Entr'acte: Conflicting memories in old and new France
The violence this past autumn in some French immigrant banlieues, or suburbs, is a case in point. At one level, it was about alleged police brutality, discrimination, unemployment and poverty. At another, it was about French-born youths of immigrant extraction angry over being denied the normal privileges of being French.
At a less visible level, though, it was about memory: Everything that happened - on the streets, in the media, among politicians, in the government - was shaded by perceptions inherited from the past. And nothing disrupts official versions of history more than when past and present collide.
Under the shock of this unrest, then, France is beginning to look - nervously, reluctantly - at the history of its colonial rule of North and West Africa. Just this week, for instance, President Jacques Chirac decreed that the abolition of slavery would be remembered on May 10 each year. More immediately, even the idea that the recent riots were a kind of postscript to French colonialism is also gaining ground.
Now, joining the debate, is a new low-budget French movie set during what the French call the Algerian war and the Algerians call their war of independence. Its title, "La Trahison," or "Betrayal," says everything. It sums up the sentiments of all sides in that conflict. It also aptly describes the breakdown of trust between the French and a good part of France's immigrant population today.
Based on a memoir by Claude Sales, also called "Betrayal," the movie, directed by Philippe Faucon, recounts the experience of a young French Army officer in charge of a small garrison outside a small town in the desert of Algeria. The time is March 1960. By then, the war was six years old and still had two years to run.
The movie, which was warmly received by critics when it opened in France last week, has as its backdrop one of the most sensitive legacies of the Algerian war: the fact that, at one moment or other, some 300,000 Algerians fought on the French side. To the French, these men were loyal; to Algeria's National Liberation Front, they were traitors.
In the movie, four Algerian conscripts are among the soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Roque (Vincent Martinez), who treats them with respect and trusts them. The four Algerians, armed and dressed identically to the French soldiers, go on patrols and participate in clashes where Algerian rebels are killed.
One young Algerian in particular, Taïeb (Ahmed Berrhama), serves as Roque's translator when the officer executes the French anti-terrorist strategy of forcing peasants into army-controlled areas and burning their villages. It is through Taïeb, for instance, that Roque asks communities of women and children for the whereabouts of the men, who are presumed to have joined the guerrillas.
The discomfort of the four conscripts at seeing peasants rounded up is apparent. They also feel slighted when French soldiers refer to them by slang names for Arabs rather treating them as French. But even here, Roque takes their side, telling them to pay no attention to the insults of "ignorant" French grunts.
Roque's sympathy for them explains his initial disbelief when military intelligence informs him they are covert rebels. Further, Roque is told, during an imminent attack on the garrison, they have orders to cut his throat. When he discovers for himself that the information is true and they are arrested, he feels deeply betrayed. For the conscripts, though, any other behavior means betraying Algeria.
The Algerian war is perhaps the most dramatic example of what happened in almost every French colony: The rulers and the ruled viewed their place in history differently. Then, when millions of the colonized immigrated to the home country of the colonizer, they carried with them their memory of the past. And for their French-born children, it became an inherited memory, perhaps distorted by time and environment, but no less a memory.
"Forty years later, one might think that feelings have calmed," Faucon said of the Algerian conflict in an interview in Le Nouvel Observateur, "but that is not the case, as the crisis in the banlieues recently demonstrated. On each side, memory is still perpetuated in an antagonistic way, without leaving room for the position of the other."
Betrayal? It is easy to see how both sides could still feel betrayed: the French by those immigrants France has received, housed, educated, subsidized and employed; immigrants by the French who continue to look down on them as if they were still colonial subjects.
Evidently, there is no single memory.
Last February, the government majority in the National Assembly ordered French schools to teach the "positive role" of French colonialism. At the time, this bizarre legislation was protested only by a small group of youths of immigrant extraction who call themselves "The Natives of the Republic." After the banlieue riots, the article was put to a fresh vote - and again it passed. But this time, at least, it provoked angry exchanges in the Assembly and a furious debate in the media.
Since then, history is back in the headlines, with the government on the defensive.
"There is no official history of France," Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said. Chirac chipped in: "The law's job is not to write history." And the man who hopes to succeed him, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, ordered up a report on "the law, history and memory" from a high-profile lawyer called Arno Klarsfeld.
As it happens, Sarkozy's move was the cleverest because Klarsfeld's father, Serge, played a key role in reviving the memory of France's wartime deportation of Jews. For years, this memory - along with ample evidence - eroded the official portrayal of the German occupation as one of widespread French resistance. Finally, when Chirac took office in 1995, one of his first actions was to offer France's apologies to the Jews.
The parallel is obvious. France's official history may still laud the civilizing mission of its colonialism, but it is now coming under the siege of memory. Indeed, what the movie "Betrayal" underlines is that colonialism is a shared history of different memories. Recognition of this could be a first step towards peaceful coexistence between old white France and the new French of many colors.
E-mail: pagetwo@iht.com
Tomorrow: Jane Perlez on America's man in Sumatra.
