In November of 1934, Algerian Governor General Jules Carde asked the Algiers Police Prefecture to investigate a rumor circulating through the French bureaucracy that “natives” in the Arab cafés (café maures) of the city were tuning in to biweekly Arabic broadcasts transmitted by an unspecified Italian radio station that featured “commentaries unfavorable to France” and “openly attacked France's Muslim policy.”Footnote ¹ As the governor of three overseas French départements, Carde had already received notification that the airwaves over North Africa were becoming dangerous. A few months earlier, Jean Berthoin, the director of national security, or Sûreté, in France's Interior Ministry, warned regional prefects, “In a number of cities a large portion of the radio-electric industry—sales and the construction of devices—is in the hands of foreigners.” Berthoin feared that the dominance of France's radio-electric market by large, multinational firms would allow enemy agents to mask radio transmitters beneath the cover of radio sales and report clandestinely on troop maneuvers and defense preparations. He therefore instructed prefects to begin “discreet investigations” into the civil status, political affiliation, and nationality of radio merchants and their personnel.Footnote ² While ostensibly directed at metropolitan prefects, these Sûreté directives resonated in Algeria—a strategic periphery of “Greater France” and home to a sizeable European population of German and Italian descent and to multiple garrisons of France's indigenous-based African Army (Armée d'Afrique). By 1935, rumors about radio espionage and subversive auditory propaganda circulating through the Algerian colonial bureaucracy compelled Governor Carde to construct a colony-wide surveillance web to monitor radio sales, investigate Algerian listening habits, and assess the effects of radio propaganda on the “native mentality.”Footnote ³

During the 1930s, transnational radio broadcasting fueled fears within Algeria's colonial administration, France's security services, and in metropolitan political circles about the conjoined threats of foreign subversion and domestic political instability in the colony. The rising fascist powers of Germany and Italy challenged France's geopolitical status on the Continent and in its colonies with their newly streamlined radio propaganda machines, hoping to sway the loyalties of French subjects through sophisticated attacks on liberal democracy and French colonial policies.Footnote ⁴ When Mussolini openly declared Italy's expansionist aims in Tunisia, Ethiopia, and the Middle East in 1934, the fascist Italian short-wave station Radio-Bari began transmitting from the boot of the Italian peninsula, proclaiming daily in Arabic Italy's support for emerging nationalist movements in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine and their promotion of a pan-Arab and pan-Islamic identity.Footnote ⁵ After Franco's June 1936 coup opened the Spanish Civil War, Arabic-language broadcasts from Spanish nationalist stations in Seville (retransmitted through Tétouan) and Ceuta (a Spanish territory in northern Morocco) reached Algeria, as did broadcasts from Cairo, Alexandria, Zagreb, Istanbul, and occasionally even Moscow.Footnote ⁶ The mere existence of the Moscow broadcasts provoked alarm among colonial civil servants due to the Comintern's history of supporting anti-colonial nationalism. For much of the 1930s the North African Star (Etoile Nord-Africaine), the sole interwar organization to demand Algeria's complete separation from France, had maintained close ties with the French Communist Party and left-wing militants in Paris. By 1937, French politicians across the political spectrum deemed the surveillance of Algerian radio listeners and control of the Mediterranean airwaves to be vital to the preservation of political stability in the colony, and by consequence, to French national security as a whole.

In his 1959 essay A Dying Colonialism, Martinican psychiatrist and anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon first alerted scholars to the pivotal role of radio in shaping the politics of decolonization and Third World liberation struggles, describing the Algerian War of Independence as a battle waged in the airwaves over North Africa and the ears of Algerian radio listeners as much as in the violent clashes between the French Army and Maghribi militants.Footnote ⁷ Yet in recent decades, historians of empire have portrayed Western imperialism as a preeminently visual enterprise, emphasizing how the imperial epistemologies of anthropology and ethnography exploited painting, photography, and film to reinforce ideologies of European superiority. By furnishing Europeans with the discursive and material tools to “enframe” and contain their African and Asian subject populations, these emerging disciplines shaped colonial policymaking and methods of imperial rule.Footnote ⁸ The role of the mass media in European empires, and auditory culture in particular, has until recently sustained only limited scholarly attention.Footnote ⁹ While this lacuna undoubtedly reflects the fragility of the audio-historical archive (whether in the form of phonograph cylinders, gramophone records, or magnetic tape), it also exposes a pervasive tendency among historians and contemporary cultural theorists to privilege visuality as the defining feature of post-Enlightenment rationality and modern governmentality.Footnote ¹⁰ However, as national broadcasting systems took root in Europe, colonial bureaucrats overseas began experimenting with radio technology and broadcast sound as a novel method of distance communication, a source of entertainment, and a weapon of propaganda, making radios a technological centerpiece of colonial modernity. That Britain, France, and the Netherlands all introduced imperial broadcasting schemes during the early 1930s, at the precise moment when indigenous nationalist movements gained momentum and began to demand not merely reforms to imperial policy, but complete independence from European rule, should compel scholars to reexamine auditory culture as a framework for understanding late colonialism.

In French colonial Algeria, radio and an emerging mass culture of broadcast sound became a new site for contests of power between Algerians and the French colonial state, metropolitan politicians and colonial “old hands,” and ultimately, between France and its diplomatic rivals. Radio sound, as a transgressive, invisible, and distinctly modern medium that could transcend physical barriers and traverse the divide between public and private life, appeared to Europeans to be both a promising instrument of social control and a risky tool of social democratization. Yet as Europeans in Algeria and France debated how to best exploit radio in a colonial context, the emergence of a global market in Arabic records threatened to further destabilize colonial politics, revealing troubling links between auditory culture and political subversion. Historians of Algeria have often portrayed the 1930s as a period of escalating French violence and repression culminating the massacres of nationalist demonstrators in Guelma and Sétif in 1945, but investigating this decade through the lens of auditory culture instead exposes the limits of colonial hegemony against the backdrop of rising French anxieties about the nation's declining imperial fortunes and geopolitical status. Drawing on state archives from both sides of the Mediterranean, this article reveals how French authorities came to view radios and phonographs as dangerous and subversive technologies because the sounds they produced so consistently evaded the disciplinary mechanisms of the colonial state. More important, as French authorities struggled to devise new strategies for controlling broadcast sound and Algerian listeners, they were forced to recognize Algerians as political subjects and acknowledge the transnational dimensions of imperial policymaking, both factors that would continue to complicate Franco-Algerian relations into the 1960s.

THE POLITICS OF RADIO BROADCASTING IN INTERWAR ALGERIA

Radio broadcasting debuted in Algeria against the backdrop of what Maghribi scholar Jacques Berque termed the “false apogee” of Algérie française: a decade when the triumphant imperial self-confidence of the year-long celebrations in 1930 commemorating the centenary of France's conquest of Algeria barely masked the ethno-racial and class tensions that exploded into violence during the Constantine pogroms of 1934.Footnote ¹¹ The wealthy French settlers (colons) who controlled Algerian agricultural production of wine and wheat on their vast countryside estates felt outnumbered and threatened by an increasingly discontented population of impoverished wage laborers. In Algeria's cities, the multiethnic European population (of French, Italian, Maltese, and Spanish descent) witnessed their dominance over urban politics challenged by the rise of working-class solidarities and the emergence of a vocal Algerian (and primarily Muslim) professional elite composed of naturalized “citizens” and colonial “subjects”—civil servants, magistrates, public school teachers, translators, physicians, and lawyers. When a coterie of European businessmen pressured the Algerian colonial state to construct Radio-P.T.T.-Alger as France's first colonial broadcasting station, they hoped the “Voice of Algeria” might combat economic stagnation and European depopulation by promoting Algeria's agricultural products and tourist destinations in France.Footnote ¹² At the same time, they understood the political utility of appealing to metropolitan colonial enthusiasts by positioning Radio-Alger within France's larger imperial project.

