Challenge: Have a French triumph in Algeria

Cook

Banned
Before anyone wonders if my previous comment regarding New Caledonia was somehow a criticism of I Blame Commies, it wasn’t.

I was just having an ‘oh look’ moment.
 
Carve out the northern coastline, add to that some territory inland from that. Have the rest be an Algerian state. Algeria will have no coastline, but if they have close relations with the other Maghreb states, this should not be too big a deal. The colons sector of Algeria will have to be populated almost exclusively by the pieds-noirs, as well as westernized natives. The best way to convert the natives is to get them to adopt western culture, pledge alleigance to the republic, but not be forced to renounce Islam. Add in a strong police presence, assistance from France, and absolutely no Algerian War, and it might work (maybe).

Not going to work. Virtually all of the useful land in Algeria is in the northern part near the coast.

As to the OP, you need to have the French give the Arabs full, unconditional citizenship and voting rights before 1950 for this to work. IMHO anything after that is too late.
 
Step 1: Starting around the rise of Napolean III, ALgeria attracts many French settlers, mainly the large amounts of Urban poor. Originally a small trickle, by the flow becomes a flood by 1900

Step 2: alot of the native women covert to the Catholic Church, as a sort of woman's lib movement.

Step 3: Teach French language and culture in all schools in Algeria.

By WWII, Algeria is Francophone, and fairly cosmopolitain in culture and religion
 
Step 1: Starting around the rise of Napolean III, ALgeria attracts many French settlers, mainly the large amounts of Urban poor. Originally a small trickle, by the flow becomes a flood by 1900

Step 2: alot of the native women covert to the Catholic Church, as a sort of woman's lib movement.

Step 3: Teach French language and culture in all schools in Algeria.

By WWII, Algeria is Francophone, and fairly cosmopolitain in culture and religion

All except 2 occurred to my knowledge, and guess what happened? The people still wanted the French kicked out.
 
Thinking or the Catholic Church, especially pre-Vatican II, as "a sort of woman's lib movement", has me in stitches.


Me too. :) That was the silliest part of a very silly list.

Anyway, I think he left out Step 4: Monkeys Fly Out Of My Bum.
 

Cook

Banned
Step 2: alot of the native women covert to the Catholic Church, as a sort of woman's lib movement.



That would make them Apostasy, in many conservative Muslim cultures that carried the death sentence.

Besides which changing religion isn’t like changing brands of soap powder.
 
I hate to throw out ASB without provocation, because I feel like it gets used a lot to dismiss things without too much thought, but I have to say that this scenario, at least keeping the post WWII restriction on the pod, definitely verges on being ASB.

what's needed to have this challenge work is a total disintegration of the algerian culture and national identity, which, postwar, entails either a) an extremely francophile political movement spreading through the algerian population with the fervor of nothing else in modern history or b) the french using such extreme force during the algerian war that it amounts to genocide.

both of which, given the political and cultural climate of the time (what with the world just having fought a titanic war over both national self-determination and human rights) very, very, unlikely.

If you put the pod much further back though, it could be very interesting and maybe doable.
 
My very personal opinion is that a French success in Algeria would have been walking quietly away and leaving a neutral/friendly Algeria government behind.

Militarily, things looked pretty good for France in 1960-1961. The Algerian resistance was fragmented between the Messalists and those who toed the FLN party line, the counter-insurrection was working fine - the "Pierres Précieuses" operations notably had hurt the FLN wilayas pretty bad.

But the whole thing is that unless one is ready to do a thousand Pierres Précieuses, a democracy can only go so far in schizophrenia. If Algeria was a French territory, then Algerians were French citizens. And if for some reason Algerians were not French citizens, then the only logical conclusion was that Algeria was not, despite of the number of French settlers there, French territory. The Algeria war was probably one of these rare wars it pays better to lose than to win - you can imagine the trouble if Algeria had been kept French.

Back to the challenge, I think a big part of the issue is that Algeria was made French territory - not just French colonies, but French homeland territory. A good idea for a POD would be to review the status of the Algerian regions, to defuse a good part of the tensions within France itself, and make the "Algérie Française" crowd lose steam. There was a very small window of opportunity for that in 1945 - the re-established Republic could have made good de Gaulle's promises in his 1944 Brazzaville speech. Without granting independence, it may have been able to review the status of the Algerian territories, borrowing some pages from the pre-WW2 Blum-Violette plan, beefing up the Algerian assembly, reducing the settlers' influence. After de Gaulle left in 1946, the opportunity was more or less lost IMHO, even when the Left was in power.
 

archaeogeek

Banned
My very personal opinion is that a French success in Algeria would have been walking quietly away and leaving a neutral/friendly Algeria government behind.

Militarily, things looked pretty good for France in 1960-1961. The Algerian resistance was fragmented between the Messalists and those who toed the FLN party line, the counter-insurrection was working fine - the "Pierres Précieuses" operations notably had hurt the FLN wilayas pretty bad.

But the whole thing is that unless one is ready to do a thousand Pierres Précieuses, a democracy can only go so far in schizophrenia. If Algeria was a French territory, then Algerians were French citizens. And if for some reason Algerians were not French citizens, then the only logical conclusion was that Algeria was not, despite of the number of French settlers there, French territory. The Algeria war was probably one of these rare wars it pays better to lose than to win - you can imagine the trouble if Algeria had been kept French.

Back to the challenge, I think a big part of the issue is that Algeria was made French territory - not just French colonies, but French homeland territory. A good idea for a POD would be to review the status of the Algerian regions, to defuse a good part of the tensions within France itself, and make the "Algérie Française" crowd lose steam.

Very early on, there was a proposal by Napoleon III to make Algeria a separate jurisdiction as a kingdom of Algiers; the crown prince of France would also have been king of Algiers at his majority. But that's far before the POD.
 
