“The General Assembly … convinced that the continued existence of colonialism prevents the development of international economic co-operation, impedes the social, cultural and economic development of dependent peoples and militates against the United Nations ideal of universal peace....
“...Convinced that all peoples have an inalienable right to complete freedom, the exercise of their sovereignty and the integrity of their national territory … solemnly proclaims the necessity of bringing to a speedy and unconditional end colonialism in all its forms and manifestations.”
The end of this year will mark sixty-five years since the United Nations signed the death certificate of colonialism. That was on December 14th 1960, in the form of the 'Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples', which was adopted without a single member state daring to oppose it: 89 votes were cast in favour, none against. Since then, a Special Committee on Decolonisation has continued to operate at the UN.
There were only nine abstentions, mainly from the leading colonial powers of the day: Belgium, Spain, France, Portugal and the United Kingdom, plus Australia and the Dominican Republic. They were also joined by the United States, where the southern states were still practising racial segregation, and by South Africa, where racist apartheid had prevailed since its creation in 1948.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The extraordinary archival work behind the remarkable 2024 documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’État enables us to relive that moment of hope when, in the wake of the Bandung Conference of April 1955 and the independence of the first Asian and African nations, the right of peoples to self-determination took hold and the voice of the Third World asserted itself.
But, through its account of the tragedy of the Belgian Congo, the film then moves onto the next, far grimmer chapter, one bloodily symbolised by the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in January 1961. And this involved the cynical manoeuvres of the colonial powers and of North American imperialism to reverse a balance of power that had turned against them, by permanently subjecting these newly-independent nations to their interests.
Yet there was one people at this time who would not submit and whose independence, won at high cost after eight years of a brutal war from 1954 to 1962, would become the triumphant symbol of anti-colonial struggle: the Algerian people. A measure of the universal importance of Algerian independence in July 1962 is shown in the fact that in the 1960s Algiers became known as the “Mecca of revolutionaries”.
Echoes of the Haiti revolution
Even if that revolution was later suppressed or betrayed by new ruling classes, as shown by the repeated uprisings of the Algerian people to reclaim their rights and freedoms, that does not diminish the event for which Algeria remains a symbol: an anti-colonial revolution.
In this respect, the impact of the Algerian revolution recalls that of the Haitian anti-slavery revolution from 1791 to 1804. Both countries were considered jewels of the French colonial empire and, in effect, its commercial treasures: Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in the 18th century, Algeria in the 20th.
These, then, are two revolutions of universal scope, alongside the British parliamentary revolution (1642–1651), the American war of independence (1775–1783), and the French republican revolution (1789–1799). But these two were revolutions carried out by subjugated peoples, brandishing the promise of equal rights against a Western nation that had proclaimed them in 1789 only to deny them; first through slavery, then through the colonial system of indigénat or 'native code'.
Both of them victorious against France - the weak over the strong, the oppressed over the oppressor, the so-called barbarians over the self-proclaimed civilised - these two revolutions thus upheld universal values against the European country that claimed ownership of them, only for it to trample these values underfoot amid double standards which were, alas, destined to last a long time.
That is why the boldness of these two revolutions continues to contain a message for the world. The work of historian Malika Rahal highlights this today in the case of Algeria, just as the pioneering study by Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (published in 1938 and first translated into French in 1949), had already done for Haiti.
In neither case has the defeated power come to terms with this boldness. The young Haitian republic was brought to its knees economically from 1825 onwards by the vast debt imposed by France as the price of its freedom - in exchange for acceptance in the concert of nations - a debt that France has always refused to discharge.
The 'positive role' of colonialism...
As for Algeria, the parliamentary victory recently won by the far-right Rassemblement National, through its adoption of a resolution denouncing the Franco-Algerian agreements of 1968, is symbolic of this past that refuses to go away. That of a nation's independence against which the far-right has always raged, and a colonialism that much of the political world has still not come to terms with.
Sébastien Lecornu proved this when on November 4th he announced his desire to renegotiate the Franco-Algerian agreements as quickly as possible. In doing so, France's prime minster has followed in the footsteps of the president, who last year worsened tensions with Algeria by indulging in diplomatic one-upmanship in favour of the Moroccan kingdom over the issue of Western Sahara.
On both Left and Right, the refusal of successive presidents and their parliamentary majorities to adopt a clear stance breaking with colonialism, to acknowledge its illegitimacy, its injustices and its crimes, and to seek truth and reconciliation with the peoples who were its victims, has allowed the suppressed issue of colonialism to re-emerge at the heart of public debate.
So much so that a law dated February 23rd 2005 asserted the “positive role” of French colonisation, which was described euphemistically in the text as “French presence overseas, particularly in North Africa”. The abrogation by decree a year later of this phrase which caused a scandal, particularly among historians, did not repeal the law itself. That still remains in force and expresses the “nation’s gratitude to the men and women who took part in the work accomplished by France” in its colonies, and especially in the “former French départements of Algeria”.
This resurgence, like an underground river rising back to the surface, has fuelled the stock-in-trade identity-based narrative of France's far-right, for whom the Algerian war will never be over. As early as 1999, historian Benjamin Stora warned of a “transfer of memory” which maintained a deeply racist French version of “southernness”, inherited from Algerian colonisation, with a mindset similar to the segregationist legacy of the US’s southern states.
And in his 2015 book Nostalgérie (published by La Découverte), Stora's colleague Alain Ruscio underlined how the legacy of the OAS - that terrorist organisation which carried out bombings and assassinations to try to stop Algerian independence - remains active, poisoning the political atmosphere of a country whose multicultural population has been continually forged by its colonial past.
Algeria is thus not a secondary issue but an absolutely central one. The far-right is here at the vanguard of a desire for revenge that goes beyond its own ranks. For the Algerian anti-colonial revolution makes France confront not its past, but its present. And that is nothing new: back during the long fourteen years of his presidency - 1981 to 1995 - François Mitterrand hindered France's ability to come to terms openly and calmly with the two dark aspects of its modern history, the Vichy collaboration of World War II and the Algerian war.
Today, the issue of New Caledonia in the Pacific, where France still refuses independence to the Kanak people, to the extent that President Emmanuel Macron and new prime minister Sébastien Lecornu have done everything to dismantle the Matignon and Nouméa agreements that opened the path to decolonisation, reminds us that our country is the last direct colonial power in the world.
Yes, it is the last European country to hold territories on every other continent except Asia - from Guiana to Polynesia, via the Antilles and La Réunion - clinging to them come what may, in an as yet unquenched quest for power.
All the while it remains in place, the hurdle of colonialism continues to hinder the construction of a shared imagination that propels France and its people, in all their diversity, to engage with the world. Worse still, it traps the country in a backward-looking stance that recalls the words of historian Pierre Nora, then a young man, who concluded his 1961 study of the French of Algeria with this observation about the “extremists” of French Algeria. “They have gone against the tide of all of evolution. They have blocked history,” he wrote.
This backward stance is leading us towards the abyss, towards a prospect of civil strife, where one part of France seeks to settle scores with another, one labelled “anti-France”. At the rostrum of the National Assembly, Guillaume Bigot, the far-right Rassemblement National MP who sponsored the anti-Algerian resolution, made this explicit, branding his parliamentary opponents on the Left as the “foreigners' party”.
The truth is that this party - ours - is the party of France. Of a France reconciled with itself because it is reconciled with the world, with those “strange foreigners”, as the poet Jacques Prévert called them, who have always shaped, and continue to shape, the richness of its people.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter