Proclamation of the Algerian National Liberation Front

Context

Prior to the French invasion and conquest of 1830, the people of the Maghreb (a word that means “place of sunset” and refers to the region of North Africa that comprises Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria) had lived together for centuries as residents of various empires that controlled the Mediterranean Basin. The last great invasion brought Islam to North Africa, and Arab and Berber speakers learned to live together under Islam. They continued their lives as an autonomous province of the Muslim Ottoman Empire for three hundred years until the arrival of the French. The French government viewed the conquest of this territory across the Mediterranean as a way to strengthen its internal government and to expand its control over the western Mediterranean Basin by establishing colonies in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.

Unlike other Francophone colonies in Africa, Algeria became a settler colony to which French and other European settlers, or colons (colonials), emigrated to begin new lives—and to exploit Algeria's agricultural resources for France's benefit. Algeria had been a breadbasket for earlier empires centered in the Mediterranean Basin, and France became interested in its agricultural resources and minerals, especially after the discovery of oil. The colons consisted of farmers from rural southern France and from other areas such as Corsica and the eastern Pyrenees and Alps. Later, many settlers arrived from Alsace and Lorraine, two provinces that were ripped from France by the victorious Prussians in the war of 1870. The colons were joined by various other European groups escaping unrest at home, including people from Spain, Italy, and Malta. At first the French government ruled the colony through its military. Having secured the land from the indigenous people in 1830, many soldiers immigrated to the new colony. They were followed by French workers, peasants who had escaped the Industrial Revolution, exiled political dissidents, and political prisoners.

The French and other Europeans who moved to Algeria brought with them new European ideas and laws, resulting, essentially, in the dismantling of the Algerian ways of life. Prior to the arrival of the French, for example, Algerians were not acquainted with the concept of private property (land). The idea of land usage for the indigenous Algerians, as for many people throughout Africa, was that of stewardship of the land through a hierarchy of rights of use. Land was not owned but instead was cared for and managed. Under the Ottoman government, there were two categories of rights to land: the rights of the governor, called the dey, and the rights of the indigenous people in their local clan-based groups. When the French imposed rights of private property, the French state took the land that had belonged to the previous governor and divided it among the colons. From 1847 to 1863 more land was made available “to own” to attract would-be settlers from France and other Europeans nations.

The consequences of these actions were the destruction of a system of land usage by making land a commodity and the opening up of all Muslim lands for sale. Thus, the colons tried to buy the land; if that did not work, many seized it. The government also seized the lands of Islamic religious institutions such as mosques and schools to be divided and offered for sale in the marketplace. Europeans were able to increase their landholdings to millions of acres from various sources. In addition to the laws governing private-property ownership, the government devised a program by which it destroyed the power of the indigenous leaders and thus broke down the clan-based society. These measures removed the safety net used during times of crisis. For example, during lean years, when harvests had been poor, the people would receive free grain that had been collected by their leaders as taxes. The religious institutions, too, had been rendered impotent and were unable to come to society's aid with food in times of crisis.

Muslims suffered under French rule because, by supposed right of conquest, European settlers usurped all the best land for their farms. As Christians, the Europeans saw Muslims as the enemy, and Muslim resistance incurred more loss of their fertile land. During the forty years prior to the Franco-Prussian War, the French government dismantled Muslim economic and political practices and indoctrinated Algerian Muslims into what the French considered to be the modern world, with European-style culture, infrastructure, economics, education, and government institutions. Consequently, the Muslim Algerian world became unrecognizable as Algerians lost rights and their ability to provide for themselves in times of crisis. Eventually, Algeria became a sharply divided colony of rural versus urban, Muslim versus Christian, citizens versus subjects, and pro-French versus anti-French. What the French government began as a shift of cultural allegiance the colons used to rend the fabric of Muslim society.

One plan of the French government was to assimilate the indigenous people of the region by making them equal to the colons and giving them the hope of French citizenship But the colons resisted the government's attempt at assimilation of the indigenous people. They lobbied the government, only to win their point, if only by default, when the French lost to Prussia in 1870. Since the French government was now preoccupied with the terms of its loss to Prussia, colons were in charge of the colony, and they intended to make as much profit as they could by subjugating the indigenous population to France's economic needs. The Europeans had no respect for the Muslim indigenous people because they did not understand their lifestyle and because, as Christians, they believed that Muslims were infidels. While the colons enjoyed full rights as citizens, the indigenous people were “subjects” for whom the colons invented various forms of servitude. Muslims could be detained without due process, were charged a land-use tax, and were selected to perform forced labor (the corvé). In 1881 the French government enacted the Native Code (Code de l'indigénat) legalizing these oppressive measures. But the French government became concerned about the political loyalties of the large number of non-French residents. In 1889 it passed a law allowing the mass naturalization of all those who had not been born in France and thus conferred on them French citizenship. By 1900 Algeria changed from a French province to three departments (administrative subdivisions, somewhat analogous to U.S. states), with colons electing representatives to the French National Assembly. Algeria was France; France was Algeria.

