Arrest of writer Boualem Sansal provokes another Franco-Algerian clash

At 75 years of age, Boualem Sansal is one of the giants of French-speaking literature, and even more so of what could be called Franco-Maghrebi literature. The first, Le serment des Barbares ( 1999), tells the story of the unstoppable rise of fundamentalism, which “plunged Algeria into the black decade”, the civil war that resulted in more than 200,000 deaths.

It was followed especially by Le village de l'Allemand (2008), where he evokes the Shoah, the French-Algerian civil war that led to independence, and the vicissitudes of subsequent Algerian immigration in the suburbs of French cities, and 2084, the end of the world (published in 2015), where with reminiscences of George Orwell's 1984 , he denounces the threat to democracies of Islamist religious fundamentalism. 

Sansal was arrested last November 16 by State Security forces at Algiers airport, after landing from France, as confirmed by the government agency APS. The refusal of the Algerian authorities to account for his whereabouts has led to fears of the worst in both the literary and political worlds across France, including President Emmanuel Macron, who expressed his “grave concern over the disappearance”, while announcing the mobilization of French institutions to ascertain his whereabouts and situation.

The writer's publisher, Gallimard, also issued a statement, in which in addition to expressing its “deep concern at the arrest of Boualem Sanse by the Algerian Security, they call for his immediate release”, while calling the arrest “a dramatic sign of the increase in political and religious repression”.

The appeal has been seconded by the vast majority of the French literary world, especially by Franco-Maghrebi writers, including Yasmina Khadra, Tahar Ben-Jelloum and Kamel Daoud. The former describes the detention as “unbearable, as the place that belongs to an intellectual is a table for the discussion of ideas and not a prison cell”. 

As for Kamel Daoud, Goncourt Prize 2024, he denounces that his “brother [Boualem Sansal] should not be behind the bars of a prison, as is the whole nation of Algeria”. A statement that has particularly upset the Algerian authorities, who accuse him and his wife, a psychiatrist by profession, of having used the medical records, and therefore confidential and secret, of a patient to write his novel Houris, with which he won the most prestigious prize in French literature.

For his part, the arrested and probably tortured man, according to his family and closest friends, has long been a source of irritation for both the political and religious establishment in Algeria. Boualem Sansal actively participated in the numerous demonstrations of 2019, which eventually led to the resignation of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

But, the straw that seems to have broken the patience of the Algerian Security has been Sansal's adherence to the thesis that colonial France proceeded to a partition of the Maghreb that favored Algeria to the detriment of Morocco, which has earned him the label of “useful fool” by Algeria, which remains at odds with the Alawite kingdom over the Sahara, whose Moroccan sovereignty was recognized this summer by the French president, which has made it easier for Rabat to open the doors to contracts and business deals worth an estimated 10 billion euros. 10 billion euros. 

Sansal has also exasperated the religious authorities, and especially the most radical Islamism, which he accuses of trying to settle in France at all costs. His most outspoken statements, such as that “Islam is incompatible with democracy” and that “Islam and Islamism are the same thing”, have earned him numerous enmities and the banning of his books in his home country.