CHRISTIANITY IN ALGERIA

For many decades, the legacy of conflict between religion and secular republicanism in France led historians to neglect the essential role that religion played in creating and maintaining the French empire.Footnote ²² In the last several years, new scholarship, notably focused on gender and empire, has emphasized the many female missionaries who carried out the work of the French “civilizing mission” in the empire and the complexity of the relationship between Christians and French colonial authorities.Footnote ²³ This complexity may have been especially evident in Algeria, and there are several notable features about the Christian presence there during the colonial period that shed light on the violent divisions that emerged over the relationship between Christianity and colonialism during the war of independence.

In the early years after the conquest of 1830, tensions arose between the French government and the Catholic Church, which saw in Algeria a chance both to reclaim the ancient Roman lands of St. Augustine and to pursue its missionary ambitions among the Muslim population.Footnote ²⁴ Historian Sarah Curtis notes that while the French government saw the spread of French Catholic institutions and symbols in Algeria as a positive development, in that it marked the territory as “French” and helped legitimize French claims to Algeria's Roman heritage, the Catholic presence was also a potential threat to the already antagonistic relationship between French colonizers and the Muslim Arab and Berber populations, whose religious integrity the French had guaranteed.Footnote ²⁵ Missionary societies such as Emilie de Vialar's Sisters of Saint Joseph de l'Apparition (SSJ) went to Algeria to promote Catholicism through good works and evangelization, but they were not always popular with the French authorities or even with the Catholic hierarchy.Footnote ²⁶ The lack of government support for French Protestant missionaries meant that the earliest missions tended to be foreign, especially British, organizations; the only significant French Protestant mission was the Mission Rolland, which was established in 1908 in Tizi-Ouzou.Footnote ²⁷

Missionaries in Algeria found the Muslim Arabs and Berbers to be very resistant to conversion. However, the appointment of Cardinal Charles Lavigerie as archbishop of Algiers in 1866 reinvigorated the push to convert what he called “the barbarous continent of 200 million souls.”Footnote ²⁸ Lavigerie, who founded the Missionaries of Africa (better known as the White Fathers and White Sisters), focused specifically on converting Kabyle Berbers. Patricia Lorcin argues that Lavigerie strongly desired that the Catholic Church in North Africa be restored “to its former Augustian glory.” Like many French colonialists of that period, Lavigerie played a role in the creation of the “Kabyle Myth,” which posited that the Kabyles had maintained vestiges of Christianity dating from the Roman occupation of North Africa. Thus the Kabyles, according to this narrative, were more receptive to both Christianity and French values than were the Arabs, whom colonialists like Lavigerie found to be “morally depraved” and culturally inferior.Footnote ²⁹ In Kabylia, Lavigerie's tactics included creating mission orphanages, because the conversion of Muslim orphans allowed missionaries to begin with a tabula rasa, unmarked by the “deleterious” influence of Islam or local customs.Footnote ³⁰ Lavigerie's message was controversial, in part because it fed Kabyle discontent and eroded relations between European settlers and the indigenous Algerian population. As the crusading head of the Catholic Church in Algeria, Lavigerie became a de facto spokesperson for the colonizers, spreading the message of “civilization” through conversion. His influence lingered long after his death in 1892 and was reflected in the ongoing Christian emphasis on Algeria's Augustinian heritage and belief in Arab inferiority.

From 1842, when the SSJ was expelled from Algeria, until 1948, when the Little Brothers and Sisters of Jesus (orders inspired by the desert wanderer Charles de Foucauld) arrived, there was little Christian effort to serve the impoverished Algerian population.Footnote ³¹ Indeed, the Christian failure to convert Muslims meant that beyond the few missionaries who remained in Kabylia, by the late 19th century the energies of both the Protestant and Catholic churches in Algeria had turned almost entirely toward the European population. Because of Algeria's peculiar status as part of the metropole, Algerian dioceses were not integrated into the colonial framework; instead Catholic bishops came from France, and the archbishop of Algiers was a member of the Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops of France.Footnote ³² In order to protect its property and ensure its presence in the colonial setting, by the end of the Second Empire in 1870 the Catholic Church had entered into a close and mutually beneficial relationship with the French colonial powers.Footnote ³³ On the Protestant side, the synod of Algeria, despite comprising only 6,000 members, was the third largest synod of the French Reformed Church, the largest Protestant denomination in France.

