Case Study:

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In Algeria on May 8, 1945, just as people were celebrating the allied victory over Germany (in which Algerian native troops took part), banned demonstrations of Algerian nationalists took place in most of the towns of the Constantine département, in the eastern part of the country.

In Sétif, an average-sized town, the demonstration turned into a riot after the intervention of the police forces. This riot then spread to the area between Sétif and Bougie (Bejaia), and in particular around Kherrata. Ninety French settlers were killed (Tixier, J.O., July 18, 1945).

Repression was organized by the army and, to a lesser extent, by the civilian population. The death toll, still unknown, probably numbers in the many thousands (Rey-Goldzeiguer, 2001: 292-307).

On May 8, in Guelma, a small town between Constantine and Bône (Annaba), a demonstrator was killed. There were no casualties among the French population. However, on May 9 and 10, 12 French people were killed. By the end of the month, between 1,500 and 2,000 Muslims had died, most of them in the hands of the civilian population (Peyroulou, 2007).

The death toll has not yet been precisely established. However, we know that it included 102 French people. Furthermore, several thousand Muslims were either killed or wounded (Jauffret, 1990: 399, 405).

 1. The context

The fact that colonial Algeria had taken part in the Second World War gave rise to great hope amongst the nationalists, who were united around the figure of Ferhat Abbas, a Sétif chemist and a moderate nationalist conseiller général.

After the Anglo-American landing in Algiers on November 8, 1942, Algeria slipped away from Vichy’s grip. With the death of Admiral Darlan in December 1942, the end of the General Giraud alternative (sponsored by Roosevelt) and the arrival of de Gaulle in June 1943, Algeria had become the bridgehead of the France libre and the landbase for the political reconquest of the occupied metropolitan territory as well as the restoration of the République.

In February 1943, in an international context which had become favorable to the allies after the battles of Stalingrad and El-Alamein, Fehrat Abbas submitted to the French authorities a Manifeste in which, after saying that Algeria and its soldiers were fighting Nazism alongside the Allies, he demanded the creation of a federate Algerian state associated with France, in which both French and Jews would be welcome to stay.

In June 1943, General Catroux, who had been appointed gouverneur général of Algeria by de Gaulle, refused to even consider the plan submitted by Abbas and the moderate nationalists, in the name of French sovereignty in Algeria.

However, on December 1943, that is to say one month after the Brazzaville speech, with the whole French Empire wanting change, de Gaulle took a decisive step. He announced that French citizenship would be granted to many thousands of Muslims who still wanted it, without them having to give up their personal status, i.e. the legal, customary or Muslim provisions governing among other things family affairs and morals.

This can be seen as an answer to Abbas’s Manifeste and a sign of the willingness of the Comité français de libération nationale (CFLN) to reform. De Gaulle’s decision led to the March 7, 1944 order (ordonnance) granting citizenship to an elite, which was actually no more than a rehash of the Blum-Viollette plan (under the Front Populaire) which had failed owing to the opposition of the French colonial opinion. The new measure – however limited - met with the same opposition. Besides, it no longer was an answer to the aspirations of the Algerian Muslims, i.e. to become Algerian – not French - citizens, at a time when war was opening up the range of possibilities.

Ferhat Abbas then founded the movement Les Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberté (AML), with the aim to spread among the population the ideas expressed in the Manifeste. Those ideas were congruent with the principles of the Atlantic Charter, among which people’s right to self-determination once the war was over – a right later developed in the United Nations Charter – and were approved of by the Americans who had been in Algeria since November 8, 1942.

The Manifeste provoked a patriotic landslide (“un raz-de-marée patriotique”, Aït Ahmed, 2002: Chapter 2). It was highly popular among the Algerian lower middle class. The more radical nationalists from Messali Hadj’s Parti du Peuple Algérien (PPA), who asked for complete independence, and Cheik Brahimi’s association of the Oulama, of Arab-Muslim inspiration, joined the AML and spread the nationalist ideas among the Algerian peasantry for the former, and the reformist circles for the latter. Such success worried the moderate Muslim elected representatives, like Bendjelloul or Lakhdari, who saw their voters going to the nationalists.

Spring 1944 saw the emergence of confrontation between the Muslim and French populations - fuelled by a century of colonization, injustice and racism and accelerated by the events that would later lead to Germany’s defeat. This dynamic was also a result of the war-induced weakening of the power of the State, of the radical regime changes (Pétain, Darlan, Giraud, de Gaulle) and of the provisional government of Algiers leaving for Paris in August 1944 and handing over control to an administration that was hostile to reform, in spite of the presence of remarkable people such as Yves Chataigneau, the gouverneur, and Adrien Tixier, the home secretary (ministre de l’Intérieur). This dynamic was also favored by the preparation of the United Nations Charter in the Spring of 1945 and the birth of the Arab League. Here were two anti-colonial organizations (one with a universalist outlook, the other a rabist) fighting colonial France in Northern Africa and in the Levant, in which Algerian Muslims placed all their hopes.

This dynamic soon developed into a very specific demographic context. Since the interwar period, the French population had gradually become a smaller and smaller ethnic minority in the département of Constantine. It was Algeria’s most populated département and the birthplace of Muslim religious reformism.

The high Muslim birth rate was a major factor prompting the reclamation of lands lost during colonization and preceded political re-conquest. In the Guelma arrondissement, the French numbered just over 10,000 (compared with more than 180,000 Muslims) and mostly lived in Guelma and Souk-Ahras, two small towns. In Guelma, there were 4,000 French and 16,500 Muslims – all members of the AML. In the bigger city of Sétif, the population was more balanced. But in the mountains between Sétif and Bougie, with the exclusion of a few big villages like Saint Arnaud further east, the few French people there lived among the tribes of the Babors foothills. Northern Constantinois was entering the era of the masses, organized and political in the towns and disorganized and millenarian in the rural areas where famine unfolded in both 1944 and 1945.

Such a situation was the breeding ground for plotting among the Algerian Muslims, the famished and uneducated country folk, who expressed their deep anxiety in religious terms. The French, who felt besieged in their little towns and settlements, viewed the Muslims as a fanatical and dangerous mass. The elected representatives expressed these feelings to the authorities, but they were effectively helpless in attempting to maintain law and order.

As a result, on April 14, 1945 - three weeks before the violent events occurred - Achiary, the sous-préfet, decided to set up an armed civilian militia in and around Guelma as part of a policy of self-defense of the urban areas and settlements. He had the support of the mayors of the area and of Marcel Lavie, a local elected representative. If in the area of Sétif, such a militia would not be set up until after May 8. In Guelma everyone saw conspirators everywhere. However, there was most probably no plot, neither from the PPA (Pervillé, 2002: 110-111) nor from the colonial administration (Rey-Goldzeiguer, 2002: 238-241).

However, there was increased pressure from the nationalists and the anti-nationalists and more radicalized positions on both parts in the run-up to the local and by-elections of Summer and Fall 1945. There was thus little room for moderation. In the small towns of the département, fear and anxiety contributed to the build-up of tension, all the more so since the May 1 demonstrations had already led to violence in the areas of Algiers and Oran.

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