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Westerners do not seem to have understood that, for us, the problem of blocs and zones of influence is, for the moment, secondary. Because we are debating and struggling to resolve the problem par excellence: that of our existence.
AHMED TALEB from prison in Algeria,
December 10, 1957
On June 22, 1957, a teacher in an Algiers primary school asked his class of thirty-two Muslim children to respond to the following question: “What would you do if you were invisible?”1 In nearly every case, the students responded like this ten-year-old:
If I were invisible, the first thing I would do would be to go and take revenge on the paratroopers [“paras”] who have brought plenty of misery to my brothers. I would take a rope, I would strangle the last of the paratroopers who patrols the corridors in our area, and I would take his weapons from him, and then I would run up behind the other paratroopers and kill them. And if they dared to do what they usually do, I will torture them twice before I kill them. And it’s not all, I would sabotage all their plans; I would put bombs in the French areas, I would go all the way to Mollet and Robert Lacoste, I would kill them, I would go to Djebel-Aures, I would give courage to my brothers the GLORIOUS FIGHTERS [GLORIEUX MOUDJAHIDINNES] who I would find there, I would throw grenades at the paratroopers who come from there, in that sacred place, and until we win Independence, I will carry the flag myself, and, if I die, that’s nothing, for I will have finished the mission that Allah charged me with. (Response 1)
Another student wrote that, in addition to stealing “apricots” and “oranges,” he would steal jewelry and “kill all the French and the soldiers” (Response 2). One student wrote that he too would steal “apples,” “figs,” “bananas,” but that he would also put twenty-three bombs in the “rue bab azoune,” and “rip up his school notebook” (Response 3). Without exception, these children’s responses target French civilians, the French police, and the French military in Algeria. These attacks from the “invisible” young fighters illustrate that even children were traumatized by the violence of the French paratroopers. When these thirty-two responses were written, it was already well known that the French military and police had used torture liberally throughout Algeria to end the conflict. Responses such as these from Algerian children help us to understand how deeply rooted the divisions were between Algerian Muslims and the French and to see why Franco-Muslim reconciliation was already doomed.
Franco-Muslim reconciliation had not always been a futile idea, at least for the vast majority of French intellectuals and politicians, and it had powerful proponents. One of the best-known and most respected supporters was the French sociologist and ethnographer Germaine Tillion. When the “What would you do if you were invisible?” responses were penned, Tillion was part of an international commission charged with investigating the violation of human rights in Algeria. As it happened, the children’s teacher (a Muslim) gave Tillion the class work assignments of his young students and asked her to take the responses to the French politicians as proof of the war’s irreparable damage to the future of Franco-Algerian relations. When Tillion received these letters, her immediate reaction was disbelief. An exemplary advocate of peace, she had worked long and hard in Algeria and in France to ensure the peaceful coexistence of the two communities. However, considerations of how violence had affected the Muslim and French populations had forced her to reevaluate the possibility of reconciliation. After looking over these letters, she took them to the socialist prime minister, Guy Mollet, in order to show him what his policies had accomplished in Algeria and “to show him his future Algerian electorate.”2 Mollet, too, read the letters in shock and acknowledged he had no appropriate response.
After members of the French press found out about these letters, Tillion states, both Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber and Jean Daniel (two of the most important journalists in France) wanted to publish them in L’Express. Aware of the reprisals that would surely await the Algerian teacher, Tillion refused to allow the letters’ publication. She admits that she herself was nearly devastated by the letters because it was now clear that Franco-Muslim reconciliation had been overrun by the brutality of military and police action (repression, pacification, and torture) in Algeria. Tillion did not finally relinquish all hope for Franco-Muslim reconciliation until the end of the war, though after reading the letters her thoughts were couched in cautionary, if not openly pessimistic, language.3 The children’s letters were all the more shocking because, when the war began on November 1, 1954, very few, if any, intellectuals advocated a complete divorce between France and Algeria.