PARIS History, it has been said, is what a country wants to remember and tries to forget - a definition that tends to undermine the notion of learning from past mistakes. Yet, as France is discovering, different versions of history have a way of reappearing uninvited. And then things can get complicated.
The violence this past autumn in some French immigrant banlieues, or suburbs, is a case in point. At one level, it was about alleged police brutality, discrimination, unemployment and poverty. At another, it was about French-born youths of immigrant extraction angry over being denied the normal privileges of being French.
At a less visible level, though, it was about memory: Everything that happened - on the streets, in the media, among politicians, in the government - was shaded by perceptions inherited from the past. And nothing disrupts official versions of history more than when past and present collide.
Under the shock of this unrest, then, France is beginning to look - nervously, reluctantly - at the history of its colonial rule of North and West Africa. Just this week, for instance, President Jacques Chirac decreed that the abolition of slavery would be remembered on May 10 each year. More immediately, even the idea that the recent riots were a kind of postscript to French colonialism is also gaining ground.
Now, joining the debate, is a new low-budget French movie set during what the French call the Algerian war and the Algerians call their war of independence. Its title, "La Trahison," or "Betrayal," says everything. It sums up the sentiments of all sides in that conflict. It also aptly describes the breakdown of trust between the French and a good part of France's immigrant population today.
Based on a memoir by Claude Sales, also called "Betrayal," the movie, directed by Philippe Faucon, recounts the experience of a young French Army officer in charge of a small garrison outside a small town in the desert of Algeria. The time is March 1960. By then, the war was six years old and still had two years to run.
The movie, which was warmly received by critics when it opened in France last week, has as its backdrop one of the most sensitive legacies of the Algerian war: the fact that, at one moment or other, some 300,000 Algerians fought on the French side. To the French, these men were loyal; to Algeria's National Liberation Front, they were traitors.
In the movie, four Algerian conscripts are among the soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Roque (Vincent Martinez), who treats them with respect and trusts them. The four Algerians, armed and dressed identically to the French soldiers, go on patrols and participate in clashes where Algerian rebels are killed.
One young Algerian in particular, Taïeb (Ahmed Berrhama), serves as Roque's translator when the officer executes the French anti-terrorist strategy of forcing peasants into army-controlled areas and burning their villages. It is through Taïeb, for instance, that Roque asks communities of women and children for the whereabouts of the men, who are presumed to have joined the guerrillas.
The discomfort of the four conscripts at seeing peasants rounded up is apparent. They also feel slighted when French soldiers refer to them by slang names for Arabs rather treating them as French. But even here, Roque takes their side, telling them to pay no attention to the insults of "ignorant" French grunts.
Roque's sympathy for them explains his initial disbelief when military intelligence informs him they are covert rebels. Further, Roque is told, during an imminent attack on the garrison, they have orders to cut his throat. When he discovers for himself that the information is true and they are arrested, he feels deeply betrayed. For the conscripts, though, any other behavior means betraying Algeria.
The Algerian war is perhaps the most dramatic example of what happened in almost every French colony: The rulers and the ruled viewed their place in history differently. Then, when millions of the colonized immigrated to the home country of the colonizer, they carried with them their memory of the past. And for their French-born children, it became an inherited memory, perhaps distorted by time and environment, but no less a memory.
"Forty years later, one might think that feelings have calmed," Faucon said of the Algerian conflict in an interview in Le Nouvel Observateur, "but that is not the case, as the crisis in the banlieues recently demonstrated. On each side, memory is still perpetuated in an antagonistic way, without leaving room for the position of the other."
Betrayal? It is easy to see how both sides could still feel betrayed: the French by those immigrants France has received, housed, educated, subsidized and employed; immigrants by the French who continue to look down on them as if they were still colonial subjects.
Evidently, there is no single memory.
Last February, the government majority in the National Assembly ordered French schools to teach the "positive role" of French colonialism. At the time, this bizarre legislation was protested only by a small group of youths of immigrant extraction who call themselves "The Natives of the Republic." After the banlieue riots, the article was put to a fresh vote - and again it passed. But this time, at least, it provoked angry exchanges in the Assembly and a furious debate in the media.
Since then, history is back in the headlines, with the government on the defensive.
"There is no official history of France," Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said. Chirac chipped in: "The law's job is not to write history." And the man who hopes to succeed him, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, ordered up a report on "the law, history and memory" from a high-profile lawyer called Arno Klarsfeld.
As it happens, Sarkozy's move was the cleverest because Klarsfeld's father, Serge, played a key role in reviving the memory of France's wartime deportation of Jews. For years, this memory - along with ample evidence - eroded the official portrayal of the German occupation as one of widespread French resistance. Finally, when Chirac took office in 1995, one of his first actions was to offer France's apologies to the Jews.
The parallel is obvious. France's official history may still laud the civilizing mission of its colonialism, but it is now coming under the siege of memory. Indeed, what the movie "Betrayal" underlines is that colonialism is a shared history of different memories. Recognition of this could be a first step towards peaceful coexistence between old white France and the new French of many colors.
E-mail: pagetwo@iht.com
Tomorrow: Jane Perlez on America's man in Sumatra.
