Abstract
In the aftermath of the April 1901 Margueritte Affair, the fortunes of the extreme Right dissipated throughout Algeria. Faced with the threat of Muslim violence against Europeans, a constant worry throughout the colony’s history, the population in all three departments abandoned anti-Semitic politics, temporarily eschewing xenophobic rioting and inflammatory rhetoric. Memories of the 1871 Kabyle revolt remained vivid in public memory. In January of that year Berbers in Constantine rose up under the leadership of tribal luminary Muhammad al-Hajj al-Muqrānī, in response to the extension of French civilian control over rural tribal territories and to famine and disease resulting from four years of land seizures, drought, and natural disasters. Fearing the legislative authority of the settlers, whose complete disregard for the rights and properties of Algerians was far worse than the policies of the metropolitan government or the Bureaux Arabes, the 150,000-strong rebel force held out until October, killing 2,686 settlers.1
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Notes
John Ruedy, Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 76–79. Worse still, for the settlers the insurrection was not a spontaneous rising, but planned in advance, and fuelled by a marked increase in arms sales from early 1870 onward. See MarcelÉmerit, “La Question algérienne en 1871,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 19 (1972): 257.
Marcel Émerit, “La Question algérienne en 1871,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 19 (1972): 257.
Martin Thomas, The French Empire Between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics, and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 68, 253–255;
Jacques Bouvaresse, Un parlement colonial: les Délégations financières algériennes, 1898–1945 (Mont-Saint-Aignon: Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre, 2008), 19, 55;
Thomas, The French Empire Between the Wars, 56–59; Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 89–91, Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Guelma, 1945: Une subversion fran çaise dans l’Alg é rie coloniale (Paris: É ditions la d é couverte, 2009), 70–72.
James McDougall, “Savage Wars? Codes of Violence in Algeria, 1830s-1990s,” Third World Quarterly 26 (2005): 122.
Peyroulou, Guelma, 1945, 66–69; Abdelkadar Dieghloul, “Hors-la-loi, violence arabe et pouvoir colonial en Algérie au dé but du XXe siècle: les frères Boutouizerat,” Revue de l’occident musulman et de la Mé diterran ée 38 (1984): 37–45.
Malcolm Richardson, “Algeria and the Popular Front: Radicals, Socialists, and the Blum-Viollette Project,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, 5 (1977): 354–355.
Jacques Cantier, L’Algérie sous le régime de Vichy (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2002), 24–25;
Mahfoud Kaddache, Histoire du nationalisme algérien: Tome 1, 1919–1939 (Paris: Éditions Paris-Méditerranée, 2000), 52;
Pierre Mannoni, Les Français d’Algérie: vie, moeurs, mentalitéde la conquête des Territoires du Sud à l’indépendance (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993).
Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The First Wave, 1924–1933 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 10–20;
Eugen Weber, Action française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), Chapters one and two.
Oran F/92/3118, Oran/April 23, 1921, Chef de la Sûretédé partemen-tale to Préfet; Oran F/92/3118, Oran/May 1, 1922, Chef de la Sûreté dé partementale to Préfet; Constantine B/3/701, Constantine/May 25, 1922, Chef de la Sûretéd é partementale to Préfet. On the Crémieux Decree, see Richard Ayoun and Bernard Cohen, Les Juifs d’Algérie: 2000 ans d’histoire (Paris: Jean-Claude Lattès, 1982), 133–139.
Jonathan K. Gosnell, The Politics of Frenchness in Colonial Algeria, 1930–1954 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 186–190.
Thomas, The French Empire Between the Wars, 250; Jacques Cantier, “Les Gouverneurs Viollette et Bordes et la politique algérienne de la France à la fin des ann ées 1920,” Revue fran ç aise d’histoire d’Outremer 84 (1997): 31–49.
On the theme of sexual domination in the colonial sphere, see Ann Laura Stoler, “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race, and Morality in Colonial Asia,” in Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era, Micaela di Leonardo (ed.) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 54–56
Julia Clancy-Smith, “Islam, Gender, and Identities in the Making of French Algeria, 1830–1962,” in Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism, ed. Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 155–156, 173.
Clancy-Smith and Marnia Lazreg, In “A Woman Without Her Distaff: Gender, Work, and Handicraft Production in Colonial North Africa,” in Women and Gender in the Modern Middle East, ed. Margaret Merriwether and Judith Tucker (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1999), 25–62
Marnia Lazreg, The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question, (New York: Routledge, 1994), 98–105.
See David Prochaska, “History as Literature, Literature as History: Cagayous of Algiers,” American Historical Review 101 (1996): 674–711.
Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 102–109.
Manuela Semidei, “Les Socialistes français et le problème colonial entre les deux guerres (1919–1939),” Revue française de science politique 18 (1968): 1127–1128.
Emmanuel Sivan, Communisme et nationalisme en Algérie (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1976), 63.
Claude Liauzu, Histoire de l’anticolonialisme en France (Paris: Armand Colin, 2007), 139, 143–147, 149–150.
Oran/95, August 21, 1929, Commissaire Central de la ville d’Oran to Préfet; Oran/95, September 7, 1929, Chef de la Sûretédé partementale to Préfet, “Réunion organisée par M. Sther, Chefdépartementale des Jeunesses patriotes d’Oran.” On the steadfast rejection of benefits for the worker by Algerian owners, see Daniel Lefeuvre’s economic history of the colony Chère Algérie: la France et sa colonie, 1930–1962 (Paris: Flammarion, 2005), 25–68.
