Revue de l'Occident musulman et

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The many faces of colonial rule in French North Africa

L. Carl Brown

Citer ce document / Cite this document :

Brown L. Carl. The many faces of colonial rule in French North Africa. In: Revue de l'Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée,
n°13-14, 1973. Mélanges Le Tourneau. I. pp. 171-191;

doi : https://doi.org/10.3406/remmm.1973.1201

https://www.persee.fr/doc/remmm_0035-1474_1973_num_13_1_1201

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 THE MANY FACES OF COLONIAL RULE

IN FRENCH NORTH AFRICA

by L. Carl BROWN

We like to think that each generation rewrites its history because of advances
achieved both in data-collection and interpretative sophistication. Alas, the
revision is all too often only a change in style, only a lateral move from one
inadequate and incomplete cluster of concerns to another. We applaud when the
spotlight is thrown upon hitherto ignored peoples, institutions and causal
interpretation, but we are likely to overlook that certain historical actors and scenery
have, as a result, faded into a nebulous background.
Man's inclination to overlook all but the currently pressing (or popular or
"relevant") issues will ever stand in the way of historical understanding. Consider
the confrontation of West and non-West during the period of modern colonial
rule. Earlier generations showed an abysmal lack of interest in the indigenous
colonized societies. From Morocco to the Philippines there were only undif-
ferentiated natives. No one seriously disputed the colonialist potter's power over
this inert clay. Only the colonialist's action at the wheel was expected to
determine whether the resulting vessel of a new society would be one to be
treasured on only for common use. The many colonized societies with their richly
different cultures were merely "them".
At long last the time has come for "them" to step out of the shadows.
Scholars eagerly explore the divergent patterns of colonial resistance, the different
economic and social options emphasized by these newly-independent states,
literature and the arts as a reflection of these newly-discovered societies, and so
on.
On the other hand, colonialism has now been relegated to that abstracted
role given earlier to native society. Few are concerned with the different patterns
of colonial rule and their impact on the several colonized societies. Colonialism
has been hypostatized — a dull, grey monolithic force to be quickly situated in
the background of any historical analysis so the scholar may be released to get on
with the really exciting variables.
The imperial idea now has only enemies. Colonialism is a pejorative term.
When one ponders the pre-conditions for a more viable world community all this
may be accepted as modest progress, but from another perspective the result of
such a priori thinking is to hand the historian a very crude analytical tool.
172 L.-C. BROWN

Even the more conventional (in its effort to be value-free) social science
hardly gets beyond the notion of a generalized model called "the colonial
situation".
What then is to be done ? Clearly the answer is to redirect attention to
colonial rule as one • of the dynamic variables in the historical legacy of
newly-independent Third World societies. This paper is an effort to do just that
by discussing the many faces of French colonial rule in North Africa.
Re-examination of colonial rule is especially appropriate for North Africa
which offers a rich variety of approaches to modern Western colonialism — often
in extreme or welUnigh "pure" form. A roll call of certain leading figures
connected with the French presence in North Africa — Bugeaud, Lyautey,
Lavigerie, Viollette, Juin, Mendes-France, Soustelle, de Gaulle, Fanon — suffices to
suggest the many different patterns of thought, and action, concerning colonial
rule in North Africa.
Consistent with the subject under discussion, the emphasis here will be on
the initiatives of the colonizing power, at times to the relative neglect of the
colonized response. Nevertheless, the underlying argument is that historical
scholarship in North Africa (and, for that matter, other parts of the Third World)
must devote more attention to the colonizer's role without sacrificing our slowly
emerging careful concern for the activities of the colonized. As with any historical
study treating the confrontation of societies (or acculturation which is essentially
the same phenomenon stated in terms of the recipient or dominated society)
success lies in an adequate emphasis on the dynamics, and the dialectics, of
interaction.
At the same time, this is a discussion of North African history, not French
history ; and the argument for a redirection of attention to the colonial factor is
properly to be weighed from that perspective.

II

Indian nationalists in the 1930s were wont to insist that if only every Indian
would make water at the same time the stream could wash the British into the
sea (1). They were attempting, with this coarse but forceful expression, to shame
and cajole their fellow Indians into realizing that they were so many and the
British so few, and therefore independence from the British raj was possible. In
retrospect, the argument now can serve to highlight one of the crucial distinctions
of colonial rule. Some colonized territories attracted only a handful of persons
from the "home country", almost exclusively administrators and soldiers destined
to return home at the end of their careers. Other colonized territories lured
thousands of European settlers who has come seeking a new home. Their attitudes
and their artifacts demonstrated that they had come to stay.

(1) Philip Woodruff, The Men Who Rulled India, London, 1954, VoL I, p. 349.
 COLONIAL RULE IN FRENCH NORTH AFRICA 1 73

There were, after all, as that once celebrated popularizer of colonialism

Leroy-Beaulieu (2) maintained, two types of European territorial holdings abroad
— colonies d'exploitation and colonies de peuplement.
Earlier generations were sensitive to the fundamental difference between
those areas under western colonial rule which accepted massive immigration from
the home country (or from other European stock capable of assimilation to the
culture of the home country) and those which did not. The current intellectual
fashion with its implicit assumption that, deep down, all colonial rule is more or
less the same has fuzzed this important distinction. Here, then, is an old truth
that needs to be dusted off and reconsidered in the light of new interests. Let
us adapt Leroy-Beaulieu's terminology into the somewhat blander, but less
confusing , terms : settlement colonies as opposed to non-settlement colonies (3).
Then with an eye to French North Africa it may be useful to review the different
impact the two types were destined to have on a colonized people.
Unlike British India and most of the territories gobbled up by Western
colonialism since the 1880s, French North Africa was a haven for European
settlement. In addition to French North Africa European settlement colonies in
the period of modern imperialism have included Portuguese Africa, the Union of
South Africa, Rhodesia, Kenya and Libya. It is a telling list. All are examples of
colonialism with a special intensity, often also with a high level of violence.
These latter day settlement colonies as a group may be seen as a
modification of the earlier pattern that created the United States, the British white
dominions and Spanish America. The earlier examples went into more nearly
empty territories and also had greater success in reducing what native population
there was. As a result, cultural and demographic transplantation combined into an
irresistable force. In such historical circumstances there could be no later phase of
"decolonization".
Settlement colonies of the modern imperial period, for all their colonizing
energy, operated at more modest levels. Algeria after a century and a quarter had
not become French in 1954 when the FLN launched its armed struggle for
independence. Algeria was then just less than one-tenth French — 934,000 out of
(2) See his De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes, 1874. Leroy-Beaulieu advocated
colonies d'exploitation and insisted that colonies de peuplement were passé. His ideas
contributed mightily to what became the great debate in French colonial thinking, pitting the
policy of "association" against "assimilation". Advocates of the former may be seen to
have won the battle of ideas, but the continued build-up of settler society in North Africa
effectively frustrated in the long run even the creative genius of a Lyautey. And if such could
be the outcome in a protectorate established as late as 1912, one needs little imagination to
estimate the balance of forces in Algeria.
(3) Non-settlement colony is preferable to colonie d'exploitation or any conceivable
translation — e.g. exploitation, development, or capitalist colony — for it avoids the implicit link
with an economic interpretation of imperialism. See, on this subject, two excellent articles ;
D.K. Fieldhouse, "Imperialism: an Historiographies Revision", Economic History Review, XIV,
2, 1961, and David Landes, 'The Nature of Economic Imperialism", Journal of Economic
History, XXI, 4, December 1961. A more general approach with selected readings from sources
plus commentary and bibliography is to be found in D.K. Fieldhouse, The Theory of Capitalist
Imperialism (Problems and Perspectives in History Series), London, 1967.
1 74 L.-C. BROWN

