French Algeria: Humanist Imperialism?

4 janv.

February 2024, Article by Farida Dowidar

Introduction

“Chatter, chatter: liberty, equality, fraternity”, Sartre writes in the preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, “All this did not prevent us from making anti-racial speeches about dirty n*****, dirty Jews and dirty Arabs”. The underpinnings of the modern French state derive from the June 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, an expression of the liberal Enlightenment values of the time. With a lasting impact on conceptions of individual liberty and democracy from Europe to Haiti, France stood as a source of inspiration with these modern liberal values. Revolutionary France became a beacon for progress and humanism, a voice of post-Enlightenment reason.

However, French humanism found its test in Algeria. From 1830 to 1860, between five hundred thousand to one million Algerians, of a total of two million, were killed. The Empire saw limits to the idea of universal rights of man, with the colonies experiencing a corrosiveness of any notion of all- inclusive humanity. However, Algeria’s position remained unique as it was the only colony legitimately a part of France. In that way, the contradiction between humanism and imperialism reached its apex in Algeria.

Thus, through exploring a timeline of conquest to decolonisation, this essay will examine the question:

To what extent was French rule of Algeria the apex of the contradictions of French Empire ?

The Era of Conquest

The French conquest of Algeria took place from 1830-47, initiated in the last days of Charles X’s Bourbon restoration to increase his popularity through bolstering patriotic sentiment. Using Napoleon’s 1808 contingency plan, the invasion was successful. After Charles X’s disposal during the three glorious days of July 1830, supporters of Louis-Phillipe, the Citizen King, opposed the Algiers expedition. Still, geopolitical realities reinforced the advantages of French presence there (Britain would likely have attempted to occupy the land left by a French withdrawal). Resistance movements led by figures like Lalla Fadma Nsoumer and Emir Abd Al Qadir challenged the Empire, but eventually, in 1834, France annexed Algeria as a colony, enacting a colonial administration with a regime du sabre rule. 1845 saw a royal ordinance in which three types of administrations were established – European-majority areas had colons elect mayors and councils for a self-governing commune, mixed ethnicity areas had governments in the hands of appointed and elected officials with a French administrator, while communes with indigenous peoples remained under the regime du sabre. By 1848, almost all of Northern Algeria was under the rule of the French Second Republic, with the constitution of that same year declaring the occupied lands as an integral part of France. Thus, Algiers, Oran, and Constantine were organised as French departments, depicting a humanistic approach to imperial conquest.

Napoleon III’s Contradictions

The Third French Republic began with the collapse of Napoleon III’s Empire in September 1870. This Republic saw the degradation of the little rights provided to Algerians. However, during his rule, Napoleon had unique views of the Algerians. He wrote in 1863, “Algeria is not strictly speaking a colony, but an Arab kingdom... The natives and the colonists have an equal right to my protection”. Influenced by Ismael Urbain, Napoleon III issued an 1865 decree, one of the two Senatus-Consult laws, that recognised the differences in cultural backgrounds between the French and the Muslims and, shortly after, allowed Muslims to apply for full French citizenship. Few did, as renouncing the right to be governed by Shariah law and allowing their Status Personnel to be French resembled apostasy, whilst the ones who did accept French citizenship were labelled the évolués (the evolved ones), as they were the Frenchicised, and therefore civilised, Algerians. By 1913, only approximately 1,557 Muslims had gained French citizenship. However, his introduction of liberalising reforms in Algeria arguably aligns with the French cultural assimilation model. Despite opposing opinions within France, such as the claim of Flandin, the Foreign Affairs Minister, that French citizenship was incompatible with Muslim status due to the contradicting views of various social issues, Napoleon depicted the progressive and humanist aspects of the French Empire.

