Algerian Nationalism, Zionism, and French Laïcité: A History of Ethnoreligious Nationalisms and Decolonization

Abstract

The Algerian war resituated the meaning of “Muslims” and “Jews” in France in relation to religion and “origins” and this process reshaped French secular nationhood, with Algerian independence in mid-1962 crystallizing a complex and shifting debate that took shape in the interwar period and blossomed between 1945 and 1962. In its failed efforts to keep all Algerians French, the French government responded to both Algerian nationalism and, as is less known, Zionism, and did so with policies that took seriously, rather than rejected, the so-called ethnoreligious arguments that they embraced—and that, according to existing scholarship, have always been anathema to French laïcité. Most scholars on France continue to presume that its history is national or wholly “European.” Yet paying attention to this transnational confrontation, driven by claims from Algeria and Israel, emphasizes the crucial roles of North African and Mediterranean developments in the making of contemporary France.

Historicity, Peoplehood, and Politics: Holocaust Talk in Twenty-First-Century France

“…This categorical uncertainty points to the importance of an emerging conversation among French colonial historians, one that is really just beginning and insists on rethinking French colonial history outside the “identity” categories (French, Muslim, Jewish, indigenous, native) that seem so self-evident from a contemporary perspective (Davidson 2015; 2012; Katz 2015; Mandel 2014; Schley 2015; Shepard 2008; 2013; Schreier 2010; Stein 2014). The attention these colonial historians bring to the contingency and slipperiness of these categorical positions is a reminder of the constant and always contested sociological work required to make difference into sameness and sameness into difference.…”

Ramadan in the Republic: Imperial necessity and local religious assistance to Muslim migrants

“…This policy of showcasing French support for Muslim populations gained urgency after the Second World War. In the face of growing anti-imperial movements, a new ‘integrationist’ approach engendered a willingness to acknowledge religious and ethnic origins (Shepard, 2013: 456–9). Nationalists proved particularly strong and effective in Algeria; yet even as France gave up its other colonies, it clung to assertions that Algeria was an integral part of France and not an imperial territory.…”

“…Once Algeria established its independence, which was formally recognised in July 1962, France turned away from its claim to being a Muslim power. Decolonisation allowed the French to distance themselves from the North Africans they had long attempted to integrate and create a system that emphasised and enforced fundamental differences between Muslims and other – ‘truer’ – French citizens (Shepard, 2006, 2013). The Republic thus relinquished the strategies that had been required to promote a sense of imperial belonging among Muslim migrants and renewed its commitment to a rigorous laïcité .…”