Beni Saf is a fishing port on the steep cliffs of the Algerian coastline that climbs north-eastwards from the Moroccan border: a collage of multicoloured, cubed houses – blue, ochre and yellow – superimposed upon each other against a green hillside above the bay. The local deposits of iron ore that for a century provided employment in mining have been exhausted since the mid-1980s, and the port’s famous sardines are becoming rarer and more expensive, but in midsummer the town attracts families and groups of friends who rent houses and spend their short holidays by the sea. A little under a hundred kilometres to the west, at Marsa Ben Mehidi, are beaches where conservative families take their vacations, where women in loose clothes and headscarves swim during the day and take in concerts by rap artists on the boardwalk by night. At a similar distance further east, the coast turns a corner and comes in sight of the long, red Mujurjo mountain that towers over the city of Oran and the dizzying sheer walls of Santa Cruz, the sixteenth-century Spanish fortress that stands on the peak of the mountain above the sea. Here, the Thursday evening weekend road from Les Andalouses to Aïn al-Turk, where men wear shorts, girls bathe in bikinis and young couples hold hands, is packed with cars moving along the uninterrupted chain of grills, barbeques and hotels. One of them sports its name, ‘Beach House’, the English words spelled out in Arabic script, juxtaposed to the respectable designation aparthotel familial. Further east, beyond the lively sprawl of Oran and its rapidly rising apartment and office towers, the twisting road along the corniche reaches the village of Kristel, perched in an inlet on the face of the cliffs running down to the sea. The village’s fruit and vegetable gardens, watered from a spring permanently surrounded by children, are said to have supplied Phoenician trading vessels in antiquity, when the site was first inhabited. Above the gardens, a building carries the inscription École communale 1897. Above the school, on a promontory of rock over the road, a whitewashed stone cube surmounted by a dome marks the resting place of a wali, a Muslim saint. At Kristel the road turns inland before passing by the immense pipeline terminal at Arzew, the site of the world’s first liquefied natural gas plant and the country’s main crude oil port, where at night the gas flares light up the sky in a bright amber arc. A little further east is the city of Mostaghanem, with its busy street market under the trees and the colonial architecture of the bustling, traffic-packed town centre. On a wall by the railway station, someone has painted a laconic slogan: tahya firansa – vissa (‘Long live France – visa!’), the first two words in Arabic script, the last in an approximate French. The quiet, crumbling pre-colonial city overlooks the Mediterranean from its cliffs that rise on either side of a ravine filled with trees and birdsong, its empty, narrow streets of coloured houses sprinkled with satellite dishes, and its old mosques from which the call to prayer at noon rises like a sudden cloud of sound.1
The landscape is striking; the way people live in it, mark it and move through it, build upon it, name it and make a living from it displays both the diversity of contemporary life and the depth of historical time against which contemporary life is played out. Algeria’s modern history has not generally been approached through descriptions of a beautiful and fascinating country, or a diverse and creative society going about its daily life. The history of Algeria, since the Ottoman period – three centuries of history hardly known outside specialist circles and still sometimes thought of in antiquated stereotypes of piracy, ‘white slavery’ and despotism2 – through 132 years of French colonial occupation (1830–1962) and seven years of ‘savage’ colonial war (the war of independence, 1954–1962),3 up to the more recent terrors of Islamist and state violence since 1992, has often been written about only in terms of upheaval, rupture, violence and trauma. That these have existed in over-abundance in Algeria is not to be doubted, and the pages that follow will seek to account for them in their place. But the history of Algeria as a series of familiar clichés – heroism and horror, triumph and tragedy, anger and agony – is only part of what has made this country what it is, and does not begin to account adequately for the ways Algerians themselves have lived their lives, understood their country and their place in the world, have made, and continually make day by day, their own futures with the materials their past has given them.
No single study can give an adequate account of the complexity, the suppressed possibilities and unintended outcomes, the many and incommensurable aspects of the modern history of such a richly varied land and such a diverse society with so tumultuous a past. Nonetheless, the aim of this book is to explore, as far, as critically and as carefully as possible within the constraints of historical research – which necessarily differ from those of other disciplines, sociology, anthropology or political science, as well as from investigative journalism, while being informed by all of them to a greater or lesser extent – what the reality of Algerian history has been for the people who have lived through it, what its motive forces have been and how these have been understood. Above all, I hope that the reader might gain some sense, not only of Algeria’s history ‘as it really happened’ but of Algeria as a really existing place, rather than as a ‘model’ or a case study of Third World suffering or heroic revolution gone wrong, and of Algerians as the real people who live there, rather than as abstract actors in a tragic tale. It perhaps ought to be said, too, that this does not involve idealising or airbrushing any aspect of Algeria’s history or contemporary social reality: the very least that the outside observer trying to make sense of this country owes its people, beyond an empathy with them and their history, is to look both it and them honestly in the face.
