The French intifada

In Algeria, the defeat of Abd el-Kader had been seen by Muslims as a punishment sent to them from God. While the French tightened their grip on the country, another call for a jihad came from a tribal leader called El-Mohkrani, who was incensed by the granting of French citizenship to Jews in 1870. The call was met by 8,000 Muslims, who launched a revolt in the mountains of Kabylia. But the revolt was badly thought out and was quickly crushed.

The French military response was merciless: women, children and old people were slaughtered wholesale as villages and farms were razed to the ground. In the wake of this French victory, Arabic was declared a foreign language and Koranic schools and pilgrimages to Mecca were closely watched in an effort to isolate Algeria from the rest of the Muslim world. The extreme violence of the French army and the visible contempt of colons for Algerian Muslims made it inevitable, however, that Muslims looked to Fez, Tunis and Cairo as their centres of cultural, political and moral gravity, not to Paris, Lyons or Marseilles.

By now, Algerian towns of any size were home to significant populations of French colons, as wells as other southern Europeans from Malta, Spain or Italy. They started to redesign the towns and settlements in their own image, replacing the complex structures of the old Arab cities with gridiron streets, statues and piazzas. This legacy is most clearly visible in towns such as Constantine and Oran, which have a distinctly Spanish flavour, reflecting the large numbers of Spaniards who settled there.

During this period, the term ‘mission civilisatrice’ entered the French language, and by the end of the nineteenth century, it had passed into common usage as a justification for French military activity in Algeria. The background to this ideological development was an address to the French Parliament in 1882 by the republican politician and journalist Jules Ferry. He famously asserted: ‘We must believe that if Providence deigned to confer upon us a mission by making us masters of the earth, this mission consists not of attempting an impossible fusion of races but of simply spreading or awakening among the other races the superior notions of which we are the guardians.’

Two years later Ferry added: ‘The superior races have a right to dominate the inferior races, to civilize them.’ Essentially, this ‘civilizing mission’ was driven by a belief in the superiority of Western philosophy, religion and culture and the need – almost a religious duty – to bring this to other more barbarous and backward lands. It was also partly a mission against Islam in the pursuit of modernity. In his inaugural speech at the Collège de France in 1862, Ernest Renan, philosopher, historian and an admirer of Darwin, had spoken for many of his contemporaries when he declared that ‘Islam is the complete negation of Europe … Islam is contempt for science, the suppression of civil society; it is the shocking simplicity of the Semitic mind.’1

The mission civilisatrice took its most visible and direct form in the centre of Algiers, which was gradually reconstructed as a mini-Paris on the Mediterranean. An army officer described Algiers in 1830 as a ‘dazzling whiteness’ made up of ‘narrow and torturous streets where two mules could not pass side by side’, but after the conquest the military systematically drove straight lines through the labyrinth of the Arab city, for reasons of surveillance and control, blasting through streets and alleyways which had stood for centuries.2 The army engineers made detailed maps of the ‘Moorish houses’ and, where they could not be destroyed, they constructed avenues and boulevards around them, encircling the native houses with balconies and balustrades. Most shocking to the local population was the arrogance of militant Christianity on the march; even the venerable mosque of Djemaa el-Kebir, at the very heart of Algiers, was converted into a cathedral and the crescent on its minaret replaced by a cross.

The French command took over all the houses that had belonged to the Ottoman military élite, seizing palaces and mansions. Below the Casbah, the army installed a ‘Museum-Library’ in the Dar Mustapha Pasha mansion, and a series of military headquarters leading to Place d’Armes. The highest-ranking officers took over the mansions on the heights overlooking the city. At the lower levels, many buildings were rebuilt to face on to the new, wider streets, with arcades and entirely new façades. Contemporary observers noted with approval the development of this pleasing new ‘Mediterranean’ style.

