Between 1866 and 1871 Algerian society suffered from a sequence of catastrophic blows that threatened its very existence: a demographic crisis wiped out a third of the indigenous population, the Senatus Consulte law of 1863 opened the way to the dismantling of tribal organizations and the appropriation of vast areas of fertile land by settler capitalism, while two failed major revolts in 1864–1866 and 1871 led to devastating collective fines and sequestration of property. The end of Napoleon III's “Royaume arabe,” followed by the triumphal assertion of settler hegemony under the Third Republic, marked a watershed, and Algerian society was so weakened and dislocated as to render it powerless to challenge European domination until after the Second World War. Historians have generally found no contradiction between the radical disintegration of a traditional socio-economic order and the gradual emergence of a modern, urban-based nationalism built on the ruins of tribal feudalism.Footnote 1
A rather different intellectual tradition, represented by, for example, Frantz Fanon and the Front de libération nationale (FLN) historians Mostefa Lacheraf and Mohamed Teguia, has interpreted the 1954–1962 war of independence as primarily a rural-based insurrection.Footnote 2 Lacheraf in a series of influential essays argued that only the peasantry after 1871, in the face of colonial decimation, retained a, “communal ethos, which combined national, spiritual and moral elements. This defensive and exclusively rural patriotism would be supplanted later by an urban nationalism with quite different characteristics.”Footnote 3 Many historians have followed in Lacheraf's footsteps by suggesting that between 1871 and 1954 a decimated rural society retreated from armed revolt into a covert culture of resistance, a kind of internal spiritual hijra centered in messianic religion, the private sphere of the family, and the defensive silence of the “hidden transcript.”Footnote 4 Marxist and anticolonial historians like Annie Rey-Golzeiguer and Djilali Sari, in emphasizing the negative and destructive impacts of European domination, have stressed a profound hiatus in 1871, whereas Lacheraf's thesis suggests a deep socio-political and cultural continuity. However, Lacheraf and later historians have produced little evidence as to the kinds of organization or vectors of memory that may have enabled peasant society to transmit or sustain an unbroken culture of resistance over a period of eighty years.
The reasons for this historiographic failure are complex and far-reaching, but include the fact that it has been particularly difficult to find archival or other sources relating to isolated rural communities. There has also been a preoccupation with leaders in the upper echelons of military and state hierarchies, a belief that political ideologies and movements stem from urban and educated elites alone, and a conviction that illiterate peasant societies were devoid of political consciousness or agency.Footnote 5 The highly influential work of Pierre Bourdieu has tended to reinforce the latter position through a theory of habitus that does not allow illiterate peasants to articulate or reflect critically upon the logic of their own practices, which only the reflexive sociologist could unlock and comprehend.Footnote 6 The isolated mountain peasants were, in general, cast as a people without history, unable to creatively adapt to the many challenges which they faced, and therefore not worthy of study.
The aim of this article is to approach this subject from a new direction by exploring the role of a much understudied institution, the djemâa or village assembly, which I will argue formed a key organizational base for the peasant community throughout the period 1871–1962. A few historians, including Hugh Roberts and Mahfoud Bennoune, have pointed to the significance of the djemâa, but they have desisted from closer investigation, apart from those who have focused on the exceptional case of Kabylie, to which I will return in a moment.Footnote 7 Such forms of traditional assembly survived best in the mountainous zones of refuge, the same areas in which the Armée de libération nationale (ALN) maquis was later to find strategic support.Footnote 8 The Tell—the zone of mountains and high plains located between the northern fringes of the Sahara and the Mediterranean Sea with sufficient rainfall to sustain agriculture—encompassed a starkly dual economy and space.Footnote 9 On the one hand, the Tell's rich plains and valleys corresponded to the area of European urban settlement and latifundia using advanced capitalist forms of farming, producing wine, grain, and fruit for export. On the other, in its mountain areas, peasants employed age-old subsistence farming techniques, in a society mostly divided into micro-units, suffering a deepening crisis of underdevelopment marked by demographic pressure and endemic hunger. This economic dualism also found expression in a remarkable geo-political divide between settler zones governed locally by municipalities elected and controlled by Europeans (the 261 Communes de plein exercise), and the vast communes mixte of the interior, some seventy-nine in all, where in 1902 the Algerian peasantry formed 97.3 percent of the total population.Footnote 10 It is in this latter mountainous zone, corresponding to the communes mixte, that the precolonial djemâa survived in its most dynamic form, and after 1930 came to play an important role in rural nationalism and the organization of the ALN maquis. The mountainous Tell had many characteristics of a zone of refuge: the settler drive to expand land ownership stopped abruptly at the edge of steep or rocky escarpments, indigenous populations displaced by colons from the plains moved into the higher lands and forests, and traditional forms of peasant social organization survived longer and were shaped to resist taxation, corvée labor, census gathering, and incorporation into the colonial state.Footnote 11
One reason for the sparse and fragmentary nature of evidence on the djemâa is its location in a space that was, in the colonial expression “sous-administré,” and for which archival sources, if they have survived at all, remain dispersed and often un-cataloged in the vast deposits to be found in Paris, Aix-en-Provence, Algiers, and provincial wilaya archives.Footnote 12 Reconstituting, through a case-study approach, the history of any one djemâa and its local context, let alone attempting to map the entire Algerian space, presents a daunting task.Footnote 13 Nonetheless, despite the fragmentary and often elusive nature of information scattered through primary and secondary sources, there is sufficient data to begin trying to make sense of this material, and to offer an interpretation that might assist further research. The present essay is, then, very much an exploratory one that seeks to open up a new line of enquiry.
The one exception to the lack of historical investigation of the djemâa relates to the distinctive Berber society of Kabylia, in part because nineteenth-century ethnologists, most notably the officers Adolphe Hanoteaux and Aristide Letourneux and the senior administrator Emile Masqueray, provided detailed studies of the documentary and oral sources of the customary laws, or kanouns, that regulated the Kabylia assembly's system of sanctions and fines.Footnote 14 Post-colonial anthropology continued to concentrate on the rich cultural traditions of Kabylia or the Berber stronghold of the Aurès, neglecting the far more extensive “Arab” zones of the Tell. The political renaissance of the so-called “Berber spring” of May 1980 has inspired extensive research into the language (tamazight), society, and history of the larger regionFootnote 15 and to date the most sophisticated historical investigation of the Algerian djemâa is that of Alain Mahé in his Histoire de la Grande Kabylie.Footnote 16 Many past commentators, including the administrators and army officers formed by the school of Robert Montagne, believed that the djemâa was an institution peculiar to the Berber societies found in the Atlas mountains stretching from Morocco in the west to Tunisia in the east. This misinterpretation was sustained by the “Kabyle myth” that regarded Berbers as racially similar to Europeans and superior to the “Arabs.”Footnote 17 An important part of my argument here is that the djemâa assembly was in fact found throughout the Tell's peasant societies and that, despite variations in organization that reflected regional differences in language, culture, and ecology, its essential structure and function was universal to rural communities.Footnote 18 The “official” douar-djemâa, which as will be seen was introduced by the Senatus Consulte law of 1863 as a standard instrument of local government, was established across the entirety of Algerian rural space. Evidence of the informal fraction-djemâa is more fragmentary and cannot, as yet, be mapped, but its existence in non-Berber locations as diverse as Oranie, the Ouarsenis and Dahra mountains, the Collo massif, the hills and forests of Aumale, the regions of Palestro and Bougie, and elsewhere suggest that it was prevalent throughout the Tell.
