Algeria in Revolt

by HERBERT LUETHY

1

ONE of the tilings every French soldier was issued last spring on being drafted for the war in North Africa was an information booklet about Algeria. In it he was told that what he was going out to defend was not the cause of colonial domination, but the unity and integrity of his country. Algeria, he was informed, is a “French creation,” “an integral part of France,” and as French as Burgundy, Brittany, or Poitou, so that it has no right to claim a non-French nationality. What he was going to flight, therefore, was not a movement of national independence, but a handful of ‟separatists,” criminal rebels, foreign agents, and bandits.

To back up the thesis that, legally speaking, Algeria does not exist, this pamphlet carried on its front page an extract from it profession of faith once made by an Algerian who has since become quite famous — Ferhat Abbas. It is undoubtedly one of the grandest tributes ever paid to the French ideal of total assimilation of the nation’s overseas possessions within the body politic of the Republic. Under the title “An Outside View of Nationalism: La France, c’est moi,” the author, then a pharmacist and town councilor from the Algerian township of Setif, declared: —

If I had discovered the “Algerian nation,” I would be a nationalist and I would not be ashamed of the fact. . . And yet, I shall not die for the “Algerian Fatherland, because this fatherland does not exist. I have failed to discover it. I have interrogated history; I have interrogated the living and the dead; I have visited the cemeteries; no one has spoken to me about it. . . . You cannot build on the wind. We have therefore once and for all brushed aside mirages and myths to link our future definitely to the French achievements in this country. . . . Six million Moslems barefoot, clothesloss, lodged in slums, and often without even bread, Live on this land that has been French for one hundred years. Out of this famished multitude we wish to forge a modern society through schools, the defense of the peasantry, and social welfare. We want to raise it to the rank of human dignity so that it is worthy of being French.

It is well to recall this text, for it shows that this idea of assimilation which people are all too ready today to shrug off as an empty myth was once a promise, a hope, a conviction, and one that seemed almost within grasp. Almost &emadash; for we must also recall the date of this text. Published in Ferhat Abbas’ newspaper L’Entente on February 23, 1936, it is now twenty years old. Twenty years that have seen the face of the globe transformed, but in which France has distinguished herself most of all by her desperate clinging to antediluvian ideas. What an irony! At the very moment that the booklet containing this text was being distributed to French soldiers last spring, its author, Ferhat Abbas, was leaving Algeria to join the leaders of the Algerian insurrection in Cairo!

Now it is true that Algeria — and still less the Algerian nation — has no historical existence. If we are perhaps witnessing the painful and bloody birth of a nation, it is one which is being brought forth from the dire clash between three forces which once seemed to be converging, but which are now clearly tugging in different directions. First is the native mass of the country — 9 million Moslems — an amorphous mass that for a long time had nothing to hold it together but a general allegiance to Islam. It has a very high birth rate, and more than 55 per cent of these 9 million Moslems are under twenty years of age. Then there is the European colony — over one million “Algerian Frenchmen from France” who have lived in North Africa for several generations and have sunk deep roots there, intermingled with immigrants from other European countries and with Algerian Jews. Like every dominant minority, it lives in daily fear of being submerged by the native mass, and has always opposed the policy of total assimilation, of educating and emancipating the Moslem majority. And finally, between these two, stands metropolitan France, whose authority alone could have imposed on both Algerian communities — and above all on the European — the liberal policies proclaimed in Paris.

2

THE peculiar conditions of North Africa, and particularly of Algeria, might once have seemed ideal for the solution of the problem posed by the coexistence on the same soil of a European minority and a native mass. For Algeria is indeed the natural extension of France and a “French creation.” When the French first set foot in Algiers in 1830, all they found there was a nest of pirates, nominally placed under Turkish sovereignty, who spent their time preying on European maritime traffic and tyrannizing the feebly populated hinterland. Algeria owes everything, even its name, to France. Its high plateau, sheltered from the sea by rugged and steep coasts, has always been open to nomadic conquests and invasions of Bedouins coming from the east, the south, and the west. It has never had geographic unity, historic continuity, or even a single moment of independent existence.

The French colonization of Algeria may properly be called Roman in its scope and method. By dint of total annexation of the territory, the establishment of military settlements, the massive transfer of settlers from France to North Africa, the largescale expropriation of pasture lands that had, or were considered to have, no owners, the confiscation of the territories of rebellious tribes and their systematic exploitation, the French managed to do what no previous attempt at colonization had been able to: conquer Algeria in depth.

When the French launched their ambitious program for assimilating Algeria in 1865, they bad virtually no obstructions to deal with. In fact, the fusion between East and West has never been carried further than here. But it was never a perfect synthesis. In this French country the native masses remained for the most part beyond the pale of French schools, law courts, and democratic institutions, aliens in their own land, a kind of ‟internal proletariat” as Toynbee would call them.

Whence came this profound separation? The first explanation that springs to mind is, of course, the wide gap in living standards separating Arabs from Europeans. In Algeria, however, there exist both a European proletariat and a well-to-do Arab bourgeoisie. Nor can we really speak of racial clashes, for the Arabized Berbers of North Africa are white, and segregation has never been the law of the land. The one insurmountable barrier dividing the two peoples has been Islam.

It has often been said of modern totalitarianism that it is a kind of “twentieth-century Islam.” Summary as it is, this statement can be inverted: Islam is a totalitarianism that has aged. The word Islam means submission, and submission not only to a religious faith but to a total religious, political, judicial, and social system embracing and regulating all spheres of public and private life. The radical simplicity of its religious message — a rigid monotheism derived from Jewish and Christian beliefs but stripped of their mysteries and summed up in the formula “God is God” — together with a simple ritual that can be reduced to a few strict rites and prayers, gives it an immense power of expansion and penetration throughout those populations that have remained at roughly the same level of human development that the Arabs had reached at the time of Mohammed.

Being a faithful Moslem implies at the same time a submission to a social system which refuses to acknowledge any brotherhood save that of the Faithful, any law save that of the Koran, any truth save that of the Prophet, any knowledge that is more than the elucidation of the revealed truth of Islam. Ev ery religion is, of course, in a certain sense a “totalitarian system.” But what is peculiar to Islam, in its origins and throughout its history, is its absolute refusal to distinguish the spiritual from the temporal, religious authority from political, the law of God from the intellectual fashion of the age, physics from metaphysics. The kingdom of the Prophet was of this world, and he was at once the founder of a religion, a legislator, the head of a state, and a conqueror.

Arab colonization has thus been more thorough and lasting than any other. This is not because it was particularly cruel or intolerant but because of its monolithic character, which has been both its glory and its curse. Thus the forms of society and law handed down by the Arabs were from the beginning unchangeable, petrified to eternity. The basic law of the Arab world was until recently the immemorial law of the desert, according to which the state was the joint property of the descendants of the Prophet and his family, just as though it were some communal grazing lot. There was no fixed method for the transmission of power other than “despotism tempered by assassination.” The Islamic community in whatever form it has manifested itself — whether as religion, state, tribe, brotherhood, Mahdist legion, or political party — has remained essentially the same for more than thirteen centuries. Whether in some lost valley of the Atlas Mountains or in a cluster of workers’ shanties in a Paris suburb, the fundamental pattern recurs unchangingly: a chieftain and his troop of faithful followers.

The immense force and capacity for resistance of this society, which might at first sight seem doomed to anarchy and decline, consists simply in the fact that however battered or dispersed it may be, everywhere it spontaneously reforms. Nor should we overlook another factor in this extraordinary capacity for resisting external influences: the cloistering of Arab women, who remain veiled, ignorant, submissive slaves of their lord and master, and nonparticipants in public life. Revolutionary upheavals may shake the rest of the globe, but according to custom the Arab woman — and thus the family — must be kept from contact with the outer world, so that each new generation is brought up in the incubus of sacred ignorance and ancestral tradition.

This cloistering of Arab women has been one of the decisive obstacles to all genuine interpenetration between the French and Moslem communities in Algeria. Even when a real friendship or comradeship is established between European and Moslem men, it remains a masculine relationship, confined to the army, the factory, the café, or the office. It stops at the threshold of the Moslem’s home. A Moslem friend does not invite a European to his house, and when invited to the European’s home he comes alone. In Algeria the exclusion of women from intercommunity life has had the force of a religious taboo — imposed by the Moslems, not the Europeans — and the result has been that, however close the relations between individual French and Moslem men have been, the two societies have mixed as little as oil and water.

This is why such Europeanization of Arabs as there has been has taken place among the North Africans who have emigrated to France as workers or students, and who have come without their wives and families. Many of them — including such Algerian nationalist leaders as Messali Hadj and Ferhat Abbas, or the Tunisian Premier, Habib Bourguiba — have grown so incapable of bowing to the archaic forms of Islamic family life that they have married French wives. If we are seeking a key to the almost schizophrenic behavior that distinguishes the present Moslem elite of North Africa, it is here, I think, that it can be found. These men are torn between the attraction of France, which has revealed to them a free and open way of life, and loyalty to their Moslem brethren, from whom they neither wish to nor really could dissociate themselves.

3

WITH the single exception of the old Abd el-Krim, the hero of the Riff wars, whose thinking and political experience never got beyond the primitive notion of the Holy War, no North African party leader has been able to get on for any length of time with the Pan-Arab and Pan-Islamic leaders in Cairo. In the company of these Arab fanatics and blackmailing prophets of a new jihad, of mystics and mystifiers who dream of a restoration of the Arab Empire of the Caliphs, even the North African extremists could not help feeling Westernminded. Instinctively they looked for help toward the liberals and socialists in Paris rather than toward the neo-imperialists of the Arab League.

Even today Messali Hadj, the founder and leader of the Party of the Algerian People, who has always recruited his followers from among the Westernoriented Algerian proletariat in France, is engaged in a death struggle with the leaders of the National Liberation Front in Cairo. But now, interned and kept under surveillance by the French, deprived of all freedom of movement to contact emissaries and party colleagues, he has been having difficulty maintaining his authority. The day is probably past when he can exercise influence except by competing with his rivals on the plane of demagogy.

In neighboring Tunisia, Habib Bourguiba and the Neo-Destour are engaged in the same pitiless struggle against the preachers of the Holy War in Cairo. The latter are now accusing the Tunisian leader of having made his peace with France and of betraying his Algerian brothers.

But the most dramatic example of this trend was Ferhat. Abbas’ departure for Cairo last Spring. Here was an Algerian moderate — a “reformist” so totally removed from any Pan-Arabism that on arriving in Cairo he had to apologize for not knowing classical Arabic, but only French. Yet today he finds himself incapable of exercising any political influence outside of the movement directed by the Arab League.

Ferhat Abbas’ evolution is typical of that of the Algerian elite which is closest to France. I have already quoted his dramatic profession of faith as it is reprinted in the French soldier’s handbook. Unfortunately the quotation is incomplete. Even at that time Ferhat Abbas was being accused of “nationalism’ by the spokesmen of the French colony in Algeria. For these French settlers a “nationalist” was simply any Arab who laid claim, not to the independence of Algeria, but to that equality of citizenship which he was continually being promised in official speeches in Paris. “No one,’ Ferhat Abbas continued in his declaration of faith, “takes our nationalism seriously. Behind this word, it is our economic and social emancipation that is being combated. But it is this double emancipation that we want with all the strength of our wills. . . . Let us not forget that without the emancipation of the natives, there can be no lasting French Algeria!’ What has now become “Algerian nationalism” was once nothing more than this desire for equal rights which, having been frustrated within the framework of the French community, is now seeking its fulfillment outside of it.

The historical context of Ferhat Abbas’ declaration of faith is as important as the text itself. Its date — 1936 — coincides with a decisive test of the French policy of assimilation. Several months later the government of Léon Blum, with the backing of a sfroti” parliamentary majority, introduced a bill into the Chamber of Deputies intended to give French citizenship to “advanced” Algerians. Modest in scope, it was revolutionary in its implications. Hitherto every Algerian — like every foreigner living in Algeria — could apply for French citizenship, subject to certain conditions. One of these was a requirement that he must renounce his legal status under Koranic law to accept the obligations of the French civil code. This involved breaking up the whole structure of Islamic family life, with its principles of patriarchal authority, collective ownership of property, and inheritance rights. From the point of view of assimilation, which was to make all Algerians into Frenchmen, these requirements were theoretically justified. But in practice they proved an insuperable barrier for most Moslems, for whom the Koran remained the ultimate law, governing their civil as well as religious life.

