Olivier LeCour Grandmaison (September 19, 1960, Paris) is a French historian. He is a professor of political science at the Evry-Val d'Essonne University and also teach at the Collège International de Philosophie, and mainly works on colonialism issues. President of the October 17, 1961 Association Against Oblivion (which advocates official recognition of the crimes committed by the Fifth Republic during the 1961 Paris massacre), he is best known for his book Coloniser, Exterminer - Sur la guerre et l'Etat colonial (2005).
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In this book, he claims how techniques and concepts forged during the New Imperialism period at the end of the 19th century were then used for the Holocaust. He thus underlines how both Tocqueville and Michelet openly talked of "extermination" about the colonization of Western United States and the Indian removal period.[1] Hence, he quotes Tocqueville himself, in 1841, about the French conquest of Algeria:
"In France I have often heard people I respect, but do not approve, deplore [the army] burning harvests, emptying granaries and seizing unarmed men, women and children. As I see it, these are unfortunate necessities that any people wishing to make war on the Arabs must accept... I believe the laws of war entitle us to ravage the country and that we must do this, either by destroying crops at harvest time, or all the time by making rapid incursions, known as raids, the aim of which is to carry off men and flocks" [2]
"Whatever the case, continued Tocqueville, we may say in a general manner that all political freedoms must be suspended in Algeria."[3] According to LeCour Grandmaison, "De Tocqueville thought the conquest of Algeria was important for two reasons: first, his understanding of the international situation and France’s position in the world, and, second, changes in French society."[4] Tocqueville, who despised the July monarchy (1830-1848), believed that war and colonization would "restore national pride, threatened, he believed, by "the gradual softening of social mores" in the middle classes. Their taste for "material pleasures" was spreading to the whole of society, giving it "an example of weakness and egotism"." Applauding the methods of Thomas Robert Bugeaud, Tocqueville went as far as saying that "war in Africa" had become a "science":
"war in Africa is a science. Everyone is familiar with its rules and everyone can apply those rules with almost complete certainty of success. One of the greatest services that Field Marshal Bugeaud has rendered his country is to have spread, perfected and made everyone aware of this new science" [4].
Thus, LeCour Grandmaison claims that the techniques employed during the Algerian War (1954-62) by the French army were rooted in past history.
According to LeCour Grandmaison, history of warfare is not limited to the history of technical progress of weapons, but should englobe the "juridical, administrative and conceptual arsenal" which accompanies it: "We can only understand the extreme violences of the 1848 civil war - most of the times qualified as "bloody repression" - if we replace them in a longer genealogy, by the way exterior, and brought back to what was experimented before, most notably during the Algerian war [that is, the invasion of Algeria starting in 1830]" [5] In the same interview, LeCour Grandmaison, basing himself on texts from Zola, Victor Hugo, Lamartine, but also Darwin, André Gide, Albert Londres, Jules Verne, Maupassant, Foucault, Barthes, Joseph Conrad, etc., distinguish criticisms of the abuses of colonialism and criticisms of the principle itself of colonization. He goes as far as claiming how even Marx and Engels were not immune to this racialist ideology of the 19th century, as these authors also considered the colonization as inevitable and qualified, as did all their contemporaries, non-European people as "primitives" and "barbarians". It wasn't until the Third International that the socialist movement really opposed itself to colonialism and supported national liberation movements.[6]
After Michel Foucault, LeCour Grandmaison has spoken of a "state racism" under the French Third Republic, notable for example with the 1881 Indigenous Code applied in Algeria. Answering to the question "Isn't it excessive to talk about a "state racism" under the Third Republic?", he answered:
"No, if we can recognize "state racism" as the vote and implementation of discriminatory measures, grounded on a combination of racial, religious and cultural criteria, in those territories. The 1881 Indigenous Code is a monument of this genre [monument du genre] ! Considered by contemporary prestigious jurists as a "juridical monstruosity", this code planned special offenses and penalties for "Arabs". It was then extended to other territories of the empire. On one hand, a state of rule of law for a minority of French and Europeans located in the colonies. On the other hand, a permanent state of exception for the "indigenous" people. This situation lasted until 1945." [1]
Thus, it comes as no wonder that Olivier LeCour Grandmaison was part of the historians who harshly criticized the February 23, 2005 law voted by the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), which demanded to teachers to teach the "positive values" of the French presence abroad, "in particular in North Africa". The law was not only accused of interfering with the autonomy of the University toward the state, but also of being an obvious case of historical revisionism [7]. Confronted with intense criticisms, both from historians and the French left-wing and from abroad (e.g. president of Algeria Abdelaziz Bouteflika and Négritude writer Aimé Césaire), president Jacques Chirac finally had the controversial law repealed in 2006.