The State of Algeria

The Politics of a Post-Colonial Legacy

Malika Rebai Maamri

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857739452
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Algeria's current politics are influenced by its colonial period under the French to an extent not seen in other North African and Middle Eastern states. Indeed, Malika Rebai Maamri argues that Algeria's postcolonial history and politics are, in fact, a series of attempts to come to terms with the dire consequences of this colonial past. With over half a century having passed since independence, the country is still struggling to create a unified Algerian identity, and any discussion on the concept highlights how, all too frequently, the concept of identity can serve as a form of exclusion. Exploring a wide range of issues in Algerian society, such as the political, cultural social, economic and gender relations, Rebai Maamri shows how belonging and citizenship are produced and perceived. In doing so, she offers in-depth analysis of a country which is often side-lined in the study of the Middle East and North Africa, and yet is a vital component in the search for a post-colonial identity and state in the region.

PART I

ALGERIA UNDER COLONIAL EYES

Joint circumstances turned France's eyes towards Africa rather than any other part of the globe. First, because of the series of colonial conflicts¹ between France and Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century, together with the lack of expansion that the French Empire saw under the reigns of Louis XVIII (1814–24) and Charles X (1824–30). Second, the signature of the Treaty of Paris by which France's defeat in the War of the Sixth Coalition on 30 May 1814 was made absolute, as a result of which France was stripped of some of the territories it had gained under Napoleon I: in Italy, the Low Countries and the strategically important colonies of Malta, the Island of Mauritius, the Seychelles, Tobago and St Lucia. This decline, coupled with France's expulsion from India and North America and the demoralising defeat that France suffered at the hands of the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, which resulted in the loss of the prized territories of Alsace-Lorraine, left the French Empire shaking.

After so many defeats, the French saw colonisation in Africa as a chance to regain some of their lost dignity and prestige in their traditional competition against the British. From the mid-1800s, committed imperialists known as the Parti Colonial set themselves the task of raising again France's international standing in order to restore equilibrium to the French order. Determined to gain access to raw material and markets and to spread the Catholic faith, this group of conservative politicians, industrialists, capitalists and missionaries sought to conquer unknown lands. The Parti managed to win support for the steady expansion in the number and size of France's overseas possessions. As part of this initiative of rehabilitation of its empire, France then took possession of several territories in both Africa and Asia and established a new empire there.

In 1895, Côte d'Ivoire, Dahomey, Guinea, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Sudan and Upper Volta were organised as the federation of French West Africa, Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF), which unified a vast, culturally and linguistically diverse region under one administrative body. This was followed by the establishment of French Equatorial Africa (Afrique Equatoriale Française), comprising the colonies of Chad, Gabon, Middle Congo and Oubangui-Chari, which combined under one central administrative body a large number of disparate ethnic and linguistic groups.

The French holdings in Africa also included the Maghreb. Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia made up the French colonies in North Africa. Although often known as French North Africa, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia were never placed under a similar structure. While Algeria became part and parcel of France, Morocco and Tunisia were established as protectorates.²

Following the annexation of different territories in Berlin in 1884, citizenship was ascribed by each imperial power to Africans. Colonialism created two brands of people in the colonies: the subjects, not entitled to citizenship rights or benefits, and the citizens with rights and privileges associated with citizenship. More importantly, by fragmenting the local people into ‘native authorities’, with different sets of customary or tribal laws, the colonial regime constructed and fermented ethnic identities which were later to plague the State and polity in most African states during the nationalist struggle and in the post-colonial era.

Because colonialism has had a powerful and lasting impact on Algeria, this country can be neither explained nor understood without first unravelling some of its colonial experience. The first part of this book thus focuses on the colonial period and highlights how, prior to the French conquest of Algeria in 1830, citizenship was carefully edged in tradition and jealously guarded against tyrannies. French colonialism thwarted the natural development of statehood and citizenship in Algeria. The different structure of the colonial state brought about a different type of conflict over the issue of belonging.

CHAPTER 1

THE PACIFICATION OF ALGERIA

Algeria experienced millennia of migrations and invasions bearing diverse cultural outlooks from the Carthaginians and Romans to the French.¹ The French conquest of Algeria, which began on 14 June 1830, had been initiated in the last days of the Bourbon Restoration² by King Charles X who, in a last desperate bid for public and electoral support, sought to enhance his prestige. Algeria thus became a French colony.

Invasion and conquest of Algeria

France's conquest of Algeria was dressed up as a moral crusade and was underpinned by an unwavering belief in the racial superiority of the French over the Algerian people. Three fundamental intellectual strands emerged out of the cultural politics of French colonialism, all of which shared the basic assumption that the cultural identity of Algerians should rightly become a site for political intervention by France. This belief found expression in the doctrines of the civilising mission, assimilation and association.

