War in the Mountains: Peasant Society and Counterinsurgency in Algeria, 1918–1958

Abstract

In this deeply researched and ambitious book, Neil MacMaster examines the neglected history of peasant resistance to French colonialism in Algeria's Chelif Valley. War in the Mountains upends the scholarly consensus that has attributed a politically inert and reactive character to the Algerian peasantry, illuminating their central role in the struggle for independence. MacMaster dismantles the consensus view across four sections and twenty chapters, giving readers an unprecedented look at the kinship units, political organizations, and shared histories that together shaped peasant resistance in the valley. Here, there was no need for urban revolutionaries to “awaken” the ignorant peasantry; peasant communities in the surrounding Dahra and Ouarsenis mountains had been organizing mutual aid and nationalist propaganda networks for decades prior to the arrival of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in 1956. When the Algerian Revolution finally came, these rural networks formed a base of support without which revolutionary forces could not have prevailed.War in the Mountains exemplifies just how much groundbreaking work can yet be done with colonial state archives. It is a truly social history that examines the critical—but often overlooked—kinship units that structured rural life in the Chelif Valley: the extended household (ayla) and the fraction (bocca), which were assemblies composed of the men in each ayla. By tracing the histories of individual fractions across decades, MacMaster identifies a means with which peasants preserved their communal solidarity and traditional social practices through years of land expropriation and dislocation. In the “native reserves” (communes mixtes) where most peasants lived, fraction patriarchs were often the sole links connecting the rural population to the colonial state. Absentee headmen (caïds) and French agents relied on these fraction leaders for local intelligence, offering access to state resources in exchange for their cooperation. As this system fell into crisis during the Great Depression, fractions and village councils (djemâa) coalesced into what would become a mass resistance movement. The fraction—a precolonial unit of rural social life—thus formed the organizational core through which peasants mobilized for a postcolonial future.The first three parts of the book chart the “terminal decline” of French rule in Algeria and the subsequent rise of the FLN “counter-state” that overtook it (254). Caught in an irreconcilable antagonism between the conservative defenders of the commune mixte system and reformers bent on modernization, the colonial state in Algeria underwent cycles of sputtering reform followed by reactionary backlash and repression. The constricted spaces that these cycles created for peasant political expression were never adequate to legitimize French rule, but they did provide a crucial medium for the introduction of mass electoral politics to the villages of the Chelif. Newly elected village councils operated as counterweights to corrupt French officials, compensating for the absence of colonial state administration with religious and kinship-based mutual aid networks. As revolutionary violence escalated, the survival of communist, Messalist, or Frontiste cells in the region depended on their ability to affect a “juncture” between themselves and the “dormant anti-colonialism of peasant society” expressed in these village councils (480). MacMaster contends that the FLN ultimately prevailed here because it offered a revolutionary program that was most responsive to the values and concerns of the peasantry.The final section of the text reassesses Opération Pilote, an ambitious counterinsurgency plan formulated by the anthropologist Jean Servier. With Pilote, Servier promised an ethnographic “hearts and minds” strategy—built upon political reforms and vast economic development initiatives—that would win over the region's peasant population. Military and civilian leaders soon hailed the operation as a success to be emulated throughout Algeria, but the book reveals stark truths that undermine this sanguine assessment. On the ground in the Dahra and Ouarsenis, the French presence largely continued as one of underadministration punctuated by catastrophic violence. Servier's ethnography also quickly fell out of favor with French officers, replaced by a simplistic program of sloganeering and propaganda derived from the field of behavioral psychology. Moreover, the FLN remained superior to the French in providing basic services and security to the Chelif peasantry. Pilote and its “successes” have been a staple of counterinsurgency literature for decades; MacMaster offers a necessary and overdue corrective to these accounts that dwells on the self-defeating brutality counterinsurgency practitioners unleashed on the very peasants they were supposed to be winning over.By positioning peasants at the center of Algeria's revolutionary struggle, War in the Mountains compels scholars to reconsider the balance of forces driving the country's independence and subsequent state formation. It also establishes a comparative research agenda grounded in an attentiveness to enduring structures of rural life that promises to influence the field for years to come. Accessibly written, albeit dense in its argumentation, this text will make for compelling reading in advanced undergraduate and graduate-level seminars.