THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MAJOR ‘KABYLE QUESTION’ IN Contemporary Algerian politics was made manifest in the spectacular events of the spring of 1980. In an earlier article I suggested that the reason why most observers did not anticipate this development was because of their failure, on the one hand, to appreciate the specificity of the Kabyle case – the extent to which it departs from the sociologists' stereotype of Berber societies – and, on the other hand, to recognize the leading role played by the Kabyles in the national revolution and, in consequence, the significance of their subsequent eviction from commanding positions in the Algerian political elite. The practical substance of the Kabyle question itself was referred to only in passing and remains to be dealt with. Why is Kabyle particularism, which in itself is nothing new, now taking the form of ‘Berberism’, that is, not only opposition to the Arabization policy of the Algerian government but also the demand for official recognition of the Berber language? Why, moreover, has ‘Berberism’ become a popular force in Kabylia, capable of mobilizing, on occasion, support throughout Kabylia and from all classes of the population, when it was previously confined to an unrepresentative coterie of intellectuals and remains so confined in respect of the other Berberophone populations of Algeria and Morocco? The answer to these questions lies in the singular economic history of the Kabyle population.

THE DÉBÂCLE OF THE 1848 REVOLUTION WAS A SEVERE SHOCK to most European radicals of that period. The resilience of the anciens regimes proved that, contrary to the revolutionary prophecies, the millennium was not around the corner. If the powers-that-be withstood such a powerful revolutionary wave, how were they ever going to be toppled?

The disillusion was strongest among German radical revolutionaries. Many emigrated to the United States; some, like Arnold Ruge and Bruno Bauer, slowly slid into co-operation with conservative circles, and re-emerged, decades later, as spokesmen for Bismarckian politics; many just dropped out, quietly slipping into obscure and respectable bourgeois existence; Karl Marx, in his London exile, abandoned his hopes for an imminent social upheaval, stayed away from the more radical, Jacobin elements of the League of Communists and immersed himself in his journalistic and scholarly work, expecting the long-range internal contradictions of capitalist society to bring about the dissolution of the bourgeois order. Only in the 1860s did he return to some sort of political activity in connection with the First International: even there he was a moderating influence against the more extreme Blanqukts and Bakuninkts.