Empires Legacy Roots of A Far Right Affinity in Contemporary France John W P Veugelers Full Chapter PDF
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Empire’s Legacy
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Empire’s Legacy
Roots of a Far-Right Affinity in
Contemporary France
John W. P. Veugelers
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Abbreviations xvii
Introduction 1
Conclusion 175
Appendix 187
Notes 191
References 237
Index 251
P R E FA C E
Karl Marx wrote that the tradition of all the dead generations weighs
like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Does this not depend? Many
traditions have vanished. The weight of the past is itself historical: some
societies inherit more history than do others. Tradition seems to be fading
nowadays. Collective memory plays tricks on us. It selects and embellishes,
represses and confabulates. A nightmare may never outweigh a mote.
Curiosity about the unfixed weight of the past motivates this book, an
inquiry into the development of a political potential: the possibility, big or
little, that a group of people will support an option like a movement, pres-
sure group, or party. No political potential in a complex society exists in
isolation. Situations, options, and resources matter. Many potentials never
ripen into solid support.
Some do, though.
Before it happened, the rise of the contemporary far right was a possi-
bility none in France foresaw. The time for reactionaries and fascists seemed
long gone. The country’s far right came out of World War II reviled and
damaged. After 1945, usually its candidates got few votes. Suddenly, during
the 1980s, the National Front became a serious competitor. Entering the
party system, it upset the balance of forces. Its opponents responded with
new tactics and strategies. Political debate became obsessed with immi-
gration, Islam, and national identity. Not a flash party, the National Front
endured.
Before the far right broke through, this book argues, a subculture had
kept its potential alive. Societies are not uniform wholes with one way
of making sense. We are code switchers: each milieu has its own way of
organizing words and other symbols. As this book shows, subcultures
shape cognition—recognizing features, setting boundaries, and classifying
people, things, events, and other phenomena; evaluation—tying classes
of phenomena to appraisals; and emotion—connecting the foregoing to
responses (sensitivities, moods, passions, and humors) of varying intensity
on the pleasure–pain continuum.
Skill enacts identity. When people put a code into practice, their very
act conveys meaning: “I am like others who talk like this, and unlike those
who lack this ability.” Members of a subculture may not share the same skill
in using its vernacular. All know about tact, though. Effects that give spice
to life—such as humor, gaucheness, and insult—result when, purposely or
not, discourse is out of joint with what the situation calls for.
Discourses that mark identity never arise fully blown. The superficial
identity of a loose subculture is like a wardrobe item: thrown on and off,
as befits the occasion. Other identities are not so light and switchable.
A subculture may have performance standards that make authenticity and
belonging exacting. Becoming adept at using a code may require insider
knowledge and years of practice. Putting the foregoing together suggests a
line of inquiry. The codes that define a tight subculture might be rooted in
lasting relations of inclusion and exclusion. In France, as we will see, a sub-
culture with an affinity toward the far right grew out of relations between
colonizers and colonized. Codes enable meaning through practices as di-
verse as ritual behavior and visual representation. At its core, though, the
subculture that kept a far-right potential alive in France did so with words.
Using a language of sturdy gloom and hurt pride, it upheld ideas now dis-
reputable. Allotting honor and blame, it separated friend from foe. Looking
back at the past to see into the future, it fashioned threats and hopes. Out of
joint with a mixed-race France, it hid a political affinity.
External scrutiny, control, and interaction corrode subcultures. If
shielded from these intrusions, all kinds of milieus (such as the family,
village, gang, neighborhood, school, sect, religious community, and on-
line network) can uphold eccentricity, autonomy, and closure. Another
milieu that can shield is the voluntary association. In institutional and
semi-institutional political processes, associations may act as lobby
groups or cogs in patron-client systems. In addition, this book shows,
associations can protect subcultures of dissent. They do so when they in-
hibit multiple group memberships and cross-cutting connections. When
this happens, associations join the set of milieus that harbor hidden po-
litical potentials.
This book asks why the breakthrough of the National Front caught
observers off guard. The answer, I will suggest, was a blindness to latent
potentials. This does not mean that analysts had ignored the past. On the
contrary, we knew much about the ties of ideology and organization that
linked the National Front to earlier strands of the French far right. Still not
appreciated, though, was the potential of a current below the surface: a sub-
culture not expressed in party politics yet thriving socially.
[x] Preface
During the decades of post-1945 decolonization, millions of European
settlers migrated from former dominions to imperial metropole— to
Belgium, Britain, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands. By far
the greatest flow—1 million settlers, or pieds noirs—departed from Algeria
during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Most resettled in parts of France that
later became the heartland of the National Front.
Although not all became supporters of the far right, the pieds noirs were
carriers of a legacy shared by others in French society. From ancient Rome
and the British Empire to Shōwa Japan and Communist China, imperial
powers have spun myths about civilization and its opposite (with civiliza-
tion cutting both ways, lest we forget, for anti-imperialists condemn empire
as barbaric). Through various channels—literature, schools, newspapers,
exhibitions, advertising, and film—a generous appraisal of conquest and
colonization spread through nineteenth-and twentieth-century France.
This propaganda did not persuade everyone. Still, it has had a lasting
influence.
In addition to the settlers, imperialism shaped others who spent years
of their life overseas, sometimes with their family: soldiers, merchants,
missionaries, educators, doctors, engineers, and administrators. The
Algerian War mobilized some 1.7 million French conscripts and regulars.
Businesses and politicians from the republican left to the conservative right
joined in an imperial lobby that, until Algerian independence, bridged
interests in the metropole with those in the colony. In the making of an im-
perial legacy, then, evaluation meshed with experience on both sides of the
Mediterranean.
For reasons soon clear, this study starts with the conquest of Algeria,
France’s biggest settler colony and frontline of a brutal, divisive war. It ends
in 2018—when, hoping to improve her party’s image, the leader of the
National Front decided to change its name to the National Rally. Ranging
across nearly two centuries, Empire’s Legacy consists of four parts that prog-
ress through time.
Searching for the roots of a far-right potential, Part I (1830–1962) looks
at social relations in colonial Algeria. Chapter 1 examines how thousands
of European settlers from different lands became the French of Algeria, a
people that defined itself in opposition to the native Arabs and Berbers.
Chapter 2 probes the years from World War II until the onset of Algerian
independence, an unsettled time for notions of them and us. Once domi-
nant in the social order of the colony, in 1962 the settlers ended up on the
losing side. Relations with natives, metropole, and each other would condi-
tion their postcolonial identity and far-right availability.
Part II (1962–1968) begins with the flight of the settlers. Shifting
the focus to Toulon—the greatest experiment in municipal right-wing
Preface [ xi ]
extremism in Europe since 1945—I trace the transformation of colonial
refugees into political clients. Chapter 3 shows why opposition to Algerian
independence and sympathy toward the pieds noirs set leading politicians in
Toulon against the dominant Gaullist party. Chapter 4 charts strategies—
in civil society, city council, and electoral politics—by which the pieds noirs
formed a political bloc. It also shows how disunity within the pied noir
community limited their influence. By winning the pieds noirs over, main-
stream politicians had shrunk the space for the far right. An affinity went
underground.
Part III (1968–2001) shows how the far right changed from political
outsider into challenger. Chapter 5 begins with its response to the regime’s
troubles in May 1968. While the regime recovered, Gaullist dominance
over the right slipped. This opened opportunities for the non-Gaullist right
and the pieds noirs. Chapter 6 surveys the National Front’s founding and
early challenges. Turning to Toulon, Chapter 7 examines how changes in
national politics combined with initiatives by the far right and errors by
local politicians to turn this city into a stronghold for the National Front.
Seizing a rare chance to study the contemporary far right when it governs,
Chapter 8 reviews the problems that marred its term of office in Toulon.
Still, the National Front had proven it could endure. With its loyal elec-
torate, active members, and organizing efforts, in parts of southern France
it had overtaken the left as the main opposition.
Part IV (2001–2018) examines in finer detail the culture of the pieds
noirs. Focusing on the link between situation and practice, Chapter 9
isolates the affinity between their subcultural language and the insider dis-
course of the far right. Chapter 10 analyzes the connection between group
boundaries, cultural practices, and political choices. Despite claims that
voluntary associations are good for democracy, pied noir groups nurtured
a far-right potential by shielding their members from cross-pressures.
Chapter 11 distills lessons, for mainstream politics, about how to keep
the far right at bay. Despite the continued success of the National Front
in southern France, since 2001 the conservative right has held power in
Toulon by avoiding scandal, governing well, and controlling partisanship.
