The summer of 62 is still etched in the collective memory of both countries. For Algeria, it is the joy of independence, of taking its destiny into its own hands after the end of French colonization a few years earlier in Morocco and Tunisia.
>> Sixty years after the independence of Algeria, the delicate transmission of memory in families
At the time, independent Algeria embodied a third world which was growing in power and which wanted to take its full place in the concert of nations. On the French side, nearly a million Pieds-noirs leave Algeria in a few months, leaving behind them lives of work and a visceral attachment to a land where they no longer have a place. There is also the flight of the Harkis, these Algerian soldiers, auxiliary to the French army, sometimes massacred by the new masters of power, some of whom manage to reach France.
From this acceleration of History, decided by General de Gaulle, the wounds on both sides of the Mediterranean will never really be healed. This brutal divorce will mark generations it is the beginning of what the historian Benjamin Stora, calls the making of “painful memories”.
Emmanuel Macron had wanted to make Franco-Algerian reconciliation a marker of his first five-year term. Today, the French president has a feeling of frustration. Yet he multiplied the symbolic gestures of appeasement. We remember the restitution of the skulls of Algerian combatants of the 19th century, the declassification of French archives in Algeria, the recognition of torture and the disappearance of Maurice Audin, a mathematician close to the FLN, or that of Ali Boumendjel, lawyer defending Algerian nationalists.
But to reconcile, it takes two. And Emmanuel Macron received absolutely nothing in return for his gestures of appeasement. The Algerian regime remains more than ever locked in its nationalist rhetoric born in 1962. So a question now arises: what will Emmanuel Macron do with Algeria? He ended his first term with a tightening of visas granted to Algerians, in retaliation for Algiers’ unwillingness to facilitate the return of its radicalized nationals or those who entered France illegally.
Will he play appeasement or arm wrestling? In any case, officially, Emmanuel Macron calls for the strengthening of relations between the two countries in a letter sent Monday, July 4 to President Tebboune and for the continuation of the work of memorial reconciliation.