President Emmanuel Macron has announced the bestowing of national honours to members of the community known as the Harkis, the Algerians who fought alongside the French army in the North African country's bloody war of independence, in his continuing bid to soften the still bitter divisions of left over from the Algerian war.
A senior figure in the Socialist Party has angrily criticised French culture minister Aurélie Filippetti for allegedly snubbing Rivesaltes, a former internment and deportation camp in southern France which is set to become a memorial in 2015, during a recent trip to the area. The culture minister has dismissed the claims as 'absurd'. To understand the importance of the memorial site behind this political squabble, Mediapart asked historian Denis Peschanski to describe the political and historical issues at stake in a camp that revives some of the worst memories of the Second World War in France. Antoine Perraud reports.
