Algeria At The Center Of A French Debate That Turned Into A Snowball

Algeria has been at the centre of a heated French-French controversy since the visit of the first man in the Elysee Palace, Emmanuel Macron, to Algeria at the end of last August.

The reason is an article on a statement by the French president during his visit to Algeria, in which he said that France and Algeria lived “a love story that has its share of tragedy.”

This phrase did not pass without leaving reverberations among French anti-colonialism intellectuals and historians, led by the political scientist, Paul Max Morin, who wrote a column in the French newspaper “Le Monde”, on September,2, in which he said that “reducing the French colonialism to Algeria in a “Love Story” expresses the right-wing dimensions of President Macron on the issue of memory.”

After the publication of this article, the French presidency rushed to ask the newspaper “Le Monde”, which is described as the flower of written media in Voltaire’s country, to withdraw the article from the newspaper’s website, in a serious violation of freedom of expression, and an attempt to hide the ugly face of French colonialism in Algeria.

The issue has turned into a snowball that grows from day to day, about twenty days after the publication of Paul Max Morin’s article. A group of senior academics and historians issued a statement with their signatures defending the column and did not see it as “out of right”, and then they saw no justification for withdrawing it by the newspaper’s officials.

The petition was signed by leading political scientists and historians, such as Emmanuel Blanchard, professor at the University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin, Loic Blondiaux, professor at the Paris Sorbonne University, Raphaelle Branche, professor at Nanterre Paris University, Vincent Marigny, professor at the University of Nice, and other historians like Fabrice Riceputi, Gilles Manceron, Alain Rossio…

Paul Max Morin, the author of the article, is a doctor of political science and the author of “Youth and the Algerian War”, as the French call it, and the liberation war, as the Algerians call it. In his column, he presented a critical analysis of the evolution of Emmanuel Macron’s discourse on the memory of the “Algerian War”.

The reason for withdrawing the article from the online edition of the newspaper is, according to the estimates of Le Monde officials, says the petition, criticizing the errors contained in Paul Max Morin’s article, while he “did not commit any” mistake. ”

“Emmanuel Macron, who recently pretended to question the existence of an Algerian nation before its colonization by France, spoke about “a love story that has its share of tragedy”, which characterizes colonialism when it was supposed to be viewed based on the revival of Algerian-French relations”, the petition added.

In response to the newspaper’s accusation of the author of the article of providing an innocuous reading of the French president’s phrase, in a way that took it out of context, the signatories of the petition assert that nothing indicates categorically that “it is very clear that the phrase “love story” provokes French-Algerian relations.” Indeed, the phrase “French-Algerian relations” is not uttered by the journalist who asked the question, nor the President of the Republic who answers it.”

The signatories asked; “Did the head of state (Macron) want to romanticize colonial history while relinquishing this ‘part of the tragedy? Was he misunderstood? Is he a victim of over-interpretation of his remarks? As long as he argues, everyone is free to answer these questions”, and they considered the newspaper’s withdrawal of the article as an “attack on the free intellectual discussion.”

The petition’s signatories deplored the withdrawal of the article and accused Le Monde of “undermining the free expression of divergent opinions by preventing discussion on the president’s political orientation on a particular substantive issue: France’s past in Algeria, its legacy, its politics and its memory,” and “publicly and repeatedly questioned the integrity of the researcher, in this case, Paul Max Morin, to whom we, his peers assure our support and respect.”