Declassification Of Algerian Revolution Archives Faces Criticism

The decision of the French authorities to declassify the archive of the judicial investigations that took place during the liberation revolution left doubts on the Algerian side regarding its suspicious background and caused resentment among some French circles, especially the right-wing ones as well.

The French historian, Jean Sévillia, was quick to criticize the French move, explaining that any repercussions of this decision will not be limited to the French side, represented by the institutions for maintaining order, the army or the police and the sectors close to them, but also in the other side, and he refers here to the “Algerian national liberation front” as the party that took up arms for the cause of independence.

The French historian known for his closeness to the right-wing theses said in an interview with the daily “Le Figaro”: “The manner through which the Minister of Culture, Roselyne Bachelot, announced the lifting of secrecy from judicial investigations of the liberation revolution, suggests that declassifying the judicial investigations is related to the actions and practices of the French gendarmerie forces and the police will inevitably lead to the detection of the illegal actions of the law enforcement forces”.

Jean Sévillia thinks that the decision announced by the French Minister of Culture was an attempt to “blame the French institutions as if the independence camp (the Liberation Front) was innocent of any violence. It is like what can be considered a paralysed view of the Algerian war”.

According to the French historian, declassifying the archive will also reveal that the Algerian party, represented by the Liberation Front at that time, will also be condemned because it did the same thing that the other party is accused of, as long as the conflict took the form of war, despite the great differences that exist between the two parties, the party of the aggressor and the offended, asserting that lifting the confidentiality of the archive could turn into a “double-edged sword”.

The French historian tried to give a legal formula for his proposal, by providing a reading that Algeria in 1954 was part of France, and its inhabitants were French citizens, and therefore he considers that the armed operations carried out by the “National Liberation Front” for independence, were out of the law, a reading that involves a great shortcoming because the annexation of Algeria to France was a unilateral decision, and was not based on any legitimacy or legal relevance.

Jean Sévillia did not hesitate to accuse French President Emmanuel Macron of making some mistakes, such as his recognition that colonialism was a crime against humanity, during Macron’s visit to Algeria in the winter of 2017, even if he retreated after returning from that visit, this did not satisfy him, because he commissioned Benjamin Stora to complete a report on the memory of French colonialism in Algeria, in his endeavours to reconcile the memories of the two countries, despite the reproach he records on Stora represented in the fact that this historian adopts the military approach in analyzing the historical facts, to conclude in the end that limiting the concession to the French side in the reconciliation of memory cannot lead to real reconciliation.