Lethal Provocation

The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria

Joshua Cole

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781501739415
  9781501739415
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501739446
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

Part murder mystery, part social history of political violence, Lethal Provocation is a forensic examination of the deadliest peacetime episode of anti-Jewish violence in modern French history. Joshua Cole reconstructs the 1934 riots in Constantine, Algeria, in which tensions between Muslims and Jews were aggravated by right-wing extremists, resulting in the deaths of twenty-eight people.

Animating the unrest was Mohamed El Maadi, a soldier in the French army. Later a member of a notorious French nationalist group that threatened insurrection in the late 1930s, El Maadi became an enthusiastic supporter of France's Vichy regime in World War II, and finished his career in the German SS. Cole cracks the "cold case" of El Maadi's participation in the events, revealing both his presence at the scene and his motives in provoking violence at a moment when the French government was debating the rights of Muslims in Algeria. Local police and authorities came to know about the role of provocation in the unrest and killings and purposely hid the truth during the investigation that followed. Cole's sensitive history brings into high relief the cruelty of social relations in the decades before the war for Algerian independence.

Note on Transliteration

All translations from French or Arabic into English are my own. Following a custom that has developed in English-language historiography, I have transliterated Maghribi Arabic words according to a simplified system based on the recommendations of the International Journal of Middle East Studies, without full diacritics or vowel markings. I use an apostrophe (’) to indicate hamza only when it is in the middle of a word, and an opening single quotation mark (‘) for ‘ayn when it is at the beginning or middle of the word. To avoid confusion in referring to documents from the colonial period and more recent historical work, I have used the Gallicized form of Arabic proper names that are commonly encountered in the literature. Place names are given in the form used during the colonial period in Algeria, followed by the current postindependence name of the locale in parentheses at first mention.

Map 1. Northern Algeria during the colonial period.

Map by Mike Bechthold.

Map 2. The city of Constantine in 1934, with major landmarks and neighborhoods.

Map by Mike Bechthold.

Introduction

One might tell the story like this. Over three days in August 1934, an outburst of violence in a medium-size French city left twenty-eight people dead. Everybody who participated possessed French nationality. The ground on which they walked was French territory. The municipal institutions that struggled to contain the events of that weekend were French institutions, and the civil laws that reigned in the city were French laws. The soldiers brought in to reestablish order were French soldiers, commanded by French officers, and the police who lost control of the city during the hours of street fighting, looting, and murder were French police. The accused murderers were French, as were the judges that later condemned them. The victims were French, and so were the families and neighbors that mourned them. The officials who sought to avoid responsibility were French, and the local journalists who wrote about the riot in lurid terms were as French as the writers for the Parisian dailies who reported the same events.

Told in this fashion, this story points to something peculiar about the term “French.” Even if every use of the word has at least some claim to accuracy, the story sounds different when more details are added. The “French” city where the violence took place was Constantine in eastern Algeria. Algeria had been a part of the Ottoman Empire for four centuries before French armies invaded in 1830. The land became French civil territory in 1848, and legislation across the nineteenth century gave a form of French nationality to the colony’s diverse inhabitants. The Jews of Algeria—a small but diverse minority that included Berber Jews whose presence in North Africa preceded the arrival of Islam and descendants of Iberian Jews exiled from Spain in 1492—were excluded from French citizenship until 1870. In that year the newly created Third Republic promulgated the Crémieux decree, granting full citizenship to nearly all Jews in Algeria, with the exception of a tiny Jewish population in territory still under military rule. The majority population of Muslims in Algeria, also a heterogeneous group, were excluded from full citizenship for almost the entire colonial period (1830–1962), but their possession of a degraded form of French nationality was implied by decree as early as 1834, and formally recognized in law in 1865. An 1889 law revised the nationality code to make it easier for settlers who came from elsewhere to become French citizens, so long as they were not Muslim. The distinction between nationality and citizenship necessitated a new word to refer to the colonized peoples of Algeria who were not French citizens: they were sometimes referred to in official documents as “French subjects.” The colloquial term, however, was indigènes (“natives”).¹

With these facts, one might tell the story differently. The 1934 riots began on a Friday evening when a drunken Jewish man named Elie Khalifa insulted several Muslim men as they prepared for their prayers at a mosque in the ancient walled city of Constantine. The streets nearby connected to a Jewish neighborhood with several synagogues and many Jewish-owned businesses and homes. The dispute led to a larger confrontation between Muslims and Jews later that night, in the course of which a Muslim man was shot in the stomach. Crowds armed with sticks and knives besieged several buildings where Jewish families lived, until early the next morning, when soldiers finally succeeded in clearing the streets. The following day witnessed a tense standoff between Muslims and Jews in the city, while local leaders—elected and religious—attempted to calm the population after hastily convened meetings with the authorities.