TWO FORMS OF DJEMÂA: “OFFICIAL” AND “CLANDESTINE” ASSEMBLIES
Nineteenth-century observers, as well as numerous historians, have generated much confusion by continuing to analyze post-1871 Algerian society in terms of the “tribe,” an organization that from the 1870s onward was moribund or even irrelevant in much of the Tell.Footnote 19 Numerous contemporary declarations by French generals and ministers under the Second Empire clearly state an ambition to achieve the “dislocation of the tribe,”Footnote 20 and the Senatus Consulte law of 1863 has been widely credited with achieving this goal by carving up the tribes into new administrative units, the douar-communes. The post-independence consensus among nationalist, anticolonial, and Marxist historians has been that the Senatus, through the dismemberment of the tribe, radically dislocated indigenous social and political structures. This thesis, which focuses on discontinuity and destruction rather than underlying continuities, makes it difficult to imagine how a culture of resistance could have survived in the face of such anomie and uprooting (déracinement).Footnote 21 More recent research on the Senatus process has shown that the demarcation commissions that surveyed land ownership and created new commune (douar) boundaries acted in a quite flexible and pragmatic way so as to retain the socio-economic coherence and viability of village societies that had long evolved and adapted to a specific ecological niche.Footnote 22 In many instances, commissioners matched douar boundaries to those of existing tribes,Footnote 23 and in only a minority of cases were tribes radically dislocated, most of them when newly created European centers seized land on their immediate peripheries, or a powerful tribe was dismembered for political reasons.Footnote 24 The tribes grew weak for quite different reasons, among them the decline of the great aristocratic and religious warrior castes, for which the Mokrani revolt of 1871 was a swansong before the long pax gallica made redundant the recall of the tribal council or confederation in response to a military threat.Footnote 25
Debates about the “tribe” and its role in peasant traditions of resistance after 1871 have tended to deflect historians from a social organization that played a far more crucial part in this process, the fraction or ferqa, which, along with the extended, patriarchal family, comprised the fundamental building block of Maghrebian rural society. Robert Montagne, in a comparison of Moroccan and Kabyle Berbers, recognized this clearly. The fraction (for which he used the term “canton”) was the “minuscule territory, that truly reflected the cells that go to make up all Berber states … this is the most vibrant, the most active and often the most stable organism that the people of North Africa are capable of creating.… Tribes and confederations may break up and disappear, but the elements from which they are composed continue to exist.”Footnote 26 The fraction was a small enough geographic entity to remain intact and escape the blunt knife of the Senatus dissection of the tribe. During the long phase of colonial domination and destruction of Algerian rural society, especially through the appropriation of huge areas of land and forest, the fraction provided the resilient cell that made a deeper level of political continuity possible, and enabled peasant societies to adopt survival strategies to cope with the unprecedented crisis.
Pierre Bourdieu, through his analysis of Kabyle social structures, explained the logic of the small or primary community, and why larger-scale organizations could not achieve the same levels of integration. This could be represented as a system of concentric circles of allegiance, starting from the extended family, the basic social and political cell, and then expanding into ever-widening units, the lineage, the clan, the village, the tribe and the tribal confederation.Footnote 27 The intense solidarity of this society derived from the fact that, “bonds of consanguinity are considered as the archetype for every social tie, particularly for political ties.”Footnote 28 Bourdieu argued that the restricted size of the consanguinous clan was due to it being the largest political organization within which family solidarity was still effective: “Since all decisions must be taken unanimously, the political organization is compelled to restrict itself to the maximum limits within which unanimity is practicable.”Footnote 29 This “principle of limitation” can be readily understood as one in which there was a maximum population and spatial area beyond which the face-to-face relations of villagers, of shared work and land, marriage alliance, religious worship, and symbolic exchanges could not readily function. This can be illustrated with the douar of Beni Hindel, located in the Ouarsenis mountains. Its five thousand inhabitants lived in isolated farms scattered over 10,000 hectares, and it was sub-divided into twelve fractions.Footnote 30 The fraction of Metidja, studied by the ethnologist Jacques Lizot, was quite typical of the Tell mountain regions and had a population of 630 in 1954. This community was defined by consanguinity (shared descent from a real or mythical ancestor), daily contact in fields and mosques, reciprocal exchanges of group labor (touiza), endogamous marriage alliances, sharing of communal lands and forests, and a complex of religious festivals and ceremonials (weddings, funerals, feasts) that were marked by rituals of animal sacrifice, sharing meat, and other symbolic acts.Footnote 31 The fraction, with its population of a few hundred, provided the primary source of identification, while the douar of Beni Hindel, an artificial creation of the 1863 Senatus, with its population of several thousand, was too large an entity to carry the same binding emotional force.
