In downtown Algiers, on June 4, 1958, Charles de Gaulle expressed himself clearly, as usual. The conventional wisdom has it that he was “ambiguous,” even “duplicitous.” But what he said was that the page had to be turned in Algeria: Political and civil institutions had to be reformed; there could not be two classes of citizens. He said it clearly. He said there must be educational and career opportunities for all.
KATHERINE MESSENGER
Algeria, formally, was administratively and politically part of France, divided into three “departments.” In practice, it was treated like a colony in which just under a million European settlers (about a quarter of whom were of French background) had a distinctly better deal than the 10 million indigènes (as non-Europeans were called), a large majority of whom were Muslim (with some Jews and Christians). The indigènes were divided about equally between Arabs and Berbers, with both groups subdivided along tribal, sectional, and clan lines.
It was a complicated country, but by no means incomprehensible; Tocqueville had grasped the essence of the situation when he visited during the early stages of the military conquest in the 1830s and ’40s. Tocqueville, with a ruthlessness that shocks us who are used to his acute but approving analyses of the balancing acts and politics-is-always-local features of American democracy, said that the colonial enterprise was a lousy idea, but if you must do it, you either repress without pity or you assimilate systematically.
He actually favored the latter but thought the French would not like that, for all manner of reasons of racial and religious snobbery. Moreover, he said, if you export a system of rigidly centralized administration, which was already proving to be a failure in France, you could be sure it would fail in Algeria. Tocqueville predicted that it would all end badly.
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