The Jews
There remains, finally, one other important minority group to be identified — the Jews of Algeria. Comprising approximately one-fifth of the non-Muslim population, they — rather like the unhappy Asians of East Africa — tended to find themselves in the tragic position of being caught between two fires: between the European and the Muslim world. Many could trace back their antecedents to the expulsions from sixteenth-century Spain; some even claimed them to pre-date the invaders who had surged out of the Arabian peninsula during the eleventh century. Thus they could argue that only relatively were they later arrivals than the Muslims. However, by 1830 the Algerian Jews had become an under-privileged community, fallen into backward squalor, and the advent of the French gave them an opportunity to improve their status. The Crémieux Decrees of 1870, conferring automatic French citizenship, attracted more prosperous Jews from outside Algeria; while at the same time they provoked a sense of unfair prejudice among Muslims. However, it was not the Muslims but the Catholic Maltese, Spanish and Italian pieds noirs who, at the turn of the century, launched a minor pogrom against the Jews, smashing up their shops in protest against the competition of this new class of petits commerçants. (Analysing the various degrees of disdain in Algeria, a pied noir journalist, Albert-Paul Lentin, observed how “the Frenchman despises the Spaniard, who despises the Italian, who despises the Maltese, who despises the Jew; all in turn despising the Arab.” In the Second World War, Pétain’s anti-Semitic regime repealed the Crémieux Decrees, and Jewish teachers and children alike were summarily flung out of European schools; the whole community was menaced with deportation to Nazi camps.[3] Yet during all this time (so several Algerian Jews averred to the author), there was barely a breath of anti-Semitism from any Muslim quarter. By the 1950s the Algerian Jews were tugged in several directions; the least privileged tended still to identify themselves with the Muslims rather than the pieds noirs, and many were members of the Communist Party, while the wealthiest had developed distinctly Parisian orientations. Perhaps typical of the latter was Marcel Belaiche, who had inherited a large property fortune from his father; politically, however, he leaned strongly towards the liberal camps of both Chevallier and Ferhat Abbas, and away from the Borgeauds and Schiaffinos. After 1954 a significant proportion of the Jewish intellectual and professional classes was to side with the F.L.N.
[1] Today a commemorative plaque is still kept attentively burnished, the Algerians counting the overthrow of Vichy by the Anglo-Americans an important milestone on the road to independence.
[2] Bicot, opprobrium of unknown meaning, or origin; melon, slang for “a simpleton”; figuier, “fig tree”, because the Algerian peasant allegedly spent his day sitting under its shade; sale raton, “dirty little rat”; hence, later, the odious expression ratonnade, rat-hunt, or Arab-killing (not to be confused with ratissage).
[3] Following the Anglo-American arrival in 1942 the Pétainist measures were swiftly reversed.
CHAPTER THREE
In the Middle of the Ford
In this admirable country in which a spring without equal covers it with flowers and its light, men are suffering hunger and demanding justice.
Albert Camus, 1958
France’s gift to Algeria — education
THERE was never a shortage of motives for political discontent among the Algerian Muslims to explain the Sétif explosion of 1945, but close behind them always lay equally cogent economic factors (and, associated with them, those of training and education). These were to become acutely aggravated between 1945 and 1954. Before one dissects the deficiencies, however, one needs briefly to pay tribute to the truly remarkable material achievements that France had wrought in Algeria during the course of her tenancy of a century and a quarter. Even a decade after the ending of France’s rule, a visitor to Algeria could not help but be impressed by the depth of the roots her civilisation left behind; an excellent network of roads often as good in quality as those of France, and over terrain as difficult as anywhere in the world; modern railways and airfields; great cities and a score of ports; electricity and gas and a (slightly less efficient) telecommunications system. She created a medical service and imposed standards of hygiene where none had existed. In agriculture, she increased the 2,000 cultivable square miles of 1830 to 27,000 in 1954; with her capital and know-how, she dug mines and set up vast industries that would not otherwise have existed; she provided jobs in France for several hundred thousand Algerian immigrant workers, and subsidised some eighty per cent of the country’s budget deficit.
