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Photography and War

turned violent. Several people were injured and a Muslim man named Belkacem Boutarane was shot (he would succumb to his wounds several weeks later). The next day, Jewish and Muslim leaders sought to ease the tension. However, on 5 August, violence erupted again, this time to much more deadly effect. Cole’s greatest contribution is distinguishing the events of 3 August from those of 5 August. ‘The initial outburst on August 3,’ he writes, were of a spontaneous nature. However, the majority of the murders on 5 August can be attributed to a small group of perpetrators with ‘complicated goals’. Cole focuses on a certain Mohamed El Maadi, a French Muslim soldier affiliated with French far-right groups. El Maadi would later work for the Gestapo and serve as a captain in the SS. Cole also uncovers ‘circumstantial evidence [that] points to a cover-up of [his] participation’ by the army, police and political establishment, despite documents showing that they believed that he was among those responsible for the murders (pp. 247–8). Ultimately, by focusing on El Maadi and his affiliations, Cole highlights the often obscured links between the French far right and some Algerian Muslims, while reframing the events of August 1934 as a French story, rather than a Jewish–Muslim one. As such, he deliberately confronts us with the implication of the French state and French antisemitism instead of a sole focus on ‘ancient hatred’. Cole has certainly written what will no doubt be the authoritative history of the Constantine riots of 1934. But this book will be of great value to a wide range of students and scholars. Scholars of contemporary French culture and politics are keenly aware of the fact that it is impossible to understand contemporary France meaningfully without a deep engagement with the legacy of French colonialism. Indeed, the contemporary crises of French republicanism and universalism are, in many ways, related to unresolved questions and contradictions of France’s colonial past. For this reason, Joshua Cole’s microhistory of a single particularly tragic and politically charged event will be of great interest to students and scholars in a variety of disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences.