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The existence of the Maltese clubs is our first indication that settler assimilation to French culture in Algeria was not as thorough or complete as many historical sources would lead us to believe. As I spent time with the former settlers at their social gatherings, I encountered additional clues indicating that a wealth of ethnic and other distinctions continue to be meaningful to them today. Michel Pisani was the first to instruct me about the great gulfs between settlers in the colony. One afternoon while at the Amicale France-Malte office at the Maison, he regaled me with stories about his father, a humble man who had been a baker in their small rural village in eastern Algeria. Life in the countryside, the bled, was so very different from that in the big cities, he explained. There was a high concentration of Maltese and Italian immigrants in his village, and most of his father ’s friends and neighbors worked long hours with little to show for their labors. They were members of the rural petite bourgeoisie who ran small hardware and bakery shops, and who aspired one day to be able to purchase plots of land. In contrast to the French elite—owners of the growing enterprises and grandes domaines (large estates) who lived in urban centers, especially in the capital, Algiers—the rural settlers lived quite modestly. A play on words summarized this contrast in lifestyles perfectly, Michel said, and he wrote it down to make sure I understood: they, the inhabitants of Algiers, the Algérois, were kings (rois). We, on the other hand, the inhabitants of the country, Algeria, were the Algériens, or nothings (riens). Michel found this wordplay wickedly funny. Michel’s joke suggests that there were significant status distinctions between the settlers who lived in the capital and those who lived in the rural hinterlands. As I continued to meet with the elderly pieds-noirs, I was struck by the fact that, despite the dominant ideology that settlers of different origins had “melted together” in the creuset algérien, the Algerian melting pot, THREE A Hierarchy of Settlers and the Liminal Maltese  pieds-noirs of all backgrounds still identify each other today according to ethnicity or former place of residence. A woman might be referred to as Renée, la Souk-Ahrasiènne (Renée, the woman from Souk-Ahras), or Renée, la Maltaise or la Corse (Renée, the “Maltese” or “Corsican” woman, indicating ethnic heritage). People employed a whole array of ethnic labels. At first I found this usage confusing, for the people referred to in this way were not Maltese, Spanish, or Italian nationals, but French citizens of these backgrounds ; to acknowledge the distinction between these pied-noir labels and nationality, I place the ethnic labels here in quotation marks. Class is another important distinction in the pied-noir way of speaking ; and class and ethnicity are often linked. The “Spanish,” “Italian,” and “Maltese” pieds-noirs are sometimes referred to as le petit peuple, the lower or humble classes, or as Français du deuxième zone, “second-class French.” The conflation of class and ethnicity was never more pronounced or telling than in discussions among the “non-French” about “the real French,” however. The elderly Franco-Maltese regularly identified the individuals in their stories who were “pure” French (pur Français), “real French” (vrai Français), of “French stock” (Français de souche), or “French French” (Français de France, Français d’origine). In school, as Mr. Missud explained, the goal both socially and educationally was to try to reach the same level as the Français de souche, that is, les vrais Français. On another occasion, Michel’s wife, Rose, recounted how her mother and grandmother had worked in Algeria as house-cleaners for a lawyer’s family, who were “des gens riches et tout” (rich people and all) and, she added with reverence, “des Français de France,” as if this specification of the family’s ethnic background would immediately communicate to me their elite social standing. These speech practices are reflections of the salience of ethnicity and class in colonial classificatory systems and of the speakers’ membership, at least at one time, in a common speech community (Duranti 1997, 72). They also suggest that we need to further explore the question of settler homogeneity and French assimilation in the colony. As we will see, status differences understood...

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