Perhaps the greatest of France’s gifts to Algeria, however — as elsewhere in her sprawling empire, and, indeed, anywhere caressed by her culture — was education. And yet, paradoxically, both at its strongest as at its weakest points, French education tended to bolster her opponents at France’s expense. At its weakest, it was simply a matter of too few schools, too few teachers, and too little money to provide them. As far back as 1892, while the budget earmarked 2½ million francs for the schooling of European children, only 450,000 francs was allocated for the vastly more numerous and illiterate — and therefore more needy — Muslims. Over the years the situation showed little change; except that the numbers of the Muslims and their educational needs expanded ever more dramatically. By 1945, the picture was as follows:
Europeans: 200,000 children of school age at 1,400 primary schools.
Muslims: 1,250,000 children of school age at 699 primary schools.
By 1954 it was estimated that, of the Muslims, only one boy in five was attending school, and one in sixteen among girls (though in some country areas the ratio could rise as high as one in seventy); illiteracy (in French) was set at ninety-four per cent for the males, ninety-eight per cent for the females. Sometimes, also, the priorities of the funds actually spent on education looked bizarre; in 1939 Camus acidly criticised the construction in Kabylia of magnificent school buildings, costing the taxpayer up to one million francs apiece, yet seemingly designed chiefly to impress “tourists and commissions of enquiry”, and which, because of lack of space, had to turn away one in every five applicants.
Excellent as was the general standard of French education, its content sometimes struck Arabs and Berbers as painfully incongruous: as for instance the history text-books beginning “Our ancestors, the Gauls.…” And then they were sooner or later confronted by the inevitable factor of discrimination; Ahmed Ben Bella recalls that in his childhood at Marnia he “did not feel the difference between Frenchmen and Algerians as much as I later did at Tlemcen”, because in the first football teams were integrated, whereas in the latter Europeans and Muslims each had their own. The little French learning was also dangerous, in that it aroused a powerful appetite for more; and it threatened (because of economic problems) to create a class of “literate unemployed”. In words that could have applied to more than just education, an old Kabyle complained sadly to Germaine Tillion: “You’ve led us to the middle of the ford, and there you’ve left us.…”
Furthermore, with its traditional emphasis on the grandiose liberal principles of the “Great French Revolution”, French education could hardly help but divert perhaps otherwise passive minds to the nobility of revolt. M’hamed Yazid, one of the more intellectual F.L.N. leaders, notes that school heroes for his generation included Mustafa Kemal, Gandhi and the Irish rebels of the First World War. At their best, the French schools provided an admirable breeding ground for revolutionary minds. In a novel by Mourad Bourboune, Le Mont des Genêts (1962), a French official tells a young Muslim évolué that he is now too French to continue to wear a burnous, and receives the devastating reply: “It’s not with you but against you that we are learning your language.”
