Magazine / History / Narrating the Nation / Article | 06/05/2008

Colonialism in the European memory

In more and more countries, science and the public concern themselves with the repercussions of colonial activity. Andreas Eckert shows how this history is dealt with in the individual countries.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the French historian Benjamin Stora, a specialist on the history of the Algerian war, deplored the fact that the often violent end of the French colonial empire had now largely disappeared from the consciousness of the French population.[1] For a long time, the official memory policy of France had suppressed the events in the colonies.

Photo: Photocase

The Algerian war, for instance, was referred to in official documents as an "operation for the maintenance of law and order”: it was a war without a name. A few years ago, however, the Grande Nation's colonial past in North Africa caught up with it. At the beginning of 2000, Le Monde published a report by a former activist in the Algerian freedom movement which gave a powerful account of her three months of torture at the hands of the French army. A few months later, General Paul Aussaresses minutely detailed the torture methods used by the French military and thereby unleashed a mighty debate.[2] With no feelings of remorse, he admitted to killing twenty-four prisoners with his own hands. Aussaresses and his publisher were found guilty of "justifying war crimes”.

There has been no lack of scholarly publications on the Algerian war since the 1960s. However, they seldom reached a wider public. In recent years, this has changed dramatically. When in December 2000, Raphaëlle Branche defended her doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne on torture and the army during the war, the event was considered worthy of a report on the front page of Le Monde. The book published shortly thereafter[3] meticulously traced the practice of the armed forces, on the basis of archives and interviews. The historian emphatically rejected the claim that the widespread use of torture had served only military purposes. Branche said that the violence had been primarily a part of a policy of targeted terror, deployed to break the nationalists. It was only secondarily used to obtain information from prisoners.

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