THE ALGERIANS IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR
During the period of the First World War, Algeria not only provided the colonial power with substantial material support, but also provided thousands of “indijan” soldiers under compulsory military service who were often placed in attack squads. The courage of these angels and snipers did not go so far as to give them full citizenship. The Algerian sense of injustice, as France did not keep its promises to them while they stood by it when it was in danger, opened the way to a national liberation demand that the Second World War came to confirm 20 years later.
Of all the colonies of France, Algeria, along with French West Africa, was more than providing it with material and human resources. In what was then French North Africa, it was the country where the greatest effort was requested. It responded to this demand as much as the colonial power had expected of it. It was undoubtedly the one who provided France with the fullest part of capital and products and men to fight on the fronts of war and work in factories.
With the exception of French West Africa, there is no doubt that much of the material aid France received from the whole of its colonial empire came from Algeria. For four years, the French military commission had sent to Algeria procurement committees, which had virtually monopolized the purchase of products, as well as their expropriations: in particular, they had more preferential conditions for cereals, wines, tobacco and sheep than for mining products and other products. Exported by the crisis of maritime transport between Algeria and France. Compared to what it would have spent if its purchases had been at regular prices, between 1915 and 1919 France had saved on agricultural products alone at least 770 million francs. In short, Algeria helped feed France at a low price.
In a country where labor is scarce due to military recruitment, its production is declining and the spring drought has been harmed by a catastrophic harvest, the 1917 season that disintegrated and the confiscation of pension materials at their peak - while these military procurement committees were operating - they came on the green The Middle East is the first major famine, the winter famine of 1917-1918, which was unprecedented in many decades and marked a more catastrophic one: the 1920 famine that claimed tens of thousands of lives.
The damage to cereal cultivation worsened in the following years, and livestock breeding deteriorated rapidly, with only commercial products - tobacco, particularly wines, whose official prices were considerably raised - escaping the decline. Although the wine industry is jammed on the piers of Rouen and Sètes, the boom in tobacco and wine trade has had a lasting impact on Algeria's economic life during the war, especially in the post-war period.
Shy attempts were made to build industrial units in Algeria, in the context of the maritime relations crisis, which surprisingly dwarfed imported manufactured products, but the rare updates introduced by a few French capitalists faded once the exceptional conditions of war that had allowed them to end. The three ovens were dismantled in 1918 before they were put into operation. More than ever, the colonial bourgeoisie continued to dominate the real estate and trade sectors.
The colonial bourgeoisie was never going to become an active group of industrialists. Despite some minor shocks to the Algerian economy, related to temporary difficulties in the exchanges between Algeria and the center in France, the war was never raised, nor was it preceded by a salvation. The new military and political data of the war have had a different effect.
Because colonialism penetrated deeper and older than in Tunisia, especially in Morocco, Algeria was more subject to supervision and control. The French did not impose compulsory military service in Morocco, nor in Tunisia, although the Bailey system of recruitment was similar in both countries.
The French Republic established compulsory military service only in Algeria by a decree of February 1912. Of course, the Algerian public expressed its opposition to it, while its support was expressed by a small group of “advanced” Algerian youths in an attempt to wrest political rights in return for the blood tax - which It was the preserve of the citizens only 1. Many pre-war French officials made sweet promises in this direction, sometimes honest - for example, Minister of War Adolphe Messimy and Abel Ferry.
The announcement of mobilization, recruitment, and sending of the first batch of Algerians to the French front did not produce clear hostile reactions. We can even discern this kind of sacred unity in the Algerian style, to which the settler masters would like him, and the “sophisticated” would respond to them in one chorus. His explanation is only a glimmer of hope in the freedom from persecution and discrimination against the Algerians.
In their rousing praise, French officials called on all "civilized" people to block the German "barbarism" and were followed by "Algerian youth". With a small exception, the Bani Shaqran uprising (near Barigu / Mohammedia, north of Camp), the first conscripts traveled without difficulty from the standpoint of colonial power. The families of these young men were mourning their wailing as they read their light souls.
As a precaution, since 1912 the French authorities have summoned only a small part of the military service. On a purely theoretical level, half of the Algerian population (about 175,000 people) were volunteers. Algeria did not feel that large mobilizations took place until the decrees of September 1916 were promulgated. This large-scale recruitment in Algeria has had a profound impact, although only half of the recruits were sent to active army units - the rest were exempted or sent to subordinate companies.
