Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Evilest Football Player of All Time

Episode Date: August 19, 2025

Robert sits down with Dana Schwartz to tell the dark tale of Alexandre Villaplane, the French Football star and gangster who became a member of the SS. (2 part series)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Coalzone Media Oh my goodness Sophie I have some shocking news for you some information that's just come in through the wire Are you ready? Are you sitting down? Are you prepared to take in some information That may hurt you? You can see me and I'm sitting

It's it's simply behind the bastard Sophie The podcast that we do for a living every week That's what we're doing this week Are you able to handle this? Are you in an emotional state where you're prepared? Yeah, I live for it. You live for it. Well, we all live because of it.

We pay our bills because of it. It's 100% true. Which is different from living for something. But you know what I live for, Sophie? Do tell. Introducing the guest to this podcast and nothing else. So every moment before and after this has just been an unbroken string of pain. Just endless and ceaseless.

But for this one moment, where I introduced our guest for today, Dana Schwartz, host of hoax and the Noble Blood podcast. For that one moment, I feel bliss. Oh, my goodness. And you were so good at it. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome to the show.

How are you doing today? Thank you so much for having me. You were, that was an excellent introduction. I know. Back to pain. Nothing but pain from here on out. Before we get to the pain, do you want to tell the good folks about your new show, hoax? Yeah, exclamation point.

Exclamation point. That's load bearing. It is a load bearing exclamation point. And if you don't include it, that is not canonically the name of the podcast. And let's be fair, if you're a good writer, every exclamation point you use is load bearing. You know, I was really taught that. No unnecessary exclamation points. I'm not throwing them around willy-nilly unless they're in an email with someone that I want to like me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Of course. Or a text and you're drunk. Yeah, I do that a lot. Just exclamation points. Hoax is a new show that I'm doing with my good friend Lizzie Logan, who's a comedy writer. I come from a history background, and every other week we swap off bringing each other's stories of exciting, unbelievable, fantastic, strange hoaxes throughout history. My hoaxes are more of the historical bent.

Lizzie's are slightly modern. I talked about in our first episode the Cottingly Fairies, which were two young girls took pictures of what they said were fairies that convinced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in our next episode. It's nuts, right? So easy to trick, too. People were so much easier to trick back then. You think the guy who wrote Sherlock Holmes would have had like a little bit more deductive reasoning skills, but no. No, absolutely not.

Look, that's the problem with writing a super genius character is the writer is never as smart as the character. That's the thing. And he probably thought he was a genius. But my friend Lizzie also loves hoaxes like balloon boy, more modern hoaxes. And we just get into these conversations about why we believe things that aren't true. which feels unfortunately very pertinent these days. So listen to hoax.

Exclamation point. Exclamation point. Thank you. I think a lot about people talk about, oh, if you could travel back in time with like modern guns or something and you could change, you know, this battle where the world went in a wrong direction.

And no, no, no. Go back in time with fucking Photoshop. If I could travel back in time with Photoshop and like a photo printer, I could change everything. I could really fuck some shit up. Honestly, yeah. People believed a lot of stuff.

But here's the really messed up stuff, unfortunately. People believe a lot of stuff today, too. Oh, yeah. It's almost the only thing people believe is bullshit. Yeah. I mean, that is the thing we sort of are learning going back and examining these hoaxes. We're like, yeah, people did believe a lot of bullshit, but kind of no more than people believe bullshit today.

No, there's two things that are important to understand, which is that people are as dumb as they ever were, and people are no dumber than they ever were, right? That's a really good way to put it. things. Otherwise, you're going to misunderstand history. Yeah. Yeah. And that's partly relevant to the subject of our episode this week, because this week we are talking about the most evil football player of all time. Oh my gosh. I got it. This is European football. It'd be a different guy if we were talking about the American football, right? Yeah. I mean, there were some evil American football players. No. And if we're doing the most evil man in football, obviously, this would be our eight

parter on Jerry Jones, but I simply don't have the time to write 40,000 words on Jerry Jones this week. We'll get to it one of these days when he finally shuffles off this mortal coil. No, we are talking about what we Americans call soccer player, although I'm going to use the term football since we're exclusively talking about France. This is an I-Heart podcast. Our I-Heart Radio Music Festival, presented by Capital. is coming back to Las Vegas.

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The offspring. Tim McRaw. Tickets are on sale now at AXS.com. Get your tickets today. AXS.com. If you're looking for another heavy, podcast about trauma, the same it. This is for the ones who had to survive and still show up as brilliant, loud, soft, and whole. The unwanted sorority is where black women, fims, and gender

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About Buzz Aldrin, one of the two pioneers of space. You're a great pilot, Buzz. That's the story you think you know. This is the story you don't. Buzz, starring me, John Lithgow. On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. From tips for healthy living to the latest medical breakthroughs, WebMD's Health Discovered podcast keeps you up to date on today's most important health issues.

Through in-depth conversations with experts from across the health care community, WebMD reveals how today's health news will impact your life tomorrow. It's not that people don't know that exercise is healthy, it's just that people don't know why it's healthy, and we're struggling to try to help people help themselves and each other. Listen to WebMD Health Discovered on the IHeart Radio app, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, our subject for this week is a sports star,

one of the very first football stars in European history, because the sport is still like a fairly new idea at this point is like a major thing, right? Because this guy's career happens right, not only as football is taking off in Europe, but as they're going from like the only people who can play at what we would call a professional level are amateurs. That's amateurism is a big thing in sporting.

This is why it's a big thing in the Olympics, right? The idea that, like, well, these people shouldn't be doing it for a living, right? This is, so this guy's career is, like, right at the transition of that to, like, we're paying guys to play this motherfucking sport, right? And this guy is a footballer who becomes a brutal enforcer for the SS during the Nazi occupation of France, a real piece of shit. Oh, great. His name was... So when you say evil, you mean, like, like, evil, evil. Evil, evil.

No, we're not just talking about it. This isn't just a guy who, like, cheated at some sports games, you know? This is just a guy who was, like, personally abusive. No, this guy was evil, evil. I mean, it's evil to be personally abusive, but this guy's like evil on a level where the number of people he's affecting is much higher, right?

