Nadir Hamdouchi
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2:14 p.m. – June 23, 2024
The essay co-signed by two specialists in the question of memory, Sébastien Ledoux and Paul Max Morin, calls into question the Algerian policy of French President Emmanuel Macron, which has become a quagmire for him.
And “failure”. In a critically acclaimed book entitled Macron’s Algeria. The impasses of a memory policy (Presses Universitaires de France, 296 pages, 260 dirhams, May 29, 2024), MM. Ledoux and Morin inventory the meager results of the“considerable investment” of Emmanuel Macron in favor of Algerian policy, supposedly “close the mourning” the past. The French president, who launched a mission in 2020 on “the memory of colonization and the Algerian war”, with a view to triggering “reconciliation between the French people and the Algerian people», is no longer able to manage this file.
The two authors mention French measures “categorical” and gestures of “memorialization”, which in no way bridge the gap between the two countries. The book mentions a president who tempers, who uses the question of memory for electoral purposes and who acts without consultation with all the parties concerned by the subject. Furthermore, the commission of French and Algerian historians, created in 2022 to address the common past of France and Algeria (five meetings so far) only addresses often cosmetic points: “identify and record cemeteries, graves and names of resistance fighters buried in France”, “affix commemorative plaques” in “memorial places”restitution of archives and “symbolic goods” having belonged to Emir Abd el-Kader: complex operations which must be validated by France and by a set of private actors.
For both authors, Emmanuel Macron led between 2017 and 2022 “a particularly active policy on the Algerian war”except that behind “the symbolic summoned”it must be recognized that “public inaction” took over to the point that “the impasses of this presidential memory policy despite – and perhaps because of – the personal investment of the president”, have become hindering, even significant.
Emmanuel Macron “ultimately reduced its action to a very traditional categorical policy towards the memorial groups concerned, while its right-wing led it to significant renunciations in the treatment of this colonial heritage of French society of which racism remains one of the most structuring aspects”, comment the authors of the book. As a reminder, the report on which Emmanuel Macron based his memorial policy recommends neither apologies nor repentance, which was very poorly seen in Algeria, particularly by veterans’ associations.
