Algeria and Vichy slip away again into the fog
An important piece of news in Rue 89: a bill will come before parliament at the end of this month to lengthen the time national archive material remains inaccessible to the public. Very quietly, back in January with a minimum of publicity, the bill was debated and voted through by the Senate. If, as looks likely, it now passes through the lower chamber, research into fully two-thirds of the last century’s history will be seriously hampered if not, in some places, completely stopped.
At the moment archives which relate to somebody’s personal life become accessible after 60 years (already twice as long as in the UK). A quick bit of mental arithmetic makes that 1948. The bill proposes to include administrative and police archives, while adding on 15 years of secrecy, making the current release year 1933. Some people, of course, will breathe a huge sigh of relief: for those with something to hide the new law could not have come at a better time, for it doesn’t take deep knowledge of French history to know why the years following 1948 are sensitive: the war in Indochina (1946-54) followed inexorably by the war in Algeria (1954-62). 16 years of controversial war as France lost its empire coming hard on the heels of 4 years of German occupation. Les 20 tout-sauf-glorieuses. All that period and more disappears again under wraps. Once the bill is passed it will be 2037 before researchers can look at administrative and police archives about the deeply unpleasant end of the Algerian War.
But it also means that the murky Vichy period will disappear once again into the fog of unknowing. I am doing research into the administration of a French colony in the late 30’s and early 40’s, and already the doors are closing at les archives de l’histoire coloniale française at Aix en Provence, unless I get down there within the next couple of weeks I will have to wait until 2017 before I can look at papers relating to the end of my story – mind you if I publish in, say, 2010 the book would have 7 years’ life before anyone could disprove any mad theories I decide to invent. But imagine a biographer of De Gaulle: his period in power was, in archival terms, just coming into the public domain, yet with the new law it will go out of bounds again for another 15 to 20 years.
Why are the French doing this? As many historians have said, it can only be because there are enough people with enough things to hide from this supremely delicate period of recent French history – not information about themselves so much as about their parents. But the bill, and the perceived need for it to be rushed through parliament at a time when we all thought we were reforming far more important things, also shows something deeper: this insistence on the State being guardian of everything, controlling everything, allowing to be portrayed only what it considers correct. For the umpteenth time since I have been writing about France, the State is decreeing what history we shall know.