France-Algeria: A casus belli by proxy

According to an Ipsos-Sopra survey, for 87 percent of French people, France “is in decline.” For these citizens, their primary concern remains purchasing power. France is in full economic decline, with a major debt (and Mercosur is not going to spare it). But curiously, for the media, already mired in the double standards applied to the treatment of the massacres committed in Gaza and Beirut, there would appear to be something more serious: the Algerian authorities arresting writer Boualem Sansal and the demonization of another writer, Kamel Daoud, winner of the 2024 Goncourt Prize.

For the past month, the entire right-wing and even far-right media sphere has been blathering about a dictatorship that survives only on the “hatred of France.” It is a classic pattern: Algiers coughs, Paris catches a cold; all it takes is for Algiers to reassert its sovereignty for Paris to scream paranoia.

What is new is that, over the last few months, Paris has found its own spokespersons: two writers, each in his own genre, who have demonstrated a dedication to criticizing their country of origin with fervent and controversial statements. This devotion has morphed into outright allegiance, with their voices now feeding into the collective memory of a nostalgic France that still has not come to terms with the loss of “Papa’s Algeria.”

Take, for instance, Sansal, who has reduced Algeria’s sacred war of independence to mere acts of “terrorism and diplomacy.” That is all this prominent writer takes away from eight years of struggle, during which Algerians wrested their independence, freeing themselves from 132 years of one of the most criminal colonial regimes in history. According to our revisionist, the Morice Line, napalm bombings, torture and the “regroupement” camps were, in his eyes, nothing more than figments of the imagination.

Incidentally, the term “regroupement camp” is a euphemism advocated by the colonial authorities during the war of independence. In fact, the term “concentration camp” was used as far back as 1904. Judge for yourself: the indigenous populations had experienced “the organized carnage and slow agony of concentration camps.” And it was a public prosecutor, Jacques Dumas, who stated this in black and white, three decades before the rise of Nazism.

It is a classic pattern: Algiers coughs, Paris catches a cold; all it takes is for Algiers to reassert its sovereignty for Paris to scream paranoia

Salah Guemriche

For Sansal, the revisionist, western Algeria is Moroccan land. French historians have put him in his place. They could have concluded, as I have noted elsewhere, that his case falls under the heading of ultracrepidarianism: a behavior also known as “Nobel disease,” which makes people talk about subjects they have not mastered.

I have always been careful never to challenge the freedom of others and even more so when it comes to novelists; in other words, the creators of universes and inventors of life paths. So, there is no question of literature here. It is about outrageous revisionism. I am not talking about literature because, in fiction, the freedom and fulfillment of the author are at stake: like the dreams in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” fiction has its own fabric, vital to the novelist.

Sansal, a novelist, has established himself in his own category. But by becoming a historian without having the required knowledge or rigor and a political scientist without having the analytical finesse, he has joined another category: he has just discovered the virtues of negationism, which he had already practiced in favor of Israel after a stay as a guest of honor. Is it this impunity granted to Israel, this election “apart from the nations” that he defends by denying the colonial fact? In his opinion, in the “Promised Land” there is no need to talk about the colonization of Palestine.

As for his accomplice, Daoud, if some Algerians are angry with him, it is quite simply because, in his prize-winning novel, he is said to have acted courageously, shamelessly asserting: “The war is against me, for having broken a taboo.” A statement shamelessly taken up as an argument of authority by his publisher, while other Algerians had, long before Daoud, published a dozen stories and novels on the same subject without being censored or vilified. To name a few: Abdelkrim Djaad, Arezki Mellal, Aissa Khelladi, Yasmina Khadra, Djemaila Benhabib and Abdallah Aggoune.

The connection between the two writers does not end there. Applying Sansal’s theorem (“There’s no need to talk about colonization in Israel”), Daoud adds: “Palestine is not my problem.” How can you expect such Pygmalions not to be praised by the media of a country in full decline, completely submissive to the eleventh commandment: “Israel has the right to defend itself?” And it is not the 2024 Goncourt Prize winner who will be able to deny this. He, in a moment of frankness that does him credit, tells you: “I don’t like the so-called left-wing intellectual, the poor one with big ideas, the writer who dies of tuberculosis in an unpaid-for hotel room. Me, I came here to win, to be the first, to win prizes, to be admired.”

Both Sansal and Daoud, promoted to directors of conscience of the French extreme right, knew what they had to say and write. But literature deserves neither fatwa nor imprisonment. A writer is only responsible for his or her positions in reality and, like any other citizen, in a situation where public order is undermined. In this case, Sansal did not deserve to be imprisoned and the Algerian authorities’ decision was reactionary. And any reactionary decision by any government is counterproductive, because it reveals a lack of self-confidence in its foundations.

What remains condemnable, in my opinion, are the relations of these two authors with the far right and their allegiance to what Edgar Morin calls “Israelism.” I am not about to forget Daoud’s odious articles on the Palestinian tragedy in Le Point. And then there is the “Cologne affair.” Any French journalist who had committed such malpractice would have been ostracized by the profession. Daoud, on the other hand, slipped through the net. And, better yet, he was given one hell of a promotion.

• Salah Guemriche, an Algerian essayist and novelist, is the author of 14 books, including “Algeria 2019, the Reconquest” (Orients Editions, 2019), “Israel and its Neighbor, According to the Bible” (L’Aube, 2018) and “Christ Stopped at Tizi-Ouzou: An Investigation into Conversions in Islamic Lands” (Denoel, 2011). X: @SGuemriche