**The Algerian Republic: Reactionary Reconstitution and its Consequences
Part 1 of 2: The Emplacement of the Settler State (1919-1933)**
The Algerian Republic is the progeny of the European petty-bourgeois’ most lurid fantasies. Can one begin to imagine what horrors this deranged class would have inflicted upon Europe had they been allowed to take power here?
-Angelo Tasca, Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, 1934
Setting aside all the questions of conscience and public morality, can the government which proclaims an ‘Anglo-Mohammaden’ commonwealth persist in its current policy toward this so-called “Algerian Republic” without recognizing the grievous costs incurred?
-Percy Harris, English MP, 1935
Properly speaking, the socialists owe us assistance not out of charity but obligation: it is the dregs from their lands who have washed upon Algeria’s shores. Some day, when Algeria is free and the Fellahin have reclaimed their lands, we can consider whether this balance has been truly paid.
-Ahmed Messali Hadj, leader of the Algerian Union of Revolutionary Marxists, 1938
The following entry presents excerpts from Sven Lindqvist’s pathbreaking study in settler-colonialism alongside primary documents from the period under discussion. These documents are placed here by the editors of this compendium, not by Lindqvist.
Excerpts from Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate all the Brutes: An Inquiry into Settler-Colonialism(Stockholm: 1984)
…By the end of the Interregnum Era, the Algerian Republic had become something unique: repudiating both liberalism and fascism, its closest sibling was the European-dominated Herrenvolk republic of South Africa. It was distinguished by the extraordinary claims it made for itself. In the words of its leading politicians and advocates, it was something both new and old: the ancien régime of 19th century bourgeois society reconstituted as a transnational European-Christian Republic, the refuge of a shattered class that would, with time, regenerate itself and storm the battlements of the false revolutionary order. Its rhetoric, however, elided the more sordid realities. The monumental neoclassical facades of Algiers were made possible by a reign of brutal violence and dispossession, and the Arabic-Islamic world which had been assaulted by French colonialism and decimated by the consolidation of the new “Mediterranean” Republic would develop its own answer to the herrenvolk state. This is the story of how the Algerian Republic was born, how it justified itself, and how its victims catalyzed a broader resistance to the depredations of colonialism.
I. Mass Migration and the Counterrevolutionary Republic (1919-1925)
The Algerian Republic was as much a product of the great upheavals of 1919 as any of the new revolutionary states in Europe. During the tempestuous half-decade between the epochal rupture of November 1919 and the 1924 Stockholm Accords, Algeria became an increasingly influential transnational hub for white émigrés. Initially, it was far from the most desirable location: violence between white settlers and the Muslim majority had already started to flare as a consequence of the extractions imposed on the territory in the Great War, which were passed on to the indigenous Berbers and Arabs. But this mattered increasingly little in a world where options for migration were few and both America and Britain placed stringent restrictions on entry.
Throughout the First Revolutionary Era, immigrants came from nearly every European nation. From Italy arrived struggling Genoese shipping merchants, the declining small landowners of Sicily, Fiat plant supervisors, and middling functionaries from the enlarged Liberal state. From Germany came white-collar clerks, Prussian civil servants, and the nascent managerial class of a collapsing capitalism. From the Netherlands came pious, middle-class Calvinists, lawyers and doctors, unwilling to venture into the savage recesses of the East Indies, drawn instead to the Mediterranean allure of French Algeria. From Russia arrived a whole army of the lesser aristocracy, deprived of their landed estates and carrying with them their experience as officers in the war or volunteers for the zemstvo. And from France itself came the desperate remnants of a shattered middle-class, unwilling to surrender to revolutionary socialism but equally reluctant to spill their blood in fighting its seemingly inevitable advance. Perhaps the most infamous émigrés came from Poland, where the army officers who had committed ethnocide against the Jewish minority were placed alongside a sizable Jewish mittelstand, the butchers of Jews receiving treatment from Jewish doctors. Yes, here in Algeria a new social order could be built; a “European” one, albeit one that never looked quite like Europe itself, with all its squabbling nationalities and competing imperialisms.
The 2 million Europeans who arrived in Algeria from 1919 to 1930 were refugees from the revolutionary advance. While some had lost property or status, many merely feared doing so, their ideological convictions persuading them to pre-empt the seizure of their assets from hostile governments. The Great War had been a great testing ground of the European middle-class: while an astonishingly large number of minority bourgeoisie and proletarianized property owners would reticently embrace the revolution as the only means of ending the war, a remnant of the mittelstand instead chose a different path: not so much active identification with the wartime governments imposing social ruin on their societies, but more a nostalgic yearning for a pre-war past of imagined social harmony and stability. It was this group which made its way to Algeria.
