By Frantz Fanon
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First published in Les Temps Modernes, June 1959. This version published in A Dying Colonialism (1967) translated by Haakon Chevalier.
In the preceding pages we have on several occasions tried to shed light on certain aspects of Algeria’s European society. We have drawn attention to the often odious behavior of certain Europeans. One would of course have liked to find among Algeria’s European doctors and intellectuals a desire to lessen the tension, to facilitate contacts, to play down the conflict. We know that, instead, European intellectuals have taken over the colonists’ cause. The Sérignys, the Borgeauds, the Laquieres have disappeared or operate in the background. Nor must it be imagined that they act through intermediaries. That period is now closed. The Lagaillardes and the Regards are not straw men. They have assumed the leadership of the colonialist forces, made direct contacts with the army and the French parties of the right, and do not rule out the possibility of a sudden break from France. The traditionalists of colonization have long ago been outdistanced. Accustomed to parliamentary action, to political pressures, and to backstage maneuvering, these men in the past three months have shown a marked hesitation. This is because the new kingpins of the colonization see the future in apocalyptic terms. Some of Algeria’s European intellectuals, because they have links with the colonial power, have often contributed to giving the Algerian war its hallucinatory character. We have seen doctors assigned full time to the dispensaries of the judicial police, and we know that philosophers and priests, in the relocation or internment centers, assume the mission of brain-washing, of probing souls, of making the Algerian man unrecognizable.
But we shall see that Algeria’s European minority is far from being the monolithic block that one imagines. Mr. Laffont, the director of the newspaper L’Echo d’Oran, in declaring recently that Algiers does not represent Algeria, in fact manifests the desire that certain Europeans feel to keep their distance from the colonialist General Staff of Algiers. One could go further and say that the rue Michelet, the rue d’Isly, and a few cafes of Bab-el-Oued do not represent Algeria.
In April 1953, at a meeting of the Board of Directors of the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties, the decision was reached to establish contact with the European population and to initiate exchanges of views with the main groups representing the interests of the European minority. The Democratic Union of the Algerian Manifesto likewise, in its doctrinal publications, constantly reminded its militants of the strategic and political necessity of not consigning all the Europeans to the colonialist side. We may mention, incidently, that several Europeans were at that time members of the U.D.M.A.
Such positions were rapidly to bring rewards. In the cities, more and more meetings were held between Moslem Algerians and European Algerians. These meetings had nothing in common with the Franco-Moslem forces of the colonialist authorities. There was no méchoui, no exoticism, no paternalism or humility. Men and women discussed their future, called attention to the dangers that beset their country.
Groups of young people would meet during this period, and outings were organized. Associations of girls joined hands and began to work together; the psychological bases for human and really democratic encounters were definitely laid.
Europeans who were known or supposed to be democrats and anti-colonialists were approached by the leaders. The Algerian question was studied from all angles, and very often, after a complete survey of the colonial situation, the Europeans would be the ones to express surprise that Algeria had not yet drawn the conclusions to which the political failures pointed. Very often these Europeans would themselves reach the realization of the necessity for armed action as the only means of rescuing Algeria from its desperate situation.
It has often been claimed that the F.L.N. made no distinction among the different members of Algeria’s European society. Those who make such accusations fail to take into account both the policy long defined by the Front with respect to Algeria’s Europeans, and the constant support that hundreds and hundreds of European men and women have brought to our units and to our political cells. What we have said is that the Algerian people are spontaneously aware of the importance of the European population which expresses itself through its oppressive system and especially through the silence and inactivity of the French democrats in Algeria in the face of the affirmed and total violence of the colonialists.
Other things being equal, it can be said of Algeria’s European democrats what has been endlessly repeated of the French parties of the Left; for a long time history is made without them. They were unable to prevent the sending of contingents to Algeria, unable to prevent Guy Mollet’s capitulation. They were passive under Lacoste, powerless before the military coup of the 13th of May. Nevertheless, their existence has forced the neo-fascists of Algeria and France to be on the defensive. The Left has done nothing for a long time in France. Yet by its action, its denunciations, and its analyses, it has prevented a certain number of things.
