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Michel De Jaeghere: "Algeria, dream of empire"

2020-12-05T21:54:02.375Z


FIGAROVOX / ANALYSIS - French Algeria deserves better than the caricature to which it is summed up today. The hesitations of France's colonial policy led to tragedy.


Michel De Jaeghere is director of Figaro Hors-Série and Figaro Histoire.

This editorial is taken from the new Figaro Histoire: "What was French Algeria", € 8.90, available in newsstands and on the

Figaro Store

.

History has all the springs of an ancient drama.

Not only because it ended in tears and blood, the betrayal of the word given, the exodus of more than a million of our compatriots, the delivery of 70,000 auxiliaries to the knife of the slaughterers, the degradation of the country, its resignation to leave history in order to devote, according to the wishes of General De Gaulle, his "billions" to his own well-being (speech of November 4, 1960), but because he had become, for a long time, inevitable that the outcome would be tragic: because the situation was hopeless.

The colonization of Algeria, France had launched there without preconceived idea.

The landing of General de Bourmont's troops at Sidi-Ferruch certainly responded to the very old desire of the Western powers to put an end to barbarian piracy, at the end of which tens of thousands of Europeans had been reduced to servitude by the masters. of the small slave kingdom established, under Ottoman protection, on the coast of Algiers.

But he had held above all the desire of the ultra government of Charles X to increase its prestige by a resounding military victory.

The regime had hardly survived him for more than three weeks.

The conquest of the interior of the country had been led by the troops of Louis-Philippe, who himself had condemned the 1830 expedition as a "liberticidal" enterprise.

It had been consolidated, under Napoleon III, by an emperor who imagined that Algeria would one day become a united Arab kingdom, through his person, to France, but who had neither the time nor the authority to impose to the Europeans who had settled there to join the natives by granting them largely the ownership of the land.

The colony had been administered, under the Third Republic, by republicans who proclaimed their attachment to the principles of freedom and equality of the French Revolution at the same time as they invented an electoral system intended to prevent the natives from imposing themselves, by their number, at the heart of our institutions.

We never managed to make a frank choice between developing wasteland and entrusting it to colonists;

or to settle the natives on the contrary and to strive to organize, with them, a territory associated with France.

"I do not believe that France can seriously think of leaving Algeria," Tocqueville proclaimed in 1841, returning from a trip in situ.

The abandonment that she would make of it would be in the eyes of the world the sure announcement of her decadence.

(…) Any people who easily let go of what they have taken and withdraw peacefully from themselves within their former limits proclaims that the good times of their history have passed. "

All the French elites remained convinced of this for 120 years.

But we never managed to choose frankly between two branches of an alternative: to develop wasteland, abandoned by the tribes who nomadized there, by entrusting them to settlers responsible for making the stone desert flourish. ;

to treat the country as a clean slate, on which we would build a new France;

or to settle the natives on the contrary and to strive to organize, with them, a territory associated with France, destined to undergo our domination, our influence, but taking care of its current affairs itself.

The first formula was the one chosen by the founders of the United States.

It assumed that the natives would be submissive without weakness, parked in reserves, and that the country would be repopulated by an emigration which ensures their "great replacement" for our benefit.

It had seemed to lack humanity, because it implied, ultimately, the reduction of Arabs and Berbers to the condition of American Indians or Australian aborigines.

The demographic crisis which had hit France a hundred years before the rest of Europe, at the end of the 19th century, had not left it the means to populate the country.

The second was that which had allowed, in the past, the Roman Empire to maintain itself for five centuries in the provinces which it had subjugated, arms in hand, on the edge of the Mediterranean.

They had certainly been endowed with governors responsible for delivering justice and ensuring order at the head of occupation troops, supervising the construction of roads, aqueducts, warehouses and bridges.

Colonies populated by Roman citizens served there as a fulcrum for the mother city, at the same time as models offered to the conquered peoples, to encourage them, by imitating them, to Romanization.