a total population of 9,432,000. At the same time Southern Rhodesia (now

Rhodesia) had 160,000 settlers and over 2,000,000 natives, which meant that
under 8 % of the population was white settlers. South Africa (4) then had a white
population amounting to more than 20 % of the total.
In effect, at the time of independence in 1962 Algeria could look back on a
European demographic intrusion more intensive than that of Rhodesia but roughly
one-half that of South Africa. This stark numerical evidence helps to explain the
trauma —both in France and Algeria— of the 1954-1962 war for independence.
The settler populations in Tunisia and Morocco reached a maximum of
between six and eight percent of the total. Italian Libya temporarily offered a
more imposing percentage of settlers when it peaked on the eve of the Second
World War at roughly 160,000 Italians in an estimated less than one million total
population. Since, however, most of this build-up had been developed only in the
thirties and would decline to a mere 40,000 by January 1943 as a result of the
North African campaigns, the Libyan case is hardly a good example of settler
influence over a colonized people for a significant time period.
If the 6-10 % settler populations to be found in French North Africa looked
miniscule by comparison with the settler states of the Americas, Australia and
New Zealand, they loomed large by comparison with the contemporary non-
settler colonies. It did make a difference that every tenth Algerian was French ;
and the difference would have immediately struck the average Syrian or Iraqi of
the 1930s who might have been prepared to find European bureaucrats and
soldiers but hardly European farmers, postal clerks and even trade union
organizers. And what would the Egyptian or Sudanese who thought he knew
about colonialism have made of those modest farming villages dotted throughout
North Africa where only European structures could be seen radiating around that
most intrusive symbol of all, a new church ?
Unlike the situation in the Arab East and elsewhere, the phenomenon of
settlement colonies in French North Africa made unavoidable a competition
between colon and indigène for space and place. Colonized peoples, living out
their lives in non-settlement colonial environments, were, of course, both shaped
and unsettled by the colonial confrontation. Joyce Cary's Mr. Johnson might have
an identity problem as a Nigerian clerk attempting to emulate the mores of his
British district officer while blending them into his own culture. An Edward
Atiyah would understandably react in sorrow and angry frustration to find an
English friend from Oxford schooldays transformed into a patronizing junior
member of the British colonial apparatus in Egypt, intent on keeping his relation
with a subject person appropriately formal and distant. There could arise in Sudan
a group called with some ambivalence by both sides, "Black British" — those
Sudanese junior officials who admired and applied British norms of government

(4) Admittedly, South Africa cannot properly be dubbed a "latter-day settlement

colony" since settlement began there early in the seventeenth century. It is, more precisely, the
connecting link temporally and demographically, between the older pattern of settler colonies
that led to new majority-settler-stock societies and the latter-day settler colonies that produced
only appreciable settler minorities although with effective political and economic control.
 COLONIAL RULE IN FRENCH NORTH AFRICA 1 75

and administration (5). There was, however, nothing comparable to the intense
struggle in French North Africa over who would own the land, man the
bureaucracy or even have the job opportunity that comes with delivering the mail.

Ill

By the early 1950s European settlers owned 4,500,000 hectares of the best
agricultural land in North Africa -2,700,000 hectares in Algeria, 750,000 in
Tunisia and 1,000,000 in Morocco (6). This means that European colonization
had gobbled up 23 % of the cultivable land in Algeria (or, according to a
somewhat more realistic estimate that leaves out marginally productive land, a
whopping 40 %), 21 % in Tunisia and about 8 % in Morocco (7). Even the
comparatively low percentage in Morocco looms larger when it is realized that
European colonization absorbed only the best, most productive lands.
The reality of this relentless colon drive to own the land was matched by an
equally assertive ideology. As usual, Algeria served as pacesetter, but all three
countries were subjected to "official colonization", that is various schemes of free
or cheap land, easy credit and other perquisites to induce French settlers onto the
land. From the time of Marshall Bugeaud's somewhat quixotic scheme of military
colonization (8) there had always been French officials and opinion-molders to
nurture the notion that the key to a permanent French control lay in an
independent colon "yeomanry" living on the land. "Le peuplement rural", wrote
that colonial historian par excellence, Augustin Bernard, "a toujours paru ... le
seul moyen d'assurer la suprématie française d'une manière durable par la prise de
possession effective du sol. Un pays finit toujours par appartenir à celui qui y
cultive la terre" (9).
The mystique of agricultural colonization blended into that seductive dream
of imperial France as the new Rome, restoring North Africa to civilization and
the Church. Writing at the time of the centennial celebration of French rule in
Algeria (1930), the eminent French scholar on ancient and Roman North Africa
Stéphane Gsell pointed the way to French success in North Africa where even
mighty Rome and the Church of Saint Augustine had failed to survive. The

(5) Joyce Cary, Mister Johnson; Edward Atiyah, An Arab Tells his Story, London,
1946 ; Robert O. Collins, The Imperialists - the Sudan Political Service (unpublished ms.).
(6) Jean Despois, l'Afrique du Nord (2nd edition), Paris, 1958, pp. 3SS-3S6. By including
privately owned forests, Gallissot gives an even higher total estimate for 19SS : 4,800,000
hectares of which 3,000,000 are in Algeria, 800,000 in Tunisia, and 1,000,000 in Morocco.
René Gallissot, L 'Economie de l'Afrique du Nord, Paris, 1964, p. 37.
(7) Gallissot, pp. 42-43.
(8) For Bugeaud's ill-fated attempts to use soldiers and veterans for agricultural
colonization in the 1840s, see Charles A. Julien, Histoire de l'Algérie Contemporaine, Paris, 1964, pp.
231-239. Also, V. Démontes, La colonisation militaire sous Bugeaud. Paris/Algiers, n.d. (1917).
(9) Augustin Bernard, Afrique septentrionale et occidentale (first part of VoL XI, Vidal
de la B lâche et Gallois, Géographie universelle), Paris, 1937, p. 115 (as cited in Despois,
L'Afrique du Nord, pp. 388-389).
176 L.-C. BROWN

mistake of Rome and of the Church, he wrote, was in not having penetrated to
the rural masses. History, he exhorted, therefore describes for France its duty in
North Africa : "volonté inébranlable d'être les maîtres partout et toujours ;
nécessité d'une colonisation appuyée sur un fort peuplement rural
européen ..." (10).
The exhortations of official spokesmen and armchair social theorists can
create myths or justify developments already in process. Seldom can they reverse
patterns of human enterprise firmly rooted to the clear economic interests of
those involved. The individual economic choices of Frenchmen living in North
Africa were disturbing GselFs dream of ever-increasing numbers of French settlers
living on the land long before the nationalist movements shattered it completely.
By 1936, four mammouth companies owned 20% of the colon lands in Tunisia.
In the same period 900 farms averaging over 300 hectares accounted for 60 % of
the colon lands in Morocco. Even in Algeria a mere 6,400 farms of more than
100 hectares accounted for 87 % of the European agricultural holdings (1 1). In all
three countries, the tendency toward greater concentration of colon agricultural
units continued until the end of French rule.
Retrospective knowledge of this trend helps us to understand that the lavish
1930 Centennial celebration in Algeria, with related activities spilling over into
Morocco and Tunisia, was indeed a "false apogee" (12). The future was not nearly
so clear to the colonized at that time. They could see only the apparently
limitless colon power symbolized by that awesome trinity : modern technology
(machinery and chemical fertilizers) (13), credit facilities and a solicitious state
apparatus.
The struggle for the land in French North Africa had a strong but diverse
impact on the colonized societies. The results were both disruptive and
modernizing. The long confrontation cleared the way for new, potentially more effective
patterns of rural life. It also widened the gulf that always separated the settled
agriculturalists from the pastoralists, transhumants and marginal farmers, thereby
bringing into clear relief the problem, labelled somewhat antiseptically by
economists, of a "dual economy". Perhaps the Disraelian image of the privileged
and the deprived forming "two nations" would better define the magnitude of the
problem.