By the late 19th century, “Christianity” had become a mark of European identity, and the French defined the Arab and Berber populations by their attachment to Islam.Footnote ³⁴ Observers such as the pied-noir priest Jean Scotto note that during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, European “Christians” in Algeria developed into a self-contained and patriotic community that had very little interaction with Muslims and in general were not all that faithful, at least in terms of church attendance.Footnote ³⁵ However, they still identified as Christians, and Catholicism in particular became a cornerstone of European settler identity, because most settlers came from Catholic countries—not only France but also Spain, Italy, and Malta.Footnote ³⁶

Two important innovations within Catholicism in the late 1940s dramatically altered the landscape of Christianity in Algeria and initiated its gradual disengagement from the colonial regime. The first occurred with the arrival in 1947 of French cleric Léon-Etienne Duval as bishop of Constantine and Hippo. Mgr Duval had a profound impact on Algeria, especially after his nomination as archbishop of Algiers in 1954. He gained a reputation as an avant garde cleric because, unlike the vast majority of Catholic clergy in Algeria, he encouraged his parishioners to work toward social justice and engage in dialogue with Algerian Muslims. In a series of interviews conducted late in his life, Duval recalled that even before his arrival in Algeria he had come to believe that colonialism had run its course.Footnote ³⁷ His parishioners did not always agree; Duval's outspoken sermons and statements condemning the violence during the war earned him the nickname “Muhammad Duval” from conservative Catholics who believed he was betraying the cause of French Algeria.Footnote ³⁸

The second innovation was the emergence of movements such as the Catholic Action and of youth organizations such as the Scouts de France in Algeria, both of which were central to the Catholic renewal in the metropole during the 1930s and 1940s. Catholic Action movements, which were based in Social Catholic doctrine, sent lay Catholics as missionaries into working-class neighborhoods to preach the gospel and perform charity work for the “dechristianized” masses.Footnote ³⁹ André Nozière writes that in 1951, certain clergy in Algeria began to see that the impoverished and “dechristianized” masses in Algeria who should be the focus of Christian activism were, in fact, the Algerian Muslims.Footnote ⁴⁰ Several other progressive engagements with the Algerian population arose in tandem with the Catholic Action movements during the late 1940s and early 1950s. These were centered around innovative Catholic priests such as Jean Scotto, a pied-noir curé of the neighborhood of Hussein-Dey on the outskirts of Algiers who later formed the nucleus of the so-called “progressivists” on trial in July 1957.

From 1949 to 1954, Scotto organized the installation of the first MDF team in Algeria. The MDF was a Catholic prelature founded in France in 1941 to train priests as missionaries to the working classes. By the late 1940s, the MDF included worker-priests who were known in Catholic circles for their progressivist tendencies.Footnote ⁴¹ The worker-priests adopted a radical vision of the Christian mission, arguing that instead of expecting the working classes to convert to a bourgeois Christianity, the church needed to convert to the culture of the working classes. Worker-priests lived in poverty, often without disclosing their priestly vocation in order to demonstrate their Christianity through their solidarity in the struggles of laborers. Although the Vatican shut down the worker-priest project in 1954, the MDF continued to function as a missionary order. In Algeria, its priests believed that their task was to open the Christian population to its responsibilities toward the Muslims and in doing so bridge the enormous divide between the two communities.Footnote ⁴²

The work of Scotto and the MDF included the distribution of food, clothing, and medicine to the residents of a shantytown outside Hussein-Dey, a project that slowly expanded into the first Catholic social center in Algeria.Footnote ⁴³ In 1955, French ethnographer Germaine Tillion, supported by Governor General Jacques Soustelle, created a system of government-funded social centers throughout Algeria with the mission of educational modernization and social reform; they were modeled on the original Catholic centers founded by Scotto and a French Catholic parish assistant named Marie-Renée Chéné, who separately organized social services, medical dispensaries, and schools for Algerian children in the Bérardi shantytown.Footnote ⁴⁴ Père Scotto viewed the Catholic centers as a realization of the idea of “service” that would demonstrate the “positive face” of Christianity to the Algerians.Footnote ⁴⁵ In the early 1950s, these centers became the focus of several youth movements in Algiers that were educating a growing number of Catholic, Muslim, Protestant, and Jewish pieds-noirs and recent arrivals from France on the economic and social disparities between the French and Muslim populations in Algeria.