The douar and the smaller sub-divisions of the fraction corresponded to two separate types of djemâa, which historians have often confused but are important to differentiate since they came to serve quite distinct political functions. For the purposes of my analysis the first is designated here as the “official” or douar-djemâa, the second as the fraction-djemâa, often described from the 1890s onwards as the “clandestine” djemâa. Examining the fraction-djemâa first, we find an autonomous and ancient body that had deep, centuries-old roots in the precolonial Maghreb, and continued to exist throughout the war of independence and into the post-colonial period. This self-governing body, along with the patriarchal family, formed the bedrock of the small, face-to-face peasant society, which nineteenth-century ethnologists like Masqueray compared to the ancient democratic Greek cité.Footnote 32
The fraction-djemâa was usually composed of adult men who met weekly, after the Friday mosque service or on the market day, either in open meeting spaces provided with stone benches or in the mosque itself. Absentees could be fined. During assembly discussions the lead was taken by male elders, respected in the community for their wisdom, experience, skill, and moral integrity. From such notables the assembly chose a leader (amin) to supervise the day-to-day running of village affairs. Decisions were reached not by a formal, majority vote, but through consensus. While Masqueray thought the prime function of the djemâa was to prevent disorder, “to repress, prevent, or anticipate violent acts, crimes, and misdemeanors,”Footnote 33 it also made decisions relating to almost every aspect of village life, such as the building and repair of communal property (Koranic schools, the mosque, roads, public fountains, and so forth), equitable distribution of communal land rights between families, collective labor (corvées), allocation and collection of taxes, the organization of annual feasts, and made sure visiting strangers received proper hospitality (and surveillance).Footnote 34
It would be a mistake to picture the enduring djemâa through a romantic image of idealized peasant communalism in which individualism played no part. Peasants had always sought to maximize individual advantage and the history of Algeria is replete with the bitter and often bloody disputes or vendettas between neighbors over land, water rights, and honor that were universal to rural societies.Footnote 35 The djemâa provided a key socio-legal mechanism for the settlement of disputes internal to the community, and in particular, in a classic Mediterranean society of honor, to prevent feuds from deteriorating into bloody and costly vendettas. Unity of purpose also became essential when the small community was presented with an external threat from another fraction or colonial occupier. As Mahfoud Bennoune remarks, “It was necessary to contain such conflicts and disputes in order to avoid exposing the social cohesion and political unity of such collectivities to the threat of permanent tension and rupture.”Footnote 36 At such moments it was the customary response of Maghrebian society to override internal squabbles that weakened the ability to organize a cohesive defense. Bourdieu and Sayad in Le déracinement provided a powerful analysis of the dissolving force of market relations, colonialism, and economic individualism on peasant social organization. However, in the vast spaces of the mountainous interior, the underdeveloped rural economy, even when under siege, retained to the end of the Algerian War strong elements of an archaic economy and way of life. Indeed, it was precisely at the moment that individualism began to attack the core values of ‘traditionalism,’ and when the village was confronted with the unprecedented crisis of guerrilla and counterinsurgency warfare on its terrain, that elders fell back on the djemâa as a key form of defense.
Stathis Kalyvas, in his comparative study of civil war in rural societies, has sought a solution to the question of why one village might avoid massacre while a neighboring community suffered extreme violence and destruction. He argues that the habitual conflicts of everyday village life over property and honor that might be contained by non-violent forms of arbitration carried in a situation of civil war the potential of fuelling denunciations and a spiral of deepening violence. Those villages that maintained a degree of cohesion, often through the ability of elders to uphold their authority and internal solidarity while negotiating with armed incumbent and guerrilla forces, stood the best chance of avoiding violence.Footnote 37 Kalyvas' model, based mainly on evidence from the Mediterranean world, provides a useful framework for understanding how Algerian villages reacted to a situation of external threat.
The next section will explore the politics of the administrative douar-djemâa, before I return to examine in more detail changes that took place in the much smaller village fraction-djemâa. I will argue that the “official” djemâa passed through two general phases of political activity. The first, from 1863 to the First World War, corresponds to peasant opposition to a vast mapping and allocation of land rights pursued under the Senatus Consulte and Warnier Laws, a process that accelerated colonial appropriation. The second phase, intensifying from the 1930s, marks a period of emerging nationalism in which the djemâa became politicized through douar elections that became a focus of rural militancy.
THE SENATUS CONSULTE LAW AND THE “OFFICIAL” DOUAR-DJEMÂA, 1863–1918
In the later nineteenth century French authorities faced with the disintegration of tribal organizations worried about the articulation of state power: as the governor, Cambon, told the Senate in 1894, France may have destroyed the political power of the aristocracy (“grandes familles”), but in doing so it had also suppressed, “our means of action and as a result, today, we are confronted by a kind of human dust over which we have no influence…. We no longer have any official intermediaries between ourselves and the native population.”Footnote 38 From 1863 through to the 1950s, the colonial state sought to solve this by elaborating a very different kind of assembly, an “official” or douar-djemâa that could eventually become the core of local government reform and an instrument for the modernization and assimilation of rural Algerians.
During the early 1860s, a number of dynamic officers of the Bureaux arabes, among them Richard, Capifali, and Jubault, enthusiastically supported the idea of reforms that would accelerate the assimilation of Algerians into French civilization, including plans to replace tribal powers by a form of “municipal” local government that would reproduce the metropolitan commune.Footnote 39 Jubault wrote in 1862, “The population must find its own way towards progress and in this sense there can be no better route to follow than to create wherever possible a kind of native communal council. The constituents of this council can be found in the tribal djemâa; we just need to make use of them.”Footnote 40 The Senatus Consulte laws of 22 April and 23 May 1863 initiated a vast mapping and reorganization of Algerian socio-administrative space that would take teams of commissioners many years to complete. The Senatus set out to create a new type of douar-commune of two to three thousand individuals, each with an official assembly that was quite different from the traditional village or fraction-djemâa, since the provincial commander chose its president and eight to twelve members every three years. In contrast to the autonomous village djemâa, this body was conceived as an integral part of the state apparatus, a regulation-bound, closely supervised extension of a centralized, bureaucratic apparatus.Footnote 41
The creation of the new djemâas was integrally linked to the main purpose of the Senatus, which, as Didier Guignard has argued, brought about a virtual revolution in rural property rights. Between 1864 and 1870, teams of commissioners, assisted by surveyors, were able to delimit the new douars and to adjudicate on precise land holdings for about half of the total land surface in the Tell, the productive area north of the Sahara.Footnote 42 It was this radical restructuring of land rights that, complemented by the Warnier Law of 1873, accelerated the disintegration of communal or group ownership by imposing a French concept of private property, and cleared the way for the appropriation of huge areas of forest and the best farming land by the state, European settlers, big companies, and indigenous entrepreneurs.
