Confronting State Policy: A Historian and the Archives of the Algerian War

Résumé 0

At the turn of the 2020s, the Algerian War returned to the forefront of public debate, with all of its attendant contradictions. While the President of the Republic sought to turn the page on this moment in the country’s history by opening up previously classified archives, his administration endeavored to preserve secrecy. General interministerial order 1300 forced the declassification of top-secret documents, while the anti-terrorism law passed on July 30, 2021 imposed further restrictions on archives related to intelligence. This prompted historians, jurists, and archivists to mobilize against the government’s invocation of the “reason of State.” On December 22, 2021, amidst much public support, a general derogation was passed by decree that ostensibly aimed to remove restrictions on the legal and judicial archives related to the Algerian War —a full fifteen years ahead of the initially proposed date. As this article maintains, however, this decree was little more than a smokescreen. From the two-fold perspective of examining both the war and its archival materials, this article investigates the impact of three restrictive paragraphs added to the December decree that deal specifically with the protected categories of legal minors, protected intelligence agents, and persons involved in intimate and sexual affairs. This article argues that a new “reason of State” emerged with the December 2021 decree, inverting the paradigm that had prevailed during the Algerian War. While the former had subordinated the rights of individuals to the higher interests of the State and thus sealed off many archival resources, today’s policies actually seek to bar archival access on the basis of those same individual rights, thus reproducing the State’s logic. With the December 22, 2021 decree, the real violence of the Algerian War is thus repeated in the symbolic violence of State archival control.