Yeah. This guy really went for it in terms of human evil. His name was Alexander Villa Plain, and he often, you can find a number of articles that are like the most evil football star ever. Like, the titles will be variations of that sentiment. And while he was a right bastard, there's also a lot of bastardry behind

how he came into being. being in this world because in order to properly set up the context of who this guy is and what he, the culture he comes out of, we have to start way before his birth in 1905 because while Alexander was born a subject of France, he was not born French in the sense that like a lot of people who grew up in France would have seen him as, right? And he wouldn't have primarily identified as a French citizen. He came into this world in Algiers. the capital of Algeria, which since 1830 had been a colonial possession of France. When the French invaded in 1830, Algeria had been a possession of the Ottoman Sultan for

about 400 years, right? So from like the 1400s up until the French come in, Algeria is owned by the Ottomans. They're ruled by the Sultan. But if you look at a map, it's pretty far away from Turkey. And the Ottoman Empire, not great at running shit by the 1800s, you know, like there's a lot of distance and like a lot of kind of ailing empires, they more or less let local rulers kind of have a free hand in things as long as they got some taxes. And so, yeah, it's kind of that situation, you know, it's being ruled the way California was by the government in D.C. in the early 1800s where it's like, yeah, it's part of the

U.S., but not really. Or like the American colonies for a little bit at the front end. Exactly. I mean, that's another really good, like, comparison where you're generally left alone as long as they get their kind of due, right? And Algiers is a regency. It's ruled by a day, which is like D-E-Y is like the name of the kind of ruler who's governing Algiers. There's a couple other cities, Tunis and Tripoli that are also regencies ruled by days. And these guys are under theoretical control of the Sultan.

However, in reality, the days were more or less on their own, independent from each other. from the Sultan as long as they paid regular tribute. The Sultan is not going to back you up in much. He's not going to really come in and fuck with you a lot. But like if you're having problems with a foreign power, you probably, you can't really rely on the Ottoman army being anything but a basket case, right? You know, their ability to project power is is kind of declined a lot by the early 1800s. And there had been ongoing issues for a couple, like almost, I think 200 years at this point, really, with the Barbary Pirates. who were based, I mean, they're based all around North Africa.

You know, the U.S. has some early issues with them right at the birth of our country in, I think, Tripoli. But the Barbary pirates, or at least some of them, are based out of ports in Algeria, right? In what is today, Algeria. And they had been for more than 100 years at the start of the 1800s. These pirates had carried out raids across Europe as far afield as Ireland, taking slaves for generations, right? Like, these guys are slave-taking pirates.

They're not the nice, cool pirates that you get like an HBO miniseries about, right? These guys are real, real tough sons of bitches and really mean sons of bitches. And they are, you know, for generations, they'll take slaves from wherever they can. And it prompts erratic reprisals, right? You know, we talked about the U.S. gets involved in Tripoli at one point. That's why, you know, the Marine Corps and their song from the halls of Magda Zuma to the shores of Tripoli. That's us fucking with these pirates, right? Yeah, yeah, that's why that's in there.

And France had gotten militarily involved for the first time in the 1600s. So by the 1800s for almost 200 years, there had been on again, off again, military involvement because these guys, these pirates, right? They're a real issue. Now, aside from these, because they're not, France isn't the only European power that has their entanglements with the Barbary pirates, but Algeria itself, which isn't really, I say Algeria, I'm talking about Algiers, and there's some, like, low-lying areas that grow food and some villages, and you're, as the day, you're kind of controlling some roads.

The whole territory that we call Algeria, you're mostly not even governing, right? Like, it's really up to local, you know, tribal leaders and villages in a lot of the cases. You're not running things on a day-to-day basis in the middle of the desert, right? They can go months without having contact with the capital, let alone the outside world, right? That's just the way rural North Africa is. is working at this period of time. Now, while European powers in France will get involved with these pirates periodically, they try to stay out of Algiers proper and, you know, the broader Algerian territory.

Because for most, from the 1600s up to the 1800s, the Ottoman Empire still theoretically has shooters, right? Those shooters are less and less good at their job as time goes on, but you don't want to fuck with the Ottomans too hard in the 1600s because they can still throw some weight around, you know, like the U.S., right? When we talk about failing empires, they're kind of like at that, at that, this is like their post-Vietnam stage. Yeah, they're going to get messy. They have nothing to lose. They have nothing, yeah. So the Ottomans by the 1800s, though, they're too much into their sick man phase of history to really do much here. And right around

the turn of the century as the 1800s starts, France has their revolution, right? You know, so they overthrow the king, the guillotines come out. They have their, you know, Republic and they also murder rebels who'd help make the Republic. But, you know, all that stuff is going on. And while France, if you remember your French revolutionary history, shortly after the French Revolution, France winds up at war with basically everyone else in Europe. And when you're at war with everyone else in Europe and you're doing the way that France is competitive with the rest of Europe is they're doing like mass conscription, right? You have like a mass people's army for like the first time in European history, which allows you to compete with these.

much smaller professional armies that theoretically have a lot more resources behind them. But when you're taking all these guys, you don't have as many guys to, like, grow food, right? So the French Revolutionary government, for a while they're kind of trying to stay on the day's good side because Algeria is providing the grain that Revolutionary France needs to keep being Revolutionary France, right, during this time when they're at war with everybody. But this is a constant, while they need Algiers, there's constant political instability. Within Algiers, the day is never on a steady, like he's never super safe in his position. And there's constant like, you know, unrest throughout the territory, right?

And so periodically for about 30 years after the revolution, these post-revolutionary French leaders will mold the possibility of like, look, we need this grain, we can't trust the current government. They're just not stable. Should we just invade? Should we just conquer Algeria? Like, we could probably knock that out in like a weekend, right? Like, that's like a long weekend for us, you know?

they have like Iraq brain where they're like oh yeah we can just knock this out and as soon as we kick this guy out everyone will be chill to be a part of France this will be easy right who among us hasn't just thought that it'd be easy enough to take over Algeria right I think about this constantly I still feel like I could I feel like I'm a contender you know how hard could it be I'm gonna go on vacation there just see if I can wind up taking it over you know probably not uh sorry Algeria um but this is an enticing prospect for post revolutionary French leaders, Napoleon among them, right? Because Algeria, if you just look at it on the map, it's in a great location. There's really good ports, right? Really important ports. And there's a lot of really good farmland. And so Napoleon actually, he sends spies over to Algiers and he draws up plans for an invasion. But Napoleon's got a lot going on. The French military is going to be tapped for a significant portion of his time and power. And he never gets around to it, which is a real tragedy. Just one more war Napoleon could have got. gotten to, but didn't have the time.

You know, you always think you're going to have more time to go to war with Algeria than you do, which is another message for our audience, you know. Don't let time pass you by, invade Algeria today. Like the sponsors of this podcast are looking to do. This podcast is sponsored entirely by the pre-1812 Napoleonic government. So please, you know, support Napoleon with his invasion of Russia. It's going to work. So what happened at Chappaquittic?

Well, it really depends on who you talk to. There are many versions of what happened in 1969 when a young Ted Kennedy drove a car into a pond. And left a woman behind to drown. There's a famous headline, I think, in the New York Daily News, it's Teddy escapes, blonde drowns. And in a strange way, right, that sort of tells you. The story really became about Ted's political future, Ted's political hopes.

Will Ted become president? Chappaquittic is a story of a tragic death and how the Kennedy machine took control. And he's not the only Kennedy to survive a scandal. The Kennedys have lived through disgrace, affairs, violence, you name it. So is there a curse? Every week we go behind the headlines and beyond the drama of America's royal family. Listen to United States of Kennedy on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hello, I'm John.