The shrinking land…
Without schools you cannot have industrialisation and, for all French endeavours to this end, agriculture remained the mainstay of Algerian life. But, successful as French technology had been at opening up new lands by drainage or irrigation, it continued to provide
a precarious living of ever-diminishing returns. As the European slice of the cake grew, so, relatively speaking, the Muslim slice shrank. Since 1830 the area of cultivable land owned by Muslims had almost doubled; but the population trebled. In 1956 Germaine Tillion reckoned that the country could feed no more than “between two and three million”; and there were then almost nine million Muslims alone. By 1954 some twenty-five per cent of all the farming land was reputedly owned by only two per cent of the total agricultural population. (Of the country’s total wealth at that date, ninety per cent was accounted as held in the hands of ten per cent of the inhabitants.) With growing mechanisation and efficiency, whereas before the First World War over 200,000 pieds noirs lived off the land, by 1954 the figure had sunk to 93,000; and, naturally, the numbers of Muslim labourers to whom they gave employment had shrunk correspondingly. At the same time, the size of the individual European holdings had increased markedly in size. In the Department of Oran alone, 750 Europeans owned between them 55,832 hectares, while on average the vineyard of Algeria was notably larger than its French counterpart. In contrast, as a result of hereditary governances, it was not unusual to find in over-populated Kabylia one fig tree owned by several families. The statistics (from reliable French sources) relating to the average Algerian farm holding in 1954 are eloquent:
European Muslim
Size in hectares 123.7 11.6
Annual earnings (approx) £2,800 £100
The creation of the Algerian wine industry, following the phylloxera catastrophe in France, had only added to the agricultural imbalance. Although it had come to account for half of Algeria’s exports to France and had granted considerable economic power to the wine lobby (as personified by Senator Borgeaud), it hardly helped the economic predicament of the Muslims, providing him with but little steady work, and producing a crop which did not nourish him and offended his religion. After the Second World War acute and growing over-production set in, forcing the French treasury to intervene and subsidise surplus stocks, costing annually (according to Le Monde of 17 August 1955) a sum “equivalent to the total value of credits voted to Youth and Sports since 1946”.
The official Maspétiol Report of 1955, which deeply shocked the French government, revealed that nearly one million Muslims (or one in nine of the overall population) were totally or partially unemployed, and that another two million were seriously underemployed; in the country this meant that the agricultural worker worked no more than an average of sixty-five days a year — or thirty-five days if female labour were included in the reckoning. The human consequences of these bald statistics were devastating: before the war (admittedly in a time of famine) Camus had found in Kabylia families where only two out of ten children survived; he had seen children in Tizi-Ouzou fighting with dogs for the contents of a rubbish bin, and had reckoned that at least half the population was living on nothing but grass and roots. Since then, conditions had improved, but still a large proportion of the Kabyles could not support their large families on their meagre earnings, and lived themselves in grinding poverty at subsistence level. Malnutrition induces lethargy at work, which doubtless could to a large extent explain the commonly held pied noir notion that the Algerian worker was, by nature, indolent and idle.
When he was able to find a day’s work, the Algerian agricultural worker would often earn no more than 100 (old) francs a day (about 2s. or 22¢), and in other walks of life the prospects were not much rosier. For a Muslim average earnings throughout Algeria were estimated at 16,000 francs a year — whereas the European equivalent was 450,000 francs, or nearly thirty times as high. At the same time, the taxes he paid on his meagre pittance seemed unfairly weighted. It was reckoned that the 100,000 most impoverished Algerian families might be milked of twelve per cent of their incomes; while at the other end of the scale the 14,000 best off (of whom 10,000 were European), with incomes five times higher than the average for French families, were called upon to pay only twenty-nine per cent of earnings vastly larger than those of the Muslims. But at the same level in France they would have paid thirty-three per cent. Nevertheless, to escape from a life that held little prospect on the land, as in the poorer countries of Latin America the Algerian peasantry gravitated increasingly towards the cities. Here they found that nearly half of all available jobs in industry were firmly occupied by the pied noir eleven per cent, while twenty-five per cent of the urban Muslims were unemployed. The results were that during the twelve years between 1936 and 1948, as an example, the population of Algiers soared by forty-two per cent and with it the mushrooming of wretched bidonvilles and the simmering of new kinds of urban discontent.
The next logical haven for the agrarian jobless was France herself. The largest numbers came from Kabylia, the most overcrowded region of Algeria and where land-hunger had long been most acute; in 1912, only 5,000 Kabyles left for France; by 1924 they had risen to 100,000. But after 1945 economic adversity pushed the immigrant waves to new heights, and by the outbreak of the revolt the total of Algerian workers in France was over the half-million mark. Economically they were a godsend to Algeria; the wages they sent home equalled about a third of those of the whole agricultural labour force in Algeria, and at home they sustained some million and a half of otherwise indigent dependents. Equally, for France they provided a source of cheap labour for the work of reconstruction in the less agreeable tasks — such as road-building, ditch-digging and rail-laying — where a Frenchman might be more choosy. But usually they were forced to live in the worst city slums of Paris or Marseilles, in family-less celibacy and dispiriting isolation in overcrowded tenement houses. Their contacts with French life would often be limited to members of the Communist Party and other disgruntled proletarian militants, so that when they returned to Algeria they brought with them seeds of more coherent discontent, awaiting germination.
