For Jean-Michel Aphatie, France "has made hundreds of Oradour-sur-Glane" in Algeria

The bigger it is, the more it goes down. Accustomed to outrageous statements that immediately propel him into trending on social networks, columnist Jean-Michel Aphatie has been making headlines again since Tuesday morning, February 25, after declaring on RTL's morning show that France "made hundreds of Oradour-sur-Glane" in Algeria during colonization.

Invited to debate with the vice-president (LR) of the Île-de-France region, the political columnist of the Quotidien show with Yann Barthès was this time questioned by Thomas Sotto and Amandine Bégot on the subject of relations between France and Algeria . He then declared: "You know, every year in France we commemorate what happened in Oradour-sur-Glane, that is to say the massacre of an entire village. But we have committed hundreds of them, in Algeria! Are we aware of that?" Faced with protests from Florence Portelli, outraged by the comparison, and Thomas Sotto who maintained that it was not valid, Jean-Michel Aphatie retorted: "We did not behave like Nazis... The Nazis behaved like us, we did it in Algeria" , thus insinuating that the genocide committed by Nazi Germany was only an imitation of the colonial crimes that France allegedly perpetrated in Algeria.

In 2016, Jean-Michel Aphatie had already sparked heated controversy by declaring that if he were President of the Republic, he would raze the Palace of Versailles.

This time, his accusations of French crimes in Algeria therefore draw a parallel between French colonization in Algeria and the massacre of 643 inhabitants of the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in 1944 by a detachment of SS. The women and children were burned alive in a church, the men were killed by machine guns after being rounded up for extermination, on the pretext that the Germans were looking for weapons caches in the village.

Also read: In Oradour-sur-Glane, the great challenge of saving the ruins

The main accusations of violence committed by the French in Algeria concern in particular the events that occurred in Sétif, Guelma and Kherrata, in May and June 1945. Algerian nationalist demonstrations took a bloody turn after the Liberation, notably following the death of a young Muslim in Sétif, killed by the police while he was taking part in an independence march. Algerians responded with deadly riots that left around a hundred Europeans dead, and were brutally repressed by the French police, probably causing several thousand Algerian deaths - according to estimates that are the subject of heated debate among historians.