Some historians have argued that the douar-djemâas were unable to effectively oppose settler and administrative depredations, while the Algerian presidents were happy to manage the assembly as a means to seize land and resources to the benefit of their own families or clans (çofs).Footnote 43 Yet the evidence is contradictory, and while a stratum of predatory nouveaux riches notables used the djemâa to amass personal wealth, in other instances the assembly was an instrument for the defense of traditional communal rights. After 1863, peasants, faced with the inexorable juggernaut of colonialism and market capitalism, found a diminishing range of options left open to them to express resistance, among them increasingly futile revolt, social banditry, flight into neighboring Islamic states, internal hijra and millenarian prophecy, and recourse to legal and administrative appeal. Historians in the past tended to ignore legal challenge as a weapon of the weak on the grounds that courts remained a monopoly of the ruling class and state power. But a growing body of research has explored ways in which subaltern groups, from slaves and workers to women and servants, have often shown a surprising ability to fight for their interests through the courts.Footnote 44
The douar-djemâa response to the Senatus Consulte process provides an example of the weak engaging with the legal and administrative system of the dominator. As Rey-Goldzeiguer observed, the peasantry faced with the Senatus commissions “did not remain passive when it came to the question of their land…. The creation of the djemâa … enabled a concerted tribal response even though its representatives were selected by the government.”Footnote 45 Nobody knew better the infinitely complex detail of land demarcation, usage, and ownership than did the peasants, many of who also held title deeds dating from the pre-conquest era. The government could not carry out the Senatus without their cooperation, and a key reason for creating a djemâa in every douar was that the administration needed an intermediary with whom it could negotiate the explosive issue of land appropriation, exchanges, and consolidation, rather than confronting an inchoate mass of individual interests. The army and the Bureaux arabes had, during thirty years of conquest, acquired a deep experience of engagement with the representatives of local tribal and village interests, and in 1863 they were building on this savoir faire. In a process that stretched over sixty years, as each douar was created the individual reports and decrees for each location were published in the Bulletin Officiel de l'Algérie (BOA). These admittedly official and anodyne accounts frequently show that the commissioners did seriously consult with and consider objections of the djemâas, which had a right to challenge the alienation of communal property. For example, the tribe of the Ouled Defelten in 1868 successfully contested the state's claim to 36 hectares of forest, “made up of cork-oaks isolated on the eastern edges of the tribe. The djemâa opposed this and insisted, because of the nature of its plantation and exploitation over many years by the tribe to replace its bee hives, that this area be categorized as communal forest.”Footnote 46
Djilali Sari, one of the few historian to have researched extensively in the vast Senatus archives, found numerous petitions and letters to the colonial government challenging the commissioners, including those of a djemâa that, “in spite of its weak representative nature, dared to challenge the cadastral process.”Footnote 47 A detailed case study of the Beni Urjin douar reveals a dogged resistance by the djemâa over a period of twenty years, from 1889 to 1910.Footnote 48 The colonial government responded by dissolving the first Beni Urjin djemâa, but the replacement proved equally troublesome by sending numerous petitions and pursuing actions in the tribunal of Bône. It might seem that the peasants stood little chance of seriously constraining the dynamic of colonial sequestration through such legal procedure, but the court and administrative archives supply important evidence of indigenous resistance and how the official djemâa provided an organizational framework for communal defense.
A further valuable, but previously unused source of evidence is the minutes or registers of the douar-djemâa. Fortunately, we have an account, even if at second hand, by the administrator Jean Fendeler, head of the communes mixtes of Mékerra located in the rich plains to the south of Sidi-Bel-Abbès (Oranie), based on the original djemâa registers (méchaouaras) for 1885 to 1919.Footnote 49 The minutes record a wide range of functions, from control of communal lands (rents, exploitation of forest resources, land clearance) to constructing sheep pens and grain silos, combating locusts, giving loans for seed grain, and building and maintaining schools and mosques.Footnote 50 Fendeler noted, “These deliberations, sometimes naive, often marked by a high level of reasoning, also reveal a certain independent spirit—one finds objections, resistance, reservations, and sometimes outright opposition.” He illustrated this by reference to the méchaoura of the djemâa of the douar Tifillés on 5 October 1886, at which the administrator read a letter from the governor general asking the assembly to sell 3,000 or 4,000 hectares of communal land, at 35 francs per hectare, for the creation of a new European settlement at Hassi Zehana. The djemâa demanded 150 francs per hectare, but finally conceded at 40 francs, but on condition that spring water that was to be supplied to the future settlement also be piped to the village of Tifillés and to two new cattle troughs at a rate of a liter per second; that permission be given to clear the remaining communal lands so that inhabitants without private (melk) land could be granted 8 hectares each; and that the new center be located on the margins so as not to impede cattle movement and grazing. The governor replied by letter to the djemâa meeting of 25 March 1887 conceding all of the demands, except that he wanted the costs of constructing the water supply system to be paid by the douar from the proceeds of the land sale, which was accepted. Only a specialist agronomist could say who won and lost in this process, but the key point to be made is that the local population were not helpless—facing a powerful state and legal frameworks not of their making, they could through the assembly play the strongest hand possible under the conditions imposed on them by the global colonial system.Footnote 51 The situation varied considerably across Algeria since, while some administrators were incompetent or authoritarian, other “indigenophile” reformers like Camille Sabatier were happy to back the djemâa against the abuses of rapacious forest guards and caïds (indigenous chiefs who worked for the colonial government).Footnote 52
THE ELECTED DJEMÂA, 1919–1956
At the end of the First World War there arose a strong current of opinion, especially among liberals in metropolitan France, that the loyalty and “blood” sacrifice (impôt de sang) of the Algerian people should be rewarded.Footnote 53 The most significant step in this direction was the so-called “Jonnart Law” of February–March 1919, which extended significantly the vote in the elections to the quasi-parliamentary délégation financière, the regional conseils généraux, and municipal councils. By 1920 some 10 percent of males over age twenty-five were on the registers.Footnote 54 But this was dramatically overshadowed by the first-ever extension of the vote to the election of 1,249 djemâas by 425,138 men, or some 43 percent of adult males. In what Ageron has described as “a veritable electoral revolution,” large numbers of Algerian men were able to vote for the first time in their lives.Footnote 55 Historians, though, have paid little attention to the political role of the djemâas during the rise of modern nationalism, perhaps because their powers have been perceived as too insignificant and localized to be worthy of attention.
