France's Reckoning: Imperial Guilt in Film
Memorial plaque dedicated to the Algerian victims of the 1961 Seine River Massacre (Wikimedia Commons).
The legacy of the French Colonial Empire, especially in the wake of a racial justice awakening, is fully in view for French citizens and former colonial subjects across the world. As recently as three generations ago, France governed the lives of nearly 70 million foreign subjects across the world. France’s decolonization period during the 20th century brought independence to twenty-six different countries, twenty of which were in Africa. However, among the many anti-French decolonial struggles, the Algerian War for Independence is especially conspicuous in French national memory.
Inspired by Indochina’s (modern-day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) battle-earned independence from France, the National Liberation Front declared sovereignty in 1954 and began a guerilla movement. Unlike the French Empire’s other colonies, Algeria was officially made up of administrative departments intended for eventual integration into the mainland. Unlike Indochina, many French citizens, especially those born in Algeria (such as the writer Albert Camus), viewed Algeria as an integral part of the country. Thus, Algeria’s unique status sparked an especially vicious campaign by the French military that killed as many as 1.5 million Algerians until Algeria’s independence in 1962.
Blockade at Algiers, 1960. (Wikimedia Commons)
The 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, produced by former resistance fighters of the FLN in Algeria’s War for Independence and filmed in the style of a documentary mimicking the conflict’s coverage, provides a snapshot of both the war itself and the racist imperialism prevalent throughout France’s modern history.
In one memorable scene, French journalists question the morality and necessity of torturing FLN prisoners to Lieutenant-Colonel Philippe Matheu—a fictionalized hodgepodge of France’s paratroop commanders during the war. The French Armed Forces’ mass torture campaigns, alongside indiscriminate massacres of 45,000 Algerians at Sétif and Guelm, were among the many horrific war crimes perpetrated during the eight-year conflict.
This question stupefies Colonel Matheu. He responds by presenting torture as necessary to maintain the French administration of Algeria, and he is dumbfounded by the FLN and other anti-imperialists who compare the Fourth Republic practices with that of the Third Reich. Matheu reminds his audience that many of his compatriots were victims of Nazism during World War II: “Those who call us Fascist forget what many of us did in the Resistance [against the Nazi occupation]. They call us ‘Nazis’ but some of us are survivors of Dachau and Buchenwald [Nazi concentration camps mostly for political prisoners].”
Matheu’s defense demonstrates the willful ignorance that France, Britain, the United States, and other Western countries have demonstrated since World War II. The parallels between the internment of Jews and political prisoners in Algeria by Vichy France, the puppet state of Nazi Germany following France’s surrender, and France’s coercive relocation of more than 2 million Algerians into camps one and a half decades later are not just coincidental.
Furthermore, as Hampton Institute writer Joshua Briand noted, the racism and imperialism that defined Nazi Germany are foundational to the broader imperialistic projects of Europe in previous centuries.
The French Colonial Empire’s legacy offers a fundamental component to understanding the modern-day anti-Islamic measures of French President Emmanuel Macron and the French government. The most contemporary iteration of the tradition is the French Senate’s hijab ban passed on March 30 for Muslim women under 18 years old in public spaces.
Although the French 1958 Constitution declares that France is a Republic, “guaranteeing that all citizens regardless of their origin, race or religion are treated as equals before the law and respecting all religious beliefs,” the reality of France’s treatment of racial and religious minorities contradicts this procedural definition. First of all, unlike the United States, France does not survey its population in demographic models that recognize race nor religious differences. Therefore, in the name of colorblindness, French policy hinders investigations into structural discrimination in police behavior, poverty rates, health disparities, and other issues that concern French persons of color.
Many French policymakers expect citizens of all backgrounds to assimilate into a national, uniform identity as opposed to a more multicultural project that attempts to address cultural differences, such as Canada’s pluralist recognition of Quebecois identity. In particular, for many French Muslims, their faith often comes into conflict with the French conception of secularization, known as laïcité. Unlike the more Anglophone understanding of secularism, which usually indicates a neutral approach toward faith that dissociates organized religion from government management and policymaking, laïcité is a more active vision of secularization particular to France.
Laïtcite does not completely divorce religious and state affairs—the government funds historical church landmarks as well as a few Catholic schools, but it generates a more selective approach toward religion in public affairs. Laïtcite prominently emerged within the national debate in the decades since decolonization as immigration from Muslim-majority countries resulted in reactionary measures taken against various Islamic practices. The most notorious laws include the National Assembly’s ban on religious imagery in schools, which not only prohibited hijabs but also Jewish kippahs and Sikh turbans, and the 2016 ban on “burkinis” (a type of swimsuit, sometimes worn by Muslim women, that almost entirely covers oneself) from Cannes, Nice, and other municipalities.
