The French Colonial Mind, Volume 2: Violence, Military Encounters, and Colonialism

5 Fascism and Algérianité: The Croix de Feuand the Indigenous Question in 1930s Algeria

112 5 Fascism and Algérianité The Croix de Feu and the Indigenous Question in 1930s Algeria samuel kalman In Algerian novelist Robert Randau’s 1926 work Les Colons, one of the central characters proclaims: “I am an African. I am the law. I am neither a lazy Arab nor a Maltese dog. I am a colon.”1 Randau’s contention that the pieds-noirs, the European settlers, constituted a new racial synthesis represented the culmination of a pervasive theme in the European literature of the Maghreb. Termed the Algérianiste movement, these authors followed the dictum of Louis Bertrand, that only the vigor and will of the Africanized European “barbarians” could regenerate a decadent France.2 Such a vision naturally excluded inferior indigènes, lazy criminals who practiced primitive customs inferior to French civilization . When Musette’s Cagayous proclaims “Algériens nous sommes!” he specifically excludes Muslims in violent terms: “An Arab tried to run off with a roll of fabric and a blue coat. I gave the bastard a punch in the head that laid him out, and if they hadn’t dragged me off him, I would’ve smacked off his mustache and his big mouth too.”3 Despite their violent and xenophobic discourse these authors reflected everyday relations between European settlers and Algerian Muslims and an idealized vision of Algeria shared by many pieds-noirs, particularly those identified with the political center and right wing. As Azzedine Haddour notes, the creators of Algérianité proffered a staunchly mythological framework, obscuring the genuine history and culture of French Fascism and Algérianité 113 Algeria. Bertrand, for example, sought to justify European dominance, proclaiming the eternal Gallic presence in the Maghreb, a literary counterpart to the Warnier Law, the 1873 act that enabled the seizure of vast tracts of Algerian land. Similarly Haddour notes that Cagayous’s machismo and frivolity hide a more sinister agenda: “The myth of the Mediterranean joviality of the Cagayous is a way of exorcizing the history of colonial exploitation and racism . . . it wards off the fear of what was repressed, it is the forgetting of guilt.”4 Most importantly, the Algérianité expounded by Randau, Bertrand, and Musette provided the basis for a distinct Algerian identity that both incorporated French politics and mores yet simultaneously demanded the formation of a uniquely Algerian national construct. As Jonathan Gosnell observes, “Algérianité was a proclamation of their imagined and strongly felt identity, the recognition of a distinct colonial consciousness.”5 Neither was this merely a literary sojourn, the fanciful creation of a few isolated intellectuals. Xenophobia frequently devolved into both symbolic and physical violence. As many historians note, the doctrine of the piedsnoirs was frequently mobilized to justify the seizure of land from Arabs and Berbers and their utter exclusion from the European-dominated social and political sphere.6 Thus the sénatus-consultes of 1863 and 1865, and the 1873 Warnier Law, deprived the colonized of land and citizenship, only obtainable through a renunciation of Koranic law, unthinkable for a devoutly Muslim population. The latter became mere subjects, with no political representation or legal standing, subject to special “Arab” taxes and the repressive Code de l’indigénat.7 For as Neil MacMaster writes: “imperial propaganda, even when not grossly racist but anodyne and paternalist, created the opinion among even the poorest of French that they were inherently superior to the benighted Arab.”8 No area of colonial life remained unaffected by this racial inequality. Even the civil service entrance requirements for the lowliest positions in government service were rigged to prevent all but the most servile indigènes, the so-called beni ouiouis , from actually sitting the exams. This was done despite frequent calls to at least provide Arabs and Berbers with a token representation within the colonial bureaucracy.9 These attitudes further provided the justification for physical attacks against Muslims from both the authorities and the general public, including cases of armed assault and police brutality.10 Cultures of Violence in the Empire 114 Colonial historians readily discuss the Algérianiste mentality and everyday xenophobia in the imperial setting, yet most do so in the context of the pre-1914 period or under the short-lived North African Vichy regime during the Second World War. Explanations for the persistence of such attitudes during the interwar era, and pied-noir intransigence during the murderous civil war from...