This Preface opened with a wary nod to Marx; it closes with a wee bow
in his direction. Believing it indispensable to connect theory with practice,
Marx treated utopian socialism with contempt (better, he asserted, to an-
alyze the real prospects for revolution in light of the concrete situation of
the proletariat). Not an exercise in Marxist analysis, Empire’s Legacy does
not assign a central role to class conflict; but it does take a swipe at what
we can call utopian liberalism. Enthusiasm for liberal democracy lacks
gravity unless anchored in a sound assessment of its real potential next to
other possibilities. What do we gain by plumbing the contradictions of our
[ xii ] Preface
time? An alternative to unilinear readings of contemporary history, which
squeeze out conflict and make outcomes inevitable. The past is more than
a series of victories by the strong over the weak—an inexorable march that
would explain, allegedly, our situation today. In taking stock of how we got
here, let us be on the lookout for subterranean currents, countervailing
forces, and lost causes. This has little to do with a sentimental partiality for
underdogs. Against bullish optimism or soothing gloominess, shuttling be-
tween the mainstream and what lies beyond expands our vision of what
remains possible, for better and for worse.
Preface [ xiii ]
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For funding, I am grateful to the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University
of Toronto as well as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada. For quiet in which to write and community in which to delib-
erate, my thanks to the Camargo Foundation in Cassis; the Department of
Political Science at the University of Siena; and the Maison Suger of the
Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris. For access to mate-
rial on which this book depends, I am indebted to the library of the Institut
d’Études Politiques in Paris; the library of the Maison méditerranéenne des
sciences de l’homme in Aix-en-Provence; and the Archives Municipales
and the Bibliothèque du Centre Ville in Toulon.
In France, I was fortunate to receive all kinds of support—moral, material,
and scholarly—from Georges Boutigny, Marie-Lou Boutigny, Emmanuelle
Comtat, Antoine Di Iorio, Stephan Di Iorio, Jean-Marie Guillon, Guy Hello,
Jean-Jacques Jordi, Bernadette Lombard, and Nonna Mayer. I am also
grateful to the pieds noirs who agreed to my interviews. They gave graciously
of their time, hospitality, and thoughts, even when they must have guessed
that our views differed. Likewise, I am indebted to those who participated in
the post-electoral surveys of 2002, 2007, and 2012.
Along the way, talented students at the University of Toronto provided inval-
uable help: Nadine Abd El Razek, Aya Bar Oz, Edana Beauvais, Amanda Foley,
Gabriel Menard, Gavin Nardocchio-Jones, and Pierre Permingeat. Young
people like these brighten our future. Colleagues at the University of Toronto
who, despite their learning, could not rescue this project from its imperfections
include Zaheer Baber, Dean Behrens, Joseph Bryant, Robert Brym, Clayton
Childress, James DiCenso, Ron Gillis, John Hannigan, Eric Jennings, Charles
Jones, Vanina Leschziner, William Magee, Jeffrey Reitz, and Lorne Tepperman.
The café at 321 Bloor Street West that the Mercurio family runs with
Tony Macri supplied good cheer and daily fuel.
Work on this book may have put to the test my bonds with Domenico
Cuomo, Lawrence Hill, Christopher Kevill, Bernard Maciejewski, and
Bruce Veugelers. Gladly, most of these bonds more than resisted.
A B B R E V I AT I O N S
[ xviii ] Abbreviations
Introduction
The far right has adjusted its image and its message, but to what effect?
“The far right is on the rise!” warn the news media. Journalists have been
recycling this message for years, after each surge in support for the far
right: in France one year, Italy or Belgium another year, then Switzerland,
next Greece, Hungary, Poland, Austria, Italy, Germany, and—looking
across the Atlantic—the United States. Their diagnosis makes the alarm
bells ring: the failure of mainstream parties to deal with serious economic
problems due to globalization has made extreme solutions more attractive
to an alienated, suffering, and desperate segment of the electorate. The wave
is swelling, and it threatens to submerge democracy.
This—the losers of globalization thesis—lacks credibility given voting
trends over the past decade. If the alarmists were correct, a marked increase
in far-right support should have followed the jarring economic crisis that
hit Europe in 2008. Its after-effects are still afflicting youths and pensioners,
workers and families, firms and communities. Yet of 28 European Union
(EU) member countries, 10 still have no far-right party. Among the other
18 countries, after 2008 only nine saw an increase in far-right support.