(10) Stéphane Gsell, Introduction to J. Alazard, E. Albertini, et al., Histoire et Historiens

de l'Algérie, Paris, 1931, p. 5. Gsell did go on to argue for "nécessité, non moindre, de
rapprocher de nous les indigènes, avec le ferme désir et l'espoir d'une fusion dans un avenir
plus ou moins lointain". This, however, adds up to no more than a velvet glove over an iron
fist, if even that much adoucissement is properly to be read into his counsel. .
(11) Hildebert Isnard, Le Maghreb, Paris, 1966, p. 64. Gallissot writes, "en Algérie,
150,000 colons ont tenté leur chance ; il en restait 21,500 en 1954. La surface moyenne de la
propriété européenne était de 125 ha en 1954, contre 90 ha en 1930". L'économie de l'Afrique
du Nord, p. 43.
(12) The apt term used by Jacques Berque in his French North Africa (English
translation of Le Maghreb entre deux Guerres), New- York, 1967, Chapter VII.
(13) By 1930 there were an estimated 3,000 tractors and 750 combined harvesters in
Tunisia, 5,330 tractors in Algeria, and 3,620 tractors in Morocco. Berque, French North Africa,
p. 41.
 COLONIAL RULE IN FRENCH NORTH AFRICA 1 77

The modernizing sector in agriculture brought by the colons did not directly
embrace many of the colonized. In Morocco, for example, an estimated 60,000
Moroccans worked as more-or-less permanent agricultural laborers on the European
farms (14). And this was in a country where even by the end of the colonial
period 65 % of the active male population worked in agriculture (15).
Those native North Africans directly involved in the modern agricultural
sector were few ; and, as Frantz Fanon so caustically argued, these few tended to
become a privileged (for privilege is a relative matter) elite cut off from the mass
of their compatriots. The great reservoir of alienated rural manpower that
sustained the Algerian revolution for eight long years came overwhelmingly from
those who had been denied access even to the crumbs from the colons' bountiful
harvest tables.
Yet, is not this in the classic dialectical sense the true measure of colon
influence ? Small in relative numbers, those who manned the modern — or
European — sector of agriculture stood out as an ever-present alternate model, at
the same time seductive attraction and taunt. This new model "provoked a real
break in the rural continuity of the Maghrib : on the one hand, a property that
was registered, defended by law, of European aspect even if it remained in the
hands of indigenous members of the bourgeoisie, exploited with the help of
advanced techniques, based on large private capital investment or on a 'coopera-
tivism' (mutualisme) itself monopolized by the dominant class'*. On the other
hand, the overwhelming mass of North African rural folk remained as if in a
"museum of antique techniques and archaic ways" (16).
The outcome of this rural confrontation always involved more than simply
ferocious if inarticulate opposition, even in Algeria. Here, the Tunisian experience
with land registration is instructive. Demands by prospective European settlers for
a simple, expeditious way to secure a clear legal title to agricultural lands led to
the celebrated law of 1885, patterned on the Australian Torrens Act. The mixed
tribunal set up by this act composed of French judges and Tunisian qadis from
the shari'a (chra) courts, was empowered to hear pleas and, after due notice to
protect other possible claimants, award a clear title deed. Created solely in
response to colon pressure the law came to be accepted by Tunisians as well.
As early as 1907, land registration proceedings had been initiated by :
3,331 Frenchmen
2,824 foreigners
3,985 Tunisians
A generation later, in 1936, land registration requests had been received
from :
(14) Charles F. Steward, The Economy of Morocco 1912-1962, Harvard University Press,
1964, p. 105. They earned a livelihood for an estimated 250,000. Also, Service Central des
Statistiques (Morocco), Tableaux Economiques du Maroc 1915-1959, Rabat, ad. (1960X
p. 47.
(15) Tableaux Economiques du Maroc, p. 46.
(16) Jacques Berque, 'The Rural System of the Maghrib'*, in Leon Carl Brown, State and
Society in Independent North Africa, Washington, 1966, p. 198.
178 L.-C. BROWN

6,363 Frenchmen
5,000 foreigners
11,230 Tunisians (17)
By 1953, almost 2,000,000 hectares of land had been registered (18). The
Tunisians appearing before the mixed tribunal, whether to initiate or challenge a
request for title, were being introduced to a new world not just of fixed
boundaries but of commercial agriculture, secular rather than religious courts and
law as an ever-changing response to societal priorities rather than an immutable,
divinely-ordained system.
The complicated history of legislation concerning agricultural lands held in
habous (19) during the years of the French Protectorate in Tunisia reveals a
similar tendency at work. The colons wanted access to these habous properties,
estimated to cover as much as one-fourth of the cultivable land at the beginning
of the French Protectorate (20). The Protectorate administration wanted to free
these habous lands for colonization but proceeded with circumspection in order
not to offend Tunisian religious sensitivities. The habous system, in effect,
remained inviolate ; but means were found to release portions of these lands for
commercial agriculture. Again, it can be seen that a scheme designed to advance
the interests of European colons was always utilized by a handful of Tunisians.
An even larger body of Tunisians became familiar with such new possibilities. It is
perhaps not straining the argument to insist that this Protectorate experience
— with all its inequities and dangers to native agriculture — prepared the ground
for an independent Tunisia to abolish the habous system in 1957.
A comparable process both with regard to land registration and
encroachment upon habous properties may be discerned for Morocco (21). In Algeria,
the habous system was dealt with much more summarily, having been integrated
into French law as early as 1873 (22).

