From the beginning of the military conquest of the region, the majority of French observers noted that Algerian Muslims had strictly adhered to the Qur’anic prohibition of alcohol before the advent of the French.¹ This assumption was demonstrably untrue. Alcohol was consumed by Jewish, Christian and Muslim groups in Algeria before the French conquest, as it was in other Muslim regions, such as, for example, the Mughal Empire.² The prohibition of alcohol in the Qur’an is clear, yet, as argued by Shahab Ahmed in his recent book What is Islam?, historically, Muslims did not always translate the consumption of alcohol into a loss of religious identity.³

French colonial psychiatrists writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, were mostly unaware that parts of the Muslim population had been drinking alcohol in Algeria for centuries. Many French authors found the idea of abstinence deeply perplexing and ‘non-French’ on account of the complex interconnections between France’s national identity and certain forms of alcohol, as demonstrated by the historian Kolleen Guy and the anthropologist Marion Demossier.⁴ Yet not all of the Muslims they encountered in Algeria adhered to this total abstinence, which French observers interpreted as a new development. Consequently, they understood themselves as living through a period of rapid change in this respect, with more and more formerly abstinent Muslims ostensibly starting to drink increasing amounts of alcohol. Understandably, they documented their observations of this ‘new’ phenomenon of alcohol-drinking Muslims in their publications and theorised about its origins and possible consequences. The French doctor Louis Lataillade, for example, blamed contact with France for this process of gradual alcoholisation among Muslims in his 1936 dissertation:

The narrative of alcohol having been unknown in the region until it was imported by the French came to the fore soon after the conquest of Algiers in 1830. Consequently, in the mid-twentieth century, psychiatric experts such as those affiliated with the influential psychiatric school of thought commonly called the École d’Alger, established by the French psychiatrist Antoine Porot in Algeria from the 1920s onwards,⁶ were able to anchor reports of their personal experiences with Muslim alcoholic patients in a large body of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century literature that recorded an assumed steady rise of alcohol consumption among Muslims during colonisation.⁷ Despite the fact that the École d’Alger based their texts on the findings of earlier experts, the narrative that the colonised Muslim had recently discovered alcohol – and thus that excessive drinking presented a pressing new problem – remained dominant throughout the last thirty years of the colonisation of Algeria; an anachronism that seems to have been unapparent to colonial authors.⁸

World War I, during which Algerian Muslim soldiers fought and drank alongside the French, had, according to many colonial authors, further accelerated Muslim alcohol consumption in Algeria.⁹ Nevertheless, it was the establishment of psychiatric institutions on North African soil in the 1930s, which will be discussed below, that brought a sea change in the eyes of French authors writing about the alcohol consumption of the colonised Muslim. They found themselves suddenly confronted with a sharp increase in Muslim patients. A range of mental illnesses, including alcoholism, which had formerly been regarded as rare among colonised Algerians,¹⁰ were now increasingly framed as ubiquitous.¹¹

This chapter examines how French colonial psychiatrists wrote about social and economic alcohol-related problems among colonised people between the first establishment of a psychiatric institution in Algeria in 1933 and Algerian independence in 1962. How did they explain the reported increase in alcohol consumption, and how were sentiments of guilt – related to their own involvement in the introduction of alcoholism into what was, allegedly, a formerly sober region – expressed in their publications? Did the French colonial psychiatrists of the twentieth century truly believe that France was to blame for alcoholism and alcohol-related criminality among Muslims? Had France’s celebrated mission civilisatrice been, in the specific context of alcohol consumption, a corrupting influence on Algerian Muslims? Finally, this chapter asks whether the framing of ‘immoderation’ as a medically and psychiatrically defined character trait – presumed to be shared by all Muslims – had an impact on colonial descriptions of Algerians’ alcohol consumption.

