A French town’s reflective twist on a haunting war monument

It was 1958. Algerian rebels and French troops were involved in a brutal war that ended with Algerian independence in 1962. And Kellu was learning about the life-saving necessity of silence – something he had learned and which had tormented him for most of his adult life.

When Kellu saw the Blandan statue for the second time, more than 30 years later, in the French city of Nancy, he was haunted by ghosts.

It was a dark, cold and snowy morning and the now retired TV director was heading to the studio.

“I found my statue, the statue that I think I’ve seen somewhere before,” he recalled. “I didn't expect this. I asked myself: “What is he doing there?”

This simple question opened the door to a lifetime of carefully contained trauma. It prompted a father to confide in his daughter, that daughter to a meeting with high school students, those students to visit a museum, and gallerists to convince officials in Nancy to allow a reflective twist to be added to a troubled public statue.

A series of meetings led this month to a rare public acknowledgment (if not outright reconciliation) with France's colonial past that could inspire countries like Canada and the United States to confront their troubled histories and the heroes, as well as the monuments and institutions erected and named in their honor.

The center around which this story revolves is Kellu's daughter, Dorothy-Miriam Kellu, a journalist and director from Paris who calls herself “the heir of silence.”

Raised in Nancy by an Algerian-born father and a French-born mother, she began to question the “lack of transmission” from her father, the gaps in language, culture and personal history.

“Why, for example, didn’t I speak (the Berber dialect) Kabyle, which is my father’s native language, or Arabic, the language of his country,” she said. “And why didn’t we go to Algeria, why didn’t I even know the name of his village where he was born.”

There was a simple and painful reason common to children who have experienced trauma: memories. Kabylia, the mountainous region in northern Algeria where Kellou grew up, was one of the hardest hit by the war of independence.

He was also among the millions of displaced Algerians sent to camps designed to prevent locals from supporting or supplying National Liberation Front fighters.

“There were scars inside of me that I didn’t want to pass on,” Kellu said.

After the war and the French withdrawal from Algeria in 1963, Kellu also left, attending film school in Brussels, Belgium. When he returned home, armed with a Western liberal education and political inclinations, he said he no longer felt welcome in his home country.

“For them, I lost my Algerian identity.”

He returned to Europe, found work at French public television, filming news programs, sporting events, cooking shows and documentaries. He spent his entire career telling the stories of others while burying his own.

He said it was “very difficult, even painful, because people need to express who they are.”

That feeling grew when Kellow retired, and grew until his daughter's need for answers met her father's need to fill the void.

“I wanted to make a film about my history and the history of colonial France in Algeria,” he said. “As a director, I thought, ‘Well, this story was born in my head in 1958, at the height of the Algerian war. Why not consider this angle? »

It was then that Dorothy-Miriam first learned what a sergeant was. Blancan, the name of the street and military barracks in Nancy where she grew up, was intended for her father.

“He had nightmares where the sergeant was choking him and he would wake up choking,” she said.

She told a professor at Georgetown University in Washington, where she was pursuing a master's degree in Arabic studies, about her father's film and was encouraged to delve into the difficult and complicated history of her mixed heritage. This resulted in a body of journalism, including a documentary, several podcasts and a book questioning French colonialism and the long legacy it leaves to this day.

It was this kind of knowledge that Etienne Augry, a history teacher at Nancy's Lycée Joan of Arc, was looking for when he offered his students a practical assignment for the 2020-21 school year: to find and explore traces of France's colonial past in the city.

“It was at a time when all this thinking was about statues,” Ogris said.

Inspired by the protests and the difficult questions they raised, Haugris instructed his students to study the names of streets, monuments and buildings in Nancy, and asked them to climb the branches of their family trees in search of personal connections to France's colonial past.

And when he invited Dorothy-Miriam to speak to his class, she arrived with her father and his story about the giant bronze statue of Sgt. Blandan.

Students began researching the story of a 23-year-old French soldier who was mortally wounded in battle on April 11, 1842 during the French conquest of Algeria and upon his death became a Chevalier of France's Legion of Honor, a prestigious award for service to the nation.

This research set in motion a process that would turn one small piece of the country's long-celebrated history on its head.

History books record that Marshal Thomas Bugeaud, then France's finest soldier, celebrated Blancan's “heroic” death in Algiers and celebrated his dying words heard by his 20 fellow soldiers fighting in a confrontation with more than 250 “Arab horsemen” as they delivered mail that April day in 1842: “Courage, friends mine. Defend yourself to the death.”