For the French, there was both a political and aesthetic rationale for cutting through the apparent confusion of the old city. Firstly, European architecture was held to be both modern and democratic, as opposed to the perverse, anti-civilizing aesthetic which had previously prevailed. In 1784 Montesquieu, one of the great political philosophers of the Enlightenment, had described the typical Oriental mansion as a flawed political model: ‘In despotic states,’ he wrote, ‘each house is a separate empire.’ Secondly, the streets had to be straightened and widened to accommodate the traffic which would flow through the new capitalist city that Algiers was about to become. For both reasons, the old world had to be destroyed. Ironically, this process would soon be replicated in the streets of Paris, as Baron Haussmann began his vast project of remodelling the city in the 1850s, employing many of the architects and engineers who had learned their techniques and their trade in Algiers.

Like the new Paris designed by Haussmann, Algiers was conceived of as a spectacular city, a showpiece of French military and commercial might. One of the fashionable entertainments for visiting Parisians in the 1830s and 1840s was to travel over the wide bay of Algiers in a hot-air balloon, peering down through opera glasses at the city which was being built below. It was in every sense a panorama of European modernity in motion.

As part of the vision for a new, modern Algiers, the main artery on the waterfront, rue Militaire, was planned in 1837 as both a promenade and a gateway to the sea. It was finally finished in 1866, when it was named boulevard de l’Impératrice, in honour of the visit of Empress Eugénie and Napoleon III to Algiers the same year. It was an especially prestigious and skilful feat of engineering because a series of classical arches, which looked like a Roman aqueduct, were constructed to bridge the change in level between the boulevard and the slope of the hill. The ramps, all in white, which rise above the harbour and make such a dramatic visual impact on the waterfront, took another eight years to complete. This is the most famous view of Algiers from the sea and gave the city its nickname of Alger-la-Blanche (Algiers the White).

The architecture of the lower part of Algiers is a triumph of French urban planning, but it also contains a specifically political meaning: the straight lines of the French city enclose and dominate the Casbah, imprisoning its inhabitants in the displaced Ottoman past. In 1845 Théophile Gautier wrote that the Casbah should be preserved ‘in all its Original Barbary’, while the Europeans should stay in the lower part, close to the harbour, because of their taste for ‘large streets and commercial movement’. He complained that the modern French city was both vulgar and ugly, and that the Casbah was beautiful because it was dishevelled, half in ruins and belonged to an ancient, non-European past. To his mind, trying to remodel the Casbah on European lines was no less than vandalism.

Intriguingly, this foreshadowed the complaints that artists and writers made about what they saw as Baron Haussmann’s destruction of Old Paris. In the Romantic imagination at least, this was a world of labyrinths, alleyways, secret passages and a mysterious, unknowable people called the ‘working class’. Haussmann’s new, spectacular Paris of wide boulevards, arcades, department stores and open squares was declared vulgar, commercial and inhuman by a generation of artists, writers and intellectuals who longed for the stinking, fetid but poetic streets of ‘le Vieux Paris’. This mood was best caught by the poet Charles Baudelaire (a disciple of Gautier) who, in his ‘Tableaux Parisiens’, included in the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal, wrote of drunks, murderers, beggar-girls, whores and thieves who belonged to an older, more vivid and fervid city. However, as in Algiers, this reading confused the facts of history with nostalgia. The greatest danger of nineteenth-century French Orientalism was that, while it wished to be sympathetic to Algerian culture, it froze the everyday life of the Casbah in an imagined past, a fresco of ‘timeless’ or ‘medieval’ scenes which reduced real life to folklore.

By the end of the nineteenth century Algerians under the French occupation were prisoners in two senses. The first was that they lived under the control of the French government and military authorities and, as Muslims, had no political status in their own country. This was made worse by a law of 1881, the Code de l’Indigénat (the Native Code), which forbade Muslims from making ‘anti-French’ remarks about the Third Republic or behaving in an insolent manner towards a colonial official.