The source material analysed for this chapter was written by French colonial doctors interested in alcohol and by French colonial psychiatrists who either belonged to, or were contemporaries of, the École d’Alger. The source material consists of monographs, articles, dissertations and conference papers from the 1930s to 1962. Publications by Algerian Muslims, either in French or in Arabic, will not be covered in this chapter, as presenting the centuries-spanning discourse of Muslim religious, legal and medical scholars on this issue is far beyond the scope of a single chapter. This chapter focuses solely on Orientalist psychiatric viewpoints pertaining to alcohol-drinking Algerian Muslims in the French colony.¹² It should be added that, while publications of French colonial psychiatry in general, and the École d’Alger in particular, have been a site of research for a number of historians, psychiatric theories about the alcohol consumption of colonised Algerians have been mostly neglected.¹³

This chapter is divided into four parts. The first part provides the historical background of psychiatric developments during the 1930s. It maps the impact of the theories proposed by the École d’Alger on the study of alcoholism in the region. The second part examines the idea that Algerian Muslims, who allegedly had not consumed any alcohol before French colonisation, took to drinking alcohol only in an attempt to imitate their colonisers. This imitation was, in the time period studied in this chapter, often contextualised by the theory of ‘assimilation’, whose ideals had by that time already been largely discarded. The third part of this chapter focuses on the notion that alcoholism was a particularly serious problem in the Algerian context, because, as was proposed by members of the École d’Alger, Muslims inherently lacked any moderation. Finally, the last section discusses the idea, prevalent among French colonists, that alcohol-drinking Muslims were more prone to criminality and violence than any other group in colonial Algeria, and consequently presented a greater social problem to the settler society of Algeria.

The École d’Alger and alcoholism

The period between the founding of the first psychiatric institution in 1933 and Algeria’s independence from France in 1962 was the time when the École d’Alger flourished and influenced the methods, treatments and theories of French metropolitan psychiatry. The historian Richard Keller argued in his 2007 book Colonial Madness that the publications of the École d’Alger in this specific time period ‘reflected the hardening of racial lines that characterized Algeria in the interwar years as a distinct mentality emerged among the so-called pieds-noirs, or French Algerian settlers’.¹⁴ The French discussion on alcoholism among Muslims in Algeria was consequently dominated by psychiatrists of a particularly racialised mindset, which had a long-lasting impact on the framing of the issue.¹⁵

While French hospitals had been established in Algeria since 1830,¹⁶ the first colonial psychiatric institution, the hospital of Blida-Joinville, was founded (by Antoine Porot) only in 1933.¹⁷ Before the establishment of Blida-Joinville, a small number of psychiatric patients – both colonisers and colonised – were shipped from Algeria to asylums in France for treatment.¹⁸ Most of the alcoholic patients shipped to France from Algeria were Europeans.¹⁹ French experts in the metropolitan institutions wrote only occasionally about what they perceived to be an increase in alcoholism among their Muslim patients.²⁰ The opening of Blida-Joinville also meant that psychiatric experts writing about mental illnesses among colonised Muslims now lived and worked on Algerian soil,²¹ and, as Charlotte Chopin has shown, colonial doctors and psychiatrists of the École d’Alger both embodied and justified settler values.²²

Blida-Joinville was an institution that welcomed men and women, and settler and colonised patients, with colonised Algerians making up the largest proportion of the patient population. Between 1933 and 1940, Muslims made up the largest group of the hospital population (49.29 per cent), while 43.66 per cent of patients were ‘European’ and 7.1 per cent ‘Jewish’.²³ In many of the colonial texts, immense pride was expressed in the achievement of having founded a psychiatric institution in Algeria. The psychiatrists Maurice Desruelles and Henri Bersot, for example, stated in a 1939 article that ‘This psychiatric hospital is one of the most beautiful achievements of the schemes of assistance in Algeria and does great honour to the colony and its government.’²⁴ Yet despite praise like this, not all was as had been hoped. When it was officially opened in 1938, Blida-Joinville had a capacity of 1,200 beds, divided into four departments, for both French and Algerian patients.²⁵ This proved quickly inadequate for the needs of the colony. Many Muslims, who previously would never have brought their family members into a colonial institution because of the risk of them being transported across the sea, now admitted their loved ones to the care of the French psychiatrists in Blida-Joinville. Consequently Blida-Joinville quickly became overcrowded.²⁶

The psychiatrists of the École d’Alger who worked in the departments of Blida-Joinville published a series of articles on the diagnoses assigned to these ‘new’ patients, which included ‘alcoholism’. These studies were based on the theory of ‘North African primitivism’, namely the theory that colonised people acted and reacted in ways that were markedly different from French behaviour.²⁷ Antoine Porot and the psychiatrists of the École d’Alger were notably criticised for this by the psychoanalyst and political philosopher Frantz Fanon, who worked in psychiatric institutions in both Algeria and Tunisia in the 1950s.²⁸

Antoine Porot’s son and student, Maurice Porot, and his colleague Jean Gentile, conducted a study in 1941 into “Alcoholism and Mental Problems in the Algerian Muslim Native”.²⁹ They noted that 54 per cent of Muslim patients with mental illnesses in Blida-Joinville had consumed alcohol at some point in their lives, and that these patients ranged from one-time consumers to people who drank every day.³⁰ Antoine Porot used this study to underline the idea that there had been a shocking increase in alcoholism among Algerian Muslim patients in the twentieth century and suggested in 1943 that ‘60 per cent of the natives interned in Blida are alcoholics’.³¹ A rough estimation combining Antoine Porot’s statement with the numbers provided by Charles Bardenat, mentioned above, and the 1,200-bed capacity of Blida-Joinville during this time period leads to startling numbers: Antoine Porot seems to have been suggesting that in 1943 around 360 Muslim alcoholics were interned in Blida-Joinville.

Antoine Porot’s reference for the figure of 60 per cent was the article written by Maurice Porot and Jean Gentile, and specifically their statement that 54 per cent of Muslim patients had had some contact with alcohol before hospital admission.³² Yet by rounding up and presenting all alcohol drinkers as outright alcoholics, he severely misconstrued the numbers provided by his two students. The numbers are also seen to be flawed if compared with data provided in other publications. In 1954 three French psychiatrists of the École d’Alger, G.-A. Manceaux, Jean Sutter and Yves Pélicier, stated that 6 per cent of all Muslim patients in French psychiatric institutions in Algeria were alcoholics.³³ This amounted to just 10 per cent of the total suggested by Porot a decade earlier.

The figures provided by French colonial psychiatrists on the increase in alcoholism usually related to Muslim men. The alcohol consumption of Muslim women was routinely neglected by colonial authors, who believed that only marginalised Muslim women, detached from their families, would turn to alcohol. Consequently, the women whose alcohol consumption and alcoholism were recorded in the sources were mostly those described as ‘prostitutes’ and ‘dancers’ – with little or no proof provided for these claims – or as domestic workers.³⁴ Maurice Porot and Jean Gentile, for example, excluded female alcohol consumption completely from their 1941 study, arguing that ‘The extreme rarity of alcoholism among Muslim women (apart from prostitutes) made us confine this survey to men only.’³⁵ Because of such preconceptions, the non-gendered descriptions of drinking habits in the source material have to be read as male unless it is stated otherwise.

Because of a lack of reliable statistical evidence about alcohol consumption and alcoholism rates in the published psychiatric sources, it is difficult to substantiate whether the ostensibly well-documented increase was just a postulated increase (linked to miscalculation, the spread of psychiatric institutions in the region and an intensifying interest in the diagnosis of alcoholism) or was due to an actual increase in numbers (linked to a greater availability of alcohol under French rule).³⁶ Yet it is clear that most of the French psychiatric experts writing between the 1930s and Algeria’s independence in 1962 were convinced that they were observing and recording a gradual loss of inhibition towards alcohol in the Muslims around them. The leaders of the École d’Alger in particular believed there to be an actual increase in both consumption and over-consumption of alcohol among Muslims, and wrote about it accordingly.

Mission corruptrice?

The idea that alcohol was introduced not only into Algeria but into the whole Maghreb by the French was the cornerstone of psychiatric theories about the alcohol consumption of colonised Muslims. Consequently, their alcohol consumption was always understood as something imported and copied. French colonial doctors and psychiatrists often blamed the French for the advent not only of alcohol but also alcoholism in the Maghreb, and expressed a certain feeling of guilt about the existence of alcoholic Muslims. Many suspected that the bad example of European settlers – especially of the non-French, namely the Italians, Spaniards and Maltese in Algeria – was responsible for the rising levels of alcohol consumption among the colonised Muslim population.³⁷ This interpretation of the situation was troublesome to the French in general and to French doctors and psychiatrists in particular. The psychiatrist Raoul Vadon, for example, stated somewhat dejectedly in his 1935 dissertation on ‘Medical assistance for psychopaths in Tunisia’, that, while he was working in Algeria, alcohol was easily accessible to Tunisian Muslims, ‘thanks to the contribution of our so-called civilisation’.³⁸

France’s colonial empire was based on the ideals of the mission civilisatrice, the assumption that the colonisation of a region by France would markedly improve the lives of the colonised, and, as Nancy Gallagher demonstrated in her 1983 book Medicine and Power in Tunisia, European medicine was an ‘integral part of the French mission civilisatrice’.³⁹ Many colonial doctors and psychiatrists wholeheartedly adopted the mission civilisatrice and believed that their role was as much to improve the health of the colonisers and the colonised as to educate and elevate the colonised on both an intellectual and a moral level. Colonising Algeria meant, in the eyes of many of the French psychiatrists studied for this chapter, civilising Algeria. By the 1930s, France had been ‘civilising’ Algeria for a century. In this narrative of success, the question of France’s influence on the rising alcohol consumption among Muslims and the consequences of overconsumption presented a moral challenge. Was alcoholism among the colonised a necessary evil born of their contact with French civilisation? Dr H. Foley of the Pasteur Institute of Algeria, for example, described in 1938 a clear link between civilisation and alcoholism in an article on medical issues in the rural south of Algeria:

The ‘civilisation’ spreading among Algerians mentioned by Foley was, in his eyes, clearly the hoped-for result of the efforts of the mission civilisatrice; it was French civilisation spreading in the colony. Yet the projected positive effect of French influence was apparently also the ‘cause’ of alcoholism among those they tried to ‘civilise’.

French psychiatrists were convinced that proximity to French culture caused the colonised Muslim to drink. They held the view that Muslim city dwellers on the Mediterranean coast had begun to indulge in alcohol because of their exposure to French people and institutions, while those in the countryside were, so to speak, outside the reach of this apparently ‘corrupting’ proximity to France. In particular, it was believed that Algerian Muslims whose work brought them into direct contact with French drinkers, such as soldiers, porters, servants and ‘prostitutes’,⁴¹ witnessed and then copied the bad example of the French settlers, who, according to many disapproving psychiatric experts, drank too much. In 1959, for example, the psychiatrists Jean Sutter, Maurice Porot and Yves Pélicier were convinced that only those Algerians who had been in contact with France had started to drink: ‘The religious interdiction of drinking alcohol is still respected by the vast majority of rural Muslims. Those of the towns, on the other hand, indulge more and more in alcohol and often with a considerable immoderation.’⁴²

There is evidence that alcohol consumption was indeed more prevalent among Algerian Muslims in the colonial cities. French psychiatrists were, however, seemingly unaware of the fact that the upheaval of colonisation itself had, in the words of the psychologist Ihsan al-Issa of 2000, brought about ‘the destruction of traditional village life’ in Algeria.⁴³ Al-Issa argued that this process had brought many poor Algerians into the cities, where they could no longer rely on the social networks of their villages, which, in turn, caused many to develop mental illnesses. Alcoholism was one.

From the beginning of the colonisation of Algeria, French authors had debated whether the spread of civilisation necessarily went hand in hand with a rise in alcoholism. One group of French observers believed that alcoholisation – which they often directly or indirectly connected to either Christianity or secularism – was necessary to achieve civilisation. A 1913 newspaper article on ‘Alcoholism in Morocco’, for example, exclaimed that alcoholism was ‘The barometer of civilisation!’⁴⁴

The questions of whether it was possible to ‘civilise’ Algerian Muslims without alcoholising them, and whether ‘civilisation’ was even achievable without the involvement of alcohol, were closely linked to one of the main debates in regard to French colonialism since the beginning of the conquest of Algeria: the contest between the contrasting theories of ‘assimilation’ and ‘association’.⁴⁵ Although they were very different in outlook, both of these concepts were based on the ideals of the mission civilisatrice. As the historian Patricia Lorcin explained in 1995 in Imperial Identities, both theories had ‘civilisation’ as their alleged end goal.⁴⁶

In the nineteenth century, French colonial psychiatrists had actively engaged in the discussion of whether assimilation could work on Muslim Algerians, namely if they could ever ‘progress’ enough to turn into Frenchmen, or whether France should push ‘association’, or the parallel and asynchronous development of the different races in the Algerian context. The debate about assimilation versus association was often bound up with drinking habits. In the nineteenth century, there were claims that the adoption of alcohol as a drink of choice was a sign of Algerians being at least ‘capable’ of assimilation.⁴⁷ In the twentieth century, however, evolutionary theories led a majority of psychiatric authors to the conviction that had long been propagated by many of the anti-assimilationist settlers in Algeria:⁴⁸ Algerian Muslims could never be turned into Frenchmen, as they were just too different.⁴⁹ Pierre Pinaud, for example, declared in his 1933 medical dissertation on ‘Alcoholism among Arabs in Algeria’ that, despite both belonging to the ‘white race’, Algerian Muslims and French people were inherently different and that this difference could, apparently, not be bridged.⁵⁰

