History as literature, literature as history: Cagayous of Algiers

American Historical Review

Volumn 101, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 671-708

  Prochaska, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA CHAMPAIGN   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33750260672     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2169419     Document Type: Review

References (282)

1. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978).
2. See Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York, 1993);
3. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds., The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (New York, 1995), where "History" is the eleventh section.
4. See also Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen, eds., Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory (New York, 1994);
5. two collective volumes edited by historians, Nicholas B. Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1992);
6. Gyan Prakash, ed., After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements (Princeton, N.J., 1995).
7. Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York, 1990), chaps. 7-9.
8. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Critical Fanonism," Critical Inquiry, 17 (1991): 457-70.
9. Homi Bhabha, "The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse," in John Caughie, ed., The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality (New York, 1992), 318.
10. Compare Gates, "Critical Fanonism," 459;
11. Edward Said, "Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors," Critical Inquiry, 15 (1989): 205-25.
12. Bhabha's essay is a revised version of "Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism," in Francis Barker, et al., eds., The Politics of Theory (Colchester, 1983), 194-211.
13. As "The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism," it has now been reprinted in Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York, 1994), but without the sentence quoted here; see page 72.
14. His "Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition" was published as the introduction to Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1967; London, 1986).
15. It has been revised as "Interrogating Identity: Frantz Fanon" and reprinted in Location of Culture.
16. Abdul JanMohamed, "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature," in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., "Race," Writing, and Difference (Chicago, 1986), 78-79.
17. Compare Gates, "Critical Fanonism," 462. JanMohamed's use of the term "unity" is inaccurate, for what Bhabha was pointing to was "the repertoire of positions of power and resistance, domination and dependence that constructs the colonial subject (both colonizer and colonized)."
18. Bhabha, "Other Question," 313, in Caughie, Sexual Subject.
19. See Bhabha, Location of Culture, 67, where for "the colonial subject" Bhabha has substituted the clumsy locution "colonial identification subject."
20. See Benita Parry, "Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse," Oxford Literary Review, 9 (1987): 47.
21. Compare Gates, "Critical Fanonism," 464. Gates sums up his discussion by saying, "If Said made of Fanon an advocate of post-postmodern counternarratives of liberation; if JanMohamed made of Fanon a Manichean theorist of colonialism as absolute negation; and if Bhabha cloned, from Fanon's theoria, another Third World post-structuralist, Parry's Fanon . . . turns out to confirm her own rather optimistic vision of literature and social action."
22. Gates, "Critical Fanonism," 465.
23. Gates, "Critical Fanonism," 462.
24. Gates, "Critical Fanonism," 466. "The course we've been plotting leads us, then, to what is, in part, Spivak's critique of Parry's critique of JanMohamed's critique of Bhabha's critique of Said's critique of colonial discourse."
25. Gates, "Critical Fanonism," 465.
26. Moreover, it is significant that "to begin to sketch out" the path such historicization should take, Gates suggests that "a properly contextualized reading" of Fanon's book Black Skins, White Masks "should situate it in respect to" such works as Jean-Paul Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive (Paris, 1946),
27. Dominique O. Mannoni, Psychologie de la colonisation (Paris, 1950).
28. Gates, "Critical Fanonism," 458, n. 2.
29. Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris, 1952),
30. trans. as Black Skin, White Masks (New York, 1967);
31. Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (Paris, 1961),
32. trans. as The Wretched of the Earth (1963; New York, 1968).
33. On The Wretched of the Earth, see the perceptive essay by Edmund Burke III, "Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth," Daedalus, 105 (1976): 127-35.
34. Regarding the psychological dynamics of colonialism, note that one of the earliest references to Jacques Lacan in postcolonial studies is found in Black Skin, White Masks, 161-64, n. 25.
35. For the unraveling of the revolution, see, for orientation, Charles-Robert Ageron, Modern Algeria: A History from 1830 to the Present, Michael Brett, trans. (Trenton, N.J., 1991), 129-44;
36. John Ruedy, Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation (Bloomington, Ind., 1992), 195-256;
37. Benjamin Stora, La gangrène et l'oubli: La mémoire de la guerre d'Algérie (Paris, 1992);
38. special issue, "Algeria/Algérie," Mediterraneans/Méditerranéens, no. 4 (Summer 1993);
39. special issue, "L'Algérie en contrechamp," Peuples Méditerranéens/Mediterranean Peoples, nos. 70-71 (January-June 1995);
40. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 148-205. On rereading Fanon in relation to Algeria today, see the end of this article.
41. Albert Camus, L'étranger (Paris, 1942),
42. trans. as The Stranger (New York, 1946);
43. La peste (Paris, 1947),
44. trans. as The Plague (New York, 1948);
45. L'homme revolte (Paris, 1951),
46. trans. as The Rebel (New York, 1954).
47. Conor Cruise O'Brien, Camus (London, 1970);
48. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993), 169-85. Although Said acknowledges and builds on Cruise O'Brien's earlier pioneering study, he takes it further.
49. In Albert Camus, L'exil et le royaume (Paris, 1957),
50. trans. as "The Adulterous Woman," Exile and the Kingdom (New York, 1957).
51. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 176.
52. But see his unfinished novel published posthumously, Le premier homme (Paris, 1994). Earlier, Camus had flatly asserted, "There has never yet been an Algerian nation," reprising the famous debate between Ferhat Abbas and Ben Badis in the 1930s, yet Said argues that such a declaration presumes "that the ravages of French policy had wiped the slate clean."
