The award-winning film ‘Days of Glory’ is credited with changing French law that previously allowed discrimination between the pensions of former soldiers, based almost entirely on the colour of their skin. The outgoing French president, Jacques Chirac, not noted for championing a cause célèbre, announced the change on the very day the film went on general release.

‘Days of Glory’ follows the lives of Muslim soldiers recruited from France’s North African colonies, all of whom fought alongside white Frenchmen during the second World War. Some were invalided home, only to receive a pittance by comparison in their pensions. It has become an issue in the French presidential election, with Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal, conscious of her colonial background, stating firmly: "I want a France that recognizes - as its legitimate children - everyone whose family came from elsewhere, who are today full-fledged French citizens, and whose parents and grandparents gave their lives for our freedoms."

The tradition of a French colonial army began in the early nineteenth century. About 300,000 colonial troops from 23 different countries, including some from North and West Africa and Indo-China, fought for France in World War Two but less than a tenth may have survived long enough to collect their enhanced pension. The increases given to them are huge, but calculated on a very low base. For example, Moroccan-born Mohammed Azzouzi used to receive about £35 a year and now gets just over £300 a year.


Rachid Bouchareb and Jamel Debbouze

The film’s director, Rachid Bouchareb, is still trying to make the French government backdate the change from May 1945 instead of from 1 January 2007 but state officials fear that the sums involved would be enormous and quite unsustainable.

One of the stars of the film, Jamel Debbouze, put his finger on the underlying problem that many of France’s immigrant population bitterly resent not just such blatant discrimination as the two-tiered war pensions, but also the pressure put on them to conform, to integrate with the white French population. Says Debbouze, "Integration doesn't exist for me - I was born here, I grew up here, why would I need to integrate?"

French sensitivity about its colonial past is best illustrated by a law passed in 2005, requiring school textbooks to highlight the "positive role" of French colonialism. The cringe-making absurdity of the legislation quickly became obvious, and the statute was quietly dropped. It will be a long time however before the immigrant population in particular forgets this ill-conceived attempt to rewrite history.