This book has two main, interrelated themes. The first is political and concerns the ways in which those who have most directly formed and shaped structures of sovereign power – Ottoman governors, French colonial settlers and administrators and Algerian nationalist leaders, bureaucrats and generals – have sought to construct institutions of state to rule over Algerian society, extract and profit from the country’s resources and the labour of its inhabitants and provide mechanisms for regulating and directing social life.
At first sight, Algeria seems to illustrate to a very high degree the power of the modern state to control and transform social life, through both the dislocations and repression of the colonial period and the ambitious projects that followed independence. Again, this is certainly an important part of the story, and the ‘fierce’ aspects of the state, as well as its developmental ambitions, will often be referred to. But I will also be suggesting that the formation and exercise of state power in Algeria has never been a straightforward process, that Algeria’s state structures have often impinged only tangentially on the lives of many of its inhabitants and that even the most ferociously assertive actions of state apparatuses have generally incorporated the country’s people only incompletely into their orbit. They have often done so, too, with little or no understanding, and very inaccurate expectations, of what the consequences would be either for the state itself or for the people it made the subjects of its rule. The sometimes ferocious strength of a succession of states, and their simultaneous fragility and limitations, is thus a first recurring theme. In successive periods of the country’s history, the balance between the extent and strength of the state, on the one hand, and its limits and fragility, on the other, has of course varied, but there is no story here of the progressive incorporation of all areas of life into the gradually encroaching power of a model ‘nation-state’. Rather, a crucial question concerns the extent to which the transition from the domination of a colonial state imposed by conquest to a national state created in a popular and revolutionary war of liberation, the fulcrum of Algeria’s twentieth-century history and the process that drew upon it the attention and often the admiration of the world, has constituted a radical break in the country’s history, or a transition in which longer-established power relationships between elements of society and the central, governing and distributing power of the state were able to reconstitute themselves, in new forms perhaps, but with some degree of continuity. The strength and fragility of the state, and the limits and absences as well as the possibilities and ambitions of its projects for governing and transforming society, will be seen as ongoing issues in post-independence Algeria.
Related to this theme is a second one, concerning the history of Algerian society. In a colonial cliché first expressed by Governor General Jules Cambon in 1894 and repeated by Charles de Gaulle in 1959, Algerian society was seen as nothing but a poussière d’hommes (‘human dust’), disaggregated and anarchic,4 incapable of generating the social ties and institutions that might constitute the bases of its own self-government, and united in unyielding resistance to the ‘civilising’ efforts of foreign occupation only by innate violence and the xenophobic ‘fanaticism’ of Islam. While the colonial prejudices can be dispensed with easily enough, many discussions of Algeria have retained this idea of a weak, fragmented society reduced to helpless prostration before the ravages of colonialism and the depredations of authoritarianism. Discussion has often focused on politics and the state to the exclusion of serious attention to Algerian society, its means of persistence and survival and the ways in which its history has been lived and understood ‘from below’. This book argues that just as we need to nuance our understanding of the strengths and limits of state formation in Algeria, so we need to pay more attention to the making and sustaining of what in fact has historically been an extraordinarily robust, resilient society. Not only have social institutions often set limits to, and imposed themselves as interlocutors with, the state, they have also often filled the vacuum left by the absence, uncertainty or incompetence of the state. This is not to be read as a celebration of the autonomy of free social forces. Very frequently such institutions have themselves been oppressive or have worked to benefit a few at the expense of many; they have often filled gaps left vacant by the jurisdiction of the state and its lack of a guaranteed rule of law, but they have rarely themselves provided models of rule-bound, equitable and accountable arbitration. Nonetheless, enduring social solidarities and an extraordinary degree of social energy have continuously characterised Algerian society, and in accounting both for the hardships its people have experienced and for the ways they have survived them, attention to these (and to their damaging as well as enabling effects, their capacity to produce inequalities and conflicts as well as to alleviate and negotiate them) will be seen to be essential.
