The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole

Algerian Families and the French Welfare State during Decolonization

Amelia H. Lyons

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780804784214
• eBook ISBN: 9780804787147
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

France, which has the largest Muslim minority community in Europe, has been in the news in recent years because of perceptions that Muslims have not integrated into French society. The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole explores the roots of these debates through an examination of the history of social welfare programs for Algerian migrants from the end of World War II until Algeria gained independence in 1962.

After its colonization in 1830, Algeria fought a bloody war of decolonization against France, as France desperately fought to maintain control over its most prized imperial possession. In the midst of this violence, some 350,000 Algerians settled in France. This study examines the complex and often-contradictory goals of a welfare network that sought to provide services and monitor Algerian migrants' activities. Lyons particularly highlights family settlement and the central place Algerian women held in French efforts to transform the settled community. Lyons questions myths about Algerian immigration history and exposes numerous paradoxes surrounding the fraught relationship between France and Algeria—many of which echo in French debates about Muslims today.

1

Civilizing “French Muslims from Algeria”

The master stroke of our work in Africa is colonization; it is this which should restore all the rest.

—Jules Cambon, Governor-General of Algeria (1891–1897)

JUST AS A GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF ALGERIA reflected on the righteousness of the colonial project, which rested on the superiority of French, universal culture and on the need to spread it among people whose “civilization” was “necessarily backward in comparison to our own,”¹ so too did the administrators and personnel of the burgeoning metropolitan welfare network herald their commitment to bringing Algerian migrants the benefits of modern, Western culture. If once and for all welfare providers could help France embrace its humanitarian obligations, administrators believed France could demonstrate its dedication to Algerians, repair the bond between France and Algeria, and restore the nation’s place on the world stage. In many respects, what Governor-General Cambon called “the problem of colonization” was wholly different from what became known as the “Algerian problem” in the post-1945 metropolitan context.² Yet, the two problems were inextricably linked in countless ways.

To understand the interconnections, this chapter begins with an examination of the nature of the French conquest and colonization of Algeria by highlighting both Algeria’s unique history and position in the French empire and by delineating some of the major and evolving themes in colonial discourse. Subsequently, it links the history of Algeria to the early history of migration in order to compare the status, perceptions, and treatment of the Algerian population before and after World War II. When placed alongside the history of colonialism and the “republican surveillance” of the interwar period,³ the continuities as well as the distinct breaks in policies and practices regarding Algerian migrants during the era of decolonization come into view. Examining Algerians’ juridical and social position during the Fourth Republic highlights the “paradoxical” nature of Algerians’ citizenship and of France’s multiple, sometimes contradictory objectives.⁴ Understanding how contemporary thinkers imagined Algerians’ place in France reveals much about the political landscape of the post-1945 era, about the conflicting perspectives and priorities of experts on both sides of the Mediterranean, and about the nature of the welfare network itself. An initial sketch of the origins and the conglomeration of institutions and experts that constituted the network shows how new priorities mingled with long-held beliefs about Algerians. This analysis reveals how the welfare network developed as a hybrid system because of close ties between the colonial and metropolitan governments. Institutions and personnel shared techniques, regularly interacted, and moved fluidly between France and its empire.

Despite full agreement that Algerians would have to overcome their own inadequacies if they were to adapt to France’s universal culture, officials and direct service providers sometimes disagreed about the nature of and solutions to the Algerian problem. Competing priorities and limited resources hampered efforts to develop a consistent set of directives and to reach an agreement about a unified approach. The architects of the welfare network nevertheless aimed to reconcile the presence of a significant Algerian population in metropolitan France for both economic and political reasons with lingering eugenic fears that Algerians’ perceived racial and cultural differences could constitute an insurmountable impediment to their integration.

