Algeria: Prologue to Revolution (1900-1943)

In 1830, France conquered and began to colonize Ottoman Algeria by inviting settlers from France and other European countries, who settled on the narrow fertile coastal plain, as described elsewhere. (1-2) Already living in Algeria at the time of this European colonization were indigenous, dark- and light-skinned Muslim Algerians of predominantly Arab and Berber stock, respectively. (3)

Le domaine de La Trappe vu d'avion. Source: http://mitidja.free.fr/photos/trappe_staoueli.htm; accessed June 4, 2008.

The Arabs first migrated to the Maghreb (what is today Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco combined) in the late seventh and early eighth centuries AD, bringing with them Islam and the Arabic language.

The origin of the Berbers is more problematic. (4,5) Algerian historian John Ruedy notes, “The balance of opinion at present holds that the Berbers of history were the descendants of a Paleolithic stock to whom had been added a variety of other racial inputs—minor ones from Western Europe and from sub-Saharan Africa, and two major ones from the northeast and the southeast. (5)

Arab authors first recorded the term Berber, according to Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress, who continue, “Traditionally it derives from the Greek Barbaroi, Latin barbarous.” (6) Though subsequent invaders—Romans, Arabs and Europeans—adopted the term Berber, it is not used by the Berber people themselves when speaking about their own people or their own language. Rather, the Kabyles--the largest and most politically active community of Algerian Berbers--refer to themselves as Imazighen (singular Amzigh), which means free or noble men. (5)

In addition to the categories of “Berber” and “Arab” is a third category--“Berber-Arab,” which includes indigenous peoples of mixed heritage. Ruedy mentions that the great majority of Arab and Berber Algerians claim descent from Berber ancestors. Thus, to distinguish between contemporary Arabs and Berbers ethnic groups today, one must use a linguistic, rather than a racial, criterion. In other words, native Arab Algerians speak Arabic and native Berber Algerians speak Berber (many dialects exist), and that is how one goes about telling them apart. (5)

Twentieth century Kabyle Berber woman. Source: http://www.photius.com/images/dz02_03b.jpg; accessed June 5, 2008.	Kabyle Berber (author) Mouloud Feraoun. Source: http://www.kabyle.com/files/mouloud_feraoun.jpg; accessed June 5, 2008.

The European migration to Algeria in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries helped dislocate and impoverish most of these indigenous peoples, until the latter staged a prolonged bloody revolution from 1954 to 1962. The outcome of the revolution was Algeria’s independence and flight of most Europeans out of Algeria. This report is about the lead up to the Algerian Revolution, beginning in the early twentieth century.

1. Berbers Live in Discrete Areas in Algeria

The Berbers in Algeria reside in discrete areas, including 1) Kabylie (divided into Greater and Lesser Kabylie, please see map) east of Algiers and 2) the Aures Mountains. One part of Kabylie covers the coastal plain north of the Tell Atlas Mountains, which parallel the Mediterranean coast for 1,500 kilometers from Morocco to Tunisia. The second part of Kabylie covers the lozenge-shaped massif called the Aures (Aures Mountains), which belong to a second mountain range, the Saharan Atlas. The Saharan Atlas runs parallel to, and south of the Tell Atlas range.

Topographic map of the Maghreb, including Algeria. Source: http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en-commons/thumb/4/44/300px-Algeria_Topography.png; accessed June 5, 2008.

Distribution of Berber peoples in the Maghreb. Source: http://eagle1.american.edu/~jp3501a/images4/Berbers.png; accessed June 5, 2008. Light Blue: Chleuhs Purple: Zaians (Middle-Atlas mountains Berbers, also called Amazighs in a specifically sense or Brabers) Yellow: Riffis Pink: Chenwis Red: Kabyles Green: Chawis Orange: Saharian Berbers (Zenagas, Mozabites, Siwis) Dark Blue: Tuaregs

The Aures Mountains are not spectacular in size or in elevation; only in the extreme north do they rise above 7000 feet and nowhere are they more than 100 miles in length or breadth, notes Horne. (7) “For a massif of such modest dimensions, intermontane communication is surprisingly difficult and the isolation of the country, historically very acute,” adds geographer George Kimble. (7)

Berber village in the hills (Morocco). Source: http://i.pbase.com/o4/01/652201/1/58276068.1691987Berber_villageMorocco.jpg; accessed June 5, 2008.

Berbers often live in villages perched atop razor-backed ridges of the Aures and Tell Atlas Mountains. Horne suggests that Algerian Berbers fell back into the Tell and Aures Mountains under pressure from Roman, Arab, Ottoman, and finally European invaders. In 1954, Berbers comprised the largest proportion of Algerian Muslims. The leaders of the Algerian Revolution haled from the Aures Mountains.

2. Perception of Indigenous Muslim Algerians by European Immigrants

How did European colonists perceive the Berbers and Arabs before the revolution? Their attitude was one of indifference, notes Horne. A native Algerian was “an anonymous figure of whom it sufficed to know that one provided his welfare, so that one had no need to be concerned about him. In so far as he supplied the labour essential for exploiting the country, he was simply ‘a part of the patrimonie immobilier [real estate inheritance].’ At best he would be treated with paternalism, fairness and a kind of formal acceptance of his different religion and culture. But too often he was regard with disdain, and from a vantage of superiority; which manifested itself in many different ways, and more insidiously among the poorer levels of whites where the frictional contact was closest.” (8)

Group of Arab farmers in Algiers, 1899. Source: http://www.old-picture.com/europe/Algiers-Algeria-Arabs-Group.htm; accessed June 8, 2008.

Horne continues, “Bicot, melon, figuier, sale raton—there was a plethora of derogatory slang for an inferior race that sprang all too readily to the lips.” Horne argued that the white Christian Algerian colonists were similar to “the whites of South Africa, Rhodesia and the ‘Deep South’ of the United States.” The white colonists regarded Algeria as their home and indeed had nowhere else to go. The grand colons (wealthy white landowners) of Algeria were similar to the white plantation owners of the “Old South” in the US, while the least privileged colonists (petits blancs) bore a marked affinity to the “poor whites” [who coexisted] alongside African Americans in the torrid, over-crowded American cities of the same epoch.” (8)

In the 1950s, colonists took sides in support of, or against, the Muslim Berbers and Arabs. Horne estimates that the colonists who supported reform of one sort for Muslims comprised twenty to twenty-five percent of the overall population and included the European professional classes, some Muslim intellectuals, and a large part of the Jewish population. At the other end of the spectrum—those white colonists who resisted any change in the status quo towards Muslims— were known as “Ultras.” A third group included poor white immigrants who had failed as farmers and migrated to the cities where they developed “an urban consciousness.” They tended to be either Communist or reactionary. However, they tended to coalesce over liberalization for Muslims’ rights during mass demonstrations, such as the watershed Setif uprising (more later).

3. Grand Colons of Algeria

Who were the powerful grand colons (wealthy European immigrants) in Algeria in 1954? Horne cites three entrepreneur-grand colons who controlled the greater part of the Algerian economy at the onset of the Algerian Revolution: Henri Borgeaud, Laurent Schiaffino, and George Blachette. (9)

Henri Borgeaud (1895-1964) was Swiss by origin. His family had lived in Algeria for two generations. His family acquired La Trappe at Staoueli, close to Algiers, after its founders, the Trappist monks who gave it its name, were dispossessed during France’s secular “war” in 1905, recalls Horne. La Trappe produced four million liters of wine each year on some of the finest 1000 hectares of land in Algeria. Borgeaud’s other enterprises included food production, cigarette production (the Gauloises of Algeria), cement works, the Distillerie d’Algerie, the cork industry, the timber industry, and banking interests, among others. A popular saying was, “In Algeria, one drinks Borgeaud, smokes Borgeaud, eats Borgeaud, and banks or borrows Borgeaud….” Borgeaud was an Ultra (see above) and Algiers’ senator to the French National Assembly. Borgeaud and Fourth Republic French radical left politician Rene Mayer (1895-1972) threatened and finally brought down the Mendes-France government on February 5, 1955. (10)

: Laurent Schiaffino. Source: http://www.senat.fr/evenement/archives/D44/rome6.html; accessed June 4, 2008.	French politician Rene Mayer. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Rene_mayer.jpg; accessed June 4, 2008.

Laurent Schiaffino (1897-1978), whose ancestors came from Naples, Italy, in 1874, owned Schiaffino shipping company and controlled the largest fortune in Algeria in 1954. The company specialized in wine transport between North Africa and the port of Rouen in northwest France. Laurent, like Borgeaud, was a senator to the French National Assembly. He was a conservative (against liberalization) in Algeria, yet was the only one of the grand colons the new Algerian republic invited to stay on.

George Blachette’s ancestors originated in Le Midi (the South of France) and were among the earliest European pioneers to settle in Algeria. Known as “the king of alfalfa,” he owned land south of Oran, Algeria, where he grew alfalfa earmarked for British paper mills. His alfalfa exports provided no less than twenty percent of all Algeria’s foreign earnings, says Horne. Blachette became a deputy to the French National Assembly in 1951 and excelled at lobbying. One characteristic separated Blachette from Borgeaud and Schiaffino: he was a sincere and dedicated liberal (however, as Horne points out, Blachette paid his alfalfa workers miserly wages).

4. Social and Legal Status of Algerian Muslims before the Revolution

Agitation by Muslims for rights did not begin in the 1950s. Indeed, Emperor Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (1808-1873) developed a strategy for Algeria in 1865 that recognized the difference between Muslims and French citizens and granted Muslims permission to serve in the military and the right to work within the French civil administration. Kabyle author Mouloud Feraoun (1913-1962) noted, however, “Muslims still were not considered French citizens. To obtain the status of French citizenship, Muslims had to renounce shari’a, Islamic (and civil) status under Islam, which effectively meant renouncing Islam. (11) According to John Ruedy, only about two thousand Muslims took this drastic step during the nearly eighty years that the law stood in the French statutes.” (12)

Algerian Muslims, following passage of the law establishing their right to serve in the French military, joined in large numbers. Many men who led the Algerian Revolution were veterans of France’s “Army of Africa” during World War II (more below).

One of France’s greatest gifts to the Algerians was education, particularly during the early years of colonization. However, the Algerian birth rate exploded, especially after 1945, and resources were insufficient to meet the demands of the growing population, including educating Berbers and Arabs. For example, in 1945, Europeans in Algeria produced 200,000 children of school age; they attended 1,400 primary schools. Muslim Algerians, meanwhile, produced 1,250,000 children of school age; they attended 699 primary schools. In 1954, only one in five Muslim boys and one in sixteen girls were attending school. Illiteracy (in French) was ninety-four percent for males and ninety-eight percent for females. Many of the leaders of the Algerian Revolution had received education in French schools, which emphasized the principles of the Great French Revolution, thereby ennobling the concept of revolt. Indeed, says Horne, “At their best, the French schools [in Algeria] provided an admirable breeding ground for revolutionary minds.” (13)

Agriculture was the mainstay for Algerian Muslims before the French conquest in 1830. European immigrants over the next century apprehended these lands. The average Algerian farm holding in 1954 was 11.6 hectares, compared with the average European holding of 123.7 hectares. The creation of the Algerian wine industry after the phylloxera epidemic in France, as described elsewhere, further unbalanced the agricultural equation between indigenous and immigrants. (14) Tending vineyards provided “little steady work, and produc[ed] a crop which did not nourish [Muslims] and offended his religion,” writes Horne. Indeed, the “Maspetiol Report” of 1955, which shocked the French government, noted that nearly one million Muslims (one in nine of the overall population) were unemployed or partially unemployed, and that another two million were seriously underemployed. (15)

Many Muslims left Algeria to find work in France. In 1912, for example, only 5,000 Kabyles left for France; by 1924 that number had risen to 100,000. However, after 1945, writes Horne, “economic adversity pushed the immigrant waves to new heights, and by the outbreak of the revolt the total of Algerian workers in France was over the half-million mark.” The Algerians worked in France building roads, digging ditches and laying rails, jobs that a Frenchman might avoid. They usually lived in the worst city slums of Paris or Marseilles where their contacts were often limited to members of the Communist Party and other disgruntled proletarian militants, continues Horne (more below). When they “returned to Algeria they brought with them seeds of more coherent discontent, awaiting germination.” The wages these Algerian workers sent back home equaled about a third of those of the whole agricultural work force in Algeria and sustained some million and a half of otherwise indigent dependents. (16)

Thus, the French brought both enlightenment and repression to Algeria. Messali Hadj (more below) viewed the material benefits bestowed on Algerians by France in 1944 as follows: “The achievement of France is self-evident. It leaps to the eyes, and it would be unjust to deny it; but if the French have done a lot, they did it for themselves.” Frenchman Robert Aron noted, “France did much for Algeria, too little for the Algerians.” (17)

5. Pre-World War I “Young Algerians” Opposition Political Reform Movement

One of the earliest movements for political reform in the early twentieth century was the Young Algerians (Jeunesse Algerienne), comprised of a small group of middle class Muslims in Algiers who had received their superb education in French schools. (18-19) Two members were Omar Bouderba and Dr. Benthami ould Hamida--both French citizens, municipal councilmen, Freemasons, and extremely ambitious politically. Bouderba was a successful businessman and son of an old Algiers family that had long ago made its peace with France, notes Ruedy. (18) Dr. Benthami was an ophthalmologist educated in Montpelier, France. Fekar Ben Ali, of an old scholarly family of Tlemcen (a town in northwestern Algeria), was a third member. He earned a French doctorate in law, taught for a time in Lyon, and was editor of a bilingual paper in Oran, Algeria, notes Ruedy. A fourth member and the most intellectually powerful, according to Ruedy, was Cherif Benhabyles, who also had earned a French doctorate of law and written a well-known book about the “cultural and psychological contradictions faced by Algeria’s young educated class (L’Algerie francaise vue par un indigene). (18)

In October 1908, the Young Algerians sent a delegation to discuss with France’s Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) their “opposition under the status quo to a proposed policy to conscript Muslim Algerians into the French army.” (19) Clemenceau had long condemned colonization of Algeria. (20) The delegation noted in their petition that if France granted Algerian Muslims full citizenship, the Young Algerians’ opposition to conscription would be dropped. In 1911, in addition to demanding preferential treatment for “the intellectual elements of the country,” the group called for an end to unequal taxation, broadening of the municipal voting rolls, reform of Muslim representation in elective bodies, more schools, protection of indigenous property, and many other reforms. In part to reward Muslims who fought and died for France during World War I, Clemenceau appointed reform-minded Charles Jonnart as governor general of Algeria. Reforms promulgated in 1919 and known as the Jonnart Law expanded the number of Muslims permitted to vote to about 425,000. The legislation also removed all voters from the jurisdiction of the humiliating indigénat. (19)

When the philosophically anticolonialist Clemenceau returned a final time to power in 1917, he rewarded the Algerians for their contribution to the war effort by recalling Algeria’s sitting governor general, Charles Lutaud (one of the most persistent defenders of colon prerogatives, says Ruedy), and replaced him with Charles Jonnart, who had already served two terms as Governor General. (21) The Jonnart Law of February 4, 1919, contained some reforms favorable to Algerian Muslims, but, in the end, was insufficient. On the critical issue of citizenship, the Jonnart Law made no significant concessions; in some ways, this new law was more restrictive than the law of 1865 put forth by Emperor Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, as noted earlier, argues Ruedy. (22)

The program articulated by the Young Algerians dominated the indigenous side of the Franco-Algerian political dialogue into the 1930s. (23) The group spun off the Federation of Elected Natives, also known as the FEI or Federation des elus indigenes, in 1926. This Federation’s objectives were “the assimilation of the évolués into the French community, with full citizenship but without surrendering their personal status as Muslims, and the eventual integration of Algeria as a full province of France. Other objectives included equal pay for equal work for government employees, abolition of travel restrictions to and from France, abolition of the indigénat (which had been reinstituted earlier), and electoral reform.” (19)

6. Three Algerian Political Reform Movements that Began in the 1920s

In the 1920s, three movements in addition to the Young Algerian movement (which had spun off the emerged: the Star of North Africa, the Islamic Reform movement, and the Algerian Communist movement.

1. Star of North Africa. One of the earliest groups to call for Algerian independence was the Star of North Africa (Etoile Nord-Africain, known as the Star). The Star group was originally a solidarity group formed in 1926 in Paris among the North African worker community in France, which was overwhelmingly Algerian, as described above. Its mission was to coordinate political activity among North African workers in France and to defend “the material, moral, and social interests of North African Muslims.” Its leaders included “members of the French Communist Party and its larger labor confederation (the Confederation general du travail unitaire, CGTU), and in the early years of the struggle for independence the party provided material and moral support. Ruedy notes, “Culturally isolated and confronted with numerous material problems, the workers discovered that only the French far left, the anarchists and especially the Communists, demonstrated much interest in their issues or their welfare.” (24)

   Ruedy continues, “In the Star’s early years, the Communist party provided meeting places, budgetary subsidies, and the printing facilities through which it published its first newspapers…However, there was [from the very beginnings] tension between the party, which was trying to co-opt the émigrés for its own purposes, and many of the Algerian militants who were less interested in the universal proletarian cause and Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory than in the specific grievances of their colonized society,” continued Ruedy. Indeed, the Communist leadership of the Star saw Algeria’s quest for independence as an unnecessary diversion from the demands of class struggle.

   Messali Hadj, walking. Source: http://citedetlemcen.free.fr/photos%20not%E9%20vrai%20adresse%20sur%20le%20site%20en%20grand/messali%20hadj%20photo.jpg; accessed June 5, 2008.	Lebanese Shakib Arslan. Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3f/Shakib_Arslan.gif/250px-Shakib_Arslan.gif; accessed June 4, 2008.

   Ahmed Messali Hadj (1898-1974), the Star’s secretary general, enunciated the group’s demands at a conference organized by a so-called League Against Colonial Oppression, in Brussels in February 1927. “In addition to independence from France, the Star called for freedom of press and association, a parliament chosen through universal suffrage, confiscation of large estates, and the institution of Arabic schools,” notes one source. The Star was labeled subversive by the French police and banned in 1929. Nevertheless, it operated underground until 1934, when its newspaper reached a circulation of 43,500, “a very significant percentage of the émigré community,” notes Ruedy. Influenced by the Arab nationalist ideas of Lebanese Druze Shakib Arslan [1869-1946], Messali Hadj then turned away from Communist ideology to a more nationalist (separatist) outlook, for which the French Communist Party proceeded to attack the Star. (19) In other words, the French Communist Party put the interests of France and Frenchmen above the interests of Algeria and Algerians, which many Algerians never forgave.

   Messali Hadj then returned to Algeria as a nationalist with the goal of organizing urban workers and rural farmers. On March 11, 1937, he founded the Party of the Algerian People (Parti du Peuple Algérien--PPA) to mobilize the Algerian working class at home and in France to improve its situation through political action. “For Messali Hadj, who ruled the PPA with an iron hand, these aims were inseparable from the struggle for an independent Algeria in which socialist and Islamic values would be fused.” (19) We will encounter Messali Hadj and his PPA again.

2. The Communist Party. The Communist party “was less a direct participant in the nationalist movement than a fermenting or leavening agent,” explains Ruedy. (25) It provided a banner under which the Algerians working in France could demonstrate their disgust with the status quo, even though “communism in this colonial context generated contradictions that proved ultimately unresolvable,” avers Ruedy.

   The early members of the Algerian Communist Party were European settlers, not members of indigenous peoples, and the former never questioned their own superior position in a colonial society. They also never believed in replacing the French government in Algeria with an Algerian government. Ruedy also notes that when the Komintern via Paris instructed the Algerian Communist Party to Arabize the party, its Algerian European members withdrew for a time. In the end, the Communist Party began to lose ground amongst the Algerians because it persistently condemned the nationalist demands of the Star and its successor, the Parti du Peuple Algerien,” or PPA noted above.

3. The Islamic Reform Movement. The Islamic Reform Movement originated in the Arabian peninsula under the leadership of Sunni Muslim Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab (1703-1792). He advocated Islam’s “purification” by returning to what he believed were its original principles as followed by the earliest Muslims known as the Salaf. For example, he decried Sufi Muslims (recall that Algeria’s great Abd-El Kader was a Sufi Muslim, see note 1), saint worship, celebration of Muhammad’s birthday, and permitting anyone to intercede between a Muslim and Allah. The House of Saud family took up with him while spending the next 140 years conquering Arabia, a goal it reached in 1922, as described elsewhere. (26-29)

   Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab was not the first Sunni Muslim to advocate a return to what he believed was the essence of Islam. For example, he acknowledged and revived interest in the works of medieval Islamic scholar Ibn Taymiya (1263-1328), who sought a return of Islam to its sources. Followers of the teachings of ibn Abd-al-Wahhab go by the name Wahhabists or Salafists and include all the members of Saudi Arabia royal family and al Qaeda.

   The Islamic Reform Movement spread from Saudi Arabia to Egypt where reformers Muhammad Abduh (1845-1905) and his disciple Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865-1935) stressed the Arab and Islamic roots of the country, and the relative weakness of Muslim societies in the face of Western colonialism. They blamed Sufi Muslims and other marabouts (wandering religious leaders) and stagnation of the worldwide body of Muslims, and believed that a purification of Islam and a rejuvenation of the Caliphate would enhance unity and progress.

   Ben Badis of Constantine, Algeria. Source: http://www.el-mouradia.dz/francais/algerie/portrait/Archives/Portrait%20Ben%20Badis_images/portra1.gif; accessed June 5, 2008.	Funeral of Ben Badis. Source: http://www.constantine.free.fr/LaCulture/celebrites.htm; accessed June 5, 2008.

   From Egypt, the Islamic Reform Movement spread to Algeria under the leadership of Shaykh Abd al Hamid Ben Badis, who was born in Constantine, Algeria, in 1889, of a patrician family. His grandfather and father had both held high office in the colonial administration and his brother was a French educated lawyer. (30) After a private traditional education in Algeria, he completed his studies at the Zituna mosque university in Tunis, made the hajj, and then visited the major Near Eastern cities,” writes Ruedy. “While a man of deep personal, almost mystic faith, he proceeded upon his return to Algeria to devote the rest of his life to the very public work of the renaissance and purification of Algerian Islam.” (30)

   Ben Badis founded the Association of Algerian Muslim Ulama (Association des Uléma Musulmans Algériens, or AUMA) in 1931. Although Constantine was the center of support for this organization, the AUMA “struck a responsive chord among the Muslim masses, with whom it had closer ties than did the other nationalist organizations.” Ben Badis and other reformed religious scholars in Algeria “favored the adoption of modern methods of inquiry and rejected the superstitions and folk practices of the countryside, actions that brought them into confrontation with the marabouts, as noted above for the Egyptians. As the Islamic reformers gained popularity and influence, the colonial authorities responded in 1933 by refusing them permission to preach in official mosques. This move and similar ones sparked several years of sporadic religious unrest.” (19)

   The Islamic Reform Movement in Algeria established free modern Islamic schools that used the Arabic language and culture, and that served as an alternative to the schools for Muslim operated for many years by the French government in Algeria. The Young Algerians and members of the Star looked to France for their ideological models. Ben Badis instead looked to Islam, specifically the Wahhabist brand of Islam, for his models. Ben Badis believed “Islam is our religion, Arabic our language, Algeria our fatherland.” Ben Badis also noted “that this Algerian nation is not France, cannot be France, and does not want to be France . . . [but] has its culture, its traditions and its characteristics, good or bad, like every other nation of the earth.” (19)

   Thus, the main contribution of the reformist ulama was the first articulation “with clarity and eloquence [of] the proposition that Algerians belonged to a distinct nation with its own specific culture and glorious past, which could never be confounded in another. In spite of such examples of ideological clarity, however, the reformist movement always seemed torn between its cultural and religious vocation on the one hand and what many of its leaders considered as the secondary and potentially corrupting distraction of political activism,” opines Ruedy. “Sometimes its leaders sounded like nationalists and other times they feared being labeled radicals; still other times they sent telegrams of loyalty to the head of the French Republic. Such ambiguities,” writes Ruedy, “in the long run limited the contributions the movement could make to growth of the national movement.” (30)

7. The Blum-Viollette Crisis of the 1930s

During the 1930s, Muslim Algerian agitation among political groups, which had joined under the umbrella group named the Algerian Muslim Congress, continued for “emancipation.” The two routes to the ephemeral “emancipation” were via a more complete assimilation into France’s political system (i.e., as a full-fledged French province, rather than as a “colony”) or through complete separation from France and national independence.

France’s Popular Front Prime Minister Leon Blum. Source: http://www.left-wing.net/history/leonblum.htm; accessed June 5, 2008.	Algerians meet with officials over Blum-Viollette Bill. Source: http://www.prg28.org/page%20republ/documents/VIOLLETTE.htm; accessed June 5, 2008.

In response to the pervasive rise of Fascism in Italy, Germany, and France in the 1930s, the majority of French people voted into power in 1936 the leftwing Popular Front (the Communist Party, the Socialist Party and the Centralist Liberals) headed by Leon Blum (1872-1950). (31) Algerian Muslims grew hopeful when Blum appointed as Minister of State Maurice Viollette (1879-1960), who had served as Governor General of Algeria, 1925-1927. Viollette penned the Blum-Viollette document of 1938, which proposed to grant French citizenship to some 25,000 educated Algerian elites. The grand colons (see above) reacted by stalling the legislation in the French National Assembly.

Meanwhile, the French Popular Front government enabled Messali Hadj (the Star) to return to Algeria from exile in Switzerland, as described above. He wasted no time pushing his agenda for Algeria’s independence from France. Ruedy writes, “For the first time, the national [independence] question was raised on Algerian soil [recall that Messali had led the Star on French soil, prior to his exile]. Messali began touring the country giving speeches, organizing Etoile chapters, and claiming that the Blum-Viollette Bill was no more than an attempt to co-opt the Algerian bourgeoisie while leaving six million peasants in ignorance and misery. He met with phenomenal success.” (32)

Messali’s injection into the Algerian political scene blew apart the Algerian Muslim Congress, which had combined two antithetical movements—the one wanting to accelerate the process of Algerian gallicization, and the other wanting to avoid it at all costs, explains Ruedy. (33) In 1938, the colons’ Federation of Mayors went on strike to express its opposition to the Blum-Viollette Bill, and the Blum government, “smarting under accusations that its policies were contributing to Algerian unrest jeopardizing the national security [Nazi Germany was on the rise], refused to press its own legislation.” (34) The legislation languished. The year 1938 “saw the final defeat of the Young Algeria [sic] program conceived thirty years earlier which sought salvation through the extension to Algerian shores of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,” Ruedy concludes.