This story was the impetus for the naming of a street in Bufarika in honor of Blandan and the commissioning of the statue in 1887. The monument was also a creative solution to a practical problem: since the land where Blundan was buried had been sold privately, the statue would promote the colonial spirit while preserving earthly remains.

Some students in Ogris's class had grandfathers who were sent to Algeria by the French military. Others with Algerian roots expressed a different view.

“There were very different opinions, sometimes very strong ones, especially about how these statues don’t belong here or how we can’t leave them standing,” Ogris said.

The school project continued. One day, Kellou accompanied Ogris and his students to the Nancy Museum of Fine Arts to view an 1882 oil painting of the battle in which Blandan was killed.

There they met with the head of the gallery, Susana Gallego Cuesta, and Kenza-Marie Safraoui, curator of the heritage of the Lorraine Museum, the historical museum of Nancy.

Gallery owners realized that they had both a need and an opportunity.

“Nobody knew that (the Blandan statue) was a figure of colonial conquest,” Safraoui said. “People thought it was someone from World War I or an unknown soldier.”

Blandan's journey from Boufarique to Nancy, a city where the Lyon-born soldier probably never set foot, in itself says a lot about the creation and maintenance of heroic national sagas.

The fallen soldier became something of a patron of the French 26th Infantry Regiment, which was based in Nancy from 1873 until its disbandment in 1998. Several decades after arriving in the city, the veterans formed an association known as the Blandan Group. Among other things, they organized an annual commemoration for Blandan every spring.

And when the French withdrew from Algeria in 1963, veterans lobbied politicians and military officials to ensure that the bullet-riddled monument to Blancan and his remains were not left behind.

In a ceremony on December 14, 1963, 600 veterans of the Algerian War marched through the streets of Nancy and gathered in the ornate central square. Meanwhile, a statue of Blandan was installed in the hall of honor of the local military barracks, his remains were transported by two soldiers, two officers and two veterans of the 26th regiment.

Pierre Messmer, French Minister of Defense under President Charles de Gaulle, attended the inauguration ceremony, declaring: “Blandan can rest here in peace. No other place can better guarantee the preservation of his memory. Together, Nancy, the 26th and Blundan's group will look after him.”

Over the decades, this has proven to be largely true.

In 1990, local politicians, eager to beautify the city, decided to make a statue of Blandan the centerpiece of an urban development project. They considered a number of potential locations for the statue, including a traffic circle and near the officers' mess, before settling on a public square at the southern end of one of the city's main streets, Sergeant Blundan Street.

It was opened on April 7, 1990, a few days before the 148th anniversary of Blundan's death.

The ceremony was followed by a reception at City Hall, a Mass at the local cathedral and a performance by a military band. This was followed by a thrilling reunion for Malek Kellu. And this meeting, more than three decades later, was followed by a question.

What to do with a statue that cannot be melted down and remade in accordance with modern requirements?

According to Safraoui, the heritage custodian, the high school students' first instincts were outrage and calls for the statue's removal.

“They were in shock,” she said. “But as a result of the work we did with them, they eventually said we need to have an alternative view of the statue. We need to keep it, but explain what it is, give it a different place and offer a different history for this statue.”

You are reading a story that was invented by the city of Nancy.

This is the story of Malek Kellu; written by Dorothea Miriam, his daughter; engraved on a reflective metal disc measuring 1.58 meters tall (Blandan's actual height) and placed in front of a 3.35 meter tall image of the tarnished soldier.

They call it a “disorientation table,” inverting the idea of ​​an orientation chart or toposcope that can be found on top of tall buildings or mountain peaks to help identify landmarks ahead.

The short, reflective text asks, “Who are you?”

“In Bufarik, the elders remember,” he continues. “With your sharpened bayonet over your shoulder, your threatening finger pointing to the ground, and your scowling face, you knew how to scare them. The Algerians who encountered you as children are still afraid of you.”

This is a kind of counter-monument, claimed to be the first in France. But it may have only seen the light of day because it was aimed at such a humble target as Blandan – an almost forgotten figure in a small town in a large country with a complex past.

A ghostly figure transformed in the text of the counter-monument into a source of hope.

“Your ghostly presence brings to light the suppressed stories that weave the threads of our history.”