One of these youth movements was the AJAAS, founded in 1952 to bring together a diverse group of students ranging from leaders of the Algerian Scouts (Scouts Musulmans d'Algérie) to members of the French Catholic student association in Algeria (known as the “Asso”) in order to understand and respond to the grave social problems in Algeria.Footnote ⁴⁶ AJAAS projects included the improvement of hygiene in the shantytowns, literacy training, and the creation of social secretariats to help Algerians with administrative problems. By 1954, approximately 300 to 400 students were participating in conferences and social projects of the AJAAS in Algiers and the surrounding areas.

The AJAAS was not without controversy. According to the unnamed authors of a January 1955 report to the archbishop of Algiers, the AJAAS was being led by “well-known Muslim agitators who, for the most part, have recently been the object of judicial measures.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The authors were clearly referring to the Algerian students involved in the group, many of whom were members of the Algerian Scouts and therefore suspected of nationalist sympathies.Footnote ⁴⁸ From the testimonies of several former members, it is clear that the AJAAS was a radical movement in the sense that it gave sheltered European Christian students the opportunity to witness the poverty and racism that Algerian students faced on a daily basis. Through the projects of the AJAAS, many Christian members experienced a political awakening that led them to understand the desire and justification for Algerian independence.Footnote ⁴⁹

As in the Catholic community, it took impetus from outside Algeria to engage the Protestant community in a reconsideration of its relationship with the Algerian Muslims and the colonial regime. This occurred through two main avenues: an influx into Algeria of metropolitan Protestants who were directly engaged in social and political activism, including the French Protestant aid organization Cimade (Comité inter-mouvements auprès des évacués); and the influence of the ecumenical WCC. The WCC sought to unite Christian churches globally and was preoccupied with the moral issues surrounding Christians and colonialism. A major challenge in the years after the WCC's founding in 1948 was to reconcile its doctrine of equality of man before God with the reality of Christian missions, which were almost entirely comprised of Europeans and Americans, many of whom still believed that “non white races were not yet equal to the whites in their administrative capabilities” and required the further “tutelage” of whites before they could achieve a sufficient level of advancement to govern themselves.Footnote ⁵⁰ One of the WCC's major goals was to dissociate Christian missions from imperialism. During the 1954 international assembly in Evanston, Illinois, several representatives of Christian churches in colonized or formerly colonized areas asserted the need for the WCC to support the aspirations of the peoples of Africa, Asia, and other “dependent” regions to a more equal relationship with Western Christians.Footnote ⁵¹

This was a potential source of conflict in Algeria, because the Protestants there tended to be more conservative than their metropolitan counterparts. With a few exceptions, they maintained a cautious attitude toward the Algerian conflict, siding early on with the integrationist plan of Jacques Soustelle.Footnote ⁵² Until the arrival of Cimade teams in 1957, which recruited parishioners to assist in deliveries of food and clothing to the “regroupment camps,” most Protestant work engaging with Algerians occurred outside the structure of parish churches. Three examples include the Mission Rolland in Kabylia; the work of the French prison chaplain Pastor Tania Metzel, who was sent to Algeria in 1957 to work with Algerian prisoners; and two small ecumenical communities from France, the Brothers de Taizé and Sisters de Grandchamp, who installed themselves in the poor neighborhoods surrounding Hussein-Dey in the early 1950s to serve the Algerian community through social assistance, prayer, and meditation.Footnote ⁵³

In January 1957, WCC secretary general Willem Visser ‘t Hooft received a memo outlining the analysis of French pastor André Trocmé, who thought that increasing human contacts between French Christians and Algerian Muslims was important not just for Algeria but also for avoiding an international catastrophe. Trocmé argued that there was a growing hatred within the Arab and Muslim communities toward the West and Christianity but that French Christians in Algeria could demonstrate that this hatred—at least toward Christianity—was unjustified. In the eyes of the Arabs, he wrote, there was no proof of this, because the church was perceived to be completely aligned with Western powers and their “defensive tactics.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Visser ‘t Hooft agreed with Trocmé and suggested that a key objective of the Protestant community in Algeria should be direct social engagement with the Algerian population, outside of a missionary context.Footnote ⁵⁵ In his view, Cimade was the best means of promoting this engagement.