But they coexisted with indigenous cities, which had lost no other freedom than that of making war on each other;

that they were left, their tribute paid, free to administer themselves.

The formula assumed that we felt strong enough to allow our conquests to prosper: that we were capable at any moment of breaking the rebirth of an out-of-season independence.

Rome had achieved this through the threat of the presence of its legions, the ruthlessness of its repressions;

by the fact that his empire had become, over time, the only horizon, the only thinkable form of government.

But also because after the confiscations which had first sanctioned their defeat, the conquered peoples were left with a fairly large degree of autonomy.

That they were gradually linked to the people-king by offering them to share Roman citizenship: an honor which gave them judicial privileges without providing them with the means to influence the government.

That we had forged with them through the mimicry of institutions, the dissemination of Latin letters, the arts, games, habits, the bonds of a community of civilization.

The Third Republic came up against the obstacle to assimilation represented by the attachment of the natives to Islam.

It prohibited both the fusion of populations and their acculturation.

The Third Republic, which, after the first trial and error, had to choose the way in which the conquest would be administered, was founded on principles - that, in particular, that of the sovereignty of the people - which made it impossible to open up French citizenship to the totality of the natives without condemning the colonists and the metropolis itself to submersion.

She also hesitated to educate reluctant natives en masse, who were expected to take the place of agricultural workers without asking unnecessary questions.

It came up against the obstacle to assimilation represented by the attachment of the natives to Islam.

It prohibited both the fusion of populations (as it had done with the Indians in the Spanish colonies in Latin America) and their acculturation.

She chose not to choose, taking two contradictory paths at the same time, which ended up making the situation inextricable.

Hostile to the idea of ​​association, by Jacobin tradition, it encouraged colonization, the emigration of the populations of Alsace-Lorraine, the naturalization of Spaniards, Italians and Maltese who had emigrated to North Africa, and distributed to the colonists the land confiscated from tribes.

But if their number was multiplied by ten in a century, these Europeans were never enough numerous to take, alone, possession of the country, to exploit it without the recourse to an abundant native labor force.

They represented, at best, one inhabitant in seven. Accountant of the interests of this minority which it had charged to clear Algeria, it maintained in a discriminatory statute the Arabs which it had neither wanted nor to drive out altogether. made their land nor fully associate with its destiny.

However, they formed 85% of the population.

To their elites, she had also offered access, through school, to the Enlightenment.

They learned from them that all men had a vocation to participate in public affairs, that nothing justified, between them, unequal treatment: the lesson was cruel.

The benefits that France brought to the natives from then on through the dissemination of medicine and hygiene, the development of agriculture, the construction of roads (80,000 km), railways (4,350 km), hospitals (150), commercial ports (14), encouraged their demographic expansion without disarming their frustrations.

Alone among our colonies to have been the object of European emigration, Algeria stood out from the other territories conquered overseas.

The Republic proclaimed that Algeria was France, as evidenced by its departmentalization.

However, it was inhabited by a population in the vast majority of which it was impossible for it to give French citizenship, except to expose itself to being subjected to its influence, soon its domination.

She never succeeded in overcoming this contradiction.

He had no other asset left but strength.

In the multipolar world of the twentieth century, which had seen her forced in 1914-1918 to barely defend her own soil, to experience invasion and defeat in 1940, and while the wind of decolonization rose everywhere, fueled by the new great powers - the United States and the USSR - France could only ensure its supremacy at the cost of a disproportionate and exhausting effort.

The history of French Algeria hardly corresponds to the caricature that is made today of everything related to colonization.

The history of French Algeria hardly corresponds to the caricature that is made today of everything related to colonization.

It was not this land of iniquity whose fabulous wealth the French colonists would have plundered to exploit the natives without restraint.

The war of conquest had certainly been cruel there (probably nearly 300,000 dead).

