[Karelian]

Postwar Africa III: The Algerian Problem of the French Union


"We find ourselves...under the moral obligation to prove, by way of effective economic, social and political reforms, that France moves with her time, understands its demands, and that, far from remaining unappreciative of the aspirations of the peoples whom she governs, she means to integrate these peoples within the nation, but within an enlarged nation, where all will be equal before the law and will be free to choose the institutions which suit their personality and particular needs..."
Paul Giacobbi, CFLN Constituent Assembly 1946

One does not compromise when it comes to defending the internal peace, the unity and integrity of the nation. The Algerian departments are part of the French Union. They have been French for a long time, and they are irrevocably French . . . Between them and the rest of the Union there can be no conceivable secession.
Pierre Mendès-France, UF Minister of Foreign Affairs, 1954

To both foreign observers and locals alike it was clear that there was trouble brewing in Algeria during the winter 1945-46. The whole area was restless, waiting for whatever the uncertain future would have in store for this area that had for more than a hundred years been the most important colony of France. The current troubles facing Algeria where therefore fueled only partially by a poor wheat harvest, shortages of manufactured goods, and severe unemployment. The roots of the problems Algeria faced in late 1940s reached much deeper to the bitter history of the region. Algeria had lost roughly one-third of its population during the forty years filled with fighting, famines and rebellions between the first French invasion and the end of major native uprisings in the mid-1870s. This subjugation of local resistance had been followed by a large-scale confiscation of all cultivable land in the coastlines. These lands were then filled by European immigrants from France, Spain, Italy and Malta. Gradually the rule of the French colons had created a situation where these pieds noirs had became a privileged minority that was firmly rooted in Algeria, their sole homeland. This made this influential group to fiercely oppose all reforms that would alter the balance of power between the roughly million-strong pieds noir population and the much larger, oppressed Muslim majority.

Thus it was no wonder that the mood in Algeria was extremely tense when the news of the Zürich Accord reached the region in 1946. As the masses of more than 250 000 conscripted Algerian soldiers where now returning home from the inconclusive war where they had fought and died for France many had never ever seen, their leaders remembered well how General Charles de Gaulle had declared two years earlier in Brazzaville that "France was under an obligation to the Muslims of North Africa because of the loyalty they had shown." During the gradual demobilization of French armies in Italy, the French citizenship was indeed extended to certain categories of Algerian Muslims but this largely symbolical gesture did little to ease the underlying tensions in Algeria. In many ways the situation was similar to 1920s, when the postwar changes in the economical and political situation in Algeria and the return of Algerian veterans from the Great War had created a situation where new political movements had finally emerged from the growing Algerian dissatisfaction with the status quo.

Cooperation, nationalism or Islam?

The postwar Algerian nationalism developed out of the efforts of three different groups that all had taken shape during the 1920s. The first consisted of Algerians who had gained access to French education and earned their living in the French public sector. Often called assimilationists, they pursued gradualist, reformist tactics, shunned illegal actions and violence, were prepared to consider permanent union with France if the rights of Frenchmen could be extended to native Algerians. This group was loosely organized under the name of Young Algerians.

The second group consisted of Muslim reformers who were inspired by the religious Salafî movement founded in the late 19th century in Egypt by Sheikh Muhammad ´Abduh. AUMA, Association des Uléma Musulmans Algériens (The Association of Algerian Muslim Ulama) had been organized in 1931 under the leadership of Sheikh ´Abd al-Hamid Ben Badis. This group was not a political party in itself, but it nevertheless sought to create a strong sense of Muslim Algerian nationality among the Algerian masses.

The third group was much more radical in nature. It had been originally organized among Algerian workers in France in the 1920s under the leadership of Ahmed Messali Hadj and with the name Étoile Nord-Africaine, The Star of North Africa. After the French authorities had disbanded this movement in 1937, its founders had soon reorganized their ranks and formed the PPA, Parti du Peuple Algerien (Algerian People's Party). During the war and the struggle of power between Vichy and CFLN authorities the organization had been mostly waiting and gathering strength, but right after the war it became one of the most active political forces in postwar Algeria, much to the dismay of French authorities.

The ultimate goals of the three movements had many similarities but also crucial differences, reflecting the fact that Algerian political elite was far from unified in the postwar situation. The fact that prewar colonial system had prevented emergence of any group with sufficient self-confidence and popular credibility to set the goals and obtain the leadership of a nationalistic mass movement was now affecting to the way the divided locals sought to organize themselves into various factions and political movements. Until the middle 1930s and the war era, the évolués of the Young Algerian reform program had dominated the native side of the Franco-Algerian political relations. While they initially neither inspired nor spoke for more than a small minority of their Algerian compatriots in the postwar situation, these members of the French-trained elite still represented the first natives that had entered to the politics of Algeria. They were also determined to maintain their prominent place in postwar Algerian politics and were in a good position to do so because of their superior French education, the support they received from French liberals and the fact that the other political forces in Algeria had long been either actively persecuted by the French authorities (PPA) or were uninterested in participating daily politics (AUMA).

