for assimilation with France.23 His ideas were an extension of the Young Algerians. He believed that political lobbying would be more successful than mass action, and during the 1920s and early 1930s he participated in local politics around Sétif and was elected municipal councillor and Financial Delegation (Délégations Financières) representative in Algiers.24 He served in other political positions in which he continued to work toward an assimilationist agenda. After the 1927 creation of the Federation of Elected Muslims, Abbas and another elite, Mohamed Salah Bendjelloul, co-led the organization and attempted to bridge the gap between colonial officials’ repressive policies and the federation’s desire for reform.
Abbas’s foray into politics during this period proved eye-opening and frustrating because his aspirations for large-scale integration were never realized. On an individual level, Abbas achieved political and personal success, but he repeatedly confronted French officials’ unwillingness to reform their discriminatory policies toward the rest of the Algerian population. In an unfinished book titled “My Political Testament,” likely written in the 1930s, Abbas wrote about the need to elevate the Algerian peasantry, for without their emancipation Algeria would never become modern. He explained that “it is the fate of this man, his happiness or his misfortune, which will determine Algeria’s future. It is not the problem of the elite … if it were, it would be so easy to resolve! Rather it is the problem of the masses, of the continually uncultivated, miserable bankrupt masses, [and] when that mass understands its condition [it will be] frightening in its explosions of hatred and anger.”25 He understood his privilege did not extend to the masses and that Algeria’s future depended on uniform efforts to cultivate and educate the population. By 1936, after nearly fifteen years in politics, Abbas’s assimilation resolve began to waver. In failing to offer meaningful reform, French administrators started losing a dedicated advocate, whose longtime political philosophy was “La France c’est moi.”
Abbas never outright supported revolutionary violence, which a considerable portion of FLN members practiced between 1954 and 1962. But beginning in the late 1930s and especially after World War II, his political views crept more and more toward Algerian independence. In January 1956, fourteen months into the war for national liberation, Abbas gave an interview to the Tunisian newspaper L’Action in which he described his political evolution and deference to the FLN. “My role today is to defer to the leaders of the armed resistance. The methods I have defended for fifteen years—cooperation, discussion, persuasion—proved ineffective.”26 Shortly thereafter, he spoke with the Swedish press and outlined four essential points to achieving Algerian freedom. For him, obtaining the recognition of popular sovereignty was the most important point among them.27 Abbas’s advocacy for Algerian independence and support of the FLN was a marked departure from his earlier beliefs. While he maintained that any political solution required negotiation, he was open to pursuing other avenues that he would not have twenty years prior.
The Young Algerians and Ferhat Abbas represent efforts to implement reform in Algeria during the first three decades of the twentieth century. But the first group to articulate a nationalist agenda was the North African Star (Étoile Nord-Africaine), cofounded by Messali Hadj in 1926 in Paris.28 Messali Hadj, a twenty-eight-year-old former World War I conscript who was born in Tlemcen in 1898, had long opposed French colonial rule and built a coalition based on a trade union. In the wake of the Young Algerians’ failure to achieve concrete political advances, he pursued a mass mobilization approach, based on the tenets of the French left and the French Communist Party. The North African Star quickly attracted members in Paris from the growing emigrant population from Algeria. By the mid 1920s, nearly 100,000 Maghribi men fleeing poverty lived in Paris and were looking for work, and it was this group of people, socially and culturally isolated from their home, that formed the backbone of the party. His rise in politics and strand of nationalism “called for independence from France, withdrawal of the army of occupation, building of a national army, abolition of the [Native Code], freedom of press and association, an Algerian parliament chosen via universal suffrage, and municipal councils chosen via universal suffrage.”29 Historian Emmanuel Sivan maintains that the North African Star was the first movement “dedicated to the idea of Algerian independence,” an important distinction from Messali Hadj’s contemporaries, and given the nature and total reach of French colonial rule in Algeria and the absorption of the indigenous elite class, it makes sense to him that the ideas would originate outside of Algeria.30
It took ten years for Messali Hadj’s ideas to reach across the Mediterranean and spread through Algeria. But long before Messali Hadj had the opportunity to return to Algeria for this purpose, the French cabinet under André Tardieu banned the North African Star in 1929. He resurrected the party as the Glorious Star in France in 1933, but once again it was short-lived and lasted only one year. Undeterred, Messali Hadj recreated the party a third time in 1936, this time in Algeria, and called it the Algerian People’s Party (Parti du Peuple Algérien, PPA). During the summer and fall months of that year, he toured the country and taught people about the need for Algeria’s total independence from France. The PPA motto, “Neither assimilation nor separation, but emancipation,” was by far the most radical and threatening to the French authorities, which accounts for his numerous arrests in 1939 and 1941. Messali Hadj’s prominent rise represented a turning point in the emergence of nationalism. Starting with the Young Algerians, the majority of political leaders were educated elites who had studied and/or worked abroad. When Messali Hadj returned to Algeria in 1936 he helped encourage and inspire a new generation of local activists with more ties to the Algerian people who adhered to his independent Algeria aspirations.
However, eighteen years remained between Messali Hadj’s 1936 arrival in Algeria and the 1954 FLN attacks that launched the war. Several key moments—the failure of Popular Front reforms, World War II, and severe French colonial repression in Sétif and Guelma in the spring of 1945—eroded the possibility of compromise and reform and hardened previously amenable leaders, such as a Ferhat Abbas, to the point where they embraced national independence.
Between 1935 and 1937, during a rare moment of political unity in France that would have significant implications on Algerian politics, French socialists, communists, and radicals came together and formed the Popular Front “to build,” writes Martin Evans, “the broadest possible coalition against Fascism.”31 As part of a symbolic demonstration of this new alliance, men from the various groups gathered in the streets of Paris on 14 July 1935 and were joined by North African Star members, including Messali Hadj, who, according to Evans, “expected a future left-wing government to satisfy their [political] aspirations.”32 The coalition strategy worked. In May 1936, Léon Blum became the first Socialist prime minister of France. Algerian reformists, educated elites, and proto-nationalists eagerly awaited Blum’s political rise, given their heartfelt frustration over former governor general Maurice Viollette’s failure in 1930 and 1931 to increase Algerian political representation and grant citizenship to a limited and highly educated sector of the population who would not have been required to renounce their Muslim status.33
Immediately after his election, Blum appointed Viollette as minister of state of the Popular Front, and they embarked on another round of reform efforts that were not dissimilar in nature from Viollette’s five years earlier. Both men firmly believed in the “necessity of integrating the Algerians” into France and their Blum-Viollette Bill, which proposed expanding the Algerian electorate by 25,000, reflected that.34 But once again, the settler lobby, especially at the local and municipal levels in Algeria, vehemently rejected the bill. Several newspapers published inflammatory headlines claiming that if one voted for the “Viollette project, it’s voting for civil war,” and the “Viollette project, it’s a new anti-France wing.”35
In reality, the Blum-Viollette Bill was moderate and, had it succeeded, would have represented the possibility of a different political course, rather than an actual change in course. For that reason, explains John Ruedy, “it assumed enormous symbolic importance both for the Algerian opposition and the colon administration that was trying to hold the line.” Overnight, the bill became “a litmus
