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The historian Benjamin Stora presented on January 20 to the French President, Emmanuel Macron, a report on the memorial reconciliation around the colonization and the Algerian war, in which he advocates a policy “Small steps”. While the governments, in Paris as in Algiers, have still not taken a position vis-à-vis its recommendations (relating to archives, those who disappeared in the war, the liabilities of nuclear tests, the rehabilitation of historical figures … ), Mr. Stora analyzes in an interview with World Africa the incomprehension raised by his approach in Algeria, where the press echoed many negative reactions.
In Algeria, the debate around your report has mainly focused on the question of the recognition of “colonial crimes” and on the fact that you do not expressly recommend the presentation of an apology from France on this subject. You advocate “another method” to appease memories. In view of the Algerian reactions, do you regret a posteriori not to have formulated things differently?
Perhaps I should have been clearer, even though I still believe that this issue of apologies is a political trap, a formulation used by the far right. I should have written: “Yes, on certain terrible practices like the colonial conquest, we should apologize for the massacres committed. »Insofar as this report requested by the President of the Republic was above all intended for French society, I passed too quickly on the analysis of Algerian memories and the colonial trauma, even if these subjects are very present.
Basically, doesn’t the misunderstanding come from the confusion between history and memory? You work on memory, but – in Algeria in particular – we are expecting you on history. Disappointment was inevitable …
In France, there has been a great scientific production on these questions. From 1974 to 1990, I worked on archives, established facts, wrote classic books on the history of colonial Algeria, the Algerian war, immigration (which is the subject of my thesis in State, supported in 1991). And, at one point in my university activity, I said to myself: “Why does the memory of different groups always bleed despite this mass of academic knowledge?” “
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