During the late 1920s, nearly five years before the creation of a national (P.T.T.) network of state radio stations, Parisian colonial lobbyists had begun campaigning for an imperial broadcasting system to complement the privately-owned amateur stations then transmitting in North Africa, Madagascar, and Indochina. As President of the Association Colonies-Sciences Maurice Martelli told a Parisian audience in 1929, radio broadcasting held a natural appeal for France's colonial subjects, who as “auditory beings” accustomed to purely oral communication, would readily absorb the messages transmitted to them via the airwaves.Footnote ¹³ Lobbyists' repeated appeals eventually compelled the French parliament to endorse the construction of the short-wave Poste Colonial, which debuted to great fanfare at the 1931 Colonial Exposition at Vincennes.Footnote ¹⁴ At Radio-Alger's 1929 inauguration, Constantine lawyer and Centenary Commissioner Gustave Mercier paid lip service to Parisian debates, describing how the voices of the new North African station would advance a spiritual conquest of Arab hearts and minds by transgressing the public/private divide to reach into the impenetrable spaces of Algerian domestic life to advance the “civilizing mission.” Radio-Alger, Mercier asserted, would shore up consensus for Algérie française by joining “all the pioneers of the countryside and all the isolated towns and farms of the interior … together with the heart and mind of the Algerian capital … to constitute the permanent affirmation of the union of all of the Algerian population.”Footnote ¹⁵ Operating under the joint control of the colonial state and Algeria's settler elite, Radio-Alger became the first professionally run radio station in the French empire.

Despite colonial enthusiasts' elaborate schemes to promote indigenous radio listening in French overseas colonies through the installation of central village radios and loudspeakers in markets and public squares, colonial civil servants in Algeria judged metropolitan fantasies for creating a mass of docile native listeners to be woefully impractical and politically naïve. Jean Mirante, the director of the Algerian Bureau of Native Affairs, feared radio broadcasting would only open up another arena for dissent against French rule within an already heavily censored public sphere at a moment fraught with political tension. In the wake of the First World War, the French colonial administration sought to quell the rising tide of Algerian discontent by peacefully co-opting Muslim elites into the political process. However, the 1919 Jonnart reforms, which opened up civil service positions to Muslims and expanded the Muslim electorate to allow more Algerians limited participation in local government, instead galvanized Algerian politics.Footnote ¹⁶ By the mid-1930s, a diverse range of autonomous Algerian political organizations, from the reformist Association of Algerian Muslim Ulama and the liberal-minded Fédération des élus de Constantine to the openly nationalist North African Star, aired their grievances against the colonial state in municipal assemblies, at political demonstrations, and in the pages of numerous French- and Arabic-language indigenous newspapers. Elected spokesmen from the Francophone, pro-assimilation Muslim elite declared their loyalty to France while appropriating the language of republican universalism to expose the hypocrisies of colonialism and demand the expansion of the suffrage and the suppression of the repressive native legal code (code de l'indigénat). Algerian politicians also allied themselves with European opposition parties, such as the French Communist Party, in ways the right-leaning colonial government and settler population found both troubling and confusing.Footnote ¹⁷ Although the French administration had historically relied upon a tenuous balance between repression and the manipulation of indigenous elites to govern Algeria, by the mid-1930s colonial authorities no longer knew who within Algerian society represented their best allies. In such a contentious political climate, Mirante warned Governor Carde, “Radio broadcasting is far too effective of a means of propaganda for the administration not to oversee all communications directed toward the natives.”Footnote ¹⁸

Between 1930 and 1936, Radio-Alger primarily transmitted French-language programs for European audiences (local and Continental) that reflected the largely conservative politics of Algiers' settler elites: radio dramas, concerts, “live” reportages of sports matches, talks on viticulture, literature and cinema, and hours of recorded music. Because the large, cabinet-style radios of the early 1930s still represented a luxury for many in North Africa, station staff eagerly backed radio manufacturers in their campaigns to sell receivers, sponsoring glossy spreads in L'Afrique du Nord illustré and Annales Africaines that juxtaposed Radio-Alger performers against advertisements portraying radios as indispensable commodities for a modern colonial household.Footnote ¹⁹ In a concession to dialogue with Algeria's expanding Muslim middle-class, the Governor's Office approved a few intermittent talks by politically “safe” Algerian personalities “who would receive without difficulty the counsels and direction of the Bureau of Native Affairs,” including Ahmed Ben Lakahal, the muezzin at an Algiers mosque, and Chérif Benhabyles, a French-educated lawyer from Constantine.Footnote ²⁰ The majority of the “native broadcasts” consisted of “oriental concerts” featuring Arabic-language recordings or live performances by Algerian musicians. Algerian “tenor” and Arabic theater pioneer Mahieddine Bachetarzi and his El-Moutribia orchestra contributed frequently to these broadcasts alongside Lili Labassi, Sassi, Mohammed El-Anka, and Cheika Tetma, playing a varied repertory of “classical” Arabo-Andalusian music and “popular” Algerian songs (la chaabi), Arabic covers of French chansons, and hybrid musical numbers that blended Arabic lyrics with fox-trots and rumbas.Footnote ²¹ Bachetarzi recalls in his memoirs how despite colonial censorship, these radio performances offered him and fellow musicians the opportunity to make their voices heard among a wider North African audience and promote a popular revival of Arabic music.Footnote ²²

Still, Radio-Alger's use of “literary” Arabic as the primary broadcasting language for these limited “native” programs (a mere tenth of the weekly broadcast schedule) suggests that the colonial state never intended them to reach an audience outside the Muslim elite, a strategy further evidenced in the selection of the Arabic announcer: Omar Guendouz, an Arabic teacher at Algiers' Ecole Sarrouy and a contributor to the pro-assimilation newspaper La voix des humbles. Between 1933 and 1935, Guendouz became an intermediary between the state and the indigenous elite, proposing potential station contributors to the station director and introducing an array of Algerian lecturers, musical performers, and records in literary Arabic. However, the majority of the Algerian population spoke Algerian Arabic or Berber dialects, as colonial educational policies had for decades rendered classical Arabic the preserve of Algerian men with a French school diploma or a private Qur'anic education, a group that included many French speakers for whom Radio-Alger's French broadcasts would have been readily accessible.Footnote ²³

Even so, Radio-Alger's limited Arabic broadcasting initiatives turned the airwaves over Algeria into a symbolic battleground for the mounting political struggle between Algerians and French authorities over control of the colony itself. Between 1933 and 1936, Algerian deputies to the Assemblées Financières (the closest equivalent to a colonial parliament) and Algerian journalists contested racist representations of Arabs in the station's radio plays, demanded programs in dialectical Arabic, and insisted Radio-Alger devote greater air time to “native” programming. Responding to European charges that no Algerians listened to Radio-Alger, Dr. Bendjelloul, a leading spokesman for the Fédération des élus de Constantine, told a government representative during a 1936 session of the Assemblées, “The use of radio is widespread among Muslims; they exist in cafés maures, among individuals, in towns and in the countryside” and “we ask that an effort be made to increase the [Arabic] broadcasts.”Footnote ²⁴ During its first six years of operation, Radio-Alger consequently failed to produce the passive “native” audience imagined by colonial ideologues, instead provoking Algerian élus to demand that Radio-Alger give Arabic “voices” a larger place in the airwaves over North Africa. Their claims, alongside a rise in foreign propaganda broadcasting, convinced colonial authorities that radio and an emerging mass culture of broadcast sound posed a danger to the stability and security of Algérie française.

