CHAPTER ONE “A Town of no Great Interest”

As long as you keep Algiers, you will be constantly at war with Africa;
sometimes this war will seem to end; but these people will not hate you any
the less; it will be a half-extinguished fire that will smoulder under the ash
and which, at the first opportunity, will burst into a vast conflagration.
Baron Lacuée, 1831
Sétif, 1945
The market town of Sétif sits haphazardly on a high and treeless plain some
eighty miles west of Constantine. Even in early summer a thin, mean wind
whirls up the dust along its rectilinear streets of typical French colonial design.
Passing rapidly through it in March 1943, Churchill’s Minister Resident in North
Africa, Harold Macmillan, noted with the eye of a classical scholar that, in
comparison with the nearby ruins of Trajan’s Djemila, Sétif was “a town of no
great interest”.
On the morning of 8 May 1945, the inhabitants of this largely Muslim town
were preparing for a mass march. It was V.E. Day; for Europe, the first day of
peace following the Nazi capitulation the previous night.
All across the mother country, metropolitan France, there would be fervent
celebrations to mark the end of the nightmare five years of defeat, occupation
and the destructive course of liberation by her own allies. But compared with the
frenzied joy of Armistice Day 1918, France’s jubilation was somewhat muted by
the sober backdrop. The scattering of antique cars that crepitated along the
grands boulevards of Paris, propelled by cylinders of floppy bags of coal gas,
perched on the roof like great duvets, symbolised the state of France herself.
Plundered by the occupiers, bombed by the liberators, deprived of fuel and every
raw material and fed by a crippled railway system, industry faced a grim struggle
for rehabilitation. The épiceries were empty — and already there were grave
menaces of industrial unrest. French society was riven; the hunting down of
those who had collaborated (or were said to have collaborated) went on apace;
politicians were already rending one another, as in the bad old days of the Third
Republic, while an aggressive Stalinist Communist Party seemed poised for
takeover. Such was the scene that confronted a generation of prematurely
fatigued Frenchmen: those who had fought all the way from Lake Chad with
Leclerc, or had more recently come limping home from deportation and the
prisoner-of-war camps of Hitler’s Reich. The prevailing note was perhaps struck
by one returning veteran when he remarked to an American journalist: “That
great world insomnia which is war has come to an end, once again.” Like a
weary insomniac, France too greeted the relieving dawn chiefly longing for one
thing only — repose.
If it was liberation that a haggard France was fêting that May day, that too was
the magic word mobilising the Muslim community of Sétif. The difference was
that the one was celebrating its return; the other, marching in quest of something
it considered to be still denied it. Over the past weeks, hints of what might be to
come had percolated through Algeria. There had been a mounting series of
minor incidents against colons, as the European settlers were called; cars, and
even children leaving school, had been stoned; fatmas, or domestic servants, told
their employers that they had been warned no longer to work for them. On walls
graffiti appeared overnight exhorting: “Muslims awaken!” “It’s the Muslim flag
that will float over North Africa!” Or, with more direct menace: “Français, you
will be massacred by the Muslims!”
The hot-blooded colons riposted with aggressive scorn, laced with such
epithets as sale race, which tripped all too readily off the tongue. Passions
between the two communities had risen. Then, in mid-April, information had
been received by the French authorities that a general insurrection was brewing,
to be accompanied by widespread sabotage. The conspirators appeared to be a
nationalist movement called the Parti du Peuple Algérien, or P.P.A., so as a
precautionary measure its leader, Messali Hadj, was packed off into exile to the
desert, thence to Brazzaville.
In contrast to the heavily colon-dominated enclaves round Oran and Algiers,
Sétif was predominantly Muslim and had a long history of radical nationalism.
But apart from this ground-swell of political discontent, there were more
immediate economic motives for trouble. Algeria had suffered harshly from two
years of crop failures, on top of severe hardships imposed by wartime shortages.
Emergency rations normally stocked against the eventuality of famine had been
depleted by the Vichy French for the benefit of Festung Europa; the black
market had thrived, but was beyond the means of most Algerian peasants.
Revisiting his native land that year, Albert Camus was horrified to find Kabyle
children fighting with dogs for the contents of a rubbish bin. Although relatively
rich compared with Kabylia, the countryside round Sétif had received no rain
since January — and resentments had been fanned by the prosperous harvest
reaped by the foreign-owned Compagnie Genevoise, which held nearly 15,000
hectares of the best farmlands.
If there was indeed to have been a concerted demonstration in favour of
Algerian independence (although the evidence for this remains still
inconclusive), there could hardly have been chosen a better day than V.E. Day;
nor a better place in which to ignite the spark than Sétif. All Europe — and
especially France — was rejoicing at deliverance from an occupying power; the
United Nations Charter was about to be signed at San Francisco amid pious
declarations of self-determination for subject peoples; while in Cairo birth had
been given to the Arab League, a day of importance in the cause of Muslim
independence everywhere. The French army was still largely preoccupied in
Europe, and in Sétif itself there were no more than twenty gendarmes to
maintain order.
There could be no question of M. Butterlin, the sub-prefect of Sétif, halting
the 8 May parades. After all, were they not nominally celebrating the triumph of
the mother country and her allies, and specifically processing to lay a wreath on
the monument aux morts in memory of the Algerian troops fallen in the recent
conflict? And, in any case, how could his twenty gendarmes physically contain
8,000 Muslims pouring in from the outskirts of Sétif? At least, he decided, he
would impose a strict ban against the march assuming any political character;
above all, no seditious banners. But as soon as the procession had formed up
outside the mosque, Butterlin received a telephone call from his chief of police,
Commissaire Valère, that the demonstrators had, nevertheless, deployed banners
bearing such provocative slogans as: “Vive Messali!” “Free Messali!” “For the
Liberation of the People, Long Live Free and Independent Algeria!” They were
also flourishing, for the first time, the green-and-white flag that had once been
the standard of that legendary hero of resistance against the French, Abd-elKader, and was later to become that of the F.L.N. liberation movement. He at
once ordered Valère to intervene and seize the banners. Valère warned that that
might mean a fight (une bagarre). “All right,” replied Butterlin, “then there’ll be
a fight.”