(17) L.C. Brown, C. Micaud, and C.H. Moore, Tunisia: the Politics of Modernization,
New-York, 1964, p. 17. Robert Scemama, La Tunisie Agricole et Rurale et l'Oeuvre de la
France, Paris, 1938, p. 55. The discussion of this law in Stephen H. Roberts, The History of
French Colonial Policy 1870-1925, London, 1929 (reprinted 1963), p. 279, rightly emphasizes
that Tunisians approached the law with some trepidation at first and remained wary even into
the 1920s, but the inescapable fact of continued — and later growing — Tunisian use of the
court falsifies his conclusion of "practically no utilization of its provisions by the natives,
another reminder of the unimportance of logic in dealing with natives". And, in retort to that
last clause, it might be asked if since the 1920s we have finally teamed that there is neither
native nor colon, believer nor infidel in matters of logic.
(18) Etienne Buthaud, "Introduction à l'Etude des Problèmes Humains de
l'Immatriculation foncière en Tunisie", Les Cahiers de Tunisie, 3rd and 4th trimester, 1953.
(19) Actually, Hubs or Hubus, but the French usage (habous) has long been accepted.
Synonymous with waqf, ie. religious trust property.
(20) Henri de Montéty, Une Loi Agraire en Tunisie - Etude de la Législation établie ert
vue d'assurer la fixation au sol des indigènes sur les terres habous, Cahors (France), 1927, p. 15.
(21) Stewart, Economy of Morocco, pp. 70-75.
(22) Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam, "wakf".
 COLONIAL RULE IN FRENCH NORTH AFRICA 179

Colon pressure on the land was intense in all three countries, but the
different modes of colonial administration and even the timing of the colonial
experience produced different results. France's longer tenure in Algeria," the
complete colon dominance of the Algerian administration especially after the
downfall of Napoleon III and his "Arab kingdom", and the tough tradition of
violence — itself the child of native Algeria's adamant resistance and the harsh
French response — provided the framework for a thorough destruction of the
Algerian rural aristocracy or "squirearchy".
Although elements of rural proletarization were far from absent in Tunisia
and Morocco as well, other countervailing tendencies were also at work. There is
evidence to suggest that in Tunisia segments of the rural population were able to
make modest steps in the direction of a more entrepreneurial (or capitalistic)
approach to agriculture, strengthening in the process their hold over the remainder
of the rural population. Some of these constituted a group of (relatively) new
rich, but probably the majority were members of the traditional privileged class
who were judiciously adapting to the new ground rules. The extent to which this
kind of rural transformation was tied into the fortunes of the Old Destour, and
then later the Neo-Destour party, is still only vaguely known. The subject awaits
its historian (23). Can it be seriously doubted that such historical research could
contribute to an understanding of the present-day rural scene? Surely the
contending forces in Ahmad Ben Salah's ill-fated collectivation efforts would
emerge, thereby in clearer perspective.
In Morocco, the Lyautey motif of preserving traditional society and of
working through the existing aristocracy also had its impact on the land. Here
again is a theme that has been relatively ignored (24).

(23) The most complete recent study is that of Jean Poncet, La colonisation et
l'Agriculture européenne en Tunisie depuis 1881, Paris, 1961, an impressive compilation and
interpretation of quantitative data but a bit weak on conveying the human dimension. In
fairness, we should point out that several scholars believe colon agricultural practices left little
impact on the native society. See, for example, the discussion by Pierre Marthelot, "Les
Tunisiens. Réflexions sur quelques disparités géographiques et sociologiques", Les Cahiers de
Tunisie, No. 25, 1959. Nevertheless, we remain more impressed by the insights of Henri de
Montéty in his several works on this subject (e.g. "Adaptation du juridisme occidental aux réalités
sociales tunisiennes en matière foncière", IBLA, April, 1942, and Une loi agraire en funisie) as
well as the elusive but provocative comments to be found in the writings of Jacques Berque.
See also Abdelkader Zghal, "Les effets de la modernisation de l'agriculture sur la stratification
sociale dans les campagnes tunisiennes", Cahiers internationaux de Sociologie, Vol. 38 (1965).
(24) This point should be carefully clarified : In the writing on Morocco during the
colonial period there has been a tendency either (a) to concentrate on the origins and
developement of Moroccan nationalism quite often along the Unes of what the social scientist
would term elite studies or (b) to present the quantitative data of the French build-up in
Morocco, whether approvingly or in a spirit of outrage, without closely Unking the intrusive
new to patterns of change in the native society. Albert Ayache's Le Maroc, Paris, 1956, is a
good example of the later tendency, written in this case in a Marxist white heat. It contains a
commendable amount of quantitative data, but the Moroccans, or for that matter the French,
emerge as wooden statistics. There is no sense of process, of the human drama. The work by
Ladislav Cerych. Européens et Marocains, 1930-1956. Sociologie d'une décolonisation, Bruges,
1964, is a much more stimulating work while being no less well documented.
180 L.-C BROWN

Agricultural colonization not only had its impact on the colonized. The
reality it created strongly influenced the colonial administrators. During the last
decade or so before independence in all three countries reformist French officials
inaugurated ambitious efforts to bring the advantages of agricultural
modernization of the rural poor. The model of what they wanted to achieve, or in some
cases avoid, was right before them : it was the modernized or colon sector of
agriculture.
This handful of French reformist officials hoped, finally, to pass on to the
native farmer those three big advantages always enjoyed by the colons : modern
technology, credit facilities and a solicitious state apparatus. They were doomed
to fail in their efforts to keep North Africa French. They were at best only
partially successful in terms of their economic and technical aims. Initiated too
late, underfinanced, often approaching revolutionary problems in an overly-
cautious bureaucratic spirit, these several programs whose very names now evoke
an ambivalent nostalgia — e.g. Secteurs d'Amélioration Rurale (Algeria) and
Secteurs de Modernisation du Paysannat (Morocco) — cannot, for all that, be
dismissed as so many false starts. A more careful examination will show how
intimately linked they all are to independent North Africa's own agricultural
development plans.

IV

Colonialism even in non-settler colonies stimulates many changes such as

rapid urbanization, the development of modern transportation and communication
networks and the creation of new educational institutions — all part of a broad
pattern yoking the colony both to the "home country" and to the international
economy. It is, therefore, not surprising that all these things happened in French
North Africa, but in every case the pervasive presence of settlers intensified the
process.
As for urbanization, the rise of Casablanca from a sleepy little port of some
25,000 to almost one million by independence is merely the most extreme
example of a general phenomenon. Soon after independence, the North African
population was estimated to be 30 % urban (living in agglomerations of 10,000
and over) (25).
At this point one can pick up the story of those colons who dashed the
hopes of a Stéphane Gsell by refusing to stay on the land, or in most cases, by
immigrating directly to cities without even so much as a fling at farming. They
brought with them their predilections about how a city should be put together
and what it should look like. This included living in apartments, even high-rise
apartments, in contrast to the British colonial preference for dispersed bungalows.

(25) Roger Le Tourneau, "Implications of Rapid Urbanization", in Brown, State and

Society in Independent North Africa, p. 125.
 COLONIAL RULE IN FRENCH NORTH AFRICA 18 1