These were shopkeepers and lawyers, farmers and engineers, members of the moyenne and petite, but not the haute, bourgeoisie. While the great financiers and industrialists of old Europe were welcomed into the United States and Britain, their lesser brethren found themselves obliged to travel to a more racially ambiguous space, a frontier of European colonization whose metropole’s status was now quite dubious.
Their arrival caused no small amount of conflict with the pre-existing settler population. Efforts were made by the French governor-general to clamp down on their entry, but with France in Civil War and the British Navy patrolling the North Sea and Indian Oceans, the colony had no means of preventing the incessant flood of refugees. Construction of new homes could not keep pace with the arrival of fresh Europeans, and colonial society created its own solutions. Ethnic paramilitaries and local defense leagues were organized, and the second mass dispossession of Algerian land began apace. Technically speaking, land appropriation was a process which had operated continuously since the French first arrived in Algeria, but after the initial wave of conquest it had been regularized and institutionalized. Now, with the rushed arrival of millions of European settlers - many of them veterans of or otherwise trained in war - the floodgates for campaigns of cleansing and plunder were opened. Native resistance inevitably led to calls for the nascent and fragile Algerian state apparatus to assist in the process.
…During the First Revolutionary Era, the Algerian Republic was still nominally a part of “white” France. The citizenry were sympathetic to the Catholic-Conservative government of Castelnau but nervous about the exactions he would impose upon the colony. Extraordinary wartime taxes were heightened in 1922 and 1923 during the years of most brutal fighting, eliciting resentment. Many worried about the possibility of a draft.
With France’s credibility in Morocco already under strain, the Castelnau government settled upon the appointment of Hubert Lyautey as the new Algerian governor-general. Lyautey promised the Algerians that there would be no further hikes in taxes, and relaxed wartime prohibitions on political organizing amongst colonists. This enabled Jules Molle, the charismatic mayor of Oran, to begin expanding his political power-base well beyond Algeria’s second city. Molle had proven himself a capable crisis manager, ably navigating between white European refugees and the established community. He spoke a civilizational rhetoric of a shared, European-Mediterranean identity, and won ardent support through the distribution of patronage. His “Algerian Social Union” party grew to encompass not merely Spaniards and Italians, but also Russians, Germans, and Dutchmen.
By 1924, the diplomatic crisis appeared - on the surface - to have improved. Lyautey had employed the full extent of his diplomatic powers to assuage the concerns of the colonists, and the Stockholm Accords promised an end to the fighting. But in the eyes of many colonists, particularly the older pied-noirs who still possessed a burning loyalty to France, the Stockholm agreement delegitimized the Castelnau government. Ten years of sacrifice and hardship had been endured, only to see the most productive regions of the French Republic surrendered to the socialists and the Empire in tatters, picked apart by the English vulture when it could not stand on its own.
Events in the metropole reflected similar developments. Castelnau, the trustworthy catholic conservative, was overthrown by Valois’ band of misfit soldiers preaching the doctrine of fascism. The soldier was proclaimed the universal class of history, and the “French Race” declared superior to the other members of the European family. Under pressure from the colonists, Lyautey declared loyalty to Castelnau, but there was no feasible path for his return to power.
To Algeria’s over one million non-French European settlers, Valois was unacceptable. Shortly after the coup in France, militias associated with Molle’s Algerian Social Union took the lead, seizing control of government buildings in Oran. Similar actions were taken later that week in frontier outposts, with settler defense leagues formed for the purpose of land expropriation and the suppression of native resistance now turned against the remnants of the old colonial army. Contingents of the French Army were forced to choose between declaring loyalty to Valois, laying down their arms, or continuing to fight for the quixotic cause of a non-fascist but nonetheless “French” Algeria. Three weeks of chaotic violence followed, but the outcome never really appeared to be in doubt. The core of old French pied-noirs who may have resisted independence declined to fight on behalf of a Fascist government which pointedly refused to acknowledge the autonomy Algeria had gained over the past half-decade. Instead several Muslim uprisings hoping to take advantage of Algeria’s internal divisions provided the settler community with the opportunity to come together in excising them with systematic brutality.
The Oslo Conference, convened hastily in December 1925 by Britain and America, formalized the new reality in the ground. Faced with the prospect of either a failed state in North Africa or a fascist French reconquest that could destabilize the entire Mediterranean, the Anglo-American powers chose a third option: recognition of the settler republic under international guarantee. The Algerian Republic would remain nominally within the French legal orbit - a fiction that satisfied diplomatic niceties - but would exercise complete internal autonomy, existing as a sovereign state. British and American naval power would ensure that neither of the two France’s on the mainland could interfere in Algerian affairs.
The Muslim population, which encompassed over 70% of Algeria’s inhabitants, was not consulted. The People’s Front Against Imperialism, which had established a branch in Algiers in February 1925 and mobilized tens of thousands in demonstrations demanding self-determination, saw its leadership arrested, executed, or forced into exile. By early 1926, an estimated 650,000 Muslims had fled across the borders into Tunisia and Morocco, the first wave of what would become a vast and consequential diaspora.
