Is civil war coming for France? The Republic can’t escape colonialism

Today marks the moment, 63 years ago, that France finally ceded control of Algeria. But speak to many in both countries and the war might have finished yesterday, with tensions between Paris and Algiers now higher than they’ve been for years. Consider, among other things, France’s recent decision to re-examine the “special” pact of 1968 that made it easier for Algerians to settle in France, with the Quai d’Orsay also presenting its former colony with a list of nationals it wants to send back home. Algiers reacted indignantly — but Algerian terrorists have attacked several French citizens over recent years, while many French Arabs continue to fiercely resent the land they call home.

And if what Frantz Fanon called the “red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives” of decolonisation are as vicious as ever in politics and the banlieue, France’s bookshelves aren’t being spared either. One of the most vivid examples of recent times is A Counter-History of French Colonisation, a fusillade in paperback. Written by Driss Ghali, a novelist and essayist, and published in English late last year, it promises to provide “an antidote to the poison distilled in bad faith” by “apostles” of postcolonial thought, those who’ve distilled the complexities of French colonialism into a game of heroes and villains.

In a vivid riposte to these activists, Ghali says he can offer a fresh and “dispassionate” view of this still-urgent moment of history, arguing that it’s time to move on from 19 March and everything it stands for. It’s a position increasingly echoed across France and Algeria, a shift with potentially revolutionary consequences for the politics of both countries. All the same, we shouldn’t necessarily expect Paris and Algiers to bury the hatchet just yet, especially given the incentives Arab elites have to perpetuate hate — and the underlying tensions that endure right across France itself.

Before you even get to Ghali’s argument, A Counter-History first deploys identity. A Moroccan and a Muslim, the author is a product of French colonial history, one whose personal story can be traced to both flanks of the Mediterranean. His great-grandfather fought against the French in the Twenties, while his grandfather fought for them during the Second World War. As such, Ghali is able to report directly from the front lines of the conflicts that currently plague France, to say nothing of its erstwhile colonial holdings in North Africa.

Ghali’s claims are as striking as his background. The French Republic, he says, has been slowly fractured, corroded in gradients by social change which threatens its very existence. The most significant of these changes has been the growth of its banlieues into something like mini-cities, with their own codes, cultures and languages. They are usually at odds with mainstream France and the Republic, which in the form of the police is seen as an intrusive, oppressive presence (sometimes the word “colonialist”  is used in provocation).

For all the loose language bandied about in the past few years, there is as yet no civil war in France, though Ghali does not rule it out. But there is, he says, a permanent stand-off between those who believe in France as an ideal of civilisation, and those who have no interest in such abstractions, and even violently oppose them. This, Ghali argues, is probably the greatest division in contemporary French life.

He’s far from alone. The spectre of civil war may feel hyperbolic to Anglophone readers, but in recent years it has been a staple of French cultural discourse, appearing as the major theme in the novels of bestselling authors like Michel Houellebecq and Laurent Obertone. Another good example is Athena, a popular Netflix drama that depicts a battle between the French police and the eponymous fictional banlieue. Throughout the film, the French media persistently report on what’s happening as “civil war”.

The theme of civil war is a notion that’s also been picked up by politicians, notably Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, with similar language increasingly common across the Right. In April 2021, for instance, Valeurs Actuelles published an open letter from military officers, addressed to French President Emmanuel Macron. In the so-called lettre des généraux, 20 retired generals, together with 1,000 French soldiers, condemned what they saw as an attack on French values, emanating from Islamism and “the hordes from the banlieues” — who for their part were dismissed as gangsters, drug dealers or terrorists.

At the heart of these tensions is France’s unsolved colonial legacy, especially in North Africa. Beyond Napoleon’s abortive adventure in Egypt, things really started in 1830, when King Charles X invaded Algeria. That was followed by the establishment of French protectorates in Tunisia and Morocco.

Yet beyond the arrival of Europeans on the Mediterranean’s southern shores, it’s really their departure that continues to haunt France every 19 March. As the Algerian fight for freedom grew hot, from 1954, France deployed torture and mass killings as weapons of war, and to protect the million or so whites who’d made the country home. But the violence wasn’t all one way. On the Arab side, insurgency, terrorism and assassination were legitimised as tools against the European oppressor. One obvious case study here is Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, which presents an unvarnished account of Algerian nationalist attacks on innocent civilians during the war of independence.