4

THE Blum-Violette Bill of 1936 proposed for the first time to admit “naturalization within the statute”; that is to say, French citizenship was to be offered, without, requiring the renunciation of Koranic law, to a selective minority of notables and dignitaries, army veterans, and holders of French degrees. In all, about 35,000 Algerians were to be promoted to French citizenship in batches of a few thousand a year. This did not threaten the French colony with being “submerged by the native mass”; yet it was a breach in the stone wall that had hitherto excluded the Arabs from French citizenship.

What followed was a classic rehearsal of the spectacle we witnessed last February when the head of the French government was greeted by his own countrymen in Algiers with a hail of rotten tomatoes and insults. The Blum-Violette Bill was greeted by the French colony in Algeria with threats of rebellion and a show of violence. All the French mayors of Algeria banded together and offered their collective resignations as a form of protest. Faced with this show of strength, the Blum government did exactly what the Mollet government did last February: it capitulated unconditionally. The bill was buried and never even came up for debate.

This was neither the first nor the last time that a solemnly announced French project of assimilation was quietly interred. There had been more than a score of similar cases since 1865 But this was the first and last time that such a project aroused a profound response among the Moslems of Algeria. This time their disillusionment was final. Those against whom the door was slammed could no longer fail to develop a consciousness of being Algerians, precisely because they were excluded from the French community. Which did not prevent Ferhat Abbas, despite his solemn warnings, from enlisting in 1939 as a volunteer in the French Army!

Since then French policy in North Africa has drifted rudderless, with no guiding aim or vision of the future beyond the barren defense of the status quo. For five years, from 1940 to 1945, the war furnished the local authorities with a pretext for stifling all political expression. The Moslem parties were dissolved, their leaders were imprisoned, and a surface calm reigned over the land. Yet beneath it a deep subterranean fermentation was steadily gathering strength. It finally erupted in the Manifesto of the Algerian People. This document, which Ferhat Abbas presented to the Allied and French authorities after the North African landing of November, 1942, is certain to remain a landmark in the future history of Algeria. It was addressed not only to the French government but to the entire “democratic world” and it was signed by an unprecedented number of Moslem notables, ulemas (reformist theologians), and pillars of the established Islamic order, as well as by Ferhat Abbas’ own Western-minded political colleagues and friends. After offering a remarkably objective account of the colonial history of Algeria, the Manifesto concluded thus: —

It has been established, and French jurists have affirmed, that France, a Christian and Latin nation, cannot accept within its community and family without compromising its national unity an Algerian Moslem, as long as the latter has not abjured his religious faith. In these conditions it is just and human that an Algerian Moslem should be, at least, a citizen in his own country. This is the clearest and simplest justification of the recognition of the Algerian nation. . . . The hour is past when an Algerian Moslem will ask to be other than a Moslem Algerian.

The Manifesto did not intend to challenge the accomplishments of a century of colonialism. It accepted the existing state of colonial affairs as the basis for a future Franco-Algerian Federation, which was to leave French sovereignty intact in the fields of defense and foreign policy, guarantee the status of French settlers in Algeria by granting them and all Algerians in France a dual Franco-Algerian citizenship, and open the way for an autonomous development of Algeria in its domestic affairs. These proposals anticipated and outdistanced the post-war current of ideas which were intended to transform the French Empire into the French Union. But such concepts as federation and local autonomy proved incompatible with the French belief in absolute sovereignty and the “one and indivisible Republic.” The French Union thus remained a figure of speech because, as François Mitterand, the Minister of the Interior in MendésFranee’s government, declared in 1954 after the outbreak of the Aures uprising, “Algeria is France,” and because “from Flanders to the Congo there is one law, one nation, one Parliament. It is the Constitution, and it is our will.”