At this point, as so often happens with such incidents, the record is obscure as
to who actually fired the first shot. According to the investigating Tubert
Commission, based on French police reports, Commissaire Valère was knocked
down by a stone while trying to seize one of the offending banners, and had to
defend himself with his walking-stick. Some of the demonstrators then opened
fire with concealed weapons. Another account has it that a police inspector in
plain clothes came out of a café, was surrounded by shouting demonstrators, lost
his nerve and shot in the stomach a young Muslim bearing a relatively
unexceptionable banner, mortally wounding him. Whatever the truth, it seems
fairly clear that there were armed men, bent on trouble, among the Muslim
marchers, and these — egged on by the blood-curdling you-you ululations of
their women — now began an indiscriminate massacre of any Europeans caught
out in the streets. Valère’s gendarmes returned the fire, but were soon
overwhelmed. Small groups of killers, the scent of blood in their nostrils, now
fanned out by taxi, bicycle or even on horseback into the surrounding
countryside, spreading the word that a general jihad, or “holy war”, had broken
out. At Chevreul European small farmers found themselves — like the Kenyan
settlers under Mau-Mau — attacked by faithful servants whom they had
employed for thirty years, and survivors huddled for protection in the local
gendarmerie. At Périgotville Muslims seized an arms magazine, slaughtered a
dozen Europeans, including the administrator and his assistant, then pillaged and
burned the town. At the charming small seaport of Djidjelli four forest guards
were among the murdered; at Kerrata a justice of the peace and his wife. In
many cases it was the petits fonction-naires, symbols of the présence française,
that the assassins seemed particularly bent on hunting down. Meanwhile, at
Guelma, the other focus of revolt two hundred kilometres away to the east of
Constantine, there were similar scenes of demonstrators run amok, killings, rape
and pillage.
For five dreadful days the madness continued, until troops hastily rushed up
by the army managed to restore order. The accumulated casualty reports made
grisly reading: 103 Europeans murdered, plus another hundred wounded; a
number of women brutally raped, including one aged eighty-four. Many of the
corpses were appallingly mutilated: women with their breasts slashed off, men
with their severed sexual organs stuffed into their mouths.
There now began the grim work of repression. The army, incorporating
Senegalese units legendary for their ferocity, subjected suspect Muslim villages
to systematic ratissage — literally a “raking-over”, a time-honoured word for
“pacifying” operations. This involved a number of summary executions. Of the
less accessible mechtas, or Muslim villages, more than forty were bombed by
Douglas dive-bombers; while the cruiser Duguay-Trouin lying off in the Gulf of
Bougie bombarded the environs of Kerrata at extreme range (and, presumably,
comparable inaccuracy). The casualties inflicted by the armed forces were set
officially (by the Tubert Commission Report) at 500 to 600, but the numbers of
Muslim villagers killed by the more indiscriminate naval and aerial
bombardments may well have amounted to more. Nevertheless, the figure seems
to have been but a small proportion of the dead accounted for by the vengeful
backlash of an outraged and frightened European population. Spontaneously
organised vigilantes seized prisoners out of country gaols and lynched them;
Muslims found not wearing the white brassards as prescribed by the army were
simply despatched on the spot. At one village alone, held under siege by the
Muslims during the uprisings, 219 were reported to have been shot out of hand.
At Guelma, where the European fury reputedly reached its highest point, the
Algerian Communist Party was well to the fore in the work of reprisal — a
factor of significance in the forthcoming revolution. Describing the uprising as
“Hitlerian”, the P.C.A. secretary-general, Amar Ouzegane, wrote in Liberté, the
party journal: “The organisers of these troubles must be swiftly and pitilessly
punished, the instigators of the revolt put in front of the firing squad”.
Estimates of the toll of Muslim dead exacted in the wake of Sétif fluctuate
wildly, as is so often the case. The Tubert Report placed the figure at between
1,020 and 1,300; while Cairo radio immediately claimed that 45,000 had been
killed — a total which was to become accepted more or less unquestioningly by
the Algerian nationalists.[1] Robert Aron advances a figure of 6,000 which
(although the basis whereby it was derived is not entirely clear) now seems
generally acceptable to moderate French historians. But even if one were to
accept the very lowest figure proffered by the Tubert Report, it still represents a
ten to one “over-kill” in relation to the numbers of Europeans massacred;
especially when, as was later officially estimated, no more than five per cent of
the population had been tainted anyway.
Details of the Sétif bloodbath were played down with remarkable success in
metropolitan France. Simone de Beauvoir recalls: “We heard very little about
what had happened at Sétif,” and noted that the Communist L’Humanité
acknowledged only a hundred or so casualties, while de Gaulle in his memoirs
dismisses the bloody episode in one terse sentence: “a beginning of insurrection,
occurring in the Constantinois and synchronised with the Syrian riots in the
month of May, was snuffed out by Governor-General Chataigneau”. Yet the
army repression must have been carried out on orders from de Gaulle’s coalition
government, and it must equally have been fully aware of the extent of the
ensuing bloodbath; on both scores it is to be noted that the Communist ministers
shared responsibility without a murmur.
For all the general ignorance in metropolitan France of what happened at
Sétif, the impact on Algerians was incalculable, and ineradicable. Kateb Yacine,
the liberal poet, records that it was at Sétif
that my sense of humanity was affronted for the first time by the most
atrocious sights. I was sixteen years old. The shock which I felt at the
pitiless butchery that caused the deaths of thousands of Muslims, I have
never forgotten. From that moment my nationalism took definite form.
Of more direct significance was the disembarkation, shortly after Sétif, of the 7th
Regiment of Algerian Tirailleurs, a unit that had distinguished itself in battle in
Europe. Many of its men came from the Constantine area and were utterly
appalled by the stories they heard. A number of these returning soldiers were
subsequently to become leaders of the F.L.N. Among them was a muchdecorated sergeant, Ben Bella, who wrote: “The horrors of the Constantine area
in May 1945 succeeded in persuading me of the only path; Algeria for the
Algerians.” The Algerian liberal leader, Ferhat Abbas, had condemned the
wanton slaughter of Europeans by declaring, at the beginning of the uprising,
“those who have urged you to rebellion betray you”. But, on his way to
congratulate the Governor-General on the Allied victory, he — like 4,500 of his
followers who had had nothing whatever to do with the uprising — was arrested
and, later, was forced to admit that Sétif “has taken us back to the days of the
crusaders”. It was indeed hardly an exaggeration to describe it, as did Edward
Behr while the war was still in progress, as
an event which, in one form or another, has marked every Algerian Muslim
alive at the time.… Every one of the “new wave” of Algerian nationalists
prominent in the National Liberation Front today traces his revolutionary
determination back to May 1945 … each of them felt after May 1945 that
some sort of armed uprising would sooner or later become necessary.
