Modern & Contemporary France

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The Stora Report

Robert Mortimer

To cite this article: Robert Mortimer (2023) The Stora Report, Modern & Contemporary France,
31:1, 7-16, DOI: 10.1080/09639489.2022.2083091
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09639489.2022.2083091

Published online: 06 Jul 2022.

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MODERN & CONTEMPORARY FRANCE
2023, VOL. 31, NO. 1, 7–16
https://doi.org/10.1080/09639489.2022.2083091

The Stora Report

Robert Mortimer
Political Science, Haverford College, Haverford, PA, USA

ABSTRACT
With the approach of the sixtieth anniversary of the Evian Accords
that brought an end to the Algerian War, France’s president,
Emmanuel Macron, commissioned the historian, Benjamin Stora,
to prepare a report on the evolution of relations between the two
countries since the independence of Algeria. Stora, born in Algeria
in 1950, is one of the most productive French historians of the
Algerian nationalist movement, author of many studies of the
wartime period and its aftermath. Relations between the two coun­
tries have often been strained, and observers note that there has
been little reconciliation of the traumas of colonisation and the
exodus of the European pied-noir population in 1962. Predictably
the Stora Report has proved controversial. The paper will analyse
the context, the content, and the reception of the report on the two
shores of the Mediterranean.
RÉSUMÉ
À la veille de la soixantième anniversaire des Accords d’Evian qui
ont signalé la fin de la Guerre d’Algérie, le Président, Emmanuel
Macron, a demandé à l’historien français, Benjamin Stora, de
préparer un rapport officiel au sujet des relations entre les deux
pays depuis l’indépendance de l’Algérie. Né en Algérie en 1950,
Stora est un des historiens les plus reconnus du mouvement natio­
naliste algérien, auteur de maintes études de la période de la lutte
anticoloniale et la période postcoloniale. Les rapports entre les
deux pays ont été souvent tendancieux, et nous notons très peu
de démarches envers la réconciliation suite aux traumatismes de la
colonisation et l’exode de la population pied-noir en 1962. Il n’est
pas surprenant que le Rapport Stora entame des controverses. Cet
article étudie le contexte, le contenu, et la réception du rapport sur
les deux rives de la Méditerranée.

On a pleasant Saturday afternoon in October 2021, fans of the great French chansonnier
George Brassens gathered in the Parisian park named after him for a celebration of the
one hundredth anniversary of his birth. Throughout the day numerous entertainers
presented selections from his vast repertoire. The final performers were Djamel Djenidi
and his Algerian chaabi orchestra interpreting Brassens’ songs in French and occasionally
Arabic language versions. The Parisian audience loved it as the ‘Djamila Orchestra’
composed of Algerian and French musicians paid homage to the beloved French icon.
What better example of the blending of French and Algerian cultures?

CONTACT Robert Mortimer rmortime@haverford.edu Haverford College, Haverford, PA 19041-1392, USA

© 2022 Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France
8 R. MORTIMER

One week later, a different group led by France’s president, Emmanuel Macron,
gathered at the Pont de Bezons on the Seine to commemorate officially the sixtieth
anniversary of the massacre of peaceful Algerian demonstrators on 17 October 1961,
some five months before the signature of the Evian Accords that brought an end to the
Algerian war. A plaque mounted there recounts how the Parisian police attacked the
marchers, killed many people and tossed their bodies into the river. How bitter the
memories of this atrocity, covered up and denied by the authorities of the time. How
insurmountable the prospect of reconciling the two populations entwined in the coloni­
zation of Algeria?
Well aware of the depth of emotions still linked to the Algerian war, Emmanuel Macron,
the first French president to be born after the war, commissioned a report in July 2020 on the
issues of memory, truth, and reconciliation with regard to the colonisation of Algeria and the
war of independence. Macron, of course, was planning to run for re-election in 2022 in
a political environment in which the fate of ‘l’Algérie française’ is still an issue on the political
right. He conferred this task upon Benjamin Stora, the pre-eminent French historian of the
subject. As a scholar who led ‘a life spent remembering a war France has tried to forget’
(Sayare 2014), Stora is unquestionably the most knowledgeable person to whom Macron
could turn to address the conundrum of Franco-Algerian relations. In January 2021 the
historian submitted the inevitably controversial ‘Stora Report’ to the Elysée. It is most readily
accessible today as a book published by Albin Michel under the poignant title France-Algérie:
les passions douloureuses. Nothing is a better guide to the ever-vexing question of relations
between France and Algeria on the sixtieth anniversary of Algerian independence.
The notions of truth and reconciliation are, of course, not unique to the Franco-
Algerian context. Indeed, they are perhaps more familiar in the case of South Africa
where Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu created the well-known Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in the aftermath of the struggle against apartheid. The
French sociologist, Laetitia Bucaille, has written an extremely interesting comparative
analysis of the two cases entitled Le pardon et la rancoeur (2010). As the title suggests, she
is especially interested in explaining why the South African case moved in the direction of
pardon while the Franco-Algerian relationship has remained rancorous. Already in 2010
she noted that the success of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has
‘prompted the idea that a comparable institution was necessary to settle the history of
violence between France and Algeria’ (Bucaille 2010, 12). Her point, of course, reflected
the troubling fact that the coloniser and the former colony had not been able to agree on
the creation of such a body. Indeed, the idea was completely out of the question on both
sides. While the Stora Report has now endorsed the idea a decade later, the political will to
found such a commission still appears to be absent.
Bucaille identified two main factors that had produced rancour between the two
parties even fifty years after the end of the Algerian war. France, she argued, had practised
a ‘politique d’oubli’ which buried the memory of what were long referred to as ‘les
événements d’Algérie’ (Bucaille 2010, 98). She cites several authors who have identified
this policy of forgetting the Algerian war, among them one Benjamin Stora.1 Forgetting,
Bucaille argued, is not the same thing as laying a memory to rest. Rather, it is a denial of
the trauma that South Africa’s TRC was designed to address and overcome. Why did South
Africa move in the direction of remembering while France moved in the direction of
forgetting? The reason, she argues, is that while white South Africans lost privileges,
 MODERN & CONTEMPORARY FRANCE 9

France lost a war (as well as a colony). Furthermore, Algeria hardly needed to reconcile the
losers, namely the pied-noir population that fled the country in 1962. While reconciliation
had a very high stake for post-apartheid South Africa, it had little stake for France and
even less for Algeria. To put it differently, civil wars and colonial wars are very different
creatures.
Moreover, while France might have wished to forget a lost war, Algeria had every
reason to remember a victorious war. Bucaille stresses the fact that the Algerian regime
has built its legitimacy upon a heroic interpretation of their war of independence. In
striking opposition to France’s ‘politique d’oubli’, she contrasts the Algerian narrative of
‘un seul héros: le peuple’ and ‘une vision manichéenne entre l’horreur de la colonisation et
l’héroïsme des indépendantistes’ (Bucaille 2010, 98). Whereas reconciliation was instru­
mental to governance in the state of South Africa, it was not to governance of France or
Algeria. The postwar relationship was a matter of foreign policy for the two sovereign
states that emerged from the Algerian war. International politics is rarely the domain of
truth and reconciliation bodies.
There is an abundant literature on relations between France and Algeria. For example,
the Algerian political scientist, Naoufel Brahimi El Mili, has written a two-volume study
entitled France-Algérie: cinquante ans d’histoires secrètes (2017, 2019). Another informative
contribution is the memoir of a former Algerian ambassador to France, Mohammed
Bedjaoui, which he calls En mission extraordinaire (Bedjaoui 2016). The title is particularly
apt as the Franco-Algerian relationship is an extraordinary one for both states. What one
observes nonetheless is each state’s pursuit of its national interest in a highly charged
historical environment marked by 132 years of colonisation. Over the years, the two states
reshaped their economic relations as the Algerian government took greater control over
the Sahara’s rich oil and gas resources, eventually nationalizing the hydrocarbon industry
in 1971, and striking a major natural gas delivery agreement in the 1980s.
No one is better qualified to examine the complex matter of the relationship between
France and Algeria than Benjamin Stora. Born in 1950 in the western Algerian city of
Constantine, he grew up in a bustling neighbourhood that reflected the diversity of
colonial Algeria. At the age of twelve he was part of the huge exodus of people with
French nationality who fled the country in the summer of 1962. Stora recalls this as
a traumatic personal uprooting. More importantly he came to recognize the tumult that
marked the land of his birth as a collective trauma. As he declared in a 2014 interview: ‘We
still haven’t taken the full measure of how much this war, this history, this French presence
in Algeria has marked and traumatized French society . . . Everything—everything—stems
from Algeria’ (Sayare 2014). The Stora Report is a step towards understanding the full
measure.
*
The Report is not a history, it is an evocation of an immensely sensitive relationship. Stora
poured a lifetime of research and study as a historian into the document. One senses that
he has read everything that bears upon the memory of the interweaving of these two
societies over 132 years and of their respective paths since 1962. The first two citations
very aptly set the tone for the report. They come from two exceptional writers, Albert
Camus and Mouloud Feraoun. In 1956, Camus issued an ‘Appel pour une trêve civile en
Algérie’ in which he declared ‘J’ai aimé avec passion cette terre où je suis né [. . .] elle est
restée pour moi la terre du bonheur [. . .].’ Camus would of course become a highly
10 R. MORTIMER

controversial figure in the absence of ‘bonheur’ in his birthplace during the last years of
his life. Mouloud Feraoun kept a journal during these years before he became a victim of
the anger that he saw rising in his homeland: ‘Le pays se réveille aveuglé par la colère et
plein de pressentiments; une force confuse monte en lui doucement’ (Stora 2021, 7).
These two quotations capture profoundly the painfulness of the period from 1954 to 1962
that Stora was tasked to remember in search of a path to reconciliation. These citations
demonstrate from the very first page how conscious Stora was of the immensity of his
task.
Stora divided the report into several sections followed by recommendations, several
annexes, and an extensive bibliography. Part I is aptly entitled ‘Algérie, l’impossible oubli’,
directly confronting the policy of forgetting that he had condemned in his 1991 book, La
Gangrène et l’oubli. He prefaces Part I with two more striking citations from a French and
an Algerian source. The first is from the eminent French philosopher, Paul Ricœur, who
asks whether there are not nations that suffer from a ‘défaut de mémoire comme s’ils
fuyaient devant la hantise de leur propre passé?’ What is striking here is not only the idea
of haunting but also the fact that Emmanuel Macron was a graduate student of Ricœur of
whom he is a well-known admirer. Indeed one may speculate that Ricœur’s work is the
origin of Macron’s assignment to Stora.2 The second provocative quotation introducing
Part I comes from the classic novel Nedjma by Kateb Yacine, one of Algeria’s pre-eminent
writers. The passage refers to the ‘souls of ancestors’, invoking memories of forefathers
defeated in war by the French invaders of 1830. Hence Stora sets the context of his report
squarely in the sensitive realm of history/memory.
Casting his undertaking as ‘un exercise difficile, mais nécessaire’ as the war was
a ‘sombre période de la conscience nationale’, indeed a ‘traumatisme collectif’ for
France, he recognizes that colonisation was likewise a sombre period for Algeria. Stora
understands that the two nations do not remember the same things. He treats this
incongruity under the heading of ‘Deux imaginaires’ (Stora 2021, 36). Hence when
political actors call for a rapprochement, they run into two different sets of memories
(imaginaires) that separate rather than reconcile the two nations. Stora’s task was in effect
to chart a path that could transcend these two imaginaires.
Stora identifies a category of person that he calls ‘le monde du contact’ whose lives
transcended the two nationalities, for example Camus, Emilie Busquat (the French wife of
Messali Hadj), Léon-Etienne Duval (archbishop of Algiers and cardinal of the Catholic
Church) who was dubbed Monseigneur Mohamed Duval, Pierre Chaulet who joined the
Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne (GPRA, the provisional govern­
ment of the FLN) in Tunis during the war and spent a distinguished postwar medical
career at the Mustapha Pacha hospital in Algiers. These and many others were persons of
‘destins entremêlés’ between France and Algeria who represented possible paths towards
reconciliation via ‘une organisation complexe de la mémoire à propos de l’Algérie et de la
colonisation’ (Stora 2021, 48, 50). Having evoked this ‘monde du contact’ that might have
facilitated reconciliation, Stora nonetheless recognises that once Algeria became an
independent country, a whole new chapter of inter-state relations emerged to shape
the destiny of reconciliation.
Part II, ‘Les Rapports de la France et l’Algérie’, addresses this post-independence phase.
Stora explains that this new relationship got off to a rocky start. There was a mood of
resentment in France as some 800,000 pieds-noirs arrived in France during the summer of
 MODERN & CONTEMPORARY FRANCE 11

1962 laying the foundation for the far-right backlash that became the Front National.
President Charles de Gaulle, having come to power promising to save ‘l’Algérie française’,
did not want to dwell upon the recent past, whereas the new Algerian government did
not want to forget 132 years of colonial rule, let alone the hard-won victory of 1962. De
Gaulle supported a series of amnesty laws to calm the waters in France while paradoxi­
cally vaunting his role as a decoloniser. For Stora, the amnesty laws ‘ont fabriqué une
chaîne d’amnésie en France, sans construire un consensus politique’ (Stora 2021, 55).
De Gaulle’s immediate successors, Georges Pompidou and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing,
likewise sought to forget the war: ‘ils se sont ensuite peu prononcés sur les
questions mémorielles relatives à la colonisation et à la guerre d’Algérie’ (Stora 2021,
56). Who did speak out, Stora observes, were the pieds-noirs producing ‘une immense
littérature du désespoir’ that celebrated an ‘attachement pour une terre ensevelie, eng­
loutie, l’Algérie française d’hier’ (Stora 2021, 57). When the Left came to power with the
election of François Mitterrand in 1981, there were expectations of a more cordial
relationship between the two socialist governments. Mitterrand did make a prompt
summit visit to Algeria, leading to some economic cooperation agreements. Yet the
shadow of Mitterrand’s role in the 1950s governments that prosecuted the war against
the FLN hung over the visit and limited the capacity for reconciliation. Stora observes that
one had to await the 1995 election of Jacques Chirac, himself one of the 1.5 million
soldiers to serve in the Algerian war, for the issue of reconciliation to be addressed
seriously.
On the Algerian side as well, it took some time for the top leadership to contemplate
the idea of reconciliation. In 1999 Abdelaziz Bouteflika was elected president towards the
end of Algeria’s décennie noire, the ‘dark decade’. The 1990s were a period of terrible
backsliding as a violent Islamist movement challenged the FLN regime that had governed
since 1962. In June 2000 Bouteflika embarked upon an official visit to France that drew
much attention. He went to Verdun to honour the sacrifice of Algerians who died on the
front in World War I. He also delivered a major address before the French National
Assembly. Stora cites key passages from that speech: ‘La colonisation porta l’aliénation
de l’autochtone à ses limites extrêmes. Si ce qu’on a appelé la décolonisation lui rendit la
liberté, elle ne lui a pas, pour autant, assuré une relation décolonisée avec l’ancien
maître [. . .] Si la colonisation a pris fin, ses conséquences [. . .] sont loin d’être
épuisées [. . .] le fait colonial ne saurait être ignoré’ (Stora 2021, 69). Bouteflika’s speech,
while narrowly opening the door to further discussion, made it clear that reconciliation
was no simple matter. What Ferhat Abbas, a leading figure of the nationalist movement,
had called ‘la nuit coloniale’ was still to be reckoned with.3
Among the many issues that Stora identifies as obstacles to reconciliation are the
forced displacement of some two million Algerians during the war, the destruction of
hundreds of Algerian villages, the use of napalm and landmines, the contamination of the
Sahara by nuclear testing, the widespread use of torture—in a word the ‘brutalization’ of
Algerian society (Stora 2021, 71). Beyond these wartime atrocities were earlier tragic
episodes such as the post-World War II massacres in Sétif and Guelma of Algerians
celebrating their role in the victory over Nazism not to mention the numerous atrocities
of the nineteenth century conquest. Shortly after Macron asked him to prepare the report,
Stora gave an interview to the newspaper Le Soir d’Algérie in which he made the point that
several French presidents (beginning with Chirac) had already condemned the massacres
12 R. MORTIMER

of the colonial era but that these admissions were not enough to close the
‘fossé mémoriel’ between the two countries.4 What was further needed, he said, was to
‘poursuivre la connaissance de ce que fut le système colonial, sa réalité quotidienne et ses
visées idéologiques, les résistances algériennes et françaises à ce système de domination.
C’est un travail de longue haleine que nous devons mener ensemble des deux côtés de la
Méditerranée’ (Stora 2021, 109–110). Certainly Stora did not underestimate the difficulty
of his task.
While anticipating the hazards facing the likely reception of his report, Stora
doggedly advanced towards his conclusion ‘Vers un traîté de “mémoire et vérité”’
supplemented by a set of ‘préconisations’ and four annexes. Among the 28 recom­
mendations, for example, Stora calls for certain ‘gestes à caractère symbolique et
politique’ such as official state recognition of the assassination by the French army of
the Algerian lawyer, Ali Boumendjel, in 1957. On 2 March 2021, President Macron
officially admitted this crime and met with the grandchildren of Boumendjel.5 Stora
also suggests studying the matter of the restitution of the celebrated cannon Baba
Merzoug as discussed in this issue by Susan Slyomovics. The many other recommen­
dations include a host of matters such as access to archives, protection of ceme­
teries, multiple entry visas for researchers, designating internment camps as ‘lieux
de mémoire’, organizing colloquia, reactivating a project for a museum, translating
books, erecting a monument to Emir Abdelkader, and assorted other ideas. While
some of these matters are under discussion, only the recommendation regarding Ali
Boumendjel was enacted in 2021.
Of the four Annexes included in the report, the first has to do with ‘Les discours
présidentiels’ alluded to in footnote 4. Of the four speeches (by Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy,
François Hollande, and Macron), the most pertinent for this analysis is that of the current
president, a declaration made in September 2018. The president recognized on this
occasion the responsibility of the French state in the torture and murder of Maurice
Audin in June 1957. Audin was a French citizen teaching at the University of Algiers who
was sympathetic to the cause of the FLN. He was arrested on suspicion of aiding the
nationalists during the battle of Algiers. He was never seen again after his arrest. In
discussing this abominable event, Stora writes ‘Le corps de Maurice Audin n’a jamais
été retrouvé [. . .] Comment faire son deuil de cette guerre si l’on n’évoque pas le sort des
personnes qui n’ont jamais été enterrés? Et qui continuent d’errer, comme des fantômes
dans les conscience collectives?’ (Stora 2021, 123). Stora’s passion to mourn the events of
1954–1962—indeed of 1830–1962—and to move on is clear and forcefully stated,
because he recognizes that reconciliation is a strenuous undertaking on both shores of
the Mediterranean.
Macron’s 2018 recognition of the guilt of France in the disappearance of Maurice
Audin presumably foreshadows his decision to order the Stora Report. In concluding his
report, Stora officially recommends the ‘Constitution d’une commission « Mémoire et
vérité » chargée d’impulser des initiatives communes entre la France et l’Algérie sur les
questions de mémoires’. He even proposes the names of two possible members, namely
Fadila Khattabi, a deputy in the French parliament, and Karim Amellal, a Franco-Algerian
writer and political scientist. Yet more than a year after submission of the Report in
January 2021, no such commission had been established. The political will to do so is
not there.
 MODERN & CONTEMPORARY FRANCE 13

*
How can this be? The memory of colonisation is too harsh in Algeria. The Algerian
government has long called for an official state apology for France’s conquest and
settlement of the country, in effect a gesture of repentance. The Stora Report rejects
repentance in favour of a policy of recognition: ‘Plutôt que de parler de « repentance », la
France devrait donc reconnaître les discriminations et exactions dont ont été victimes les
populations algériennes: mettre en avant des faits précis. Car les excès d’une culture de
repentance [. . .] ne contribuent pas à apaiser la relation à notre passé’ (Stora 2021, 124). As
much as Stora acknowledged discrimination and suffering, he largely avoided the lan­
guage of crimes and atrocities. Algerian officials and commentators saw this as a serious
flaw. Ammar Belhimer, the Minister of Communication and spokesperson of the govern­
ment declared that Algeria wished to address the past, but that progress would require ‘la
reconnaissance officielle, définitive et globale par la France de ses crimes [. . .] la repen­
tance et des indemnisations équitables [. . .] Le criminel fait tout pour éviter de reconnaître
ses crimes’ (Courrier International, 10 February 2021).
The director-general of Algeria’s National Archives—and there is much concern about
archives in the report—characterized the document as a ‘rapport franco-français’ and
reminded reporters that Algeria has called for the ‘restitution intégrale’ of all archives that
were transferred to France at the end of the war. The military weighed in on the sensitive issue
of France’s nuclear testing in the Sahara, a longstanding grievance that Stora addresses less
fully than desired. General Bouzid Boufrioua deplored the lack of technical data about the
tests and the absence of any commitment to cleaning up the radioactive sites or compensat­
ing Algerians exposed to the tests (Courrier International, 10 February 1921).
Perhaps the most probing critique of the report came from the Algerian historian
Noureddine Amara. Characterizing the document as revisionism, Amara argued that ‘sans
nier les crimes coloniaux, l’auteur fouille dans l’histoire, trie et sélectionne, nivelle et
hiérarchise’.6 The account of Franco-Algerian relations in the Stora Report is revisionist
by virtue of its very objective, Amara contends, namely reconciliation rather than justice.
France’s 132-year-long occupation of Algeria had harmful consequences for the Algerian
people that do not lend themselves readily to reconciliation. Algeria cannot afford, Amara
states, to forget or devalue ‘nos mémoires algériennes de la conquête et de l’occupation
françaises’.
Amara sees the Report as a move by the French state to align Algeria more closely with
its own geopolitical interest. Why, he asks, is France promoting the very idea of a common
memory now when clearly France and Algeria hold different memories of their historical
relationship?

Parce que dans notre géopolitique méditerranéenne et sahélienne heurtée, l’Algérie est
redevenue une frontière utile à la France. C’est le triptyque migrants-terrorisme-énergies
fossiles/renouvelables mis en avant par Benjamin Stora à la fin de son rapport. Si nous
comprenons le présupposé utilitariste de la réconciliation et la promesse d’un bénéfice
commun, la mémoire ne saurait être avancée comme concession de bon voisinage [. . .] Nul
besoin de mémoire commune pour réfléchir ensemble à une relation gagnant/gagnant dans
l’intérêt des Etats.

Amara’s realpolitik is consistent with Bucaille’s earlier analysis of the difference between
the South African and France/Algeria cases.
14 R. MORTIMER

Amara critiques one of the foundational premises of Stora’s argument, the idea of
a common past that justifies a reconciliation. To the extent that Algerians share a past
with France, it is one of ‘dispossession, discrimination and humiliations’. What the two
parties have in common is an experience of colonial conquest that Algerians dare not forget.
While respecting Stora’s knowledge, he argues that the document is more an argument of
state than of history: ‘Comme si la parole jupitérienne d’un président français suffisait aux
Algériens’. In focusing on issues of memory, he concludes that Stora is overlooking that ‘la
vérité première devant régler les rapports d’entre les hommes est la justice, non la mémoire’.
Amara’s text in Libérté-Algérie was no doubt the most sophisticated intellectual
response to the Stora Report. Others argued more generally that it ignored important
aspects of Algeria’s grievances. The broader public mood in Algeria was that it was soft on
the atrocities of the colonial period and insufficiently harsh on the crimes of the war:
torture, assassination, displacement, napalm, minefields. As Mohamed Kouini (2021)
wrote in Le Jeune Indépendant, it was ‘destiné aux seuls français’ while pronouncing
‘aucun mot sur les politiques barbares de la terre brûlée . . . qui ont désarticulées le peuple
algérien’ (20 January 2021). Stora himself allowed that he may have passed a little too
quickly over Algerian memories and the colonial trauma (New York Times,
17 February 2021). Yet the problem was not really that Stora had passed too lightly
over historical memories. The problem is that sixty years after the end of the Algerian war,
the two states have their own national agendas.
*
The Stora Report appeared about fifteen months before the French presidential election
of 2022. While Macron may well have hoped that a well-received report would be an
electoral asset, he had to forge ahead in a context where the memory of the Algerian war
remained a divisive issue. It is generally estimated that some seven million French citizens
have been variously affected by the drama of decolonisation, approximately 10% of the
national population. These include notably pied-noirs, immigrants, harkis and veterans of
the war. Stora addressed the delicate issue of the harkis in the report, proposing that
France engage with the Algerian authorities to facilitate travel conditions for travel by
harkis and their children between the two countries. In September 2021 President Macron
organized a reception for some 300 representatives of the harki community at the Elysée
Palace. The event was designed to recognize the contribution that these Algerian soldiers
had made to the French war effort. Little recognized, let alone appreciated in the after­
math of the war, the president declared that he did not want them to be ‘des oubliés de
l’histoire’ (Le Monde, September 19–20, 2021).
Shortly after the commemoration of the harkis, Macron hosted a luncheon with the
‘grand-children’ of the war, most of them young people from immigrant families
currently enrolled at Sciences Po Paris. Indeed one of the invitees was the grandson
of Ali Boumendjel, a martyr of the battle of Algiers (see footnote 5). At this unusual
event Macron told the students ‘Vous portez une part d’histoire et aussi un fardeau. Un
fardeau car on n’a pas réglé le problème [. . .] Vous êtes une projection de la France,
votre identité est une addition à la citoyenneté française. Vous êtes une chance pour la
France, une chance inouïe’ (Le Monde, October 3–4, 2021). Inspirational as these words
might be, Macron then waded into troubled waters, claiming that Algeria’s ‘histoire
officielle totalement réécrite [. . .] repose sur une haine de la France’. Responding to
 MODERN & CONTEMPORARY FRANCE 15

a student who observed that young people in Algeria do not hate France, the president
went on to say ‘Je ne parle pas de la société algérienne dans ses profondeurs mais du
système politico-militaire fatigué qui s’est construit sur cette rente mémorielle’.
Needless to say, Algerians read Le Monde and Macron had turned a luncheon into
a diplomatic incident.
The Algerian government promptly recalled its ambassador and for good measure
suspended French military flights over its territory. These flights supported the French
forces in Mali, known as Opération Barkhane, an anti-jihadist engagement. While most
observers of Algerian politics would agree that the military play an outsized role in the
political system, Macron’s remark was highly offensive to the Algerian authorities. As the
political scientist Lahouari Addi put it, ‘Macron reconnaît explicitement la légitimité
politique des revendications du Hirak, ce qui est inacceptable pour le régime algérien’.7
It appeared that the French president, having invested in the concept of reconciliation via
the Stora Report, was venting at its frosty reception across the Mediterranean. Algerian
President Abdelmadjid Tebboune gave an interview to Der Spiegel stating that Macron’s
remark about the politico-military regime reflected the old hatred of the colonial era and
had badly damaged Franco-Algerian relations. He attributed the comment to the heat of
the upcoming 2022 presidential election. In December veteran Minister of Foreign Affairs
Jean-Yves Le Drian went to Algiers to calm the troubled waters by paying his respects to
the Algerian government. Both sides were ready for a détente by this time, that is to say
a return to the wary diplomatic dance of the post-colonial couple.
Meanwhile, as alluded to by President Tebboune, the electoral campaign in France was
heating up, notably because of the rise to prominence of Eric Zemmour, a far-right-wing
journalist and commentator. Paradoxically, Zemmour is the son of an Algerian Jewish
couple who emigrated to France in 1952 before the outbreak of the anti-colonial war.
Zemmour was basically contesting the extreme-right anti-immigrant electorate of Marine
Le Pen who has changed the name of her political party from Front National to
Rassemblement National. The Front National, of course, was founded by her father Jean-
Marie Le Pen, who served as a paratrooper during the Algerian war and whose political
base rested upon the pied-noir population. In January 2022 Macron added the pied-noir
community to his series of meetings. Before this audience, Macron characterized the 1962
exodus as a tragic page of French history. Acknowledging that those who fled were not
well welcomed in metropolitan France with the ‘affection that every French citizen
deserves’, thus experiencing a ‘double punishment’, Macron completed his pre-election
round of Algeria-related audiences (New York Times, 27 January 2022). No better evidence
of the legacy of the Algerian war in contemporary France is needed.
The Stora Report, alias France-Algérie: les passions douloureuses, is ground zero for
understanding and analysing the heritage of the war that ended with the Evian
Accords. Algeria is no longer ‘l’Algérie française’, France is no longer an imperial state.
Both nations have long, deep memories and both pursue their national interests in 21st
century international politics. Neither can act without the close attention of the other,
neither can forget their long-held memories, ‘douloureuses’ as they may be.
On 7 October 2021, Le Monde published a front page cartoon by the talented Algerian
illustrator, Dilem, captioned ‘France-Algérie: L’Heure de tourner la page’. The drawing
showed a book lying open on a table. In the open binding of the book stood a red brick
wall. Some pages are harder to turn than others.
16 R. MORTIMER

Notes
1. Bucaille cites Stora’s (1991) La gangrène et l’oubli: la mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie, p. 101.
2. See for example Paul Ricœur (2000), La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli.
3. Stora (1995) (with Zakya Daoud) wrote a biography of Abbas: Ferhat Abbas, Une utopie
algérienne. Abbas (1980) himself wrote Autopsie d’une guerre from which Stora quotes
a passage in the introduction to Part II of his report (p. 51). The expression comes from
another work by Abbas (1962), La nuit colonial.
4. Le Soir d’Algérie, 10 August 2020. Stora includes major segments of these various presidential
speeches in Annexe 1 of the report, pp. 137-165.
5. Boumendjel was a member of the Union Démocratique du Manifeste Algérien led by Ferhat
Abbas. See Malika Rahal (2010, 2022), Ali Boumendjel, une affaire française, une histoire
algérienne. Originally published in 2010, a new edition containing a new preface was
published in 2022.
6. Noureddine Amara (2021), ‘Une mémoire hors contrat,’ Liberté-Algérie, 31 January 2021. All
quotations of Amara come from this Algerian newspaper.
7. Le Monde, October 10-11, 2021. ‘Hirak’ refers to the weekly protests in Algeria dating back to
February 2019.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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