French Historian Criticizes The Programmed Closure Of Colonial Archives Pertaining To Algeria

French historian, Gilles Manceron, stated that the French Ministry of Armed Forces should review its policy regarding the management of its archives, and estimated that the continuation of the current situation is no longer justified from all political and legal aspects, as it contradicts the most basic fundamentals of human rights and the values upon which French democracy was built.

In a study published by the French historian in the blog of the French newspaper “Mediapart” at the end of the week, it was stated that “the right of citizens to freely access public archives is a fundamental right of democracy, based on numerous texts indicating this, foremost among them the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789.”

The French historian based his reading on the courts’ condemnation of the French state for prosecuting an officer for researching chemical weapons in Algeria, and for refusing to allow the son of a soldier killed in Thiaroye (Senegal) in 1944 to access the archives, in addition to many users facing arbitrary decisions in this regard.

The French academic pointed out that there are many texts sufficient to justify lifting the ban on archives under the administration of the French Ministry of Armed Forces, similar to Article 15 of the Declaration of Human Rights of 1789, which stipulated that “society has the right to demand from every public official an account of his administration.” As well as the law of June 24, 1794, which stipulated in its Article 37 that “every citizen may request, in all archives, on specified days and times, to view the documents contained therein.”

Gilles Manceron supported his reading with the efforts of another French historian, Christophe Lafaye, who worked in the French Defense Historical Service (SHD) and as a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Research of the Military School (IRSEM) during 2019-2020, in a study titled “The Return of Forbidden Archives… Defense Secrecy and Military Archives,” published in the journal “Histoire Politique” of the Institute of Political Science in Paris, which indicated the fact that “the accessibility of the Ministry of Armed Forces’ archives raises many problems.”

He also referred to the book “Forbidden Archives. French Fears in the Face of Contemporary History,” by Sonia Combe, who is also the author of the article “Archives, the Legislator, and the Effects of Censorship,” also published in the journal “Histoire Politique” in 2008, in which she was accused of blaming archivists for being “complicit in concealing state secrets.”

The historian noted that “freedom of access to public archives is a fragile principle, and citizens must ensure its effective application.” He cited the prosecution of a French officer, Commander Romain Choron, a history professor at the “Saint-Cyr Coëtquidan” military academy, on charges of “disclosing national defense secrets,” which was accompanied by a search and seizure of his documents that were not returned to him, as well as his deprivation of promotion after obtaining his doctorate, to make him an example to others, knowing that Officer Choron completed his doctoral thesis in 2023 on the war of resistance in Algeria (1954-1962).

Despite public archives being subject to the same rules regarding their access since 1887, resistance within the republican state itself has consistently hindered their application, says Gilles Manceron, who affirmed that the Popular Front government tried to put an end to this situation, but ultimately had to retreat and content itself with trying to mitigate its effects.

The archives of the Ministry of War (which later became the Ministry of Defense, then the Ministry of Armed Forces), the Council of State, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Paris Police Prefecture remained in the possession of these institutions and not the National Archives, says the historian, while the archives of the Ministry of Colonies (which later became the Ministry of Overseas France) were transferred to the National Archives as part of the National Archives of Overseas (ANOM) in Aix-en-Provence.

As for the French Defense Historical Service (SHD), according to Gilles Manceron, it remained a special case where this law is not always applied, which made its supervisory body tyrannical over its employees, who often show interest in user requests due to its exclusive retention of the decision to grant or refuse access permits according to conditions that reflect a degree of sovereignty leading to arbitrariness.

Despite the Archives Law being adopted in 1979, the assessment presented by State Counselor Guy Braibant in 1995 concluded that its “extremely liberal legislative basis” had become “ineffective due to regulatory texts.” This led to the enactment of a new law in 2008, which stipulated a “full right to communicate” with archives older than fifty years, although historians objected to its monopolization of a category of archives described as “permanently incommunicable,” on the grounds that they fell under “defense secrecy.”

Gilles Manceron pointed out that a number of historians protested the impossibility of accessing documents from the occupation period in some archive centers, such as letters of denunciation preserved in certain administrative archives. They considered demanding this in an opinion piece on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Germany’s surrender, coinciding with the approaching 50th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe.

The historian stated that shortly after Emmanuel Macron’s election as president, a phase of archive closure began, which was recounted in the book “The Missing in the Algerian War,” as well as in “The Battle of the Archives (2018-2021).”

This closure contradicted Emmanuel Macron’s statements regarding colonialism as a crime against humanity (February 2017), and his visit to Josette Audin (September 2018), where he acknowledged not only her husband’s death at the hands of French soldiers, but also the system implemented by the French colonial army, including torture and enforced disappearance.

He noted that this closure was initiated by certain sectors of the army and the state, particularly the General Secretariat for Defense and National Security, which opposed the recognition of colonial crimes, along with the aforementioned legal actions against Commander Romain Choron, as well as serious threats of similar actions on charges of “undermining national defense secrets” against researchers and archivists who accessed or shared “classified” documents.

According to the historian, this closure took the form of requiring prior declassification of all military archives requested by researchers pertaining to the Algerian War, on the pretext that many of them bore the “secret” stamp.

This closure was based on a narrow and illegal interpretation of joint ministerial instructions, which made access conditional on prior approval from the existing military institution. This led to appeals to the French Council of State, which issued a ruling in July 2021, thereby annulling the illegal administrative procedure.