Muslim Marseille: the metropolization of imperial practices (1900-1939)

During the first four decades of the twentieth century, Muslim North Africans were French colonial subjects and started to become a sizable minority in France. A few thousand in the first decade, France brought over 300,000 of them to Europe as soldiers and workers during World War I. Though many returned to their homes in Algeria, Tunisia, or Morocco after the war, French officials of the interwar period found the status quo ante bellum of a negligible Muslim presence in France unattainable. Their numbers in metropolitan France never dropped below 50,000 again and continued to rise from the 1920s through the 1930s. This dissertation argues that although historians have generally interpreted this history as one of foreign immigration to France, categorizing it primarily as such imposes a postcolonial and anachronistic understanding of France and North Africa on the time period. Further, it does not fully reflect how French society and North Africans both saw this migration: as a movement of colonial subjects within a single imperial nation-state. As such, it is better to think of this as a colonial and transnational history as much as one of migration, and the metropolitan "capital of the colonies," Marseille, illustrates this. The port city served as the gateway in and out of France for Muslim North Africans and had a Muslim colonial population second only to Paris. The city's officials looked to colonial administrators and experts in governing them, thus bringing imperial practices to metropolitan France that included views on hygiene, policing, and preventing North Africans from integrating as citizens. Meanwhile, North Africans brought their knowledge of the French state and what rights they had as limited participants in that society with them as well. Thus, Muslim North Africans did not arrive in France as complete foreigners, but as members of the French imperial-state, and unlike many European immigrants, the French government prevented them from integrating as citizens. Colonialism made them partial members of French society, neither in nor out. In doing so, France placed them in a transnational existence that straddled two continents, languages, major religions, and political statuses.

MUSLIM MARSEILLE: THE METROPOLIZATION OF IMPERIAL PRACTICES (1900-1939) by Gregory Richard Jackson A dissertation submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of History The University of Utah December 2014 Copyright © Gregory Richard Jackson 2014 All Rights Reserved The Uni v e r s i t y of Utah Graduate School STATEMENT OF DISSERTATION APPROVAL The dissertation of Gregory Richard Jackson has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: James R. Lehning Chair 9/22/2014 Date Approved Nadja Durbach Member 9/22/2014 Date Approved Lauren Jarvis Member 9/22/2014 Date Approved Edward J. Davies, II Member 9/22/2014 Date Approved Therese de Raedt Member 9/22/2014 Date Approved and by Isabel Moreira Chair/Dean of the Department/College/School o f ____________________History and by David B. Kieda, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT During the first four decades of the twentieth century, Muslim North Africans were French colonial subjects and started to become a sizable minority in France. A few thousand in the first decade, France brought over 300,000 of them to Europe as soldiers and workers during World War I. Though many returned to their homes in Algeria, Tunisia, or Morocco after the war, French officials of the interwar period found the status quo ante bellum of a negligible Muslim presence in France unattainable. Their numbers in metropolitan France never dropped below 50,000 again and continued to rise from the 1920s through the 1930s. This dissertation argues that although historians have generally interpreted this history as one of foreign immigration to France, categorizing it primarily as such imposes a postcolonial and anachronistic understanding of France and North Africa on the time period. Further, it does not fully reflect how French society and North Africans both saw this migration: as a movement of colonial subjects within a single imperial nation-state. As such, it is better to think of this as a colonial and transnational history as much as one of migration, and the metropolitan "capital of the colonies," Marseille, illustrates this. The port city served as the gateway in and out of France for Muslim North Africans and had a Muslim colonial population second only to Paris. The city's officials looked to colonial administrators and experts in governing them, thus bringing imperial practices to metropolitan France that included views on hygiene, policing, and preventing North Africans from integrating as citizens. Meanwhile, North Africans brought their knowledge of the French state and what rights they had as limited participants in that society with them as well. Thus, Muslim North Africans did not arrive in France as complete foreigners, but as members of the French imperial-state, and unlike many European immigrants, the French government prevented them from integrating as citizens. Colonialism made them partial members of French society, neither in nor out. In doing so, France placed them in a transnational existence that straddled two continents, languages, major religions, and political statuses. iv For Sue, Lyla, Nicolas, and Alexander. ABSTRACT........................................................................................................................... iii LIST OF FIGURES.............................................................................................................. viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................... x Chapters I INTRODUCTION: MUSLIM COLONIES IN THE METROPOLE.......................... 1 Historiography ..................................................................................................................10 Colonialism, North Africa, France, and Marseille .......................................................23 Structure of the Dissertation........................................................................................... 61 II COLONIAL SPACES IN THE METROPOLITAN CITY OF MARSEILLE ......... 66 Historiography.................................................................................................................69 The Expositions of 1906 and 1922.................................................................................79 The Staircase at Gare de Saint-Charles..........................................................................98 The Muslim Village.......................................................................................................109 Conclusion.....................................................................................................................138 III REPATRIATION WITHIN A NATION? REMOVING MUSLIM NATIONALS AND SUBJECTS FROM THE METROPOLE IN 1920...........................................141 Historiography............................................................................................................... 144 The French Police(s)......................................................................................................149 A Dossier of Forced Repatriation.................................................................................155 Removing Colonial Subjects, Not Immigrants............................................................162 Arrests: Rationale and Location...................................................................................170 Conclusion.....................................................................................................................189 IV SERVICE DES AFFAIRES INDIGENES NORD-AFRICAINES: THE SURVEILLANCE OF MUSLIMS IN INTERWAR MARSEILLE........................194 Historiography............................................................................................................... 196 The Development of Colonial Surveillance................................................................201 TABLE OF CONTENTS Murder, Fear, and Colonial Practices in Paris.............................................................206 SAINA Marseille........................................................................................................... 215 Conclusion.....................................................................................................................225 V BECOMING A CITIZEN: A DESIRE THAT TRANSCENDED FRENCH OR ALGERIAN IDENTITY...............................................................................................227 Historiography............................................................................................................... 231 Muslim Politics and the Young Algerians (1900-1926)............................................. 236 L 'Islam (1909-1914) and Conscription for Civil Rights............................................ 244 L 'Ikdam (1919-1923) and Civil Rights....................................................................... 257 Muslim Politics and Algerian Nationalism (1926-1939)...........................................269 El Ouma (1930-1939) and L 'Ikdam (1931-1935).......................................................277 Conclusion.....................................................................................................................290 VI CONCLUSION............................................................................................................. 293 From the Colonies to the Metropole.............................................................................294 "Muslim Marseille" within the Historical Discourse................................................. 299 From "Capital of the Colonies" to Euromediterranee............................................... 306 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY......................................................................................... 308 vii 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 LIST OF FIGURES Map of the 1906 Colonial Exposition..................................................................... 83 The Tunisian Palace, 1906 Colonial Exposition.................................................... 85 Visitors walking on the rue de I 'Annam, 1906 Colonial Exposition.....................86 The West African Palace, 1906 Colonial Exposition............................................. 88 The Algerian Palace, 1906 Colonial Exposition.................................................... 90 Panoramic view of the Grand Palais, 1922 Colonial Exposition......................... 93 The Moroccan Palace, 1922 Colonial Exposition.................................................. 94 The Algerian Palace, 1922 Colonial Exposition.................................................... 95 Angkor Wat Palace, 1922 Colonial Exposition.......................................................97 View from the top of the staircase at St. Charles train station............................ 100 View from the bottom of the staircase at St. Charles train station......................102 "Colonies of Asia" statue, staircase at St. Charles train station.......................... 102 "Colonies of Africa" statue, staircase at St. Charles train station.......................104 "Marseille, Gateway to the East" statue, staircase at St. Charles train station.... 106 "Marseille, Greek Colony" statue, staircase at St. Charles train station............ 107 Blueprint of housing for North African families.................................................. 125 Blueprint of housing for single North African workers.......................................126 Villot's Kabyle house............................................................................................. 133 Kabyle house proposal based on Villot's sketch.................................................. 134 20 Sketch of the proposed mosque..............................................................................137 21 Ali Ben Eubarek's passport.................................................................................... 173 22 Brahim Ben Ahmed Ben Lahcene's carte d 'identite...........................................175 ix ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the sacrifices my family. First and foremost, credit is due to my wife, Sue, who was always encouraging and understanding of my need to work long hours for extended periods of time. This was especially the case in the summers of 2012 and 2013, during which she graciously took care of our children in the United States while I was researching in France. I am also grateful to my children, Lyla, Nicolas, and Alexander, who welcomed me home enthusiastically after long research trips or days of writing. Many at the University of Utah provided vital assistance without which I never would have completed my work. I cannot give enough thanks to my committee chair, James R. Lehning. I feel an enormous debt of gratitude for his mentoring, teaching, encouragement, and guidance over the past several years that I believe cannot ever be repaid. I am also grateful to the other members of my committee and faculty at the University of Utah that helped shaped my understanding of historical research, modern France, Europe, colonialism, and the Islamic world. On that note, Nadja Durbach, Edward J. Davies, II, Therese de Raedt, Lauren Jarvis, Ronald Smelser, and Peter Sluglett-thank you. My gratitude also goes to the faculty who served on the graduate committee, especially Eric Hinderaker. The willingness of the Department of History at the University of Utah to provide funding for my studies throughout my PhD program, as well as for travel to France and professional conferences, has not gone unnoticed. To that same end, I am grateful to Judith Burton Moyle for my funding as a Burton Scholar. Of course, this dissertation also required access to primary sources. I wish to thank the archivists at the Bibliotheque nationale de France, the Archives Departementales des Bouches-du-Rhdne, the Archives de la Chambre de Commerce et d'Industrie Marseille-Provence, and the Archives de la ville de Marseille for access to and suggestions of dossiers. To all of them, I offer un grand merci. Finally, I am also thankful for the encouragement of my parents, siblings, and friends, some of whom let me talk to them (or at them) for hours as I processed ideas. For that I am especially grateful to Susan Jackson, Diana Averill, Bradford Jackson, Dallin Jackson, Eric Dursteler, Corry Cropper, Daryl Lee, and Christopher J. Dawe. xi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: MUSLIM COLONIES IN THE METROPOLE Muslim North Africans have been a noticeable presence in metropolitan France since the start of the twentieth century.1 They mainly arrived via the southern French port city of Marseille, where many of them stayed to work. In 1912, somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 Muslim North Africans lived in the whole of metropolitan France.2 During World War I, well over 400 thousand of them crossed the Mediterranean in order to work or fight for France.3 Their numbers fluctuated throughout the 1920s and 1930s but never fell out of the tens of thousands before settling into the hundreds of thousands. This migration has proven itself to be a deeply impactful migration on French society. Still mostly Muslim, North Africans are now the largest minority in twenty-first-century France and have been at the center of many discussions in the public sphere, ranging from concerns about immigration, such as assimilation and job availability, to greater xenophobia of Muslims in general due to the rise of Islamic extremists. This dissertation is a history of the earliest arrivals of this highly debated minority group on a large scale 1 Though very few in numbers, the Muslim and/or Arab presence in France predates nineteenth-century colonialism. For more on this, see Ian Coller, Arab France: Islam and the Making o f Modern Europe, 1798-1831 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 2 Les Kabyles en France. RAPPORT de la Commission chargee d 'etudier les conditions du travail des indigenes algeriens dans la metropole (Beaugency: Imprimerie Rene Barrillier, 1914), 9, 28. 