A painful question today in social issue with the sociologist Jean Viard, CNRS research director : the traces left by the Algerian war in France. How to build a common memory around this tragic episode in our history?
The harkis and their descendants, the conscripts, the pied-noirs, the separatists too, the bearers of these very different memories were gathered on Saturday March 19, in front of Emmanuel Macron at the Elysée, 60 years after the signing of the Evian agreements, which marked the official end of the war.
franceinfo: Emmanuel Macron wanted, he says, “laying a first stone of this common memory”. Why is this task so delicate today in France?
John Viard: If you like, because we were brought up, trained with the different paths, side by side, those you just mentioned, the pied-noirs, etc. Me, when I was a child, for example, every Sunday at mass, the priest denounced the torture. My father worked more with the FLN, even if he never wanted to finance it. It was things that were present.
In 1962, I was in the port of Marseilles to carry the suitcases of the Pieds-noirs. We went there with all our friends because no one welcomed them. France was closed to the pied-noirs who arrived at the port, because they were there, with their suitcases, their bags, etc. But of course Gaston Defferres had the impression that the war had been made for the Pieds-noirs. Even I, who am neither pied-noir nor Algerian, afterwards, I published a lot of Algerian writers. That is to say that all of this is mixed up in our lives. And somewhere, it’s still, including in the imagination of young people from the neighborhoods, all that, firstly because in the meantime, there is Palestine, they are quite close to the Palestinians, of course, in Algeria, even more, and then, here, they always have the impression of being discriminated against.
You have to remember one thing, for me France’s big fault in Algeria is the fact of having given nationality to everyone, except Muslims. We gave it to the Jews, to the Christians, who were already there before we arrived, but we didn’t give it to the Muslims, the Republic has not kept its fundamental commitment. Today, all that is present in a slightly reinvented way. And let’s not talk about Algeria, where the government, since the war, has used the war to basically legitimize its very largely military power, that’s all that comes into play.
Are these scars linked to the Algerian war also hereditary? They were able to be transmitted from generation to generation and that can create, even 60 years later, tensions in France today?
But they are transmitted. Where I live, there are harkis who live in houses, there are camps, there are houses given to them, built for them, which are very poor. They live next to each other. Let’s not talk about the Pieds-noirs, which is a brilliant, warm culture, a kind of warmth, a mixture of Jews, Spaniards and French. It’s festive, this culture. So all these cultures are transmitted. It is an enrichment for France to have brought back these cultures with their dimensions. But we never say it like that. And so obviously, all that creates difficulties, because basically, you also have to allow time.
You have to know how to allow time for a wound that exists between all these people, but afterward, you also have to say: wait, the arrival of a Muslim culture in France, but that’s an asset, the arrival of a pied-noir culture, but it’s an asset, these people bring know-how, behavior, etc. but we can’t say that for the moment. We are unable to give Islam its place. It’s a central question, I often say it, but for me, it’s essential.
What has not been done, precisely, which could have made it possible to accelerate this process, or which can make it possible to really start it?
But on the one hand, the fact of saying that Islam is the second religion of France and that it is time for them to have large mosques, in squares, with cultural centers, etc. and that the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, we take the education of children much more seriously than we do. There are wonderful people in these neighborhoods. We know that Henri IV has better teachers if we can say that many suburban high schools. At some point, all of this comes into question.
Do you directly link these two issues?
Of course I reread it, because I think there is a certain link and that on this subject, we have never been completely clear. Afterwards, we must also let the historians work, little by little. There are links between French historians and Algerian historians. In a war like that, there is communication, there are horrors, there are things like that. So historians have to gradually build the story, the war, but also the story of colonization, you tell the French, for example, we conquered Algeria in 1830, in fact, we settled in 1860, we took the good land. Do they know it? We put the local populations in the weeds on the hills and basically, all this destruction of the local society, we don’t know it.
There are things like that that need to be told. It is not to repent, it is the history of the world, but to say to oneself effectively, those who have come to France, whether they are harkis or whether they are black Algerian workers who are not French, it must slowly give them a legitimate place, independently of this memory.