Recent Work on Colonial Violence in French Algeria
La prise de Constantine by Horace Vernet (1838)
“And from the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.”
Introduction
Hannah Arendt’s 1969 observation that violence, despite its ubiquity in human history, had been “singled out so seldom for special consideration” was only partly accurate. [1] War and warfare had generated abundant scholarship, but such work dealt, as she put it, with “the implements of violence, not with violence as such.” [2] The half-century since the publication of On Violence has produced a substantial corrective, particularly within the discipline of history.
French history has been no exception, shaped in part by what has become a contested but durable “colonial turn” in the scholarship. [3] This paper surveys recent historical work on colonial violence in French Algeria, concentrating on monographs published since 2007. I begin with the intellectual trajectories that brought scholars, from the mid-twentieth century onward, to treat French imperial violence—especially in the Maghreb—with the kind of sustained empirical attention it demands. I then turn to four monographs that collectively deepen our understanding of colonial violence from the initial conquest in 1830 through the formal end of the Algerian War in 1962. The selection is representative rather than exhaustive. Benjamin Claude Brower’s A Desert Named Peace (2009) opens the Algerian Sahara—long neglected in French imperial historiography—to sustained analysis of physical and structural violence. Jennifer E. Sessions’s By Sword and Plow (2011) reconstructs the ideological infrastructure that made conquest legible, and eventually necessary, to metropolitan audiences. Judith Surkis’s Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria (2019) traces the juridico-discursive regimes through which colonial sovereignty alternately asserted itself and undermined its own coherence. Joshua Cole’s Lethal Provocation (2019) reconstructs the 1934 Constantine massacres as an event generated by deliberate provocation rather than atavistic communal hatred. What these four texts share is a methodological premise—that colonial violence resists reduction to a single logic, a single set of actors, or a stable hierarchy of perpetrators and victims—and in demonstrating this, each shows what remains possible when historical scholarship takes seriously both the specificity of the archive and the weight of structural analysis.
Intellectual Trajectories of French Colonial Studies
Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper’s 1997 introduction to Tensions of Empire, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” remains an indispensable orientation to the problems this historiography addresses. [4] In fifty-six pages, Stoler and Cooper subjected what had been a dominant tendency in colonial historiography—the tendency, through various methods, to reinscribe the very colonizer/colonized dichotomy scholars were ostensibly analyzing—to sustained critical examination. That dichotomy, they argued, neither reflected the complexity of the lived colonial experience nor was it consistently borne out in the colonial archive, even in cases of extreme subjugation. What scholarship needed was “to attend more directly to the tendency of colonial regimes to draw a stark dichotomy of colonizer and colonized without themselves falling into such a Manichean conception.” [5] The essay called for attentiveness to what Stoler and Cooper described as a fundamental “tension of empire”: that historians should examine “how a grammar of difference was continuously and vigilantly crafted as people in colonies refashioned and contested European claims to superiority.” [6] Scholarship in the 1990s had begun to surface the fact that “the tensions between the exclusionary practices and universalizing claims of bourgeois culture were crucial to shaping the age of empire.” [7]
Stoler and Cooper identified four methodological orientations that had governed colonial scholarship up to their writing. Work in the mid-1970s was largely committed to an economistic or Marxian political economy. Scholarship of the late 1980s and 1990s theorized what they called a “repressive model of history,” in which European colonizers treated non-European landscapes as a colonial playground for Orientalist projection. [8] A third tendency, associated especially with Paul Rabinow (1989) and Gwendolyn Wright (1991), understood the colony as a “laboratory of modernity” for social engineering. [9] A fourth, drawn from cultural and literary studies, emphasized that colonies furnished “the Other against whom the very idea of Europeanness was expressed,” an orientation most closely linked to Edward Said (1978). [10] Each of these tendencies, taken alone, risked overstatement. Stoler and Cooper called instead for an approach that combined newer attentiveness to cultural and discursive analysis with a renewed commitment to the less glamorous work of political economy and archival research. The colonizer/colonized binary was, after all, itself a historical artifact: when historians “engage colonial archives further,” they discover “how much protracted debate, how much political and cultural energy went into defining dichotomies and distinctions that did not have the predicted effects.” [11] Colonial states, they concluded, “were often in the business of defining an order of things according to untenable principles that themselves undermined their ability to rule.” [12]
The emergence of this critical scholarship was probably connected, they suggested, to a “growing disillusionment with the entire range of progressivist ideologies.” [13] A critical reading of colonial texts had “gradually become a way of showing that cultural domination, racist exclusivity, and violence were written into modernizing, nationalist, and socialist projects.” [14] But even before the theoretical turns of the 1980s and 1990s, some scholars had been working toward new analytic fields in the turbulent climate of the Cold War—in the shadow of modernization theory’s failures and the institutional enclave of “area studies.” [15] George Balandier’s seminal 1951 essay “La situation coloniale” is the crucial case. Balandier argued that the colonial situation had to be understood in its own right, as the cultural and political construction of a particular historical moment, and that colonizers were part of that story rather than merely its background. [16] His agenda went largely unheeded at the time. As Frederick Cooper documents in “The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Colonial Studies, 1951–2001,” the Cold War’s psychologizing of the colonial situation effectively silenced Balandier’s critique; it was not until the anthropological work of the 1980s that one can see “a return to the agenda that Balandier left on the table thirty years previously.” [17]
The state of French colonial history received periodic synthetic treatment across the following decade. Robert Aldrich and Daniel J. Sherman published review articles on the renewal of scholarly interest in French colonialism in 2002 and 2000, respectively. [18] Alice Conklin updated those syntheses in a 2007 review article surveying French colonial scholarship produced in the first decade of the 2000s. [19] Conklin drew an important distinction between research conducted by colonial historians, those, like Elizabeth Thompson, Peter Zinoman, and Gregory Mann, who worked primarily from non-European archives and fieldwork, and French historians interested in colonial questions, such as Eric Jennings, J. P. Daughton, and Emmanuelle Sibeud, whose “discrete groups of French colonizers” constituted the primary research focus. [20] The present historiography falls largely into the second category, though it acknowledges the debt it owes to the first.