Although the picture is still fragmentary, there is no doubt that the djemâa elections (1919, 1925, 1929, 1935, etc.) caused ferment in rural Algeria. The peasantry now controlled local assemblies that, no matter how restricted their powers were, provided one of the very few institutional bases through which they could express opposition to the colonial system and, to some degree, ensure the protection of land rights, the equitable distribution of social welfare, and access to communal employment. The douar-djemâa thus passed from an early stage of legalistic defense of communal rights into a potentially far more explosive electoral and political phase of militancy. Once again, Jean Fendeler, who administered and closely observed the douar-djemâa throughout the period from 1919 to 1936, provides a valuable insight, even if from a conservative, official position. He noted that elections were hotly contested not only as a matter of individual prestige, but also because considerable economic rewards were at stake. The 1919 law transferred to the djemâas the administration of the Société Indigènes de Prévoyance (SIP), which controlled the distribution or allocation of loans of money and seed grain to peasants facing crop failure, usury, and starvation.Footnote 56 Fendeler claimed that in Mekerra, a rich zone in which wealthy wine makers had appropriated up to 90 percent of the land,Footnote 57 the remaining communal property and SIP distributions were crucial resources for the poor and helped to alleviate the potential for violent unrest. The paternalistic administrator claimed that before the First World War, assisted by pliable djemâas, he had been able to ensure relative equity, but that this had been rapidly undermined by the “quite brutal” impacts of the 1919 law. Newly enfranchised but illiterate and gullible peasants, with no experience or understanding of a democratic electoral system, were easily misled by groups of wealthy notables who resuscitated the moribund clan system (çofs) to pack the djemâas with their own clientele and to hand out SIP loans or rent communal land to their supporters.Footnote 58
Yet elected djemâas, far from confirming existing power relations, contributed to the undermining of colonial authority. As far as the new electors (43 percent of adult males) were concerned, the 1919 law suppressed the notorious Code de l'indigénat, and so the disciplinary powers over the local population were dramatically reduced.Footnote 59 The law also excluded as candidates in the djemâa elections the caïds, bachagas, aghas, forest guards (gardes-champêtres), khodjas, and other police agents that constituted the key force through which administrators exercised rule over the huge, dispersed populations of the interior. Such exclusions enabled the djemâas to present themselves as an alternative pole of mobilization against the detested caïds, many of who had long track records of corruption and violence. The elected djemâas regarded themselves as holding a far more legitimate mandate than the handpicked caïds had as creatures of the colonial regime, and Fendeler wrote, “Often they lay claim to the right to administer, to rule over, and to change everything, noisily pretending to annihilate the prestige and authority of the caïd.”Footnote 60 To Fendeler, the 1919 law seemed to have opened a Pandora's box: peasants, with a new sense of empowerment, began to resurrect ancient quarrels over land rights and forest access once thought dead and buried, resulting in a deeply worrying, “recriminatory movement that will be difficult to calm especially in a region [Oranie] where official and private colonization has had a considerable development.”Footnote 61 He considered it especially threatening that the prewar respect and deference for the commune administrator was dissolving rapidly, as djemâas met without his permission, no longer replied to his orders, and displayed “a combative and violent character,” so that he was increasingly compelled to have recourse to arrest warrants and other forms of judicial and police restraint.
In 1931, Fendeler was transferred from Oranie to head the commune mixte of Aïn-Touta in the Constantine region, where over the next five years he witnessed a turbulent phase of emerging nationalism led by the Jeunes algériens of Dr Mohammed-Salah Bendjelloul and the reformist Islamic association of the Ulema founded by Ben Badis.Footnote 62 Bendjelloul, head of the Constantine Fédération des élus, targeted the djemâas, which he recognized as a key instrument for the radicalization of rural society. For example at El Kantara, on the western fringes of the Aurès mountains, in December 1932 the inhabitants of the “Village Blanc” instigated a campaign to remove a caïd. Fendeler claimed the village “had always been a dangerous center of resistance and opposition.”Footnote 63 Several djemâas in Fendeler's area (including douars Ouled Aouf, Tilatou, Ouled Chelih, and Tahanent) told inhabitants to stop paying fines imposed by forest guards for illegal grazing, while many other djemâas campaigned surreptitiously against payment of taxes, leading to prosecutions of two presidents and five djemâa members. After the turbulent elections of 1935, the new pro-Bendjelloul djemâas undertook against the administration, the caïds, and other agents “a campaign of denigration, resistance, and systematic opposition.” Other sources confirm Fendeler's account of the significant politicization of the elected djemâas. Mahfoud Bennoune notes how in El Akbia after 1919 the members of the djemâa “gradually became the authentic representatives of the people and dared not only to defend their vital interests before the [Senatus] commission but, also, to denounce the nepotism and arbitrary power of the caïds and administrators.” During the 1935 djemâa elections, Saad Ben Daradja, candidate of the Fédération des Elus Musulmans, won the Presidency after leading an anti-tax campaign.Footnote 64
From the end of the Second World War, the nationalist movement, and in particular the Mouvement pour le triomphe des libertés démocratiques (MTLD) of Messali Hadj, expanded its popular base extremely rapidly and, in doing so, turned for the first time to mass electoral campaigning. The MTLD systematically put up candidates in the djemâa elections of October 1947 as a means to spread its influence into the more isolated areas and, as Mahfoud Kaddache wrote, “For the first time rural electorates saw representatives of Algerian nationalism seeking their vote.”Footnote 65 The Algerian Communist Party, turning to a policy of “Algerianization,” also began to deploy militants from urban and mining centers to propagandize in surrounding rural areas. For instance, a number of young Algerian Communists of peasant origin—Abdallah Mokarnia, Mustapha Saâdoun, Abdelkader Guerroudj, and Younès Kouch—organized a trade union of small farmers and strikes among seasonal harvesters working on the big colon estates, and stood candidates in djemâa elections in the mountain villages between Ténès and Cherchell (such as El Gourine, Sidi Slimane, Bouhellal, Aghbal, Zatima, and Beni Bou Mileuk). In October 1947, Brakni won the djemâa presidency of El Gourine, and Mokarnia that of the douar Beni Haoua, to the fury of the local caïd, Mokarnia's uncle.Footnote 66 In February 1948, communist activists contacted fourteen djemâa presidents who had come to Ténès for a meeting of the municipal commission and tried to persuade them to set up a regional bureau.Footnote 67 The administrator of the isolated commune mixte of Teniet-el-Haad warned his superiors that the Parti du peuple algérien (PPA), with the assistance