Inequality and State Racism

However, following the fall of the monarchy, a regression of sorts was seen in terms of the rights provided to Algerians. The contrast between the treatment of the pied-noirs and the indigénat substantially indicates the contradictory nature of French imperial power. The pied-noirs (French for black feet, referring to how they were often manual labourers) are people of European, usually French, origins who were born in Algeria under French rule. Originally known as colons, an estimated one million settlers moved at the start of the French colonial period, displacing the native population. They had a disproportionate hold of land (e.g. in 1962, they owned 2,726,700 hectares, representing 27 per cent of the arable land, and by 1900, producing more than 2⁄3 of the value of output in agriculture) and had full political representation in Paris whilst the indigénat did not. Resembling a quasi-apartheid South Africa, the pied-noirs dominated Algerian industry and institutions. Though many were blue- collar labourers, the most influential class in society was populated by the White pied-noirs. In this period, they contributed to some progress in health, infrastructure, and the overall expansion of the economy, improving aspects of French Algeria. As André Nousche discusses in “Les Armes Retournées” (2005), despite modern advancements fostering population growth and economic dynamism, the Empire’s administration perpetuated low education, legal inequality resembling a quasi-apartheid state, and exploitative practices.

The indigénat, the native Algerians, were dehumanised and treated like second-class citizens. According to Governor-General Gueydon, the system enacted in Algeria allowed for “the serfdom of the natives”. Best exemplifying this is the Code de l’indigénat, an 1881 set of laws that created an inferior legal status for natives. Introduced in waves throughout the colonies, the Code was first applied in Algeria, where it aimed to solve administrative issues. Formalising de facto practices of discrimination, the 27 imprisonable crimes within the Code allowed for the issuance of fines to Muslims without due legal processes, the extraction of special taxes, and organised the seizure of the native’s land. Subjected to higher taxes, in 1909, Muslims made up 20% of total income but paid 70% of direct taxes. Colons controlled how tax revenue was spent, so colon towns heavily contrasted with indigénat villages, where little tax revenue was spent, depicting a structural inequality between settler citizens and their native subjects, an inconsistency between French ideals in the metropolis and actions in the subaltern society. The colons blocked the most moderate reforms to the Code. Still attempting to assimilate Muslims to a French social structure, Franco-Algerian philosopher Sidi Mohammed Barkat explains how, through the Code de l’indigénat, there lay a legal limbo through which the natives were systemically treated as an inferior mass but were still subjected to the “liberating” civilising mission (the principle that Europe must civilise the “backward” people), depicting the contradictory nature of French colonial rule.

The Violent Pacification of Algeria

Furthermore, the Pacification of Algeria (1835-1903) was a violent series of military operations that attempted to stop rebellions that resulted in a series of atrocities against the Algerians. According to Grandmaison, native Algerian populations fell by one-third in the years between the invasion and the mid-1870s, which is attributed to a combination of direct violence (warfare) and structural violence (disease, starvation). The Pacification’s brutality included but was not limited to, a scorched earth policy enacted by Governor General Thomas Bugeaud. A type of military combat in which there is a destruction of everything needed by the enemy to fight a war, the natives experienced deprivation of water, food, and land that led to devastating losses of life and socioeconomic effects. A keen advocate for the Pacification of Algeria, Tocqueville claims, “I believe that the right of war authorises us to ravage the country”, suggesting, “We make war much more barbaric than the Arabs themselves”.

The massacres of entire tribes ensued, such as the murder of all 500 members of the El Oufia tribe in one night or the 1852 Siege of Laghouat (the Khalya in Arabic, for emptiness) where the city was emptied of its inhabitants and saw the first recorded use of chemical weapons on civilians. Lieutenant- colonel Lucien de Montagnac wrote in March 1843:

“Everything must be seized, devastated, without age or sex distinction: grass must not grow any more where the French army has set foot... This is how, my dear friend, we must make war against Arabs: kill all men over the age of fifteen, take all their women and children, load them onto naval vessels, send them to the Marquesas Islands or elsewhere. In one word, annihilate everything that will not crawl beneath our feet like dogs.”

Consequently, some historians consider French rule in Algeria to be a genocide. Ben Kiernan, an Australian expert on the study of genocide, explained that the shared belief that the native must be expelled or destroyed, along with the substantial death count, is a tell-tale sign of genocide. Though genocide is not the consensus opinion, it is abundantly clear that atrocities were committed against the native Algerians.