Yet, from the French-Algerian War’s beginning until its conclusion with the signing of the Evian Accords on March 18, 1962, reconciliation remained an extremely powerful narcotic and the dominant peace paradigm for moderate leftand right-wing intellectuals; few intellectuals who worked for this reconciliation could accept the idea that the Algerians did not aspire (culturally and politically) to remain French. The French army’s repression increased, as the French vigilantes and the fascistic Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (oas) began to murder indiscriminately, and as revolutionary violence against France escalated, pro-reconciliation intellectuals acquiesced to the idea of an independent Algeria, but grudgingly and only after hurling many caveats at the Algerian nationalists and the French ultras.4
Reconciliation did not suddenly appear ex nihilo in the debates over the decolonization of French Algeria. In fact, the idea grew out of French colonial history, was a theoretical cousin of the mid-nineteenthand twentiethcentury debates over “assimilation” and “association,” and fed directly into the mid-twentieth-century identity debates and the French government’s policy of “integration.”5 By the time the war was over, the idea of Franco-Muslim reconciliation had been relegated to the dustbin of history, and it had lost support on both sides of the Mediterranean.
Since the conquest of Algeria in 1830—when the French monarch Charles X attacked the Ottoman Hussein Dey and overthrew his government—France had maintained an ambivalent relationship with the Muslim population. Algeria first became a military colony; by April 1845, it was divided into three provinces. In the 1860s and 1870s it began to experience a new wave of European colonists who expropriated most of the best lands, leaving the Arabs and the Kabyles with the leftovers. After conquering Algeria, France never fully opened its cultural and political arms to Algeria’s indigenous population, at least not without attaching unacceptable strings to the idea of rapprochement.
But just where did the idea of reconciliation come from, and how was it used during the war? According to theorist and historian Tzvetan Todorov in his seminal work On Human Diversity, two dominant themes about human identity emerged in French thought just prior to and during the Enlightenment: monogenesis, which presented identity as universalist, and polygenesis, based on particularistic representations of identity.6 According to Todorov, the universalism of monogenesis gave way to ethnocentrism, which he maintains had “two facets: the claim to universality on the one hand, and a particular content (most often national) on the other” (2). Some thinkers (La Bruyère, for example) were universalistic in their approach to identity but were not truly ethnocentric; others (such as Pascal) embraced universalistic and ethnocentric views of French cultural superiority because Western values and beliefs claimed to be universal and therefore superior. During the Enlightenment, Diderot, Condorcet, and others put unity above plurality and consequently moved French thought toward a universal absolutism that encouraged ethnocentrism. Todorov argues that Diderot’s syllogism, for example, began with his general idea of the unity of nature and ended by making particular claims about human diversity.
Todorov locates this syllogism not in the Enlightenment project itself (since other leading figures did not share Diderot’s deductions) but in Diderot’s science-based desire to dissolve human variation. Montesquieu and Rousseau (to take two alternative thinkers) moved French thought in a different direction and offered formidable critiques of ethnocentric doctrines during the Enlightenment. Whereas Diderot began with science, which led to an ethics based on science, Rousseau and Montesquieu based ethics on human freedom and saw the perils inherent in scientific ethics.
If Diderot’s scientism was dangerous for human diversity, Condorcet’s was even more so. As the “last of the Encyclopedists,” Condorcet wanted to eradicate divisions between different peoples through the “transformation of the world from an agglomeration of countries into a single State.” Ignoring the historical and cultural conditions of each country, Todorov argues, Condorcet’s scientism rested on a totalizing universalism: “since the principles of justice are everywhere the same, laws must be the same as well” (24). After Condorcet’s death in prison during the French Revolution, his project was adopted by the ideologue Destutt de Tracy, was carried still further by Henri de Saint-Simon, and eventually went on to affect the writings of Auguste Comte.
What is important here, Todorov stresses, is that Comte, the father of positivism, called for a return to Condorcet’s scientism. This scientism would, of course, displace diversity and replace it with homogeneity. “Comte believes it is possible to establish—with the help of science—the one and only ‘correct’ constitution, which will rapidly impose itself on all peoples transcending national differences” (27). Conveniently, in Comte’s theory, France would be the epicenter and would export its cultural and intellectual goods to other countries (29). Furthermore, white Frenchmen alone would be able to export their cultural and intellectual goods. In this new “universal state,” Comte made important divisions between the “white,” “yellow,” and “black” races. “Whites are most intelligent, yellows work the hardest, blacks are the champions of feeling” (31). Comte’s positivist theories eventually affected other major French thinkers such as Émile Durkheim and Gustave Le Bon.