53. Albert Camus, Essais (Paris, 1965), 1012-13,
54. quoted in Said, Culture and Imperialism, 179.
55. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 181, 174, 185.
56. Pierre Mille, "Quand Panurge ressuscita," Cahiers de la quinzaine, Ser. 9, cahier 16 (June 30, 1908): 146-56;
57. Mille, "L'illustre Cagayous," Les nouvelles littéraires (April 17, 1930);
58. Mille, "Sur Musette, l'auteur de 'Cagayous,'" La dépêche coloniale (October 28, 1930): 1;
59. Lilian Husson, "Cagayous, Fils de Bab el Oued" (typewritten manuscript in possession of the author, 1947);
60. Aimé Dupuy, "Les enfances Cagayous," Journal des Instituteurs de l'Afrique du Nord, no. 5 (November 22, 1947): 66-67, 79;
61. Dupuy, "Les 'écoles' de Cagayous," Journal des Instituteurs de l'Afrique du Nord, no. 7 (December 20, 1947): 98-99;
62. Gabriel Audisio, introduction, Auguste Robinet [Musette], Cagayous: Ses meilleures histoires (Paris, 1931), 7-40.
63. On the colonial novel, see Alain Calmes, Le roman colonial en Algérie avant 1914 (Paris, 1984);
64. Hubert Gourdon, Jean-Robert Henry, and Françoise Henry-Lorcerie, "Roman colonial et idéologie coloniale en Algérie," Revue algérienne des sciences juridiques, économiques et politiques, 11 (1974): 7-252;
65. Jean Déjeux, La littérature algérienne contemporaine (Paris, 1975).
66. Numerous visitors to Algeria at the time noted the birth of a "new race," including André Gide. See his Amyntas (Paris, 1905), 123-24. The political history of the term pied noir lies at the center of my concerns in this essay. Since it did not come into general use until around World War II, to use it earlier is technically anachronistic. Cagayous and the European settlers often described themselves as "Algerians," and they termed the Algerians indigènes (indigenous peoples). Only with the rise of Algerian nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s was "Algerian" increasingly applied to Algerians and pied noir to the Europeans. Although pied noir has been interpreted as somewhat disparaging, I use it interchangeably with "settler" in this essay, because it is the single most widely used term for the European settlers of colonial Algeria.
67. Besides Robinet, only Louis Bertrand and John Antoine Nau featured the petits blancs. Others who worked the picaresque vein include Stephen Chaseray and Paul Achard.
68. On pataouète, see Albert Lanly, Le Français d'Afrique du nord: Etude linguistique (Paris, 1962);
69. Roland Bacri, Trésors des racines pataouètes (Paris, 1983);
70. Bacri, "Le pataouète," in Lucien and Myriam Elia, eds., Les pieds-noirs (Paris, 1982), 89-96;
71. Aimé Dupuy, "Le Français d'Afrique du Nord," Vie et langage (January 1960): 2-11;
72. Pierre Pérégo, "Quelques remarques à propos du français parlé en Algérie," La pensée (January-February 1960): 90-95.
73. David Prochaska, Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône, 1870-1920 (New York, 1990);
74. Prochaska, "Making Algeria French and Unmaking French Algeria," Journal of Historical Sociology, 3 (1990): 305-28;
75. Prochaska, "Tales of the City: Between Algérie française and Algérie algérienne," in Daniel Segal, ed., Crossing Cultures: Essays in the Displacement of "Western Civilization" (Tucson, Ariz., 1992), 182-225.
76. By 1900, 60 percent of all Europeans lived in towns. On colonial Oran, see René Lespès, Oran: Etude de géographie et d'histoire urbaine (Paris, 1938), Graphique V;
77. on colonial Bône, see Prochaska, Making Algeria French; and on colonial Algiers, note 31 below. By way of contrast, only 2 percent of the population of colonial Delhi was European in 1921, only 5 percent of colonial Cairo in 1897, and 20-35 percent of colonial Casablanca during the period 1913-1952.
78. Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power, and Environment (London, 1976), 232;
79. Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (Princeton, N.J., 1971), 98;
80. André Adam, Casablanca, 2 vols. (Paris, 1972), 149.
81. Gouvernement Général de l'Algérie, Tableau général des communes de l'Algérie (Algiers, 1908), 2-3. In 1907, Algerians numbered 33,250 (23 percent). Fanon imagined no more Manichean a site than colonial cities like Algiers. "The colonial world is a world cut in two . . . The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers . . . The settlers' town is a strongly built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the garbage cans swallow all the leavings . . . The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where or how."
82. Wretched of the Earth, 38-39.
83. Max Lamouche, "Un publiciste sociologue algérois: Musette," Revue de la Méditerranée, 4 (1947): 545.
84. The symbolic significance with which these hunks of stone were imbued certainly rubbed off on the Algerians. Fanon understood; he writes that the colonial world is "a world of statues: the statue of the general who carried out the conquest, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge; a world which is sure of itself, which crushes with its stones the backs flayed by whips." Wretched of the Earth, 51-52.
85. In walking "this labyrinth of a quarter, you encountered the speech, mores, and odors of the lower parts [bassi], warehouses [fondaci], and alleys [vicoli] of Naples." René Lespès, Alger: Etude de géographie et d'histoire urbaines (Paris, 1930), 578.
