Forever “Fifty-Percenters”: The Racialization of Spanish Ethnicity in French Algerian Literary Colonial Hierarchies and Pied-Noir Memory, 1889-1974

During the summer of 1962, over one-million Euro-Algerian “repatriates” immigrated to France – a country to which many had no familial ties and even fewer had ever visited.[1] When these Français d’Algérie (French of Algeria) or pieds-noirs (black-feet), as the repatriates were later labeled, first began arriving in southern France at the end of the war, many French governmental officials did not anticipate that their relocation would be permanent. Quickly, however, it became apparent that the pieds-noirs would not be returning to an independent Algeria. The French government’s miscalculation of the support needed for a successful repatriation program was further problematized by an evolving discourse in the metropole which characterized the pieds-noirs as not French, based on a racialized cultural essentialism.[2] Indeed, as stated by Le Figaro in 1961, "the Europeans of Algeria [...] have become increasingly independent of French tutelage, and having adapted to the environment, or better yet, to the soil, have become a new race."[3] The former settlers’ assumed penchant for violence, irrationality, and hyper-masculinity had made them particularly susceptible to extremist fascist and racist politics threatening to the new Fifth Republic.[4] In short, many officials apparently did not consider the endeavor of making Algeria French a fait accompli in 1962 and, consequently, they did not see the pieds-noirs arriving in the metropole as returning to their proper homeland because doing so would have meant acknowledging the fragmented, unstable, and often unmarked category of whiteness upon which France’s ideas of citizenship and “colorblind” racialized social system depended.[5] By holding the repatriated Euro-Algerian settlers at the margins of whiteness following their repatriation – a condition that would change over the 1970s as immigrants from former colonial possessions became the primary scapegoats for the ills of French society – the French state and metropolitan population in the 1960s did not have to fracture the category of ‘colonizer’ which so conveniently deflected the responsibility of French colonialism primarily onto these “Algerian invaders.”[6]

Furthermore, part of the problem of incorporating these pieds-noirs into French society was not only that they were not French in 1962, but that a large portion had never been French, either in their own eyes or those of the state. Concerns over the quality of the settlers’ Frenchness had spanned the 132 years of French colonialism in Algeria, and these apprehensions continued to inform metropolitan discourse about the pieds-noirs into the 1960s and 1970s. In a territory where initially half of the European-descended population came from other Mediterranean countries, the most salient feature of colonial-era debates was anxiety about the permanence of the settlers’ ethnic (i.e. non-French) culture, and the politicization of their supposedly “natural” ethnic identities, which could disrupt French hegemony in Algeria. Thus, to limit the potential influence of non-French Europeans, colonial officials, metropolitan French commentators, and Français d’origine (the French from France) racialized these immigrants and descendants to limit their access to economic, political, and social power. This was particularly true of the numerous Spanish immigrants and their descendants who clustered predominately in the westernmost department of Oran and Algiers, whom colonial officials insisted on calling néo-Français (new-French) after the mass naturalization of most Europeans born on French soil which began in 1889.[7] In a fin-de-siècle colonial world in which status and power depended on visible demonstrations of Frenchness – defined by whiteness and superior economic status – the recently enfranchised but largely blue-collar Spanish population found itself supposedly lacking in both categories.[8]

This essay examines representations of the Spanish of Algeria at two particular moments in time: the 1890s-1900s and the 1960s-70s. I argue that the supposed cultural and political dissimilarity between the néos and Français d’origine in Algeria that crystallized discursively in 1889 was a defining feature of intra-European racialized hierarchies both in the colony and the immediate postcolony. This analysis builds on a select body of literature which has turned its focus to the social life of the settlers and revealed that race as a category of analysis can be productively applied to the study of the Euro-Algerians.[9] Whereas the Français d’origine were undoubtedly the ruling class in Algeria, the Spanish who lived there were a “paradigm of imperfect emigration.”[10] They were imperfect because they were simultaneously the target of colonial assimilation policies, denigrated as “paper Frenchmen,” and because they were active agents who shaped the agricultural, labor, and political landscape of Algeria and responded to their own racialization by adopting at times the identity of a new masculine, regenerative “Latin” race.[11] However, colonial law enforcement, politicians, corporations, and other representatives of the French state often treated and governed the néos more like racialized colonial subjects than as full citizens. Violence, repression, and discrimination against this group was not only permissible but necessary because French colonial hegemony depended on maintaining the social hierarchies and boundaries between the ethnically diverse European settler population as well as between Euro-Algerians and indigenous Algerian populations. However, once most former settlers arrived in 1960s France, metropolitan officials and pied-noir associations alike began presenting the pieds-noirs as a single ethnoracial community, “a new race” in the words of Le Figaro. This trend obfuscated an earlier history of discrimination against the néo-Francais which has limited our understanding of pied-noir incorporation into French society and the continued salience of racialized ethnic origins and constructions of whiteness in pied-noir memory and cultural activism.[12]

Literary sources are particularly useful for illuminating the fluid and unstable French racialization of the Spanish population described above. In what follows, I will proceed in two steps. First, I will show how particular representations of the Spanish settlers as racialized immigrants incapable of becoming French emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. A series of tropes took root in this period, which would resurface as pieds-noirs tried to integrate into French society after 1962. To demonstrate the emergence of these tropes, I turn to Louis Bertrand’s Le sang des races (1899) and Auguste Robinet’s Cagayous series (c. 1900) to explore what Fatima El-Tayeb has called the “ethnicization of labor,” that is to say a process by which an ethnicized population “despite often having acquired citizenship is continued to be perceived as migrant, ‘as alien[s] from elsewhere’.”[13] This literary analysis will help illuminate why, by the time of Algerian independence, every settler was a potential Meursault, the narrator of Camus’ The Stranger, in the eyes of many metropolitan observers.[14]

Second, I will turn to two autobiographical works by the Spanish-descended author Emmanuel Roblès, the first dating from 1958 and the second published in 1974. Born in Oran in 1914, Emmanuel Roblès was one of the most influential pied-noir authors of the twentieth century and from 1973 to his death in 1995 an elected member of the Académie Goncourt. Roblès’ autobiographical texts are not exercises in restorative nostalgia, but political documents which grapple equally with the legacies of racialized colonial hierarchies and shifting French politics towards repatriates from before the end of the Algerian War through the mid-1970s. While the presentation of these texts along the those of Bertrand and Robinet might prompt a feeling of disconnect, here I argue that metropolitan authorities applied the racialized caricatures of the lower-class Spanish néos – already understood as not white and therefore not French thanks to the earlier works of Bertrand and Robinet – collectively to all Euro-Algerian repatriates after their flight to France. Officials did so to distance the state and “true” French people from the horrors of the Algerian War, a process which in turn shaped the type of narratives which the pieds-noirs would develop in response to their perceived “rejection.” It is my goal to pair representations of and representations by the same racialized ethnic group to highlight the continuous and ambiguous construction of a "white Frenchness" in French Algeria before and after independence that was denied to many Euro-Algerian French citizens. If, as some scholars have attested, many pieds-noirs authors remain incapable of criticizing their own complicity in colonialism after repatriation, this article seeks to contribute to such studies by exploring how and why this “amnesia” came to be.[15]

“An Imperfect Emigration”: The Spanish Peopling of Algeria and the Emergence of the Néo[16]

It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that settlers from France finally outnumbered southern European – particularly Spanish – foreigners in Algeria.[17] Economic, political, and environmental conditions pushed many Spaniards to look for alternatives to remaining in Spain in the nineteenth century. Immigration to Western Algeria throughout the nineteenth century functioned as an “escape valve” for the revolutionary explosions among the proletariat in southern Spain.[18] Higher wages for comparable working conditions in Algeria likewise made it an appealing destination for the Spanish laboring-class. The Spanish immigrant, mostly petty agriculturalists and manual laborers already familiar with the cultivation of Algeria’s key exports crops, was more likely than their French counterparts to secure employment with French corporations. The preference for Spanish laborers was so apparent that many Français d’origine eventually took to writing the Third Republic government demanding that they restrict Spanish immigration to limit competition.[19] While Spanish immigration was never explicitly restricted, the French government did ultimately attempt to limit more white-collar and professional leadership roles to French citizens, as well as restricting Spanish imports – such as literature, newspapers, and other forms of cultural exchanges – and prohibiting children from speaking Spanish in primary schools, moves which reveal the extent to which Spanish culture and politics were deemed a threat to French colonial hegemony.[20] Thus, contradictorily "the first stage of the agricultural mise en valeur” in Algeria was accomplished and maintained by Spanish labor, while the colonial government kept the Spanish population isolated from both French and Spanish society.[21]

Partially owing to demographic concerns in both Algeria and France, as well as the demands of military conscriptions, France drastically changed its citizenship laws in 1889. Whereas previously French citizenship had been based on jus sanguinis, the more liberal 26 June 1889 Naturalization Law was based on jus soli.[22] It automatically made all children born in Algeria to foreign fathers French citizens upon reaching the age of majority, greatly increasing the nominally French citizenry in Algeria.[23] Not all French politicians favored mass naturalization. Some colonial officials, such as the moderate Opportunist deputy Eugène Étienne, objected to the implementation of the law in Algeria specifically. Étienne argued that the law, by granting citizenship and to the soon-to-be dubbed néos, would effectively place all political power in their hands. He warned that these néos would “seize the communal administration and morally prepare the annexation of the department of Oran to Spain.”[24] The racialized ethnicity and origins of these superficially French citizens continued to matter more than naturalization status in the colony.[25]

Politicians and social commentators at the end of the century wrote prolifically about the dangers posed by these new citizens, and nourished xenophobic reactions in Algeria. These observers characterized the Spanish as dangerous “half-Africans” because of the “Arab blood that runs through their veins, their fanatic and brutal temperament, their indolence, [and] their zealotry.” They asked, “[S]hould we not be afraid of the actions of this race which only grows in strength in the African climate? Will the Algerian people not become more Spanish than French?”[26] Much of the racialized language used to describe the Spanish mirrored the language used to describe – and draw specious distinctions between – the Arab and Amazigh populations, such as discourses of religious “fanaticalness” applied both towards Catholicism and Islam.[27] However, unlike the indigenous Algerian populations, the néos became a powerful voting bloc in local politics. They used this influence not, however, to deliver Oran to Spain but to fuel xenophobic and antisemitic politics.

Ironically, as Sarah Stein and others have shown, efforts to assimilate the various disparate elements of Algerian society, including the northern Algerian Jewish population in 1870 and the European-descended populations in 1889, had the effect of accentuating and hardening differences between ethnic groups.[28] Although politically and economically the Jewish and néo population shared many similarities, antisemitic politicians achieved great electorial success through their presentation of the Jewish population of Algeria as the direct economic and political competitors of the néos over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The result was a polarized political culture in which “French citizens in Algeria had very little in common except their official status and the fact of living in a French territory.”[29] The néos entered the electoral body at a moment of growing insecurity in 1890s colonial Algeria, fueled by economic depression, droughts, famines and plagues, a downturn in the wine industry, and the tumult of the Dreyfus affair. Amid this uncertainty, French Algeria experienced a violent wave of antisemitism led in part by certain néos that only further revealed to French republican authorities the need to control this particular “European” element of its citizenry. It is at this fraught moment that our exploration of the interplay between the racialization and politicization of Spanish-descended settlers begins.

“Fascinating Spectacle of a Nascent People”: Le sang des races (1899) and Cagayous (c. 1900)[30]

Between 1894 and 1920, a picaresque working-class trickster known as Cagayous appeared in some fifteen hundred Algerian and French cartoons, serials, and dime novels. In his introduction to the 1931 publication of the best-selected works of Auguste Robinet’s Cagayous series for the centennial celebration of France’s conquest of Algeria, French author and poet Gabriel Audisio pushed back against the traditional characterization of Cagayous as the “biggest thug of Algiers.”[31] Audisio insisted that Cagayous was the “living incarnation of the plebian néo-Français of Algeria,” and the epitome of the “sang des races” (blood of the races).[32] Consequentially, he maintained that the French public could augment their knowledge about the Euro-Algerian settler population by studying Cagayous.[33] Audisio assured his audience that within the series they would discover the “real” settler culture, which he described in an affectionate if albeit condescending tone as “typical of the individual, of the race, of the country.”[34]

But did this “Algerian race” of European descent exist and, if so, what were its characteristics? Many commentators on French Algeria from the conquest onwards certainly asserted that such a race was in the making. As much excellent scholarship has shown, French military officers, colonial administrators, ethnographers and anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and a variety of authors all helped to develop the notion of a “Latin” North Africa to rationalize settler colonialism in Algeria.[35] This supposed new race of settlers was hard-working, passionate, and strong but also impulsive, violent, and lacking intellectually; this stereotype was, needless to say, constructed through the complete erasure of local Muslim Algerians.[36] This complex combination of valorizing and denigrating qualities attests to the ambivalent nature of the colonial racialized hierarchy. For at the same time, Spanish immigrants and néos could be viewed as a rejuvenating life force injecting vigor into the now "decadent French race," while also feared as the products of a failed Spanish empire who could be a dangerous infection in French colonial society.[37] Two authors played a key role: Louis Bertrand and August Robinet. Bertrand introduced the French metropolitan public to this new “race” through such high-brow works as Le sang des races while Robinet claimed to faithfully represent the settlers through low-brow popular publications such as his Cagayous series mentioned above.[38]

Yet if extant historiography has revealed how Bertrand and Robinet’s discursive erasure of the indigenous Algerian populations rendered pre-colonial Algeria a literary terra nullius, thus legitimating France’s claim to the region, previous scholars have perhaps been too hasty in amalgamating the heterogeneous settler population under the umbrella term of “colonizer.”[39] Indeed, to limit analysis of these texts to the question of European superiority versus Arab and Amazigh inferiority runs the risk of reproducing binary oppositions and missing the “politics of difference” among settlers, which in turn influenced how different groups of settlers treated and hierarchized the colonized populations intentionally beneath themselves.[40] Textual analysis reveals that Bertrand’s and Robinet’s works were not in fact homogenizing representations of a new “settler race,” but rather depictions of a specific economic and ethnic social group – the poor, working-class Spanish immigrants of the Bab-el-Oued district in Algiers. Together these literary works, presented to metropolitan audiences and Français d’origine, those most likely to be literate at the time to consume said material, as quasi-ethnographic works about an imagined, distinct “race,” helped establish the foundations of the racialization of the settler population, regionally coded as Spanish immigrants and descendants, and marked this population as clearly external to the “real” French population.

Heavily influenced by nineteenth-century racial thinkers, such as Arthur de Gobineau and Maurice Barrès, Louis Bertrand (1866-1941) arrived in Algeria in 1891 seeking an antidote to French degeneration. According to Bertrand’s theories of rebarbarization, only through proximity to people like the néos, who were simple, violent, and insular, would France achieve rejuvenation.[41] Fittingly, French rebarbarization would be achieved via settler colonialism and blood-mixing - the incorporation of more, in his mind, virile Spanish “blood” into that of greater France. However, even though Bertrand professed the positive effects of this mixing, the qualities which he sought out in the Spanish population, that of “a wilderness to be tamed,” echoed the earlier racialized discourses used argue for the supremacy of the "noble" Kabyle over the Arab population and underscores the ambiguous nature of his racial ideology and texts.[42] For Bertrand there was not a singular Latin race taking root in French Algeria, but a plurality and hierarchy of racialized European ethnicities that were simultaneously threatening to France and worthy of a tempered celebration.

Le sang des races (1899) recounts the life of Rafael, the son of Spanish immigrants Ramon and Rosa, in 1880s Algeria, as he works as a cart driver in the Sud region. Arriving from Spain sometime in the 1860s, Ramon is “fresh off the boat” and desires to assimilate into French colonial society.[43] He wants to “imitate” the French and “do as they do.”[44] However, Ramon does not and cannot transgress cultural boundaries. The racialized hierarchy of colonial settler society prevents Ramon and Rafael from entering French space, physically, morally, and economically. Ramon cannot enter French society because his “innate” character has already marked him as a threat to the state. Ramon became moderately wealthy after the Mokrani Revolt in Kabylia in 1871.[45] Or rather, he gained money during the “insurrection" selling gunpowder to the Arab population.[46] This swift reversal of economic status was only achieved by cheating the French state. While Ramon profited financially during the revolt, the narrative quickly punishes him as he descends into drunkenness, gambling, and lasciviousness, leaving his family ultimately abandoned and destitute.

Shortly before Ramon’s premature death, Rafael begins his path to becoming a Spanish cart driver after being kicked out of an artisan apprenticeship in the French section of the city, introducing one of the first instances of the ethnic-labor preordination in the novel. At first Rosa questions why Ramon wants to secure Rafael professional training, stating “You know well that he is as block-headed as a rock: he’s of the Spanish race like us all, he’ll never learn anything.” However, the “seductive” idea that Rafael could become “almost a proper gentleman” persuaded Rosa to send Rafael out of Bab-el-Oued to try to become a leather tanner. Within days of beginning his apprenticeship, Raphael is sent back to his parents by the French instructor claiming that “owing to his block-headedness he is not capable of being anything other than a cart driver.”[47] Thus, Rosa’s belief that owing to his Spanish race, Rafael could never achieve more than becoming a cart driver, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The tension between Rafael’s devotion to his nomadic métier (trade), the demands of providing for his widowed mother of ten, and his sexual relationships drive the plot of the rest of the novel.[48] Within the narrative’s repetitive elegies to the Algerian landscape, Bertrand stresses the similarities between the Spanish and Arab mentalities, way of living, and appearances.[49] Thus, the theme of Spanish “foreignness” is central to Le sang des races. Equally central, given the néos’ subordinate role in the colonial economy, is the theme of ethnicized labor. Place of origin identifies the characters and defines for the reader their place in the colonial hierarchy (examples include Salvador the Valencian, Thérèse the Frenchwoman, and Rosa the Spaniard). Furthermore, ethnicity defines one’s profession and by extension class status (“the Spanish cart drivers,” and “the Valencian coal miners”).[50] Regardless of aspirations, the characters’ identities are circumscribed by their ethnicity.

When characters attempt to subvert their assigned place by forming social ties with people outside their ethnic circles, they are duly punished. Thérèse, a French woman who falls in love with Rafael, although she is of a higher class because of their different “blood,” ends the story heartbroken and childless.[51] Juanita, Rafael’s childhood friend has become extremely wealthy and fat after marrying a Frenchman. While this should be a shining successful example of cultural assimilation and ethnic mixing, Juanita remains childless, stating “voilà that’s what happens when you marry a Frenchman!... men who don’t have any blood.”[52] Finally, Chimo, an Italian immigrant who idolizes Rafael fares even worse. While Rafael and his friend Salvador discuss Chimo’s request that Rafael accept Chimo as an apprentice cart-driver, Salvador tells Rafael that Chimo “loves him [Rafael] like a brother.” Rafael foreshadows Chimo’s fate when he replies that "it isn't the same thing, you see, we aren't of the same blood."[53] However, after acquiescing to Chimo’s request, Chimo attempts to impress Rafael by pushing the cart drive during a storm, but gets swept away by a strong river current and dies. The world of the Spanish cart drivers is off-limits even to other non-French Europeans. Thérèse and Chimo desire to create a new ethnically blended “Algerian” world, but the boundaries and limitations of racialized difference in the text, echoing Gobineau’s race theory and mirroring actual colonial society, prevent them from achieving this goal.[54]

Bertrand’s novels about Algeria would ultimately earn him a place among the illustrious “immortals” of l’Académie française. Robinet’s Cagayous, in contrast were something much grittier. The Cagayous series (1891-1920) was the creation of the Français d’origine author Auguste Robinet (1862-1930), who published under the penname Musette. As an adult Robinet joined the colonial administration, working as the inspector of foundlings in Algiers, a position which "brought him into daily contact with the predominantly Spanish population of Bab-el-Oued.”[55] Like Bertrand, then, Robinet was a French citizen depicting the lower-class, ethnically Spanish population. However, whereas Bertrand both valorized and lamented the “barbarity” of the Spanish immigrants and néos, Robinet's portrayal is steeped in humor and irony.

Cagayous is the "everyman" of the historically working-class Spanish district of Algiers, Bab-el-Oued. While Cagayous’ antics are supposed to be comedic, his actions and opinions have been held up by literary scholars and historians as a reflection, albeit exaggerated, of the political and sociological reality among the néos of Algiers. As stated by Guy Thuillier, Cagayous exists in a “lost world” that Robinet has authentically preserved.[56] However, scholars have not fully acknowledged the fact that Robinet was a French colonial administrator depicting a foreign ethnic group to which he did not belong. David Prochaska, for example, asserts that Cagayous was a “sociologist of the street,” as he revealed to the audience the “truth” of his milieu.[57] Yet this conclusion ignores the fact that Robinet was the real ethnographer crafting Cagayous’ opinions and, as such, provides, like Bertrand, a valuable window into intra-ethnic tensions in the settler community. It is thus to Robinet that we turn to next.

Robinet’s status as a French colonial administrator should give readers pause when considering the humor that the author presents in at least two of his popular series. These two works are Cagayous antijuif (1898) and Cagayous antitout (1902). Both “comically” identified the embrace of antisemitism as one of the most important distinctions between the néos and the Français d’origine. While it is certainly true that the recently enfranchised néos contributed to the success of antisemitism in fin-de-siècle Algeria, I would like to argue that the texts do not present the néos’ antisemitic actions by themselves as humorous – in fact Robinet is partially critical of such antisemitism. Rather, the humor in the stories is framed around the néos’ extremism, ignorance, and inability to see through political propaganda. Robinet presents the néos as an easily manipulated, overly defensive mob of zealots. While I certainly agree that the reader is meant to find humor in the texts, we need to reconsider whether we are supposed to be laughing with Cagayous or rather at him.

Cagayous antijuif and Cagayous antitout map the rise and fall of political antisemitism among the néo population of Algiers at the end of the nineteenth century. The first story, published at the height of the antisemitic riots and violence in Algiers, features Cagayous’ diatribe about the “Jewish threat” and his participation in the 1898 Algiers riots led by the Italian-descended Max Régis.[58] As the twice-elected mayor of Algiers, Régis gained power by aligning himself with the leftist Radical Party in Algeria, and used a combination of antisemitic and anti-capitalist rhetoric to appeal the néos’ status and economic insecurities.[59] Against this backdrop, Robinet mockingly uses Cagayous as a tool to demonstrate the insurmountable difference – based on a racialized cultural essentialism – between the French and the néos. Cagayous’ embrace of the type of separatist “Algerian” language popularized by Régis is the joke. The humor is that Cagayous, as a newly naturalized citizen, believes he has the liberty to speak for France. His misplaced confidence is ironic and attests to his inferiority. Cagayous identifies as an "Algerian," an identity that encompasses all Mediterranean Europeans, but not the Français d’origine. These “Algerian” néos, according to Cagayous, are the only people brave enough to reveal the truth. He asks, “do we not have the right to march all together and say that Dreyfus is a rat, and that Zola is a sell-out?”[60] Cagayous asserts that the French government and French citizens are unaware of the imminent threat posed by the Jewish population of Algeria, and need the naturalized citizens to inform them of the “obvious truth.”[61]

By exposing the Jewish threat, Cagayous and the other néos believe that they can prove their loyalty to France and secure their position in the colonial hierarchy. Cagayous tells the reader that “if the Algerians had not hollered about the Dreyfus Affair, the true French people (“les Français de France”) would have never stopped believing that the only people here [in Algeria] are foreigners and half Italian, half Spanish champoreaux (mixed people).”[62] Cagayous knows that he is not on the same level as French citizens from France, as demonstrated by the fact that he distinguishes between “natural” and “naturalized” French citizens in the text, but he must defend his position against the other most recently naturalized group within the colony – the Jewish population. However, the irony is that he is competing for a second-place prize.

In his study on popular culture in colonial Algeria, Emanuel Sivan argues that humor was a key tool that reinforced the inferiority of the Arabs and Imazighen in colonial narratives, affirming that “ridicule is no less effective a method for keeping one’s distance from the lower ranks of the social hierarchy.”[63] While Sivan correctly identifies the application of these traits to the indigenous Algerian population within the Cagayous series, he misses how Robinet likewise views the psychological, social, and spatial segregation of the néos in Algiers as an object of ridicule. The Cagayous néos are amusing to their French creator precisely because they are fanatical, backward “savages.”[64] Like Eugen Weber’s French peasants, the néos require French modernization.[65] But whereas rural French people could become French, the néos, owing to their essential difference, were destined to remain underdeveloped. They continued to engage in "savage" behavior and beliefs that marked them as unlike the Français d’origine.

