Empire: World History - 380. Algerian Revolution: The Rise of Le Pen (Ep 6)

Episode Date: July 22, 2026

How is Marine Le Pen connected to the Algerian War of Independence? What can the cult film, La Haine, tell us about life in the banlieues for people of Algerian descent? What happened to Algerian protestors in Paris in 1961? In the final episode of the series, William and Anita explore how the Algerian war continues to echo in French politics today. Summer sale is here: get an annual Empire Club membership for an extra 20% off with code SUMMER26. That's ad-free listening, early-access, every bonus episode, and full access to our exclusive members' series. Sale ends August 31st, so grab it before summer's over. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imee Marriott Editor: Bruno Di Castri Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening, and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Well, hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durimple. And this is the final episode of our Algerian series. we have told the story of three centuries of Algerian history, from the Corsair Republic, the Barbary Pirates, the extraordinary story of whole villages from Ireland and Iceland being lifted and taken

into slavery in Algiers, through the story of 100 years of French colonialism and the transplantation of one million French people who are given the best land in Algeria, then the battle for independence and its ambiguous aftermath. Today we ask the question that we have been building towards the whole of this series. What does all this mean for France today? And we would argue everything. Yeah. And the answer doesn't come in 1962 on the day of independence, but a little before that. So we need to take you back to October 1961, eight months before independence, while the war is still raging. In Paris, on the night of the 17th of October, tens of thousands of of Algerians living in Paris and surrounding suburbs took to the streets, and they were

demonstrating against a curfew that had been imposed specifically on French Muslims from Algeria, you know, both discriminatory, they said, and unconstitutional. I mean, this is Liberté, fraternity. Where's the fraternity? Or the egality, for that matter. Oh, the egality, yes. They carried no weapons. They've been told to march quietly, and they'd been told to dress smartly by organizers, because the organisers wanted to show the watching world that the Algerian community in France was a dignified law-abiding set of people. And it's at this point that we meet one of the most dodgy characters from the whole of this series, who is the prefect of the French police, and his name is Maurice Papon.

Now, astonishingly, Papon had served in the Vichy French regime as an administrator in Bordeaux, and it was he who had organized the deportation of 1,690 Jews to Auschwitz, and he'd been left in place. Unthinkable, but true. And this guy who had personally supervised the deportation of the Jews to Auschwitz carries on in a sort of extraordinary case of sort of bureaucratic survivalism. And his career transfers seamlessly from Vichy to the Fourth Republic. And it's now this same guy, the guy who deported the Jews,

who's responsible for policing Paris. What could go wrong, you might ask. And on the night of the 17th of October, he deploys his police force against the Algerian demonstrators with a violence that the city has not seen since the Nazi occupation. So these protesters, well-dressed, again, instructed to be peaceful, were beaten in the streets and in the metro stations in the courtyards of police buildings,

They were thrown into the seine. Dozens of them were bound, thrown from bridges into the river, and bodies washed up on the banks for days afterwards. Others found themselves taken to the Véletron Diverr, the cycling stadium where Jews had been rounded up for deportation back in 1942. And they were also taken to the Palais despoise de Spont and held without charge in conditions of deliberate brutality. All of this would have been, one would think,

an echo to the French of what had happened during the war. The official death toll issued by the French government the following days was three. Three. So, you know, that was clearly way off base. And we have a wonderful bonus episode with my friend Farron Mujr, whose father was in that demonstration. He was a recent immigrant to Paris. And he was, in the lingo of the time, disappeared by the French, disappeared into a French prison. He was beaten initially in a metro station with a wet rope.

torture continued in the jail. And he only got out because one of his French bosses bothered to go around every police station in Paris looking for him and demanding where he was. And she persisted sufficiently that the police eventually owned up to Farah's dad being with them and released him. Yeah, I mean, it's a really compelling story. But do you know, I mean, modern historians always look back on these figures. Three, three just seems ridiculously improbable. do they have an estimate of how many people were killed? They do. And the estimates now are between 40 and more, probably 200 people

who are killed by the French police and many of them are just dumped in the canals and in the Sen. This is the 1960s. This is the 1960s. It's not that long ago. Yeah, I mean, I think of France, the 1960s as being the centre of French counterculture and all these sort of existentialists smoking cigarettes.

and free love and all that. Instead, what we have is people who collaborated with the Nazis, now disappearing Algerians. Yeah. And Faris said that for Algerians in parish, the Sen still holds this association. People look at the Sen and they think of their fathers and grandparents that were shoved into it.