On Sunday morning, August 5, the violence began again after false rumors spread that a popular Muslim elected official had been assassinated by Jews. Angry people, massed in crowds, attacked many homes and businesses in Constantine’s Jewish quarter. Sixteen Jews were murdered in three locations alone—in two apartments and an office that rioters invaded. Others were killed in the streets nearby. Several Jews were also killed in attacks in other towns in the region, bringing the total number of Jewish deaths to twenty-five. Three Muslims also died. The man who was shot on Friday evening died in hospital twenty days later, on August 23. A Muslim man who was shot on Sunday shortly before midday died in the street before hundreds of onlookers; and a Muslim boy who was shot in the stomach during a disturbance in the nearby town of Aïn Beïda died on Tuesday, August 7. He was only twelve years old. During roughly six hours of rioting in Constantine on August 5, the police and the military garrison—which included both Jews and Muslims within their ranks—seemed to have ceded control of the city to angry crowds. The local and national press emphasized the passivity of the authorities, precipitating a crisis within the colonial administration, which was forced to explain its failure to either predict or to contain the outbreak of violence.²

This version of the story also has issues. First, there is a missing term: as in the first narrative, I managed to tell a story about something that happened in Algeria without using the word “Algerian.” Is that because the terms I did use—“Muslim” and “Jewish”—carry their own explanatory weight? Given that the riots began with an argument at a mosque between an inebriated Jewish man and Muslim men preparing to pray on a Friday evening, it is clearly impossible to tell the story without using the words “Jewish” and “Muslim.” Nevertheless, invoking these terms seems to drive the story inevitably toward its violent conclusion, as if such occurrences were already scripted and needed no further explanation.

This is in part due to the tragic history of Muslims and Jews in the Middle East and North Africa in the twentieth century. Six years after the events described above, the Jews of Algeria—about 140,000 people—had their French citizenship revoked by the Vichy regime, the government that came to power in France after the German invasion in 1940. This act relegated Algeria’s Jews back to the “native” status they had shared with Muslims after the French conquest in 1830.³ The Vichy government enacted its own antisemitic policies during the Second World War, eventually deporting over 75,000 Jews to Nazi extermination camps in Poland. Only 2,567 survived.⁴ Jews who remained in French Algeria during the war escaped deportation, but it took the Free French authorities nearly a year after Allied troops landed in Africa to restore their citizenship in 1943. When the Fourth Republic was founded after the war, Algeria’s Jews were welcomed as full members of the French nation, but the possibility that Algeria’s Muslims would find a place alongside them seemed increasingly remote after nationalist violence broke out in Sétif on VE Day (May 8, 1945). When police fired on nationalist demonstrators, marchers and their supporters responded by attacking and killing 102 Europeans in the surrounding streets and nearby countryside. Following these murders, the French authorities responded with a brutal collective repression that killed thousands of people in the region.⁵

In the wake of these traumatic events, a determined Algerian nationalist movement challenged French sovereignty in North Africa, culminating in a war for independence that lasted from 1954 to 1962.⁶ The position of Algeria’s Jewish citizens became untenable at the end of this war, though some Jews supported the cause of independence from France.⁷ After the establishment of independent Algeria in 1962, the French colonial settler population migrated en masse to France, and the vast majority of Algerian Jews came with them.⁸ This migration of Jews from Algeria had some similarities with migrations to Israel by Jews from elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa after 1948. In 1962, however, only about 10 percent of Algeria’s Jews chose to go to Israel, preferring instead to remake their lives in France, the country that had granted them citizenship in 1870.⁹ By the end of the twentieth century there were virtually no Jews living in Algeria.

