6 - The War as seen from Algeria by the Settlers

Summary

Taking a further step away from narratives that turn around military personnel (Chapters 1–3), Resistants-turned-OAS abettors (Chapter 4), conscientious objectors (Chapter 4) or female civilians (Chapter 5), this chapter focuses instead on two late-colonial films that draw poignancy from the concerns and desires of European settlers: Les Oliviers de la justice/The Olive Trees of Justice (1962), by Jean Pélégri and James Blue, and Au biseau des baisers/Slanted Kisses (1962), by Guy Gilles and Marc Sator. Forged after the conquest of Algeria in 1830, the settlers (later labelled les pieds-noirs), were a socially and religiously diverse community, whose geographical bastion extended largely throughout the northern coastal towns: Oran, Bône, Philippeville, Algiers (which features in both films), and the rural vistas of the Mitidja, as featured in Les Oliviers de la justice. Out of a total population of 10 million, just under a million were settlers, yet, irrespective of their origins, they possessed enormous privileges systematically denied to indigenous Algerians, including: economic privileges fostered by the expropriation of land, often exploited to produce wine, even though it was anathema to the largely Muslim population; educational privileges; legal privileges (the right to vote); and French citizenship, which was extended to those originating from Italy and Spain. In 1961, Frantz Fanon famously attested to how these privileges had manifested themselves in the ‘brightly lit streets of the settler’s town: well-fed, easy-going; its belly always full of good things’ ([1961] 1963: 39).

Privileges so ingrained in the fabric of everyday colonial life that they seemed natural and immutable were, unsurprisingly, privileges that turned the settlers into what was increasingly considered a legitimate target of nationalist violence during decolonisation, giving rise to a series of atrocities of escalating ferocity. In 1945, armed men associated with the Algerian nationalist politician Messali Hadj killed approximately a hundred European settlers in the north-eastern town of Sétif, after having been prevented from unfurling banners during a pro-independence demonstration, catalysing, in turn, a vertiginous torrent of retributive attacks against indigenous Algerians, perpetrated by settler vigilantes and the French army. In 1955, two FLN leaders residing in Constantine launched a policy of total war on all colonial inhabitants (military and civil), leading to what is now known as the Philippeville Massacre, during which seventy-one European settlers were slaughtered.