Benjamin Stora: “It’s Very Difficult To Build A Consensus On The Algerian War”

On the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the Evian agreements ending the Algerian war, Ouest-France publishes a special issue entitled France and Algeria: understanding history, appeasing memories. This special issue looks back at the common history of France and Algeria and the initiatives to appease memories on both sides of the Mediterranean basin.
On this occasion, the historian Benjamin Stora granted the relevant daily an interview. A specialist in the history of Algeria, he is also the author of a report, submitted in January 2021 to President Macron, on the memorial issues relating to colonization and the Algerian War.
According to the historian Pierre Nora, “history unites, memory divides”. Why, then, does the work of historians have so much difficulty in bringing together memories of the Algerian War?
The work of historians is considerable on the Algerian War. At the end of the 1990s, I had listed nearly 3,000 works. Why is it so difficult? Because Algeria was not a French colony like the others. Unlike Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal or Indochina, it was a French department, part of the national territory.
The end of French Algeria was felt as an amputation of a part of France, reduced to the Hexagon. It opened a crisis of French nationalism.
Yet cohabitation between the communities in French Algeria was never real…
There were the flags, the bandstand, the alleys lined with plane trees, the town hall opposite the church. We had the illusion of living in a small reconstituted France, but with a central problem. It was both France and not France because the majority, the French Muslims, did not have the same rights as French citizens. We lived in a kind of theatre, a fiction.
People lived in the same space but with a strong social differentiation. Moreover, full French citizens were not necessarily in a better social situation than people in the Metropolis. Many pieds-noirs (Black Feet) were poor. It was quite incredible and paradoxical, hence the complexity of the situation.
The historian specializing in the Algerian revolution noted that the independence of Algeria caused a rift in French society, and he was referring here to the state of division caused by the liberation revolution, where the French were divided between supporters of the war in Algeria, a minority of black feet and centenarians (colon), and the majority of the French people, Those who strongly opposed this war, and this was evidenced by the demonstrations carried out by the French in French cities, refusing to send their children to die in Algeria.
Benjamin Stora also spoke about the state of division and fragmentation that Algeria was suffering from during the colonial era, and pointed out in this regard that the Algerians were completely separated from other residents.
During the colonial period, Algeria witnessed the recruitment of thousands of Europeans by the colonial authorities, in order to create an alternative society for the original community, after enabling them to benefit from the bounties and property of Algeria, where arable lands were removed from their rightful owners and granted to these arrivals, who are of European and not only French origins. Spaniards, Italians, Germans, Portuguese, Maltese, Swiss…
The historian emphasized that the Algerians under the occupation authorities, or what the French called them Muslims, did not enjoy the same rights that were enjoyed by other Europeans on Algerian soil, even though Algeria was affiliated with France and subject to French law, and he expressed this by saying: “People lived in the same place but also with strong social differentiation.”
More than a year after submitting his report to the French presidency, Benjamin Stora concluded by emphasizing that “it is very difficult to reach a consensus on the Algerian war”.