Roberts A.D. The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 7: from 1905 to 1940
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1922-193°
small shopkeepers, most were now employees or self-employed
workmen and craftsmen. The minority who had been merchants
and moneylenders, however, whether or not they enjoyed French
citizenship, had become strongly Europeanised, and were in
competition with their Muslim counterparts in the same kind of
enterprises.
For the Muslim population, nevertheless, affluence was still
closely related to the land and its inhabitants. Moneylenders,
landowners and officers of the regime, often the same people,
enjoyed the tolerance and indeed patronage of the French. In turn
they patronised the peasantry, to whom they offered a form of
protection. This depended partly on the nature of the regime. In
Algeria the presidents of the
djemaas
(native councils within the
communes), the
aghas
(headmen) and the caids, whether elected
or appointed, had limited authority and opportunity. In the two
protectorates, however, the caids were theoretically in charge of
their districts under French supervision. Responsibility for justice
and taxation, without the possibility of revolt to restrain them,
gave these officials wide powers, especially in Morocco. The two
sons of the Middle Atlas chief Moha ou Hammou at Khenifra
acquired a form of lordship over their charges, while el-Glaoui,
the pasha of Marrakesh, was the virtual ruler of an empire in
southern Morocco with revenues running into millions of francs
(although his debts to French banks amounted to many more).
With the caids went the marabouts or holy men, now generally
favoured
by
the French after years of distrust
as
the representatives
of a native Islam opposed to the revolutionary doctrines of the
Middle East. Traditionally living off the gifts of their congrega-
tions,
they owned property and dispensed patronage on a
considerable scale, with Morocco once again providing the
outstanding example in the
shartf
of Ouezzane.
The upper classes formed by such people were basically drawn
from old-established families which had adapted to French rule,
increasingly supplemented by newcomers who seized the oppor-
tunity to take the place of those who failed to keep their position.
Their success was measured in landownership. The Muslim
community as a whole continued to lose land to the Europeans,
often by expropriation or forced sale. Great landlords had
disposed of their traditional estates, sometimes at a profit, more
often at a loss, leaving their tenants to be evicted. Muslims
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themselves, however, were in the market, buying from each other
and from Europeans, among whom the turnover was quite fast.
To the surviving domains of the old nobility, therefore, were
added new estates in the countryside and in the towns, where at
Sale for example impoverishment forced many families to part
with their houses. In Morocco, the sultan was on his way to
becoming the richest landowner in the French empire. In Tunisia,
large profits were made from olive groves. Most striking were the
figures from Algeria, where in 1931 about 43,000 proprietors, or
7 per cent of the Muslim total, occupied 42 per cent of the land
in Muslim possession. Of these the great majority owned an
average of 43 hectares each. But 7,000 had average holdings of
198 hectares, accounting for half the land belonging to the group.
In eastern Algeria, older families were more prominent; in the
west,
'enrichis'.
Some of these landlords were traditional, leaving
the land to be cultivated by tenants in the old way. But many,
with the advantage of property registered in French fashion, were
turning to European modes of cultivation. If equipment and
yields were far below the European standard, they were higher
than the Muslim average, and much more so in terms of the
produce marketed.
Meanwhile a class of professionals and some skilled workers
was slowly forming, severely hampered by the European near-
monopoly of professional, skilled, and even semi-skilled occupa-
tions.
The necessary French education and training was best
acquired privately or in France. State education was limited.
Whereas the French in Algeria had the same system of education
as in France, progressing through the
lycees
to the University of
Algiers with its 2,000 students, in 1929 only 60,000 of the 900,000
Muslim children of school age attended the so-called auxiliary
schools which in 1908 replaced the more ambitious 'native
schools'. A few hundred only went on with scholarships to the
French secondary schools, and a mere handful to the university.
A Christian missionary education in secular subjects was available
to the Berbers of Kabylia. In Morocco the dozen or so primary
schools in Berber tribal areas emphasised French and Frenchness,
while the thirty or more rural schools in Arab districts kept the
teaching of French to
a
minimum. Results were all very poor, but
the regime persisted at secondary school level with the two
branches of the College Musulmane at Fez and Rabat, where
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1922-193°
Arabic studies predominated, and the Berber College at Azrou,
opened in 1929, where teaching was in French. Tunisia had the
advantage of the Sadiki
College.
