If ‘geography serves first of all as a means of war’, as Yves Lacoste famously remarked, then much the same can be said about the state archives.footnote¹ As evidence, one need only look at the battles over documentation that took place during the Algerian War of Independence. Throughout the war, French military, police and judicial officials collected, classified and inventoried a vast trove of documents, patiently constructing the materials produced by searches, arrests or requisitions into what the authorities themselves called ‘archives’, to be put to immediate use—circulated between offices, from police stations and courts to prefectures and ministries, relaying information and reconstructing links while maintaining maximum secrecy over their findings.footnote² Between 1954 and 1962, these documents were either released to the press or sheltered from public view, depending on whether doing so would advance or hinder what today would be called ‘national-security interests’—in Richelieu’s terms: raison d’État.

At the same time opponents of the war, like the historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet and his comrades in the Comité Audin, were feverishly collecting papers entrusted to them by lawyers, conscripts or senior civil servants who had been involved in police or military operations, and issuing evidence of innumerable state crimes, official lies and cover-ups, thanks to a few publishing houses and periodicals, official or semi-clandestine. As Vidal-Naquet put it later, their refusal to compromise drove a determined quest for ‘documents of the sort that I didn’t want to be discovered only fifty years later, in the archives’.footnote³

But archives also serve, of course, as a means for writing history, or for discovering one’s personal backstory when it has been hidden by public denial or family silence. That research may be hampered when it touches on present-day raison d’État. As evidence this time, one might point to recent battles over access to the Algerian War archives. Since 1979, the principle has been that all public archives should be accessible after a certain period has elapsed. Without going back over the recurrent—and necessary—debates around ‘forbidden’, ‘secret’, ‘sensitive’ or ‘conflictual’ archives,footnote⁴ special requests for access have generally been granted since the early 2000s. But as global tensions have risen, a new struggle has emerged, in which advances in access have been systematically contradicted by boomerang effects, some blatant, some subtler.

In September 2019, Macron’s government announced that the archives of Maurice Audin and others who ‘disappeared’ during the Algerian War would be made accessible; in April 2020, this was extended to documents covered by the Commission for the protection of individual rights and freedoms. Yet this opening was immediately countered by the resurgence of the 1952 General Inter-Ministerial Instruction, igi 1300, a hoary sea-monster from the depths of the Cold War, which was suddenly applied à la lettre to numerous holdings, following a directive from the General Secretariat of Defence and National Security.footnote⁵ Documents stamped ‘defence secret’ now had to be formally declassified by the relevant authority before they could be consulted, even though the Code du patrimoine had opened them to the public. igi 1300 met with a general outcry from historians, legal scholars and archivists and was overturned by the Conseil d’État, the supreme administrative court, in July 2021. Within less than a month, however, a new anti-terrorism and surveillance law was enacted which prolonged delays in access to the intelligence-service archives, with no recourse to appeal—effectively handing power to the bureaucracy against the legislator.footnote⁶ While the Algerian War was not the principal target, it was inevitably affected by further restrictions on intelligence-service files.

Then, on 22 December 2021, the Macron government announced what seemed a genuine advance: an order decreeing the ‘general exemption’ of police and judicial archives related to the Algerian War—making them accessible, with the exception of three types of files: those related to minors under the legal age of 21; those that might identify informers or others involved in intelligence-gathering; and those bearing on intimate medical or sexual details. These restrictions, it was argued, would serve to protect the rights of the individual. The announcement was greeted with great media fanfare, giving the impression of a huge leap forward, like the one that had been taken for the French archives covering the Second World War in 2015. That general welcome was extended by the scholarly community as well. Yet working on the Algerian War archives at granular level, it becomes clear that the order’s three seemingly innocuous restrictions, unnoticed at first, effectively shutter the files in a more subtle yet definitive manner than the heavy-handed igi 1300 and terrorism law. A closer look at the operation of these three exceptions may help to reveal the logic of two types of raison d’État that are at stake here: that of yesterday, governing the conduct of the Algerian War; and that of today, governing its archives.

In the autumn of 2021, the daughter of Salah Khalef—an fln fighter who had remained silent about his experience in France during the Algerian War, though he was deeply marked by it—visited the National Archives in Pierrefitte-sur-Seine. She was unable to access the two files on her father, one relating to a police investigation, the other to his appeal for pardon. Khalef had been 20 years old when he was sentenced to death by a military tribunal in Lyon, on 9 January 1961. As a ‘minor’ at the time, his files were excluded from the general exemption. Here we glimpse the strange reversal of values through which the logic of the Algerian War is reproduced. Khalef’s youth, discussed in the courts and their back offices at the time, was no obstacle to his legal execution. Examining the case before the appeals committee, the French authorities had no intention of revoking the sentence pronounced on Khalef, ‘who disposed in absolute fashion of the lives of his co-religionists despite his young age, 19 years, due to his functions as regional chief’.footnote⁷ Old enough to appear before a military tribunal and be sentenced to the guillotine in 1961, Khalef had been reclassified as ‘too young’ for his files to be seen by his daughter in 2022; one injustice reinforcing the other.footnote⁸

The contradiction reveals a simple historical reality: the Algerian War was fought by young people.footnote⁹ Over a fifth of the trials conducted before the Lyon military tribunal between 1958 and 1962 involved defendants under the age of 21, and another 13 per cent involve 22-year-olds charged with deeds committed while they were still minors. Since the new ‘protection’ applies to the defendant’s age at the time of the alleged crime, rather than at the time of the trial, over a third of the files have been rendered inaccessible. In addition, the presence of a minor in a case involving several defendants blocks access to the entire dossier; the daughter of another prisoner condemned to death by the military tribunal was denied access to her father’s file not because he was under 21, but because one of his associates was.