Neil MacMaster

Torture: from Algiers to Abu Ghraib

The treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq focused worldwide media attention on the US practice of torture. Underlying such a practice was not only a self-serving debate in US political circles, academia and entertainment media on how a liberal democracy could justify such methods but also a history of counter-insurgency techniques which owed much to French warfare in Algeria. Yet while the lessons of the torturer have been assiduously learnt, what has been ignored is the recent open debate in France on the profound damage done by such institutionalised barbarity both to the victims and to the individuals and regimes that deploy it.

Imperial Façades: Muslim Institutions and Propaganda in Inter-War Paris

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the interrelationship between expressions of colonial power, orientalist architecture and town planning.1 Attention has centred on the syncretic relationship between western and Islamic architecture and design, both overseas in the British and French colonies or spheres of influence (from Istanbul and Cairo to Algiers and Rabat) and in the imperial heartland. Within western Europe a major field of innovation and influence was the great exhibitions and world fairs, from the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851 onwards. In Paris, for example, elaborate complexes of Arab villages and pavilions, often constructed by North African craftsmen and inhabited by natives in tableaux vivantes, were designed for the exhibitions of 1867, 1889, 1900 and 1931.2

‘Black Jew ‐ white Negro’ anti‐Semitism and the construction of cross‐racial stereotypes

The relationship between anti‐Semitism and anti‐black racism in Europe has been largely neglected by scholars. The article examines one facet of this problematic by exploring the ways in which after c.1860 the rise of modern anti‐Semitism was accompanied by stereotypes that racialized the Jews through associating them with the most ‘primitive’ racial modality, the black African. Against a background of deepening political anti‐Semitism, colonial racism, Social Darwinism and eugenics, the Jews were perceived as a danger both through their impurity and biological mixing with blacks (hybridity being a source of degeneration), as well as through their ability to retain their own racial purity while manipulating black ‘interbreeding’ with Europeans, an infernal conspiracy to weaken the white race and to achieve racial dominance.

Colonial Destruction of Algerian Society

Colonialism, in association with the corrosive impact of capitalism, was an almost universal determinant of ‘Third World’ migrations into Europe in the twentieth century. Algerian migration to France shared many of the general features through which military conquest and the economic dislocation of traditional pastoral and agrarian societies led to the impoverishment and displacement of peoples.1 However, each society of emigration had its own quite specific and historic characteristics. What distinguished Algeria was the unusual degree of violence involved and the systematic and premeditated way in which the French set about the radical dislocation of tribal society and the massive appropriation and transfer of land to European settlers. The removal of the economic independence of the peasantry and its reduction to a condition of endemic poverty, created a semi-proletarianised class which was compelled to sell its labour power first to the colons who had seized their lands and, eventually, to metropolitan employers. The impact of French colonialism was far more profound in the case of Algeria, for example, than for the neighbouring Maghrebian societies of Morocco and Tunisia and in part this explains the larger scale of emigration from Algeria.2 However, it must be emphasised that colonialism was a necessary but not sufficient cause of emigration. As will be seen later the huge undermass of hungry Algerians could have remained bottled up in the North African colony; it required crucial legal-political measures by the metropole to open the ‘doors’ to emigration.

The Roots of Insurrection:The Role of the Algerian Village Assembly (Djemâa) in Peasant Resistance, 1863–1962

Interpretations of the origins of the Algerian war of independence have tended to emphasize either discontinuity - the radical dislocation of precolonial social and political structures following the French conquest - or the continuity of a culture of peasant resistance between 1871 and 1954. Little investigation has been carried out into the latter, or how, if at all, socio-political institutions enabled rural society to sustain an unbroken tradition of resistance over nearly a century of unprecedented crisis. Most debate has focused on the role of the tribe, a largely moribund institution, and this has obscured the importance of the village assembly, or djemâa, a micro-level organization that historians have largely neglected. The djemâa, in both its official and covert forms, enabled village elders to regulate the internal affairs of the community, such as land disputes, as well as to present a unified face against external threats. This article shows how emerging nationalist movements starting in the 1920s penetrated isolated rural communities by adapting to the preexisting structure of the djemâa, a tactic that was also followed after 1954 as independence fighters established a guerrilla support base among the mountain peasants. While Pierre Bourdieu and other scholars have emphasized the devastating impacts that economic individualism had on peasant communalism, this study employs the djemâa as a case study of a traditional institution that proved flexible and enduring as rural society confronted settler land appropriations and a savage war of decolonization.

Spanish fighters : an oral history of civil war and exile

Village life before the civil war - David stormclouds gather, 1930-1936 - David the war in Asturias - David the civil war in Asturias - Consuelo the fall of Asturias - David escape from Asturias, Consuelo Catalonia in war - David exodus across the Pyrenees - Consuelo across the Pyrenees - David refugee labour - Consuelo the concentration camp at Septfonds - David Aspres concentration camp - Consuelo the camps of the holocaust - David the coming of liberation - Consuelo the coming of the liberation - David life in exile - Consuelo life in exile - David homecoming - Consuelo homecoming - David uprooted - Consuelo uprooted - David.

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

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.

Islam and the Village

When French journalists and commentators peered from a distance at the shadowy world of the North African immigrant one of the questions which was uppermost in their minds was the extent to which they were assimilating to ‘French civilisation’. This chapter looks at two key elements in the definition of Algerian identity and culture, first Islamic practice and then the relationship to the values of the home society, to assess the extent to which they were undergoing change during the period down to 1950.

Kabylia and the Migrant Tradition

Throughout the first half-century of emigration (c.1905–1950) there existed a remarkable variation between zones of high and low emigration. The great majority of Algerians in France were Kabyles, the mountain-dwellers of Berber descent, who inhabited the sedentary peasant villages of Greater and Lesser Kabylia to the east of Algiers.1 This predominance was reflected in the title of the first official inquiry into Algerian emigration carried out in 1912–14, Les Kabyles en France. Kabyles were estimated to have constituted 84 per cent of total Algerian emigration in 1923, 75 per cent in 1938 and about 60 per cent in the early 1950s.2 These figures should be treated with caution since there was no accurate way of identifying who the Berber/Kabyles were, since many had historically, and continued to be, absorbed into surrounding Arab peoples. However, the figures provide a reasonable measure of Kabyle predominance.3 Since Kabyles made up about 21 per cent of the total Algerian population, but up to 84 per cent of all emigrants in 1923, Kabyle men were sixteen times more likely to migrate than Arabs. The remarkable geographical concentration of the regions of emigration is shown in Map 1 for 1949.4

Élite Racism and the Colonial Lobby

The process by which Algerian migrants were targeted and categorised in racial terms reached a crucial phase during the period 1920–4 and was primarily the work of various colonial pressure groups. Their central object of concern was the liberal provision of the law of 15 July 1914 which had granted all Algerians complete freedom of movement to France. In the light of the later intense pressures to eradicate or cripple the working of the law it is curious that its passage through the legislature aroused little opposition. It appears to have been one of those ‘blunders’, common enough in the history of legislatures, in which potential opponents fail to recognise in time the radical implications of a new bill.1