Conklin opened her article by invoking Stephen Howe’s observation that there is not one new imperial history of Britain but several, a remark that applied with equal force to the French case. [21] The diversity Howe identified in sources, methods, interdisciplinary approaches, and linguistic competencies was real, but it had also generated problems. Writing in the wake of Paul Gilroy’s 2004 After Empire, which argued that British national culture had been dominated since the end of World War II by an inability to confront, let alone mourn, the violence of empire,[22] Howe reviewed scholarship asking how “claims about colonial massacre, atrocity and genocide have been made, used and contested” in both the public sphere and in historical writing. [23] His conclusion was that “recent and present British contestations over colonial pasts significantly parallel the concurrent French ones,” even if the specific politics of memory differed. [24] In the French case, scholarship centered on colonial history was “sometimes seen as a direct and powerful challenge to central national ideas, especially republican universalism” [25]—a charge leveled, not always fairly, at historians who had fought back against what Gilroy would call postimperial melancholia. [26]
Conklin’s own argument concurred with Howe’s earlier observation that scholarship of the 1990s and 2000s had moved away from the abstraction of postcolonial theory, which had made “far less use of archival sources than previous work.” [27] Agreeing with Cooper’s criticism that certain key concepts—“globalization,” “identity,” “modernity”—had lost their analytical force through “excessive and often imprecise use,” she welcomed the empirical turn in French colonial scholarship while acknowledging what had been gained in the theoretical moment. [28] To Cooper’s trio, one might add “hybridity” (from Homi Bhabha), “culture” in its most generalized anthropological usage, and “power” in the sense that Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood have each subjected to critique. [29] Cooper’s own formulation of the underlying problem was precise: “discussion at the general level of the colonial does not tell us enough about the ways in which conflict and interaction have reconfigured imaginative and political possibilities.” [30] His “family description of empire,” an empire as “a political unit that is large, expansionist (or with memories of an expansionist past), and which reproduces differentiation and inequality among people it incorporates,” was an attempt to facilitate locally situated research without yielding to teleological narratives, whether Orientalist or nationalist. [31] What historians needed, Cooper argued, was a “critical and sensitive historical practice” capable of keeping “our focus on the possibilities of political imagination and the importance of accountability for the consequences of our actions.” [32]
Conklin’s response to Cooper’s critique was measured: by 2006, she suggested, his concerns were somewhat exaggerated in the French case, given the abundance of rigorously historical scholarship. [33] On this point, Stoler staked out a more combative position. Writing in 2006, she argued that “colonial studies” had “subscribed to a myopic view of empire that sidelines a wide range of imperial forms as anomalous,” thereby casting their political and territorial ambiguities as idiosyncratic. [34] Her corrective was to insist that “imperial formations” be understood as “macropolities whose technologies of rule thrive on the production of exceptions and their uneven and changing proliferation.” [35] Despite their divergent emphases, Cooper and Stoler arrived at compatible definitions of empire, and the scholarship surveyed here has largely held both commitments simultaneously; it attends to the local without losing sight of the structural, and engaging the archive without capitulating to its categories. [36]
Physical Violence
Benjamin Claude Brower’s A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902 is in many respects a companion to Julia Clancy-Smith’s 1994 Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800–1904). [37] Both texts push back against the colonizer/colonized dichotomy, the reinscription of which (in Stoler and Cooper’s analysis) historians risk producing in the very practice of scholarship if they are insufficiently vigilant. Brower’s introduction offers a précis of the French invasion and conquest of the Algerian Tell, traces the political motivations behind the 1830 conquest, [38] charts the flash points of extreme violence between 1830–38 and 1839–47, and sets out the theoretical and methodological orientation for his study of the Algerian Sahara, the desert region lying to the south.