Civilisation, assimilation and association

In the eighteenth century, ‘progressive’ thinkers such as French political scientist Nicolas de Condorcet assumed that it was their holy duty to help those peoples mired in barbarism and savagery, hence ill-equipped to govern themselves.³ Based on this logic, colonial governance took on a sacred air. The expansion of the French Empire appeared thus not as a quest for land, but as a noble mission aimed at helping ‘the wretched of the earth’. This, however, implied the ultimate abandonment of Algerian traditional culture in favour of assimilation⁴ into the French model, which is to say the eventual adoption of French culture, politics, social mores and beliefs. This project of tutelage was in its essence an ideology of cultural annihilation.

It was after the foundation of the Third Republic in September 1870 that the assimilation policy became the heart of French colonial rule. As assimilation-style colonisation in the 1870s and 1880s reshuffled land, rights and a sense of place in colonial Algeria, it created a range of categories and lines of demarcation between the French on the one hand and the Algerians, Jews and neo-French/foreigners on the other. But the policy of assimilation cut both ways: while it certainly accorded to them freedom to design and implement programmes favouring their goals in the country, it also permitted an alarming metropolitan meddling in their affairs. During the 1890s, the settlers therefore backed away from assimilation in favour of association, which consisted in infusing French pride and love of the mother country into the Algerians without forcing them to throw away their native ideas and culture.

Theoretically, associationist policies centred on a type of colonial governance in which African bureaucrats educated in colonial schools worked in close collaboration with new colonial elites to reinforce the colonial order through nominally consultative assemblies and other such superficially participatory institutions. However, association was in no way less racist than assimilationist thought. While assimilation reinforced a belief in the absolute inability of non-Europeans to accommodate change, association implied a teleology that valorised French norms and denigrated any non-European ways of life. And the civilising mission altered the very identities of the peoples whose lands France had colonised. It deprived them of their cultural heritage in order to produce a population easy to manipulate. Inspired by the industrial and democratic revolutions, France saw itself as endowed with the capacity to remake nature and reshape societies at will. Through the application of new social and political prophylactics such as education, medicine and secular belief in progress, the French colonial state would educate and remould native societies along the path of progress away from superstition and backwardness. At the same time, guided and encouraged by the colonial state, the opening of the local economy to the market would reveal latent resources. What kind of colonial history of Algeria did this yield in practice?

Exterminate all the brutes⁵

The empire has done in Algeria what it would never dare do in France. It has committed against the Arabs a crime against humanity and against the army, that of offering the elite of its officers to the monstrous appetite of the leaders.⁶

Transgressing settled notions of right, breaking promises and engaging in murderous terror were the hallmarks of the French colonising enterprise in Algeria. Inspired by the German Reich, the French blotted out the clan structure of Algerian rule, destroying almost all indigenous political institutions. In their endeavours to civilise the natives, the French colonisers created for them a state of perpetual Otherness. They destructured then restructured the colonised people, and in the process depersonalised them.

The French war of pacification unleashed uncontrolled human destructiveness. It inflicted both physical and moral torture on the colonised and involved not only the dismantlement of the existing social structures and economic system but also massive expropriation of land, which deprived most Algerians of their basic means of subsistence. When French colonists poured into the country in their thousands, they had to acquire legal title to territory in areas where they had established political control. To do so, they engaged in repellent forms of pseudo-legality, using not only violent but also iniquitous measures. They seized the fertile land, displaced the peasantry and razed the city.

The French army violated norms of international law recognised in Europe. Command was given to General Thomas Bugeaud, whose appointment brought reforms that ‘pacified’ Algeria, but generated tenets that characterised and influenced colonial warfare in Africa at large ever after. Following the lines of the ancient Roman strategy to conquer the province of Africa, Bugeaud took as his main aim not so much to defeat the indigenous population as to subdue them. In 1837, the General believed that the Tafna Treaty, which acknowledged Emir Abdelkader's authority over almost two-thirds of Algeria, reinforced his pre-eminence among the tribes. So when he took full charge of the Algerian campaign, he discarded this policy of limited control and launched his own campaign to occupy the entire territory. The French then manipulated the provisions of the treaty itself. The pretext for renewed war on both sides was the other side's breach of the treaty and there were bitter disputes over its various provisions. Bugeaud's main strategy was to weaken the enemy by internal discord and division, exploiting the antagonisms between the two Algerian groups, Arabs and Berbers. Contrary to some observers in both France and Algeria, who recognised that there was no good argument for the original conquest of Algeria and that the French methods transgressed the boundaries of common morality, Bugeaud believed that the military policies in Algeria, though ‘brutal’, were ‘logical’.⁷ And now that it was done, they had ‘to do it grandement’,⁸ for national pride precluded withdrawal.

The changes Bugeaud introduced in Algeria were largely the fruit of his own experiences in Spain during the Napoleonic Wars and tested on the ground in Algeria. The General defined victory in terms of élan. In his methods of warfare, he always endeavoured to maintain a line between efficient and excessive force. His obedience to orders was swift and second to none. He did not seriously believe that the natives had any right to self-determination and, more importantly, he did not even express much outrage at their suffering. In six years, the French Cromwell managed to pacify the country. He increased the mobility of the French colonial army and converted it into a force proficient in counter-guerrilla war. French troops systematically organised pitiless raids, also known as ‘seas of fire’, to instil terror and destroy tribal cohesion.