When Governor Jules Carde constructed a surveillance web in December 1934 to investigate Algerian radio listening habits, he worried less about Radio-Alger's broadcasts than the voices of foreign propagandists penetrating invisibly across Algeria's borders. From the start, the French colonial administration responded differently to the threat of foreign propaganda in North Africa than Parisian politicians and the French security services of the metropole. Starting in the 1920s, metropolitan radio audiences could tune in regularly to foreign radio programs from across the Continent, and German and Italian propaganda broadcasts bombarded French border regions as early as 1933. Although diplomatic tensions prompted the French state to construct a radio listening service in 1935 to monitor the content of foreign broadcasts (primarily politicians' radio speeches) and a Radio Police (Police de l'Air) patrolled the French airwaves in search of clandestine and unlicensed amateur transmitters, the national police seldom interfered with the listening practices of ordinary French citizens.Footnote ²⁵ In contrast, colonial authorities virtually ignored the content of Radio-Bari's early propaganda broadcasts. Rather than establish a listening service, which would have required a significant outlay of funds and personnel, Carde instead directed his staff to monitor Algerian radio listeners themselves, a decision justified on the grounds that Algerian subjects did not possess the same “rights” to listen in to the airwaves as freely as French citizens.Footnote ²⁶ Carde clearly wanted to quickly quell any manifestation of anti-French unrest incited by radio propaganda, yet his fixation with watching people, rather than listening in to the airwaves, exposed longstanding preoccupations within the French security services and the particularities of the interwar colony-metropole relationship.

Like many European colonial regimes, French Algeria was, in the words of Ann Laura Stoler, a “taxonomic state.” Since the mid-nineteenth century, the French Army and colonial civil servants had developed a wide range of visual surveillance techniques to identify, categorize, subdue, and control the population. Physicians and ethnographers elaborated racial and ethno-religious typologies to classify Algerians, targeting the Arab-Muslim population as the most resistant to the French “civilizing mission” vis-à-vis the more “assimilable” Berbers.Footnote ²⁷ Beginning in the 1880s, and increasingly after World War I, French police tracked Muslim pilgrims en route to Middle Eastern holy sites. Colonial authorities feared Algerian Muslims' exposure to nationalist currents in the French protectorates of Syria and Lebanon, particularly after the spectacular rise in the mid-1920s of the Lebanese pan-Arab propagandist Shakib Arslan, whose Geneva-based newspaper La Nation Arabe attacked France's interventions in Islamic societies across North Africa and the Levant.Footnote ²⁸

Police-state measures adopted during the First World War further fueled metropolitan and colonial bureaucrats' fantasies of maintaining internal political stability and securing France's external borders by rendering the activities of subject and foreign populations visible to the French state. Faced with an onslaught of postwar immigration from Eastern Europe and the colonies, metropolitan security services modernized older methods of visual surveillance methods, using photographs, passports, and work permits to track immigrants at border crossings, political demonstrations, and ports, strategies that acquired increasing importance in the Maghrib as the North African Star drew significant financial and political support from Algerian workers living in France.Footnote ²⁹ These surveillance strategies were adopted by indigenous and French civil servants in the Bureau of Native Affairs, policemen, and eventually, the security services of the French Army, and all shaped the colonial state's investigation of Algerian radio listening. However, if modern state power relies upon strategies designed to render populations “legible,” as James C. Scott has argued, French colonial surveillance relied upon no single, coherent logic, but rather a shifting series of tactics driven by fear, racial prejudice, the desire to stabilize colonial politics, and above all, a profound uncertainty about how an emerging mass media of sound would operate in a diverse, multiethnic society.Footnote ³⁰

When Radio-Bari first began transmitting in Arabic, the Governor's Office had no idea how many Algerians even owned radios, and in keeping with time-honored methods, Carde asked the Algerian Postal Administration to compile lists of Algerian radio owners. The recent institution in 1933 of the annual radio license fee aided this task by requiring radio owners to register their receivers with their local Post Office branch. As in metropolitan France, colonial P.T.T. registers recorded the owner's name and the radio's classification for public or private usage. However, colonial postal agents also recorded Algerians civil status (état civil): their marital status, profession, and classification as French “subjects” or naturalized French “citizens,” this latter category presumably less suspect from a political point of view. These early surveys of radio ownership revealed several important facts. The price of personal radio receivers (ranging from 500 to 1500 francs in 1933–1934) prohibited many Algerians outside the educated Muslim elite from buying them. In Algeria's three départements, postal agents counted only 225 total radios in “native” hands, with 43 in Oran, 66 in Constantine, and 116 in Algiers. Algerian radio ownership appeared concentrated in urban neighborhoods (for example, eighteen in the cities Constantine and Bône, versus seven in Bougie), with the majority of radio owners living in Algiers.Footnote ³¹ Although the number of registered radios in Algerian hands rose to an estimated two thousand out of sixty thousand total colonial radios by 1937, the Bureau of Native Affairs believed this figure remained well below the reality because “statistics do not permit precisions on this point.”Footnote ³² Many Algerian radio owners, like their metropolitan counterparts, likely avoided declaring their radios to escape paying the radio tax. Moreover, colonial civil servants consistently doubted the validity of statistics that relied upon self-reporting, believing that Algerians deliberately lied about information such as census data to escape the scrutiny of the colonial state in their private lives.Footnote ³³

Personal radio ownership statistics revealed little about broadcast reception because of the many public radios in use. Early reports of Algerian radio usage stressed the growing numbers of cafés maures, greasy spoon restaurants (cremeries françaises), brothels, and “Muslim associations (cercles)” where Algerian men gathered in groups to listen to the radio and where foreign propaganda might reach a potentially unlimited number of listeners. For the colonial state, collective radio listening promised to be a far more dangerous phenomenon than domestic listening, for audiences could discuss and debate the broadcasts, lending them a greater authority. In fact, French police had long targeted the café maure, a traditional site of Muslim male sociability and a gathering place for transient laborers, as a special target for surveillance and after the First World War, as a breeding ground for nationalist and communist politics.Footnote ³⁴ Although memoirs testify that North African women (especially in wealthier families who could afford a home receiver) became avid radio enthusiasts during the interwar years, that French policemen focused their surveillance almost exclusively on public and collective listening betrayed their assumption that Algerian men alone represented significant political actors.Footnote ³⁵

Colonial civil servants had for decades privileged the information that could be gathered from cafés and public spaces—based on rumors, whispers, and hearsay—as the most reliable indicators of the “native” mentality, and they sometimes bribed café owners to serve as informants and report on political dissidence in their businesses.Footnote ³⁶ However, radio threatened to disrupt this time-honored method of information collection. Café owners who used radios to attract a clientele to their businesses were less likely to volunteer details about customers' listening habits or the stations their radios received. Moreover, Radio-Bari's initial broadcasts were short and irregular (ranging from five to fifteen minutes in length), making it difficult for colonial policemen to catch Algerians in the act of listening.Footnote ³⁷ For European policemen and officers in the Bureau of Native Affairs accustomed to recording applause or cheers during theatrical performances and film screenings or documenting the shouts of political demonstrators, deciding precisely when radio listening became a political act proved enormously challenging, in part because it relied upon a visual register on a listener's face or a manifest physical reaction.Footnote ³⁸ Colonial civil servants began to portray foreign radio broadcasts as a technological manifestation of the téléphone arabe—what some Algerians referred to as “Radio-Burnous”—the indigenous information (gossip) network that the colonial state always sought to tap into, but consistently feared.Footnote ³⁹ For this reason, colonial authorities rapidly turned their attention to Arabic recordings, which appeared as dangerous as radio transmissions, but at least initially, offered a means to capture the elusive and temporal qualities of broadcast sound.