The reaction of the European colons, a mixture of shock and fear, was to
demand further draconian measures and to suspend any suggestion of new
reforms. “When the house is on fire,” wrote the Écho d’Alger, “when the ship is
about to sink, one calls for neither the insurance company nor the dancingmaster. For the house, it’s the hour of the fireman; for the ship, the hour of the
lifeboat. For North Africa, c’est l’heure du gendarme.” With remarkable
prophetic accuracy the French divisional commander, General Duval, who had
already been responsible for much of the “gendarme” action in the immediate
aftermath of Sétif, reported to Paris: “I have given you peace for ten years. But
don’t deceive yourselves.…” In fact, the precarious peace was to last nine and a
half years; but, in effect, the shots fired at Sétif represented the first volley of the
Algerian War.
The conquest, 1830
Though immediate causes, such as hunger and the years of deprivation of the
Second World War, may partly explain the fateful explosion at Sétif, for deeper
motivations one needs to skim back swiftly over 115 years of the présence
française in Algeria.
In 1830, the country lay nominally under a loose suzerainty of Turkish
military rule. Successive generations of French historians have, for fairly
obvious reasons, claimed that a state approximating tribal anarchy prevailed.
This view is now contested by “neutral” as well as Arab historians. In 1847 de
Tocqueville declared to the French National Assembly that “The Muslim society
in North Africa was not uncivilised; it only had a backward and imperfect
civilisation.” He went on to claim “we have rendered Muslim society much more
miserable and much more barbaric than it was before it became acquainted with
us”. Even some of the early French conquerors paid tribute to signs of Algeria’s
civilisation, however rudimentary, with one general noting in 1834, “nearly all
the Arabs can read and write; in each village, there are two schools”. What is
indisputable, however, is that in 1830 Algeria was suffering from acute political
instability internally and therefore presented a feeble exterior to the world
outside. It was indeed quite difficult to establish a national identity for a territory
that had been little more than a corridor for successive conquerors, and known
little but turbulence over many previous centuries. The Carthaginians had ruled
for some seven centuries; they had been followed by the Romans; who had in
turn been followed by the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Spaniards and the Turks. In
the early nineteenth century the trouble-someness of corsairs operating out of the
rugged Algerian coast had provoked thoughts of occupation among various
European powers, and even troubled the United States. Back in the sixteenth
century, the first European consul to El-Djezair, as the city was then called, had
been a Frenchman, and Napoleon I had himself cast covetous eyes in its
direction. From then on French merchants had become progressively involved in
a series of complex and tangled trade details, and it was during a row provoked
by one of these that, in 1827, the reigning Dey of Algiers (half of whose twentyeight predecessors are said to have met violent ends) lost his temper with the
French consul, struck him in the face with a fly-whisk, and called him “a
wicked, faithless, idol-worshipping rascal”.
France waited three years before avenging the insult. It then presented a useful
pretext for Charles X’s regime which, increasingly unpopular, adopted the timehonoured formula of distracting minds from domestic problems by the pursuit of
la gloire abroad. There were at once voices raised against the Algerian
“adventure”, arguing that it was a deviation from France’s essential interests in
Europe (“I would gladly”, declared one deputy, “exchange Algiers for the most
wretched hole on the Rhine”). And in fact the Algerian entanglement was to play
an important role in bringing down the regime — not for the last time in French
history. Marching to plans based on a Napoleonic project, the French
expeditionary force landed at Sidi-Ferruch, a sheltered beach some twenty miles
west of Algiers. The enterprise was accompanied by a touch of the fête galante,
with elegant ladies booking accommodation aboard pleasure boats to observe the
naval bombardment of Algiers. A few weeks later the city fell, taking with it Dey
Hussein; but too late to save the restored Bourbons in France.
But despite initial French optimism, the fighting continued in the interior. In
1832 there arose a fierce and dedicated Algerian resistance leader, Abd-el-Kader,
then aged only twenty-five. With intermittent cease-fires, Abd-el-Kader waged
war against the French occupation over the next fifteen years. Though winning
remarkably wide support in western and central Algeria, he was never able to
unite totally the warlike Algerian tribes which, traditionally, were little more
inclined to submit to his authority than they were to the French. In the context of
the nineteenth century the weight of colonialist France was, in any event,
altogether too great for Abd-el-Kader to have achieved anything resembling a
united, modern nation. Militarily, the struggle assumed forms that were to
become painfully familiar. Ill-prepared French troops would freeze to death in
the harsh mountains in pursuit of an elusive foe, or fall into well-laid ambushes.
Little quarter was given. The French army retaliated with scorched-earth
reprisals; on one occasion French public opinion was deeply shocked to learn
how fires had been lit at the mouth of a cave where 500 men, women and
children had taken refuge, asphyxiating all but ten of them. “It was not a pretty
war, nor an amusing war,” wrote one military commander. A legendary figure in
French nurseries, Père Bugeaud, pressed operations ruthlessly to a conclusion,
and in 1847 Abd-el-Kader finally surrendered— to spend the rest of his life in
honourable exile in Damascus. In December the following year, a time when the
U.S.A. had admitted little more than half its eventual complement of states to the
Union, the Second Republic declared Algeria an integral part of France,
transforming its vast territories into three French departments. It was a historic,
indeed unique, step, and one which thereby set up for successive French
republics a deadly trap from which they would find it well nigh impossible to
escape.
La présence française
Pari passu with Marshal Bugeaud’s “pacification”. French colonisers steadily
took root in Algeria. Said Bugeaud in a renowned statement before the National
Assembly in 1840: “Wherever there is fresh water and fertile land, there one
must locate colons, without concerning oneself to whom these lands belong.” By
1841 the numbers of such colons, or pieds noirs as they came to be called,[2]
already totalled 37,374 — in comparison with approximately three million
indigènes. There were a number of sources from which French administrations
furnished the necessary land; the state domains which the French government
had inherited from its Turkish predecessor (some one million hectares — nearly
4,000 square miles), forestry domains (much of which was in a condition of
neglect), and agricultural land simply expropriated because it lay uncultivated, or
for punitive measures. One such example of the last was 500,000 hectares seized
from the Kabyles in 1871 in reprisal for their revolt against the pressures of
French colonisation (about a quarter of this was later handed back as being
inutilisable). On top of this there came the land which the colons acquired
through direct negotiation with the owners. Various laws were passed to protect
Algerian property from land-greedy colons, but all too often they were easily
circumvented.
