Commonwealth and Foreign
FRANCE ACROSS THE SEA
By D W. BROGAN
"DON'T you think that we have made a success of it? A century ago there was nothing, nothing, swamp and desert." The French business man who asked me this pertinent question was very large, and a very large Frenchman gives an astonishing impression of size, as if the dynamic energy so noticeable in small Frenchmen was present in due proportion in the big, instead of being diluted as is the case in other peoples. But even if my interlocutor had been a small Frenchman, I could still have truthfully replied, " yes, you have worked wonders." For Algeria and Tunis are a tribute to an energy, courage and tenacity not sufficiently appreciated even in France. To drive through the fertile plains to the south of Algiers is to get, at first sight, the impression of being in a more fertile Provence, a fat land less wind-swept, with less of the bare bones of the rock showing through.
To arrive as a casual traveller with no preconceived notions in the fantastic city of Constantine on its twin ridges high above the extraordinary gorges of the Rummel is to be startled and pleased. Although there has peen no military reason for it for over a century, the city still clings to the magnificent and remarkably inconvenient site selected by a Numidian king ; surmounting gulfs with amazing bridges, reducing the danger of fallen arches by municipal lifts up and down to the cliffs where the cave-dwellers live, pushing one side of a road over the dizzy gulf on concrete arches and making space for demonstrations—or car-parks- by building a great concrete platform on the site of the breach through which Lamoriciere led his storming party a hundred years ago. Were Constantine in America or Germany, it would be well known as a monument to Yankee boldness or German skill. As it is in Algeria it is not half as famous as it should be.
Modern Algiers, stretching for miles on either side of the crowded hill of the old Kasbah, whence the pirates plagued Europe ; the long canal that has made Tunis a port at last ; the corkscrew bends of the roads that climb up to the summit of the passes and down into Algiers ; the pyramidal markers that keep the desert driver more or less on the road ; the familiar red kilometre-stones that try to pretend that the road on the high plateau, empty except for nomads with their camels, is a route nationale like any other route nationale from Dunkirk to Menton ;—French system, tenacity and inflexibility mark them all. There may be ornamental Arabic lettering on the walls of the post-office but all the notices are in French, even in the territories of the Bey of Tunis, in a town overwhelmingly Arabic-speaking, only a shabby paper notice pinned to a screen admits that there is another tongue than French spoken there and that Arabic needs more recognition than is afforded by bi-lingual street-notices or postage stamps.
" You mustn't think of this as a colony " said the lively young official to whom I talked in Algiers. " This isn't like Tunis or Morocco. This is a part of France." But the vast glass and steel offices of the "gouvernement-general " belied his words, for what " chef-lieu " had a building like that or an official like the Governor-General? For the fiction of representation in Parliament, of the organisation into three Departments appears quickly as a fiction even to the casual visitor. Around him are the veiled women and the men in various modifications of European costume but without hats or caps, and if he has ever been in a country where there are two classes marked off by fairly obvious race stigmata, he feels something of a familiar atmosphere. In my case it was the South that I recalled ; the swarming streets of Charleston or even the back alleys of Washington. It is true there is no such obvious colour- line as there is in America, but there is a line and you are on one side of it so that in the souks of Tunis even Sicilian children look more like London children than they do like their Moslem neighbours with whom they have so much blood in common. Advertisements on walls announcing a pilgrimage to Mecca ; announcements of the first film in the Tunisian version of Arabic, a sudden explosion of anger over the attack on Albania as a blow at Islam, all remind you that French faith in the universality of their political and social doctrine, the pre-eminence of the lay power and of the rights of man is here facing an obstacle which they have so far failed to conquer.
" You are looking," said the official whose business it is to hasten the process and correct its dangers, " at a popula- tion in a state of very rapid material evolution and very slow spiritual evolution." In a century the French have remade North Africa ; they have projected their economic and political life overseas. At the northern end of the continent they have done what the Anglo-Dutch have done at the other ; they have created in the bosom of a native society a miniature Europe. But the differences are as striking a. the resemblances. Islam and Arabic are obstacles to European penetration far tougher than Bantu society. True to the Rhodes principle of equal rights for every civilised man, the French have in theory and, to a large extent in practice, made their equals of those natives who have been willing to accept the full implications of that status. A distinguished French naval engineer is an Algerian Arab ; several others have entered the army from the Ecole Polytechnique. If they choose to do so, the Arabs of Algeria can become French citizens—at a price. But that price is one that few have been willing to pay. It means abandoning their own family law and polygamy, not under the pressure of economic necessity but as a deliberate renunciation of their own way of life. There is nothing but a reluctance to make that renunciation to prevent the Algerian Moslems swamping the colonists, but much to the relief of the colon- ists that danger is remote ; the price is too high and despite efforts or promises made in the first days of the front popu- laire, it seems likely to remain too high.
So one sixth of the population have all the more im- portant political rights, limited only by the centralisation of authority in Algiers and in Paris and by ingenious modifica- tions of the local government system, for stout as is the French belief in uniformity, the idea of giving all power to the local colonial " pays legal" is too much to swallow. There are native representatives on all the local governing and advisory bodies. So one can read a long electoral address that might have been designed for the electors of Brioude or Tulle but is addressed " to my dear Fellow- Moslems " and one can read debates in the Algiers town- council with bandying to and fro of charges of proselytism and assertions of religious fervour that make one think of Belfast.
But in an age when nationalism is the real con- quering living religion, when the prestige of the western world is deservedly low, it is natural and inevitable that in Algeria, as elsewhere over French North Africa, the authority of France should be, if not endangered, at least questioned. And North Africa is economically and mili- tarily so important to France that such questionings are matters of very serious concern.
Previous page
