DecaturNature@roadriverrail I'm in the "Preface to the Algerian Reports" right now. It's intense. I hadn't realized that some people had hoped for an egalitarian integration of France and Algeria -- rather than French domination or Algerian independence.
He wrote: "Such a position [an equal union] satisfies no one today, and I know in advance how it will be received by both sides. I sincerely regret it, but I cannot do violence to what I feel and what I believe. Besides, on this subject no one satisfies me either. This is why, finding it impossible to join either extreme camp, faced with the gradual disappearance of that third camp in which it was still possible to keep a cool head...I decided to take no further part in the constant polemics that have had no result other than to harden the uncompromising points of view at leggerheads in Algeria and to split even wider a France already poisoned by hatreds and sects.
"There is indeed a spitefulness in the French, and I refuse to add to it."
This essay is a good refutation of today's 'campism' and 'hyper-partisanship'. It's important to be clear about the wrongs being committed, regardless of who commits them. This is the same message he had in "Why Spain" regarding some in the anti-Soviet movement of his day, that would have him ignore the crimes of Franco in order to oppose Stalin (or vice versa, for some anti-Fascists).
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