At the end of Cagayous antijuif, after Cagayous and his friends participated in the 1898 riots, his friend Bacora complains to Cagayous that the woman he is interested in will not have sex with him. Cagayous advises Bacora to buy a picture of Max Régis and to show it to the woman as an aphrodisiac. A day later Bacora seeks out Cagayous exclaiming joyfully, “You’re a magician! When she saw the portrait of Max Régis...well, she began to sing songs and do somersaults around the room. [...] When I was finishing, I couldn’t help screaming ‘Down with the Jews!’”[66] Régis’ photo becomes an idol for Bacora. Robinet depicts the néos as foolishly investing their hopes into the antisemitic figure of Régis. This use of idols and magic is a layered joke about not only the néos’ antisemitism, which has approached, according to Robinet, a divine level, but also their unenlightened Catholicism and superstition.

However, when it becomes apparent that the antisemitic candidates would not be the saviors of the impoverished population of Bab-el-Oued, Cagayous turns from being “anti-Jewish” to “anti-everything” a year after the most extreme antisemitic municipal leaders of Algeria were forced out of office by the French state. In Cagayous antitout (1902), Cagayous presents himself as a parliamentary deputy candidate representing the Comité antitout de Bablouette (Anti-everything Committee of Bab-el-Oued). What follows is a debate between Cagayous and his "constituents" as he attempts to outline his platform. The irrationality of Cagayous’ platform comes through in the absurdity of his campaign. He has no articulated ideology besides the fact that all he wants is for “the country to be rich, everyone to be content, and for me to be deputy.”[67] Nevertheless, he asks the crowd, “Citizens! Naturalized and champoreaux, all of you are anti-everything (antitout), yes or no?”[68] To which the gathering responds enthusiastically in the affirmative. The transition from antisemitism to antitout-ism makes logical sense to Cagayous. The leftist Radical Republican Party which had so successfully mobilized néo voters under Régis had failed to address the quotidian demands of the population, and thus he explains the rise of antitout-ism as the “polemic of those whose bellies are empty but who refuse to lower their heads.”[69]

To achieve these goals, Cagayous is willing to agree to any demand made of him which earns him the enthusiastic support of the néos, although the issues presented to him are structural. Indeed, the complaints that Cagayous receives reveal the difficult lives of the people living in Bab-el-Oued and in part explain why antisemitic politicians so effectively mobilized anticapitalist and antisemitic politics. A woman complains about the prices of sugar, coffee, and bread rising without anyone knowing why. Another discusses small business owners being forced to sell their storefronts since they cannot afford their rents. Fishermen complain about the quality of the harbors, a sweeper says that his family does not have a bathroom in their house, and a mother pleads for access to clean drinking water which “in the rich quarters flows without a thought as long as they want. It’s injustice!”[70] Physically isolated from the resources of the French region of the city, the néos remain locked in an impoverished district whose “reputation was as poor as its population.”[71] Indeed, as Cagayous’ populist antics reach their crescendo, he ends the meeting promising the crowd that he will meet with the French president to advocate for “the shithouses of the people.”[72] While the concerns expressed by the people there underscore the insecurities of the working-class district of Bab-el-Oued, their plights are ultimately comedic fodder for a wealthier French colonial society.

The works of Bertrand and Robinet, when examined in light of the time they were written – a period of both intense political antisemitism and concern over foreigners undermining French colonial hegemony (le peril étranger) – stress the limits of assimilation in French Algeria. More than successful mixing, the texts reveal a profound mental and physical distance between the poor Spanish néo-Français, the Français d’Algérie, and the representatives of the French state that was further exacerbated by some néos’ embrace of a political antisemitism that French officialdom condemned. It was this persistent racialization and marginalization that future generations of Spanish-descended pieds-noirs would grapple with as they relocated to France after decolonization.

“They All Have Cagayous in Them”: Jeunes saisons (1961) and Saison violente (1974)[73]

After spending two years working as a schoolteacher in Oran, French historian Pierre Nora published his 1961 study Les Français d’Algérie in which he declared that the Euro-Algerian population was a community of “ambiguous Frenchmen” because of the influence of non-French European immigrants.[74] Additionally, Nora asserted that the “Spanish or Calabrian worker is closer to an Egyptian fellah (farmer) than to a Forty-Eighter or Alsatian laborer.”[75] Lest Nora’s opinions of the pieds-noirs seem ambiguous, he further declared that “all of the French of Algeria are like Cagayous, humiliated and scornful.”[76] While scholars have questioned the objectivity of Nora’s research, his work was indicative of the general intellectual consensus at the time about who the pieds-noirs were – a consensus formed in part by the works discussed in the previous section, and that would continue to shape incorporation of the former settlers into French society.[77] Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as French intellectuals disparaged the pieds-noirs, the French state negotiated the policies by which the pieds-noirs would enter metropolitan French society.[78] The resources that the state needed to spend on the pieds-noirs made them the object of ire for common French people. To advocate for more sweeping social policies for the “repatriates,” pied-noir associations presented the former settlers as a coherent, united bloc. Even though the pieds-noirs were often ethnically and financially dissimilar, these associations maintained the “impression of harmony and homogeneity” to strengthen their claims to material restitution and moral recognition.[79]

The autobiographical literature of Emmanuel Roblès (1914-1995) provides a counternarrative to the homogenizing characterization of the pieds-noirs. Roblès, an “archetypical” néo-Français, was born to Spanish immigrants and grew up in the impoverished Spanish district of Oran. As an adult in the late 1930s and 1940s, he worked alongside a variety of other notable Algerian-born literary figures such as Albert Camus, Mohammed Dib, Kateb Yacine, and Jean Sénac, collaborating on newspaper reporting and literary magazines. Roblès wrote prolifically about the potential for a multi-ethnic, anti-capitalist, proletarian coalition between the petit blancs (small whites) - the property-less, poor, white artisanal and laboring European underclass – and the indigenous Algerian populations. His hope for solidarity among the entirety of the working-class Algerian population is a powerful theme that runs through most of his oeuvre.[80] However a comparison of his two autobiographical works, Jeunes saisons (1961 – but written in 1958) and Saison violente (1974), highlights how Roblès’ narrative focus shifted from exposing the ignorance of the Euro-Algerian, particularly his néo community, both in the past and in his 1950s present, to stressing the néos’ marginalized position in French Algeria before independence in response to metropolitan stereotypes of the pied-noirs that ignored the diverse identities of the former settlers.[81] While we can see the continuity of France’s attitude toward the Spanish immigrant and néo community, Roblès’ texts demonstrates the agency of this population and how they laid claim to their own racialization that was not antithetical to ‘Frenchness.’ Within these texts we see a return to the ambiguous racialized hierarchy that by law had disappeared, but that in practice clearly dictated the young Roblès’ everyday experiences and relationships.

Originally written in 1958, when the possibility of Algeria remaining French was still debatable, Jeunes saisons could comfortably fit into the tradition of what certain scholars have come to call nostalgérie – a convenient portmanteau of nostalgia and Algeria used to describe pied-noir literature characterized by themes of exile and rupture.[82] Jeunes saisons is a memoir of Roblès’ youth in the late 1920s told through an unspecific passing of the season. There is not an explicit plot; rather it is a collection of memories mostly pertaining to his relationship with his classmates, neighbors, and mother. However, revisiting his youth is difficult for Roblès because it only underscores for him the depth of his current ignorance in 1958. By the interwar period of the text, with fascism looming large, the néos had become more politically engaged, if increasingly fractured, by generations. Fittingly, Roblès begins the story by telling the reader that he would rather forget his youth than remember it. He writes that even when he feels that he is “truly removed, merely a distant stranger to those drowned years, a little nothing is all it takes to bring them [the memories] back, coming to the surface with a power that saddens and disturbs me... perhaps this is what we call nostalgia.”[83] The imagery of water, understood as the Mediterranean Sea, typically glorified in settler literature, is inverted as a destructive force in the opening pages of Roblès’ work, immediately anticipating the subversion of his nostalgia to follow.

Even if Roblès craves a child’s ignorance, he knows that the Euro-Algerian community of Algeria must confront their culpability for their painful present. Roblès recognizes that the imagined Algeria of his youth has “disappeared.”[84] However, this loss was the result not of a neglectful France or vindictive de Gaulle, but of the historic social and cultural insularity of the Euro-Algerian, particularly the néo, community.[85] The néos, the grand majority of whom remained landless owing to the reservation of land concessions for Français d’origine and metropolitan companies, inhabited a “suffocating” society which prevented different ethnic communities from interacting and understanding each other, like the ethnically circumscribed spaces of Algiers present in Le sang des races and Cagayous.[86] According to Roblès, this isolation, the result of the racialization and ethnicization of labor, further contributed to the success of political antisemitism among the néos that revived during the interwar period and which he laments.