Invoking this history to explain the Constantine riots of 1934 obscures as much as it illuminates: this is not a story about Algerian or Arab nationalism, or pan-Islamism, or Zionism in North Africa. None of these movements are irrelevant to this history, but none are more important than another adjective that was also absent from the second account of the riots, that peculiar word “French.” As we will see, the violence in Constantine broke out largely because of the possibility that both Muslims and Jews might be included in the French polity on equal terms. This bears repeating—the riots took on their contemporary meaning in the context of a debate about reforming the colonial system, not ending it. Although a small nationalist movement was active in the diaspora of Algerian laborers working in France in the 1920s, there was no mass-based nationalist movement in Algeria until several years after the riots took place. Virtually everybody in Constantine in 1934 assumed that the French empire would continue to exist for the foreseeable future. The drama of Algeria’s subsequent history makes it hard to reconstruct the particular dynamic of social and political relations in French Algeria before the rupture between Muslims and Jews took place. The problem for the historian in recounting the story of Constantine in 1934 is that words like “Muslim,” “Jewish,” “Algerian,” and “French” are both necessary and too resonant. Their constant threat is that they “make sense,” but too much of it. This problem is at the heart of this book.

Parts 1 and 2, accordingly, examine the ways that the preceding century of colonial settlement recast relations between Muslims, Jews, and “Europeans” in Algeria. From the French invasion in 1830 until the Constantine riots of 1934 and beyond, citizenship in French Algeria was an unsettled question. French sovereignty created many obstacles to political participation for Algeria’s Muslims, even as it offered citizenship for Algeria’s Jews, but this did not prevent the Muslim majority from attempting to shape the social world they lived in and its future. Algeria’s Jews came to welcome the opportunity that full citizenship offered them, while many of Algeria’s Muslim leaders sought a similar form of belonging that was commensurate with the preservation of their culture and religion. The violence of 1934, as we will see, emerged precisely because of the many dissonant ways that the people of this North African city found the term “French” to resonate with the meanings of “Jewish” and “Muslim.”

The second half of this book tells an even darker story. Uncertainty about the boundaries of citizenship left the population of Constantine vulnerable to acts of provocation, defined here as menacing mobilizations of difference in the furtherance of political goals. At the heart of the cycle of provocation and reaction that produced the riots of August 1934, a small group of agitators committed multiple acts of murder with the goal of intentionally escalating the horror of the event with spectacular acts of brutality. By the end of this book, I will present evidence that at least eighteen and perhaps as many as twenty of the twenty-five Jews who died on August 5, 1934, were killed by a relatively small and organized group. The local police were themselves convinced that this was the case and said so publicly until their investigation was shut down and taken over by their superiors. Eventually, the police came to believe that one of the primary agitators responsible for the murders was a soldier in the French army named Mohamed El Maadi, although they never made this information public.

If this is true—and this book will argue that it is—our understanding of what happened in Constantine in 1934 will have to be revised. This was not simply, as some historians have suggested, a “classic pogrom.”¹⁰ Certain aspects of the initial outburst on August 3 invite such a comparison, but the perpetrators of the majority of the August 5 murders had more complicated goals. Mohamed El Maadi was no ordinary local conspirator. He is a notorious figure in the history of political extremism in France, well known to the French police in the late 1930s as a member of a violent terrorist organization, the Comité secret d’action révolutionnaire (CSAR), that unleashed a campaign of assassination and bombings in France in 1937–1938. This right-wing network, known in the contemporary press as the Cagoule (the Hooded Cloak), brought together militants from nationalist leagues in France who sought authoritarian or fascist solutions to the political crises of the 1930s. El Maadi was arrested in 1937 and detained for ten months for his connections to this group. During the Second World War, El Maadi became an enthusiastic supporter of French collaboration with the Nazis and a propagandist for Vichy’s antisemitic campaigns. After working with the Gestapo in Paris, El Maadi finished the war as a captain in the SS, the commander—and primary recruiter—of a North African Brigade of Algerians who fought alongside German troops against the French resistance in the weeks after the D-Day invasion.¹¹

Given his subsequent history, it is important to recognize at the outset that El Maadi’s antisemitism was linked to his embrace of an extreme form of French nationalism that was also viciously anti-Jewish. His engagement in 1934 was not an expression of a specifically “Muslim” antisemitism or Arab nationalism that had affinities with National Socialism. El Maadi gravitated toward extreme French nationalism while serving...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• Introduction
• Part 1: Algerian Histories of Empire
• Part 2: Colonial Society in Motion
• Part 3: A Riot in France
• Part 4: Making the Riot Algerian
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Index