86. For more recent studies, see Farouk Benatia, Alger: Agrégat ou cité; L'intégration citadine à Alger (Algiers, 1980);
87. Djaffar Lesbet, La Casbah d'Alger (Algiers, 1985);
88. Maria Sgroi-Dufresne, Alger 1830-1984 (Paris, 1986), esp. chap. 1.
89. In one of the key defeats of the Algerian resistance led by Abd al Qadir, General Thomas Robert Bugeaud won the battle of the Wadi (River) Isly in 1844 and was later raised to the peerage as duke of Isly. After independence in 1962, the Algerians changed the name of the Rue d'Isly and renamed the Place Bugeaud the "Place Amir Abd al Qadir."
90. Lespès, Alger: Etude de géographie, 578.
91. Lespès, Alger: Etude de géographie, 405-06, 409, 524-26, 560, 578, 785. Percentage increases during 1901-1926 are for the first district (arrondissement), which includes the areas of the Marine, former Préfecture, and Rue Bab el Oued. In this district in 1881, 304 people lived per hectare, in 1901, 596, and in 1926, 871. In the densest parts of the quarter, there were 1,376 individuals per hectare in 1926.
92. Lamouche, "Un publiciste: Musette," 543;
93. René Lespès, Alger: Esquisse de géographie urbaine (Algiers, 1925), graph 2, 89;
94. Lespès, Alger: Etude de géographie, 558, 566-67. A mere 800 Algerians, or 3 percent, lived in Bab el Oued in 1926. Furthermore, Bab el Oued was 26 percent French in 1906, compared to 59 percent of central Algiers and 69 percent of the predominantly French d'Isly quarter.
95. Whereas old Algiers hands termed the Marine quarter le petit Naples, Bab el Oued was referred to as la petite Espagne. Lespès, Alger: Etude de géographie, 573.
96. Lespès, Alger: Etude de géographie, 344, 384-85, 405-06, 500, 530, 532.
97. Robinet played the piano and flute, and composed on occasion. He was a bricoleur (handyman); he maintained a fully equipped shop and was a founding member of "L'Automobile Club d'Alger." Lamouche, "Un publiciste: Musette," 546.
98. Lamouche, "Un publiciste: Musette," 543-44, quote on 544.
99. Mallebay (1859-1939) was a professor of history at the College of Blida until 1887, when he went into journalism, founding La revue algérienne and Le Turco. Mallebay was a Radical Republican and anti-Semite. Louis Montoy, "La presse dans le département de Constantine (1870-1918)," 3 vols. (Thèse de doctorat, Université de Provence, 1982), 1: 766,
100. Louis Montoy, "La presse dans le département de Constantine (1870-1918) 2: 1099, 1267. Lamouche states incorrectly that Robinet moved to Le Turco in 1896, whereas the first Cagayous pieces were already appearing there in 1895.
101. See Lamouche, "Un publiciste: Musette," 543.
102. Lamouche, "Un publiciste: Musette," 545. A musette is a small, bellows-filled bagpipe popular especially in the eighteenth century.
103. See Appendix: Cagayous Publication Data in Chronological Order at the end of this article.
104. Emile-Félix Gautier, "Les émeutes antijuives en Algérie," in L'Algérie et la métropole (Paris, 1920), 203;
105. Audisio, introduction, Robinet, Cagayous, 15.
106. Interview with Edmond Charlot cited in Paul Siblot, "Pères spirituels et mythes fondateurs de l'Algérianisme," in Martine Mathieu, ed., Le roman colonial (Paris, 1987), 52.
107. "Pochades algériennes: Cigarettes Cagayous," Le Turco (October 30, 1896).
108. Auguste Robinet, Le mariage de Cagayous (Algiers, 1906), advertisement before 49.
109. "Pochades algériennes: Bibliographie," Le Turco (May 5, 1895);
110. "Pochades algériennes: Cagayous au caveau," Le Turco (May 12, 1895).
111. Siblot, "Pères spirituels," 52-53.
112. "Not so many years ago, many [Spanish] immigrants came [to Algiers] on fishing boats [balancelles] transporting water jugs. They disembarked carrying an enormous bag; in local parlance they were named 'snails.' More crudely, they were referred to as 'potato eaters.'" Lespès, Alger: Etude de géographie, 571, n. 1.
113. Lanly, Le Français d'Afrique du nord.
114. On Algerian sabir, see M. Hadj Sadok, "Dialects arabes et francisation linguistique en Algérie," Annales de l'Institut d'Etudes Orientales (Algiers, 1955), 61-97;
115. Louis Brunot, "Sabirs," Journal des Instituteurs d'Afrique du Nord, 1 (April 1948): 209-10.
116. Dupuy, "Le Français d'Afrique du Nord," 5. In a rough-and-ready manner, Dupuy distinguishes the pataouète spoken by fishermen, truck drivers, farmers, Jews, and the urban working class. He refers to Cagayous' pataouète, rooted in such working-class neighborhoods as the Calère in Oran and the Cantera and Bab el Oued in Algiers, as "le langage cagayoussien." Other commentators reserve the term pataouète for the heavily Spanish version spoken in western Algeria and refer to the Italian-dominated Bône variant as "le Bônois." Although I follow most commentators in using pataouète here for the versions of French spoken in Algeria, insufficient attention is generally paid in the literature to geographical, ethnic, socioeconomic, and especially oral versus written differences. In the most substantial book-length study, Le Français d'Afrique du nord, Lanly notes but does not systematically pursue such variations and, more serious, uses later published tests as data of earlier oral practices despite the fact that, as Siblot points out, "literary texts cannot furnish linguistic facts, but only facts of linguistic representation."
