The story of an idealist executed by France

In « Trous de mémoires », the writer and cartoonist Nicolas Juncker examines, in his own way, burlesque and tragic, the wounds never closed from the Algerian war. A must.

It was the only noir foot - white French born in Algerian territory - of the nearly 200 supporters of the National Liberation Front (FLN) executed during the Algerian War (1954-1962), which culminated in the independence of the North African country. Of a Spanish mother and French father, Fernand Iveton was a young communist worker of 30 years who, to demonstrate his support for the armed cause in his country, planted a bomb at an electric power…

A contribution by Ali Farid Belkadi – The French colonial narrative on Algeria was built on a methodical falsification. This land had to appear without history, without culture, without memory, so that the conquest could be seen as a civilizing mission. From then on, the work of historians such as Louis Veuillot, Camille Rousset, Emile-Félix Gautier, and Henri Lorin forged a legend: that of a human and moral desert, Algeria occupied by barbarian…

The media sequence around RTL's former columnist – and his comparison between the massacres committed in Algeria and that of the Nazis in Oradour-sur-Glane – is evidence of France's pathological inability to face its colonial history.