France’s far-right reckoning: ‘My Algerian father wanted a better life for us here but I could only get ahead when I lost my African name’

The National Rally is as toxic as mustard gas, writes this French author, and its rise can only be understood against the backdrop of an unresolved colonial legacy

Jordan Bardella and National Rally supporters celebrate during the announcement of the recent European election results. Photo: Julien De Rosa via Getty

Xavier Le Clerc

In 1939, Albert Camus travelled to the Kabyle Mountains in what was then French Algeria to witness the extreme poverty there. Over 11 days, the 25-year-old journalist wrote an article a day, backed with numbers and precise descriptions of the natives’ hardship, caused by an exploitative and cruel colonial system. The Kabyle people were not even allowed to collect wood and had to feed on roots. Thousands died of hunger.

Camus used the word ‘slavery’ to describe the working condition of these men, who often fell by the roadside out of exhaustion and hunger. Among the children in rags, fighting wandering dogs for scraps of food, there was a little boy called Mohand-Saïd Aït-Taleb. This green-eyed kid would one day become my father.