Extract
[...] The school institution would therefore be passing over the colonial injustices and military atrocities. For over a decade, school textbooks have integrated recent university research into their latest editions. The Algerian War in education would be placed on the same level as other conflicts in the Arab world, in the interpretation of students. As noted by Sandrine Lemaire, specialist in the Algerian War, textbooks are true vehicles of official history but this affirmation is questioned by Claude Liauzu in his article since he has difficulty understanding that an association of historians like the ACHAC (Association of Researchers on Contemporary Africa) supports that 'history textbooks are true vehicles of official history.' Either the torture is exaggerated, or it is minimized and Claude Liauzu implies when he mentions the controversy around the numbers of victims of the Algerian War which depend on the camp in which one finds oneself and the unstable relationship climate between the French government and the Algerian government. [...]
[...] To this affirmation by Claude Liauzu, one can oppose that of Benjamin Stora who clearly responded that the teaching of the Algerian War is not today a taboo subject and notes that there is a profusion of images and texts on the subject. The testimonies are often linked to a community of memories: the harkis, Pieds-Noirs, officers, activists, OAS, Algerian nationalists, left-wing anticolonial militants, as we mentioned earlier. The taboo is no longer on the evocation of the Algerian War. [...]
[...] He argues that we must reconsider colonial knowledge, in his opinion. The Algerian War is the subject of research in various disciplines: history, philosophy, sociology, and ethnology. The knowledge about the Algerian War therefore brings together interdisciplinary studies whose interest is to achieve a common goal by confronting different approaches to the same problem and from different angles, psychological and social, in particular. We recall that the Algerian War, at the time, mobilized mainly left-wing intellectuals who were above all anti-imperialists: Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, in the review of Temps modernes. [...]
[...] Thus, the colonizers are re-studied by inscribing them in their relationships with the indigenous people. The historiography of colonization is no longer compartmentalized, it evolves. In education, the historian specifies that in 1959, the study of civilizations entered the programs. Decolonization, according to Liauzu, which was accompanied by the entry of new independent nations into the Third World, represents a paradoxical historical phenomenon. While it is a major fact of international relations since 1945 with the Cold War, it is the subject in France of a certain amnesia. [...]
[...] Decolonization is understood in the school programs as the denouement of the colonial fact. In the programs, it is thus more of a study of international relations in their political, economic, and cultural dimensions than a study of its effects on the metropolis. The teaching of decolonization participates in an international relations history and modes of development closer to the syntheses of the 1980s than to the problems that followed decolonization, particularly in terms of the consequences of decolonization related to the emergence of the Third World, economic poverty, and unstable political regimes. [...]