In this respect, this book argues for a view of Algerian history that emphasises continuities as well as, sometimes more than, ruptures. This is not an argument for ‘invariables’ (‘national constants’ as official Algerian rhetoric put it in the 1970s) but for attention to the forms of social capital and solidarity, worldviews, codes of behaviour and self-understanding that govern the constitution of social relations, and their bases in the everyday material realities of social life, as they are changed or remade by different generations in new circumstances across time. The primary focus, then, is Algerian society and the continuous responses, innovations and strategies of people faced with the conditions of life dictated by their environment and inheritance, or imposed upon them by those who would rule them. Both the ferocity and the limits of politics are best understood, from this perspective, not through high policy and palace intrigue, nor by measurement against prescriptive (and in fact mythical) schemes of ‘national awakening’, developmental modernisation, ‘Western-style’ free-market democracy or the ‘Islamic republic’, but in terms of the constant interplay of social forces with the institutions of state, in which the former have often been more robust, the latter less coherent, than has frequently been appreciated.
These themes are explored here over three periods, and the organisation of the book reflects my attempt to explore long-term themes and continuities through the episodic unfolding of events and the disruptions they have often most obviously caused. The first chapter offers a synopsis of the Ottoman period, considering the broad outlines of social and cultural life and the relation of Algerians and their diverse places of habitation to the beylik (state) and the wider worlds beyond it. The colonial period is discussed through Chapters 2 to 4, which run in parallel as well as in sequence. Chapter 2 sees the long process of conquest, its effects and Algerians’ varied responses to it, as far as possible from the perspective of Algerian society up to the eve of the First World War. Chapter 3 changes the angle of view, looking at the century-long construction of a ‘French Algeria’, a European-dominated colonial society, and the institutions through which it created what, by the 1940s, seemed a permanent settler state on North African soil but within the body politic of the French republic. Chapter 4 takes up where Chapter 2 left off, to explore the rapidly developing changes in Algerian society and its demands on and contests with the French state from 1912 to 1942. These three chapters reflect a conviction that the ‘Algerian’ and the ‘French’ histories of Algeria from 1830 to ca. 1940 need to be seen as both distinct and intertwined; neither aspect can properly be understood without the other, and neither is sufficient as a ‘true’ record without the other, but these are the histories of parallel, occasionally intersecting, colliding or overlapping societies, not a single common narrative. Indeed, much of the bitterness of the war of independence and of its continuing reverberations in more recent times can only be explained by the peculiar way in which Algerian and French histories of Algeria are both interdependent and incommensurable. Chapter 5 considers the origins and unfolding of the war of independence, its multiple meanings and the diverse ways in which it was experienced, from 1942 up to the independence of the Algerian republic in 1962. Chapters 6 and 7 follow a more straightforward political chronology that also, in these years, falls in with major patterns of social and economic life, as Algeria experienced first the years of revolutionary state consolidation in the 1960s and 1970s, the mounting crisis of the system in the 1980s up to the dramatic events of 1988–92 and the terrible violence and uneasy ‘normalisation’ of the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Algeria today is an important as well as a ‘difficult’ country. Little known to most people in most of the English-speaking world, known often in confused and conflicting ways in Europe, especially in France, familiar to most only from news items about terrorism or illegal migration, it is (in surface area) Africa’s largest country, a major source and supplier of oil and gas to Europe, a significant actor in the international relations of the Mediterranean region and a focus of attention (however undesired) for all those concerned with ‘war on terror’, European security and economic relations, immigration and Islamism, as well as for students of colonialism and anti-colonialism, insurrection and counter-insurgency, Third Worldism, ‘socialist’ development and transitions towards more liberal markets and (perhaps) democratisation, the legacies of imperialism in the postcolonial world and the making of ‘the West’ in its modern encounter with ‘Islam’ and ‘the Orient’. If some of those readers whose interest in Algeria stems from any of these many reasons why we should pay attention to this country, its people and their historical experiences, find in these pages some clues about how Algerian history has also been lived by those whom it has first, and most of all, concerned, then this book will have served its purpose.
