Remaking the Post-War Colonial Order

This chapter focuses on the question of colonial reform in interwar Algeria, asking how political actors sought to redefine their place within the imperial polity in the wake of the war. Through a close reading of the debates that surrounded the two major moments of prospective colonial reform, the Jonnart reforms (1919) and the Blum-Viollette Project (1936), it shows how activists across ideological and ethnic divides mobilized the memory of the war to reimagine the system of colonial rule in Algeria. Underlining the limited appeal of Wilsonian rhetoric in the colony, this chapter explores the dominance of arguments grounded in concepts of the ‘moral economy of wartime sacrifice’ and ‘mutual obligation’. It considers how political actors sought to legitimize their visons of a just post-war colonial order by maximising their contribution to the war effort while minimising the wartime participation of their opponents, thus undermining their rival claims on the post-war state.

Fighting for the Empire

This chapter explores the history of military service in Algeria and across the colonial world before and during the Great War. It introduces the reader to key concepts from the fields of colonial history and First World War studies that are crucial to understanding the political legacies of the entanglement of the colonies and, especially, Algeria with the Great War. Taking a comparative approach, it explains the range of legal categories that underpinned colonial rule within the different empires and considers how the rights and responsibilities they implied were connected to and altered by military service. The chapter also examines the variety of attitudes toward the use of colonial soldiers in the different imperial polities and asks how these influenced the expectations of post-war reform in the colonies.

Introduction

This introduction opens with an analysis of the controversies that surrounded the centenary of the Great War in Algeria, arguing that they reflect a much longer history of political mobilization of the war’s memory in the country. It positions this book at the heart of contemporary historiographical debates about the global nature of the First World War and its legacies, the conflict’s impact in the colonial world, and the transformation of politics in interwar Algeria. By combining the work of leading scholars of colonialism with the discourse analysis approach of the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, it explains why the contested language of politics is so crucial to understanding questions of agency in a colonial context like interwar Algeria. Finally, it acknowledges the challenges of the colonial archive and demonstrates how a critical approach to sources can allow for a nuanced discussion of political discourse in colonial societies such as the Algeria.

Pensions, Posts, and Petitions

This chapters shifts focus away from the collective toward the individual, considering how indigenous veterans, war widows, and orphans evoked participation in the war to ensure access to state provision. It examines how actors often considered marginal in the colonial order set about claiming their legal entitlements from the state. Using the correspondence between individual claimants and the colonial administration, this chapter explores the complexity of the daily negotiation between the colonized, their intermediaries, and the apparatus of the colonial state. It considers the extent to which the colonial state’s conception of its duties to indigenous rights-holders and its attempts to meet these duties overlapped and/or contrasted with claimants’ understanding of their own rights. In doing so, it exposes the variety of forms of contact between the colonial state and its subjects that emerged as a result of the Great War and that heretofore have largely gone unstudied.

‘They Have Rights over Us’

This chapter turns away from partisan politics to analyse the development of the Algerian veterans’ movement over the course of the interwar period. It considers organizations that drew members not only from different ethnic and social backgrounds but also from a pool of men with an unparalleled claim to legitimacy born of participation in the war. The chapter focuses on the attempts of one such veterans’ association, the Amicale des Mutilés du Département d’Alger, to reconcile its supposedly non-racial notion of veteran primacy with the real primacy of the European community in the colonial state. Furthermore, it illustrates how the tensions at the heart of the Amicale’s discourse empowered indigenous veterans to assert their demands within the movement and eventually to set up their own organizations that were fully committed to achieving real change on behalf of indigenous ex-servicemen.

Conclusion

This conclusion ties together the different cases studied throughout the book to illustrate the centrality of the Great War to political discourse in the Algeria of the 1920s and 1930s. It analyses the effectiveness of the evocation of the Great War as a framing strategy for political, economic, and social demands in a colonial context. In particular, it considers how efforts to shroud rival conceptions of the relationship between the colonial state, its citizens, and its subjects in the cloak of legitimacy conferred by the war often had unforeseen consequences. The book concludes by arguing that the predominance of the Great War in political discourse in colonial Algeria may have, in the short term, ensured that most political actors envisaged reform within the bounds of the imperial polity, but it also created expectations that, in the long term, the colonial state proved unwilling and unable to satisfy.

Communal Contributions and Racial Hierarchies

This chapter analyses the place of the Great War in the rhetoric of the extreme-right movements that played a central role in the politics of interwar Algeria. It argues that the visions of the Great War that they promoted reflected an intrinsically racial understanding of Algeria’s wartime contribution. It examines the rhetoric these organizations developed around the participation of the Jewish, Muslim, and European communities, considering how these organisations’ evocation of the war embodied their wider aspirations for the reshaping of colonial society in line with imagined racial hierarchies. It also explores how those who resisted these exclusionary visions of Algeria’s past, present, and future mobilized their own counter-narratives of the colony’s contribution to the First World War in the struggle against the extreme right. In doing so, the chapter demonstrates both the potential positives and the potential pitfalls for political movements who mobilized the memory of the Great War in Algeria.

Social Claims in the Shadow of the Fallen

This chapter examines the left’s attempts to mobilize the wartime ‘moral economy of sacrifice’ in support of its vision of a just post-war order in the colony. Focusing on the immediate post-war moment, it examines how the campaigns of strike action and political protests led by socialists and trade unionists in the colony relied heavily on egalitarian notions grounded in the wartime experience. It also considers the response this provoked from conservative forces, which sought to counter the left’s rhetoric by stressing the ‘fraternity of arms’. Finally, it assesses the place of indigenous workers in these debates, asking how the left reconciled its use of an egalitarian language, drawn in part from the experience of the war, with its ambiguous attitude toward any erosion of European hegemony in the colony.