The Politics of Frenchness in Colonial Algeria 1930-1954 (review)

In this well-researched and carefully argued book, Jonathan Gosnell examines constructions of French identity in Algeria during the years from 1930 to 1954; that is, from the year in which France celebrated the centennial of its presence in the country to the beginning of the armed conflict that eventually led to the creation of an independent Algerian state. Frenchness was a shifting and contradictory notion in colonial Algeria. On the one hand, as Gosnell notes, “Algeria and its diverse populations could become French, according to enlightened universalist thought, through a process of assimilation. […] Frenchness represented a kind of civic faith, a consciousness or sensibility, a moral unifying force capable of transcending racial, religious, cultural, and socioeconomic differences” (4). On the other hand, French nationalist discourse in the period often assumed that Frenchness depended on close emulation of the model provided by metropolitan France and often posited a Christian or Jewish subject of European descent. For most people living in Algeria, assimilation into French society required both a thorough-going adoption of French culture and a renunciation of significant aspects of one’s own culture. Various legal reforms over the course of the period in question made citizenship slightly more attainable for Arabs and Berbers, but most settlers continued to adhere to highly exclusive definitions of French cultural identity.

The evidence of this book suggests that the equality promised by the republican definition of Frenchness was by and large a thin veneer placed over the reality of Algeria’s domination by a minority of French citizens who were almost all of European descent. Frenchness remained overwhelmingly tied to the model of metropolitan France and did not evolve to include aspects of the cultures of colonized societies. In retrospect it is hard to imagine that French colonialists did not see that such contradictions would only increasingly alienate the vast majority of Algeria’s inhabitants, but this is precisely what makes the material in this book so interesting.

The Politics of Frenchness is organized into six chapters addressing various aspects of the discourse of national identity in Algeria and the institutions that sought to make the country more French. The first chapter explores the writings of colonial administrators and essayists that claimed Algeria was French, even as they revealed anxieties that this was not really the case, or was becoming less so. This chapter provides a useful summary of the major legal reforms, public events, and official initiatives that sought to extend French identity in Algeria. A second chapter examines primary school textbooks written for students in Algeria. There are fascinating details here. For example, the curriculum contained a wealth of material on the geography and pre-Revolutionary history of metropolitan France (post-Revolutionary history was deemed too divisive), but was only belatedly revised to include information about Greater France (France plus its colonies): it was designed far more to spread a metropolitan French identity than to expand that identity to include aspects of colonial experience.

The third and fourth chapters focus on the construction of France and Frenchness in the colonial and indigenous presses respectively. Gosnell argues that the settler press was a central site for imagining Algeria as part of a Greater France. In contrast, the indigenous French press, aimed at the small Arab and Berber elite who spoke French, initially considered the possibility of a French Algeria that would include them but eventually became an advocate for Algerian autonomy and independence.

The last two chapters examine how definitions of Frenchness affected and were perceived by various ethnic groups within Algeria. Events outside of France, such as the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the creation of Israel, raised doubts among colonial administrators and writers about the loyalty of various populations in Algeria, and hierarchies existed that differentiated between the Frenchness of the colony’s different ethnic groups. At the same time, an increasing number of intellectuals and officials claimed that a non-French, distinctly Algerian identity had developed. This new group was a hybrid of...