117. Paul Siblot, "Mises en texte de la pluriglossie dans la littérature coloniale," Cahiers de praxématique (Montpellier), no. 5 (1985): 108, emphasis in original.
118. Gautier, "Les émeutes antijuives," 199.
119. For glossaries, see Bacri, "Dictionnaire," Trésors, 20-183;
120. Audisio, "Lexique," in Robinet, Cagayous, 251-65;
121. Edmond Brua, "Petit glossaire," in Fables bônoises (Paris, 1972), 209-13;
122. Louis Lafourcade, "Glossaire," in Harmonies bônoises (Algiers, n.d.), 35-44;
123. Husson, "Petit lexique pour non avertis," in "Cagayous," 45-46.
124. Audisio writes, for example, that "when a personage cries 'Tiens!' every good Mediterranean sees the obscene presentation of the arm, of the hand, or of the finger which corresponds to those fruits symbolic in every regard to the people who live on the coast of the Latin sea; the fig and the olive." Audisio, introduction, Robinet, Cagayous, 23, emphasis in original.
125. For the northern shore of the Mediterranean, see Laurence Wylie, Beaux Gestes: A Guide to French Body Talk (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).
126. On Cagayous' language, see Lanly, Le Français d'Afrique du nord;
127. Audisio, introduction, Robinet, Cagayous, 7-40, 251-65;
128. Bacri, Trésors.
129. Auguste Robinet, Au miracle (Algiers, 1905), 2. "Une aute fille qu'elle a 14-15 ans comme ça et que tout le temps elle bouge, elle saute, elle fait des galipettes qu'une girelle dedans le couffin c'est rien, sa mère elle y a porté pluss de dix médicins pour voir ça que c'est et tous on l'y a dit que c'est la danse sanguide basta!"
130. See, among other works, J. Davis, People of the Mediterranean: An Essay in Comparative Social Anthropology (London, 1977);
131. J. G. Peristiany, ed., Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (London, 1965);
132. Jane Schneider, "Of Vigilance and Virgins: Honor, Shame and Access to Resources in Mediterranean Societies," Ethnology, 10 (1971): 1-24.
133. Mille, "Quand Panurge ressuscita," 146.
134. Audisio, introduction, Robinet, Cagayous, 9.
135. Lespès, Alger: Etude de géographie, 494, 506, 517, 565, 570, 585. At certain times, the ratio was even more lopsided. In 1907, for example, the population consisted of 50,996 native French, 12,490 Jews, 26,305 naturalized French, 12,354 Spanish, 9,885 other Europeans, and 33,250 Algerians.
136. Gouvernement Général de l'Algérie, Tableau général des communes de l'Algérie, 2-3.
137. For a detailed study of residential segregation in another Algerian port city, see David Prochaska, "La ségrégation résidentielle en société coloniale: Le cas de Bône en Algérie de 1872 à 1954," Cahiers d'histoire, 25 (1980): 53-74.
138. Mille, "Quand Panurge ressuscita," 151-52;
139. Auguste Robinet, Cagayous candidat (1902), rpt. in Robinet, Cagayous, 113-14.
140. Compare also Robinet, Cagayous, 254, 256, 62.
141. Quoted in Mille, "Quand Panurge ressuscita," 150-51.
142. Charles Gouillon, Annuaire administratif et commercial des trois départements de l'Algérie (Algiers, 1877), 176-77,
143. quoted in Lespès, Alger: Etude de géographie, 759.
144. Lespès, Alger: Etude de géographie, 413, 442, 573, 575, 758, 763-64, 778-79. In 1930, sixteen firms employed 1,800 workers, 1,000 of them women, 1,425 of them Spanish or Spanish naturalized French.
145. Lespès, Alger: Etude de géographie, 785. Robert Bresson's film Pickpocket was made in 1959.
146. Mille, "Quand Panurge ressuscita," 152.
147. On political patronage and corruption in Algeria, see Prochaska, Making Algeria French, 180-205;
148. David Prochaska, "The Political Culture of Settler Colonialism in Algeria: Politics in Bone, 1870-1920," Revue du monde musulman et de la Méditerranée, nos. 48-49 (1988): 293-311.
149. For a Moroccan case of economic power and political brokerage, see John Waterbury, North for the Trade: The Life and Times of a Berber Merchant (Berkeley, Calif., 1972).
150. Albert Camus captures this street-swaggering stance in the following passage written, moreover, in pataouète. "Alors Coco y s'avance et y lui dit: 'Arrête un peu, arrête.' L'autre y dit: 'Qu'est-ce qu'y a?' Alors Coco y lui dit: 'Je vas te donner des coups. - A moi tu vas donner des coups?' Alors y met la main derrière [à la poche-revolver] mais c'était scousa. Alors Coco y lui dit: 'Mets pas la main darrière, parce qu'après j'te choppe le 6-35 et t'y mangeras des coups quand même.' " Camus, Noces (Paris, 1950), 66. "Then Coco goes up and says to him: 'Wait a minute, wait.' The other one says: 'What is it?' Then Coco says to him: 'I'm going to slug you.' - 'You're gonna slug me?' Then he reached in his hip pocket, but it was only a pretext. Then Coco said to him: 'Don't reach for it, because after I hit you with the 6-35 you're going to eat it anyway.'"