Algeria’s European democrats, in the framework of the Algerian war, could not as a whole act like their homologues living in France. Democracy in France traditionally lives in broad daylight. In Algeria, democracy is tantamount to treason. A Claude Bourdet, a Domenach, a Pierre Cot can publicly take a position different from that of the government of their country. Being former members of the resistance, having from the beginning devoted their lives to the defense and to the triumph of certain principles, they experience no hesitation. And the threats, when they come, do not budge them. But we must emphasize the fact that within the framework of the French hexagon, democratic traditions have by and large been maintained. France, as an imperialist country, has great racist potentialities, as we have seen more clearly in the past two years, but among Frenchmen there are reflexes that operate spontaneously. This accounts for the relative freedom left to opponents—less and less, however, because France is beginning to be colonized by the Algerian activists—and this also accounts for the outburst of public indignation that greets every revelation that reaches France regarding the tortures practiced in Algeria.
Because of their own contradictions and because of the power and the radicalism of the reactionary parties, the forces of the Left in France have up to the present time been unable to impose negotiation. But undeniably they are constantly forcing the extremists to unmask themselves, and hence progressively to adopt the positions that will precipitate their defeat.
In Algeria the forces of the Left do not exist. It is unthinkable for European democrats really to militate in Algeria outside the Algerian Communist Party. We know that even the Algerian Communist Party was for a long time confined within a reformist position of the French Union type, and that for long months after November 1, 1954, the Algerian Communists denounced the terroristes provocateurs—in other words, the F.L.N.
Algeria’s European democrats have from the beginning lived in a more or less clandestine state. Drowned in the European mass, they live in a world of values that their principles reject
and condemn. The European democrat is on the defensive. He has contacts with Algerians but in secrecy. In the European colony he is referred to as “the Arab.” All these phenomena are well known, and they have appeared in Indochina, in Africa south of the Sahara, in Tunisia, and in Morocco.
This democratic European, accustomed to semi-clandestine contacts with Algerians, unwittingly learns the laws of revolutionary action. And when those whom he used to receive in his home tell him to give shelter to a friend, to find medications, or to transport a parcel, there is as a rule no difficulty. We must emphasize the point that never has a member of the Front deceived a French democrat. It would be out of the question to expose a man or a woman who had always commanded our esteem to the slightest risk, without warning them. The decision to help the F.L.N. was taken quite knowingly, in a wholly responsible way. Never has a French democrat been deceived. Sometimes, especially in the extremely crucial periods of 1957, it would happen that a democrat would hold back and refuse, in despair, the service requested; but never was there an attempt to deceive or to exploit the sincerity and the good will of the Europeans.
It should perhaps be added that often the European would ask not to be told the details of the matter in connection with which his collaboration was being sought. But the leadership was uncompromising as to this. The F.L.N. wanted responsible people, not people who at the slightest hitch would break down and claim that they had been deceived.
The European men and women who have been arrested and tortured by the police services and the French parachutists, by their attitude under torture, have shown the rightness of this position taken by the F.L.N. Not a single Frenchman has revealed to the colonialist police information vital to the Revolution. On the contrary, the arrested Europeans have resisted long enough to enable the other members of the network to disappear. The tortured European has behaved like an authentic militant in the national fight for independence.
For five years the F.L.N. has not considered it necessary to insist on the participation of Europeans in the fight for liberation. This policy is dictated by the consideration that these
Europeans should not be made conspicuous, that their action should not be differentiated from that of any other Algerian. The F.L.N. did not want to make of them “show Europeans” in the ranks of the Revolution, on the model of colonial Algeria where the “show” Moslem and Jew were ritually to be found in every committee.
For the F.L.N., in the new society that is being built, there are only Algerians. From the outset, therefore, every individual living in Algeria is an Algerian. In tomorrow’s independent Algeria it will be up to every Algerian to assume Algerian citizenship or to reject it in favor of another.