Napoleon III, who was perhaps one of the first French leaders to concern
himself seriously with the Algerian plight, in 1863 passed a law aimed at
“reconciling an intelligent, proud warlike and agrarian race” in which was
stipulated, inter alia, that “France recognises the ownership by Arab tribes of
territories of which they have permanent and traditional benefit”. As so often
with the more liberal acts of this well-intentioned ruler, however, their execution
did not match up to his ideals; while a decade earlier he had himself pushed the
floodgates of immigration ajar with his own political exiles and the unemployed
of the Parisian ateliers. In his constant search for fresh funds abroad, he had also
sold to the Compagnie Genevoise some fifteen thousand hectares of the best land
round Sétif; but in the long run this would benefit neither France (in that the
substantial income off it flowed into the pockets of Swiss bankers) nor Algeria
(in that, contrary to Louis-Napoleon’s intentions, its intensive operations offered
but little employment for land-hungry peasants), and in itself was to provide one
of the contributory causes to the 1945 events. Another subsequent piece of
protective legislation was the Warnier Act of 1873, which aimed at preventing
the sub-division of Muslim lands, but left loopholes whereby such scandals as
the following could occur: near Mostaganem a Jewish lawyer’s clerk acquired
292 hectares, which was tenanted by 513 indigènes, for no more than 20 francs.
The costs imposed on the “vendors” somehow amounted to 11,000 francs, and
they now became the purchaser’s labourers at starvation wages.
In France voices continued to be raised against the colonisation of Algeria;
Clemenceau bitterly attacked the “colonialist” Jules Ferry on the grounds that he
was serving the designs of Bismarck by helping distract France from her destiny
in Europe; agronomists feared that, because of the lower wages paid the
Algerian peasants, French farmers and vine-growers would be threatened. But
still the European immigrants arrived in their various waves. There were the
unemployed and unwanted from the revolution of 1848, who hardly formed the
best material for breaking the stern soil of Algeria; after 1871 (when
immigration first began on a large scale) there came industrious and efficient
Alsatians, refugees from the provinces forfeited to a triumphant Prussia. There
came Spaniards, Italians and Maltese in their thousands; so much so that by 1917
only one in five of the non-Muslim population was said to be of French origin.
As Anatole France muttered angrily: “We have despoiled, pursued and hunted
down the Arabs in order to populate Algeria with Italians and Spaniards.”
Undeniably, however, much of the land colonised by the pieds noirs had been
carved out of insalubrious wilderness, some of which may have been used as
migratory grazing grounds, rather than grabbed directly from Muslim farmers.
This was especially true of the mosquito-ridden marshes of the Mitidja, inland
from Algiers. Its reputation in the early colonial days was so bad that anyone
with a face rendered sallow by fever was said to have a “Boufarik complexion”,
but under French expertise it was rapidly to become Algeria’s richest farming
area. In 1843, Trappist monks introduced the vine to the Mitidja; thirty-five
years later the coming of phylloxera to France launched the Algerian wine
industry, and by the mid-twentieth century it had grown to be one of the
Mediterranean’s biggest producers. Thus in the all-important realm of
agriculture, as indeed in that of industrial development later, the colons could
reasonably claim that they had created the country out of virtually nothing. But it
was the old, old story of the Europeans with their superior technique, resources
and aggressive vigour progressively assimilating the best lands, while at the
same time the more numerous indigènes were being pushed out on to the more
peripheral lands.
During the first forty years of the présence française Algeria was chiefly run
by the military; administration at the local level being in the hands of the
Bureaux Arabes created by Marshal Bugeaud. These were adapted from the
Turkish system, except that plenipotentiary powers resided with the French
administrator, who combined the roles of governor, judge, inspector of taxes,
technical adviser and welfare officer. Often these came to be highly expert in
their field, as well as deeply dedicated to the welfare of the people under their
charge. By 1870, however, the pied noir population had risen to over 200,000
and an uprising against the military-style administration forced Paris to grant
them greater control over their affairs and something more closely resembling
the forms of government enjoyed by metropolitan Frenchmen. The institutions
that then evolved were to remain, with little basic change, over the next eighty
and more years. At the top, Algeria — since it had been annexed as an integral
part of France — was governed through the French Ministry of the Interior. This
was in sharp contrast to its closely related Maghreb[3] neighbours, over whom
France established only “protectorates” during the nineteenth century and which
were consequently dealt with by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Thus it would
always prove difficult to formulate any co-ordinated policy for the Maghreb as a
whole, and in fact such disparate territories as French West Africa and IndoChina came to have more homogeneous links through both being subordinated
to the same Ministry of the Colonies.
Appointed by, and responsible to, the Minister of the Interior was the
governor-general, one of the most senior functionaries of the French republic. By
unwritten tradition he was never a pied noir, any more than the prefect of
Corsica was a Corsican. Directly under him came the prefects of Algiers, Oran
and Constantine; which, as departments of France, were entitled to send senators
and deputies to the mother parliament in Paris. Originally only the pied noir
population enjoyed the right to vote for these representatives. Then came the
creation of the double electoral college system; the first college consisting of all
“French citizens”, plus a modest proportion of select Muslims, the number of
which was augmented over regular intervals — though at a painfully slow rate;
the second embracing the whole Muslim population. Each college (in 1946)
could elect eight senators and fifteen deputies to the National Assembly. In effect
this meant that one million Europeans had voting rights equal to those of over
eight million Muslims. Laws specifically relating to Algeria were adapted or
initiated by a “regime of decrees” established in 1834, controlled by the
administration and thus escaping any parliamentary control. The nearest
semblance to any Algerian legislative assembly was the Délégations Financières,
composed of mixed European and Muslim members, but the competence of this
body was strictly limited to budgetary matters; and, in practice, for one reason or
another it tended to reflect the interests of the grands colons.
At lower levels — although the vast, empty Saharan territories continued
under military control — the administration was divided between communes de
plein exercice and communes mixtes. The former were established in
communities where Europeans predominated (though there were some glaring
exceptions, such as Constantine, where the Muslims were in an overwhelming
majority), and they were based on the French model with a ruling mayor
(invariably European) and an elected municipal council, three-fifths of whose
seats were reserved for Europeans. The communes mixtes held sway in the areas
where the Muslims had clear numerical superiority, and each was headed by an
appointed European administrator, governing through the medium of local caids
— all of whom derived their office through the governor-general.
