Decolonization and the French of Algeria

Bringing the Settler Colony Home

Sung-Eun Choi

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137520753
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

In 1962, almost one million people were evacuated from Algeria. France called these citizens Repatriates to hide their French Algerian origins and to integrate them into society. This book is about Repatriation and how it became central to France's postcolonial understanding of decolonization, the Algerian past, and French identity.

1

French Settler Colonialism in Algeria

Settler colonial foundations

France was a settler colony in Algeria until 1962. This section provides an overview of settler colonial history in French Algeria, and explains the political and socio-economic setting from which the repatriate protagonists in this story emerged and out of which they forged a settler colonial Frenchness.¹ The significance of this chapter is to show that Algeria’s social relations gave way to an understanding of Frenchness that differed in specific ways from that of the Metropolitans.

Historians have shied away from identifying Algeria as a colony because the French government used these terms with the specific aim of undercutting Algeria’s French status during the Algerian War.³ This study places emphasis on settler colonialism as a distinctive set of material and ideological conditions. As an analytic category, settler colonialism conceptualizes the particular political, legal, and economic practices that made the notion of Frenchness in Algeria distinct from that in the Metropole.

By definition, settler societies were historically founded by exogenous migrants whose aim was to establish permanent residence on colonized lands. This desire for permanence inevitably led to the expropriation of land that was already inhabited by a native population. Violence became intrinsic to “indigenous de-territorialization.”⁴ In conceptual terms, in settler colonialism, as Lorenzo Veracini explains, the migration of the settler to the colony is a “foundational” sovereign movement, for settlers aim to create “a new political order.”⁵ Thus the systematic alienation of native inhabitants from the political order was always interconnected with settler efforts to undermine native proprietary rights and access to the land.

In the process of overtaking native proprietorship, the settler polity creates what Veracini calls “two alterities”: those migrants of the home country who do not partake in founding a new political order, and those existing inhabitants in the colonized lands who do not autonomously join the settler polity.⁶ In the new political order, settlers establish themselves “as normative” while the “subalterities” are defined in distinction to and in interaction with them.⁷ From the perspective of the settler, the colonized joins the settler polity, but always “eventually,” while assimilation is always set by the settlers as the course toward achieving European standards of normativity.⁸ The indigenous people are, in the end, “denied any state-making capability”;⁹ they are not even indigenous. In displacing the native population and claiming the colony as their permanent home, the settler competes with the native for claims to indigeneity.

In this chapter and throughout the study, the term “settler” designates the non-Jewish European colonists who arrived in Algeria during the nineteenth century, as well as their descendants. The Jews in Algeria who were originally placed in the category of “natives” alongside Muslim Algerians, were absorbed into the settler polity in 1870, but only those living north of the Sahara. The Mozabite Jews in the Sahara were made French only in 1961.¹⁰ The civic membership of northern Jews was the result of initiatives of elite members of the Metropolitan Jewish consistory, but and once naturalized, Jews eventually became advocates of the French Algerian framework and benefited from the same civil status and rights as their European counterparts. Conceptually, however, they cannot be identified as settlers as they did not arrive as exogenous agents for the purpose of colonization. The experiences of Jews in Algeria as “both colonized and colonizer” distinguished them from Europeans and from the Muslim population.¹¹ To allude to the whole of the French non-Muslim community, the chapters will thus use the phrase “settlers and Jews.”

In Algeria, the goal of eradicating Muslim Algerian presence was never fully attained by the French. The Muslim population remained resilient in their numbers throughout the colonial period despite decades of brutal wars and massacres. The Muslim population even surged in the years that followed World War II. The desire to uproot and remove the indigenous people was not absent in Algeria,¹² and as was the case with other settler societies, the contest over land became determinant in the relations forged between colonizing settlers and Muslim Algerians throughout the colonial period. The desired aim of extermination in Algeria was hampered by several factors. Arab and Berber resistance forces led formidable battles against the invading French army until 1847, while resistance in the Kabyle continued until the 1870s. The force of the French military alone was insufficient to displace the entire Muslim population. Entrenched tribal ownership of the land made expropriation a more protracted process. In addition, Algerians proved immune to pathogens from Europe that in other colonial contexts had razed indigenous populations.¹³ This failure to eradicate the Muslim population led to a constant demographic asymmetry in Algeria, which settlers saw as a permanent source of danger and threat to their security. In fact, French Algeria’s entire economic and political history could arguably be conceived in terms of this numerical imbalance in favor of the Muslim population and the challenges this posed for the settler society in maintaining hegemony.

In settler colonialism, the founding of a new political order is also attended by a push to attain autonomy from the Metropole, with some colonies ultimately founding sovereign “successor states,” as Anglo-settler societies did in the United States, Canada, and the Antipodes.¹⁴ The settlers’ relations with the Metropole are thus always ambivalent, since they

occup[y] a place caught between two First Worlds, two origins of authority and authenticity. One of these is the originating world of Europe, the Imperium – the source of its principal cultural authority. The other First World is that of the First Nations whose authority they not only replaced and effaced, but also desired.¹⁵

In Algeria’s case, although efforts were made intermittently to expand settler self-governance, movements for greater autonomy faced difficulties due to the settler society’s ultimate dependence on French jurisdiction for political legitimacy. The geographical proximity of Algeria to France and its administrative ties to the government in Paris made it difficult for settlers to imagine a complete break with Metropolitan France. But as with other settler societies, the French in Algeria deeply resented Metropolitan intervention, and tensions with the government in Paris persisted as an endemic feature of French Algeria’s history. Such tensions would intensify during the interwar period when the settler community fought off reforms proposed by the leftist Populist Front in France. Clashes with the Metropole would reach their apogee during the Algerian War as settler vigilantism turned into seditious uprisings and violent confrontation with Metropolitan authorities, as we will see. A brief overview of the settler colony’s history is in order, to give context to the development of French Algerian identities.

