France lifts the lid on its Algeria war

On June 11, 1957, at 11 pm, French soldiers burst into Maurice Audin’s apartment in Algiers. Audin, a 25-yearold mathematician, just had time to tell his wife, Josette, “Take care of the children” before being marched down the staircase by two paratroopers. Those were the last words she heard from him. Neither she nor their three children, then 3 years old, 18 months and 1 month, ever saw him again. For the next 61 years, Audin, helped by French intellectuals, fought to have the facts established about her husband, who was a member of the Algerian Communist Party and an anti-war activist. The French Army said he had escaped while being transferred. The truth was more sinister: In a 1958 book based on witness accounts, the historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet revealed that Audin was tortured by the military and died either as a result of his treatment or by summary execution. Thousands of Algerians similarly went missing during their war for independence from 1954 to 1962, and for six decades France had nothing to say about those disappearances. Finally, on Sept. 13, President Emmanuel Macron paid a visit to Josette Audin, now 87, at her home in Bagnolet, a Paris suburb, to seek forgiveness and tell her and her children, “in the name of the French Republic,” what they knew all along: that the official version was a lie and that Vidal-Naquet had been right — although the precise cause of Audin’s death is still unknown. More remarkably, in a statement released the same day, Macron admitted what no French president before him had dared to acknowledge: that torture by French forces was widespread during the Algerian war as a product, in Macron’s words, of a “legally established system.” French historians described this admission, which goes far beyond the emblematic Audin case, as a turning point for French history. President Macron also promised that archives that might shed light on the disappeared would be opened. Could official France finally be coming to terms with its colonial past? It certainly helps that Macron is the first French president born after the Algerian war. In every African country he visits he makes this point: As a 40-yearold, he does not feel burdened by this part of French history, and he encourages young Africans to look ahead, not back. It also took France more than half a century to acknowledge its complicity in deporting Jews during World War II; President Jacques Chirac did that in a 1995 speech at the site where Jews rounded up by the French police were detained before being sent to Nazi death camps. Previous presidents had supported the fiction that the Vichy regime, not France, bore responsibility for what Chirac called “the irreparable.” Chirac, who was too young to have participated in World War II, had a clean conscience about the German occupation. But he did serve in Algeria as a junior officer, and as president avoided the Algerian war as an issue. Algeria has a special and painful place in French national memory, and vice versa. The Algerian war in the French psyche is often likened to the Vietnam War for Americans — two conscription wars that ended in humiliating defeat. But the Algerian wounds, kept under a lid, are deeper. More than a colony, Algeria had been made an integral part of France. For more than a century, hundreds of thousands of settlers left France for a new life across the Mediterranean. After the war, their descendants returned to a country many had never known, and they never quite accepted their loss. More than 1.5 million French conscripts fought in the war; 23,000 died, and those who came back traumatized kept silent. France’s booming economy made the 1960s a time for optimism, not tales of failure. Amnesty laws ensured that army officers would not be held accountable for war crimes. Still, the two countries seem forever intertwined. Algiers and its spectacular bay still seem a mirror image of Marseille, on the other side of the sea. Algerian immigrants flocked to France for jobs in the 1960s and ‘70s, when labor was needed. Today, their children and grandchildren are French, but they have inherited a troubled legacy. The resentment never vanished. “As long as our common history is locked, we’ll keep going in circles, as we’ve done since 1962,” a senior French diplomat told me two months ago. “France must make some kind of gesture.” Will President Macron’s move unlock this tragic past? Algeria’s minister of veteran affairs, Tayeb Zitouni, welcomed it as “a positive, commendable step.” But only a step. Mr. Macron’s words about torture were cautious, and the Élysée, France’s presidential palace, noted that he was extending “recognition,” not “repentance.” A week later, the French president awarded the Légion d’Honneur to a group of Harkis, the 150,000 Algerians who chose to side with the French during the war and paid a heavy price for it. This is his point: the injustice to be repaired is on both sides. Florence Beaugé, a journalist who investigated the use of torture in the Algerian war, wishes that Mr. Macron had included in his statement, along with Mr. Audin, two other Algerians who suffered the same fate: Ali Boumendjel, a lawyer, and Larbi Ben M’Hidi, a leader of the insurrection. “This would have been a huge step forward,” Ms. Beaugé said. Ms. Beaugé opened the floodgates of memory in 2000 with an interview of Louisette Ighilahriz, an activist for Algerian independence who recounted being raped and tortured by French soldiers in 1957 while generals looked on. She spoke out after all those years to thank the army doctor who found her after an interrogation session and saved her life. The publication of the interview, on Le Monde’s front page, was such a shock that shortly afterward, two retired generals agreed to speak out. They admitted overseeing the use of torture, giving new impetus to a debate that refused to go away. “It was not so much remorse as a need to talk,” Ms. Beaugé says. “They had to unload their dark past before leaving this world.” Many of these actors are now gone, as is former President François Mitterrand, who in 1957 was justice minister in the Socialist government that gave the French Army a green light to crush the insurrection at all costs. As the official truth finally moves ahead, soul-searching can be expected about the political responsibilities of both Socialists and Gaullists, and of the highest echelons of the French armed forces. Light will have to be shed on the extent to which rape was used as a weapon, along with torture. The present Algerian leadership, heir to the independence war, will also have to finally confront the dark side of the insurgency’s struggle. The introspection won’t be easy, but it is now, at last, inevitable.