PARIS History, it has been said, is what a country wants to remember and tries to forget - a definition that tends to undermine the notion of learning from past mistakes. Yet, as France is discovering, different versions of history have a way of reappearing uninvited. And then things can get complicated.
The violence this past autumn in some French immigrant banlieues, or suburbs, is a case in point. At one level, it was about alleged police brutality, discrimination, unemployment and poverty. At another, it was about French-born youths of immigrant extraction angry over being denied the normal privileges of being French.
At a less visible level, though, it was about memory: Everything that happened - on the streets, in the media, among politicians, in the government - was shaded by perceptions inherited from the past. And nothing disrupts official versions of history more than when past and present collide.
Under the shock of this unrest, then, France is beginning to look - nervously, reluctantly - at the history of its colonial rule of North and West Africa. Just this week, for instance, President Jacques Chirac decreed that the abolition of slavery would be remembered on May 10 each year. More immediately, even the idea that the recent riots were a kind of postscript to French colonialism is also gaining ground.
Now, joining the debate, is a new low-budget French movie set during what the French call the Algerian war and the Algerians call their war of independence. Its title, "La Trahison," or "Betrayal," says everything. It sums up the sentiments of all sides in that conflict. It also aptly describes the breakdown of trust between the French and a good part of France's immigrant population today.
Based on a memoir by Claude Sales, also called "Betrayal," the movie, directed by Philippe Faucon, recounts the experience of a young French Army officer in charge of a small garrison outside a small town in the desert of Algeria. The time is March 1960. By then, the war was six years old and still had two years to run.
The movie, which was warmly received by critics when it opened in France last week, has as its backdrop one of the most sensitive legacies of the Algerian war: the fact that, at one moment or other, some 300,000 Algerians fought on the French side. To the French, these men were loyal; to Algeria's National Liberation Front, they were traitors.
In the movie, four Algerian conscripts are among the soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Roque (Vincent Martinez), who treats them with respect and trusts them. The four Algerians, armed and dressed identically to the French soldiers, go on patrols and participate in clashes where Algerian rebels are killed.
One young Algerian in particular, Taïeb (Ahmed Berrhama), serves as Roque's translator when the officer executes the French anti-terrorist strategy of forcing peasants into army-controlled areas and burning their villages. It is through Taïeb, for instance, that Roque asks communities of women and children for the whereabouts of the men, who are presumed to have joined the guerrillas.
The discomfort of the four conscripts at seeing peasants rounded up is apparent. They also feel slighted when French soldiers refer to them by slang names for Arabs rather treating them as French. But even here, Roque takes their side, telling them to pay no attention to the insults of "ignorant" French grunts.
Roque's sympathy for them explains his initial disbelief when military intelligence informs him they are covert rebels. Further, Roque is told, during an imminent attack on the garrison, they have orders to cut his throat. When he discovers for himself that the information is true and they are arrested, he feels deeply betrayed. For the conscripts, though, any other behavior means betraying Algeria.
The Algerian war is perhaps the most dramatic example of what happened in almost every French colony: The rulers and the ruled viewed their place in history differently. Then, when millions of the colonized immigrated to the home country of the colonizer, they carried with them their memory of the past. And for their French-born children, it became an inherited memory, perhaps distorted by time and environment, but no less a memory.
"Forty years later, one might think that feelings have calmed," Faucon said of the Algerian conflict in an interview in Le Nouvel Observateur, "but that is not the case, as the crisis in the banlieues recently demonstrated. On each side, memory is still perpetuated in an antagonistic way, without leaving room for the position of the other."
Betrayal? It is easy to see how both sides could still feel betrayed: the French by those immigrants France has received, housed, educated, subsidized and employed; immigrants by the French who continue to look down on them as if they were still colonial subjects.
Evidently, there is no single memory.
Last February, the government majority in the National Assembly ordered French schools to teach the "positive role" of French colonialism. At the time, this bizarre legislation was protested only by a small group of youths of immigrant extraction who call themselves "The Natives of the Republic." After the banlieue riots, the article was put to a fresh vote - and again it passed. But this time, at least, it provoked angry exchanges in the Assembly and a furious debate in the media.
Since then, history is back in the headlines, with the government on the defensive.
"There is no official history of France," Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said. Chirac chipped in: "The law's job is not to write history." And the man who hopes to succeed him, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, ordered up a report on "the law, history and memory" from a high-profile lawyer called Arno Klarsfeld.
As it happens, Sarkozy's move was the cleverest because Klarsfeld's father, Serge, played a key role in reviving the memory of France's wartime deportation of Jews. For years, this memory - along with ample evidence - eroded the official portrayal of the German occupation as one of widespread French resistance. Finally, when Chirac took office in 1995, one of his first actions was to offer France's apologies to the Jews.
The parallel is obvious. France's official history may still laud the civilizing mission of its colonialism, but it is now coming under the siege of memory. Indeed, what the movie "Betrayal" underlines is that colonialism is a shared history of different memories. Recognition of this could be a first step towards peaceful coexistence between old white France and the new French of many colors.