While Roblès believes that class similarities should have united the néos with the Arab, Amazigh, and Jewish peoples of Algeria, he quickly reveals that a “furiously antisemitic” interwar Oran made such unity impossible.[87] At the end of the 1920s, many settlers had turned away from French parliamentary democracy and instead advocated for “Algerian” politics – inspired again by the idea of a shared settler Latin collectivity - under political leaders such as the interwar mayor of Oran, Abbé Gabriel Lambert, and leagues such as the Unions latines, Action française, and Jeunesses patriotes.[88] In response, Roblès criticizes older néos for buying into the far-right propaganda; in particular, veterans of the First World War, who, after returning home from the war, realized that their military service did not automatically make them “true” Frenchmen. Much like Cagayous before them, since they “did not know how to manifest their patriotism in order to be admitted into the French community,” they turned to chauvinistic behavior and antisemitism, believing that it would augment their social positions.[89] Rather than investigating the colonial regime which upheld the economic and social disparities between the néos and the Français d’origine, Roblès contends – and subsequent research has shown – these far-right néos asserted the little social capital they possessed through violence and humiliation.

In addition to the fascist néos, Roblès highlights the activity of leftist néos, frequently members of the Communist party and often younger than the fascists, who gathered politically and rallied against colonial racism. As a result of their upbringing and education, these younger néos, especially children, were reluctant to acknowledge differences among their peers “because in school we were all mixed together, we were not contaminated by that propaganda.”[90] However, throughout the narrative, Roblès dismantles the simple dichotomy of “good” versus “bad” néos that he set up in the beginning. Roblès demonstrates that leftist Euro-Algerians who believed that they were not affected by antisemitic and racist propaganda remained ignorant – much like the right wingers – about the depth of Algerian suffering.

To emphasize this point Roblès makes himself the target of his analysis. He describes an instance in which during a far-right demonstration, he threw a paper airplane made from a Union latine flyer that had “Down with the Jews!” printed on it into the shop of a Jewish neighbor. Caught up in the ruckus, Roblès naïvely believed he was playing a childish game. However, the look that the shopkeeper gave him revealed a deeper betrayal, “the look which I have never been able to forget. That regard, more regretful than incensed, seemed to be saying to me, ‘And you too, you’re like the others? Aren’t there enough of them? Who to trust now, hm? Who can I trust?’”[91] The text underscores the transtemporal shame Roblès experienced and continues to feel for having “added that day to the immense miseries of the world.”[92] Roblès became conscious that the class similarities he believed had made him immune from colonial violence had merely masked the privilege he still held as a Euro-Algerian, which could not be resolved through superficial political coalitions, an example that is all the more pertinent as the adult Roblès, writing in 1958, grapples with feelings of shame for missing the “obvious” facts of colonial oppression that had been in front of him his whole life.

While Roblès does criticize the French government and population of Algeria for marginalizing the néos, in 1958 he ultimately held his community accountable for their responses to structural discrimination. Writing during the Algerian War, Roblès underscores how many néos sought enemies among the collectively oppressed rather than seeking a resolution to the inherent exploitation of colonial regimes, stating that “via a familiar inversion, from the persecuted we became the persecutors.”[93] Regardless of political affiliation, Roblès highlights how none of them really “knew the Arabs,” whether or not they personally held prejudices.[94] Roblès thought that he understood colonial society because he was an impoverished “Fifty-percenter” (cinquante pour cent de Français) who was equally oppressed by colonial hierarchies, but he quickly discovers that he was unaware of the distorted lens through which he approached life.[95] The only option for both the young Roblès and, as his concluding pages suggest, the current author, is honest reflection which would require “more courage and valor than [that demanded of] many others to face the future.”[96] The question of temporality is not abundantly clear in the concluding pages; what is clear is that, according to Roblès, he must embrace his memory to respond to the future. Jeunes saisons’ conclusion appears as a prescription for the type of introspection that Roblès believes the entire Euro-Algerian population should hold amid the ongoing war.

Over fifteen years later, after repatriating to France, Roblès’ would once again revisit his adolescence in his 1974 work Saison violente. This second time around, Roblès would direct his critical gaze at the “true” French population and colonial authority. As the two works’ titles continuity suggests, Roblès wanted to rewrite the narrative of his youth, “dispens[ing] with the kind of nostalgia in Jeunes saisons and introduc[ing] an idea of menace.”[97] Here is it important to note that Roblès’ novelization of his adolescent years in interwar Oran was published during a period of emerging pied-noir cultural activism and French state silence regarding colonialism. Amid these trends, Roblès chooses instead to emphasize the distinctive colonial barriers based on ethnic difference. While Roblès remains conscious of his privilege as a Euro-Algerian, ultimately, he wants his readers to understand that regardless of status, in the eyes of many French colonial administrators and "true" citizens, the naturalized Spanish néos, were "like the Arabs [...] of a second-class humanity" and that this trend continued even after decolonization.[98]

Set in the summer of 1927, Saison violente, an autobiographical novel, recounts the young Roblès’ interaction with colonial police and various Français d’origine as he struggles with the fact that his young, widowed mother is interested in remarrying. The text is structured in three parts with each part representing Roblès’ (the néo’s) interaction with a different facet of French society past and present. Part one details an interaction with the police (the French state), part two Roblès’ employment by the wealthy viticulture heiress Madame Quinson (Français d’origine), and part three his first romantic relationship with the metropolitan-born Véronique (metropolitan French). The distance afforded by the novelization of his youth makes the text hard to classify, for while Roblès is more critical of the French colonial regime, he is less attentive to néo agency when compared to Jeunes saisons. Ironically, by moving away from the nostalgia of the earlier work, the victimization and defensiveness grew as he describes how the néos were “excluded in a stepmother society that used us without loving us.”[99] For example, after witnessing a police officer beat a local Arab honey vendor, Brahim, the question of solidarity and Euro-Algerian ignorance so present in Jeunes saisons is absent in Saison violente as the crux of this disturbance is not the initial injustice, but the consequences for the narrator and his mother afterwards.

While the narrator had been involved in planning revenge on the officer, he did not ultimately participate in the attack. Asserting his innocence, the narrator suggests to the investigating detectives that they confirm his alibi by speaking with Khader, an Arab man, or Sarcos, a Euro-Algerian communist. In response to these claims, the officers tutoyer (to use the informal tu form) the narrator’s mother and scoff at the idea of believing the testimonies of “that type” or a “bicot.”[100] As Roblès’ mother grows increasingly distraught, she demands of the police if they have “the right to strike a child? [...] Yes or no, do you [the police] have the right? Yes or no, are we not in a republic? You are treating him worse than an Arab!”[101] The police warn her that she needs to tread carefully, leaving pregnant pauses at the end of their statements, which allow both his mother and the readers to fill in the threat amid the silence. The police, as symbols of French authority and supremacy, act with impunity not only because of their official status as arms of the state but likewise because of the perceived inferiority of their victims whose low economic status and physical features distanced them from the whiteness of the “true” French citizens.[102] However, by reminding the authorities that they are “Arabizing” her son, Roblès’ mother simultaneously reveals the hypocrisy of France’s assimilationist rhetoric, while also depending on this same system of violence and racialized colonial hierarchies to protect her son, by affirming that they should be treated better than the indigenous population.