And the French state suppressed this evidence for decades. They didn't only keep it out of, you know, the teaching in the curriculum. They made a point of denying it. Papin was never charged with the events. of October 1961. He wasn't even charged with the crimes of deporting the French Jews to Auschwitz

until finally, 1997 and convicted in 1998 at the age of 87, but never charged for what he did to the Algerians as recently as October 1961. And indeed the October 1961 massacre was not even acknowledged by the French state until

2012, just a decade ago, just over a decade ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, That's when London was hosting the Olympics, and it's not that long ago. It's just a crazy story. So you can really understand why, you know, if you have a suppression of an event that is so important to Fara and people like Fara, and the history of France, you know, that whole relationship between France and Algerians or people of Algerian descent, you can understand why it is.

And tetchy to say the least, but unresolved, you know, and filled with this. sense that there is no justice here or justice is too long coming. And you then have the development of this landscape of suppression, denial. It's a cocktail for disaster. And there is one man who stares that cocktail. Absolutely. With a great deft hand. And I'd love to just do a quick book pitch at this point. Andrew Hussey's French Intifada is the book which I have been absolutely great by the long war between France and its Arabs. It's a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant read. And at the centre of it is this figure of Jammé Le Pen. Because Le Pen, and I didn't know this until I read Hussie's book, had served as a paratrooper with the first

colonial parachute regiment in both Indochina and Algeria. He was present in Algiers during the Battle of Algiers, but it wasn't just present. Numerous witnesses place him at these notorious interrogation centres where people are being waterboarded, put into baths, brutalised with sheer muscle. And most famously, they have these little wind-up electricity generators and these are being attached to sensitive parts of the body and people who are given massive electric shocks. So he loses the lawsuit that he brings against his accusers. It's a defamation suit. Yeah, a defamation suit. But he's never formally charged or tried or punished, formerly held to

account for being present in these torture chambers. So it's generally accepted in France now that he was there, but he was never punished. A rather like Papon, he gets away with it, which is still something that still rankles with the French Algerians. So he, and this is the crucial point, returns to France from Algiers carrying the convictions of a man who believed that France had the right to use unlimited force to defend its interests and its civilization, and that the loss of Algeria was a national betrayal, people responsible for the betrayal, which in Le Pen's twisted mind at the left, the intellectuals, the Jews and ultimately the Arabs, the Algerians, they all needed to be held to account. And let's just remind you of the kind of situation that Pierre Noirs were facing when they left.

You know, they said it was a choice between the coffin or the suitcase, you know, that they had to leave. Now, although Le Pen is not a Pierre Noir himself, he is there to enforce French rule and protect the Pianoise. So, you know, you can see where his conviction comes from. He was a Pujadist deputy elected to the National Assembly, eventually in 1956, on a small wave of business populism, and then loses his seat not long after in 1962. And that is when Le Pen makes the decision that actually we need a new party and a new politics in France. And he co-founds the Front Nacional in October 1972. And right from the very beginning, this is kind of a rag-tag bunch of people who have complaints against the state.