Despite the difficulty, the number
of
francisants,
those at home with the language and culture of the
ruling power, was nevertheless increasing at the expense of those
who came up from the Koranic schools to the mosque universities
of the Karaouiyine (Qarawiyin) at Fez and the Zitouna at Tunis,
and went on to the profession of Islamic law. In Morocco these
received some official encouragement, but in Algeria in 1924 Ben
Badis felt it necessary to found the first of his Arabic-language
schools to provide Algerians with a proper education in their
classical culture.
The centenary of the capture of Algiers, 1930, was a year of French
celebration. The expensive festivities in Algeria were accompanied
by literature of varying value describing the French achievement
in the Maghrib. One mild protest was the first edition of Ch.-A.
Julien's
Histoire
de PAfrique du
Nord,
an attempt to reveal that
Muslims also had a history of which to be proud. The
tribunaux
repressifs,
set up early in the century to deal with Muslim offences
as a threat to public security, were finally abolished. Europeans
were alarmed by a bill presented in July 1931 to the French Senate
by Maurice Viollette, who had been governor-general of Algeria
in 1925-7. The bill proposed that selected Muslims, of good
French culture, should be able to vote with the Europeans for the
same candidates, instead of with the mass of the Muslim electorate
for separate representatives. It was indeed a similar proposal that
had caused Viollette to be dismissed. He now supported his bill
with a book, UAlgerie
vivra-t-elle?,
which warned that without
such a reform Algeria would be lost in twenty years. Its
publication coincided with a collection of articles by Muslim
evolues
of the kind envisaged by Viollette, in which they argued
the same case. The editor, Ferhat Abbas, and his colleague
Bendjelloul had in 1927 created the Federation des Elus Indigenes,
elected representatives of the Muslim community who now
concentrated on support for the Viollette project. The critical
stage of the argument over assimilation had been reached.
One alternative became clearer when in that same year, 1931,
Tewfik el-Madani published the first history of Algeria in Arabic.
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He and twelve others grouped themselves under the leadership
of Ben Badis into the Association des Oulemas reformateurs to
promote the movement for Islamic reform, and to combat both
the spread of French culture and the corruption of the Faith by
the maraboutic allies of the regime.
In Tunisia the Destour was unable either to agitate or to seize
the opportunity presented by renewed disturbances. In 1930,
students of the Zitouna and the Sadiki College rioted in protest
at the ostentatiously Christian character of the celebrations
attending the holding of the Eucharistic Congress at Carthage, but
this was an isolated incident. The affair of the
dabir
of May 1930
in Morocco was more serious. This so-called dahir
berbere,
obtained from the young Sultan Mohammed by the new resident,
Lucien Saint, just arrived from Tunisia, was the last of a series
dictated by the idea that the Berbers could and should be separated
from the Arabs and
sbari'a
law, to live in accordance with their
own customs in a special relationship with the French. It therefore
recognised the judicial competence of the
djemaas
or village
assemblies, going on to create 'customary tribunals' to judge by
local custom in all but criminal cases. Since local custom was
different from the
sbari'a
in these matters, although tolerated in
practice by the Muslim scholars and judges who continued to
handle civil cases under the protectorate, the effect was to make
hard and fast a distinction which had previously been obscured.
The
dahir
went on to remove criminal cases from the competence
of the sultan, represented in these matters by the Haut tribunal
cherifien created in 1918 to hear appeals from the judgements of
pashas and caids, and to judge in all cases carrying a penalty of
more than two years in prison. In Berber areas such cases were
to be given directly to the French.