of the Parti communiste algérien (PCA), had captured the djemâas of Ighoud, Beni-Meharez, Meddad, and Khobbaza, which were serving as “bases from which to undertake future conquests.” The movement was particularly directed against the powerful pro-French family of the Bachaga Belkacem Ferhat, including his son and nephew, who were both caïds.Footnote 68 On occasions, such opposition movements assumed a populist and possibly millenarian religious form, as when the inhabitants of the douar Hermis went on an annual pilgrimage to the Zaouia of Sidi-Maamar led by the politically suspect president of the djemâa of Touarès. In 1947 the pilgrims were so turbulent in traversing the colonial center of El-Alef that many settlers, “seized by panic and fearing that the village would be sacked, chose to bivouac throughout the night by hiding themselves in the tall standing wheat fields.”Footnote 69 The response of the colonial government to this growing challenge was to dissolve the “enemy” djemâas where possible, under the powers of the 1919 act, and to appoint Marcel-Edmond Naegelen as Governor-General. Naegelen achieved notoriety for attempting to halt the advance of the nationalist movement through his use of widespread corruption and violence during the 1948 elections.Footnote 70
FROM “CLANDESTINE” FRACTION-DJEMÂA TO FLN ASSEMBLY, CA. 1948–1962
Throughout the century-long life of the “official” douar-djemâas, the far more numerous but ancient fraction-djemâas continued to exist in parallel with them, forming the very substratum of village social organization. During a debate on 28 March 1892, Captain Louis Rinn, a leading authority on native society, supported plans to rejuvenate the “official” djemâa, but astonished members of the Conseil de Gouvernement by promoting this as a counter to “clandestine” djemâas.Footnote 71 By the nature of such a secretive body, the archival evidence remains elusive, but contemporary administrators of the communes mixtes did not doubt its existence. Jean Morizot, who between 1934 and 1956 acquired much expert knowledge of rural society in Tunisia and Algeria,Footnote 72 explained that the publicly visible, official djemâa simply acted as a facade: “In the majority of settlements two organizations coexist, one traditional and the other official, which often work together but sometimes ignore or even combat each other. In general there are two assemblies, two funds, and two sets of regulations.”Footnote 73 Fendeler, commenting on the period immediately after the 1919 act, observed how newly elected assemblies began to defy the authority of the administrator and lay claim to powers they did not possess, and held their own meetings without obtaining permission from the authorities or submitting their minutes and decisions for approval.Footnote 74
The fraction-djemâa, a truly autonomous and self-regulating body that existed outside the state apparatus and bureaucracy, provided an intimate expression of the needs of the small community, a refuge in which peasants could go about their business beyond the eye of the colonial power.Footnote 75 In the fraction of Metidja, for example, the djemâa, which met periodically in the mosque and was observed directly by the anthropologist Jacques Lizot, had, as elsewhere, no written minutes or records, no fixed schedule, and met as issues arose.Footnote 76 Secrecy, or what James Scott has termed the “hidden transcript,” was especially characteristic of the isolated communities of the interior or mountain zones in which some 70 percent of Algerian people lived. French administrators rarely if ever visited them, and the consequent “sous-administration” of peasants meant that many of the basic functions of the modern state (maintaining civil registers, census gathering, tax collection, conscription lists) operated with great difficulty. Algerian peasants were notoriously suspicious toward any officials or outsiders who traveled into their area, since the rare intrusion of agents of the state was invariably associated with the gathering of intelligence on land, livestock, crops, and human capital. The colonial historian Georges-Henri Bousquet described the extraordinary cohesion and force of the village omerta code: “Little children at five years are already indoctrinated, and just like the adults maintain secrecy when external authorities come, for example, to investigate a crime.”Footnote 77 Karim Rahem has recorded fascinating oral testimony from an elderly woman on the operation of a clandestine fraction-djemâa in the Ouled Razif: “The mountain folk lived apart and did not suffer from poverty. They harvested all they needed from their land…. The peasants were not bothered about the government. They were self-sufficient.”Footnote 78
An anthropological perspective on the village djemâa suggests that it met and carried on its business in a distinctive cultural ambiance and style. This was beginning to disappear by the 1970s, but elements of it were captured in an important conversation between Pierre Bourdieu and Mouloud Mammeri.Footnote 79 Mammeri (1917–1989), the most influential champion of Berber language, poetry, and anthropology, explained how his father was one of the last professional bards or sages (amusnaw) who undertook a long apprenticeship in oratorical skills and the practical wisdom or science of Kabyle society (tamusni). The sage dispensed his wisdom in the djemâa, and in other contexts of socializing such as artisan workshops, market places, or pilgrimages, and was highly respected for his expertise in practical matters such as medical remedies, demarcation in boundary disputes, and when to sow crops. He was also called upon to adjudicate difficult matters facing the community, and was delegated the authority to negotiate on its behalf with external powers. Mammeri concludes by saying that the amusnaw “was truly a political role,” and Bourdieu sums up: “He is the man of situations of crisis, crucial situations, the one who is capable of speaking and saying what is to be said when everyone is reduced to silence.”Footnote 80
Mammeri wrote that boys and youths sitting in on the various social gatherings of men learned the arts of debate and measured and wise decision-making: “There was that informal apprenticeship. The village assembly had an important role in this, which met at regular intervals—for example, every other Thursday—to resolve all the past and forthcoming business of the village. These assemblies were veritable schools of tamusni since those who took part in them were naturally the most eloquent people, the masters of language. But anyone could attend, even children. I personally attended a great number of village assemblies from childhood onwards and I remember very clearly how they proceeded.”Footnote 81
It is important to stress, in relation to my overall thesis, that the fraction-djemâa was not simply a means of transmitting an unchanging oral tradition from 1871 to 1954. Rather, it was a highly flexible and dynamic organization that constantly adapted custom and knowledge to resolve problems and crises as they arose, and this helps explain the long-term durability of the village djemâa. As militant nationalist and communist movements penetrated the more isolated interior after 1945, we find evidence of modern political cells that, far from displacing the djemâa, emerged effortlessly from the deep cultural values and practices of the peasant assembly. Valuable evidence of this was recorded by the communist militants and schoolteachers Jacqueline and Abdelkader Guerroudj as they worked to organize political cells among impoverished peasants in the hinterland of Tlemçen in 1948.