Among these nine, the increase topped 5 percent in only four (Austria,
A CONSTANT DEMAND
This book does not attempt to resolve the conundrum of whether a de-
fense of democracy can justify a militant intolerance of political extremism
(by suspending the right to free speech or freedom of association, for ex-
ample).17 Anchored in an interdisciplinary approach at the juncture be-
tween history, sociology, and political science, instead this book addresses
a paradox.
Scholars who study the contemporary far right look at two families of
factors: (1) demand-side factors that pertain to electorates (such as social at-
omization, relative deprivation, ethnic competition, popular xenophobia, or
political discontent); and (2) supply-side factors outside of electorates (such as
party messages, party organizations, interparty dynamics, electoral systems,
elite alliances, or media messages).18 At first glance, it would seem sensible
not to rule out causes of either kind: How could explanation do without
both? According to this line of reasoning, far-right voting depends on the
interaction between demand and supply. A good part of the electorate must
share an appetite for the far right; and the party system (as well as mass
media and other opinion shapers) must whet and satisfy that appetite.
Sensible as this composite theory seems, one of its premises turns out
to be weaker than expected. Explanations focused on the demand side risk
overestimating the importance of demand. This is because attitudes sympa-
thetic to the far right are always in plentiful supply.19 Far-right success may
TOULON
The story that unfolds in this book turns on a single event: the victory, on 18
June 1995, of the National Front in Toulon. On that day, this Mediterranean
port of some 170,000 inhabitants became the largest city in Europe to
come under the far right since 1945. Victory had eluded the National Front
in elections with higher stakes (whether departmental, regional, parliamen-
tary, or presidential). The party of Le Pen thus scored a coup in 1995: the
chance to show it was not merely a protest party but one that could govern
well. Its opponents feared the south of France would become a showcase
for the politics of reaction and intolerance.
To explain the victory of the National Front in Toulon, I return to the
development of a complex and multilayered sense of belonging and ex-
clusion among the Europeans of colonial Algeria. Herein lie the roots of
an affinity for the French far right. Other parties received the support of
the ex-colonials during the two decades that followed the independence
of Algeria. During the 1980s, though, many ex-colonials turned to the
far right. Whether members of this group supported the National Front
depended on closed social ties that sealed them within a subculture.
Born in the same year in the 1940s, Monsieur Bertou and Monsieur Ollières
both grew up in Algiers. They migrated to the metropole during the summer
of 1962, and both reside in Toulon, where they know each other. These men
are lukewarm Catholics: they go to church for baptisms, marriages, and
Even with the Arabs—people with whom we would have many quarrels later on—we
all lived together, each community contributed its own customs, its traditions, and eve-
rything was mixed together, was really mixed together and it made for a melting pot that
worked well.
At the Algiers Forum in May 1958, Monsieur Bertou joined the thousands
of settlers who called out “Long Live De Gaulle!” They counted on this
man—who thanks to their insurgency soon became president—to save
their colony:
Four years later, he kicked us out. In this regard, I think that we pieds noirs, we’re all the
same. We were manipulated by the Gaullists. They came to power by making us think
they would restore order but in the end, after four years, they let everything go.
You know militants who are dead, people who were fighting with you, they were from
my neighborhood, and now they were dead.
Honoring such sacrifices means not turning the page. He calls the National
Front a protest party, not a governing party. But honor entails duties:
I am loyal, no matter what. I am loyal to the people who fought the same fight I did. And
in the National Front there are many people who fought the same fight we did. I don’t
Monsieur Bertou cannot let bygones be bygones. For him, a French ex-
colonial who supports the left is a sellout.
Monsieur Ollières, who prefers the moderate left, understands people
like Monsieur Bertou:
They were hurt badly, really torn apart. They were told: “You are going to fight for
France,” and then suddenly they were told, “You have won on the battlefield, but
you must retreat.” They had friends who had died, children who had died, so they
came back here with a rancor that is understandable, a rancor they still hold onto,
they still hang onto. I understand all that, for sure, I understand. Even if I can’t agree,
I understand.
They need to understand too. They need to turn the page. Life can’t stay stuck in the past
forever. The English did some bad things to the French too. But if you keep going back,
it never ends. Same thing with the Germans. When I see a twenty-year-old German,
I don’t blame him for what Hitler did. He is not responsible. The English too. They
fought against the French—at Mers-El-Kébir, for example. It never ends. I think people
need to know when to turn the page. A time comes when people need to say, “Okay, we
won’t forget, but we need to change.”