The second form of imprisonment was less visible but no less damaging: the tendency of Orientalist artists and writers to describe Algerians as colourful and exotic natives, creatures from a mysterious but primitive world which was somehow not quite real.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the colons had a firm grasp on the political administration in Algeria. Although the central authority was nominally still Paris, in reality most of the day-to-day affairs of Algeria, in the cities, towns and even the most remote villages, were run by the colons, who developed a network of Muslims whom they believed were friendly to their cause, or who could at least be bribed. These functionaries were known as ‘cadis’ and they had enormous power over a mainly illiterate Muslim population. The cadis acted in the interests of the colons, but they also served their own private causes, dividing up territory in an arbitrary fashion or demanding high illegal taxes on crops and land.

As the colons consolidated their political power, they also began to develop a cultural identity of their own, nothing to do with metropolitan France or with Paris. The colons cultivated their own slang, songs and jokes. A distinct dialect developed, le Français de l’Afrique du Nord (North African French), which was grammatically and lexically separate from the language of metropolitan France, le Français natural (Natural French). More informally, North African French was known in Algiers as pataouète, a word derived from the Catalan el patuet. First used by Catalan speakers, mainly from the Balearic Islands, who settled around Oran in the late nineteenth century, pataouète soon became a generic term for the French used by all Europeans in Algeria, which included borrowed words from Arabic, Italian and Maltese, and southern French regionalisms.

The accent was harsh and nasal and the vocabulary drawn from the realities of everyday life: the police, brothels, money and fighting. It included words like barouffa (a brawl or scrap), coulo (homosexual), balek (Get out of the way), boujadi (a fool, or sometimes a drunk). The speakers of pataouète also loved homely proverbs which had a entirely local meaning; for example, anisette, a potent and fragrant aperitif considered the best in the Mediterranean by all true French Algerians, was ‘swigged down as sweetly as the piss of the Baby Jesus’. The drinking of anisette was accompanied by kémia – a snack of snails, squid or fried bread, which were staples of the raucous bars of the lower Casbah and around the docks.3

The cuisine developed into another badge of a unique French-Algerian identity, using local produce and borrowing freely from Arabic and Turkish dishes. So, alongside the southern European staples of bouillabaisse and paella, the colons also used spices, mutton, almonds and fruit such as figs and melons to produce a hearty, hybrid cuisine. Visiting Parisians turned their noses up at its lack of refinement and tended to regard genuine Arab dishes (couscous or tagine) as barbaric. None the less, the French Algerians celebrated their culture with pride. By the time Algeria gained its independence in 1962, they had come to be known as ‘pieds noirs’ (black feet), allegedly from the fact that the settlers in the cities wore smart black shoes, unlike the Muslims.

The emblem of French Algerian culture was the fictional character Cagayous, a picaresque rogue invented by the writer ‘Musette’ (the pseudonym of a certain Auguste Robinet, an outwardly respectable pied-noir civil servant). Cagayous appeared in a series of illustrated stories in the popular journals La Revue Algérienne and Turco, in the 1880s, and soon became a hero to a community of readers across the social spectrum; his adventures were then published in serial form between 1896 and 1920.

Most of the stories involved Cagayous in some kind of brawl or scam with his gang of hooligan pals in the Bab-el-Oued quarter. He spoke nothing but fluent pataouète, one of the reasons why he was so loved by his readers, and was fond of drink, whores and fighting. In one story, Cagayous went to Paris to visit the Exposition Universelle and was asked by passers-by who heard his strange accent whether he was French; he famously responded in the ungrammatical syntax of the Casbah: ‘Algériens nous sommes … et que?’ (‘We is Algerians … and whatcha gonna do about it?’) This riposte would become the famous battle cry of future generations of French Algerians who rejected the political and cultural niceties of France.4

In Catalan or Occitan, cagayous means ‘wheezy-chested’. However, all of Cagayous’ readers could easily make the connection that the first part of his name was clearly related to the Spanish cagar (to shit); less certain was whether the second part, yous, was related to youpin, an insulting French term for ‘Jew’, which is usually translated as ‘yid’.