The book’s structure borrows from William Faulkner: Brower describes it as “a single story, several times told.” [39] This formulation is somewhat misleading, since the most consequential contribution of A Desert Named Peace is its introduction of the Sahara, long overlooked in French imperial historiography, as a site of colonial domination in its own right. In a review, Emmanuelle Saada argued that the book’s greatest merit was its “polyphonic description of the violence committed by different populations, without presupposing a ‘colonial action’ followed by ‘indigenous reactions.’” [40] That archival polyphony, what Saada called, suggestively, a kind of heteroglossia, is central to Brower’s method. He acknowledges the national and linguistic constraints of the French colonial archive while insisting on the “infinitely complex” diversity it nevertheless contains, a multilayered assembly of voices and contexts deserving examination on their own terms. [41]
The analytical center of A Desert Named Peace is the argument that “violence is not a singular phenomenon” and that it “assumes many forms.” [42] Colonial space in Algeria never produced a single logic governing how, when, or why violence was inflicted, and French imperial domination was never projected uniformly across the colonial field. This multiplicity of logics requires a multi-regional approach, justified partly by Algeria’s unusual status as a “Mediterranean borderland.” [43] State power in the Algerian Sahara never formed what Brower calls a “seamless institution,” [44] and never achieved the “robust disciplinary grid” that French politicians and bureaucrats sometimes claimed. This finding amounts to a pointed rejection of any Foucauldian model of colonial biopower in this period. [45] The modes of violence Brower documents “eluded the logic of colonial oppression and anticolonial resistance” and expressed a range of political strategies, anxieties, and hopes rather than anything reducible to a single structural logic. [46]
Rather than Foucault, Brower’s theoretical touchstone is Étienne Balibar, specifically the claim that “[there] are layers of violence which do not gravitate around the alternative of power versus counter-power, although they inevitably return to them—infect them, so to speak.” [47] Working toward a provisional rather than definitive understanding of colonial violence, Brower argues that such an understanding must “unfold in several stages”: [48] the historian must think about violence as a series of processes and as a “phenomenon with effects.” [49] He defines actors as “those who perpetrated and suffered the effects of violence, that is, its victims,” [50] and attends throughout to the relationship between physical force, political power, and the symbolic and structural violence analyzed by Pierre Bourdieu—himself an anthropologist who had done fieldwork in Algeria. [51]
The four parts of A Desert Named Peace trace the history of the Saharan lands that became part of France’s Algerian colony in the second half of the nineteenth century. [52] The first examines the conquest and the gap between the rhetoric of “pénétration pacifique” and the violence actually deployed on the ground, including the failure of Governor General Bugeaud to win the allegiance of Algerians opposed to him. After the mutiny at Biskra, the Chamber of Deputies registered its impatience: France, it wrote, “bears with reluctant patriotism the burdens of this conquest,” and ought to proceed through “negotiations and by the intermediary of indigenous leaders” rather than arms. [53] But the Chamber’s posture of “restricted occupation,” endorsed by Louis-Philippe, was no longer operative by the end of the 1830s, as “ambitious military leaders chafed under the limitations placed upon them.” [54] The Saint-Simonian Père Enfantin and others helped manufacture a vision of the Algerian Sahara consonant with “pénétration pacifique,” but the rhetorical work of imagining the desert as a fertile oasis did not translate into actual French knowledge of or access to it. [55] Bugeaud’s resignation in 1847, coinciding with the surrender of Abdelkader, briefly suggested the possibility of “a new chapter marked by peace and prosperity.” [56] The campaigns in Ksour (1847), Zaatcha (1849), and Laghouat (1852) swiftly dispelled that hope.
The second part centers on the 1861 uprising at Djelfa, led by the Sufi mystic Si Tayeb ben Bou Chandougha, which Brower uses to “rethink the national-resistance model of popular movements in the Middle East and to seek new ways to explain the dynamics of their violence.” [57] French imperialism in the trans-Saharan region was economically and socially destabilizing: the conquest of the Ouled Naïl disrupted the balance between nomadic and settled populations, and the appointment of exogenous leaders generated political disorder—“in the short term, the policy left local society without effective voices of direction and authority.” [58] The administration’s violence could be startlingly direct. At Djelfa, a caïd of the Ouled Naïl bore his subordination visibly: he was missing both ears, cut off by French troops in 1852, who collected them for the bounty the army paid on Algerian ears. [59]
Brower is careful not to let Si Tayeb’s revolt collapse into familiar interpretive categories. The attack, he writes, “neither fits neatly into a story of Islamic revolt nor one of colonial accommodation, and it does not match the paradigm presented in studies of national resistance.” [60] Si Tayeb’s motivations were at once socio-political and religious, driven by the need to demonstrate continued divine favor to his followers. [61] Ultimately, “economic insecurity unleashed a host of social tensions and crises that created conditions for conflict rather than assuring a Pax Francus. With daily existence having become precarious, and the fabric of the social order having frayed, the people of Algeria sought solutions by following increasingly dangerous paths.” [62] The third and fourth parts extend this analysis into the domain of indigenous slavery—where French abolition rhetoric coexisted with, and in practice sustained, the institution it claimed to oppose—and into the metropolitan cultural fantasies bound up with what Brower calls a “fascination with the extreme and the archaic”:[63] Trumelet’s apocalyptic “Sahara sublime” and Duveyrier’s romantic idealization of the Tuareg as desert medievalists, literary tropes whose limits became visible in the 1881 Flatters massacre. [64]
Ideological Violence
Jennifer E. Sessions’s By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (2011) belongs to the rigorously historical, methodologically pluralist tradition Conklin celebrated in her 2007 review. [65] Sessions understands the history of France’s colonies as integral rather than peripheral to metropolitan identity, and she is committed, like Cooper, to recovering causality rather than resting on description of abstract power relations: purely discursive approaches, she argues, vitiate “the explanatory force required to answer historical questions about empire’s origins.” [66] The book’s title borrows a phrase from Bugeaud; its argument engages the question of why French imperialists did what they did—and why metropolitan audiences accepted, even celebrated, what was done in their name.