If by chance the Socialist candidate in an election fails to qualify for the run-
off, Monsieur Ollières transfers his support to the moderate right. He never
supports the far right:
In the National Front, you find former members of the Waffen-SS, and you find former
members of the OAS. The National Front incites people to look for scapegoats who are
responsible for every problem. It used to be the Jews, now maybe it’s the blacks, maybe
it’s the Arabs. They always say, “It’s not me, it’s their fault.”
When one looks at the projections, our workforce will need more and more foreigners.
Look, we are living longer, right, and we are having fewer children, because we prefer
well-being and tranquility.
It’s easy to unite resentments, but that only amounts to exclusion. It’s not constructive,
it’s all about criticism, that’s all. National Front politicians don’t provide any solutions.
When you read their program, it has no solutions. Or when they put some in, they are
completely utopian.
Their memory is stuck. It cannot move ahead. Their memory does not evolve. Instead of
looking around, they only want to look back. But that doesn’t work, it’s not useful. We
might not like many things, we don’t have to agree with everything, not at all, but the
Euro, the European Union, are good things. We can’t retreat inside ourselves. We can’t
do that anymore. It does not help. The past is over.
Today it is easy to forget that the breakthrough of the National Front came
as a surprise. Since its formation, the party had remained weak and nearly
invisible. During the 1980s, suddenly, it moved out of the shadows. Outside
as well as inside France, its ascent caught observers off guard. The reason
for surprise inhered not in the events, but in the lenses used to view them.
Overlooking deep and enduring patterns in society, observers had missed
an undercurrent.26 Unlike communism (above the surface, even after the
consolidation of Gaullism), right-wing resentment against the regime
had slipped from view. It re-emerged when relations between voters and
politicians unraveled. To see this required a lens that did not cut empire,
colonization, and decolonization from its field of vision.
The National Front consolidated its breakthrough by building its voter
base. Coupled with citizen alienation from the established parties, a mix
of voter concerns—crime, unemployment, economic liberalization, and
European integration— ensured the party’s ongoing competitiveness.
Today, in depressed mining and industrial areas of the north and northeast,
the party of Le Pen is replacing the Communists and the Socialists as the
voice of the weak and vulnerable. In towns and cities of the Mediterranean,
by contrast, European ex-colonials provided a reservoir of support. Studying
Toulon, then, opens the lid on regional variation in the party’s strategy.
The fortunes of the far right have fluctuated, yet it remains competitive.
Other parties try to match its appeal, yet it refuses to disappear. Politicians
take a risk when they mimic the far right: opportunism harms credibility.
Stealing votes from the far right in one election, they lose them in the next.
For those who oppose the far right, the lesson is sobering. A quick fix to the
challenge of nativist politics is chimerical. By connecting France’s colonial
past to contemporary politics, we see why the demand that allowed the far
right to penetrate the party system will persist.
This book tells the story of a poisoned legacy, a betrayal of liberty, equality,
and fraternity. Shaping this story is a vision that transcends its sub-
ject. Ignoring the losers of history, I submit, results not merely in blind
spots—a forgetting of the past—but also a thin and potentially distorted
understanding of politics and social change, whose direction depends on
interactions between the losers of history and those who occupy positions
that confer influence, esteem, or power.27
[ 10 ] Empire’s Legacy
I am not the first with this vision. Explaining the attraction of Nazism to
social classes that felt threatened, in 1932 Ernst Bloch wrote:
Germany in general, which did not accomplish a bourgeois revolution until 1918, is,
unlike England, and much less France, the classical land of nonsynchronism, that is, of
unsurmounted remnants of older economic being and consciousness.28
Empire’s Legacy [ 11 ]
PART I
PORTUGAL
SPAIN
Mediterranean Sea
Bouzaréah Philippeville
Orléansville Algiers (Skikda) Bône
Cassaigne (Chlef) Zeralda Bougie
(Sidi Ali) Koléa Boufarik (Béjaïa) (Annaba)
Mostaganem Blida Guelma
Mers-el-Kébir Oran Dublineau Sétif Constantine
Bordj
Lourmel (El Amria) (Hacine) Bou
Mascara (Khemis Arréridj
Sidi Bel Miliana)
Abbès Saïda
MOROCCO
0 100 200 Kilometers ALGERIA TUNISIA
0 100 200 Miles
The most bothersome point is the absence of any affective and spiritual contact between
the French and the Muslims. Two populations live side-by-side, go about their common
business, without making serious efforts to understand and respect each other. Cultural
events organized by one part leave the other part completely indifferent. This is the most
preoccupying point, because indifference can sometimes be more durable than open
hostility.1
This report came just months before the Algerian war of independence, a
conflict that would make contact across the ethno-religious divide more
difficult yet.