In the postwar political climate the évolués were still trying to achieve the same goals they had set in Fédération Program published in September 1927:
*Extension of metropolitan social legislation to Algeria
*Abolition of the indigénat
*Equal payment for equal work in the bureucracy
*Development of academic and vocational education
*Reorganization of election procedures in the communes mixtes
*Native representation in Parliament
*Equality of terms of military service


Son of a poor agrarian family, Messali Hadj had been imprisoned for his nationalist agigation in 1937 and roughly ten years later he sought to utilize the political turmoil of Algeria by organizing new political groups to promote his vision of fully independent, free Algerian state.

This program was relatively mild when compared to the strongly nationalistic stance taken by the radical PPA, calling for "complete and immediate independence" from French colonial rule, freedom of press and association, a parliament chosen through universal suffrage, confiscation of large estates, and the institution of Arabic schools.

Meanwhile the program of Islamic reformers called for a purification of Islam by returning to its roots in the Qur´an and the early Sunna of the Prophet. It stressed the necessity of opening the Islamic community to the spirit of modern scholarly inquiry and scientific method. Reformer program also promoted allegiance to Arab ancestors, to Arabic language and to the Arab "métropole" in the east, thus bringing the organization to direct conflict with the évolué notion that salvation for Algerian Muslims lay in future cooperation with French culture. One of the main ideologists of the AUMA, Ahmad Tawfiq al-Madani had written the well-known Kitab al jaza´ir (Book of Algeria) that begun with the preface that was basically a rant against "the absurdity of supposing that two peoples with totally different customs, language and history can ever be one." This book also gave the reformist movement a new slogan that was soon recited by pupils in all Qur´anic schools founded by the reformist movement through Algeria: "Islam is my religion, Arabic is my language, Algeria is my fatherland." While the movement did much to stimulate the renewal of Algerian Islam in a formal sense, it never attracted a broad following. Its main contribution to postwar Algerian politics was the idea that the Algerians belonged to a distinct nation with its own specific culture and glorious past, which could never be confounded in another. As noted before, the évolué position was completely opposite one: Ferhat Abbas wrote that "after questioning history, the living and the dead and visiting the cemeteries, I have concluded that the Algerian fatherland did never exist and therefore we should link our future definitively with that of France." Reformists responded by publishing an article that stated that Algerian nation did exist, and that nation "is not France, cannot be France, and does not wish to be France."

Algerian Manifesto and the rise of the UDMA and MTLD

Ultimately the Algerian domestic politics in late 1940s became a two-man show: Ferhat Abbas and his évolué supporters promoting increased autonomy and independence through cooperation and assimilation were opposed by Messali Hadj and the radical nationalist PPA. Abbas has initiated his political career as a moderate assimilationist, and he had great hopes towards the Blum-Viollette proposals made by the Popular Front in 1937. Settler opposition to the extremely limited measures of these proposals had been so fierce that the project was never even brought to a vote in the French Chamber of Deputies. Disillusioned by these turn of events in 1938, Abbas and his colleagues organized the Union Populaire Algérienne, which promoted equal rights for French and Algerians while also focusing for preserving the Algerian culture and language.

The next major step on Algerian politics arrived alongside with the Allied troops. On Feb. 10, 1943, the "Manifesto of the Algerian People", prepared by Abbas, was proclaimed. It was subsequently presented to the French and the Allied authorities in North Africa. The manifesto, which reflected a fundamental change in its author's political position, not only condemned French colonial rule but also called for the application of the principle of self-determination and demanded an Algerian constitution granting equality to all inhabitants of Algeria. In May, Abbas, along with a number of his colleagues, wrote an addendum to the manifesto, which envisioned a sovereign Algerian nation. It was presented to the French on June 26, when the frontlines had moved on to Italy and Soviet Union had withdrawn from the war. After the conservative French Governor-General of Algeria had rejected the document and its demands out of hand, Ferhat Abbas and Messali Hadj organized the Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberté (AML; Friends of the Manifesto and Liberty), a pressure group that promoted the idea of an Algerian autonomous republic federated to a renewed, anti-colonial France. Despite this cooperation Abbas and Hadj found themselves in a postwar situation where the political movements they led were beginning to view one another as the most serious obstacle of fulfilling their conflicting visions for the future of Algeria.


A son of a wealthy family of landowning provincial administrators, Ferhat Abbas accepted the middle-class évolué movement that supported politics of colonial reform and assimilation.

