Defining Imperial Citizenship in the Shadow of the Great War: Equality and Difference in the Debates around Post-war Colonial Reform in Algeria’

The mass participation of both the European and the indigenous communities of French Algeria in the Great War had a transformative effect on politics in France’s most prized colony. The thousands of men who crossed the Mediterranean to fight on the battlefields of Europe or work in the munitions factories of the metropole had a special claim on the post-war state. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the political leaders of both communities sought to evoke this claim to redefine imperial citizenship, hoping to empower their constituencies by conquering new rights while preserving old privileges.
In this chapter, I consider how the seemingly contradictory notions of equality and difference were employed by both indigenous and European political leaders in the post-war debates around reform. The experience of the war had simultaneously reproduced and radically altered the boundaries of equality and difference between colonial subjects, colonial citizens and their metropolitan brothers-in arms. In its aftermath, faced with the possibility of forging a new form of imperial citizenship, both the defenders of political rights for the indigenous community and the proponents of a European-dominated autonomous Algeria drew on the multi-layered experience of the war to argue for a political programme that blended equality and difference. By analysing the rhetoric of this debate, we can assess the importance of the war as a potentially polysemous source of legitimacy while also challenging Manichean understandings of political life in a settler colony.