Recently in France, debates on the legacies of colonialism have gained renewed political traction. This has taken the form of a series of state-led joint historical commissions addressing the colonial past in Algeria, Cameroon, and Haiti. These commissions are part of the latest wave of historical commissions (or commissioned history) set up to inquire into the legacies of colonialism and document their enduring consequences. However, the phenomenon of historical commissions is not new. Since the 1990s, they have been installed across post-authoritarian, post-conflict contexts, as well as part of diplomatic relationships between nations. While this piece is grounded in illustrative examples of commissions in France established to inquire into the colonial past, it speaks more broadly to the logics underpinning the work of historical commissions across all other categories.
Scholarship often treats these commissions as primarily investigative, aimed at assisting governments in addressing responsibility, acknowledgment, and redress of past wrongs. However, this perspective tends to overlook their role in shaping public understandings of the past.
This piece approaches historical commissions as infrastructures of public history through which states seek to reshape how societies relate to contested pasts. In this sense, the past is not simply revisited but actively reinterpreted and mobilized to influence present political and moral landscapes. Historical commissions transform contested pasts into politically actionable historical knowledge by producing state-authorized accounts[1] and communicating them through public history practices. In doing so, they function as state-managed arenas where moral and ethical relationships[2] to the past are (re)negotiated.
States’ Commissioned Past
Historical commissions are often embedded in broader state-led politics of the past through which contemporary governments engage with the legacies of historical wrongdoing in ways shaped by the political context. Sociologist and historian John Torpey uses the term “politics of the past” refers to how historical events, memories, and interpretations are mobilized in present political life. Such processes include practices of acknowledgment, recognition, apology, reparations, and memorialization where states intervene in ongoing processes of reckoning with past wrongdoings.
Yet these mechanisms are highly sensitive to shifts in socio-political relations. The Franco-Algerian joint commission of historians offers an example. The commission was set up, in 2022 following the recommendation of historian Benjamin Stora, with the objective of working through the archives of both countries from the colonial period and the war of independence. Two years later, in 2014, its work was interrupted due to increasing diplomatic tensions between the two countries. This start-stop pattern illustrates the extent to which the work of historical commissions remains contingent on broader political relations.
Politics of the past operate between two overlapping logics. A normative one, in which the state assumes moral and political responsibility and positions itself as a recognizing authority, moral agent, and facilitator of justice and recognition. And an instrumental one, in which the past is used to legitimize current political regimes, distance the state from previous regimes or historical events, consolidate national identity, and stabilize political authority. In practice, these logics are rarely separated from one another as state-led mechanisms often combine both. Historical commissions play a central role across these logics. By producing and circulating authorized historical knowledge, they shape which accounts of the past become publicly legitimate, whose experiences of the past are recognized, and what forms of redress are imaginable.
While the Franco-Haitian joint commission has not yet begun its investigation, its foundational documents clearly illustrate these dynamics. The commission was established to examine the effects of the indemnity France imposed on Haiti in 1825. Following its successful revolution and independence, this indemnity was intended to compensate former French slave owners for the loss of their plantations and enslaved people. In the presidential statement of April 2025 that announced its creation, the French state assumes a role recognizing authority to assign historical acknowledgement, as a moral agent that condemns past injustice while distancing the Republic from the Monarchy (which was responsible for installing the indemnity payments), and as a facilitator of a process of recognition through the work of the commission. By framing the mandate of the joint commission around the establishment of “truth” and the building of “a more peaceful future,” (instead of being articulated around reparations as requested by Haitian authorities and civil society organizations), France effectively sets the terms of reckoning, determining what counts as justice, who leads the inquiry, and which forms of redress are possible.
This dynamic is also evident in a presidential statement from July 2022, in which French President Emmanuel Macron proposes establishing a Franco-Cameroonian joint commission of historians to examine the war in Cameroon during the struggle for independence (1945–71)[3]. In his speech, Macron presents this initiative to Cameroonian President Biya as a sign of commitment, stating that “[w]ithin 24 months a report will be submitted. I will receive the report at the Elysee Palace and will study it carefully. Based on this report – because this was one of your requests – I will move forward with a fact of recognition that are grounded in historical fact”[4]. While there have been longstanding demands from researchers and civil society to shed light on these historical events, by presenting the commission as a French-initiated proposal, France retains agency over both the commission’s establishment and what would happen afterwards. France is, therefore, positioned as the moral authority to intervene in a process of recognition of the war.