Sessions enters this question by surveying the limits of established explanatory frameworks. Henri Brunschwig had argued in 1960 that French imperialism, unlike its British counterpart, was driven not by economic incentives but by “a passion for national honour and cultural extraversion,” expressed through the activities of “ambitious colonels and admirals conquering vast tracts of commercially insignificant territory.” [67] Sessions confirms Brunschwig’s negative conclusion: historians found that “the colonies offered little, if any net economic benefit and that empire impeded rather than promoted the development of capitalism,” and that decolonization “met with little opposition from business circles and caused no crisis of French capitalism.” [68] Conklin had urged scholars to attend more carefully to how evolving forms of capitalism shaped colonial and postcolonial conflicts, [69] but Sessions found that analysis of the colonial lobby shed little light on how empire’s image had developed through cultural fields—travel literature, advertising, film—that lay beyond political-institutional explanation. [70]
Sessions turns instead to “political culture,” deploying the concept in ways that echo Keith M. Baker’s usage in Inventing the French Revolution (1990): the “set of discourses or symbolic practices by which individuals and groups in any society articulate, negotiate, implement and enforce the competing claims they make on one another and upon the whole.” [71] Political culture, in Sessions’s analysis, “provided the map by which nineteenth-century Frenchmen made sense of the colonial conquest unfolding on their public squares, stages, canvases, and print stalls.” [72] What this approach opens up is a way of thinking about causality that economic and political-institutional frameworks could not provide.
The received view held that the Algerian conquest was, in Ageron’s phrase, “a makeshift expedient for internal political consumption, carried out by a government in difficulty seeking the prestige of a military victory.” [73] Sessions does not dispute that the regimes of both the Bourbon Restoration and the Orléanist July Monarchy were in difficulty; she shows, however, that the invasion was far from makeshift. It stood, she argues, “at a critical crossroads both between the ‘first’ and ‘second’ French empires, and between continental and overseas empire.” [74] Both regimes sought “to reconcile the revolutionary principles of popular sovereignty and participation with prerevolutionary ideals of kingship and royal authority,” turning to “aggressive warfare and overseas expansion” as a mechanism of legitimation. [75] Conquest was, in other words, a political technology—the means through which constitutional monarchy attempted to shore up its authority against competing claims.
The analysis of gender and sexuality is central to Sessions’s argument. Liberal critics of Charles X traversed the rhetoric of “Oriental despotism” to accuse the king of hypocrisy in his campaign against the dey of Algiers; for Louis-Philippe, legitimation required a more intricate balancing of meritocratic soldiering and monarchical authority. Sessions’s examination of Louis-Philippe’s five soldier-sons and the Musée Historique de Versailles brings Horace Vernet—an understudied painter commissioned to legitimize the July Monarchy—into view, revealing how artistic mentalities ultimately complicated rather than confirmed the political message they were meant to deliver. The atrocities committed by Bugeaud did not shake the legislature’s commitment to the Armée d’Afrique: French lawmakers “proved unwilling to refuse the budgetary requests of the Armée d’Afrique’s commanders or to reject plans for colonization.” [76] Instead, they endorsed “a colonization policy that enlisted thousands more French men to take up the struggle for domination in Algeria by the plow, rather than the sword.” [77] Sessions’s conclusion draws the ideological circuit closed: “If the Bonapartist vision of masculine citizenship helped to undermine the Orléans royal family’s claims to power, it also provided the legitimizing foundation for a large-scale project of settler colonialism in Algeria. Settlers and soldiers would become partners in making Algeria the jewel in the French imperial crown.” [78] The book’s second part shifts from cultural history to social history, examining the movement of French settlers into Algeria under government-sponsored migration schemes and finding that most were urban and north of the Massif Central—a demographic profile that complicates the agrarian mythology Bugeaud’s phrasing invoked.
