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This book recovers the lost history of Algeria's communist movement and its complex relationship with Algerian nationalism. The movement's shifting fortunes reflected both Algeria's largely rural class structure and the country's complex national and international dynamics. Algeria's de facto colonial relationship with France was critical. Algeria's Communist movement began in 1920 with a virtually all European membership as a region of the Parti Communiste Franҫais (PCF). The Parti Communiste Algérien (PCA) formed in 1936 remained close to the PCF during the Popular Front and Second World War years. But from the late 1940s growing numbers of Muslims joined the PCA, attracted by its concern with social justice and alienated by the nationalist movement's factionalism. This demographic change compelled the PCA to address the issue of national liberation. With the launch of armed struggle in November 1954, the PCA faced a classic socialist dilemma – organisational autonomy or dissolution and merger into the broader Front de Libération National (FLN). Increasingly independent of the PCF, the PCA maintained its organisational autonomy, while participating fully in the war of independence. Despite suffering severe repression during the war, at independence Algerian Communists refused to disband, seeing themselves as part of a long-term socialist movement that could be rebuilt. While the FLN promoted a one-party socialist state, the PCA promoted a pluralist political system. The PCA's hopes for political pluralism were shattered when it was banned by the one-party state in November 1962. The June 1965 military coup shut down all public political space.
guerre d’Algérie (Editions Complexe, 2001), 219–36, p. 29; Pierre-Jean Le Foll-Luciani, ‘Un microcosme de l’Algérie nouvelle? Le Parti communiste algérien en clandestin à Constantine pendant la guerre d’indépendance (1954–1962)’, Atala, 16 (2013), 245–58, pp. 245–7; Harbi, Vie, p. 150
idées de liberté », Manifeste du Parti communiste algérien (12 août 1945), in Collot and Henry (eds), Mouvement national, pp. 208–12; Sivan, Communisme, p. 152; Rey-Goldzeiguer, Origines, p. 359. In 1962 the PCA had still not accepted the depth of European racism, claiming in ‘For a Free Algerian Republic’, p. 35, that the massacre
. 49 ANOM FM 81F/752, ‘Renseignements - a/s de la situation du parti communiste Algérien’ [date stamp 6 November 1942]; Planche, Sétif, p. 49; Dore-Audibert, Françaises, pp. 89–90; Alleg, Mémoire, p. 66, n. 1; Gallissot (ed.), Algérie, pp. 580–1; Cantier, L’Algérie, pp. 340–41; Drew
, à la télévision, il faut populariser et mettre en valeur les initiatives, encourager l’échange d’expériences d’un bout à l’autre du pays » (emphasis in original). Programme du Parti communiste algérien pour l’indépendance totale (Algiers: El Houriyya, 18 April 1962 ), p. 17. 33
-society, one which sought to reform and eventually overthrow and replace the colonial order. For decades the party’s membership remained predominantly European, imbued with a colonial mentality and easily swayed by the Parti communiste français (French Communist Party, PCF). When Algerians eventually joined the Parti communiste algérien (Algerian Communist Party, PCA) in significant numbers, Sivan contends
par la Fédération de France du Parti communiste algérien , 4 (1959). 19 Buono, L’Olivier, p. 26; Alleg, Mémoire, pp. 309–11, 313–15; Réalités algériennes et Marxisme, 1 (January 1957); ANOM ALG 91 3F/75. 20
-minded nationalists in the neighbouring protectorates, so by 1937 Ben Badis was committed to establish an ulama association spanning the three French North African territories. 99 The Algerian Communist Party (Parti Communiste Algérien, PCA) suffered comparable state repression to the ENA/PPA after 1925, when PCA membership and the party newspaper
In May 1958, and four years into the Algerian War of Independence, a revolt again appropriated the revolutionary and republican symbolism of the French Revolution by seizing power through a Committee of Public Safety. This book explores why a repressive colonial system that had for over a century maintained the material and intellectual backwardness of Algerian women now turned to an extensive programme of 'emancipation'. After a brief background sketch of the situation of Algerian women during the post-war decade, it discusses the various factors contributed to the emergence of the first significant women's organisations in the main urban centres. It was only after the outbreak of the rebellion in 1954 and the arrival of many hundreds of wives of army officers that the model of female interventionism became dramatically activated. The French military intervention in Algeria during 1954-1962 derived its force from the Orientalist current in European colonialism and also seemed to foreshadow the revival of global Islamophobia after 1979 and the eventual moves to 'liberate' Muslim societies by US-led neo-imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq. For the women of Bordj Okhriss, as throughout Algeria, the French army represented a dangerous and powerful force associated with mass destruction, brutality and rape. The central contradiction facing the mobile socio-medical teams teams was how to gain the trust of Algerian women and to bring them social progress and emancipation when they themselves were part of an army that had destroyed their villages and driven them into refugee camps.
, Jacqueline Guerroudj says she saw the injustices of colonialism all around her, and, alongside a number of other communists, she joined the Algiers bomb network. Following her arrest and trial, Jacqueline Guerroudj was the only woman of European origin condemned to death. Jacqueline Guerroudj euphemistically states that communists did not join the FLN ‘like anyone else’ but that individuals within the FLN welcomed them with varying degrees of enthusiasm or hostility.53 The positions of the Parti Communiste Français (French Communist Party, PCF) and Parti Communiste