In Algeria, the French urban presence simply smothered traditional Algerian

cities, as a visit to the Kasbah section of Algiers illustrates. The Kasbah, a major
lower-class "native quarter" of Algiers was presumably the strongest refuge of
"nativism". Perhaps, in certain aspects of its inhabitants life-style this was true,
but the architectural style and general urban plan are scarcely distinguishable from
the slums of Barcelona, Marseilles or Naples.
Tlemcen was reputedly the Algerian city that preserved most of its pre-
French heritage, but the tourist expecting a Maghribi Aleppo or Old Jerusalem is
in for a rude shock. The wide streets arranged basically in a grid pattern cutting
through undistinguished rows of one and two story buildings are clearly French
provincial à l'algérienne.
Tunisian and Moroccan cities are more like those to be found in the Arab
East where a juxtaposition of the old medina and the new city is the rule. Yet,
even in these two countries the influx of so many colons left an urban imprint
distinguishable, either by it sheer extent or occasionally for some qualitative
aspect, from that in the Arab East. In Tunisia Bizerte, Beja and Enfidaville are
examples of towns wherein only a handful of structures and styles suggesting
other than French origin can be detected.
As for Morocco, those skyscrapers of downtown Casablanca stand in stolid
rebuttal to those who would argue that colonialism is more-or-less the same
everywhere. Even Lyautey's plan to give the new parts of Rabat a neo-Moorish
style in the conviction that it would blend into the architectural style of the old
city only serves to call attention to the intrusive French presence.
Throughout North Africa, cities with sidewalk cafés, cylindrical billboards,
urinoirs, boutiques, Monoprix and small public gardens often with a statue in the
center (26) survive as symbols of the French urban legacy.
There were just too many Europeans in French North Africa for all to be
senior administrators, businessmen and prosperous farmers. They spilled over into
crafts, petty trade and even semi-skilled occupations. Of course, the scale of
expectations for any colon was appreciably higher than for the indigène. There
was a level below which the European could not fall in the colonial situation just
as there was a ceiling above which the native could not expect to rise.
Nevertheless, there remained a broad socio-economic range — at the lower
middle class and lower class, to use European terminology — where colons and
native North Africans had the same kinds of jobs (and job insecurity), spent
roughly identical percentages of their total income on food, housing clothing, and
had, in short, similar economic problems and expectations. In some cases, they
even shared, or competed for, the same jobs ; but the more usual pattern
— consistent with the tendency to segregation (de facto or legal) implicit in any
colonial situation — was to reserve certain jobs for the Europeans, others for the
natives. Here, in short, was an explosive arena for the most basic sort of
confrontation between colonizer and colonized.

(26) "Songez, Messieurs, que c'est la première statue qu'on dresse ici depuis la chute de
l'empire romain". Resident General René Millet, inaugurating the statue to Jules Ferry in Tunis
(1899).
182 L.-C. BROWN

What then was the response of these European artisans, laborers and petits
fonctionnaires, to their environment ? To a large extent they simply brought with
them the ideologies, prejudices and life-styles of the old country. They clung
fervently to a working class consciousness. They organized into trade unions. They
identified with appropriate leftist parties in the métropole. And, being sufficiently
numerous, they also created their own newspapers in North Africa.
In all three countries, both the French Socialist party and the Communist
party either had their own newspaper or worked somewhat more informally with
newspapers sympathetic to their cause. The most famous and longest-lived was
Tunis Socialiste which appeared from 1921 to 1938. There was also Le Maroc
Socialiste, and in Algeria the Oran Républicain (founded 1936) and Alger
Républicain (founded 1938) supported the ideology of the Popular Front. The
Communist papers had a more haphazard life, some dying through lack of funds,
others being banned in times of political repression. As might be expected, there
was a fierce rivalry among Socialists and Communists over whom could claim to
speak for the Left. Alger Républicain, for example, resumed publication in 1943
only to be later captured by the Communists (27).
When set alongside the great mass of French newspapers and journals in
colonial North Africa these few leftist publications appear only as an insignificant
minority. Nor did their political complexion guarantee any appreciable solicitude
for or knowledge about the natives. Indeed, the judgment a French observer in
Algeria offered in 1923 could be applied as a general rule for the entire colonial
period. "Ce sera l'étonnement de nos descendants que, dans un pays où vivent
cinq millions d'indigènes, aucun quotidien français ne s'occupe de questions
musulmanes, sinon pour insérer des communiqués tendancieux d'une agence
parisienne'* (28). Even so, the leftist press provided an interesting and provocative
leaven — of the sort not to be found in non-settlement colonies.
In effect, the colon working class and the colon leftist ideologues were
caught up in certain inescapable colonial contradictions. As Frenchmen living in
French North Africa they belonged to a privileged minority. However modest
their resources or insecure their future, they were, solely by ascriptive right of
French citizenship, vastly better off than the great majority of the native
population. A few troubled leftist thinkers wrestled with this situation, but they
had scant chance of convincing the rank and file of settler Socialists, Communists
and trade unionists that they should surrender their limited perquisites as a mark
of revolutionary purity. The petty functionary liked his "colonial third" (the
bonus amounting to one-third of salary for working outside of metropolitan
France). The craftsman preferred to limit access to his occupation to settlers in
order to avoid "unfair" competition.
Somewhat comparable to the way American populism came to grief over the
race issue in the South, the rank-and-file of settler leftists were always vulnerable
to the siren call of an authoritarian rule that would preserve racist privilege. When
the showdown came in the nationalist struggle for independence most of these
(27) Christiane Souriau-Hobrechts, La Presse Maghrébine, Paris, 1969.
(28) Cited in Charles-André Julien, L 'Afrique du Nord en marche, Paris, p. 136.
 COLONIAL RULE IN FRENCH NORTH AFRICA 1 83

settler leftists and trade unionists proved eager to line up with capitalists, the
army or any other group that appeared capable of maintaining their status Hv
keeping North Africa French.
More important for present purposes, a growing group of North Africans
moving into the "modernized sector" grew up in contact with this ambivalent
settler leftist tradition. Paradoxical as it may seem, this uncertain leftist trumpet
sounded a crisp clarion call to certain native ears. European working class
mentality and leftist philosophy, as transplanted to North African soil, stimulated
the creation of the most effective trade union organizations in the Arab world. It
also coaxed, chivvied and provoked a group of North African nationalists into
formulating a doctrine of realistic pragmatism. This important legacy has often
been overlooked perhaps because it goes against the human penchant for a
simplistic, manichean approach to causality. To appreciate the development one
must recapture the critical distinction between intentions and consequences, not
to mention to complex dialectic of confrontation.
For example, the settler leftists in opposing what they saw as the reactionary
and bourgeois nature of colonial nationalism did not manage to wean native
leadership away from nationalist ideology. They did, however, prod certain
nationalist leaders into working out a better appreciation of socio-economic
determinants in political action. The newspaper duel in the late 20s and early 30s
pitting the young Habib Bourguiba and his colleagues who would create the
Neo-Destour in 1934 against the staff of Tunis Socialiste provides the clearest
example of this process at work (29). Dr. Elie Cohen-Hadria, a Socialist party
militant and staff writer for Tunis Socialiste was, if anything, overly modest in his
retrospective appraisal of Socialist influence on the Neo-Destour : "II est
vraisemblable que certaines campagnes des socialistes de Tunisie ont contribué à faire
réfléchir les hommes qui ont animé ce mouvement national. La libération de la
femme, l'unification de l'enseignement tunisien dans la laïcisation, le
cantonnement de la Grande Mosquée dans le secteur limité de la théologie, la suppression
des habous, toutes ces réformes et d'autres encore, s'apparentent trop étroitement
à tout ce que les socialistes de Tunisie ont réclamé depuis 1919 pour qu'il n'y
ait là que coïncidence" (30).
In Morocco and Algeria the confrontation took place more within the
framework of trade union organization and activity. The formative influence of
the French Communist party and the Confédération générale des Travailleurs
(CGT) upon Messali Hadj is well known. Messali followed a tortuous route from
the time he recruited Algerian workers in France to establish the Etoile Nord-
Afrique in 1926. In many ways it could be argued that his own idea of the
leader's role ultimately borrowed more from the traditional Algerian notion of the