There are, to be sure, the war criminals, all those torturers spawned by the civil strifes of Saigon, Tunis, or Meknes, and who today in Algiers or in Mascara, before the end of the colonial reign whose approach they sense, are bent on shedding the greatest possible amount of blood. Those men belong nowhere. Now that the French colonial empire is being shaken by its last spasms, the French would do well to identify them. If they return to France, these men should be kept under surveillance. Jackals do not take to feeding on milk overnight. The taste of blood and of crime is deeply embedded in the very being of these creatures who, it should be said, must be retrieved by psychiatry.
There are also the few hundred European colonialists, powerful, intractable, those who have at all times instigated repressions, broken the French democrats, blocked every endeavor within the colonial framework to introduce a modicum of democracy into Algeria.
The Algerian people need not restate their position with respect to these men who have considered Algeria and the Algerians as a private reserve. The people have excluded them from the Algerian nation and they must not hope to be “taken back.”
We shall now show in detail that the European minority has in the past few years become diversified and that considerable numbers of non-Arab Algerians have identified themselves with the Algerian cause and collaborate actively in the struggle while others officially fight in the ranks of the Algerian Revolution.
Algeria’s Jews
The Algerian Jews represent one-fifth of the non-Moslem population of Algeria. Their attitude toward the struggle of the Algerian people is obviously not a homogeneous one. A socioeconomic analysis affords a complete explanation of the different attitudes adopted by the members of the Jewish community.
A first group of Jews has bound its fate very closely with that of the colonial domination. Jewish tradesmen, for example, protected against competition from the Algerians by their status as Frenchmen, would not look too favorably upon the setting up of an Algerian national authority and the disappearance of preferential systems. It is a fact that the banks make it enormously difficult for Algerian tradesmen to borrow money and very often block their transactions and thus actively collaborate in their bankruptcy, or in any case limit the expansion of their business and consequently prevent it from becoming a danger to other tradesmen.
In every large city in Algeria, however, one or two Algerians can be found who, by dint of tenacity and business acumen, have managed to circumvent the maneuvers and to constitute a threat to the pre-eminence of the Jewish tradesmen.
“If ever they get their independence,” the tradesmen admit, “they will take our place.” On the level of economic competition, therefore, there is the fear on the part of the Jewish tradesman that equality in the competition that would be set up by an Algerian power would be prejudicial to him. This fear is far from being the exclusive characteristic of Jewish tradesmen. It is to be found in European tradesmen of all origins in every business, large and small. The end of the colonial regime is looked upon as the end of prosperity.
It must be pointed out, however, that such a state of mind is not to be found at all levels and in all regions. In the centers where the Jewish tradesman maintains close contacts with the Algerian population and where economic independence is pretty clear, there is a confusion of interests. In these centers, Jewish tradesmen furnish the A.L.N. its supplies of military clothes, blankets… It is no secret that since 1954 several Jewish tradesmen have been arrested for aiding and abetting the Algerian Revolution.
Jewish civil servants, practically the only administrative personnel recruited locally—Algeria’s Europeans are settlers or else exercise liberal professions—also look upon the prospect of the birth of an Algerian state with fear and trembling. It is easy for them to guess that the freedom of every Algerian to receive schooling and possibly a scholarship, the disappearance of ostracism and of the numerus clausus, would introduce radical modifications in their privileges. One remembers the discontent expressed by European civil servants in Algeria when, in a show of “conscience,” the French authorities waved the spectre of “the accession of Moslems to public service.”
This state of mind, although frequent in Algeria, does not exclude absolutely opposite positions. We know Jewish police officers who, especially in 1955-56, retarded the arrest of patriots even though it had been ordered on a high level, thus often enabling them to “disappear.”
Finally, colonial Algeria being an eminently racist country, the different mechanisms of racist psychology are to be found there. Thus the Jew, despised and excluded by the European, is quite happy on certain occasions to identify himself with those who humiliate him to humiliate the Algerian in turn. But it is very rare, except in the region of Constantine where many poor Jews find shelter in the shadow of the colonial reign, to see Jews, in broad daylight, affirm their membership in Algeria’s extremist groups.
Alongside the two large categories of Jewish tradespeople and civil servants, there is the great majority, a floating, highly Arabized mass having only a poor knowledge of French, considering itself by tradition and sometimes by dress as authentic “natives.” This mass represents three-fourths of the Algerian Jewish population. They are in the Algerian territory the homologues of the Tunisian Jews of the Moroccan Djerba or the mellah. For these Jews, there is no problem: they are Algerians.
