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In the twenty years between the end of the First World War and the start of the Second, the French empire reached its greatest physical extent. At the end of the First World War, the priority of the French political community was to consolidate and expand the French empire for, inter alia, industrial mobilisation and global competition for strategic resources. The book revisits debates over 'associationism' and 'assimilationism' in French colonial administration in Morocco and Indochina, and discusses the Jonnart Law in Algeria and the role of tribal elites in the West African colonies. On the economy front, the empire was tied to France's monetary system, and most colonies were reliant on the French market. The book highlights three generic socio-economic issues that affected all strata of colonial society: taxation and labour supply, and urban development with regard to North Africa. Women in the inter-war empire were systematically marginalised, and gender was as important as colour and creed in determining the educational opportunities open to children in the empire. With imperialist geographical societies and missionary groups promoting France's colonial connection, cinema films and the popular press brought popular imperialism into the mass media age. The book discusses the four rebellions that shook the French empire during the inter-war years: the Rif War of Morocco, the Syrian revolt, the Yen Bay mutiny in Indochina, and the Kongo Wara. It also traces the origins of decolonisation in the rise of colonial nationalism and anti-colonial movements.
masses. 65 The Jonnart Law in Algeria Algeria was the exception that proved the rule of ascendant associationism. France’s most cherished colony was constitutionally, if not culturally, assimilated to France. Such was the theory at least. Algerian society was certainly transformed by French conquest and colonisation
Jonnart Law holds true for administrative reforms enacted in the inter-war period: ‘The Jonnart legislation can be viewed in one sense as France’s final rejection of the doctrine of assmiliation and in another as a fateful step in the direction of political instability’. 3 Associationism traded on the value of ‘tradition’, understood as popular respect for indigenous hierarchies, as a stabilising
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.
1918–19. The Jonnart Law of 4 February 1919 called for a second college for local elections for qualified Muslim voters. This increased the Muslim electorate to about 425,000 or approximately 43 per cent of the adult male Muslim population. Those with the right to vote in municipal elections included honourably discharged veterans, recipients of French honours, land or business owners, active and retired civil
–39 catalysed inter-Arab co-operation and hardened popular antagonism to European imperialism in general. 6 As we saw in chapter two, the institutionalisation of Algeria’s second college electoral system through the 1919 Jonnart Law entrenched the second-class status of the Muslim electorate and their Arab and Berber representatives in local and national assemblies. The three financial
1933. By this time Radiquet had returned to Paris. Following the announcement of elections, communists from Algiers travelled to Blida to meet local peasants. The 1919 Jonnart Law restricted voting to about 43 per cent of adult Muslim men, effectively excluding most peasants. Nonetheless, the elections offered communists the opportunity to engage in propaganda on their behalf, and they suggested that a peasant
between Algerians and Europeans, not all of whom were exploiters. 82 De Gaulle’s response to Abbas’ manifesto was crystallised in the Ordinance of 7 March 1944, which Governor-General Catroux, replacing Peyrouton, had taken the lead in formulating. This expanded the Algerian electorate, the first such change since the Jonnart Law, granting French citizenship to 65,000 additional Algerians without mandating
rather than emancipation.123 From time to time the settler regime conceded, under intense pressure from liberal reformers and Algerian elites, as with the Jonnart law of 1919, tiny additions of carefully selected categories of male Algerians to the European electorate, such as war veterans, property owners and the holders of educational qualifications. However, with the Liberation the political climate in metropolitan France was one of intense expectation of radical change and the institution of a new, democratic constitutional order, an optimism that was symbolised by