151. Michel de Certeau elaborates a rhetoric of walking in which he compares turns of phrase or stylistic figures to the art of composing a path. See his chapter "Walking in the City," in The Practice of Everyday Life, Steven F. Randall, trans. (Berkeley, Calif., 1984), esp. 99-100.
152. "A la casbah," in Auguste Robinet, Cagayous antijuif (Algiers, 1898), 157-61.
153. "Virility and relationships with prostitutes play such a role that with certain authors the Casbah becomes a gigantic whorehouse." Gourdon, et al., "Roman colonial," 153. They are referring to Louis Bertrand, Lucienne Favre, R.-H. de Vandelbourg, and Robert Randau, but their comments apply equally to Robinet.
154. Robinet, Le mariage de Cagayous, 147.
155. Auguste Robinet, Le divorce de Cagayous (Algiers, 1906), 42. " - Çuilà qui perd y paye. - Et çuilà qui gagne? - Çuilà qui gagne aussi y paye. Alorss quoi! - Et pourquoi qu'on dit que la Justice ça doit être battel pour tout le monde? - La Justice elle est battel; mais ceuss-là qu'on travaille vec elle y marchent pas à l'oeil."
156. Robinet, Le divorce de Cagayous, 64: "With Anaïs who tells Fifine, Chicanelle who tells Lina and Mecieu Hoc who tells everyone he can lay his hands on, there are enough that all of the Cantère, Algiers, Mustapha, Boufarik, Blida, everyone knows that Félisque has become the lover of Mme. Solano. Aïe, what a laugh!" Cantère and Mustapha are outlying suburbs of Algiers; Boufarik and Blida are nearby towns.
157. Robinet, Cagayous antijuif, 24, 28-29. "Tout le temps les juifs y barbotent dedans les affaires du Gouvernement. Les Français qui sont beaucoup pareils les fourmis, y restent tranquilles à travailler, et les juifs chaque instant y sortent un truc pour qui vient la misère, ou la guerre, ou les disputes . . . Les juifs c'est la même chose les punaises. Si vous disez rien, si vous y jetez pas de la poudre secticile forte, y vous pompent tout ça que vous avez dedans la poche, dedans la potrine, dedans la tête et dedans la peau de . . . ça que nous avons dedans le patalon . . . En bas, en bas les juifs! Ça c'est mon opinion, à moi!" The terms antijuif/antijudaisme and anti-Semite/anti-Semitism are used interchangeably in the Algerian case. The former is technically more accurate, since the Algerians are also Semitic peoples in a cultural sense, but "anti-Semitism" has the advantage of explicitly linking anti-Semitism in Algeria to that in France and elsewhere.
158. "Parasite morbifère, le juif a porté la décomposition dans notre milieu social. Adorateur du veau d'or, il nous tient par l'or, il nous a, par contagion, conquis à son culte . . . C'est en Algérie surtout que souille la Mal'aria juive." Fernand Grégoire, La juiverie algérienne (Algiers, 1888), 5-6.
159. For contemporary works on anti-Semitism in colonial Algeria, mostly by anti-Semites, see in particular Joseph-François Aumerat, L'anti-sémitisme à Alger (Algiers, 1885);
160. Louis Durieu, Le prolétariat juif en Algérie (Paris, 1899);
161. Durieu, Les juifs algériens (1870-1901) (Paris, 1902);
162. Georges Meynié, L'Algérie juive (Paris, 1887);
163. Eugène Bey, La vérité sur les émeutes d'Alger de janvier 1898 (Algiers, 1898);
164. Fernand Grégoire, La juiverie algérienne;
165. anon., L'oeuvre des antijuifs d'Alger (Algiers, 1899);
166. Jacques Defrance, L'expulsion des juifs (Algiers, 1898);
167. Defrance, Drumont: Sa vie, son oeuvre, son programme (Algiers, 1898).
168. Adolphe Crémieux was minister of justice in Léon Gambetta's Government of National Defense and as such had purview over Algeria. The decree conferring French citizenship on all Jews in Algeria was promulgated by Crémieux on October 24, 1870, at the very beginning of the Third Republic.
169. Gouvernement Général de l'Algérie, Tableau général des communes d'Algérie, 2-3;
170. Lespès, Alger: Etude de géographie, 494.
171. See also Claude Martin, Les israélites algériens de 1830 à 1902 (Paris, 1936), 288-90.
172. On Oran, see Geneviève Dermenjian, La crise anti-juive oranaise (1895-1905): L'antisémitisme dans l'Algérie coloniale (Paris, 1986);
173. on Bône, see Prochaska, Making Algeria French, 201-05.
174. See also Martin, Les Israélites algériens, 299.
175. Martin, Les Israélites algériens, 295-300;
176. Charles-Robert Ageron, Les algériens musulmans et la France, 2 vols. (Paris, 1968), 595-96;
177. e siècles (Paris, 1980), 179-82.
178. See also Dermenjian, La crise anti-juive oranaise, 74-89.
179. Robinet, Cagayous antijuif, 89-90. Algiers greeted Drumont "with unbelievable outbursts of enthusiasm."
180. Martin, Les israélites algériens, 305; see also 303-06.
181. On Cagayous antijuif, see Paul Siblot, "'Cagayous antijuif': Un discours colonial en proie à la racisation," Mots, 15 (1987): 59-75.
182. Robinet, Cagayous antijuif, 90. "Alors quand je vois ça, j'empoigne la branche du palmier qui se portait Bacora, et je marche en devant Drumont. Gardez de là vous autres! Place! - Qui c'est Drumont? je parle. - C'est moi qui me répond en riant un meçieu qu'il a les grands cheveux, la barbe et les lunettes. - Ça va bien. Moi je suis Cagayous!"