Through the lens of imperialism, the clearly Islamophobic policy enforcement of laïcite among other elements of the universalizing French national republicanism encouraged and developed concurrently with French imperial expansion.
For example, in A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930, Ohio State University history professor Alice C. Conklin writes that the mission civilisatrice—France’s civilizing mission of republican values—was the main justification used by the governors-general of French West Africa to assault Indigenous African traditions in order to readjust the colonial subjects into exploitable participants in the capitalist economy. The governors-general typically based their notion of superiority in racial terms, often deeming Africans as “lazy” or “primitive.” Other academics note similar justifications used within the French Colonial Empire’s other colonies, such as Algeria and Indochina.
The mission civilisatrice, however, failed even by its own measure of success: by 1924, there were only 24 full West African citizens. Ironically, the imperial desire to economically strip colonies of their resources usually overruled the “civilizational” goals of administrators. Only 4.03 percent of taxation on Africans went to education in 1935. The notable violence of France’s decolonization period further highlights the mission civilisatrice’s intrinsic failures: A decade prior to the Algerian War for Independence, France brutally suppressed other independence movements, such the 1947-1949 revolt in Madagascar, during which as many as 100,000 people died, and the Indochina War for Independence, in which around 500,000 Vietnamese people died.
More than half a century later, France struggles to reckon with its imperial legacy. While Holocaust denial is criminalized in France, similar to many other European countries, Vichy France’s role in the genocide and its various imperialist crimes are either downplayed or ignored. In 2007, then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared that “France never committed crimes against humanity.” Even when Macron admitted in January 2021 to war crimes such as torture committed by French soldiers during the Algerian War for Independence, he refused to offer an official apology to Algeria.
Site of Caché’s main filming location, 49 Rue Brillat-Savarin. (Wikimedia Commons)
France’s self-ingrained rejection of historical atrocities is encompassed in Michael Haneke’s 2005 thriller-drama Caché (Hidden). Caché approaches French imperialism from the perspective of 21st-century middle-class intellectual television producer Georges Laurent living in a Parisian suburb. Although the setting of Caché is the opposite of the guerilla warfare portrayed in The Battle of Algiers, the physical tension of the bullet is replaced with psychological dread and responsibility.
When Georges’s comfortable bourgeois lifestyle is interrupted by a series of disturbing children’s drawings and recordings of residency mailed to him, Georges is forced to address guilt long locked away from his childhood. However, Georges repeatedly denies any responsibility for his past actions and diverts blame toward those he harmed. Caché revolves around Georges’s allegorical relationship to one of the most intentionally denied and overlooked atrocities in France’s colonial history: the murder of more than 200 pro-FLN protesters at the hands of Parisian and National police in 1961. Like an imperial boomerang, the vicious counterinsurgency tactics institutionalized for years across the Mediterranean were fully employed against a crowd of more than 30,000 people. The Parisian police tossed protester bodies into the Seine River, dubbing the event historically as the Seine River Massacre.
The commander of the massacre was Paris Police Chief Maurice Papon, who collaborated with Nazis during Vichy France by deporting more than a thousand Jewish people to concentration camps. Following news leaks in the 1980s, Papon was finally placed on trial and convicted for his Holocaust involvement, but he died in 2007 without ever facing repercussions for his instigation of the 1961 massacre.
Similar to Georges, Macron deflects from the past. Instead, Macron praises the same unitary vision that justified colonial expansion in the past and Islamophobia in the present. To him, laïcité and the republican spirit unify the country; furthermore, he argues that France must isolate “radical Islamism.”
Although Macron declared the establishment of a reconciliation committee on the French Colonial Empire in the same announcement that he acknowledged torture in Algeria, the stubborn refusal to accept the moral culpability of those actions shows a half-hearted effort to address a history too-long erased from French consciousness.
A more honest reconciliation would step beyond mere investigation. Some argue it would be best for France to investigate financial compensation as well, in the tradition of reparations advocates such as Ta-Nehisi Coates. In particular, Dr. Shashi Tharoor MP argument in favor of British reparations for its imperial exploitation of India and other colonies is equally applicable to France: “It’s a bit rich to oppress, enslave, kill, torture, maim people for 200 years and then celebrate the fact that they are democratic at the end of it.”
Without a comprehensive understanding and legitimate rectification of its colonial past, France will remain as uncertain of itself as Georges Laurent and as malignantly ignorant as Colonial Philippe Matheu.