(29) For details, see Micaud, Moore, and Brown, Tunisia: The Politics of Modernization,
pp. 48-52.
(30) E. Cohen-Hadria, Du Protectorat français à l'Indépendance tunisienne - Souvenirs
d'un témoin socialiste unpublished typescript dated July 1959- February 1960, p. 233. The
author acknowledges his thanks to Dr. Cohen-Hadria for permitting him to consult the ms. as
well as for his great help in clarifying this historical period and the Socialist role in several long
interviews and discussions (Tunis, 1960).
1 84 L--C BROWN

sufi shaykh (31), but for all that he did effectively recruit from proletarian
elements and use leftist notions of political and economic organization. In
addition, there were other Algerian workers who since 1932 had participated in
the CGT (32), and the leadership for what became the Union Générale des
Travailleurs Algériens (1956) came out of this background.
An identical pattern of trade unionism growing out of the CGT is discernible
in Morocco. Mahjoub ben Saddiq and the founders of the Union Marocaine du
Travail (UMT) had learned the ropes in the CGT during those stormy years since
1936, when a dahir authorized Moroccans to join trade unions. The law was soon
revoked, and for the remainder of the Protectorate period, Moroccan trade
unionists learned to cope with erractic phases of legality, semi-legality and
— rarely — even grudging governmental favor. What the CGT stood for was so
strongly embraced by Moroccan workers that the Istiqlal party (organized in
1944) reversed its earlier decision to boycott CGT activities and instead urged
party members to capture the trade unions from within (33).
The tactic worked and by 1954 Ben Saddiq and his colleagues had captured
the loyalty of Moroccan workers, and in the following year crowned their success
with the organization of the UMT. During the same period these Moroccan
unionists underlined their break with the CGT by turning toward the ICFTU. This
international aspect of the Cold War lining up the ICFTU against the Communist-
controlled WFTU — which seemed so important at the time — now offers only
antiquarian interest in the North African context. Infinitely more important in
tracing the evolution of a colonial process was the formative influence of the CGT
in Morocco. The Lacoutures perceived this clearly in describing the situation in
1954-1955 : "Mais si nette soit la condamnation qu'ils (Ben Saddiq and his
colleagues) portent contre la grande centrale marxiste, ils ne pourront jamais en
renier toutes les marques. La plupart d'entre eux y ont milité huit ou dix ans, y
ont fait l'apprentissage de la dialectique marxiste et de l'action ouvrière aux côtés
d'hommes comme Louis, Puravel et Antoine Mazella. Ils y ont appris comment on
monte un meeting, comment on "fait" une salle, comment on rédige et on
présente une revendication, comment on commence et surtout comment on finit
une grève. Ils ne l'ont pas oublié" (34).
(31) That is, the notion of blind obedience to the sufi shaykh, e.g. "The disciple must be
in the hands of his skaykh like the corpse in the hands of the washer of the dead". Yet, this
may be unneccessarily straining a point. Certainly, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, and Castro's
Cuba demonstrate that Communist and leftist regimes have a rather weak record when it comes
to avoiding the "cult of personality".
(32) Eqbal Ahmad, 'Trade Unionism", in Brown (éd.), State and Society in Independent
North Africa, p. 180.
(33) Jean and Simonne Lacouture, Le Maroc à l'Epreuve, Paris, 1958, pp. 296-298, citing
information provided by Abderrahim Bouabid.
(34) Le Maroc à l'Epreuve, p. 300. The seemingly banal point of "learning how to run a
meeting" deserves greater emphasis in the scholar's study of the "impact of the West" on the
non-West in modern times. Shaykh Fadil ibn Ashur, describing a different context and time,
sensed the importance of this innovation brought by the West. In writing of the Khalduniya (a
sort of school-cum-scholarly society organized in Tunis in 1896 to offer Zitouna students some
knowledge of western learning) he observed that the very establishment of the society
constituted "the first experience of the country with the system of elections, conferences and
peaceful debate on public affairs". Al-Haraka al-Adabiya wa al-Fikriya fi Tunis, Cairo, 1956,
p. 54.
 COLONIAL RULE IN FRENCH NORTH AFRICA 185

The history of the Tunisian trade union movement even more clearly
confirms the role of the European unionists and leftists as the intrusive foreign
sand that enters the oyster, making possible the pearl. Schematically, the process
in Tunisia went as follows : An effort to create a native trade union movement in
the 1920s failed in face of the strange opposition alliance of the European
Socialists and unionists (seeking working-class unity and intent on stifling any
rival), the Protectorate administration (antagonistic to any form of organized
native activity) and the Old Destour (eager to avoid "unnecessary" trouble with
the authorities and out of sympathy with the idea of a proletarian organization
led by other than traditional, bourgeois notables). A second effort in the 30s was
only slightly more successful, but — a crucial evolution — the Neo-Destour
championed the native trade union movement. Then, in 1 944 when the
Communists captured the Tunisian CGT a dynamic Tunisian unionist, Ferhat Hached,
rallied Tunisian workers to create a native Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail
(UGTT), skillfully balancing Socialist desire to frustrate the Communist takeover,
traditional Tunisian effort to turn the UGTT into a "Muslim movement" (35),
cautious governmental support in face of the Communist threat, and enthusiastic
Neo-Destour backing. The Tunisian trade union movement had come of age. It
was in a position to "use" instead of "be used". Ferhat Hached and his colleagues,
just as their peers in Algeria and Morocco, went through the CGT school of hard
knocks and were graduated with honors.
In the Arab East and in most non-settlement colonies trade unionism was
more nearly a "hot-house plant" — either developed as rather superficial adjuncts
of nationalist political parties or nurtured somewhat late in the day by
sympathetic colonial officials (in some British colonial holdings, following the Labour
Party victory in 1 945) (36). It is no discredit to those leaders — several of whom

(35) Cohen-Hadria, p. 151. He adds, "La création de l'U.G.T.T. est un événement capital.
La collaboration consciente des masses ouvrières, prises en tant que telles, à la lutte pour
l'indépendance a donné i la Tunisie nouvelle des caractères très particuliers qu'on ne trouve
nulle part ailleurs, et dont un socialiste doit se réjouir". He continues that, of course, "we
old-timers" regretted the break-up of the CGT, but he feels it was inevitable. Cohen-Hadria, it
might be added, here speaks for a noble, but minority, "brotherhood" —those individual
Frenchmen in the colonial context, whether socialists, missionaries, contrôleurs civils, or in rare
cases colons, who realized that their original goal could not be achieved but rather than risk all
in ferocious "counter-revolution" chose to adapt to the new situation in order to leave at least
a portion of their ambitions and achievements as legacy to the post-colonial societies. Further,
this small "brotherhood" represents the most appealing examples of "feedback acculturation"
— those from the French side who were profoundly influenced by the native nationalist
movements.
(36) The one partial exception to this general rule of weak trade unionism in the Arab
East was, at the time of independence, the Sudan Workers Trade Union Federation. It is
interesting to speculate why this was so, since clearly the "settler element" was non-existent.
Closer examination will show that the only really well-organized unions were those connected
with the railroads. Perhaps it was the nature of this "new industry", demanding radically new
skills of its workers, uprooting them from their home areas and accustoming them to a pattern
of geographical mobility, and — finally — concentrating them together in a basically new town,
Atbara, where they would be stimulated to work out a new life-style that accounts for the
effectiveness of the Sudan railway workers unions. See, especially, Saad al-Din Fawzi's excellent
monograph, The Labour Movement in the Sudan, 1946-1955, Oxford University Press, 1957.
186 L.-C. BROWN

