11

Enemy States

In 1930 the French celebrated one hundred years of conquest. There was a series of commemorative festivals across Algeria and France that year and again in Paris in 1931, at what would be the last Great Exhibition. Algeria was now an integral part of France and the Muslims were grateful, so the French argued, for the benefits of peace and civilization.

At the opening of the Great Exhibition in May 1931, Paul Raynaud, Minister for the Colonies, declared, ‘colonization is necessary, for it is in the nature of things that peoples who have arrived at a superior level of evolution lean down towards those who are at a lower level in order to help them up’. The Italian Minister for State put it in slightly less sophisticated terms when he described the French Empire as part of the ‘Homeric odyssey of the white race, which, having reached into every corner of the world, has transformed and continues to transform the barbarian continents into civilized regions’. The Catholic Church joined in: a certain Cardinal Verdier praised the ‘powerful colonizing genius of our dear France’, while his colleague Monsignor Durand of Oran added, ‘Let God fold all of those from beyond the sea and natives of Algeria into the flag of France, which is so dear to Christ!’1

Resistance to the French took many forms. One of the less overtly political ways of challenging the French authorities was through football, which had been popular in Algeria since the early 1920s. The sport allowed young Muslims to come together in a collective identity that was otherwise denied them, and matches against colons permitted direct physical contact (which was probably why they often ended with brawls on the pitch). The North African Championship of 1927 helped to unify and organize the sport.

For the young Muslim players and supporters, football was a way of subverting the French state and of organizing collective activity out of view of the authorities. The name of the Mouloudia Club, founded in the Casbah in 1921, for example, was taken from Mouloud, the festival celebrating the birth of Mohammed, while their team colours were the red and green of Islam. Naturally, the authorities were suspicious that these teams might be a front for Nationalist activities. In 1928 a new law declared that every team in Algeria must have at least three European players (this was increased to five in 1935). It was possible, however, to circumvent this rule by fielding ‘naturalized’ Muslims, or simply saying that Europeans were just not good enough.

The first real organized resistance to colonialism was, however, founded in religion. The years after the First World War saw an Islamic revival in Algeria as Muslim soldiers returning from the front line in Europe found comfort in their faith. The wider Muslim population in Algeria was also now learning from the dismal realities of the European war that their colonial masters were not all-powerful and unbeatable.

In 1931 Shayk Ben Badis founded the Ulema, a political movement which began to articulate these perceptions of colonial weakness and desire for a homeland into a kind of religious and cultural faith. In spiritual terms, Ben Badis’ faith closely resembled the Wahhabi form of Islam, which was a powerful force in the deserts of Saudi Arabia: he scorned saints and superstition and advocated Islam as an active rather than a passive faith. So Muslims were told to be no longer ‘the domestic animals of colonialism’. His political credo was enshrined in the statement: ‘Islam is my religion, Arabic is my language, Algeria is my country. Independence is a natural right for every people on earth.’2

The Islamic revival in Algeria which began in the 1920s was also driven by charismatic Egyptian intellectuals such as Muhammad Rashid Rida, who argued against colonialism and made the case that Islam was not a quaint museum piece but a living component of the modern world.

In 1933 the French colonial authorities banned the Islamic reformers from preaching in the mosques of Algiers and Constantine, preferring the more traditional and politically naïve forms of Islam. The inevitable result was growing anger among the Muslim masses. In 1936 the mood was caught in the words of Shayk Ben Badis, who declared: ‘this Algerian nation is not France, cannot be France, and does not want to be France … [but] has its culture, its traditions and its characteristics, good or bad, like every other nation of the earth.’

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The first wave of modernist ideas in politics came from the Young Algerians, a group founded in 1907. Its members were intellectuals from the Muslim upper middle classes who spoke French as well as being fluent in the Arabic of the Koran. Taking their cue from the Young Turks – the movement of radicals which did so much to modernize Turkish society in the early twentieth century – they argued for ‘integration’ between the Muslim and French populations and saw no contradiction in these dual identities. The Young Algerians were unashamedly élitist and demanded preferential treatment for ‘les évolués’ – the more ‘evolved’ elements in Muslim society who accepted that modernity in its European form was an unshakeable and powerful force. On this premise they argued for reform and indeed were successful in extending the vote to more (though not all) Muslims.

