Kamel Daoud, French Goncourt Prize Winner: Does Freedom of Expression Have a Passport?

Nour El-Houda Ziani — Alger, Algérie — 2026-09-06

"I am sad for my country," Le Point headlined the day after Kamel Daoud was sentenced in absentia to three years in prison by the Oran court. The phrase has the elegance of great sorrow — and the aptness of great omissions. Sad, the writer is, and that is his right. But what the Parisian press presents as a blow struck against Literature with a capital L is first and foremost a dispute of clinical precision between a Franco-Algerian writer and a survivor of the black decade who was treated, for years, by the novelist's psychiatrist wife (AFP).

Let us recall the setting, which Le Point knows by heart, since part of Houris unfolds there: Oran, the black decade (1992–2002, some 200,000 dead by official figures), Aube — mute ever since an Islamist slit her throat on 31 December 1999 — a novel translated into 32 languages yet never published in Algeria, where it circulates in pirated copies (RTBF). Against that fiction, a reality: Saâda Arbane, who lost her parents in a bombing, breathes and speaks thanks to a cannula, and maintains — proceedings to prove it, in France and in Algeria alike — that the novel draws on what she confided in a medical setting (AFP). The writer firmly contests it; the judges will decide. But the debate itself should take place — not be smothered under "creative freedom" banners.

For the French double standard in this affair is spectacular. Freedom of expression is protected "unwaveringly" — the words of Culture Minister Catherine Pégard, on 23 April 2026 (BFMTV) — when the case involves a Goncourt laureate tried in Oran. It becomes singularly more malleable when France is the one judging: the Gayssot Act of 13 July 1990 punishes Holocaust denial; Article 421-2-5 of the penal code, created in 2014, punishes the glorification of terrorism, and the trials are not lacking — against Dieudonné, for whom one year in prison was sought in June 2026 (20 Minutes), or against Jean-Marc Rouillan, whose cassation appeal was rejected in December 2025 (Le Figaro). Even medical confidentiality, which Saâda Arbane invokes, enjoys penal protection in France (Article 226-13 of the penal code). Nowhere, in the columns choking with indignation on the author's behalf, has anyone explained why those limits are French and therefore legitimate, while the ones Algeria sets by law are Algerian and therefore unworthy.

In reality, freedom of expression has never needed a passport: it is exercised within the framework of each state's laws — France's included. What is new is the claim to extraterritoriality. Kamel Daoud is Franco-Algerian: the law of his first country applies to him as the law of any state applies to its own nationals. And Paris concedes this readily enough when it suits it: for Christophe Gleizes, the French journalist sentenced in Algeria to seven years in prison for glorifying terrorism, France did not cry fire — it sent its justice minister to negotiate in Algiers on 18 May 2026 (20 Minutes). The jurisdiction of Algerian courts is scandalous only when it targets an author someone has decided to canonize.

That leaves the instrumentalization, which turns this affair into a firework display of French domestic politics. Kamel Daoud built part of his Parisian reputation on ferocious columns against the Algerian authorities — going so far, in January 2025, as to take aim at the government in Algiers and at the French "left-wing press," according to 20 Minutes. Part of the right, campaigning towards 2027, has made him its resident dissident; in early April 2026, Le Figaro gave him a long interview in which he declared that "Algiers can file a complaint against Kamel Daoud in France" — remarks for which he is being prosecuted for defamation before the Paris criminal court, where the prosecution sought his acquittal on 5 June (Franceinfo). Le Point, meanwhile, mourns him on its front page. All that chorus drowns out a single voice: that of the woman who says she was dispossessed of her story.

The duty of remembrance, brandished in one direction only, becomes a privilege. France, so quick to take umbrage on behalf of a writer, has never held a minute of silence for the some 200,000 Algerians dead whom the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation buried under the modest phrase "national tragedy." A novel that reopens those wounds from the intimate experience of a patient, without her consent — that is the complainant's thesis, which nothing prevents one from debating — and there lies the real subject for millions of Algerians. That subject is not settled with ministerial press releases.

Freedom of expression has no passport: it has a framework, laws and limits — in Algeria as in France. What is priceless, on the other hand, is consent. One cannot at once celebrate a writer who speaks out and refuse to hear the woman who, for her part, lost her own voice — in the most literal sense. Le Point, so skilled at turning a phrase, could at least spare her one: Saâda Arbane has already proved she knows how to write.