So, you know, you have the Pierre Noir refugees in the South, those who had lost everything and come with just their suitcase. OAS veterans like himself and sympathizers. Catholic traditionalists who thought the Republic was behaving in a contemptuous manner and moving further and further away from God and becoming a little too liberal, a little too lefty, you know, all of that kind of thing. and a sprinkling, it has to be said, of authentic fascists in this coalition as well. What Le Pen supplied was the political structure, the rhetorical gift and the strategic patience to build a movement rather than just a faction. He understood that the constituency of Algerian grievance was too large and too angry to remain permanently marginal. and all that the pen had to do

was to wait for that spark to ignite. And after the break, we're going to be talking about the lives of the Algerians who came to France in the 1960s and how their rage at how they're treated in France ignites a spark that ends up in the fire of the 2005 riots. I'm Mary Beard. And I'm Josephine Quinn. At the rest is fest this September, we're putting on a show that can only be described as an iconoclastic romp through the ancient world. We're talking about leaders behaving badly, emperors putting their horses in charge, cities built by asylum seekers and empires getting their comeuppance. There will be

some proper myth busting. But we'll also be asking why these myths matter, even when we know they're wrong. So if you love your ancient history and you're free on September 6th, get your ticket now and join us at London's South Bank Centre. Tickets are on sale now. Just. just visit southbank centre.co.com.uk. That's southbank centre.com.com.com.com.com.com. Welcome back. So just before the break, we had Le Pen, who is getting together this coalition of the miserable in France, those who think that France has left them down,

the Fourth of Republic, is not what it's cracked up to be. We haven't looked at what the Algerians are doing as well, because remember, this is not long after 1961, and those terrible crimes that had taken place and never been acknowledged and never punished. The Algerians are working as many immigrant communities find themselves working in the menial kind of work. You know, they're working on the roads,

they're building, they're, you know, working in the factories. And that too then sort of builds up a momentum, a head of steam, if you like, among the Algerians who've now settled in France, willy, of the fact that, you know, they're not getting a fair shake at all in this fourth republic. Not at all. And they end up in the Bon Leuille,

on the outskirts of Paris, and what they call the Grand Ensemble, these great concrete housing estates that are constructed on the periphery of every major French cities in the 1960s, which anyone has ever watched any of these French fleek movies

of particular anything involving drug pushers or anything will know these estates well. And these states, as in Britain, are both an expression of modernist utopianism and post-war reconstruction ambition, on one hand, and sort of urban horrors.

story on the other. Places like Tishis subois, Volan Valin. And these estates considered progressive. Modern housing with running water and heating for working people end up being dangerous slums,

full of pushers, full of violence. Yeah. And if you want an idea of what it is, you could do worse and go and watch the movie Lahain, the hatred, which is all about sort of the immigrant

festering rage. It's an absolutely extraordinary movie. And it's all set in the immigrant communities of the baniers. And just think long concrete corridors with lights that flicker and don't quite work as they were intended to work. And, you know, these corners where pushes and violence are around the corners. And very little greenery. There's uniformity. And it's not just France that does this. Remember, this is the post-war dream in many countries in Europe. That, you know, we're going to build for more people. We're going to build these structures that are going to, you know, be these wonder sites that, you know, are going

to flourish with communities living one on top of the other. But the thing is, you know, they're built quickly. They're often not in very good nick. Things don't work very well. Young people don't have jobs around these places or can't get employment. And so you have this sort of army of gangs often that run these, you know, sort of corridors or buildings or sites or whatever it is. It is not the most lovely place to live. And, you know, within a decade, it's just 10 years. At this this dream sort of turns into a nightmare. You know, these places become synonymous with poverty, unemployment, racial segregation. And the Algerian community, along with the wider North African, sub-Saharan, African communities,

are concentrated there. And for them, you know, and for others who look at this, you know, sociologists who look at this, you know, you're sort of creating concentrations of discontent. You know, no legal basis to corral people into these places, but that's what happens. And, you know, some have argued, including I think Andrew Hussey, who, you know, you've been really enjoying reading lately, that it is almost a kind of an apartheid system without having any legal legislation for it. But if you separate these people and push them out and keep them corralled in this kind of housing, which is the only housing that you're offering them, you are creating a time bomb. I'm banging on about this book a lot, but I learned so much in it. The French had defaude, the long war between France and its Arabs.