Juridico-Discursive Violence
Judith Surkis’s Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930 is a colonial legal genealogy asking how the Franco-Algerian “Muslim question” became, in sustained and consequential ways, a sexual question. [79] The book works against “the work of historical forgetting in order to reveal the neglected memory of Muslim law in French law” [80]—in Howe’s terms, a contribution to anti-forgetting scholarship. [81]
More precisely, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty is a cultural history of imperial legality, tracing “how contests over the legal status of Algerian men and women were implicated in wider conflicts over French efforts to assert colonial sovereignty.” [82] Surkis’s source base is broad—French state archives, journalism, professional ethnographic writing, novels—and her argument extends the project begun in Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870–1920, which traced how women’s freedoms contracted in the shadow of the 1804 Napoleonic Civil Code.[83] In Sex, Law, and Sovereignty, French sexual fantasies about Algerian men and women do not remain confined to culture and art; they bleed “into the writing and practice of law.” [84]
Where the mature Foucault located power in forms diffuse enough to escape state capture, Surkis re-centers sovereignty—examining how legal writing and practice made “sovereignty’s contingency” visible by “highlighting legal indecision over the organization and regulation of sexual and familial order.” [85] The mechanisms were concrete. Algerian real estate considered desirable by colonizers was classified as le statut réel (real property law), subject to supposedly universal French civil law and thus more easily expropriated; the signification of Muslim difference through “masculine privilege” and ethnographic constructions of Algerian gender relations produced le statut personnel (personal status law), which effectively preserved an imagined sphere of Muslim private life even as it served the purposes of colonial land seizure.[86] The legacy of these “sexualized conceptions of Muslim legal difference” was durable. [87] Economic and political motivations alone cannot explain it; the legal formations Surkis analyzes were also “imbued with powerful affective investments.” [88]
Working out the significance of that affective dimension requires Surkis to think carefully about how colonial law actually functioned as a cultural and political formation. She argues that she must attend to “texts and trials” as documents that “refracted and ramified concerns that extended beyond the confines of technical legal argumentation on the one hand, and the interests of jurists and litigants in the colonial legal field on the other” [89]—precisely “to illustrate how contests over the legal status of Algerian men and women were implicated in wider conflicts over French efforts to assert colonial sovereignty.” [90] What she calls the “cultural life” of Algerian colonial law—“the material, political, and affective resources and resonances on which its elaboration and its powerful effects depended” [91]—shares significant features with Baker’s and Sessions’s “political culture.” The colonial legal field, like the metropolitan political one, was a site of continuous negotiation, projection, and displacement. French journalists and jurists, Surkis argues, regularly acted on “unrecognized desires and fantasies that were regularly displaced or projected onto Algerian men and women.” [92] Colonial law, she writes, “always relies on a compensatory fantasy, which is to say a denial of the inevitable gaps and uncertainties of knowledge entailed by rule over a distant and often defiant population.” [93]
In analyzing these affective dynamics, Surkis follows Stoler in arguing that libidinal investments in the colonial project were not merely incidental or metaphorical—not simply par for the course of colonial ideology—but were rather “at the heart of colonial governmentality.” [94] Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, she introduces the concept of the “extimate”—a “fascination with and jealousy of the Other’s excessive sexual pleasure that reveals deep-seated but unrecognizable desires within the self” [95]—to describe how French jurists and journalists projected desires they could not avow onto Algerian men and women. The “unacknowledged desire represents an intimate foreignness that is actually created, by the structure of social and psychic rules, as an integral excess”: [96] to acknowledge it would “rupture, to use the terminology of the Civil Code, both ‘public order’ and the subject of the law.” [97] A “totalizing and gendered fantasy of the Civil Code,” Surkis argues, “prompted such extimate projections.” [98]
The instabilities generated by this structure run through all eight chapters of the book. The opening chapter, “Bodies of French Algerian Law,” begins with the Colombon Affair of early 1832 and ends with the case of Aïcha, an Algerian Muslim woman who sought to convert to Catholicism. It establishes what will become the book’s central finding at the level of state policy: “the French colonial state consistently sought the assimilation not of Algerian people, but of Algerian land.” [99] The case of Aïcha shows that “contingency and uncertainty, as much as strategic planning, shaped Algeria’s legal order” [100] and that “gendered fantasies about women’s place in Muslim law and religion came to ground a regime of colonial law that was eventually adopted in 1834.” [101] The “period of uncertainty” was, in other words, “fantasmatically staged and provisionally resolved in law.” [102] Chapter two traces the construction of “Muslim legal, religious, and sexual difference” through the specter of polygamy; [103] chapter three examines the fabrication of the distinction between statut réel and statut personnel through “disingenuous rhetoric”; [104] and chapter four analyzes the weaponization of child marriage as a means of establishing French legal and civilizational supremacy. [105]
Chapters five through eight track the accumulated instabilities of this legal architecture. Chapter five examines how sex, gender, and civilizational difference inflected jurisdictional conflict between military and civilian authorities; [106] an 1891 case involving a military doctor’s charges against a fellow officer in the native cavalry shows that “the fantasmatic integrity of colonial legality, masculinity, and racial dignity remained precarious, vulnerable to charges of perversion and corruption, even as French domination appeared to be reaching its height.” [107] Chapter six analyzes the rare but deeply anxious cases of mixed marriage between European women and Algerian men. [108] Chapter seven surveys debates over colonial reform at the Algerian centenary, where the legislature’s refusal to extend political rights to Algerian Muslims illustrated how memory was weaponized for colonial ends. [109] Chapter eight turns to indigenous intellectual production—particularly in La Voix des humbles—contesting French romantic mythologies of Algerian womanhood. [110] Across all four chapters, a legal system premised on fantasmatic coherence was continuously destabilized by the encounters it was designed to manage. In this way, Surkis’s argument about the contingency of French imperial sovereignty shares significant parallels with Sessions’s analysis of the post-Revolutionary quest for political legitimation—both scholars showing that the colonial project was not merely constrained by metropolitan politics but constituted by its failures.
