France 24 : French ‘counter-monument’ holds up a mirror to ghosts of colonial Algeria
A “counter-monument” unveiled last week in the city of Nancy invites viewers to reflect on a dark chapter in French history and acknowledge traumas that have long been silenced. Bringing a fresh perspective to the debate on colonial monuments in public spaces, the initiative addresses a generational thirst for knowledge about a troubled past that continues to cast a long and divisive shadow.
The "counter-monument" to the colonial-era statue of Sgt Blandan, in the French city of Nancy, is a first of its kind. © Ville de Nancy. Adeline Schumacker
For decades, the trauma of Algeria’s gruesome independence strugglelay buried deep in Malek Kellou’s psyche, silenced and suppressed to shield himself and his family as he built a new life across the Mediterranean, in the former colonial power.
The shield began to crack one winter morning, long after the war, when he came face to face with an eerily familiar monument in his new hometown of Nancy, in eastern France.
Kellou was shocked to recognise the towering statue of Sgt Blandan, a French hero of the 19th century Algerian conquest, which had once stood in the town of Boufarik, southwest of Algiers, famed for the juicy oranges that gave birth to the popular beverage Orangina. A symbol of colonial domination, it used to terrify him as a child growing up in the early stages of the 1954-1962 independence war.
“Shut up and eat your orange,” his mother would reply when quizzed about the menacing figure.
ADVERTISING
His mother’s words, written in the Berber Tamazight language of Kellou's native Kabylie, are now inscribed on a gleaming metal sheet facing the statue in Nancy, located on the edge of a working-class neighbourhood that is home to many people of Algerian descent.
Passers-by, whose features are reflected in this “counter-monument”, are invited to fill the gaps in France’s history and reflect on a colonial past that continues to haunt a large swath of French society and poison both its politics and its relations with Algeria.
‘Statuemania’
A first of its kind, the Nancy counter-monument is known as the Disorientation Table, after the French term for a toposcope (table d’orientation). Its aim is to challenge assumptions about France’s history and invite new perspectives on its colonial past.
Positioned upright, the circular table is 1.59 metres tall – the actual height of Sgt Blandan, whose nearby statue is more than twice as large. Inscribed on the metal disk in French and Arabic is a text by Kellou’s daughter Dorothée-Myriam Kellou, a journalist, writer and filmmaker whose efforts to investigate her Algerian roots eventually helped her father open up about the past.
She says the text “unspools a counter-history: that of the colonised and their descendants”, opening up a space in which “colonial histories can be voiced and reflected upon – and become part of the collective narrative”.
Designed by artist Colin Ponthot, the work was commissioned by Nancy’s leading museum, the Palais des ducs de Lorraine – musée Lorrain, whose curator Kenza-Marie Safraoui has described the Disorientation Table as an “anti-monument” challenging the heroic, domineering discourse of colonial statuary.
According to French military lore, Sgt Jean Pierre Hippolyte Blandan died a heroic death in April 1842, aged 23, leading a handful of men into battle against “hordes” of Arab cavalrymen who outnumbered them by more than 10 to one. His was the kind of desperate rearguard action 19th century colonisers loved to dramatise – like Rorke’s Drift in the Anglo-Zulu war or Custer’s Last Stand at Little Bighorn – in which the aggressor becomes the victim.
Blandan was made a hero of the Algerian conquest, his name and face appearing on plates, school notebooks and even board games, some of which can still be seen at the museum in Nancy. His ashes were placed in a giant pedestal beneath his hulking bronze statue, unveiled in Boufarik’s market square in 1887.
The monument’s conception was part of what some contemporaries ironically described as a wave of “statuemania” under France’s nascent Third Republic (1870-1940), says Julie Marquet, a historian at the Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale in northern France, whose research focuses on colonial legacies in the public sphere.
“The Third Republic multiplied such public monuments to promote civic models and the inspirational ‘great men’ who would set an example for fellow citizens,” she explains. A low-ranking officer, Sgt Blandan was a perfect fit for a republican regime “keen to promote ordinary soldiers celebrated for their heroism rather than their rank”.
An illustration from 1894 depicting Sgt Blandan's last stand at the battle of Beni Mered. © Wikimedia Creative Commons
This ‘statuemania’ was of particular importance in the Algerian context, says Marquet, noting that “civic authorities that took over from the army were keen to assert their control over the conquered territory and its population”.
Huge monuments perched on high pedestals dominated public spaces and a colonised people unaccustomed to figurative sculpture. Hence the menacing traits that so impressed the young Kellou and returned to haunt him decades later.
A history ignored and denied
Sgt Blandan’s statue twice crossed the Mediterranean, first as a triumphant symbol of French domination, then eight decades later as a cumbersome but cherished souvenir repatriated by a defeated army.
Around a hundred other statues and busts were shipped back to France after Algeria’s independence in 1962. Several were relocated in towns across southeast France, where many of the estimated 800,000 Pieds Noirs – Algeria-born French citizens of European descent – were resettled after their bitter exile from the newly independent state.
“Among the Pied Noir community there was a very strong attachment to these monuments,” says Marquet. “They came to be seen as the bearers of their memory and identity, and symbols of nostalgia for the homes and lands they left behind in Algeria.”