achieved considerable progress given the objective conditions they faced — to

point out that they lacked the long and harsh training that the CGT provided in
North Africa. And as a result, the North African trade union leadership possessed
in infinitely greater measure the proper mix of hard-bitten realism, tactical
expertise and an idealism tempered in battle with persistence.
Yet another reason for placing this much emphasis on the formative
influence of the CGT and on-the-spot European leftist thinking and agitation in
French North Africa warrants attention. Western scholars, even those working in
non-Western studies, are accustomed to view the growth of trade unionism and
the various shadings of socialist ideology as an uphill fight against an already
well-established capitalist economy — and ideology. It is a struggle of the outs to
overthrow the ins, force them to share the benefits of the existing system, or
some combination of the two extremes.
Now, as Frantz Fanon's brilliant polemical writings have made clear, the lines
of battle are differently drawn in the colonial situation. In colonial context the
trade unionists (just as the agriculturalists in the modernized sector) are really
part of a privileged elite by comparison with the great mass of the colonized
society. Fanon's aim was to put the great deprived masses of these societies
coming out of colonialism into independence on guard against the threat of
domination by a new minority — a "bourgeois nationalist" elite. Yet, perhaps
Fanon needs the somersault treatment Marx claimed to effet on Hegel, for he
may have grasped the wrong end of the problem.
The colonial dialectic can be seen as an interlocking two-front war of
emerging modernized leadership against "traditional" leadership (37) and of
colonized society against the colonial rule. Where the victorious forces meet at the
point of independence is of crucial importance for later developments. Leaving
aside the logical extremes which never occur (i.e. survival intact of the traditional
leadership or a total victory for the modernizing leadership against both tradition
and colonial rule) one can get on to the more realistic options .
If the modernizing leadership that does emerge is too weak vis-a-vis
traditional forces, then there is greater risk of social stagnation overlaid by an
ineffective and formalistic political structure radically out of harmony with the
actual forces and opposing interests of the country (38).

(37) Again, let it be remembered that one must not assume a single monolithic entity
— traditional society — acted upon by colonialism and/or other forces of modernization. The
necessarily abstract level of argument in this paragraph should not obscure our major theme :
There were many kinds of traditional society and many kinds of colonial experience. One must
give due attention to both patterns of variables whether treating an individual case or
constructing general theory.
(38) A considerable degree of disharmony is clearly part of the colonial legacy (or any
other route to modernization), for, as we have seen, the impact of modernizing forces is
uneven. It creates, or exacerbates a "dual economy", hits urban areas and those with access to
formal education first, etc. If, however, the emerging elite is sufficiently modernized (and thus
no longer a hostage to the traditional leadership in times of stress or temporary breakdown)
and sufficiently diversified in its modernity (e.g. agricultural and commercial entrepreneurs plus
trade unionists, technicians as well as political mobilizers, modernized military professionals and
also modernized civil bureaucrats, etc.), then a healthy dialectic process of change can continue.
 COLONIAL RULE IN FRENCH NORTH AFRICA 1 87

In effect, the modernizing process is intrinsically disintegrate — at least for

a painful transitional period. And the danger of disintegration becomes suddenly
most acute when that intrusive unifier, the common colonizing enemy, is removed
with independence (39). In such a crisis-situation those former colonized groups
who had rubbed elbows with European trade unionism and leftist ideology could
well tip the scales in favor of the modernizing leadership in their struggle against
the native old guard.
That is, Fanon's despised "bourgeois nationalist" elite just might play the
dynamic role equivalent, mutatis mutandis, to Europe's bourgeoisie in early
modern times.
Such an interpretation offers one more perspective on our major theme
— the many faces of colonialism and their different impact on the colonized
society. It also sets the stage for a few remarks by way of conclusion. First,
however, it may be useful to sum up the argument advanced thus far and then
move on to say a word about the separate colonial experience distinguishing
Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco.

The impact of colons on the land and of European leftism in the urban areas
is, in one important sense, part of a single phenomenon — the special intensity of
colonial confrontation that comes ineluctably with settler colonization. The
heavy-hand of settler colonialism is perhaps best seen in these two fields, but they
only serve as examples of the quantitative and qualitative differences growing out
of the massive demographic presence of settlers. Other examples would include :
more widespread use of the "colonial language" to such extent that it becomes at
least partially "nationalized" (40), more roads, cars, radios and — in short —
European consumption patterns creating a greater sense of relative deprivation
among the natives, and a transplanting of the entire metropolitan educational
system, from jardins d'enfants to universities which, juxtaposed virtually
unchanged alongside the native traditional systems and various hybrid efforts such as the
Franco-arabe schools, then serves as a yardstick for nationalist educational
aspirations (41). All of these many elements, and others that could be cited, served to
distinguish French North Africa, as settler colonies, from non-settler colonies.
There are, however, other scales of colonial intensity. They include the
duration of the colonial period, the timing (e.g. Europe in 1830 had a much

(39) See the chapter by Clifford Geertz in Clifford Geertz (éd.), Old Societies and New
States. The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa. New York 1963.
(40) See, on this subject, Charles F. Gallagher, "Language and Identity" in Brown (ed.)
State and Society in Independent North Africa, and David C. Gordon, North Africa's French
Legacy 1954-1962, Harvard, 1962.
(41) See Brown, "Tunisia" in James S. Coleman (ed.) Education and Political
Development, Princeton University Press, 1965. Other chapters in this volume pertinent for purposes of
comparison include those of Michel Debeauvais, Ayo Ogunsheye, and Malcolm Kerr. -
188 L.-C. BROWN

harsher view of what would justifiably be done to the natives than in the 1880s
or after), the extent of physical violence (duration of military "pacification"
campaigns and numbers of soldiers involved), and the variant patterns of formal
colonial control (from outright legal absorption on one extreme to a mandated
territory on the other).
According to such standards, appreciable difference emerge to distinguish
Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. They fell under colonial rule in 1830, 1881 and
1912, respectively. Algeria achieved independence in 1962 — a 132 year period of
colonial rule. Tunisia and Morocco both became independent in 1956, making for
colonial periods of 75 and 44 years. Algeria was incorporated legally into
Metropolitan France. Tunisia and Morocco were protectorates.
Pacification in Algeria spluttered on until the 1850s. At the peak of Marshal
Bugeaud's campaign against Abdal-Qadir in the 1840s over 108,000 French troops,
or one-third of the French army at that time were tied up in Algeria. Another
imposing test of arms, the revolt of el-Mokrani, broke out in 1871. The
disturbance of 1945 and the brutal French repression marked the penultimate
armed confrontation before the long revolution (1954-1962) that achieved
independence. If ever a colonial relationship may be said to have been born, lived
and died in violence, it is French Algeria (42).
By contrast, there was only sporadic armed resistance in Tunisia following
the establishment of the Protectorate and hardly more in the period immediately
before independence. The struggle, instead, involved successive waves of native
Tunisian efforts to organize, indoctrinate and mobilize their society in an
endurance test against a French colonial presence conceded to be irremovable
through frontal attack. In such a context the tactics of appeals beyond "colon
preponderance" to "the other France" were very much in evidence.
On the matter of violence, Morocco falls in between Algeria and Morocco.
The Morrocan colonial period divides into equal halves of pacification
(1912-1934) and post-pacification (1934-1956). The celebrated Lyautey tache
d'huile doctrine, itself in part a reaction against the inefficient and brutal military
violence characterizing French Algeria, mitigated the violence ; and in some cases
the resistance was only a baroud d'honneur. Even so, the French casualty figures
for the period 1907-1935 are telling : 27,000 dead and 15,000 wounded (43).
In terms of a radical destruction of native society and institutions, Algeria
stands out again as the extreme case (44). In Tunisia France with a combination