Inter-Communal Violence
Joshua Cole’s Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria (2019) provides a forensic reconstruction of the most lethal episode of antisemitic violence on French soil in peacetime: twenty-eight deaths occurring over three days in Constantine in August 1934. The book operates on two levels: as a “murder mystery” uncovering a hidden dimension of calculated provocation, and as a “social history of political violence” that situated these events within the broader colonial field. [111]
Cole’s core intervention is a sustained critique of essentialist accounts that frame inter-communal violence in the Maghreb as a resurgence of “precolonial atavistic hatreds.” [112] He argues instead that the 1934 massacres were generated by specific actors with identifiable political motives, operating within the unique pressures of the interwar colonial state. While the riots began with a localized dispute at a mosque on Friday, August 3, Cole demonstrates that the systematic murders of Sunday, August 5, were exacerbated by purposeful agitation designed to escalate the horror of the event. [113]
The book presents compelling evidence that as many as twenty out of the twenty-five Jewish deaths that day were likely the work of a relatively small, organized group—or, limiting the count to those killed in home and business invasions within a single neighborhood, at least eighteen. [114] At the center of this conspiracy was Mohamed El Maadi, an adjutant in the French army’s Third Zouaves Regiment. [115] Cole’s research into police archives uncovered a January 1938 inspector’s note explicitly naming El Maadi as “one of the agitators who provoked the ‘pogroms’ of Constantine.” [116] El Maadi’s presence at the site of the Attali family murders is documented by military records and his own later testimony, yet his actual role remained hidden from the public for decades. [117]
The significance of El Maadi’s involvement lies in his political trajectory, which Cole traces from extreme French nationalism in the 1930s to enthusiastic fascism during the Second World War. El Maadi was recruited into the Cagoule, a right-wing terrorist network, by its organizer Jean Filiol, and eventually served as a captain in the German SS, commanding a North African Brigade that fought against the French Resistance. [118] (203–4) His participation in the 1934 murders was not an expression of “Muslim” antisemitism but an attempt to forge a bond between Algerian Muslims and French extremists through a shared hatred of Jews—a “Eurafrican” fascist alliance that he would go on to theorize explicitly under the Vichy regime. [119]
Cole meticulously details the cover-up that followed the massacres, involving the military, the police, the local political establishment in Constantine, and the governor-general’s office in Algiers. [120] When the local Police Mobile initially leaked a “gang of throat slitters” theory to the press, the administration intervened to replace it with a narrative of spontaneous religious fanaticism. The subsequent trials in 1935 and 1936 were theatrical performances that successfully reduced the conflict to two incompatible communal narratives—the “Jewish thesis” and the “Muslim thesis”—while suppressing evidence of coordinated provocation and the presence of suspects at multiple murder sites. [121] By showing how colonial authorities managed the perception of violence, Cole illustrates how “France was still absent” from the official story, preserving the colonial order at the expense of historical truth. [122]
Conclusion
Research on violence in French Algeria shows no signs of slowing. The 2020 publication of the four-volume Cambridge World History of Violence signals the deepening institutionalization of interdisciplinary approaches to the history of violence, continuing the reversal of the trend Arendt observed in 1969. [123] The scholarship surveyed here has been animated throughout by a double commitment: to the rigorous empirical analysis of what actually happened in specific places and times, and to an understanding of French colonialism as a structural formation whose logics extended across regions, archives, and the metropole-colony axis alike.
The common thread through Brower, Sessions, Surkis, and Cole is not simply methodological pluralism. It is the recognition that the colonizer/colonized binary, whatever its political utility, was never an accurate description of the colonial field. Cooper and Stoler’s foundational argument, that “social transformations are a product of both global patterns and local struggles” and that metropole and colony must be treated in “a single analytic field,” has been vindicated rather than superseded by the work examined here. [124] None of these books is “so nationally bound” that it remains blind to “those circuits of knowledge and communication that took other routes than those shaped by the metropole-colony axis alone.” [125] And all of them enact Cooper and Stoler’s reminder that the stakes of this analytic work are not merely professional: “Social taxonomies allowed for specific forms of violence at specific times. How a person was labeled could determine that a certain category of persons could be killed or raped with impunity, but not others.” [126]
The memory of French-Algerian relations remains contested in the metropole itself. Article 4 of Law No. 2005-158 of 23 February 2005 “regarding recognition of the Nation and national contribution in favor of the French repatriates,” defended under the Chirac administration by Michèle Alliot-Marie, required a pedagogical emphasis on the “positive role” of French imperial activities overseas. [127] After substantial public outcry in France and in its overseas territories, Article 4 was partially repealed. It continues to be criticized by historians and left-wing activists for promoting reactionary revisionism. The memory of colonial violence—its uses, abuses, instrumentalizations, and suppressions—remains an open historical problem, and the scholarship examined here suggests that the discipline is better equipped to address it than it has ever been.
Notes
[1] Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), 8.
Parenthetically, Arendt adds, “In the last edition of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences ‘violence’ does not even rate an entry” (8). Explaining the significance of this observation, she suggests that “[this] shows to what an extent violence and its arbitrariness were taken for granted and therefore neglected; no one questions or examines what is obvious to all.”
[2] Arendt, 8, fn. 6.
[3] Broadly, the colonial turn refers to the effort to reframe France’s role in the world by emphasizing the centrality of its imperial activities.
[4] Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley, Los Angeles, & London: University of California Press, 1997), 1–56.
[5] Cooper and Stoler, 3.
[6] Cooper and Stoler, 3–4.
[7] Cooper and Stoler, 37.
[8] Cooper and Stoler, 6.
[9] Cooper and Stoler, 6.
[10] Cooper and Stoler, 6.
[11] Cooper and Stoler, 8.
[12] Cooper and Stoler, 8.
[13] Cooper and Stoler, 16.
[14] Cooper and Stoler, 16–17.
[15] Cooper and Stoler, 15.
[16] Cooper and Stoler, 15.
[17] Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, Los Angeles, & London: University of California Press, 2005), 34, 47.
