Decolonising Europe? The Colonial Boomerang

Abstract

The hidden secret at the core of Michael Haneke's remarkable film of that name is Georges Laurent's denunciation of a young Algerian boy who found refuge on his relatives’ farm after his own parents had perished in the infamous 1961 Paris massacre. In a bizarre return of the repressed, the memory of this betrayal invades and destroys his affluent bourgeois existence forty years later. In this article, I attempt to link this return to the “colonial boomerang” of the suburban revolts of 2005 (and 2007) and the “official” occlusion of past crimes against humanity most clearly shown in the case of Maurice Papon, in which the betrayal of France's Jews and the massacre of Algerian demonstrators merge on the grounds of the Veld'Hiv.