3 At least 325,000 Algerians, 80,000 Tunisians, and 45,000 Moroccans went to France during World War I. John Ruedy, Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development o f a Nation, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 111; Kenneth J. Perkins, A History o f Modern Tunisia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 74; Susan Miller, A History o f Modern Morocco (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 102-103. 2 in metropolitan France, between the start of the twentieth century and World War II. However, this is not solely a history of immigration, although that is how it has largely been conceived of in the past. This is equally a transnational history of colonialism that explores identities and how early-twentieth-century France dealt with difference. There are good categorical reasons for why early-twentieth-century Muslim North Africans in metropolitan France have been written about and discussed primarily as a history of immigration. The most obvious one is that these Muslim North Africans did leave North Africa-for the purposes of this dissertation, defined as Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco-to live in France. Movement from one continent to another certainly evokes the word "immigration." Another reason is race. Generally speaking, North Africans are either Arabs, or, less frequently, Berbers. They are not "white" Europeans, which is the majority in France. Being "French" or holding citizenship in France is not defined by race today, but it certainly has been used as an important determinant in the past. Indeed, for France's Nazi-Collaborating Vichy Regime, this was the most important factor.4 Currently a factor or not though, race, like movement, is often a part of discussions about immigration. A third reason is religion. Like race, this too has ceased to be an official consideration for French citizenship, but it was a factor until as recently as 1958.5 It was only then that a desperate Charles de Gaulle offered full-integration to Muslim Algerians in one of the last attempts ever made to preserve French rule in Algeria before it came to an end four years later.6 Thus, this was a factor in the first decades of the twentieth 4 For a detailed explanation of how France has defined citizenship since the French Revolution, see Patrick Weil, How to Be French: Nationality in the Making since 1789, trans. Catherine Porter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 5 That year, all Algerians, Muslims or not, became French citizens until Algerian independence. For more, see Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: the Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008), 19. 6 Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 173. century that are under examination in this dissertation. Movement, race, and religion are all factors in how many societies conceive of difference, identity, and immigrants, and this was perhaps even more so the case in the first-half of the twentieth century. Beyond categorical, there are the less tangible, more emotional reasons as well. In the past half a century, both Algerians and French have had their reasons to want to distance their identities from each other. By 1962, Algerians had just suffered through 132 years of colonial rule and a painful war for their independence. Although accurate, writing histories that highlighted the previous union between Algeria and France would have cut away at the new Algerian identity that the revolutionaries wished to create. It seemed better then to write histories that anachronistically consider Algerians and French completely separate during the first half of the twentieth century. As for France's emotional interest in forgetting or obscuring this history, its pride and sense of self as a nation had been deeply wounded. The French had just lost their most prized colonial acquisition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Algeria. This came on the heels of defeat in another prized colony, Indochina, as well as the loss of several other colonies as decolonization toppled colonial empires around the world. These losses were further piled upon with the embarrassment of Nazi occupation during World War II. All of this was a great deal of loss for a historical world power to process almost all at once, and it took its emotional toll, especially on the French military.7 Struggling with these losses and the need to completely redefine French civilization is why Todd Shepard has argued "‘the invention of decolonization' ... allowed the French to forget that Algeria had been an integral part of France since the 1830s and to escape 3 7 Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 171 many of the larger implications of that shared past."8 Indeed, while perhaps not a perfect reflection of French sentiment, that emotional toll might point to why the French Parliament took until 1999 to recognize that the "conflict" in Algeria that toppled the Fourth Republic was, in fact, a war.9 Ignoring the history of North Africans in metropolitan France, or at least downplaying Franco-Muslim North Africans of the colonial period while highlighting the differences between North Africans and the French, was thus something of a historical distortion used by French society to sooth its wounds and reconstruct itself in the wake of decolonization. Despite these reasons for conceiving of the history of North Africans in early-twentieth- century metropolitan France as a wave of immigration, if immigration is the movement of a foreign population to another country, then using this as the sole or primary vantage point to study this history renders a narrative that is quite incomplete. By 1900, France had long considered Algeria fully integrated into France. The city of Algiers was considered as much a part of France as Paris. Hundreds of thousands of white Europeans, first known as colons and later as pieds-noirs, lived in Algeria, a number that reached one million by the time of independence. Those originally from France retained their citizenship, their rights, voted, and sent representatives to the parliament in Paris. This was also the case for those colons who had never been to Metropolitan France, even if their family had not been to metropolitan France since the French invasion of Algiers in 1830. By the end of French rule, some French families had lived in Algeria for well over a century. White Europeans from other countries had full- French citizenship offered to them in due course as well. They were absorbed into the 8 Shepard, The Invention o f Decolonization, 2. 9 William B. Cohen, "The Harkis: History and Memory," in Algeria and France, 1800-2000: Identity, Memory, Nostalgia, ed. Patricia M. E. Lorcin. (New York: Syracuse University Press), 176. 4 colon population, just as though they had immigrated to Metropolitan France. Even some of the North African population had gained full-citizenship. The 1870 Cremieux Decree gave French citizenship to the Jewish population of Algeria. Jews who had never been to Metropolitan France and whose families had lived in North Africa for centuries were suddenly citizens of France. Only Muslim Algerians did not have full-citizenship. They were considered French nationals, which was a distinction from Muslim North Africans who came from the French protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco. Their distinction as French nationals was because Muslim Algerians, according to the French, were not born in a French colony like Tunisians or Moroccans. They were born in France because again, as it bears repeating once more, colonial Algeria was completely and integrally France. The mixture of French and Algerian identities caused by colonization was so thorough that is has also manifested itself through literature. For instance, the pied-noir Algerian born author Albert Camus' novel, L 'Etranger (The Stranger), has become one of the best-known books of the twentieth century. Its plot revolves around a Frenchman named Meursault who kills a nameless "Arab."10 The very fact that Camus, writing in the 1940s, took no effort to explain how and why his protagonist inhabits a European world where Arabs or Berbers cross his path shows that Camus assumed his readers would find this natural. Indeed, Camus does not make it clear even whether some scenes are happening in Algeria or in metropolitan France. Similarly, Malika Mokeddem, born in Algeria and educated in France, has explored French and Algerian identities in her novels, as seen in L 'Interdite (the Forbidden).11 Alternating between the voice of an 10 Albert Camus, L 'Etranger (Paris: Gallimard, 2013), 92. 11 Malika Mokeddem, L 'Interdite, 6th ed. (Paris: Grasset), 2009. 5 Algerian woman named Sultana and a Frenchman named Vincent, Mokeddem takes us into a world where North African and French identities are still entangled in the postcolonial era. Vincent is a math professor at the University of Paris who has come to Algeria on an emotional impetus after receiving a kidney transplant from an unknown Algerian woman. In creating this story line, Mokeddem crosses nationality and gender lines to emphasize their common ground and overlapping identity. Meanwhile, Sultana is an Algerian who had moved to France to gain an education and become a doctor but now finds herself back in her hometown, practicing medicine. Mokeddem shows an internal struggle in Sultana who feels rejected by both worlds. She is too culturally French for Algerians, but will be forever seen as an Algerian by the French. The truth is that Mokeddem is exploring an identity crisis that has existed for at least a segment of North Africans for well over century. Literary works such as these that explore the colonial or now postcolonial ties between France and Algeria illustrate the ambiguity of transnationalism. The characters in Mokeddem's novel overtly struggle with the ambiguity of their own transnational identities. Vincent struggles in a physical sense with how having an Algerian female's kidney in his body impacts his identity. Sultana struggles in a cultural sense with how her education in France and Algerian heritage come together, be that in coexistence, a fusion of the two, or in spite of each other. Meanwhile, Camus presents a colonial world where Algeria and France have a political union that brings Europeans and Arabs into a single world, but where their differences remain. These linguistic, religious, and ethnic differences were, after all, great enough to permit historians to have traditionally overlooked the political union between Algeria and France prior to 1962 so much that 6 7 they only thought of the movement of people between the two as a foreign migration. Yet with those differences, Camus' story reminds us that the Europeans and Arabs in Algeria or metropolitan France actually inhabited a less clearly divided world, for neither could escape the presence of the other in their shared physical spaces. In this sense, literature from both before and after Algerian independence demonstrates the ambiguity of the idea or term "transnational" through the ambiguity of places or identities in the minds of these colonial and postcolonial era authors. Indeed, defining transnationalism is a task in and of itself. A popular working concept of transnationalism comes from Steven Vertovec, who says that "to the extent that any single ‘-ism' might arguably exist, most social scientists working in the field may agree that ‘transnationalism broadly refers to multiple ties and interactions linking people or institutions across the borders of nation-states."12 His speculation proved correct. Many scholars across disciplines doing work on transnationalism have cited this same quotation even, at least in part, while trying to define transnationalism in the past few years.13 This includes historians Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine, and Frank Trentmann, who also see transnationalism as a vital part of understanding modern European colonialism and cite Vertovec's view in the introduction of their edited volume 12 Steven Vertovec, "Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism," Ethnic and Racial Studies 22, no. 2 (1999): 447. 13 Kevin Grieves, Journalism Across Boundaries: The Promises and Challenges of Transnational and Transborder Journalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 8; Valentina Mazzucato, "Simultaneity and Networks in Transnational Migration: Lessons Learned from a Simultaneous Matched-Sample Methodology," in Migration and Development Within and Across Borders: Research and Policy Perspectives on Internal and International Migration, ed. Josh DeWind and Jennifer Holiday. (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2008), 71; Lesley Bartlett and Ameena Chaffar-Kucher, "Introduction: Refugees, Immigrants, and Education in the Global South-Lives in Motion," in Refugees, Immigrants, and Education in the Global South-Lives in Motion, ed. Lesley Bartlett and Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher. (New York: Routledge, 2013), 10. on the British Empire.14 Crucial to understanding Vertovec's definition in the context of France and North Africa though is the recognition that the borders of nation-states are quite different from the borders of imperial-nation states. The former typically consists of a dominant culture, language, and people with a shared sense of identity. The latter consists of a conquering people who have subjugated other cultures and peoples that are forced into some level of rapprochement or hybridization, but often remain distinct in many ways as well-as was the case with the conquering French and largely Arab peoples of North Africa. This is why the definition offered by Eliezer Ben-Fafael and Yitzhak Sternberg is also useful: "while by ‘transnational' one also understands relations that run across states and societies, this term focuses on people and groups and do not necessarily refer to official bodies."15 Their clarification of what transnationalism means illustrates how the term is not just applicable, but fitting, to describing the colonial relationship between metropolitan France and French North Africa, which was a single official body as an imperial nation-state, but still included distinct groups of people. In what follows, the notion of transnationality illuminates for us the interaction of incompletely constructed identities in the French colonial empire. Administrators and officials in France at times viewed Muslim North Africans as members of the French nation, while at other times they saw them as foreign intruders into that nation. North Africans, on the other hand, found themselves seeking the rights they had been promised 8 14 Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine, and Frank Trentmann, "Introduction," in Beyond Sovereignty, Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c. 1880-1950, ed. Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine, and Frank Trentmann. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1. 15 Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yitzhak Sternberg, "Introduction: Debating Transnationalism," in Transnationalism: Diasporas and the Advent o f a New (dis)order," ed. Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yitzhak Sternberg. (Boston: Brill, 2009), 1. as French subjects, while at the same time maintaining aspects of their identities, such as Islam. Thus, designating the movement of North Africans to metropolitan France a transnational history of colonization as much as it is a history of immigration is not a simple technicality based on how the French labeled Algeria, the place of origin for the majority of Muslim North Africans in France both then and now. This is about understanding the arrival of Muslim North Africans in early-twentieth-century metropolitan France without the hindrance and baggage of the later constructions of decolonization that reimagined people and events of the French colonial empire's recent past in a manner that was more palatable to a changing French society. To that end, this dissertation examines the history of Muslim North Africans in metropolitan France between 1900 and 1939 in a way that balances its migratory aspects with its transnational and colonial aspects as well. The city of Marseille serves as the case study because it was the main metropolitan point of entry and exit for North Africans and one of the largest centers of North African life in metropolitan France. In Marseille, therefore, we will be able to observe local experiences as well as larger nationwide events. Ultimately, this dissertation accomplishes two goals. First, it adds to our working knowledge of the local history of Muslim life in Marseille. This is important because so little scholarship currently exists on the subject. What is shown here is that Muslim life in early-twentieth-century Marseille had multiple facets to it, and it reflected the multiple identities of Muslim North Africans, sometimes multiple times within the same day. They were immigrants in a sense, but they were also nationalists, communists, loyal French nationals with assimilationist visions, French war veterans, thieves, agents of the police, 9 fugitives, dockworkers, sugar factory workers, venders, fathers, brothers and sons from North Africa, and even husbands (or at least lovers) of French women. At times, some of these identities gave them power. At other times, some of these identities were imposed by France and took power. Either way, these various identities showcase the agency of Muslim North Africans as they acted within an imperial nation-state's colonial system. Second and far more reaching, this dissertation also challenges the current spatial thinking of colonial history's distinctively geographical discourse of "colonies," defined as places where a colonial empire has conquered; and of a "metropole," which is the homeland of the colonizing people. Rather, this dissertation shows that this dichotomy fails to acknowledge the full reality of twentieth-century French colonialism, which is that the colonies had followed the colonizers "back home" to the metropole. It had not only impacted French thought, but as colonial migrants from North Africa arrived in metropolitan France and identities began to mix, imperial practices from the colonies were used to monitor them, to control them, to try to dictate separate identities as the colonial and metropolitan worlds were merging and becoming less distinguishable. In this way, the French literally created colonial enclaves within the borders of metropolitan France-Muslim colonies in the metropole, essentially-that reflect French fears of difference and the transnational nature of colonial identities as the lines blurred between old identifiers, such as colony and metropole, or immigrant and national. Historiography This dissertation pulls from and contributes to several fields of history, but most especially, to the history of immigration to France and the history of colonialism. In order to illustrate the significance of the dissertation's overall argument then, this section 10 11 situates it within the scholarship currently available on these two subjects. Doing so makes it evident that the history of immigration to France is in many ways still an emerging field that will greatly benefit from further additions. Indeed, this is especially the case within the subfield of Muslim North African migration to France prior to Algerian independence in 1962, which will be explained separately after discussing the more general history of immigration to France. Lastly, this section also explains the current historiography of colonialism in order to show that the specific argument for a nonspatial and transnational view of colonialism challenges and pushes colonial scholarship since the "imperial turn" in a meaningful and new direction. The history of (im)migration and nationality-in other words, the history of different groups coming to France and becoming or being "French" in anyway-was almost completely ignored until the 1970s and 1980s.16 It only became of interest then because immigration and minorities had become contentious topics in France's political discourse. Scholars from the era often say as much in their works. Introducing his memoire de maitrise on Muslim North African migration, Bernard Panza wrote that three years earlier, Marseille "saw racial tension suddenly reach the breaking point," and that "historians have until now neglected the first North African migration, content to star over eternally with one or two reference texts."17 Gerard Noiriel claimed that this was also the case for the whole history of immigration to France. "The state of historical research in France in the 1980s," writes Noiriel in his preface to the English-language edition "is also relevant to understanding the conditions in which this book [The French 16 The lone scholar who predates this era in a significant way is Norbert Gomar. His work focuses on the poor living conditions of North Africans and offers some demographic information, but is quite basic; see Norbert Gomar, L 'emigration algerienne en France (Paris: Les Presses modernes, 1931). 17 Bernard Panza and Bernard Viala, "L 'immigration Nord-Africaine a Marseille et dans Les Bouches-du- Rhone, 1906-1939" (Memoire de maitrise, Aix-en-Provence, France, 1976-77), 1. 12 Melting Pot] was written. The issue of immigration, a topic of heated political controversy, was at the time completely marginal in French historical writing."18 Thus it was the political interests of the day that first produced any significant historical studies of immigration to France within the past forty years, as well as histories of migration to France by specific groups, such as North Africans. The standard-bearer for the general history of immigration to France is Gerard Noiriel. His book, Le creuset frangais, was the first extensive general history ever written on immigration to France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Spurred by the political climate of the day, Noiriel sought to separate the real origins of the various minority groups in 1980s France from the various claims made at the time. To that end, he examined census records and French laws surrounding immigration over the past two centuries. In doing so, he discovered that France has been Europe's melting pot, or creuset in French, for the past two centuries. In fact, Noiriel found it appropriate to compare France to the United States in this regard. His findings contradicted the idea that France has a static Gallicized population descending from Celt and Romans, proving rather that France had welcomed several waves of immigrants from all over Europe and subjects of the previous colonial empire in order to meet economic or wartime needs for at least the past two hundred years. Noiriel's book has been an important reference point for historians of immigration to France who have since sought to build on his important but nonetheless general history of a broad topic and time period.19 18 Gerard Noiriel, The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship and National Identity, trans. Geoffroy de Laforcade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), xiii. 19 Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Peter Sahlins, Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Miriam Feldblum, Reconstructing Citizenship: The Politics o f Nationality Reform and Immigration in Contemporary France (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1999); Riva Kastoryano, Negotiating Identities: States and Immigrations in France and Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Following Noiriel's publication, Rogers Brubaker joined him as one of the most influential historian of immigration to France.20 Brubaker examined immigration in a comparative context, using a historical view to understand how France and Germany have responded to immigration in recent decades. His conclusion was that these two neighboring nations have drastically different paradigms on the topic. He argues that since the French Revolution, France has determined citizenship and the acceptance of foreigners on the principle of jus soli, or citizenship by place of birth. He also claims that Germany, on the other hand, has operated on the idea of jus sanguinis, which is citizenship determined by ancestry, or bloodlines. Brubaker discusses North Africans in France after Algerian independence, but he largely glosses over their arrival in the colonial period. What he does have to say on the matter takes less than a paragraph, which is a skeleton outline of the numbers Muslim Algerians who migrated to France from just before World War I to the era that Brubaker is interested in discussing-the 1960s and on.21 Pointing this out is not meant to take away from his work. It remains an important contribution to the discussion of French immigration and nationality, but Brubaker's work shows how North Africans of the colonial period continued to receive little to no attention in the 1990s as scholars brush over them in an all too eager desire to discuss their modern-day descendants. Following Brubaker, Patrick Weil has thus far become the face of scholarship for the history of immigration and nationality in the twenty-first century. Like Brubaker, Weil uses immigration to discuss the acquisition of French nationality. Specifically, his Press, 2002); Alec G. Hargreaves, Multi-Ethnic France: Immigration, Politics, Culture and Society, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2007); Weil, How to Be French, 2008. 20 Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. 21 Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, 139. 13 work seeks to explain what has made a person "French" since the French Revolution. His research relies on years of archival research in France, Germany, and the United States, ranging from public to private collections. Tracing the history of French nationality, or perhaps better put, the history of French citizenship, he examined civil laws, military recruitment, and interviewed French lawmakers. Weil ultimately refutes Brubaker, claiming that French nationality in the past two centuries cannot be simplified to the concept of jus soli. Rather, modern French nationality has a complex history that has included jus sanguinis. The French were, in fact, responsible for unleashing jus sanguinis on Europe through the French civil code of 1803. Prussians later brought it back to France after the Franco-Prussian War. France also developed what Weil has dubbed double jus soli, a principle that permits the children of immigrants to France to choose French citizenship but automatically considers their grandchildren citizens. In short, Weil shows that French identity or nationality is a continually evolving concept. It "is less a subject about which we have a substantial body of knowledge and analysis than an object fraught with contradictory representations, beliefs, and stereotypes."22 It also bears mention that Weil succeeds far more so than Brubaker in unraveling the complications of colonialism in modern citizenship, though of course he does through the prism of immigration: the arrival of a foreign group and their eventual absorption into a new society. The larger discussion on the history of immigration and nationality in France has made serious progress since political necessity made it a topic of study in the last quarter of the twentieth century, but it is still lacking. Weil put it well in his introduction: "the history of French nationality has never been the object of a complete and systematic 22 Weil, How To Be French, xiv. 14 study. Whole facets of this important story have been left in the dark."23 This is a telling comment, especially when considering that Weil wrote it less than a decade ago. To be sure, Muslim North Africans, especially those with colonial identities in the first-half of the twentieth century, remain-to paraphrase Weil-one of those facets "of this important story" that has largely been "left in the dark." To shift from the general historiography of immigration to France to its subfield of Muslim North Africans im/migration to France requires revisiting the 1970s in order to introduce Charles-Robert Ageron. Although he was more a historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century North Africa than a historian of North African migration in France, the transnational nature of the prior meant that he made great contributions to the latter. Having very little scholarship to fall back on in the 1970s and 1980s, it is not surprising that many of his multiple works are essentially textbooks that lay out the basic political and economic histories of French North Africa.24 He also produced some of the first biographical sketches of important early-twentieth-century figures like the relatively sympathetic Governor-General of Algeria, Charles Jonnart, and the Francophone Muslim Algerian reformer, the Emir Khaled.25 Ageron also lays out the stark realities of life for Muslim Algerians that pushed them to the metropole in the early-twentieth century, but he left plenty of room for other historians to explain in greater detail what life was like on the other side of the Mediterranean. 15 23 Weil, How To Be French, xv. 24 Charles-Robert Ageron, Les Algeriens musulmans et la France: 1871-1919 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968); Charles-Robert Ageron, Modern Algeria: a History from 1830 to Present (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1991). Charles-Robert Ageron, Politiques coloniales au Maghreb (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1973); Charles-Robert Ageron, L 'Algerie des Franqais (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993). 