Cimade was founded in France in 1939 as a refugee relief organization and later transformed into a clandestine resistance organization, helping thousands of Jews escape France into Switzerland and Spain.Footnote ⁵⁶ After World War II, Cimade's first interactions with Algerians were with immigrant workers in the shantytowns outside major French cities.Footnote ⁵⁷ In September 1956, Cimade's secretary general Jacques Beaumont decided that the organization needed to find a way to address the grave problems caused by French policies in its overseas territories, especially in North Africa.Footnote ⁵⁸ Heeding the call from the WCC, Cimade teams in Algeria spread from Algiers to Médéa and then into some of the “regroupment camps.” Cimade, which later worked clandestinely with the FLN in France and Tunisia, was the most visible and successful example of Protestant efforts to show the Algerian Muslims a positive side of Christianity by demonstrating solidarity on the ground and working to build the country for the Algerians rather than the French.

By the outbreak of the Algerian war in 1954, there were thus small pockets of practicing Christians who pushed for a style of Christianity that emphasized social justice, dialogue, and direct engagement with Algerian Muslims. For some, this meant actively rejecting Christianity's ties to the colonial regime and showing solidarity with Algerians in their fight for independence. This political and theological position emerged through their dialogue with Algerians in youth movements such as the AJAAS and their experiences working with impoverished Algerians in the shantytowns. And it put them into conflict with a conservative, deeply entrenched vision of Christianity that provided a moral justification for both the French colonization of Algeria and the ongoing privileges enjoyed by European settler society.

THE POLITICS OF SOLIDARITY

In November 1954, armed conflict erupted in the Algerian countryside, marking the beginning of the war of independence and pushing many European Christians who had been attempting to promote dialogue between Europeans and Algerians toward more radical action. For some the war and the French policies of pacification merely confirmed the legitimacy of the Algerian nationalists’ calls for independence. The police and military tactics, including the use of torture and summary executions, drove even some of those who favored reform of the colonial system toward concrete actions on behalf of Algerian nationalists—especially when the targets of French “pacification” were longtime friends they had met through groups like the AJAAS.

By late 1955, the French police and military were suspicious of any signs of friendship between Algerians and Europeans. However, European Christians continued to help their Algerian friends and neighbors, whom they felt they could not abandon in a time of great need. For many, it was specifically this show of solidarity in the most difficult of circumstances that demonstrated Père Scotto's “true face of Christianity”—one that was compassionate, concerned with social and political justice, and took a moral position against the use of torture and other repressive “pacification” techniques. After the war began, suspected Algerian nationalists were arrested in droves. The threat of arrest, torture, and incarceration in French internment camps drove Algerians into hiding, including some who had no affiliation with nationalist movements. These so-called “outlaws” often sought help from their European friends, a few of whom were still—at that point—above suspicion.Footnote ⁵⁹ Salah Louanchi found shelter, for example, in the presbytery of Hussein-Dey, where Jean Scotto allowed several Algerian militants to stay on the condition that they left their arms at the door.Footnote ⁶⁰ In 1956, Benyoucef Ben Khedda (Bin Yusuf bin Khidda) stayed for several months with André Gallice, a “crime” that led to the latter's arrest.Footnote ⁶¹ Evelyne Lavalette, a former Girl Scout and AJAAS member, sheltered a number of Algerian militants, including Larbi Ben M'Hidi (al-ʿArabi bin Mhidi) and Krim Belkacem (Karim Balqasim).Footnote ⁶²

For some, like Evelyne Lavalette and Denise Walbert, the next step was engaging in more directly political activities, such as acting as liaisons between militants or helping to prepare, print, and distribute leaflets. In testimony after her arrest in 1957, Walbert, who was accused of distributing tracts for the FLN, argued that in order to understand the context of her engagements with her Algerian nationalist friends, one first had to understand that rumors widely circulated that the police were searching for Algerian militants and that once caught they would be subjected to torture, a known reality in Algeria as early as 1955.Footnote ⁶³ Lavalette worked with Père Jules Declercq, whose apartment near the Casbah of Algiers housed the Ronéo machine on which the first issues of the FLN's French-language newspaper El Moudjahid were printed, helping with the printing and distribution of it and other nationalist tracts.Footnote ⁶⁴ Lavalette and several other European women were later arrested in Oran after transporting FLN tracts from Algiers.Footnote ⁶⁵ Jacques and Eliane Gautron, a Catholic teacher and a social assistant, respectively, provided their apartment for meetings of Algerian nationalists as well as for the famous meeting between French journalist Robert Barrat and Algerian militants Abane Ramdane (ʿAban Ramadan) and Amar Ouamrane (ʿAmmar ʿUmran) in September 1955.Footnote ⁶⁶