Declaration of Principles of the Algerian Social Union, adopted by acclamation at the Union’s Second Congress, Algiers, October 1928. Issued in French, by then the administrative and common language of the Republic, and translated here in full.
DECLARATION OF THE SECOND CONGRESS OF THE ALGERIAN SOCIAL UNION
Preamble
There are seasons of civilization when the work of centuries of labour and wisdom shatters in a single year, and the patient inheritance of a hundred generations is carried off in the flood. Such an inundation washed over Europe in the autumn of 1919. We have witnessed this great catastrophe, have buried our sons in foreign earth and departed our ancestral fatherlands.
In the hard school of exile , we have learned the truth that the comfortable years kept hidden: a robust civilization cannot be slain by a foreign conqueror. The barbarian at the gate is never as deadly as the rot within. Three generations the liberal order laboured to loosen every bond by which men are held together and held upright — the bonds of faith, of family, of soil and station — until there remained only the abstract citizen. When the solvent had done its work, and nothing firm was left to break the wave, the red tide came in and met no resistance at all.
The great ones did not stay to hold the line. The financier had his passage booked and his fortune lodged in safety; the lord of industry was made welcome in London and in New York, where his capital bought him a new ready-made patriotism. It was not these sort who stood for our civilizational order. It was the other Europe which suffered and which held fast, the Europe of small property and honest calling, of the workshop and the freehold and the modest counting-house, of the officer and the clerk, the schoolmaster and the physician; the Europe that could not flee, having nowhere to flee to, and would not kneel, having been bred to a sterner and less compromising faith. This Europe has been cast upon foreign shores, and is gathered here today to fulfill its true vocation.
Why this shore? Providence, that is wiser than men, did not cast us here by chance. Upon this southern coast of the Latin sea, Europe was once herself. Here Augustine of Hippo gave the Church her mind and her tongue; here the legions held the frontier of the ordered world against the sand; here stood cities of Rome whose broken stones still reproach the wilderness that a thousand years of conquest made of them. We are not simply strangers arriving in a strange land. We have come home to a country that was European and Christian a thousand years before the conqueror’s crescent rose above it, and we have come to make it so again.
This, then, is what we are. We are not Frenchmen, though many of us were born to France and speak her tongue, which has become among us the common speech of the Latin sea as Latin was once the common speech of Rome. We are not Italians, nor Russians, nor men of the German lands or the Low Countries, though we keep faithfully the memory of every one of our homelands. We are the thing that Europe, in her pride and her quarrelling, never fully became: we are Europeans, simply and without qualification — sons of one civilization, one faith, one inheritance, who have laid the wars of the nations down at the water’s edge and taken up the single name the nations had forgotten. Let the degenerate husk of the Old World rend itself feebly upon our borders. Here there shall be one, united people.
I. Of the Two Idolatries
Our enemy is named: it is the proletarian barbarism that has drowned the European homelands, that abolishes property and faith and family together, that sets the Class upon the altar where God once stood and calls its tyranny liberation. With this idolatry there is no peace, no parley, and no common ground; it is the negation of everything by which men have lived since they ceased to be beasts.
But we are told that against this red barbarism a saviour has arisen, who in Toulouse took up the sword and promised the nations their greatness again. We know this saviour; we have looked upon his face; and we say that he is brother to the thing he fights. He worships, as the Bolshevik worships, the mass, the fist, the marching column; he deifies the State as the other deifies the Class; he casts down God and sets the soldier in His place. And when he speaks the sacred word nation , he means not the great European civilization that is the common mother of us all, but one tribe of it raised up as an idol above the rest: the French Race, the blood of a single people made a god. It was this creed, in the very hour of our abandonment, that would have made us the subjects of a foreign tyranny rather than the citizens of a free European commonwealth, that looked upon what we had built and saw only a province to be reconquered. We did not cross the sea to exchange one master for another.II. Of Citizenship, and Its Earning
The Republic belongs in common to all who belong to it, and within that company none stands above another by his nation or his birth: the Italian and the Russian, the Frenchman and the Hollander, the German and the Pole are equal in its citizenship and equal in its defence, for we have abolished the quarrels of the nations and shall not raise them again. But citizenship is no gift of nature, to be had for the mere fact of breathing the Republic’s air. It is an earned dignity, and it is rendered to those who have shown themselves worthy of it by the property they hold and have made fruitful, by the years they have given to this soil, and above all by their readiness to bear arms in the Republic’s defence. He who will not defend the commonwealth shall have no voice in its councils; he who defends it with his blood shall want for no voice at all. This is no aristocracy of birth, which we have abolished, but an aristocracy of service, which we have raised in its place.