CAPTURED SOUND: FRENCH SURVEILLANCE AND ARABIC RECORDS

In their initial forays into the colony's cafés maures to investigate Algerian radio listening, colonial policemen and P.T.T. staff made an unexpected discovery: record listening, perhaps even more than radio listening, had become a popular and widespread pastime. Edouard Estaudié, the director of the Algerian P.T.T, reported to the governor in December 1934, “no [foreign] station broadcasting in Arabic could be heard” in the Algiers cafés he visited, but that café owners used their radios as “pick-up” devices for playing records as often as receivers.Footnote ⁴⁰ Policemen deployed to investigate foreigners working in radio-electric sales outlets turned up several suspicious persons, but similarly noted that radio merchants made higher profits from Arabic-language record sales than radios. In part because phonographs required no electricity or batteries to work, they proved to be a more practical entertainment choice than radios for those living in rural areas. Even electric gramophones remained cheaper than wireless sets, rendering them accessible not only to the Muslim professional class, but to the Algerian laborers who crowded Algiers and other port cities in search of work.Footnote ⁴¹ In fact, North Africa experienced an explosion in record sales during the interwar years, as multinational firms including Pathé, Columbia, and Gramophone recruited Maghribi artists to cater to the growing European taste for “ethnographic” records and the expanding Arabic-language market.Footnote ⁴² Egyptian musical films playing in Algerian cities introduced Middle Eastern musical stars like the chanteuse Oum Kalthoum to a broad audience, while Algerian performers including Mahieddine Bachetarzi and Lili Labassi recorded hundreds of songs, signed record contracts, and joined European firms as talent agents. The music of this first generation of Maghribi recording artists is seen today as the origin of contemporary Algiers-based la chaabi and Oranais raï, but interwar colonial observers typically viewed these records as evidence of a dangerous Arabic-language auditory culture that had thus far escaped French surveillance.Footnote ⁴³

Staff in the Bureau of Native Affairs harbored longstanding suspicions of Algerian oral culture, for the satirical (and sometimes openly polemical) songs and poems performed by itinerant musicians in souks and Muslim orchestras in private homes too often escaped the colonial state's surveillance web. The new media of 78-rpm records, which could be easily transported, sold and resold, and played in a variety of environments, defied the temporality of these live performances by offering listeners the possibility of recreating a sonic experience again and again.Footnote ⁴⁴ Thanks in part to Radio-Alger's “oriental concerts” and the research of a few astute Sûreté staff, in 1934 French authorities already possessed some knowledge of the growing vogue for recorded sound in Algeria.Footnote ⁴⁵ Although French record companies dominated record sales in North Africa, colonial police soon fixed their attention on the Baidaphone Company, an Arabic-language film and recording company run by the self-proclaimed “Doctor” Michel Baida and his brothers Pierre and Gabriel from their joint headquarters in Beirut, Cairo, and Berlin. Between 1930 and 1935, Michel Baida attracted the attention of French police as a visible “foreigner” traveling through France's three North African possessions with his German sound engineer Max Printz, where he secured recording contracts with local performers and established a network of distributors to sell Baidaphone records.Footnote ⁴⁶ Citing Baida's relations with a host of unsavory characters, the Algiers Police Prefecture warned regional bureaus in 1935 that he was a likely German spy and that Printz had participated in “contraband sales of weapons” in neighboring Morocco during the First World War.Footnote ⁴⁷

Arms trafficking paled in comparison to Baidaphone's current subversive trade in Arabic records. In June of 1935, Tunisian authorities informed Algiers of a local rumor that Pierre Baida was planning to smuggle records across the Moroccan-Algerian border to avoid customs duties and inspections at Algerian ports by “transporting them clandestinely by car” through the intermediary of his nephew Theodor Khayat of Casablanca.Footnote ⁴⁸ Although no evidence tied the Baida brothers directly to political agitation, Constantine police reported in January of 1936 that Dr. Bendjelloul, one of the leaders of the Fédération des Elus de Constantine, had recently shared a drink with Baida.Footnote ⁴⁹ Another un-authored note insisted that the Baidas acted very clearly “in the service of German interests.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Moreover, the Sûreté had at least one prior example of such subversive traffic in records. In 1917, the Ministry of Interior had discovered German spies using phonograph cylinders and records to smuggle communications concerning troop maneuvers and munitions levels across the French border.Footnote ⁵¹ This precedent, combined with Germany's wartime history of spreading pan-Islamic and pan-Arab propaganda within France's colonial armies, convinced many within the security services that the expanding global trade in Arabic records, and particularly Baidaphone records, comprised a covert but sophisticated strategy to inflame Algerian nationalism and undermine French authority in North Africa.

Fears of imported Arabic records inciting political subversion in North Africa spread quickly through the French colonial bureaucracy during 1935–1936, when the Bachagha Smati, an Algerian agent working for the Bureau of Native Affairs, produced a detailed study of Arabic-language records and Algerian listening habits and distributed his findings in a training course for French officers. Echoing French tropes about Arabs' natural proclivities for sound, Smati argued that the “traditional taste of Mediterranean peoples for music” combined with the inexpensive price of phonographs made records into a commodity so popular that they transcended masculine public spaces to reach into the “cloistered life” of Muslim women. As a result, “There is hardly a café maure or family—however modest their condition—that does not have a phonograph and a collection of popular songs.”Footnote ⁵² While this vogue for records began harmlessly enough, the popularity of local Maghribi artists soon dwindled in the face of a foreign invasion of Middle Eastern “oriental records” facilitated by the Baida brothers.

According to Smati, Middle Eastern records contained elaborate codes of hidden meaning through which simple words became “declamations on the beauty and charm of the oriental countries.” Polemical phrases such as “my country” (biladi) or “homeland” (al watan) recurred in song lyrics while Arabic spoken-word recordings featured hadith and phrases from the Qur'an such as “you were the best people to appear on the surface of the earth.”Footnote ⁵³ Algerian musicologists confirm that the transnational Arabic-language record industry offered Maghribi performers a new political vocabulary lifted from Middle Eastern Arabic dialects and the Arab nationalist press, fostering the emergence of hybrid musical genres that in their turn contributed to the emergence of modern standard Arabic.Footnote ⁵⁴ However, Smati viewed the resulting transformations to Maghribi music less as the product of benign cross-cultural mixing than as evidence of Algerians' suggestible mentality and ingrained superstitions, recapitulating a view of native psychology advanced by European physicians since the turn of the century.Footnote ⁵⁵

To the audience Smati described, “whose dominant trait remains a profound if unreasonable attachment to Islam,” Baidaphone served up “the official or unofficial songs of the different Muslim countries: Cherifien hymns, Tunisian, Egyptian, Lebanese, Syrian, Iraqi, etc. … [and] while this might appear anodyne, in fact they inculcate in the native the idea that there exist in the world peoples having his faith … who have kept more or less the façade of Arab states and who proclaim their desire for liberty in their maternal language and not in that of a foreign Marseillaise.”Footnote ⁵⁶

As evidence of the Baidas' subversive pan-Arabism, Smati claimed they had tested “the reaction of the public authorities” to their propaganda records by only slowly introducing into North Africa songs with subtle nationalist or religious themes. Once a performer acquired a loyal following, Baidaphone and its subsidiaries introduced records with more overtly political lyrics. An example of the latter included a recent recording by Elie Baida (the Baidas' cousin) that featured the refrain “Awaken Oriental!” and worked to “captivate and awaken the spirit of the listeners” by nourishing “xenophobia” toward the French.Footnote ⁵⁷

The Bachagha Smati's analysis of the Arabic-language record encapsulates the mixture of paranoia and pragmatism that colonial bureaucrats and the French security services displayed in the face of widespread Algerian record listening. Citing Michel Baida's relations with German politicians from Streseman to Goebbels, Smati portrayed the global distribution of Arabic records as nothing less than an expansive German strategy for geopolitical dominance. Yet even as his report displayed a competent knowledge of the Arabic-language recording industry, Smati's depiction of ostensibly Christian Lebanese businessmen serving as the vehicles of Nazi-sponsored pan-Islamist and pan-Arab propaganda left logic wanting. Were the Baidas really German pawns, or just ambitious and successful businessmen eager to make a profit?Footnote ⁵⁸ If metropolitan security services found the distinction between foreign espionage and internal social disorder relatively clean-cut, Martin Thomas suggests that interwar colonial states struggled to “distinguish between foreign subversion and indigenous resistance to European rule” because the loyalty of their colonial subject populations could never be assumed. Even after the leaders of the Muslim reformist Ulama movement of the mid-1930s sought out exchanges with influential Middle Eastern clerics in their desire to reclaim a purer, pre-colonial Islamic past, the Algerian Governor's Office possessed little convincing evidence of a direct connection between foreign pan-Islamic propaganda and direct manifestations of anti-French dissent in Algeria. This did not stop some within the French administration from portraying Algeria's highly diverse population as a monolithic mass.Footnote ⁵⁹ While Smati worried about Arabic records inciting nationalist agitation, he disavowed Algerians' political agency by portraying Arabs as passive, superstitious listeners who lacked the intellectual sophistication to resist the polemics of foreign agents. The Baidas' powers of seduction even extended to Radio-Alger performers Mahieddine Bachetarzi and El-Hadj Mohammed El-Anka, who traveled to Berlin to record for Baidaphone on the promise of lavish dinners, automobiles, and untold financial rewards.