This attempt to regularise the colonial division of Morocco was
well understood by the young nationalists of Rabat and Fez. Their
agitation began at
Sale,
where the elderly
imams,
the prayer leaders
in the mosques, were persuaded to recite the
lafif,
the prayer for
God's mercy in time of trouble, as a general protest against the
Christian protectorate. Only as the recitations spread from city to
city was specific mention made in the prayer of the separation of
the Berbers from the sbari'a law. By then a more important
objective had been achieved: the winning of mass support,
irrespective of generations and classes, for a nationalist cause. In
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their appeal to Islamic tradition, the organisers were not unaware
of the success of Gandhi in his association of a general strike with
prayer and fasting. The campaign was taken up and given an
international dimension by the Arab nationalist Chekib Arslan in
Geneva. Within the country, at Fez, the crowds overflowed from
the mosques onto the streets. A number of agitators, including
el-Ouezzani, were arrested and flogged. The excitement over, it
was left to
a dahir
of 1934 to restore criminal jurisdiction in Berber
areas to the Haut tribunal. Meanwhile the groups of Rabat and
Fez, 'the Reform Party', had constituted themselves into the
Jama'a al-Wataniya, the National Association, whose inner circle
became known as the Zawiya. This use of the word meaning a
Sufi lodge was perhaps intended to deceive the police, but
represented a popular image not too far from the reality of a
partnership of initiates presiding over their followers. Like the
Destour before them, however, they settled down to work for
constitutional reform within the framework of the protectorate.
1930—1940
The depression and its economic
consequences
The response of Moroccans to the agitation over the
dahir berbere
had economic roots. The comfort drawn from the establishment
of law and order by the French
was
giving way
as
the disadvantages
of European occupation began to be felt. Even those whose
businesses had benefited were outclassed by European enterprise.
This enterprise, moreover, had rendered the economy vulnerable.
Trade had doubled during the 1920s. The increase was the result
of European investment, public and private. At this early stage
in the exploitation of the country's hitherto untapped resources,
such investment was still unrewarded. Instead, it financed a
notable trade deficit. Imports were more than twice as high as
exports. Prices had risen in consequence, standing six times higher
in 1929 than in 1914. Moroccans who lacked credit were hit hard,
and certainly could not afford any kind of failure. Three years of
drought, culminating in 1930, corresponded to years of good
harvests in Europe. The reduction in the production and export
of cereals was a blow.
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Unlike the rest of French North Africa, whose trade was
protected by agreements with France, Morocco remained bound
by the Act of Algeciras to admit all foreign goods at no more than
10 per cent ad
valorem.
While exports fell in 1930 to only half their
value in the previous year, therefore, imports remained high,
swollen by commodities
'
dumped' by Japan in particular. There-
after exports remained almost steady, with a minimum value of
600m francs in 1933. Imports on the other hand fell sharply, so
that by 1935 the total value of foreign trade had been cut by half
in six years. By 1940 it had grown again by little more than 10
per cent, its worth disguised by the devaluation of the franc.
Except for the bumper year of 1934, cereal production remained
below the level of 2 million tons attained in the 1920s, mainly
because of North American supplies on the world market.
Vegetables, citrus fruit and wine began to be exported, but still
on a small scale. Phosphates likewise fell shoijt of the 1929 peak
of
1,880,000
tons, partly because of the fall in world demand,
partly also because of agreements with Algeria and Tunisia to
restrict output. As with cereals, the major crop, this failure of the
major mineral could not be made good by modest success
elsewhere. The production of manganese, lead, zinc and cobalt
ores reached commercial proportions in the mid-1930s. Coal
began to be produced from deposits near the Algerian frontier
at the rate of 100,000 tons a year by 1939, enough to export to
Algeria and France, and to supply the Moroccan railways. Spanish
production of iron ore in the Rif reached well over a million tons
a year, mainly for export to Germany.
Algeria, more closely connected to metropolitan France, was
not seriously affected by the world depression until 1931 or 1932.
Between then and 1935, however, the value of its foreign trade
fell by 40 per cent, with a very modest recovery by 1940. Cereals
faced the same problem of competition in France from North
American grains, as well as from domestic French production in
years of good harvests. Exports of fruit and vegetables, on the
other hand, were at least as valuable as those of cereals, while
exports of iron ore, after a disastrous fall from over
2
million tons
to less than 500,000 in 1932, climbed to almost 3 million tons in
1938 as a result of British and German demand. What saved the
country, however, was the continued export of wine to metro-
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1930-194°
politan France, where it was valued for its high alcoholic content.
