Even though French colonial authorities from Morocco to Syria spent much of the 1920s suppressing rebellions, they at least had a party in Algeria to look forward to. A century had passed since the dey of Algiers sealed the fate of his country with an ill-tempered swish of the fly whisk in 1827. Since landing their first troops at Sidi Ferrush in June 1830, the French had ousted the Ottomans, defeated Amir Abd al-Qadir, and suppressed a number of major rebellions—the last in 1871–1872. By the early twentieth century they had completed their conquest from the Mediterranean to the Sahara. By the 1920s, over 800,000 settlers had moved from France to Algeria.³¹ The French in Algeria were no longer on foreign soil; since 1848, when Algeria had been declared French territory, the three provinces of Oran, Algiers, and Constantine had been converted into dйpartements of France, with elected representatives in the French Chamber in Paris. The “Algerian” deputies—or more precisely, the French Algerian deputies, as native Algerians were allowed neither to vote nor to stand for election to national office—enjoyed disproportionate influence in the Chamber and worked as a bloc to protect settler interests. With the approach of the 1930 centenary, the French Algerians took the opportunity to impress on both the Metropolitan French and the native Algerians the triumph and permanence of the French presence in Algeria. The planning for the celebrations began years in advance. The first step was taken by the governor-general of Algeria in December 1923, when he decreed the creation of a commission “to prepare a program celebrating the centenary of the French seizure of Algiers in 1830.” The French parliament authorized a budget of 40 million francs and the convening of a commission charged with the task of organizing events. In the end, the celebrations cost more than 100 million francs. Algeria was transformed for the year. Artists were commissioned to create monuments celebrating major milestones in the history of French Algeria, to decorate the towns and countryside. Museums were built in the great cities—Algiers, Constantine, Oran. Public works were constructed across the country—schools, hospitals, orphanages and poor houses, agricultural colleges and professional schools, and the world’s most powerful broadcasting station to ensure news of the centenary events reached across all Algeria. A major exposition was organized in the western coastal city of Oran, with all the fanfare of a world’s fair. Well over fifty international conferences and congresses were held on virtually every subject under the sun. Sporting events, trans-Saharan auto rallies, and yacht races marked the calendar. Cities were lit at night, with prominent buildings outlined in strands of electric lights and exquisite firework displays. The symbolism of the centenary was best captured in the monuments commissioned to mark the event. In Boufarik, a few miles south of Algiers, a massive stone plinth 45 meters wide and 9 meters high (about 148 feet by 30 feet) celebrated “the glory of the colonising genius of France.” The sculptor Henri Bouchard (who designed the Protestant Reformation memorial in Geneva) placed at the center of the monument a cluster of French ?pioneering heroes of civilization? headed by General Bugeaud and General de Lamorici?re, the military commanders who scorched Algeria to defeat the Amir Abd al-Qadir in the 1830s and 1840s. A group of French nobles, mayors, and ?model settlers? stood in proud ranks behind the military men. To the rear, looking over the shoulders of the French men in uniforms and suits, the sculptor included a few Arabs in national dress, representatives of ?the first natives whose active fidelity made the task [of French colonization] possible.?³² The French even managed to insinuate a sympathetic Algerian presence into the 1830 military memorial. The French press had heatedly debated whether the monument proposed to celebrate the landing of French troops at Sidi Ferrush on June 14, 1830, would “upset the natives.” “All those who know Algeria,” wrote Mercier, the official historian of the centenary, “and who live in daily contact with its Arabo-Berber population, had no apprehensions in this respect.” The true feelings of all native Algerians, Mercier insisted, were captured in the remarks of the tribal leader Bouaziz Ben Gana, who claimed: “If the natives had known the French in 1830, they would have loaded their rifles with flowers rather than bullets to greet them.” These sentiments were captured in the inscription on the 10-meter-high monument, picturing a cockaded Marianne gazing down into the eyes of a dutiful Arab son: “One hundred years later, the French Republic having given to this country prosperity, civilization and justice, a grateful Algeria pays homage of undying attachment to the Motherland.” It was as though the French wished to cast the Algerians in a supporting role in the colonization of their own country.