Lythgo. We choose to go to the move. I want to tell you about my new fiction podcast. That's one small step for man. It's about Buzz Aldrin, one of the true pioneers of space. You're a great pilot, Buzz. As far as I'm concerned, the best I've seen. That's the story you think you know. This is the story you don't. Predisposition to depression, alcohol abuse, and suicide. We'll see Buzz try to overcome demons. What do you say, Buzz? Another beer? and triumph over addiction. Here's to you, Buzz Aldrin. Good luck to you.

And become a true hero. Buzz and I will proceed into the lunar module. Not because he conquers space, but because he conquers himself. Buzz, we intercepted a Soviet radio transmission. Starring me, John Lithgow. Can you put it through? Can you translate?

On the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. your entire identity has been fabricated your beloved brother goes missing without a trace you discover the depths of your mother's illness the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life impacting your very legacy hi i'm danny shapiro and these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories i'll be mining on our twelfth season of family secrets with over 37 million downloads we continue to to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told.

I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, and in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Athea and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right, in terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyperfixation and observation of our hair, right? that this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled.

We talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil

Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. We're back. It didn't. Bad stuff in Russia for the French army, which is why Napoleon gets forced out, right?

He's no longer the guy running things. You've got a king in France again, but he's not on a super stable footing. And neither is the day. And the two of them wind up in constant conflict over debts, right? The Algeria owes France money. France is pissed off about it and periodically when the two countries are at odds the day will kind of tell the Barbary pirates

hey go back to doing your thing he can exert a little bit of control over him when he wants to keep France happy but when he's pissed he'd be like all right you guys you know go fuck around you know fuck around with some shit right and this time the Barbary pirates fuck around and all of Algiers finds it out because France is like uh-uh

First off, we're pissed because we just lost war, a war with all of Europe, right? We're feeling kind of bad about ourselves, like the U.S. in Iraq, right? We need an easy win, you know, to make us feel better about ourselves. We lost this disastrous series of wars. So we really, you know, this is for our egos. We've got to invade and conquer Algeria, right? Yeah. And I'm smoothing things out a little bit, but this is generally what happens.

And kind of things come to a height when there's a series of arguments between the French ambassador in the day, and in April of 1827, the day smacks the French consul to Algeria in the face with a fly swatter. It's a moment that's memorialized in this beautiful painting. Look at this. Look at this. First off, they couldn't have made the day look like more of a Chad and the fucking, the console look like more of a soy jack if they tried.

Like, it's the original Chad and soy image. When you said flies, like I thought you were being metaphorical. It's a literal fly swatter. It's a literal fly swatter. He smacks him in the face. We don't know. You know, this is one of those things. There's a couple different stories about what happens.

In an article for Ebsco Grove Coger describes differing accounts of what went down. Quote, Hussein bin Hassan either tapped or struck depending on conflicting accounts, visiting French consul Pierre DeVal with a fly whisk. The incident may simply have been intended to indicate by the day that their interview was at an end. or it may have constituted, as the French chose to interpret it, a horrible and scandalous outrage. So either he's like, hey, we're done. Or he, like, hits him. And he's like, fuck you, man, you know?

We don't really know which it's kind of deal. But the French assume it's a fuck you and that he really hit him, you know? So this is the most direct provocation that leads to the French invasion and conquest of Algeria. Again, I tried to make it a point. There had been ongoing and escalating difficulties between them. and the fact that France, you know, has lost this series of wars is a big part of, like, why they want to get involved. There's an aspect of this that's like we need to kind of revitalize our national pride

by winning a war. This is about 50 years before the scramble for Africa. So they're not caught up in the scramble for Africa. In fact, this is kind of one of the inciting incidents in the scramble for Africa, right? The fact that French winds up taking Algeria will lead 50 years later to a, because I don't know, I wasn't actually aware of this until I started doing the research. The Algerian colony that France controls is the single largest portion of Africa that's controlled by anyone during this period. Algeria is the largest country in Africa geographically. So this is a huge chunk of

Africa. And so, 50 years or so down the line, the fact that France has this, as these European powers awaken to how much money there is in Africa, they're going to be, oh, shit, we're running out Africa. We got to get some, you know, is kind of why Belgium winds up controlling the Congo. There's a piece of that here. Now, a more direct reason why France gets involved and invades Algeria is the oldest reason of all time. I keep making George W. Bush comparisons, but like the new King of France, Charles X, is like a bushy figure. He's very unpopular. He is struggling to govern a country that is not thrilled to have him in power. And he kind of needs to destroy. from the fact that he sucks at what he's doing and nobody likes him, right?

So Charles, Charles, the 10th is like, I said X, sorry, Charles, the, he's Charlie X, C, X. Charles, the 10th, that's how I'm choosing to picture this now, is Charlie XX, is Charlie X, starting the slow genocide of Algeria. That is very brat, Sophie. It's not Brad. It's not Brad. Is Brad is good. Is Brad good?

Brad is good. Brad is good. It's not bad. It is not Brad. in Algeria is not brad. I was literally just saying it's pretty braddy to do a genocide,

but okay, this is, I'm glad I'm getting this context. That would have been really embarrassing. So Charlie the 10th decides,

this fly swatter thing, this is the excuse I need to get into a foreign war that absolutely won't threaten my power or involve the rest of Europe. Safe. It's going to be super easy.

We're going to be in and out, you know? Koja writes, quote, announcing publicly that he was eradicating Algerian privateering, Charles quickly dispatched a naval squadron under the command of Rear Admiral Joseph Collet.

Collet reached the port of Algiers on June 11th. After taking the consul and other French citizens on board, he set up a naval blockade. Through the next three years, Sultan Mahmoud II of the Ottoman Empire tried in vain to persuade de Hussein bin Hassan to come to terms with the French. He was supported in these efforts by the British, who were anxious to maintain a balance of power in the Mediterranean and protect their own interests. In March of 1830, Mahmoud sent an emissary, a former Grand Mufti, which is a judicial official, of Algiers, who had since retired to Turkey, to insist that Hussein bin Hassan make peace.

By that time, the French government, an ever-increasing need of a distraction from its internal affairs, had decided to launch a direct invasion. So this really is like a war on terror a moment for them where they're like, oh, yeah, we got to deal with these pirates. Yeah, that's why we're stealing all this stuff. Protecting, protecting everyone. Protecting everyone. Yeah. Yeah, French 9-11, was this guy getting hit by a fly swatter?