Jacqueline was astonished, on first contact, to find that isolated and largely illiterate mountain peasants already possessed a highly structured communist organization, a fact that she found difficult to understand or explain. She made a detailed record of the proceedings of the first communist meeting that she attended at Ouchba, and though she does not use the term djemâa, they carry the indelible imprint of the culture and practices of the traditional assembly. Twenty or thirty men gathered at night by the light of candles and paraffin lamps, and the three leaders—Tahar Ghomri, Medjoub Berrahou, and Kaddour Mohamedi—began by outlining the issues and problems that were to be debated. The meeting was conducted in the measured verbal economy of peasant culture, and the men sat in silence for fifteen minutes while each reflected, then: “Each man spoke in turn and discussion was engaged in a calm ordered way, ending in operational decisions that concerned first their reply to pressing problems, immediate issues of survival: how to counter the measles epidemic, assist in the construction of a house, ensure the defense of those [militants] who had been arrested, support their families who had been left totally without resources, etcetera.”Footnote 82 Subsequent meetings analyzed the source of each problem, such as the colonial administration, its structure, and agents, and agreed on effective forms of action: “Letters, petitions, and delegates to present them to the authorities, information to be sent to the press, preparation for elections.… To summarize, their approach started from everyday life, the immediate struggle for survival and the possible improvement of their living conditions, the methods of reaching this goal, and ended with the analysis of the causes of their oppression, the economic and social structures determining their condition, and the principles which they could apply in their defense.”Footnote 83
The leader Tahar Ghomri, not unlike the Kabyle amusnaw described by Mammeri, was a man respected for his wisdom. He possessed a deep knowledge of indigenous culture, could read and write Arabic, and had been active in the reformist ulema before transferring to the Parti communiste algérien in 1946, with which he helped organize trade union and strike activities among agricultural workers and peasants.Footnote 84
An identical transition from djemâa to political cell can be found during the same period (1947–1948) in the nationalist movement led by Messali Hadj as it turned to creating a dual structure—the overt political party of the MTLD and the clandestine and illegal PPA. In its drive to penetrate as rapidly as possible the previously neglected terrain of the interior, good use was made of the existing djemâa structures, not only during election campaigns, as we have seen, but also to establish an armed insurrectionary movement. Early evidence of this process can be found in the memoirs of Hocine Aït Ahmed, a leading figure in the PPA and later the FLN, who in 1948 developed a sophisticated manual for the training of guerrilla forces. Aït Ahmed came from a prestigious Kabyle marabout family, and from an early age had an intimate knowledge of the cohesive values of the village community,Footnote 85 and also of a dynamic djemâa that marginalized the French administration by enabling villagers to manage their own affairs and settle disputes without recourse to colonial courts.Footnote 86 His father had shared a family tradition of “non-cooperation with the colonial administration,” but in 1939 had agreed to become caïd at the request of the djemâa of Beni-Ouacif, which feared the administration would impose a corrupt caïd. When his father was later appointed caïd of the douar Amal, his first political act was to go “into every village and to make the notables swear on the Koran that under no circumstance would they disclose the secrets of the village or douar.”Footnote 87 Here as elsewhere, the peasant community was able to deploy a “weapon of the weak” by subtly co-opting or containing the prime instrument of colonial rule in the interior: the caïds and presidents of the official djemâas on whom the administration depended for intelligence.
Statistical biographical studies of the nationalist movement's membership—its complex internal diversity of members' regions, ages, occupations, and class—indicate that those that most actively supported a strategy of guerrilla insurrection from 1945 to 1954 represented a young generation that had reached political maturity and activism during and immediately after the Second World War.Footnote 88 This generation, composed of many demobilized soldiers, secondary school students, and scouts, faced the delicate task of breaking free from the conservative, pro-French “backward mentality” of their fathers' age-group, while simultaneously managing, or bringing on-side, the influential elders that carried so much respect and power in their patriarchal society.Footnote 89 A significant number of future FLN leaders, including Hocine Aït Ahmed, came from rural “grandes familles” (of caïds, marabouts) and thus had an intimate knowledge of the powerful political and moral weight of their fathers and male ancestors within village society.Footnote 90
During the extremely violent and bloody events of Sétif in May 1945, Hocine Aït Ahmed was part of a group of young militants at Beni-Ouacif that on 22 May responded to orders to take up arms. Aït Ahmed and his group immediately called a tajmat t'nach, a traditional djemâa, in the village of Bou-Abderrahmane, which was attended by his father and other older men: “It was better to keep the elders on side by revealing our plan (but not the date of the operations), which they appreciated as a mark of trust.”Footnote 91 The elders, who carried great moral weight within the community and were respected for their wisdom and sense of justice, warned against undertaking such a venture without considering the serious repercussions it would have for the population, including women and children. Hocine's father referred to the position taken by his grandfather, the Cheikh Mohand el-Hocine, who wisely refused to join the great 1871 insurrection because of its lack of preparation, but had later been arrested for refusing to disown the rebels.Footnote 92 The outcome of the debate in the djemâa was that the older men gave the young, would-be insurgents their total moral support and assistance. Soon the youth section of the PPA extended this practice by encouraging young militants to participate in what Aït Ahmed called “ad hoc” djemâas, where they respectfully managed to counter the conservative attitudes of the gerontocracy and create a form of “popular counter-power,” such that the colonial administration “turned in a void, without any real hold on the population.”Footnote 93
Soon after, in December 1948, when Hocine Aït Ahmed became the key organizer and theoretician of the Organisation spéciale (OS), the PPA's underground network that trained for insurrection, he presented a sophisticated plan to a secret Central Committee meeting in the Chélif Valley. A future partisan war, he argued, depended critically on a campaign to win over the peasantry, but to date, “our structures, which remain urban and petites-bourgeoises, have not penetrated at all into the rural masses of some regions.” In certain areas they had succeeded in displacing the reformists of the Union démocratique du Manifeste algérien (UDMA) and Ulemas, “notably on the occasion of municipal and djemâa elections, and thanks to electoral alliances.”Footnote 94 He then detailed a program for creating “revolutionary centers” or “rural bastions,” a process founded on a political offensive: “We have to reinforce our rural implantation. We have to take full advantage of the influence of the notabilities, won over to our movement, in order to structure the peasantry.”Footnote 95 Although the OS was severely disrupted by mass arrests in 1950, this strategy gave many of its activists, who went on to form the core of the FLN insurrectionary movement, experience of working in a peasant milieu.
When the final revolt, consisting of a few hundred poorly armed men, broke out in 1954, the ALN established a fragile and tenuous hold in the Aurès and Kabyles mountains. Between then and the summer of 1956, the ALN achieved the remarkable feat of advancing across the vast interior of the Tell. Finally, in September 1956, it effected a juncture in the Ouarsenis-Chélif area between forces that were penetrating from Morocco in the west and Tunisia and Kabylia in the east.Footnote 96 The historiography of the Algerian War has had little to say about the formidable difficulties faced by the inexperienced ALN in simply surviving in such a harsh environment and in finding an initial support base among a peasantry that was hostile to outsiders, fearful of being compromised in the eyes of the colonial power, and had little understanding of nationalism and its goals. That the guerrillas, a relatively tiny and ill-equipped force, were able to diffuse so successfully throughout rural society owed much to the skill with which they took full advantage of the preexisting structures and values of peasant society, including the djemâa.