Far-right parties are obsessed with the threat from aliens living inside
the national borders. Sometimes they paint this threat as hidden and mys-
terious, other times as plain to anyone with common sense. Aliens threaten
cherished values and traditions, say the nativists, because they are unable
or unwilling to assimilate. Intolerant, authoritarian, sexist, and potentially
violent, aliens threaten progress and peaceful coexistence. Many are agents
of Islamic fundamentalism, allegedly. They take jobs away from natives, and
they take advantage of the welfare state. Their criminality erodes public
safety. Immigration serves a plan that disregards the interests of the average
citizen. Combined with anti-elitism, nativism offers ready-made diagnoses
and remedies for a host of problems.2
Why has this language resonated with a sizeable part of the French elec-
torate? The National Front is the continuator of an intellectual and political
tradition fixated on Jews, Bolsheviks, and Freemasons. Yet these scapegoats
it hardly mentions in public. Instead, it targets “immigrants”—a euphemism
that includes refugees and a good number of French nationals but excludes
people of, say, Portuguese, Italian, or Armenian descent. Immigrant is code
for nonwhite, above all people of Maghrebi origin.3 The far right in con-
temporary France, I will argue, has exploited stereotypes, hopes, and fears
planted during the colonial period.4
Among the three countries that form the Maghreb, Tunisia and Morocco
came under French domination half a century later than Algeria. Neither
attracted anywhere near as many European settlers as did Algeria. Tunisia
and most of Morocco were protectorates (the rest of Morocco went to
Spain). French Algeria—the “Jewel of the Empire”—was not a colony in
law because it was subdivided into departments with a civilian administra-
tion, just like the rest of France. During the 1950s, Tunisia and Morocco
made the transition to independence relatively smoothly. Algeria became
independent after a brutal war that cost many lives and upset many others.
Dividing public opinion and creating political crisis, like the Dreyfus Affair
it belonged to the series of periodic conflicts that have pitted French against
French since 1789.
When he visited Algiers during the 1840s, the writer Théophile
Gautier found chaos and confusion. “The black cloak of the Parisienne,”
he wrote, “brushes in passing against the white veil of the Moorish
woman; the embroidered sleeve of the officer scratches the naked arm of
the Negro rubbed with oil; the rags of the Bedouin jostle the frock coat
of the elegant Frenchman.”5 Colonial Algeria was a caste society whose
European inhabitants could count on political rights, social courtesies,
and material prospects unknown to the vast majority of those they re-
ferred to as les Arabes. The settlers did not form a unified mass, clearly.
Half or more possessed Spanish, Italian, or Maltese origins. Rural life
offered one formative context, life in one of Algeria’s cities or towns an-
other. The party choices of the Algerian settlers spanned the left-right
spectrum. Fault lines between Europeans did not disappear during the
war that led to independence in 1962, but crossing them became easier.
The French of Algeria set aside ethnic differences and came closest to
forming one people with a shared consciousness of its collective des-
tiny.6 By then the colony’s survival was uncertain. With the unravelling
of French Algeria, 1 million settlers found themselves among the losers
of twentieth-century history.
We have not conquered Algeria to make it into a cosmopolitan country: French land
it is, and French land it shall remain. It is imperative to monitor carefully the arrival
of emigrants, especially the Spanish; to admit only those with proper documentation
and certified morals; and to deport vagabonds and miscreants. All the hospitality in the
world could not oblige us to accept in our land the cast-offs of other peoples.17
In mixed European marriages, nearly always the man was French. The prestige French
nationality bestowed served as an attraction to women from the southern Mediterranean
shores, in particular the Hispanic-Algerian women, who were gratified to marry into
“the conquering race.”27
While taking a French spouse allowed social climbing for the Neo-French,
finding a non-French spouse from a higher class might rescue from social
decline a French person with dim economic prospects.28 Though never
achieved, a melting pot of Europeans—the French of Algeria—was in the
making.
For all the differences between Europeans, they would pull together in
defending a system that made the lowest among them superior to almost
any native. Those lumped together as les Arabes included not only people
of Arabian descent but also the first inhabitants of the region, the Berbers,
who had converted to Islam after the Arab incursions of the seventh cen-
tury.29 Through war, famine, sickness, and emigration, during the four
decades after 1830 the subject population shrank from an estimated 3 or
4 million to 2.1 million.30 This number never fell below that of the settler
population, though, a condition that made Algeria different from Australia,
Canada, and the United States.
Beyond the enmity born of violent conquest, religious difference, forced
loans, and punitive levies, the opposition between colonizer and colonized
fed off the land question.31 The French seized the lands of tribes in exile or
at war with them. Estates of the Ottoman oligarchy as well as uncultivated
lands (including fallow fields and common pastures) reverted to the French
state as well. The colonial administration imposed a system of private prop
erty that overturned Ottoman, Islamic, and tribal systems of land use; and
adopted a policy of tribal consolidation that freed up more land. To aid
settlement, in turn, the administration created villages and granted land to
During the quarter century after 1880, only 139 marriages joined a Muslim
man and a European woman; and only 126 joined a European man and
a Muslim woman. Most Europeans believed that unyielding cultural
differences doomed such unions to failure.35
By the early twentieth century, the native represented a diminished
threat to the physical security of the settler:
It was now a question of creating a society in the image of the newcomer, and this could
only work to the detriment of the society already in situ. The settler ideology that evolved
denigrated and marginalized indigenous society better to anchor its own. This ensured
the exclusion, with a few individual exceptions, of the indigenous population from the
European social pyramid. Indigenous society evolved at its own pace, and with its own
hierarchies, alongside European society but not within it.36
The gentleman: Look here! Find me two Arabs who are no thieves to whom I can en-
trust two bundles of laundry to bring to my house.
The native: Such Arabs are not to be found, sir!42
If an indigène should wish to act independently, where will we be? He, a French subject,
would want to question the basis of sovereignty! I challenge him on his right to do this.
I am the conqueror, with the goodness of a Frenchman, but I wish to remain the con-
queror and to say to him, “Your place is not in the same assembly as mine.”46
Solidarity with their own made few Muslims apply for French citizenship.
To prove assimilation, in any event, an applicant needed to know French
and have professional or friendly relations with a European. Because it
showed devotion to France, service in the military, schools, or administra-
tion helped. After a background check, though, the police might conclude
that career advancement had motivated an application. The administration
treated polygamy or a criminal record as a sign of poor character. Education
also raised suspicion—the applicant might be an independent thinker.
During the entire colonial period, perhaps 6,000 Muslims crossed to the
other side and acquired French citizenship.47
The Ottoman regime had tolerated Judaism but subjected its adherents
to legal and economic discrimination. France also recognized its subjects’
right to practice their religion. Just as Muslims came under the jurisdiction
of cadis who upheld Islamic codes mixed with Berber customs, the Jewish
minority came under the authority of rabbis and the Mosaic codes.48 After
the conquest, young Jewish men took advantage of new opportunities for
schooling, but French nationality remained a condition for public employ-
ment or entry into professions like law and medicine.49
Pressure for the naturalization of Jews did not originate within the
colony, where military elites feared it would antagonize the Muslim ma-
jority.50 The metropole held precedents: the emancipation of the Jews in
1791; and the civil code of 1804, which had granted religious freedom. In
1806, Bonaparte had convened an assembly of Jewish notables in Paris to
ascertain if the civil code were compatible with the Mosaic code. Foremost
among the issues discussed were polygamy, divorce, and intermarriage.