That's the fucking plane hitting the second tower? Is this splice water smacking fucking this console in the face? So on May 11th, 1830, a French fleet of 600 ships set sail for the African coast and arrived there on June 12th. Utilizing intelligence gathered during the Napoleonic era, 34,000 troops landed and carried out a rapid and successful invasion. The Algerians outnumbered French soldiers. They have like 20% more guys on board. And normally, if you're attacked. you want like two to one numerical odds against the defender if like everything else has

parity, right? That's generally like best wisdom across the last like 10,000 years of military history. But these forces are not in parity, right? The Algerian military is just a militia. They're armed with weaponry that would have been outdated even for like the regular Ottoman army. And France has a modern army with a lot of experienced troops, right? They've got modern guns. They've got modern cannons. They just steamroll. Day's army. The actual fighting is not really ever in doubt, right? And that's not the problems that France is going to encounter is not in straight up land battles, right? It's going to be in an insurgency. By July 4th, Algiers had been bombarded by sea and the Day's army had been shattered

in two decisive land battles. French civilians who'd been evacuated from Algiers before the invasion watched the shelling from yachts anchored offshore. It's one of those classic like start of the Civil War moments where people are like picnicking to watch the battle. You know, they're sitting on their yachts watching the city get shelled. Yeah. Really makes you sympathetic for these rich French people. So the day goes into exile and France takes nominal control of the capital. This is the end of things going well for France, right?

They get a nice quick victory. They occupy the city. But they can't actually govern Algeria. That's a lot easier in theory than reality. The war had ended very rapidly. France has then left with this uncomfortable reality that the day had never governed Algeria. He had controlled the capital in like some roads and towns. But for the most part, there's this patchwork of regional leaders and warlords who have been

handling their shit for the day and primarily on their own terms. There's no functional Algerian state for France to just plug into. There's this vast and hostile territory that they know very little about and has no interest in being part of France. The fact that French soldiers act like occupying. soldiers once they take the capital does not help matters, right? No, that doesn't endear, endear them? No, no, they're pillaged.

They pillage the capital, right? They desecrate mosques and cemeteries because soldiers are assholes a lot of the time. They're like really going out of their way to make these people angry. Yeah, everybody loves it when you desecrate their holy buildings and cemetery. Their cemeteries, come on, man. Yeah. So France, and a big part of why, you know, This isn't just these soldiers are losing control and being let off the leash by their officers.

France has sent 600 ships to Algiers, right? Right after losing a series of hideously expensive wars, they're broke. They need to rob Algiers blind to pay for the invasion, right? So they absolutely just steal the entire treasury, which wrecks the local economy. So this makes the Algerian people very unhappy. Sure. And they attempt to register their displeasure. at this state of affairs.

When, you know, it becomes clear that the natives are restless or restive, the king sends an interpreter who speaks the language to deliver a message to the people of Algiers. It's called a proclamation to the Arabs. And in this proclamation, the king's interpreter tells the people of Algiers that France only wants to help them. And they really hope they'll obey their new overlords. And if they don't, this guy warns, God will inflict, quote, the most rigorous punishments

on those who commit damage against the land and who ruin the country and its inhabitants. Now, it's really worth noting the way that's framed, right? In her study, French land Algerian people, page goalie notes of this proclamation. Significantly, this statement emphasized above all harm to the land and the country, listed the inhabitants last, almost as an afterthought. In other words, it depicted the well-being of the country

and the land itself as the primary concerns of the French. So from the jump, they're like, you guys better not fuck up this land with your being people and you're living on it. You know, we need this stuff. Nice guys. We love a colonial overlord. So things start off on a bad foot. And over the next few decades, they don't get better. This evolves, this attitude that, like, we're putting the land before the people who live there becomes official state policy of the French occupiers.

And the Algerians aren't stupid. They know immediately, as soon as this proclamation comes out, they know that, like, we're going to, like, like, oh, these people are going to steal our land from us, and they don't care what happens to us, just because we happen to be living on it, right? So they're not motivated to be loyal to the crown. To make matters worse, right after Algiers gets taken, in July of the same year, there's a revolution in France called the July revolution that forces King Charles XX, you know, out of power, right? Just a couple of weeks after his great victory. Now, he gets replaced by his cousin. So not a wild difference between these two guys. And he has to go it, it's very

funny, he forces the day to go into exile and he has to go into exile so his cousin can't run things. That's karma. That's karma. If only the Iraq war had worked out this way, George Bush is hiding in like Argentina or something right now. Doing his paintings from, yeah, I dream. So the government behind the next monarch are not supportive of this latest foreign adventure, right? The people who wind up because the king gets deposed and like the officials around his cousin are the guys who had opposed the king invading Algeria, right? They'd been the ones being like, this is going to be disastrous and expensive, but now they're in charge and Algeria is a French possession. You can't just leave it, right? Like you can't just go, even though you know

it's a bad idea. You have to maintain the occupation that you know is a bad idea because otherwise you're going to be admitting that you failed and national pride won't let you leave this possession behind, right? Like the French people have invested their egos now into controlling Algeria. So you can't, it's like an Afghanistan thing. Even though you didn't start this,

if you take over and leave, you're going to get blamed for it not working out. It's cool how often the same shit happens in history. I know, you're saying that and it's like that can be applied to so many situations. Oh, fuck. We didn't want to be. be here, but we have to figure out how to make this war work, and we're going to wind up committing

so many crimes against humanity to try to make this war that we didn't want work for us, right? In her study, French land Algerian people, which I really do recommend if you're trying to get an idea on how this occupation went. Page Gulli describes what happened next. After the initial conquest, Algeria was left under the control of largely autonomous generals who waged brutal warfare against the local Arab and Berber populations. So because they're Westerners under like a quote-unquote modern state, we don't call these guys warlords, these generals that France just gives power to do whatever in Algeria, but they're warlords.

And they're primarily, when they get frustrated, these guys are military men. So they don't have any idea of like, okay, well, the population's angry because the cost of living has increased and because of this policy and that policy. So if we set up this like broad-based series of policies looked at changing the economic status, then, like, we can improve people's quality of life. And gradually, the level of resistance will fade because people will have, like, they won't be willing to die fighting because they'll actually have things and they'll have a life. They don't think that way. They're like, people are angry. Guess we'll shoot them. They're still angry. Let's try shooting some more. Maybe we'll starve

them. Let's poison the water. You know, that's the only fucking, that's the only way they're capable of thinking, right? And so for the next 70 years, there are regular uprisings against the French occupation, right? I cannot exaggerate the degree to which this is not a situation in which the Algerian people are passive or just letting this shit happen to them, right? For an idea of how intense an occupation they require because of how effective their resistance is. For the first 20-something years, France occupies Algeria, a third of the French military

is constantly deployed in the territory, right? Feels like a big investment. That is a huge investment. Like, that's so much money. And throughout this first 20-something years, more than 1.6 million Algerians will be killed by the French, largely people who like disease and starvation, right, as a result of different military and other policies being pursued by the occupiers, along with at least 100,000 French soldiers, right? So this is a brutal occupation. We are talking a massive body count here. Algeria is not annexed formally until 1841, and until the 1880s, the colony is governed by military officers, right?