Shocking news about the fate of Algerian soldiers was arriving from the front as the war dragged on, and in the hearts of the people of Algeria there were millennial hopes for the emergence of the awaited Mahdi 2, not unrelated to German or Turkish propaganda promising the hour of emancipation of Muslims from the yoke of the infidels. Some raised his objection against the recruitment and others protested against him or rebellion and take up arms. A large uprising shook the northwestern part of the Aures Mountains (Belezma, Metlili). The conspirators declared “public” 3 or the republic as a symbol of freedom, (ie the republic or, in other words: “We also want to be free and want to prevail”). Because of the systematic repression with which this uprising was met, in Algeria between October 1916 and the spring of 1917, two full military divisions were retained under General Deshayes de Bonneval.
Looking at the war as a whole, the colonial regime, after all, succeeded in recruiting in its army a considerable number of men and employing tens of thousands of workers in the factories of national defense, which made the French official discourse called Algeria "loyal".
However, the sympathy of the people of Algeria, especially in its eastern part, was with the armies of the Commander of the Faithful, the Sultan-Caliph, who in November 1914 asked the sheikh of Islam in Istanbul to invite Muslims to jihad. The more propaganda the French were to denounce the Turks, describing them as “Germans of Islam,” the more they embarked on the more fighting they were engaged in, the transgression of the boundaries of sympathy without hesitation under the Ottoman flag remained a step that most Algerians did not take. The vast majority of Algerian prisoners held at the Zossen-Halbmandlager camp in Berlin refused to join the Ottoman army. In Algeria itself, as well as among Algerian workers in France, sympathy for Turkey, though often, has not resulted in a well-managed and inclusive political action. The French still ruled Algeria and did not leave it, while the hopes of two millennia for a Turkish landing were frustrated. In short, the Algerian public was cautiously awaiting. This clear state of hostility towards France is what has been termed “loyalty”.
In other forms, “loyalty” has also emerged: the reformed loyalty of some notables and administration officials hoping to reward their good conduct and their effectiveness during recruitment campaigns, the sincere loyalty of some “advanced” youth, who were influenced by the Republican rhetoric of citizenship, human rights and blood tax ( In particular, the case of some young students-teachers at the Bouzareah High School), circumstantial loyalty in response to France's calls for a sacred unity in a battle that has been portrayed as a battle of civilization against barbarism. The Algerians suddenly discovered themselves in the “civilized” camp after long believing that they were barbarians or that the colonial masters looked at them as well, which then explained many of the unusual actions marked by surprise towards this new situation, as this was the first time the colonial power begged for it. This is a great urgency.
Young conscripts taken from their land suffered after their “planting” in France, and the movement's war in 1914 caused massacres in their ranks. These young people - most of whom had no military experience thrown unintentionally into the inferno of the race to the sea - lived in stalemate. It has reduced the ranks of those who survived by his skin, deaths, pneumonia, tuberculosis and the amputation of some of the limbs, after freezing of severe cold. There have been many cases of panic and flight from the battlefield and refusal to comply with the orders of the march, and there have been extrajudicial executions whose victims were selected by lot, which is undoubtedly proven by the archive in at least three cases: the 45th, 37th and 38th Infantry Divisions, where the victims were, Respectively, Algerian Jews, Algerians and Tunisians. We do not know if these atrocities recur after the war has turned into a position war. However, the size of the archives of the French army divisions has been shrinking because orders are being issued more and more over the phone, and the written restriction of what was written in them has declined.
In any case, from the spring of 1915, the leadership reports no longer had the same tone when it came to Algerians. After the massacres of 1914, they were mobilized in the rear of the troops, they were in charge and trained. While they were described in 1914 as a feared exhausted herd, they were increasingly praised, both in Artois on the banks of the Somme River, in Verndun and in Chemin des Dames. Morale and offensive spirit reached their peak in 1918, especially when the 1917 Battalion recruits who had revolted in the north of Constantinople in 1916-1917 entered the battlefield. The Algerian infantry battalion was one of the units most involved in the war, with high praise and honors. In this area, in turn, is only one of the requirements of the "civil policy" 4 and its temptations.
