Macron is a shrewd operator and some French commentators saw this, like his recently announced “war on poverty”, as his attempt to ingratiate himself with the left, especially the French Communist party, for whom Audin has long been a cause célèbre. But a more generous view would be to see Macron’s act as a brave and noble gesture, as his “Vichy moment”. This is a reference to the famous statement made in 1995 by President Chirac that France had been complicit in the deportation of 76,000 Jews to German death camps during the Second World War. As such, it marked a turning point in French history – the beginning of reconciliation with a recent, shameful past. [...]
This was the great moral dilemma for the French during the Algerian war and was taken up by the likes of Albert Camus and other intellectuals, who argued that torture was not just a crime against humanity but degraded the torturer. Having endured the Nazis in the Second World War, so the argument ran, the French were now themselves behaving like Nazis. And, as the Audin case reveals, they were also torturing and killing their own citizens. This much was revealed as far back as 1958 by Henri Alleg, a journalist in Algiers. Alleg was suspected of sympathies with the nationalists and so arrested and tortured at the same time as Audin. Unlike Audin, Alleg survived and wrote about his experiences in a book called La Question, which was immediately banned in France and Algeria but which nonetheless circulated underground at the height of the war, doing much to undermine the French cause. [...]
The open question is whether this model will change much in contemporary French society, particularly in communities of Algerian heritage, which have now been established in France for decades. One of the ever-present taboos on the French left is to make a link between the violence of radical Islamists and the French colonial legacy. This is dismissed as crude determinism or, worse still, pure racism. But it is a fact that a disproportionate number of homegrown French terrorists have Algerian origins, as do Muslim prisoners in French prisons.
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