“For decades, French society has made great progress, it has opened up” on the war in Algeria, estimates Friday March 18 on franceinfo Paul-Max Morin, doctor of political science and co-author of the podcast Algerian sauceproduced by Spotify.
franceinfo: The intimate memories around the Algerian war have been silenced, like taboos?
Paul Max Morin : Yes, there is a fairly classic pattern where the first generation suffers and buries it so that the second generation can fit in. There’s a lot of pain because it’s a very violent, painful story. But for the new generation, things are different. They may have been spectators of pain, but they themselves are not bearers of it. For decades, French society has made great progress, it has opened up and offers these young people plenty of tools so that they can better build their relationship to this Algerian past.
Can this generation be that of appeasement?
Appeasement, I don’t know, I rather use the term overcoming. 39% of young people between the ages of 18 and 25 today have a grandfather or grandmother affected by the Algerian war. For these young people, this past is not really conflicting. They share a fairly consensual vision of what colonization is, the fight for independence. They express benevolence towards all the actors who have gone through this war. The descendants of Pieds-noirs and the descendants of Algerians do not have an opposing vision of the past. This generation of overcoming above all requires tools to work with, what interests them is more history than memory. They want to reinforce learning about colonization in school curricula, or about the war in Algeria.
This is not yet the case ?
It’s getting better and better. The Algerian war has been taught since 1983 so it’s been a long time. It is now rather well taught. What is perhaps most lacking is colonization. There there is a real work of reinforcement, knowledge on what colonization was, the colonial system and especially on what it produced as consequences. The Algerian war is only the end of this story, before there are 132 years of colonization which are much less known: the conquest, the colonial system, etc.