In Our Time - The Mokrani Revolt

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the revolt that broke out in 1871 in Algeria against French rule, spreading over hundreds of miles and countless towns and villages before being brutally suppressed. It began with the powerful Cheikh Mokrani and his family and was taken up by hundreds of thousands, becoming the last major revolt there before Algeria’s war of independence in 1954. In the wake of its swift suppression though came further waves of French migrants to settle on newly confiscated lands, themselves displaced by French defeat in Europe and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, and their arrival only increased tensions. The Mokrani Revolt came to be seen as a watershed between earlier Ottoman rule and full national identity, an inspiration to nationalists in the 1950s.WithNatalya Benkhaled-Vince Associate Professor of the History of Modern France and the Francophone World, Fellow of University College, University of OxfordHannah-Louise Clark Senior Lecturer in Global Economic and Social History at the University of GlasgowAnd Jim House Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone History at the University of Leeds Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading list: Mahfoud Bennoune, The Making of Contemporary Algeria: 1830-1987 (Cambridge University Press, 1988)Julia Clancy-Smith, Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters, Algeria and Tunisia 1800–1904 (University of California Press, 1994) Hannah-Louise Clark, ‘The Islamic Origins of the French Colonial Welfare State: Hospital Finance in Algeria’ (European Review of History, vol. 28, nos 5-6, 2021)Hannah-Louise Clark, ‘Of jinn theories and germ theories: translating microbes, bacteriological medicine, and Islamic law in Algeria’ (Osiris, vol. 36, 2021)Brock Cutler, Ecologies of Imperialism in Algeria (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) Didier Guignard, 1871: L’Algérie sous Séquestre (CNRS Éditions, 2023)Idir Hachi, ‘Histoire social de l’insurrection de 1871 et du procès de ses chefs (PhD diss., University of Aix-Marseille, 2017) Abdelhak Lahlou, Idir Hachi, Isabelle Guillaume, Amélie Gregório and Peter Dunwoodie, ‘L'insurrection kabyle de 1871’ (Etudes françaises volume 57, no 1, 2021)James McDougall, A History of Algeria (Cambridge University Press (2017)John Ruedy, Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation (Indiana University Press, 2005, 2nd edition)Jennifer E Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Cornell University Press, 2011)Samia Touati, ‘Lalla Fatma N’Soumer, 1830–1863: Spirituality, Resistance and Womanly Leadership in Colonial Algeria (Societies vol. 8, no. 4, 2018)Natalya Vince, Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, Memory and Gender in Algeria, 1954-2012 (Manchester University Press, 2015)

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, in 1871, the McCranian Revolt broke out in Algeria

against French rule, spreading over hundreds of miles and countless towns and villages before being brutally suppressed. It was the last major revolt there before Algeria's War of Independence in 1954, and it became seen as a watershed between earlier Ottoman rule and full national identity. And in its wake came further waves of French migrants

to settle on the confiscated lands, themselves displaced by war in Europe, and their arrival only increased tensions. With me to discuss the McCroney revolt of 1871, at Jim House, senior lecturer in French and Francophone, History at the University of Leeds, Hannah Louise Clark, Senior Lecturer in Global Economic and Social History

at the University of Glasgow, and Natalia Ben-Karlene Vince, Associate Professor of the History of Modern France and the Francophone World Fellow of University College, University of Oxford. Natalia, why were the French in Algeria in the first place? Well, this is a question that the French keep asking themselves throughout the period 1830 to 1870. But let's begin in 1827.

and with a story that was told to generation after generation of French school children and indeed generations of Algerian school children after independence as well. And that is the story of the flywisk slap. So in 1827, the day of Algiers, Hussein Day, and he is the day of the Ottoman Regency of Algiers, basically has a meeting with the French consul at the time, Pierre de Val. and Hussein Day is furious that the French have failed to repay debts that they've incurred during the Revolutionary Wars

where Algeria has supplied a large amount of wheat to the French and basically now the French don't want to pay for it. Enraged, so the story goes, Hussein day slaps Pierre de Val around the face with a fly swatter and the invasion of Algeria is three years later in 1830 is presented as the avenging of French honour. The other reason sometimes... Do you believe there? No.

I don't. I mean, the other reason, given that I also don't believe, is that the French are sort of striking a blow for European civilisation by ensuring, bringing about an end to sort of piracy in the region, of which there is very little by this point in history. The real reasons for me ally in what's going on in France in 1830. We have the monarch, the Bourbon monarch, Charles X, he's pretty unpopular domestically.

He is also seeking to reassert French dominance in the Mediterranean. And so basically he thinks that a foreign adventure is going to solve his problems domestically and internationally. And the invasion of Algiers takes place in 1830 with that in mind. So in that sense, it's a very classic case of a government using foreign intervention as a way to secure their position domestically and internationally and cloaking it in this language. of basically avenging one's honour and ensuring the rule of law and humanitarianism in the region as well. It doesn't actually work out too well for Charles the 10th because he actually gets overthrown just a few months later.