The institution of the commune mixte contained many of the elements of what,
by the mid-twentieth century, was most unsatisfactory about French rule in
Algeria. It was, in fact, an adaptation in modern dress of Père Bugeaud’s
Bureaux Arabes, which had worked well enough in the early days, but it was
simply not equipped to cope with either the advanced technical problems of the
twentieth century or its vastly expanded Muslim populations. It is revealing that,
whereas in 1922 there were 300 European administrators for the communes
mixtes for three million Muslims governed by them, by 1954 the ratio had
shifted to 257 for four and a half million. At Arris, for instance, the epicentre of
the 1954 revolt in the Aurès, one administrator and two assistants were in charge
of 60,000 dispersed over a wide and inaccessible area. The fault lay, to a large
extent, with French policy which — possibly out of fear of releasing a genie
from the bottle — had consistently shied away from creating an indigenous
administrative corps. A passing comparison could be made with India, where,
after a long participation in government, by the time of the British devolution of
power in 1947 something like half of the civil service was “Indianised”.[4] In
contrast, by as late as 1956 — two years after the Algerian war had broken out
— Governor-General Lacoste admitted that no more than eight out of 864 higher
administrative posts were held by Muslims; and it was not until 1959, after the
coming of de Gaulle, that the French army could proudly announce the
appointment of the first Muslim regimental commander. Though often excellent
and dedicated men in themselves, the French (or frequently pied noir)
administrators tended to become an ingrowing race. As Professor Émile-Félix
Gautier, a distinguished scholar and fervent admirer of Algérie française, wrote
at the time of the 1930 centenary:
The administrative career in Algeria has been a closed shop; the official
enters at the beginning of his life to become later, if he succeeds, a director
with grey hair; he doesn’t leave it; normally no door opens on to other
French or colonial administrations. The result is that the Government-
General is permeated by an Algerian [i.e. pied noir] spirit.
The “cadi’s ear”
Paradoxically, the advent of modern communications meant that the overworked administrator became more, rather than less, out of contact with his
flock; he communicated by telephone instead of riding out by horseback, as in
the good old days, to stay overnight in the various douars. Many inhabitants in
the remoter mountains of the Aurès and Kabylia never saw a European in their
lives, their sole contact with France being through a caid, bachaga[5] or the
hated local tax-collector. More and more the administrator came to rely on these
Muslim intermediaries; some were venerable and honourable old men, laden
with decorations, who had fought for France, or served her loyally and with
integrity; others owed their position purely to family and tradition, and were
known contemptuously by young nationalists as the Beni-Oui-Oui, the rubber
stamps of French policy; still others were appallingly corrupt. In the Turkish
tradition, the bribe was all too often an indispensable fact of life. Jean Servier, a
well-known French ethnologist, describes his outrage when an elderly illiterate
produced a piece of paper stating that a local Muslim judge, or cadi,[6] was
charging him 2,000 (old) francs ($6) for obtaining a copy of his marriage
certificate, plus “scribal expenses, 1,000 francs”.
“That’s not the normal fee,” I told him, “France does not charge so much
for justice.”
“The cadi assures us nevertheless, that it is France which obliges us to
pay so much money.”
He added with a knowing smile. “Among our people there is a large cake
called ‘the cadi’s ear’ — because it requires a lot of honey to sweeten it!”
The “sweetening” often descended to the level of sheer swindle; 100,000 to
200,000 francs for a Legion of Honour or a post of caid, which might never
materialise; or a desert sheikh who would bully the government into digging at
great expense artesian wells to provide poverty-stricken fellahs with a living —
these would prove to be dry and investigation would reveal that the arid land had
in fact been sold (again, at great expense) to the Government by the said sheikh.
The capacity (and ingenuity) of the “cadi’s ear” seemed boundless; it increased
hand in hand with the gulf between the French rulers and the ruled in Algeria —
and so did resentment.
There was an important additional anomaly that provoked bitterness whenever
the bona fides of “assimilation” with the mother country were questioned. This
was the issue of French citizenship. Muslims were automatically French
“subjects”, but not French “citizens”. From the early days legislation had
permitted them to be subject to Islamic, as opposed to French, law; this may
have been designed as a cultural and religious protection, but it became in effect
a prison, because a Muslim wishing to adopt French citizenship had to renounce
these rights, thereby virtually committing an act of apostasy. Moreover, in
practice many obstacles were placed in the path of the Muslim seeking French
citizenship. Back in 1871 tribesmen reporting in front of a judge at Bougie to fill
in naturalisation papers were, reportedly, thrown into prison — pour encourager
les autres. As a result, by 1936, after seventy-five years of “assimilation”, no
more than 2,500 Muslims had actually crossed the bar to French citizenship.
There were two further inconsistencies. To begin with, in having imposed upon
them by the French the Arab judicial system, the Berber Kabyles had been made
to accept a social structure that had been alien to them in the first place.
Secondly, in 1870 the Crémieux Decrees had made the exception of conferring
automatic French citizenship upon the whole Jewish community of Algeria.
Here, for Muslims, was a constantly open wound: why should the Jewish
minority be open to political privileges denied to the indigenous majority?
Attempts at reform
Before Sétif, various attempts had been made at political and social reform —
in 1868, 1919 and 1944. By and large they had followed a dismally stereotyped
pattern; initiated by metropolitan French governments, frustrated by pied noir
pressure-groups. In 1914–1918 Algerian troops fighting alongside the French
had suffered appalling casualties of 25,000 killed out of 173,000 joining the
colours. By way of recognition of their courage and loyalty legislation was
introduced in 1919 to facilitate Muslim access (in modest numbers) to French
citizenship. It aroused the most intransigent and violent opposition from the
pieds noirs, reluctant or fearful of change, typical of which was this
expostulation by the senator from Oran. “The indigènes have fulfilled their duty
vis-à-vis ourselves and deserve to be recompensed. But to do this, is it necessary
to resort to imprudent measures?” The same kind of smug, myopic reliance upon
Muslim “duty” and docility was abundantly evident at the lavish and selfcongratulatory centenary celebrations of the conquest in 1930, which included a
re-enactment of the landing at Sidi-Ferruch. At one of the many such ceremonies
one Beni-Oui-Oui bachaga was heard to declare that if the Muslims had known
the French in 1830 as they now knew them, “they would have loaded their
muskets with flowers”; while another proclaimed that the legions of his
countrymen who had died in the First World War in the cause of the “civilising
work of France in Algeria” had atoned for the French killed in 1830.
