Boualem Sansal, or Betrayal Disguised as Conscience

There comes a moment when intellectual politeness turns into complicity, when academic courtesy becomes a refined form of cowardice. A moment when insisting on “complexity” and “divergent viewpoints” serves only as a pretext to avert one’s gaze from fully formed roles and clearly assigned functions. That moment has arrived.

The Boualem Sansal affair is no longer the story of a writer who disagrees with his state, nor of an intellectual who chose internal critique. It is a question of function. A polished, accredited role, wrapped in a ready-made moral halo, placed at the service of an old and familiar mechanism: undermining Algeria from within, but in a voice deemed “acceptable” on the French market.

Within the dominant French narrative, there is a persistent need for a “different Algerian.” An Algerian who says what France does not wish to say about itself. An Algerian who indicts Algeria rather than unsettling Paris. An Algerian who explains “our failures” using their vocabulary, their metrics, their moral hierarchies. This is precisely where Sansal was installed.

We are invited to believe a comforting tale: a writer awakened by the light of truth, rebelling against “authoritarianism,” paying the price through symbolic exile. The story satisfies everyone. It absolves the institutions that promote it, simplifies history, and launders power relations. Reality, however, is cruder—and therefore more disturbing.

Sansal was not born an opponent. He did not emerge from the margins. He was not expelled from a university nor imprisoned for his views. He was part of the Algerian state apparatus, held senior positions within the Ministry of Industry, and benefited from the state’s stability, symbolism, and moral capital. His departure from this apparatus in the early 2000s was never clearly explained to public opinion. Accounts varied; silence prevailed. And it is precisely this silence that raises questions.

The question Paris prefers not to ask—but which persists insistently in Algeria—is simple: when, and why, did this senior civil servant transform, in record time, into a voice fully aligned with the most hostile French narratives toward Algeria, and the most indulgent toward the colonial past?

No one becomes a “global conscience” by accident. There exists today a full-fledged economy of “exportable dissent.” It requires no written contracts; it operates through incentives: repeated invitations, ready platforms, prizes, decorations, academic seats. The implicit message is clear: the more faithfully you confirm what the center wants to hear, the higher you climb the ladder of recognition. This is not a conspiracy; it is a market.

Sansal’s public statements clearly belong to this market. When he claims that “the Islamic threat is worse than twentieth-century fascism,” he is not offering a literary provocation; he is establishing a hierarchy of evil perfectly aligned with contemporary Western anxieties—while simultaneously erasing the continuity of colonial violence from any serious reckoning. When he speaks of the “Arab world’s inability to resolve its relationship with religion and freedom,” he deploys a culturalist, sweeping discourse, carefully avoiding any symmetrical critique of colonial powers and their role in distorting societies and obstructing development.

More dangerous still is the deliberate equation of Islam with Nazism. This comparison is not meant to think; it is meant to displace the locus of evil from political history to “civilizational essence,” transforming questions of domination and empire into internal cultural pathologies. In this configuration, the “Algerian word” becomes the ideal instrument of a French discourse still tormented by its past, because it is presented as testimony from within—even as it is reformatted to suit external needs.

The 2012 visit to Jerusalem was not an innocent detail. One may defend the individual right to travel; one cannot deny the symbolic weight of such an act. That moment marked a definitive rupture with the Arab and Algerian space, later confirmed by his declaration: “I have no account to settle with the Arab world.” From then on, the writer no longer spoke from within a shared wound, but from an external, elevated vantage point.

From that point forward, Western consecration accelerated: prizes, honors, memberships. Not because the texts initiated a linguistic or aesthetic revolution, but because they reassured. Because they confirmed. Because they never forced France to confront its archives, acknowledge its crimes, or interrogate the continuity of its condescending gaze. All severity was directed elsewhere: at Algeria, at Islam, at national memory, at the so-called “post-colonial failure.”

In Algeria, these prizes are read differently—not as purely literary recognition, but as political signals. This is the Algerian we want. The one who validates our narrative. The one who attacks his country on our behalf. In parallel, Algeria is portrayed as backward, violent, incapable of thinking beyond failure. And when Algerians reject this caricature, they are accused of censorship and barbarism. The inversion is complete.

France has never ceased working to distort Algeria’s image: through media, curricula, archival silence, and selective memory. Yet when the mirror is returned, France recoils. Mirrors do not lie. They reveal a state still in need of an “approved Algerian” to continue absolving itself.

There is an effort to criminalize the word “betrayal,” to confine it to courtrooms and dismiss it as emotional excess. This is evasion. In a colonial context, betrayal is not an insult; it is a historical category. It materializes when an individual accumulates capital from his homeland, then returns to judge it from the platform of its former executioner.

The conclusion is painful, but necessary:
Boualem Sansal is not a great writer. He is a functional writer.
Useful to a France that has not digested Algerian sovereignty,
and useful to a colonial system that requires a “local” face to perpetuate its civilizing discourse.

This text calls neither for banning nor for persecution. It calls for the end of idolatry—for distinguishing between prize and value, noise and depth, political utility and genuine talent. Algeria is not obliged to applaud those who build their prestige by indicting it.

Returning the mirror is not hatred.
It is an act of consciousness.
And consciousness, in an age of masks, is the highest form of dignity