History: “This Is How French Intelligence Sought To Recruit The “Witness Of The Century”…

The Imam Abd al-Hamid Ibn Badis Foundation in Constantine and the “al-Huda” publications recently presented an important book that narrates part of the life and history of Algerian thinker Malek Bennabi.

The book was signed by Allaoua Amara and Riyad Charwana, under the title “Malek Bennabi Documents in the French National Archives,” where the book outlined more than 201 documents from the French Archives dating back to 1939.

The two researchers provided a reading of the documents that are considered an unknown precedent that was not completed.

It has been touched upon before and it can reveal many aspects of Malek Bennabi’s life that were not mentioned before in his memoirs.

The 256-page book deals with the relationship of “Witness of the Century” with Germany and the French intelligence during World War II, the story of his imprisonment, his activity within the French People’s Party, and his membership during the 1930s of a political party affiliated with the right-wing movement.

The book highlighted information for the first time that came out into the open regarding the attempt to recruit Bennabi by the French intelligence services when he was in Paris between the years 1951 and 1952, where colonial intelligence tried to use Bennabi as bait to hunt down Algerian intellectuals and workers who were the fuel of the liberation struggle there.

The book was based on a security file by Bennabi, which was kept in the North African Communications Department, which is affiliated with the intelligence service, and includes 60 documents that talked about the activity of the Algerian thinker, in addition to a court file containing 294 documents dealing with accusations made by France related to conspiring against France’s external security and cooperation with the Germans during the World War II and it ended with Malek Bennabi’s imprisonment.

The book also included information about Malek Bennabi’s activity within the French People’s Party, in which he worked as an official in charge of the Algerian section of the party before returning to Algeria, and worked in the schools of the Association of Muslim Scholars in addition to his work at the headquarters of the German forces in the French city of Troy during World War II. His closeness to the Germans ended with his travel to Germany and his work as a delegate with the French workers.

The book provides a reading of archival documents that reveal a large amount of information that refers to the political aspect of Malek’s life, especially his joining the “Democratic Union Party for the Algerian Manifesto”, accompanied by Farhat Abbas, and his joining the foreign delegation to the glorious Algerian revolution in 1957.

The researcher and one of the supervisors of the research work, Riyad Charwana, said in a press statement, that the information contained in the book should be placed in its historical, temporal and spatial framework, adding that the historical material in the book may help researchers open the biography of Malek Bennabi and study his rich work and his salient path as a thinker who suffered from “ideological sorting”, as he put it.