Memory can indeed reconcile peoples, provided that the peoples in question, as in the case of the German and French peoples, are true, of a majority, free and independent.
In the case of the Algerian and French peoples, we are faced with two exclusively French memories. The first is written by French historians and the second is entrusted to B. Stora.
France created Algeria. It gave it a history, a geography, an administration, institutions… now it is time for it to give it a memory.
Arab-Islamic Algeria is a French myth that only French intellectuals master. Historical leaders, with the exception of Ferhat Abbas who never believed in the Algerian nation, as well as Algerian intellectuals have been (and continue to be) instrumentalized and mobilized for the needs of the myth.
Try to discuss with the French intellectuals of Kabylia, the Berbers, antiquity, the Mediterranean, Saint Augustine, Apuleius. … They will immediately re-frame you and send you back to the myth. For them, the history of Algeria begins with their friend the Emir Abdelkader, Jugurtha of Rimbaud.
During the Azawad war, a French intellectual, whose name I have forgotten, said this: “I am a great admirer of the Tuareg culture (he was probably referring to mint tea), I am in favor of the recognition of the Tuareg language, but I will not go so far as to give them a state. ” – of course, a Tuareg state is considered to be contrary to the myth. This intellectual surely has Tuareg friends, loves the Tuareg, but he is paid not to help his Tuareg friends, but to keep them in the myth.
The mythical Algerian people, Arab-Islamic, is programmed against Kabylia and against all the homogeneous entities that refuse the myth. A myth that Kabylia contests and tries to destroy. This risks, of course, to destroy the whole political ecosystem of France in the region. So, in order to consolidate its strategic positions which it calls “regional balance”, France is reviving the myth through memory.
The Algerian people, officially Arab-Islamic, do not write and do not archive. They are unaware of the history of the country that France has given them. And it is not in their habits to cultivate their memory. He has only the history of war and religion: He made his religious war, chased the Christian from his land as his prophet asked him to do, the rest is only literature. And this is how the myth wants it.
The memory ordered to B. Stora is of interest only to the French state. A selective memory that it intends to use both to combat that of the real peoples such as the Kabyle people and other Berber entities whose true memories are voluntarily stifled. Then for its internal needs: a memory intended for suburban French people, of “Maghreb” origin, in order to reconcile them with the Republic and their mythical Arab-Islamic history.
NB: I am also talking about Morocco, Tunisia, the “Maghreb”, Mali and all the former French colonies in Africa.
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