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I N MARCH, BENEATH the chandeliers of the Elysée palace, four adult cousins met Emmanuel Macron, France’s president. What really happened, they wanted to know, to their grandfather, Ali Boumendjel, a lawyer and nationalist, who died in colonial Algeria after his arrest by French troops in 1957? Officially he committed suicide. In fact, Mr Macron acknowledged, Boumendjel was tortured and killed by the French army. His body was thrown from a window to disguise the cause of death. Listen to this story Enjoy more audio and podcasts oniOSorAndroid. The president and the lawyer’s grandchildren all of the same generation engaged in an “extraordinary dialogue”, says Benjamin Stora, a historian who was present. The cousins’ discomfort, he says, focused on a question: “How can we live in the country that assassinated our grandfather?” Although a French general had confessed 20 years ago to ordering the murder of Boumendjel, the government had never admitted th ....
National fronts? The Algerian War began 60 years ago. Some eight years later, a new Arab nation came about – and a million Algerians of French origin fled to France. The recent successes of the extreme-right Front National have made these pieds-noirs a political factor again, as the fronts of the Algerian War retain contemporary relevance. By Jakob Krais During her campaign for the local and European elections at the beginning of 2014, Marine Le Pen addressed an open letter to her friends, the harkis and pieds-noirs . It was an assessment of the former French president Charles de Gaulle, the founding father of the Fifth Republic. ....