There was no reason to make a clear distinction between the behavior of the French soldiers from Algeria and the behavior of the rest of the French soldiers - their assessments differ considerably from one observer to another. On the other hand, there was a real integration of Algerians into the French army. This merger owes little to the loyalty to France as an adoptive homeland, a loyalty that was purely a myth. What he mainly explains is that these “guests of war” have shown that the military regime is, in the end, less than the colonial system of oppression and discrimination against them. This does not mean that racism has become extinct - it has existed, especially in the holiday system because the leadership feared uncontrolled relations with French civilians within French families. What made racism recede dramatically is a sense that has grown over time that there is no difference between this spirit and that of a massacre that grinds people indiscriminately. The positive, and sometimes enthusiastic, reception with which French civilians met these strange foreigners, coming to strengthen France, and the gratitude felt by Algerian recruits as they saw the conditions of their care in the medical service units are the same as the conditions of care of the French and the admiration of the nuns and the nurse. More generally, the patriarchal care that the leadership had surrounded them: these were all things that had no effect on them. Patriarchy, as one side of a coin, the other includes repression and racism, Mean, in spite of everything, the indifference of the colonialists recruits.
The spirit of nervousness was instrumental in its role in instilling the tribal system in the heart of the military regime, a system that presented the Algerians with an attractive image of a colonel who is at the same time the leader of a clan whose power is indisputable: you see, whether it is a form of nostalgic fossilization. The age of intense solidarity within the components of traditional society (solidarités segmentaires) or a premature embodiment of total national solidarity?
The first world war was a major event for the Algerians. It made 300,000 young men smell for the first time in their lives the wind of the outside world with its sweetness and bitterness. The number of Algerian workers in France in 1914 was not more than 15,000, and between 1914 and 1918 was introduced to work 12,000 "processors" 5 (so they called them in Algeria), most of them were working under the supervision of the army, and they were reminiscent of any reminder of the atmosphere of mixed municipalities. But during the first 15 months of the war, thousands of young people were able to leave Algeria legally to work freely in France in private companies, and an unspecified number of clandestine immigrants remained outside military control.
Numerous reports have touched on the miserable conditions of administratively-employed workers7, sometimes teenagers portrayed as "volunteers" by volunteers, including a horrendously shameful report prepared in 1917 by Senator Paul Kaznoff, a senator from the Rhone, and reminiscent of investigations from the age of 8. It was, in fact, quite an age for these young colonialists who had been uprooted from their roots.
They learned about the lives of workers, factory workers, demand protests and strikes, and at times were able to acquaint themselves with French and French women and, in any case, acquired habits that would not have been compatible with maintaining the colonial system as it existed not so long ago. The authors of the post-war psychological state of Andijan made it extremely disturbing to note their obsession with the spirit of the “working-in-France” and the ludicrous “liberating warrior” who challenged the existing power more than ever before. A significant part of the quadrant of the North African star was a member of the Communist Party and / or the United General Labor Confederation.
In fact, France has been persecuted and liberated at the same time, it enabled Algerians who were taken from their land to be planted on its territory to discover the work of manufacturing, military technology and images of industrial or military activity, and at the same time, left them the possibility to reinvest the gains of this " This is the case of Mohamed Makkoud, the Staifi warrior of the infantry vanguard who was referred to the military trial in 1917 after he sent his mother a training manual for the machine gun with a letter asking him to keep it very carefully because “it could benefit Receptive. "
From a proportional point of view, the price paid by the Algerians was almost equal to the blood paid by other soldiers, although the number of those killed during the attacks may be more than the number of those who died while performing other tasks, the leadership used to not leave them long bored because of the publicity. Their reputation as storming units.
Clémenceau honored what he had ordered - contrary to the opinion of French deputies and competent Algerian settlers - of equality between the granting of colonial and French warriors, but the Fifth Republic seemed later and its ingratitude was tainted by the carefulness of the Algerians. 1918 at 1962, while French pensions were regularly reviewed.
The image of the Turks in France was fairly beautiful. Their military advantages - acknowledged by the official conception and acknowledged by the people - have been entrenched by the necessary warrior cliché, whose energy must also be channeled and contained in a marked rush outside the battlefields with the same ardent enthusiasm, as the “two”, despite the creation of a “warrior,” . For their part, the Algerians, even if they merged into the French army, did not lose their critical sense or their algeria, if their strength did not strengthen them to a homeland that was absent.
They recognized the power of France and readily tempted them to take home what they had seen and felt on the other bank of the Mediterranean. Immediately after the start of the post-war period, the French school gained a great significance of the tour in Algeria, as it refused to accept the students because it was unable to receive them after they Not so long ago, they are often forced to search for them to register them, and this happened as the Islamic cultural missionary of scholars 10 received its success and popularity.
The image of the Algerian after the war remained, in a sustainable manner, the image of a man of the lower proletariat, pale of Asmal, confused thought, anxious for French women, the image of a dangerous knight of the knights of tuberculosis and smallpox, and the war of 1914-1918 was firmly established in the minds of the French clichés degraded its value.