But the occupation of Algeria continues for the next 40 years. It's very patchy. It's brutal. It's shaped by the resistance of the people that they encounter in Algeria. And as I said at the start, for a long time, the French are not really sure what they're doing there and they're definitely not sure of what they should be doing there and what kind of colony this should be.

Did the French see themselves as going for particular things in Algeria? So one explanation is that actually Charles X is looking to capture a lot of the treasures that are held in Algiers in the Casper so in the traditional Ottoman part of the Ottoman city. What sort of treasures? Well, money basically and he wants to use that to pay off, electors to win the next elections and certainly there's plenty

of evidence I would say that a lot of the wealth of Algeria it's held in the treasury is taken and makes a lot of people in France rich but as I said it doesn't it doesn't serve its purpose for Charles of 10th. What is it a special part of Algeria that he was keen on

conquering? I actually don't think that they have any grand plan so they plan to take Algiers which they do But then the conquest of the rest of the Algerian territory takes place really over the next 40 years in the face of very significant resistance. And indeed, the Sahara is only brought under French rule in 1902. So this is a very prolonged.

It's a very patchy colonisation. And for the first 40 years up until 1871, there's a real debate about whether this should be a military occupation. to what extent it should be a civilian occupation. Should there be settlers? Should there not be settlers? And the French, that this is, there is no French grand plan in what happens in Algeria.

Thank you very much. Jim, what was understood by the word Algeria at that time? That's a good question. So Algeria, when the French invaded, was a province of the Ottoman Empire. It was divided up into three main zones. which covered the north of Algeria.

To the west, there was the border with Morocco, very much as it is today and to the east, likewise with Tunisia. But the Sahara was not considered part of the Ottoman Empire. It was a very diverse country, diverse people, linguistically, culturally, regionally, very diverse. Why could you call it by one name then? Because that's a process,

a process and one thing that helped in that process was precisely the opposition to the French that would develop I suppose very early on during this process of colonisation which takes decades. Figures emerge, such as Abdul Qadar, who will become later symbols of a growing feeling of nationhood within Algeria and within his struggle and within others such as that of Albuquerani, as we'll see, there's also the religious Islamic sediment to society, which notwithstanding the Christians and Jews who are also in Algeria is nonetheless the bedrock really of Algerian identity, or that's how it will be reimagined in the decades and over the next century really. And it's also a country with an integrated economic system. It's a country where the, you know, the Ottomans decided to rule in an indirect way, really, reliance on the sorts of very powerful families like the Al-Mocranes to raise taxes, to protect their own troops, the Ottoman troops as they moved around the country. So it's culturally, we can say that for the moment that feeling of nationhood is perhaps there in a sort of nascent way, but it will soon begin to cohere around people.

particular figures that will come to symbolise resistance to the French. And religion is one part of that as well. What changes did people start to see in Algeria in what we can perhaps say in the first decades of colonial rule? There was the violence of conquest, as we've already heard. There was also linked to that. So we're not just talking about military campaigns, if you're like, in the narrow sense of the world of the use of physical violence. There's also an economic repression. Can you illustrate what you mean by physical violence? There are numerous

battles between local tribes and the French forces during the course of which the civilian population, when it's on the losing side, is often massacred, their villages are burnt, people are smoked out from the caves that they're hiding in. And so there are, the physical violence

is always deliberately disproportionate because that That's one characteristic of colonial violence, which is to punish those that have disobeyed, and also to set a marker to show what might happen to other people that decide to resist. But to weaken further local society, the French also lead economic repression, taking the crops, destroying the crops, taking the grain storage. That's part of that process of conquest, and that's part of that process of conquest, and that's, links in in part to the process of colonisation, because in these first few decades of colonial

real, those areas that have already been conquered by the French are opened up to the arrival of colonial settlers, even if for the moment their number is relatively small. And so what that means on a concrete basis very often is that the most fertile land is seized from the Algerians. They're forced to work on smaller areas of land, which are less first. And what it also means is a sort of religious and cultural imposition, the building of churches, for example, in what is in its vast majority, a profoundly Muslim society. And so there are military, economic, but also cultural and religious changes which are weakening the fabric of Algerian society, but which for the moment remains relatively resilient. Thank you. Hannah-Rees-Claught, the Ottomans had exerted a great deal of influence over this territory per centiars, which of their changes were still in place?