Decades on, such colonial relics bear witness to overlapping and often competing traumas – of Algerians who endured more than a century of oppression, of European settlers uprooted from their land after independence, and of the indigenous Harkis who sided with the colonial power, only to be shunned by both sides after the war.
The uniquely sensitive nature of this colonial legacy was on display earlier this year when veteran journalist Jean-Michel Aphatie sparked a very public outcry by comparing French colonial crimes in Algeria with the Nazi massacre of hundreds of French civilians at the village of Ouradour-sur-Glane – stating that France had committed “hundreds of Ouradour-sur-Glane" during its brutal conquest of Algeria.
Commenting on the backlash against Aphatie, writer and academic Clara Breteau said it stemmed in part from “ignorance of colonial history, itself a product of France’s inability to acknowledge colonial crimes and include them in school programmes”.
Breteau cited the “rabid revisionism” peddled by a revanchist far right averse to scrutiny of France’s imperial past. She also pointed to a broader reluctance, inherited from colonial-era thinking, to treat the massacre of French and Algerian villagers by the same standard.
“From a historian’s point of view, Aphatie is not only right, he’s also not saying anything particularly revolutionary,” she wrote in an article on Le Monde, citing the infamous enfumades that saw French troops murder civilians by the hundreds, “smoking them out” as they hid in caves.
The daughter of an Algerian window cleaner, Breteau describes herself as “the heir to a history that has been hollowed out” by the brutality of colonisation. Like Kellou’s daughter, she has written a book about her efforts to piece together the fragments of her father’s unspoken history – a traumatic past he methodically “washed away” each day as he polished shop windows in the streets of Tours, where she grew up.
Aiming to release such traumas, the text inscribed on the Nancy counter-monument invites viewers to “peer into the unvarnished mirror of our memory”, using the French term ‘mal poli’ that can mean both rude and unpolished. It aims to be provocative in the sense of thought-provoking.
The idea, says Dorothée-Myriam Kellou, “is not to smooth over our history but to acknowledge its rough edges”, confronting and embracing the multiple memories that make up France’s post-colonial society.
The journalist and filmmaker, who has worked with several French media including FRANCE 24, says the work aims to address a generational thirst for recognition of the past in a country where an estimated seven to eight million people – roughly 10 percent of the population – have some link to Algeria.
“Many of us suffer from the silence of our elders and feel a need to process what they have been through, which they are not always able to do,” she explains. “This is because there is a lack of collective spaces to do so. And I think the more we create such spaces, as in Nancy, the easier it will be to access these stories.”
Topple or preserve?
Throughout his presidency, French President Emmanuel Macron has called for the “recognition of (historical) facts” and a “reconciliation of memories” to heal France’s fraught relations with Algeria. He spearheaded the establishment of a “memories and truth” commission comprised of historians from both countries and widened access to declassified archives on Algeria’s independence war.
The French president has also ruled out repentance, apologies and reparations, leaving many wanting more.
In the summer of 2020, at the height of the global anti-racism protests that followed George Floyd’s killing in the US, Macron said France would tolerate none of the statue-toppling that had seen protesters from Britain to the French Caribbean take down monuments to colonial-era figures, many of them closely associated with the transatlantic slave trade.
“The [French] Republic will not erase any trace, or any name, from its history (...) It will not take down any statue,” he declared. “We should look at all of our history together” with a goal of “truth” instead of “denying who we are”, the French president added – though his warning against “false and hateful rewritings of our history” suggested a possible limit as to how much scrutiny of its past France would tolerate.
Last week, Nancy’s Socialist mayor also ruled out erasing the past as he attended the inauguration of the counter-monument at the foot of Sgt Blandan’s statue.
“It is not a matter of tearing down statues or renaming streets, but of contextualising them and, when history demands it, accompanying them with a work that offers a different perspective,” Mathieu Klein told the audience. “We refuse brutal erasure; we refuse simplistic censorship. Our path is one of pluralistic memory, of history rooted in debate, of shared dignity.”
Historian Marquet says the counter-monument is not so much an “alternative” to statue toppling as a complementary initiative, stressing that both approaches can be seen as “legitimate” in their specific context.
On Monday, a court in Martinique is expected to deliver a verdict in the trial of 11 anticolonial activists who tore down statues of colonial-era figures in 2020. Marquet says the case must be understood in the particular context of the slave trade and longstanding grievances specific to the French Caribbean.
The Nancy approach, in contrast, “offers a chance to move away from the perception of public spaces as necessarily being venues for struggle and competition between rival memories”, says Marquet. “It’s a constructive approach that allows us to work collectively on the memory of these colonial pasts and what we want to do with it.”
Municipal authorities in Sgt Blandan’s native Lyon, home to a second statue of the Algeria “hero”, have already expressed interest in the initiative. As for Dorothée-Myriam Kellou, she says she felt “ambivalent” about removing or preserving the statue that haunted her father.
“When I asked him whether he would have it removed, he suggested using it as a memorial medium instead,” she recalls. “It certainly served that purpose for me,” she adds. “If the statue hadn’t awoken my father’s colonial past, I might never have discovered his story.”
