"We must close the box of sorrows." More than 60 years on, this phrase about the Algerian War, uttered by Charles de Gaulle in 1961, remains topical today. Many strive to keep "the box" open, whether among the distant political descendants of de Gaulle, the great architect of French decolonization, or on the far right, which has come to praise the former president after having hated him. The Algerian "box" is no longer so much the 1954-1962 war as the repressive regime currently in Algiers, whose anti-French rhetoric and constant references to colonization and the war have served to mask its failures. The "box" continues to spill forth a torrent of bitterness and a desire for revenge, centered around the repulsive figure of the Algerian immigrant, a symbol with high electoral potential.

Take conservative Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, who posed, with crossed arms, for the front cover of the magazine L'Express's January 23 edition, under the headline "Nothing gives Algeria the right to offend France." His anger, as an interior minister, at a country that has refused to take back its deportees, imprisoned a French writer and gone after its political opponents using influencers, might seem logical. Yet, when it comes to Algeria, he goes further.

Likely hoping to establish his image as a serious presidential candidate, he spoke of an "offense," stating that "many French people feel hurt." He then moved on to resentment, claiming that "France is too generous" in granting visas to Algerians. The "hurt" implicitly refers to the major trauma that was France's loss of Algeria; "generosity," meanwhile, refers to immigration. A message that would seem inappropriate if it concerned any other country – referring to decolonization to send a message about immigration – is made to seem normal in Algeria's case, more than six decades after it became independent.

Of course, saying that the Algerian regime relies on history to maintain its legitimacy, as President Emmanuel Macron did in 2021, is an understatement. It has never ceased to exploit France's colonial guilt to fuel its own nationalism, silence its opponents and brandish migration as a weapon. Didn't Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune claim, in the newspaper Le Figaro, in 2022, that Algerians should be entitled to 132-year visas – a period equivalent to the duration of French colonization? Yet why should France continue to bring up, even in a subliminal way, the fruitless war that it fought to keep Algeria, and the humiliations it caused?

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