For these reasons, the Bachagha Smati determined the auditory polemics on Arabic records to be more dangerous than visual propaganda disseminated through films or the printed press. Records also passed through Algerian ports without examination by colonial censors. In one notorious example of administrative failure, censors removed the nationalist song “Hymn to the Green Flag” from the popular Egyptian musical film Tears of Love before its premiere in Algiers, while a Baidaphone record of the song passed through customs to sell hundreds of copies across the colony.Footnote ⁶⁰ On Smati's urging, policemen and agents in the Bureau of Native Affairs began combing Algerian shops and cafés for subversive, anti-French recordings, compiling deep files on Baidaphone and its local subsidiary labels and following cartons of records as they traveled from Algiers to Tlemcen or Constantine to Bône.Footnote ⁶¹ In 1937, police interrogated an Algerian named Boulbina after he tried to sell a carton of records to Radio-Alger produced by the little-known Diamphone label. After Boulbina revealed that Diamophone's owner, the Constantine-based merchant named Taieb ben Amor, was “in contact with Dr. Baida,” they placed the merchant and the shop under surveillance.Footnote ⁶² The staff of the Bureau of Native Affairs then began to transcribe and translate the lyrics of hundreds of Diamophone records (and those of other labels), underlining particularly subversive passages with red ink. If radio broadcasts evaded the scrutiny of colonial censors, records appeared to translate invisible sound waves into a precise script that could be lifted off the surface of the shellac, transcribed, and analyzed.

However, producing definitive interpretations of song lyrics remained challenging given the social and political turmoil of the mid-1930s. After Messali Hadj generated mass support for the once-banned North African Star under the banner of the Algerian People's Party (Parti du Peuple Algérien) in 1938, colonial politics remained highly fragmented with Algerians and Europeans competing for influence within the French administration and for support from diverse Algerian constituencies. The very definitions of the terms “nation,” “religion,” and “community” depended largely upon the identity of the speaker and the precise context in which they were uttered, factors that only a few of the savviest colonial agents understood.Footnote ⁶³ As colonial bureaucrats struggled to determine precisely what constituted “nationalist” activity, and contain it, they consistently sought to tie anti-French behavior to specific political organizations (typically the “militant” Muslim Ulama or the North African Star and its later incarnation as the Algerian People's Party) though Algerians confounded their efforts by modifying their political rhetoric or shifting their political allegiances. This changeable political atmosphere complicated the work of record translators, particularly when they possessed little knowledge of Arabic dialects spoken outside the Maghrib or lacked the cultural capital to understand local slang.Footnote ⁶⁴ A 1939 evaluation of a stack of Baidaphone record translations in the files of the Bureau of Native Affairs highlighted numerous errors in the transcriptions, noting that the songs' “esoteric language” and the use of parables to convey messages made it “difficult to understand Arab songs word-for-word and often impossible to get a hold of their true, hidden meaning.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Alongside the wave of strikes, political demonstrations, and street violence in Algeria's largest cities that accompanied the Popular Front's arrival into political power in the summer of 1936, colonial officials continued to rely upon time-honored methods of visual surveillance to contain Algeria's burgeoning auditory culture, with civil servants seeking to link dangerous records to politically suspect individuals. Such was the case with an infamous record produced by the local North African label Rsaissi. In December of 1937, the head of the Sûreté in Algiers warned police prefects across the colony that the Algiers shop Algeriaphone had sold an estimated forty Rsaissi records bearing the false label “Piano solo 65075A/65075B.” However, the record did not contain a piano selection but instead featured an unknown vocalist singing the lyrics “Muslims, listen to me, join the Association; get rid of this mentality with which you are afflicted [and] unite together so that we might chase away our enemies and make religion live again.” The song enjoined Algerians to purchase El Ouma, the newspaper of the Algerian People's Party.Footnote ⁶⁶ This discovery, which came just a few months after Messali Hadj created the Algerian People's Party, confirmed policemen's fears that record listening fostered political dissidence in Algeria. In an attempt to slow the diffusion of the “piano solo” record across the colony, police interrogated its primary distributor, a Swiss-German national named Jean Zupiger, who reportedly employed an Algerian named Bechir with ties to the leading alim Tawfiq al-Madani.Footnote ⁶⁷ That Anouar Rsaissi—owner of the local Rsaissi label—was known to be an early Baidaphone distributor and a reputed “Lothario” with an avowed Neo-Destourian (Tunisian nationalist) brother further substantiated the seditious intent of the “Piano solo” record.Footnote ⁶⁸

Over the next year, French police fanned out across the colony in an attempt to track the distribution of the “Piano solo” record from Algiers to merchants in regional cities and then on to individual cafés maures, restaurants, market stalls, and brothels in the tiniest villages.Footnote ⁶⁹ The fact that a “clientele in the countryside” now listened to records posed new challenges for the colonial state, which had thus far targeted urban areas for surveillance.Footnote ⁷⁰ As if to confirm French authorities' worst fears, the “Piano solo” record turned up across Algeria and police searches uncovered additional Rsaissi records bearing false labels, included one song misattributed to the popular malouf singer Mohammed El Kourd entitled “I Weep Alone for My Country” (Abki biladia). The song demanded the suppression of the code de l'indigénat and included “seditious” phrases such as “If God grants us our wishes … we will be delivered from our enemies and all of our sorrows,” and “Oh Muslims, awaken yourselves from your slumber.”Footnote ⁷¹ The “care with which these labels were forged proves the criminal intent of the editors,” the chief of the Special Police in Constantine wrote to the Algiers Police Prefecture in 1938.Footnote ⁷² Backed by the 1935 Régnier decree, which criminalized “anti-French” activity or “civil disorder” incited by Algerians and “foreigners,” colonial police seized records in cafés across Algeria and demanded that café proprietors inform on their clientele. In 1938, police in Constantine, Phillipeville, and Bône closed three cafés for a month after discovering “Piano solo” and other political records inside.Footnote ⁷³ Record listening, once a benign evening pleasure for Algerian café habitués and families, now placed Algerians under greater scrutiny from the French colonial state.

FUGITIVE SOUND: TRACKING “NATIVE” LISTENERS

The French administration's obsession with tracking and confiscating politically “subversive” Arabic records betrayed civil servants' persistent fears about the nefarious influence of auditory propaganda, and particularly transnational radio broadcasting, on Algerian minds. Records appeared to provide a means to capture and render legible the intangible qualities of broadcast sound, even as colonial authorities failed to capture Algerians listening to foreign radio broadcasts. During a training course for officers in the Bureau of Native Affairs in February of 1937, the French agent Delahaye reminded his audience about the “essentially fugitive” character of radio sound: “The radio broadcast has liberated itself from the ties that bind the written word … crossing the most protected borders, the most firmly closed doors, and the thickest walls” to the point that “nothing can stop it except jamming.”Footnote ⁷⁴ By 1937 the Algerian Governor's Office had also amassed considerably more data about the schedules of foreign propaganda broadcasts, the technical capacity of foreign transmitters, and the structure and content of the programs themselves, thanks in part to summaries of the programs transmitted by the Listening Center in Paris and the Army information service's Bulletin des renseignements musulmans (Bulletin of Muslim Information).Footnote ⁷⁵ Colonial authorities now knew that the fascist Italian transmitter Radio-Bari, Franco's nationalist Radio-Seville, and even Radio-Cairo introduced their news reports with “oriental music” to attract listeners, which suggested a direct correlation between Algerians' growing record consumption and increased radio listening.