The psychiatrists of the École d’Alger were clearly in favour of a strong theory of association. While they interpreted alcohol consumption among colonised Muslims as essentially France’s fault, they did not consider drinking an indicator of assimilability. Colonised Muslims could never hope to become French in any way, and still less so through alcohol, as they drank it ‘wrongly’ – both too much of it and the wrong drinks – as will be discussed in the next part of this chapter. The perceived increase in the number of alcohol-drinking Muslims was construed as a sign of North African ‘primitivity’. It should be added here that this argumentation and vocabulary were also adopted by some Muslim writers of this period. The prolific Algerian author Mohammed Soualah, for example, lamented in 1937 that alcohol and alcoholism were spreading ‘rapidly’ in the Maghreb, before stating that, because of alcohol, ‘this beautiful North African race, strong, sober and prolific, is undergoing a veritable physical and moral downfall’.⁵¹

‘Immoderation specific to the primitives’

From the 1930s onwards, when writing about alcohol, French colonial psychiatrists focused on over-consumption to such a degree that they used the term ‘alcoholism’ even when they referred to moderate drinking, as in the case of the article by Antoine Porot quoted above. The fact that a Muslim ‘drank alcohol’ was very often interpreted as evidence of ‘alcoholism’. The notion that Muslims were incapable of moderate consumption was explained either by the assumption that those who, knowing that they broke religious precepts, felt the need to profit to the utmost from their transgression, or by postulation of an inherent trait among Muslims for immoderation.⁵² The latter was far more prevalent, especially among the theories of the École d’Alger. Maurice Porot and Jean Gentile even went as far as stating in their 1941 article that ‘The Muslim who drinks, does not drink moderately … .’⁵³ The authors based this assertion on their experience at Blida-Joinville. They confirmed Antoine Porot’s earlier suggestions of 1918 and those of an article co-authored with Don Côme Arrii in 1932 that the drinking habits of Algerian Muslims were driven by an ‘immoderation specific to the primitives’, which supposedly made alcohol consumption among Muslims all the more dangerous.⁵⁴ In 1943 Antoine Porot wrote: ‘Periodically, alarms are raised [about the problem of alcoholism in Algeria], especially regarding the danger that is posed to the natives who rush towards alcohol with an immoderation specific to all primitives.’⁵⁵

Porot’s view was that it was ‘immoderation’ that made alcohol consumption dangerous. He never suggested that people should be abstinent and believed that moderate drinking was a sign of civilised Frenchness. Porot did not subscribe to the views promulgated by the French abstinence movement, which had formed during World War I.⁵⁶ Instead, he conformed to a long-established consensus in France, where people had always regarded abstinence as somewhat suspicious and as essentially non-French. As the historian Patricia Prestwich put it in 2003: ‘In the late nineteenth century, those who voluntarily abstained from all alcohol were considered eccentric and prone to other non-French preoccupations, such as vegetarianism, animal rights and Protestantism.’⁵⁷

Many colonial psychiatrists during the time period covered by this chapter agreed with Porot, suggesting that it was this inherent immoderation, rather than the increased availability of alcohol connected with the French conquest, that caused the medical, economic and social alcohol-related complications that apparently plagued Algeria. Immoderation was described in the psychiatric sources as a shared, inherited character trait of a ‘race’ – which variously included all ‘Arabs’, all Muslims, all colonised people and all ‘primitives’. Psychiatrists of the École d’Alger even propagated the theory of a North African ‘primitive mentality’ that included both immoderation and proneness to addiction as two of its main criteria.⁵⁸ Immoderation was seen to be exacerbated by the abstinence of generations of Algerian Muslims before European influence. As Antoine Porot and Don Côme Arrii perceived: ‘The native is hypersensitive to alcohol because of his individual or ancestral unaccustomedness [to drinking] … .’⁵⁹

Was the drinking behaviour of Algerian Muslims persistently immoderate or was this observation just a racist prejudice shared by French authors? On the basis of the psychiatric source material from the colonial period, it is impossible to answer this question. Nessim Znaien has suggested in a 2020 chapter on ‘Drinking and production patterns of wine in North Africa during French colonisation, c. 1830–1956’ that there was indeed a clear increase in the consumption of wine among all groups in Algeria after 1900, including among Muslims.⁶⁰ An increase in wine consumption might indicate an increase in over-consumption. Similarly, the problems caused by overcrowding at the psychiatric hospital of Blida-Joinville, and Maurice Porot’s and Jean Gentile’s research in 1941 that seemed to show that over half of male Muslim inpatients had consumed alcohol at least once in their lives, may have caused colonial psychiatric experts to assume an increase in immoderate drinking.

The information in the source material, however, is merely anecdotal and cannot be extrapolated to broader patient and non-patient populations. The most thorough investigation into the forms of alcohol consumed by individual Algerians can be found in Pierre Pinaud’s 1933 dissertation, in which he described Muslim patients confined in mental institutions and certified as ‘alcoholics’, as well as Muslim alcohol consumers among the general public, as drinking litres of wine every day,⁶¹ consuming excessive amounts of aperitifs and anisettes at ‘all hours of the day’⁶² and absorbing ‘excessive amounts’ of beer.⁶³ One of the cases he mentioned in his dissertation was a Muslim man whom he had personally looked after and who, at the end of Ramadan, had consumed enormous amounts of alcohol. Allegedly, this man had drunk ‘in an hour, six bottles of red wine’.⁶⁴ Although Pinaud was not part of the École d’Alger, his personal experiences led him to subscribe to the idea that alcohol consumption among Muslims was immoderate almost by definition.

Lack of moderation was not described in any detail in the source material; the École d’Alger interpreted it as an inborn character trait that did not seem to warrant explanation and definition.⁶⁵ Pinaud, on the other hand, explained ‘immoderation’ in relation to the pressure felt by Algerians during the process of colonisation, when new models of social and religious behaviour emerged. He noted in 1933:

This ‘immoderation specific to the primitives’, to use Porot’s favourite formulation again, was, allegedly, shown not only in the amounts consumed by the Algerian Muslims, but also in their choice of drink. French authors often lamented that Algerian Muslims usually did not choose to drink wine, which was essentially seen as harmless by most French authors, including doctors and psychiatrists.⁶⁷ Instead they chose stronger liquors, such as anisettes, and absinthe before its prohibition in 1915. It should be added, however, that this interpretation of Muslim drinking habits was extremely one-sided. Many Algerian Muslims did drink wine, as shown, for example, in Pinaud’s dissertation, where he described cases of Muslim patients drinking four to five litres of wine a day.⁶⁸ Despite such evidence, most of the colonial psychiatrists believed that Algerian Muslims had chosen to consume mainly ‘bad alcohol’, i.e. everything stronger than wine and beer. This taste for ‘bad alcohol’ led, allegedly, to situations that were dangerous both to the drinkers and to the rest of society, as will be discussed in detail in the fourth part of this chapter. Even Pinaud, perhaps the least prejudiced voice on this issue among the authors studied in this chapter, conceded that the consumption of anisettes posed a particularly serious problem for Algerian Muslims. For him, anisettes were an extreme drink due to the ‘essential oils’ used in their production, which had historically been blamed for the strong effects of absinthe.⁶⁹ Their consumption added a further level of danger to the quantitative immoderation of Algerian Muslims and to the ‘fact’ that their bodies were not yet generationally adapted to the consumption of alcohol:

The idea of immoderation among Muslims in regard to both choice of drink and quantity consumed was, however, nothing new. The historian Rudi Matthee showed in 2014 that since the sixteenth century Muslim alcohol consumption had been described as excessive.⁷¹ The harking back to earlier ideas was not unusual. While being enormously influential, most of the ideas that the École d’Alger propagated in the twentieth century had, indeed, existed for some time, as is noted by Richard Keller.⁷²

The tragedy of alcoholised criminality

According to Richard Keller, the idea that North Africans were excessively violent was another theme that the École d’Alger had adopted from the publications of nineteenth-century French colonial psychiatrists.⁷³ The École d’Alger suggested that the observed increase in immoderate alcohol consumption among Muslims heightened the threat posed by Muslims even further. In this they agreed with the French settlers, who were deeply fearful of Muslims in general and Muslim drunkenness in particular. As Peter Dunwoodie, a professor of French literature, suggests, after 1912 ‘newspaper campaigns exploited widespread fears that France faced a major social crisis’ in Algeria.⁷⁴ These fears were focused on the figure of the ‘dangerous Algerian’, the suspected rapist and murderer.⁷⁵ Pinaud alluded to these same sensational newspaper reports in his 1933 dissertation when he claimed that ‘it is enough to consult any newspaper in order to observe the considerable number of criminal acts, attacks and murders committed by natives in a state of drunkenness’.⁷⁶