By some accounts, the actions of all of these European Christians were openly political; Evelyne Lavalette and Pierre Chaulet (who as a medical student treated wounded maquisards and who joined the FLN in 1955) proudly declared that they took part in the nationalist movement. For others, even those who had begun treating the Algerian problem as a political one well before the outbreak of the war in 1954, actions such as hiding friends or typewriters were not necessarily openly political statements in support of Algerian independence. But as the war intensified and moved into the cities, even Christians who strongly identified with the “liberal” camp, supporting the rapprochement of the Christian and Muslim communities in Algeria and the reform of the colonial system, discovered that they could not avoid being caught up in the politics of the war.

As the war progressed, both the European and Algerian staff of the social centers especially became targets of suspicion among government and military officials, who believed they were in contact with FLN militants. In some cases, it was true. Both the Catholic and the government-run social centers recruited heavily from former Scout and youth movements in Algeria, including the AJAAS.Footnote ⁶⁷ Whether or not they were involved directly in the FLN or other nationalist groups, many of the staff of the social centers were close friends with those who were, such as AJAAS leaders Benyoucef Ben Khedda and Salah Louanchi. As for the charge that the Algerian staff of the social centers was made up of nationalists, that also was likely true. As Soeur Renée Schmutz, a Sister of Grandchamp, noted of the Algerian staff: “Of course they were nationalists! They were working toward the future of Algeria!”Footnote ⁶⁸

THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS AND GENERAL MASSU

The spring of 1957 marked a turning point in the Algerian revolution, as the battles between the French military and the FLN shifted from the countryside to the cities, escalating toward total war. In the fall of 1956, the FLN had responded to the execution of several Algerian prisoners by initiating a campaign of random terrorism against European civilians in Algiers, although it specifically excluded women, children, and the elderly.Footnote ⁶⁹ In retaliation for the deaths of fifty-nine Europeans, a pied-noir counter-terrorist group blew up a house in the Casbah on the Rue de Thèbes, killing nearly seventy Algerians, including women and children. The FLN's Algiers operational executive Yacef Saadi concocted a plan in which three attractive Algerian women placed bombs in highly populated civilian targets in the center of Algiers, including the Air France office and the Milk-Bar, a scene famously recreated in Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 film The Battle of Algiers. In January 1957, in the wake of the bombings, the FLN launched an eight-day general strike against French businesses in Algiers, and the French government handed over full police powers to General Massu, the commander of the Tenth Parachute Division, whose task was to dismantle the FLN network based in the Casbah. As historians Raphaëlle Branche and Sylvie Thénault have carefully documented, the parachutists’ main concern was efficiency, not legality.Footnote ⁷⁰

General Massu, like many French officers in Algeria, was shaped by his experience fighting in Indochina, and tended to view the Algerian conflict through the lens of the Cold War. For the French military, Algeria was a “revolutionary war,” and the fight against the FLN was just as much a battle in the war against communism as it was the repression of an anticolonial rebellion. Branche notes that whether or not the imagined links between the FLN and global communism were real, French military leaders believed them to be so, supposing that the FLN “rebels” were incapable of organizing by themselves “such a subversion of the colonial order.”Footnote ⁷¹ General Massu saw himself as a good Catholic, following in the footsteps of Père Charles de Foucauld.Footnote ⁷² He understood that his job was to maintain French Algeria in the face of threats from the FLN and communism. As he wrote in his memoir fifteen years later, “At the dawn of the Battle of Algiers, the army estimated that it could demonstrate pacification in the tradition of the great ancients—the Foucaulds, the Gallienis, the Lyauteys—adapting its action to the revolutionary war that had been imposed on it and pursuing the objective that it defined with the term Eurafrica.”Footnote ⁷³ Buried in that quote are many coded phrases, including “pacification,” a term that covered all manner of violent excesses, but Massu's worldview is clear: the army was not the aggressor; the soldiers were merely “keeping the peace” in the manner of the great 19th-century colonialists.

