France had been since the early 19th century a major occupying power in Africa. Its Empire ended mostly after WWII, but Paris has never totally left alone its former colonies and still exercises strong control on most of them through the International Organisation of La Francophonie.
Not all the formerly occupied nations are in the organization and it is striking that the main absence is Algeria (North Africa), colonized by France in 1830.
Anger and hatred of the French colonizers grew and in 1954 an war for independence war broke out, causing hundreds of thousands of fatalities, but eventually giving Algeria its long wished independence in 1962.
The war caused an exodus of the Pied-Noirs, the French people who settled in Algeria. 800,000 were evacuated to France and since then have been a fertile ground for the right-wing parties. Their political stance became often a sort of a reaction to the discrimination they experienced in their motherland, as a living memory of a national disaster.
As April Presidential Elections are looming, President Macron, seeking reelection, made a move that aimed to gain Pied-Noir support.
On January 26th, during a meeting with the representatives of the former French settlers, he called the 1962 exodus a “tragic page of our national history”, stressing how mistreated were the refugees.
But Macron’s previous statements on the Algerian Occupation are still alive in the Pied-Noirs’ memory. Ahead of the 2017 Presidential Election, Macron, then a candidate, said on TV that occupation of Algeria was a “crime against humanity.” Indeed more than a few think French colonialism gave the natives more advantages than disruption, despite the mass killings during the 1954-1962 war.
The latest words about Pied-Noirs seem to uphold a view of a Macron changing ideas according to the change of public opinion. Now that polls say the three right-wing candidates are to gain more or less 50% of ballots in the elections, he’s moving his position and its party, La Republique en Marche, rightward.
Sympathy shown towards Pied-Noirs is just a piece of a puzzle where Macron is trying to court the far-right voters through the most different ways, such as denouncing an Islamo-leftism bias in the universities.
And there again the Algerian War plays a major role in French public consciousness. The idea of an Islamic invasion of the country, grown in France after ISIS terrorist attacks, lays its roots in the 1954-1962 war and specifically in the justification the then President Charles De Gaulle added when asked why he didn’t go on with the conflict.
He replied: “Because I do not want Colombey-les-Deux-Églises (Colombey The two Churches, De Gaulle’s native town,) to become Colombey-les-Deux-Mosquée (The Two Mosques)”.
In a few words he suggested that keeping Algeria would have meant that sooner or later Arab natives, because of their high rate of births, would have replaced the Catholic French.
That perspective still nourishes fears as immigration increases in France and Macron, with a disapproval rate around 58%, tries to ride the wave of islamophobia in the country.
The Pied-Noirs community is hence a perfect spot to offer a new image of himself as a herald of the Catholic and conservative France, one that has pretty much always prevailed in the ballots and without which it is hard to govern, even if elected.
However, playing with history is always a dangerous task, and Macron, who started as a liberal and progressive candidate in 2017, is unlikely to gain right-wing voters through this risky game, because they will choose the original right rather than someone who apes it.
Far from defusing tensions, such an ambiguous attitude towards a sad page of history could easily trigger new anger and hatred, two feelings that are not missed today.
Of course Pied-Noirs suffered from the war but the same did Algerians, they’re not two sides to court occasionally when necessary, but the victims of the wrongdoings of someone in the past.
Politics should seek conciliation, a necessary step to move on towards the future, because as French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once wrote: “The important thing is not what we do with us, but what we ourselves do with what they have done with us”.
