Benjamin Stora, French historian commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron to write an official report on the memory of colonization and the Algerian War published Histoire de la guerre d’Algérie (1992), La Gangrène et l’Oubli: la mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (1991), co-directed, with Abdelwahab Meddeb, History of Jewish-Muslim Relations: From the Origins to the Present Day (Princeton University Press, 2013),The Arrival, from Constantine, to Paris, The Keys Regained and with Thomas Snégaroff France/Algeria: anatomy of a tear (2026). 

On the plane, at the moment of takeoff, I watch the passengers. Some are crying. Faces are sad, exhausted. Very quickly, a great silence sets in. The anxiety, the violence of the situation crush any desire for conversation. No one dares speak anymore. Then, behind the windows, night appears. So suddenly that we couldn’t watch the Algerian land recede into the distance. This land, already absent. And so I have not kept in my memory the ‘last image’ of a vanished country. It is still night when we arrive at Orly. My uncle Robert is waiting for us there. By way of welcome, a Red Cross hostess offers each of us a piece of candy. We were in France, and lacking the City of Light, seated in the back seat, through the car window, I watched the darkness of the ring road until we reached our destination: Montreuil, in the Paris suburbs…”

On the plane, at the moment of takeoff, I watch the passengers. Some are crying. Faces are sad, exhausted. Very quickly, a great silence sets in. The anxiety, the violence of the situation crush any desire for conversation. No one dares speak anymore. Then, behind the windows, night appears. So suddenly that we couldn’t watch the Algerian land recede into the distance. This land, already absent. And so I have not kept in my memory the ‘last image’ of a vanished country. It is still night when we arrive at Orly. My uncle Robert is waiting for us there. By way of welcome, a Red Cross hostess offers each of us a piece of candy. We were in France, and lacking the City of Light, seated in the back seat, through the car window, I watched the darkness of the ring road until we reached our destination: Montreuil, in the Paris suburbs…”

In the space of about 10 years, young Benjamin Stora passes from childhood to adulthood, from a Constantine at war to the Paris of May ’68. He tells his own story — one of exile, and of a man’s coming of age as he embraces a new life.

The Keys Regained: When Benjamin Stora’s mother died a few years ago, he discovered, at the back of her nightstand drawer, the keys to their apartment in Constantine, left behind in 1962. These rediscovered keys opened the doors to his memory. War memories: when, in August 1955, soldiers set up a machine gun in young Stora’s bedroom to fire on fleeing Algerians, he is four and a half years old and doesn’t understand. Happy memories: the gentle warmth of the hammam among the women, summer trips to the beach, the neighborhood cinema showing American westerns, the flavor of the food and the joy of celebrations… Between the mother’s Arabic and the father’s French, the blonde........

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