Colonialism / national memory
The past is not past policy.
A hierarchy of rights once organized empire. The question today is not whether every inequality is identical to colonialism, but how that history enters citizenship, memory and political possibility.
Exceptional sanctions
Movement and assembly controls
Different territorial regimes
Administrative hierarchy
A legal system that manufactured inequality
The indigénat was not simply a prejudiced attitude. It was an administrative and punitive regime differentiating colonized subjects from citizens, including exceptional sanctions, internment and restrictions on movement or assembly. In Algeria, the regime was legalized in June 1881; related but differing systems extended across other colonial territories. Bernard DrozL’Obs
Historical accounts identify offenses such as “réunion sans autorisation”, meeting without authorization. When the same authority defines the category of person, controls permission and imposes punishment, hierarchy becomes an ordinary administrative procedure. The timeline shows selected extensions, not a claim that Algeria, Senegal and Madagascar had identical legal experiences. Bernard DrozL’Obs
Reverse the scene
Imagine an Algeria that conquers France, claims its land and makes French people subordinate indigenous subjects. Would resistance look like an inexplicable hatred of the newcomers? Or would the prior question be: by what right did those newcomers acquire the power to rank human beings?
This is a counterfactual ethical exercise, not an alternative history. It tests how a narrative changes when the person permitted to say “we” changes. It does not absolve attacks on civilians. It asks why some violence becomes the beginning of a story while the coercion that structured everyday life remains outside the frame.
National therapy, without the comforting myth
“France never talked about colonialism” is too absolute. Historical research, anti-colonial criticism and public contestation existed; Droz’s review itself describes opposition to the indigénat. The harder question concerns which accounts acquired institutional authority, entered education or altered policy. Bernard Droz
National therapy is a metaphor, not a medical diagnosis. Its useful meaning would be durable public work: opening archives, hearing testimony, examining responsibility and debating material remedies. The United States is not a completed therapeutic success against which France simply failed. Its conflicts over slavery and racial memory show that speaking about a history and resolving its inequalities are different achievements. Bernard Droz
From inherited hierarchy to present choices
France’s present Constitution guarantees equality before the law without distinction of origin, race or religion. Contemporary citizenship is therefore not legally identical to the indigénat. Drawing a historical connection requires specifying a mechanism: categories of belonging, differential entitlements, policing, migration agreements or the language of civilizational superiority. Constitution of 4 October 1958RFIAssociated Press
Le Pen’s October 2026 national-priority and deportation proposals put differential entitlement and relations with Morocco and Algeria into the electoral debate. Senegal’s demand for the return of French bases makes another point: former colonized societies are political actors with sovereignty, not simply locations in France’s memory. A serious campaign discussion must face both domestic equality and the agency of those societies. Constitution of 4 October 1958RFIAssociated Press