In September of that year, after the Gazette de la Maritime reported that Italian spies had begun distributing fixed-frequency receivers in Algeria and Morocco tuned to Radio-Bari's frequency (a strategy already employed to great effect in Germany by the Nazi Party), colonial police began recording the manufacturer, model number, and provenance of the radio receivers they found in Algerian hands.Footnote ⁷⁶ Simply owning an Italian- or German-made radio became enough to implicate an Algerian in nationalist politics. As a policeman in Aumale wrote to his inspector, “During our operations we found in the café of Mohammed El Imam … a radio of a German label, purchased from an agent of the merchant Meyzoret and Zupiger in Algiers … [and] it is well know that this establishment is one of the preferred meeting places for sympathizers of the Algerian People's Party.” The Maison Zupiger, of course, had first sold the seditious “Piano solo” record. These attempts to tie radio listening to record consumption reveal French authorities' continued uncertainty about how to precisely measure the effects of an invisible, sonic medium on Algerian politics.

In fact, the files of the Bureau of Native Affairs and the Governor's Office between 1935 and 1938 are filled with contradictory reports about Algerian radio listening as policemen, civil servants, and municipal authorities disagreed over the degree to which foreign propaganda influenced their local populations and which social groups it affected. Policemen who visited a café at the appointed hour of a Radio-Bari broadcast might hear no Arabic playing through a radio loudspeaker, but later hear rumors of people tuning in to the news bulletins. One anonymous report to the Oran Police Prefecture in 1937 described how “In the different sales outlets for radios in Oran nearly all the natives coming in to purchase a radio ask for one capable of picking up the Cairo station. Some even demand BOMBAY.” These requests, together with the public's growing taste for “oriental” records, signaled Algerians' desire to participate in a wider world outside the sphere of French control, a dangerous prospect for France's civilizing mission and the political stability of the colony. Yet the very same report concluded that foreign broadcasts had not as yet exerted a “profoundly harmful influence” on the native mentality, for “it is undeniable that the local broadcasts of Radio-Alger are followed with interest.”Footnote ⁷⁷

Disagreements between French staff in the various branches of the colonial administration over foreign radio broadcasting centered upon two key problems: first, the number and type of radios in Algerian hands and initially the class base of the radio audience; and second, whether Algerians could understand the “literary” Arabic employed by the announcers of foreign radio stations. Algerian radio ownership jumped dramatically from 2,000 in July of 1937 to 2,966 in March of 1938, a startling increase matched by a growing number of public radios, which continued to outnumber those purchased by individuals for private, domestic listening.Footnote ⁷⁸ In Bône, forty-seven radios operated in cafés, whereas only thirty-six Algerians owned home receivers.Footnote ⁷⁹ In the city of Constantine, thirty-five public radios transmitted broadcasts to listeners in café maures and restaurants.Footnote ⁸⁰ A report from Oran noted that radio sales would be even higher “if merchants did not demand the full price of a radio upon its delivery.” Still, other bureaucrats found that the “all-wave radios (necessary to receive the short-wave broadcasts of Radio-Bari) are found only among native notables and several well-off functionaries,” thus diffusing the dangers posed by the short-wave broadcasts.Footnote ⁸¹

Some policemen also claimed that the working-class Algerian population (who spoke local Arabic or Berber dialects) could not understand the “literary” Arabic employed by the Cairo announcer, nor that of the speakers on Radio-Bari and Radio-Seville (often of Middle-Eastern descent).Footnote ⁸² According to the Sub-Prefect of Tizi-Ouzou, few people in his Berber-speaking region could comprehend the polemics of Radio-Seville, for a “broadcast in Arabic, is generally speaking, for the Kabyle listeners, less interesting than listening in French.”Footnote ⁸³ Historians continue to disagree about whether French colonial authorities deliberately fostered illiteracy in Arabic to promote Algerian assimilation to French values, though the fact the multiple interwar “nationalist” parties promoted the Arabization of Algeria's populations in their political platforms aroused suspicions within the colonial administration. In 1933, Messali Hadj had reclaimed Arabic as the “official” language of Algeria in the North African Star's manifesto, while the reformist Ulama made reviving the Qur'anic language a centerpiece of their desired religious renewal by offering Arabic courses to Algerians in private schools.Footnote ⁸⁴ Yet as a report from the French Army General Staff concluded in 1937, literacy in classical Arabic was irrelevant when so many Algerian men gathered to listen in cafés maures where a single individual could translate a foreign program to a crowd gathered around a loudspeaker. Moreover, members of the educated elite might prove the most susceptible to the entreaties of foreign announcers. “The current listeners who belong to the most evolved classes are very sensitive,” the report noted, and “lacking a critical mind, they are often considerably taken with adverse propaganda and in turn reproduce these harmful ideas among the popular classes, who are very easily influenced.”Footnote ⁸⁵

In ensemble, these reports reveal more about the fears and suspicions of colonial civil servants and the incomplete and ever-shifting nature of colonial hegemony than they do about Algerian listening habits or the effects of foreign radio propaganda on Algerian politics. Both Claude Collot and Charles-Robert Ageron have pointed to the general disorganization of the colonial civil service (police, Native Affairs, and municipal governance) during the interwar years and the relatively poor educational level of French administrators and their indigenous reinforcements.Footnote ⁸⁶ Although the colonial state offered annual salary subsidies for Arabic proficiency, in 1938 only seventy individuals (excluding interpreters and Arabic teachers) received the bonus for their ability to write in Arabic, alongside another three hundred for conversational skills in dialectical Arabic or Kabyle.Footnote ⁸⁷ These statistics reveal how a modern, oral medium challenged the capacities of civil servants, and illuminate the colonial state's alternating reliance on visual observation and rumor to generate knowledge, or direct surveillance and mediated queries through native informants, none of which proved to be entirely effective. However, if the Bureau of Native Affairs consistently sought out direct physical evidence of radio's impact on Algerian politics, members of the Army's radio-goniometry services who listened in to the airwaves required no such proof.

By the autumn of 1937, staff in the Army's information and intelligence services began to worry about the effects of foreign propaganda on the morale of North African troops in the African Army, and demanded that the colonial administration and metropolitan politicians adopt proactive counterpropaganda measures. Radio-Bari redoubled its attacks on France's presence in North Africa following the 1935 Laval-Mussolini Accords in Rome, Radio Seville and Radio-Tétouan urged North Africans to rally behind Franco, and the Iberian Anarchist Federation, which seized control of a Barcelona station in September of 1936, called upon Muslim troops to rise up against their colonial oppressors in a jihad.Footnote ⁸⁸ Invoking the cliché of the téléphone arabe, a reservist Army captain in Algiers mailed a quasi-hysterical letter to the headquarters of the National Radio Broadcasting Services in the autumn of 1937, describing how “rumors spread within Islam that France is afraid of Mussolini.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Exacerbating European fears, the indigenous French- and Arabic-language press also began printing summaries and discussions of foreign propaganda broadcasts. By the end of the year, the Army General Staff would acknowledge that broadcasting constituted a novel form of psychological warfare that worked subtly on the minds of listeners and transcended traditional measures of visual surveillance. “In periods of political tension or in case of a European war, a campaign of false news unleashed by enemy powers could have grave consequences if we have no means of protection,” the anonymous author of one Army report noted, making it “necessary to put into place an organization permitting us not only to protect the natives under our guardianship, and even more to exert a positive action over them.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Despite the vast scope of the colonial state's surveillance web, which stretched from the cities of Algiers, Constantine, and Oran to tiny communes such as Bou-Sâada, radio listening revealed itself to be a highly individualized and subjective act and therefore difficult to measure and control. Yet in challenging the loyalties of indigenous troops, broadcast sound appeared to threaten not only domestic political stability in Algeria but also the territorial security of France, demonstrating the need to shore up the peripheral borders of the nation in the airwaves over North Africa.

