French Colonial Fascism

The Extreme Right in Algeria, 1919-1939

S. Kalman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137307095
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia africana

This study investigates the various extreme-rightist leagues in Algeria, with particular attention to certain key themes, among them the rabid xenophobia directed at the Jewish population and local Muslims. It demonstrates that fascism helped to construct a racial hierarchy to preserve European hegemony and a pool of cheap labor.

1

THE ACTION FRANÇAISE, JEUNESSES PATRIOTES, UNIONS LATINES, AND THE BIRTH OF LATINITÉ, 1919–1931

In the aftermath of the April 1901 Margueritte Affair, the fortunes of the extreme Right dissipated throughout Algeria. Faced with the threat of Muslim violence against Europeans, a constant worry throughout the colony’s history, the population in all three departments abandoned anti-Semitic politics, temporarily eschewing xenophobic rioting and inflammatory rhetoric. Memories of the 1871 Kabyle revolt remained vivid in public memory. In January of that year Berbers in Constantine rose up under the leadership of tribal luminary Muhammad al-Hajj al-Muqrānī, in response to the extension of French civilian control over rural tribal territories and to famine and disease resulting from four years of land seizures, drought, and natural disasters. Fearing the legislative authority of the settlers, whose complete disregard for the rights and properties of Algerians was far worse than the policies of the metropolitan government or the Bureaux Arabes, the 150,000-strong rebel force held out until October, killing 2,686 settlers.¹

These events were greeted with repressive measures, including assessed reparations of 36.5 million francs to all Algerians regardless of their tribal affiliation, along with the summary execution of thousands of rebels following fixed trials. Adding insult to injury, the authorities subsequently initiated land seizures. Laws in 1883 and 1887 voided traditional tribal ownership, replacing it with French legal standards. Courts thus handed entire properties to European colons, and by the turn of the century these rich farmers controlled the wheat and wine industries, in addition to holding over one-third of the seats in the Délégations financières. By 1920, the settlers seized 2.6 million hectares in this manner, leading to poverty and immiseration for Algerian peasants, who now worked seasonally for European owners, paid a pittance for their efforts.² Muslims were also subject to the Indigénat, a legal system that one historian calls “the juridical incarnation of the violence of the colonizer.” Its 33 criminal acts, not recognized in metropolitan France, covered a range of offenses from insulting a European official to traveling without a permit. Algerians were declared subjects rather than citizens (indigènes) became a legal category), brutally punished for any infraction without recourse to a jury trial, and forced to pay impôts arabes in addition to French tithes, while the Statut personnel placed civil matters under Koranic law rather than Gallic courts.³

Given such harsh measures, it is unsurprising that Algerian violence against Europeans persisted in the fin-de-siècle, evidenced by a murder rate eight times that of the métropole, and increasing attacks against law enforcement officials. Fearful for their safety, various communities organized militias to defend local property and the lives of the local colons. Banditry also reemerged after 1871, an activity explicitly linked with attacks on French imperial hegemony, engaging hundreds of police officers and gendarmes in manhunts, and fuelling rumors of rising nationalism among the Arab duwars.⁴

Yet the threat of violence receded in the aftermath of the Great War, buoyed by the February 1919 Jonnart Law, which rewarded the blood tax paid by Algerian servicemen with the right to vote in a distinct electoral college for 421,000 compatriots. This elite could cast ballots in all regional and local elections, including the Délégations financières and the Algerian Supreme Council. To be sure, they elected fewer representatives than their European counterparts and were thus devoid of any real power. The promise of citizenship remained contingent upon a renunciation of Koranic law, unthinkable for devout Algerian Muslims, and even then possible only for the educated elite and war veterans.⁵ Yet if it left Muslims deeply dissatisfied with the paltry nature of the reforms and the nonabolition of the Indigénat and the impôts arabes—any candidate who participated in the new system was labeled a collaborator—the Jonnart law renewed hope in the possibility of a more just imperial system and the eventual assimilation of Algerians via genuine French citizenship. Thus in the 1920s the grandson of Abd-el-Kadar, the Emir Khaled, whose moderate nationalism and acceptance of imperialism did little to incite the Muslim population, eclipsed the bandits and rebels of the nineteenth century.⁶