Because French policies and programs divested the individual Muslim Algerian of land and social commitment, it was not difficult for Algerians to leave. As Muslim Algerians were forced from their lands, they became destitute and looked for jobs in France. When a 1908 law drafted Muslims into the army, many left Algeria for the lands of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, such as Turkey, Tripolitania, and Syria. After World War I, Muslim men left Algeria for France to fill the labor demands of various metropolitan centers. The French government became the state placement agency acting as recruiter and importer of Algerian labor in post–World War I France. This was a problem for the colons because they saw their pool of free labor exit the country.

Algerian nationalism began as early as 1926 in France when educated Muslims and Muslim workers organized to begin their quest for autonomy from French rule. In the wake of World War I, some moderate organizations fought for equal rights within the French Empire, while others had members who adapted and assimilated and who hoped to become more than second-class citizens. Algerians studying and working in France followed Ahmed Messali Hadj, who in 1926 organized the first group to protest for Algerian autonomy, the Star of North Africa (Étoile Nord-Africain). The Star of North Africa advocated for freedom of the press, freedom of association, and a parliament elected by universal suffrage. In 1937 Hadj founded the Algerian People's Party (Parti de peuple algérien) to organize Algerians in France and Algeria to orchestrate better political positions for Algerian independence. This party was banned by the government in 1939, although it went underground with the support of students and workers.

During World War II, under Vichy rule—referring to the rule of the French district unoccupied by the Nazis during World War II, the seat of the French collaborationist government—Algerian Muslims in France, supported by students and workers, continued to agitate for independence. In 1944 a moderate named Ferhat Abbas, who had appealed for equal rights for Algerian Muslims, joined Ahmed Messali Hadj to form the Friends of the Manifesto and of Liberty (Amis du manifeste et de la liberté, or AML), an organization that called for Algeria to be a republic federated with France. Social unrest in Algeria grew because a failed wheat harvest (1944–1945) and shortages of other staples caused by the war created desperation among the indigenous people. On May 1, 1945, the AML organized demonstrations in twenty-one towns across the country demanding independence for Algeria. Then on May 8, 1945—V-E Day (also known as Victory in Europe Day, the day when the Allies formally accepted the surrender of Nazi Germany)—nationalist leaders led a nonviolent demonstration that the colons turned into violent reprisals, and violence became the direct action to wrest independence from France. In 1946 the Friends of the Manifesto and of Liberty became the Democratic Union of the Algerian Manifesto (Union démocratique du manifeste algérian), which advocated for a fully autonomous Algeria. This group became a political party, the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties (mouvement pour le triomphe des libertés démocratique, or MTLD), which had a platform of Algerian autonomy; it won five of fifteen seats in the 1946 parliamentary elections for the French National Assembly.

In 1947 the French National Assembly appeared to side with the Muslim constituency over the colons in Algeria by approving more democratic representation at the local level, Arabic as an official language with French, and an Algerian assembly whose elections would be in 1948. The colons were unnerved by the increasing possibility of future power sharing with the Muslims and by the MTLD success at the polls in the 1947 Algerian municipal election. Thus the colons conspired to make sure they would be successful in the 1948 Algerian assembly elections by initiating a more intense program of Muslim political repression. These experiences in 1947 spawned the creation of an underground guerrilla movement, the Special Organization (Organisation spéciale, or OS) by Hocine Aït Ahmed, who conducted terrorist acts against government facilities. In the 1948 elections for the French National Assembly, the MTLD lost all of the five seats it had previously won to election-rigging tactics by the colons; after 1948 all elections were deemed to have been “rigged.” By 1950 the MTLD suffered from police repression.

Years of a separate-but-not-equal Algeria, international promises of self-determination after both World War I and World War II, and failed attempts at using nonviolent tactics to work within the system spawned a desire for more direct action. On November 1, 1954, the Algerian government in exile and the FLN issued a proclamation declaring Algeria's separation from France. Later, in September 1958, exiled indigenous Algerian leaders met in Cairo and created the Provisional Government of Algeria, claiming to speak for the Algerian people as their government in exile.