Abstract
The article studies the administration of post-war memory in observing international negotiation processes devoted to the legacy of the past. The purpose of the article is to compare the failed Treaty of Friendship between France and Algeria with the Elysée Treaty between France and Germany. Why does closure seem impossible in one case and not in the other? The comparative analysis is based on two main kinds of data. First, a systematic corpus of official speeches allows for a description of the evolution of the leaders since the end of the hostilities. Second, a comprehensive gathering of narratives depicts the reactions of individuals directly affected by the violent past. The aim of the article is not to draw causal relations in the strictest sense of the term. It is rather to illuminate the discrepancies, inconsistencies, and tensions that exist not only between national strategic narratives but also—and above all—within each national group. Rather than focusing exclusively on the political uses of the past, the article underlines the long-term impact of emotions such as humiliation, anger, hatred, or sorrow on victims’ descendants. Rather than reducing the notion of public administration to the mere implementation of a government policy, the article suggests to broaden the perspective and to consider a mix of policy areas, from foreign affairs and defense to youth and culture.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
“Exilés du même royaume, nous voici comme deux frères ennemis (…) ayant superbement rejeté l’héritage pour n’avoir pas à le partager” (October 17, 1957). Letter quoted by Benjamin Stora, Les guerres sans fin: Un historien, la France et l’Algérie, Paris, Stock, 2008.
In France, the choice to negotiate a treaty rather than a standard agreement did not only make a difference in terms of the degree of official importance. It also affected the negotiation process since the French Constitution (titer VI) distinguishes between treaties, which are negotiated and ratified by the French President, and agreements, which are not directly negotiated by the president and which are approved by the Government (art. 52). Thus, this procedural distinction reinforced the crucial importance of leadership (cf. infra).
Regarding the number of victims, see Pervillé (2004).
The purpose of the French associations 4ACG (Anciens appelés en Algérie et leurs amis contre la guerre) and Association nationale des Pieds noirs progressistes is explicitly to develop friendship between both sides of the Mediterranean. Far from any nostalgia toward the French Algeria, they support projects in Algeria in order to favor the development of the country and to ensure a form of reparation vis-a-vis the Algerian population.
In this regard, it is useful to stress that 30,000 Maghrebi soldiers were killed while they were fighting for France during WWI, that 80,000 soldiers coming from North Africa died during WWII, and that 50,000 of them fell during the war in Indochina. The key common past events that created strong links between both sides of the Mediterranean Sea (figures given by the French historian Benjamin Stora, quoted in Le Monde 25 February 2005).
It is striking that the economic exchanges between France and Algeria increased threefold between 1999 and 2013. The main French groups investing in Algeria are among others Total, Lafarge, and Renault.
In Algeria on May 8, 1945, just as people were celebrating the allied victory over Germany (in which Algerian native troops participated), banned demonstrations of Algerian nationalists took place in several towns. In Sétif, the demonstration turned into a riot after the police forces intervened. Ninety French settlers were killed. The severe repression organized by the army left many thousands of dead—between 10,000 and 45,000 victims, according to sources. In the view of Algerian writer Kated Yacine, who witnessed “this horrible slaughter” (Le Monde, 9 March 2005), the Setif massacre was the founding moment of Algerian nationalism. Some historians even consider that the Algerian war of independence did not start on November 1, 1954, but on May 8, 1945.
The figures still vary according to the sources.
Born in 1876, Adenauer was elected to the Provincial Diet as a member of the Catholic Centre Party. In 1920, he became President of the Prussian State Council. When the Nazi Party of Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Adenauer lost all his offices and posts. After intermittent persecution, he was held prisoner by the Gestapo for several months as an enemy of the regime after the assassination attempt on Hitler had failed.
The West German government paid out tens of billions of dollars in compensation to the victims of the Nazi era, beginning with an initial payment of DM 3 billion paid to the state of Israel as part of the Luxemburg Agreement of 1952.
References
Abécassis, F., & Meynier, G. (2008). Pour une histoire franco-algérienne: En finir avec les pressions officielles et les lobbies de mémoire. Paris: La Découverte.
Ackermann, A. (1994). Reconciliation as a peace-building process in post-war Europe: The Franco-German case. Peace and Change, 19(3), 229–250.
Aggestam, K., Cristano, F., & Strömbom, L. (2015). Towards agonistic peacebuilding? Exploring the antagonism-agonism nexus in the Middle East peace process. Third World Quarterly, 36(9), 1736–1753.
Alvarez, J. (1998). Rush to closure: Lessons of the Tadić judgment. Michigan Law Review, 96(7), 2031–2112.
Antelme, R. (2005). Vengeance? Mayenne: Farrago (text written in November 1945 and initially published in 1946 in Les vivants).
Arnoux, A. (1946). Indice 33. Paris: Fayard.
Axelrode, R. (1997). The complexity of cooperation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Brudholm, T., & Rosoux, V. (2013). The unforgiving. Reflections on the resistance to forgiveness after atrocity. In A. Hirsch (Ed.), Theorizing post-conflict reconciliation: Agonism, restitution and repair (pp. 115–130). New York: Routledge.
Charbonneau, B., & Parent, G. (Eds.). (2012). Peacebuilding, memory and reconciliation? London: Routledge.
Chirac, J. (2011). Le temps présidentiel. Paris: Editions NiL.
