France will further ease access to its archives on the Algerian war, by authorizing the consultation of files involving minors, said a decree published on Sunday August 27 in the Official Journal, a gesture demanded by historians and families.
In December 2021, following announcements by Emmanuel Macron in March of the same year, France had opened, fifteen years ahead of the legal deadline, its judicial archives related to the war and relating to the period between November 1, 1954 and December 31, 1966. In practice, access to these documents remained difficult for families and researchers.
One of the main obstacles was the exclusion of files involving minors – those under 21, according to the legislation in force at the time. Indeed, records involving minors are normally subject to a hundred-year classification delay. Due to this limitation, coupled with several others, most of the folders remained inaccessible. The new decree therefore removes the exclusion from consultation of files involving a minor.
Many files will remain classified
“This bureaucratic management leads to ignoring the reality of a war waged by young people”, regretted the historian Marc André in November 2022, in a column published by Le Monde. “The historical ignorance symbolically redoubles the violence against a ‘minor’ (…) who was not tried by a juvenile court but appeared before a military tribunal: sufficiently of age at the time to have his head cut off, he is today sufficiently minor to see his file subtracted from the general derogation, “he was indignant. His remarks had been widely taken up in the Algerian media.
However, those whose communication “infringes the privacy of people’s sexual life” or “the safety of named or easily identifiable persons involved in intelligence activities” remain classified. These restrictions which also close many files, further noted the historian.
This relaxation is part of the policy of appeasement decided by Emmanuel Macron during his first five-year term, after the recommendations of the report by Benjamin Stora on the memorial conflict between Algeria and France concerning the colonial past.