183. Drumont received 11,557 votes, versus 4,069 for his two opponents. Martin, Les israélites algériens, 306.
184. Robinet, Cagayous antijuif, 78. "Attends, moi je te [Bacora] prête deux ronds et ça fait que tu peux t'acheter la photographie de Max Régis. Porte-z-y à te gonzesse. Ce soir elle laisse que te montes." Charles-Robert Ageron describes Régis sitting in his carriage drawn by an enthusiastic crowd, "the women of the Algiers petit peuple throwing flowers, offering palms to their idol."
185. Ageron, Les algériens musulmans, 583.
186. See also Martin, Les israélites algériens, 297, 299, 304.
187. "In effect the Jew with French citizenship is an Algerian [indigène] who has been given the right to vote." Gourdon, et al., "Roman colonial," 151.
188. Iancu, "Du nouveau sur les troubles antijuifs," 175.
189. Robinet, Cagayous candidat, quoted in Robinet, Cagayous, 125-26. "Citoyens antitout, . . . Moi que je suis antitout, si jamais vous me donnez la place, je sange tout ça qu'y a ici . . . Ça que je veux moi, c'est que le pays y soye riche et que le monde y soye content et moi député."
190. Gautier, "Les émeutes antijuives." See n. 40 above. There are numerous fascinating parallels - writing, newspapers, music, philology, politics - between Robinet and Aristide Bruant, one of the most colorful characters of fin-de-siècle Paris.
191. See Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-1930 (New York, 1986), 235-40, and the references cited there.
192. Audisio, introduction, Robinet, Cagayous, 14.
193. Compare Calmes, Le roman colonial, 68-77;
194. Gautier, "Les émeutes antijuives."
195. Gautier, "Les émeutes antijuives," 204.
196. Auguste Robinet, Les amours de Cagayous: Pochades algériennes (Algiers, 1896), introduction, 11-12, written by "Fly" (pseud.), a member of the group around Robinet at Le Turco.
197. Arthur Pellegrin, La littérature nord-africaine (Tunis, 1920), 76.
198. Audisio, in Robinet, Cagayous, 249; compare 14.1, of course, understand that Cagayous is fiction, not fact, that despite Robinet's writing strategy of conflating fact and fiction to achieve a documentary, lifelike effect, Cagayous was the creation of his author. The following description of a caricature of Robinet makes this clear: "The 'Automobile Club of Algiers,' of which Robinet was a founding member, conserves in its gallery a magisterial caricature by Herzig which represents our author dressed as a shepherd, . . . wearing a pointed hat with a wide brim, manipulating to the sound of his musette a miniscule Cagayous, castanets in hand."
199. Lamouche, "Un publiciste: Musette," 546.
200. The topic of subliterary genres, or what the French call paralittérature, is too vast to enter into here, but it ranges from serial novels to comic strips and other formula fiction, all of which are intimately connected to the rise of a capitalist mass reading public in the last two centuries. See in general Jean Tortel, et al., Entretiens sur la paralittérature (Paris, 1970);
201. the special issue of Europe, 52, no. 542 (1974).
202. On formula fiction, see John Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago, 1976);
203. on comic strips, Francis Lacassin, Pour un neuvième art: La bande dessinée (Paris, 1971).
204. Compare Slim [pseud. of Menouard Merabtene], Zid Ya Bouzid: Les meilleures bandes dessinées de Slim (Algiers, 1980).
205. See also, on proletarian literature, Michel Radon, Histoire de la littérature prolétarienne de langue française: Littérature ouvrière, littérature paysanne, littérature d'expression populaire (1974; rpt. edn., Paris, 1986), esp. 10-25. I thank Mary Harper for helpful discussions.
206. Audisio, introduction, Robinet, Cagayous, 13;
207. Calmes, Le roman colonial, 68-77.
208. "Cagayous appears today, . . . who, with Assus, has made the success of our newspaper . . . Cagayous is popular from Nemours to Tunis and from Algiers to Ouargla . . . The fantasy of Musette will live from now on in Algeria in the same degree as V. Hugo's Gavroche. He is our very own Gavroche, funnier perhaps than his Parisian cousin, more beloved as well." Le Turco (January 30, 1896).
209. On the picaresque, see, among other works, Barbara A. Babcock, "'Liberty's a Whore': Inversions, Marginalia, and Picaresque Narrative," in Babcock, ed., The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society (Ithaca, N.Y., 1978), 95-116;
210. Robert Alter, Rogue's Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel (Cambridge, Mass., 1964).
211. Alter, Rogue's Progress, 32-33.
212. Mary Douglas, "The Social Control of Cognition: Some Factors in Joke Perception," Man, n.s., 3 (1968): 372.
213. On the trickster, see, among other works, Barbara Babcock-Abrahams, "'A Tolerated Margin of Mess': The Trickster and His Tales Reconsidered," Journal of the Folklore Institute, 11 (1975): 147-86;
214. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Davy Crockett as Trickster: Pornography, Liminality, and Symbolic Inversion in Victorian America," in her Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York, 1985).
215. Audisio, introduction, Robinet, Cagayous, 7-8;
216. Mille, "Quand Panurge ressuscita," 152. To this list, I would add Pepe le Moko, played by Jean Gabin in the film of the same name (director, Julien Duvivier, 1937), remade as Algiers, starring Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr (director, John Cromwell, 1938).
