I don’t mean by being creative in changing history but correcting it to reflect the reality.
France’s colonial past was like the British written to minimize the suffering by the use of a fictive glorious nostalgia for a different time: France was bringing civilization to a barbarous world, the right wing of course thinks that the reality/truth is unnecessary and harmful forgetting the many millions who were actually harmed.
The best thing Macron has done is to acknowledge at least part of the reality
French President Emmanuel Macron visited Rwanda this week as part of a process aimed at confronting France’s past "without repentance or denial”. By acknowledging France's role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the French president sought to turn the page on 27 years of diplomatic tensions.
"I come to acknowledge our responsibility." On May 27, in the Rwandan capital of Kigali, French President Emmanuel Macron delivered a historic speech, officially acknowledging for the first time France's role in the 1994 genocide, which left some 800,000 people dead, mostly from the Tutsi minority.
I’ll let you read the article.
The one glaring omission is recognition of France’s role in the slave trade
Though the Portuguese and British dominated the transatlantic slave trade, the French were the third largest slave traders, elevated to that rank by the staggering numbers of Africans delivered to Saint-Domingue (Haiti) in the late eighteenth century. Of the 1,381,000 Africans loaded onto French ships during the course of the transatlantic trade, 1,165,000 survived the Middle Passage to encounter harsh conditions mostly in French Caribbean colonies. Though substantial numbers sailed on French ships to Guadeloupe (73,000) and Martinique (217,200), the vast majority (773,000) went to Saint-Domingue—the New World’s most profitable eighteenth-century colony.
My opinion
It is always necessary to learn to accept the actual past and to learn from it, if you hide the facts by perverting them with nostalgia for the ‘glory days’ you end up forgetting that Empires hurt and abused many millions more than the relative few that profited from them.
To progress, you must face the past openly.