The Ottomans have been working with local structures of social organisation, but they've been there since 1516, and in that time a number of infrastructures have been put in place. some of those things have to do with land tenure, some of those things have to do with taxation systems, because after all, as the French government comes to entrench itself further, it is needing to take revenues. So you're not going to simply do away with the existing system, you're going to work with it. Let's just talk about fiscal infrastructures, taxes that the Ottomans had introduced or had overseen come to be called Arab taxes. Now, they're not paid across Algerian territory about,

a third of the population are liable for these taxes, but those continue to be collected until 1919. Other taxes, which were introduced under the stewardship of the Ottomans, for example, a feudal tax called Arous Rasmi, is actually collected up until the war for Algerian independence. So those kinds of imperial debris, they're still there because that's part of the state apparatus that is very useful. And in sociological terms, I think you can also see that, of course, they're going to be influences. So take an example from law. A particular type of Islamic law is around endowments. This is land, which is going to be tied up for use in a kind of pious endowment in trust. It's land that the French really want to get their hands on. And decisions about how

land is tied up in trust, those are controlled by the Maliki religious establishment. That's the main legal school in North Africa, but also individuals who have a lot of land, who want to, you know, to dispose of it, to set up a charitable trust, let's say, to fund a mosque or to fund repair of fountains. They don't just have to look to the Maliki religious establishment. They can also look to Hanifilor. So that's the official legal school of the Ottoman Empire. And people continue to forum shop right up until the 20th century. There's quite a lot made of Algeria becoming a French department in the mid-90th century.

What did that mean or look like in practice? There's some chopping and changing in policy. Consistently underlying it is a desire to take land, but the ways in which the land is organised and is going to be administered shifts. So there's territory which is in use by European immigrants, administered by civilian government. There's territory that is inhabited by Algerians that is going to be administered by a branch of the military called the Bureau Arab,

who have been in place since quite early on. And then you've got territories, in the middle that are in transition. They're currently under military rule, but at some point they will move into civilian control. It's kind of been an easy transition. Indeed, no. And over this period, the Bureau Arab, some of them have visions for Algeria, which are utopian and which are at odds with the visions of the European immigrants, for example. Thank you. Natalia, by the time of the McCranoly revolt, France, had been in Algeria for 40 years.

Why were the conditions ripe for a rebellion in 1871? Well, let's start with the socio-economic conditions. So in the course of the 1860s, it's estimated that between 20 and 25% of the population of Algeria dies, and they die as a result of famine and disease. And in part, that is the result of natural disasters, but all of those are aggravated. and to some extent structurally produced by the impact of colonialism on the economy.

So the systems of taxation that we've been talking about and the land grab that's also been referred to. And when we're talking about people having their lands taken off them, they're not just losing their livelihoods, but that is also about dismantling sort of social structures, ones of solidarity, and particularly lands that are communally owned, they are a guarantee really for a degree of subsistence in times of poor harvest. So the socio-economic situation is very, very, very precarious for much of the population of Algeria. And Mokrani himself has been trying to attenuate some of the effects of the famine.

He's been distributing aid. Mokrani is in many ways an intermediary of the French Empire and the way that his family were also intermediaries of the Ottoman Empire. What do we mean by intermediary in this case? Well, he basically rules over a territory in Algeria, which is the Magena, the high flat plains in eastern Algeria. He will collect taxes, he will pay tribute to the Ottomans. And his family kind of expects that that relationship will continue with the French, that they maintain a significant degree of autonomy in their region.

And the French will leave them alone as long as they accept. French rule. But what the French do is they're increasingly encroaching upon McCrani's what he considers to be his political prerogatives. And he increasingly feels that he is sort of subservient partner rather in this relationship

rather than sort of valued intermediary. Before we go and can I ask you, Jim, tell us even more about McCrani and why he would want to revolt and why he had the sort of power to cause a revolt which was so significant. Well, as Natalia's said, the family,

The McCrani family had practiced a policy of strategic accommodation with the Ottomans and now with the French for centuries. And that had made them the richest family, the richest Muslim family in Algeria. 30,000 hectares of land, for example, a lot of livestock, mills. And that personal fortune, and with it the power and influence, is under threat. Because McCrani has lent, given money very extensively, to help out. the local communities because the colonial state does not want to step in and provide what we've now called the humanitarian aid that is needed as thousands and thousands of people are dying of famine. And McCrani has borrowed to give this money and one of the problems is precisely that in 1870,

late 1870 the creditors are knocking on his door and because the local tribes are so impoverished they cannot repay McCrani. And he, McCrani, was reliant upon or had been reliant upon the previous Governor-General of Algeria, McMahon, who was a military man. But the military regime has now disappeared. And so his guarantor, in essence, his political guarantor for that loan is no longer there. And so if we think about the historic role and self-perception of the McCrani family, then its power was economic and its, it's, symbolic power as well as its economic power, is now fundamentally threatened. And so he's in a very desperate situation towards the end of 1870 going into 1871.

What does he hope to get out of the revolt? Certainly some financial compensation to pay him back the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of francs that he owes. And as Natalia was hinting, there'd been an erosion of the power of his family, that of a lot of many other locally powerful families, which was a deliberate strategy as part of colonisation. Colonisation needs these intermediary families, but they can't be too powerful because that could then threaten the delicate power balance

that the French seek to maintain. Natalia, you want to come in. Yeah, so I was just going to say the broader context of this is, of course, that France has lost in the Franco-Prussian War. They've lost some of their territory. They've lost Alsace-Lorraine, Napoleon III, who was most closely associated really with the bureaus Arab, the Arab bureaus that Hannah-Louise has been talking about. So military form of rule, which supposedly, or at least is presented as being more sympathetic to indigenous populations,

there is increasingly the risk that they are going to be replaced by civilian rule. Civilian rule is a greater threat than military rule in many ways, because military want to control territories, civilians want to change. change societies. So 1871 for Mochrani is both a threat and an opportunity. All of the situation that we've just described in terms of impoverishment, the debts that need to be repaid, the risk of civilians taking over in Algeria, but at the same time the idea that France is in a weakened position might be pulled to the negotiating table to re-establish an earlier relationship in which more autonomy is granted to aristocratic leaders, such as Mokrani.