Druckman, D. (2001). Turning points in international negotiation: A comparative analysis. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 45, 519–544.
Dupont, C. (1994). La négociation. Conduite, théorie, applications. Paris: Dalloz.
Fackler, M. (1965). The Franco-German treaty: The end of hereditary enemy. The World Today, 21(1), 24–33.
Faure, G.-O. (2004). Approcher la dimension interculturelle en négociation internationale. Revue Française de Gestion, 153(6), 187–199.
Feraoun, M. (2011). Journal, 1955-1962. Paris: Points.
Gardner Feldman, L. (2002). The principle and practice of ‘reconciliation’ in German foreign policy: Relations with France, Israel, Poland and the Czech Republic. International Affairs, 75(2), 333–356.
Gerstenmaier, E. (1964). L’influence de la France sur le sentiment national en Allemagne, Articles et documents, n° 1606, 2.
Grosser, A. (1967). French foreign policy under de Gaulle. Boston: Little Brown.
Harbi, M. (2001). Une vie debout. Mémoires politiques, tome 1 : 1945–1962. Paris: La Découverte.
Hassner, P. (2005). La revanche des passions. Commentaire, no.110, 299–312.
Hirsch, M. (2008). The generation of postmemory. Poetics Today, 29(1), 104–128.
Hirsch, M. (2012). The generation of postmemory. Writing and visual culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press.
Horelt, M.-A. (2016). France–Algeria. The double discourse of apology. In C. Daase, S. Engert, M.-A. Horelt, J. Renner, & R. Strassner (Eds.), Apology and reconciliation in international relations. The importance of being sorry (pp. 195–217). London: Routledge.
Jauffret, J.-C. (2000). Soldats en Algérie, 1954–1962. Expériences contrastées des hommes du contingent. Paris: Autrement.
Ku, Y. (2008). International reconciliation in the postwar era, 1945–2005: A comparative study of Japan-ROK and Franco-German relations. Asian Perspective, 32(3), 5–37.
Langenbacher, E., & Shain, Y. (Eds.). (2010). Power and the past. Collective memory in international relations. Washington: Georgetown University Press.
Lichterman, P., & Cefaï, D. (2006). The idea of political culture. In R. E. Goodin & C. Tilly (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of contextual political analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mannheim, K. (1952). The Sociological Problem of Generations. In P. Kecskemeti (ed.), Karl Mannheim: Essays (pp. 276–22), London: Routledge.
Meynier, G. (2002). Histoire intérieure du FLN (1954–1962). Paris: Fayard.
Mouffe, C. (1999). Deliberative democracy or agonistic pluralism? Social Research, 66(3), 745–758.
Nora, P. (1982). L’Algérie fantôme. L’Histoire, n°43, 9, March.
Pervillé, G. (2004). La guerre d’Algérie: Combien de morts? In M. Harbi & B. Stora (Eds.), La guerre d’Algérie, 1954–2004. La fin de l’amnistie (pp. 477–493). Paris: Laffont.
Pervillé, G. (2014). Une politique de l’oubli: La mémoire de la guerre en France et en Algérie. Le Sociographe, 46(2), 85–95.
Pichler, J. (1994). Mannheim’s Sociology of Generations: An Undervalued Legacy. British Journal of Sociology 45/3, 481–495.
Puchala, D. (1970). Integration and disintegration in Franco-German relations, 1954–1965. International Organization, 24(2), 183–208.
Rosenblum, R. (2009). Postponing trauma: The dangers of telling. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 90(6), 1319–1340.
Rosoux, V. (2005). Memory and international negotiation: The Franco-German case. In I. William Zartman & V. Kremenyuk (Eds.), Peace versus justice. Negotiating forward- and backward-looking outcomes (pp. 155–177). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Rubin, J. (1991). The actors in negotiation. In V. Kremenyuk (Ed.), International Negotiation: Analysis, Approaches, Issues (pp. 90–99). San Francisco: Jossey Bass.
Sayad, A. (1999). La double absence. Paris: Seuil.
Schivelbusch, W. (2003). The culture of defeat: On national trauma, mourning, and recovery. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Suleiman, S. (2002). The 1.5 generation: Thinking about child survivors and the holocaust. The American Imago, 59(3), 277–296.
Théofilakis, F. (2014). Les prisonniers de guerre allemands. France (1944–1949). Paris: Fayard.
von Kageneck, A. (2004). Examen de conscience. Paris: Perrin.
Wallace, H. (1986). The conduct of bilateral relationships by governments. In Partners and rivals in Western Europe: Britain, France, Germany (pp. 137–155). Adlershot: Gower Publishing Company.
Weigel, S. (2002). Generation’ as a symbolic form: On the genealogical discourse of memory since 1945. The Germanic Review, 77(4), 264–277.
Zartman, I. W. (1988). Common elements in the analysis of the negotiation process. Negotiation Journal, 4(1), 31–43.
Zartman, I. W. (2000). Ripeness: The hurting stalemate and beyond. In P. Stern & D. Druckman (Eds.), International conflict resolution after the cold war (pp. 225–250). Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.
Zeniter, A. (2017). L’art de perdre. Paris: Flammarion.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Rosoux, V. The Administration of Post-War Memory in the Franco-German and Franco-Algerian Negotiations. Int J Polit Cult Soc 32, 227–244 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-018-9306-x
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-018-9306-x