The Letter France Owed the World, but Never Had the Courage to Write

A letter from a French soul who has finally decided to account for the inheritance of their nation.

To Africa, Haiti, the Caribbean, Asia, the Pacific, and every people whose existence France attempted to control.

I am French.

And today, I want to tell you something that perhaps you have waited centuries to hear from someone belonging to the country that caused you so much suffering.

I am sorry.

Not because France is now experiencing difficulties.

Not because our influence is diminishing.

Not because countries that once depended on us are reclaiming authority over their own existence.

But because, for the first time, I am willing to look at the country I belong to without asking the rest of the world to admire it alongside me.

And I am so glad that you are finally taking back what was always yours.

I am proud of you.

I am proud of the courage it takes to confront a power that has shaped your existence for generations.

I am proud that you are questioning relationships you were once expected simply to accept.

I am proud that you are recognising the value of your own land, your own people, your own resources, your own knowledge and your own capacity to build.

And if this means France must now learn to sustain itself differently, then France must learn.

We should have learned a very long time ago.

To the African nations reclaiming their autonomy

To Mali.

To Burkina Faso.

To Niger.

To Côte d’Ivoire.

To Senegal.

To Chad.

And to every African nation questioning the arrangements inherited from French colonial rule.

I AM SO PROUD OF YOU.

You cannot imagine how deeply I mean that.

Or perhaps you can.

Because I imagine it must take an extraordinary amount of courage to confront an entire system of inherited dependency.

To look at institutions that have existed for generations and say:

We want to decide for ourselves.

To look at the foreign military presence on your land and question why it should remain.

To look at resources extracted from beneath your feet and ask why their value has not consistently translated into the wellbeing of your own people.

To look at the financial, commercial and political structures surrounding you and question whose interests they were designed to serve.

To decide that your country is not merely a supplier to somebody else’s prosperity.

Your country is your home.

And it is time that its resources, opportunities and institutions were organised primarily around the wellbeing of the people who inhabit it.

I know independence does not automatically mean that every problem disappears.

I know some of your countries are facing serious security challenges, political struggles and difficult economic transitions.

I know that replacing one foreign dependency with another would not complete the work of liberation.

And I do not need to approve of every decision made by your governments to respect the principle that you should have the authority to determine your own futures.

Because your sovereignty is not conditional upon France agreeing with what you do with it.

That is something my country should have understood from the beginning.

When I see French military bases being returned to African authorities, I do not see a humiliation for France.

I see something that should be entirely normal.

An African country exercising authority over its own territory.

Why should that be considered extraordinary?

Why should the withdrawal of a foreign military force from another sovereign country be treated as though somebody has suffered an injustice?

And why should our national pride be wounded because another nation has decided to stand more independently?

We should never have needed to be pushed out of relationships that should have been based on voluntary cooperation from the beginning.

And to Côte d’Ivoire, especially, I understand that the handover of a military base does not mean every inherited dependency has disappeared.

But it can still represent an important movement towards a different relationship.

I hope you continue examining every arrangement that does not adequately serve your people.

Not because I wish for hostility between our nations.

Quite the opposite.

Because a relationship is much more meaningful when both parties are free to determine its terms.

I do not want France to be loved because another country cannot afford to leave us.

I want France to become a country that other nations freely choose to cooperate with.

That is the difference between dependency and relationship.

And it is about time we learned it.

To Niger, and the countries whose resources helped sustain our way of life

I owe you an acknowledgement.

France has benefited from access to natural resources located far beyond its own borders.

Uranium from Niger has contributed to the supply chains supporting our nuclear energy industry.

Other African countries have supplied materials and commodities that have fed industries, businesses and consumption far beyond their shores.

And I want to ask a question we should have asked long ago.

What does our prosperity actually mean if the communities providing those resources cannot exercise adequate control over their value?

How can I stand in my heated home, switch on my electricity, celebrate our infrastructure and never question the conditions under which the resources sustaining it were obtained?