After the end of WWII in 1946 Abbas once again led the reorganization of assimilationist-minded and évolué-led political forces, forming the Union Démocratique du Manifeste Algérien (UDMA; Democratic Union of the Algerian Manifesto), which advocated cooperation with French in the formation of the Algerian state. For the first time during his long political career, these moderate and conciliatory attempts were now receiving sympathetic response and official support from the French CFLN colonial officials, and the UDMA was allowed to organize and campaign rather freely in the tense municipal elections of 1946. This sudden change in French colonial policy was linked to the support CFLN authorities gave to the rise of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain in the French colonial federations of AOF and AEF. The logic behind this new position was based on the hope that the radical nationalism of populists like Messali Hadj could be checked or at least limited by gradualist évolué reformers like Ferhat Abbas if they could be able to show to the illiterate masses (according to some estimations 86% Algerian men 95% of Algerian women were still illiterate in 1946!) that step-by-step decolonization and liberalization was possible.

Elections of 1946 and their aftermatch

In 1946 most Algerians, excluding the colons, were still subject to rule by military officers organized into Arab Bureaus, led by colonial officers with knowledge of local affairs and of the language of the people but with no direct financial interest in the colony. In 1946 these officers tended to have Free French background and they often sympathized with the outlook of the people they administered and were more keen to listen to them than the demands of the European colonists. The paradox of postwar French Algeria was thus the notion that this despotic military rule initially offered the native Algerians a better situation than prewar civilian and democratic government had done in previous decades. The CFLN Constituent Assembly voted for a statute on Algeria on March 20, 1947, in which the country was defined as "a group of departments endowed with a civic personality, financial autonomy, and a special organization." The tensions in Algeria mounted as the new constitution draft created an Algerian assembly with 120 members, representing some 1.9 million Europeans and Algeria's 9 million Muslims. As a part of the new constitution Muslims were finally considered full French citizens with the right to keep their personal religious beliefs. Military territories in the south would be abolished, and Arabic would become the language of educational instruction at all levels.


Muslims of Algeria greeted the formation of French Union with utter joy, while the pied noir population openly accused CFLN leadership for "betraying them and everything that France stands for."

The sweeping victory of Ferhat Abbas Union Démocratique du Manifeste Algérien in the 1946 municipal elections frightened the colons, whose political leaders attempted to obtain a result more favorable to them in the following year's first Algerian Assembly voting through fraud and intimidation. During the next year the term élection algérienne indeed became a synonym for rigged election. Ultimately after violence-ridden political campaign and mass demonstrations, UDMA gained fourty-six seats, Messali Hajd's new MTLD (Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Libertes Democratiques) was given seventeen, and government-approved "independents" were awarded with the remaining fifty-eight seats, thus conslidation the position of UDMA while keeping the European minority in a position of power within the new political structure. These results may have reassured some of the colons that the nationalists had been rejected by the Muslim community, but actually the elections suggested to many PPA supporters that a peaceful solution to Algeria's problems would not be possible as long as the French authorities would control the state authorities.

Messali Hajd's decision to present slates of candidates in the Algerian Assembly elections of 1947 after years of urging Algerians to boycott elections spread confusion within the party and among other Algerians who looked to the party for direction. Why did the PPA chose to engage in the electoral games promoted by the CFLN? This sudden change was the result of the first party congress of PPA, held in February 1947. Here it was decided that newly created political wing (MTLD) would pursue the route of electoral politics, making whatever rhetorical and tactical compromises necessary to be effective in that arena. The PPA itself would continue at a secret level for the purposes of cultivating the movements nationalistic purity and quietly communicating to Algerians that, although public statements might of necessity change from time to time, the goal of absolute independence within an Arab-Islamic framework remained unaltered. The most important decision was the creation of a secret paramilitary structure in the form of Organization Spéciale, with a mission to explore the possibilities for revolutionary action in the likely case where the ballot box-route to power would remain closed.

But while the forces of Algerian politics schemed and planned, the actual Algerian Assembly that now assemled for the first time faced a rough start plagued with serious challenges and problems. The fundamental flaw of this new parliament was its limited competence, excluding defense, elections, local government, administrative and judicial organization, civil and penal procedure, land policy and customs. Its bills required promulgation by decree of the Governor General who was appointed by the UF government. Despite this the Assembly was able to bring about the swift abolition of the communes mixtes and the southern military territories as well as bringing about substantial extension of Arabic language exucation. In the last years of the 1940s the society of Algeria was thus experiencing fast-paced and radical changes, and despite the seemingly calm reforms and the success of new extented local autonomy the security situation in the region was deteriorating fast, and when the Suez Crisis escalated to Middle-Eastern War in 1951, the UF leadership was allready silently preparing for what seemed to be a stormy future.


As de Gaulle seemed to be willing to abanon the pied noir interests for his ambitions of turning the former French colonies into a new federation that he would personally lead, it is not surprising that many Algerian pied noirs begun to look north in their search of potential supporters. While the ongoing civil war between the Vichy authorities and Resistance brought increasing number of French political refugees to Algeria the notorious Vichy secret service CIG, Centre d'Information Gouvernementale, kept sending in its own infiltrators and extended its networks in Algeria.