… and exploding birthrate
The most ineradicable cause of all Algeria’s economic woes from 1945 onwards, the factor constantly nullifying any French ideal or scheme of improving things had one simple, insoluble root: the net Muslim birthrate. At the time of the conquest the indigenous population stood at somewhere less than three million; then a combination of war, disease and disastrous famine reduced it by fifty per cent. But by 1906 it had re-established itself at 4,478,000, and from then on it began to take off, as European medical prowess made its impact. Such population inhibitors as malaria, typhoid and typhus all but disappeared; infant mortality shrank to a percentage not far from that of metropolitan France; penicillin became known as “the drug that brings children”, for it stamped out venereal diseases causing sterility. According to figures cited by Robert Aron, if between 1830 and 1950 the population of France had risen at the same rate as that of Algeria, it would by then have reached more than 300 million. As it was, by 1954 the Muslim Algerians numbered nearly nine million, and were increasing in a geometrical progression. Over the previous twenty years the urban population had more than doubled, and it was reckoned that it would double again over the next twenty years — which, but for the war losses, it probably would have done.[1] With one of the highest net birthrates in the world, the Muslims were estimated to be breeding at ten times the rate of the pieds noirs — hence the very real basis of their fears of being demographically “swamped”, for they could reasonably reckon that, within the next generation, instead of representing eleven per cent of the total population they would have shrunk to a mere five per cent. Here also, by extension, lay one of the root sources of opposition in metropolitan France to a policy of “assimilation”, or “integration”; for, by the end of the twentieth century, what kind of France would there be if she were wedded inextricably to an Algeria by now of almost equal population, and increasing more rapidly, and with equal rights and representation in all her councils?
As a summing up on how Algerians viewed the material benefits bestowed on them by France in 1944, the words of Messali Hadj strike a relevant note: “The achievement of France is self-evident. It lea
ps to the eyes, and it would be unjust to deny it; but if the French have done a lot, they did it for themselves.” Or, phrased perhaps even more succinctly by a Frenchman, Robert Aron: “France did much for Algeria, too little for the Algerians.”
France distracted
But if she stands accused of doing “too little for the Algerians”, it would be only fair to consider the problems — beyond the ever-present nightmare of Algeria’s demographic explosion just discussed — confronting France from 1945 onwards. The world has become so accustomed to a strong, rich and politically stable France as it was under de Gaulle that it is easy to forget the prolonged malaises of the Fourth Republic (which in so many ways resembled those of Britain of the mid-1970s); equally one forgets her quite spectacular feats of reconstructing an economy gravely mauled by war, and of uniting a broken Europe. In 1945 de Gaulle warned his countrymen that it would take “a whole generation of furious work” to resuscitate the nation, and his estimate proved to be remarkably accurate. In his Memoirs of Hope he describes how “a few months after victory, the State was on its feet, unity re-established, hope revived, France in her place in Europe and the world”. But then, “the parties had reappeared, to all intents and purposes with the same names, the same illusions, and the same hangers-on as before. While displaying towards my person the respect which public opinion demanded, they lavished criticism on my policies.” Exasperated by the wheeling and dealing identical to that which had so disastrously undermined the Third Republic during the inter-war years, on 20 January 1946 he suddenly resigned the premiership with that hauteur, just tinged with the irresponsible, which characterised both his earlier and later career. He had not, he remarked with crushing causticity to one of his ministers, liberated France “to worry about the macaroni ration”.
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