25 Charles-Robert Ageron, "Enquete sur les origines du nationalisme algerien. L 'emir Khaled premier nationaliste algerien ?," Revue de l 'Occident musulman et de laMediterranee 2, no. 2 (1966): 9-49. Malek Ath-Messaoud and Alain Gillette collaborated to write one of the first books that truly addressed North African migration to France before decolonization. For them, this history could be boiled down to one word: economics. They emphasize how France benefited economically from Muslim Algerian labor in the metropole during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In fact, the largest section of their work is entitled "Fonctions economiques," and explains that Muslim Algerian migrants were always available to do the work that the French did not want to do, but were then easily disposable if the economy hit a down turn. While their main argument is that Muslim Algerian migration is always entangled with French capitalism, their more lasting impact has been framing this history as immigration in nature, which they claim first started as early as 1871. No other scholars have agreed with their start date since, but they have nonetheless generally continued to use Ath-Messaoud and Gillette's essentially immigration point of view.26 This is not to say that colonialism or the status of Algerians as French Nationals has been completely ignored, but both of these aspects have only been recognized in the past fifteen years and remain extremely underdeveloped. The influential historian Emile Temime is one such example of how this is the case. Temime's work encompassed the whole of the Mediterranean, but he had a few 16 26 Raouf Ressaissi, Settlement Colonization and Transnational Labor Emigrations in the Maghreb: A Comparative Study o f Algeria and Tunisia (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 1984); Belkacem Hifi, L 'Immigration algerienne en France: Origines etperspectives de non-retour (Paris: Harmattan, 1985); Jacqueline Costa- Lascoux and Emile Temime, eds., Les Algeriens en France : genese et devenir d 'une migration (Paris: Publisud, 1985); Benjamin Stora, Algeria, 1830-2000: A Short History, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Benjamin Stora, Ils venaient d 'Algerie: L 'immigration algerienne en France (1912-1992) (Paris: Fayard, 1992); Jacques Simon, L 'immigration Algerienne en France: des origines a l 'independance (Paris: Paris-Mediterranee, 2000); Rabah Aissaoui, Immigration and National Identity: North African Political Movements in Colonial and Postcolonial France (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). publications that significantly included the migration of Muslim North Africans.27 These included collaborative works over the past few decades, the most thorough of which was a history of migration in Marseille.28 It carefully notes in the preface, written by Temime himself, the problem with counting Muslim North Africans in the first half of the century is that "the Algerian migration is, until 1962, a French migration and, as such, difficult to discern in numbers."29 This is an improvement. Even though his multivolume work still discusses Algerians as "immigres" (immigrants) with little further acknowledgment of their colonial reality, Temime had begun to shift toward seeing Muslim North Africans as having a French (colonial) identity, even if his analysis still treated them essentially as immigrants.30 This small change is a reflection of the "imperial turn" bringing colonialism into the discourse on immigration. From the mid-twentieth century to the late-1990s and early-2000s, colonial or imperial history appeared to be on its way out. In the decades following World War II, a process now called "decolonization" by historians took place. This term is used to describe the process by which the colonies of various European powers around the world either seized their independence or had it granted to them. As the imperial world disappeared, so too did its place as a field of history. Increasingly, those who wished to study the former colonies of Europe did so through area studies, or as histories of the 17 27 Jacqueline and Temime, Les Algeriens en France; Emile Temime and Pierre Echinard, La prehistoire de la migration (1482-1830), vol. 1 of Migrance: Histoire des migrations a Marseille, ed. Emile Temime (Marseille: Jeanne Laffitte, 2007). 28 Emile Temime, ed., Migrance: Histoire des migrations a Marseille, 4 vols. (Marseille: Jeanne Laffitte, 2007). 29 Temime and Echinard, La prehistoire de la migration, 5. Italics added by me for emphasis. 30 Emile Temime and Renee Lopez, L 'expansionMarseillaise et « l 'invasion italienne » (1830-1918), vol. 2 of Migrance: Histoire des migrations a Marseille, ed. Emile Temime (Marseille: Jeanne Laffitte, 2007), 154. independent and sovereign nations that were replacing the colonies.31 It was a shift that reflected the now autonomous peoples of previous colonies claiming their own identity and Europe coming to terms with that fact. However, just when imperial or colonial history truly appeared to have become a thing of the past, "imperial turn," which is the study of the influence and impact of the colonial empires on the colonial powers themselves, changed and brought new life to the field. Among the first historians to embrace this idea and to push other historians to pursue it were Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper. In the late-1990s they co­authored a crucial essay that served as the introduction to an edited volume that helped to usher in the "imperial turn." In their essay, Stoler and Cooper framed a discourse in which colonizer was no longer seen as the only influencer in the colonial experience. Rather it could be seen as exchange between the colonies and the metropole. As they put it, "our interest is more in how both colonies and metropoles shared dialectics of inclusion and exclusion, and in what ways the colonial domain was distinct from the metropolitan one. We hope to explore within the shared but differentiated space of empire the hierarchies of production, power, and knowledge that emerged in tension with the extension of the domain of universal reason, of market economics, and of citizenship."32 Stoler and Cooper were seeing how various dynamics of imperial empires, such as economics, politics, and intellectual discourse were reverberating back in their metropoles, and they hoped to see more historians of European powers seek to understand the implications and extent of that influence. 31 Douglas M. Peers, "Is Humpty-Dumpty back together again? The revival of imperial history and the Oxford History of the British Empire," Journal o f World History 13, no. 2 (2002): 452. 32 Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler, "Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda," in Tensions o f Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997) 3. 18 19 While Stoler and Cooper's edited volume helped create the "imperial turn," Antoinette Burton's edited volume assisted historians in continuing to engage with it and find solutions to its challenges. Focused significantly but not exclusively on the British Empire, Burton's volume "seeks dialogue and critical companionship with a number of recent discussions about the directions of postmodern and postcolonial scholarship."33 She points to the challenges of maintaining the national histories of both metropoles and colonies within the context of the "imperial turn" while also considering ways in which these once empires connect now in an increasingly globalized, postcolonial world. Despite the impression given by the volume's title, After the Imperial Turn, Burton very much encourages new avenues of thinking within it, rather than depicting it as something that is or will soon be past. Likely due to the influence of the "imperial turn" then, some worthwhile histories of colonial migrant populations in the metropoles started to appear in the late-1990s and have continued through the past decade.34 Among the first historians influenced by the "imperial turn" to write on Muslim North Africans in early-twentieth-century metropolitan France was Neil MacMaster. His 33 Antoinette Burton, "Introduction: On the Inadequacy and the Indispensability of the Nation," in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton. (Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 2003), 16. 34 Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler, Tensions o f Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997); Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Felix Driver and David Gilbert, eds., Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999); Sue Peabody and Tyler Edward Stovall, eds., The Color o f Liberty: Histories o f Race in France (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Clifford Rosenberg, Policing Paris: The Origins o f Modern Immigration Control between the Wars (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Eric T. Jennings, Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine, and Frank Trentmann, eds., Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c. 1880­1950 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Mary Dewhurst Lewis, The Boundaries o f the Republic: Migrant Rights and the Limits o f Universalism in France, 1918-1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); Richard S. Fogarty, Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914-1918 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008); Amelia Lyons, The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole: Algerian Families and the French Welfare State during Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). work encompasses Muslim North Africans between 1900 and 1962.35 The title of his book alone shows a marked increase in the attention to the colonial facet of this history, Colonial Migrants and Racism: Algerians in France, 1900-62. Though publishing in the late-1990s, MacMaster's work, like Noiriel's over a decade earlier, is also a response to the fact that "integration of ethnic minorities, and racism have become central issues in French politics."36 MacMaster's unique contribution was explaining the colonial influence in the development of racism towards Algerians in metropolitan France. He found a number of causes for racism against Algerians in the metropole, but the colonial relationship was a major contribution. He argues that many of the colons in French- Algeria felt threatened by Muslim Algerians going to the metropole and experiencing greater Freedom. In response, the colons influenced metropolitan French society to see Algerians as criminals and to slow their access to metropolitan France. For MacMaster then, the colonies were shaping the experience of North Africans before and as they arrived as immigrants in the metropole. Clifford Rosenberg's contribution to our understanding of Muslim North African life in metropolitan France is an examination of how France policed immigrants, and especially Muslim North Africans in Paris, between the wars. Rosenberg is very clear that his interest is in unraveling the French perspective on immigration, or as he puts it, he focuses "on the French response to immigration rather than the immigrant communities themselves."37 His recent monograph is divided into two major parts. The first provides a summation of France's surveillance of foreigners and how policing 35 Neil MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism: Algerians in France, 1900-1962 (New York: St. Martin's Press Inc., 1997). 36 MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism, 1. 37 Rosenberg, Policing Paris, xii. 20 worked and changed between the wars. The second part discusses how North Africans specifically were policed in interwar Paris. In dedicating half of his book to the subject, Rosenberg makes it one of the most in-depth histories of North Africans in the interwar period published to date. For example, he explains thoroughly how Paris' North African Brigade functioned and the origins of the Franco-Muslim hospital in Paris. In the end, he argues persuasively that the French state treated Muslim North Africans migrants far more harshly than other white immigrants from European countries. Meanwhile, Mary Dewhurst Lewis has approached early-twentieth-century immigration to France from a comparative point of view that greatly includes Muslim North Africans. She contrasts the experiences of three groups in the metropole: "labor migrants," who are by and large Europeans, refugees of various nationalities, and lastly, Muslim Algerians. Relying on departmental archives and numerous others in Paris, Lewis uses the cities of Lyon and Marseille as case studies to better understand the experiences of these three migrant groups in interwar period France, which leads her to give ample attention to Muslim Algerians. Lewis' conclusion is that despite the ideals of republican principles and equality, the extent to which the Third Republic assimilated each respective group had more to do with "factors ranging from local social relations to national politics to international affairs, and dependent on the choices made by both state agents and migrants under the constraint of these shifting relationships."38 In a similar vein as Rosenberg, Lewis' work has further helped to demonstrate that North African migrants were indeed treated in a manner that did not fit with the other (white) immigrants' experiences. 21 38 Lewis, The Boundaries o f the Republic, 16. Histories produced in the past fifteen or twenty years since the "imperial turn" have considered some of the ways in which colonialism impacted early-twentieth-century Muslim North African im/migration to France, but they remained constrained by terms used within the colonial discourse. Specifically, terms such as "colony" and "metropole" conjure a more rigid and cleanly bifurcated image of colonial empires, the people within them, and their identities, than actually existed. Challenging the current static and purely geographical definition of these terms, this dissertation demonstrates that the experience of Muslim North Africans in metropolitan France can be better understood by recognizing that French colonial subjects took their colonial status and identities with them wherever they went. This was even the case when migrating to the metropole, because metropolitan leaders looked to their colonial counterparts in order to replicate colonial life. In a very real way, they endeavored to create colonial enclaves inside the metropole that prevented Muslim North Africans from truly being immigrants in the sense of being a people moving to foreign land with different laws, customs, and national identities. Indeed, the metropolitan French of the early-twentieth century viewed them far more as colonial subjects, or indigenes (native, usually of a colony) than as immigrants. To put that in another way that leans partially upon Todd Shepard's framing, just as France "invented" decolonization in order to accept that Algeria was no longer French after 1962, historians since the 1950s have "invented" the image of metropolitan-dwelling colonial subjects as immigrants to better fit our postcolonial geopolitics at the expense of reflecting colonial realities. By looking past constructions of "immigrants" moving from a "colony" to the "metropole," Muslim North Africans of the era can better be seen for what they were: a diverse group with multiple identities that existed in a 22 colonial world and did not see the end of this existence as possible, let alone inevitable. This new colonial perspective will improve our understanding of North African history, French history, the transnational identities of those caught in the middle of this trans­Mediterranean colonial French world, and even better inform discussions about twenty-first- century minority groups in France today. Colonialism, North Africa, France, and Marseille As a colonial and transnational history with its focal point in Marseille, this dissertation brings together a number of historical narratives, all of which are important to understanding the experience of Muslim North Africans in France between 1900 and 1939. This section provides a brief overview of how colonialism, North Africa, and the city of Marseille came together in early-twentieth-century France. To that end, first is a history of French imperialism and colonialism, which will be followed by overviews of colonialism in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, in that order. This will illustrate how Muslims from these three colonies were often seen as one cohesive group of colonial subjects, yet were also different, as the Algerian majority of them had a second semi- French and transnational designation, that of French national. Their commonalities and differences all factored into how they and the French state interacted with each other. This is followed by a brief history of the French Third Republic, which focuses on its struggle and desire to be a place of egalite (equality) even as it expands a colonial empire that contradicts this ideal and challenges assumptions about French identity. Last of all 23 24 comes a history of Marseille as a transnational place of migration, or as Temime describes it, the "crossroads-city that is Marseille."39 French Imperialism and Colonialism Europe began the process of what is now called "European colonization" as early as the late-fifteenth century. European powers did so in an effort "to expand their trade, protect their political authority, and export their religious beliefs and ways of life to the other parts of the world."40 Their attempts at empire were frequently challenged, both by those peoples being subjugated and by other European powers vying for control of the same regions. Despite these difficulties, large empires had been established by the early 1800s. Best known to English-speaking audiences was the British Empire. Already including large territories ranging from the Indian subcontinent to North America by 1800, it only continued to grow over the course of the nineteenth century. Portugal controlled parts of Africa's coasts, significant islands in the Atlantic Ocean, and modern-day Brazil. Spain had taken a large swath of land in North and South America, as well as the Philippines. Among the Netherlands' conquests was the Dutch East Indies, which makes up much of Indonesia today. All of the above had colonies in the Caribbean. Russia, meanwhile, had expanded its conquest from Eastern Europe and Western Asia to 39 Emile Temime and Renee Lopez, L 'expansionMarseillaise et « l 'invasion italienne » (1830-1918), vol. 2 of Migrance: Histoire des migrations a Marseille, ed. Emile Temime (Aix-en-Provence: Jeanne Laffitte, 2007), 154. 40 James R. Lehning, European Colonialism since 1700 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 16. For a more in-depth overview of all of these colonial empires, see William Roger Louis, ed., The Oxford History o f the British Empire (Oxford [England]: Oxford University Press, 1998); Philippa Levine, The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset (Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, 2007); Martin Thomas, The French Empire between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); Martin Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918-1940 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012). include the Americas via the Pacific Ocean, taking in Alaska and even exerted influence as far south as California. Alongside these five imperial powers was France.41 Certainly not the least among them, France had also established colonies throughout the world during the early modern era (roughly 1500 to 1750, sometimes considered to go as late as 1800) with various degrees of success. With the exception of occasional interruptions by other European powers, early-nineteenth-century France had maintained control of several Caribbean islands for some two hundred years, where lucrative plantations had first produced "tobacco, cotton, cocoa and coffee that found ready markets in Europe," before shifting "to a more lucrative product, sugar," in the late 1600s.42 Other colonial undertakings included a failed venture in Florida, and a successful one in Pondichery, India.43 The largest French colonial holding before the nineteenth century, however, was Nouvelle- France, or New France. A stronghold of French missionary work and the fur trade at its height, New France covered an enormous span of North America. From north to south, it included what is now the Canadian province of Quebec down to the American state of Louisiana. From west to east, it claimed much of the modern-day Midwestern United States. All of New France was lost to the British and Spanish in the 1763 treaty of Paris that brought an end to the Seven Years War. France still had some very lucrative colonies, but the influence, economy, and surface area that its colonial holdings encompassed had been significantly dwarfed. 41 Jean Meyer and Jacques Thobie, Histoire de la France colonial (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990); James Pritchard, In Search o f Empire: The French in the Americas 1670-1730 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Thomas, The French Empire between the Wars; Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order. 42 Lehning, European Colonialism, 17. 43 Lehning, European Colonialism, 16. 25 Through the end of the eighteenth century, France's focus was more on European affairs than on overseas colonization. First, there were the economic, political, and philosophical issues that led to the French Revolution of 1789. Notably, France's providing aid to the colonials in the American Revolution sounded the economic death knell for the government's finances. Combined with inept taxation practices and the costs of the Seven Years War, both in terms of fighting it and the colonial territory lost, the resources spent on ensuring American independence had rendered France insolvent. In need of economic reform, Louis XVI called for a meeting of the Estates General. This was was an Old Regime legislative body that consisted of representatives from the clergy, the nobility, and "the third estate," which constituted "the overwhelming mass of the French population."44 With the ideas of the Enlightenment in the atmosphere, the meeting gave way to calls for a constitution and gave rise to a revolution. Then there was the Revolution itself. Things went as smoothly as could be expected of any revolution the first few years, but by 1792, the Revolution's proponents found themselves not only struggling internally, but externally as well. This was the beginning of the Revolution's radical phase. At the behest of displaced French aristocrats, European monarchs unleashed their armies on France with the goal of ensuring Louis XVI's continued reign. These conflicts, known as the French Revolutionary Wars, not only kept France focused on Europe, but they enabled it to gain territory at the expense of its neighbors. Much of this was done under the leadership of a young Napoleon Bonaparte. 26 44 Raymond Anthony Jonas, France and the Cult o f the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale fo r Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 58. Bonaparte's military prowess facilitated much of France's success, and ultimately permitted him to transmute the essence of the Revolution into a regime under his control, known as the Napoleonic Empire (1804-1815). Under the Corsican general, his troops up ended the whole of Europe, controlling territory from the Iberian Peninsula to Moscow at the Empire's peak. Yet, Napoleon did not focus solely on Europe. He simply had more success there. His 1798-1801 campaign in Egypt failed to establish French rule along the Nile, although he did destabilize the region enough for the Ottoman general Muhammad Ali to eventually break it away from the Empire to form the modern state of Egypt. Napoleon also had ambitions to expand in the Americas, but gave up this dream once it had become clear that the revolting slaves in the once lucrative French colony of Saint- Domingue were on the path towards a successful revolution. Having planned to use the colony as his staging ground for empire building in the Americas, he opted instead to sell the vast North American territory that he had acquired from Spain in 1800 to the United States as the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Europe, then, was where he enjoyed success, but this unraveled in 1814. After a short revival following his escape from the Island of Elba that same year, Napoleon's power and empire came to an end when he was exiled for a second time in 1815. At the same time, leaders from the most powerful states of Europe met at the Congress of Vienna, where they dismantled most of what Bonaparte had built and redrew the political map of Europe. Though France still remained in control of some colonial holdings, Bonaparte's fall meant the largest loss of territory and empire since the loss of New France in 1763. Despite the political turmoil that prevented a single regime from surviving in France for more than twenty years from 1789 to 1870, the French began to build another 27 28 colonial empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the twentieth century, Britain alone surpassed France's empire in size and influence. Aided by the technological advancements of industrialization, it rose with other European empires in the nineteenth century that culminated in the creation of Europe's "imperial nation-states," in which "colonial subjects were pulled into the economic, political, and cultural systems of empire by force of conquest, colonial government, and the daily presence of colonizers in their midst."45 The French built a new, second colonial empire with the belief that they were bringing civilization to the non-European world, and as such, they officially charged themselves with la mission civilisatrice (the civilizing mission).46 A mixture of pseudoscientific racial thinking and paternalism, French supporters of colonialism claimed that the empire would enable "inferior races" to become greater by becoming more French.47 Colonized peoples were encouraged to "associate," which still meant adopting French language, culture, and leaving behind their "barbaric customary law" in favor of French law.48 One unique exception to this was in Algeria, where some French hoped for a period that the Berber subgroup known as Kabyles would assimilate and become fully French.49 While other European powers had similar ideas about race and empire, most notably Britain and its supposed "white man's burden," no other empire 45 Lehning, European Colonialism, 210. 46 Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea o f Empire in France and Western Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Patricia Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995); Denise Bouche, Histoire de la colonisation franqaise: Flux et reflux (1815-1962) (Saint-Amand-Montrond, Cher: Fayard, 1991); Osama Abi-Mershed, Apostles o f Modernity: Saint-Simonians and the Civilizing Mission in Algeria (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 47 Bouche, Histoire de la colonisation franqaise, 207. 48 Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, 6. 49 Lorcin, Imperial Identities, 184. made these views an "official imperial doctrine."50 Further, as a republic by the late-nineteenth century, France alone believed it had a charge to export its republican ideals of liberte, egalite, fraternite to the world through its colonial empire.51 As a people who valued equality before the law, the French also believed that their views on empire and race were not as racist as the British.52 Whether this was true or not, the French believed it. Thus, the civilizing mission "implied that France's colonial subjects were too primitive to rule themselves, but were capable of being uplifted," through assimilation or association.53 The French colonized extensively in Africa and Asia through means of conquest, coming to control immense areas of land that make up several countries today, such as Vietnam, Madagascar, and Senegal. The second French colonial empire got its start in 1830 with the invasion of Algiers. This North African city would later serve as the capital of colonial and then independent Algeria. Algeria The territory that became the French colony of Algeria sits directly south and across the Mediterranean from France. They would share borders were it not for this body of water. While Berbers are its indigenous people, the area has been conquered and inhabited by several other groups, including the Phoenicians, Romans, and Germanic tribes. It was when seventh-century Muslim Arabs swept through that it acquired the religious and ethnic concentration that it mostly retains to this day. Many Arabs settled 50 Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, 1. 51 Bouche, Histoire de la colonisation Frangaise, 207. 52 William A. Hoisington, Jr., Lyautey and the French Conquest o f Morocco (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), 108. 53 Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, 1. 29 and soon outnumbered the Berbers who adopted the religion of the new dominate group. In the sixteenth century, Muslim Ottoman Turks established a vassal-state of their then expanding Ottoman Empire that roughly aligns with the boundaries of modern-day Algeria. The Ottomans had a few governors there called "beys," who answered to a single "dey" in Algiers. The Dey in turn answered to the Ottoman Empire's governing powers, also known as "the Porte," in Istanbul. Although an ailing Ottoman Empire had largely lost its ability to control Algeria by the start of the nineteenth century, the Dey of Algiers still respected the appearance of Ottoman oversight. The 1830 invasion of Algiers and subsequent creation of French-Algeria started with a French Revolution debt. While the French Revolution and its wars raged on, Algerian-Jewish houses of Bushnaq and Bakri provided much needed grain to Bonaparte's armies and southern French provinces between 1793 and 1798.54 When Bonaparte invaded Egypt, then a possession of the Ottoman Empire, like Algeria, Franco- Algerian relations broke down with an outstanding French debt of 7,000,000 to 8,000,000 francs. After Bonaparte's demise, relations were reestablished with France and Louis XVIII and continued under his brother and successor, Charles X (r. 1824-1830), but the issue of this French Revolution debt hung over both countries. Meanwhile, Bakri, "who owed money to the state," convinced the Dey of Algiers, Hussein Dey, that he was financially incapable of paying the state until the French payed him.55 To make matters worse, Bakri claimed exaggerated interest rates, while the Bourbons remained loath to pay a debt taken by revolutions to overthrow their dynasty. 30 54 Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 45-46. 55 Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 46. On April 29, 1827, the debt issue came to a head. The French consul at Algiers, Pierre Deval, visited the Hussein with the intention of paying his respects as Ramadan was coming to a close. During their exchange, Hussein asked why he had not heard back from Charles X regarding this now thirty-year-old debt. "Deval allegedly responded in words to the effect that His Most Christian Majesty could not lower himself to correspond with the Dey."56 Insulted and out of patience, the usually calm and collected Hussein had simply come to his breaking point. He lost his composure and hit Deval "three times on the arm with the handle of a peacock-feather fly whisk and ordered him to get out."57 This event has since been known as the "Fly Whisk Incident." As tension increased over the matters of honor, insult, and who owed an apology to whom, Hussein cut off French trading posts in Algeria while France undertook an expensive, ultimately failing, blockade of the port of Algiers. Three years passed like this, during which time Charles X's creep towards greater autocratic rule was making him increasingly unpopular with many of his subjects. Uneasy about the certainty of retaining his crown, he ordered the full invasion of Algiers with the hope that a military victory would rebuild his popularity at home. It did not work. Only three weeks after the French flag went up over the defeated Kasbah of Algiers on July 5, 1830, the people of Paris defied him and barricaded the small alleyways of their architecturally medieval capital, causing Charles X to abdicate within a mere three days now known as the July Revolution. France subdued the rest of Algeria over the course of the next four decades (1830­1871). The process started under the leadership of Count Bertrand Clauzel, who was 31 56 Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 46. 57 Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 46. given charge in Algeria on September 2, 1830 by the newly crowned Orleanist king, Louis-Philippe (1830-1848).58 Clauzel crushed the resistance efforts of Hussein's Bey of Constantine, Ahmad Bey, but was replaced shortly thereafter in 1836 when he suffered a thorough and embarrassing defeat at the hands of another resister to French occupation who has gone down in Algerian history as a symbol of colonial defiance, Abd al-Qadir. Clauzel's defeat caused his replacement by Thomas Robert Bugeaud that same year. Bugeaud was merciless. He became infamous for chasing those who dared to defy French expansion into caves, then lighting fires at the entrance to trap them inside, which cause them to either suffocate or burn to death. His tactics worked. Elevated to Governor- General in 1840, he greatly weakened Abd al-Qadir in the early 1840s, which contributed to the latter's surrendered to General Louis de Lamoriciere in 1847. Others rose to fight back after his surrender, but they all saw defeat. The millenarian Bou Ma za fought in the lowlands. Bu Ziyan repelled the French at his fortified oasis for over fifty days before all 800 of the people with him were "methodically slaughtered" and his decapitated head was placed on the wall.59 The female marabout Lalla Fatima rallied Kabyle fighters in the mountains.60 They all failed. The Kabylia insurrection in 1871 was the last gasping breath of Algerian resistance. It took the lives of 2,686 Europeans, while the Algerian loss of life will always remain unknown, though "it was clearly many times greater."61 From 1830 to 1871, 1861 was the only year that passed with a significant military 32 58 Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 52. 