with Algeria. That's huge," the MP said, citing for instance the descendants of the French settlers, the so-called pieds noirs, and those of members of the Organisation Armee Secrete (OAS), a French dissident paramilitary group which conducted violent action against Algerians during the war.
According to Sebaihi, the nostalgia felt by all these circles echoes a feeling of downgrading among a large part of the French population on the global stage and amplifies the denial of colonial crimes.
Moreover, she said, "colonisation is always difficult to come to terms with because it recalls an inglorious past."
"It was easier to move forward on French-German reconciliation because many French people were resistance fighters against the [the World War Two collaborationist] Vichy regime; there is a narrative of national pride. But when you are a state that colonised and massacred, it's harder to admit it."
In 2020, historian Raphaelle Branche wrote a book in which she interviewed relatives of French soldiers mobilised during the Algerian war from 1954 to 1962. The shame they felt kept them silent.
"The families also did not want to know what happened," she explained.
Secrets and smears
Many spectators of Kaki's plays express this feeling to the playwright at the end of his performances.
"Some come to apologise, sometimes saying they were unaware of the existence of such atrocities," the actor-activist told MEE.
This lack of awareness is partly explained by the minimalist treatment of colonisation and the Algerian war of independence in the French school system.
Sometimes the colonial era is even glorified. A year ago, MEE discovered a history lesson for 11-year-olds that echoed rightwing and far-right propaganda about the “positive role” of colonisation.
"Some teachers have in mind debates on colonisation that are political and not scientific," Laurence De Cock, a history teacher and co-author of a book about "memories and history at the school of the republic", told MEE.
For historian Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, as long as there is no official recognition of colonial crimes, this history will find no place in school textbooks.
"One might have thought that the February 2005 law would be the epilogue to this desire for redemption [of the colonial era], but it was the prologue," he told MEE.
“After Sarkozy and his then Prime Minister Francois Fillon, other political leaders, such as the current interior minister, have taken over to defend an apologetic interpretation of France's colonial past.”
According to him, these figures often stand out by their aggressiveness toward any initiative aimed at lifting the veil on the atrocities of the colonial system.
Marseille Mayor Benoit Payan recently experienced it after wanting to commemorate the May 1945 massacres.
The municipal opposition asked the socialist party mayor to "stop trying to rewrite history" and to "stop kowtowing to the Algiers regime".
They were referring to the ongoing diplomatic crisis between France and Algeria, which has experienced a spectacular worsening in recent times, fuelled by the conflicting memorial narratives surrounding the colonial era and the independence war.
As long as there is no recognition of colonial crimes, this history will find no place in school textbooks
Another example is the smear campaign launched against veteran journalist Jean-Michel Apathie last March after he compared the massacre committed by the Nazis in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane to the "hundreds" of similar acts committed by France in Algeria at the beginning of the 19th-century colonial conquest.
Although many historians defended Apathie by supporting his comparison, he was the target of virulent reactions and had to quit his radio station.
A right-wing newspaper called him an "evangelist of wokeism who confuses journalism with morality".
Even Arcom, the French audiovisual regulatory authority, got involved in the affair, claiming that Apathie's comments relativised Nazi atrocities.
On the far right, the vice-president of the National Rally, Jordan Bardella, also took a stand, calling Apathie’s comparison "odious".
This was an expected reaction from a party whose founder, the late Jean-Marie Le Pen, was a former officer in the colonial army in Algeria who was accused of torture.
His daughter, Marine, who has replaced him at the head of the party, said colonisation had not been "a tragedy for Algeria" and that France had nothing to apologise for.
On several occasions, she criticised the policy of memorial reconciliation between the two countries initiated by Macron, denouncing "disastrous signals of repentance, division and self-hatred".
Does this desire for repentance really exist? According to Le Cour Grandmaison, the French president "has demonstrated, since coming to power, remarkable opportunism and pusillanimity in addressing issues related to colonisation."
"As the political situation in France deteriorated, the far right rose and the right-wing parties in the government radicalised, Macron contented himself with partial, biased and in some cases completely false statements, as was the case with the 17 October 1961 massacres," the historian told MEE, accusing the president of yielding to purely electoral interests.
Several commentators have also mentioned political reasons behind the cancellation of a documentary on the massive use of chemical weapons by the French army during colonisation, that was about to be aired on public television two months ago.
The decision, officially justified by the need to focus on a busy international news agenda, constituted another missed opportunity for many French people to learn more about the crimes committed by their country in Algeria.
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