There's no like civil administration. It's not until the close of the 19th into the 20th centuries that the territory of Algeria becomes anything close to a functional colony in the way that we usually talk about when we're discussing colonies of European powers during this period, right? Because it's just too violent for it to be really functioning the way a colony is supposed to. Now, again, Algeria today, the country Algeria, is about 900,000 square miles, right? The largest country in Africa, so it's not surprising. The French have difficulty tying things up. And the sheer amount of bloodshed and the consistency of resistance from the population does two things.

First, it inculcated within the French people a feeling that this land was theirs in a way that separated it from even their other colonial possessions because they bled so dearly for it, right? A lot more of us died for this than the other place. as we owned, so we own this in a different way, right? And the fact that a lot more of them die doesn't really, that's not really hitting us, hitting our books, you know? The second thing this does is it further separates the Algerian people from the land

and from French citizens, right? The Algerians are seen as damaged. They're not just inferior in the sense that, like, you know, white supremacists see all non-white people as inferior, but they're also broken in a way that can't be fixed. Because in most, you know, these are all white, all of these colonial states are white supremacist, right? But not necessarily in the way that we think about today. There's an attitude of like, especially like if you look at the way the British were talked about their Indian possessions. There's an attitude of like, well, we can uplift these people and make them civilized, right?

And that's also very racist and problematic. But there's still that this attitude that we're there to leave behind a functional state. the French never feel this way in Algeria. They don't feel, we're not here to do anything but kill these people and take their, we don't give a fuck about these human beings, right? We're not even pretending to. Eugene Boryshon, who's a French doctor who settles in Algiers in the 1850s, is one of the first intellectuals to lay this out clearly, right?

Because he's a, you know, he's a medical professional. He's a learned man. And he's engaging with other learned men of this. this, you know, the state that has these kind of within sort of the French population, these attitudes of like egalitarianism, right? And so we're all kind of debating, you know, the kind of empire we want to have. And he starts to complain that there's a couple of issues. We have a couple of major issues in Algeria governing it, right? First off, when you send Europeans to Algeria, they die really fucking quickly, right? Because the climate is not hospitable

to French people, you know? You're in the desert. There's a lot. of different diseases that, you know, French people aren't used to getting. It's just like not a good place for French people to be. And so you can't get that large a European population, or at least not a French European population. Spaniards do okay, right? And there's some French possessions that are basically Spanish in this period, like in the Mediterranean and some like allies. So like they will take in Spanish colonists to colonize Algeria. Because like, you know, Spain is hotter, right? like they're more used to the climate, right? If you look at like southern Spain, it's not a wildly different climate from North Africa

in a lot of ways, right? So you can kind of do that, but you can't really get a large French population in Algiers because they just keep dying, right? But also you can't trust the native Algerians because they keep rebelling, you know? They're fundamentally, and there's this idea that Bodhishan has that like they're never going to be, we'll never be able to trust them. So what we need to do is replace them with other Africans. right, from different parts of Africa.

Quote, this is Bodishan writing. Such colonists could be best found by diverting captives from the Saharan slave trade and directing them towards Algeria. Here they could be legally emancipated and put to work on the land. I got an idea, guys. Look, post-revolution, we're an ethical state now, France's modern and enlightened. What if we take slaves from the slave trade and just use them? to grow food in this other possession, and we ethnically cleanse the native people,

and technically we say we're not doing slavery anymore. Is that, can we, can we make that work, right? That's, that's Bodhoshan's idea. These people suck so bad. Now, slavery is made illegal in France in 1848, which is a fact that, you know, the fridge like to bring up to the Americans, because it takes us a bit longer. But it's like illegal, right? You can't have slaves in France.

You're not supposed to have a many where else, but slavery still exists and also state like situations for workers that is not technically slavery, but it basically is slavery. You know, you've got prisons and colonies and stuff that functioned that way too. And guys like Bodhisan are going to argue that we actually, even though it's illegal, we need slavery, at least to get Africans from elsewhere in Africa, from sub-Saharan Africa, to Algeria, right? We can do away with the system once they're in Alisian. Algeria, but only, quote, the devotion of African slaves of color can counteract the bellicose

nature of the native Algerians, right? That's his argument. So just the most racist people that you can imagine. Now, the abolition of slavery in France is further complicated by the fact that there's a lot of slave owners in Algeria. And there's two types of Algerians at this point, right? There's two types of people who call themselves Algerians. There's what we would call Algerians, which is like the native indigenous peoples of the area who had lived there before French conquest.

And then there's these foreign Europeans who have settled in Algeria and to some extent have intermarried with the local population but also keep to themselves a lot. And they also call themselves Algerians, right? So the upper strata of like the people who had been closer to the day who are wealthier and are native Algerians, they have slaves. and the European Algerians have slaves. And the French authorities are supposed to enforce the laws against slavery in Algeria, but they don't, or at least they do it unevenly, right? Historian Benjamin Brower noted that colonial authorities allowed Algerians of both kinds who are friendly with the French government to continue to hold and trade slaves.

Quote, French administrators granted permission to trade in slaves and keep those they owned. And in some cases, the French administration even returned to fugitive slaves, right? you only take slaves from people if they're unfriendly Algerians, right? If they're opposed to the French government, then you take their slaves and you try to turn them in the farmers, right? We're using this as a way to try to colonize, you know, and keep a working population we can trust in the colony. Now, this doesn't work very well.

It's hard to make something like this work at the scale you need to. And so in the 1850s, our favorite French king, Napoleon the third, who we talked about a lot on this show a year or two ago. Old Knappy 3 sends a group of French political prisoners who had tried to leave. Call him Nappy 3. Nappy 3. Nappy Trace, baby. We got Charlie XEX and Napi 3. Yeah, there we go. Jesus Christ. So he had come to power. He, you know, it was a coup, right? He like, he takes power as the king. And there's a counter-revolution against him that fails. And he arrests like 6,000 people. And he sends them, he starts sending these guys. He starts sending these guys over to Algeria. And his attitude is like, well, I'll send these arrestees and they'll

create farms. And once they've got a farm going, they'll send for their families to join them. And that's how we'll get like a trustworthy population base in Algeria going, right, so that we can make this appropriately French. And eventually the idea is we'll just kind of genocide, ethnically cleanse, push out all of the native people, right? Like that's the hope. It's never going to work for them because this is a bad idea for a lot of reasons. And, you know, Napoleon the third being Napoleon the third, he can't even be consistent about this. And in short order, he pardons most of these prisoners because his popularity takes a dive.

