Colonialism and Popular Culture in Algeria

Abstract

One of the traits which make for the uniqueness of the Algerian case in the annals of decolonization is the salient role played by the pied noir masses. This sizeable settler community (ca. 980,000, or one-tenth of the overall population) was a major disruptive force, providing the crowds, as well as most of the hard-core activists for all the attempts to scuttle l'abandon de l'Algerie Frarkcaise: from the 6 February 1956 demonstration in Algiers against visiting French premier Guy Mollet, through the events of May 1958, the Barricades Week rebellion (January 1960), the Four Generals' Putsch (April 1961), up till the OAS's final no-holds-barred counter-terrorist campaign (1960-62). While journalistic and fictional descriptions of the fratricidal (and eventually suicidal) pied noir psychodrama are legion, no systematic attempt at an in-depth study of their collective mind has been made, apart from Pierre Nora's essay, Le Francpis d'Algerie (1961), based primarily upon observations during his 1958-1960 stay as a high-school teacher in Oran. Source material is not lacking, however, for the study of the popular culture of this overwhelmingly urban community, made up of manual workers, white-collar employes and small artisans and shopkeepers. The most important among these sources are the cheap mass-circulation novels (romans a deux sous) of the Cagayous series. Spanning almost three decades of publication (1891-1920) in weekly instalments (usually 16-page fascicules), they were written in the plebeian dialect of the urban pied noirs, nicknamed pataouete; a French patois upon which were grafted vocabulary and syntax forms from Spanish, Italian, Maltese and Arabic.' The prolific author, Auguste Robinet (1862-1930), writing under the pen-name Musette, was an Algiers lawyer, journalist and public official who drew upon his intimate knowledge of the Euro-

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