Abstract
Drawing on existing literature on the subject, this chapter presents important characteristics of Algerian immigrants and French of Algerian origin (FAO) as described in various situational contexts. It contains arguments in favour of identifying FAOs with different categories—national, class, spatial, etc.—and contributes to current discussions on the integration of immigrants with the rest of French society in the broader historical and social context. The subjects discussed include the parallel functioning of two definitions of Frenchness (political—relating to citizenship—and ethnocultural) dating from the fear in the nineteenth century of ‘foreigners from the suburbs’; social and political relations in colonial Algeria; different periods of migration to France; and contemporary memories of the French–Algerian past, including the Algerian War. Attention is drawn to the durability of certain identifications, and to the fact that within these it is often only the entity to which a given category name is attributed that changes. It seems that lasting connections are also made among certain identifications in relationships; for example, immigrant identification may be connected with identifications with the following categories: poor people, those living far from city centres, those who threaten French values.
The basis of sections “Identification of Algerian Immigrants from the Beginning of the Colonial Conquest to 1974” and “Algerians and the Descendants of Algerian Immigrants in the Structure of French Society After 1974” of this chapter is a translation of J. Kubera (2013), Algierczycy we Francji. Jaka integracja? [Algerians in France. What Kind of Integration?], Przegląd Zachodni, 1, supplemented with new content.
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Notes
- 1.
Muslim children did not attend school in Algeria—not because the school system was badly organized, but because of its Republican secular educational ideology, with which the parents of young Muslims did not agree. It is worth noting that parents’ fears that their children could absorb Western models gradually receded during the period of the Third Republic (Monneret 2008, 36).
- 2.
Aleksander Hall (2005, 428) wrote in reference to the problem of Algeria that de Gaulle ‘believes that one can assimilate individuals—and only to a certain degree—but not nations [but was convinced that an Algerian nation existed, and so was ready to recognise the independence of Algeria]. He considers it beneficial for a certain number of people from other races and cultures to belong to the French nation, but on condition that a clear majority of them become French: “After all, we are mainly a European people, of the white race, of Greek and Roman culture and the Christian religion”, he said in conversation with [Alain] Peyrefitte . For de Gaulle, allegiance to a nation did not result solely from formal possession of citizenship, but from possession of a national consciousness. He did not believe that the French nation could be a multicultural nation.’
- 3.
This section focuses on issues of civil rights, omitting French economic policy towards the Algerian departments. For Jean Monneret (2008, 34–37), apart from its detrimental aspects, that policy had several positive consequences: Algiers became a modern city with higher education and a stock market; other urban centres such as Oran and Constantine were developed; agriculture thrived, especially the cultivation of grapes and grain; roads were laid out, and ports created or reopened; the irrigation system was expanded; hospitals were developed and infectious diseases effectively combated. On Algeria’s development after 1962, see Jałowiecki 1978.
- 4.
In practice, this was about the need to do away with five customs: polygamy; a father’s choice of his daughter’s husband (droit de djebr); unilateral dissolution of a marriage by the husband (répudiation); the application of the theory of enfant endormi (paternity recognised in cases where a child is born within five years following the breakup of a marriage); and privileges for men concerning inheritance (Weil 2005, 100). When Algerian nationalists were seeking full civic rights for Muslims, they simultaneously demanded the preservation of those practices resulting from Sharia (Monneret 2008, 32).
- 5.
For example, in the first 50 years following the establishment of such a possibility (1865–1915), 2396 ‘indigenous Muslims of Algeria’ underwent the procedure. They were mainly soldiers, administrative officials, or Muslims who had converted to Catholicism (Weil 2005, 103).
- 6.
The word derives from the youth argot known as verlan, a basic characteristic of which is the creation of new words that reverse the order of syllables of existing words. At first, Maghrebs were called Rebeus (a syllabic transposition of the word Arabes), and later Beurs (a reversal of Rebeus) (Stora 1992, 436). Opponents of the word use arguments similar to those they employ to negate what they believe is a label for the second generation of immigrants. In their view, both terms have an ethnic character and emphasise that the Beurs are not completely French (Hargreaves 1991, 31; Redouane 2012, 16).
- 7.
Nelly Wolf (2011, 7–10) claims that the current period is characterised by ‘memory inflation’ and compares it to the period 1958–1981 (the governments of de Gaulle and his successors), in which there was ‘memory deflation’—in relation to both the Second World War (especially, French collaboration with the Nazis and the issue of the genocide of Jews and Roma) and the Algerian War. This obliviousness towards the Algerian War, in Wolf’s opinion, comprised three periods: 1962–1968, a time of legal and judicial amnesia and forgetfulness; after 1968, when those ‘events’ gradually disappeared from public life; and the period from the beginning of the 1980s, in other words the beginning of historical research on the subject, after which came a time of hypermnesia (see McCormack 2007).
- 8.
I refer here to an act passed by the French parliament in 2005 that contained controversial provisions (deleted in 2006 after numerous protests) concerning the need to show the positive outcomes of the French presence in its former colonies, especially Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, in school teaching programmes (cf. Stora 2007, 20–21).
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Kubera, J. (2020). Names and Arguments: Algerians and the Descendants of Algerian Immigrants in France. In: Identifications of French People of Algerian Origin . Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35836-5_2
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