And he's like, maybe this will make people like me. So he's trying, which is something. He's trying, right? So less than 50 of these 6,000 guys actually wind up settling in Algeria, which is kind of shit like this keeps happening, where they'll have these grand ambitions, this will let us get a popular, this will do it. And it never really works. So for the next 50 years or so, France struggles to convince any French people to move to a place where they

aren't wanted and the climate and native illnesses will kill them very quickly in most cases. French intellectuals and political elites only grow more dedicated to holding onto Algeria during this time because they're continuing to pour troops and bullets into the territory while complaining that without French farmers, this project can't work. So by the end of the century, you know, in 1870, 71, we have Germany goes to war with France. Germany also becomes the thing. We have the Franco-Prussian War, right? Napoleon falls at the end of the Franco-Prussian war, and France becomes a republic yet again, right? And by the time the republic is back, French policy has settled into this uneasy conclusion, R.E. Algeria, which is that it's not a

colony in the same way that like Indochina is, right? And for a description of how they're looking at Algeria in this period, I want to quote from an article written by Jim House for the University of Leeds. Algerians were French subjects, but not French citizens. For decades, Algerians embodied a significant exception to the established French Republican model that, for men at least, combined nationality and citizenship. Algeria constituted a colonial territory, fully integrated into the republic that, as politicians like to say, ran from Dunkirk in the north to Tameracet in the Sahara,

the Mediterranean separating French in Algeria like the sin running through Paris. right? So I think that's really important to dwell on a little. After the revolution, there are attempts to say, look, France is an empire. We govern a lot of territory that's outside of Europe, but all the men there are equal, right? Because, you know, liberty, equality, fraternity, right? We're all equal. Now, they're never perfect. We can talk about Haiti, right? The French are never perfectly consistent. But there is an attempt in most of their colonial possessions to say, we recognize the equality of all men, right? They don't really believe it.

They're not consistent about it, but they are at least signposting that. And they don't even try to do that with Algeria, right? The final establishment of French policy is that Algerian land is ours and the people don't belong anywhere, right? They can move, they can move to Paris even if they want, but they won't have rights there. They can't vote they're not citizens, right? And because shit is bad in Algiers, in Algeria, there's a lot of poverty, there's a lot of desperation. A lot of Algerians move to Paris, right? Both native Algerians and kind of people who, for a couple of generations, had been part of this European population that call themselves Algerians in Algeria, they also moved to Paris.

And there's an extent to which they're all viewed kind of the same by Parisians, right? And they come to form a permanent underclass. And this is, by the way, still a thing. in France, and particularly in Paris, the Algerian population, which is consistently mistreated and not treated equally and abused by the police. And like, that is still a problem in France to this day, right? And this is kind of where that all starts, you know? And so these Algerians who are living in Paris are abused by the police. They're abused by their employers. They're unable to advocate for themselves in any legal way. This is not a happy situation for the Algerians who are

living in Paris, and there's a lot of anger as a result of that. In 1892, the French Senate ordered an inquiry into Algerian affairs, which was written by Emilia in Chattroo. His 350-page report essentially summarized the final conclusion of the French state into the Algerian question. Chaturu was not only a government official who was supposed to be analyzing the country. He'd lived for years in Algeria. During a chapter in the history of colonial policies towards land use, he praised the richness

of Algeria's land and blamed its constant famines. which had been incited by the government during Napoleon III's reign to starve Algerians and break the rebel movement as instead being caused by negligence and lack of foresight by Algerian farmers. They didn't foresee that we were going to kill him. You know? That's why they died. Like a foresight. Classic, that's the issue. Lack of foresight. Right. Yeah. He concluded only the European, with his civilization, knows how to subject the soil to the intensive cultivation that will return 100% of its potential. Page Gulli summarizes the rest of the report.

In reviewing past colonization policies, Chetroux was complementary of the French government's recognition of the potential value of Algerian land. We have understood that the future of North Africa had to be rooted in the progressive acquisition of land for the European settlers, who bring with them their scientific methods and their sophisticated equipment. However, despite this recognition, many colonization policies failed to significantly increase the cultivation of Algeria. Shatrude blamed this failure largely on what he perceived as French leniency in allowing Algerian people to keep their own land that their relatives had owned for forever or to even buy land, labeling that imprudent generosity that always weighed heavily on the colony.

This generosity of letting people stay in their home sometimes, sometimes, stopped France from using Algeria's land to its full potential because the people who live there cultivated ineffectively. And again, Shetri was ignoring the fact that fridge people can't survive there, right? And also have no interest in being subsistence farmers because it sucks. This guy sucks. Uh-huh. French leniency. French colonial administrators, always shitty. You know who else is always?

No. Not always shitty. There we go. Sometimes shitty. Sometimes shitty. We don't pick them. Sponsors of this podcast. Oh, great.

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We intercepted a Soviet radio transmission. Starring me, John Lithgow. Can you put it through? in the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So what happened at Chappaquittic? Well, it really depends on who you talk to. There are many versions of what happened in 1969 when a young Ted Kennedy drove a car into a pond. And left a woman behind to drown.

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I sit down with Dr. Athea and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right? In terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media,

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We're back. Oh, my goodness. Everyone having a good time. We're still talking about French genocide and colonialism in Algeria, just because it's one of my favorite topics, and it ties into our bastard here. So, Shatrude's report not only concludes

the French have to be more assertive in Algeria and being dicks to the locals, but that we need to focus more on the Frenchness of Algeria. His work argued, quote, in Algeria, it is necessary to carry out French policies. That is the lesson of history. He asserted, we have tried time and time again to create an Algeria for the Arabs. Events have always cruelly demonstrated that this was nothing but a dangerous illusion. Because we conquered Algeria, we must make it a colony that is for neither the Arabs nor the foreigners, nor the Jews, but for the French.

some anti-Semitism just sliding in there out of just tea-boning that sentence. I was waiting for when it was, you tease Nazis. I was waiting for the anti-Semitism. Yes, and this is important. The fact that you could have put these words in the mouth of a Nazi, right? If you just replace French with German and it would sound right, you know, that's important because we're going to spend most of these episodes talking about the German occupation of France. And a lot of what the German occupation of France is, is Germany doing to the French,

a less brutal version generally than what the French had done to the Algerians. They're certainly going to kill a smaller portion of the population, shall we say. So that's what these French colonial administrators are being like, well, Algeria obviously doesn't belong to the Arabs or the foreigners and he's talking about like the Spanish

and other European Algerians, right? Nor the Jews. It belongs to the French. Natural French territory. Algeria! The place we can't survive in. We die immediately there. Of course, this boy.

belongs to us. Now, I told you at the top of this episode, we're talking about a goddamn football player, right? I was like, where is the kickball situation? Well, he's an Algerian, right? He's a European Algerian, right? He is born in Algiers, right? And he's going to wind up becoming a colonial enforcer in France for the Nazis, which I find a really fascinating dichotomy, right? that you have this horrible history of French colonialism in Algeria. This guy is a product of it. He's French and Spanish, but he's born and raised in Algeria. He would call himself an Algerian.

Other people called him an Algerian. And he moves to France and winds up an occupying soldier, carrying out a brutal insurgent war against the native people of France, which is a really interesting thing to me, right? Yeah. Like what a wild switcheroo we're going through here. And among other things, I felt it would be fucked up to just talk. about how brutal this guy was as an occupier and like pretend, as we often do when we're talking about the European powers around this period, pretend they didn't get up to Nazi shit

before the Nazis did, right? You know, I think it's important. It's like we'd say about the British Empire. Were they absolutely much better than the Nazis, of course. Were they also, for most of their history, just slower than the Nazis? Yes, that's also true, right? You know, we could we could talk about the genocide, the starvation genocide in Bengal, right? You know, 20, 30 million people dead.

And we have on this show. And we just talked about the French killed 1.6, 2 million Algerians, you know, in this period of time. Now we're starting with the story of our actual bastard. On December 24th, 1904. Yeah, hell yeah. Who are you, Margaret, Killjoy? Yeah, context, baby. Context.

Context. Yeah. On December 24th. 14, 1904, Alexander Eugene Vilaplanah was born in Algiers. By the time of his birth, there were more than 100,000, close to 200,000 foreigners, which are Europeans who are living in Algeria. And they have their own patois dialect, because again, they are intermaring to some extent. So it's a mix of like Arabic and French, and there's, I think there's some Spanish in there. And they call themselves Algerians. Alexander's father is of Spanish extraction.

his parents had come from a Mediterranean island called Menorca and had immigrated to Algeria in the 18th century. Spain had let France use the island as a staging area for their invasion. And once France took Algeria, they urged Minorkan farmers to leave their homes. And per Luke Brien's biography of Vilaplana, Minorcan farmers were encouraged to leave the poor in Stony land to exploit that of Algeria, the women especially, right? And what you get with that, the women especially, what's going on here is France recognizes

these people who live in this island that's pretty close. They're European. So, you know, in terms of our racial supremacy, it's better for us that we consider them more trustworthy and better people, but they can survive being on the land better. So we really want to get as many of those women over there as possible, get them pregnant, and start building a European expat population in Algiers, right? However, these kind of minorcan farmers can survive in North Africa better than the French, but not all that well, because Alexander's grandparents die when his dad is seven. So shortly after they arrive, they die.

Joseph, his father, is left an orphan. He eventually grows up. He gets married to Nathalie, a French woman whose family came from the mainland, but who had moved to Algeria to try and colonize it. And, yeah, they get married. This is not, Joseph is married at least once before and has one divorce because he's abusive and jealous. Like, he's physically abusive enough that they make a note of it in like the 1890s, right? Which is hard.

He also gets in trouble at one point for assaulting a tax official who makes eyes at his wife before they're married. Right. This guy, this tax official looks at his future wife wrong and he assaults him. So this is our, this is our. this is our bastard's dad. This is Joseph, Alexander's father. And Joseph, again, I've just said he's a European. These are, these are, we, we see them rightly as the colonizers. Joseph doesn't see himself that way, nor does he see their family as colonizers. He sees himself as one of the

common people of Algeria, right? So he sees himself as Algerian, even though he's like European in his heritage. Yes. And he sees himself as a European Algerian. So we certainly does, one would assume see himself as probably better or at least different from the Arab Algerians, but he still sees himself because he's poor, right? And so most of the Europeans are on the wealthier side of things, right, and the European descent. And he sees himself, he identifies as I am of the common people of Algeria, right? We're not these rich assholes, right? That's very important to Joseph. And that's going to be a major aspect of like the way he raises Alexander. Alexander's going to be raised to believe these rich French assholes are like kind of our

natural enemy, right? Because, like, we're poor working class Algerians, right? Like, fuck these guys, you know? And that's going to be important to how Alexander views the world as he grows up. So Joseph is, you know, he's poor by the standards of Europeans and Algeria, but he's rich by the standards of probably Arab Algerians. He starts, like, three different barrel-making businesses that all fail. But he's got enough family money coming in from his money and then his wife's family, that he's able to repeatedly start and fail at new barrel-making businesses. At some point, man, just stop making barrels, homie. Like, what the hell? Like, it's not working. How many barrel businesses, come on, one more, one more. He keeps, like, switching towns.

Like, this is the town that wants barrels. None of them do. I mean, it seems like people would need barrels. I get the logic. Sure. People need a lot of stuff, but that doesn't mean that you're going to be the one to provide it. Wow. Yeah. So from his earliest memories, Alexander would have been told by his father, again, we're working poor. We're not like these wealthy foreign landowners. And the reality is that his wife's family, so Alexander's mom, has like family with some amount of, I don't think they're rich, but they're comfortable back in France.

And they visit them regularly. So as a little kid, Alexander is going from North Africa to France. The Villa Planas are thus much better off. most native Algerians. And because of this, because he's traveling back to France, he gets a head start on the rest of the kids in Algeria and playing football, right? And this is a thing. Football, it's kind of started off in the UK, right?

And it's traveled down Europe at this point. It's going to hit, obviously today, North Africa, the whole Arab world, football's a massive deal, right? Like, I can tell you just like all of the time I've spent in Iraq, I saw so many fucking messy jersey. Right? It was like the one thing everyone could agree on

is how much they fucking love that guy. Everybody loves Lionel Messi. Everybody loves fucking Messi for like in his book Le Brassard

Luke Breand writes about Alexander's early family trips back to France. Quote, the family, which now included two daughters

in this little boy regularly returned to her role and later some would remember seeing young Alexander, a child of the century treading the football

fields of set when he was barely four years old. Legs like matchsticks, running tirelessly, in laughter in the sunset over the ponds. Four years is young, but it is true that the child shows predispositions, always laughing in lively, spinning enthusiastically, a ball in his hands are at his feet. He's one of these kids, he's just born to play football, right?

The instant he gets a ball in his hand, right? Yeah. He's just losing his mind over the sport. Like, you can't stop him. Football remains his main concern throughout his childhood. He does okay in school. Breon describes him as performing honorably in primary school, which I had to translate the book because it's in French,

so maybe I'm just getting that one wrong. It kind of sounds like honorably is like, oh, fine, you know, honorably. He does okay. He doesn't shame himself, right? Yeah. So he starts primary school in 1910. He attends a free school in a town near Algiers,

which is a free school because, like, it's basically a more affluent suburb. And they're like, we don't want to pay into the public schools that these Arab kids are using, right? So we'll pay for a free school in our suburbs, right? Where it's like our tax. It's one of those things. It's a charter school deal, right?

