Why Algeria prefers myth over historical truth

Algeria is moving toward a vote on a bill that would criminalise France’s rule from 1830 to 1962, presented as a “defining milestone” and a sovereign act. 

That framing gives the game away. This is not an archive opening, not a historians’ commission, not a patient effort to disentangle tragedy from myth. It is a political instrument, designed to keep France in the dock forever and to keep Algeria’s present rulers out of it.

No serious country builds its future by legislating a single approved interpretation of the past. When a parliament tries to turn memory into criminal law, the aim is not justice, it is control. 

It is a way to manufacture unity on command, to discipline internal debate, and to convert national trauma into diplomatic leverage. Algeria’s leadership has learned that anti French theatre is a cheap currency: it costs nothing domestically, it rallies the loudest voices, and it attempts to put Paris on permanent moral probation.

The selective story Algeria insists on telling

France’s Algerian chapter contains brutal realities, especially during the independence war. France has acknowledged grave wrongdoing in that period, and that is as it should be. 

But Algeria’s bill is built on a deliberate simplification: France as pure criminality, Algeria as pure innocence, and history as a weapon to be pointed outward rather than a mirror held inward.

What is carefully avoided, and what any honest “memory law” would have to confront, is the FLN’s own record. Liberation movements are not automatically absolved by the nobility of their stated cause. 

The FLN engaged in intimidation, assassinations, bombings, and ruthless internal purges. It targeted civilians, enforced obedience through fear, and punished Algerians who dissented or refused to submit. A legal text that demands “historical justice” while airbrushing that violence is not justice, it is narrative management. It asks France to confess, while insisting Algeria’s own myth remain untouched.

The same selective morality applies to the human catastrophe of 1962 and the fate of the Pieds Noirs. One can debate the politics of French Algeria without erasing the trauma of families who had lived for generations in the country and were then forced into a chaotic exodus, dispossessed, and scattered. 

Their experience is treated by official Algerian memory as an inconvenience, yet it remains one of the great Mediterranean ruptures of the twentieth century. A story that makes no room for that suffering is not history, it is a political script.

What is also carefully avoided is the inconvenient fact that 132 years of state building cannot be reduced to a slogan. 

Modern Algeria’s administrative skeleton, much of its urban infrastructure, ports, roads, hospitals, public health systems, schools, and the very architecture of a centralised state were shaped in that period. None of this requires romanticising empire. 

It simply requires intellectual honesty. France did not arrive to perform charity, it pursued its interests, but the material transformation was real and the institutional legacy remains embedded in the Algeria of today.

That complexity is precisely what Algiers wants to outlaw, because complexity breaks the spell. A regime that governs confidently does not fear nuance. A regime that governs by narrative does.

Why now, and why it matters for France

The timing is not accidental. The relationship is already tense, with disputes compounded by regional fault lines such as Western Sahara and competing diplomatic choices. 

In that atmosphere, the bill functions as a pressure tactic: it hardens positions, inflames sentiment, and tries to force France into ritual apology as the entrance fee for any “normal” relationship.

France should refuse that logic, calmly and completely. A nation that can face its history does not need to submit to a foreign legislature staging a retroactive show trial. 

Apology demanded under political threat is not reconciliation, it is tribute. It would not close the file, it would open an endless account, because a regime that profits from grievance will never declare itself satisfied.

A smarter French posture

France does not need to shout. It needs to stand upright. That means continuing serious historical work, including frank acknowledgement where facts demand it, while rejecting Algeria’s attempt to turn history into a diplomatic cudgel. 

It means defending the full record, including the parts Algeria prefers to erase: the FLN’s crimes, the tragedy of the Pieds Noirs, the foundations of modern governance and infrastructure that were built, the Mediterranean orientation that still anchors Algeria’s economy, and the reality that post independence legitimacy cannot be outsourced forever to anti French ritual.

France can respect Algerian suffering without accepting Algeria’s political blackmail. It can extend a hand without kneeling. 

And it should say, with quiet confidence, that the future will be negotiated on interests, security, trade, and stability, not on a permanent performance of guilt that serves only one side’s domestic politics.

In the end, the bill is less a verdict on France than a confession about Algeria’s current leadership. When the present is difficult, they prosecute the past. France should not play the part they have written for it.