“Mediterranean-and-a-half”); and with the demographic explosion spawned by his potency, he was threatening to swamp the European by sheer weight of numbers.
The pied noir would habitually tutoyer any Muslim — a form of speech reserved for intimates, domestics or animals — and was outraged were it ever suggested that this might be a manifestation of racism. Commenting on this, Pierre Nora (admittedly a Frenchman often unduly harsh in his criticism of the pieds noirs ), adds an illustration of a judge asking in court:
“Are there any other witnesses?”
“Yes, five; two men and three Arabs.”
Or again: “It was an Arab, but dressed like a person.…”
With shame, Jules Roy admitted:
One thing I knew because it was told me so often, was that the Arabs belonged to a different race, one inferior to my own… “They don’t live the way we do.…” The sentence drew a chaste veil over their poverty.… Yes, their happiness was elsewhere, rather, if you please, like the happiness of cattle… “They don’t have the same needs we do…,” I was always being told. I was glad to believe it, and from that moment on their condition could not disturb me. Who suffers seeing oxen sleep on straw or eating grass?
Later on, he confesses: “It came as a great surprise to realise — little by little — that the figuiers were men like ourselves, that they laughed, that they wept, that they were capable of such noble sentiments as hatred or love, jealousy, or gratitude.…”
Even great-hearted Camus, who was among the first to expose the dreadful economic plight of the Algerians, both shortly before and after the Second World War, occasionally reveals a curious blindness, almost amounting to indifference, towards them as human beings. His Oran of La Peste appears to be devoid of Muslims; although he writes so sensitively (albeit often censoriously) of his kindred pieds noirs , his vendors selling lemonade for five sous a glass on the Algiers streets, his Oran shoe-shine boys (“the only men still in love with their profession”) seem to be accepted as part of the essential, touristique backdrop, without his pausing to question the penury that must inevitably accompany the “profession” he believes them to be in love with. Again, in The Outsider he seems oblivious to the other victim of tragedy, the Arab girl whose lover beats her up and whose brother is killed while trying to avenge her. It is as if Camus, too, cannot be bothered to understand this “anonymous figure”, this portion of the patrimoine immobilier.
Petits blancs and grands colons
But how difficult it is to generalise about a people so diverse as the pieds noirs ! Apart from their mixed racial origins, they represented a wide spectrum of political hues, and the span between the top and bottom of the economic scale was even wider. At one end of the political spectrum there were the diehard conservatives, both rich and poor, some of them later to become known as “ultras”, who stubbornly resisted all change; at the other end, various kinds of liberals supporting reform of one sort or another. By the 1950s, these latter were reckoned to comprise twenty to twenty-five per cent of the overall population, loosely embracing the European professional classes; these figures also include the Muslim évolués and a large section of the Jewish community. But the liberals had little or no proletarian support. Many of the petits blancs were failed farmers who had gravitated towards the cities, and this in itself was to grant them a collective political consciousness not to be found among the more rural settlers of Morocco and Tunisia. Like the poor whites of Rhodesia, they could not afford to be liberal, but tended to be either Communist or reactionary; and, curiously enough, these two opposing forces were largely at one, at least where liberalisation for the Muslims was concerned, as has already been noted at the time of the Sétif uprising. Between the
The pied noir would habitually tutoyer any Muslim — a form of speech reserved for intimates, domestics or animals — and was outraged were it ever suggested that this might be a manifestation of racism. Commenting on this, Pierre Nora (admittedly a Frenchman often unduly harsh in his criticism of the pieds noirs ), adds an illustration of a judge asking in court:
“Are there any other witnesses?”
“Yes, five; two men and three Arabs.”
Or again: “It was an Arab, but dressed like a person.…”
With shame, Jules Roy admitted:
One thing I knew because it was told me so often, was that the Arabs belonged to a different race, one inferior to my own… “They don’t live the way we do.…” The sentence drew a chaste veil over their poverty.… Yes, their happiness was elsewhere, rather, if you please, like the happiness of cattle… “They don’t have the same needs we do…,” I was always being told. I was glad to believe it, and from that moment on their condition could not disturb me. Who suffers seeing oxen sleep on straw or eating grass?
Later on, he confesses: “It came as a great surprise to realise — little by little — that the figuiers were men like ourselves, that they laughed, that they wept, that they were capable of such noble sentiments as hatred or love, jealousy, or gratitude.…”
Even great-hearted Camus, who was among the first to expose the dreadful economic plight of the Algerians, both shortly before and after the Second World War, occasionally reveals a curious blindness, almost amounting to indifference, towards them as human beings. His Oran of La Peste appears to be devoid of Muslims; although he writes so sensitively (albeit often censoriously) of his kindred pieds noirs , his vendors selling lemonade for five sous a glass on the Algiers streets, his Oran shoe-shine boys (“the only men still in love with their profession”) seem to be accepted as part of the essential, touristique backdrop, without his pausing to question the penury that must inevitably accompany the “profession” he believes them to be in love with. Again, in The Outsider he seems oblivious to the other victim of tragedy, the Arab girl whose lover beats her up and whose brother is killed while trying to avenge her. It is as if Camus, too, cannot be bothered to understand this “anonymous figure”, this portion of the patrimoine immobilier.
Petits blancs and grands colons
But how difficult it is to generalise about a people so diverse as the pieds noirs ! Apart from their mixed racial origins, they represented a wide spectrum of political hues, and the span between the top and bottom of the economic scale was even wider. At one end of the political spectrum there were the diehard conservatives, both rich and poor, some of them later to become known as “ultras”, who stubbornly resisted all change; at the other end, various kinds of liberals supporting reform of one sort or another. By the 1950s, these latter were reckoned to comprise twenty to twenty-five per cent of the overall population, loosely embracing the European professional classes; these figures also include the Muslim évolués and a large section of the Jewish community. But the liberals had little or no proletarian support. Many of the petits blancs were failed farmers who had gravitated towards the cities, and this in itself was to grant them a collective political consciousness not to be found among the more rural settlers of Morocco and Tunisia. Like the poor whites of Rhodesia, they could not afford to be liberal, but tended to be either Communist or reactionary; and, curiously enough, these two opposing forces were largely at one, at least where liberalisation for the Muslims was concerned, as has already been noted at the time of the Sétif uprising. Between the
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