Parliament's honour has finally foundered, swallowed up in waves of republican disgrace, to the cheers of the far-right. On Thursday October 30th, for the very first time, a motion presented by the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) was adopted by France's National Assembly. And this was not just any text: the non-binding parliamentary resolution denouncing the 1968 Franco-Algerian accord is driven by a denial of colonial history and by a racist and xenophobic hatred that is fully in keeping with a party co-founded by a former Waffen-SS officer and a senior member of a terrorist organisation, the OAS.
A shocking symbolic act, the result of the vote (185 in favour, 184 against) was trumpeted in the chamber by the RN vice-president of the Assembly, Sébastien Chenu, who chaired the session, and who himself took part in the vote, contrary to parliamentary custom. This victory, handed to the far-right by the rightwing Les Républicains (LR) and Macron-supporting MPs, confirms at the legislative level that the political Right has merged to stand together on an identity-based, vengeful terrain, that of a past that cannot be accepted. The politicians who occupy this terrain are determined to set French men and women against each other and fuel a rejection of foreigners.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
For that is what this is about: the 1968 agreement, signed six years after the end of the Algerian War, which ravaged the country from 1954 to 1962 after 132 years of violent French domination and expropriation, grants Algerians specific clauses concerning travel, immigration and residence in France. In theory at least, it allows Algerian nationals to obtain a ten-year residence permit through a fast-track procedure and enables family members, within the context of family reunification, to receive a residence certificate of the same duration on arrival in France.
Admittedly, even in 1968 this agreement represented a step back from the Évian Accords of 1962, which had established free movement between the two countries so that people born in Algeria, who were French by nationality, could travel freely from one country to the other after independence. And it is also true that the 1968 agreement has been repeatedly restricted over the years through successive amendments. Yet the overall framework governing migration between the two countries remains, even today, somewhat less restrictive than the rules applying to other non-EU nationals.
A deliberate ratcheting up of tension
Originally concluded in a spirit of reconciliation, combining a genuine concern for reparation with a less acknowledged French need for workers, the 1968 agreement has become a red rag for a far-right that was forged in its opposition to Algerian independence, after having actively supported France's side in that war. This included the use of torture by its historic leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the RN's forerunner the Front National, as documented by the historian Fabrice Riceputi.
An outlet for its racist and xenophobic bile, the accord has long served the far-right as a means of settling scores not only with the Algerian authorities but also with Algerians and Franco-Algerians, the main victims of its harassment. For years antipathy to the agreement has hidden a latent resentment, as though it embodied the “repentance” towards Algeria that the Right and far-right hate so much, as though France owed no supposed “privileges” to a country it had been forced to leave.
This time, in the chamber of the National Assembly, the RN got its way.
Won by a single vote, the result is no mere mishap. It is the culmination of a political and diplomatic crisis with Algeria, one carefully stoked this spring by former interior minister Bruno Retailleau, under the false pretext of condemning the unjustifiable imprisonment of the writer Boualem Sansal.
At the time Mediapart visited Perpignan in southern France, home to many citizens of Algerian origins, to report on the dismay and anger of dual nationals who, feeling trapped by this rise in tension, attacked the exploitation of their history and administrative status for the benefit of the far-right.
Among them was Mohamed Moulay, an activist with the Collectif pour une histoire franco-algérienne, which fights for a less-biased take on Franco-Algerian history. He met our reporter on the Esplanade Pierre-Sergent, named after a former local MP whom the city’s far-right mayor, Louis Aliot, describes as a “former resistance fighter” rather than as a representative of the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS), which carried out numerous terrorist attacks in a bid to to keep Algeria French.
The centre's 'ideological flexibility'
Instead of standing up to the arsonists he himself brought into the corridors of power, Emmanuel Macron has dithered. From a “war of diplomatic bags” in July to his “firm letter”, and then to mutual accusations of “lies” in August, the escalation with Algeria reached close to breaking point.
The recognition of France’s responsibility in the killings of Maurice Audin and Ali Boumendjel now feels a distant memory, the Gaullist tradition of reconciliation even more so. The current rift stems from a dual process: on one side, the steady alignment of the Right, especially since Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency (2007 to 2012), with far-right ideas; on the other, the passivity, if not the outright complicity, of Macron’s own camp. Thursday's vote proves it: the absence of most MPs from Macron's Ensemble pour la République group, including its leader Gabriel Attal, allowed the alliance between the RN, LR and the centre-right Horizons to have maximum impact.
This growing permeability on the Right has been documented in a recent article in the highly-regarded political science journal the Revue française de science politique. After analysing all the general policy statements made by prime ministers since the start of the Fifth Republic in 1958, Tristan Boursier, a research fellow at Cevipof - the centre for political research at Sciences Po university - and Antoine Lemor, a researcher at the University of Sherbrooke in Canada, observed a “steady rise” of far-right themes. These themes ranged from the defence of national identity to the glorification of authority, and from hostility to immigration to opposition to equality, and they came from rightwing or centrist prime ministers “often seen as more moderate” and in “supposedly consensual speeches”. Examining the “ideological flexibility of the centre”, the researchers note that the first significant convergence of views appeared at the time of the Algerian War.
In the midst of a constitutional crisis, with a new dissolution threatening to bring the far-right to power in France, this strategy of alliances is suicidal for a country whose constitution enshrines equality in its very first article, and whose president, when he ran for office in 2017, called colonisation a “crime against humanity”. For eight years, Mediapart has chronicled how the bulwarks have given way one by one: it is now clear that, even without a parliamentary majority, the RN is embedding its obsessions deep within the executive and the legislature.
“History only exists in the present,” said the historian Marc Bloch. France’s endless retrograde steps on acknowledging its colonial past prove him right. Once again, the country’s leaders have shown themselves unable to confront the past, while demonstrating an inversely-proportional capacity for acclimatising to the worst. On the eve of the National Assembly's fateful vote, and speaking at the somewhat vague Paris Peace Forum in the context of international fascism, President Emmanuel Macron declared: “We must take back control of our democratic life.” It would seem rather late to start worrying about it.
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- The original French version of this op-ed can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeeter