Colonial Algeria Research Articles

A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF FRENCH AND ZIONIST SETTLER COLONIALISM IN ALGERIA AND PALESTINE

The paper explores and analyzes similarities and differences between French settler colonialism in Algeria and Jewish Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine. This study focuses on the history and historical development of French settler colonialism and Jewish Zionist settler colonialism by deploying the analytical framework of settler colonialism, and the comparative history of settler colonialism. Settler colonial studies and comparative settler colonialism allow for gaining insight into the genesis, and development of settler colonies. The intention behind the application of comparative settler colonialism, specifically in juxtaposing French settler colonialism in Algeria and Jewish Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine is to identify overlaps, similarities as well as differences between these settler polities. The results of this study have shown that French and Zionist settler colonialism share numerous similarities and features. The most important feature that these settler colonialisms adhere to is the logic of elimination, which is defined as policies and practices of settler colonial policies aimed at the dispossession, displacement, ethnic cleansing, genocide, as well as cultural assimilation of the indigenous populations. In this case, both French and Zionist settler colonialisms have subscribed and followed the logic of the elimination of the natives. Yet as opposed to French settler colonialism, Zionist settler colonialism has been less interested in cultural assimilation and integration of the indigenous people of Palestine into settler society. Another conspicuous difference between French and Zionist settler colonialism is that while French settler colonialism is already defunct, Zionist settler colonialism has managed to survive and persist. The current study contributes to settler colonial studies and the comparative history of settler colonialism. Moreover, our research can inform other studies in the field of settler colonialism, and we suggest that more research into comparative settler colonialism needs to be undertaken.

Идеолог французского колониализма Алексис де Токвиль об алжирском вопросе (1830-1848)

The article analyzes a wide range of sources, the most valuable of which were the works of Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) written by him in the 1830s and 1840s, which allowed him to formulate and characterize his views on the colonization of Algeria and corresponds to the objectives of this work. The study of his ideas in the context of the colonial discourse of the July Monarchy (1830-1848) helped to determine their place in it. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time in Russian science, an overview is given of the attitude of modern Western historians to the role of Tocqueville in the development of the French colonial ideology and strategy in Algeria. As a result, it has been determined that Tocqueville’s works were woven into the general colonial discourse of the July Monarchy on the future of Algeria. Supporting the side of the European colonists, Tocqueville often turned to widespread colonial ideas and cliches, thereby accelerating the course of colonization.

Surrealism in the Shadow of the French–Algerian War

Surrealism in the Shadow of the French–Algerian War

Remembering Colonial Algeria’s Desert in the “Grand Sud”

While the majority of French colonists in Algeria lived on the Mediterranean coast in cities such as Algiers and Oran, or in not-too-distant inland towns like Constantine, those who settled further afield in communities bordering or in the Sahara Desert, like Aflou, Batna, Biskra, or Khenchela, had a vastly different experience of colonial life. These settlers were often isolated outsiders, subdued by the remote terrain. In French Algerian memorial books destined to fulfill French colonial nostalgia, repeated iconic images of recognizable destinations and events overlap and solidify in the memory of Algeria’s former French inhabitants, the Pieds-Noirs. Within these same memorial texts, the desert, which occupies 80% of Africa’s largest country, has always been present. Photographs from the 1850s onward, attempting to capture the country for its French occupiers, depict the desert as a peaceful and quiet landscape with exotic indigenous figures, traditional houses, and little evidence of Europeans in the frame. Locations are hard to pinpoint, outside of the occasional oasis, and the sand dune landscapes would have been shifting. This article examines how colonial photographs and sparsely written textual souvenirs of the desert provide a contrapuntal image of colonial Algeria as a place of the unknown. Using Dylan Trigg’s work on place and memory, I explore the juxtaposition of the predominant nostalgic vision of European settlement and images of the desert that highlight what the French Empire never possessed.

The Political Origins of Colonial Land Policy: Evidence From British India and French Algeria

Whereas the literature on colonial legacies has flourished in recent years, relatively less attention has been paid to the origins of colonial institutions. What explains variation in the design of colonial institutions? Some scholars have stressed the importance of precolonial factors, arguing that institutions were designed to reflect the environmental and socio-political conditions that the colonizers encountered in the colonies. Others hold that policymaking reflected the colonial powers’ metropolitan identity and aims. We believe these literature have been insufficiently attentive to the colonial state and the political ideals of colonial bureaucrats. Drawing on evidence from British India and French Algeria, we show that land policy was shaped by intense competition between ideologically motivated officials, who disagreed over the uses and aims of state power. Theorizing the role of ideas allows us to explain variation in colonial policies across both space and time while highlighting the indispensability of qualitative methods of analysis.

The Partisan Psychiatrist

ABSTRACT: Frantz Fanon's stature swelled in the late 1950s as he crisscrossed the nascent Third World, winning support for the Algerian nationalist cause. As a member of the National Liberation Front (FLN), the party fighting a war of independence against Algeria's French colonial rulers, Fanon held a dizzying number of responsibilities: he provided psychiatric treatment to FLN fighters; he helped produce the party's official newspaper; he delivered lectures on philosophy and history to soldiers at the front; and he traveled across the African continent as a formal ambassador for the provisional Algerian government-in-exile, raising political and financial capital for the revolutionary movement.

Our Newspaper as Care: Narrative Approaches in Fanon's Psychiatry Clinic.

This paper argues that the newspaper Notre Journal enshrined the importance of narrative in the revolutionary psychiatry of its founder and editor, Frantz Fanon. Anchoring my analysis in the interdisciplinarity of the medical humanities, I demonstrate how care at Hôpital Blida-Joinville in colonial Algeria was mediated by the written word. I examine Fanon's physician writing and editorial texts detailing the use of narrative approaches in the clinic. As an object of care, Notre Journal's promotion of psychic healing, social actions, and engaged professional practice shaped the interactions and experiences of patients and staff. Printed and distributed to the wider institution, the newspaper created community-during an oppressive French Occupation and at the outset of the War of Independence-in addition to nurturing creativity, curiosity, solidarity, and accountability. Still, Fanon would come to recognize the limits of narrative methods amidst cultural oral traditions, illiteracy, and divergent attitudes about narrating the self.

A Hospital Journal. Reforming Psychiatry in Colonial Algeria during Wartime (1953–1959)

Between 1953 and 1959, the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital (HPB) published a weekly magazine with the sober title Notre Journal. It was written jointly by the colonial hospital’s patients, nursing staff and doctors, and was seen as the “social cement” of a vast medical reform undertaken on the initiative of Dr Frantz Fanon. The journal was a supporter and a privileged witness of the reform, and was one of the places where socialtherapy was developed in word and deed, and where its achievements, representations and contradictions could be seen most clearly. By analysing the 165 issues that appeared in the course of the weekly’s six years of existence, this article points out the interest this source has for the history of psychiatry and its reform in colonial Algeria. A study of the copies of the journal makes it possible to separate the history of Algerian collective psychotherapy from that of its pioneer. Without downplaying Dr Fanon’s influence on the trajectory of a medical reform of which he was the architect, the aim of this article is to give the project back its historical and collective depth. By revealing the ways the junior doctors, nursing staff and patients appropriated and implemented the principles defended by the Martinican psychiatrist on a daily basis, it reminds us that socialtherapy was not simply part of the actions and itinerary of one man alone: just as the signs of collective psychotherapy preceded Frantz Fanon’s arrival in Algeria, the reform survived his departure, in spite of the problems that followed it.The article makes the in-house weekly its topic of interest and principal source, and in so doing assesses the role played by Notre Journal in the transformation of psychiatric practices at the HPB. By turns a vehicle for dissemination, a therapeutic resource, a tool for professionalisation and a political forum, the magazine was unquestionably one of the principal representatives of the paradigm supported by Dr Fanon. While it contributed to a change in the level of the reformist dynamic and was a collective voice for patients’ claims and recriminations, it also revealed a variable geometry of reform: depending on their beliefs, resources or personal status, psychiatrist, junior doctors, nurses and patients took hold of the project begun by Dr Fanon in different ways.Finally, while it makes the portrait of Algerian socialtherapy more complex, this article invites us not to overestimate the specificity of the reform engaged at the HPB. In terms of the rhetoric used in the pages of the in-house weekly, and of the protocol and treatment techniques applied, the approach that was begun in Algeria was inspired by previous experiences in Metropolitan France. What was unique about the overseas experience was for the most part of the interest shown in the local culture and beliefs, which gave rise to a cross-community paradigm that acted as a radical, alternative societal project. In the context of colonial Algeria during wartime, the journal had great difficulty maintaining its status as a safeguard in the face of intensifying political and military tensions, which in all likelihood had an impact on its disappearance.

Economic Shocks and Assimilation Policies: Phylloxera and Educational Expansion in French Algeria

Economic Shocks and Assimilation Policies: Phylloxera and Educational Expansion in French Algeria

:The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria

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A Settler Colonial Memorial Book: The Agricultural School and Museum of Sidi-Bel-Abbès, Algeria

In French colonial Algeria (1830–1962), a European settler community was made from both displacement and the encounter with Indigenous Algerian collectives. After Algeria's independence from France in 1962, this community was remade by a second displacement and the encounter in France with the metropolitan community. Known as Pieds-Noirs, this community has organized associative life, books, and newsletter publications, and sometimes return visits to Algeria. This article looks at Pieds-Noir settler associations devoted to Algeria's colonial agricultural schools, model farms, and nurseries, and how they reconstitute metropole-colony and colony-metropole through memory and a memorial book. This case study of the agricultural school in the town of Sidi-Bel-Abbès, former headquarters of the French Foreign Legion, discusses post-independent Algerian responses to return visits, claims, and writings by settlers.

Alsace in Algeria and the Notion of ‘Failure’ in Settler Political Culture, c. 1870–1960

AbstractThis article explores a key trope in the history of French colonial Algeria: the idea of the colony as a failure. The focus is on the resettlement of Alsatians and Lorrainers in Algeria in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. What started as a wave of nationalist elan that sought to rebuild the lost provinces in France’s largest colony soon became the object of criticism and controversy, depicted by contemporaries from early on as failure. While this perceived failure was itself a colonial category – the failure to recruit settlers, expulse Algerians, and seize land – it tells us a great deal about the political culture of the colony. How was this resettlement project conceived? What visions of colonization and colonial settlement were projected upon it? And what mechanisms of coercion, dispossession, and violence did different colonial players seek to deploy? Through these questions, this article seeks to demonstrate that the verdict of ‘failure’ by settlers and lobbyists did not emerge in hindsight but was rather the product of the inherent tension between the sheer force that was necessary to seize the land and the metropolitan attempt to establish in the colony a form of unequal yet standardized civilian governance.

:The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria

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The new white race: settler colonialism and the press in French Algeria, 1860-1914

The new white race: settler colonialism and the press in French Algeria, 1860-1914

Dealing with a Nuclear Past: Revisiting the Cases of Algeria and Kazakhstan through a Decolonial Lens

ABSTRACT Over 2000 nuclear weapons explosions were conducted worldwide between 1945 and 1996. Most of these high-yield explosions took place at nuclear test sites in the Global South: among them, the Algerian Sahara and the Kazakh steppe, where their respective colonising powers (at the time) France and the Soviet Union tested their nuclear arsenal. Contemporary Algeria and Kazakhstan still bear the egregious impact of these nuclear tests. The perceptions and demands of the local population, including victims and survivors of the testing, related to addressing the nuclear past have not been comprehensively investigated. Little is known about the local-regional resistance to these tests, aside from the Sahara Protest Team in 1959 and the anti-nuclear Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement in 1989. Our aim is to develop this line of research by considering the links between anti-nuclear movements and colonialism in Algeria and Kazakhstan. By revisiting these cases using a decolonial lens, we develop a more comprehensive understanding of resistance to nuclear testing in the Global South.

Demarginalizing the Margins: Gender, Agency, and Nostalgia for French Algeria in Carnets d’Orient (Jacques Ferrandez, 2011)

Representations of the Other, particularly the racialized and gendered Other remains problematic for many artists, particularly in the context of representing aspects of French colonialism. This is notably the case for French pied-noir artists who set out to retrospectively tell the history of colonial Algeria. Jacques Ferrandez, a francophone pied-noir graphic novelist, published his series Carnets d’Orient between 1987 and 2009. In the second cycle, there is one single, recurring female Algerian character named Samia who will be the focus of this article. A close analysis of Samia’s representation illustrates the degrees to which the artist exploits the medium’s specificities in order to influence the message received by their readers. The reader is required to be an active co-creator and becomes implicated from an ethical point of view in that they are asked to reflect critically on their own subjectivity and biases. In the case of Carnets d’Orient, while a reading in which the Algerian woman’s agency is foregrounded is possible, we will see that instead of giving a voice to the female Algerian character, the white male pied-noir author uses her to voice a plaintive nostalgia for an Algeria which according to some “could have been.”

The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria by Owen White (review)

Reviewed by: The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria by Owen White Kolleen M. Guy White, Owen–The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021. 319 p. French Algeria was the fourth-largest wine producer in the world for much of the twentieth century. And, yet, there has been no comprehensive study of wine and the vine in Algeria since the publication of Hildebert Isnard’s La vigne en Algérie: étude géographique in the 1950s (volume 1 in 1951, and volume 2 in 1954). Writing at a moment when Algerian vineyards were on the frontline of a nationalist insurrection, Isnard’s two-volume work was based on an impressive albeit limited range of archival sources. It has remained the starting point for scholars interested in colonial agriculture and the culture of the vine in North Africa—until now. With the publication of Owen White’s magisterial study, we have a comprehensive overview of the vine and wine in Algeria that makes use of new archival collections and new methodological approaches. The result is an essential read for anyone interested in French wine, environment, race, and the aggressive capitalism of imperialism. [End Page 236] It was the aggressive capitalist pursuit of commodities that shaped the early French colonizer’s vision of the landscape of Algeria. Agricultural production in North Africa, including the cultivation of vines for wine, was diverse and thriving at the time of conquest. What the early colonists saw, however, was not success but “potential.” French inspection after 1830 projected the ecology of southern France on North Africa with rows of grain, olive trees, and grape vines enhanced under an agricultural mission civilisatrice. Much like in other colonial ventures, the European-born settlers and planners experimented with the best path to extract wealth. Land appropriation and diminished property rights for Indigenous Algerians led to widespread destruction of local forms of cultivation. Great hopes were placed by colonial advocates in crops like tobacco and cotton that would complement the metropolitan economy. By the late 1860s, with the colony running a commercial deficit and famine and other hardships facing those on the land, settlers turned away from these experiments and returned to crops that had long been cultivated by Indigenous Algerians, including the vine. It would be a mistake, however, to see the spectacular rise in vine cultivation after 1870 as inevitable. White makes a case that the expansion of the Algerian vineyard had a gold-rush quality where gamblers who were willing to place bold bets might reap big payoffs. Some of the high stakes gamblers built fortunes by betting on vineyard expansion just as the metropolitan wine production was crippled by a still unnamed vine blight. Smaller players with ties to Europe were also able to improve their fortunes through some well-timed gambles on land, vines, or allied services, such as barrel making or wine transport. Phylloxera was a wild card, however, creating opportunities and ruining fortunes when it eventually was discovered on Algerian vines. White argues that the combination of phylloxera and market fluctuations made for the consolidation of land in the hands of banks and wealthy investors. This reality did not deter the creation of the myth of the French “colonizing genius.” By 1892, Jules Ferry toured the Algerian vineyards highlighting what he saw as the heroic achievement of colonization and the role of vines in “consecrating” the land to assure it was “fully and authentically French” (p. 64). Vines became a symbol of the “spirit of enterprise” in the French colonial project. While South Africa had its “Randlords” with portfolios based on a similar rush for gold and diamond extraction, Algeria now had what White calls “vinelords” with fortunes and political power based on vast tracts of vine monoculture and vertical investments (p. 79). On the eve of the Great War, Algeria exported more wine than any other region of the world. With this new global position came a “refashioning of the land and the shaping of local identities” (p. 79). These local identities, in the first half of the twentieth century, were shaped...

Algérie 1962: une histoire populaire. Par Malika Rahal

Early in her remarkable ‘histoire populaire’ of the advent of Algerian independence, Malika Rahal, Director of the Institut d’histoire du temps présent, twice cites Benjamin Stora. As the pre-eminent scholar of the conflict, Stora appears in his expert capacity, but also as a witness to the lived experience of a revolutionary moment. The eleven-year-old Jewish boy who left Constantine with his family in June 1962 takes his place among the exiled pieds-noirs, in counterpoint to myriad ‘indigenous’ Algerian voices, as Rahal weaves a complex narrative that throughout exemplifies the writer’s commitment to letting the subaltern speak. Wide-ranging, frequently moving, and — inevitably — at times disturbing, these collectively inspirational testimonies reveal the fine grain of profound societal change. As Rahal’s incisive study makes clear, this process was not only practical and organizational, but also conceptual and symbolic. Her historical assemblage mobilizes interviews conducted in Arabic and French, underpinned by extensive archival research and related primary documentation. The ­investigation also draws upon prominent scholarship in the field, notably that of ­Natalya Vince in her own pioneering oral history of female nationalist combatants (Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, Memory and Gender in Algeria, 1954–2012 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015)). Rahal thus offers an intricate and engrossing chronicle of a pivotal year, her structuring chronology punctuated by three key events: the ceasefire instituted by the Accords d’Évian (19 March); the national celebration of Algerian independence (5 July); and the proclamation of the Algerian Republic (25 September). This essential contextualization allows the author to develop a detailed case study in each of her twenty-two substantive chapters. The resulting analyses are as individually absorbing as they are cumulatively compelling, so allowing 1962 to emerge as a political and cultural totality: simultaneously event and effervescence, empowerment and performance, things falling apart while others coalesce in modes ranging from the patriotically heroic to the festively euphoric. Rahal maintains the coherence of this ambitious project by dividing her findings into four thematic sections: ‘Violences’, ‘Corps’, ‘Espaces’, ‘Le Temps’. These broad headings provide an appropriately inclusive space for her compendium of telling tales, as male and female, young and old, urban and rural, arabophone and francophone contributors find a space in which to articulate their imbricated stories of this year of revolution(s). ‘Le long 1962’, as scrutinized by Rahal, is a crux in the fullest sense: a touchstone to Algeria’s past, present, and future, in which the all-too-evident threats — military, diplomatic, economic — are counterbalanced by hitherto unimaginable social opportunities. Rahal charts this post-conflict reordering in spheres as diverse as medicine and agriculture, education and housing, political infighting and trade union organization. Elsewhere, she targets demobilization, returns from exile and liberation from captivity, reunions for some and the often drawn-out confirmation of loss for others. Through this close reading of a momentous year, Rahal makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of the transition from colonial rule to Algerian sovereignty and thereby to the broader histories of France in Algeria and Algeria since independence. Her monograph is essential reading in our own times and is likely to remain indispensable for future scholars.

Owen White. The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria.

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited Algeria in the early 1840s, he was skeptical that the mountainous areas surrounding Algiers would be suitable for cultivating crops, including wine. This was worrying, given his conviction that agricultural settlement would be a decisive factor in the success of the France’s colonial project. Owen White’s engaging monograph, The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria, mentions this anecdote as it charts the “rise and fall” of French Algeria, using wine as a lens to study the economic, political, and social contours of French settlement. Tocqueville’s impressions were ultimately misguided; in the 1880s, “anyone who was in a position to plant vines did so,” which reflected an optimistic frenzy analogous to the gold rush in the United States (50). The monograph builds on a number of excellent works on wine, many of which were written in the 1950s and 1960s. Emphasizing the “human element” in the story of wine, White poses a broader set of questions regarding the relationship between Algeria and metropolitan France. In so doing, he contributes to a recent wave of scholarship that draws upon William Sewell’s notion of “embedded economies” to examine the economic life of the French Empire.

Mobilizing Memory: The Great War and the language of politics in colonial Algeria, 1918–1939 , by Dónal Hassett

Mobilizing Memory: The Great War and the language of politics in colonial Algeria, 1918–1939 , by Dónal Hassett