The agony of silence

摘要

IN MARCH, BENEATH the chandeliers of the Elysee palace, four adult cousins met Emmanuel Macron, France's president. What really happened, they wanted to know, to their grandfather, Ali Boumend-jel, a lawyer and nationalist, who died in colonial Algeria after his arrest by French troops in 1957? Officially he committed suicide. In fact, Mr Macron acknowledged, Boumendjel was tortured and killed by the French army. His body was thrown from a window to disguise the cause of death.The president and the lawyer's grandchildren-all of the same generation-engaged in an "extraordinary dialogue", says Benjamin Stora, a historian who was present. The cousins' discomfort, he says, focused on a question: "How can we live in the country that assassinated our grandfather?" Although a French general had confessed 20 years ago to ordering the murder of Boumendjel, the government had never admitted the crime. Algeria's eight-year war for independence ended in 1962. But such questions trouble a younger generation, who feel that France should fully acknowledge the atrocities it committed.