Why do I feel entitled to a stable, affordable supply of something that belongs beneath somebody else’s land?

And why should their decision to reassess ownership, mining rights, contracts or exports be treated as an affront to my existence?

If your governments wish to renegotiate the terms under which resources are extracted, they have the right to pursue that.

If France believes an agreement has been violated, it can pursue lawful resolution.

But we must stop confusing a commercial expectation with a natural entitlement.

France was never born with a right to African uranium.

Nor African oil.

Nor African minerals.

Nor African agricultural production.

Nor the labour of African populations.

Our own economic responsibilities do not give us authority over another nation’s resources.

If we need something that another nation possesses, we should negotiate an equitable exchange.

And if that nation chooses another path?

Then we must adapt.

We must innovate.

We must reconsider our consumption, our energy systems and the organisation of our industries.

We must take responsibility for what we require to sustain ourselves.

We cannot keep calling ourselves one of the world’s most developed nations while treating access to other people’s resources as something we cannot survive without.

What exactly have we developed, if that development cannot withstand another nation’s freedom to make decisions for itself?

To Haiti

I do not even know how to begin apologising for what France did to you.

You fought for your freedom.

Enslaved people rose against a system that had reduced their bodies, their labour, their families and their very existence to property.

You fought against an extraordinary machinery of violence.

And you won.

You declared your independence in 1804.

You achieved something that should have been recognised as an immense declaration of humanity.

But France could not bear the loss of ownership.

So in 1825, France demanded an enormous financial indemnity as a condition for recognising your independence.

We made the formerly enslaved pay compensation to the former enslavers.

I want to repeat that, because it exposes something so deeply wrong that I struggle to understand how anyone could defend it.

The people who had been enslaved were made to compensate those who had claimed ownership over them.

The financial interests of former slaveholders were recognised.

The stolen labour, the physical suffering, the separation of families, the trauma and the lives destroyed were not given equivalent restitution.

And this imposed financial burden consumed resources that your new nation could otherwise have used to develop itself.

France imposed a debt upon a nation whose freedom France should never have denied.

How dare we?

How dare we then speak about Haiti’s development without fully accounting for the economic burden we imposed upon it?

I know that Haiti’s present difficulties have many causes, including events and decisions long after French colonial rule.

But that does not erase the injustice of what we did.

And I refuse to treat historical acknowledgement as the end of responsibility.

I believe France must engage seriously with restitution.

Not as charity.

Not as generosity.

Not as another arrangement that places France in a position of superiority.

But as an attempt to address a documented historical injustice.

Haiti did not owe France for becoming free.

France owed Haiti for what it did to prevent and then financially burden that freedom.

I am sorry.

To Algeria

I am sorry for the invasion of 1830.

For the land taken.

For the displacement of populations.

For the massacres, collective punishment, repression and violence through which French colonial authority was established and maintained.

For the attempts to make Algeria part of France while denying much of its Indigenous Muslim population equal political status.

For the humiliation, dispossession and inequality embedded in colonial institutions.

I am sorry for the people killed during the repression in Sétif, Guelma and Kherrata in 1945.

For the torture and disappearances during the Algerian War.

For the executions.

For the civilians caught in military violence.

For the people who had to fight for the recognition of a sovereignty that should never have been ours to deny.

And for the Algerians who came to Paris in October 1961 to demonstrate against discriminatory restrictions and were subjected to brutal police repression.

People died.

Bodies were thrown into the Seine.

Families waited for people who never returned.

This was not some distant colonial battlefield.

This happened in the capital of the country I call home.

And for decades, the extent of that violence was obscured.

I am sorry for the nuclear tests France carried out in the Algerian Sahara, including tests conducted after Algeria became independent.

For the environmental and health consequences, the questions still surrounding contamination, and the struggle for adequate recognition, information and repair.

And I am sorry for every occasion on which the French state has treated acknowledgement as a concession to be carefully negotiated rather than a responsibility to be fulfilled.

I do not want our relationship with Algeria to be built upon denial.

I do not want generations of French and Algerian people to inherit unresolved hostility because the institutions responsible refuse to account adequately for the past.

And I do not want the present diplomatic disputes between our countries to become another excuse to avoid historical accountability.

Algeria does not need to surrender its memory for France to feel comfortable.

To Senegal, Cameroon and Madagascar

I am sorry for Thiaroye in 1944.

For the West African soldiers who served France during the Second World War, only to be met with lethal military repression when they demanded what was owed to them.

For the massacre.

For the decades of disputes over the number killed, the records and the circumstances.

For every family that had to struggle to establish what happened to somebody who had already served our country.

I am sorry to Cameroon.

For the violent repression of independence movements.

For the suppression of political opposition, the arrests, the deaths and the attempts to maintain French influence during decolonisation.

For the history of those who demanded self-determination and were treated as threats to colonial order.

And to Madagascar, I am sorry for the repression of the 1947 uprising.

For the mass deaths.

For the villages and communities devastated.

For the people whose demands for independence were answered with violence.

For the long absence of adequate public recognition.

And for every time the people who were fighting for their own futures were described as the problem, while the colonial system they were resisting was treated as legitimate.

To Rwanda

I am sorry for the failures and grave responsibilities of French policy during the years preceding and surrounding the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.

For the blindness, political decisions and failures to respond adequately to warnings.

For the people who were abandoned while hundreds of thousands were being murdered.

For the failure to confront the danger with the urgency that human life demanded.

I understand that France’s precise role has been the subject of investigations and disagreement, and that historical responsibility must be established through evidence.

But I cannot use those complexities to erase the responsibilities that have already been identified.

When the cost of political failure is human life on such a scale, accountability must be more than a diplomatic gesture.

To Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos

I am sorry for French colonial domination in Indochina.

For the extraction of labour and resources.

For the coercion, repression and inequalities imposed through colonial administration.

For the plantations and working conditions that served colonial economic interests.

For the people subjected to punishment for resisting.

For the wars fought to maintain French power over territories whose people were increasingly demanding independence.

For every family whose future was interrupted because our government considered the preservation of its empire more important than the right of another population to determine its own existence.

I am sorry for treating another civilisation’s autonomy as negotiable.

And for the extraordinary arrogance of believing we could legitimately govern people who had not invited us to govern them.

To the Caribbean, the Pacific and all those whose identities we attempted to remake

I am sorry for slavery in Martinique, Guadeloupe and other territories under French colonial rule.

For the plantations.

For the commodification of human life.

For the racial hierarchies that slavery and colonialism established and reinforced.

For the suppression of languages, spiritual practices, cultural identities and ways of life that did not conform to French expectations.

For the historical assumption that becoming French, speaking French or adopting French customs represented an elevation of somebody’s humanity.

No civilisation needs to become French to become legitimate.

No person needs to abandon their ancestral identity to deserve respect.

To the peoples of French Polynesia, I am sorry for the consequences of the nuclear tests conducted between 1966 and 1996.

For the exposure and environmental damage, the suffering, the uncertainty and the long struggle for recognition and compensation.

To the Kanak people of New Caledonia, I recognise the history of colonisation, land dispossession and the continuing contest over political status and self-determination.

I recognise that the territory’s population holds differing political aspirations, and that France must address those questions without dismissing Indigenous rights or imposing a convenient conclusion.

I am sorry for the times when our idea of national unity has taken priority over listening to the people whose futures are at stake.

To the nations whose monetary and economic systems remained connected to France

I want to address something that cannot be explained away simply by saying colonialism ended.

The CFA franc arrangements.

The monetary relationships.

The financial guarantees.

The long history of French political, commercial and military influence within countries that had formally achieved independence.

I understand that these arrangements have changed over time, including reforms that ended the requirement for West African monetary reserves to be centralised at the French Treasury.

But I also understand that reforming an inherited relationship does not automatically resolve every question of monetary autonomy, dependency or unequal power.

