“France has turned my grandfather

“36 rue Goutte D’or, that’s where your grandfather opened the tailor shop,” he says, eyes lost in a time long past.

“What was it called?” I ask.

His eyes narrow in confusion. “It didn’t have a name. It was a measly thing. Why should we have named it? Just one room, enough space to put two sewing machines and a chair. There were scraps of tissue everywhere. And buttons, and needles. Wool, sometimes. I remember that.”

Many of these nameless tailor ateliers were later repurchased by the French state and offered to fashion designers at a discounted rent in an effort to develop the neighborhood of La Goutte D’or. Today, there are no visible traces of Algerian grandfathers in the story of Paris’s fashion legacy.

Sifting through memories, my great-uncle turns his attention to another urban site of Algerian presence, Nanterre. In the 1950s, the state hastily built cheap wooden cabins in this commune to house a growing number of North African immigrants coming to work in Parisian factories. He remembers the shanty town in the western “banlieue” (suburb) as a muddy, foul-smelling amassment of 10,000 North Africans — mostly Algerians — living in leaking, poorly insulated shacks. Yet — his eyebrows rising up — he also remembers the coffee stands mimicking the cafés in Algeria and the men, sitting on wooden stools, playing games of dominoes or ronda like at home.

Since my grandfather’s arrival, the Nanterre shanty towns have been razed to the ground, replaced by their vertical doppelganger — cheap, high-rise social housing. Today, this type of public housing is found throughout Paris’ economically disadvantaged “banlieues”, and is mostly home to people of immigrant origins. Nanterre has been so thoroughly cleansed of its slums that it is almost impossible to retrace the history of the thousands of North Africans who lived here.

Many immigrants and their descendants now live among the ruins of a violent colonial union, erased from French society and culture. Today, France’s settlement into

Algeria — a period that lasted for almost a century and a half — is considered taboo, barely mentioned in school programs or in public discourse.

After having spent my entire higher education studying French history, the first time I had heard about the 17 October 1961 massacre in Paris was through my grandfather. On that October night, the FLN mobilized the immigrant population to protest a curfew targeting Algerians living in Paris. What started as a peace march ended up a bloodbath when police officers opened fire on the crowd. Hundreds of Algerian bodies, dead and alive, were then thrown into the river Seine. It was not a covert operation done at the fringes of the city — this happened right in the heart of Paris, at the Pont Saint Michel next to the Notre-Dame Cathedral. That night, tens of thousands Algerians were arrested, many of whom disappeared.

“I saw two of my friends go to the march,” my grandfather told me. “No one heard from them after that. To this day, I don’t know what happened to them.”

It was in his measly couture atelier that my grandfather spent the night of 17 October.

“I made hundreds of Algerian flags that night, for people to take to the march. I sewed and sewed until my machine broke.”

Later that day, French police arrested him. He spent weeks in prison for making the Algerian flags, which were outlawed at the time.

“Say you’re French”

As French president Emmanuel Macron stated in his October 2020 speech against “separatism”, France is “not the sum of multiple communities but one single community.” This is the very idea upon which French society is built — to be considered French, immigrants and descendants of immigrants are asked to shed their cultural and religious heritage. France's view on integration borders on assimilation: an extreme form of inclusion that forces one to give up their culture of origin in order to completely blend into French society.