But not everyone shared Massu's vision. As previously mentioned, throughout the spring of 1957, the French military faced growing criticism in France for its tactics during the battle of Algiers and especially for its use of torture to gain information from captured rebels. Massu was much more disturbed, however, by criticisms being voiced by certain Christians within Algeria. In his book La vraie bataille d'Alger (The Real Battle of Algiers), Massu noted that, in his opinion, the most serious opposition to his tactics came from the “attitude of Mgr Duval, and certain priests, notably abbé Jean Scotto.”Footnote ⁷⁴ By 1957, Mgr Duval was the archbishop of Algiers and was publicly known for his opposition to the use of torture.Footnote ⁷⁵ Duval had lodged several protests with French government officials and military leaders, including a letter to an unnamed general dated 22 August 1956, in which he took the general to task for “thefts committed by soldiers in the course of control operations in the rural villages, the victims of which are often families already suffering from enormous poverty; odious treatment inflicted on suspects; summary executions of prisoners; the use of torture during interrogations (bathtubs, electric current, etc).”Footnote ⁷⁶

Yet Duval is an ambiguous figure in Algerian history. It is clear that in his public statements he attempted to maintain as neutral a tone as possible on political questions, and even to some extent on military tactics, tip-toeing delicately around issues such as the legitimacy of Algerian nationalism and the Europeans’ right to self defense. While exhorting Christians to treat all the inhabitants of Algeria with Christian charity and fraternal love, there appear to be two primary missions with which Mgr Duval was principally concerned: maintaining the unity of the clergy and the Catholic community in Algeria and preserving Christian presence and influence there.Footnote ⁷⁷ As a consequence, his public criticisms of the military's conduct and of the French colonial project were highly measured, and the FLN and more progressive members of the Christian community pressured him to go much further.Footnote ⁷⁸ Regardless, Massu saw Duval as a clear threat, as evidenced by the letter he wrote to the pope in February 1957 to complain about the “surprising attitude of Mgr Duval,” which “differed totally from that of Your Holiness in your Christmas letter of 1956.”Footnote ⁷⁹ While Mgr Duval posed an enormous moral challenge to Massu's authority, the abbé Scotto and the Christian community he led presented more concrete problems.

CHRISTIANITY ON TRIAL

In February 1957, as the battle of Algiers gained momentum, French police and military forces carried out the series of raids in which they arrested thirty-five people, including the twelve “progressivist Christians.” A 5 April 1957 article in Le Monde outlined the accusations against the defendants, which were expanded in a report from the trial prosecutor to the secretary of the interior dated that same day.Footnote ⁸⁰ The prosecutor's report makes clear that several of the European and Algerian defendants had some connection with the social centers. The others, accused of being part of a support network for the FLN, all had connections with Christian movements such as Cimade, the Scouts, or the Catholic community in Hussein-Dey. The report portrays them as a subversive group of criminals, hiding communists and FLN leaders and serving as liaison agents for Algerian nationalists.

The Le Monde article paid special attention to the charges against the abbé Jean-Claude Barthez, a Mission de France priest and a close associate of Père Scotto, who was

The prosecution report further accused him of hiding a Ronéo machine in the presbytery of Hussein-Dey and of encouraging several of the other European defendants to support the FLN.Footnote ⁸²Le Monde also noted that, like Barthez, Denise Pepiot [Walbert] had been caught with a Ronéo machine that was used to print copies of El Moudjahid and that she had participated in hiding Raymonde Peschard.Footnote ⁸³

Peschard was not on trial with the thirty-five defendants in July 1957, having escaped Algiers and joined a maquis unit in the countryside where she was later killed.Footnote ⁸⁴ However, several of the European defendants were on trial specifically because they had played key roles in hiding her, as she was the communist militant accused of both the Milk-Bar bombing in September 1956 and the bombing of a public bus in Diar-es-Saada in November 1956. Throughout the spring of 1957, European newspapers in Algeria repeated the charges that she had placed both bombs, further claiming that she had been an “abusive” resident at both of the Catholic convents where she hid for several weeks.Footnote ⁸⁵ According to L'Echo d'Alger, Peschard was identified as the “blonde woman” bomber based on the testimonies of an arrested communist named Georges Marcelli and of a key eyewitness of the Milk-Bar bombing. However, the prosecutor later reported that when asked to identify Peschard in a photograph, the witness was unable to do so.Footnote ⁸⁶