The French peace and the eradication of plague, typhus and smallpox nonetheless increased the Muslim population from 3 to 12 million people (1830-1962).

The great mass of the "pieds-noirs" consisted of artisans, workers, employees, civil servants, whose average income was 20% lower than that of the metropolis, while that of the fellahs, similar to that of the workers. farming in Italy and Spain, was five times that of Egyptian peasants.

In 1954, out of some 1.2 million Europeans, only 19,000 owned land, 120 had properties of more than 100 ha.

60% of arable land (it is true the least fertile) belonged to Muslims.

Those of the Europeans had been cleared with their hands.

The 372,000 ha of the Algerian vineyard had been planted there by them.

Confiscated for lack of cultivation or bought at a low price for the benefit of colonization (2.8 million ha out of 7.1 million agricultural land), they were, before the conquest, often abandoned, the plains being delivered to looters who forced the peasants to take refuge in the mountains.

Faced with the rise of nationalism, France provided with the plan of Constantine in 1958, a final and formidable effort of equipment, industrialization and education to attract the support of the population by the scale of the achievements that 'she was working for it.

The business did not end in a bloody failure.

He teaches us that it is futile for a democracy to claim to pursue a dream of empire.

Such an ambition supposes the acceptance of an inequality of conditions contrary to its principles, or the capacity to replace the population, by extinction of the natives and intensive influx of immigration.

Colonization is, for us, history.

That of Algeria is no less rich in lessons.

The finding weighed heavily, no doubt, in the turnaround of General De Gaulle in 1959, his betrayal of the hopes maintained when his name had become a rallying sign for those who intended to keep Algeria in France, and who had played a role. decisive in the "velvet coup" which had enabled it to take power the previous year (operation "Resurrection").

He sheds light on his haste to "extricate himself" at all costs from the Algerian quagmire, even if in 1962 it delivered the country, endowed with a Sahara over which it had no historical rights, to a hostile nomenklatura, rather than taking time to pass the orders to the elite of Muslims rallied to France, after having nevertheless engaged the French army, at the cost of heavy sacrifices, to put out of action its enemies on the ground.

The paradox is that this abandonment resulted, in a few years, by the transfer of the same difficulties in metropolitan France, due to the immediate influx of immigration caused by the disorders linked to the failures of independent Algeria and, more generally, the ruin of countries born of decolonization.

Colonization is, for us, history.

That of Algeria is no less rich in lessons.

Anxious, at its beginnings, to get out of the contradiction which undermined its will to power, the Third Republic had believed, for a time, to be able to escape it through assimilation.

She took over, in 1870, the provisions of the senatus-consultum through which the Second Empire had generously offered to Muslims in Algeria to access the fullness of French citizenship.

Like him, she only put the condition that they renounce their personal right - to the application of Muslim law, Sharia - to submit to the Civil Code.

The vast majority of them refused, considering such a renunciation to be an apostasy and a betrayal.

At the same time, the assimilation of Italians, Spaniards and Maltese of Christian culture who formed at the end of the 19th century more than a third of the European population, like that of the Jews, naturalized en bloc in 1870, went smoothly. major (despite ultimate manifestations of anti-Judaism) in a few decades.

The precedent renders imprudent the opinion according to which Islam is in no way an obstacle to the integration of populations foreign to the French nation.

Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune estimated on July 4 the number of Algerians living in France at 6 million (interview with France 24).

This is double what they were in 1830 on Algerian territory.

A more moderate estimate of the Pew Research Center, an American think tank, arrives at a similar figure for all Muslims present on our soil.

By giving independence to Algeria in the worst conditions, De Gaulle had, he confided to Alain Peyrefitte, wanted to prevent his village from one day being called Colombey-les-Deux-Mosques.

There are today two mosques in the immediate vicinity of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises: in Bar-sur-Aube and in Chaumont.

Figaro

“What French Algeria was”

, 132 pages, € 8.90, available in newsstands and on the Figaro Store.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2020-12-05

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