From colonial past to present: The struggle for identity in France

I have a cousin who I could never recall spoke Arabic. He was born and raised in France in the early 2000s and seemed like an ordinary young Frenchman to me, albeit one of Algerian descent.

The last time we met, however, he impressed me with a mastery of the language I did not think was possible to achieve — at least not past one’s formative years when learning a language comes more naturally.

When I asked him about how he did it, he said it was “normal” being that he’s “Algerian”.

A long discussion ensued wherein I questioned him on why he identified as exclusively Algerian (side note: his trips to Algeria are few and far between). His answers didn’t necessarily make sense, but it occurred to me that he was not alone in feeling this way.

Estimates vary, but it’s believed that as many as seven million people in France are of Algerian descent. And many of them, like my cousin, suffer from an unresolved identity crisis that dates back decades, long before the most recent outcry over the police killing of a 17-year-old French-Algerian.

To be sure, this affects members of other diaspora communities. Integration, or assimilation, is just as contentious an issue for those whose ancestors hail from Senegal or Ivory Coast, two other former French colonies.

Algiers as far back as 1827

Still, Algeria’s case is peculiar, because France did not just colonise Algeria for 132 years — it also sought to erase it.

Paris convinced itself over time that the country was an integral part of its treasured identity. While Mali might’ve been a useful piece of land whose resources it could pillage, Algeria was France and France was Algeria. This was official French doctrine.

Algeria’s geographic proximity to the metropole — as mainland France was commonly referred to — and the presence of over a million European settlers (constituting some 10 percent of the population at the time) made abandoning the colony all the more difficult for the French to digest.

France’s exit in 1962, following a brutal seven-year liberation war, was a swift affair. But tensions between the two countries would continue to linger for decades to come, feeding an animosity that surges to the surface whenever the issue of colonialism is brought up.

This was the case in late 2021, when President Emmanuel Macron stated that Algeria, as a state, had never existed before the arrival of the French in 1830.

French historian Benjamin Stora, himself born in Algeria, was quick to rebuke the president’s statement.

France’s foray into Algeria, Stora said, was triggered by an incident that involved the Dey (or ruler) of Algiers slapping the French consul with a fly whisk over an unpaid debt. Surely, he concluded, the presence of a French consul in Algiers as far back as 1827 — the year of the incident — is sufficient proof that an Algerian state existed before France seized the territory.

Defying a former occupier

The ghost of the war would meanwhile continue to haunt both countries in another arena.

France, which was witnessing a great economic revival after the Second World War, needed workers. Algerians, naturally, could fill the gap.

Algerian workers would move to France temporarily to make up for the country’s labour shortage, leaving once they were no longer needed. By 1965, three years after Algerian independence, more than 500,000 Algerians were living in France.

French policymakers couldn’t foresee that they would remain in France all those years later. Moreover, nobody could have imagined that they would get married and have children to whom France was home.

Since there has been no admission of wrongdoing and no apology was ever issued for the crimes committed during the century-long colonisation of the North African country, Algerians continued to feel a certain resentment towards their former occupier.

It didn’t help that many of the workers were crammed in distant ‘banlieues’ (French for suburbs) that were meant to house them temporarily until they returned to their homeland. Their legal status as aliens, both in the eyes of the French administration and among ordinary citizens, cemented this reality.

Even as France relaxed restrictions and began allowing families to regroup, it wasn’t unusual for Algerian workers to laugh at the idea of applying for French citizenship. After the long and bloody struggle for independence, they were too proud to let go of their identity.

More importantly, they would go on to pass this obsession with identity onto their French-born children. It wasn’t uncommon for parents to scold their children for displaying affinity for France.

And so, for many of them, France was a physical space they inhabited, but their minds and spirits were elsewhere.

Post-industrial ghettos

Meanwhile, successive French administrations failed to address the issue. Centrist parties today are increasingly moving to the right, including Macron’s Renaissance party.

For some, like polemicist-turned-politician Eric Zemmour, it is up to foreigners and their descendants to make the effort to integrate into French society. “In Rome, you do as the Romans,” he would clamour on talk shows time and again.

Shortsightedness on the part of French authorities and a rightward shift in the state’s political discourse are topics that are seldom broached.

This is while descendants of Algerians and other diasporas continue to live in separate communities on the periphery of once-bustling economic cities that, after France's heavy industries moved to China and India, have been reduced to desolate ghettos.

It’s difficult to convince people like my cousin of the need to identify with a country that, paradoxically, has given them so much, but that is unable to fully accept them as their own. It is just as difficult as finding the words to explain to him that, should he make the questionable decision of moving “back” to Algeria, Algerians, too, would struggle to accept him — even with newfound Arabic fluency.