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CHAPTER ONE ALGERIA 1830-1954: A COLONY IN ALL BUT NAME The French expedition against Algiers in 1830 which led a generation later to the conquest of what the invaders named Algeria was motivated by a series of domestic and foreign policy problems. Jewish merchants in Algiers owed money to metropolitan French interests; and the dey of Algiers whose powers derived from the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople had been provoked into striking the French consul with a fly-swatter, something the administration in Paris could not let pass. Finally, the advisers ofthe last Bourbon king, Charles X, calculated that a successful militaryexpeditionwould shoreup theradically declining popularity of the king. French army units disembarked in Algiers on 14 June 1830. On 5 July, the dey surrendered the city. Over the next several decades, French army men tended to initiate, and the civil authority in Paris to follow, a policy of substantial territorial conquest as a result of which large stretches of North Africa were absorbed by France. In this effort, the invaders were challenged by the young marabout Abd-el-Kader. In 1834 he proclaimed ajihad or holy war against the conquering infidel and hoisted the green-and-white banner which 130 years later became the flag of the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN). In the face of this resistance, Marshal Bugeaud, commander of the invading army (as well as governor-general between 1841 and 1847) ordered his men to devastate those parts of the territory outside French control through what became known as the razzia. Roughly four-fifths ofthe population ultimatelybrought under French control was Arab; some twenty percent scattered throughout the territory belonged to the original indigenous Berber culture. Whatever their ethnic background, those living in what became French Algeria adhered to the teachings of Mohammed. French colonization in earnest began under the Third Republic when France, to compensate for her defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, pressed ahead with imperial expansion. Some 5,000patriots, many ofthem Protestant, left Alsace and Lorraine when these provinces were ceded to Germany; some ended up in Algeria. Other Protestants from the Hautes-Alpes department were induced to relocate across the Mediterranean by the Societe Coligny. Many ofthe immigrants duringthe latter part of the nineteenth century came not from metropolitan France (the metropole) but from the Mediterranean littoral, from Corsica, Cyprus,Italy,Portugaland Spain. A law 11 12 The Call of Conscience passed in 1889 declared the children of these foreign-born immigrants to be "Fran9ais d'Algerie," endowingthem with the rights of full citizenship. This legislation helped shape a sense of ethnic solidarity and of sharedsuperiority to the Muslimmasses at a time when racial (and racist) myths were sweeping through the European continent. Charles-Andre Julien, the distinguished Protestant historian of the Maghreb (the Arabic term for extreme northwest Africa, including Morocco and Tunisia as well as Algeria) who spent much of his early life in Algeria, before World War I, offers a graphic portrait of this settlermentality: Reassured by a policy of repression (directed against the Muslim majority), proud of its vitality and its entrepreneurialspirit, sure of its republican and civilizing vocation, the European populationfelt free to impose on the territory and its indigenous masses a political, economic and social dominationwhich nothing would be able to undo.' Pierre Nora, a prominent French historian who spent two years teaching in an Algerian lycee beginning in 1958, paints a remarkably similar collective portrait: "The only common bond among French and other European immigrantswas apsychologie dedeclasse with regard to theirnation of origin. In one way or another, those who came to Algeria as settlers had left a failed life behind them."2 Nora adds that thisinferiority complex broughtthe colons to make sure that the Arabs and Berbers in their midst would be humiliated as they themselves had been back in Europe. This helps explain why the European minority would feel justified in rejecting out of hand reforms being urged on them not only by the Muslim society which they had come to despise but by their metropolitan counterparts who could not share their hurt but were all too ready to condemn their retrograde mentality. While Algeria did not become a colony in name, it was situated on the periphery of France's (and later the world's) capitalist economy, destined to export raw materials and to import manufactured goods. Early on, copper and iron were discovered by French prospectors. Towards the end, in the decade before independence, vast reserves of oil and gas were...

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