French President Emmanuel Macron has announced the easing of security restrictions on the country's archives of the Algerian war. It was hardly a dramatic move. Rather than opening up its war archive, the presidency has simply proposed new rules intended to speed up access. However, that it garnered column inches around the world goes some way in indicating just how controversial a chapter the war remains in both countries' history.
In Algeria, the war remains a pivotal moment. It marks the point at which — successive governments have insisted — the National Liberation Front (FLN) delivered freedom to the people of Algeria and secured their role at the center of the state, a position now being increasingly questioned by protesters throughout Algeria. For the French, battered by German occupation during World War II and scarred by the recent loss of its territories in Indochina, the war and its conduct remains an uncomfortable legacy of an unloved and largely unacknowledged past.