We see therefore that the fraction of the Jewish minority actively engaged in the ranks of colonialism is relatively unimportant. Let us now look at the case of Algerian Jews participating in the fight for national liberation.
At the time when the French authorities decided to create urban and rural militias, the Jewish citizens wished to know what attitude to adopt in the face of this mobilization. A few of them did not hesitate to propose to the F.L.N. that, instead of responding to the requisition order, they join the nearest maquis. The Front as a whole advised caution, merely asking these Jews, within the framework of their professions, to become “the eyes and ears of the Revolution” inside the enemy
apparatus.
Their presence in the militias, moreover, has rendered service to the struggle. Thus the members of a patrol advise the chiefs of the size of the units, the nature of their arms, the route to be followed, the times when the rounds are made. Likewise the chiefs are often kept informed of reprisal operations organized against this or that douar.
Thus, too, a European of Algeria who has actively participated with his unit in the massacre of Algerians may, a few days later, be the victim of an attempt on his life organized by the
fidaïnes.
For the European population ignorant of the events that have determined the decision of the local cell of the F.L.N., the attempt may appear unjust and inexcusable. But for the other members of the militia, who remember the cries of the men murdered in the douar and of the women being raped, the reason for this act is clear. The rightness of popular justice manifests itself in a particularly convincing way. The observer familiar with events in detail may notice in the course of the days following the attempt that several civil servants among the militiamen have asked for their transfer or else have literally fled to Algiers.
At other times, the Jews participate financially in the struggle and make a monthly contribution through an intermediary. It is well for the French to know these things; as for the French authorities, they are well aware of them. It is well for the Jews to know them too, for it is not true that the Jew is in favor of colonialism and that the Algerian people reject him and relegate him to the camp of the oppressors.
The Algerian people, in truth, did not wait until 1959 to define their position with regard to the Jews. Here in fact is a passage from the appeal addressed in the form of a tract to the Jews of Algeria, at the most difficult moments of the Revolution, that is, in the fall of 1956:
The Algerian people consider that it is their duty today to address themselves directly to the Jewish community in order to ask it solemnly to affirm its intention to belong to the Algerian
Nation. This clearly affirmed choice will dissipate all misunderstandings and will root out the germs of the hatred maintained by French colonialism.
Already in the issue of the Plate-forme published in August 1956, the F.L.N. had declared, on the subject of the Jewish minority:
Algerians of Jewish origin have not yet overcome their qualms of conscience, nor chosen sides.
Let us hope they will, in great number, take the path of those who have responded to the call of the generous fatherland, and have given their friendship to the Revolution by already proudly proclaiming their Algerian nationality.
Jewish intellectuals have spontaneously demonstrated their support of the Algerian cause, whether in the democratic and traditionally anti-colonialist parties or in liberal groups. Even
today, the Jewish lawyers and doctors who in the camps or in prison share the fate of millions of Algerians attest to the multi-racial reality of the Algerian Nation.
Various groups of the Jewish population of Algeria have likewise taken an official stand. In August 1956, a group of Jews in Constantine wrote:
One of the most pernicious maneuvers of colonialism in Algeria was and remains the division between Jews and Moslems. … The Jews have been in Algeria for more than two thousand years; they are thus an integral part of the Algerian people. … Moslems and Jews, children of the same earth, must not fall into the trap of provocation. Rather, they must make a common front against it, not letting themselves be duped by those who, not so long ago, were offhandedly contemplating the total extermination of the Jews as a salutary step in the evolution of humanity.
In January 1957, in response to the Front’s appeal, a group of Algerian Jews wrote:
It is time, today, that we should return to the Algerian community. Attachment to an artificial French nationality is a snare and a delusion at a moment when the young and powerful modem Algerian nation is rapidly taking shape. … Jews have joined the ranks of the Algerians fighting for national independence. … Some have paid with their lives, others have bravely borne the foulest police brutalities, and many are today behind the doors of prisons and the gates of concentration camps. We also know that in the common fight Moslems and Jews have discovered themselves to be racial brothers, and that they feel a deep and lasting attachment to the Algerian fatherland. In proclaiming our attachment to the Algerian Nation, we put an end to the pretext used by the colonialists when they try to prolong their domination by making the French people believe that the revolt here is only the result of a medieval fanaticism…
Algeria’s Settlers
Another myth to be destroyed is that Algeria’s settlers were unanimously opposed to the end of colonial domination.