217. In addition to Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532, 1534),
218. see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, Helene Iswolsky, trans. (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), esp. 11-30.
219. Like Cagayous, Till Eulenspeigel delights in language, and he uses it to make a fool of his boss, typically by following his orders literally. Ordered to boil some hops, he boils a dog named "Hops." In a bathhouse advertised as a "House of Cleansing," he enjoys an enormous bowel movement. Again like Cagayous, he has no mature relationship with a woman, in or out of marriage, but "he delights in shit." Paul Oppenheimer, trans., A Pleasant Vintage of Till Eulenspiegel (Middletown, Conn., 1972), xx.
220. Audisio, introduction, Robinet, Cagayous, 7-8.
221. Also known as Karakouz, Karagouz, and Garagouz. On Karagöz, see Jean Déjeux, Djoh'a: Héros de la tradition orale arabo-berbère; Hier et aujourd'hui (Sherbrooke, Quebec, 1978), 91-112;
222. Sabri Esat Siavusgil, "Karagöz: Théâtre d'ombres turcs," Les cahiers de l'Oronte, no. 2 (1965): 15-32.
223. Where Cagayous merely mouths obscenities, Karagöz wields his giant phallus in a number of ways including as a weapon. In an 1835 performance in Algiers, Karagöz uses his member to drive off a French army contingent; in Tunis at the beginning of the twentieth century, he sodomized, successively, a Jew, a British tourist, and a French consul. No wonder Nerval compared the Karagöz skits to Rabelais' ribald tales.
224. On Muhammad al Muwaylihi and the maqama, see Marilyn Booth, Bayram al Tunisi's Egypt: Social Criticism and Narrative Strategies (Exeter, 1990), chap. 4, esp. 345-47, 350-53, and the references cited there.
225. On Djoha, see Auguste Mouliéras, Les fouberies de Si Djeh'a (Paris, 1892);
226. Déjeux, Djoh'a. Central to the enduring quality of these literary types is the way they are worked and reworked.
227. Richard Strauss's orchestral poem, Till Eulenspeigel (Opus 28), was performed first in 1895.
228. The Algerian writers Mohammed Dib (Au café, 1955),
229. Kateb Yacine (La poudre d'intelligence, 1959),
230. Rachid Boudjedra (L'insolation, 1972) all rework the Djoha theme.
231. Slim, Zid Ya Bouzid;
232. Déjeux, Djoh'a, 34;
233. Youssef M. Ibrahim, "Algerian-in-Exile's Pen Wielded for Home Front," New York Times (March 19, 1995): 8.
234. Critical of both the FLN generals - "a collection of banana republic brass" - and fundamentalists of the Front Islamique de Salut (FIS) - "I am part of the silent Algerian majority which is against religious fascism and for a free modern Algeria" - Merabtene left Algeria for Morocco as a result of death threats in September 1992 and has lived in Paris since the end of 1994 (Ibrahim, "Algerian-in-Exile"). Thanks to Edmund Burke III for first bringing Slim to my attention.
235. My starting point here is a 1977 study of the colonial novel: "Political and/or literary essays . . . 1894. First installments of Cagayous, by MUSETTE (the genre of which is difficult to define, but which had an important influence on all colonial literature in Algeria)." Gourdon, et al., "Roman colonial," 83. And thus I want to ask, in what sense is Cagayous political?
236. Déjeux, La littérature algérienne contemporaine, 13-53.
237. Quoted in Déjeux, La littérature algérienne contemporaine, 27.
238. Jean-Claude Vatin aptly describes the outpouring of apologias as "French pleas for the defense of 'tearjerkers'" (les plaidoyers ou 'larmoyers' français)" Vatin, L'Algérie politique: Histoire et société (Paris, 1974), 309,
239. quoted in Philip Dine, Images of the Algerian War: French Fiction and Film, 1954-1992 (New York, 1994), 153. See also Dine, 149-50;
240. Stora, La gangrène et l'oubli.
241. This point is made by Martine Mathieu, in "Présentation," Mathieu, Le roman colonial, 9. The roman colonial generally is characterized here as "minor" in a collection devoted not only to colonial Algeria but also Madagascar and Réunion.
242. Déjeux, La littérature algérienne contemporaine, 33.
243. See also Siblot, "Pères spirituels," 29.
244. "Contacts between the races . . . are described . . . as if . . . Algeria was France and [as if] the races were already mixed." Déjeux, La littérature algérienne contemporaine, 32. In contrast, French-language literature of the Maghreb constitutes for Albert Memmi "a literature of separation," which in effect leaves out the native Arabs and Berbers.
245. See Memmi, "Une littérature de la separation," in Albert Memmi, ed., Anthologie des écrivains français du Maghreb (Paris, 1969), 11-21. In Memmi's view, therefore, "Camus's The Stranger is in the first place about Camus as a stranger in his native land" (p. 17). For Déjeux, "The myth of integration leads to exclusion . . . If the Latins [i.e., Europeans] are integrated, the 'others' are not: integration and exclusion."
246. Jean Déjeux, "De l'éternel méditerranéen à l'éternel Jugurtha," Revue algérienne des sciences juridiques, politiques et économiques, 14 (1977): 674, emphasis in original.
247. See, among others, Déjeux, La littérature algérienne contemporaine, 21-22, 30, 51-52.
248. The term "forgotten ancestor" is Siblot's. "Pères spirituels," 48-54. Calmes treates Robinet as a precursor to the "grand roman colonial."