The centenary of the conquest was indeed a glittering colonial occasion
reminiscent of the British Raj in India at its peak, and showed evidence on every
hand of the genuine, and remarkable, benefits that France had bestowed on
Algeria in so many fields over the preceding hundred years. Summing up, a
British writer, Mary Motley, wrote: “In the golden glow of the centenary there
seemed no reason why the existing regime should not last indefinitely.” This
optimism, however, was far from being shared by Maurice Viollette, who had
been one of France’s most visionary governor-generals. Deeply aware of the
stirrings of discontent beneath the then apparently placid surface of Algeria, he
issued this prophetic warning the year after the centenary: “before twenty years
are up we will know the gravest of difficulties in North Africa”. Five years later,
Viollette succeeded in getting a set of liberal reforms tabled by the Assembly, the
Blum— Viollette Bill. His declared ideal was that “Muslim students, while
remaining Muslim, should become so French in their education, that no
Frenchman, however deeply racist and religiously prejudiced he might be… will
any longer dare to deny them French fraternity”. It spelt, in one word,
“assimilation”. The provisions of his bill, however, were once again extremely
modest, notably offering citizenship to no more than 25,000 (out of some six
million) Muslims, without renouncing their statutory rights to Islamic law. It
would have been one of the most impressive pieces of legislation by Leon
Blum’s Popular Front, then in power. But the well-oiled mechanism of pied noir
protest began to run; the Algerian Press fulminated against the “explosive
situation” provoked by Parisian ignorance; the anciens combattants marched
through the streets; the mayors threatened to resign; the powerful lobbies in Paris
burrowed away. “We will never tolerate that in even the smallest commune an
Arab might be mayor” was a not untypical pied noir reaction. Under pressure at
home and the threat of Hitler abroad, Leon Blum’s Popular Front hesitated, and
finally collapsed before the bill could be passed. A bitterly disillusioned Viollette
said to the Assembly in an eloquent warning that has been variously quoted:
When the Muslims protest, you are indignant; when they approve, you are
suspicious; when they keep quiet you are fearful. Messieurs, these men
have no political nation. They do not even demand their religious nation.
All they ask is to be admitted into yours. If you refuse this, beware lest they
do not soon create one for themselves.
The still-born Blum—Viollette Bill was the ultimate plea for “assimilation”. It
aroused the most glowing hopes among Muslim liberals, but when — like every
other endeavour of reform between 1909 and 1954 — it was thwarted, they were
replaced by black despair.
Growth of nationalism
Back in 1894 Jules Cambon, then governor-general, wrote to the Senate
describing the consequences of the French policy of breaking up the great
traditional families of Algieria,
because we found them to be forces of resistance. We did not realise that in
suppressing the forces of resistance in this fashion, we were also
suppressing our means of action. The result is that we are today confronted
by a sort of human dust on which we have no influence and in which
movements take place which are to us unknown.
It was a profound and far-sighted analysis. When France, in extremis between
1954 and 1962, was to cast around for interlocuteurs valables, moderate
nationalist representatives with whom compromise solutions might be
negotiated, among this “human dust” she was to find virtually none. On the other
hand, from earliest days the colonial structure had so functioned as to impede
and obviate the emergence of any concerted Muslim opposition body, and for
long years it succeeded marvellously; yet again, when the ultimate disaster did
occur, France would be taken by surprise, because — for the reasons suggested
by Cambon — the resistance movements would be “unknown”.
Because of Algeria’s unique status as an integral part of France, which cut it
off from undercurrents of Arab nationalism in the outside world more than its
neighbours, one cannot easily state — as with other colonial territories — at
what precise point a “resistance movement” began. In broad terms, three
separate strands of Algerian nationalism have been defined, each identified with
a particular leader. There was the religious movement, as embodied by the
Association des Ulema of Sheikh Abdulhamid Ben Badis; the revolutionaries
following Messali Hadj; and finally the liberals of Ferhat Abbas. Over the past
century of French rule, French education and French culture, Muslim scholars
consider that it was the religious doctrine which, more than anything, had kept
alight the fires of nationalism in Algeria, and — although they were not the first
in the field — it was probably the Ulema (founded in 1931) that provided the
nationalists with their first momentum. Certainly their philosophic influence was
of primary and inestimable significance, even remaining very much of a force in
present-day Algeria. A Berber from Constantine descended from a family with
centuries of tradition in political and religious leadership, Ben Badis was an
ascetic and deeply conservative theologian who believed that Algerian
regeneration could only be achieved by a return to the first principles of Islam.
He remains the only one of the early nationalists who is still regarded as
something of a national hero by most Algerians today. In their puritanism of
outlook, the Ulema perhaps most resembled the Wahabi sect which, under Ibn
Saud, had swept through the Arabian peninsula from the early 1900s onwards.
They rigorously condemned alcohol, tobacco, dancing, music and sport, and one
of their principal targets was the marabouts — or holy men and leaders of
mystic orders — whom they accused both of corrupting the faith by their
espousal of mysticism and of being the “domestic animals of colonialism”. The
Ulema also campaigned, with patriotic motives, for the separation of church and
state; their programme was cultural as well as religious; and in schools set up
widely across the country the values of Arabic as a language, of Algeria as a
national entity and of pan-Arabism as an ideal were pressed home with
considerable effect. Stated in all simplicity, their creed was: “Islam is my
religion, Arabic is my language, Algeria is my country.… Independence is a
natural right for every people of the earth.…” The Ulema did more than any
other body to rekindle a sense of religious and national consciousness among
Algerians, but, tied up in their own theological coils, they failed to find
pragmatic applications of their doctrines.
Messali versus Abbas
To some extent, this gap was filled by the “revolutionaries” of Messali Hadj.
[7] Born in 1898, the son of a shoemaker from Tlemcen near the Moroccan
border, Messali received little formal education; he served in 1914–1918 in the
French army, and then went to work in France. Here he married a Frenchwoman,
who brought him for a short period into the ranks of the Communist Party (but
the role played by the P.C.A. in the repressions at Sétif finally caused him to
break with the Communists), Always studiously dressed in the traditional attire
of djellaba and red fez, with his broad face and vigorous beard, Messali was an
imposing figure and an inflammatory orator. A journalist of Le Monde visiting
him in 1952 was reminded of “Rasputin of 1916, Gapon of 1905… a magus, a
prophet, a miracle-worker”. In 1927 Messali became president of a political
grouping recently formed from Algerian workers in the Paris area, called the
Étoile Nord-Africaine, which under his lead soon became the most radical of all
the nationalist organisations. Through the working-class origins of both Messali
and its founding members, the Étoile came to have a proletarian character
superimposed over its nationalist and religious doctrines. It differed from the
Ulema both in a more modernistic interpretation of Islamic dogma and in its
social demands, which included the redistribution of land among the fellahs.