Does McCrani think a good win? I don't think he would have started the war if he didn't think he could win. And I think his confidence is reflected by the fact that he actually warned the French that he's going to go to war against them. He sends a letter to the Governor General in Constantine. And he basically said, I've tried to work with you. He is actually one of a number of Algerian aristocrats who write a letter to the French at the start of the Franco-Prussian War, sort of expressing their support for them. So Mukrani says in this letter,

we didn't want to cause any trouble at the start of the war. We know he had enough problems going on, but this situation has to end. I'm no longer going to work with you. And I'm also going to write a letter to the commander in the fort of Budzbar Ridge to let him know that basically I'm coming with weapons. And I think partly we can understand this as these are military men speaking to each other. So this idea that there's this code of honour between them,

that I'm not going to do something sneakily behind your back. I'm going to do things properly. so we can fight kind of as men. But I also think that that is also the confidence of a family that has ruled over this part of Algeria for centuries. I really don't think that he thinks he's going to lose. Thank you. Anna Louise, let's bring in the religious dimension,

which is very important. Then you tell us why. It's important to talk about the Sufi orders. And Sufi crumfetrienne, he's come to be really important in terms of social organisation. they provide ideological and organizational and legal recourse. The one that's directly involved here is the Rahmania order, headed by a macadam or teacher Mahand Amizyan Ahad.

So in this struggle, Akhani, he expects that he's going to have an immediate impact on the French. And when they're not coming to the negotiation table, and when he doesn't have as many tribes rallying behind him as he would like, he turns to Sheikh Ahad, who by the 4th of April, proclaims a jihad. That's one of the Islamic legal options you can have. And another option might be to emigrate or another option might be to withdraw, but in this case to declare a holy war. And that rallies behind Mokrani.

Thank you. We read, Natalia, that the Algerians were very aware of the French defeat and the weakening. But it obviously hadn't weakened it enough. Yes. So in terms of how the struggle plays out, on the 16th of March 1871, Ukrainian troops attack a French garrison in Bouchbara Ridge, the attack of fort there. Hannah-Louise has already mentioned that Al-Haddad then does this call to Holy World, to jihad,

and this is fetishized in many ways by French observers. But really it's sort of a rallying cry in which the idea of driving the infidel from your land is the same as driving a person off your land that is basically literally stolen it. So I think there's something very concrete in the way in which the concept of sort of Holy War is being used that probably shouldn't be conflated with how that term is used nowadays. The problem that McCrani has is that the army is actually quite weak. But I think he's hoping that it's going to be a fracture between the French military and the civilians. But what we actually get is not only repression from the French army,

but also we have civilians who are armed as militias, and this becomes quite a feature of warfare in Algeria going forward, that if you want to rise up against the French militarily, you don't only have to fight the French army, you also have to fight civilian militias, and they often are involved in committing some of the most brutal acts of violence. And if we think of the scale of the violence and just how disproportionate it is,

Why the French win, I'll be interested in your thoughts. Well, let's ask, Jim. Well, I suppose in pure military terms, in part it's because the French are able to get reinforcements in slowly. But surely, in particular, they reconquer a key port, Delis, which then enables them to bring soldiers in directly from metropolitan France. And so ultimately, in terms of, I suppose, the, whereas, whereas, the local population know the terrain better, the army has begun to know that terrain because of the role in conquest, but militarily the French army is better equipped as well.

And so that's one key key point I think that we should raise. And then another one, sort of on the basis of what Mattalia has just said, is what we see here is a classic scenario where the French armies is playing its role. It's there to protect the, the lives and the economic assets of the Europeans. And so a scenario that repeats itself constantly during this war is that the Europeans hold up in fortified castles, if you want to call it that Borch, protected by the French army.

And so these castles can essentially hold out pending the arrival of reinforcements from Algiers or from elsewhere on the coast in Kabilia that will ultimately be able to militarily defeat the Algerians that have surrounded that fortified zone. And that scenario, as I said, repeats itself time and time again during the conflict. Did the fortunes of war vary from one period to another? In the initial period of the war, let's say, in March 1871, then the Algerians certainly have the initiative. And then as we go into April and particular May,

then with the arrival of more and more troops, then there are considerable victories for the French across Cabellia, for example. And so it takes the French time, let's say six, seven, eight weeks altogether to really up their numbers. But once they're there, then the victory, it's certainly on a piecemeal basis, because there are some pockets of resistance that continue for, well, at least a year. And according to some sources,

is there are people that go off to the hills and only surrender eight years later. And so, but generally, the balance of power in France's favour has been re-established by the end of June, 1871. Hannah Louise, how did the French eventually suppress the rebellion and its supporters? So, El Mokrani during the combat, has died. He's been killed.

