Cultural representations and political evocations of veterans in former colonies often reproduce visions of ex-serviceman as the stooges of empire or the vanguard of anticolonial agitation. Colonial historians have long contested this binary, pointing to the variety, conditionality and contingency of veterans’ individual and collective attitudes towards the colonial empires for which they had fought. The case of Nourredine Abdellah Bendjelloul, a veteran of the Great War and activist in the Algeria of the 1930s, underlines how many former subject soldiers sought to radically change the imperial system from within rather than break with it entirely. It also highlights how the nature of colonial rule meant that even their demands, couched in the language of loyalty to an empire for which they had put their lives on the line, were more likely to be met with repression than real reform.
Algeria was a major contributor the French imperial war effort. The colony’s settler community were, as citizens of France, subject to the same conscription as men in the metropole. The same was true of the much smaller Jewish community, who had been made citizens by decree in 1870. The majority Algerian Muslim population were subjects not citizens and did not enjoy basic civil or political rights. A more limited form of conscription was introduced for these Algerians in 1912. Once the war broke out, the French intensified recruitment efforts in Algeria, enforcing the draft against resistance in rural areas and using increasingly coercive method to attract ‘volunteers’. A total of 173000 Algerian subjects served in the First World War, with some 125000 seeing action on the battlefields of Europe and beyond and around 26000 making the ultimate sacrifice.
Figure 1: A Group of War-wounded Algerian Tirailleurs, 1914, Agence Rol, Gallica.
When the French state came to legislate for compensation for those who had served in its defence after the Armistice, North Africans were treated differently from most other colonial subjects. Disabled veterans from Algeria, Tunisia and (subsequently) Morocco were given equal pensions regardless of their status as citizens of subjects of the Empire. This equality was also reproduced when, in 1930, a general veteran’s pension was extended to all those who had served at the front for more than 90 days. In practice, disparities in the payment of professional pensions, family allocations and widows’ pensions and major inequalities in access to veterans’ services meant that there were real limits to the system’s egalitarianism, but the fact that some form of equality between citizens and subjects was recognised was significant in and of itself.
This nominal egalitarianism meant that veterans’ associations in Algeria, while they were dominated by settlers, claimed to represent Algerian veterans and allowed them to join as members. Throughout much of the 1920s, the specific concerns of subject veterans were often ignored by the settler leadership of the associations. However, by the end of the decade, Algerian veterans were increasingly frustrated at both their neglect by the French state and their subordination within veterans’ associations. Some worked for change within the existing organisations. Others, like Nourredine Abdellah Bendjelloul, helped organise associations to specifically cater to veterans who did not enjoy the rights of citizenship or the access to veteran services that often came with them.
A municipal employee in Algeria’s second city, Oran, Nourredine was a central figure in the Ligue des Anciens Combattants Musulmans de l’Oranie (LACMO) or League of Muslim Veterans of the Province of Oran. This group would not restrict itself to calling for minor tweaks to pension regulations and improvements to veteran services for Algerians. At its inaugural conference in September 1930, the members of the LACMO railed against the broader discrimination that underpinned the colonial regime and demanded that they accede to full French citizenship. How, they asked could France claim to represent ‘liberty and equality’ if ‘Algerians, long considered good enough for the trenches, are treated worse than citizen deserters, rehabilitated traitors, worse than the enemies of yesterday?’ This powerful rhetoric, blending the emphasis of past loyalty with virulent critique of the discriminatory nature of colonial rule, would become a key feature of the LACMO’s campaigns and Nourredine’s speeches on its behalf. It would win him the support of many Algerian veterans and leading Muslim politicians. It would also earn him the hostility of settler veteran leaders and the enmity of colonial administrators.
Figure 2: Correspondence with the letterhead of the LACMO, 12 September 1938, Archives de la Wilaya d’Oran.
The rise of the LACMO and its leader paralleled a broader political awakening among the Algerian population in the early 1930s. While the nascent nationalist movement remained primarily centred on migrant communities in France, mass political organisations seeking political reform from either a liberal or an Islamic perspective were experiencing rapid growth in the colony. Independent veterans’ associations specifically for Algerian subject veterans began to spring up in other cities, while Nourredine built links with emerging political leaders, writing on veterans’ issues in both the liberal and Islamic reformist press. Such was his prominence that colonial officials took to calling him the ‘Negus’, a title used by the Ethiopian Emperor. Intended to ridicule his supposed delusions of grandeur, this nickname betrays the anxiety his popularity among Algerian veterans and his fiercely defended independence provoked for the colonial authorities.