Most specialists of French colonial theory would agree with Todorov’s assessment of the connection between universalism and ethnocentrism within French thought. Most would also concur with his distinction between “racialism” and “racism,” a distinction central to the theoretical foundations and justifications for French colonialism.7 Todorov locates the “flowering” of racialist ideology in the period between the mid-eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. During this time there were many active racialist theorists, the best known of whom were Ernst Renan, Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, Gustave Le Bon, and Hippolyte Taine. According to Todorov, the idea of polygenesis united these four theorists. Understandably, Todorov has few kind words for them because in their own way they each privileged white Europeans over other, non-Europeans. He says that for Renan “The white race alone is endowed with the dignity of the human subject” (111); that Le Bon in the spirit of scientism constructed hierarchies of race that combined with hierarchies of class and gender (113); that Taine’s racialist determinism created hierarchies that rejected the notions of a unified human race and equality; that Gobineau, like the others, remained at odds with the humanistic aspirations of the Enlightenment and, like Taine, subscribed to the idea that “men’s behavior [was] entirely determined by the race to which they belong” (123).8 De Gobineau’s work, Todorov continues, is particularly disturbing because he proposes a theory of social history that “postulates that a society’s quality must be judged by its capacity to assimilate other societies, to subjugate by absorption” (135). The consequences of scientism are there to be drawn: “for Hitler, as for Gobineau, civilization was identified with military superiority” (160).9
Raymond Betts offers a similar criticism of scientism as he traces the genesis of the two seminal doctrines of colonial theory, assimilation and association, in his landmark Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890–1914. Like Todorov, Betts underscores the importance of the idea of universalism in French intellectual history and colonial theory. Furthermore, Betts demonstrates that the French imperial drive toward assimilation was based on the idea that the French could bring other civilizations into their universalistic credo. This drive toward French or European universalism was felt in both ideological and political arenas. Before the French Revolution France’s relations with indigenous populations (in North America, for example) were based on religious assimilation, but afterward the “idea of religious conversion evident during the ancien régime was now translated into political assimilation.”10 What made this transition possible, according to Betts, was the belief first in human reason and second in the notion of “universal man” (14), or, as Todorov would have it, monogenesis. This particular Enlightenment conception of reason and universal humankind led the French to posit that it is not only possible but also better for the natives to assimilate into French civilization because it alone was capable of ensuring human progress. Betts argues that Condorcet gave the idea of French superiority and universalism form in his “expression that ‘a good law is good for all men,’ ” which in turn came to form the bedrock for French colonial policy. By 1848 France was clearly moving toward assimilation without much resistance by intellectuals. In 1863, Emperor Napoleon III wrote to the governor general of Algeria, Peissier, that he wished to see the idea of an “Arab Kingdom” act as proof for the Arabs that the French “have not come to Algeria to impress and exploit them, but to bring them the benefits of civilization” (10).11 Two years later, Napoleon issued the senatus consulte, which essentially granted Algerian Muslims French citizenship on the condition that they relinquish their civil status under Islamic law, a measure tantamount to rejecting Islam, which by 1936 fewer than three thousand Muslims agreed to do.12 Nevertheless, by the time the Third Republic was in full swing during the 1880s and 1890s, the notion of assimilation had become part and parcel of France’s imperial (and national) identity, not only in Algeria, but throughout its colonial possessions.