249. Le roman colonial, 67-77.
250. Jean Déjeux, Bibliographie de la littérature "algérienne" des Français (Paris, 1978);
251. Gourdon, et al., "Roman colonial";
252. Calmes, Le roman colonial;
253. Fadhila Yahiaoui, Roman et société coloniale dans l'Algérie de l'entre-deia-guerres (Algiers, 1985). I am following here the line of argument developed in Siblot, "Pères spirituels," precisely because he first establishes the position of these four critical works within the literature on the roman colonial and "Algerianism," then proceeds to gauge the position of the Cagayous tales within them (see 55, n. 4). Déjeux characterizes Robinet as "local production that hardly makes it across the Mediterranean."
254. La littérature algérienne contemporaine, 23.
255. For testimonials from Pierre Mille, Arthur Pellegrin, Jules Roy, and Pierre Martino, see Siblot, "Pères spirituels," 49. Jules Roy, for example, writes, "I am an African; these unsophisticated pages have brought back the times of my youth."
256. Quoted in Yahiaoui, Roman et société coloniale, 18.
257. Paul Siblot, "Un essai d'élaboration identitaire en société coloniale: Cagayous," in Robert Lafont, ed., La production d'identité (Montpellier, 1986), 219.
258. Siblot, "Mises en texte de la pluriglossie dans la littérature coloniale," 133;
259. Siblot, "Un essai d'élaboration identitaire," 231. To clinch his argument that "the construction [of the text] was motivated by a sense of the collective identity that it in fact helped to promote," Siblot uses as an example an official speech Gautier delivered in 1930 in his capacity as rector of the University of Algiers as part of the celebrations of the centennial of the French conquest. Gautier celebrated the settlers as a "new race," using as his example the "admirable fidelity" of Cagayous' pataouète to that spoken by the settlers. Siblot rejects Gautier's argument, contending that Gautier mistook thepataouète actually spoken with its literary representation in the Cagayous texts. I agree with Siblot's argument, but he has his dates wrong.
260. While the essay containing Gautier's remarks was indeed published in his collection, Emile-Felix Gautier, Un siècle de colonisation (Paris, 1930), in the centennial series, it was first published ten years earlier in Gautier's L'Algérie et le métropole and merely reprinted in 1930.
261. See Siblot, "Mises en texte de la pluriglossie dans la littérature coloniale," 133;
262. Siblot, "Un essai d'élaboration identitaire," 230-31.
263. Paul Siblot, "L'Algérianisme: Fonctions et dysfonctions d'une littérature coloniale," in Jean-Louis Joubert, ed., Le roman colonial (Suite) (Paris, 1990), 88.
264. Quoted in Gabriel Audisio, Jeunesse de la Méditerranée (Paris, 1935), 113;
265. Yahiaoui, Roman et société coloniale, 17;
266. Siblot, "Pères spirituels," 52;
267. Siblot, "Un essai d'élaboration identitaire," 227;
268. Déjeux, La littérature algérienne contemporaine, 18-19.
269. Charles-Robert Ageron, Histoire de l'Algérie contemporaine, Vol. 2 (1871-1954) (Paris, 1979), 407.
270. See also Jacques Berque, French North Africa: The Maghrib between Two World Wars, Jean Stewart, trans. (New York, 1967), 222-24.
271. "In recent years, there has been much talk about racism and anti-racism . . . This racism feeds primarily on the defeat of a people, of a nation. The [French] invaders saw in their victory clear proof of their superiority. It even became rational to occupy a country and subdue the inhabitants, since they were to be 'civilized.'. . . The National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen . . . reactivates this kind of colonial racism." Stora, La gangrène et l'oubli, 288-89.
272. As Benjamin Stora puts it, "The problem of immigration lays bare an obsessive conflict that has never been resolved. Behind the 'Arab,' the 'North African' and behind the 'North African,' the 'Algerian.'" Stora, La gangrène et l'oubli, 286.
273. On the electoral sociology of the FN, see Nonna Mayer and Pascal Perrineau, eds., Le Front national à découvert (Paris, 1989), esp. 38, 43-44, 50, 96, 148, 163-64, 230-32, 251, 311.
274. On Le Pen and torture in Algeria, see Edwy Plenel and Alain Rollat, eds., La République menacée: Dix ans d'effet Le Pen (Paris, 1992), 225;
275. Jonathan Marcus, The National Front and French Politics: The Resistible Rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen (New York, 1995), 31-32, 34;
276. Stora, La gangrène et l'oubli, 290-91.
277. Marcus, National Front and French Politics, 125-29. Olivier d'Ormesson left the FN in 1987 when he realized that Le Pen believed in "historical revisionism," namely that the Holocaust had never taken place.
278. Stora, La gangrène et l'oubli.
279. In addition to the references at note 11 above, contemporary news about Algeria is available on-line from Azzedine Layachi at layachi@acf2.nyu.edu.
280. Ibrahim, "Algerian-in-Exile," 8.
281. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 200, 164-65, 204-05. "It is in his study of the national bourgeoisie that we can see Fanon most clearly as a revolutionary, not merely an anti-colonialist. For him, the new leaders of Africa were notable chiefly for their ability to manipulate slogans, the better to enable them to profit from the perquisites of power."
282. Edmund Burke III, "Frantz Fanon: A Retrospective Review," orig. ms., 13-14. (I thank Edmund Burke for giving me a copy of this manuscript, the published version of which, "Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth," "was unfortunately mangled in the editorial process.")