59 Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 67. 60 Kabyles are a specific group of Berbers, many of whom live in the mountains of Northern Algeria. A marabout is a figure within North African Islam comparable to a saint, "who was enlightened or famous for his virtues who becomes, after death, a cult figure or object of veneration." F. Benzakour, Driss Gaadi, and Ambroise Queffelec, Le Frangais au Maroc (Brussels: AUPELF-UREF, 2000), 255. 61 Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 78. resistance. 62 After forty years of valiant effort and total failure, it was not until the 1940s that a significant number of Algerians could even conceive of a future without French rule. During forty years of conquest, settlers were arriving. In the 1830s, Clauzel was a figure who bridged the two worlds of conquest and settlement. For him, Algeria was the answer to France's colonial void since the loss of New France in the Americas. "In many ways a man of the eighteenth century, Clauzel saw Algeria replacing France's lost new-world empire as a source of exotic commodities, and he became a vigorous proponent of active settlement in Algeria."63 Indeed, Clauzel's vision set the tone for Algeria to become a white settler colony. He helped "to trigger a land rush that saw Europeans buying and selling agricultural lands at a feverish pace."64 Europeans seeking greater opportunity jumped on the chance for a fresh start. Some were so poor, colonial legend has it, that they could not afford footwear.65 This is one of the origin-stories given for the nickname of colons in Algeria used by the twentieth century: pieds-noirs (literal translation, "black feet"). Big companies also bought tracts of land for farming. They then hired the native Algerian population to work as laborers for pittance, sometimes employing Algerians on what was their very own personal farm before the French took it. When Buguead became Governor-General, the European population of colons was approaching 40,000.66 In the next few decades, Algeria attracted white settlers from various European countries and also became a dumping ground for French criminals, radicals, and republicans. By 1872, settlers-arriving by their own free will or not- 62 Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 55. 63 Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 52. 64 Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 52-53. 65 Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 69 66 Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 69. 33 coupled with births, had raised the colon European population to 279,691.67 This was still not enough settlement in the eyes of those in support of colonialism, but it had made Algeria the primary destination for colons of the French Empire. Structural and administrative changes during this same time period completed the annexation of Algeria. Under the July Monarchy, the bureaux arabes (usually translated in the singular as "Arab Bureau") was established. Its efforts to slow colons abuse of native Algerians combined with a few opportunist officers who joined the colons ensured that both sides hated it until its end in 1871.68 In 1845, a royal ordinance divided Algeria into the three provinces of Alger, Oran, and Constantine and further created local administration that depended on the ratio of Europeans to native Algerians. A commune de plein exercice used civil law and was for areas with a high colon population. The other two types of administrations, territoires mixtes and territoires arabes, were under military rule, though limited self-government was permitted for colons in the former.69 As Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte rose to power in France, first as president of the short-lived Second Republic (1848-1852) and then as Emperor Napoleon III of the Second Empire (1852-1870), he came to see himself as "Emperor of the Arabs" and "instituted enlightened policies of pacification and development in Algeria."70 His first attempt at such a policy was the Senatus Consultum of April 22, 1863. The point of the law was to protect native Algerians from further land confiscation at the hands of the colons by stipulating that any lands traditionally used by an Algerian tribe belonged to that tribe and was not available for the government or colons to claim. Instead, the civil 67 Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 69. 68 Abi-Mershed, Apostles o f Modernity, 88. 69 Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 73. 70 David Baguley, Napoleon III and His Regime: An Extravaganza (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2000), 172. 34 authorities reinterpreted the 1863 law in a way that turned tribal lands into mulk (private land, able to be sold), or transferred tribal lands to the public domain. Thus, the law had completely failed within a few years. Another attempt to give Muslim Algerians more political rights came through the Senatus Consultum of July 14, 1865, but it backfired as well. The law "declared that Algerians were French" and therefore, French nationals who "could serve in the military, become civil servants, and perform other functions in the French establishment."71 These opportunities afforded to Muslim Algerians as French nationals were later expanded to include other privileges that their fellow colonial subjects from other colonies did not enjoy, such as the ability to travel to metropolitan France freely, or having a limited vote on some local measures. But the Senatus Consultum of July 14, 1865 also stipulated that those who were ruled under Muslim law "were not citizens of France."72 If a Muslim Algerian wished to become a citizen then, it required apostatizing, a choice that only two thousand or so made between 1865 and Algerian independence in 1962. Thus, the Senatus Consultum of July 14, 1865 also unintentional established a three-class system among Muslim North Africans and white French within the imperial nation-state of France. At the top were French citizens. They were primarily white European Christians with a Jewish minority, and were either born with citizenship or had naturalized. By the start of the Third Republic, male citizens enjoyed full voting rights while women at least benefited from legal protections. Beneath them came Muslim Algerian French nationals. Despite being of the same ethnicities (Arab and Berber) and religion (Muslim) as other colonial subjects from the other North African colonies, they 35 71 Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 75. 72 Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 75-76. enjoyed the few additional privileges given by the Senatus Consultum of July 14, 1865. Even so, this was not equal to the rights of full citizens. Muslim Algerian men were not uniformly given the right to vote. Even as this right was expanded to more Muslim Algerian men after World War I, it still only included 43 percent of them, and their votes were counted in a separate college from that of the colons to ensured the former never trumped the latter.73 Muslim Algerian French nationals also continued to be subject to additional laws that did not apply to French citizens. The most famous example of this was the code de l 'Indigenat. Passed in 1881, it permitted administrators to inflict penalties on Muslim Algerians without going through the court.74 Despite these injustices, the second-class designation of French national was still better than the third and lowest designation of being only a colonial subject. This described Muslims in the neighboring colonies of Morocco and Tunisia. While subject to all the additional regulations placed on Muslim Algerian French nationals but not French citizens, they were also denied the few rights and privileges granted by the Senatus Consultum of July 14, 1865. They could not leave their respective colonies without express permission and purpose and had even less if any say in their governance. The last crucial administrative changes occurred when the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) ended Napoleon IIII's reign in 1870. Republicans in the metropole happily teamed up with colons to help each other achieve their political ambitions. The colons supported a republic while the republicans supported the end of military rule and full-annexation of Algeria into France. Because of this, from 1870 until the Algerian independence in 1962, Algeria was French-Algeria, and counted as an integral part of 73 Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 112. 74 Lehning, European Colonialism, 201. 36 France just as much as Provence, Brittany, or Paris itself. At the same time, Adolphe Cremieux proposed the Cremieux decree, which would give full-French citizenship to all native Algerian Jews. The colons, republicans, and Cremieux all got what they wanted. By 1871, Algeria had become French-Algeria and its tone changed very little until World War I. The minority of Europeans and native Jews and token apostate Muslims were citizens capable of full participation in the wholly civil government. On the other hand, the majority population of Muslim Arabs and Berbers recognized that the French were there to stay for the foreseeable future, meaning large-scale overt revolts ceased and a large spectrum of views on how to live under French rule emerged. Their status as French nationals, or second-class citizens had been well established. The colons continued to profit at their expense, using the backing of the French government to take the land best suited to agricultural productivity from Muslims for themselves. Between 1871 and 1919, the French government took 18.5 million acres of land from Muslims in Algeria in order to give it to the colons15 Stora asserts that doing this in nonindustrial Algeria, where "the economic future was based almost entirely on agriculture," financially devastated much of Algeria's Muslim population. Some significant reforms happened in the years surrounding World War I, but they only occurred because French leadership felt they were necessary to encourage Muslims to help France in the war or to keep them from rebelling. The first of these was the 1914 law on free circulation between French-Algeria and metropolitan France that was ostensibly extended to all Muslim Algerians to encourage them to help in the war effort. The next significant reform was the Jonnart Law in 1919, which was the reform 37 Benjamin Stora, Algeria, 7. 75 that expanded the male Algerian vote to 43 percent, but this reform was a dramatic let down from what Muslim Algerians had been led to believe they would receive at the end of the war. From the early-1920s on, the number of Muslim Algerians who believed that France would ever offer them full civil rights continued to steadily drop through the 1930s and on, eventually opening the way for Algerian nationalism to rise. The next meaningful proposal for reform came in the form of the Blum-Viollette Bill in 1936. It was named after French Prime Minister Leon Blum and Minister of State Maurice Viollette, both of whom were sympathetic to Muslim Algerians. Blum did not have a strong understanding of the complicated situation in French-Algeria, but he "surrounded himself with trustworthy people who had a thorough knowledge of Algerians matters," which included the appointment of Maurice Viollette as his Minister of State.76 Viollette was a socialist and had served as the Governor-General of Algeria (1925-27). His sympathies for the Muslim population had earned him the nickname "Viollette l'Arabi" (Viollette the Arab).77 Together, they put forward the Blum-Viollette proposal, which would have made some assimilated Muslim Algerians, called evolues, full French citizens without requiring them to give up Islam. It would have applied to Muslim Algerians who worked in the civil service, social administration, or as teachers.78 This would only have included 21,000 to 25,000 of French-Algeria's 5 million Muslims, but this was such a large step forward for Muslim equality that Muslim leaders took 38 76 France Tostain, "The Popular Front and the Blum-Viollette Plan, 1936-37," in French Colonial Empire and the Popular Front: Hope and Disillusion, eds., Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 219. 77 France Tostain, "The Popular Front and the Blum-Viollette Plan, 1936-37," 219. 78 France Tostain, "The Popular Front and the Blum-Viollette Plan, 1936-37," 222. notice.79 However, the bill did not pass. Colons and Algerian nationalists who opposed the further integration of Muslim Algerians into French society managed to kill it by 1938. By the start of World War II in 1939, or the independence of Algeria in 1962 for that matter, all enacted reforms had fallen drastically short of full citizenship for Muslims as the most meaningful reforms never made it past the level of discussion. It was not until the start of the Fifth Republic in 1958 that de Gaulle spoke of giving all Muslim Algerians citizenship in one of the last attempts to keep French rule in Algeria. But the details of events beyond 1939 reach beyond the scope of this dissertation. At this point, it is sufficient to state that French-Algeria had become more integrated into France than any other colony of France did; possibly more so than any other colony of any European power for that matter; and that only complicated things for the protectorates on either side of it. The Protectorate of Tunisia Tunisia is modern Algeria's smaller and eastern neighbor. Like Algeria before the 1830 French invasion, this area had become mostly Arab and Muslim since the seventh century and was technically a vassal-state of the crumbling Ottoman Empire that actually enjoyed great autonomy. Being smaller both in terms of geography and population, it was ruled by a single bey, called the Bey of Tunis, who worked directly under the Porte. From 1705 on, all of the Beys of Tunis came from the Husainid dynasty. 39 79 Tostain says the Blum-Viollette Bill would have impacted 21,000 Muslims while Ruedy says it would have impacted "about 25,000." France Tostain, "The Popular Front and the Blum-Viollette Plan, 1936-37," 222; Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 141. Tunisia did not become a French protectorate until 1881, but it was pursued and pressured by the French from the 1830s on. When France began conquering Algeria, the Porte responded by tightening its grip on Tunisia's eastern neighbor, Tripolitania, by sending occupying troops in 18 3 5.80 The new Bey of Tunis, Ahmad Bey-not to be confused with his contemporary, the Bey of Constantine in Algeria who resisted French rule, also called Ahmad Bey-faced a difficult situation. He wanted to maintain the autonomous nature of his family's position, but felt the pressure of the French to the west and the Ottomans to the east. Ahmad proved a brilliant diplomat as he successfully played the Porte's interest in reasserting its control of the region against France's interest in less Ottoman control in the region, all while updating his military with state-of-the-art weaponry and ships of European design. As he sent his modernized armed forces to assist the Ottoman Empire in the Crimean War (1853-1856), Ahmad felt great pride in having essentially reversed the vassal relationship. When he died in 1855, he did so completely unaware that his modernized military, on a campaign financed by the sale of expensive royal jewels, had been virtually wiped out by disease before ever seeing battle.81 Ahmad's successors failed to prevent foreign influence the way he had. Muhammad II (1855-1859), who was down one army, had debts, and was a less effective leader than his predecessor, found himself manipulated by the French and British, both of which had interest in Tunisia by this point. Muhammad al-Sadiq (1859-1882) inherited an even worse situation. Externally, he had the French and British increasingly meddling in Tunisian affairs and a further weakened Ottoman Empire that could no longer fend them off. Internally, Tunisia's debts and expenditures had increased beyond what taxes could 80 Perkins, A History o f Modern Tunisia, 12. 