After the narrator’s building is condemned for insalubrious conditions, which the novel implies was the result of police retaliation, Roblès’ mother finds him live-in employment with a former customer, Madame Quinson. Throughout the second part of the novel, Roblès becomes an object of obsession and repulsion for his employer, Madame Quinson, the aging heiress of a wine-producing French colon (land-owning colonizer) family. Madame Quinson decides that she must “civilize” the narrator by controlling his manners, acquaintances, and studies, even though he had been fully acculturated through the French education system.[103] Madame Quinson sees any similarities, phenotypical or cultural, between the narrator and the indigenous Algerian populations, as something to be ridiculed and eradicated.[104] She habitually refers to the narrator as a “true savage” and she allows her company to physically inspect the young Roblès like a work animal.[105] They conclude that even though he is only thirteen and a half, “he looks way older than his age! Too bad that he seems so stupid,” immediately adultifying and denying childhood and innocence to a racialized child.[106] On multiple occasions, Madame Quinson questions the narrator about his deceased father, insinuating that rather than dying of cholera while working for the French government as a ditch digger in Morocco, he intentionally abandoned his family, going so far as to proclaim, “[Y]ou are so brown! A true gypsy! Are you sure that your father, your real father, wasn’t a gypsy?”[107] Furthermore, even when presented with evidence of the narrator’s academic success, Madame Quinson reproaches his Spanish accent while speaking French: “mimicking the way I would pronounce certain words, she would say, ‘no matter what, you are and will always remain a fifty-percenter.’”[108]

It is Roblès status as a "fifty-percenter," as a poor ethnically Spanish néo, that eventually prevents him from furthering his relationship with his French neighbor, Véronique. Véronique, as the metropolitan-born young daughter of an important French colonial official, represents France’s future and young Roblès’ hope for social acceptance for the naturalized néos. Roblès remains optimistic that through their innocent romantic relationship that Véronique will learn the truth about him: that he is just as French as she is. However, regardless of his demonstrated affection and superior knowledge about France, Véronique cannot seem to reconcile the “real” Roblès in front of her, and how colonial culture up to that point had represented the Spanish and néos. Véronique, like the larger colonial society and metropolitan French observers, collapses the variety of among Spanish residents and French citizens of Spanish descent. She asks “you people, you Spanish, you are truly cruel. Right?” Roblès is perplexed, comparing Véronique to “certain ethnographers who question the natives of a primitive tribe.”[109] Roblès’ rejection by all facets of the French ruling class in the three parts of the novel marks for the narrator the “decline of the French myth” and emphasizes the traumatic experience of rejection both during and after colonialization.[110] Eventually, Véronique returns to France, forgetting about Roblès. Roblès then positions the ability to move on from French Algeria as not only hypocritical, since France had benefited from its colonization and depended on the labor of the néos, but an opportunity only afforded to metropolitans and wealthy former settlers.

Roblès’ interaction with the French characters produces in him a “double consciousness” between Frenchness and Spanishness.[111] When presented with denial of his inclusion in the French community, the young narrator cannot fathom the truth behind the idea because he had “assimilated completely.” Thus, when hearing the label “fifty-percenter,” he cannot help but think “Me, a ‘fifty-percenter’? Me, half a foreigner? How was that conceivable? Even as I knew my difference, I knew equally well the depth of my communion. I was not at the door, but inside, not at the border, but within the same territory of this cultural homeland."[112] The oppositional relationship between French assimilationist ideology and colonialism encouraged an affiliation to Spain in the young Roblès that only grew as he aged and became more aware of the discrimination he faced.[113] Critically, Roblès underscores how the French state encouraged the patriotic disassociation of a large part of its citizenry, which would further contribute to the discourse of a Euro-Algerian particularism following their repatriation.[114]

Having internalized French assimilationist ideology, the narrator feels doubly betrayed – both in the moment of the text and by 1974 – by the idea of France and the French people. Elevating French society to the level of a biblical paradise, he comments that the term “fifty-percenter” prevented him and the other néos from “entering the kingdom” which “cracked the walls of [his] utopia a little more every day.”[115] In the 1970s, as France was about to officially “end” immigration, Roblès issued a soft warning with his own embrace of his Spanish roots about the effects of suppressing cultural differences and denying Frenchness to the descendants of immigrants.[116] If France struggled with the “incorporation” of immigrants – both Euro-Algerian and former colonial subjects – in the 1970s, Roblès suggests that was because France had habitually created its own “social problems” by permanently othering immigrants.[117]

This paper has traced the genealogy of a discourse of Spanish racialized ethnic difference in colonial Algeria to highlight how this discourse influenced works produced by self-identified Spanish-descended pieds-noirs. It has sought to demonstrate the extent to which this discourse was internalized and served as a wound that was reawakened once the so-called pieds-noirs arrived in France. As literary scholar Peter Dunwoodie has expertly shown, intertextuality, “a conscious reaction to its predecessors,” was a distinguishing factor of Franco-Algerian literature.[118] By studying the intertextual references and continuity of themes in these literary sources, scholars can not only learn more about the intricacies of the racialized ethnic colonial hierarchies guiding Algerian society and politics but likewise we can study pied-noir memoirs and literature as more than examples of naïve nostalgia but as critical manifestations of the “diasporas of decolonization” in which the label of “repatriate” has masked a variety of identities.[119] Without attention to those identities we will not be able to begin to make sense of the contradiction between the “invisibility” of this population in the academic literature and the notorious, visible phenomenon which they represented in recent French society and politics.

Notes

1. According to Andrea Smith, applying the term “repatriate” to the Euro-Algerian population following Algerian independence remains problematic. She contends that an uncritical acceptance of the divide between “immigrant” and “repatriate” in the literature on immigration has only further reified the image of the “immigrant” as a foreign, racialized “Other” in Europe. Andrea Smith, “Introduction: Europe’s Invisible Migrants,” in Europe’s Invisible Migrants, ed. Andrea Smith (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 9-31.

2. On the ad-hoc and at times paradoxical nature of the French government’s repatriation policies, and the discrimination faced by the pieds-noirs upon arriving in France, see Yann Scioldo-Zürcher, Devenir métropolitain. Politique d’intégration et parcours de rapatriés d’Algérie en metropole (1954-2005) (Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2010); Sung-Eun Choi, Decolonization and the French of Algeria: Bringing the Settler Colony Home (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016); Claire Eldridge, From Empire to Exile: History and Memory within the Pied-Noir and Harki Communities, 1962-2012 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016); and Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: the Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).

3. Cited in Choi, Decolonization and the French of Algeria, 4.

4. Martin Evans, “Towards an Emotional History of Settler Decolonisation: De Gaulle, Political Masculinity and the End of French Algeria 1958-1962,” Settler Colonial Studies 8, no. 2 (2018): 213-243.

5. On the constitutive nature of race, and in particular ideas of whiteness, to French citizenship, national identity, and colonial regimes, see: Crystal Marie Fleming, Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017); Lorelle Semley, To Be Free and French: Citizenship in France's Atlantic Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Elisa Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Tyler Stovall, White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021).

6. Jean-Jacques Jordi, “The Creation of the Pieds-Noirs: Arrival and Settlement in Marseilles, 1962,” in Europe’s Invisible Migrants, ed. Andrea Smith (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 74.

7. While the term néo-Français appeared at the end of the nineteenth century and has been used in scholarship to describe all the European populations in Algeria naturalized under the 1889 law, it carried specific local meaning depending on which group of southern Europeans was the most present in that region. When discussing néos, colonial officials in the departments of Oran and Algiers, the locations concerned in this paper, were quite explicit in clarifying that for them néo was “a term that designates the French of Spanish origin.” This construction continued through the twentieth century, much later than the First World War, which some scholars have identified as the “melting pot” moment in which ethnic difference stopped mattering in settler society. See, for example, letters from the 1940s between the Head of Police and the Prefect of Oran which use the exact wording cited above: Archives nationales d’outre-mer (ANOM), FM 81F/999. For clarity, I use the term néo or néo-Français to refer to this group and the term Français d’origine for those of French descent, to emphasize how cultural essentialism and naturalization status worked together to racialize the néo as a distinct, immutable challenge to French colonial authority. Likewise, I use pied-noir to refer to the Euro-Algerians who immigrated to France after Algerian independence.

8. Jonathan Gosnell, The Politics of Frenchness in Colonial Algeria, 1930-1954 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 176.

9. On Euro-Algerian settler heterogeneity, in particular the experience of settlers of Italian and Maltese origins, see: David Prochaska, Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône, 1870-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Andrea Smith, Colonial Memory and Postcolonial Europe: Maltese Settlers in Algeria and France (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); and Hugo Vermeren, Les Italiens à Bône (1865-1940): Migrations méditerranéennes et colonisation de peuplement en Algérie (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2017). For the Spanish descended populations see: Juan Bautista Vilar, Los Españoles en la Argelia Francesa (1830-1914) (Madrid: Universidad de Murica Centro de Estudios Históricos, 1989); Jean-Jacques Jordi, Espangol en Oranie: Histoire d'une migration 1830-1914 (Calvisson: Editions Jacques Gandini, 1996); and Anne Dulphy, L’Algérie des Pieds-Noirs: Entre l’Espagne et la France (Paris: Vendémiaire, 2014).