Figure 3: Lottery ticket for the Interfédération Nord-Africaine des Anciens Combattants in Le XVI Congrès Interfédéral d’Alger, 16 et 17 avril 1938 (Algier: Imprimerie Imbert, 1938)
When the arrival to power of the Popular Front government in France opened the possibility of a real reform of the colonial system, Nourredine worked to mobilize Algerian veterans behind it. Under his stewardship, the LACMO organised a congress in March 1937 in Oran to bring together all the new veterans’ associations for Algerian veterans. Even though the government’s proposed reform only granted citizenship to small numbers of veterans, the congress rallied behind it. The following year at the Interfederal Congress of all veterans’ associations in North Africa he tried, in the face of fierce opposition from settler veteran leaders, to get a general endorsement for a reform of the exclusionary colonial citizenship regime. While he was ultimately unsuccessful, the fact that he, and other Algerian veteran leaders, contested settler hegemony both within the veterans’ movement and colonial society more broadly underlined the growing militancy of subject veterans in the colony.
Figure 4: Logo of the Amitiés Africaines, Archives Nationales, Pierrefitte, AN 90331/09.
The authorities in Algeria were increasingly alarmed at the mobilization of veterans behind the campaigns for radical reform. In the late 1930s, they shifted responsibility for Algerian veterans to a new organisaiton, the Amitiés Africaines, staffed by retired military officers and colonial officials. While the increased funding extended to the Amitiés did improve access for rural veterans, the delivery of service was now expressly paternalistic and often accompanied by efforts at political indoctrination. The rights-based model of veteran provision established by the law was now superseded by a paternalistic and often authoritarian model that made veteran services conditional on the performance of loyalty and subservience to the colonial state.
If Nourredine Abdellah Bendjelloul remained outwardly loyal to the idea that France should continue its rule in Algeria, never expressly identifying with the nascent nationalist movement, he explicitly rejected any notion of subservience. This made him a thorn in the side of veterans’ administration in the colony. The local head of veteran services in Oran had long advocated his removal, arguing that ‘once rid of Nourredine’ the LACMO ‘would enjoy universal sympathy and could take the form of a real veterans’ association’. In 1939, the authorities moved against him, arresting him on charges of embezzlement. Both Nourredine and the LACMO were expelled from the umbrella organisations of the veterans’ movement in North Africa. Months later the courts dismissed all charges against Nourredine but his influence over veteran politics in the colony had been broken. The state rushed to impose its own leaders on Algerian veterans and they would never again be able to organise independently to contest the discriminatory nature of French rule in the colony.
The story of Nourredine Abdellah Bendjelloul underlines the complexity of veterans’ political participation in colonial contexts. His activism, like that of many of his peers in other colonies, does not fall neatly within the binary of loyalty and resistance. Veterans who owed their social prestige, economic stability and political legitimacy to the colonial state they had served were often reluctant to break with it fully, instead advocating for change within the imperial polity. This did not mean, however, that they were the simple stooges of empire. They could, and often did, mobilize their past service to demand changes to the discriminatory system of colonial rule. They also asserted their right to speak for themselves, a radical act in the colonial context. The fact that veterans had proven their loyalty to the imperial polity on the battlefields and continued to loudly proclaim it in their public declarations was not sufficient to spare them the repression of the colonial state. While Nourredine Abdellah Bendjelloul did not experience the brutal repression meted out to many activists of the nationalist movement, the colonial administration still could not tolerate the threat he posed to its authority and to that of the settler leadership of the veterans’ movement. His arrest on trumped up charges and the colonial state’s assertion of its control over Algerian veterans exposed both the hollowness of its celebrations of the equality of the trenches and the hard limits of reform within the colonial system. While their record of service may have won Algerian veterans some privileges, even granting them limited forms of pension equality, their race continued to exclude them from an active role in shaping veteran services in and the political future of Algeria.
Bibliography
Jacques Frémeaux, Les colonies dans la Grande Guerre: Combats et épreuves des peoples d’outre-mer (SOTECA, 2006).
Dónal Hassett, Mobilizing Memory: The Great War and the Language of Politics in Colonial Algeria, 1918-1939, (Oxford University Press, 2019).
Dónal Hassett, ‘Catering for and Controlling Subject Veterans: The Comité des Amitiés Africaines and North African Ex-servicemen in the Interwar Period’ First World War Studies 10 (1), (2019), 68-87.
Jan C Jansen, ‘Une autre « Union Sacrée » ? Commémorer la Grande Guerre dans l’Algérie colonisée (1918-1939)’, translated by Augustin Jommier, Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine, 61-2 (2), (2014), 32-60.