At about
14
million hectolitres a year, wine accounted for as much
as half the total value of Algerian exports and, despite a drastic
reduction in the price, served to keep the country's foreign trade
at three times the level of Morocco's.
15
In Tunisia the export of phosphates dropped from almost 3
million tons in the late 1920s to less than 2 million in the 1930s.
On the other hand the main agricultural exports, olive oil, grain
and wine, maintained themselves despite wide seasonal fluctua-
tions,
partly because of the very high alcoholic content of the
wine, which gave it a market in France in excess of the limited
quota of
5
50,000 hectolitres
a
year admitted duty free. Indeed, first
wheat and then oil reached new heights in the early 1930s,
although the increase in quantity was offset by catastrophic falls
in value of
as
much as 85 per cent. From 1936 onwards, with the
exception of wine, the quantities exported fell back to the average
of the early
1920s,
but their value was somewhat restored by rising
prices. The result by the end of the 1930s was that total Tunisian
foreign trade, which was roughly the same size as that of
Morocco, had fallen in value by about 40 per cent, a reduction
comparable to that in Algeria.
16
Throughout French North Africa the trade gap narrowed as
imports suffered most from the depression; indeed, from 1935
Algeria had a favourable balance of trade. The new level of
imports corresponded more nearly to the true earning power of
the economy. At the same time it revealed the extent of the fall
in purchasing power. This unprofitability on the part of economies
15
J.-P. Charnay, La Vie
musulmant en
Algirie d'apres la jurisprudence de
la
premiere moilii
duXXesiecle (Paris, 1965), 116-19; Ageron, Hisloire, II, 480-2; 510. See above, p. 299;
below, pp. 518—9.
16
External trade of North Africa, 19)8 (in millions):
Imports
Exports
Algeria
4,666
5.6jo
francs
Tunisia
1,600
'.35°
French Morocco
2,100
1,500
pesetas
Spanish Morocco
"3
7«
Sources:
Great Britain, Admiralty handbooks: Algeria, 11, 279; Tunisia, 548-9; Morocco,
II,
224, 232. Comparisons with the values of previous years arc complicated by
fluctuations in the value of the franc and the peseta: in 1938 the French franc stood
at less than half its value in 1930, after rising in 193; to 165 per cent of the 1930 value.
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created and sustained by credit called for still greater assistance.
Regulations increased, to control and market the colonial product
in sufficient quantities at an adequate price. Tunisian wine for
example had been excluded from the customs union with France
which was finally completed in 1928; nevertheless the quota
allowed into France duty free was raised by 35 per cent. More
comprehensive were the various
offices
for grain and oil created
in Morocco, France and Algeria, and Tunisia, while general
control was exercised in the two protectorates by the Office
Cherifien de Controle et d'Exportation and the Office Tunisien
de Standardisation. Work continued on capital projects planned
or begun before the crisis. Road-building continued, and the rail
link between Casablanca and Tunis was completed in 1931.
Dam-building for electricity and irrigation went on in Morocco
and Algeria; as a result, Algeria in particular showed a spectacular
increase in the generation of electricity from 20m kwh in 1922 to
200m in 1937.
Credit itself was made available to a still greater extent, in the
first place by the state, through the various institutions previously
created to finance European agriculture. The funds came ulti-
mately from the autonomous budget of each country. Meanwhile
the French banking system as it operated in North Africa helped
to raise loans for each government on the French money market,
and provided advances to suitable clients. The banks themselves
owned many of the most important concerns. In Tunisia, for
example, mining was controlled by subsidiaries of the Banque de
l'Union Parisienne and the Banque de Paris et du Pays-Bas. In
Morocco, the Union Parisienne owned the large holding company
Compagnie Generale du Maroc. Private capital meant that mining
in particular remained subject to the fluctuations of the market,
while state-funded agriculture was gradually stabilised. From
1935,
however, the general effect of
all
these measures was a slow
but steady improvement.
The price that was paid was the final failure of the policy that
had governed the colonisation of all three French North African
territories: the peopling of the countryside by numerous European
settlers. Official colonisation, whereby the state made available to
such settlers individual lots on favourable terms, was finally
abandoned.
