A series of calamities struck the Algerian Muslim population between 1867 and 1871. Already pushed onto marginal territory by French land confiscation, they were acutely vulnerable to the drought that hit in 1867-1868. Then, on the heels of France’s defeat by the Germans in 1870, there was a large-scale uprising centered in the mountains of eastern Algeria led by Muhammad al-Mokrani. The French army crushed that revolt and still more land was confiscated. French refugees from Alsace and Lorraine, the provinces annexed by Germany, contributed to increased European presence in Algeria.
The 1870s and 1880s were in many ways the darkest decades in the experience of the Muslims of colonial Algeria. Europeans dominated politics at the local level. The government decreased funding for the Islamic courts and the three government schools that trained Muslim judges and interpreters. The settler-dominated
Tuareg Chiefs in Algiers, 1930s, during the celebrations for the 100th anniversary of the French occupation of Algeria. © SVT Bild/Das Fotoarchiv.
Commercial agricultural economy expanded, especially after a blight hit French vineyards. It was during these years that there occurred the last of the desperate rural revolts, notably that of the Awlad Sidi Shaykh along the Moroccan frontier.
By the mid-1880s the situation began to change. As nationalist French politicians called for a war of revenge against Germany they realized that Algerian Muslims constituted a possible source of military manpower. But conscription would require political concessions. There were periodic waves of emigration by Algerian Muslims to the territory of the Ottoman empire that caused embarrassment for France in the Middle East.
Within Algeria, urban Muslim leaders took a more active role, protesting repressive measures and defending Muslim interests. The French metropolitan government saw the need to accommodate these leaders. In 1891, a new governor more sympathetic to Muslim interests, Jules Cambon, was appointed by Paris. He took measures to respond to the grievances of the Muslim urban leaders. There were expanding opportunities for Muslims within the French school system.
The rural Muslim population, however, lived in desperate poverty. A local rebellion around the settler village of Margueritte in 1900 dramatized their plight. The rebels’ trial, held in France, proved a forum for exposing the injustices that led to the outbreak.
The French parliament finally passed a conscription law in 1911, drawing support from a small, French-educated Muslim elite. The conscription system was in place by the outbreak of World War I. Though there were incidents of resistance, many young Algerian men found in military service or wage labor in wartime France an alternative preferable to a life of poverty and humiliation in Algeria.
At the end of the war, with the inspiration of U. S. President Woodrow Wilson’s call for self-determination, there was a brief upsurge of Muslim political activity in Algeria, focused on Emir Khalid, a grandson of nineteenth-century resistance hero Abd al-Qadir. But the movement lacked the ability to withstand harassment and manipulation by colonial authorities. More durable was the current of labor migration to France. This emigrant community proved the seedbed for Algerian nationalist politics. Messali Hajj, a wartime conscript who returned to France as a worker, emerged as leader of the North African Star, the first organization to clearly advocate independence.
Within Algeria, Islamic associations sprang up, concerned mainly with providing Algerian Muslim youth with a modern-style Arabic-Islamic education. They coalesced into the Association of Algerian Ulama in 1931, led by Abd al-Hamid Bin Badis, scion of an influential family in the city of Constantine.
There was some hope for political reform within Algeria, first in 1927 under liberal Governor Maurice Violette, and again at the time of the Popular Front government in France in 1936. But these efforts, which would have granted full political rights only to a minority of French-educated Muslims and army veterans, were resisted vociferously by settlers, many of them drawn to the racist ideologies of the European right.
With the fall of France in May 1940 Algeria came under the rule of the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Prominent Muslim religious and political activists were arrested and interned. But in late 1942 British and American forces took over Algeria, bringing in their tow the Free French forces led by Charles de Gaulle. He recruited Algerian Muslim troops who fought loyally for his cause. Muslim leaders now set their aim on ambitious changes, embodied in the Manifesto of Liberty. They called for full political equality for Muslims and autonomy for Algeria. The war, which brought trade to a standstill, left most Algerian Muslims in deepening poverty. It also made them aware that a reordering of global power relations was in the making, one in which France would have a secondary role.
Demonstrations in favor of the manifesto were scheduled for V-E Day (May 8,1945). The goal was to convince the British and Americans of the widespread popularity of the nationalist cause. Muslim leaders, warned by French authorities, called off demonstrations in most localities, but they went ahead in the small eastern city of Setif. Demonstrators unfurled the Algerian flag, and shots were fired. In the ensuing repression an estimated 50,000 Muslims were killed.
In the wake of these events the French government began one final effort at reform. In 1947 a new legal framework was established for Algeria that for the first time made Algerian Muslim representation possible in the French parliament. But the French administration in Algeria rigged elections in favor of its own malleable proteges.
The nationalists themselves were divided between moderates, led by Ferhat Abbas, and militant nationalists under Messali Hajj. There was a failed attempt in 1949 to launch an uprising. Then in 1954 the victory of the Viet Minh over the French at Dien Bien Phu helped convince a group of young nationalists that the time was ripe for armed struggle. They met in the summer and laid plans for an insurrection that was to begin on All Saints Day, November 1, 1954.
Allan Christelow
See also: Algeria: European Population, 1830-1954.
Further Reading
Christelow, Allan. Muslim Law Courts and the French Colonial State in Algeria. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Kaddache, Mahfoud. Histoire du nationalisme algerien: question nationale etpolitique algerien. Algiers: SNED, 1980. Meynier, Gilbert. L’Algerie revelee. Geneva: Droz, 1981.
World History