What is beyond doubt is that, like most of his readers, Cagayous was unrelentingly anti-Semitic, and this was a large part of his appeal. At the end of the nineteenth century, ‘Jew hatred’ was at its height in France, too, among those of all political persuasions (indeed, many deputies were elected to the National Assembly purely on the grounds of their anti-Semitic views). The country was then both traumatized and divided over the Dreyfus affair, the drama which unfolded in 1894 when an unsigned letter, containing French military secrets and apparently on its way to the German military attaché in Paris, was intercepted by French intelligence. The letter was attributed to Captain Alfred Dreyfus, whose only mistake was to be Jewish.

In Algeria, the Dreyfus affair had a specific resonance, given the pervasive anti-Semitism among the colons and the Muslim population. This hatred had been sharpened by the Crémieux Decree of 1870, which gave Algerian Jews French citizenship. This apparently progressive move, engineered by Minister of Justice Adolphe Crémieux, a well-meaning Catholic, had the effect of deepening the divisions between Jews and Muslims, who were denied citizenship and remained colonial subjects. The Muslims also blamed the Jews for supporting the original colonial project – most probably, it was argued, for commercial reasons.

The Europeans hated the Jews with, if anything, more viciousness than the Muslims. This hatred was an essential ingredient in the formation of a national character among the colons; the most disparate races were united in their contempt for the Jew: the non-European bloodsucker and betrayer of France. The deputy for Algiers in the 1890s was Edouard Drumont, the leading anti-Semitic ideologue of the day and the author of the bestselling tract La France Juive (Jewish France), which made a racial opposition between ‘Aryans’ and ‘Jews’, accusing Jews of polluting and weakening the French national character, yet taking control of the economy. In Algiers Drumont was the inspiration for a new version of the ‘Marseillaise’, which was loudly sung by the welcoming crowds at the port when Drumont arrived in April 1898. In this version, the familiar verse which begins ‘Aux armes, citoyens…’ is replaced by:

Français de France d’Algérie,

Serrons les poings et terrassons deux fléaux,

Les youpins et les francs-maçons

A bas les fourbes et les traîtres

Crachons dans les gueules des juifs

Nous les connaissons à leur pif

Ces salauds qui parlent en maîtres.

Frenchmen of France of Algeria

Clench your fists and smash two vermin among us

The yids and the freemasons

Down with frauds and traitors

Spit in the faces of Jews

We know them by their big noses

These bastards who speak like masters.5

This was a view shared by the mayor of Algiers, Max Régis (who was actually of Italian origin), with the added twist that Régis also claimed independence from France, which was degenerate, weak and Jew-ridden. Régis was elected to the Algiers city council, partly because of his unremitting hatred of the Jews, which he proved by whipping up hatred with every speech and systematically organizing pogroms. In January 1898 two Jews were killed and hundreds more threatened, humiliated or beaten up.

The fictional world of Cagayous reflected these events. The story Cagayous anti-juif presents him as an enthusiastic supporter of Drumont and Régis; with his band of mates, and with even more enthusiasm, ‘the greatest of the Casbah’ takes part in anti-Jewish riots in Bab-el-Oued, exclaiming, ‘Down with Jews! Smash them all! A good hiding is what they all need!’ However, there is a strange moment in this tale when Cagayous watches the lynching of two poor Jews. One is killed, and the second is near death, being battered by a crowd who ‘are stronger than a herd of wild bulls’. At this gory spectacle Cagayous is moved to an uncharacteristic moment of pity. ‘Killing two poor Jews, that’s not good,’ he says. The reader draws back at the next sentence: ‘Throw them all into the sea, that’s what should happen,’ he continues. ‘Or if you threw them all into a big box and sealed it up, I’d happily seal it up myself so none is left breathing.’ What Cagayous actually objects to is homicide, whereas he has no qualms about genocide.

