In the aftermath of the Second World War, after years of an immutable colonial order, the forty or so territories and some 110 million men and women placed under French domination were suddenly shaken.

Everywhere the colonised peoples thirst for emancipation. Remaining deaf to the wind of history, France will nevertheless try hard to preserve its colonies by all means. A blindness that fed decades of hatred and violence, fuelling a quarter-century long conflict punctuated by a wave of unprecedented repression. This painful page of our history has left an indelible mark in the hearts and souls of our people that never ceases to shape us. So much so that even today, the wounds that are still alive bear witness to a past that never passes.

Part 1: The fracture (1931-1954)

As early as the 1930s, when the French colonial empire was at its height, the first demands for independence were heard, but France remained deaf to these demonstrations. The Second World War was to turn the tables and call into question a system of domination that until then had seemed immutable. A cycle of repression began that would last a quarter of a century. From Senegal to Indochina and from Madagascar to Algeria via Morocco and the Ivory Coast, France tried at all costs to preserve its colonies. In vain.

Part 2: The rupture (1954-2017)

After eight years of deadly conflicts, the French colonial empire is falling apart on all sides.
The defeat of Diên Biên Phu forces France to abandon Indochina and then its Indian trading posts. For all the colonised peoples, it is a spark: France, however powerful it is, can be defeated. The Algerian War broke out immediately. From Africa to the West Indies via the Indian Ocean and Polynesia, the fire spread but against the wind of history, the Republic responded by force when it did not use cunning to try to preserve its possessions.

NOTE OF INTENTION OF THE AUTHORS :

The history of French decolonisation begins with the Second World War; but this time the occupying power is France. A brutal occupation, which ended in blood and tears and which finally had to be told in all its breadth and complexity.
In the course of our research and filming around the world, we set out to understand the destinies of these men and women in what was a thirty-year war. A conflict during which the Republic deployed a repressive system of unprecedented violence in order to preserve its colonies at all costs.
Beyond a political history, we have chosen to gather the still vivid memories of this founding event by interviewing the witnesses who lived through these events from the inside, but also their descendants. At the end of a meticulous investigation, on both sides of the colonial mirror, about forty of them agreed to give us their testimonies. All of them are bearers of a wounded memory.
Echoed by largely unpublished archives in colour; this sum of personal accounts constitutes a great collective history, a common history that each one can now appropriate to understand this indelible trauma that never ceases to shape us.

David Korn-Brzoza and Pascal Blanchard