Nonetheless, Europeans reverted to the arguments evinced during the 1890s anti-Semitic wave, that the settlers were denied any real voice in Algerian affairs. With only nine colon representatives in the Chamber of Deputies, they were forced to accept unilateral decisions emanating from Paris or Alger. If the Jonnart law never truly threatened their position, for only 8,000 Algerians actually applied for citizenship under its auspices, it unleashed a torrent of anti-Muslim sentiment, and reinforced the belief that the French government had betrayed them. Thus the actions of “Jonnart l’arabe” were greeted by an official protest from the Federation of Algerian Mayors and the European press, while the settlers again searched for alternatives to the métropole and republican government, in defense of l’Algérie française.⁷

Unsurprisingly given the success of the anti-Semitic wave during the 1890s, whose self-proclaimed republicanism obscured actions and ideas more firmly rooted in extreme-rightist politics, in the 1920s settlers turned away from French parliamentary democracy. Anti-republican movements were seen as bulwarks against a variety of real or imagined enemies that undermined the European cause: the communist and socialist Left, Muslim supporters of Algerian independence, the substantial Jewish community, and the metropolitan French authorities who supposedly acted to prevent the settlers from establishing hegemony in Algeria. All four categories were interconnected, purportedly working in concert against the European population. In this atmosphere, two metropolitan extreme-rightist leagues attempted to take advantage of settler discontent—the Action française (AF) and the Jeunesses patriotes (JP).

Founded during the height of the Dreyfus Affair in 1898 by anti-Semites Henri Vaugeois and Maurice Pujo, the AF became one of the most notorious exponents of anti-republicanism in Paris. Led by monarchist poet and journalist Charles Maurras, the group’s appeal to replace parliamentary democracy with the pre-1789 alliance of throne and altar attracted leading conservative intellectuals to the movement. The newspaper Action française became essential reading for the French Right, selling up to 60,000 copies per day in the 1920s, while wealthy conservatives provided needed funding throughout the group’s existence. Yet this seeming respectability coexisted with more sinister activities, including a campaign of terror in Paris’s Latin Quarter perpetrated by the notorious Camelots du Roi, who from 1908 onward gleefully assaulted leftists and Jews in the streets and disrupted political meetings, lectures, and theatrical performances. Their monarchism and violence was twinned with ardent xenophobia, and Maurras frequently pilloried what he termed the Quatre états confédérés: Jews, Protestants, Masons, and foreigners, who supposedly joined forces in order to subjugate the pays réel through the machinations of the republican pays légal. Although the AF only attracted 30,000 metropolitan followers by the 1920s, their rhetoric seemed tailor-made for Algerian settlers whose politics favored anti-Semitism, hatred, and distrust of Muslims, and anger toward the Republic and the Left.⁸

The JP provided potentially stiff competition to the AF for settler loyalty. Founded by industrial magnate and deputy Pierre Taittinger as the youth wing of the Ligue des patriotes in 1924, from its very beginnings the group operated independent of its sponsor. By 1926, the JP boasted 100,000 members, 77 parliamentary sympathizers, a youth auxiliary (the Phalange Universitaire), and a daily newspaper (Le National). Ultra-Catholic and anti-republican, Taittinger and his colleagues evinced a staunch anticommunism and proposed to mobilize French youth in order to fight the forces of revolution in the streets. In this pursuit, the JP program included appeals to paramilitarism, elitism, and a strong anti-parliamentary bent. Enthusiastic about Mussolini’s success in Italy, Taittinger posited dictatorship as the solution to French woes.⁹ Although not as xenophobic as their royalist competitors, the JP was not exactly philo-Semitic either, and members frequently derided non-Christians at meetings or in newspaper articles.¹⁰