Much of Messali’s ideals of popularist socialism was later to be inherited by the
F.L.N. and present-day Algeria. By 1933 Messali was already talking of
“revolution”, and the Étoile programme declared for universal suffrage in
Algeria, “a struggle for the total independence” of all three Maghreb nations, and
confiscation of all property acquired by the French government or colons.
Messali’s revolutionary zeal was to bring him several spells in prison or exile,
and make him — until the outbreak of the war in 1954 — the best known of all
the Algerian nationalist leaders. The Étoile was dissolved, then recreated by
Messali in 1937 as the Parti Progressiste Algérien (P.P.A.), with roughly the
same platform but concentrating its activities on Algeria alone; after 1945 the
P.P.A. — banned again — assumed the more dramatic title of Mouvement pour
le Triomphe des Libertés Démocratiques (M.T.L.D.).
The third strand of Algerian nationalism in the inter-war period, the liberal
movement, is less easy to reduce to party terms than the other two, but can
perhaps best be studied through the person of its central figure, Ferhat Abbas.
His whole career is one of utmost relevance in this story, for it was symptomatic
of how the liberal moderate — through successive disillusions — becomes
superseded by the revolutionary extremist. Born in 1899, Abbas, like Ben Badis,
originated from the Constantine area, but his father, unlike Messali’s, had risen
from being the son of a fellah to be a caid and Commander of the Legion of
Honour. To Abbas, his father’s career exemplified how the best of the French
colonial system could be exploited to the advantage of the Muslim, and he
himself rose successfully through the ranks of legislative posts that were open to
him. He did his secondary studies at a French lycée in Constantine, then adopted
the profession of pharmacist[8] in Sétif. Everything about Abbas was orientated
towards the West, specifically France, and a bourgeois France at that.
Linguistically, he never felt as at home in Arabic as he did in French, which he
spoke with great skill and charm. He divorced his Muslim wife, and then, like
Messali, married a Frenchwoman — a marriage that in itself was symbolic of his
divided loyalties between France and Islam, where he could not support
puritanical zeal to the same extent as Sheikh Ben Badis. In the Second World
War, at the age of forty, Abbas promptly enlisted in the French army, but never
received a commission.
It was during his time at Algiers university, however, that Abbas was first
influenced by nationalist sentiment, through contact with other young évolués
like himself. As president of the Muslim Students Association he entered the
political arena and began ardently to pursue a goal of Franco-Algerian equality.
Of pacific temperament, although he was a skilful debater, he was no rabblerouser like Messali, and he and the proletarian supporters of Messali felt
mutually ill at ease. To them, remarks one French writer: “he was a little like the
cousin who had gone up to the big city, educated himself, and succeeded, but
having forgotten his origins”. With his clipped moustache, long, cultured
features and neatly sober dress, Abbas was the essence of the westernised,
middle-class Arab évolué — and so were the majority of his followers. Until
relatively late in his career he was a passionate protagonist of assimilation — in
equality — with metropolitan France, and unlike Messali and Ben Badis he did
not believe in an Algeria with a separate identity. In a much-quoted passage, he
declared in 1936:
Had I discovered the Algerian nation, I would be a nationalist and I would
not blush as if I had committed a crime.… However, I will not die for the
Algerian nation, because it does not exist. I have not found it. I have
examined History, I questioned the living and the dead, I visited cemeteries;
nobody spoke to me about it. I then turned to the Koran and I sought for
one solitary verse forbidding a Muslim from integrating himself with a nonMuslim nation. I did not find that either. One cannot build on the wind.
Two months later Ben Badis riposted fierily that he and the Ulema sages had
also “examined History”, and had indeed discovered a “Muslim Algerian
nation”, which “has its culture, its traditions and its characteristics, good or bad
like every other nation of the earth. And, next, we state that this Algerian nation
is not France, cannot be France, and does not wish to be France.”
The schism within the nationalist movement was wide open, a prelude to
those that were to plague the Algerian revolutionary movement throughout its
existence. In June 1936 a “Muslim Congress” was convened in Algiers for the
first time, but the display of unity it produced was short-lived. The BlumViollette proposals of the same year themselves provided the root cause of a
fresh split. While Ferhat Abbas and the liberals warmly welcomed them, they
were attacked by Messali in violent terms as “a new instrument of colonialism
aimed at dividing the Algerian people, by the usual French methods of
separating the élite from the masses”.
When the Blum-Viollette Bill collapsed, however, an impossible predicament
confronted the liberals: on the one hand, they saw themselves looked on as
renegades by Messali and the Ulema; on the other, they were rejected by the
French. It was a bitter personal disillusion for Abbas, who, from this moment,
began to move away from the ideal of assimilation towards some form of
autonomy for Algeria. Thus, at least ideologically, he and his supporters were
brought a long step closer to the “revolutionaries” — a progression, tragic for
France, that was to be repeated each time “moderate” Algerian nationalists found
their overtures repulsed by the government of France, or by the pied noir
lobbies. Modest as were the reforms it would have introduced, the abortion of
the Blum-Viollette Bill undoubtedly marked a vital turning-point for the
Algerian nationalist movement. At the same time it also bestowed on the pieds
noirs a first dangerous awareness that they could call the tune on any reform
initiated by a government in Paris.
Impact of the Second World War
The Second World War came, and with it France’s crushing defeat in 1940. To
Muslim minds, particularly sensitive to prestige and baraka,[9] the humiliation
made a deep impression. The reaction of many was: “France has had it; so why
not pay our taxes to the Germans, instead of to France?” For the pieds noirs,
circumstances were austere but not impossible: “there were restrictions, shortage
of oil, and chickens on the balconies to lay eggs. Life was tolerable, we all more
or less had a photograph of the Maréchal in the dining-room, but simply because
he had a fine head of an old man,” recalls a Jewish resident of Algiers. But
discrepancies with the Muslim population were marked; economic severance
from the mother country, with its 100,000 Algerian wage-earners there, and
successive famines caused standards of living to sink acutely. As Harold
Macmillan noted in his wartime memoirs:
It is as if the Irishmen in the U.S.A. and Great Britain were to cease sending
money home, and at the same time no Irish labour was going over to
England for the harvest, etc., and earning money in that way.