Here again, French colonialism must know that the most important backing given by Algeria’s Europeans to the people’s struggle has been and remains that of the settlers. Even the Algerians have been surprised by the frequency with which the settlers have responded to the appeals of the F.L.N. In any case, once contacted by the F.L.N., no settler has ever reported to the French authorities. It has happened that they have refused an appeal, but the secret has always been kept.
In the countryside, from the first months of 1955, the small settlers, the farmers, the managers were approached by turns. Of course, the known extreme rightists were systematically avoided. Generally speaking, especially in the small and medium population centers, men know one another, and the Algerian for his part has from the beginning put a label on every European. When an F.L.N. cell would decide to contact the Europeans in the region, the members knew at once who were the ones who should automatically be excluded. They also knew, though with less certainty, which ones would probably contribute their help to the Revolution.
Very often, especially in the small rural centers, only one member of the cell is made responsible for relations with the Europeans. One can readily imagine the vigilance that must be exercised in the first months of the struggle to prevent ill-advised moves on the part of militants not yet sufficiently disciplined. We have seen in fact that the European minority was seen as an undifferentiated whole within the framework of the colonial situation. On November 1, 1954, there was therefore an extreme oversimplification. The outlines and paradoxes of the world stood out in sudden sharpness.
The settler who helps the Revolution might be led to echo colonialist remarks in public—at the cafe or in a conversation—in order to assure the other Europeans of his solidarity. “With them the only thing that counts is force… They’re all in cahoots…” The people, who have their ears to the ground, find out that these remarks have been made, and a new body of evidence builds up in the village. That settler is unanimously designated as a target for the fadaïnes. It then becomes necessary to intervene tactfully, to prohibit any act of hostility to the person or against the property of that settler and at the same time not give any hint as to the reasons for these instructions.
Sometimes it may be decided to burn a few haystacks in the fields of a settler who, in a region that has otherwise been razed to the ground by the F.L.N., has paradoxically suffered no damage. The colonialist Europeans sooner or later begin to wonder what is behind the Front’s unusual respect for that settler’s fields. We may mention also that in certain localities we have evidence of fires being set or livestock being slaughtered by European neighbors jealous of the protection a settler seems to enjoy, in contrast to the almost daily raids carried out by units of the A.L.N. on their properties.
Since 1955, many farms belonging to European settlers have been used by turns as infirmaries, refuges, or relay stations. When the French troops, in the course of their forays, began to make a habit of systematically destroying the grain reserves of the Algerian population, the A.L.N. decided to stock their supplies on the farms of Europeans. Thus several farms belonging to Europeans were transformed into A.L.N. granaries, and at nightfall sections of the A.L.N. units could be seen coming down from the mountains to take delivery of sacks of wheat or semolina.
At other times weapons would be stored on the farms. This was the period during which, in many areas, meetings would be held on European farms. Deliveries of arms were made under the sacred protection of the European settler. It sometimes happened, too, that settlers would accept the weapons that were delivered them by the French army—on the pretext of self-protection—and hand over to the A.L.N. those that they had had previously. Finally, since the beginning of the Revolution, a great number of European farmers have regularly been helping the Algerian Revolution financially.
The dozens of European settlers arrested for arms traffic, arms transport, financial support of “the rebellion,” suffice to show the scope of this European participation in the national fight for liberation. The French authorities, since they have discovered this commitment of the Europeans to the cause of the Front, have formed the habit of keeping it hidden, or of branding these Europeans as Communists. This propaganda trick has two objectives: First, to revive the argument that North Africa is a target of Communist infiltration into the N.A.T.O. strategic system, into the heart of Western civilization. Next, to discredit those men, to present them as “foreign agents,” even mercenaries. French colonialism refuses to admit that a genuine European can really fight side by side with the Algerian people.
