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Ferhat Abbas, Vichy's National Revolution, and the Memory of the Royaume arabe

N HIS MEMOIR, LA NUIT COLONIALE (1962), Ferhat Abbas offered what might be termed the conventional account of the impact of the Second World War on the politicization of Algeria’s Muslim population. In the inter-war years, Abbas had been an important voice of moderate Muslim opinion in Algeria. A leading member of the Jeune Algerien movement, which took its inspiration from Kemal Ataturk’s modernization of Turkey, Abbas had looked to French republicanism to redress the injustices of colonial Algeria. He had, for example, played a key role in the campaign in support of the BlumViolette reforms of 1936-37, a project to secure a significant increase in the number of naturalized Algerian Muslims that had been blocked largely on account of the actions of the powerful colonial lobby in the French parliament. As Abbas put it in La Nuit coloniale: “ma generation et celles qui l’ont precedee […] se sont obstinees a recourir a la France republicaine et liberale contre la France colonialiste et tyrannique. Elles pensaient qu’il suffisait d’eclairer la premiere sur les contradictions qui ont fait naitre nos malheurs pour qu’elle y mette fin.” The events of the Second World War, however, put an end to any such illusions, convincing Abbas that colonialism was “une entreprise raciale de domination et d’exploitation,” in which even the most enlightened strands of French republican opinion were fully implicated. 1 Hence, according to Abbas, it was the experience of the War that had finally convinced him that an independent Algeria was the necessary precursor to any genuine improvement in the political status and socio-economic condition of Algeria’s Muslim population. A concrete manifestation of this significant shift in political position could be found in the “Manifeste du peuple algerien,” which Abbas published in February 1943, following the Allied invasion of North Africa in November of the previous year. Here he explicitly rejected any policy of assimilation, whilst strongly suggesting that outright independence was now the only feasible option. 2 In justifying his rejection of the politics of assimilation, Abbas alluded firstly to the failure of the BlumViolette project, to what he termed “le refus systematique ou deguise de donner acces dans la cite francaise aux Algeriens musulmans.” The failure of the Blum-Violette project had demonstrated the inability of enlightened French republicans to achieve even a modest improvement in the Muslims’ political