(42) See on this theme Mostefa Lacheraf, L'Algérie: Nation et société, Paris, 1965 (a
collection of articles published between 1954 and 1964, which through necessarily polemical in
that they were intended to contribute to Algeria's independence struggle, are important
historical writings both in the evidence assembled and the mood conveyed).
(43) Cited in lohn Waterbury, The Commander of the Faithful - the Moroccan Political
Elite, Columbia University Press, 1970, p. 37, noting that most of the casualties were Moroccan
auxiliaries, Algerian spahis, and Senegalese.
(44) "Je puis affirmer, pour en avoir fait le décompte, qu'il reste i peine à Alger une
quarantaine de personnalités issues d'une ascendance déjà notable en 1830". Augustin Berque,
"La Bourgeoisie algérienne", Hesperis, XXXV, 1948.
 COLONIAL RULE IN FRENCH NORTH AFRICA 1 89

of deliberate and unintended actions clearly facilitated the emergence of a new

elite (45), but at the same time the key motif was that of a staged development
without the native society ever being completely overwhelmed or disoriented.
Native Tunisia always managed to roll with the colonial punches (46).
Lyautey did not want to disrupt traditional Morocco, and his successors
— even those far from lyauteyists in principle — maintained something of the
original approach, even though often to serve quite different goals. In Morocco,
therefore, the sultanate survived if indeed it was not revived, the traditional state
bureaucracy was left largely untouched, and a calculated effort to preserve (or
even aggrandize) traditional leadership is discernible in the écoles de fils de
notables and the policy of working through the grands caïds.
All the indices, in short, are in accord in placing Algeria at the extreme end
of the spectrum of colonial intensity. Morocco, on the other hand, with the one,
admittedly very important, exception of being a settler colony, experienced a
colonial intensity more nearly in common with states of the Arab East. Tunisia
may be placed somewhere in between Algeria and Morocco on the colonial
intensity scale.

VI

Returning now, in conclusion, to the varieties of colonialism as measured by

the impact on the colonized societies it may be seen that in Algeria France
radically 'destroyed traditional society and its leadership and also stimulated the
creation of new, modernizing elites ; all, however, in a painfully disjunctive way
that left the life-styles of the several different native Algerian groups farther apart
than they had ever been. At the same time, the destruction/creation process took
place in a rigidly inflexible political structure that barred the door to piece-meal
or staged development toward independence. The historian should avoid the world
"inevitable", but certainly the cards were stacked against anything but a violent,
revolutionary end to colonial rule in Algeria. Further, the post-independence
Algeria while evidencing a dour fundamentalist, religious puritanism seems firmly
in the hands of modernizers rather than neo-traditionalists.
Tunisia moved through the colonial period in orderly stages, reaching
independence without unbearable traumatic shocks to society, having developed in
the process a new modernizing elite organized for purposes of social mobilization
in perhaps the most effective political party in the Arab world. As a result,

(45) Henri de Montéty, Enquête sur les Vieilles familles et les Nouvelles Elites en Tunisie.
First issued as a confidential document for limited circulation in 1939, a slightly abridged
version was published by the Centre des Hautes Etudes d'Adminiiration Musulmane Documents
sur l'Evolution du Monde Musulman, Fascicule 3, 8 August 1940. An English translation is now
available in Man, State, and Society in North Africa, edited by I. William Zartman.
(46) This basic argument forms the central theme of the present author's contribution to
Micaud, Moore, and Brown, Tunisia : the Politics of Modernization.
190 ^ L.-C. BROWN

independent Tunisia was able to embark on an ambitious and generally effective

program of social and economic reforms (47), while avoiding political breakdown.
Only Morocco arrived at independence with traditional forces still very much
intact if not, indeed, in stronger position than the modernizers. During the
struggle against colonialism that other battle of modernizing leadership v.
traditional leadership was muted ; and, in effect, largely postponed until after
independence (e.g. creation of the UNFP in 1959). Some observers detect an
almost overly balanced array of forces in which the king can play off the several
ill-formed political forces, these forces in turn can continue to play the political
game to some individual advantage, but all at a heavy price in terms of national
economic and political development (48).
This analysis, if accurate, further refines the provocative question of
correlation between colonial intensity and post-colonial adjustement. Morocco, it has
been argued, sustained the least intensive colonial experience in French North
Africa. Morocco, according to this posited cumulative scale of colonial intensity,
presents a case perhaps more consonant with the colonial period in the Arab East.
Does, in fact, the post-independence Moroccan experience bear comparison with,
say, Egypt from 1922 to 1952, Iraq from 1930 to 1958 and Syria since World
War II ?
The whole approach raises disturbing questions concerning what might be
called the disadvantages of "premature" independence or the developmental
benefits of a harsh rather than a tantalizing colonial experience (49). Only those
psychologically at ease in a Machiavellian or Nietzschian world will rejoice in such
findings, but only those capable of sidestepping fairly imposing obstacles of
stubborn empirical fact can readily dismiss this line of inquiry.
Or does the image of Tunisia's colonial experience at a middle position
between the extremes of Algeria and Morocco suggest a certain optimum degree
of colonial intensity which is either exceeded or not attained only at subsequent
social cost to the country concerned ?

(47) With, admittedly, considerably greater success in the social than the economic field.
The relative sluggishness of economic development in a socio-political system that has achieved
such impressive gains in other fields deserves more attention for what it might contribute to
modernization theory in general.
(48) E.g., Waterbury, The Commander of the Faithful.
(49) Note, for example, the following perceptive observation : "There is a case to be
made for as well as against the imperial peace —Persian, Roman, Arab, Turkish, French or
British — as a stage in the development and spread of civilization ; there is little that can be said
in defence of the so-called imperialism encountered by the Middle East in the first half of the
twentieth century — an imperialism of interference without responsibility, which would neither
create nor permit stable and orderly government. Perhaps one of the most significant
distinctions in the ex-imperial countries of Asia and Africa is between those that were directly
administered through a colonial or imperial civil service, and those that were under some form
on indirect rule of influence. The people of the latter group of countries got the worst of both
worlds, receiving neither the training in administration of the colonial territories, nor the
practice in responsibility of the old independent states". Bernard Lewis, The Middle East and
the West, Indiana University Press, 1964, pp. 59-60.
 COLONIAL RULE IN FRENCH NORTH AFRICA 191

Or, alternatively, are we drawn back to the "catharsis of revolution" doctrine

enunciated by Fanon (50) ?
There are no easy answers to these questions, for at this level of abstraction
evidence is especially vulnerable to being shaped, however subtly, by the
investigator's own values. Suffice here to assert this much as proven : a careful
attention to the nuances of the colonial period offers rich dividends of increased
knowledge about contemporary North Africa.
To end, then, with a seemingly appropriate citation, "Cette histoire n'est
donc pas en Afrique 'la plus inutile des sciences' "And who said this ? Stéphane
Gsell used these words as a ringing finale to his argument that France, the new
Rome, had come to North Africa to stay. An appropriate counsel of humility and
caution concerning both politicians' plans and historians' prophecies ?

L. Carl BROWN
Professor of Near Eastern Studies
Princeton University
(New Jersey 08540)

(SO) Or, for that matter, the very challenging thesis of Barrington Moore, Jr. in his Social
Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World,
Boston, 1966. His argument may be adapted and tested to good advantage in the study of
social change under colonial rule. The book deserves more careful consideration by historians
and social scientists working in this field than it appears to have received.