And I believe those questions should be examined by the people living within the countries concerned.

They should be able to decide what monetary arrangements serve their future.

They should be able to discuss currency, finance, trade, development and cooperation without being treated as incapable of managing their own affairs.

If they choose to continue certain arrangements, that should be their decision.

If they wish to change them, that should also be their decision.

France’s comfort must never be the measure of another nation’s economic sovereignty.

We cannot continue assuming that our financial institutions, our definitions of stability and our preferred economic relationships are the natural standards to which everyone else must conform.

And we must be willing to examine the unequal exchanges that have occurred within these relationships.

How much labour?

How many resources?

How much land, water and energy?

How much value was produced?

Who retained that value?

And who carried the environmental and social costs?

These are questions that deserve serious accounting.

Not another speech about partnership without meaningful changes in the distribution of power.

And now, to my own country: France

This is the part of the letter I most want my fellow French people to understand.

I AM GLAD THAT OTHER COUNTRIES ARE RECLAIMING THEIR AUTONOMY. EVEN IF IT MAKES LIFE HARDER FOR US.

Yes.

I said it.

And I mean it.

I know our country is facing serious difficulties.

I know our public finances are under strain.

I know people are frightened about their livelihoods, the cost of living, their savings, their businesses and their future.

I know there are protests, political divisions and arguments about who should bear the cost of repairing our own economy.

And I do not celebrate the suffering of ordinary French people.

But I refuse to turn that suffering into a reason why another nation should continue providing us with advantages it no longer wishes to provide.

Our financial problems have many causes.

We must not dishonestly attribute them all to the retreat of French influence in Africa.

But wherever the loss of an inherited advantage creates a cost for us, we must accept that cost as ours to manage.

We are responsible for France.

Mali is responsible for Mali.

Burkina Faso is responsible for Burkina Faso.

Niger is responsible for Niger.

Côte d’Ivoire is responsible for Côte d’Ivoire.

Senegal is responsible for Senegal.

And each of these nations must be free to determine its future without having to prioritise the convenience of France.

It is not their responsibility to organise their resources around what makes our lives easier.

It is not their responsibility to preserve our commercial privileges.

It is not their responsibility to keep foreign military bases because their presence reassures our government.

It is not their responsibility to remain dependent because independence might disrupt our economy.

It is our responsibility to learn how to live without assuming those advantages belong to us.

And if that means the first months are difficult, then they are difficult.

If the adjustments take years, then we must work through those years.

If businesses need to restructure, then let us restructure them.

If we must rethink our energy supplies, let us rethink them.

If we must learn to produce differently, consume differently, budget differently and collaborate differently, let us do it.

Let us use our universities.

Our researchers.

Our engineers.

Our farmers.

Our workers.

Our industries.

Our creativity.

Our land.

Our own capacity for innovation.

We have spent centuries presenting France as an extraordinary civilisation.

Then let us demonstrate that greatness through what we can create responsibly, rather than through what we can continue extracting from others.

We should be capable of building a prosperous society without requiring unequal relationships to sustain it.

And where we need to trade, let us trade.

Where we need materials, let us negotiate.

Where another country has something we value, let us offer something genuinely worthwhile in return.

And let us respect its right to refuse.

That is what equal relations look like.

I do not want the empire back

I do not want French troops returned to countries that no longer consent to their presence.

I do not want political influence maintained through fear, pressure or manipulation.

I do not want a financial relationship that benefits us because another country has been left with fewer choices.

I do not want African governments measured according to how agreeable they are to Paris.

I do not want our diplomacy to become a continuous attempt to regain what we used to control.

And I do not want us to treat every new African partnership with another country as though Africa has betrayed France.

They are not ours to possess.

They never were.

An independent country does not betray France by exercising its independence.

And I want my fellow citizens to understand that France is not being robbed when another nation recovers its authority.

France is not being punished simply because someone else has decided to determine their own future.