REMAKING THE VOICE OF FRANCE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN

The summer of 1936—bracketed by the May elections that ushered the left-leaning Popular Front coalition into political power and Franco's July coup that ignited the Spanish Civil War—transformed metropolitan policymakers' attitudes towards foreign radio propaganda in the Maghrib. The long-term psychological effects of foreign propaganda on the “native” mentality notwithstanding, the Ministry of Defense worried the Spanish Civil War might spread into Morocco and engulf the entire region in conflict. Prominent politicians in the Ministries of Defense and Colonies first called for a coordinated “Muslim policy” during the First World War to respond to the German-sponsored pan-Islamic print propaganda in North Africa and the Middle East, but only after transnational radio broadcasting exposed the concomitant threats of indigenous nationalism, pan-Arabism, and fascism did Parisian politicians take definitive steps to coordinate counterpropaganda, political surveillance, and defense policy in the Maghrib.Footnote ⁹¹ In late 1936, the newly elected premier Léon Blum recalled to life the dormant Haut Comité Méditerranéen (High Mediterranean Committee/HCM)—an ad-hoc advisory group that included the reform-minded Maghribi sociologist Charles-André Julien, former colonial governors Maurice Violette and Albert Sarrault, and representatives from the relevant Cabinet ministries—to formulate strategies to “shore up security in the Maghrib” by “seeking out the most efficacious means of defense against the Muslim peril that exalts Communism, espionage … pan-Islamic propaganda, [and] nationalist dreams.”Footnote ⁹² Radio “broadcasting and the means of controlling it” featured prominently in the HCM's agenda, since the spread of Arabic broadcasting had exposed the linguistic incompetency of French colonial civil servants in North Africa and the failures of the colonial state's surveillance mechanisms. Both factors contributed to the restructuring of the Bureau of Native Affairs in 1937.Footnote ⁹³

The debates between the members of the HCM and its various subcommittees over radio broadcasting in the Maghrib, which continued from the first Blum government in the fall of 1936 through the radical Daladier administration of April 1938, led to a fierce turf battle between Parisian politicians and colonial authorities over the right to direct Arabic-language counterpropaganda initiatives. The socialist journalist Marceau Pivert, charged with formulating Popular Front media policy, condemned the “fascist” politics of Radio-Alger's European staff and the “excessive privilege” enjoyed by Europeans in shaping the broadcasts, declaring that Radio-Alger had failed in its mission “as an educator of the Muslim population.”Footnote ⁹⁴ The Inspector General of National Radio Broadcasting Marcel Pellenc, dispatched to North Africa in late 1936 to investigate the transmitting power and “reach” of Radio-Alger and metropolitan stations, concurred with Pivert. Reporting to the Blum Cabinet, Pellenc described an economically distraught North African population who clustered around radios at the “hour of the Arabic broadcasts, in any Arab town,” always ready to be “guided by its instincts, its religious passions, [and] its beliefs” and “cleverly exploited by foreign agents.” Although “France still has with radio perhaps the sole means to peacefully win over the Arab mind and maintain its influence, already unfortunately compromised,” Pellenc determined, the solution lay not in appealing to a circumscribed Muslim elite, but rather in putting radio receivers “in the hands of the masses.”Footnote ⁹⁵

In 1937, the French parliament authorized the construction of a powerful new radio transmitter in Tunisia (to be inaugurated in 1938 as Radio Tunis) to cover much of the Maghrib, and the conversion of the outdated short-wave Poste Colonial into Paris-Mondial.Footnote ⁹⁶ The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whose staff directed Paris-Mondial's broadcasts from its debut in March 1938, intended for the station to provide a distinctly French perspective on global affairs in multiple European languages and a synthetic daily news report in Arabic to clarify French diplomatic policies in the Muslim world, rather than leaving the task to Radio-Alger or the small, amateur radio stations transmitting in Morocco.Footnote ⁹⁷ Despite the paternalism of these counterpropaganda proposals designed to “protect France's North African subjects,” the Mediterranean radio crisis forced metropolitan colonial advocates to rethink their earlier preconceptions of radio sound as a malleable tool of social control, and perhaps more significantly, to acknowledge North African listeners as political subjects whose sensibilities required careful tending. When the Under-Secretary of State François de Tessan pressed his colleagues to “re-baptize” the Poste Colonial in 1938, he argued that its current name, which was too reminiscent of colonial oppression, would never attract Muslim listeners, whereas Paris-Mondial would communicate France's distinctly republican and “universal values.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Even the Army General Staff, charged with experimental jamming in Algeria of Radio-Seville in 1936 and Radio-Berlin in 1939, worried about producing an “unfavorable reaction” among Muslim listeners by giving them the impression that France deliberately sought to restrict their transnational listening habits.Footnote ⁹⁹ In the face of the new political realities created by international radio broadcasting, cultivating a Maghribi audience for French radio stations became a new political priority.

Metropolitan politicians' efforts to centralize Arabic-language counterpropaganda in Paris did not please Algerian Governor Georges LeBeau or the Bureau of Native Affairs, who argued that Parisian politicians and diplomats lacked sufficient knowledge of the “local” Algerian context to produce politically “safe” broadcasts. LeBeau believed any Maghribis recruited from Parisian student or worker circles to serve as Arabic announcers would already be “won over by the ideals of nationalism and xenophobic sentiments” hostile to France.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Moreover, cultivating a mass Algerian audience remained a dangerous prospect given the difficulty of monitoring radio listeners. Faced with the growing popularity of the Algerian People's Party and the reformist Ulama, staff in the Bureau of Native Affairs warned against any proposals that might unwittingly “re-Arabize” the population and foster Algerian ties to pan-Arab political currents.Footnote ¹⁰¹ When LeBeau eventually capitulated to Parisian demands to restructure and increase Radio-Alger's volume of “native” broadcasts, he provoked the ire of European listeners in the colony. Amid the fierce debates over the Blum-Violette bill to extend French citizenship to an estimated 21,000 Muslim men, many Europeans interpreted the appropriation of Radio-Alger's air time for Arabic broadcasting as tantamount to giving Algerian nationalists access to radio microphones.Footnote ¹⁰² Even worse, the journalist Edmond Esquirol speculated in Alger-Radio Magazine, the increase in Arabic broadcasting might “promote the resurrection of Arabic and … slow the predominance of French culture and by consequence, the much-desired ‘assimilation’ of the native population.”Footnote ¹⁰³

When Radio-Alger's new “native” broadcasts debuted in the winter of 1937, they exposed colonial authorities' persistent uncertainties about how to exploit radio for counterpropaganda purposes. The new Arabic announcer Salah Arzour translated news broadcasts from the national radio network's nightly Radio-Journal de France into both literary and dialectical Arabic, Leila Abed offered talks on child-rearing and hygiene for women, and the French diplomé Ahmed Lahbib spoke on such illuminating subjects as the “The Wheat Office” and “The History of the Microscope,” the latter becoming the target of persistent jokes in the indigenous press.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Station staff translated Governor LeBeau's speeches into the Kabyle dialect intermittently in 1936 and 1937.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Yet Radio-Alger's native programming remained dominated by concerts of recorded music and live performances, including artists whose records previously appeared on police censorship lists. Mahieddine Bachetarzi, whose popular theatrical tours attracted a significant police presence that led to a ban on sales of his song lyrics in 1937, continued to perform over Radio-Alger's microphones.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ If the Bureau of Native Affairs now took greater care in censoring which “oriental records” would be played over the airwaves, Radio-Alger's appeals to popular Algerian cultural figures, regardless of their political sympathies, exposes the colonial state's growing desperation to maintain an indigenous radio audience as the prospect of another global war neared.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

During 1938 and 1939, colonial police continued their forays into cafés maures around Algeria to assess Algerians' reception of Radio-Alger's latest programs and the Arabic news broadcasts of Paris-Mondial. Policemen found that Algerians could indeed hear Paris-Mondial and tuned in regularly to Radio-Alger, but they failed to determine whether the French broadcasts swayed Algerians from tuning in to foreign stations. However, in 1938 the Chief of Police in Blida observed worrying behavior, writing to Algiers how, “Yesterday evening … one of my native inspectors surprised the owner of a café maure in the process of playing several records of nationalist propaganda.” Although the agent immediately seized the records, the policeman remained troubled by the fact that the “consumers picked up the refrains of the chorus,” confirming definitively that broadcast sound, whether surfacing from phonograph or radio speakers, had become the soundtrack to anti-colonial resistance. By singing along to the song on the record, these café customers had become political activists rather than passive listeners. Similar reports of radio inciting political disorder continued into 1939, when the French administrator of Nedroma, a commune mixte in the département of Oran, informed his Sub-Prefect that Radio-Berlin had caused uproar in his tiny community, stirring rumors about France's mistreatment of Messali Hadj and several elected Muslim officials.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