Now, it covers not only all the history that we. we've been doing on this series. All the stuff about the Barbary Pirates, the French colonial era, the civil war, and then the return of the Pied Noir. But he focuses particularly on its resonance in France today. So Andrew Hussie's argument is that this is not a new problem. France has been at war with its Arab population continuously since the colonial period. And he argues very articulately walking through these estates of the Banlure, talking to people who live in them, describing a policing culture that is literally indistinguishable in its attitudes and in its methods from the policing of occupied Algerian territory during the Battle of Algiers, during the War of Independence,

the stop and search, the systematic harassment, the casual violence, the impunity, particularly the impunity of the officers involved. these are not aberrations from the ideals of the French Republic. He argues this is just the way it is in France and has always been. And that the modern French police are inheritors of a colonial policing culture that was never examined, never reformed and never even acknowledged right up until about 2012. So the children and grandchildren of the Harkis, the collaborators and the Algerian workers who built post-war France are being policed by the descendants, institutionally speaking, of the very men who ran the notorious Algerian interrogation centres.

Right. So, I mean, what you've got then is heat being turned up on an already simmering pot. And on the 27th of October 2005, everything boils over. Two teenagers, Zayad Bena and Buna Traroé were electrocuted on a pylon at a power substation in cliche suabois while fleeing from a police identity check. They hadn't done anything wrong. They were just afraid of the police. You know, that was the intelligence that, you know, existed, that the police are not your friends.

If they stop you, you run. And they ran and they died. And within days, the banlier of every major French city was on fire. Cars, bins, buildings, you know, the kind of thing. You know how these conflagrations grow and spread. And there are three weeks of confrontations between young people and the police across at least a dozen cities. And the whole world is watching. I remember seeing these, you know, images.

and just thinking, God, this is so close and felt, you know, sort of baffling at the time. But when you understand sort of the motivations and the histories behind people, not baffling at all. And what's interesting, if you look at those names, Bena and Traoroulli, one is Algerian and one is Malian Muslim. And this is exactly what my friend Farah described the world.

She grew up in. Her best friends were either Algerian or Malian Muslims. And they're in the same blocks. They're in the same banal. deprived. And they are both, you know, at war with the French police. The kids on the estates regard the police as the occupying enemy and react accordingly. Now, when you get this in 2005, the interior minister is Nicola Sarkozy. And he's already positioning himself for the presidency. And he goes on television and he calls the rioters, Arcai, in other words, scum. And he promises to

clean up the estates with an industrial cleaner. And then his government declares a state of emergency under a law passed in 1955 to deal with the Algerian uprising. It's a kind of perfect storm of anti-Algerian horror. Yeah. And if you use law that's passed in 195 to deal with the Algerian uprising, what do you think that's going to do to the Algerian communities who already are deeply unhappy with their status quo? You know, that colonial echo is, of course not subtle, but probably not accidental either, because, you know, the political culture that reaches back into 1955 for emergency laws in 2005, it's the same political police culture that has been reaching for colonial methods since the colonial period, one might argue.

And this is kind of exactly the fertile ground that Willie described him as being very patient, patient Jean-Le Penh is waiting for. that, you know, this is the kind of these scenes that, you know, I remember seeing and being kind of really scared and horrified to watch. What is that going to do to the French people? Well, he's sort of making the calculus. It's going to drive them into his arms. So on one hand, you get this extraordinary world developing in Paris, where you've got these wonderful French, North African writers. Asia Jabah, Tahr, Jalun, Yasmin Kadra.

