French President Emmanuel Macron told the Le Point news magazine that he doesn’t feel the need to apologize for his country’s violent colonization of Algeria. While Macron has recently mended relations with France’s former subject, his former ambassador warned that a soft touch with Algiers could spell doom for France itself.
French President Emmanuel Macron has said he “will not ask for forgiveness” over his country’s 132-year-long colonization of Algeria and its role in the war of independence, which saw French troops kill approximately 1.5 million Algerians.
French colonial rule over Algeria started in 1830 with the invasion of Algiers and lasted until the Algerian War of Independence, which began in 1954 and concluded in 1962. The occupation ended in 1962 only after up to 1.5 million Algerians had been killed in an eight-year war of independence.
The brutality of the war, which included executions and acts of torture against Algerian nationalists, has had a lasting impact on the society of both nations. Rape crimes by French soldiers are also believed to have taken place on a large scale throughout the war for independence.
In 2018, France admitted that it carried out systematic torture in its former colony in an attempt to crack down on the independence movement.
Several years before the start of the war, on 8 May 1945, as many as 45,000 Algerians were slaughtered for demanding independence, marking the most extensive carnage committed by France in a single day.
In 2017, then-presidential candidate Macron dubbed the French occupation of Algeria a “crime against humanity.” However, he has also previously questioned whether Algeria existed as a nation before being colonized by France.
In an extensive interview published on Wednesday, Macron described the topic of Franco-Algerian relations as “an intimate subject for everyone,” but a particularly “traumatic” one for Algeria.
Two years ago, Macron angered Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune when he condemned what he called an institutionalized “hatred of France” in the former colony, and asked whether there “was an Algerian nation before French colonization.” Tension between Paris and Algiers at the time was heightened by a French decision to cut visas for Algerians amid Algeria’s refusal to take back deported illegal immigrants.
However, the French leader visited Algeria in August, during which he pledged to “deepen bilateral relations…and pursue the work of addressing the past.” The trip to the gas-rich country also coincided with a Europe-wide scramble for new energy sources after the EU voluntarily embargoed Russian fossil fuels.
Reconciliation with Tebboune’s government would be a mistake, France’s former ambassador to Algeria, Xavier Driencourt, wrote in Le Figaro on Sunday. He claimed that doing so risks validating Tebboune’s “anti-French discourse” and solidifying the nationalist leader’s rule, which Driencourt argued is running the Algerian economy into the ground and driving political opponents to flee.
The “collapse” of Algeria could see millions of Algerians flee for France, where most have at least one family member already, he continued, arguing that such an influx would “trigger the collapse of France.”