In the wake of the First World War, the Young Algerians were led by Khalid ibn Hashir, the intellectual and hard-headed grandson of Abd el-Kader. Emir Khalid, as he was called by his supporters, pressed hard for changes in legislation and won several important victories and concessions from the French government, which still saw Algiers as a fundamentally unstable city, but which wanted to reward the Muslim population for the sacrifice of those who had died in the trenches. Emir Khalid retired to Damascus in 1923, exhausted by the struggle, but his legacy was the abolition of travel restrictions on Muslims, equal pay for government employees and the abolition of the Code de l’Indigénat.

These were also the demands made in the 1930s by Ferhat Abbas, who, following the Young Algerians, sought an ‘integrationist’ model which would give the French-speaking élite among the Muslim population parity with French citizens. The question of Islam was separate from the political agenda pursued by Abbas, who – at least at first – believed that the French insistence on the secular state meant that religion was an individual, not an ethnic, issue. In other words, to be an Algerian Muslim was an act of choice, like being a French Protestant or Catholic, but all rights were equal and guaranteed in the Republic. On these grounds, Abbas argued that Algerian Muslims could not be denied their rights as citizens.3

But such reforms were still a long way from any real challenge to French colonial authority in Algeria. This came in 1927 from a group called Etoile Nord-Africaine (the ENA, or North African Star). This was originally a loose coalition of factions which came together in Paris to support and defend the rights of North African workers in France. Their inspiration was the French Communist Party, which taught many of its first members the language of anti-colonialism and human rights. In 1927 the leader of the ENA, Ahmed Messali Hadj – a charismatic speaker and shrewd political operator – called for the overthrow of French rule in Algeria and a declaration of sovereign independence. Even more provocatively, he also called for freedom of the press, universal suffrage and the return of all stolen lands to their original, Muslim owners.

His speech exploded like a bomb planted at the heart of the French political system. All parties, of Left and Right, condemned Messali Hadj and, unsurprisingly, the ENA was made illegal in 1929. This forced Messali Hadj underground, but he did not disappear. Instead, learning the language of liberation from such mentors as the Lebanese ideologue Shakib Arslan, he moved further away from Marxism, necessarily limited as a European world view, and began developing a clearer idea of what it meant to Algerian and a Nationalist. By 1934, still operating in clandestine form, the ENA’s newspaper had a readership of 43,000 in France and Algeria.

Initially, Messali Hadj saw no contradiction between Islam and Socialism. He was, however, disappointed at the indifference or even contempt of his European Socialist peers towards Islam and consequently began to drive his party towards a more explicitly Nationalist position. In the 1930s, after a spell in a French prison, he returned to Algeria, and in 1937 he founded the Parti du Peuple Algérien (Party of the Algerian People), which agitated for an uprising among the Algerian working class. Although he espoused class-based politics, for Messali Hadj the Algerian working class meant Muslims.

On 14 July 1937, during a parade of the French Communist Party, Messali Hadj was the first person to carry the Algerian flag through the streets of Algiers. The flag had been designed by his French wife in the colours of Islam, with the crescent as its emblem. Carrying it on 14 July, the national day of celebration of the French Republic, was a provocative gesture that immediately identified all Muslims as true Algerians and non-Muslims as French. This division had already been given a sharp edge by the French authorities’ opposition to the strengthening ties between Algerian Muslims and the Arab world, a dangerous coming together of qawmiyya and wataniyya.4

Algerianists and Parisians

All of the currents for reform in Algeria – integrationist, Nationalist or Islamic – were opposed with equal ferocity by the colons, who had built a nation in their own image. The fantasy of ‘French Algeria’ explored in the novels of Louis Bertrand had been made real in architecture, town planning, military power and the sheer number of settlers who now ran the big cities, traded in the ports and swarmed across the countryside and the mountains. For them, by the early twentieth century, Paris was as much an enemy as the Muslims.