[18] Robert Aldrich, “Imperial Mise En Valeur and Mise En Scène: Recent Works on French Colonialism,” The Historical Journal 45, no. 4 (2002): 917–36; Daniel J. Sherman, “The Arts and Sciences of Colonialism,” French Historical Studies 23, no. 4 (October 1, 2000): 707–29.
[19] Alice L. Conklin, “Histories of Colonialism: Recent Studies of the Modern French Empire,” French Historical Studies 30, no. 2 (April 1, 2007): 305–32.
[20] Conklin, 315.
[21] Conklin, 305–6. See also Stephen Howe, ed., The New Imperial Histories Reader, Routledge Readers in History (London and New York: Routledge, 2010).
[22] Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?, Reprinted (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 98.
[23] Stephen Howe, “Colonising and Exterminating? Memories of Imperial Violence in Britain and France,” Histoire@Politique 11, no. 2 (2010): 2.
[24] Howe, 3.
[25] Howe, 5.
[26] Howe cites, for example, Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison’s book Coloniser, exterminer. Sur la guerre et l’État colonial, published in 2005. Le Cour Grandmaison received substantial criticism for his “selective use of sources, alleged neglect of internal debates and complexities among colonialists, his focusing on only the most spectacular incidents of colonial violence (‘une anthologie des horreurs coloniales,’ say Gilbert Meynier et Pierre Vidal-Naquet), and his frequently white-hot rhetorical language, are said by critics to contribute to an over-polarised debate” (1).
[27] Conklin, “Histories of Colonialism,” 307.
[28] Conklin, 307.
[29] For a stinging critique of Bhabha (among others’) theorization of hybridity, see Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Hybridity, So What?: The Anti-Hybridity Backlash and the Riddles of Recognition,” in Recognition and Difference, ed. Scott Lash and Mike Featherstone (London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2002), 219–46. For a more moderate critique, see Dominique Schirmer, Gernot Saalmann, and Christi Kessler, eds., Hybridising East and West: Tales Beyond Westernisation. Empirical Contributions to the Debates on Hybridity, Southeast Asian Modernities 2 (Berlin: Lit, 2006). Schirmer et al. suggest that the move toward hybridity carries little to no conceptual weight and results in a flattening synecdoche for transnational encounters. For a review of the debate, see Amar Acheraïou, “Critical Perspectives on Hybridity and the Third Space,” in Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 105–20. For critiques of culture and power in general, see Talal Asad, “Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz,” Man 18, no. 2 (1983): 237–59; Saba Mahmood, “Islam and Gender in Muslim Societies,” in Observing the Observer: The State of Islamic Studies in American Universities, ed. Mumtaz Ahmad, Zahid Bukhari, and Sulayman Nyang (International Institute of Islamic Thought, 2012), 70–87.
Regarding the tendency in cultural studies scholarship and research informed by postcolonial theory to examine the Foucauldian analytic of “power” differentials in general, at the expense of precise, local empirical analysis, Frederick Cooper argues that “if every form of asymmetrical power is termed empire, we are left without ways of distinguishing among the actual options [for analysis] we might have.” Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, 29.
[30] Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, 31.
[31] Cooper, 26–27, emphasis in original.
[32] Cooper, 32.
[33] Conklin, “Histories of Colonialism,” 331.
[34] Anne Laura Stoler, “On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty,” Public Culture 18, no. 1 (January 1, 2006): 127.
[35] Stoler, 127–28.
Stoler’s essay focuses on the place of the United States as an empire or colonial power. Fn. 29 above condenses her first two points of departure to introduce the field of scholarship on which this paper reflects. Elaborating on the phrase “imperial formations,” she adds that one of its “critical features…include[s] harboring and building on territorial ambiguity, redefining legal categories of belonging and quasi-membership, and shifting the geographic and demographic zones of partially suspended rights” (128, emphasis in original). Stoler’s third point of departure concerns the topographic representation of empire, arguing against the idea of geographic boundedness. She suggests that these “imperial formations” are better seen as “scaled genres of rule that produce and count on different degrees of sovereignty and gradations of rights” (128). These formations “thrive on turbid taxonomies that produce shadow populations and ever-improved coercive measures to protect the common good against those deemed threats to it” (128). Stoler adds a final observation highlighting both the constricting and generative effect of “imperial formations” on populations: they “give rise both to new zones of exclusion and new sites of—and social groups with—privileged exemption” (128, emphasis in original).
[36] One important issue that this historiography will not treat is the question of imperial circulation, that is, what was the nature of the movement of ideas about imperial practices of domination and the movement of these practices themselves. Did they circulate from Europe to the colonies and then back again in every case? See Cooper and Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” 24.
Cooper and Stoler argue, in summary, that “[metropolitan] states with extensive colonial ‘holdings’ shrank back before the implications of extending their universalistic social engineering theories overseas, but that very process unsettled the security of colonial rule itself. The problem came home to the metropole: former colonial subjects, now the citizens of sovereign countries within francophone or anglophone communities, migrated to their former metropoles-where they had for some time been an unsettling presence-rekindling forms of exclusion and racism and setting off political pressures for the narrowing of citizenship within Great Britain and France.”
[37] See Julia Clancy-Smith, Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800–1904) (Berkeley, CA.: University of California Press, 1997).
[38] The subject of Jennifer E. Sessions’ 2011 book—see below.