The idea of assimilation reached its zenith during the Third Republic, precisely when French sociologists and psychologists were beginning to sketch the characteristics of the French psyche. As Betts shows, men like Alfred Fouillé, the author of Psychologie de l’esprit français, spearheaded the move away from assimilation. Fouillé was instrumental in helping formulate the notion that the French people were rational, logical, and universaloriented. Not surprisingly, he argued that France had reached this stage of development through a gradual evolution passed down from the Romans and mutated into the Christian notion of universalism.13
In fact, it is possible to argue that the notion of the innate superiority of French society had become commonplace among most fin-de-siècle French intellectuals. For example, Émile Sedeyn in his preface to Edgard Denancy’s 1902 Philosophie de la colonisation celebrated the notion of colonialism and went on to describe the French psyche in positivistic terms. “Two particularities dominate all definitions of the French psyche: intelligence and impressibility.”14
According to Alice Conklin, in her brilliant study A Mission to Civilize, the urge to civilize the world was unique to the French Third Republic and thus rendered a unique form of European imperialism. From about 1870, when France began to enlarge its holdings in Africa and Indochina, French publicists, and subsequently politicians, declared that their government alone among the Western states had a special mission to civilize the indigenous peoples now coming under its control—what the French called their mission civilisatrice.15
The civilizing mission, then, generally defined France’s relations with its colonies and always left France in the paternalistic position of the educator. After all, France could impress itself on others with its intelligence. Most Third Republican theorists were convinced that the people in the colonies could learn from the more advanced, rational, and modern French civilization. Moreover, because republicanism had been victorious at the beginning of France’s modern colonial ventures, French theorists had no difficulty in reconciling republicanism with the civilizing mission. In fact, according to Betts, “The vocabulary relating to the doctrine of assimilation and that relating to these republican ideals were the same.”16
While republican rhetoric seemed to justify the French notion of superiority over indigenous populations, new theories tying back to the idea of polygenesis were beginning to erode support for the doctrine of assimilation and giving way to the idea of association. De Gobineau’s idea of the inequality of races was resuscitated to give credence to the idea that there were elements of civilization that could not simply transmigrate into the psyches of the so-called less advanced civilizations. Ernst Renan’s linguistic analyses echoed de Gobineau’s racialist distinctions, and Le Bon weighed in on de Gobineau’s racialism by arguing that not all races were the same. In his most significant work, Les Lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples, Le Bon claims that “each people possesses a constitution as fixed as its anatomical characteristics.” From this, Betts notes, Le Bon went on to draw up his typology of races: “primitive,” “inferior,” “intermediate,” and “superior” (67)
Other theorists began to follow Le Bon’s lead, and the French scientific community grew antagonistic toward the idea of assimilation. Perhaps the most notable skeptic of assimilation as it relates to Algeria was Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, who in his De la Colonisation chez les peuples modernes attempted to set the record straight with regard to Franco-Algerian relations. While insisting that some type of “fusion” was still needed between the two peoples, he “used ‘fusion’ interchangeably with ‘rapprochement’ and emphasized that what he meant was not a physical union of Europeans and Arabs, but a specific progress of cultural change.”17 Further, he suggested that various remnants of the so-called Arab aristocracy must be destroyed. This destruction could be accomplished by importing European institutions (schools and government offices) and everyday conditions (hygiene, agricultural reforms, and infrastructure).
According to Conklin and Betts, Leroy-Beaulieu can be seen as one of the most important representatives for the French impulse to civilize through ideology. As he phrased it in the preface to the second edition of his work, “Colonization is for France a question of life or death: either France will become a great African power, or, in a century or two, it will be a second-rate European power.”18 Moreover, echoing Le Bon’s positivism, Leroy-Beaulieu described the French psyche and its relationship to colonialism in the following manner: “That which has been missing from French politics until now is uniformity [l’esprit de suite] in colonial thought. Colonialism has been relegated to the back seat of the national conscience; today it should be moved to the front seat” (xxiii). Although he argued that France should continue to exercise “intellectual and moral influence on the indigenous youth” in Algeria (513), he also suggested that Arabic should be taught in the colony’s lycées (514).
Associative civilizing (my term for the phenomenon as it applied to Algeria) was a nice compromise for colonial theorists because it allowed the French to maintain the idea of their racial and cultural superiority and encouraged them to expand on the notion of an evolutionary and permanent separation between the European and Muslim populations. Imperialism was simply the natural expression of the Europeans’ superiority over the indigenous populations under their control. Precisely this qualitative distinction between those who were lowest on the evolutionary and positivist’s scale (indigenous) and those who were highest (French) allowed for a practical shift from assimilation to association.
Association, according to its proponents, allowed for a separate form of evolution for the indigenous population because it allowed for the types of variation de Gobineau, Le Bon, and Leroy-Beaulieu advocated. It also allowed theoreticians to mark out another key concept in the identity puzzle: time.
