Driencourt, the spurned lover: seven years in Algiers, "I love Algeria" — and today he tears it apart. What a love story.

Marc Lefèvre — Paris, France — 2026-09-08

Ah, love. Love, that purest, most disinterested of feelings—especially when it is declared at press conferences, monetised in books and avenged in columns. For we really must talk about Xavier Driencourt, that great lover of Algeria who writes this morning in the JDD that "the Tebboune regime" is playing a "double game" over dual nationals. A double game? Him? Never. He loves Algeria. He said it. He shouted it. He even had it printed. For seven years—two ambassadorial terms, from 2008 to 2012 and then from 2017 to 2020—he represented France in Algiers, collected Algerian friends, delivered a farewell at the Résidence des Oliviers so moving that you would have thought it a scene from a melodrama, and declared, with no one threatening him: "I say that I love Algeria. It is the only country, in my whole diplomatic career, where I have kept so many friends, real friends." His own words. His own friends. And it is this very lover who, six years after packing his bags, writes that the country of his "real friends" is "instrumentalising" dual nationality. We have seen more dignified breakups. Above all, we have seen less self-interested lovers.

For that is where the comedy turns delicious, and it must be savoured slowly. The JDD column opens with an assertion presented as a fact: "A new Algerian law, since January 2026, makes it possible to refuse entry into Algerian territory to any dual national who does not hold a valid Algerian passport or a visa." A "new law." That is what seven years of diplomatic career and a diploma from the ENA produce: the transformation of a banal administrative measure into a legislative war machine. The truth is more prosaic, and more awkward for the columnist: there is no new law. There is the end of a temporary facility—adopted on 30 May 2024 to meet a consular emergency, extended until 31 December 2025—that allowed entry with an expired document. Since 1 January 2026, the ordinary rule applies: a valid passport, or a visa. As in France. As everywhere. A diplomat of this calibre reads a regulatory text with his eyes closed, one hand tied behind his back, even in his sleep. So when he writes "new legislation" to describe the end of a facility, he is not mistaken, heavens no—he is distorting, with the precision of a master craftsman. "Law" sounds far scarier than "end of a facility." The double game, in the end, is perhaps his own: the double game of language.

And this is where our lover trips over his own red carpet. For what he denounces as "à la carte dual nationality," as a "refusal to let people return to their own country," is exactly what France negotiated, organised and locked down for decades—and his own column recounts it without seeing the farce. At the Évian Accords, it was Louis Joxe who wanted to preserve French nationality for the "minorities" and to grant it to the Muslims who had stayed loyal to France. It was the Algerian delegation that contested that dual nationality. So France invented, as early as 1961, a system tailor-made for its own interests—one foot in the former colony, one foot in the till—and Algeria has given the same answer since 1962: an Algerian is an Algerian, full stop. Sixty-four years of consistency, and Driencourt is the one handing out lessons in legal clarity? The country that built the system for its own profit is now astonished that it has consequences. In ordinary homes, they call that blowback. In embassies, they call it elementary geopolitics—though it is true that Mr Driencourt is no longer posted at an embassy.

Let us come to the facts, since our great lover forgets them in favour of feelings. He speaks of a "regime" that "refuses entry" to dual nationals. The reality, easily verifiable, is that Algerian dual nationals keep entering Algeria en masse—summer after summer, by the millions, as always. The 2024 measure had been created precisely to smooth those returns; it expired because it was temporary, as it had always been. And who was asking for it to be extended? Algerian members of parliament—Tawfik Kheddim, Abdelouahab Yagoubi—who wrote to the President of the Republic to make life easier for Algerians abroad. That is the "regime" Driencourt describes as an exclusion machine: a regime whose elected representatives are demanding that the doors be opened wider. A regime that supposedly "excludes" dual nationals, yet whose parliamentarians plead for their easy passage through the gates? You must choose, Xavier. Or rather: you must stop performing the comedy—that one, even at the Résidence des Oliviers, nobody would believe.

So let us ask the question no one dares ask a spurned lover: what changed between the man who swore in 2022, "I bear no grudge towards Algeria, I say that I love this country," and the prosecutor who writes in 2026 that the very same country is playing a "double game"? Between "Xavier the Algerian"—the nickname his Algiers friends had given him—and the columnist who speaks of "instrumentalisation"? What changed is not Algeria. It is his books. Since his departure, Driencourt has published L'énigme algérienne, L'Algérie 1830-2026, France-Algérie, le double aveuglement: a flourishing little business in need of a raw material—a threatening, calculating, "fragile," "double" Algeria. An ex-ambassador who loves Algeria does not sell; everyone knows that. An ex-ambassador who denounces it sells very well; everyone knows that too. He has chosen: the bookshop shelf over the Oliviers. That is his strictest right. But let him not come to us speaking of love—love does not invoice its columns.

And there is one small detail that the comedy of 8 September cannot hide: its date. The column appears on the very morning the Paris administrative court is due to rule on whether the expulsion of the Algerian influencer Doualemn—a fourth removal order, the first three having been annulled by the French courts—was lawful. As if by chance. Driencourt writes about dual nationals on the day the French courts may well contradict the very policy he preaches. So he sets his frame in advance: "the regime's double game," "à la carte dual nationality"—so that, whatever the verdict, the culprit is already identified: Algiers. That is the ideologue's method: preparing the excuse before the judgment. But judges do not read JDD columns. They read the law. And French law has already annulled three times the orders targeting this dual national—without Algeria lifting so much as a little finger. It is France correcting France. Driencourt should rejoice at that, he who loves the rule of law so dearly: it works, even against the policy he served. Unless his love stops precisely where the law begins. That would be a pity. Above all, it would be very funny.

So, one last caress, for the road—on the back, as one caresses those one will never see again. When you have spent seven years in a country, left behind "real friends" whom you "continue to see regularly," been hailed on your departure as a friend of Algeria—and then you write, methodically, column after column, that this country "instrumentalises," "distorts," "plays a double game"—there is a word for that. It is not "geopolitical analysis." It is not "expertise." It is, to stay in the register he so enjoys, an infidelity—and everyone knows what the vows of the unfaithful are worth. Algeria, for its part, has not changed: it applies its rules, as always, and its deputies defend its children abroad. What has changed is the man—or rather his autumn catalogue. We do not resent him for changing his mind: that is the most absolute freedom. We resent him for lying about the facts in order to justify that change—for inventing a "legislation" that does not exist, for turning an expired facility into a conspiracy, he who reads legal texts with his eyes closed.

The JDD may go on offering him its columns; he needs them, and they need him. As for us, we shall go on holding up against him his own words, his own dates, his own friendships—and his declaration of love, which one day will have to be reprinted, perhaps in the "humour" section of his publishing house. There is no better weapon against a hypocrite than his archives. There is no better reading for a spurned lover than his letters. His are public, dated, signed—and they condemn him with an elegance he will never forgive us for.