Europe once stretched into Algeria

Written by Hanna Bechiche

The French Empire’s bid for a European Algeria — and the French Republic’s crusade against an Algerian France

“We had French nationality, but not French citizenship. We were part of Europe, but we were not European. We were immigrants, but not foreigners.” Sitting in a Parisian café, my greatuncle reminisces about when he and his brother answered France’s call for cheap manual labor in the 1950s.

“What were you then?” I ask.

“Nothing. We were nothing,” he responds. “We were only allowed to come to France as guests, to work. That’s what we were supposed to do, work and then go back.”

Today, European borders are deemed immovable walls, the result of natural barriers clearly cut out in the form of a continent — ones that take the shape of migrant restrictions and a separation between an us and a them.

Yet, Europe once stretched into Algeria.

A French Algeria

In 1830, the failing French Bourbon monarchy set its sights on Algeria to reinvigorate the empire’s prestige and military might after revolts against Charles X. What was supposed to be a quick military operation — intended to turn people’s attention away from internal struggles and improve electoral support — ended in 30 years of genocidal carnage that wiped out one-third of the entire Algerian population. At the end, France claimed the nation as an extension of itself. For over a century after that, French people settled in large numbers in their new “French department”. By 1900, French settlers made up one-quarter of the population. Yet those native to Algeria were demoted to the status of second class non-citizens and lived under a “Code de l’Indigénat” (Indigenous Code) which restricted their rights to work, move, own livestock or property. They were also forced to pay arbitrary taxes which assured their inferior legal and political status.

When the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC) planted the seed of the European Union in 1957, Algeria was still a part of France. As one of the six founding members signing the treaty of Rome, France demanded the inclusion of its Algerian territory. To French officials, France was Algeria, and Algeria was France. It was only natural that Algeria was thus European. In 1957, Algeria was incorporated into the EEC as a symbolic “seventh member”.

But there was nothing natural about the drawing of the EEC’s initial borders. The inclusion of Algeria was a ploy to consolidate colonial power. At the time of negotiations, France was knee-deep in the Algerian War of Independence, 1954-1962, led by the National Liberation Front (FLN). The Algerian nationalist movement wished to reinstate the Mediterranean Sea as France’s outermost southern border. In the first months of 1957, the war reached its peak with a bloody campaign of urban guerrilla warfare against the French Algerian authorities — the Battle of Algiers. By late March 1957, the authorities had mostly crushed the FLN within Algiers. Its leadership had been arrested, tortured,and sometimes executed. Signing the treaty of Rome that same month was France’s last bid to hold its empire together.

After Algeria claimed its independence in 1962, the president of the newly formed Algerian state, Ben Bella, attempted to keep its ties with Europe. But most of his demands for migration rights and muchneeded reconstruction funds were swept aside by the EEC, claiming Algeria’s independence as reason enough to ignore them. Then Minister of Foreign Affairs Bouteflika pushed for the recognition of Algeria’s place in the EEC — as agreed in the treaty of Rome — but the independent nation’s legitimacy remained blurry. Algeria’s membership of the EEC ended in 1976 with a newly negotiated relationship that ignored its past membership and considered Algeria simply a neighboring country like many others.

An Algerian France

While the borders of Europe included Algeria when it was convenient, the conception of a closed-border Europe now excludes Algerian presence from its identity and history. The collective French memory has been remodeled to think of Algeria as a separate entity — a past colony. Yet, legally, it was never a colony. Algeria was considered a French department, forcefully attached despite the sea separating the two lands. As French historian Pierre Nora explains, “Algerians and Algeria came to be perceived as “non-lieux de mémoire” (non-sites of memory) or even “lieux d'oubli” (forgotten sites).” The European mark France has left on Algeria after 132 years of colonial presence is undeniable. But so is Algeria’s mark on France, for settler colonialism is not a one-way street.

Algerians are one of France’s largest post-colonial immigrant minorities, a presence that dates back more than a century. Algerian immigration was initially labor migration, due to the population decrease of World War I and the call for North African soldiers. In the 1920s, one-fifth of Algerian youth physically able to work immigrated to France. After World War II, “travailleurs invités” (guest workers) were called to fill in the growing need for cheap manual labor and rebuild a country ravaged by war. Initially, 700,000 Algerian men were legally allowed in. But the status of a guest worker, whose wages were lower than the law was supposed to allow, was temporary. After contributing to France's manufacturing growth, the men were meant to return to Algeria. Many of them never did.

After the 1970s, a pattern of permanent family settlement began to emerge among North Africans living in France. Today, Algerian communities are scattered across the country, but they cluster in two cities: the southern cosmopolitan city of Marseille and the northern capital city of Paris. Though seen as the most quintessential French city, Paris holds urban pockets people colloquially call “Little North Africa”. They form what historian Pascal Blanchard calls “le Paris Arabe” (the Arab Paris). Here, the word “Arab” has become a blanket term that denies ethnic diversity by capturing any and all French-North Africans into a net strewn with colonial prejudice, stereotypes, slurs, exclusion, violence, and criminalization.

One of the most famous sites of Arab Paris is Barbès, a northern Parisian neighborhood in the 18th “arrondissement” (district). Barbès is filled with North African shops, restaurants, butcheries, pastry shops, and fashion stores. One of the most iconic and famous ones is Tati, a North African landmark whose bright pink and blue sign hovers above a Haussmann-style building. Tati, which went out of business in 2021, was a discount department store built by Tunisian immigrants in the 1940s. It was a memorable — and hectic — place for many immigrant families who had found in Tati the North African “souks” (markets) of their childhoods.

Undeniably, Algerians who settled in Barbès in the mid-20th century have left their mark on the French landscape. Here, the verb “to settle” loses its colonial brutality to reclaim a softer nature. Algerians have settled in Barbès like a leaf settles on the ground, like a shell settles on the sand — organically — after decades of enticed immigration.

My maternal grandfather was one of these guest workers who immigrated to Paris in the 1950s with the idea of returning home — an intention that withered into an improbability. As a tailor’s apprentice, he left the Algerian countryside around Constantine — an eastern city nestled atop mountain ravines — to work in a Barbès couture atelier in need of cheap labor. A few years later, his brother joined him to open a little tailor shop in the middle of the immigrant neighborhood.

Erased from history

When I visit my great-uncle, his broken memory tries to stitch back together what he calls “his little Algeria”. He recounts the names of Parisian places where he finds bits of his natal home. The Place de Clichy where he lived, the neighborhoods of Abbès and Anvers where his favorite Algerian cafés were, and Nanterre — where tens of thousands of North Africans first lived in shanty towns built to house them in a hurry.