French Colonial Fascism: the Extreme Right in Algeria, 1919–1939

Samuel Kalman’s French Colonial Fascism is an important book that will be required reading not only for scholars and students of interwar fascism but also for researchers of the later war in Algeria. It investigates the political culture of the European settler population, which believed itself to be caught between the perceived threat of an independent Algeria under the leadership of Arab Muslim hordes, Jews, communists and socialists and a metropolitan government whose Republican democracy the colons rejected. The response of the settlers came in the form of a ‘colonial’ fascism that prioritized anti-Semitism, Latin racial hegemony and algérianité. For the Europeans in Algeria, Algérie française did not mean the inclusion of the territory within some Republican ‘Greater France’ but rather ‘...the domination of European settlers over Algerians and Jews, backed by an authoritarian regime that virulently opposed the Left while exclusively defending local economic and cultural interests.’

During the 1920s, this colonial brand of fascism was best exploited by mayor of Oran-Ville and leader of the Unions latines (UL) Jules Molle. Molle urged the settlers to throw off the tutelage of their French Republican masters and establish an authoritarian regime based on the superiority of Latin blood and civilization. Kalman makes a compelling case for the genuine specificity of this type of fascism, which focused on the colonial political reality rather than merely transposing fascist tropes from Europe. Indeed, political groups ignored local concerns at their peril. The monarchist Action française and the nationalist Jeunesses patriotes, both of whom enjoyed moderate success on the French mainland, found their efforts to transfer their metropolitan campaigns against the Republic to Algeria hobbled by an ignorance of colonial concerns.

Following Molle’s death in 1931, the mantle of the extreme right was taken up by the Croix de feu (CF), a violent and anti-Republican paramilitary league that enjoyed huge success in France during the 1930s. Like its metropolitan counterpart, the CF provided an array of activities for its members, from the activists of the Volontaires nationaux to the social services directed by female recruits. Local factors in each of the three departments influenced CF activity. In the less radical department of Alger, the movement behaved much like a conventional right-wing party and it rejected racial bias. However, in Constantine, where locals were thought to be more amenable to authoritarianism, the CF tended towards fascism. In Oran, anti-semitism dominated the CF’s appeal to the local population and the section engaged in rabble-rousing and physical violence against Jewish inhabitants. Meanwhile the CF was particularly effective in courting the Arab vote for its candidates in municipal elections. However, its attachment to the racist precepts of the French ‘civilizing mission’, and its inherent preference for assimilation, prompted stinging criticism from the Algerian nationalist groups such as the Etoile nord africaine. Yet the CF’s attitude to the Empire also drew the opprobrium of its own members who preferred algérianité to assimilation. Kalman’s study thus underlines the non-essentialist nature of the CF, and in doing so provides a lesson for historians of the metropolitan movement on how fascist groups operate in context.

Following the rise of the Popular Front in France, the dormant Algerian left revived. Its seeming promise of equality and partnership in the governance of Algeria appealed to the non-European population and bolstered the Muslim nationalist movement. To combat the revivified left and indigenous separatism, Europeans once again turned to algérianité and colonial fascism. Abbé Gabriel Lambert’s Rassemblement national d’action social (RNAS) was particularly influential across the three departments. Lambert founded the RNAS in June 1936 to unite the diverse factions of the extreme right against the enemies of Algérie française. Its combination of authoritarianism, elitism, militarism, anti-Republicanism and its sympathy with fascism in Italy and Spain won broad support from the settler population. Such was the appeal of Lambert’s brand of colonial fascism that the Algerian sections of the Parti social français (the successor to the CF) and the Parti populaire français adopted a similar position. While the violent anti-semitism of the PSF and the PPF’s North African sections ran contrary to each movement’s strategy in metropolitan France, party leaders were prepared to overlook such excesses given their evident appeal to the colons. Kalman’s study therefore reveals the violence present on the periphery of these movements and the concomitant tension with the centre; some PSFs even accused their leader, Colonel de La Rocque, of consorting with Jews. By 1940 the ground had been well prepared for the implantation of the Vichy regime in Algeria and many settlers welcomed Marshal Pétain’s right-wing exclusionary National Revolution.

The importance of this book reaches beyond its examination of extreme right-wing politics in interwar Algeria. It exposes the historical hinterland of not only the Vichy regime in North Africa but also that of the European response to Algerian nationalism during the 1950s and 1960s. For some pieds noirs, such as those who joined the violent Organization d’armée secrète, algérianité had evidently not lost its appeal.