His brother, Bumazrug, takes his place. But you have the different tribes who are joining in. And as it peters out, the French move to punish the population that has risen up against them. And they do this in two main ways. One is to impose war fines, reparations, and the other is to sequester land. Now, both of these have to be done in a legal way. There is a system, there is a process for doing it. Why do they have to be done in that way?

Well, if you claim that you're bringing the rule of law, and in fact you're replacing oriental despots, law and French law, which has slowly been imposed. It's not been imposed in some areas of Algerian society, for example. Muslim Algerians retain their Muslim legal status and with it the right to marry and divorce and endow their inheritance under Islamic law. So French law has been introduced to civil and criminal codes. But the scale of what the legal and administrative system is having to cope with, though, in terms of managing these reparations payment,

managing the sequestration, it is quite out of proportion. What did the French hope to get out of this? Right from the beginning, I think it's come out of what we've said, that there's been this balancing act that becomes unbalanced in different directions between French officials and the military being the institution, the Bureau of Arab, between the European immigrants and between the local population. the French Governor General is having to stop European immigrants from lynching people. The public opinion in the press, the settler press, show them no quarter, destroy them.

Only rich people rise up in revolt. If we're going to have security and peace, we need to take everything. And the language of lynching is used. So they have to keep this under control. The Governor General has to stop this kind of mob justice. So they want land for colonization for refugees, but also for the ongoing settlement of Algeria. Because the concept is, and there's this kind of racialized conception of economic organization, if you like. So the land is not being productively used.

Here, the tribes have all this land, and they're not growing things on it. They're not using the land as it should to produce its potential. So they're just wasting it, so we should take it. That's the settler view. And so this is why it's important. They're having to set limits, set some boundaries to the viciousness of the European immigrants desires. But they're also very much invested in this project of colonising. Natalia, you want to come in.

It's this idea that we're not going to just take the land. We're going to destroy all of the political and social structures and therefore no more resistance can rise out of this. But I think what the French come to discover is that you can't oppress a people into submission and that forms of resistance, new forms of resistance, will arise, whether that will be now people sort of learning French and working through the political system in the 20s and the 30s, whether it's people in trade unionisms, also in the interwar period, or indeed whether it's a new armed role led by a new generation who come from very different social,

backgrounds in the 1940s. So what the French do is really I think they think that they have crushed the resistance, but really what they've done is they've only crushed one type of resistance. So part of the explanation regarding the high levels of French repression of the revolt come from the fears that the army but also the European civilians have for their own well-being. and that's, I think, well documented. But there's also fear on the Algerian side, fear for the future, this uncertainty that's been created by the move to the new civilian regime. And so that's a driver for the involvement of McCrani,

and no doubt many other of the big families, as they might be called. But there's also the fear that the French repression deliberately creates as we've seen, and it's there to design to put people off from resisting in the future. And as Natalia has said, that that doesn't actually work, or it might work for a period of weeks or months or perhaps a few years, but in the longer course of things,

it doesn't actually work. And so fear, the way in which fear is experienced, the way in which fear is used as a strategy, I think is something that we can use to help understand the war Hannah, Hannah Louise Clark. I want to make sure that I've underscored the disproportionate punishment that was meted out because the war fines, three-fifths of which is paid in a year, is equivalent to between eight and 12 times the annual tax burden of each tribe.

It's three to four times what the French have to pay to the Prussians. Then, in terms of the sequestrations, there's as much land taken as a result of the punishments, as has been taken in the entire period from 1830 up to 1870. And the iniquities abound because even people who had been fighting for the French, who had been defending the French settlers who had been with the army, or people who were absent, or women or children, their collective lands were also taken, although they were innocent of any involvement.

And then it settles down to be an old-fashioned colony, does it? Absolutely not. You know, this is the last arms revolt for 80 years, really. How many years? 80 years. So the War of Independence begins in 1954. But that doesn't mean at all that Algeria has, to use the colonial terminology at the time, been pacified. Resistance takes on different forms.

So this is a watershed moment in many ways. It is at least outside of the Sahara, the end of the military conquest of Algeria, but actually the military conquest of the Sahara that goes on across the 1880s, 1890s, is only really finished in 1902. It has a huge impact on patterns of mobility of the Algerian population. So we've talked about people being pushed off their land. many of those go into towns. Some of them leave Algeria go to get all together.

They go to Tunisia. They go even further afield. The leaders of the insurgency are gathered up, put on trial, deported to New Caledonia. So there is huge mobility that is brought about by the repression of the revolt. And also a real destructuring of the traditional Algerian elite. and that means that when anti-colonial movements, nationalist movements begin to form in the 20th century, that they're drawing from a very different basis in society.

They're not drawing from these traditional elites like they are in Tunisia and Morocco. They're coming from mostly young men who have been educated in the French education system and come from quite modest social backgrounds. So this is the reasons so many French people began to migrate to Algeria. After 1871, we get the establishment of the civilian regime. So it's the ends of the military regime in Alger, at least in the northern part of Algeria, and the establishment of a civilian regime. Two things happen.

So the first one is that the land grab increases an ever greater rate. So it's estimated that on the eve of the First World War, between seven and nine million hectares of land has been taken off Algeria. And the other thing that happens is that migration to Algeria really increases as well. It's fairly patchy between 1830 and 1870, but then it really, really takes off. Why are they going there? Well, they're going to get land. So, you know, some of these people are people that have lost their land who were in Alsace and Loren.

A lot of them are quite poor rural communities from across the Mediterranean basin. So not just France. They're coming from Italy. they're coming from Spain, they're coming from Malta, basically going to Algeria to seek their fortune. And this is a bit of an issue for the French, the fact that these people aren't just French. They're actually very concerned about the French nature

of European colonisation. And in order to reinforce that in 1889, they pass a law whereby the children of all Europeans born in Algeria are going to be automatically French. So they Frenchify the Spaniards. and the Italians and the Maltese. And perhaps it's worth mentioning here as well that there's a continuing low-level micro-resistance

from Algerians to this colonial domination. So that could take the form of burning forests, that can take the form of trying to contest the way in which the lands have been re-irrigated to their disadvantage. That can take the form of very low-scale, but lethal violence, murders of Eurovision. European farmers and their families, all of these are expressions of an ongoing refusal, which can even be shown through some of the more elite families who, in effect, are playing a double game with the French colonial administration,

but also perhaps providing information to local people that will help them in their legal struggles, in their social struggles. And so on the surface, everything appears from a French perspective, much calmer, but longer, term and with hindsight, there is a sort of a slow burning resistance. And then there will be new movements, new political movements that emerge in the 30s, or 20s, 30s and 40s, that will very powerfully re-articulate a sense of Algerian nationhood, which will provide a channel, a focus for resistance to the French. Hannah, Hannah Louise Clark. Just to add to what Natalia said about the refugees,

from Alsace and Lorraine. So the French state needs to resettle these people. And here they have an opportunity to do so at no cost to themselves. So it's in June of 1871 that decision is taken by the National Assembly to grant 100,000 hectares of Algerian land, which hasn't yet been taken, but soon will be, to refugees from Alsace and Lorraine alone. And of course, that's only part, about a fifth of the land that is eventually sequestered from Algerians who are accused of suspected of being involved, having taken up arms against the French. Jim. We've raised the question of the disproportionate amount of violence used against Algerians.

And what, as historians of colonial violence, we're very often faced with the fact that we have no idea how many Algerians were killed in a particular reform. oppressive sequence. We will know that there were 98 Europeans killed. We will know that there were 238 French soldiers killed. And then we will have an idea of somewhere between 4 and 9,000 Algerian deaths, for example. And that's as far as we can go. And that actually tells us so much about a colonial situation, about how lives do or the extent to which some some lives do and do not matter. And we see this time and time again. And so it was the case for the Settif repression of May and June 1945. And it's there throughout the entire sequence of the Algerian War of Independence

between 1954 and 1962. And so I think that the McCroney revolt from that respect is part of this wider sequence. And we could have gone back to the 1840s and 50s as well to talk about the violence of conquest in those same terms. Natalia, would you say that the impact of the McCrani revolt set off something that continued in a straight line, developed and developed until the mid-20th century? So I think one of the questions that has really taxed historians is the extent to which this is a nationalist revolt or not. And I think if we look at the event itself, we can see that what people are fighting for is not. articulated in the language of nationalism.

Their concerns are local, their concerns are regional, and their concerns are transnational as well, if we think about the religious dimension to this. But this becomes such a thorny question because one of the French claims to the justification of their presence in Algeria is that Algeria doesn't exist. That Algeria has never existed as an independent territory in that there's no such thing as Algerians.

There's just disparate religious ethnic groups who are constantly at war with each other. So what Algerian nationalist historians have to do in the 20s and 30s is tell a story in which Algerians have always existed, not only if they always existed, they've always resisted. And in that sense, Mochrani is a really important figure because he represents the east of Algeria.

And then in an earlier period in the 1830s and 40s, we have the figure of the Emir Abdel-Qadal who resists the French in the west of Algeria. And then in the 1850s, we actually have a woman, Fatma and Suma, who resists sort of in the centre of Algerian. So very conveniently, that triptych of figures demonstrates a sort of a pre-national resistance. And as we have discussed today, historically, that that doesn't actually really work with what actually happens and what people's priorities are at the time. But I think the revolt is really important in the construction of,

a historical memory. So when I was doing interviews in the early 2000s with women who participated in the Algerian War of Independence between 1950 or 1962 in the region of Kabilia, a lot of them would actually refer to their family histories of dispossession of land and of migration as part of the repression that followed the Mochrani interruption. And that was how they understood what they were doing when they joined the Nationalist Struggle in the 1950s. But because they could also remember that, they were also very, very aware of the potential consequences of that participation and yet they were still willing to do it all over again. Well, thank you all very much. Thanks to Hannah Louise Clark, Jim House, Natalia Beckhalad

Vince and to our studio engineer Emma Hath. Next week, the history of the waltz, how the new couples dancing broke up the old social structures in the 19th century. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time. time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did you not get a chance to say that it would have liked to have? When I was doing research in Algeria, I was invited to stay with some friends and pass through a place called Iql Ali, which is a beautiful part of Algeria in Kabilia.

And it was a very modest village. And actually I was looking for an infirmary that had been there, and there really wasn't much trace of it. but it's a rural area and there was very little evidence of what had previously been there. And then some years later I was strolling around the Museum de Quay-Bronli in Paris and came across this massive wedding chest from Irle Alley, this beautiful Aleppo pine with iron, which would have contained all these riches or these objects that a bride would have.

And the juxtaposition of this, in my mind, of this beautiful piece of iron, furniture, a very prized possession with what the village is now and the contrast. It was my own experience for, you know, I couldn't possibly relate to the experience that these tribes had of being ripped from their lands or losing everything, but it was just a reminder of what had been lost. How did the French occupation play out over the next 100 years? Well, Algeria doesn't quite fit into the pattern, really, of French Empire more. broadly in that it's not part of its first empire in the Americas and in the Caribbean. And it's earlier than its conquests in West and East Africa and indeed some of them in Asia as well

in the late 19th century. So Algeria, interesting, is always presented as an exception because it's considered to be sort of an integral part of French because it has a large settle a population. And in some ways it is. There's things that happen in Algeria that don't happen elsewhere. But in other ways, colonial rule in Algeria, despite the fact that France, that Algeria is an integral part of France, is exactly the same as how it functions in other parts of its empire. We can even just look at things like the Code de Lundigina, the Native Code of 1881, which sets out a whole series of rules that only apply to people who don't have full French citizenship. So in this case, Muslim Algerians. They include things like not being able to

leave a certain area without authorisation or it's, you can be punished for insulting someone in a position of authority, even if that person is off duty. And that begins in Algerian, then sort of spreads across the French Empire. So Algeria is both exceptional and exemplary, I think, in how the French Empire functions. Jim, the revolt failed. What happened to the leaders? Well, those leaders that were still alive and were captured

would be severely punished. As Natalia has mentioned, the French used their overseas territory of New Caledonia, which is about 2,000 kilometres north-east of Australia, to house about 110 of the, of the main leaders of the McCrani Revolt. Prior to that, after their court sentence,

they spent several years in prison in France or in islands just off the French coast, and then they were sent to New Caledonia, where they stayed in many cases for up to 20 years. They found themselves there with the deported political prisoners from the Paris Commune. But those prisoners, the Communards,

were amnested before they were, and many of the Algerians were actually forced by the French, even when they were freed from the penal colony, to actually stay on the island. And so El Mokrani's brother, Bumazrag, who's played a big role in the revolt, he's only able to leave the island, New Caledonia, in 1904.

So that gives you an idea, so he'd spent nearly 30 years on the island. And so the French didn't use Devil's Island, island off the coast of French Guyana for the Algerians from El Mokrani, but they could draw on a different penal solution. Obviously, the vast majority of those Algerians never actually made it back to Algeria and their families. Do you want to write anything? I suppose, I mean, thinking about what this punishment meant versus the other kinds of punishment we've already talked about, which really affected the people's ability to feed

themselves to care for their family, but also their connection to the land they loved. So for the leaders who are who are exiled, not only are they completely ripped away from their homes, but also they are, I believe, forced to marry French women, some of the prisoners that Germ had mentioned. They're not allowed to give them Muslim names. And of course, people continue to preserve their heritage, their family arrangements in secret. But the idea is that they will through this process of being incarcerated, and then once they're freed from the penal colony, the labour they will do, the hard labour they will do, and through the marriage to French women, they will be rehabilitated.

So rehabilitation is possible for these aristocratic leaders. But there's no real option for the tribes whose private property is completely taken from them and then whose collective lands have been sequestered. This has been described as a watershed moment for Algeria. What was a watershed about? This moment has been viewed in different ways depending on different narratives form around it, and that depends very much on your starting point.

So if you're an historian like Charles Robert Ageron, this is a watershed because the big question is what if. French Algeria had been a land of harmony with Muslim Algerians and European immigrants living comfortably side by side. And is it this moment that represents a victory for the European immigrants when the Bureau, Arab and other forces have tried to temper that? Is this the watershed in that sense? For taking us an Algerian nationalist narrative, you would see right from the beginning from 1830 throughout colonisation that you would see a history of French violence and resistance. But this is a watershed in the sense that it certainly crushes and hollows out the potential for armed rebellion against the French.

