Communal Contributions and Racial Hierarchies

Abstract

This chapter analyses the place of the Great War in the rhetoric of the extreme-right movements that played a central role in the politics of interwar Algeria. It argues that the visions of the Great War that they promoted reflected an intrinsically racial understanding of Algeria’s wartime contribution. It examines the rhetoric these organizations developed around the participation of the Jewish, Muslim, and European communities, considering how these organisations’ evocation of the war embodied their wider aspirations for the reshaping of colonial society in line with imagined racial hierarchies. It also explores how those who resisted these exclusionary visions of Algeria’s past, present, and future mobilized their own counter-narratives of the colony’s contribution to the First World War in the struggle against the extreme right. In doing so, the chapter demonstrates both the potential positives and the potential pitfalls for political movements who mobilized the memory of the Great War in Algeria.