From 1954 to 1962, Algerians fought for independence from French imperialism. During this time, France fought to continue its control over Algeria, as well as to pursue its agenda of performing a cleanse over its country and Algeria. This cleanse was to create a new standard of hygiene amongst French citizens, because as Kristin Ross explains in her article, “Starting Afresh: Hygiene and Modernization in Postwar France”, “If Algeria is becoming an independent nation, then France must become a modern nation: some distinction between the two must still prevail” (Ross, pg 27). Essentially, France wanted to keep its feeling of superiority over Algeria, so it felt that being more physically clean would help. This idea of cleansing was not an issue until it was taken further. If the French were more clean than the Algerians, then the Algerians were amongst the grime they needed to eradicate.
In 1993, a United Nations’ commission defined Ethnic Cleansing as, “the planned deliberate removal from a specific territory, persons of a particular ethnic group, by force or intimidation, in order to render that area ethnically homogenous” (USLegal). It is my opinion that the the French were performing a subset of this definition of Ethnic Cleansing. They were not always physically trying to remove Algerians from Algeria, but were actively stifling the culture of the Algerians. Practice of their religious rituals, and personal rituals, as well as the use of their language was oftentimes prohibited by the French government. In the 1966 movie, The Battle of the Algiers, one watches as a Muslim Algerian is arrested and his mouth is covered when he begins to speak Arabic. This is a very literal representation of the French policemen oppressing the Algerian culture. Among one the of the methods the French used to fight the Algerian nationalists of the of the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) was torture. It was not enough to be superior, one had to make the lesser body of people feel inferior, or so John-Paul Sartre asserts in his article, “Colonialism and Neocolonialism.”
Sartre writes , “Since no one can rob, enslave, or kill their fellow human beings without committing a crime, they establish that the colonized are not fellow human beings” (Sartre, pg 78). In other words, the French sought to squander the humanity within the Algerians through torture, until they were so deprived of hope and thought, that they were no longer human beings, but something less. Once the French saw the Algerians as less than humans, it was then time to extend its cleansing efforts to them. Within her article on hygiene, Kristin Ross includes a cartoon of a French officer giving a man a bath. Upon a closer look, one sees that the man being cleaned is actually being drowned (Ross, pg 47).
Cartoon of a man drowning another man in order to clean him.
Gruesome as it may be, the cartoon perfectly emulates the French government’s attitude towards the Algerians. To be clean, the Algerian culture needed to go. The Algerians opposed the cleansing and fought the French imperialism through guerilla warfare. The Battle of the Algiers shows Algerian nationalists planning and executing shootings of French policeman in the middle of the streets. Occasional shootings turned to full out war, and in 1960, the United Nations finally approved Algeria’s right to independence.
Your blog was very well written and did a great job of discussing the articles from this week as well as connecting them to the film. One of the most powerful statements in your post was “it was not enough to be superior, one had to make the lesser body of people feel inferior.” This was so powerful because it is still something that happens in our world today; there is so much animosity between different groups that instead of belittling others people need to focus on the good.
I really liked that you went into detail about the cartoon since it shows how far the French went to “cleanse” Algeria. I thought you tied all the sources together well, including the movie. I also liked how you brought up all the ways that the French tried to silence and torture the Algerians to make your point. I think that the French went too far in the ways that they tortured the Algerians. The rulers over the colonies should not treat the native people that poorly. Are there other situations between colonizer and colonies where a similar situation had happened? If so were they as malicious as the French were to the Algerians?
You made a great post on this week’s readings! I can see where you are coming from in your argument about the French’s efforts to ethnically cleanse the Algerians. Yes, they were trying to make them “clean” by changing their culture, but I think that this doesn’t go as far as ethnically cleansing. But that doesn’t mean that what the French did was good. It’s still terrible.