So this is a religious school, but Alexander's family is not, right? They're very much kind of a French Republican family in that area, and that, like, they're not really believers. Quote, in the Villa Plana household, Luke Breon writes, weddings and funerals are resolutely civil. Alexander was a decent student. He's good enough that he gets in the local papers for his grades, but he doesn't graduate with honors. Since Vilaplan is a Spanish name and not a French one, his father starts using the name

Vilaplan to try and sound more French, right? Like instead of P-L-A-N-A, it's P-L-A-N-E, right? And Alexander is not unique in the fact that he is a nut for football from an early age, but he is lonely in Algeria. at that point, because it's starting to take a hold, but it's still very new to the colony. Football doesn't reach North Africa until 1897, right? So by the time he's born, North Africa has had football for like eight years, right? And the first club hadn't been established in Algiers until the year before Alexander's birth.

In 1908, Joseph enrolled his son in a military preparatory program that included a football team, right? So it's like a broader school thing, and it's technically like an ROT. deal, but they also, they have a football club, right? And so from the time he's a little kid, this kid is going to be one of the first people in North Africa, period, to play football, right? And he's, again, he's not just interested in it, he's really good at it. And his team, this first team he plays on, this first Algerian team, wins the youth North African football championship in 1913, 1914, right? So he exhibits excellence from an early age and wins helped win a competition with this team.

Now, he's generally very good at athletics. He wins a diving competition when he's 15. And he's good enough at football, but by age 16, he's made a name for himself as a player, and he's able to leave Algeria for good, right? At 1916, he, like, bounces. He's never going to come back. He moves to set to live with his, in France, to live with his uncles, and he joins the local club there, FC Set.

Now, the team was managed by a Scotsman, Victor Gibson, and as soon as Gibson got a look at Villepland, he decided, this kid's got what it takes to go professional, right? You know, I say professional, because that's how we would look at the team that Alexander's about to join. At this point, they're all still amateurs, right? You're not allowed to pay players. It's against the rules, right? But football's already a big business. And so if you want to get the best talent, you have to offer players.

something. This isn't the kind of situation where there's as crooked a racket around it as like we have in the NCAA where you're just taking these kids in and not giving them shit and permanently injuring them in a lot of cases in order to make millions and millions of dollars off of them playing college ball. You actually have to provide an incentive. It just can't be their salary job to play football. So by the 20s, by the time that Alexander gets to France, a system is developed by which good players are offered jobs, other jobs, right? Where it's like, hey, if you move to FC set, we'll get you this job, like managing a butcher shop.

And you don't have to come to work. You just get money from it. But you're technically employed, right? Or if you're really good, they'll be like, hey, if you move and you agree to work at this team and play here for at least, you know, however many years, I'll give you a nightclub. It's already operational. It's already selling. or I'll give you a theater, right?

And you can see, here's the bank statements. This is how much money it makes. And that'll be your theater. And so you'll support yourself off of the income from this business that we're handing over to you, right? That's how you get paid if you're like a top footballer, right? So when he first comes to France, Alexander has to kind of take whatever they can give him.

He's not immediately getting good deals. But within five years or so, he's one of the best players in the entire country, right? In this first wave of football stars, he's one of the brightest stars. Like, he is good enough that in very short order, he is getting poached, right? He's getting offered turnkey businesses and huge amounts of money. He's by the time he's in his early 20s, like 21, 22, he's verging on, like, rich because of how good he is at football and how much everyone wants him on their team. Alexander becomes the first Algerian pro football player in France.

He's often called the Algerian. And after a year and a half on Gibson's team, he's poached by a team in. Verguise, which is sponsored by Perrier, the bottled water company. What? Yeah, that's the sponsor of his second team, is Perrier, right? They're like buying him a nightclub or something. I forget what business they hand him, but like he's getting different business. He's accumulating businesses, basically, during this period of time.

Now, once Perrier gets him, his original team recruits him back, you know, they're all offering, you know, different jobs and whatnot to do this. But he's good enough that he keeps getting poached. And so he gets poached back by his original team. And in the 1927, he gets poached by a team in Neme, who promised that he'll be given a business of his own, which will, you know, really make him wealthy if he continues to play for them. So he moves to Neme, which is where he becomes known as the best ball header in the country

and one of the best passers. Do I know what a ball header is? No. Am I giggling a little when I wrote it? Is it someone who hits a ball with their head? I think that's probably it, right? Or not. I think that's probably it.

There's a lot of that in football, right? I've seen one professional European match and everybody was hitting the ball with their head. So that's my guess, is he's the best at ballheading, which also probably is giving in some CTE. He's later going to exhibit some signs of maybe, you know, the kind of aggression that you sometimes get when you've repeatedly taken on head injuries for sporting purposes. But he's really good. He's the best ballheader in France. Again, I'm sorry, I'm seven. He's really good at passing.

He wins a France cap, which is a big football award in a game against Belgium in 1926. And in short order, he's made the captain of this team in Neme, right? So he's by 1926, he is at the top of the world, right? Or he's close to, he's actually going to raise some from this. But he is rich, he's famous, he has succeeded, right? This life is going as well for him as it could possibly be going for somebody in his situation, right? So he's going to become a huge fucking Nazi is what you're telling me? No, he's got to become a huge fucking Nazi.

He's going to destroy all of this. Yeah, it's going to be great. Jesus Christ. Yeah, he has talent, he has opportunity, and he's just going to become a complete monster. That's right. He is going to nuke it because he's an asshole. And then he's going to become a Nazi. It's going to be cool.

What if I did a fascism? That sounds. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know what? We'll talk about it. But he doesn't even have the moral consistency to be like an ethical fat.

Like, not ethical, but like he's not a fascist ideologically. It's just where the money is. Right. He doesn't even give a shit about fascism. Like that's how much he's, it's one of those like, uh, fucking Walter from the big Lebowski moments of like he doesn't even have any ethos, you know? Um, he's, but yeah, we'll talk about that. But first, Dana, let's talk about your plugables.

My plugables. My Instagram is Dana Schwartz with three Zs at the end, two extra Zs. And my podcast, Noble Blood is about historical nobles and hoax. And hoax is a brand new show. Talking about historical hoaxes, please go check it out, listen to it, like, subscribe, rate review, all of the above. Excellent. We'll do all of that. and, you know, do something else.

Go try to conquer Algeria. Or you know what? People have been doing that. Conquer France. It's been a long time. It's been like, it's been almost a hundred years since anyone. It's been like 80 years since anyone conquered France. Go do it.

You can take them. All right. Yeah. I can probably take them. I think you got it, you know? Thank you so much. Just don't go in through Belgium. That doesn't work well.

Thank you so much for this encouragement. I've been waiting for someone to tell me that I'm capable of conquering France. Sophie brought that up before the call. She was. like, you know, Dana, really, she's got what it takes to conquer France. I think she just needs, you know, some encouragement. So we're offering that. I'm also offering 200,000 men and tanks and armored transports.

Don't ask where I got them. Yeah. Yeah, it'll be enough. It'll be enough. Amazing. All right. That's the episode. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.

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