We hear in Abbas’s writing the echoes of the Muslim notables who spoke at the centenary celebrations in Sidi Ferrush—“raise us yet higher, raise us up to your level.” Yet Abbas was more assertive in his demands. Abbas claimed that the Algerians had earned their rights of citizenship by virtue of their wartime service. France had placed a heavy burden on indigenous Algerians since conscription was first introduced to Algeria in 1913. Over 200,000 Algerian Muslims had been drafted during the First World War, and many never returned. Estimates of Algerian war dead range from 25,000 to 80,000. Many more were wounded.³⁶ Even after the war, Algerians were conscripted into the French army. Abbas maintained that he had earned his rights of citizenship through his own military service in 1922. France did not distinguish between soldiers by race and religion in military service, he argued, and should not do so in law. “We are Muslims and we are French,” he continued. “We are indigenous and we are French. Here in Algeria there are Europeans and indigenous people, but there are only Frenchmen.”³⁷ Yet native Algerians had been reduced to an underclass in their own country through colonial society and its laws. “What more can be said about the daily insults which the indigenous man suffers in his native land, in the street, in the cafйs, in the slightest transaction of daily life? The barber closes the door in his face, the hotel refuses him a room.”³⁸

Abbas was particularly critical of French naturalization laws that required Muslims to renounce their personal status. “Why should an Algerian seek to be naturalized? To be French? He already is, as his country has been declared French soil.” Writing of Algeria’s French rulers, he asked rhetorically: “Do they wish to raise this country to a higher level or do they wish to divide and rule?? For Abbas, the answer was self-evident. ?What is needed is for the same law to be applied to all, if truly we wish to guide Muslim Algeria towards a higher civilization.?³⁹ Even so, he clung to the cultural rights of Algerians to preserve their religion and to be taught in their own language—Arabic—without prejudice to their rights as French citizens. Abbas was not the first to set out a claim for full citizenship rights; the Young Algeria movement had pressed for such reforms since the early 1900s. Nor did he speak for all Algerians. The Islamic reform movement, headed by Abd al-Hamid Ben Badis (1889–1940), rejected Abbas’s idea of assimilation out of hand. The differences between Abbas and Ben Badis were captured in an exchange of editorials in 1936, when Ferhat Abbas famously declared there was no such thing as the Algerian nation: “Algeria as a fatherland is a myth. I have not discovered it. I have questioned history; I have questioned the dead and the living; I have visited the cemeteries: no one has spoken to me of it.” Algeria, he claimed, was France and Algerians were French. Indeed, carried away by his rhetoric, Abbas went on to say that he was France (“La France, c’est moi”).⁴⁰ “No, sirs!” Ben Badis retorted:We have scrutinized the pages of history and the current situation. And we have found the Algerian Muslim nation.... This community has its history, full of great feats. It has its religious and linguistic unity. It has its own culture, its habits and customs, good or bad, like all nations. Moreover, this Algerian and Muslim nation is not France. It would not know how to be France. It does not want to become France. It could not become France, even if it wanted to.

Yet Ben Badis made no more claim for Algerian independence than did Abbas. Whereas Abbas sought equality with the French, Ben Badis wanted Algerian Muslims to be “separate but equal” to the French. He asked the French to grant indigenous Algerians liberty, justice, and equality while respecting their distinctive culture, their Arabic language, and Muslim faith. Ben Badis concluded his essay by insisting that “this Algerian Muslim father land is a faithful friend to France.”⁴¹ The differences between the secular assimilationists and the Islamic reformers were hardly insurmountable. Ironically, the only activists to demand full independence for Algeria came from the expatriate worker community in France. A handful of politically engaged men in the 100,000-strong Algerian workforce in France came to nationalism through the Communist Party. Their leader was Messali Hadj (1898–1974), who founded the workers’ nationalist association L’Йtoile Nord-Africaine (the North African Star) in 1926. Messali presented the new organization’s program to the Congress of the League against Colonial Oppression in Brussels in February 1927. Among the points called for were independence for Algeria, the withdrawal of the French occupation forces, the formation of a national army, confiscation of settler plantations and a redistribution of farmlands to native farmers, and a host of social and economic reforms for independent Algeria.