European farmers, without engaging in combat, help the Front by refusing, for example, the protection that the French Army offers to provide them. These refusals are sometimes of consequence, for in farms happening to be in a crucial strategic area (a passageway between two mountains, frontier regions) the absence of colonial forces favors the movement of units of the A.L.N. or the supplying of the moudjahidines. It sometimes happens that the French Army decides, in the course of a control operation in a given sector, to establish a post on a farm despite the settler’s opposition. The owner then never fails to notify the Front that these quarters are being set up without his consent and that he has not asked anyone for protection.
The settler does his best, in fact, to make things uncomfortable for the French military, and in any case to communicate to the local chiefs of the F.L.N. detailed information as to the size and the morale of the unit posted on the farm.
Europeans in the Cities
In the urban centers Algeria’s Europeans were to work essentially in the political cells. With the measures taken by the French ministers Soustelle and Lacoste, we found that pharmaceutical products and surgical instruments were hit by an embargo. We have already pointed out that directives addressed to doctors made it an obligation for them to notify the police authorities of any wounded man who appeared suspect.
European doctors and pharmacists then began to treat wounded A.L.N. members without discrimination, and to deliver the antibiotics and the ether asked for by the F.L.N. militants. Hundreds of millions of units of penicillin daily made their way to the maquis.
Other doctors went further and unhesitatingly answered calls to go to the nearby mountains to treat the wounded. Sometimes when the wound was very serious the moudjahid would be taken in the doctor’s car to a friendly clinic and treated for a week or two. The French police learned of these things, for after a certain period some of these clinics were regularly searched.
European nurses, for their part, found ways of spiriting surgical instruments, sulfa drugs, dressings from the hospitals.
It would also sometimes happen that, after a wounded prisoner had been operated on by French doctors, while still under the effect of anaesthesia he would disclose certain secrets. The nurse, after the wounded man was entirely awake, would advise him to be cautious and tell him what he had revealed. On the other hand, it could also happen that an intern present in the room would immediately telephone to the police who would then, two hours after a critical operation, subject the patient to real torture sessions.
European doctors likewise organized clandestine training courses for future medical corpsmen of the A.L.N. Several successive classes of medical corpsmen thus were turned out by these schools and joined those trained in corresponding centers directed by Algerian doctors.
European girls would put themselves at the disposal of a political cell, obtain paper and mimeograph machines, and would often handle the printing of F.L.N. tracts. Youngsters would make themselves responsible for driving members of a network in their cars. European families would take important political leaders under their wing and in a number of cases enabled them to escape General Massu’s dragnets. European political figures, highly placed civil servants, furnished false passports, false identity cards, and false employment cards to F.L.N. cells.
It was thanks to the involvement of an increasingly large number of Algeria’s Europeans that the revolutionary organization was able, in certain towns, to escape the police and the parachutists.
We know that many Europeans have been arrested and tortured for having sheltered and saved political or military leaders of the Revolution from the colonialist hounds.
The Europeans have not contented themselves with carrying medications and men in their cars. They also carry arms. Automatic pistols, cases of grenades, have thus been able to pass through all road-blocks, as Europeans are never searched carefully. It has even happened that, when a European’s car has been searched, the driver, to avoid being molested, has explained the arms by saying he wanted to be ready to “smash the Arabs.” Such an attitude delights the highway police, and this “anti-native” solidarity is frequently toasted in the nearest bistro.
Finally—and this is quite unexpected, though it has happened several times—members of the police will report to the local cell on planned operations, will warn a given Algerian that he is being watched or, at the last minute, advise him that a tortured prisoner has been made to talk and has named him as the local chief.
Apart from the Europeans arrested and often frightfully tortured by the French troops for “complicity with the enemy” there are of course in Algeria a great number of Frenchmen engaged in the fight for liberation. Others have paid for their devotion to the Algerian national cause with their lives. It was thus, to give an example, that Maitre Thuveny, an attorney of Oran, who had fought for a long time in the ranks of the F.L.N., died as the result of an assault organized in Morocco by the French Second Bureau.
See appendices and footnotes at the original article here.