In a first phase, as formal citizenship expanded political participation for former colonial subjects, the determination of settler-colonial politics to maintain minority rule and that of the administration to impose “security” by repressing nationalist demands stalled and subverted the reform process, voiding citizenship of substance. Building on recent scholarship which has emphasised both the extreme violence and the unprecedented “integration” that came to characterise this late colonial project in Algeria, this article traces the changing logic through which reform and reconquest came to be entwined, to the ultimate failure of both. “Pacification” in Algeria was seen as the essential precondition for the creation of this renovated, trans-Mediterranean Republic, whose liberal and emancipatory “empire of law” would finally come into its own. It was imagined and prosecuted as such on the basis of a widespread belief in the necessity of reinventing and normalizing a transcontinental France that could maintain its global posture after 1945 only by retaining the strategic depth of empire shorn of the colonial legal frameworks on which empire had hitherto depended. The film offers a delicate exploration of the emotional and psychological effects of political and symbolic violence, which troubles a more usual imaginary of Algerian women as noble, suffering and endlessly resistant or resilient figures.įrance’s war in Algeria from 1954-62 was a war of colonial reconquest and at the same time a struggle to “decolonize” the French state. Finally, an exploration of Yamina Bachir-Chouikh’s Rachida (2002) reveals a more complex staging of female resistance in times of terror. I then turn to the Algerian Civil War, considering one of the most enduring photographs to emerge from the conflict, Hocine Zaourar’s La Madone de Benthala (1997), an image that inscribes a quasi-universal image of female victimhood. I examine the model of female agency through the figure of the bomb carrier in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), illuminating the gap between the freedom depicted, and promised, and the reality of women’s experience after the war. This vision of Algerian Women, caught between models of participation and passivity, can be charted through a long imaginary of Algerian women as exposed to colonial, patriarchal, state or terrorist violence, but also possessing fortitude and resilience in the face of conflict. This article charts the roles and representations of Algerian Women as both agents and victims of violence in the War of Independence (1956-1962) and the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s in which the role of women has emerged as a significant site of ideological, religious, and political struggle. As demonstrated by the French, the FLN also adjusted its relationship to Islam depending on specific circumstances: when dealing with urban populations, it would place more emphasis on the compatibility of progressive values and Islamic principles while in the rural areas, it tailored its message to appeal to a more traditional audience who placed importance on maintaining cultural and religious customs.
For the FLN, Islam was linked to nationalism and was, to a certain degree, promoted as being central to a newly emerging Algerian identity.
When it came to military propaganda campaigns, the French military portrayed the French colonial power as a benevolent liberator of ‘oppressed’ Muslim women despite its uses of rape, torture, and forced unveiling as counterrevolutionary tactics of warfare.
JESSICA MACMASTER ARCHIVE
Within the metropole, the police would racially profile any person who ‘looked’ North African the police archive documents presented in this paper reveal that generalizing psychological sketches of the Maghrebin (North African) population based on set perceptions of Islam and supposed typical Muslim behavior were systematically institutionalized. While France is associated with a strict laïcité, it would, however, frequently promote a ‘French Islam’ through state-sponsored religious sites such as the Grande Mosquée de Paris while simultaneously justifying forms of physical and psychological colonial violence with Orientalist tropes of indigenous Muslim populations. An examination of the French state’s and FLN’s relationship to Islam reveals that both parties’ approach in engaging with religion often changed with the circumstances as the war progressed.
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