PARIS — Boualem Sansal has spent his life fighting for the right to speak freely. Today, at 81, suffering from cancer, he is paying the price for that courage — imprisoned in Algeria after a sham trial, condemned for doing what he has always done: telling the truth about power.
In March 2025, an Algerian court sentenced the Franco-Algerian writer to five years in prison for “undermining national unity” and “attacking state security.” His crime was to speak — calmly and publicly — about the legacy of Algeria’s authoritarianism and the suffocating control its rulers still exert over public life. For that, he was seized, tried without due process, and locked away.
For decades, Sansal has stood as one of the Maghreb’s most lucid moral voices. A trained engineer and economist, he began writing fiction in the 1990s, after years in the civil service. His novels — among them Le Serment des barbares, Rue Darwin, and 2084: La fin du monde — explore the corrosion of memory, the rise of fanaticism, and the betrayals of postcolonial power. He is not a polemicist but a novelist in the classic French tradition: humane, ironic, and precise.
Yet in the eyes of Algiers’ rulers, literature itself has become subversion.
The proceedings against Sansal were political theater from the start. His lawyers were restricted, his health ignored, his conviction foreordained. Rights groups and observers described the trial as a performance designed not to establish guilt but to deliver a message: that even the most celebrated writers are not beyond the reach of the regime.
Gestures that cost nothing, tepid statements
What makes this tragedy still more shameful is the indifference of the French government.
President Emmanuel Macron, who once promised to renew relations with Algeria “on the basis of truth,” has offered only tepid statements of “regret.” The French foreign ministry called the verdict “unjustified,” and the prime minister asked for clemency — gestures that cost nothing. Beyond these formal protests, there has been silence.
No sustained campaign to free a French citizen whose health and freedom are visibly in danger.
No emergency session in the National Assembly, no special envoy, no sustained campaign to free a French citizen whose health and freedom are visibly in danger.
The Élysée’s calculation is transparent. Macron’s government, already entangled in disputes with Algiers over migration, energy, and memory, prefers not to risk a full-blown diplomatic rupture. The plight of an aging writer is inconvenient to a foreign policy built on quiet pragmatism. Keeping the Sansal affair out of the headlines has become an act of policy.
When an authoritarian government imprisons a French novelist for his words, the least the French Republic can do — the very least — is to speak clearly and loudly.
France has prided itself for centuries on being the home of free thought, the refuge of the persecuted. The silence surrounding Sansal’s case betrays that tradition.
Criticism is treason
Algeria’s leadership, meanwhile, continues to wield repression as a tool of statecraft. Under President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, the regime has used sweeping “unity” and “security” laws to silence journalists, activists, and artists. Dissent is criminalized; criticism is treason. And in moments of tension with France, dual nationals and French citizens are convenient targets — political hostages dressed up as criminals.
Diplomacy without principle is not diplomacy — it is avoidance.
Sansal’s imprisonment is part of that pattern. By jailing a figure of global stature — a man who embodies the shared cultural space between Algeria and France — the regime asserts dominance over the very idea of intellectual independence. It is not just one man who has been silenced; it is a whole tradition of dialogue and dissent that is being suffocated.
If France accepts that, it accepts complicity.
Macron’s defenders will say that diplomacy must be handled delicately, that back-channel discussions are under way, that public confrontation would be counterproductive. But diplomacy without principle is not diplomacy — it is avoidance. To hide behind quiet “engagement” while an 81-year-old writer languishes in prison is not prudence. It is cowardice.
The lesson of Boualem Sansal’s ordeal reaches beyond Algeria. It is about the ease with which democracies trade moral clarity for temporary calm. The authoritarian Algerian regime thrives not only on repression but on the indifference of those who might object.
Sansal once wrote that “truth always returns, because it has no other homeland.” For now, that truth sits behind bars.
Source: Death Penalty News, Editor; Opinion, October 31, 2025
"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
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