Notwithstanding the cliches of French historians, then, Ghali suggests that France wasn’t the only agent of history during its messy escape from empire. More than that, he argues that the Maghreb’s failures since decolonisation are largely its own fault. The end of empire offered an opportunity for these newly independent states to create their own futures on the model of what Ghali calls “the civilised world” — but which have instead wallowed in corruption, religious fanaticism, inequality and tribalism. These problems have been particularly acute in Algeria, where the stale and intransigent government helped spark civil war in the Nineties. Fought against Islamist extremists, about 200,000 people died. Tunisia and Morocco, the other French possessions in North Africa, were spared such horrors, but they too have chafed under cruel and authoritarian rulers.

Not, of course, that France is blameless here. Quite aside from the brutality of colonial rule — and though Algerian independence was formally conceded decades ago — neo-colonial exploitation persisted right across the region. Consider the clientelism of the sort seen in Morocco, or else the kind of financial, military and political influence found under the umbrella of “Françafrique” and which has ravaged countries from Senegal to Mali. As Ghali notes, that’s before you factor in the Hexagon’s enduring cultural influence, whether in television or fashion, or getting a job at a French firm.

Yet whatever Africa’s own discontents, Ghali sees the worst consequences of France’s colonial legacy in the way North Africans now make up the bulk of the immigrant population of France. Roughly 30% of the country’s immigrants hail from North Africa, while the country has over five million Muslims overall, the largest such community in Europe.

In one of his most controversial claims, Ghali is critical of what he calls reverse colonialism — which has seen millions leave the former French colonies for metropolitan France. This, he says, is a betrayal of their home nations, though he does concede that fleeing poverty and war are greater motivations than idealistic nation-building. Most importantly, this process has created an imbalance between France and its former territories, one still being played out at home and abroad. Bleakly, Ghali describes a situation where millions of euros return to the former colonies from immigrant economic activity in France, who in return offer criminality and Islamist terrorism.

Is this fair? Certainly, it ignores much of the cultural richness which has emerged from the postcolonial relations between France and the Maghreb. Yet it’s a perception that’s not only grown popular on the far-Right of French politics, but has also increasingly entered the mainstream, especially given the ever-present terrorist threat. In 2023, after all, even President Macron himself said that France had “an immigration problem” while also pushing through a law distinguishing more sharply between French citizens and migrants.

None of this is inevitable: Ghali himself is testament to the ways Arabs can straddle both shores of colonial divide. But for that to happen, both sides need honesty, and to finally face up to their shared history, not least by owning up to historical atrocities. It’s a process that Macron has sought to start, publicly acknowledging French errors and crimes. Among other things, that’s involved acknowledging responsibility for the “disappearance” of the pro-Algerian activist Maurice Audin in 1957.

So far, though, any “reconciliation” has been strikingly one-sided, even if Ghali isn’t totally alone in pushing for change in the literary space. In the pages of Marianne, for instance, the historian and philosopher Marcel Gauchet, a heavyweight voice on the centre-Right, declared that Ghali’s book was a must-read for Macron and any other European politician serious about understanding the twin processes of decolonisation and mass immigration. For Gauchet, Ghali is not only courageous, but also accurate in his assessment of the French imperial experience — as a tragedy which has brought misery both to the colonisers and the colonised.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Arab intellectuals have had less time for such ideas, even accusing Ghali of echoing the far-Right rhetoric of Éric Zemmour. Yet here, too, change is coming. Progressive journals like Tel Quel in Morocco have, for instance, started testing long-standing taboos around the French colonial experience, questioning the collusion of powerful elites who have a vested interest in sustaining anti-French feeling to maintain their own positions. After many years of working in universities across the Maghreb, I was recently heartened at an academic conference in Morocco to hear similarly dissident views, especially surprising coming from the postcolonial academic establishment.

Just as significant, there has been a generational shift here too. A younger generation of North Africans no longer accept everything their elders tell them about the imperial past. A true postcolonial culture, they instead argue, must be forward looking: working out new geopolitical strategies for North Africa, beyond the old tensions brought up every 19 March. This thinking has even gained some momentum in semi-official circles, with Moroccan media quick to condemn Algeria’s latest arguments with France as outdated and pointless. Yet with the banlieues as unhappy as ever — Paris alone saw around 100 gangland clashes in its suburbs last year — we shouldn’t imagine that these decade-long struggles can be solved by writers alone.