This view can still be found today, in a slightly mutated form, on the streets of Algiers, where the mainly Muslim population celebrates Cagayous as part of their own history and folklore. Anti-Semitism is still very much alive in the streets of Bab-el-Oued, although there are no more pieds noirs. ‘All for Cagayous,’ wrote a journalist in the newspaper El Watan in 2005, in a piece celebrating Cagayous as ‘anti-everything’; ‘Long live us!’6

The Blood of Races

By the end of the nineteenth century, the colon had constructed an image of himself as a rugged and fearless soul who, far from bringing the French civilizing mission to a savage land, was in fact making a new nation. However, although this ‘nation’ was clearly a living political entity, defined and united in its antagonism towards France and in its collective hatred of Jews and contempt for Muslims, it also needed an ideology, or at least a mythology.

The father of this movement was the novelist Louis Bertrand, who spent nine years in Algeria from 1891 to 1900. Bertrand was born in the Meuse in north-eastern France and enjoyed a brilliant academic career which finally took him to Algiers as Professor of Rhetoric at the university. At this stage he was tall and slim, cultivated a long, elegant moustache, and posed as a dramatic, Romantic figure, clearly possessed of great intellectual charisma as well as a surefooted style as an aesthete. He was a political conservative, eventually veering even further to the Right in the footsteps of his hero and mentor Maurice Barrès, who was a key influence on Bertrand’s ideas and theories. (Many years later, Bertrand – obese and wheezing with emphysema – was elected to Barrès’ seat in the Académie Française, but on taking the seat was accused of betraying his father-figure with a lukewarm eulogy.)

In Algeria, Bertrand dreamt of a ‘Latin Africa’. The colons who were settling there might seem rough and hardy and uncultured, but in his novels and essays Bertrand celebrated them as the heirs to Roman and Greek civilization, which was now being reclaimed from the ‘decadent’ Arab usurpers.

In his memoirs he wrote: ‘I believe I introduced into novelistic literature the notion of a wholly contemporary Latin Africa, which no one had deigned to see before I pushed aside the Islamic and pseudo-Arab decor which fascinated superficial viewers and showed, behind these sham appearances, a living Africa barely distinguishable from the other Latin countries of the Mediterranean. The rest is only death and decrepitude, and all Africans who wish to live modern life – whoever they are – will have to enter into the framework of this new Africa.’7 Bertrand’s novels set in Algeria were minor bestsellers in their day. This was partly because they were entertaining fables of an imagined Mediterranean ideal. They also fed an appetite in the popular imagination for tales of a tougher, more vital world beyond the softness of Europe. To this extent, they function as colonial propaganda almost incidentally, much like the tales of the Old West which were beginning to circulate in the United States at the same time.

Rafael, the hero of Bertrand’s first Algerian novel, Le Sang des Races (The Blood of Races), is a carter of Spanish descent who spends his time brawling, boozing and whoring in the streets of Bab-el-Oued, before finally settling down as a farmer and married man. He makes his way in a society made up a variety of European races. Interestingly, Bertrand denounces those French writers who have come to Algiers in search of local colour or the ‘exotic’ – usually located in Arab or Berber culture. Instead, he insists on the everyday reality of the life of the colons as the true portrait of Algeria.

Using Zola’s panoramic technique of describing the crowd, Bertrand evokes the streets of Algiers: ‘There were men present from every nation … The most peaceful Northerners kept themselves apart: they were almost all Alsatian immigrants or Badois from the Black Forest … Near the Spaniards, there were whole tables of Neapolitans, and Majorcans, very much at ease and speaking like people at home. The Maltese […] stroked their heavy Victor-Emmanuel moustaches. Many had gold earrings. At bottom, however, the others despised them because of their mixed blood and their resemblance to the Moors and Jews.’ The hatred of Arabs is matched by the hatred of Jews. In a central scene, Rafael enthusiastically joins in as a crowd throws stones at two Jews crossing the street dressed in the European style. ‘Kill them all!’ the crowd chants. ‘They’re disguised as us!’