What we are witnessing is a change in relationships that have been shaped by an extraordinary imbalance of historical power.

We can respond with resentment.

Or we can respond with maturity.

We can spend years attempting to restore our previous position.

Or we can spend those years learning how to build relationships that no longer require somebody else’s dependency.

And for the sake of our future, I hope we choose the latter.

There is a guilt I did not know I was carrying

For years, I might have defended France without recognising what was happening within me.

I might have said:

But France brought education.

But France built infrastructure.

But France introduced institutions.

But France gave people opportunities.

But France has helped those countries.

And perhaps I would have believed every word.

But why did I feel the need to immediately introduce those arguments whenever somebody questioned colonialism?

Why was my first instinct to defend my country rather than listen to the people describing their suffering?

Why did I need to remind them of something France had done well before I could acknowledge something France had done terribly?

What was I protecting?

I cannot say every defensive response is hidden guilt.

But I can examine my own.

And I now recognise something.

Guilt does not always arrive with its name attached.

Sometimes it exists as discomfort.

Sometimes as avoidance.

Sometimes as defensiveness.

Sometimes as fear of being judged.

Sometimes as the need to explain something away before one has even understood what was being questioned.

And sometimes a person can carry a burden for years before developing the consciousness to identify what that burden actually is.

I am not separate from the ecosystem I call my country.

I have inherited its language, its history, its institutions, its opportunities, its accomplishments and its narratives of greatness.

I cannot claim the parts that make me proud while insisting that everything that makes me uncomfortable has absolutely nothing to do with me.

I did not personally enslave anyone.

I did not personally invade Algeria.

I did not personally impose Haiti’s independence debt.

I did not personally order colonial massacres.

But I inhabit a society whose institutions and historical development were shaped, in part, by those actions.

And I have a responsibility to examine what remains of that inheritance.

That is not the same as claiming every French person has committed a crime.

It is recognising that collective inheritance creates questions of collective responsibility which cannot be answered merely by establishing individual innocence.

I no longer want the discomfort of confronting history to become another reason to refuse accountability.

To those who are demanding reparations

I hear you.

And I do not want my first response to be:

How much will this cost France?

Because I now recognise how extraordinary that question can sound when it is presented before we have fully acknowledged the cost already borne by those harmed.

I want to understand the losses.

I want to understand what can be returned.

I want to understand what can be repaired.

I want to understand what forms of restitution affected peoples are requesting, and what fair and accountable processes can determine responsibility.

I want our museums to confront the origins of their collections.

I want us to stop treating objects acquired through colonial violence as though their presence in France automatically makes them French property.

I want us to examine the wealth accumulated through slavery and colonial extraction.

I want historical records opened and properly investigated.

I want the truth taught without requiring the children of formerly colonised peoples to perform the work of correcting every omission.

I want the people and communities concerned to participate meaningfully in decisions about repair.

And I want us to understand that an apology without action can become another way of protecting the person offering it.

I do not want to apologise so that I can feel better.

I want to contribute to changes that make the apology meaningful.

To the French people who are afraid of what comes next

I understand your fear.

I understand that uncertainty can be exhausting.

I understand that we have our own children to feed, homes to maintain, bills to pay and lives to organise.

I understand that the thought of losing economic advantages can be frightening.

But I want to ask you something.

Why should another country’s continued dependency be the price of our reassurance?

Why should their autonomy threaten our identity?

Why should our national confidence depend upon the continuation of relationships that other people are asking to change?

And why, if we truly believe in France’s ability, are we so frightened of having to rely more responsibly upon it?

We have the capacity to adapt.

We have human beings capable of extraordinary creativity.

We have knowledge, infrastructure, productive capacity and opportunities to develop differently.

We can also build new partnerships that are better precisely because they are no longer based on inherited coercion.

But we must stop seeing the dignity of other nations as a loss to ourselves.

We must stop imagining that our historical position is a natural entitlement.

And we must stop expecting the countries that suffered under colonial rule to reassure us that our future will be comfortable.