According to Raoul Girardet, the most important aspect of the French colonial idea was the French insistence that they were indeed the bearers of a new category of time for the indigenous populations. With the advent of the French empire, the French argued that they were responsible for bringing progress, technology, education, and order to an otherwise chaotic world. In Girardet’s words:
The Empire is celebrated only to the degree in which it permits France to rest true to its historical vocation, to not diminish in its stature, to maintain security, independence and grandeur. It is celebrated to the degree to which it can assure to the people placed under the protection of the tricolor flag the immense benefits of peace and progress, which allows them to educate themselves, to overcome sickness, to triumph over ignorance, to traverse as quickly as possible the stages of human history, and finally to attain the supreme values of dignity and liberty. There is nothing as constant in the colonial literature between the two world wars, official or unofficial, as the opposition of “before” and “after.” “Before” means the time preceding the establishment of French sovereignty, which for Africa and Asia translates into the oppression of man by man, the subjection of the weak to the strong, slavery, the despotic and bloody reigns of the black kinglets or the greedy domination of the mandarins. … “After” means after the establishment of French sovereignty, which translates in Africa and Asia into the possibility that everyone can liberate themselves from the old terrors and subjugation, the ideal of profound fraternity substituted for an archaic past and degradation, oppression replaced by protection, newfound security, hospitals for the sick, and schools for the children.19
This notion that historical time miraculously began after the European conquest of Africa was not new to the history of imperialism. In fact, it related directly back to the old Roman notion of colonialism and assimilation; remnants of this notion of time can be found in Hegel’s depiction of history. What is important is the degree to which the French believed they would be able to change indigenous cultures for the better simply by bringing them into European, progressive time.
By the 1940s and 1950s, a new understanding of history and time was beginning to capture the imagination of French intellectuals and politicians concerned with colonialism. It was possible to separate a progressive notion of time into indigenous time and European time. These times or histories would operate in parallel universes where the force field of European time would eventually pull indigenous time into its vortex. As a result, association gradually came to dominate colonial policy in Algeria. Considered a unique colonial acquisition by France, Algeria was divided into three French departments: Oran, Constantine, and Algiers. The French (especially the colonists) continued to believe that French culture divided time in the colony into before and after, but there was also a growing recognition that the colonial status quo was being challenged because most of the Muslim population (Arabs and Kabyles) were never truly considered French citizens.
Because association was also soon found to be unpalatable in Algeria, another paradigm—integration—was almost immediately offered by the French after the war began in 1954. This is when the problem of Franco-Muslim reconciliation took center stage. It is certainly no accident that the last governor general of Algeria, Jacques Soustelle, who articulated the transition away from association to integration, was also one of France’s preeminent anthropologists. As an intellectual, Soustelle unquestionably privileged the French nation as a bearer of progress and civilization. He also believed that French technology, progress, science, and rationality were superior to Algerian indigenous culture. His idea of integration represents a mixture of the universalist overtones of assimilation and the racialist undercurrent of association. Integration, in fact, is a compromise: the child of the marriage of monogenesis and polygenesis. The collision of these two segments of human identity is precisely what gave rise to the idea of Franco-Muslim reconciliation.
According to Soustelle, integration recognized the essential cultural and ethnic differences of the populations in Algeria, whereas assimilation did not. Furthermore, distinct patterns of cultural evolution prevented advocating assimilation. In other words, because of their beliefs and practices, Muslims were evolving more slowly in Algeria than European civilization. Soustelle distrusted Islam and believed it was a backward, regressive religion that had delayed historical progress and the development of reason in Algeria. For this reason, he argues, “Integration takes Algeria as it is, the Algerians as they are—as history made them—in order to bring this province into equal footing with the rest of the French Republic.”20 Accordingly, integration would not mean “administrative uniformity” because the local administrative apparatus would respect distinctions; it would not mean “a colonial system” because all Algerians would be considered French, and therefore equal without distinction; it would not mean “succession” because Algeria would not have the structure of an independent state.
