Everyone has their memories. A color, a smell, a pain. Everyone has their pain. Different, silent, burning. Each to his own Algeria. In the head, in the heart, in the blood. “Your stories are all incomparable. They are all unique. They are all irreducible”, launched Emmanuel Macron. Saturday March 19, at 12:28 p.m., sixty years to the day after the entry into force of the ceasefire the day after the signing of the Evian agreements, which put an end to more than seven years of conflict between the power colonial and the National Liberation Front (FLN), the President of the Republic chose to invite – and bring together – to the Elysée various witnesses who bear within them the wounds of the Algerian war.
There were returnees, soldiers, conscripts, harkis, families of the disappeared, separatists or militants against independence and Jews from Algeria. These memories accepted – some refused the invitation like the Algerian ambassador – to meet together in the heart of the Palace of the Republic to commemorate a date, far from being unanimous, but “symbol of lives turned upside down by the war in Algeria and its consequences of deep wounds and fractures between the actors of the same drama”summed up Geneviève Darrieussecq, Minister Delegate for Remembrance and Veterans.
Before speaking, the Head of State made a point of listening to them by allowing four of them to say a few words. Jean-Pierre Louvel, a conscript from the contingent, Lalia Ducos, an Algerian separatist, Messaoud Guerfi, a harki, and Marie-Rose Antoine, a pied-noir of Spanish origin, recounted their war in Algeria before the head of General Staff Thierry Burkhard.
“The matrix of much of our trauma”
The symbol is strong: four memories, sometimes rivals, seated side by side, follow one another. The stories of a few minutes multiply, mix, also combine. The emotion is there, Algeria too, very present in the village hall of the Elysée. We feel the nostalgia, the pain of no longer being there for some and the ordeal that this conflict has been. “I also wanted to bring together all these memories and allow us to move forward in this history and its transmission for ourselves and for our future. So, during these few years, I held a lot of hands, I will not let go of them and I have a dream: that they hold each other.replied Emmanuel Macron.
During his five-year term, the Head of State made Algeria a strong focus of his memory policy. Since he has been at the Elysée, he has sought to free speech, to resuscitate a forgotten history in order to build a bridge to appease and reconcile memories between two shores of the Mediterranean. But also in France. A few months ago, in front of the young heirs of the Algerian war whom he received for lunch, he explained that he had been “Struck, in recent years, to see how much the history and memories of the Algerian war were the matrix of a large part of our traumas. There are sufferings which have been silenced, and which have been constructed as being irreconcilable. But I think the exact opposite.”. On Saturday, he repeated that “the Algerian war and its unspoken had become the matrix of all resentment, including for so many of our young people who had nothing to do with it”.
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