French President Emmanuel Macron called for further reconciliation between France and the former French colony on the 60th anniversary of the armistice in the Algerian war. Macron said in a speech at the Élysée Palace in Paris that the path of acknowledging the injustice that has happened will have to be continued.
“The Algerian war and what was kept secret about it had become – and still are today – the basis … for resentment.” At the commemoration ceremony with 200 guests – among them former combatants from the opposing sides, but not a single official representative of the Algerian government – he wants to bring together the different perspectives on the war and thus make it possible to make further progress on the path of coming to terms with the past. “There will inevitably be moments of irritation, there will still be feelings of injustice, but we’ll get through it.”
Between 1954 and 1962, Algerian advocates of independence fought in the Algerian War against the French colonial power, which had ruled the country since 1830 and brutally suppressed the liberation struggle. An armistice agreement between the French government and the Algerian National Liberation Front FLN was signed on March 18, 1962 in Évian on Lake Geneva; The war, which had cost hundreds of thousands of victims, ended the next day.
Relationships still strained
The conflict has long been taboo in France. The integration of the Algerian French (Pieds-Noirs), originally from Europe, was difficult; with many Harkis – those Algerians who had fought for the colonial rulers and who fled revenge from their compatriots after 1962 – it hardly succeeded. Relations between the two countries remain strained to this day. At least Macron, like his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy, recognized France’s historic responsibility. As early as 2017, Macron called colonization “a crime against humanity, downright barbarism. It is part of a past that we must face up to and for which we must apologize to the victims.” Since then he has tried several times to reach out for reconciliation and to deal with what happened as comprehensively and truthfully as possible.
In the past year, the historian Benjamin Stora made numerous suggestions as to how the understanding of history on both sides could be aligned. Accordingly, Macron is now trying to “pacify” remembering and to speak truths with a politics of gestures. In the Élysee on Saturday, around four war witnesses told of their very different experiences and memories. In addition, Macron has repeatedly admitted French responsibility for certain murders and massacres during and after the Algerian War.
Macron’s right-wing and far-right competitors in the current presidential election campaign consider this course to be fundamentally wrong. There is no reason for France to regret anything or apologize, stresses Marine Le Pen, for example. Macron is faking history, agrees the candidate for the conservative Républicains, Valérie Pécresse.