An Official Islam and Inconsistent Secularism

From 1830 onwards, particular attention was provided to exerting meticulous control over how the colonised population, predominantly followers of Islam, expressed their collective identity and religious practices. In 1850, the French founded three madrasas, educational institutes in mosques usually dedicated to Islamic studies, to train imams, judges, and interpreters. In 1851, several circulars from the Government-General of Algeria reaffirmed religious hierarchies, classifying muftis, imams, and muezzins as high-level staff. In 1875, expenditures for Islam (officials’ salaries, maintenance of places of worship, etc.) were provided to each department. In this way, the French authorities could exert control over the ways Islam is conducted within Algeria. Beyond managing religious infrastructure and personnel, the colonial authorities meticulously regulated all collective expressions of Islam, including celebrations, pilgrimages, and religious gatherings. These measures effectively circumscribed the activities of Muslim brotherhoods, historically integral to revolts, limiting their influence and stifling potential challenges to colonial dominance. However, in this way, the French also created an “official Islam”, directly contradicting the secularist values of the French Republic. In 1892, a commission of inquiry by the French senate saw that French legislation, without modifications or adaptations, could not rule a Muslim-majority area, depicting the contrasts between the universalistic ideals of the Republic and the ethnocultural and religious realities within the Empire.

The law separating church and state, a cornerstone of the Third Republic’s legal framework, looked to secularise French society. However, as the parliamentary debates unfolded, the colonies, particularly Algeria, were explicitly excluded from the direct purview of the law of December 9th, 1905. Despite Algeria being a part of France, Aristide Briand, the rapporteur of the proposed law, crafted a compromise that relegated the application of the law in Algeria and the colonies to “regulations of public administration,” effectively bypassing parliamentary oversight. This allowed the government to apply adaptability to the colonial context, implicitly reserving the right to postpone, soften, or exclude certain territories from the law’s scope, ensuring an ability to tailor measures to the colonial reality.

Education: Civilising or Oppressive?

The educational landscape in colonial Algeria serves as a glaring depiction of the stark disparities between the education provided for Muslims and Europeans. For Muslims, the educational system was predominantly centred around Quranic schools, offering religious instruction rather than a comprehensive, secular curriculum. This limited educational access exacerbated social divisions, hindering the development of an inclusive and secular society. Along with this, colons failed to allocate sufficient funds to properly maintain these educational establishments. The stark financial disparity was glaring: in 1892, more than five times the amount was spent on the education of Europeans compared to Muslims, despite the latter having five times as many schoolchildren. Attempts at bilingual institutions were short-lived and phased out by 1870. That year, 1870, fewer than 5% of Algerian children attended school, and literacy rates were estimated to be a mere 2% in urban areas, even lower in the rural hinterland. Efforts to address this educational inequality began in 1890, framed within the context of the civilising mission. However, these efforts were marked by a Eurocentric approach, as a small number of Muslims were integrated into the French school system. The curriculum, entirely in French, left no room for Arabic studies, reinforcing the imposition of French cultural norms.

Additionally, unlike in the British colonies, where British rule structured the educational system in the native languages, the French chose to teach in their language to fast-track the civilising mission. In this way, the educational system was a tool of social division, perpetuating inequalities and impeding the emergence of a unified, coherent society. During the 1890s, Jules Ferry, the creator of the Ferry Laws of the 1880s, conducted a critical assessment of Algeria, foreseeing an inevitable conflict between the Indigénat population and Europeans. Particularly, his observations highlighted tensions over education, with Ferry advocating for Indigénat education, a stance met with scepticism by European settlers. Historians analyse that the French utilised the 1789 rights to explain their educational approach, mainly drawing upon the idea that they must liberate the Africans from their own oppression, including their theist ignorance. Though they may have self-justified their approach, the failure to provide adequate educational opportunities for Muslims underscored the incongruities inherent in the French Republic’s imperial project.

The Crémieux Decree

The Crémieux Decree, enacted during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, was a French policy emancipating one Algerian community at the expense of another. While granting French citizenship to native Algerian Jews, it strategically excluded Muslim Arabs and Berbers, maintaining their second- class indigénat status. This legislative division became a tool for the colonial administration to enact a “divide and rule” strategy. By giving citizenship to Algerian Jews and withholding it from Muslims, it fuelled internal discord, forcing a societal rift, affirmed by Decree 137, which reinforced Muslims’ exclusion from French citizenship in Algeria.

