In 2020, France quietly handed over 24 human skulls to Algeria—remains of anti-colonial resistance fighters kept in a Paris museum for more than a hundred years. Officially, they were catalogued as war trophies. The term says it all: the spoils of victory, as if the act of beheading opponents and exhibiting their remains could be dressed up as civilisation.
These were not anonymous bones. They were the heads of men who dared to resist when France claimed Algeria not simply as a colony, but as part of France itself. From 1830 to 1962, that claim lasted 132 years. The French did not just occupy Algeria; they tried to incorporate it into the map of France, three départements on paper, indistinguishable from Normandy or Provence, except for the mass killings that made the fiction possible.
For many generations, these fighters’ names were completely missing from official records, their stories reduced to footnotes, if mentioned at all. What remained was only the official French version of history, polished and repeated in schools, politics, and public monuments. Yet in Algeria, memory worked differently. Families told their children about the battles, the executions, and the exiled. Whispered recollections passed down in kitchens and courtyards kept the past alive in a way no archive could contain.
No matter how many records were erased, locked away or stories are pushed aside, these buried stories have a way of coming back up. Irrespective of how hard governments try to keep them out of public view. it only reveals one thing, the mechanics of collective memory and political power.
After years of pressures from Algerian historians, campaigners, and descendants of anti-colonial fighters, in 2020, France returned 24 skulls to Algeria. The gesture was framed it as an act of reconciliation and a pledge to confront the colonial past by Emmanuel Macron. However, many in Algeria saw it as far from enough. With thousands of artefacts, documents, and even human remains, still locked in French museums and archives, far from the soil they came from.
France’s rule in Algeria was never just about controlling land; it was about controlling the story. By presenting its conquest as a “civilising mission,” France excused acts of violence as steps toward progress. The decapitated fighters, displayed in Paris, served as both a warning to other rebels and a twisted proof of victory. And also material evidence that resistance could be crushed, and that those who defied the empire could be turned into objects.
Algeria see recovering these remains as more than a symbolic act. It’s not just ceremony. Bringing these remains home is a way of giving back the dignity stolen from those who fought for Algeria’s freedom. It also forces a reckoning with the tendency to smooth over or politely forget, the brutal parts of colonial history. Every skull that makes the journey back is a quiet protest against that forgetting, a statement that history belongs to no single author and that it can be fought over, piece by piece.
The fight over memory is ongoing. Even as the skulls were repatriated, French officials avoided any formal apology for colonisation. Macron has talked about “truth” and “recognition,” yet he has stopped short of the kind of apology that might carry legal or political weight.
In Algeria, the skulls were received with solemn respect, yet the air carried a sense that the real work was unfinished. People see it as step in the right direction, but not an end. And the past, especially one built on colonial wounds, has a way of slipping back into the present. It shows up in speeches, in protests, even in family stories. You can put it in a glass case, but you can’t keep it from finding its way back into the world.