This growing French Algerian nationalism was expressed in the ‘Algerianist’ literature which discarded French identity altogether for a new Mediterranean civilization. The term ‘Algerianist’ was coined by the algérois writer Jean Pomier in the founding issue of his journal Afrique in 1921. In the journal’s manifesto Pomier called for a future ‘Franco-Berber race’ which ‘would be of French language and civilization’.

This was not the ‘Latin Africa’ of Louis Bertrand, although Bertrand was the acknowledged father of the movement. Rather, the ‘Algerianists’ imagined a mixed race of Mediterraneans, including the Berbers as the ‘original Africans’, who, forged by the hardships of living on African soil, would produce a new generation of virile, self-reliant French Algerians. One of the leading lights of the Algerianist cause was ‘Robert Randau’, whose real name was Robert Arnaud and who been a colonial official in the Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso). By the time of his death in 1950, Randau had published over twenty novels, many of which described the life he found in Algeria. Randau never explicitly called for a separate French Algerian state, but, like many settlers, he dreamt of an autonomy which would effectively have made French Algeria a ‘state within a state’. He expressed this in one of his first novels in 1907: ‘We are those who want Algeria to have complete administrative and financial autonomy, who advocate racial fusion, and who believe that the union of interests is the precursor to the union of hearts.’

This ‘racial fusion’ is, however, firmly within limits defined by Europeans. In Cassard le berbère, Randau tells the tale of Jean Cassard, a settler who fought in the First World War at the head of a unit of Berber troops drawn from his estate. What he admires about the Berbers is that their vigour and brutality, which are missing in feminized and weakened Europeans on the mainland. Cassard’s neighbour says of the Berbers: ‘They are filthier than pigs, but they don’t fight progress! Sure, four million of them and one million French Algerians, that’ll make a country! And we’ll be through with the bullshit they send us from Paris.’ Randau’s view was that the new country would be built by Africanizing the Europeans as well Europeanizing Africans.

As a young man Albert Camus was influenced by the Algerianist movement, even if he did not agree with the political views of its members. For Camus, to be an Algerianist was to speak French as one’s mother tongue, but to belong to a Mediterranean world which saw Paris as a dark, distant, entirely separate place. Even when he had become famous in Paris, Camus always described himself as an ‘Algerian writer’. Camus celebrated this Mediterranean world in his meditations among the Roman ruins at Tipasa, some seventy kilometres outside Algiers. In his 1938 essay Noces à Tipasa, dedicated to rediscovering the ancient classical memories of Algeria, Camus evoked the pagan, sensual world which he saw reflected in the vital, physical life on the sun-soaked shores of North Africa. Camus’ most Algerianist work, however, was the Le Premier homme (The First Man), the unfinished manuscript that he was working on when he was killed in a car crash in 1960. In this semi-autobiographical text which draws on his childhood in the working-class district of Belcourt in Algiers and his quest for a missing father, Camus reminisces about his upbringing with tenderness. He recalls the houses at the foot of the Casbah where the ‘homes smelled of spices and poverty’, and the ‘obstacle course of Arab peddlers’ stands bearing helter-skelter displays of peanuts, dried salted chick-peas, lupin seeds, barley sugar coated in loud colours, and sticky sourballs … Arab fritters dripping with oil and honey, a swarm of children and flies attracted by the same sweets.’5

The Arabs of Algiers are more present in this work than in any other of Camus’ books set in Algeria; it is the European child, who has lost his father in a European war, who feels displaced and an outsider. ‘The Mediterranean separates two worlds in me,’ he wrote. By 1960 terrorist bombs were a regular occurrence in Paris and Algiers, and Camus could not feel at home in either city.

In 2013 I asked his daughter, Catherine Camus, who was a small child at the time, whether she had any recollection of her father’s anguish. We were sitting in the back room of Camus’ house in Lourmarin in south-eastern France, surrounded by his books and papers, original editions of the journal Combat and his letters. ‘We did not understand what was happening,’ she said. ‘But we knew that when Papa came back from Algeria he was always sad.’ Catherine looked exactly like her father – the determined jawline and saturnine eyes. The house was full of dogs. ‘My father loved all animals, especially dogs,’ she told me. It was one of his habits to find stray dogs and give them away to friends and neighbours. After the family was forced to leave Algeria and moved to Lourmarin, Catherine missed North Africa. When she later fell ill, her father promised that if she got better he would get her a donkey sent over from Algeria. He was as good as his word and Catherine’s childhood companion was an old donkey from Philippeville. She still referred to the town as ‘Philippeville’, rather than Skikda, its new Arab name.6

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Slowly, through the 1920s and 1930s, Paris was beginning to wake up to the fact that ‘French Algeria’ was not necessarily driven by French interests. This was a volatile state of affairs, not only because of the Muslims’ violent resentment but also because the colons were now presenting a direct threat to the authority of Paris.

Liberals in Paris favoured an ‘integrationist’ solution, but were blocked by the colons, who dismissed all attempts to advance the Muslim cause as betrayal. In Algeria, the colons had control over the business world and the armed forces, and had powerful supporters in the National Assembly. This was the basic framework for what would soon become not so much a colony as an enemy of metropolitan France.

In 1936 the Front Populaire (Popular Front) swept to power in Paris. This coalition of Communists, Socialists and other forces on the Left, led by the Socialist Léon Blum, had come together as a response to the rising tide of right-wing leagues and political parties. When the Front Populaire took office, everything changed in France more or less overnight. A maximum working week of forty hours and paid holidays were introduced for the first time in the history of Europe. Folk memories of the Front Populaire usually conjure up images of cycling trips to the countryside, expeditions by train to the sea, huge soccer crowds, Sunday picnics with wine and flirting, and, above all, a long-sought-after sense of dignity for the working population. There were new products, such as suntan lotion by l’Oréal or the fizzy drink Orangina, which brought what had been luxuries to the masses. Paris was declared a workers’ paradise on a par with Moscow.

It was, of course, no more than an illusion. As inflation and depressed wages began to bite, the workers’ demands soon created real hardships for the workers themselves. The right-wing press, ever alert to the ‘Red Terror’ in Paris, began publishing cartoons of workers raping rich old ladies in the name of their ‘rights’. Fear returned as the dominant leitmotiv of everyday life. Anti-Semitism was rampant. It was rumoured that Léon Blum, a Jew and a vociferous supporter of Dreyfus, was planning to wreck France and take refuge with his co-conspirators, the deadly and hypocritical English. The gutter press was alive with the wildest allegations, which no one dared refute or challenge in case the attacks became worse. The press also regularly carried dire predictions of a devastating future war which would destroy France once and for all.

In Algeria, the Front Populaire government was welcomed as a potential ally by the integrationists led by Ferhat Abbas and by the Nationalists led by Messali Hadj. However, it was also met by deep suspicion, which soon became hatred, among the working-class settlers, who feared any move towards political power for the Muslims. None the less, Blum was determined to resolve the ‘Algerian Question’ by drawing Muslims into French citizenship.

To this end, in the wake of a congress held in Algiers in 1936, the Blum government announced the ‘Viollette Plan’ (named after its author, Minister of State Maurice Viollette), which would immediately extend French citizenship with full political equality to certain members of the Muslim élite, including university graduates, elected officials, army officers and professionals – some 25,000 Muslims, with numbers growing every year. Predictably, these proposals were vehemently opposed by the colons, who feared a Muslim majority in elections. Messali Hadj disdainfully dismissed the plan as ‘an instrument of colonialism’. (This statement led the Front Populaire to ban Messali Hadj’s Etoile Nord-Africaine, only for it to re-emerge in 1937 as the Parti du Peuple Algérien, or PPA – the Algerian People’s Party.) The Viollette Plan was also rejected in Paris by the politicians of both the Right and the Left who had a vested, usually commercial, interests in French Algeria.7

By 1939, as France lurched towards the catastrophe of the Second World War, there was no longer any middle ground in Algeria. The stage was set for a conflict which would engulf France in the post-war period, and, like the Nazi occupation, would threaten the very existence of the French state.