“Relations between France and Algeria can be good or bad, in no case can they be banal. These words from 1974 are from Bouteflika, then a young foreign minister. The context is particular: he wants to make his country the guide of the non-aligned, the thinking head of another diplomacy, far from the colonies.
Yes, but here it is. Ten years earlier, or forty years later, these words still have the value of an axiom: between France and Algeria, although the two parties sometimes agree on paper, other times in the clenched hands that we display in front of the presidential palaces, it's always complicated. Since the Evian agreements, they have maintained a passionate and tumultuous relationship made up of love and hatred against a backdrop of gas contracts, immigration and poorly healed identity wounds. A relationship where all shots will be allowed, but in secret.
These deceptions, these secret stories, Naoufel Brahimi El Mili has decided to finally reveal them. From Giscard d'Estaing and the OAS, to the Algerian spies in Paris, passing through the small services of Alexandre de Marenches and the DGSE, he reveals fifty years of confidential maneuvers, low blows always remained in the shadows .
Everything that should never have been said.

Naoufel Brahimi El Mili is a doctor in political science, teaching at Sciences Po Paris. He is the author of Le Printemps arabe: une manipulation? (Max Milo, 2012).