It would be wearying to go back over the innumerable meanderings of France’s Algerian policy since the end of the war. After the bloody suppression of the local uprisings that greeted the end of hostilities, the Algerian claim for home rule was met halfway by the Organic Statute for Algeria in 1947. This was a confusing compromise between the legal equality of citizenship granted by the new French Constitution to all inhabitants of France’s metropolitan and overseas territories and the factual inequality of the two different sectors of the Algerian population. Be that as it may, it might have been made to work had it been loyally applied. It did at least have the merit of setting up a local Algerian Assembly, half of whose deputies were to be elected by the Europeans, and the other half by the Moslems. This was a belated recognition of the fact that the interests and points of view of the two communities were not identical with those of the metropolitan French, and that an effort should be made to give both representation within the democratic framework of the French Republic.

But the organic statute was never allowed to work. The only autonomy that Algeria gained from it was in the increased power assumed by local French settlers and irremovable and irresponsible colonial functionaries who could now make the administration their own. With the utmost cynicism these administrators openly set about making and remaking puppet parties, rigging elections to the “second” (Moslem) electoral college, and making a mockery of the very principles of democratic representation which the new statute and the French Constitution granted in theory to the Moslems. For the last ten years Algeria has thus lived under the reign of arbitrary rule, “in the scorn of the law, and under the law of scorn,” as Ferhat Abbas has described it.

The French colonial administrators were deceiving themselves, however, in thinking that the nationalist agitation seething in the adjacent territories of Tunisia and Morocco could somehow be kept from filtering into Algeria. The uprising in the Aurès Mountains, close to the Tunisian border, in November, 1954, was the simple result of revolutionary contagion and the infiltration of armed bands. North Africa — the “island of the Maghrib,” as the Arabs call It — is, despite its political and administrative fragmentation into three chunks, geographically and ethnically one; and the most frightening illusion that French policy has recently given way to — one that was never shared by the founders of the Empire— is the idea that three different and conflicting policies can be pursued in North Africa.

With the outbreak of the insurrection in the Aurès Mountains a National Liberation Front was set up, with its headquarters in Cairo, to direct and exploit the unrest in Algeria. Even today most of its leaders are virtually unknown to the Moslems of Algeria, with the exception of such recent recruits as Ferhat Abbas. Messali Hadj, confined though he is in France, remains the “Great Leader,” and his party, now called the National Algerian Movement, was and maybe still is the only political mass movement among the Arabs of Algeria. But as its leaders — unlike those of the National Liberation Front — were publicly known, nearly all of them have been put under lock and key by the French.

Thus deprived of legitimate and experienced leadership, the Algerian maguis has fallen into the grip of “warriors of Islam,” some of whom were common bandits before. Unlike the Messalistes, whose principal demand is for free elections, these other, Eastern-oriented fanatics are pledged to a Holy War against the French with the full backing of Cairo, which knows that only through a Holy War can it extend its influence over Algeria.

As it is, the policy of military “pacification,” demanding the mobilization of 600,000 soldiers and policemen to deal with rebel bands officially estimated to number some 20,000 men, has enabled France to keep a military grip on Algeria, but not to pacify it. Its failure is now so manifest that even Marshal Juin, France’s highest-ranking officer and a Franco-Algerian long regarded as the most diehard “colonialist,” has come around to recommending a “federal solution” as the only way out of the Algerian conflict. But the official formula is still Algeria is France, and in fact the political constitution of the “one and indivisible” French Republic leaves no alternative between integration and secession.

It is the almost total integration of Algeria into the French Republic which makes any solution of the problem inconceivably difficult. Neither Morocco nor Tunisia, under French administration, was ever denied its own individuality, traditions, or national existence. They remained organized states, under French protection but nonetheless distinct from France. Their own administrative bodies, even though reduced to a decorative façade, never ceased to exist and could thus fairly easily be revived. But Algeria, after 125 years of French colonization, has never known any political structure other than the French. Precisely because French colonization has been so thorough and so sweeping, the retreat of the French from Algeria would deliver it up to total anarchy and to a relapse into that state of barbarism which the French found when they landed there. Thus this land, which once seemed so flourishing, would return to the desert and pastoral economy of nomadic tribes, with perhaps a solitary enclave of French territory fortified against the assaults of the Arab hinterland — a second Israel at the other end of the Mediterranean.