Evidence of this two-year process of infiltration and consolidation exist for Wilaya 4 and the mountainous region stretching from Palestro southeast of Algiers, through the Blida Alps, the Ouarsenis, and then north up to the Dahra mountains near Ténès.Footnote 97 As ALN units advanced and approached unknown villages for the first time, they adopted a standard procedure for making contact. Rémy Madoui notes how vulnerable guerrilla units were in the early stages, lacking in arms, money, and food and constantly tracked by the French army: “In 1955 there were very few douars or villages in which we were warmly received and in which we felt safe…. This was a period of heartbreaking isolation, of immense despondency: the people that we were burning to liberate wanted nothing to do with us.”Footnote 98 Initially the ALN units had to proceed with great caution,Footnote 99 and a standard approach was for the guerrilla force to hide near a target village for several days and, using informant-supplied lists of names of caïds, forest guards, or fraction heads, arrest these notables at night and then closely interrogate them in isolation.Footnote 100 The aim was not necessarily to assassinate the colonial administration's key agents in the douars; where possible, they tried to win them over, thereby co-opting the lower tier of the colonial administration, men who the French often continued to trust. We have seen that, starting in 1920, some douar-djemâas had provided the basis for the penetration of nationalism into the rural interior, and now, from the very beginning of the war of independence, the presidents provided ready support for the FLN.Footnote 101 The fraction heads and forest guards had a close knowledge of every family, its resources, level of taxation, number of hunting rifles, and degree of alienation from or support for the French administration, and other intelligence the ALN could use in constructing its own political organization: the nizam, or OPA (Organisation politico-administrative). Rémy Madoui provides a particularly interesting account of a month-long meeting held in the Ouarsenis during October 1955 to train guerilla cadres and settle on a coherent strategy for the region. During this intense course, held during a formative stage of the maquis, the ALN commander Baghdadi taught his lieutenants that the structure of the isolated, mountain douars was “based on the djemâa, the assembly of the people, on which you are going to mould the organization of your sectors.”Footnote 102 Once the ALN had a clear grasp of the socio-political structure of the fraction, they would call a village djemâa at which they announced the leaders of the new FLN five-man council, who might be existing elders or, where recalcitrant caïds had fled or been assassinated, new and younger men chosen for their dynamism.Footnote 103 An important feature of such processes of winning control of a particular fraction was that inhabitants were not won over as individuals, but rather, in line with the traditional solidarity of the village community, as a single block.
It is highly relevant that Kalyvas' model of successful strategies of survival in a situation of civil war was based on village solidarity and negotiation between incumbent (French) and guerrilla (ALN) forces. A djemâa could opt to join either the ALN or the French side, according to which could best protect its interests, but when it did so the entire community tended to rally as a single entity. This pattern is confirmed by the frequency with which entire communities surrendered collectively to the French through ritual ceremonials (aman) involving many hundreds or thousands of men, women, and children. Such “pacified” villages were then offered military protection and arms, and organized into auxiliary self-defense units (harki).Footnote 104 The worker-priest Louis Kergoat, in a remarkable account of life in a “zone interdite,” provides an eyewitness account of the desperate attempts of the fraction-djemâa of Boukraba in the Djebel Bissa, starving and disorganized by intense French operations and bombardment, to negotiate their surrender in May 1957.Footnote 105 The chaos of war meant that such negotiation was not always easy or successful, and it could lead to catastrophe, as in one infamous case in February 1956 when three djemâas suspected of trying to negotiate with the French for protection were massacred by ALN forces at Melouza.Footnote 106
The extent to which the djemâa in its new FLN form—the OPA—was able to spread and take root across Algerian space remains unclear. One French intelligence report from Médéa in December 1956 claimed, “As to the OPA, it is not too exaggerated to say that it covers the greater part of the subdivision territory.” But three years later another army document stated, “The people's assemblies have only an ephemeral existence; in the greater part of Algeria, they have been dissolved….”Footnote 107 Be that as it may, even where formal ALN structures (OPA) were dissolved under the stress of French counterinsurgency, the deeply embedded and ad hoc functions of the djemâa continued to surface at moments of danger to the community. The photographer Marc Garanger captured the most dramatic visual record of an assembly of elders responding to such an emergency in May 1960, when the men of the douar of Rouabas, threatened with removal into a military regroupment camp, confronted a machine gun half-track and the local commander de Mollans.Footnote 108 Most noticeable in Garanger's photograph is the predominance of gray-bearded elders, an indication of the huge evacuation of younger or able-bodied men from peasant society as they joined the ALN, were incarcerated, or emigrated, in part to escape the violence of the army that targeted them. Mountain villages were inhabited primarily by women, children, and old men, and the resulting dominance of a male gerontocracy may well have reinforced traditionalism, at least until the war ended and a deep intergenerational fissure opened with the return of younger males.Footnote 109
CONCLUSION
Contrary to many historians, including Pierre Bourdieu, Abdelmalek Sayad, and Djilali Sari, who emphasized the radical dislocation, atomization, and discontinuity of Algerian peasant society under the impact of French colonialism and capitalism, Mostepha Lacheraf presented the case for the survival and transmission of a culture of resistance between 1871 and 1954. But he did not specify what made this possible. The history of the djemâa is particularly pertinent to this debate. This is not because it was the sole or even main institution through which continuity can be tracked, and indeed it played only one part of a much wider complex of interrelated socio-economic, religious, and familial structures through which change was negotiated. But the djemâa provides fruitful evidence of the methods by which peasant communities organized rationally and collectively to resolve both minor pragmatic issues and potentially fatal crises. The djemâa should not be regarded as a simple repository, a means of transmitting the memory of past acts of rebellion; rather, it was a highly flexible organization that constantly debated and adapted to new challenges as they arose. Oral memory of past insurrections, especially that of 1871, did play a role, but as always within peasant oral culture, retelling involved transformation of the “text” and an instrumental reinterpretation of the past in the light of present contingencies and dangers. Such flexibility is illustrated by the way in which migrant laborers in French factories, slums, and shantytowns regrouped themselves by village affiliation and organized sophisticated self-help strategies through reconstituted, unofficial djemâas. As in the past, the djemâa in the French city provided an instrument of community cohesion in the face of anomie and the dislocations of modern urban society.Footnote 110 Traditional peasant institutions, including the djemâa, were expressions of what Clifford Geertz called “primordial sentiments,” which instead of dissolving with the advance of modernity, impregnated and shaped the political culture of the FLN and of the post-independence state.Footnote 111 Much work remains to be done on how the political culture of the djemâa operated, but as I have explained, it provided a key forum for the intergenerational transmission of memory and the hard lessons of anticolonial struggle. For rural communities caught up in civil war, as in Algeria between 1954 and 1962, the best means to avoid internal fragmentation and a downward spiral of violence was for the village to retain solidarity. This essential unity was often achieved through elders that could sustain a single voice in negotiation with powerful contending forces. Peasant society in precolonial Algeria possessed djemâas that could settle internal disputes, maintain order, and defend local interests against external fractions or tribes, and these organizations proved equally adept at defending villagers against a violent and hegemonic colonial order: hence the secret of their dynamism and longevity.
