“Boualem Sansal, Algeria and France”

Dear subscribers,

In 1960, when Sartre risked prison after signing the “manifesto of the 121,” a firebrand that advocated military disobedience and the independence of Algeria, de Gaulle exclaimed: “We are not imprisoning Voltaire! ». We don't put intelligence behind bars. The Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, who received the Grand Prix de la Francophonie from the Académie française in 2013 and the Grand Prix du roman from the Académie française in 2015, was nevertheless arrested by the Algiers regime because he is a great writer, uncompromising with the corruption of the elites and the rampant Islamism in his native country.

Boualem Sansal spoke of this totalitarian drift in Algeria in his novels and his committed essays, as in this Letter of anger and hope to my compatriotspublished in 2006 by Gallimard, including Le Figaro published extracts: “Basically, we never had the opportunity to talk to each other, I mean between us, the Algerians…