Colonization through civilian settlement in Algeria followed on the heels of the 1830 conquest of the Ottoman beylik, first with the invasion by the Restoration monarch Charles X (1815–1830). The constitutional July Monarchy (1830–1848) put forward civilian settlement as a means to stabilize control over confiscated lands. The goal was to implant French civilization and help displace the backward and stagnant customs of the Arabs.¹⁶ As Alexis de Tocqueville put it in a report written while he served on a government commission, Algeria would ideally “resemble [France] in everything.”¹⁷ In 1848, the Second Republic, which succeeded the July Monarchy, formally incorporated Algeria as three French departments: Algiers, Oran, and Constantine. But jurisdiction over land did not cohere with jurisdiction over all of the inhabitants in the colony, and Muslim and Jewish peoples were subjugated under the pernicious Code Indigénat, which deprived them of all rights and allowed the French courts to deliver punishment to non-Europeans for any slight infraction considered injurious to the Europeans.

Metropolitan transplants were the first colonists in Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s, but immigrants from the Mediterranean regions of Spain, Italy, Malta and Greece soon surpassed those from the Metropole in number, so that by 1850, more than half of the 483,500 European colonists living in Algeria were from countries other than France, as Jennifer Sessions has found.¹⁸ Although French officials at this time encouraged the settlement of farmers who would cultivate small family plots with government subsidies and concessions, the majority of Metropolitan transplants were manual laborers and wageworkers who preferred the towns to the farms.¹⁹ Newly arrived Europeans from Spain, Italy, and other parts of the Mediterranean also flocked to the towns and worked as small-scale entrepreneurs and shopkeepers.

The failure to make Algeria a colony of virtuous farmers was also owed to the difficulties of climatic variation and the unfamiliar character of the soil, which made agriculture exceedingly challenging. In the late nineteenth century, the increased circulation of American and Asian grains on the global market adversely affected Algeria’s exports, even with its exclusive access to the Metropolitan market.²⁰ Many settlers sold off their plots and headed for the urban areas. By the early twentieth century, it was only the capital-rich large estate owners who could sustain the risks of farming in such a dry climate. They survived as the primary landholding class, while most colonists became urban denizens and self-labeled gens modestes. It is not uncommon to find in the many pied noir memoirs written after 1962 a strong emphasis on their humble and even impoverished backgrounds in Algeria.

Class division within the settler society coexisted alongside the ethnicization of labor in Algeria. Algerian farmers who were pushed off the arable lands became the main source of cheap labor in the colony. And as only a small number of Europeans remained on the land, Algerian agriculture remained dependent on native labor.²¹ This dependency on Algerian labor resulted in a vertical wage scale that placed higher value on European work than on work done by Muslim farmers. Specific types of work were reserved exclusively for the Europeans and denied to Muslim workers. This was especially true in viticulture where the division of labor was clear-cut along ethnic lines. By 1911, wine production was the principal source of wealth in Algeria, valued at 44% of the total European assets in the colony.²² While “delicate vineyard work” such as was given to Europeans brought them better pay,²³ Muslim Algerian workers were restricted to the unskilled tasks including such work as “breaking the soil, hoeing, and deep plowing, or to seasonal work, such as harvesting the grapes.”²⁴

The ethnic differentiation in wages and work was also found in the urban areas. In nineteenth-century Bône in the department of Constantine, for example, in addition to the large industries such as mining, Europeans owned a variety of smaller urban industries such as cork, tiles, bricks, and pottery.²⁵ If the history of colonial Bône was any indication, Muslim entrepreneurship in the cities in Algeria was limited at best to local eateries and small shops that sold mainly foodstuffs and daily necessities requiring almost no capital investment.²⁶ The ethnicization of labor in Algeria thus reinforced the perception among Europeans that Muslim Algerians were unskilled, uneducated, idle, and only able to carry out the most menial tasks.²⁷ Textbooks during the interwar period drew comparisons between Europeans and Algerians according to such socio-economic markers as occupation. Even as the colony was represented as a harmonious community of Europeans and Muslims, the educational literature insisted on the “vast cultural void” and economic barriers between the two worlds.²⁸

Labor relations were indicative of settler colonial social relations, but it was the contest over land that most profoundly shaped settler colonial policies and relations with the Muslim population. Even though the conquest of Algeria failed to completely eliminate the Muslim occupants on the land, the expropriation of land was still carried out in much the same spirit as other settler colonies where native inhabitants were forcibly removed with treaties and extra-legal transactions intended to make room for colonists. As France began to establish ownership of conquered lands during the mid-nineteenth century, it became necessary to formalize the procedures of land transactions through official transfers and exchange of titles in recognition of France’s victory and right to the spoils of land. The structure of land ownership in Ottoman Algiers was highly complex, however, and invading French forces were often at a loss as to how to identify the deeds and titles to the land that could verify its exact status. Frustrated by the difficulty of distinguishing between privately owned land and public domain, French administrators forcibly convened claimants to present their titles at certain times and places, so that absence from these proceedings would result in the automatic conversion of unclaimed land...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  French Settler Colonialism in Algeria
• 2  The Algerian War in the Settler Colony
• 3  Repatriation: Bringing the Settler Colony Home
• 4  Gaullists and the Repatriate Challenge
• 5  Repatriation after de Gaulle: Pompidou and Giscard
• 6  A Socialist Politics of Repatriation
• 7  Repatriates Narrate the Colonial Past
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index