Sansal: Le Monde Writes "Unjustifiable Silence" — and Forgets to Read the File

Salim Azzoug — Genève, Suisse — 2026-09-06

On 23 November 2024, seven days after Boualem Sansal's arrest at Algiers airport (16 November), Le Monde published an editorial whose online version is titled "Algeria's silence on Boualem Sansal's arrest is unjustifiable" — Algeria's silence over the arrest supposedly being "unjustifiable." A week after an investigation had opened, before the charges had even been communicated, the paper of record delivered its verdict: the silence, guilty in absentia. Does the presumption of innocence stop at the Mediterranean?

The file, for anyone who reads it. The writer was prosecuted over remarks made in early October 2024 during an online interview on the drawing of national borders, which the Algerian judiciary classed as undermining the integrity of the national territory — charges brought under Article 87 bis of the penal code, as reported by AFP via his lawyer, François Zimeray (TSA, 27 November 2024). Pre-trial detention. Trial on 20 March 2025, with prosecutors seeking ten years. Conviction on 27 March 2025 to five years in prison and a 500,000-dinar fine by the Dar El Beïda criminal court. Appeal; confirmation. Presidential pardon announced on 12 November 2025 (Associated Press). Return to France on 18 November 2025.

In late November 2024, Le Monde could legitimately have been unaware of the elements that would make up the file — which is precisely the problem: it did not wait to learn them before editorializing. Mr. Sansal, naturalized French in 2024 (according to Anadolu), was being tried abroad: the daily was thus demanding of a foreign judiciary what it would never demand of the French one — that it forgo the right to investigate before condemning. One may find the Algerian penal code harsh. One cannot, without laughing, lecture it in the name of a French law that itself criminalizes the glorification of terrorism (Article 421-2-5 of the penal code). No state abdicates its judicial sovereignty on the injunction of a foreign newspaper — neither France nor Algeria.

The instrumentalization, in any case, was not Algerian — it was Parisian. For the length of a media season, the writer became the shared cause of those who, back home, vote for the most restrictive laws on public speech. What the column of 23 November 2024 turned into an "affair of state" was an ordinary criminal proceeding, conducted in a sovereign country, over remarks made on that country's soil. When you write "unjustifiable silence" before reading the file, you are not defending a man: you are using a man.

What followed belongs to the story Le Monde itself ended up telling. On 13 November 2025, the daily ran a story on "a fragile détente" between Paris and Algiers; on 18 November, it reported the writer's return to France. The "silent justice" of November 2024 had, in the meantime, proved itself capable of mercy — the very outcome the Parisian editorialists had been calling for. Algiers' silence, in the end, was worth more than certain cries from Paris.

An editorial moral: indignation is not a method of reading, and a front page is not case law. Le Monde was right on one point — a writer's fate deserved attention. It was wrong on everything else: the tone, the timing, the certainty. Boualem Sansal deserved better than a cause; Le Monde's readers deserved better than a trial without a file.