France and Algeria: a new rupture?

Franco-Algerian ties can be explained by the persistence of a historical dispute. The regional geopolitical context plays a role.

Asking a historian about Franco-Algerian relations is symptomatic of a dominant idea: Franco-Algerian relations can be explained by the persistence of a historical dispute and it should be resolved with a view to reconciliation. Of course, colonization created specific links between France and Algeria. It was not only of an exceptional duration (one hundred and thirty-two years), but also of a very particular nature.

Algeria was a settler colony, founded on the supremacy of a colonial minority of 1 million people, while the 8 million Algerians were maintained in legal, political, economic and social inequality.

Violent, this form of colonization could only be defeated at the cost of an eight-year war of independence, particularly murderous on the Algerian side; a war which also affected French society even in its most rural parishes, through the use of the contingent.

And then immigration, from the interwar period, distinguished Algeria from other colonies. It is from this rural and impoverished Algeria that the largest contingents of migrants left for France. No more than others, however, Franco-Algerian relations are determined only by history.

The current crisis has everything to do with a regional geopolitical context – logically the French rapprochement with Morocco is straining Algeria. Beyond, towards the east, the situation in the Middle East separates the two States. On the larger scale of the African continent, a reconfiguration is at work.

The era of French hegemony seems to be drawing to a close. It is up to me, as a historian, neither to deplore it nor to congratulate myself on it, but, quite simply, to note it – and thus to contextualize Franco-Algerian relations. You have to get out of the face-to-face situation to understand them. In comparison, history only has a very relative weight. A clue? The 1^is November 2024, France recognized the assassination of Larbi Ben M'Hidi, when Emmanuel Macron was visiting Morocco. So, of course, the statement didn't carry any weight.

It was even poorly received. Finally, it is necessary to note the error of perspective of the dominant idea. It is a question of diplomatic relations and, in this matter, stability can never be achieved. Since 1962, Franco-Algerian relations have gone through various phases. Let's stop believing that they have always been in conflict – in the 1960s, Algeria was the priority destination for French aid workers while, conversely, Algerians benefited from advantageous travel conditions towards France.

Let us also stop believing that Franco-Algerian relations could be eternally peaceful. This is not how international relations work. Like others, Franco-Algerian relations will continue to fluctuate, depending on multiple factors, among which the past must not be abused.

The diplomatic crisis is not a new political fracture, but the symptom of the necrosis of ideologies based on memorial rent.

Let's start by naming the facts in an era that insists on burying them in the common graves of non-thought and media bullshit. In the asymmetry of the balance of power between France and Algeria, two very convenient and poisonous state resentments govern their bilateral relations, their internal political affairs.

Talk about something else, like “painful passions” and the “reconciliation of memories”would amount to accepting, consciously or not, an endless carnival of political exploitation of the colonial question for chauvinist and authoritarian purposes both in Paris and in Algiers.

Since the publication of Houris in August 2024 until the arbitrary imprisonment of Boualem Sansal, including the awarding of the Goncourt Prize to Kamel Daoud (for Houris – Editor’s note), violent colonial reflexes contesting the legitimacy of independent, Arabic-speaking Algeria have resurfaced among large sections of the French cultural and political elites. Their crystallization was revealed in the racist offensive carried out against the historian Nedjib Sidi Moussa, because he criticized on the set of C Politics (November 24, 2024) reactionary ideas, “nostalgic” and xenophobic that the two Algerian writers recently naturalized French promote.

Regarding the unleashing of such postcolonial racism, let us remember one thing. The paranoid obsession of the hegemonic media with the Islam-immigration-insecurity triptych partly explains their permanent quest for right-wing figures of the ” diversity “ to legitimize, with a powerful orientalist charge, the most rancid ideas of the “blessed time of the colonies”.

This media configuration gave birth to the figure of the “hearable Arab”, a major player in the dissemination of biologizing culturalism of the hard and extreme right. Contrary to the proposals of the Sansal-Daoud duo and their hypernationalist adversaries, talking about the colonial and postcolonial question with the language of the official institutions of France and Algeria is an immense intellectual defeat.

To compensate for this destruction of meaning and language, it is essential to say no to the followers of authoritarianism in the name of anticolonialism; no to those nostalgic for colonial supremacism in the name of “duty of civilization” ; no to circumventing the colonial question in the name of evoking the Algerian civil war (1991-2002); no to the valorization of a named barbarism “the French presence in Algeria”.

The current diplomatic crisis between France and Algeria is not, in my opinion, a “new political rupture” between the two countries. It is rather the symptom of the necrosis of resentful ideologies which, under various modulations, cling to two aggressive nationalisms which feed on their mutual and alienating memory income. A dying income… but one that doesn't want to die.