[39] Benjamin Claude Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902, History and Society of the Modern Middle East (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011), 5.
[40] Emmanuelle Saada, review of A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902, by Benjamin Claude Brower, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle 41, no. 2 (2010): 171–72.
“[Le] plus grand mérite de cet ouvrage est d’offrir une description polyphonique des violences commises par les différentes populations, sans présupposer une « action coloniale » suivie de « réactions indigènes ».”
[41] Brower, A Desert Named Peace, 5.
[42] Brower, 6.
[43] Brower, 6.
[44] Brower, 6.
[45] Brower, 6.
[46] Brower, 7.
[47] As quoted in Brower, 7.
[48] Brower, 7.
[49] Brower, 7.
[50] Brower, 7.
[51] Brower, 8.
[52] Brower, 6.
[53] Brower, 46.
[54] Brower, 32.
[55] Brower, 74.
[56] Brower, 75.
[57] Brower, 93.
[58] Brower, 116.
[59] Brower, 116.
[60] Brower, 135.
[61] Brower, 136.
[62] Brower, 137.
[63] Brower, 6.
[64] Brower, 200.
[65] Jennifer E. Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014).
[66] Sessions, 11.
[67] Ronald E. Robinson, “Introduction,” in French Colonialism 1871–1914: Myths and Realities, by Henri Brunschwig, trans. William Glanville Brown (London: Paul Mall Press, 1966), ix.
[68] Sessions, By Sword and Plow, 10.
[69] Conklin, “Histories of Colonialism,” 332.
[70] Sessions, By Sword and Plow, 11.
[71] Baker, Inventing the French Revolution; as quoted in Sessions, By Sword and Plow, 14–15.
[72] Sessions, 15.
[73] As quoted in Sessions, 1.
[74] Sessions, 3.
[75] Sessions, 2.
[76] Sessions, 173.
[77] Sessions, 173.
[78] Sessions, 173.
[79] Judith Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930, Corpus Juris (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 6.
[80] Surkis, 18.
[81] Howe, “Colonising and Exterminating?”
[82] Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930, 8.
[83] See Judith Surkis, Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870–1920 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006).
[84] Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930, 4. Surkis’s book shares many similarities with Todd Shepard’s Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962–1979 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017). Shepard’s work, while less explicitly focused on the fantasmatic extimacies of legal texts, can be seen as a chronological extension into the twentieth century of Surkis’s analysis of French imperialism and gender in the nineteenth century.
[85] Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930, 9. See also the introduction to JaKob Nilsson and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, eds., Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality, Södertörn Philosophical Studies 14 (Huddinge: Södertörn Univ, 2013).
[86] Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930, 4.
[87] Surkis, 5.
[88] Surkis, 5.
[89] Surkis, 8.
[90] Surkis, 8.
[91] Surkis, 8.
[92] Surkis, 15.
[93] Surkis, 14.
[94] Surkis, 15; Stoler’s phrase as cited therein.
[95] Surkis, 15.
[96] Surkis, 15.
[97] Surkis, 16.
[98] Surkis, 17.
[99] Surkis, 19.
[100] Surkis, 49.
[101] Surkis, 31.
[102] Surkis, 31.
[103] Surkis, 21.
[104] Surkis, 21.
[105] Surkis, 22.
[106] Surkis, 23.
[107] Surkis, 23.
[108] Surkis, 24.
[109] Surkis, 24–25.
[110] Surkis, 25.
[111] Joshua Cole, Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 7.
[112] Cole, 8.
[113] Cole, 5.
[114] Cole, 246.
[115] Cole, 204.
[116] Cole, 221.
[117] Cole, 205.
[118] Cole, 203–4.
[119] Cole, 226–27.
[120] Cole, 247.
[121] Cole, 247.
[122] Cole, 242.
[123] See especially Ussama Samir Makdisi, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (Oakland, CA.: University of California Press, 2019); Hafid Gafaïti, Patricia M. E. Lorcin, and David G. Troyansky, eds., Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World, France Overseas (Lincoln, NE.: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Julia Clancy-Smith, ed., North Africa, Islam, and the Mediterranean World: From the Almoravids to the Algerian War, History and Society in the Islamic World (London and Portland, OR.: Frank Cass, 2001); Julia Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900, The California World History Library 15 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
[124] See for example Howard G. Brown, Mass Violence and the Self: From the French Wars of Religion to the Paris Commune (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2019). Also see Benjamin Claude Brower, “Chapter 12: Genealogies of Modern Violence: Arendt and Imperialism in Africa, 1830–1914,” in The Cambridge World History of Violence, ed. Louise Edwards, Nigel Penn, and Jay Winter, vol. 4, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 246–62; James P. Daughton, “Chapter 23: Quotidian Violence in the French Empire, 1890–1940,” in The Cambridge World History of Violence, ed. Louise Edwards, Nigel Penn, and Jay Winter, vol. 4, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 468–89; Jeremy Teow and Peter McPhee, “Chapter 17: Change and Continuity in Collective Violence in France, 1780–1880,” in The Cambridge World History of Violence, ed. Louise Edwards, Nigel Penn, and Jay Winter, vol. 4, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 347–66.
[125] Cooper and Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” 4.
[126] Cooper and Stoler, 28.
[120] Loi № 2005-158 du 23 février 2005 portant reconnaissance de la Nation et contribution nationale en faveur des Français rapatriés.