So, Jews were seen as accomplices of colonial power, positioning them against the Muslim-majority nation. Additionally, many Pied-Noirs opposed this policy as they saw their citizenship as a privilege. So, in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, a week of anti-Jewish riots took place in Algiers in January of 1898, where Jewish property and people were attacked. That May, Algeria elected four anti-semitic deputies to the National Assembly. This manoeuvre aimed to maintain a firm rule over Algeria by splitting the country. As Fanon explains, colonialism is separatist and regionalist, with the compartmentalisation of the nation a purposeful move to sustain rule. In the early 1940s, the Vichy government revoked the citizenship of Jewish people, but it was later restored in 1943.

Pre-Algerian War: Changes to Status and The Wake of Anti-Colonial Movements

After 172,019 Algerians contributed to the First World War in 1919, the Jonnart Law made obtaining French citizenship easier for specific individuals. This included those who served in the French army, had a family member in the war, could read and write French, held public positions, or were married to or descended from an indigène who became a French citizen. Then, 1944 saw the end of the Code de l’indigénat, and a second electoral college was created for the 1,210,000 non-citizen Muslims. In May 1946 French citizenship was offered to every overseas national, including Muslim Algerians, giving them the right to vote, though it was not equal to that of the Colons. Systems of discrimination remained in more informal aspects, instilling an “internal system of apartheid”, but in many aspects, colonial hierarchies were slowly balancing.

Meanwhile, the anti-colonial movement began to take shape and structure prior to World War II, led by figures such as Messali Hadj and Ferhat Abbas. Hadj’s 1937 founding of the Parti du peuple algérien (PPA) pushed for greater autonomy but not complete independence. Algerian intellectuals ranged from those seeking a similar status to that pushed for by the PPA to some seeking full independence from France. In a context in which ideas of nation-statehood is rooted in French Republican ideas, a contradiction lies in the inability of France’s colonies to establish themselves independently.

From May 8th to June 26th, 1945, France carried out two significant massacres – Setif and Guelma. Its initial outbreak occurred when 5000 Algerian Muslims went out on the streets of Setif to celebrate the surrender of Nazi Germany. Banners calling for the end of colonial rule in the crowd led to major clashes between the people and the local French authorities. There continues to be uncertainty on who fired first, but news from the attacks provoked riots in the town, which led to attacks on the Colons, with an estimated 102 deaths. A combined effort by the Colons and the French authorities resulted in a retaliation that killed between 6,000-30,000 Algerian Muslims. Towns in Setif with suspected involvement were ransacked, shelled (ie. Kherrata), and lynchings took place at an unprecedented rate. Whilst only 12 pied-noirs were killed in Guelma, attacks on civilians persisted. The Constantine préfet, Lestrade-Carbonnel, endorsed the formation of settler militias, whilst the Guelma sous-préfet, André Achiari, established the Comité de Salut Public, which fuelled settler vigilantism and encouraged the assassination of nationalist activists. The indiscriminate response fuelled indignation among the indigenat that planted the seeds of the Algerian war. The massacre was censored in France until 1960.

The Front de libération nationale (FLN) was the major nationalist movement during the Algerian War. Its background can be identified from the growing anti-colonial sentiment in Algeria from the outbreak of World War II. With the banning of the Algerian Communist Party and the PPA, and the ideological turn of anti-colonial sentiment on a global scale, major sentiment promoted independence to occur following World War victory. Underrepresentation in parliament (with a required even number of representatives from the settlers and the indigenous Algerians, despite demographic differences) combined with the unfair election in 1948, prevented major anti-colonial parties, like the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties (also founded by Hadj), from gaining substantive political power. This marked a turn towards a more military-centric approach. Under that lens, the FLN was established on October 10th, 1954. That November, the FLN launched the Algerian War.

The Algerian War

Toussaint Rouge on November 1st, 1954 – when the FLN attacked military and civilian targets throughout Algeria. Broadcasting their declarations from Cairo, they called for the “restoration of the Algerian state – sovereign, democratic and social – within the framework of the principles of Islam.” Pierre France, President of the Council, reacted in the National Assembly, “The Algerian departments are part of the French Republic. They have been French for a long time, and they are irrevocably French. ... Between them and metropolitan France there can be no conceivable secession”, establishing the following French foreign policy.