III. Of the Native Populations
This was a European and a Christian land, and it will be so again. The labour of one generation can hardly repair the ruin of over a thousand years, and for a long time yet there will live on this soil a vast multitude who are not, and who cannot be made, of the Republic. Concerning the so-called native inhabitants who dwell among us and beneath us, we hold to the honest truth that softer men cannot bring themselves to admit: there is no natural equality of races, and some are born to labor where others are born to rule. To deny this principle is to open the gate to the very disorder from which we fled.
We owe the other inhabitants of this land exacting justice: the justice of order, of honest labour, and of the firm and patient tutelage by which a higher civilization has in every age dealt with its inferiors. They are entitled to nothing else. The peace between us shall be kept, as the peace of every frontier that has been kept since the legions watched the desert, by an unsleeping vigilance and by arms which are never sheathed.
IV. Of Faith
We are a Christian people, and we shall remain one, not because every man among us bends his knee, for we constrain no conscience and we suffer no priest to govern where the citizen should rule, but because Christendom is the name of our civilization, and the cross the standard under which it was raised. The faith of our fathers built the law, the cities, and the learning that are our true patrimony; it drew the line between Europe and the desert; and a people that forgets its God will not for long remember itself. We honour the Church as the mother of our civilization and the keeper of its memory, but we do not put into her hand the keys of the State. Faith shall be the soul of the Republic, and the Republic the master in its own house.
Peroration
Let no man take us for a people in retreat. The tree was felled, but the seed was carried across the water, and here, on these warm and savage grounds, the people of Europe will harden and regenerate themselves. We hold here, in trust, the civilization that the Old World in its madness threw away — its faith, its order, its learning, its reverence for property and family and the labour of free men — and we keep it whole until the day of its return.
The false revolutionary order shall not endure. No tyranny built upon the denial of nature and the abolition of God has ever endured, and this one shall not be the first to break the rule. The flood will rise to its height, and turn, and fall; and when it falls, the peoples of Europe, waking from their long fever, will look across the sea for the thing they squandered, and they shall find it here, kept and living and armed. From this shore the tide of restoration shall flow back the way the tide of ruin came.
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Excerpts from Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate all the Brutes
II. Constitutional Construction: Codifying Herrenvolk Republicanism (1925-1933)
…The 1927 Constitution gave the settler republic its institutional form, setting down two distinct relations to the state: an illiberal but republican framework for the European citizenry, and authoritarian provisions for the native majority. The preamble declared Algeria to be “a refuge for European Christians fleeing anarchic disorder and mob persecution, and a free republic dedicated to the preservation of liberty and property.”
The citizenship clauses offered the clearest window into whom the Republic was intended to serve. There were three classes of person within it: full citizens, possessed of the entire suite of civic rights; “passive citizens,” capable of earning the right to political participation but provisionally excluded from it; and subjects, constitutionally barred from the civic process altogether. All “persons of European descent and Christian faith, resident in Algeria at the time of Constitutional Enactment” were made automatic full citizens. The pre-existing Jewish population, granted citizenship in 1870 by the Crémieux Decree, was therefore selectively stripped of it. Jews, like future arrivals of any confession, could acquire citizenship only by meeting one of three conditions: a three-year term of military service; a high property qualification, generally within reach only of the upper-middle classes and the wealthy; or a decade’s residence in the territory, throughout which they were subject to heightened, extractive taxation. Fighting the native and funding the state were the two routes to citizenship for newer arrivals and the existing Jewish population alike. The effect on the Jewish community was to re-sort a population that had been uniformly enfranchised into those who could meet the new thresholds and those who could not. A poor Jewish family resident for fifty years, without means and without a son of serviceable age, was returned to the margins of political life it had left two generations before, though the door, unlike the Muslim’s, was not sealed behind it. Muslims occupied a far less hazy category: classified as “indigenous subjects,” entitled to the protection of their persons and property - a clause observed more in the breach than in the keeping - and explicitly excluded from ever becoming citizens at all.
The machinery of government reflected the settlers’ middle-class, authoritarian Herrenvolk republicanism. A lower house of 180 deputies was returned by first-past-the-post in single-member constituencies; a Senate of 100 sat half-elected from the municipalities and half appointed outright by the President. The President himself, directly elected to a seven-year term, commanded sweeping executive authority, including the power to declare states of emergency, suspend civil liberties, and govern by decree. These powers were exercised most often in Muslim areas to put down unrest. Administrative detention — imprisonment without trial for as long as two years — was standard practice for suspected nationalists; censorship governed what the newspapers might print of Muslim resistance or settler violence; and the intelligence services watched not only Muslim political activity but settler dissidents and Jewish organizations besides.
The constitution wrote segregation into the map. “European zones” - the coastal cities, the prime agricultural land, the tracts marked for settler development - required Muslims to hold permits for residence, and sometimes for mere entry. “Native reserves” in the interior and on marginal land concentrated the Muslim population. “Mixed zones” let Muslims work the European farms but never own them.
