PARIS – French President Emmanuel Macron announced on Tuesday that the declassification of secret archives of more than 50 years will be accelerated, a step that will facilitate access to documents related to the Algerian war – a controversial chapter of the French history that the government has long been reluctant to face.
A statement from the Élysée Palace stated that a new rule from Wednesday ‘will significantly shorten the time required for the declassification process’ to encourage ‘respect for historical truth’.
Mr. Macron recently took a series of steps to lift the veil on France’s colonial history in Algeria, a lasting trauma that still shapes modern France. The change announced Tuesday was intended to respond to growing complaints from historians and archivists about strict government instructions to declassify archives.
Under the new rules, authorities are allowed to declassify archive boxes at the same time, speeding up a declassification process for secret documents carried out page by page.
However, some historians have said that the new rules hardly address their complaints.
“It’s just going to speed up the process of a procedure that should not exist,” said Raphaëlle Branche, a historian of the Algerian war.
At the heart of the complaints by historians is a 2011 government requirement that any document classified as “secret” or “top secret” must be formally classified before it is made public. This is in violation of a 2008 law requiring the immediate release of secret documents 50 years after they have been produced.
The 2011 assignment has been loosely applied in recent years, or even ignored. But the General Secretariat for Defense and National Security, a powerful unit within the prime minister’s office, began enforcing the rules last year.
Tens of thousands of documents that were once public were subsequently re-locked, obstructing historical research and reactivating the secrecy of information previously revealed.
A group of archivists and historians, including Robert O. Paxton, an American historian who revealed the French authorities’ cooperation with Nazi Germany, challenged the 2011 claim before the French Supreme Court.
Mrs. Branche, who is leading the legal battle, said the group would continue its challenge despite the announcement of Mr. Macron Tuesday.
It is unclear what motivated the attempt to apply the declassification policy last year. But the desire of mr. Macron to pull back the curtain on the Algerian war has slammed some feathers in the military, which oversees most of the archives on defense matters.
Fabrice Riceputi, a historian of the Algerian war, said that the declassification policy had led to absurd situations.
He cited a visit to the French National Archives in 2019 when he read a secret document from 1957 setting out the use of torture by French forces during the Algerian war that was promulgated in the 2008 legislation a decade ago .
In fact, the report was anything but secret, as it was first revealed in a 1962 book and subsequently cited in several historical studies in the 1990s.
But Bruno Ricard, head of the National Archives, said the report had now been reclassified – in line with government instructions.
In January, Mr. Macron received a report on the Algerian war advising to end the declassification process page-by-page, but also to return ‘as soon as possible’ to the secret document of more than 50 years, as required by the 2008 legislation.
In its statement, the Élysée Palace said the government was trying by summer to reconcile the 2011 mandate and the 2008 law.
“It’s a matter of coordination between different legal systems,” he said. Ricard said in a recent interview as he carefully flipped through the pages of a (declassified) archive file on Maurice Audin, a mathematician who had been tortured to death by the French army. in Algeria in 1957.
Documents about mr. Audin is part of about 100 files released in 2019 and 2020 after Mr. Macron called for the opening of all archives dealing with people who disappeared during the war.
But historians say that many documents were not available due to the 2011 order.
Me. Branche, who has written extensively on the use of torture by French forces, said many of her books could not be published today because they relied on documents that had been resealed.
Since she started teaching at Paris Nanterre University in 2019, about ten of her students have had to change their research topics because they did not have access to key documents, she said.
“There are some studies that are no longer conceivable,” she said. Branche said.
The Algerian war remains a deep wound in France that feeds bitter feelings among millions of residents with ties to Algeria, from immigrant families to war veterans. Questioning this past has long been a difficult task.
Macron’s official acknowledgment last week that France “tortured and killed” a leading Algerian independence fighter in 1957 has been widely criticized by the French right.
But almost 60 years after the end of the war, the issue of France’s colonial past was perhaps never so urgent, underlying a racial awakening by immigrants in the country and sparked heated debates over the country’s model of integration.
Mr. Riceputi, the historian, launched in 2018 a website listing hundreds of names of people who went missing during the war, based on archival research he was able to do before the new instructions were applied.
According to him, within a few weeks he received a shower testimony from Algerian families, which enabled him to document more than 300 cases.
“It would not stop,” he said.