In response to Christian Morisot's text, which reflected the feelings of many French Algerians, the Pied-Noirs, regarding what they experienced as a betrayal by France—a country they had, generation after generation, built that they believed to be their own—I wanted to emphasize the broader reality of France's colonial administration, its structure, and its laws, for all the peoples who lived, worked, and suffered on that land.

Today, Antoine Marquet's response follows in this tradition and opens a path to reconciliation. His text invites us to view this history with balance and humanity, without resorting to oversimplification.

He reminds us how essential it is to foster dialogue between different memories rather than pit them against each other.

Antoine, you accurately express the profound feelings of the Pied-Noirs, a sentiment I understand all the better because my wife is from this community and fully shares this emotion, a mixture of nostalgia and hurt. Louis Perez y Cid

By Antoine Marquet
Louis,
You are right to remind us that the history of colonial Algeria cannot be reduced to a heroic vision, nor to a purely victim-centered version. We all know that, on this land, destinies overlapped, intertwined, clashed, and sometimes intersected. There were injustices, suffering, and violence. No honest person can deny that.

But to understand a memory, one must begin by hearing it as it is expressed.

Christian wasn't giving a mini-lecture as a historian: he was speaking from his own memories, from the images passed down, from what still survives in the French families expelled from there. In this type of memory or testimony—sometimes indirectly—there is not a judgment on others, but the pain of a disappearance: a world built generation after generation, then erased in an instant. Many of these people didn't consider themselves "settlers" in the ideological sense of the word. They were born there and felt at home. Many were ordinary people.

I believe that today, it's in our best interest not to pit memories against each other, but to juxtapose them, to let them engage in dialogue. Global history, with its structure, its laws, its decrees, its systems, and all that jazz, yes, it's necessary—but it doesn't replace the intimate truth of each individual.

What I fear, precisely, is that in this debate, the grand historical narrative will overshadow human testimony. We end up erasing real people in favor of concepts.

To move forward, we must accept four simple things:

• Algerians have suffered structural injustices.
• The French of Algeria experienced a brutal rupture that marked them for life.
• France, in any case, struggles to look this past squarely in the eye, even though it contributed so much to Algeria, liberating it from the Ottomans… that's no small feat.
• Algeria must stop living off, through the actions of its leaders, a kind of anti-French historical narrative.

If we can hold these four truths together, perhaps we can finally talk about Algeria without every conversation turning into a trial.

And then memory will become something other than a battleground: a place of transmission.