Even though the recognition-oriented approach of the commission is central in Macron’s statement, the final report published in February 2026 reveals its instrumental logic. While the commission was presented by Macron as a recognition-oriented mechanism, the report situates the work of the commission as part of “a wider effort to rethink France’s relationship with African societies” over rising “anti-French sentiment”, emphasizing the need to “produce a common narrative”[5]. Historical reckoning becomes, explicitly, a political tool. The state thus operates simultaneously as narrator and mediator of collective memory, as a gatekeeper of historical meaning, structuring the conditions under which the past becomes politically and publicly intelligible.
Public History as Arena
To be effective, politics of the past require channels through which authorized historical accounts reach broader society. Public history becomes an arena through which the commission’s findings are circulated and embedded in the public sphere, making the past visible and publicly accessible. This transfer typically occurs through the actionable recommendations issued by historical commissions. Broadly, such practices can be grouped into three interrelated forms: shifts in the vernacular and the framing of the past in public discourse; official interventions, such as apologies or acknowledgement statements; and symbolic or performative practices, including commemorations and memorialization, in which historical knowledge is embedded in public space and collective experience.
The recommendations of the Franco-Cameroonian joint commission illustrate how these three forms are translated into practice. The recommended measures span from archives, curricula, and official recognition to sites of memory and commemoration[6]. Some of these recommendations address how the war is named and framed in state-endorsed historical discourse, including the adoption of the phrasing “war of decolonization” to refer to the conflict and its place within a broader pattern of French colonial violence. Others propose acts of recognition by the French State and French Army, demanding state-level acknowledgement of specific forms of violence (although not directly requesting an official apology). A third set addresses collective memory in the public sphere through memorialization, commemorative sites, and a proposed National Day of Remembrance, by which historical knowledge is translated into spatially and temporally embedded public experience accessible beyond archival or academic settings.
Taken together, these outline how the historical knowledge produced by the commissions is intended to circulate beyond the report itself and become embedded in public life.
The Afterlife of Historical Commissions
Even though historical commissions occupy an intermediary position between the state and the public, translating official mandates into publicly circulated historical knowledge, the implementation of the commission’s recommendations remains contingent on political will. This contributes further to an inherently ambivalent character of these mechanisms. The work of historical commissions opens spaces for recognition, responsibility, and reckoning with past wrongdoing in the political and public spheres. But they operate from within (and reproduce) forms of state control over how the past is interpreted. The state authorizes critical inquiry while simultaneously defining the limits of what counts as a relevant past, what forms of responsibility are admissible, what conclusions are permissible, and how these things are all transferred and circulated in the public domain.
Nevertheless, once made public, the findings of historical commissions circulate through public history channels. The reports can be reinterpreted, contested, and mobilized by members of the public, civil society actors, scholars, affected communities, and other political actors, oftentimes in ways that expose the political and investigative limits of the commissions themselves. The question is not whether historical commissions are sufficient (they rarely are), but what conditions they create for further action.
[1] “Authorized accounts” refers to the idea of the state authorizes a specific historical discourse through the selection of a groups of “expert” historians (or other disciplines) to carry out a historical investigation under political mandate. In doing so, the state delineates the legitimate questions to be asked, as well as the methods and interpretive frameworks through which the past is examined.
[2] The term “moral and ethical relationships” is understood as the way in which societies, and groups within them, position themselves toward past wrongdoing; raising questions such as who was harmed, who bears responsibility, and how these are acknowledged.
[3] See page 11 of the Franco-Cameroonian joint commission’s report.
[4] See page 11 of the Franco-Cameroonian joint commission’s report. Emphasis added.
[5] See page 13 of the Franco-Cameroonian joint commission’s report.
[6] See page 847-48 of the Franco-Cameroonian joint commission’s report.
Featured Image Credit: Edouard Duval-Carrié, “Tropical Convention,” 2021.
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