Magical Printing

This chapter gives a brief history of newspapers in colonial Algeria, showing how beliefs about newspapers contrasted with their actual usage. The men who conquered Algeria believed that the printing press could bring modernity. This belief can be described as a form of magical thinking. In practice, newspapers behaved in unexpected ways as they interacted with the rest of the news ecosystem. In the summer of 1881, the French Parliament passed two laws that instituted a division between those who could publish and those who could not. But while Europeans dominated printing, they did not control reading. Algerians had read newspapers well before the French arrived, and continued to import publications not intended for them. Yet by the turn of the twentieth century, the belief in magical printing had spread to elite Muslim Algerians, who saw their production of newspapers as an attempt to ‘catch up’ with Europeans.