The early days of the war were focused in the countryside with low levels of casualties. A significant turning point in the war was the massacre of Pieds-Noirs by the FLN near the town of Philippeville in 1955. Prior to this incident, the FLN’s strategy focused on targeting military and government installations exclusively. These attacks were justified by the intellectuals of the period, such as in Frantz Fanon’s ‘On Violence’, where he seeks to morally justify the use of violent resistance in the colonial context, explaining that “Decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon”. Following the French response to the massacre, which resulted in the deaths of 12,000 Muslims, repressive measures became a catalyst for the Algerian population’s increased support for the FLN—subsequently marking the beginning of an all-out war.

On the political side, the FLN persuaded—and coerced—the Algerian people to support the aims of the independence movement. Under Abane Ramdane, characterised as the architect of the revolution, by 1956, almost all nationalist movements had joined the FLN, whether co-opted or merged. The party reorganised itself to resemble that of a provisional government; inspired by the Ottomans, they sorted six territories into wilayas. Suspected to be funded by Egypt’s Abdel Nasser and holding their troops in neighbouring North African countries, the party succeeded with the help of its geographic neighbours. Using a strategy of internationalisation, the group appealed to the Americans, the support of newly decolonised states, and the United Nations (a model that inspired the likes of Arafat and Mandela). Their armed wing was called the National Liberation Army (ALN) – divided between guerilla groups fighting the French army and rival nationalist groups (e.g. the Cafe Wars) and that of a more traditional army.

Following a series of massacres and bombings orchestrated by Muslim Algerians across the Algerian countryside, the Pieds-Noirs began pressing the French government for stricter countermeasures. These measures included declaring a state of emergency, implementing capital punishment for political offences, and advocating for retaliatory actions by the French military. Colonial vigilante groups, tacitly supported by law enforcement authorities, carried out ratonnades (‘rat-hunts,’ a racist term to degrade Muslim Algerians) targeting suspected FLN members.

In a bid for international attention, the FLN escalated the conflict by targeting cities, calling for a nationwide strike, and planting bombs. The Battle of Algiers in September 1956, highlighted by civilian bombings by three women, showcased FLN’s ability to strike urban centres. French paratroopers responded forcefully, quelling the strike and dismantling FLN infrastructure. However, the FLN’s actions and the harsh French response raised doubts about France’s role in Algeria, with widespread attention drawn to the military’s brutal tactics, including torture. French forces (that increased to 500,000 troops) managed to regain control but only through brutal measures, and the ferocity of the fighting sapped the political will of the French to continue the conflict.

In 1959, Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the newly established 5th Republic, declared that the Algerians had the right to determine their own future. Despite terrorist acts by French Algerians opposed to independence and an attempted coup in France by elements of the French army, in March 1962, the French government finally agreed to the Évian Accords, a ceasefire deal with the FLN. In July of that year, the Algerian people voted in favour of the ceasefire agreement with France in a referendum, endorsing economic and social cooperation between the two countries. This paved the way for full independence, with the FLN assuming control of the nation.

Conclusion

Algeria emerges as a microcosm of the broader contradictions within the French Republican Empire. A clash between humanistic Enlightenment ideals and imperial pragmatism, the disparities between settler citizens and native subjects, and the struggle to reconcile secular principles with religious diversity all converge in the Algerian narrative. However, Alice L. Conklin explains in ‘A Mission to Civilise’ that there was a belief that “France owes it to its traditions and its principles to stay at the head of liberal and civilising nations”. Therefore, what we may now observe as contradictions between the French Republic ideals and their imperial rule, it is possible that it was legitimately believed that a barbaric rule of colonial territories was a moral good that would consequently afford the natives their liberty once they have become the Westernised évolués. Therein, today, we understand that Algeria stands as a depiction of the impossibility of exercising republican principles whilst pursuing colonial motives. But, at the time, there was a belief that France was exercising their very values of liberty through their colonial rule. Characteristically, as Fanon saw it, “If that is your humanism, you can keep it”.

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Lucas Desgardin