Alsace in Algeria and the Notion of ‘Failure’ in Settler Political Culture, c. 1870–1960

Abstract

This article explores a key trope in the history of French colonial Algeria: the idea of the colony as a failure. The focus is on the resettlement of Alsatians and Lorrainers in Algeria in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. What started as a wave of nationalist elan that sought to rebuild the lost provinces in France’s largest colony soon became the object of criticism and controversy, depicted by contemporaries from early on as failure. While this perceived failure was itself a colonial category – the failure to recruit settlers, expulse Algerians, and seize land – it tells us a great deal about the political culture of the colony. How was this resettlement project conceived? What visions of colonization and colonial settlement were projected upon it? And what mechanisms of coercion, dispossession, and violence did different colonial players seek to deploy? Through these questions, this article seeks to demonstrate that the verdict of ‘failure’ by settlers and lobbyists did not emerge in hindsight but was rather the product of the inherent tension between the sheer force that was necessary to seize the land and the metropolitan attempt to establish in the colony a form of unequal yet standardized civilian governance.