General Duvivier took the long view, reminding the French of the benefits for posterity. If France left Algeria, it would justly be accused of having, almost casually, massacred a people who were defending their faith, their liberty and their country. According to Duvivier, future generations would, however, convict the French of having used their superior power to destroy a people without any real purpose, merely as a pure pastime. Only persistence and eventual success in founding a colony could retrospectively blot out such a stigma.⁹ Arguments about why France's honour was at stake in Algeria dominated the debate in both the government and the army in the early 1840s. What drives these arguments for colonisation is not expansive nationalism to gain markets or power but a particular understanding of the requirements of patriotism: the notion that honour requires avoidance of cowardly second thoughts once the die is cast.

Alexis de Tocqueville also saw the pacification of Algeria as a means of avoiding humiliation. Despite his attachment to political freedom and the rule of law, he supported not only colonisation itself but also Bugeaud's army's means of achieving it:

As for me, I often heard in France men, whom I respect but do not agree with, who found it bad that we burned crops, emptied stock silos, and took unarmed men, women, and children. For me, these are unfortunate necessities which any people that want to wage war against the Arabs is obliged to do.¹⁰

Even as he praised citizenship in America, de Tocqueville thus upheld subjection in Algeria. France, according to him, would lose face by admitting its own impotence and lack of courage. If France abandoned the Algerian colony, it would be disgraced, weakened beyond repair in Europe and utterly ruined. If it remained, it would have to pursue the war of massacres.

Tales of torture

The French army thus turned Algeria into a huge concentration camp, with miles of barbed wire cutting the country's borders with Morocco and Tunisia to limit infiltration from these countries. The mass executions practised on civilians suspected of aiding the rebels evoked invidious comparisons with totalitarian regimes, more particularly National Socialism. For instance, in June 1845, General Pélissier trapped hundreds of people of the Ouled Riah tribe who took refuge in the caves of Nacmaria in the vicinity of Cherchell. Refusing their terms of surrender, Governor Bugeaud ordered Pélissier to ‘smoke them out mercifully like foxes’.¹¹ As a good soldier, the latter obeyed and set fire at the cave's mouth, smothering to death 1,500 rebellious Algerian men, women and children. Hundreds of people were burned alive or asphyxiated in the caves. The spectacle in the grottos was so macabre that words are too poor to translate it, but French officers such as Joseph Bosquet relished that horrifying spectacle and found in it ‘toute la poésie possible … On respire dans toute la ville une délicieuse odeur de grillades …’,¹² he wrote to his mother. Other commanders imitated his actions on the grounds that these acts of terror would hasten the pacification of the country.

In the administrative report that can be found at the Centre des Archives d'Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence (France), Pélissier revealed a macabre respect for detail. He explained how he hunted down the natives, butchered them and burnt their villages, reserving some of the girls, and how every centime he earned cost a rape, a mutilation or a life. But once the exhilarating moment had passed, Pélissier sorrowfully looked up and prayed to God. He had been the monster of crime, the butcher of Algeria. Christendom would rise with horror at the news, he acknowledged. A feeling of remorse pervaded him. He signed off his report with a personal comment on the harshness of such military raids that one undertakes only under compulsion, he wrote, pleading with God not to be entrusted with such horrible mission in the future.

The hideous acts committed at that time against the natives, and which today would constitute internationally recognised crimes, were recorded in several witness accounts and reports such as the one issued by a Royal Commission in 1883:

We tormented, at the slightest suspicion and without due process … We massacred people who carried passes, cut the throats, on a simple suspicion, of entire populations which proved later to be innocent… [Many innocent people were tried just because] they exposed themselves to our furore. Judges were available to condemn them and civilized people to have them executed … In a word, our barbarism was worse than that of the barbarians we came to civilize, and we complain that we have not succeeded with them!

A French captain also admitted to the massacre in the letters he wrote home: ‘Grass no longer grows where the French army has set foot … we scour the country, we kill, we burn, we carve up, we chop down, all for the best in this best of all worlds.’¹³ On the issue of the reversal of the ‘civilised’ and the ‘savage’, de Tocqueville was to observe: ‘I returned from Africa with the distressing notion that we are now fighting far more barbarously than the Arabs themselves. For the present, it is on their side that one meets with civilization.’¹⁴ The French destroyed Muslim charitable establishments, usurped their revenue and let their schools decay, making them more miserable than they had been before, he remarked.

Violence against Algerians was not limited to Algeria proper. Immigrant workers in France were also castigated for supporting their embattled compatriots in the homeland. In 1959, chief of police Maurice Papon created a concentration camp in Vincennes, Paris, where he jailed hundreds of Algerians and subjected them to hideous treatment. The horrific violence used by France against Alger...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Algeria under Colonial Eyes
• Part II Reframing Citizenship
• Conclusion: What Future for Algeria?
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography