BY ROBERT MAISEY In https://www.jacobinmag.com/
Early Nationalism
The Algerians had waged a long and furious struggle against colonization at its onset in the 1830s, but by the late nineteenth century, all traces of this resistance had been quashed. However, as in other parts of the old empires, the experience of serving in the imperial armies during World War I and II, as well as migration in and out of the industrialized heartlands, exposed Algerians to new ideological perspectives. Wilsonian liberalism, Soviet socialism, and reformist currents within Islam combined to bring about a renewed Algerian national self-consciousness.
By the 1920s, liberal currents within Algerian politics responded to Woodrow Wilson’s anti-colonial declarations and began to argue for equal citizenship and limited autonomy. However, they rapidly found themselves frustrated and persecuted, failing to find their hoped-for ally in the United States. “Wilsonian” self-determination was intended only for the white peoples of Europe. Resistance to Muslim participation in democratic life was particularly strong among the colons, who had no intention of allowing the conquered natives to coexist on equal terms.
On May 8, 1945, the day of Victory in Europe, a mass demonstration broke out in the town of Sétif. With France now liberated, the expectation was that colonial reform would follow. The colons who, during the war, had decisively sided with the Vichy fascists increased their resistance to reform of any kind, and the demonstration was met with immediate and brutal recrimination. Soldiers fired indiscriminately into the crowds, triggering rioting and resulting in five days of intense repression, including the aerial bombing of nearby villages and the organization of ratonnade (rat hunt) pogroms of the local Muslim settlements, leaving up to thirty thousand people dead.
The Sétif massacre sent shock waves around the country, radicalizing the liberal independence movement. A new generation of independence leaders soon emerged from the ranks of the demobilized Muslim soldiers of the Free French Army, many of whom had served France with distinction and had no intention of returning to a life of violent subjugation in their own land.