Its-
ending meant that the perpetual loss of European
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1930—194°
farmers to the towns, discouraged by the constant battle to
maintain a European standard of living out of irregular yields and
uncertain prices, was no longer even partly made good. Only
those individuals and companies who could take advantage of the
credit offered, and go on to enlarge their holdings to the size
necessary to ensure an adequate return, were able to survive and
prosper. In Algeria between 1930 and 1940 the number of
European farms fell by only 800 to about
2
5,000.
More revealing
is the enormous drop in the number of Europeans employed on
the land, whether as proprietors, tenants or wage-earners, from
35,000 in 1930 to perhaps no more than 20,000 in 1940. European
villages were blighted; in 1935 at
Malakoff,
only eight colonists
remained out of an original 3 6; at Fromentin, 12 out of 40; at
Charon, 6 out of
68.
Meanwhile the number of European farms
with more than 100 hectares each increased by almost a thousand
to 6,345, growing from less than three-quarters to over four-fifths
of the area involved. Some were enormous, anything up to 10,000
hectares. They more than made good the loss of European land
to Muslim buyers, enlarging still further the area in European
possession. The Europeans themselves, however, were ever more
closely concentrated in the cities, where their numbers rose from
673,000 in 1931 to 735,000 in 1936. Over half lived in the two
great cities of Algiers and Oran, five-sixths in Algiers, Oran,
Constantine, Bone, Philippeville and Sidi Bel Abbes. As yet there
was no great industrial growth to support this constant increase;
in this period it was mostly absorbed by the tertiary sector.
In Tunisia and French Morocco, where the colonised area was
much smaller, some
8 5
0,000 hectares in each country, the results
were similar. By
1934
in Tunisia, European properties were being
sold at
a
tenth of their previous value to pay off accumulated debts.
Loans from the new Caisse fonciere, repayable at an interest rate
of 7 per cent over fifteen years, enabled others to continue.
Nevertheless the number of French proprietors fell to a mere
3,000. Italian owners numbered no more than a thousand as a
result of the naturalisation law of 1921, coupled with the Fascist
ban on Italian emigration. The total of 4,000 European proprietors
for Tunisia was roughly the same as in Morocco, where the more
thorough provisions for colonists lessened the gravity of the
crisis.
No further increase, however, took place in the European
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rural population, only in that of the big cities.
17
On the eve of
the Second World War, it was clear that throughout French North
Africa the large-scale enterprise had finally triumphed over the
small in a European economy concentrated on the production of
a few primary commodities for export. While this may have been
essential to the survival of the colonial system, it could not and
did not generate wealth spread evenly or adequately through the
society as a whole.
The growth
of
nationalism
The French conquest of Morocco was completed in 1934 when
the Ait Atta of the Anti-Atlas were defeated in the Djebel Saghro,
and the Tafilelt was finally occupied in a campaign undertaken
from Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania to put an end to the last
elements of resistance in the north-western Sahara. It was an event
of little significance to compare with the rapid rise of political
opposition to the French in North Africa from 1930 onwards.
Deprived of credit on the scale available to Europeans, Muslims
were hard hit by the depression. Violence increased, with attacks
on officials and tax-collectors in Algeria. No effective organisation
existed to turn this misery to account. Those who suffered most
were incapable of combining. No radical initiative was
forthcoming from the leaders of Muslim society in the country,
however they may have been affected; the wealthier continued to
increase their possessions.
18
The French Left was out of power;
Muslim politicians and reformers lacked the representative
character and the constitutional channels to pursue their case.
They remained dependent upon the occasional issue and the
favourable moment to make themselves heard. Agitation never-
17
European population of North Africa,
Algeria
Urban 735
Total 946
Tunisia
213
1936 (thousands):
French Spanish
Morocco Morocco
160
206.5 44*
Tangier
17
* There were also 120,000 in the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla.
Sources: Great Britain: Admiralty handbooks, Algeria, II, 37; Tunisia, 187-203;
Morocco,
H, 32-119. The classification of the urban population of Algeria in 1936 was eccentric.
18
Cf. Ageron, Histoirt, II, 509-10; above, pp. 311-12.
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