³³ The centenary celebrations reached their climax at Sidi Ferrush on June 14, 1930. Here again, the organizers sought to present colonial Algeria as a Franco-Arab joint production, officially known as “the celebration of the union of the French and indigenous populations.” A massive crowd gathered around the new monument of Sidi Ferrush to watch the military parade and hear the speeches. The governor-general headed a phalanx of colonial officials. The air force made a flyover and dropped flower petals on the crowd surrounding the memorial. Torch bearers, following Olympic example, set off running from the monument to Algiers, some 30 kilometers (about 19 miles) to the east. The speeches given by the French were predictably triumphalist, but far more astonishing were the comments that came from the Algerian dignitaries who took to the podium. Hadj Hamou, a religious scholar speaking on behalf of the teaching staff of the mosque schools, expressed his gratitude for the freedom he enjoyed to teach Islam without interference. All mosque-goers, he claimed, followed the lead of their imams in “the common love of the secular holy French Republic” (la sainte Rйpublique Franзaise laпque)—a wonderful oxymoron. M. Belhadj, speaking on behalf of Muslim intellectuals, remarked on the day’s celebration of “the profound union of the French and indigenous people? who had transformed into ?a single, unique people, living in peace and concord, in the shadow of the same flag and in the same love of the Mother land.? M. Ourabah, a leading Arab notable, supplicated: ?Instruct us, raise us yet higher, raise us up to your level. And let us join in one voice as in one heart to cry: Long live France, ever greater! Long live Algeria, ever French!?³⁴ In an age of burgeoning Arab nationalism, Algeria seemed to be embracing imperialism. Yet the Algerians were not satisfied with their lot. Many of the educated elite recognized they could not beat the French, and so they sought to join them—with the full rights of French citizenship that, down to 1930, had been denied them. Accepting French rule as inevitable, these Algerians opted for a civil rights movement instead of nationalism. Their spokesman was a student of pharmacology at the University of Algiers named Ferhat Abbas. Ferhat Abbas (1899–1985) was born in a small town in eastern Algeria to a family of provincial administrators and landholders. He was trained in French schools and came to share in French values. What he wanted more than anything else was to enjoy the full privileges of any Frenchman. Yet the laws of France put severe limits on the legal and political rights of Algerian Muslims. These laws divided Algeria geographically, between areas with relatively high European populations, where French common law applied; rural communes with European minorities, where a combination of military and civilian rule applied; and Arab territories, which were under full military administration. The laws also clearly distinguished between Europeans and Muslims in Algeria. In 1865 the French Senate decreed that all Algerian Muslims were French subjects. Although they could serve in the military and civil service, they were not actually citizens of France. To be considered for French citizenship, native Algerians would have to renounce their Muslim civil status and agree to live under French personal status laws. Given that marriage, family law, and the distribution of inheritance is all precisely regulated in Islamic law, this was tantamount to asking Muslims to abandon their faith. Not surprisingly, only 2,000 Algerians applied for citizenship during the eighty years in which this law remained in force. Unprotected under French law, Algerian Muslims actually came under a host of discriminatory legislation known as the Code de l’Indigйnat [“Indigenous People’s Law Code”]. Like the Jim Crow laws passed after the American Civil War to keep African Americans in a segregated, subordinate status, the code, drafted in the aftermath of the last major Algerian revolt against French rule in 1871, allowed native Algerians to be prosecuted for acts that Europeans could legally perform, such as criticizing the French Republic and its officials. Most of the crimes set out in the code were petty, and the punishments were light—no more than five days in prison, or a fine of fifteen francs. Yet the code was applied all the more regularly because its consequences were so trivial. And, more than any other legal distinction, the code reminded Algerians they were second-class citizens in their own land. To someone like Ferhat Abbas, who had been schooled in French republican thinking, the indignity was unbearable. Abbas responded to the centenary celebrations with a sharply critical essay, written in French, that captured the disillusionment of a young Algerian after a century of French rule. Entitled The Young Algerian: From Colony to Province, Abbas’s book was an eloquent plea to replace French colonialism in Algeria with the more enlightened aspects of French republicanism. The century which has passed away was the century of tears and blood. And it is we the indigenous people in particular who have cried and bled.... The celebrations of the Centenary were but a clumsy reminder of a painful past, an exhibition of the wealth of some before the poverty of others.... Understanding between the races will remain but empty words if the new century does not place the different elements of this country on the same social rank and give the weak the means to raise their standing.³⁵