to forty-five, this increase kept pace neither with the growth of the region’s population nor with the expansion in medical care elsewhere in Algeria.50 Even with a renewed commitment to providing more doctors, these statistics highlight how much of Algeria and its population lay beyond the reach of the colonial state.
After 1945 French health administrators took a proactive step toward expanding the medical corps by issuing a series of ordinances and decrees updating rules and regulations regarding who was permitted to practice medicine in France and Algeria.51 They generally stipulated that physicians, dentists, and nurses were required to have a diploma issued by the French state, have French citizenship, or have recognized diplomas from Morocco or Tunisia. Vaccines and preventative care were regulated through the Public Health Code, which discussed methods for staying healthy for those living in France and Algeria. The Public Health Code also included details about hospital operations, the ways in which the regional, departmental, and national medical profession should be organized, and the nature and role of hospitals and public clinics.52 As of 1953, the French did not differentiate between how medical institutions and their staff members were expected to operate in France and in Algeria. Even though the medical infrastructure varied greatly in the two places, the government conceptualized them as similar and subject to the same rules.
One way to help further alleviate these stresses would have been to train more Algerian doctors in the new medical schools and institutes the French were erecting around the country. But as one prominent doctor who participated in the national liberation struggle remembered, in his medical school class of more than thirty students only one or two of them were Algerian in the early 1950s.53 Algerian women were even less likely to enter medical school, as one of the few trained female doctors of the time recalled.54 High illiteracy rates and poor early education excluded most Algerians from becoming competitive medical school applicants and often relegated them to inferior positions such as medical assistants. On the eve of the war for national liberation, Algerians had been marginalized in the medical sphere for decades. But they witnessed the power, both literally and ideologically, that medicine could have over the population.
The French had created a significant gap in knowledge and access to information, leaving them ill-equipped and unprepared to deal with the medical crisis that would erupt during the war. The medical sector in colonial Algeria was seriously underdeveloped and in need of significant financial resources, as well as training opportunities and staff. These conditions set the stage for French medical campaigns to take advantage of the health-care vacuum, the result of decades of colonial failure, when the war for national liberation began and attempts were made to use them for political gain. The FLN watched closely and gained inspiration from them, implementing nearly identical medical programs in Algeria after 1956.
The Sections Administratives Spécialisées
As the war forged ahead and tensions escalated between the two sides following the August 1955 Philippeville massacres, a turning point in the war, Soustelle began implementing social and economic programs he hoped would mitigate Algerian resentment and combat nationalist propaganda.55 Even though the administration’s initial response to the FLN attacks was simply to reinforce police efforts, by 1955, and especially after Philippeville, it became clear that a larger, less conventional conflict was under way. Soustelle knew winning the battle for Algerian hearts and minds would be critical to winning the war, a fact to which many military officers recently returned from Indochina attested.56 He realized that the French army, once again, faced an unconventional opponent in Algeria and would need to use different methods to vanquish the enemy. As such, he drew from French military strategies that assumed the nature of war had become increasingly “subversive, fought not with regular armies but with bands of guerrillas or people’s armies … finding refuge and support among the population.”57 Militias around the world utilized revolutionary warfare as their dominant strategy, and Algeria was no exception.58 From its first set of coordinated attacks, the FLN employed guerrilla tactics that were meant to destabilize French rule throughout the country. In response, the French military adopted counterrevolutionary measures that were applied in conjunction with a series of programs intended to destroy Algerian political networks, collect intelligence, and win over the local population.59
The Sections Administratives Spécialisées were the cornerstone integration program, and by 1961 more than seven hundred existed in Algeria.60 Despite French claims throughout colonial rule that Algerians could become French citizens, few actually obtained citizenship because in order to do so Algerians were required to abandon their Muslim personal status. During the 1950s and 1960s, in an effort to quell the war, French politicians adopted a more flexible approach to officially incorporating Algerians into France.61 Alongside meager political openings, the government pursued integration policies that officials hoped would “overcome [the Muslim community’s] overwhelming poverty and that independence would be prevented by integrating Muslims fully into modern French society.”62 But there was a certain irony to the urgency of the SAS. Had the French previously educated Algerians, granted them political rights, or consistently provided social services, the Pierre Mendès-France and Edgar Faure governments may not have needed Soustelle to devise an integration campaign.63
Nearly six months after his initial trip through the Algerian countryside, a 26 September 1955 decree permitted Soustelle to establish the Special Administrative Sections. In a December 1955 pamphlet he explained that in light of the current situation, he decided to create the SAS “to ensure the retaking of the population in regions where terrorists are active or those at risk of being contaminated.” The heart of the mission was “to reestablish contact with the Algerians, renew their confidence in the French, and report information back to civil authorities.”64 To help SAS personnel accomplish these goals, Soustelle authorized them to “exercise certain administrative functions that will permit them to service the population” and help it “recover a taste for and respect of the French presence.”65 He divided up the country into zones, and the SAS would operate within those areas that Soustelle believed harbored rebels. Soustelle specified that an Algerian Affaires officer would head each SAS unit and a member of the Algerian Affaires Attaché Corps, medical personnel, a protection force, a vehicle and radio, and construction supplies, would be at his disposal.66 This team’s objective, writes Jacques Frémeaux, was to “prevent losing Algeria” and “to construct an Algeria linked with France,” not service the people simply for their own good.67
The December 1955 pamphlet obscures the degree to which SAS social programs were firmly subordinated to the military and its larger purpose of fighting the FLN. Its medical sector received instructions from the military and reported its progress and monthly activities back to military superiors. The various programs’ materials and equipment were supplied by the military, and personnel were frequently hired through military channels. Any structural changes or reassignments came from military officials. In actuality, the SAS were simply an extension of the French military and carried out what one scholar calls “police missions.”68
However, this new face of the military did not principally guard checkpoints or carry rifles. The SAS personnel arrived with more gentle weapons, medicine and health-care products, and, similar to military physicians who helped settle Algeria during the mid-nineteenth century, they became potent symbols of colonial development to which the French could point as showcasing their commitment to Algeria. How could the government be accused of neglecting the Algerians’ welfare if it was offering free medical care and building new schools? Jacques Soustelle knew the colonial administration needed to concentrate on public relations and focus on strengthening relations with the Algerian population. For French general Raoul Salan, the SAS officers played a central role in this endeavor and were “the driving force behind pacification.”69
From the inception of the SAS there was a distinction between the military objectives and the way the SAS portrayed its activities to the Algerian people. The military’s dual mission was to subdue the local