Within these limits the party system loosened from Molle’s early dominance into competitive coalition politics. His Algerian Social Union took 70 to 75 percent of the chamber in the first elections, in 1928, then fragmented by degrees as the crisis of independence receded and the settlers divided along ideological — and, increasingly, ethnic — lines. Communist and socialist parties were outlawed outright, as was any organization that advocated Muslim political rights or otherwise challenged the “constitutional order”.
The security apparatus grew without pause through the decade, swelled in part by the new arrivals who rushed to enlist for the citizenship that service conferred. The Gendarmerie Nationale, a militarized national police, kept order in the European zones and mounted operations in the Muslim ones. The Service de Renseignements built its networks of informants inside Muslim communities, men bought with money or broken by threat, to be used and never trusted, never offered the ladder of earned citizenship held out even to the Jew. Unlike the French administration it displaced, the Republic cultivated no collaborator class: its creed could not concede that any part of the native population was worth bringing in, and so it penetrated that population without incorporating an inch of it. The informer, like the caid, was a hireling and never an initiate. The settler militias, formalized as the Garde Territoriale, furnished auxiliaries for the “pacification” campaigns, and the daily collaboration of militia and police became one of the few spaces in which the newer arrivals and the Jews mixed with the established citizenry. The settler nation was made here, in the checkpoint and the militia column: the Italian, the Russian, and the conditionally-admitted Jew became Algerian in the shared labor of holding the Muslim down. The apparatus of repression was the Republic’s truest “school of the nation.”
III. Consolidating Settler Supremacy: Economic and Ideological Foundations of Mediterraneanism (1925-1933)
The settler republic faced a fundamental problem: how to create a new, national identity among a population drawn from over a half-dozen nationalities, speaking just as many languages, and adhering to different Christian denominations? The solution was the ideology of Mediterraneanism, developed and propagated by intellectuals associated with Molle’s Algerian Social Union and institutionalized through the education system, cultural production, and state ritual.
Mediterraneanism posited that Algeria’s true identity lay not in its Islamic-Arab present but in its ancient Mediterranean past. The Roman ruins scattered across the landscape became national shrines, tangible proof that North Africa had once been part of European civilization. School curricula emphasized classical antiquity: children learned about Carthaginian merchants, Roman legions, Byzantine administration, and Christian martyrs. The Arab conquest of the 7th and 8th centuries was presented as a foreign invasion which rudely interrupted Algeria’s natural Mediterranean trajectory. The settlers were therefore not colonizers but reclaimers restoring Algeria to its rightful civilizational pathway.
The invocation of an ancient Mediterranean past existed alongside a cultural model far closer to home: the pre-war world of Europe, an epoch of imagined harmony, moral purity, and tradition. Mediterraneanism purified the Algerian space of its troubling Arabic vestiges, but it was an imagined Victorian past, now reconstituted on the shores of North Africa, which provided the real substantive content for the construction of Algerian nationhood. Memory, however, is never strictly equivalent to its recalled object: the past which was created in Algiers was not the peaceful time of Victorian progress but a fantasy-world of the 19th century in which “order” and “family” were as tangible as the commodities of the arcade; this was a past transformed precisely by virtue of being resuscitated through grievance and nostalgia.
The constitution of an imagined past went hand-in-hand with the ongoing dispossession of native Algerians. In the late 1920s, another 500,000 settlers were added to the 1.5 million which arrived over the First Revolutionary Era from 1919-1924. The demographic absorption of these new arrivals was accomplished through the seizure of increasing amounts of Algerian land, the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of native Algerians, and the conversion of the remaining native population into a menial, unskilled labor force. Ethnic cleansing and the proletarianization of the Algerian peasant were thus the twin conditions for the demographic growth of the Republic.
Social networks between the settler moyenne and petite bourgeousie of Algeria and the wealthy emigre communities of New York, London, and Chicago were crucial to providing the young republic with a continuous infusion of capital. These relations, typically originating in the pre-war world, survived the “great inundation” and were maintained despite the bitterness and resentment felt at the so-called “desertion” of the upper classes. For the Italian industrial magnates of Long Island, the Prussian Junkers of Milwaukee, and the Russian Aristocracy of the Upper East Side, investment in the republic provided an opportunity to burnish their anti-communist credentials and to imagine that they were working toward the reconquest of their homelands, even while they showed reticence to regularly visit this violet frontier of counterrevolution or establish more enduring political - as opposed to financial - links. They were ultimately ideologically-motivated and profit-seeking investors, which meant that when the Republic’s promises of booming agricultural yields failed to meet reality, their solidarity with their former country-men would not prevent them from acting in their own self-interest.