Integration, according to Soustelle, would mean the acceptance of the “Algerian fact.” Here his definition is quite specific. Soustelle as a professional academic anthropologist endorsed the cultural differences in Algeria and realized that each ethnicity—Arab, Berber, and French—needed to be recognized as a separate ethnic group. However, regardless of the groups’ individual characteristics they were each to be considered French first, which essentially meant that they were not only to coexist but also to come under the rubric of the French Republic. Essentially, this translated into a “separate but equal” doctrine for the Algerian “province” and all those in it. The French national budget would finance the administration in Algeria, linguistic and cultural differences would be respected, and all Algerians would be considered the provincial neighbors (if not brothers) of the metropolitan French (18–19).
At its heart Soustelle’s policy of integration was undeniably paternalistic. Consider for a moment a “declaration” he delivered on Radio-Algérie on January, 12, 1956:
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN OF ALGERIA,
For Algeria’s own good, she must stay French. Algeria without France would mean poverty in countless ways. Who else in the world would replace what France gives to Algeria? Who else would replace the millions of francs that Algerian workers send from metropolitan France? Foreigners who encourage the rebellion or who give advice to France are interested in Algeria only because they want to drill oil wells and dig mines there, but they are not interested in building roads or constructing schools. I say that the separation of Algeria and France would be for Algeria, and especially for its Muslim people, the worst of all catastrophes. Secession is ruin….
Neither directly nor indirectly, through whatever form it may be, will I allow secession. As long as I am responsible here, as long as I am in charge of Algeria, everyone, friends and adversaries alike, should know that I will not consent to anything which will distance Algeria from France….
The unleashing of violence will not bring an impossible victory to the rebellion; it can only increase the number of Algerians who will be condemned to death or who will face destruction every day. There is not a solution outside of France and without France. I only have one goal, one care, that is to clear the way and to prevail. I will attain it if you help me, if you give me your support and your confidence in the task I am undertaking. Thus, and only thus, will we be able to re-establish peace in dignity and union.21
Soustelle believed that France and Algeria could never be separated; there was no solution for Algeria outside France; the Algerians would be happier, and in a sense better off, if they remained connected to France. In other words, French colonial philosophies had taken two steps forward and three steps back since Condorcet’s universalism, de Gobineau’s racialism, and Soustelle’s integration. Two steps forward, assimilation to association; three steps back, association, assimilation, integration.
Unfortunately for Soustelle, his dreams of a peaceful union between the benevolent French motherland and her obedient overseas territory could not be realized; very few Algerians could be tricked by his linguistic legerdemain. France had simply waited too long and had missed the opportunity to deal peacefully with the Algerian people. As a result, many Algerians ceased to identify with France, and there was a growing sense of division between the French and non-French populations in Algeria.
This is not to suggest, however, that the Algerians themselves had a clear sense of identity. Many, such as the leading Algerian intellectual Mouloud Feraoun, saw themselves as colonial hybrids. He wrote in his journal of the war: “What am I, dear God? Is it possible that as long as there are labels, there is not one for me? Which is mine? Can somebody tell me what I am! Of course, they want me to pretend that I am wearing a label because they pretend to believe in it. I am very sorry, but this is not enough.”22 A few months later he wrote: “The French, the Kabyle, the soldier, and the fellagha [the rebels] scare me. I am scared of myself. The French are inside me and the Kabyle are inside me. I feel disgust for those who kill, not because they want to kill me but because they have the courage to kill” (90).
Feraoun was not alone in his personal struggle to depict the effects of colonialism and the lived anxieties of colonial hybridity. In the words of another prominent Kabyle intellectual, Jean Amrouche, “The colonized lives in hell, isolated and introverted, without communication with the Other, uprooted from his history and his myths, cursed.”23 Not surprisingly, the “hell” in which the colonized lived was precisely Soustelle’s earthly paradise. In January 1956, at a meeting of the Comité d’Action des Intellectuels contre la Poursuite de la Guerre en Afrique du Nord (see chapter 2), Amrouche called himself an “integrated native.” Yet a few months later, in the March–April issue of Économie et humanisme, he wrote that he “represented, to a high degree of perfection, the assimilated native” but that he was certainly “no partisan of assimilation.”24
The reasons for Amrouche’s rejection of assimilation were clear: it provoked an identity crisis for the natives. “The Algerian tragedy,” therefore, was not an exterior event. “The battlefield is in me: no parts of my mind and soul belong at the same time to the two camps that are killing themselves. I am Algerian, I believe myself to be fully French. France is the spirit of my soul, but Algeria is the soul of my spirit.” Ironically, Feraoun and Amrouche had somewhat sympathetic views concerning French culture because they were elite intellectuals whose careers were made in the French-speaking publishing world.25 Nevertheless, they both exhibited profoundly nuanced senses of personal, ethnic identity.