France and Algeria: A Brief History

From the moment the French arrived in Algiers in May 1830, brutal violence characterized the conquest of Algeria. Military and later civilian authorities on the ground and political thinkers from Marx to de Tocqueville justified the use of force as necessary to bring Algerians out “from the dark night of superstition and ignorance” and into the modern era. They advocated the introduction of education and modern techniques in industry, medicine, and social organization that would create a new society.⁵ The officer corps, populated with highly educated men from France’s premier schools and influenced by Saint-Simonian utopianism, viewed themselves as scientists and educators. They envisioned the conquest as an obligation, “a civilizing mission full of weariness and danger.” Using the language of “pacification,” colonizers believed that once Algeria had been conquered it could become “a vast field of study.” As Marshal Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, governor-general of Algeria in the 1840s, famously put it, colonization occurred “by the sword and by the plough.”⁶

In order to remake not only Algeria, but all of the empire, the French framed imperialism in the ever-evolving concept of a civilizing mission. The basic principle that the French should be “leading people to civilization” and “our superiority” had been central to developing conceptions of universalism and racial thought since the eighteenth century.⁷ It continued to develop in the nineteenth century, with use of the term mission civilisatrice first appearing circa 1840 in reference to French actions in Algeria.⁸ The concept took its most recognizable form during the Third Republic. One of France’s most eloquent leaders, Prime Minister Jules Ferry, provided a well-known articulation of the civilizing mission’s rationale in an 1884 speech. After outlining the economic, geopolitical, and nationalist reasons for pursuing the scramble for Africa, Ferry proclaimed that “the superior races have a right” and a “duty to civilize the inferior races.” While other nations had failed to fulfill the task thrust upon them, France would not. Appealing to their sense of competition with European rivals, Ferry reminded his colleagues France would accept its calling with “generosity, with grandeur, and with sincerity.”⁹

Decades before Ferry articulated France’s imperial mission, proponents of conquest had already argued for a new kind of colonization, one devoid of excesses, particularly the reliance on chattel slavery associated with earlier periods of expansion. Algeria held a special place in the French imagination. If a significant settler colony implemented the new colonial model, it could solve France’s “social question.” Under the July

Monarchy and after, proponents of colonization championed Algeria as a fertile territory upon which settlers could produce an ideal, hardworking, rural France devoid of metropolitan social problems. Proponents claimed that if the urban poor—especially those who might participate in revolutionary activities—could be motivated to emigrate, France could simultaneously provide a safety valve for domestic unrest and create a new class of yeomen farmers who, because of their ties to the land, could build a new society in Algeria.¹⁰

The idealization of agricultural labor meant the French set their sights on the acquisition of land. Through a willful refusal to acknowledge communal and other traditional types of property rights, the French military and later the civilian government effectively dismantled the centuries-old, locally regulated agricultural system. The French implemented property laws to confiscate and to cultivate common lands. In all, from 1830 to the end of World War I, Algeria’s indigenous population lost 7.5 million hectares of land.¹¹

The architects of French colonial expansion, like their counterparts constructing other European empires, claimed that this complete transformation, or mise en valeur, of indigenous society—through the introduction of private property as well as modern agriculture and other technologies to harness natural resources—brought progress.¹² Referring to the urban landscape of his hometown of Bône, one colonist basked in “the grandeur and the beauty of the task accomplished by the French,” which could be properly understood only when one remembered the city had been “previously deserted, barren, and virtually without natural resources.”¹³ This triumphant assessment of conquest encapsulates the policy of assimilation, which became the “official objective” and “an ideal of republican dogma” that sought to reconcile the settler community’s demands to assimilate Algerian territory and to maintain a strict racial hierarchy.¹⁴ Frantz Fanon’s 1961 indictment of colonialism summarized it this way:

A hostile, ungovernable, and fundamentally rebellious Nature is in fact synonymous in the colonies with the bush, the mosquitoes, the natives, and disease. Colonization has succeeded once this untamed Nature has been brought under control. Cutting railways through the bush, draining swamps, and ignoring the political and economic existence of the native population are in fact one and the same thing.¹⁵

Colonization, in other words, worked to assimilate Algerian territory, reimagining it not as a colony but as “one of the most beautiful provinces of France.”¹⁶ This utopian vision focused on French and other European settlement and made little space for the indigenous population.