Yet as the military made headway in dismantling Yacef Saadi's network, officials realized that Peschard had not been the “blonde woman” who had placed either of the bombs in question. With the arrests in April 1957 of Djamila Bouhired (Jamila Buhayrad) and Abderrahmane Taleb (ʿAbd al-Rahman Talib), the FLN bomb maker, the French military determined that Bouhired had placed the Milk-Bar bomb, a crime for which she was convicted in June 1957 in the military tribunal of Algiers.Footnote ⁸⁷ On 12 June 1957, the investigating magistrate dismissed the case against Peschard. All of this occurred before the trial of the progressivist Christians, which began more than a month later. This information, however, apparently never made it to the prosecutor in the trial, and it was not until the second day of their trial (24 July) that the military released the information, after the judge asked the government commissioner to investigate what had happened to Peschard.Footnote ⁸⁸ Several newspapers noted the highly charged nature of the withholding of this information. Serge Bromberger of Le Figaro, hardly an ally of the Christians on trial, noted that if Peschard was not the woman who was “responsible for the explosion of a bomb that wrought horrifying human devastation among an anonymous crowd,” and was simply a wanted communist militant, then the case against the Christians accused of sheltering her would be “infinitely less serious.”Footnote ⁸⁹

So why did the military allow this trial to go forward, when the case against a number of the European defendants, at least, was no longer viable, and when the potential outcry around the exposure of its use of torture on European Christians was so great? The explanation most evident to people like Mgr Duval and Jean Scotto was that this was actually a show trial meant to put the so-called progressivist Christians in their place and keep them from impeding the military's mission in Algeria. As the accusations and propaganda swelled to a fever pitch in Algeria during the spring and summer of 1957, Mgr Duval came to the realization that the crux of the whole problem for Christians was not so much the reality of their positions and actions as the public perception of them. In reports to the Vatican in 1957, Duval consistently criticized the conservative press in both Algeria and France for peddling the theory that the Christian defendants were progressivists, a charge that he wrote was an example of “absurd slander” and “excessive and passionate propaganda.”Footnote ⁹⁰

For French government and military leaders such as Massu, the Christians on trial in July 1957 represented a shocking betrayal of the French cause; Robert Lacoste, then governor general, ranted to a Le Monde journalist that Nelly Forget's sheltering of Raymonde Peschard “disgusted” him.Footnote ⁹¹ In a letter dated 10 March 1957, Massu stated that “after the warning shot given to certain European circles who have given charity an abusive and antinational interpretation, [we have] slowed the proceedings against them, in a manner that would not annihilate the old and valuable efforts, of unselfish men and women, in their social programs.”Footnote ⁹² This “warning shot” refers, however obliquely, to the arrest of the progressivists, whose explanation of “Christian charity” he clearly found in direct violation of their national duty.

It was in this political climate that Jean Scotto began organizing the collective defense of the Christians on trial. While each defendant had a separate lawyer, there was also an attempt to create a unified defense that would reject the accusations that they were plotting against the French nation and that they were progressivists. All of the defendants denied these accusations, but they were not in agreement about how the defense should construct its explanation of their actions. Jean Scotto, who organized the defense of Jean-Claude Barthez and the larger strategy of the Christian defense team, wrote in his memoirs, “We had the choice between two attitudes: plead guilty and defend a political cause or plead not guilty and protest that we were acting in the name of Christ. I chose the second position.”Footnote ⁹³

Although Scotto saw a distinct difference between actions that supported a political cause and actions that were undertaken in the name of Christian charity, some of the defendants saw things differently. For André Gallice, the connections between his Christian faith and his political responsibilities were central to his moral positions on the Algerian war. For him, as for Pierre Coudre and Pierre Chaulet, the defense of “Christian charity” was merely a strategy that was focused, first and foremost, on defending the reputation of the Catholic Church.Footnote ⁹⁴