Geneviève Dermenjian, La Crise antijuive oranaise (1895–1905): l’antisémitisme dans l’Algérie colonial (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986), 74–94, 107–108, 140–144;
Elizabeth Friedman, Colonialism and After: An Algerian Jewish Community (South Hadley: Bergin and Garvey, 1988), 18–24;
Oran/95, Oran/May 31, 1924, Chef de la Sûret é d é partementale to Préfet; Oran/81, n.d., “Notice sur la sociétél’Union latine”; Docteur Jules Molle, Le N éo-antisémitisme (Millau: Artières et Mau, 1933), 9–11. This work is a compendium of Molle’s press articles and speeches. He claimed that Oran’s Jewish community had paraded through the streets after the 1924 election drunkenly menacing non-Jews, which provoked the UL’s formation.
Robert Attal, Les Émeutes de Constantine, 5 août 1934 (Paris: Romillat, 2004), 35–37;
Joëlle Bahloul, The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish—Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria, 1937–1962 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 12;
David Prochaska, Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 138–139, 160–168;
Friedman, Colonialism and After (South Hadley: Bergin and Garvey, 1988), 15, 81.
Lizabeth Zack, “French and Algerian Identity Formation in 1890s Algiers,” French Colonial History 2 (2002): 120, 125–132. As Zack notes, the establishment of socio-cultural difference extended to the Muslim population. Resentful at their inequality, at various times they evinced anger at Jewish neighbors.
GGA 3CAB/95, “Recensement de la population en 1931”; Thomas, The French Empire Between the Wars , 303; Kamel Kateb, Europ é ens, “indigenes,” et juifs en Alg é rie (1830–1962): repr é sentations et r é alit é s des populations. (Paris: É ditions de L’Institut national d’études dé mographiques, 2001), 176, 190–193. Although the percentage of Jews was not substantially higher in Oran than in Constantine, the overwhelming presence of Muslims in the latter department tended to eclipse the Jewish population, particularly for the extreme Right.
Un tableau,” Petit oranais , March 23, 1925; “L’Internationale juive,” Petit oranais , June 17, 1927; Oran/95, Oran/November 27, 1928, Chef de la Sûretédé partementale to Pr é fet. Molle frequently repeated the charge that North African Jews did not fight in the Great War, displaying little patriotism or enthusiasm for the French side in 1914, because the conflict did not serve their interests. See “A Propos d’un appel,” Petit oranais , June 8, 1929. This charge is patently false, as thousands served and many died for France during the war. See Richard S. Fogarty, Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
L’altercation entre MM. Roux-Freissineng et Molle,” Petit oranais, July 1, 1928. On the circulation of Le Quotidien and the position of Le Temps in interwar French journalism, see the relevant sections in Claude Bellanger, Histoire g é n é rale de la presse fran ç aise (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1976).
Gosnell, The Politics of Frenchness, 6–7, 141; Patricia M. E. Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Race in Colonial Algeria (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995), 212. The systematic creation of otherness was not entirely unknown to metropolitan Europeans, and particularly to the nineteenth-century middle-class. As Patrick Wolfe notes: “Ideologically, the production of the European bourgeois self relied significantly on the colonized (savage or barbarian) not-self in a manner congruent with the way in which the productivity of the Manchester cotton mills relied on the coercion of labor in Louisiana, India, and Egypt.” Thus the colonizer—in this case the Algerian settler—bases his or her entire self-definition on the negative colonized (“History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory, from Marx to Postcolonialism,” American Historical Review 102 (1997): 413).
Patrick Wolfe, (“History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory, from Marx to Postcolonialism,” American Historical Review 102 (1997): 413).
Bouvaresse, Un parlement colonial, 18–19. On the concept of a nation or people as an imagined community, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 1991).
Gosnell, The Politics of Frenchness, 13–16; Jean-François Guilhaume, Les Mythes fondateurs de l’Algérie française (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992), 223–233
Daniel Leconte, Les Pied-noirs: histoire et portrait d’une communauté(Paris: Seuil, 1980), 101.
Benjamin Claude Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence ofFrance’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 53–89;
Raphaëlle Branche, La torture et l’armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie, 1954–1962 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 26.
Ali Yedes, “Social Dynamics in Colonial Algeria: The Question of Pied-Noirs Identity,” in French Civilization and Its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, and Race, Tyler Stovall and Georges Van Den Abbeele (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006), 245;
Pierre Nora, Les Français d’Algérie (Paris: Julliard, 1961), 12–15.
Thomas, The French Empire Between the Wars , 138–140; Lorcin, Imperial Identities , 186; Peyroulou, Guelma, 1945 , 72–73;Yedes, “Social Dynamics in Colonial Algeria,” 245; Gosnell, The Politics of Frenchness , 223–229, Neil MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism: Algerians in France, 1900–1962 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 122. Many settlers rejected all but the most token and essential contact with France: monetary policy, a common market, and the protection afforded by the gendarmerie were seen as undesirable but necessary evils. See Gosnell, The Politics of Frenchness , 187.
Joë lle Hureau, La Mémoire des Pied-noirs de 1830 ànosjours (Paris: Perrin, 2001), 111–114, 239–240. As Hureau notes, Musette’s Cagayous best expresses settler views on the matter: “Les relations avec les arabes se limitaient à des affrontements pour l’acc è s aux fontaines publiques, des mauvaises plaisanteries faites aux prostitués de la Casbah, ou des frayeurs inspirées aux moutchous, se dresse, au contraire, comme un obstacle incontournable devant les thé ories de l’enracinement.” Thus his famous exclamation “Alg é riens nous sommes!” naturally excludes Arabs.
In Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 70.
Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 3–4.
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© 2013 Samuel Kalman
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Kalman, S. (2013). The Action Française, Jeunesses Patriotes, Unions latines, and the Birth of Latinité, 1919–1931. In: French Colonial Fascism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137307095_2
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