From the initial conquest of Algiers until the implementation of a civil government in 1872, the French army, despite dissenting voices among Saint-Simonians and others, implemented a “system of extermination and repression.”¹⁷ As Dr. Eugène Bodichon, a committed republican and opponent of slavery who championed the rights of the poor and women—but not Algerians—explained, “Without violating the laws of morality, we must combat our African enemies with firepower joined to war by famine, internal strife, alcohol, corruption, and disorganization. . . . Without spilling any blood we can, each year, decimate them by attacking their food supplies.”¹⁸ Bodichon’s description of commonly used techniques, including burning villages and crops, is representative of justifications of pacification as the natural or inevitable result of contact between modern society and one that was considered less civilized—with frequent references to Algeria as another American Far West as confirmation.¹⁹ As demographer Kamel Kateb’s research has shown, the violent war of conquest decimated the Algerian population. Although exact figures are impossible to determine, Kateb used colonial sources to estimate that in the first four decades of French rule over 800,000 Algerians died in military operations, with a roughly equal number of civilians falling victim to “pacification” tactics and the resulting droughts, famines, and epidemics.²⁰

Even the Arab Bureaus, which the settler community criticized as evidence of the Second Empire’s pro-Arab policies, participated in the pacification. According to Lieutenant-Colonel Eugène Daumas, a devotee of Bugeaud whom the latter appointed in the 1840s, the bureaus intended to “create pathways for our colonization [and] our commerce by maintaining public security, to protect all legitimate interests, and to improve the well-being of the indigenous population.” Daumas continued that the men staffing the bureaus had to be prepared to use the “most expedient and least onerous” types of “military force in case of insurrection” and to be sure “the natives” accepted “our domination with as little revulsion as possible.”²¹

In order to reconcile the desire to construct a utopian white settler colony with the irresolvable impediment of a permanent, if shattered, indigenous population, French experts postulated that the North African population was in a steady, if gradual, Social Darwinian decline.²² In the French imagination, Algerians were not only backward, but also prone to violence and disease. Their social, religious, and cultural practices were either exotic and titillating or bizarre and frightening. Colonizers sought to emancipate Algerians from their recalcitrant adherence to a collective “Muslim mentality” that explained their penchant for idleness, brutality, and stagnation.²³ A state agent working in the 1850s acknowledged a surge in prostitution as “the saddest consequence” of “extreme poverty,” but blamed it on “vices inherent in Islamic law.” In particular, he noted the frequency with which Muslim judges allowed husbands to repudiate wives and concluded that this made prostitution the simplest solution for women who were “essentially ignorant, lazy, and unskilled.”²⁴ Colonial officials generally placed responsibility for the problems of colonization on the Algerians’ shoulders despite contemporary evidence that the French knew the European presence—from the violence of pacification to the introduction of diseases like cholera—caused much of the destruction.²⁵

While the pacification stage of colonization officially ended with the establishment of the civil regime, the settler community (which numbered about 280,000 by the 1870s) sought to retain control in a number of ways. In the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, the Commune, and the massive Algerian insurrection in 1871,²⁶ a settler brochure articulated French anxieties: “The Arab must suffer the fate of the conquered; he must assimilate to our civilization or disappear. . . . European civilization is ruthless when set against savagery.”²⁷ Fear about Algerians’ continued resistance coupled with the perception that metropolitan authorities did not adequately support or protect the colonists’ way of life inspired new strategies to implement a far-reaching system of legal discrimination that would simultaneously control Algerians and strengthen the colonists’ collective voice in Paris.

The landmark reform of the French nationality law (1889), the Native Code (1881), and in less straightforward ways, the Crémieux decree (1870) all eroded Algerians’ status and fur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures and Table
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Civilizing “French Muslims from Algeria”
• 2. Instructing the Experts: Framing the Metropolitan “Conquest of Hearts”
• 3. Instructing a “Difficult and Delicate Clientele”: The Social Services Mission
• 4. From Dormitories to Homes: Housing Workers and Families during the Fourth Republic
• 5. Services and Surveillance: Welfare, the Police, and the Algerian War
• 6. The Great “Hope”: Housing Algerian Families at the Height of the Algerian War
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index