Arabs (48 page)

Algeria was transformed for the year. Artists were commissioned to create monuments celebrating major milestones in the history of French Algeria, to decorate the towns and countryside. Museums were built in the great cities—Algiers, Constantine, Oran. Public works were constructed across the country—schools, hospitals, orphanages and poor houses, agricultural colleges and professional schools, and the world’s most powerful broadcasting station to ensure news of the centenary events reached across all Algeria. A major exposition was organized in the western coastal city of Oran, with all the fanfare of a world’s fair. Well over fifty international conferences and congresses were held on virtually every subject under the sun. Sporting events, trans-Saharan auto rallies, and yacht races marked the calendar. Cities were lit at night, with prominent buildings outlined in strands of electric lights and exquisite firework displays.

The symbolism of the centenary was best captured in the monuments commissioned to mark the event. In Boufarik, a few miles south of Algiers, a massive stone plinth 45 meters wide and 9 meters high (about 148 feet by 30 feet) celebrated “the glory of the colonising genius of France.” The sculptor Henri Bouchard (who designed
the Protestant Reformation memorial in Geneva) placed at the center of the monument a cluster of French “pioneering heroes of civilization” headed by General Bugeaud and General de Lamoricière, the military commanders who scorched Algeria to defeat the Amir Abd al-Qadir in the 1830s and 1840s. A group of French nobles, mayors, and “model settlers” stood in proud ranks behind the military men. To the rear, looking over the shoulders of the French men in uniforms and suits, the sculptor included a few Arabs in national dress, representatives of “the first natives whose active fidelity made the task [of French colonization] possible.”
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The French even managed to insinuate a sympathetic Algerian presence into the 1830 military memorial. The French press had heatedly debated whether the monument proposed to celebrate the landing of French troops at Sidi Ferrush on June 14, 1830, would “upset the natives.” “All those who know Algeria,” wrote Mercier, the official historian of the centenary, “and who live in daily contact with its Arabo-Berber population, had no apprehensions in this respect.” The true feelings of all native Algerians, Mercier insisted, were captured in the remarks of the tribal leader Bouaziz Ben Gana, who claimed: “If the natives had known the French in 1830, they would have loaded their rifles with flowers rather than bullets to greet them.” These sentiments were captured in the inscription on the 10-meter-high monument, picturing a cockaded Marianne gazing down into the eyes of a dutiful Arab son: “One hundred years later, the French Republic having given to this country prosperity, civilization and justice, a grateful Algeria pays homage of undying attachment to the Motherland.” It was as though the French wished to cast the Algerians in a supporting role in the colonization of their own country.
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The centenary celebrations reached their climax at Sidi Ferrush on June 14, 1930. Here again, the organizers sought to present colonial Algeria as a Franco-Arab joint production, officially known as “the celebration of the union of the French and indigenous populations.” A massive crowd gathered around the new monument of Sidi Ferrush to watch the military parade and hear the speeches. The governor-general headed a phalanx of colonial officials. The air force made a flyover and dropped flower petals on the crowd surrounding the memorial. Torch bearers, following Olympic example, set off running from the monument to Algiers, some 30 kilometers (about 19 miles) to the east.

The speeches given by the French were predictably triumphalist, but far more astonishing were the comments that came from the Algerian dignitaries who took to the podium. Hadj Hamou, a religious scholar speaking on behalf of the teaching staff of the mosque schools, expressed his gratitude for the freedom he enjoyed to teach Islam without interference. All mosque-goers, he claimed, followed the lead of their imams in “the common love of the secular holy French Republic” (
la sainte République Française laïque
)—a wonderful oxymoron. M. Belhadj, speaking on behalf of Muslim intellectuals, remarked on the day’s celebration of “the profound union of the French
and indigenous people” who had transformed into “a single, unique people, living in peace and concord, in the shadow of the same flag and in the same love of the Mother land.” M. Ourabah, a leading Arab notable, supplicated: “Instruct us, raise us yet higher, raise us up to your level. And let us join in one voice as in one heart to cry: Long live France, ever greater! Long live Algeria, ever French!”
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In an age of burgeoning Arab nationalism, Algeria seemed to be embracing imperialism. Yet the Algerians were not satisfied with their lot. Many of the educated elite recognized they could not beat the French, and so they sought to join them—with the full rights of French citizenship that, down to 1930, had been denied them. Accepting French rule as inevitable, these Algerians opted for a civil rights movement instead of nationalism. Their spokesman was a student of pharmacology at the University of Algiers named Ferhat Abbas.

Ferhat Abbas (1899–1985) was born in a small town in eastern Algeria to a family of provincial administrators and landholders. He was trained in French schools and came to share in French values. What he wanted more than anything else was to enjoy the full privileges of any Frenchman. Yet the laws of France put severe limits on the legal and political rights of Algerian Muslims. These laws divided Algeria geographically, between areas with relatively high European populations, where French common law applied; rural communes with European minorities, where a combination of military and civilian rule applied; and Arab territories, which were under full military administration.

The laws also clearly distinguished between Europeans and Muslims in Algeria. In 1865 the French Senate decreed that all Algerian Muslims were French subjects. Although they could serve in the military and civil service, they were not actually
citizens
of France. To be considered for French citizenship, native Algerians would have to renounce their Muslim civil status and agree to live under French personal status laws. Given that marriage, family law, and the distribution of inheritance is all precisely regulated in Islamic law, this was tantamount to asking Muslims to abandon their faith. Not surprisingly, only 2,000 Algerians applied for citizenship during the eighty years in which this law remained in force.

Unprotected under French law, Algerian Muslims actually came under a host of discriminatory legislation known as the
Code de l’Indigénat
[“Indigenous People’s Law Code”]. Like the Jim Crow laws passed after the American Civil War to keep African Americans in a segregated, subordinate status, the code, drafted in the aftermath of the last major Algerian revolt against French rule in 1871, allowed native Algerians to be prosecuted for acts that Europeans could legally perform, such as criticizing the French Republic and its officials. Most of the crimes set out in the code were petty, and the punishments were light—no more than five days in prison, or a fine of fifteen francs. Yet the code was applied all the more regularly because its consequences were so trivial. And, more than any other legal distinction, the code
reminded Algerians they were second-class citizens in their own land. To someone like Ferhat Abbas, who had been schooled in French republican thinking, the indignity was unbearable.

Abbas responded to the centenary celebrations with a sharply critical essay, written in French, that captured the disillusionment of a young Algerian after a century of French rule. Entitled
The Young Algerian: From Colony to Province
, Abbas’s book was an eloquent plea to replace French colonialism in Algeria with the more enlightened aspects of French republicanism.

We hear in Abbas’s writing the echoes of the Muslim notables who spoke at the centenary celebrations in Sidi Ferrush—“raise us yet higher, raise us up to your level.” Yet Abbas was more assertive in his demands.

Abbas claimed that the Algerians had earned their rights of citizenship by virtue of their wartime service. France had placed a heavy burden on indigenous Algerians since conscription was first introduced to Algeria in 1913. Over 200,000 Algerian Muslims had been drafted during the First World War, and many never returned. Estimates of Algerian war dead range from 25,000 to 80,000. Many more were wounded.
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Even after the war, Algerians were conscripted into the French army. Abbas maintained that he had earned his rights of citizenship through his own military service in 1922. France did not distinguish between soldiers by race and religion in military service, he argued, and should not do so in law. “We are Muslims and we are French,” he continued. “We are indigenous and we are French. Here in Algeria there are Europeans and indigenous people, but there are only Frenchmen.”
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Yet native Algerians had been reduced to an underclass in their own country through colonial society and its laws. “What more can be said about the daily insults which the indigenous man suffers in his native land, in the street, in the cafés, in the slightest transaction of daily life? The barber closes the door in his face, the hotel refuses him a room.”
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Abbas was particularly critical of French naturalization laws that required Muslims to renounce their personal status. “Why should an Algerian seek to be naturalized? To be French? He already is, as his country has been declared French soil.” Writing of Algeria’s French rulers, he asked rhetorically: “Do they wish to raise this country
to a higher level or do they wish to divide and rule?” For Abbas, the answer was self-evident. “What is needed is for the same law to be applied to all, if truly we wish to guide Muslim Algeria towards a higher civilization.”
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Even so, he clung to the cultural rights of Algerians to preserve their religion and to be taught in their own language—Arabic—without prejudice to their rights as French citizens.

Abbas was not the first to set out a claim for full citizenship rights; the Young Algeria movement had pressed for such reforms since the early 1900s. Nor did he speak for all Algerians. The Islamic reform movement, headed by Abd al-Hamid Ben Badis (1889–1940), rejected Abbas’s idea of assimilation out of hand. The differences between Abbas and Ben Badis were captured in an exchange of editorials in 1936, when Ferhat Abbas famously declared there was no such thing as the Algerian nation: “Algeria as a fatherland is a myth. I have not discovered it. I have questioned history; I have questioned the dead and the living; I have visited the cemeteries: no one has spoken to me of it.” Algeria, he claimed, was France and Algerians were French. Indeed, carried away by his rhetoric, Abbas went on to say that he
was
France (“
La France, c’est moi”
).
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“No, sirs!” Ben Badis retorted:

Yet Ben Badis made no more claim for Algerian independence than did Abbas. Whereas Abbas sought equality with the French, Ben Badis wanted Algerian Muslims to be “separate but equal” to the French. He asked the French to grant indigenous Algerians liberty, justice, and equality while respecting their distinctive culture, their Arabic language, and Muslim faith. Ben Badis concluded his essay by insisting that “this Algerian Muslim father land is a faithful friend to France.”
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The differences between the secular assimilationists and the Islamic reformers were hardly insurmountable.

Ironically, the only activists to demand full independence for Algeria came from the expatriate worker community in France. A handful of politically engaged men in the 100,000-strong Algerian workforce in France came to nationalism through the Communist Party. Their leader was Messali Hadj (1898–1974), who founded the workers’ nationalist association L’Étoile Nord-Africaine (the North African Star) in 1926. Messali presented the new organization’s program to the Congress of the League against Colonial Oppression in Brussels in February 1927. Among the points called for were independence for Algeria, the withdrawal of the French occupation forces,
the formation of a national army, confiscation of settler plantations and a redistribution of farmlands to native farmers, and a host of social and economic reforms for independent Algeria.
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The association’s demands were as just as they were unrealistic at that time, and they attracted little support among Algerians at home or abroad.

Of all the Algerian political activists in the 1930s, Ferhat Abbas was the most influential. His writings were widely read by educated Algerians and French policy makers alike. “I read your book with great interest,” Maurice Violette, former governor-general of Algeria, wrote to Abbas in 1931. “I would not have written it in the same way. I regret certain pages in it, but faced with some veritable provocations . . . I recognize that it is difficult for you to retain your composure and I understand.” The tone was condescending, but Abbas clearly did not mind (he used the quote as encomia on the dust jacket of his book). He knew that, through Violette, his arguments would be discussed in the upper echelons of the French administration.