⁴² The association’s demands were as just as they were unrealistic at that time, and they attracted little support among Algerians at home or abroad. Of all the Algerian political activists in the 1930s, Ferhat Abbas was the most influential. His writings were widely read by educated Algerians and French policy makers alike. “I read your book with great interest,” Maurice Violette, former governor-general of Algeria, wrote to Abbas in 1931. “I would not have written it in the same way. I regret certain pages in it, but faced with some veritable provocations . . . I recognize that it is difficult for you to retain your composure and I understand.” The tone was condescending, but Abbas clearly did not mind (he used the quote as encomia on the dust jacket of his book). He knew that, through Violette, his arguments would be discussed in the upper echelons of the French administration. Maurice Violette had grown yet more influential since the end of his term as governor-general of Algeria and his return to Paris. He was named to the French Senate, where in March 1935 he opened a debate on granting citizenship rights to a select group of Algerians on the basis of their assimilation of French culture and values—referred to in French as йvoluйs. The expression, meaning “more highly evolved,” was pure Social Darwinism that conceived of Algerians as advancing from a lower to a higher state of civilization as they shed Arab culture in favor of “superior” French values. This “civilizing mission” was one of the principles by which the French justified their imperial project. While playing to the ideals of the “civilizing mission,” Violette argued before the Senate that the enfranchisement of progressive Muslim Algerians would forestall nationalism and encourage assimilation. The French colonial lobby (comprising settler representatives and their supporters in Paris) was too powerful, however, and defeated Violette’s 1935 motion. They feared that granting full citizenship rights even to a select group of Algerians would only lead to a broader enfranchisement that ultimately would undermine European dominance in Algeria. Violette found a more sympathetic hearing for his controversial views in 1936, when he was appointed to a cabinet post in the socialist Popular Front government led by Lйon Blum. The Popular Front spoke of a whole new relationship between France and its colonies, and Algeria’s political elites knew Violette to be an ally to their cause. The Islamic reformers led by Ben Badis decided to unite forces with Ferhat Abbas’s assimilationists. They met in the first Algerian Muslim Congress in Algiers in June 1936 and endorsed Maurice Violette’s proposal to grant full citizenship to a select group of Francophile Algerians without requiring them to renounce their Muslim civil status. The Congress then dispatched a delegation to Paris to present its political demands to the government. The delegates were received by Blum and Violette, who promised to satisfy many of the Algerians’ demands. By the end of December 1936, Blum and Violette had drafted a bill on Algeria and submitted it to parliament. The Blum-Violette bill, they believed, was enlightened legislation that would secure France’s position in Algeria once and for all, through the cooperation of the country’s political and economic elites. “It is truly impossible, after so many solemn promises made by so many governments, notably at the time of the centenary (1930), that we should not realize the urgency of this necessary task of assimilation that affects in the highest degree the moral health of Algeria,” they wrote in the bill’s preamble.⁴³ The bill set out the categories of indigenous Algerian Muslims who would be eligible for citizenship. Nine different groups were defined, beginning with those Algerians who served as officers or career master-sergeants in the French army or were soldiers decorated for valor. Those Algerians who had attained diplomas of higher education from either French or Muslim academies, as well as civil servants recruited through competitive examination, were also eligible. Natives elected to chambers of commerce or agriculture, or to administrative positions in the financial, municipal, or regional councils, were named, as were notables holding traditional office such as aghas and qa’ids. Finally, any Algerian awarded such French honors as the Legion of Honor or the Labor Medal would be eligible for full enfranchisement. In all, no more than 25,000 Algerians from a total population of 4.5 million would have qualified for citizenship under the terms of the Blum-Violette bill. Given the bill’s very limited aims, and its authors’ clear intention to perpetuate French rule in Algeria, it is amazing how much opposition the Blum-Violette reforms encountered. Once again, the colonial lobby went into action to ensure the bill was not even debated, let alone put to a vote. The colonial press savaged the bill as opening the flood gates to the Islamization of France and the end of French Algeria. The debates in the French Chamber set off disturbances in the streets of Algeria between proponents and opponents of the bill. Indigenous Algerians took to the streets in mass protests and demonstrations to assert their demands for civil rights. The unrest in Algeria only reinforced the arguments of the conservatives and the colonial lobby, who claimed that the troubles were caused by the disastrous policies of the Blum government. French mayors in Algeria went on strike in protest, as did elected Algerian politicians, as the bill passed from one parliamentary committee to another without ever coming to the floor for debate. In the end, the colonial lobby prevailed. The Blum-Violette bill was abandoned in 1938 without ever having been discussed in the Chamber of the National Assembly. The centenary was over. In spite of the many solemn promises made, the French government would not concede the urgent task of assimilation. It is hard to capture the depth of disillusionment that set in among Algerian elites, whose expectations had been raised to new heights only to be dashed by the failure of the Blum government to deliver on its promises. Henceforth, the dominant trend in the Algerian opposition movement would be nationalist. France would not get another century in Algeria. Within sixteen years the two countries would be at war.