In response to these reports, the colonial state adopted new measures to shut down Algeria's burgeoning auditory culture by further censoring the colonial public sphere and restricting Algerian listening. A 1938 decree forbade the import of records in any “foreign” language (including Arabic) other than French,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ while the Army banned all Baidaphone records from the cafés maures used to entertain native troops in the Maghrib and in metropolitan France.Footnote ¹¹⁰ That same year police in the town of Laarba restricted radio use in public cafés after 8:00 p.m. to prevent Algerians from receiving broadcasts from “Nationalist Spain.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Similar attempts to restrict radio listening would only be adopted in metropolitan France after the start of the Second World War, revealing how the colonial periphery of France became its first battleground in the impending guerre des ondes (war of the airwaves).

BROADCAST SOUND AND COLONIAL HEGEMONY

In conclusion, I wish to consider how the previous analysis of the politics of interwar radio in colonial Algeria complicates Frantz Fanon's canonical account of radio during the Algerian War of Independence. In A Dying Colonialism, Fanon argued that French imperial broadcasting, embodied in the transmissions of Radio-Alger, perpetrated a sonic psychological violence on a prostrate Algerian population. For decades Algerians refused to listen in to the airwaves, Fanon claimed, for they viewed radio ownership as a “sign of Europeanization in progress, of vulnerability.” Only after 1954 did Algerians make the radical decision to embrace radio, a modern technology they previously identified as an emblem of Western corruption or colonial oppression. As Algerians tinkered with their radio dials, searching through static and French jamming to detect the Cairo-based broadcasts of the National Liberation Front (FLN), broadcast sound became the “Voice of Algeria,” implanting in listeners the sensation of participating in a living, breathing, and fighting Algerian nation.Footnote ¹¹² Fanon's ideological fervor clearly informed this dialectical narrative of Algerian militants transforming the “foreign technique” of radio listening, once an exclusive tool of a repressive colonial state, into a weapon of anti-colonial resistance. However, what Fanon interpreted as Algerians' sudden embrace of radio following the creation of independent national broadcasting systems in Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon during the early 1950s resulted as much from the global democratization of battery-powered and portable transistor radio receivers and their decades-long exposure (often through the airwaves) to Arab cultures of the Middle East as from the start of the FLN's broadcasts.Footnote ¹¹³

If Fanon viewed French imperialism, and its outgrowth in the airwaves, through the bifurcated lens of the colonizer and colonized, a careful historical reading of the politics of interwar radio complicates our understanding of late colonialism by revealing the multiplicity of competing parties both within colonial Algeria and outside its borders seeking to dominate the airwaves and manipulate Algerian radio listeners. During the early 1930s, Parisian policymakers competed with European businessmen and settlers in Algeria to determine the content of Radio-Alger's broadcasts. After 1936, right-leaning civil servants in the Governor's Office and the Bureau of Native Affairs only reluctantly accepted the orders of a left-wing Popular Front government to transform the North African station into a weapon of counterpropaganda against the broadcasts of fascist powers, in part because radio listening proved so difficult to discipline and control. Algerians clearly tuned in to the airwaves during the 1930s, though determining the precise number of listeners and surveying their reactions to what they heard challenged the competencies of colonial civil servants. Far from becoming an oppressive instrument of colonial domination, radio and recorded sound, particularly when traveling from outside Algerian borders, consistently eluded the grasp of the colonial state. Instead, broadcast sound exposed the weaknesses of the state's surveillance web and the incomplete and ever-shifting nature of the colonial power nexus at a moment when localized and foreign threats to the stability of the French empire became intertwined in the airwaves over North Africa. That French policemen and civilian authorities in the Bureau of Native Affairs suddenly had to grapple with echoes of nationalist unrest in France's Levant possessions and the diplomatic maneuvers of fascist Italy, Francoist Spain, and eventually Nazi Germany, reveals how radio broadcasting transformed the conflict between colonizer and colonized into a multifaceted global struggle long before the Algerian War of Independence.

Despite Fanon's Manichean vision of French imperialism, his analysis of listening-as-resistance does provide a useful theoretical framework for evaluating listening in a colonial setting. By the start of the Algerian War, the French army had perfected jamming techniques that began, not as Fanon described, on the battlefields of the Second World War, but rather in France's North African colonies during the late 1930s. After “The Voice of Free Algeria” reached Algeria in 1953–1954, French authorities reinstated restrictions on Algerian listening first imposed in 1938–1939, including monitoring lists of radio ownership and controlling sales of transistor and other mobile radio receivers. By 1960, the colonial state had banned public listening and battery sales and began jamming the Arabic-speaking voices that reached Algeria, after stations in Tunis, Rabat, Damascus, and Cairo alternated hosting the FLN's broadcasts.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Although French tactics kept Algerian militants from receiving the FLN's transmissions, as Fanon described, radio still served the revolution by encouraging listeners to retell, embellish, and even invent the news they “heard” during their listening sessions.Footnote ¹¹⁵ “Every morning the Algerian would communicate the result of his hours of listening in,” compensating for the “fragmentary nature of the news by an autonomous creation of information.” At these moments, the voices of Arabic radio announcers welled up inside listeners to “recount new things, tell of more and more glorious battles, [and] picture vividly the collapse of the occupying power.”Footnote ¹¹⁶

Scholars of colonial independence movements and postcolonial disaporic populations have highlighted this power of radio to give voice to “imagined communities” of listeners from within and outside the boundaries of the nation-state.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Did the expansion of transnational radio broadcasting (albeit sponsored by European propagandists) and Arabic-language recordings (sometimes home grown) fuel the growth of Algerian nationalism during the interwar decades? The answer to this question lies outside the scope of the current essay. If this article has primarily examined the shifting perspectives of French colonial and metropolitan authorities about radio broadcasting in the Mediterranean, Algerian accounts of broadcasting must likewise be deeply contextualized within the nation's tumultuous political history. Indigenous French- and Arabic-language newspapers commented on Algerians' radio listening habits beginning in the 1930s, yet the succession of governing regimes in Algeria—from the Third Republic through the Vichy period and the Allied occupation of North Africa to the Fourth Republic—all politicized radio listening in different ways, suggesting that newspaper accounts might be primarily understood as a form of dialogue with a particular government or occupying power. Recollections about interwar radio listening written amid the Algerian War of Independence and during the post-independence period must also be interpreted through the violence of the post-1945 era, when an Algerian's personal history could be used by political enemies to label them as a colonial “collaborator,” or alternatively, to claim participation as a “nationalist” in the revolution. Indeed, Fanon's own refusal to acknowledge that an Algerian could listen to European radio voices without accepting colonial domination masks myriad opportunities for quotidian resistance. It is reasonable to suggest that for Algerian listeners of the 1930s, placing a record on a gramophone turntable or navigating their radio dials through an ocean of cacophonous static offered them small opportunities to resist the confines of the colonial state. Though French and foreign propaganda continued to dominate the airwaves over the Mediterranean, Algerians could use their radios, however few in number, to gain access to the world outside the sphere of French control or find a little quotidian pleasure in the Arabic music that escaped colonial censors. Radio's potential to serve as a tool of both domination and resistance should provoke historians to reconsider the pivotal role of sound in constructing colonial encounters. More important, the politics of broadcast sound in interwar Algeria reveal how colonialism cannot be understood solely through the conventional framework of the imperial nation-state, but must be examined in a transnational or international context, which radio broadcasts and recorded sound were particularly well-suited to navigate.