The characterisation of North African men as dangerous per se has recently been critiqued by a group of Tunisian psychiatrists, who have claimed that French colonial psychiatry framed North Africa as ‘a space of wild violence and of sexual perversity, as well as of madness’.⁷⁷ In the eyes of the psychiatrists of the École d’Alger, the perceived danger was intensified if North Africans were drunk. Antoine Porot and his student Jean Sutter even connected alcohol and criminality to the ‘primitive mentality’ of all Muslims. They claimed that nothing was more likely than alcohol ‘to reveal the criminal impulsivity which we have already reported as one of the dominant traits of the native soul’.⁷⁸ In their eyes, alcohol intensified a predisposition towards criminality and violence inherent in North Africans. The idea of alcohol as a catalyst for crime in North Africans was also taken up by some North Africans themselves. The aforementioned Algerian writer Mohammed Soualah, for example, stated in 1937 that the consumption of anisettes destroyed Maghrebi families, as it drove North African ‘men, degraded, [to] commit crimes’.⁷⁹

In his 1937 dissertation, Jean Sutter epitomised this sense of fear, shared by his fellow settlers and, as shown by Soualah’s example, also some Algerians, painting a vivid picture of ‘everyday’ drunken violence among Algerian Muslims:

In Sutter’s worldview, alcohol ignited a violent savagery in North Africans, which might otherwise have remained hidden. Consequently, alcohol posed a distinct threat to Algerian society. As the French psychiatric experts believed that a large percentage of all criminal acts were committed by Muslim men under the influence, the reported rising alcohol levels among Muslims must have appeared alarming. Antoine Porot warned readers in a section of the 1952 version of the Handbook for Clinical and Therapeutic Psychiatrists titled ‘Chronic Alcoholism’: ‘Our findings as medical experts in North Africa have allowed us to establish a parallelism between the extension of alcoholism and the increase in criminality stemming from it: from 24 per cent in 1929 to 50 per cent in 1940.’⁸¹ These numbers, which included alcoholism and criminality among both Muslim and French patients, were undeniably alarming. Yet given how carelessly Antoine Porot used the statistics on alcohol consumption in Blida-Joinville composed by Maurice Porot and Jean Gentile, these figures must be taken with a large pinch of salt, especially as he did not provide source references for them. In any case, Porot’s claim of a doubling of alcohol-fuelled criminality in just a little over ten years confirmed existing views that the safety of French settlers in Algeria was threatened. Even though violence was most often directed towards those in close proximity to the drinkers – namely families, friends and neighbours – French settlers, frightened by sensationalist newspaper articles on Muslim violence, pictured themselves as the potential victims of thefts, assaults and even murders by drunk Algerian Muslims.

Alcohol was not only seen to pose a danger to the drinker on account of its detrimental medical and psychiatric effects, and to society because of associated alcohol-fuelled violence and crime, but was also seen to jeopardise the wellbeing of future generations – Muslim and European alike.⁸² In the context of Algeria, this was also understood as a problem among the French.⁸³ French settlers in particular were often framed as failing France’s mission civilisatrice by not producing capable, strong and healthy children. As the historian Daniel Pick suggested in his Faces of Degeneration, in the nineteenth century alcoholism was framed as one of the main factors causing or at least furthering ‘racial degeneration’, lowering birth rates and thus ‘endangering the European races’.⁸⁴ While theories of hereditary degeneracy were strongly criticised and largely discredited in French psychiatry in the early twentieth century, as discussed, for example, by Ian Dowbiggin in Inheriting Madness,⁸⁵ French colonial doctors and psychiatrists were, nevertheless, still influenced by them. In colonial Algeria, degeneration was seen as a pressing issue, as European settlers felt threatened by the colonised population surrounding them.

The idea of racial degeneration through alcoholism was also at the core of the postulated decline of the Algerian Muslim, a ‘race’ that was seen to have once possessed a wide range of noble qualities. Pierre Pinaud mused:

Pinaud conformed here to the Orientalist narrative of Muslim regions as civilisations in decline.⁸⁷ In the context of the Maghreb, these narratives usually insisted that the perceived decline had started at an unspecified period, long in the past, while Pinaud believed its cause to lie in the introduction of alcohol to the region.