81 Perkins, A History o f Modern Tunisia, 16. 40 cover. This pushed Muhammad al-Sadiq to strengthen France's position even more by accepting a 35 million franc loan from French bankers that committed Tunisia to annual payments of "roughly half the state's average annual income" in 1863.82 Meanwhile, almost every attempt at meaningful reform was stifled, from the Constitution of 1861, to various increases and decreases in taxation. Sporadic armed rebellions ensued. Conflict between longtime Prime Minister Mustafa Khaznadar and the reform-minded Khair al- Din al-Tunsi, who briefly replaced him from 1873 to 1877, further exacerbated problems. By this point, the path to making Tunisia a colony was rapidly clearing for France. Neither Tunisia nor the Ottoman Empire had the strength to resist a European power taking over. Meanwhile, the other European powers willingly gave France their blessing. Britain's interests in Tunisia had waned. Its attention was now focused on the recently opened Suez Canal and its access to India. France then found its ambitions in Tunisia supported at the 1878 Congress of Berlin while its only other competitor, Italy, were not. This came at the behest of the newly formed German Empire, which hoped that its support for French rule in Tunisia might assuage France's revanchisme towards the Second Reich for its annexation of Alsace-Lorraine as it formed itself after the Franco- Prussian War. As every historian of World War I could attest, Tunisia did not prove to be a sufficient healing balm, but France took the support. Italy's complaints were smoothed over with a similar promise of support for their rule in Tripolitania. Now France only had to wait for a scuffle that would justify its descent upon Tunisia, which came in early 1881 along the Algerian-Tunisian border. French troops moved in and Muhammad al-Sadiq was forced to sign the Bardo Treaty by May of that year. which left him in his position as Bey, but "placed Tunisia's external relations under the command of a French general" 82 Perkins, A History o f Modern Tunisia, 28. 41 and "allowed France to station troops throughout the country as it deemed necessary to maintain order."83 The French crushed protest and rebellion against the new treaty. Paul Cambon, a senior French diplomat, arrived the following year to serve as France's first resident general of the French Protectorate of Tunisia. A number of similarities and differences existed between Algeria and Tunisia under the French. Though not fully-annexed like Algeria and permitted to retain the semblance of local authority, Tunisia was also soundly under the thumb of French government. The successor to Muhammad al-Sadiq, Ali Bey, "continued to reign, but he no longer ruled," and by World War I, "protectorate officials had come to take beylical subservience for granted."84 Tunisia never came to have the same kind of colon population as Algeria, but those that were there enjoyed privileges that the indigenes did not, just like their colon counterparts in Algeria. Indeed, Muslim Tunisians were not even French nationals as were Muslim Algerians. Even as Muslims from Algeria and Tunisia were sometimes lumped together in metropolitan France, this would make a difference in how they were treated at times, and in how they navigated their interactions with the French. The Protectorate of Morocco While Morocco has a similar ethnic and religious composition to that of Algeria and Tunisia, its political history differed, as it remained the only part of North Africa that never succumbed to Ottoman rule. It is known as "The Western Kingdom" in Arabic because it sits at the western edge of the Arab world-to the west of Algeria at the end of the African continent. This places Morocco directly south of Spain, with the two barely 83 Perkins, A History o f Modern Tunisia, 12 84 Perkins, A History o f Modern Tunisia, 40. 42 being separated geographically by the Strait of Gibraltar. This close geographical proximity helped facilitate the Arab invasion of Spain and its nearly eight-centuries long Muslim presence that only ended with the completion of the Reconquista (reconquering of Spain from Muslim rule) by European Christians in 1492. The Alaouite Dynasty began ruling as sultans of this largely Muslim and Arab populated state in the early-seventeenth century and, despite the interruption of French colonization, continues to do so to this day, albeit now under the title of king. Like Tunisia, Morocco also got entangled with France shortly after its 1830 conquest of Algiers. While noting that there were still many other factors in Moroccan life at this point, Susan Gilson Miller asserts that "the year 1830 marks the beginning of a transition to a new phase in which Europe is no longer an intermittent factor in Moroccan affairs, but an omnipresent reality looming over political events, the economy, and even social life."85 The Moroccan sultan at the time was Abd al-Rahman (r. 1822-1859). He was already busy trying to rebuild the prestige and trade of Morocco that his predecessor, Sultan Sulayman, had destroyed nearly singlehandedly. Cautious of upsetting either the Ottomans or the French, Abd al-Rahman nonetheless decided to try and take advantage of the French invasion in Algeria. He welcomed Algerian refugees and purposely allowed western Algeria to see him as "an alternative to the Turks."86 He offered refuge to Abd al-Qadir in the early 1840s, but the Sultan ultimately proved no match for the French. Their warships demolished Moroccan ports. In 1844, Bugeaud achieved a decisive victory over Moroccan troops led by Abd al-Qadir's son and heir at the battle of Isly. By September of that year, Abd al-Rahman had little choice but to sign the Treaty of 43 85 Miller, A History o f Modern Morocco, 7. 86 Miller, A History o f Modern Morocco, 13. Tangier. This ended hostilities between Morocco and France, but it also meant the loss of some Moroccan territory and the recognition of French rule in Algeria. Fiercely independent Morocco was now on the same path to eventual European conquest as the rest of North Africa. The primary contenders at this point were France and Spain, though Britain remained interested mostly out of a desire to obstruct the expansion of French or Spanish power. Partly to that end, Britain secured increased trade access and the lowering of custom duties for British goods going to Morocco through two Anglo-Moroccan conventions in 18 5 6.87 Abd al-Rahman had hoped this would give a boost to Morocco's economy. Instead, it destroyed local production as cheap British products easily undersold Moroccan goods. From here, "other European states lined up to take advantage of Morocco's all-too-apparent vulnerability." When Anjera tribesmen began raiding the Spanish garrison at Ceuta in 1859, Spain seized upon the moment to go on the offensive, leading to the short Tetuan War (1859-60). The new Sultan, Muhammad IV (r. 1859-1873) suffered a tragic defeat. Spanish holdings at Ceuta and Melilla were expanded and missionaries were permitted to build a church at Tetuan.88 Spain also required an indemnity of twenty million duros, a sum "far greater than the balance of the Moroccan treasury."89 British loans partially facilitated payment of the indemnity while Spanish agents remained in Moroccan ports to ensure tariffs were collected to pay the rest. Like his troubled counterpart pushing the Tanzimat reforms in Istanbul, Mohammad IV and his successors also hoped reform could save Morocco. Efforts were mostly continuous into the twentieth century and included the economy, military, and administration. 87 Miller, A History o f Modern Morocco, 23. 88 C. R. Pennell, Morocco since 1830: A History (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 68. 44 89 Miller, A History o f Modern Morocco, 25. What really kept Morocco independent, however, was not Moroccan reform, but the relationships between the interested European powers. For the next few decades after the Tetuan War, none of them wanted to spoil their chance to profit from Morocco by forcing things militarily and causing another European power to react. So they all sought indirect influence instead. The 1880 Conference of Madrid is a perfect example of this. Ostensibly meant to limit European infringement in Morocco, the conference increased it, ensuring that Europeans could own Moroccan land.90 Even so, the stalemate did not last more than a few decades. Morocco's continued independence relied greatly on Britain's continued interest in preventing other Europeans from colonizing it, which had turned Britain into an "informal protector of the makhzan" [Moroccan government].91 This dynamic broke down in 1904 with the signing of the Anglo-French accord. The Anglo- French rapprochement "gave France the lead in negotiating a major bailout of the failing makhzan"-much as it had with the Bey of Tunis years before-that ensured "the removal of all obstacles to a French takeover was complete."92 In connection with the mounting tensions building to World War I, Germany was concerned about this development. This spurred the 1906 Algeciras Conference held in Algeciras, Spain, at which it was acknowledged that France had won out as the dominant power in Morocco. Moroccans, who had been able see their independence slipping away for quite a while by this point, had taken to rebelling. Without France needing to worry about reprisals from other European powers, a 1911 uprising served as the pretext for French occupation. Claiming to want to protect European property and the Sultan, French troops occupied Morocco. Sultan Abd al-Hafiz (r. 1908-1912) was forced to agree to the treaty of Fez the 90 Pennell, Morocco since 1830, 86. 91 Miller, A History o f Modern Morocco, 62. 45 92 Miller, A History o f Modern Morocco, 62-63. following year. Spain acquired Ifni in the south and established a small protectorate on the northern coast with Tetuan as its capital; Tangier became an international city; while France controlled the rest of Morocco. Germany agreed to the arrangement in exchange for a piece of French Equatorial Africa-Neukamerun. Moroccans were more like Tunisians than Algerians, but they had their own unique path as well. Barely acquired by the French before World War I, Hubert Lyautey, who served as Resident-General of Morocco from 1912 to 1925, had to focus on suppressing rebellions more than French leaders in Tunisia or Algeria. Indeed, his leadership came to an end because of a military failure in April 1925, when troops he sent to fight against insurgent Moroccan Berbers in the Rif War (1920-1926) were overrun.93 Like Tunisians, however, Moroccans in the metropole would at times seem indistinguishable from their Muslim Algerian counterparts even though distinctions existed. All of them were colonial subjects, but only Algerians were also French Nationals. Thus, the experience of Moroccans under the French tricolor more closely resembled that of Tunisians than of Algerians. Their struggle for independence would even culminate in a near simultaneous liberation in 1956. Their smaller role in French society and history is why both Moroccans and Tunisians were, and still sometimes to this day, assumed to be Algerian in metropolitan France. The French Third Republic From monarchs, to emperors, to republics, French government oscillated between nineteenth-century conservative and liberal ideas from 1789 to 1870. There were various constitutional and authoritarian governments in the first decade (1789-1799), which were 46 93 Miller, A History o f Modern Morocco, 108. then followed by Napoleon Bonaparte's Consulate (1799-1804) and full-fledged French Empire (1804-1814). Even so, a decade of rule under an emperor had not snuffed out the evolutionary ideals of equality before the law and constitutional government. The restored Bourbon Dynasty had to rule as a constitutional monarchy rather than as an absolutist monarchy. Louis XVIII (r. 1814/15-1824) understood this well enough, which permitted him to be the last monarchical ruler of France whose reign did not end with abdication. His brother and successor, Charles X (r. 1824-1830) failed to take this lesson to heart. His restrictive July Ordnances of 1830 attempted to take France in a more conservative direction that precipitated the July Revolution of 1830. Louis-Philippe of the house of Orleans (r. 1830-1848) replaced him. Initially loved by the common people for his more liberal views, as reflected in his nickname "Citizen King," his approval diminished as the working class came under distress. After an economic crisis in 1847, he was forced to abdicate as the Revolution of 1848 ushered in the Second Republic (1848­1852) that briefly extended the vote to all Frenchmen and elevated the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte from exile to President. Ironically, President Louis-Napoleon is responsible for the short existence of the republic. As the constitution did not permit a president to run for a second term, he arranged a coup d'etat that made him emperor. Taking the title of Napoleon III, he was the lone ruler of the Second Empire (1852-1870). He was repressive in the 1850s, but permitted increased liberalization in the 1860s, extending the vote to more Frenchmen. He also grew the colonial empire, oversaw the expansion of railroads, and famously remade Paris in the Haussmann architectural style for which it is still known today. It was only when France saw defeat at the hands of 47 Prussia and its allies in the Franco-Prussian war that Napoleon III's empire ended and left France open to yet another regime change and established its Third Republic. A republican government was not the obvious choice for France in 1870. Although republicanism had existed in France since the Revolution in 1789, it had also remained a minority view. Most of France remained monarchist. The problem for this majority was that they could not agree on which dynasty ought to rule. Those known as Legitimists favored restoring the House of Bourbon that had ruled before the French Revolution and during the Bourbon Restoration (1814/15-1830). Those known as Orleanists wanted the House of Orleans to rule. Yet still others, called Bonapartists, remained loyal to the House of Bonaparte. Given the discord among the majority, republican government proved to be a stopgap measure that none of the various monarchists thought would last long anyway. Indeed, beyond the monarchical sentiment in France, no one would have predicted the Third Republic's seventy-year longevity given the challenges of Prussian invaders and internal rebellion. Proclaimed on September 4, 1870, the Third Republic still had to contend with advancing Prussian troops who began laying siege to Paris itself later that same month. After a few more months of resistance, peace was made in May 1871 on Prussian terms, which required France to pay an indemnity of five billion francs and give up the territory of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany.94 Meanwhile, the election of monarchists to the Republic's National Assembly and government's choice of using Versailles as its capital rather than Paris led to rebellion in major French cities that established self-governing communes. Paris established its commune on March 18 and 94 Reiner Marcowitz, "Attraction and Repulsion," in A History o f Franco-German Relations in Europe: from "Hereditary Enemies " to Partners, eds., Carine Germond and Henning Turk. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 20. 48 49 found itself in a full on war as the Third Republic sent troops to take the capital by force from Paris' National Guard.95 After a bloody nine weeks that cost 20,000 lives, the Paris Commune fell. Adolphe Thiers ordered the savage military occupation of Paris. Originally an Orleanist politician and statesman, Thiers had nonetheless emerged as the head of the new republic. During the Second Republic, he had first endorsed republicanism, famously calling for it on practical grounds as ‘the government which divides us the least.'"96 Twenty years later, France was proving Thiers right. At the peak of his career, well known and trusted throughout France, the republic's National Assembly chose him as the provisional president, a position that he held from 1871 until 1873. By his last year, France had paid its indemnities to the newly created German Empire under Prussian leadership and the monarchist majority in the Assembly finally decided they could challenge Thiers and reestablish a French king. Instead, the monarchists divisions let the republic creep along until the people of France came to prefer it. The Legitimists wanted the comte de Chambord placed on the throne, but the more liberal Orleanists would not accept a king who refused the tricolor flag.97 Thus, they installed the conservative Marshal MacMahon to buy them yet more time, but that time proved instead to legitimize republican governance. The Wallon amendment of 1875 ensured the survival of the republic with "universal manhood suffrage."98 With the Third Republic soundly established then, France of the Belle 95 Donny Gluckstein, Paris Commune: A Revolution in Democracy (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011), 223. 96 Munro Price, The Perilous Crown: France between Revolutions, 1814-1848 (London: Macmillan, 2010), 4. 97 James R. Lehning, To Be a Citizen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 187. 98 Lehning, To Be a Citizen, 10. Epoque (Beautiful Period) began to transform into the laique, republican and egalitarian-aspiring country that it is known as today. Ironically, this was also when France vastly expanding its colonial empire, as it acquired French-Indochina, Madagascar, Tunisia, Morocco, and further expanded French West Africa, as well as French Polynesia. While celebrating universal human rights and equality before the law, French society was simultaneously navigating what it meant to have colonial subjects and what rights they deserved. Essentially, France was trying to make sense of how to incorporate colonialism and the differences of ethnicity and religion it brought while still aspiring to live up to its rhetoric of a laique and equal society. These tensions manifested themselves in the metropole as well. The Dreyfus Affair became a deeply divided issue in French society in the 1890s. In 1894, a cleaning lady at the German Embassy in Paris found a note that clearly indicated a French officer had committed treason by divulging information about the War Ministry.99 Army captain Alfred Dreyfus was accused of being the spy because his handwriting had some similarity to that on the note. There was nothing to really convict Dreyfus. The only difference between him and his colleagues was that he was Jewish. France was split in two. Conservatives, often Catholic and filled with anti-Semitism, were certain that Dreyfus was guilty. On the other hand, the more liberal, prorepublican and anticlerical French stood by him. It took until 1906 for the case to be completely resolved, when it was proven that Dreyfus was indeed innocent. Crucially though, the Dreyfus Affair shows the tension in Third Republican France between the ideal of equality before the law, and France sorting out what it means to be truly accepted as French; to have a French identity. 99 Leslie Derfler, The Dreyfus Affair (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 117. 50 France was also preparing for possible war shortly after the start of the new century. By 1907, France had entered into an agreement known as the Triple Entente with Russia and Britain to shore up its chances in the event of a war against the more populated German Empire and its allies, Austria-Hungary and Italy. After nearly a century of relative peace, Europe had become enamored with a romanticized version of militarism that further failed to comprehend the impact of industrialization on warfare. Although not wanting a war it could not win, France was also eager to regain Alsace- Lorraine from Germany. The assassination of the heir to the Austrian-Hungarian throne, Franz Ferdinand, carried out by Serbian nationalists in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, ignited these and other larger issues that ushered in World War I. Over the course of the war, hundreds of thousands of colonial subjects from around the world came to France to fight under the tricolor.100 World War I saw the height of Georges Clemenceau's career. As a radical republican, he was highly invested in the war and wanted to see France regain Alsace- Lorraine from Germany.101 He served as Prime Minister of France twice, once before the war, from 1906 to 1909, and at the end of the war, from 1917 to 1920. He was also a committed supporter of Dreyfus, and anticolonial. Yet, anticolonial did not mean accepting of all races as equal, or equally French. Clemenceau backed efforts to "repatriate" all colonial French war veterans to their homes in the colonies, as will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter III. To the horror of French leaders, however, they found that even if they could return the colonial subjects, the links between the colonies 51 100 For more on colonial subjects in the war, see Fogarty, Race and War in France. 101 Lehning, To Be a Citizen, 138. and the metropole forged during the war proved too strong to break as colonial subjects came back to the metropole. In the 1920s, France found the punitive measures it took against Germany in the Versailles treaty that ended World War I to be difficult to enact. The Bloc National coalition of moderates and conservatives that led the government from 1919 to 1924 sent troops to occupy the industrial and economic centers of Germany's Rhineland, but payments still lagged. This failure gave the socialists the chance to take the lead in the form of the Cartel des gauches (cartel of the lefts), but they faired no better. The saving grace at the end of the 1920s came from Raymond Poincare. He was a member of the Democratic Republican Alliance, which by this point had become a probusiness and republican government party. He had built a strong reputation in government through the years, most notably serving as President of the Republic from 1913 to 1920. He became Prime Minister in 1926. His financial reforms, which recognized that France would have to absorb some of the costs of the war, put France on a much better financial footing at the end of the decade. Unfortunately, that footing was lost in the 1930s. The Great Depression that first started in the United States in 1929 spread around the world and caught up with the French economy early in 1931. While in Germany and Italy, financial crisis permitted the rise of a new extreme right-wing ideology called fascism, it facilitated the emergence of the left-wing alliance called the Front Populaire (Popular Front) by 1934. A union of previously bitterly divided communists and socialists, it also included the North African metropolitan political group, Etoile nord-africaine (North African Star, or ENA). Although more of an Algerian nationalist party, it owed much of its success to French communists. 52 The ENA's role in a metropolitan French political alliance serves as yet another example of the complications of the North African identity in a French context during the interwar period. Its members were colonial subjects and French nationals, many of whom were also French military veterans, living and working in metropolitan France with a small degree of influence in the government. Yet at the same time, they constituted a movement calling for greater autonomy from France, if not complete separation. Even their platform sent mixed messages, calling for changes that would increase autonomy while also asking for more social programs to be provided by France. The ENA's role in the Popular Front came to end, however, when its nationalist endeavors came to full force when it opposed the Blum-Viollette Bill and contributed to its ultimate failure to pass by 1938. The identity and place of Muslim Algerians in French society remained an unsettled question as World War II broke out and Nazi Germany over took France. As the French always seemed willing to offer too little too late in terms of reforms, Algeria ultimately became independent through the Algerian war (1954-1962). Yet, as Mokkedem's twentieth and twenty-first century writings show, the narrative of two separate identities today oversimplifies their separation. North Africans and pieds-noirs in France still struggle to some degree to find a place for themselves. While this is the case today, it was exponentially more of an issue during the French Third Republic. Marseille Marseille was an international hub of the Ancient World, where the descendants of Greek colonists mingled with Roman Rulers and local Celts, all while trading with peoples throughout the Mediterranean. The city was born of colonialism and has been 53 54 fueled by its interactions with foreigners ever since. Located on what is now France's southern and Mediterranean coast, Marseille was founded by Ionian Greek colonists who called it Massilia in 600 BC. Barely a trace remains of the original Greek settlement today, but Marseille had "remained a centre of Greek culture and learning until the 6th century AD."102 During this 1,200-year period, Marseille held the attention of Aristotle, was an ally of the Roman Republic during the Punic Wars, was part of the Roman Empire's first Gallic province, influenced the Celtic Hallstatt and La Tene cultures, and dominated trade with the Iberian Peninsula.103 In many ways, Marseille has maintained its reputation as a place of independence and transnational populations through the millennia. It retained its autonomy from Rome until 49 BC, when Julius Caesar took his revenge on the port city for siding with Pompey, not him, in the Rome's Great Civil War (49-45 BCE). Further cultural exchange eventually Gallicized the city as Frankish influence mixed with its Greco-Roman ways. Even so, it continued to guard its independence after the fall of Rome. Marseille did not completely succumb to the French Crown until the rule of Louis XIV.104 But even as an integral part of France, the independent and transnational nature of the city's population continued to thrive. It was revolutionaries from Marseille who had travelled to Paris that gave France the national anthem now in use today, La Marseillaise. They stood apart so much from other revolutionaries that as they sang this newly written marching song it became uniquely associated with them. Only then was it named after the 102 Kathleen Donahue Sherwood, "Massilia," in Encyclopedia o f Ancient Greece, ed. Nigel Guy Wilson. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 452. 103 Aristotle described of Marseille's government in his work, The Constitution o f Massilia. Unfortunately, it has been lost. Scholars of the ancient world are still aware, however, that the Greek government was an oligarchy, "with its council of 600 (timouchi), an additional minor council of 15 members, and three top magistrates." Sherwood, "Massilia," 452. 104 Emile Temime, Histoire de Marseille, de la Revolution a nos jours (Paris: Perrin, 1999), 8. 55 southern port city. Meanwhile, many in Marseille resented the centralizing efforts coming from Paris. In 1793, the city became the location of one of the most forceful and extreme federalist revolts against France's National Convention.105 After the fall of Napoleon III, Marseille followed in the steps of Paris and established an independent commune that effectively lasted until April 1871.106 Had it the means to resist at the end, the commune of Marseille would likely have ended in great violence, as General Espivent was there "to ensure the enforcement of Thiers' decrees."107 Meanwhile, foreigners continued to arrive in Marseille, keeping it a city of cultural and ethnic fluctuation. "The end of the fifteenth century to the start of the nineteenth shows the constant renewal of the population, proletariats from Gap [in the Hautes-Alpes] or Piedmont, Genoese sailors and fishermen, assistants and merchants coming from Northern Europe or the Eastern Mediterranean."108 From the most part, the nineteenth century was the Italian century for Marseille and, to some degree, France. Italian immigration to Marseille was nothing new. Indeed, in terms of immigrant groups, "Marseille has always been an Italian city," as might be expected of a major port city whose country shares its national border with Italy.109 This was actually a reflection of increased immigration to France as a whole because of the nation's need for more workers in its increasingly industrialized economy. In fact, industrialization had turned France into Europe's largest immigrant nation by the 1870s, enticing workers especially from Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Belgium.110 From 1850 to 1901, the number for foreigners residing in France rose from 379,289 (1.1 105 William Scott, Terror and Repression in Revolutionary Marseilles (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1973), 143. 106 Louis M. Greenberg, Sisters o f Liberty: Marseille, Lyon, Paris and the Reaction to a Centralized State, 1868-1871 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 212. 107 Greenberg, Sisters o f Liberty, 212. 108 Temime and Echinard, La prehistoire de la migration (1482-1830), xiv. 109 Temime and Lopez, L 'expansionMarseillaise et « l 'invasion italienne » (1830-1918), 70. 110 Simon, L 'immigration Algerienne en France, 10, 22. percent of the population) to 1,037,778 (2.6 percent of the population).111 The two largest in sheer numbers and best established among immigrant communities were Belgians and Italians, the latter being slightly bigger. Together, they represented over 600,000 of the just over a million foreigners residing in France in 1901, numbering at 323,000 Belgians and 330,000 Italians.112 From 1851 to 1901, censuses show that between 24 percent and 27 percent of Italians in France lived in Marseille.113 More impressive is that in 1901, the just over 90,000 Italians in Marseille "represented more than 91percent of the foreign population established in the city, a proportion that had never been reached and which will never be passed up to our day."114 Marseille continued to have connections with and receive immigrations from other parts of the world, but Italy had become the dominant immigrant group in the city's work force by 1900. As such a dominant part of the work force, Italian workers in Marseille were assimilating and starting to expect more of their employers. They began to form organisations syndicates (trade unions) in the late 1890s. Italian workers were expressing the same frustration as the French working class. Having formed slowly as industrialization steadily crept through France over the course of the preceding century, the working-class across many different industries had become more collectively self-aware and ready to fight for better pay and working conditions. Indeed, Michelle Perrot characterized the late nineteenth and twentieth century as a time when "like an irresistible 56 111 Gary S. Cross