The collective defense progressed, however, and the defense attorneys amassed as many character witnesses as possible to testify not only to their clients’ faith but also to their moral character and their dedication to helping people in need, the Algerians being simply one example. This aspect of the defense was especially important because even though the defendants had denied the charges of undermining the security of the French state, none of them denied that they had given assistance to their Algerian friends, and several admitted to committing specific acts, like hiding a Ronéo machine, in the case of Barthez, or hiding Raymonde Peschard, in the case of Nelly Forget.Footnote ⁹⁵ It was the larger narrative of FLN activism and plotting against the security of the French nation that they denied. The task, then, was to explain why the defendants’ actions did not evince a plot against the French nation but rather were a striking example of Christian charity, performed under the most difficult and morally challenging circumstances.

It is surprising that, given the political climate in Algiers at the time, the judge seemed to agree with the defense's argument that they were acting in the name of Christian charity; with the exception of Pierre Coudre, whose activities were found to be overtly political in nature, all of the European defendants were either acquitted, received a suspended sentence, or had their cases dismissed for lack of evidence.Footnote ⁹⁶ However, the judge maintained that the conduct of the French military was also beyond reproach. When Eliane Gautron brought up the injustices that Algerians faced, including the serious risk of being tortured or killed, the judge replied, “People are always talking about torture. They forget that that the rebellion preceded the repression. Without it I wouldn't be here.”Footnote ⁹⁷

In the end, being tortured and standing trial alongside Algerians were perhaps the best demonstration of inter-religious solidarity these Christians could have imagined. Between the dramatic events of 1957 and their work providing material support to impoverished Algerians in organizations like AJAAS and Cimade, their actions had a far greater impact on the Algerian population's perception of the relationship between Christianity and French colonialism than did those of the French government, military, or the conservative pied-noir Christians. When the negotiations for independence began, a committee of Algerians and European Christians, including several notable progressivists, organized under the auspices of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Algeria (GPRA), wrote a report on the Catholic Church in Algeria that would form the basis of negotiations on the status of Christianity after independence.Footnote ⁹⁸ It asserted that although the Catholic Church would no longer have the privileged place it held in French Algeria, in “independent Algeria” it would “feel free and respected.”Footnote ⁹⁹ The report continued:

One condition was that the church transform itself to be of service to the Algerian people, a condition already in line with the vision of those like Jean Scotto who sought to “decolonize” the church.

With Algeria's independence, the vast majority of Christians in Algeria left, but those who chose to stay witnessed the transformation of the colonial Eglise de France into the Eglise d'Algérie: the Algerian dioceses were no longer under the control of the French episcopate. As one Mission de France priest noted, “In sum, the Church wants to be Algerian in Algeria.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Instead of treating their interactions with Muslim Algerians as “mission work” or “charity,” they were now engaged in “building capacity” and training Algerians to run their own country. In response to a request from the GPRA for international aid in reconstruction, the World Council of Churches teamed with Cimade to institute a major new development program, the Christian Committee for Service in Algeria.Footnote ¹⁰² With their emphasis shifting after Algerian independence away from conversion of Muslims, Catholic missionaries such as those in the White Fathers and White Sisters ran libraries and helped transform the formerly European Catholic schools into schools for Algerian students.

Although the global implications of Christian involvement in the decolonization of Algeria are only now beginning to come to light, including how decolonization shaped Vatican II, we do know that certain key issues in postcolonial Algeria, including the future of missions and of Christian responsibility in development, were among those up for discussion as Pope John XXIII called a new Vatican Council in 1959. As Catholic leaders gathered in Rome for the opening of the Second Vatican Council in October 1962, Mgr Duval and the Algerian clerics took their place among the African bishops, further demonstrating the Algerian church's separation from its colonial history. When in 1965 Pope Paul VI named Mgr Duval a cardinal, it was an honor that was particularly well received by the Algerian population. For Jean Boisson-Pradier and other Christians who felt betrayed by Algerian independence, the irony was that even as they accused Mgr Duval and “progressivist” Christians of inciting the “fratricidal struggle and hatred” in Algeria between Christians and Muslims and of “erasing the Church in Algeria,” it was, in fact, Duval and the progressivists who actually secured the possibility of the Church's continued existence there.