Expressing Entitlement in Colonial Algeria: Villagers, Medical Doctors, and the State in the Early 20th Century

Abstract

Abstract:This article expands our understanding of state-society interactions in rural Algeria under French colonial rule, focusing specifically on villagers in the eastern department of Constantine. I analyze previously untapped administrative records, newspapers, petitions, and complaints to show how sanitary regulations and medical expertise came to shape relationships among villagers, local elites, and the colonial state from the early twentieth century. Villagers responded to state-led medicalization by seeking the protection of medical doctors, not only from disease but also from the state itself. In particular, they hoped to avoid heavy-handed treatment by qaids and local elites who applied emergency disease control measures without appropriate medical knowledge. Furthermore, close examination of petition literature suggests that hardships experienced by rural communities during the First World War accentuated nascent feelings of entitlement towards state medical treatment that crossed demographic, ethnic, and religious communal boundaries. The "great disease" was only the most recent misfortune to afflict the villagers in Runda.Four months previously, small-scale acts of resistance to compulsory conscription in neighboring communes mixtes and in Belezma itself had developed into widespread insurrection. 4 French troops descended on the Aurès region-a contingent of 6,142 soldiers and 106 officers in November 1916, increasing to 13,892 soldiers and 217 officers in January 1917-and engaged in a range of repressive tactics to quell resistance and enforce conscription. 5 Soldiers seized livestock and grain, destroyed silos, took hostages from the families of men refusing conscription, and burned villages; the air force bombarded the presumed mountain hideouts of deserters and resisters. 6 Predictably, epidemic disease followed in the wake of misery. In the month prior to the outbreak of disease in Runda, ninety-three of the hostages taken in the communes mixtes of Aïn Touta (ʿAin al-Tuta), Batna, Belezma, and Corneille died from typhus. 7The "great disease" in Runda may itself have been typhus, the symptoms of which were known to include fever, a rash, and altered mental states. 8 By appealing to local authority figures for a doctor to treat a terrifying affliction, villagers and elders sought the protection of the state. They did so even as French soldiers were depriving households of their men, beasts, and grain, and civil agents of the state were rounding up and isolating vulnerable members of their community.How was it that villagers in the remote mountain hamlet of Runda came to seek the aid of a French doctor? Why did they view the provision of a doctor as the authorities' responsibility?In contrast to scholarship on medicine and the state in sub-Saharan Africa and Egypt, the majority of work the history of medicine in Algeria has had little to say about how ordinary people responded to state medicine. 9 The reasons for this are partly methodological, and partly due to the perception that state medici...

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