This speculative burst of capital expenditure enabled the new settler state to accumulate the cultural infrastructure required for ideological production. New institutions promoted the Mediterraneanist ideological synthesis: the University of Algiers, dramatically expanded in the mid-1920s, became its intellectual center. Its faculty of classical archaeology conducted excavations of Roman sites and published lavishly illustrated volumes depicting Algeria’s ancient heritage. More theoretical works mined factitious links between the ‘Roman’ world and the world of 19th century capitalism, treating Roman property law as an inherited good which stitched together an unbroken ‘European’ civilization.
The most dramatic fusion between haute bourgeousie speculative capital and petite bourgeousie phantasmagoria came in the rebuilding of Algiers, which made the new ideology palpable in stone and concrete. Over the late 20s and early 30s, Algiers underwent a massive building campaign which radically restructured the city, creating a European metropolis of ‘classical’ proportions. Wide boulevards lined with cafés and shops, public squares adorned with fountains and monuments, neoclassical government buildings evoking Roman grandeur, parks and promenades overlooking the Mediterranean - this would become the Algiers celebrated in settler literature, photography, and propaganda, a world of serene repose set against the still undomesticated interior. The Palais du Gouvernement, completed in 1931, featured Corinthian columns and marble facades, while the new opera house hosted touring companies from Paris, London, and Madrid.
Christianity also served as a unifying symbol, but in a carefully ecumenical form. The state could not favor Catholicism over Orthodoxy or Protestantism without fragmenting the settler coalition. Instead, public Christianity emphasized shared rituals and a common civilizational inheritance rather than the specifics of doctrine. Christmas and Easter became national holidays celebrated with interfaith services. The Cathedral of Notre-Dame d’Afrique in Algiers hosted Catholic masses, Orthodox liturgies, and Protestant services in rotation. Christian imagery appeared in public buildings and on currency, but always in generic, slightly bloodless forms: crosses and saints rather than denominationally specific iconography. This new, ‘European’ Christianity was not the Christianity of any one person’s forebears, but an instrument forged in the effort to differentiate the colonist from the indigene and to bind together a nation which spoke disparate languages.
From Studies in the Consciousness of the Colonial Peasantry , a series issued in 1934 under the auspices of the Anti-Colonial Committee’s section for social inquiry and printed in Leipzig. The interviews were conducted in 1929 among Algerian refugees in eastern Morocco by S. Belkadi, himself a young Algerian of the lettered class, a schoolmaster’s son drawn into the apparatus during his studies abroad. The series set out to document the awakening of revolutionary and anti-imperialist consciousness among the dispossessed rural masses of the Maghreb. Translated from the French of the published text.
I nvestigator’s note
This subject is a fellah of the Tlemcen plain, some sixty years of age, unlettered, formerly the holder of a modest patrimony of orchards, cereal-lands and a few beasts, before the settlers dispossessed him. He has lived since in the district of Oujda, where he works another man’s land for a share of its crop. He came to the interview readily and spoke without reserve, though he understood our purpose imperfectly and, I believe, mistook our committee of inquiry for an office of relief. I record at the outset that his testimony did not employ, and only fitfully gestured toward the categories with which we embarked upon the study: the objective fact of his expropriation is plain, but its translation into consciousness remains, in his case, incomplete, and is overlaid with the typical, inherited fatalism of his class and his faith. I have set down his words faithfully, abridging only what bore no relation to our subject.
Interview
I asked him first who he was. “I am Brahim ould el-Hadj Mokhtar,” he said, “of the plain by Tlemcen. My father made the pilgrimage, and was known, and his father before him. We were people with our land.” He returned to this phrase, “people with our land”, throughout the entire afternoon.
I asked how the land was lost. He said:
“It was the land of my father and his father. We had olives, old trees, you understand, that my grandfather set in the ground…a man does not plant olives for himself, he plants them for the sons of his sons. We had wheat in the good years, and barley, and our very own well, along with two pair of oxen, and goats. We were fortunate enough not to be poor, and wise enough not to be rich.
“Then the Christians came…Not the old French, who were Christians also but whom at least we knew, who took the tax and left. These were new people, off the boats, with nothing, hungrier than we were. And there was a paper. The caid brought it [he spoke the caid’s name with such bitterness that I judged it better not to set it down], a paper that said the land was not ours, that it belonged to the State, or to a company…I cannot read, I do not know what the paper said, only that the caid read it to us smiling, this man who had eaten at my table just a month ago. And when my son Mokhtar stood in the road and said, this is our land , the men of the league…” [Here he was silent for a time, and I did not press him.]
“They gave the land to a man from the boats, an Italian. He tore up my grandfather’s olives, tore them out of the ground, the old trees, because they stood where he did not want them, and he planted the vine. The vine! On our own earth they grow the wine that our religion forbids us even to taste. I have seen it from the road: my grandfather’s trees gone, and the vine where they stood, and a wall, and a dog that barks at me on the ground where I was born.”
