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Algeria
Hegemony of the Colons
A commission of inquiry set up by the French Senate in 1892 and
headed by former Premier Jules Ferry, an advocate of colonial
expansion, recommended that the government abandon a policy that
assumed French law, without major modifications, could fit the
needs of an area inhabited by close to 2 million Europeans and
4 million Muslims. Muslims had no representation in Algeria's
National Assembly and were grossly underrepresented on local councils.
Because of the many restrictions imposed by the authorities, by
1915 only 50,000 Muslims were eligible to vote in elections in
the civil communes. Attempts to implement even the most modest
reforms were blocked or delayed by the local administration in
Algeria, dominated by colons, and by colon representatives in
the National Assembly, to which each of the three départements
sent six deputies and three senators.
Once elected to the National Assembly, colons became permanent
fixtures. Because of their seniority, they exercised disproportionate
influence, and their support was important to any government's
survival. The leader of the colon delegation, Auguste Warnier,
succeeded during the 1870s and 1880s in modifying or introducing
legislation to facilitate the private transfer of land to settlers
and continue the Algerian state's appropriation of land from the
local population and distribution to settlers. Consistent proponents
of reform, like Georges Clemenceau and socialist Jean Jaurès,
were rare in the National Assembly.
The bulk of Algeria's wealth in manufacturing, mining, agriculture,
and trade was controlled by the grands colons. The modern
European-owned and -managed sector of the economy centered around
small industry and a highly developed export trade, designed to
provide food and raw materials to France in return for capital
and consumer goods. Europeans held about 30 percent of the total
arable land, including the bulk of the most fertile land and most
of the areas under irrigation. By 1900 Europeans produced more
than two-thirds of the value of output in agriculture and practically
all agricultural exports. The modern, or European, sector was
run on a commercial basis and meshed with the French market system
that it supplied with wine, citrus, olives, and vegetables. Nearly
half of the value of European-owned real property was in vineyards
by 1914. By contrast, subsistence cereal production--supplemented
by olive, fig, and date growing and stock raising--formed the
basis of the traditional sector, but the land available for cropping
was submarginal even for cereals under prevailing traditional
cultivation practices.
The colonial regime imposed more and higher taxes on Muslims
than on Europeans. The Muslims, in addition to paying traditional
taxes dating from before the French conquest, also paid new taxes,
from which the colons were often exempted. In 1909, for instance,
Muslims, who made up almost 90 percent of the population but produced
20 percent of Algeria's income, paid 70 percent of direct taxes
and 45 percent of the total taxes collected. And colons controlled
how these revenues would be spent. As a result, colon towns had
handsome municipal buildings, paved streets lined with trees,
fountains and statues, while Algerian villages and rural areas
benefited little if at all from tax revenues.
The colonial regime proved severely detrimental to overall education
for Algerian Muslims, who had previously relied on religious schools
to learn reading, writing, and engage in religious studies (see
Education
, ch. 2). Not only did the state appropriate the habus
lands (the religious foundations that constituted the main source
of income for religious institutions, including schools) in 1843,
but colon officials refused to allocate enough money to maintain
schools and mosques properly and to provide for an adequate number
of teachers and religious leaders for the growing population.
In 1892 more than five times as much was spent for the education
of Europeans as for Muslims, who had five times as many children
of school age. Because few Muslim teachers were trained, Muslim
schools were largely staffed by French teachers. Even a state-operated
madrasah (school) often had French faculty members. Attempts
to institute bilingual, bicultural schools, intended to bring
Muslim and European children together in the classroom, were a
conspicuous failure, rejected by both communities and phased out
after 1870. According to one estimate, fewer than 5 percent of
Algerian children attended any kind of school in 1870.
Efforts were begun by 1890 to educate a small number of Muslims
along with European students in the French school system as part
of France's "civilizing mission" in Algeria. The curriculum was
entirely French and allowed no place for Arabic studies, which
were deliberately downgraded even in Muslim schools. Within a
generation, a class of well-educated, gallicized Muslims--the
évolués (literally, the evolved ones)--had been created.
Almost all of the handful of Muslims who accepted French citizenship
were évolués; more significantly, it was in this privileged
group of Muslims, strongly influenced by French culture and political
attitudes, that a new Algerian self-consciousness developed.
Reporting to the French Senate in 1894, Governor General Jules
Cambon wrote that Algeria had "only a dust of people left her."
He referred to the destruction of the traditional ruling class
that had left Muslims without leaders and had deprived France
of interlocuteurs valables (literally, valid gobetweens
), through whom to reach the masses of the people. He lamented
that no genuine communication was possible between the two communities.
The colons who ran Algeria maintained a condescending dialogue
only with the beni-oui-ouis. Later they deliberately
thwarted contact between the évolués and Muslim traditionalists
on the one hand and between évolués and official circles
in France on the other. They feared and mistrusted the francophone
évolués, who were classified either as assimilationists,
insisting on being accepted as Frenchmen but on their own terms,
or as integrationists, eager to work as members of a distinct
Muslim elite on equal terms with the French.
Data as of December 1993
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