These are figures who are winning the, you know, the prigancourt and so on. But in the south, in the working class, suburbs, this is only stirring up further people who think that their saviour is Jean-Marie Le Pen. And he is gaining political support as all this is going on in places like Marseilles and Toulon and Montpellier, the Piedneois and their children and grandchildren, are now voting on block for Jean-Marie Le Pen in numbers which stuns the Republic. And in the 2002 presidential elections, Le Pen reaches the second round, knocking out the socialist character, Leonelle Jospin,

and forcing the entire French left to hold its nose and vote for sheer rack to keep Le Pen out. And the shock of that moment changes French politics permanently. Now, I remember the name Jean-Marie Le Pen. You know, I'm old enough to remember that. But some of the younger people listening to our podcast, they will know Le Pen, but they won't know the dad. will know the daughter, Marine Le Pen. I mean, tell us a little more, Willie, about her story. So, Marine Le Pen is in every way more presentable and telegenic than her, you know,

her slightly brutish-looking dad, who has this very dodgy past as a suspected torturer. And she goes around intending to rebrand her father's party for modern French politics. And one of the first things she does is to, in this sort of either, moment, she expels her father from his own party, which is a sort of symbolic severance that allows her to claim distance from, you know, the party's more embarrassing past, particularly it's avert anti-Semitism. Because Le Pen has been not only aiming his guns at the Arabs, he's been aiming it at the French Jews. And Marie Le Pen changes this. And she ditches what is widely regarded as her father's most politically top.

it characteristic. But she slightly softens the rhetoric on immigration without abandoning the substance. And she renames the party, the Rassembleman Nacional, the national rally in 2018. And with that rebranding, she builds a new coalition. We should say one thing that we've not mentioned about Jean-Marie Le Pen is if you do Google him, you'll see pictures of him from the 60s and 70s, and he always wears an eye patch. And the reason he wears an eye patch is just an interesting story. He's like this political pirate, waving his arm in the air and making these tub-thumper speeches with his iPad. He said he lost his eye in the October 1965 campaign where he was setting up a tent for the first ever French far-right presidential candidate, and they kind of get

jumped on. And this iPad, you know, he sort of wore as a symbol of, you know, we are boarding the ships. This is going to be new. And of course, his daughter knows that's not how politics works in the 2000s. And then she starts work on building a new coalition. And this is a coalition of working class people, you know, the post-industrial North, if you like, and, you know, a North that had once voted, communist. But also the Pianoas and their, you know, their children and their grandchildren. And also, you know, young people from the Banlieu, some of them, you know, which is baffling, but drew of Algerian origin themselves, who had absorbed enough of this resentment and social conservatism from their neighborhoods, who start finding her message of, we're going to rip this up and start again.

This is, you know, this is not what was promised, we're going to start again. The wrong people are in Charlotte start again. And she comes second to Macon in 2017. And then she comes second again in 2022. And, you know, that time in 2022, I believe she received more than 13 million votes. So, I mean, that's, just imagine, 13 million people. So, you know, what does this do to Macron? I mean, I want to know what Macron's own sort of reckoning with this situation, how much Algeria is in his mind, how much the Algerians or French Algerians are in his mind.

What does he do? Well, just before I answer that, I wanted to do another pitch for this extraordinary bonus episode with Farah. And she talked about how growing up in Sarkozy's education system, She was force-fed history in her curriculum in Paris, which taught all the French kids to look with pride on their colonial history and that she was made to recite for her exam. She couldn't pass her exams without coming out with all the stuff of all the things the French gave to the Algerians. And you don't get any pushback on that until 2012 when the 1960s riots and the deaths and the deaths in the sense. are acknowledged. And then again, in 2018, when Macron acknowledges that the mathematician Maurice Odin, a French communist who had sheltered FLN members and was arrested by the French paratroopers

in June 57, had been tortured and killed by the French army, that this was a state crime. And this was the first time that the French president had ever acknowledged this sort of wrongdoing. And he follows up in 2021. This is again, you know, this is very recent. This is just now by commissioning Benjamin Stora, an Algerian historian historian from Konstantin, who fled Algeria in 1962, to produce a report on how France should address all this, the memory of colonialism and the war. It's the kind of nearest thing that France has ever come really is to a sort of truth and reconciliation moment. And Stora's report recommends a number of steps towards both acknowledgement and to reconciliation. So, yeah, Macron's response to the report is really kind of interesting. I mean, he commissions the report.