They have spent long enough accounting for the consequences of our decisions.

Now we must account for our own.

And finally, to every people France has harmed

I want to say something to you that I wish my country had said much earlier.

Thank you for surviving.

Thank you for protecting what you could of your languages, your cultures, your identities and your relationships with your lands.

Thank you for resisting the idea that your humanity needed French validation.

Thank you for preserving knowledge through generations of interference.

Thank you for rebuilding what was destroyed.

Thank you for continuing to demand answers when the institutions responsible would have preferred silence.

And thank you for every act of courage through which you are reclaiming your own futures.

But I also recognise something.

You should never have needed extraordinary courage merely to exercise rights that already belonged to you.

You should not have had to fight France for your freedom.

You should not have had to pay France to recognise it.

You should not have had to accept foreign control over your land and resources as the condition of participating in international economic life.

You should not have had to spend generations explaining why your cultures, beliefs, languages and knowledge deserved respect.

And you should not have had to wait for France to become comfortable enough with its own history to acknowledge your suffering.

You do not owe us forgiveness.

You do not owe us reassurance.

You do not owe us continuing access to your resources.

You do not owe us the maintenance of our historical privileges.

You do not owe us gratitude for deciding to acknowledge what we should have recognised long ago.

France owes itself the responsibility of becoming a country that can sustain its existence without undermining the autonomy of others.

And that responsibility belongs to us.

So as I look at France today, with its economic difficulties, its political uncertainty, its changing international relationships and the need to reconsider how it sustains its own future, I do not wish to turn backwards.

I do not wish for the return of empire.

I do not wish to reclaim control over the countries that are moving away from us.

I wish for France to grow.

To mature.

To become conscious of its own history.

To recognise the humanity of others without needing to place itself above them.

And to learn that greatness is not measured by how many countries depend upon you.

Greatness is measured by what you are capable of contributing without making somebody else’s existence dependent upon your authority.

To Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Chad and every other nation pursuing a more autonomous future:

I wish you the courage to keep building.

I wish you the discernment to avoid replacing old dependencies with new ones.

I wish you the ability to protect your people while transforming your institutions.

I wish you ownership of your achievements.

And I wish you a future in which your children do not need to ask another country for permission to determine what becomes of their own land.

And to France:

It is our turn to take responsibility for ourselves.

If doing so is difficult, we will face the difficulty.

If doing so requires sacrifice, we will determine how to share that sacrifice fairly.

If doing so demands that we reorganise our systems, we will reorganise them.

But we will not demand that other nations abandon their autonomy to preserve our convenience.

Their freedom is not our punishment.

Their sovereignty is not our humiliation.

Their progress is not our defeat.

Their liberation is long overdue.

And if France is truly the extraordinary country we have spent centuries telling the world it is, then we should finally be capable of demonstrating that without requiring anyone else to live beneath us.

I am sorry for everything we did.

I am sorry for everything we refused to acknowledge.

I am sorry for everything we continue to benefit from without adequately accounting for its origins.

I am sorry for the lives we cannot restore, the futures we interrupted, the wealth we extracted and the burdens that remain.

And I recognise that there will always be more to investigate, more to acknowledge, and more to repair than one letter can contain.

But for the first time, I do not want the conversation to end when I say that I am sorry.

I want that to be where the responsibility begins.

May Africa thrive without needing France.

May Haiti receive justice without needing to beg for it.

May every people harmed by French colonialism exercise their autonomy without needing our approval.

And may France finally learn to be proud of what it creates for itself and contributes to others, rather than what it can claim, control or extract from them.

Because what is freedom worth if we can only sustain our own by limiting somebody else’s?

And what is greatness worth if we cannot remain great once others are free?

With profound remorse, recognition, gratitude, accountability and responsibility,

A French soul who no longer mistakes the loss of domination for the loss of greatness.

Museum of Doom III — The Letter France Owed the World, but Never Had the Courage to Write.

SHS – Human First