10. Vilar, Los Españoles en la Argelia Francesa, 25.

11. Most recently, Charlotte Ann Legg has underscored the way in which settler journalists consolidated an “imagined community of 'Algerian' settlers by expanding the definition of Latin identity,” which was open to southern European immigrants and their descendants and complicated the discourse of civilization, race, and gender in colonial Algeria. Charlotte Ann Legg, The New White Race: Settler Colonialism and the Press in French Algeria, 1860-1914 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021), 219.

12. Smith, Europe’s Invisible Migrants, 16.

13. Fatima El-Tayeb, European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2011), xviii. According to El-Tayeb “the 'ethnic,' rather than replacing the loaded and ambiguous term 'race' with a neutral, precise, and nonbinary terminology of largely objectifiable regional difference as is often professed in neoliberal discourse, is the outcome of hierarchized labor structures that not merely use but produce 'ethnic' difference” (xvi).

14. Albert Camus was also of Spanish descent on his mother’s side. Both Camus and Meursault, the protagonist of The Stranger (1942), were from the historically working-class Spanish district of Algiers, Bab-el-Oued. Bab-el-Oued was also the base for the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS) – itself formed in Francoist Spain.

15. See Amy Hubbell, Remembering French Algeria: Pieds-Noirs, Identity, and Exile (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015).

16. Vilar, Los Españoles en la Argelia Francesa, 25.

17. “Les populations espagnoles et d’origine espagnole en Oranie,” René Huertas, 1951, 2, ANOM, GGA 8X/302. In this report for the Civil Services of Algeria, colonial administrator René Huertas reproduced the 1886 census which listed the French and Spanish populations, respectively, of the three departments as the following: Algiers: 105,600 / 48,599; Oran: 79,661 / 92,290; and Constantine: 74,468 / 3,641. It is important to note that even as late at the 1950s French colonial administrators were still concerned about and producing reports about the loyalty of the “Spanish colony” in Algeria. As the title reflects, regardless of nationality, officials identified settlers by their ethnic origins and suggested an observable difference in their behavior and mentality that was distinct for the Français d’origine.

18. Vilar, Los Españoles en la Argelia Francesa, 24.

19. “Les populations espagnoles et d’origine espagnole en Oranie,” René Huertas, 1951, 21, ANOM, GGA 8X/302.

20. Jan Jansen, for example, reveals how colonial officials policed the corrida (the running of the bulls) at the end of the nineteenth century to restrict the diffusion of non-French national symbols and rituals. Jan Jansen, “Celebrating the Nation in a Colonial Context: Bastille Day and the Contested Public Space in Algeria, 1880-1939,” Journal of Modern History 85, no. 1 (2013): 36-68. The limiting of professional opportunities was not only applicable to the Spanish. Hugo Vermeren shows how French colonial officials used “territorial nationalism” to control Italian engaged in maritime activities. Vermeren, Les Italiens à Bône, 135.

21. Jordi, Espangol en Oranie, 200.

22. For more on this shift in naturalization policies see Patrick Weil, How to Be French: Nationality in the Making since 1789 (Durham, Duke University Press, 2008).

23. Yuval Tal, “The 'Latin' Melting Pot: Ethnorepublican Thinking and Immigration Assimilation in and through Colonial Algeria,” French Historical Studies 44, no. 1 (2021): 85-118. While Tal contends that the 1889 law was motivated by the belief that all Europeans in Algeria belonged to the “same ethnic group,” I argue that was a more ambiguous situation than that. Hope and fear about the limits of assimilation and racial mixing, rather than conviction in the Latin myth and a shared ethnicity, motivated politicians to push for changing nationality law regarding Algeria.

24. Cited in Vilar, Los Españoles en la Argelia francesa, 191. Étienne himself was a representative of the department of Oran, the most western department of Algeria, which bordered on a nominally independent Morocco which both Spain and France hoped to seize for themselves.

25. This assertion supports Albert Memmi's argument that assimilation and colonization are inherent contradictions because authentic assimilation will only undermine and dismantle a colonial society built on hierarchy. See Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonisé suivi du portrait du colonisateur (Paris: Buchet Chastel, 1957), 165.

26. A 1906 quote from Victor Demontès, a professor at the lycée d’Alger. Cited in Anne Dulphy, L’Algérie des Pieds-Noirs: Entre l’Espagne et la France (Paris: Vendémiaire, 2014), 11.

27. Kyle Francis, “Civilizing Settlers: Catholic Missionaries and the Colonial State in French Algeria, 1830-1914,” PhD diss., (The City University of New York, 2015).

28. Notably, French citizenship was available only to Algerian Jews living north of the Mzab (the northern region of the Saharan desert), a population of about 30,000. The Mzab was deemed a protectorate region and not incorporated into any of the northern departments of French Algeria. See Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). For more on the history of the Jewish populations in Algeria see: Sophie B. Roberts, Citizenship and Antisemitism in French Colonial Algeria, 1870-1962 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Julie Kalman, Orientalizing the Jew: Religion, Culture, and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century France (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017); Joshua Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010); and Elizabeth Friedman, Colonialism & After: An Algerian Jewish Community (Boston: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, Inc., 1988).

29. Lizabeth Zack, “Who Fought the Algerian War? Political Identity and Conflict in French-Ruled Algeria,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 16, no. 1 (2002): 64-65.

30. Gabriel Audisio, “Introduction,” in Auguste Robinet (pseudo. Musette), Cagayous: Ses meilleures histoires (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1931), 7.

31. Audisio, “Introduction,” 7.

32. Ausidio, "Introduction," 7. "Sang des races" is in quotation marks in the original, and is a clear reference to Louis Bertrand’s Le sang des races.

33. Seth Graebner, "'Unknown and Unloved': The Politics of French Ignorance in Algeria, 1860-1930,” in Algeria and France, 1800-2000: Identity, Memory, Nostalgia, ed. Patricia M. E. Lorcin (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 49-62.

34. Audisio, “Introduction,” 16.

35. See Bonnie Effros, Incidental Archaeologists: French Officers and the Rediscovery of Roman North Africa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018); Patricia M. E. Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (London: I.B. Taurus, 1995).

36. On the intersection of the Latin myth and the literary erasure of indigenous Algerian populations see Peter Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

37. The language of disease and racial hygiene was frequently used when considering the assimilation of non-French Europeans into French society over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. See Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race, 2009; and Margaret Cook Andersen, Regeneration through Empire: French Pronatalists and Colonial Settlement in the Third Republic (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015).

38. The Cagayous series was incredibly popular. In 1896, 12,000 copies of one story sold out in a single afternoon. David Prochaska, “History as Literature, Literature as History: Cagayous of Algiers,” The American Historical Review 101, no. 3 (1996): 685.

39. As pointed out by Seth Graebner these literary studies tend to reproduce the binary oppositions of center/periphery, colonized/colonizer, Christianity/Islam, modernity/tradition. By focusing solely on the colonizer/colonized divide within these texts, “these studies have often had limited ability to make interpretative sense of the larger colonial context.” Seth Graebner, History's Place: Nostalgia and the City in French Algerian Literature (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007), 6.

40. Frederick Cooper and Jane Burbank, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 11-13.

41. Patricia M. E. Lorcin, “Decadence and Renascence: Louis Bertrand and the Concept of Rebarbarization in Fin de Siècle Algeria,” in New Perspectives on the Fin de Siècle in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century France, eds. Kay Chadwick and Timothy Unwin (Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2000), 189.

42. Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria, 117. On the “Kabyle Myth” see Lorcin, Imperial Identities, 1995.

43. Louis Bertrand, Le sang des races (Paris: Arthème Fayard et Cie, éditeurs, 1899), 5.

44. Bertrand, Le sang des races, 7.

45. This specific mention of colonial resistance is noteworthy because as Dunwoodie states, “while depicting the working-class world of Bab-el-Oued, Bertrand avoided overtly divisive political issues in order to construct an exclusively European picture of the birth of the people.” Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria, 85.

46. Bertrand, Le sang des races, 14.

47. Bertrand, Le sang des races, 15-16.

48. Abdelmajid Hannoum points out that in the colonial narrative “nomadism is the defining characteristic of Arabs; civilization is absent, disorder and anarchy are the only law.” Abdelmajid Hannoum, “The Historiographic State: How Algeria Once Became French,” History and Anthropology 19, no. 2 (2008): 97.