The population is therefore very poor, and the food and clothing position
among the people has caused us all a lot of worry.
On top of the humiliation of defeat was compounded the confusion of not
knowing what authority represented the true France. After 1940, while the
French colonies in Equatorial Africa went over to de Gaulle, Algeria remained
pro-Vichy; thus, within three years, Algerians found their loyalty invoked first to
Pétain, then to Darlan, then Giraud and finally de Gaulle. But even after the rise
to eminence of de Gaulle, it was the shadow of the Allied colossus in the
background that constantly obscured the rekindled, feeble light of the présence
française in Algeria. Landing — once again at Sidi-Ferruch — in November
1942, the Anglo-Americans with their overwhelming weight of war material and
the power and riches that this implied, in contrast to the puny resources of the
Vichy French, made a powerful impact on the Algerian nationalists. They were
also soon aware of the anti-colonialist creed of Roosevelt’s America, and Abbas
had several meetings with Bob Murphy, the President’s personal representative
in Algiers, to explore the possibility of applying the Atlantic Charter to Algeria.
But when, early in 1943, a Muslim delegation approached the Free French
leader, General Giraud, with a petition of reforms, they were headed off with “I
don’t care about reforms, I want soldiers first.” And, indeed, Algeria did provide
France with soldiers — as in the First World War: magnificient Tirailleurs and
Spahis, to whom General Juin was heavily indebted for his victorious progress
through the grinding Italian campaign. These Algerian soldiers at the front were
either largely unaware of, or had their backs turned upon, the turmoil brewing at
home — until Sétif. But the camaraderie of the battle-front, their contact with
the more privileged British and American troops, as well as the training they
received, were things not to be lightly forgotten.
In 12 February 1943, Abbas produced his own “Atlantic Charter” called the
“Manifesto of the Algerian People”. In a more virulent tone than heretofore, he
claimed savagely: “The French colony only admits equality with Muslim Algeria
on one level; sacrifice on the battlefields.” More ambitious than his previous
demands, the “Manifesto” now marked a clear turning away from assimilation,
calling for an “immediate and effective participation” of Muslims in the
government and the establishment of a constitution guaranteeing inter alia,
liberty and equality for all Algerians, the suppression of feudal property — as
well as various other planks borrowed from the more radical platform of
Messali. At this point, Messali was under house arrest (a sentence commuted
from sixteen years’ hard labour imposed following an army mutiny in 1941), his
P.P.A. was in dissolution and the Communist Party of Algeria (P.C.A.) banned —
so, temporarily, Abbas reigned supreme. Next, in May 1943, pressed on by the
followers of Messali, Abbas came out with a “Supplement” to the “Manifesto”
which demanded nothing less than “an Algerian state” — though still through
recourse only to legal and peaceful means.
This was too much for the French authorities, and Abbas too was consigned to
house arrest. In protest against French policy the Muslim representatives on the
Délégations Financières refused to take their seats that September. Perhaps
realising that he had gone too far, Abbas recanted, affirming his “fidelity to
France”, and was released again at the end of the year. Then, in January 1944, de
Gaulle gave an epoch-making declaration in Brazzaville; it was French policy,
he announced, amid some typical oratorical ambiguities “to lead each of the
colonial peoples to a development that will permit them to administer
themselves, and, later, to govern themselves”. Algerian Muslims were offered
equal rights with French citizens, and an increase in the proportion of
representatives in local government. To the Algerian nationalists this was little
more than Blum-Viollette warmed up, and, by 1944, it was too little too late.
(Nor, indeed — like other promises of reform — was the Brazzaville declaration
ever to be implemented.) Abbas’s reaction was to bury the hatchet with Messali,
and on 14 March in the fateful town of Sétif, and in another rare moment of
unity, all the principal components of nationalism joined hands in a new
grouping called Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberté (A.M.L.). In the most precise
terms yet, it restated its aim as being “to propagate the idea of an Algerian
nation, and the desire for an Algerian constitution with an autonomous republic
federated to a renewed French republic, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist”. This
new brief moment of unity was to perish finally amid the bloodshed and
recriminations of Sétif the following year; nevertheless, the A.M.L. declaration
did establish a principle of immense political and propaganda importance.
Indeed, in the opinion of Albert Camus the movement was “the most original
and significant that has been seen to emerge since the beginnings of the
conquest”.
And so France in Algeria staggered from war into peace, her prestige in
Algeria gravely tainted, her power and influence in the world sorely reduced.
United in despair, the Algerian nationalists saw, in the ending of the war,
prospects of a return to “colonialism as usual”, a powerful French army
returning to police the country and aid the pieds noirs prevent implementation of
the reforms they so ardently demanded. The scene was set for the terrible,
unforeseen and unexpected explosion at Sétif — and, in its wake, l’heure du
gendarme.
[1] In an interview with the author in October 1973, President Bourguiba of
Tunisia persisted in the belief that “more than 50,000” had been killed after
Sétif. Maître Teitgen, the liberal secretary-general of the Algiers prefecture in
1956–7, told the author that he reckoned the Muslim dead at “probably 15,000”.
The discrepancy in the figures may (according to Robert Aron) be partly
accounted for by the fact that many of the inhabitants of suspect mechtas
“disappeared” into the hills in advance of the army ratissages, and were thus
subsequently accounted for among the presumed dead.
[2] There are at least two schools of thought on the origins of pied noir; one, on
account of the black polished shoes worn by the French military; the other based
on the somewhat patronising view of metropolitan Frenchmen that the colons
had had their feet burned black by an excess of the African sun.
[3] Meaning, literally, the “land of the setting sun”, the Maghreb embraces the
western territories of the North African littoral: Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.
[4] It would be unfair to extend it too far, as the British had never colonised
India with a view to permanent settlement; to correspond with the pied noir
problem there would have had to have been roughly 30 million Britons in India
in 1947.
[5] The Algerian equivalent of pasha.
[6] The offices of Turco-Arab origin, cadi=judge and caid=a local governor,
should not be confused.
[7] Hadj is a title bestowed on Muslims who have made the pilgrimage to
Mecca.
[8] It will be noted that many of the nationalist intellectuals (like Ben Khedda,
president of the provisional Algerian government in 1962, who was also a
pharmacist) were doctors, pharmacists or lawyers — professions where Muslims
generally encountered the least barriers to advancement.
[9] Baraka, hard to translate, is a special grace or good fortune accorded from on
high.