I asked him when he had first understood that the Europeans were the enemy of his people. He seemed not to follow, and I asked the question again. He said:
“The Christian is the Christian, and we are the believers. This is how the world was made.” [The informant resisted the distinction between the colonial settler and the Christian as such; the religious category absorbs the political one, and the work of the movement is patiently to undo it.] “But I will tell you a thing. The old French, when they took, they took and let you live. These new ones came to take everything, the land, the trees, the water, the very name of the place, and to leave us nothing, not even a grave we could find. That is the difference. It is not Christian and Muslim. It is the ones who leave you something, and the ones who leave you nothing.”
I asked whether the other fellahin had stood together against the seizure, and whether he had come to see the settler as the common enemy of all Algerians. He said:
“Stood together? Each man ran with what he could carry on his back.” [He gave a long account of the flight, of the families scattered along the tracks toward the frontier, an infant of his own house buried by the wayside near —; this concerned his private griefs, and I have abridged it.] “Together, no. The caid was one of us, and he sold us. There were men of our own blood who carried the Italian’s papers and rode with the league for a wage. You ask me about Algerians. I do not know all Algerians, though I knew my neighbours. Some were faithful and some were dogs, and I suppose the same can be said of Algerians, too.”
I told him I had heard his second son had gone to the men in the mountains, that he fought now for the cause, and that this must be a consolation to him. He looked at me a long while. His manner, easy until now, became guarded.
“Abdelkader. Yes. He went two years past. You say the cause. The educated men all say the cause. I say that I have one son in the ground and one son in the mountains, and I do not know whether he eats, or whether he is cold, or whether he is alive, for they send no word. When you go back to your friends who have the money and the guns, ask them, when they have finished with my son, will they send him home to me?”
I asked him, last, what he hoped for and what he believed must be done. He answered at once, as though the question were a simple one:
“I want to go home. I want to die on my own ground and be buried by my own people, near my son, and not in this place where I am a stranger and a servant in another man’s field. That is all. That is everything.”
Then he took me by the sleeve. He had taken me for a man of influence, an envoy of the powers, who might dispense papers or restitution, and asked whether I could arrange his return: whether the committees that gathered the money, or the foreign friends, might give him back his land, or a piece of it, or even leave to visit the graves. [I told him what I could, which was very little.]
Notes
It will be seen that the objective conditions are wholly present - the violent expropriation of the peasant by settler capital, the destruction of the old rural economy - while the subjective transformation lags: encumbered by religious fatalism, by an attachment to the particular and the familial, by the absence of a conception of the struggle beyond the recovery of a single lost patrimony. The task of the movement is precisely to set these grievances into a broader frame and to teach the fellah that his stolen field, and the rubber estates of Malaya, and the plantations of the Caribbean, are one field and the same theft.
— S. Belkadi
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Excerpts from Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate all the Brutes
IV. Agitating against European Supremacy, Defending the Arab Masses: The Nakba’s Descendants in Morocco and Tunisia
The ethnic cleansing and dispossession which emptied the Oranais and Mitidja produced a multilayered diaspora which reflected the many different segments of native Algerian society. The mass of the dispossessed - fellahin, herders, and small artisans of country towns - crossed into Tunisia and Morocco with no property to their name, wanting nothing so much as to return home. They understood what had befallen them in the religious idioms of ruined patrimony, scattered kin, and a God who had imposed a trial upon his faithful. Above them were the notability, the remaining Algerian landowners and large merchants who frequently collaborated with the old French colonialism but now had no place in the new settler society. In the middle were the effendiya, schoolteachers, lawyers, journalists and students who were small in number but who possessed what the fellah (and many of the notables) did not, the capacity to give the event a name and articulate it in terms of a broader history of dispossession. It was they who first reckoned with the momentous task of translating raw shock, fury, and resentment into a politics of resistance. The formal political language of the diaspora was largely the creation of this second group, but as it dispersed, they ceased to have a monopoly over it.
The geography of the diaspora would have immense political consequences. Those who crossed West into Morocco encountered a country which, alone among Maghrebi polities, had preserved intact at least the formal structure of traditional sovereignty throughout the entire period of colonial rule. In the first few years of the Haldane Ministry, the British government, looking to reduce the costs of colonial administration, had rescinded the fragile protectorate it extended over Morocco in the last years of the First Revolutionary Era, in exchange for favorable trade terms and the Sultan’s promise to remain within the Sterling system. The Alawite sultanate thus survived the years of colonialism with its sacral legitimacy intact, its religious authority unbroken, and its own institutional memory of governing a Muslim population substantially continuous. During the same period in which settler dominance over Algeria was entrenched, Mohammed V consolidated his position through the 1920s against residual French influence as well as internal rivals. Tunisia presented a very different situation. The French colonial apparatus reached an early modus vivendi with the British during the First Revolutionary Era, the situation made more urgent by the popularity of the IntRevMar affiliated League Against Imperialism within Tunis. The existing French colonial administration was thus propped up by British protection even as it severed ties with the traditional metropole.