Researching and writing this book has taken far longer than I initially (naïvely) imagined. It would not have been possible without the support of several institutions, and many friends and colleagues. Marigold Acland first proposed that I take it on, when I was a Junior Research Fellow at the Middle East Centre, St Antony’s College, Oxford; I have her patience and enthusiasm, and Eugene Rogan’s encouragement, to thank for making me think I could do it at all. The project was subsequently supported at Princeton by the history department, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences; at SOAS, by the University of London’s Central Research Fund; and at Oxford again by the History Faculty’s research committee, the John Fell Fund and my beautiful academic home since 2009, Trinity College. I was able to finish writing thanks to the Leverhulme Trust, truly the most supportive and enabling of funders. Maria Marsh, Cassi Roberts and Matt Sweeney at CUP brought a long overdue ship into port not only with good grace but with great energy and efficiency. Christine Moore provided essential expertise in map-making at the last moment. Thanks are due to Claire Marynower, Tawfiq Ibrahim, Marie Chominot and Mme Kouaci, Eléonore Bakhtadze, Karim Bouayad and Saïd Abdeddaïm for locating and/or giving permission for use of illustrations.
Research in Algeria was possible only thanks to Daho Djerbal, Joseph Rivat, and especially Bob Parks and Karim Ouaras, and to the opening and flourishing while I was working on this book of CEMA, the Algerian research centre of the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS) in Oran, with which it has been an honour and a pleasure to be associated. In Algeria, I especially have to thank all those who consented to be interviewed, or who spoke to me off the record or in informal conversations, particularly for questions relating to Chapters 5, 6 and 7. Those who did not wish to remain anonymous are listed in the bibliography: I am immensely grateful to all, named and anonymous alike. I also owe particular thanks to Tewfik Sahraoui, both for conversations and hospitality over several years and for sharing with me a memorable 2,544 km road trip from Oran to Biskra and back in June 2008, and to Nacer and Laïd who guided us through the Aurès. Research in France was greatly facilitated by the welcome afforded by staff and colleagues at the MMSH in Aix-en-Provence, and by archivists and librarians in Aix, Paris and Nantes.
Successive delays in finishing the book brought the advantage of my being able to learn from a new generation of research on Algeria, some of which I have had the honour of supervising or examining. I am grateful in particular to Jennifer Johnson, Brock Cutler, Tom de Georges, Jacob Mundy, Marie Chominot, Jan Jansen, Jeff Byrne, Lakhdar Guettas, Natalya Vince, Hannah-Louise Clark, Julien Fromage, Claire Marynower, Linda Amiri, Afaf Zekkour, Muriam Haleh-Davis, Ed McAllister, Nadjib Sidi Moussa, Nadjib Achour, Annick Lacroix, Augustin Jomier, Arthur Asseraf and Charlotte Courreye for discussing and sharing their work.
For conversations, comments and critical readings I have to thank Omar Carlier, Gilbert Meynier, Mohamed Harbi, Sylvie Thénault, Raphaëlle Branche, Emmanuel Blanchard, Sara Abrevaya Stein, Susan Miller, Susan Slyomovics, Lahouari Addi, Julia Clancy-Smith, Isabelle Grangaud, Francis Ghilès, Abderrahmane Hadj Nacer, Fatma Oussedik, Jean-Paul and Marie-France Grangaud, Mohammed Ghrib, Natalya Vince, Walid Benkhaled, Judith Scheele, Karima Dirèche, Hugh Roberts, Michael Willis, Mohamed Hachemaoui, Neil MacMaster, Jim House, Ben Brower, Marie Colonna, Christian Phéline, Ouarda Tengour, Didier Guignard, Jennifer Sessions, Fatma Zohra Guechi, Mohand Akli Hadibi, Mustafa Haddab, Fouad Soufi, Hassan Remaoun, Amira Bennison, Adlène Meddi and Aidan Lewis. My beloved comrades, Bob Parks and Malika Rahal, generously read each of the chapters as I wrote them; their advice and encouragement have been essential. That some of these friends and colleagues disagree with each other on many points will be apparent to anyone who knows the literature. I have learned from all of them, but none of them might agree with everything, or anything, that I have written here, especially concerning the events of more recent decades. Algeria’s recent past is especially contentious: I have tried to present the evidence available to me in such a way as to allow readers to draw their own conclusions. My interpretations, and any errors, are my own responsibility. The book is dedicated to Algerian friends without whom I could never have got to know, let alone understand, anything of their country: it was written with them in mind, in the hope that this version of their story might be one they recognise – or at least, one that does them no injustice.
My greatest debts as ever are to Anna, my partner in love and life, and now also to our wonderful daughter Kate, whose arrival caused only one of the many delays to the completion of this work, but by far the most joyful one.
