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.  

Now Macron must reconcile his past attitude as a campaigner for office, that colonization was a “crime against humanity,” with his stated position in January that France would consider “no repentance nor apologies” for his country's occupation of Algeria. Instead, Macron holds an uncertain middle ground, no doubt aware of his vulnerability to the right wing, including the descendants of Algeria's past colonizers and Marine Le Pen's National Rally, a party founded by her father, Jean-Marie, himself accused of torture as a lieutenant during the Algerian war.

In the meantime, France continues to wrestle with the legacy of the "police action" it undertook in Algeria between 1954 and 1962. Even today, the total number of fatalities remains a matter for debate. Over seven years of bloody conflict, the French estimate that somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 Algerians lost their lives. The Algerians put that figure far higher, at around 1.5 million.