Stymied French politicians turn to sins of the past

On Thursday, two years after France’s controversial retirement age increase, the National Assembly voted to withdraw the reform. While the news was politically explosive because the far-right National Rally helped the left-wing opposition gain a majority in the vote, the decision hasn’t yielded any actual legal results.

The situation reflects the country’s ongoing failure to address structural reforms since the parliamentary elections last summer, which left the government won without an absolute majority.

But in the area of remembrance policy there has been significant movement. In the same week as the toothless retirement resolution, parliamentarians adopted three texts that reclassify historical events or offer the prospect of reparations.

Alfred Dreyfus posthumously promoted

On June 2, the French parliament voted unanimously to posthumously appoint Alfred Dreyfus to the rank of brigadier general. The Jewish officer was wrongly accused of high treason in 1894, based on falsified evidence that he revealed military secrets to the German embassy in Paris. Dreyfus subsequently spent four years in the notorious Devil’s Island penal colony off the coast of French Guiana.

The Franco-German dimension of the case had explosive foreign policy implications even then. The suspect’s Jewish origins and his family background in the Alsace-Lorraine region, which came under German rule after the Franco-Prussian War, and strained relations with Germany, made him an ideal target for the nationalist mistrust many French people harbored at the time.

Writer Émile Zola famously sided with Dreyfus in his essay “J’accuse…!”, which played a critical role in the officer’s exoneration and military rehabilitation in 1906. Nevertheless, after serving in the First World War as a lieutenant colonel, Dreyfus was only reinstated at a lower rank.

This posthumous promotion for Dreyfus still has to pass the Senate. Alsatian MP Charles Sitzenstuhl, a member of French President Emmanuel Macron’s center-right Renaissance Party, who introduced the initiative, offered a link to the present as a warning: “The anti-Semitism that plagued Alfred Dreyfus is not a thing of the distant past,” he said.

Recognizing returnees from Indochina

Just one day after the Dreyfus vote, the National Assembly also passed a law to recognize and compensate former returnees from French Indochina after the colonial rule of territories including Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia ended in 1954. Around 44,000 people were repatriated to France, among them colonial officials, soldiers and their families, the descendants of French colonizers and local women, as well as local collaborators.

Between 4,000 to 6,000 returnees ended up in temporary camps, which were often outfitted with wooden barracks that lacked heating and plumbing. Returnees were also subject to degrading policies that included bans on going out and owning cars or other luxury goods.

The new law introduced by the left-wing Socialist Party now provides for financial support based on someone’s length of stay in the camps. It is estimated that up to 1,600 people could claim compensation.

Reparations for Haiti?

On June 5, the Assembly adopted a resolution addressing a “double debt” to Haiti that goes back to 1825. That was the year that France forced Haiti, which had declared independence in 1804, to pay compensation of 150 million gold francs. This was intended as a recognition of independence that would also compensate for the loss of French colonial possessions, including income from slaves. Haiti was forced to settle this “independence debt” over decades — a considerable economic burden that contributed to long-term poverty and instability on the island.

The resolution, initiated by the Communist Party, calls for recognition, repayment and reparations for Haiti. But the text does not include concrete political steps or financial agreements. Nevertheless, the far-right National Rally voted against it.

A history of remembering

Remembrance politics have some tradition in France. In 2001, the “Taubira” law, named after the parliamentarian who introduced it, recognized the slave trade and practice of slavery as crimes against humanity. The topic has been a part of school curricula in France ever since.

In October 2006, the National Assembly passed a bill to criminalize the denial of the Armenian genocide of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire with a year in prison or fine of €45,000 ($51,300). The bill never came into force after it failed to pass in the Senate, and was followed by a similarly doomed initiative introduced under President Nicolas Sarkozy. That draft law passed both chambers of parliament, but was declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Council in February 2012, which said that it amounted to unlawful interference with freedom of expression and research.

Another example is the treatment of the so-called “Senegalese riflemen,” the colonial soldiers from Africa who fought for France in the two world wars. For decades, many received significantly lower pensions than their French comrades, especially if they lived outside of France after decolonization. It was not until 2009 that President Sarkozy decreed an equalization of pension benefits, a step that held great symbolic significance.

Social maturity or empty gestures?

The latest spike in such initiatives has been met with mixed interpretations by political scientists. Some experts see the willingness to take historical responsibility as a form of social maturity. But others point out that in a politically paralyzed legislature, symbolic initiatives are easier to pass than structural reforms in areas such as pensions, education or the budget.