In Morocco, Mohammed V recognized the refugee population as both an opportunity and a potential danger. The Sultanate positioned itself as the natural patron and protector of the dispossessed and the traditional defender of the Arab-Islamic world against European incursion. The fleeing notability received land and legal status, while the fellahin were offered charity. The Sultan needed the refugees to legitimate his own Pan-Islamic pretensions, but he also was wary of radicalization which he could not fully control and claims on resources which he did not possess. He maintained testy relations with the influx of IntRevMar-aligned groups which surged into the country in the 1920s; unwilling to crack down on them outright, he nonetheless showed a systematic preference for conservative groups rooted in the Ulema. With the assistance of Syrian notables in the distant Mashriq, Mohammed V quietly supported these same organizations, hoping to ensure he retained a voice within refugee politics.
Anglo-French Tunisia presented a more volatile environment. It was not a colonial state in the ordinary sense, but a French colonial apparatus shorn of its metropolitan legitimacy, now supervised by a British power whose regional strategy rested on the patronage of conservative Muslim elites tasked with managing a refugee population whose very existence was an indictment of the supervisor’s guarantees. The British could not simply suppress the refugee committees and their agitation without incurring significant reputational harm; the “Anglo-Mohammaden Commonwealth” rested on at least the appearance of comity between British Toryism and Islamic Traditionalism. But the British could also not afford to allow the committees to operate freely, especially if this might lead to them being co-opted into Pan-Arab and Socialist networks. Nor could they permit them to serve, as they often did, as a means to funnel arms to the slowly burgeoning resistance in the Algerian interior. Predictably, the French colonial administration alternated between grudging toleration and selective arrest, the apparatus of repression fluctuating in its intensity according to the diplomatic weather. This produced exactly the type of political ecology in which clandestine operation thrives.
During the early days of the Nakba, organizing revolved around the most pressing and immediate needs of the refugee community: resettlement, food, and integration into their host societies. Scores of charitable societies sprung up in Tunisia and Morocco, even before the Algerian cause had activated the broader Arab masses in the Mashriq as well as the Maghreb. Subscriptions were collected in the main spaces of Arab life: the marketplace, the cafe, and the mosque.The political affiliations of these early relief societies were not always worn on their sleeves, and the vast majority were, in fact, solely charitable institutions. Over time, they accumulated broader functions; some of them became notorious for their links to the nascent Algerian resistance, while others also served as informal networks for migrant effendi , who frequently held positions on their boards.
Urban areas saw the first forms of more characteristically ‘modern’ political organization. Clandestine political cells emerged in Tunis and the bidonvilles of Oran and Constantine, composed of both educated Muslims and workers in strategic sectors such as docks and railways. Unions were illegal, but in the large port cities of North Africa, organizing had picked up everywhere in the Great War and First Revolutionary Era, spurred on by the war machine’s need for colonial labor and both the proletarianization and bargaining power this brought workers. The clandestine cells emerged through the same neighborhood networks and informal strike committees which had troubled the colonial authorities. They were, especially in the 1920s, the prime conduit through which “official”, IntRevMar funds went, as opposed to Soviet assistance, which targeted a broader range of Pan-Arab groups. In the factory groups and amongst urban laborers, the workerly idiom of “solidarity” mixed with and transformed both Pan-Islamic calls for religious sympathy and the Pan-Arabism of effendi dominated groups.
It would take time before these nascent organizations could crystallize into a genuine movement. They were fractured first of all by geography, which divided the diaspora between two countries and two political worlds, and beneath that by the older fault-lines of class and creed: the lettered effendi of the urban cells, the notables courting the Sultan’s favor, and the fellahin who wanted only their fields did not readily speak with one voice, nor want the same things when they did. The interior, in which the settler could be confronted with a rifle, lay beyond the reach of all but the most determined, and the committees that might have armed it worked always beneath the eye of authorities who could not decide whether to tolerate them or to break them. Nor were the refugees themselves, in these first years, the stuff of which risings are made. Dispossession produces demoralization as often as it does defiance. Grief can as easily turn inward toward one’s own loss rather than outward toward a cause.
The cafes of Tunis and camps of refugees did not have the capacity to puncture the Republic’s aura of civilizational inevitability on their own, but what the diaspora could not yet do for itself, the wider Arab world would in time do for it and with it. Over time, the catastrophe suffered by one people would become the shared grievance of many. Algeria would cease to be a mere private sorrow of displaced refugees, and become instead the wound around which the Arab world learned to articulate its own anger at the colonial world-order.
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