Death over a Low Heat

In 1958, the French authorities banned Henri Alleg’s memoir, La Question, shortly after it was published. Alleg had been the editor of the daily Alger républicain, already banned in 1955. His book gave a detailed account of his torture at the hands of the French during the Algerian war of independence: the shining steel clips of the electrodes, the straps and gags, the plank he had to lie on still sticky with the vomit of previous ‘customers’. He described the misery of detention in the ‘enormous overcrowded prison’ and the suffering of those on the ground floor, awaiting execution:

There is not one of them who does not turn on his straw mattress at night with the thought that the dawn may be sinister, who falls asleep without wishing with all his might that nothing will happen at dawn.

Despite the ban, more than 160,000 copies of La Question circulated in France, Algeria and beyond. In a preface, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that Alleg had revealed the brutalising and inhumane structure of French colonialism:

Perhaps the greatest merit of Alleg’s book is to dissipate our last illusions. We know now that it is not a question of punishing or re-educating certain individuals, and that the Algerian war cannot be humanised. Torture was imposed here by circumstances and demanded by racial hatred. In some ways it is the essence of the conflict and expresses its deepest truth.

More than a million people were killed in the war. Once it became obvious that the French had lost, Charles de Gaulle and the Front de Libération Nationale began negotiations, which concluded with the Évian Accords of March 1962. The agreement guaranteed free circulation of people between France and Algeria. The Algerians had a strong negotiating hand and the French government wanted to encourage immigration as a source of cheap labour. De Gaulle’s government also assumed that French settlers (pieds noirs) would stay in Algeria and wanted to guarantee their mobility, but those who chose to stay after independence were a dwindling minority.

At the end of 1968, a new arrangement governing migration between the two countries was signed. Most pieds noirs were back in France, and, as Kristin Ross observes in May ’68 and Its Afterlives, that year marked ‘the emergence onto the political scene of the travailleur immigré (immigrant worker) in French society’. In place of free movement, the new accord introduced a quota system, giving entry to 35,000 Algerians a year (compared to 65,000 from Portugal, for example), but in compensation offered them a fast-tracked ten-year residence permit and more time than other nationalities to find a job or face deportation. Family reunion was also easier.

These advantages have been chipped away and were all but dissolved in 2002, but they have come under renewed scrutiny from right-wing critics in France who see them as inappropriate and outdated. The Algerian government, however, has declined to renegotiate. Quite the opposite. The president, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, told Le Figaro in 2022 that ‘Algerians should receive 132-year visas … Now that would be a fair deal.’ Franco-Algerian diplomatic relations are strained. Both countries have recalled their consular staff and last year, President Macron traduced the rights of the Sahrawis by acknowledging Morocco’s contested claim on Western Sahara and antagonising Algeria, the main backer of the Sahrawi liberation movement.

On 30 October, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National introduced a bill to revoke the 1968 accord and put Algerian immigrants on the same footing as everyone else. (The Algerian dictatorship, the RN claimed, had set out to humiliate France.) Since last year’s snap legislative elections there has been a hung parliament. None of the three blocs can command a reliable majority. Many MPs from Macron’s centrist grouping Ensemblewere mysteriously absent from the chamber when the vote took place, while the traditional right were divided, with some voting for the RN’s bill. Laurent Wauquiez, a former leader of Les Républicains and an aspiring 2027 presidential candidate, said: ‘When the RN defends projects or convictions that we share, there is no reason … not to vote for what we want.’

The bill passed by 185 votes to 184. It was the first time any bill tabled by the RN has passed. It isn’t legally binding – the president can ignore it – but it is a milestone in the RN’s strategy of normalisation, in which the centre and the traditional right are colluding. As in the UK, however, the slow march of the far right should be measured not only by parliamentary precedent but by the incremental intrusion of extremist ideas into the mainstream.

The traditional right justified their support on technocratic grounds, as if the vote were about the fine details of immigration policy. But the Algeria question has always been fundamental in France, especially for Le Pen’s party, formed in 1972 as the Front National from the ashes of the French empire, with strongly pro-colonial, militaristic and anti-immigration positions. It explicitly defended the memory of Algeria as ‘French’. Its base comprised former pieds noirs activists (their descendants are still a key constituency for the RN), former colonial soldiers and others politicised by the war. Jean-Marie Le Pen was himself a torturer in Algeria and the leader of a special military intelligence unit. He was accused of electrocution, beatings, rape and waterboarding, but he didn’t like the term ‘torture’: ‘French soldiers shouldn’t be embarrassed about what they did.’ Often enough, they weren’t.

The question of Algeria, for the RN, is not only about migration, but about the status of the colonial past. This makes their first legislative victory particularly disturbing. For the RN – as for Trumpism – it is not enough to contest the details of contemporary migration policies. They want to challenge the historical and social foundations of liberal and even traditionally conservative visions of post-colonial statehood.

Contemporary European border regimes have their origins in the control of space, land and mobility that underpinned colonial projects. The techniques of policing, surveillance and incarceration developed in the colonies are deployed at Europe’s borders and in the hidden cells of deportation camps. Alleg wrote of the night terrors of the colonial prison. For the Gilets Noirs, an anti-racist collective of undocumented migrants, detention and asylum are their own kind of prison: ‘Over there, France colonises us; here, France doesn’t want us to receive us. In Africa we get killed directly. Here it’s death over a low heat. You wake up in the morning and someone has gone mad in the night.’