8. World War 2 Commences

The Allies landed in North Africa in November 1942. Algerian nationalists watched with rapt interest as a greatly weakened France turned to the United States, co-author of the Atlantic Charter, which called for the liberation of subject peoples. Ferhat Abbas (1899-1995), born near Constantine and a pharmacist by professional training, led twenty-four fellow Arab and Kabyle nationalists in the cause of Algerian independence when the French government moved to conscript Algerian men to fight Fascism. Earlier in his life he was a Francophile; however, he became disillusioned with France by the onset of World War Two during which he served as a medical corpsman and also issued a condemnation of French rule (Manifesto of the Algerian People), demanding a constitution that would grant equality to all Algerians. He presented the document to Vichyite Governor General of Algeria Marcel Peyrouton at the end of March 1943, which represented “a major milestone in the progression of Algerian protest form assimilationism to separatism.” (35)

Abbas Ferhat. Source: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/B0002F9MSO/sr=8-2/qid=1212718613/ref=dp_image_0?ie=UTF8&n=1055398&s=home-garden&qid=1212718613&sr=8-2; accessed June 5, 2008.	Governor General of Algeria Marcel Peyrouton. Source: http://www.atlaswords.com/FRANCIA%2051.htm; accessed June 5, 2008.

When Peyrouton accepted the Manifesto as a “basis for future reforms,” Abbas and twenty-one of his group sponsored an Additif au Manifeste, which was more radical that the Manifesto. They called for the recognition after the war of the “political autonomy of Algeria as a sovereign nation with droit de regard (a juridicial term meaning ‘right of inspection,’ which seems to imply some vague French interest short of sovereignty, notes Ruedy). (36) Abbas continued to play an important part in the Algerian Revolution and its aftermath.

Generals Henri Giraud and Charles de Gaulle. Source: http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/1/10/300px-Degaulle-freefrench.png; accessed June 5, 2008.

9. France’s General Charles de Gaulle Moves to Algeria

On May 30, 1943, General Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970), the exceptional but often difficult leader of Free France, left London, where he had been living since 1940, for an “unknown destination.” (37) The destination was Algeria where he became head of the Comite francais de liberation nationale—the French Committee of National Liberation. Formed by de Gaulle and General Henri Giraud on June 3, 1943, this body’s mission was to provide united leadership and coordinate the campaign to liberate France from Nazi occupation during World War 2. The committee challenged the legitimacy of the Vichy regime and unified all the French forces that fought against the Nazis and collaborators. The first The committee evolved later to become the Provisional Government of the French Republic under Charles de Gaulle.

The direct experience of de Gaulle living in Algeria during the war afforded him a perspective that informed his handling of the final conflagration in Algeria. De Gaulle’s biographer, Charles Williams, writes “To be sure, the ‘rebellion’, as the French called [the Algerian Revolution], had started at the end of the Second World War. But the situation, indeed the whole dirty war, had been reasonably contained until the mid-1950s.”

10. Summary

The rapid development of political self-awareness by indigenous Arab and Berber peoples who the grand and petit colons repressed characterized the first half of the twentieth century political scene in Algeria. France, distracted by her own monumental problems, responded tepidly to Algerian opposition leaders’ demands for either Algerian assimilation or Algerian independence. World War 2 began. General Charles de Gaulle moved to Algeria in 1943 to set up the body that would subsequently become the French Provisional Government at the conclusion of the war. His direct experience in Algeria informed his later management of the bloody Algerian Revolution that finally erupted in 1954.

Notes:

1. SEMP Biot Report #486: “Abd-El Kader and the French Conquest of Algeria 1830-1848). December 11, 2007. Available at http://www.semp.us/publications/biot_reader.php?BiotID=486; accessed May 13, 2008.

2. SEMP Biot Report #487: “Colonizing and decolonizing French Algeria (1830-1962).” December 26, 2007. Available at http://www.semp.us/publications/biot_reader.php?BiotID=487; accessed May 13, 2008.

3. Alistair Horne notes the Berbers and Arabs trace their origins to a “multiplicity of racial and tribal stocks, including Kabyle, Chaouia, M’zabite, Mauretanian blacks, Turkish and pure Arab.” Source: Alistair Horne: A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962. New York: New York Review of Books, 2006, p. 49.

4. Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress: The Berbers. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

5. John Ruedy: Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005, p. 9.

6. Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress: The Berbers. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004, pp. 283-284. These authors also write: “S. Gsell, Histoire ancienne de l’Afrique du Nord, vol. v (Paris, 1927), p. 115, observes that in a third-century grammar written at Carthage the use of ‘barbar’ instead of ‘barbarus’ was condemned. However, G. Camps, ‘Les Bavares’, Revue africaine, 99 (1955), 241-88, notes that the word appears frequently in Semitic names, and a tribe such as the Bavares of the early empire could have given their name to the whole, just as the term Mauri, our Moor, derives from what was in origin a specific group.” (p. 283). For more on premodern history in Algeria, see John Ruedy: Modern Algeria. Bloomington: Indiana Press, pp. 10-15.

7. Alistair Horne: A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962. New York: New York Review of Books, 2006, p. 50.

8. Ibid, p. 54. Horne defines the terms as follows: “Bicot, opprobrium of unknown meaning, or origin; melon, slang for “a simpleton;” figuier, “fig tree,” because the Algerian peasant allegedly spent his day sitting under its shade; sale raton, “dirty little rat:” hence later, the odious expression ratonnade, rat-hunt, or Arab-killing.

9. Alistair Horne: A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962. New York: New York Review of Books, 2006, pp. 56-57.

10. “Mendes France’s campaign to ‘clean up’ the Moroccan security forces was extended to Algeria after the rebellion of 1 November 1954…The prime minister pushed ahead to reform the corrupt Algerian police service by the decree of 20 January 1955. Through this, the colonial service would be integrated with that of metropolitan France, and some two hundred loyal officers would be transferred to Algeria to replace a core ‘mafia,’ the agents of illegal repression and torture, who were to be sent to France where they could be isolated and contained. This concerted attempt to break the entrenched system of colonial police violence, a key instrument of the magnates who dominated the Maghreb, was not going to be tolerated by them and Henri Bordeaud threatened Mendes France in a letter of 3 January 1955. Mitterrand considered the police reform as the prime reason why Rene Mayer brought down the Mendes France government on 5 February 1955: “The police constituted one of the trump cards of the Algerian lobby: threats, blackmail and violence allowed it to control officials, the press and politicians.” Source: Jim House and Neil MacMaster: Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory. Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 47.

11. Mouloud Feraoun: Journal 1955-1962: Reflections on the French-Algerian War. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000, p. 317. Introduction by James D. Le Sueur.

12. John Ruedy: Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.

13. Alistair Horne: A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962. New York: New York Review of Books, 2006, p. 61.

14. SEMP Biot Report #488: “French Phylloxera epidemic: Largest disaster in history of wine.” December 27, 2007. Many French vineyard professionals moved to Algeria after the phylloxera epidemic. Available at http://www.semp.us/publications/biot_reader.php?BiotID=488; accessed May 24, 2008.

15. Alistair Horne: A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962. New York: New York Review of Books, 2006, pp. 62-63.

16. Ibid, pp. 64-65.

17. Ibid, p. 65.

18. John Ruedy: Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005, pp. 108-110.

19. Helen Chapan Metz (ed.): Algeria: A Country Study. Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1994. Available at http://countrystudies.us/algeria/25.htm; accessed June 3, 2008.

20. Alistair Horne: A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962. New York: New York Review of Books, 2006, p. 31.

21. John Ruedy: Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005, pp. 111-112.

22. Please see John Ruedy, pp. 110-113, for further detail on the Jonnart Law.

23. John Ruedy: Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005, p. 132.

24. Ibid, p. 136.

25. Ibid, p. 138.

26. SEMP Biot Report #123: “Who is a Wahhabi?” October 10, 2004. Available at http://www.semp.us/publications/biot_reader.php?BiotID=123; accessed June 4, 2008.

27. SEMP Biot Report #126: “What is ARAMCO?” October 17, 2004. Available at http://www.semp.us/publications/biot_reader.php?BiotID=126; accessed June 4, 2008.

28. George S. Rentz: Birth of the Islamic Reform Movement in Saudi Arabia. Arabian Publishing, 2005.

29. Natana DeLong-Bas: Wahhabi Islam from Revival and Reform to Global Jihad. Oxford University Press, 2004.

30. John Ruedy: Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005, p. 134.

31. Joel Colton: Leon Blum: Humanist in Politics. Duke University Press, 1987.

32. John Ruedy: Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005, p. 142.

33. Ibid, p. 143.

34. Ibid, p. 144.

35. Ibid, p. 145.

36. Ibid, p. 146.

37. Charles Williams: The Last Great Frenchman. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1993, p. 222.