This pops up every so often; there was a thread on it just a few weeks ago. "What about a French-majority enclave, maybe around Oran?" is a question that gets asked.

1) Oran had a lot of settlers, but they were still a minority. If we don't move anybody out or in, the settlers would be between 30% and 50% of the population, depending on how the borders are drawn.

Thus, Oran could not be made secure without some combination of a massively militarized garrison/security state and/or ethnically cleansing the large Arab minority.

2) There would still be several hundred thousand settlers outside of Oran. Many of these people own farms and plantations; in some cases, they've been there for generations. Not all of them will want to move to Oran.

3) The economic difficulties would be nontrivial. While Oran proper was industrialized, it was doing things like agroprocessing and light industry -- turning Algerian cotton, corn and tobacco into textiles, canned foods and cigarettes. These light industries tended to be labor-intensive, and so relied on a supply of cheap Arab labor.

So that gives French Oran a nasty choice -- expel its Arab population and let its light industrial sector collapse, or keep them and deal with some very alarming security concerns. Google the Oran Massacre for just how bad this could get.

Additionally, if French Oran faces a hostile Algeria -- which of course it will -- then it's cut off from the agricultural hinterland upon which its economy depends; the cigarette factories and canneries go dark if you can't bring in that cheap corn and tobacco.

So you end up with a rump colony that's an economic basket case /and/ that needs a large military garrison. This adds up to a fairly huge burden on the French taxpayer,

4) In any event, an Algerian Ulster was ideologically unthinkable to both sides. France was insisting that all of Algeria was "Algerie Francaise", so dividing it would be a very painful admission that it had been a colonial relationship all along. And the Algerians, of course, were not prepared to settle for anything less than full independence for their whole country.

The OAS seems to have had something like this in mind, but with an independent settler-dominated coastal strip. As I've written elsewhere, at best you get a smaller, poorer, meaner, dumber, more paranoid and much less secure Israel. (At worst you get a long string of massacres.) One could reasonably ask why anyone would want to live there.



Doug M.
 
The Algerian war was effectively won by the French Army from a purely military standpoint. However this could not negate the fact that beyond the coastal areas Algeria was very poor, majority Muslim and unintegrated to France in any way. As De Gaulle himself said "if you go into a douar, the only thing you will find is an old sergeant of Tirailleurs speaking poor French".

Owing to the tribal structure of the Arab society it could have been just possible to create a large pro French class of chiefs and senior citizens, had France decided to fight on from Algeria with the promise of French citizenship for any Algerian Muslim who enlist in the forces. However the vast majority of the Algerian Muslim population will remain separate from the French settlers (which mostly lived in cities) and assimilated Muslims. Improving the economic conditions and th infrastructure in the Algerian interior would nevertheless remains a huge challenge. But there is no way France can keep Algeria if the majority of the population living in the interior remains in abject poverty and near Middle Ages conditions. It may have been to late to change this for good by the 1940s.

The best outcome for both Algeria and France assuming a POD after 1940 would have been a multicultural independent Algerian Republic closely associated to France.
 
The best outcome for both Algeria and France assuming a POD after 1940 would have been a multicultural independent Algerian Republic closely associated to France.

I'd agree. And the best way to get that would be a peaceful separation.

Unfortunately, getting a peaceful separation would be really hard. The most plausible POD I can think of is to fight and win the war as iOTL, but then kill off the OAS before it really gets going. No OAS campaign of bombing, terror and assassination --> probably no Oran massacre and other eye-for-eye escalating horrors, and a peaceful settlement becomes at least possible.

The experience of the rest of Africa suggests that, if decolonization were peaceful and orderly, you might keep around 50% of the _colonate_. They'd be a small minority, five or six percent. But they'd still occupy a lot of privileged economic positions, and just by staying they'd make Algeria a rather different place. This could go in a number of different directions, good or bad, but it would at least open up some interesting possibilities.


Doug M.
 
Lets look at it another way let us say that from the 1840s on the number of European colonist arriving in Algeria was far larger than what it was. The French colony 's European population grew much faster that the Europeans as a percent of the population was more than 33% by the late 1880s and that by the end of the first World War it was over 45%. This would mean that by the time of the Second World War the Colonial Population that might be considered European and Christian might be more than 50%. If the population was more European than Arab there would be little chance of i breaking away.
 
Hmm. I'm not sure if this has been discussed but wif France decides to scrap southern Algeria in say 1948-49 what happens is that they create an Algerian nation who has a puppet gov run by the French. So
the french encourage Arabs who are nationalistic to move there. Next they establish that all Muslims would be treated equally with no discrimination by the French. What this does is allows the Muslim pop to remain citizens of France, and with an end to discrimination Nat. Movements will crumble because they would recieve no support and most militants would be sent to that puppet gov in Southern Algeria. Now when I mean Northern Algeria think of it as the Algeria contolled by the Ottomans siezed by France in the 17th or 18th century I think? So is this plausable or is it ASB.
 

archaeogeek

Banned
Hmm. I'm not sure if this has been discussed but wif France decides to scrap southern Algeria in say 1948-49 what happens is that they create an Algerian nation who has a puppet gov run by the French. So
the french encourage Arabs who are nationalistic to move there. Next they establish that all Muslims would be treated equally with no discrimination by the French. What this does is allows the Muslim pop to remain citizens of France, and with an end to discrimination Nat. Movements will crumble because they would recieve no support and most militants would be sent to that puppet gov in Southern Algeria. Now when I mean Northern Algeria think of it as the Algeria contolled by the Ottomans siezed by France in the 17th or 18th century I think? So is this plausable or is it ASB.

It's been proposed, it's a stupid idea. Algeria was seized in two shots within a decade of each other in the 19th century.
 
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