The War in Algeria: The Mentality of the "Colons"
Duchet, Michèle
What is the privileged French minority defending in Algeria? A past of ease and comfort that certain of them already regard with remorse. Some try to deny what is happening and desperately...
...They were not responsible for the conquest of Algeria, but are they so innocent of what has been done to Algeria since its conquest...
...But the human world stops for the colonist with the twenty workers who sleep in his barn...
...Whether they want to or not, they derive from their lands a high profit through the low wages of their workers...
...It is not we, they say, who conquered Algeria...
...He fails to see that his "humanity" presupposes his acceptance of an order of things of which the justice{ remains unquestioned...
...he will readily denounce those who abuse their rights, and, most strongly, those who corrupt the ideal of the colonist...
...There is then a moral commitment on his part, which is not, however, as disinterested as he would like to believe...
...Beyond that lies the bled (wasteland), unknown space out of which alone could come this savage insurrection, this unforeseen explosion like a blast of the sirocco...
...Certain of them now say they are its victims, and if the best of them recognize the evils that follow from the economic and social structure to which until now they had accommodated themselves without remorse, they believe, in good faith, that they were not "responsible...
...THE MIDDLE COLONIST defines himself by his behavior and mentality, especially to the degree that he adopts a "humanitarian" attitude, which he thinks distinguishes him from the "big colonist...
...A past of ease and comfort that certain of them already regard with remorse...
...Should the criterion be the size of income...
...Beside them, 8,000 small colonists possess less than 25 acres and 11,000 who have between 25 and 250 acres represent the middle group of colonists...
...An accounting of his present choice —not some vague moral purity—will be asked...
...Rarely does he go beyond the limits of a narrow space within which he finds those familiar features of a French village: a church, the town hall, shops...
...THE SELF-IMPOSED isolation into which the colonist has withdrawn cannot prevent his having to confront tomorrow those who make no distinction between "good" and "bad" settlers...
...One would then have to note that many of the middle bracket colonists lead a life comparable to that of the big French landowners...
...But why does he respect the law...
...What is the privileged French minority defending in Algeria...
...To be sure, he does not go so far as to condemn the latter, whose cynicism and ferocious exploitation he often disregards...
...IN A COUNTRY where 70 percent of the population lives from agriculture, where the essential problem is that of land, where the colonial regime has concentrated over 5 million acres in the hands of 6,000 big landowners, nothing can keep the colonist from becoming the symbol of a state of repression of which, he was until now the chief beneficiary...
...To be sure, the capitalist phenomenon of the concentration of land has drawn a rather clear line between "big business" and the small or middle colonists who work their lands themselves...
...It would be harder to state precisely where big property begins and middle-sized exploitation ends...
...Even in his own village the colonist hardly gets about...
...In Algeria there are only 6,000 owners with more than 1,250 acres...
...The "good" colonist regrets—sometimes—its inadequacy, but he is content to pay the agricultural worker this "legal" wage...
...He will admit that not all the colonists behave as he does...
...Out there, the desert, mysterious Islam, a fatalistic people, a vista from which every human thing has vanished...
...They represent less than a fourth of the European landowners...
...But these innumerable victims of an evil which is beyond his charity erect between him and those who surround him the invisible barrier of hate...
...but what exactly dd they represent...
...for these men, who must confront a past and a future equally burdened with misery, his paternalism is only a ridiculous alms...
...But among these colonists there are a few who question themselves...
...His "humaneness" which recognizes no rights, creates duties for those it claims as its beneficiary...
...The official rate varies from region to region...
...If one calls his attention to the "existence of others," he will reply that his workers are well off, that he treats them well and they have no complaints...
...Should one distinguish according to the number of acres...
...They regard themselves as doubly innocent: historically and morally...
...the mode, of life...
...it is in any case very much below a `vital minimum" (even if one reduces the latter to a supposed Algerian level...
...Those who define themselves in this way clearly do not belong to the circles of the big colonists...
...They have improved these lands under conditions that were often difficult: it is only just that their sons should have har vested the fruits—they are "in the colony" as others are "in, business," from father to son...
...He is not required to do so and he knows it...
...And that goodness of his which is addressed to some men who are chosen as objects, almost as pretexts, how could it save him from those thousands of others, nameless and faceless, whom he casts out of his life and who starve without his ever giving them a glance...
...On the other hand, if his own workers "budge" (a revealing euphemism: he sees the Arab as immobile), he talks of their ingratitude...
...He simply doesn't belong to the same species: while integrating himself in a colonial system, he doesn't identify with it completely: he has some "honorable" reservations, he is concerned about law and justice...
...But it is not enough to consider merely the size of a property: in a country like Algeria, the nature of the soil and the geographical situation have decided influence on the yield: among the middle colonists, certain ones control rich, well-irrigated lands that are among the best vineyards or wheat farms...
...It is not from his own free choice that he guarantees his workers a wage that permits them to live...
...Perhaps he thinks that the "good" Arabs share his indifference...
...As they see it, their history opens with the coming of those courageous pioneers who cleared the untilled land, drained the swamps, and spread everywhere the benefits of civilization, thereby establishing doubly their rights to the possession of land "legally" acquired...
...Of this the colonist has no awareness...
...He retains the same picture of colonization that he saw in the history books of his childhood...
...If he came closer, he might see that those mounds of earth are actually huts in which death in every form dwells, that those desolate areas are scratched by the plow, that a people who wish to survive on what colonization has left it still cling to those barren rocks...
...He pays his workers at the official rate, he allows them the social benefits provided by the law, and he doesn't play politics...
...Some try to deny what is happening and desperately reject this image of an Algerian people suddenly transformed into a rebellious mass that only yesterday was silent and wrap themselves in a blindness that is to serve their interests to the bitter end...
...The fact is that in adhering to the law, he is making his own moral responsibility...
...he limits himself to respecting the law and so he believes that there is nothing for which to reproach himself...
Vol. 3 • July 1956 • No. 3