Although French intellectuals were often sympathetic to anticolonial critiques offered by Algerian intellectuals, they were much more at a loss when dealing with the anticolonialism of the subaltern, the non-intellectuals in the colonies. In part, this ambivalence arose from the fact that no one knew the degree to which other Algerians would want to preserve relations with France should independence occur. It took words from Algerians like Djamila Boupacha—a young Algerian Muslim woman accused of being a “terrorist” who was catapulted into French public opinion when Simone de Beauvoir, Gisèle Halimi, Germaine Tillion, and other prominent French intellectuals came to her defense—to make the French understand that Algerians wanted complete political independence. Boupacha phrased it in the following manner: “[A]ll of you in France must get it into your heads that what we feel isn’t hatred. We just want to be like you, like the other African nations, like any other normal person—we want to be free.”26 Boupacha’s words were all the more powerful after she had become (like many others) a “symbol” of French injustice and inhumanity when it was revealed that she had been raped with a bottle and tortured by the French army in March 1960 (see chapter 5).27
Many other instances illustrated Algerians’ desire to distance themselves from France and Franco-Muslim reconciliation. “L’Affaire Guerroudj” involved two teachers in Algeria, Jacqueline and Abdelkader Guerroudj, a husband and wife. They were sentenced to death for being accomplices of Fernand Yveton, the first French citizen to receive the death penalty for his failed attempt to plant explosives in an electrical and gas building in Algeria in November 1956. Jacqueline, of French origin, and Abdelkader, of Algerian origin, were condemned but later freed. In Abdelkader Guerroudj’s trial declaration in December 1957, he stated the problem plainly:
No one can force the Algerians to feel French. But if Algeria does not want it, does not want to be French, if it seeks independence, is that to say that this independence should be made against France?
No! And it is not because of the commodities of language; I am sure that we will need material, technicians, engineers, doctors, and professors to construct our country; it is to France which we address ourselves [for this] first. I believe that would be in the true interest of both of our countries.
It is not in the interest of France to have valets ready at every moment here to run to the call of the most powerful master, but friends who have freely consented to this friendship.28
Hence, by his and many other Algerians’ admissions, there was, at least until the final years of the war, a sense that the Algerians wanted to continue some of their former relations with France. Most Algerian nationalists who argued this were very well aware of the growing importance of technology and desired to modernize Algeria after independence.
However, an awareness of the fact that a post-independence Algeria would require technical assistance from France did not imply that Algerians would automatically wish to retain French identity or pursue Franco-Muslim reconciliation. Neither can we conclude that all Algerians rejected every aspect of French culture. And for all concerned it became increasingly clear that violence would play a large role in separating French and Algerians. Yet, contrary to what many claimed after independence, few Algerians immediately advocated absolute separation from France when the war broke out because most agreed that, like it or not, to some degree Algeria would need French support after liberation. The problem for French and Algerian intellectuals confronting violence and reconciliation was that intellectual and citizen responsibilities were often seen by intellectuals and state alike to be in conflict.
Although there was tremendous ambiguity concerning the identity of Algerians and even the French during the war, various forms of colonial policy proved to be incompatible with the Algerian fact. Assimilation, association, and integration had failed, and, returning to the letters of the “invisible” children, cited at the beginning of this chapter, it became evident that reconciliation would never work. While adults struggled with problems such as colonial hybridity, children seem to have had a clearer sense that the French violence against them and their families had rendered it impossible for them to identify with France. Whereas for many Algerians (such as Feraoun and Amrouche) the “enemy” was both within and without, the children viewed the enemy as external and as other than their Algerian selves: the enemy were the French “paras,” as purely and simply as only children can see. Extreme violence, especially that of the military’s pacification, had destroyed the credibility of reconciliation. Consequently reconciliation, despite the best efforts of well-intentioned intellectuals such as Germaine Tillion, was truly doomed to failure.