Sex is a fundamental part of Bertrand’s Mediterranean fantasy. When Rafael settles down into his life on the land, he does so with ‘the joy of conquest … his veins more ardent than the sun’.8 In Bertrand’s Les Nuits d’Alger, written towards the end of his life, nearly all of the chapters are set in the parts of the upper Casbah known for prostitution, in streets which are visibly disintegrating as they come into contact with Europeans. The union between the European adventurer and the prostitute is, however, no casual moment of exploitation, but rather an honourable, even heroic, act on the part of the European. Bertrand wrote: ‘The prostitutes took me back to the most distant age of Africa, to the ritual prostitution of the temples, when the sexual act was a deeply serious thing, a religious act, when love was a terrible ill and when the act of reproduction helped the fertility of the earth and the germination of seeds.’

This scene reveals the real ideological content of Bertrand’s work. As a follower of Barrès, Bertrand hated the idea of the French Republic and wished to replace it with the ‘nation’. Essentially, Barrès’ political theories were based on the notion that the French nation was a product of the family, the village and the region, and was subservient to them. Barrès opposed the democratic values of liberty, equality and fraternity because they were abstract concepts, with no connection to the soil of France and therefore to its people. Barrès argued instead for an ethnic nationalism, which defined Frenchness as a multiplicity of local forces, in direct opposition to the controlling central power of Paris. Unsurprisingly, he called for the return of Alsace-Lorraine on the grounds that it was a lost province of the national patrimony.

Bertrand took this theory and applied it to Algeria, which he described as a lost Latin land which was now being reclaimed by the French. He justified his ideas by arguing that the Arab invaders of the seventh century were merely occupying what had once been Roman territory. He saw the evidence for this in the plentiful ruins around Algiers and the main cities, and even in the indigenous Berber people, whom he claimed were proto-Europeans rather than Arabs.9 It was perhaps also no coincidence that, as Paris was rebuilt by Baron Haussmann in the mid-nineteenth century, architects and engineers had uncovered the remains of the Roman city of Lutetia. For writers and historians of the Right and Left, this proved not only the antique and noble past of the French race, but also legitimized its mission to bring Latin civilization to the world.

More than this, for Bertrand, Algeria was a territory in which Frenchmen, weakened by the degeneracy of democratic government, could rediscover the strength, ardour and martial spirit which were the true glories of the French nation before the catastrophe of the Revolution of 1789 swept them away. Little wonder that in 1936 Bertrand praised the Nuremberg rallies and wished that he could see them in France, and devoted pages to praising the neo-classical architecture of Mussolini’s Italy.

Bertrand is thus revealed as that most toxic combination: a French patriot and a fascist sympathizer. He died in 1941, before the Nazi occupation gave shelter to a whole generation of right-wing intellectuals who thought in this way. But it was enough that in less than a decade in Algeria, Bertrand had defined a mythology of the colonial experience that reinforced the most severe political decisions taken by Paris about Algeria. These would eventually and inevitably lead to bloodshed.

There was, of course, no sense of this unfolding tragedy in Paris or Algiers. Rather, the French were proud that they had proved themselves the supreme force for civilization, through marshalling together technology, industry and, above all, the French flair for creative artistry. This is what the French meant by progress and modernity, and what they had achieved with the reinvention of Paris in the mid-nineteenth century as the glittering capital of the world. They celebrated it with the construction of the Eiffel Tower, the supreme symbol of power and strength, for the Great Exhibition of 1889. At the exhibition, mosques and souks were constructed along the rue du Caire, to allow visitors to ‘travel’ from one world to another, from the glories of the West to the fantasy regions of North Africa.

The same trick was repeated to even greater effect in the Great Exhibition of 1900: there was belly dancing in cafés where you could smoke nargilehs, and whole streets in the 7th arrondissement were turned over to recreating the exotic, sensual, passive East that the French had conquered and made their own. In this stage set, the North African world of Islam was dramatized as a world of savage cruelty, sexual pleasure and infinite riches. All of this was so much entertainment for the Parisian audience, who thrilled, swooned, and then moved on to new tricks and pleasures.