“Why allow someone who comes to do a show called “I’ll sleep at your place” only to, in the end, forbid him and give a detestable image of a police state where people are afraid? It’s really the art of transforming a good publicity stunt for tourism into its opposite,” said an Algerian journalist, on condition of anonymity, after the broadcast, Friday March 8, of the famous travel show presented by Antoine de Maximy.
Even if the globe-trotting journalist was welcome in Algeria, filming the episode, in September 2023, was not always a pleasure. Broadcast on RMC Découverte, the program sparked a torrent of indignant comments, most of them deploring the “policing” to which the reporter in the red shirt was subjected during his travels in the country.
Antoine de Maximy’s surveillance was particularly close in Ghardaïa, a town located 600 km south of Algiers, in the Mzab valley. “Now if I want to go to someone’s house, can I? », ends up asking the host, at nightfall, to the plainclothes police officer who followed him all day. “No,” the agent replies, arms crossed, shaking his head. “But if…” begs the host. “Forbidden,” says the official, smiling.
When, the day before, the journalist had found a couple ready to welcome him, the same police officer intervened directly to put an end to the exchange. “He absolutely wanted nothing to happen to me, because, obviously, it would have looked bad […] It was really to protect me,” explains Antoine de Maximy. But the process shocked viewers and Internet users.
However, the apolitical broadcast was reassuring, especially for a government that hopes to attract tourists, particularly in the Deep South. “We bet that with the legendary hospitality of the Algerians, Antoine de Maximy will certainly not sleep under the lucky stars,” said the French-speaking newspaper El Watan in September. Alas, it was in the hotel that the reporter had to spend most of his nights.
“A missed opportunity”
Under the falsely interrogative title “The Frenchman Antoine de Maximy damaged the image of Algeria on purpose? », the Algérie Patriotique site, owned by the son of former defense minister Khaled Nezzar, criticizes the reporter for having knowingly selected sequences which show “a hideous and forbidding face of a country which would be inhospitable and a “A police state that shoots everything that moves.” In short, “a missed opportunity to translate through images and human contact the true temperament of Algerians, known for their friendliness, contrary to the bad reputation that certain malicious circles have given them.”
The site goes further by suspecting the French journalist of having “tarnished the image of Algeria on behalf of the Makhzen”, in other words the Moroccan royal power. The reporter had declared, in the past, that Morocco was the country where he had been best received. After the broadcast of the Algerian episode, the media of the Cherifian kingdom, in particular those reputed to be close to the regime, such as Le360, did not hesitate to mock the “security schmilblick, a mixture of the Securitate and the communist Stasi », which the journalist faced. Forgetting in passing that the Algerian authorities do not have a monopoly on the surveillance of journalists…
In the end, Antoine de Maximy will only spend one night with locals in Kabylia. His host, Daoud Baraka, a retiree from the Sonatrach oil group with a clever sense of humor, shows him, from his eagle’s nest in Aïn El Hammam, the orchards transformed into a prohibited zone by the French army during the war of independence and speaks to him about torture and deaths “for the revolution”, a common phrase in Algeria which surprises the reporter. “The Algerian people cannot forget,” says this retiree whom Algerian Internet users have dubbed as the bearer of the most positive image of the country in the show. The host of “I will sleep at your place” will also be entitled to a nap at home in Djanet (south-east), a town close to Libya.
For Abdallah Benadouda, host of Radio Corona International, a pirate web radio launched on social networks during the Hirak, the show, which was a hit in Algeria, is ultimately “close to our reality: welcoming people, lots of hideous constructions and cops stopping a country.”