Some who are, you know, less charitable than others. They may say he had to because, you know, had to do something. And a report was the least he could do. Well, he didn't do very much after the report comes out. He sort of, you know, in that kind of sort of French. There's a very English equivalent to it, too. We know he all too well. Well, I mean, so he takes some modest recommendations.

Okay. But there is one gesture. And again, you know, every time we talk about, colonial history. This is this hill, which either you you die on or don't die on, always appears, is does an apology matter? And that's the one thing that he doesn't do, which is, you know, a formal apology. A formal apology. And the reason, and it's important to understand why he wouldn't do that as well. You know, politics is a game of four to five years. You know, you're up for re-election. You're looking at the next docket. You're looking at the next constituency.

And if he had issued a formal apology, I think it is absolutely true, he would have lost the midi, the middle of France. And, you know, whoever carries the midi can carry the election. So he doesn't do the formal apology. And those, you know, the midi, he's fighting. And the reason he doesn't, again, we come back, you know, in the circle of us, because Marine Le Pen is very strong in the midi. And, you know, she's just sort of snapping at his heels with those 13 million votes. And this is the area that has, you know, not just the more conservative, but also, you know, the descendants of the Piennoyas who still feel like France let them down. They did everything they could for France. They did everything for the empire and the empire basically kicked them to the curb.

So, you know, God, all of this is sort of suppurating wounds, no balm, no salve. I mean, that's, I guess, where we are. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because there are elements of this story that are very like, what we've done at partition and when we're looking at Indian decolonisation. But there are other elements which are totally not so. And yet for all the differences, you know, France and Britain are now at a similar junction. It's not impossible that an anti-immigrant party will win the next British general election, nor is it impossible that a similar party will win the election in France. France has has now a significant community of Pied Noir and their children and grandchildren who carry their own very different memories of the war and the attitude to Algerian Muslims in France that that

generates. And this far right party led by the daughter of a man who tortured Algerians in the Casper in Algiers may well win the next French presidential elections. And at the other side of that, we have a Ban Lue population that has been policed, suppressed, and marginalized and treated like occupied Algiers for 60 years by a state that has never apologized and has only partially acknowledged the colonial horrors and its own colonial origins of its policing and so on. So these are not separate stories. These are the same story, a wound that has never been treated and therefore has never been healed and continues to separate and to provide enormous pain in the body politic.

It is absolutely live. It's not yet a given that Marine Le Pen is going to be able to run because she has this legal question hanging over her head. I think she was convicted in March 2025 and just looking it up of embezzling European Parliament funds and she was given a ban from public office. Now, you know, if she's cleared, odds which change on a daily basis, but when we're going out, you know, would put her in a very strong position. But we don't know that she can even run at the moment.

That's not settled as we are recording this. That's right. So she has, though, this deputy called, who's taken over while she's under this legal shadow called Jordan Bardella. And he is young, clever, articulate and ultra far right. And he's always on the television in France. And he is a very, very good media performer. And he is more than capable of carrying the party over the line if she is not there. So it's a head of a situation that we find ourselves in.

And this is, you know, exactly in a sense why we do this podcast. Because it, you know, we are at its heart studying how colonial and imperial history affects us all today. And there is no better textbook example. that than the French in Algeria. Well, it's all interesting, isn't it? So it's what we always say our catchphrase should be, is how did we get here? Which is like, that's why we do this podcast. Anyway, let me remind you this bonus episode that Willie's been talking about with his friend Farahman Jor as a French Algerian right in the middle of this story. You know, will tell us all what it felt like to live in the midst of all of this. It's a first-person

testimony which is really interesting and informative. So don't miss that. It's an extraordinary story over three generations. So, I mean, if you want to listen to that, just join the Empire Club. It's EmpowerPodUK.com, but Empirpoduk.com. Look, I mean, a lot of, we love doing what we do. Joining the club helps us do what we do, and we give you these very special episodes as well. So do join up. Thank you to everybody who's listened to all six episodes of this series.

We've enjoyed very much and have learned so much doing it. Until the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me. William Durember.