ORAN, Algeria — I was born eight years after the 1962 Algerian declaration of independence. I didn’t experience the war, but it was present in my imagination, through my parents, their friends and their discussions, and through the state: in school, on television, on national holidays and in official speeches. As for many people my age, everything I heard brought on saturation and then rejection.

When I was a child, one way to get people to laugh was to make fun of war veterans and their tendency to exaggerate or invent acts of bravery in the past in order to gain privileges in the present. As young as school-age, we could sense the lying. This intuition was reinforced by our parents, who told us about fake mujahideens — supposed former combatants — more and more of whom were claiming rights, and also by the spectacle of the injustices brought about by those rights: privileged access to housing and employment, tax exemptions, special social protections, among other things.

I was made to feel guilty for not having been born earlier and not having participated in the war. Indebted to those who fought France, I was ordered to revere my elders. So I’m part of the generation for whom the memory of the war in Algeria — and, according to our schoolbooks, its 1.5 million martyrs — is shrouded in suspicion. We grew up convinced that this story was no longer an epic, but about profits.

Today, the France of Emmanuel Macron — a president who, like me, has no experience of the war — has decided to recognize an important event: the torture and execution of Maurice Audin, a young French Communist, by the French Army during the Battle of Algiers in 1957.