Conclusions: when others drink

French colonial psychiatrists, whose publications were used as the source material for this chapter, wrote as experts for an expert audience, even though the ideas expressed in their texts often reflected and justified settler notions about colonised Algerians – especially when it came to the allegedly inherent Muslim immoderation and tendency to violence.⁸⁸ It can be argued that the opinions expressed in the publications of the École d’Alger were a distillation of a distinct pieds-noirs mentality and that they should be read as a clear defence of settler interests.

By the 1930s, the discussion about whether alcohol consumption among Muslims could ever be an acceptable sign of assimilation was over. The consensus was that the 100 years of French presence in the colony had proven that assimilation was not possible for the simple reason that it had, allegedly, not occurred. The way colonised Muslims misused alcohol was taken by the psychiatrists of the École d’Alger as the ultimate proof of their un-assimilability. Even authors such as Pinaud, who concluded in their publications that the alcohol consumption of Algerian Muslims showed a certain degree of assimilation on their part, stated that they had assimilated ‘wrongly’. Reports on Algerian alcohol drinkers have to be understood as case studies, composed by the settler-psychiatrists of the École d’Alger to prove the un-assimilability of colonised Muslims.

Between 1930 and 1962 there was surprisingly little variety in the views of French colonial psychiatrists on the subject of Muslim alcohol consumption. Psychiatrists of the École d’Alger tended to dominate wider views on alcohol and alcoholism. There were only a few dissenting French voices on issues surrounding alcohol-drinking Muslims. The best example of an exception is Pierre Pinaud, whose nuanced 1933 medical dissertation on ‘Alcoholism among Arabs in Algeria’ was based on his personal experiences in Algeria before the establishment of Blida-Joinville, and unlike the main authors writing on the psychiatric diagnosis of alcoholism among Algerian Muslims in the 1930s, he seems not to have had any personal or professional connection to Antoine Porot.

As shown in this chapter, Pinaud’s views diverged from the principal theories of the École d’Alger in many respects, especially in regard to the explanation for excessive consumption and in regard to the question of guilt. He described the immoderation in consumption that he observed among Algerian drinkers not as a racial characteristic, as the École d’Alger’s theories of a primitive mentality suggested, but as a result of breaking Islam’s religious norms.⁸⁹ As he did not understand ‘immoderation’ to be a racial characteristic, he did not blame it for the rise in alcoholism, but instead put responsibility for this rise on the force that introduced alcohol into the region: France’s colonial empire itself. In Pinaud’s eyes, France was directly accountable for the ‘degeneration’ of Algerian Muslims, which he clearly deplored.⁹⁰

Publications of the École d’Alger and, to a certain extent, Pinaud’s own works expressed the view that there was an increase in alcohol consumption among colonised Algerians, which necessarily led to alcoholism on account of Muslims’ alleged innate immoderation and taste for particularly harmful drinks. The increase was seen to have caused overcrowding in the psychiatric institution of Blida-Joinville as well as a fear of Muslim violence and criminality among the European settlers. The perceived threat was fuelled both by financial worries about the expansion and upkeep of overcrowded psychiatric institutions in Algeria and by sensationalist reports in settler newspapers on crimes committed by drunk Muslims.

The psychiatrists of the École d’Alger recorded their findings in a world where decolonisation was occurring all around them. Their tendency to adhere to a settler mentality, combined with a certain defensiveness due to the fact that most of them wrote texts that could be read as pro-colonial in an increasingly anti-colonial world, found its way into their theories on alcohol consumption. Their focus on the violence committed by drunk Algerian Muslims, for example, must be understood as a justification of continued French presence and control in Algeria, on both an ideological and a practical level.

Finally, most of the colonial psychiatrists of the École d’Alger expressed the paradoxical view that France had introduced alcohol and alcoholism into the region, yet still blamed Algerian Muslims for both their alcoholism and the criminality allegedly caused by it. This paradox was due to the fact that, in the eyes of these authors, it was an innate immoderation that caused both alcoholism and drunken assaults, not alcohol itself. Therefore France’s mission civilisatrice was not truly to blame for the problems caused by the introduction of alcohol, as France had no influence on the character traits of the ‘un-assimilable’ colonised Muslim. In their view, by introducing alcohol, France had given the Algerian Muslims a tool of progress, a means of attaining civilisation, but the Algerian Muslims were incapable of grasping it, and their allegedly innate immoderation turned alcohol, a symbol of Frenchness and civilisation, into a catalyst for violence and degeneration.