North African Crafts under Colonial Status, c. 1900: The Case of Pottery in Tunisia and Algeria

Abstract

This article considers parallel approaches to ceramic craft revival, attempted at the same time in Algeria and Tunisia under French colonial administration. It compares two men – Georges Marye and Elie Blondel – who had idealist visions for the revival of glazed ceramics industries, both of which ultimately failed. In Algeria, where the craft was non-existent by the late nineteenth century, Marye proposed a revival of the industry based on tradition, without imposing European models and training, but this was misunderstood by the colonial authorities. In Tunisia, on the other hand, guilds still operated and glazed ceramics, especially tiles, were regularly shown in salons and international exhibitions. Blondel joined forces with the intellectual Jacob Chemla, and together they spent years experimenting in order to reinvent the iconic color of the Qallaline tiles of the eighteenth century. Their approach was a matter of ethnographic enquiry and the development of a training infrastructure, rather than an attempt to produce art objects for commercial ends. But it was slow and expensive compared to the competition from more mechanised, European-influenced processes that the colonial administration favored. While Blondel was unsuccessful in his goal, the project was continued by Chemla and became iconic in its own right; today Chemla ceramics are symbols of Tunisian national identity.