Yet for all of their success in the métropole, neither the AF nor JP elicited the slightest interest from the European population in Algeria. This was certainly not the product of unwillingness on the part of the settlers; their authoritarian streak, anti-Semitism, hatred of the revolutionary Left, and derision of the republican authorities betrayed clear sympathy for the doctrine and politics of the extreme Right. However, both Maurras and Taittinger misunderstood the colons, and mistook anti-republicanism for the desire to retain French predominance in Algeria under a Gallic monarchy or dictator. Although virulently anti-Semitic, local AF leaders and their metropolitan counterparts rarely broached the subject of Algeria’s Jewish community during meetings or in the colonial press. Similarly neither they nor their JP counterparts seriously analyzed Algerian politics and society. Colonial themes were infrequently invoked, and then only through articles lauding the French empire rather than the local populace. In short, the very attitudes rejected by the settlers—the metropolitan assertion of control over Algerian affairs and a concomitant lack of interest in the colon vision of empire—appeared throughout AF and JP imperial discourse. Leaders of both groups even sympathized with the plight of Muslims rather than the European population, blatantly disregarding the quite contrary settler views on the subject.

As a result, after a promising start in the immediate postwar era, the extreme Right faltered by the late 1920s in the Departments of Alger and Constantine. However, in the western Department of Oran, the Unions latines (UL) achieved much greater success under the leadership of a prominent local politician, Oran-Ville mayor Jules Molle. In stark contrast to the métropole-centered discourse and organizational inertia displayed by the AF and JP, the UL succeeded as a result of their doctrine and aggressive politics, often carried out in the streets rather than the ballot box. They specifically addressed the concerns of the Algerian settlers, rather than French sensibilities. Like Louis Bertrand and the proponents of algérianité, Molle and the UL explicitly lauded the superiority of the Latin race in Algeria, stridently rejecting Muslim separatism and any attempts at Jonnart-style reform. Settlers responded positively to such rhetoric, which was assiduously combined with authoritarianism, government-directed campaigns of violence against “enemies” of the municipality, and official anti-Semitism. Their support was further assured through a leadership cult and the threatened creation of an independent settler state in order to guarantee Latin hegemony. Thus the UL mobilized an authentic colonial fascism, dominating municipal politics with 8,000 votes from May 1924 onward, a clear majority that resulted in decisive victories in mayoral and legislative electoral contests.¹¹

I

The AF became the first extreme-rightist organization to woo Algeria’s European population in the interwar era. Riding a postwar surge in metropolitan popularity, during which the group managed to elect Léon Daudet to the Chamber of Deputies in Paris as a member of the Union nationale’s Chambre bleu-horizon, they looked to Algeria as fertile ground for recruitment.¹² Thus from March 1919 onward the group’s newspaper informed readers that weekly meetings would now be held in Alger, Oran-Ville, and Philippeville, and noted that the newspaper Action francaise and AF publications could be purchased at local permanences, which also accepted donations on behalf of the new Algerian sections.¹³

This appeal attracted no attention in the department of Alger. In Constantine, the group initially proved more palatable, successfully founding sections in Constantine, Philippeville, Khenchela, Sétif, and Bône. Although membership outside of the departmental capital numbered only in the dozens, meetings attracted up to 1,000 locals, particularly if they featured a prominent speaker from the métropole. Thus in January 1926 AF agricultural expert Ambroise Rendu addressed hundreds in Bône and Philippeville, benefiting from a clearly sympathetic local population.¹⁴ The authorities also evinced some concern about AF recruitment activities. Police in Khenchela worried about the ties of the Camelots du Roi to the Toulon family, which in May 1923 engaged in an attempt to control the municipality by toppling the local mayor and replacing him with their pater familias. Similarly in Bône, the sous-préfet sternly rebuked a professor at the local college in January 1926, demanding that the Prefect take immediate disciplinary action in order to prevent any civil servant from engaging in anti-republican proselytizing.¹⁵ Police also noted the presence of military officers in the departmental AF, who donated thousands of francs to the group’s Algerian coffers.¹⁶

However, these worries were tempered by the AF’s incapacity to attract a stable following anywhere in the department. Initially promising, the Constantine section fell apart in 1922 when its...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1   The Action française, Jeunesses patriotes, Unions latines, and the Birth of Latinité, 1919–1931
• 2   The Algerian Extreme Right, the Great Depression, and the Emergence of Muslim Nationalism: The Croix de Feu and the Front paysan, 1928–1935
• 3   An Algérianiste Insurrection: The Rassemblement national and Amitiés latines, 1936–1938
• 4   The Transformation of Metropolitan Strategy into Colonial Practice: The Parti populaire français and the Parti social français
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index