So depending on your viewpoint, this might be seen as a watershed in other ways. Or you could also say you could see it as one of continuity as tribes continue to rebel as Algerians continue to find ways to resist. Natalia, is it possible to develop where these years sit in the history of Algeria? Yes. So a sort of very crude

sort of schema is that the years 1830 to 1871 are the years of what is sometimes termed primary resistance. So armed resistance and then the years of the 20s and 30s are sort of political resistance, resistance through trade unionism, and then armed resistance re-emerges

from 1954 onwards. But the picture is a lot more complex than that, and actually on different scales, all of those forms of resistance kind of exist all the time. What I would also say as well, though, is that, you know, we've talked a lot about resistance. And of course, kind of that keeps the French at the centre of the story. So we're talking about the reactions of Algerians to the French coming. One of those reactions is resistance. Another one, another term we've talked about is accommodation. But it's important to underline that the French were arriving in a complex society in which there are also,

you know, lots of power struggles, different hierarchies, different dynamics. And the French become one very, very important hierarchy and dynamic in that. And so if we look at sort of one of the impacts that we keep coming back to of the repression of the 1871, interaction. It is the destruction of sort of the traditional elites. And it's very interesting when you look, for example, at some of the poetry that is produced in the aftermath of this. So some of the poetry of Simohand, for example, that is gathered by the Algerian intellectual Moolod Mamri in the 20th century. He talks actually very little about Europeans in his poems. The main thing that he is complaining about is the destruction of traditional Algerian society

and the fact that he, a man from an elite background, has now been completely stripped of everything, dispossessed of all of his wealth. And he talks now about people who were once butchers and shepherds beginning to hold political and social power. So I think reinserting that social history in which the French are not always at the centre of the story is important to do.

Was there a sense that the attempt to get full Algerian independence speed it up, in the 20th century. Yes, absolutely. It's often explained by a failure of the French to reform Algeria as a colony in the sense of granting greater political rights. But as has often been observed, a colonial situation is, by definition, a profoundly unequal one. And so if you entirely and thoroughly reform it, then it's no longer,

the same regime. And so that attempt by the French to reform just after the First World War, just after the Second World War, that failed because Algerians were increasingly realizing that full equality for themselves could only be brought about in an independent Algeria. The question, I suppose, in the interwar period, was, well, how is that going to happen? How is that going to happen? And the Second World War plays a key role here because it's really the Second World War and what happens in May and June

1945, but in Algeria, where there is another very repressive episode where the French army and the European militias kill an estimated 15, 20,000 Algerians that really brings, I think, a lot of people in Algeria on board to the more radical Algerian nationalist movement that will eventually move to violent protest and to armed interaction in 1954. And so that is in a context in which that Algerian nationalist movement is

becoming a mass movement through, say, the scouts, through sports associations, through all sorts of ways of touching the increasingly urban population, which is moving into the cities because of the property in the countryside. And so the actual picture of Algeria is transforming. And for me, I suppose as a historian of shanty towns in Algeria, we can see that the Mukarni revolt through its acceleration of the land grab ultimately paves the way for a move into the cities which we see from the end of the First World War onwards. And so ultimately there are movements which are there to channel the protest and a protest which is also, which needs to be set in its international context of a move towards decolonisation of what's happening in the neighbouring countries of

Morocco and Tunisia, protectorates run by France, but from the early 1950s onwards, Algerians know for well that those two protectorates are going to become independent from 1952, 53 onwards that that writing is on the wall. also inspires Algerians, as they're also inspired by what's going on in Indochina, where the French lose to the Viet Minh. And so all of that creates a context as well. It's that intersection of what's going on within Algeria, with what's going on internationally as well, which will accelerate the movement for independence. As Jim was alluding to when he mentioned his work on Chanty towns, I mean in terms of the socio-economic transformations and the

the people who are forced to relinquish their land, who are resettled on poor quality land because their higher quality land has been given to settlers. That leads to the much greater precarity as tribes are left with nothing or are forced to go and work as sharecroppers on lands that have previously been theirs. And then due to that precarity,

you can just imagine the sort of long-term social and economic impacts of that. And in other ways as well, I mean, sticking with sort of some of the, how do people experience their place in the world, one of the outcomes of insurrection and revolt when it was put down in the arrest, just a few years after the Mochraney revolt, because the revolts haven't stopped, the impact of the French artillery led people to reimagine epidemic diseases and what it was to be sick. because when they fell sick with cholera or typhus or other infectious diseases, they imagine that it was evil French spirits who were causing the disease

because the sick would rave and they would shout as if they were in battle. So it's really entering into how people experience their bodies in material ways, in these ways how do you exist and how do you make sense of the world around you. It has really enduring effects in that sense as well. And there's an oral memory of this repression, but also the land seizures, which is transmitted over the decade. So as I say, orally from parents to children, from grandparents to children.

And that is a key factor in understanding a continuity into the 20th century. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you very much indeed. And here comes Simon. Hello, I'm David Yelland. And I'm Simon Lewis. We're the hosts a Radio 4s when it hits the fan, the podcast which looks at how big names and big companies manage their PR.

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