Between 1914 and 1918, more than 172,000 men left Algeria to fight for
France (with some 22,000 Europeans and 25,000 Muslims killed). Wartime
service unified the European soldiers from Algeria by putting their attach-
ment to France above differences in locality and ethnicity. Within the
The indigène is at the end of his rope. He is running out of food and cash; debt is
paralyzing him; the mortgage on his lands has reached the extreme limit; the lack of
pasture has reduced livestock by 60 percent; and to provide for his family, which he can
no longer feed on his own, he has no choice but to sell the rest. All around are rock and
bare earth.68
Even if pure friendship was exceptional between women, cordial relations might some-
times grow between European women and their Muslim domestic helpers. When they
Would it be possible to grant complete political rights to the Algerian indigènes, in par-
ticular the right to be electors and candidates for the Houses, without running a serious
danger? Would this not run the risk of provoking a kind of plebiscite against our dom-
ination? Would this not place a weapon in the hands of people who would not know
how to use it?83
One French critic put the problem succinctly: the Europeans of Algeria
did not want liberal reforms that would submerge them under the greater
number of Muslims.84
Here lay the contradiction of a republic single, indivisible, equal, and
free—in principle. Algeria formed a part of France, yet rights and freedoms
in the colony depended on religion, hence ethnicity. Republican liberalism
upheld not just the exclusion of the majority of the people but also a regime
that served the interests of a dominant people. In 1937–1938, Algerian
mayors and municipal councilors threatened to resign unless the National
Assembly in Paris withdrew the Blum-Viollette bill, which would have
extended the franchise to select Muslims (civil servants, elected officials,
those with a higher level of education, and veteran war officers). The sen-
ator from Oran declared, “The French of Algeria will never accept such a bill
because . . . it would place them sooner or later under Arab domination.”85
2. Because there is a time also required, that men may fill up the
measure of their sinnes.
Vse. This may serve to admonish us, not to condemne God any
way either of slownesse or rashnesse in respect of his judgements,
but to rest well satisfied in his most wise ordering of all things.
Reason 1. Because when they suffer for the name of God, God
doth in some sort suffer with them, and therefore their cause is Gods
cause.
Reason 1. Because they cannot suffer for the name of Christ but
as they suffer for well doing.
Verse 2. Feed the flock of God which is among you, taking the
oversight thereof, not by constraint, but willingly: not for filthy
lucre, but of a ready minde.
The Analysis.
Vse. This may serve to direct us, in all our exhortations and
admonitions to have respect unto this.
Vse. This may serve to admonish every one to take greatest care
of those duties which are proper to his calling or condition.
2. Because that which comes not from the heart, and is not done
willingly, is done only perfunctorily and for fashion sake, not with that
diligence and care which God requires.
3. Because that which proceeds not from the heart and the
deerest affection of the soule, doth not usually worke upon other
mens mindes, and therefore is not effectuall to the edification of the
Church, which is the end of the Ministery.
Reason 1. Because they are called to feed the flock with all their
strength; and therefore they should edifie the Church not only by
their words, but by their deeds also.
4. Because it takes away all prejudice out of mens minds, and all
suspicion of affecting Lordlinesse and vaine glory, when they see
Ministers seriously to do that, which they propound and perswade
others to do.
2. Because they must expect many injuries from men, and those
good things which doe happen, are not such, or so highly to be
esteemed of, as that they should depend upon them.
3. Because they will labour to please him most, from whom they
expect their reward. Now they should please Christ, not men.
Reason 1. Because glory is the reward of the faithfull for all kinde
of obedience towards God: Now in the Ministery there is a speciall
kinde of obedience.
Verse 7. Casting all your care upon him, for he careth for you.
The Analysis.
Reason 1. Because the same God and Lord both of Pastors &
people, hath imposed and prescribed to both their duties.
Use. This may serve to reprove those that are very curious and
rigid in exacting their Pastors duty, when in the meane time they are
nothing carefull of their own dutie.
Vse. This may serve to reprove those that come unto Sermons,
as Judges, to play the Criticks, not to subject themselves to the will
of God, and such as cast off all discipline as an intollerable yoke.
Vse. This may serve to refute all those, that seeke for honour and
reputation by arrogancy; and shunne humility as it were a vile
debasing of a mans selfe.
Vse. This may serve to exhort us, greatly to labour for humility.
Vse. This may serve to admonish us, not to suffer our selves so
much as in thought to be led away from our obedience towards God,
but from the meditation of Gods omnipotency and our own infirmity
to increase daily more and more in humility.
2. Because they glorifie God, and therefore God will exalt them
according to his promise, Those that honour me, I will honour.
Vse. This may serve to direct us, to seek for true exaltation by
humilitie and submission.
Vse. This may serve to comfort all the godly, because God hath
freed them from all care; and they should imbrace this libertie by true
faith, and putting their trust in him, and apply it to themselves.
Verse 9. Whom resist stedfast in the faith, knowing that the same
afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are in the
world.
Verse 10. But the God of all grace, who hath called us into his
eternall glory by Christ Iesus, after that ye have suffered a while,
make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you.
Verse 11. To him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen.
The Analysis.
2. Because the care of the world doth draw and distract the
minde, so that although it doth not altogether exclude religion, yet it
doth diminish and weaken it.