From Tent to Village Regroupement: The Colonial State and Social Engineering of Rural Space, 1843–1962

Abstract

Following the conquest of Algeria the colonial state sought to force tent-dwelling populations to settle in fixed villages so that nomads could be better policed, registered and assimilated into a model of civilisation based on the metropolitan French commune. This chapter traces the ideological continuities in the century-long attempt to achieve this goal. While sedentarisation had been largely achieved by the 1930s, Algerian peasants successfully resisted ‘villagisation’ by constructing dispersed farmhouses. After 1945, newly emergent technocratic planners, influenced by theories of amenagement du territoire, came to see this as a major impediment to economic modernisation. They argued that the extreme poverty of rural society, a classic pattern of under-development and a root cause of growing nationalist unrest, could only be resolved by greater concentrations of population. This, they argued, would facilitate the rational planning of rural space, with schools, medical centres, electrification and communications. By 1948 such costly resettlement was blocked by settler interests, but during the War of Independence (1954–1962) the military seized the opportunity to force dispersed mountain populations into regroupement camps in order to destroy the guerrillas’ support base. Gaullist technocrats seized on this massive dislocation of peasant society as an opportunity to achieve the modernisation they had dreamed of in the 1940s through ‘New Villages’. Colonial Algeria provides an exemplary case of the ideology of ‘villagisation’ analysed by James C. Scott: only authoritarian regimes, like those found in a colonial context, had the unhampered power to engage in such ‘utopian’ and inhumane forms of mass social engineering.