Introduction

This introductory chapter defines ‘news’ and presents the context of colonial Algeria. Using the example of news of the Tunisian invasion of 1881 in Algiers, it shows how news circulated through a variety of media, forming a complex news ecosystem. This ecosystem challenges standard theories of media put forward by scholars from Marshall McLuhan to Benedict Anderson. The introduction then explains the formation of a deeply divided society within colonial Algeria, placing the history of information within the wider historiography on colonial Algeria. The chapter concludes with a consideration of sources for a history of news, explaining how the colonial surveillance archive can form a useful entry point because surveillance was part of the news circulation system.

Old Waves

This chapter considers how the news ecosystem could change with the introduction of new technologies, particularly the cinema and the radio. What was unfolding was not a replacement of old forms of media but a superposition of waves upon waves of information in a variety that proved bewildering. The first section explains the development of newsreels in cinemas and radio as new forms of visual and aural news. The technical constraints of the radio made the existing problem of divergent audiences more evident, by placing the spotlight on the issue of spoken language. The second section looks at how these new forms of news contributed to a growing political polarization of Algeria in the 1930s, focusing on news of the Spanish Civil War. The novelty of radio-listening was that it facilitated the formation of new political communities across borders, placing Algeria within a wider transnational conflict between fascism and communism.

Magical Printing

This chapter gives a brief history of newspapers in colonial Algeria, showing how beliefs about newspapers contrasted with their actual usage. The men who conquered Algeria believed that the printing press could bring modernity. This belief can be described as a form of magical thinking. In practice, newspapers behaved in unexpected ways as they interacted with the rest of the news ecosystem. In the summer of 1881, the French Parliament passed two laws that instituted a division between those who could publish and those who could not. But while Europeans dominated printing, they did not control reading. Algerians had read newspapers well before the French arrived, and continued to import publications not intended for them. Yet by the turn of the twentieth century, the belief in magical printing had spread to elite Muslim Algerians, who saw their production of newspapers as an attempt to ‘catch up’ with Europeans.

Epilogue

The epilogue extends the story to the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) and beyond to the role of news in independent Algeria and post-1962 France. It summarizes the findings of the previous chapters and ties them together by reconsidering the writings of Frantz Fanon on radio and the development of television in the last years of colonial rule. While nationalists hoped that independence would bring uniformity between the media and the people, no such thing happened. This should lead us to consider whether news under colonialism was particularly exceptional, and when, if ever, the news stopped being electric. It ends by considering what might be a new relationship between the historian and the news.

Palestine the Martyr

This chapter looks at how debating news of distant events shaped the development of Algerian nationalism. Distance gave Algerians a means to reconsider their own problems on a different scale, to zoom out and reconsider their relationships with each other. It considers two case studies. First, Algerians observed keenly the Italian takeover of neighbouring Libya from 1911 to 1919, and used it to experiment with new forms of political mobilization. However, the interpretation of events in Libya remained volatile. This uncertain interpretation remained a problem during a second moment of mobilization around events in the British mandate of Palestine from 1929 to 1939. Palestine seemed to offer a mirror back to communal relations between Muslims, Jews, and Europeans in Algeria, leading to a number of conflicting interpretations.

Wartime

Did people in a colonial society live at the same time? This chapter tests this by looking at different forms of news that circulated around a single event: the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Prophetic manuscripts, rumours, and songs emplotted the same events within different temporalities. A historical manuscript connected to an insurrection in western Algeria used the beginning of war to promise the end of French rule. By contrast, the French administration dismissed this as ‘false news’, using a different historicity that saw rumours as the remains of an archaic past. French historians like the medievalist Marc Bloch who was in Algeria during the war were key to this diagnosis of ‘false news’ that ignored most Algerians’ understanding of the world. Yet certain forms of news could move across communities, in particular the song of Hajj Guillaume, a popular tune that acted like a sung newspaper.

Arab Telephone

The telegraph was introduced to connect Algeria to France. Yet the effects of the telegraph cables were double: they brought European Algerians closer to France at the same time as they brought Algerian Muslims closer to other Muslims around the world. Through the example of an incident in the town of Rébeval in Kabylia during the Greek–Ottoman War in 1897, we see how telegraphic news inserted itself into existing networks and allowed people in Algeria to connect their local problems with the rest of the Muslim world. As colonized Algerians were increasingly defined by French law as ‘Muslims’, they used this category to situate themselves within global events, leading to a ‘pan-Islamism’ from below. While French authorities remained convinced that this pan-Islamism was coming from outside, intermediaries employed by the French state were at the centre of this shift in the meaning of ‘Muslim’.