49. Bertrand, Le sang des races, 26-27.

50. Both Smith and Vermeren describe a similar racialization of professions for the Maltese and Italians. The possibility for upward mobilities seems to have been slightly higher for these groups over the demographically larger Spanish population as Smith attests that “rapid assimilation was a feature particular to the Maltese.” Further, the Italians in Bone were not as residentially segregated from the Français d’origine – although there was a clear overrepresentation of Italians in the poorer areas of the city. See Smith, Colonial Memory and Postcolonial Europe, 121; and Vermeren, Les Italiens à Bône, 233-301.

51. Bertrand, Le sang des races, 53.

52. Bertrand, Le sang des races, 57.

53. Bertrand, Le sang des races, 118.

54. Scholars have demonstrated how Bertrand was influenced by Arthur de Gobineau, thus it is not surprising that the text would in the end reject inter-ethnic relations; Gobineau recommended blood-mixing for the survival of the race while recoiling from it. Arthur de Gobineau, “The Inequality of Human Races (1853),” in The Idea of Race, eds. Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lee Lott (New York: Hackett, 2000): 45-53.

55. Prochaska, “History as Literature, Literature as History,” 682.

56. Guy Thuillier, “Un monde disparu: Cagayous,” La Revue administrative, no. 324 (2001): 572.

57. Prochaska, “History as Literature, Literature as History,” 696.

58. Pierre Hebey, Alger 1898: La grande vague antijuive (Paris: NiL Éditions, 1996) and Roberts, Citizenship and Antisemitism (2018).

59. Richard Ayoun, “Max Régis: un antijuif au tournant du XXe siècle,” Revue d’histoire de la Shoah 173, no. 3 (2001): 137-169.

60. Robinet, Cagayous: Ses meilleures histoires, 99.

61. Robinet, Cagayous: Ses meilleurds histoires, 100.

62. Robinet, Cagayous: Ses meilleures histoires,, 100. Champoreaux, coming from the Spanish word champurro, was a mixture of coffee, milk, and alcohol typically consumed in Algeria by the néos. Cagayous implies that the French denigrated the southern Europeans because of their “mixed” blood.

63. Emanuel Sivan, “Colonialism and Popular Culture in Algeria,” Journal of Contemporary History 14, no. 1 (1979): 27.

64. It is interesting to note that in the interwar period, Camus would refuse to valorize Cagayous’ linguistic hybridity which he viewed as an example of French disparagement against the néos’ ability to learn French. Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria, 294.

65. See Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976).

66. Robinet, Cagayous: Ses meilleures histoires, 109.

67. Auguste Robinet, “Cagayous Antitout (1902),” Revue administrative, no. 378 (2001): 578.

68. Robinet, "Cagayous Antitout (1902)," 575.

69. Robinet, "Cagayous Antitout (1902)," 575

70. Robinet, "Cagayous Antitout (1902)," 576.

71. Prochaska, “History as Literature, Literature as History,” 682.

72. Robinet, “Cagayous Antitout,” 578.

73. Pierre Nora, Les Français d’Algérie (Paris: Julliard, 1961), 134.

74. Nora, Les Français d’Algérie, 134.

75. Nora, Les Français d’Algérie, 161.

76. Nora, Les Français d’Algérie, 50.

77. Todd Shepard states that Nora’s book “synthesized a self-righteous anti-pied noir discourse that many French intellectuals shared,” and likewise, David Prochaska notes that it was, “not so much a work of history [...] as a personal account.” See Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 195, and David Prochaska, Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône, 1870-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 6.

78. Daniel Just, “The War of Writing: French Literary Politics and the Decolonization of Algeria,” Journal of European Studies 43, no. 3 (2013): 227-43.

79. Claire Eldridge, “Unity Above All? Relationships and Rivalries within the Pied-Noir Community,” in Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar Germany and France: Comparative Perspectives, eds. Manuel Borutta and Jan Jansen (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 140.

80. For more on Roblès’ politics see Dunwoodie, Writing French History, 284-301 and Graebner, History’s Place, 236-242.

81. Scholars who have studied Roblès’ work have predominantly seen these autobiographical works as coming-of-age narratives defined by a “quest for identity.” See Pierre Rivas, “La quête d’identité dans l’autobiographie d’Emmanuel Roblès,” in Espagne et Algérie au XXe siècle: Contacts culturels et creation littéraire, ed. Daniel-Henri Pageaux (Paris: Éditions l’Hartmattan, 1985): 161-178.

82. Amy L. Hubbell, “The Wounds of Algeria in Pied-Noir Autobiography,” Dalhousie French Studies 81 (2007): 62.

83. Emmanuel Roblès, Jeunes saisons (Algiers-Paris: Éditions Baconnier, 1961), 15.

84. Roblès, Jeunes saisons, 10.

85. As Owen White details, non-French Euro-Algerians were more likely to remain laborers for the French Algerian wine industry while Français d’origine were proprietors and middle management. See Owen White, The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021).

86. Roblès, Jeunes saisons, 11.

87. Roblès, Jeunes saisons, 83.

88. For more about interwar politics, antisemitism, and the Algerian extreme right see Samuel Kalman, French Colonial Fascism: The Extreme Right in Algeria, 1919-1939 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Dónal Hassett, Mobilizing Memory: The Great War and the Language of Politics in Colonial Algeria, 1918-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Joshua Cole, Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019).

89. Roblès, Jeunes saisons, 77.

90. Roblès, Jeunes saisons, 83.

91. Roblès, Jeunes saisons, 101.

92. Roblès, Jeunes saisons, 101.

93. Roblès, Jeunes saisons, 80.

94. Roblès, Jeunes saisons, 31.

95. Roblès, Jeunes saisons, 75. The term Cinquante-pour-cent, according to Roblès “understood as Fifty-percent-French” was a term used by the Français d’origine to label the néos owing to their history of immigration, ethnic and naturalization status, and lower economic status.

96. Roblès, Jeunes saisons, 106.

97. Graebner, History’s Place, 239.

98. Emmanuel Roblès, Saison violente (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974), 94.

99. Roblès, Jeunes saisons, 128.

100. Roblès, Jeunes saisons, 42-46. The term “bicot” does not have an easy translation, although dictionaries compare it to the English term “wog” the comparison is not quite right as it was an overtly racist term with a specific colonial connotation used to refer to Maghrebi, usually Muslim, people.

101. Roblès, Jeunes saisons, 45. Roblès writes, “She said it simply. If I were an Arab, the treatment would have been different, given that the status of the Republic in no way applied to the indigenous people, who as French subjects, not citizens, were entirely left to the absolute discretion of the colonial authority.”

102. Roblès describes both his mother and him as looking “Moorish” but he states this with pride and as a mark of strength.

103. Roblès, Jeunes saisons, 93.

104. Roblès, Jeunes saisons, 88. There are multiple other instances throughout the text when Roblès himself makes comparisons between his appearance and those of the indigenous North African peoples, but he again rejoices in it.

105. Roblès, Jeunes saisons, 90.

106. Roblès, Jeunes saisons, 96.

107. Roblès, Jeunes saisons, 108. Italics in original. This example of phenotypic discrimination, while brief, supports Crystal Marie Fleming’s conclusion that scholars have not paid enough attention to anti-Blackness and overemphasized the cultural racism perspective when studying the history of race in France. Fleming, Resurrecting Slavery, 32.

108. Roblès, Saison violente, 111.

109. Roblès, Jeunes saisons, 150.

110. Camille Tchéro, “Représentation du Père dans Saison violente d’E. Roblès et Ébauche du père de J. Sénac” in Emmanuel Roblès et l’hispanité en Oranie, ed. Guy Dugas (Paris: L’Hartmattan, 2012), 133.

111. Roblès, Saison violente, 112.

112. Roblès, Jeunes saisons, 112.

113. Roblès, Jeunes saisons, 112

114. Roblès development of an identity in which his Frenchness and Spanish coexisted only to then produce a double consciousness upon his rejection by French society is a prime example of all three features of French white supremacy identified by Fleming: anti-racialism, asymmetric racialization, and anticommunitarianism. Fleming, Resurrecting Slavery, 37-40.

115. Roblès, Jeunes saisons, 112.

116. See Alec G. Hargreaves, Immigration, 'Race' and Ethnicity in Contemporary France (New York: Routledge, 1995).

117. Hargreaves, Immigration, 'Race' and Ethnicity in Contemporary France and El-Tayeb, European Others (2011) make similar arguments that the status of being an “immigrant” in France, regardless of when this migration took place, results in the permanent designation of being an “Other.”

118. Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria, 2.

119. Smith, Europe’s Invisible Migrants, 26.