Social Vivisection

The destructuring of the traditional Algerian society and the agrarian reforms imposed by France are – explicitly or implicitly – the essential background to any Bourdieusian reasoning on colonialism, which he interprets as a “total social fact”, following Balandier’s 1951 seminal article on the “colonial situation”.Footnote ²⁴ Without giving a brief summary, his inquiries would be incomprehensible.

When the French seized Algeria from the Ottoman empire in 1830, the country’s main means of subsistence was agriculture, including livestock farming. Such practices were linked intimately to a specific socioeconomic structure. No individual private property existed in Algeria, nor any legal concept of such. There were three types of land: the first belonged to the sovereign; then there was land possessed by the religious foundations; and, finally, land owned by the tribes, which had an indivisible and hereditary right to communal landownership and everything produced on that communally held land. The socio-legal organization revolved around the extended family, which was the alpha and omega of the whole system, in which the man, the head of the family, enjoyed a dominant role. Next were the tribes, which collected together several families linked by blood or by simple alliances. Finally, there was the village assembly. If disease did not strike the Algerians, there was a double balance, between technical and natural conditions – no more was required than what the land could give – and between resources and population. The glue that held everything together was a constellation of values: the land itself, solidarity, gifts, subordination of the individual to the community, honour, and Islam.Footnote ²⁵

Given these characteristics, we can understand how the agrarian issue became one of the objectives of colonization. France, not without casual errors and successes, achieved four interconnected results: land appropriation, the disclaiming of the rights of use accorded to tribes, the imposition of private property, and the emergence of a land market. These results were achieved by different means: blatantly violent, legislative, and administrative.Footnote ²⁶

Military intervention and the deposing of the sovereign allowed France to requisition the sovereign’s lands. The French then seized those of the religious foundations, and finally they claimed rights to the remaining lands. With the excuse of wanting to ensure a living and working space for the tribes and to avoid conflicts over borders, the first restrictions were imposed, thus laying down the principle that an area of land equal to half or a quarter of the original area would suffice for the population’s survival. Thus, between 1847 and 1863, the peasants and farmers were uprooted from their ancestral settlements and “quartered” in smaller areas (cantonnements).Footnote ²⁷ The Sénatus-consulte of 1863 was the legal culmination of this slow bloodletting. The Warnier Law followed in 1873: under article 815 of the French Civil Code – “nothing can remain indivisible” – it removed common landownership within those areas that had already been severely shrunken and laid out the boundaries of small individual properties, contrasting the age-old local practices and a mentality that revolved around the community.Footnote ²⁸ These interventions were truly a vivisection of the society and caused far-reaching consequences that were to persist and later survived the revolution.

The Three Effects Of Social Vivisection

In economic terms, there was an immediate transfer of the lushest, most fertile land from the hands of Algerians to those of the colonists and to European companies, which obtained the properties free or at low cost. The Algerian peasants were segregated in the areas that were most inaccessible and difficult to cultivate.Footnote ²⁹ Between 1871 and 1919, in the Department of Algiers alone, where the most fertile plots were located (Mitidja Plain), the French settlers quadrupled their landownership, from 100,000 to 400,000 hectares. Between the two wars, ownership of land became increasingly concentrated due to the huge investment needed to modernize farms, techniques, and crops. Smallholdings tended to disappear. The only small farms remaining were among Algerians and these were in no way competitive with those of Western farmers and even struggled at subsistence level. On these lands, for example, between 1830 and 1950 the production of cereals decreased by 20 per cent compared with a doubling of the population. In 1930, just over 26,000 Europeans possessed over 2,200,000 hectares of arable land. By 1950, the number of Europeans had decreased to 22,000, but the area they owned had increased to 2,700,000 hectares, equivalent to eighty per cent of the land – producing about seventy per cent of Algeria’s gross agricultural income. Conversely, the number of Algerian owners and sharecroppers diminished. The number of Algerian landowners dropped from 617,000 in 1930 to 494,500 in 1954, while the number of sharecroppers fell from 634,600 to 60,400 in the same period.Footnote ³⁰

The social effects of this agrarian colonization were perhaps even more dramatic. What happened to the dispossessed peasants? What was the fate of the tribal communities and the consequences on attitudes, mindsets, and patterns of perception? Beyond the safety net provided by the village, forced to tackle arid lands and with few financial resources, the fate of the “quartered” population was impoverishment, misery, and often debt. Some succumbed immediately to the temptation to sell their land to the colonists. This meant that a mass of uprooted people began to migrate to urban centres in search of a new dignity to replace the loss of an identity focused around the land. In 1876, there were 82,976 Algerians in cities with over 10,000 inhabitants. By 1936, that figure had risen to 959,444. The percentage of rural dwellers now settled in towns rose from twenty-eight per cent to 44.6 per cent of the population. Internal migration and the expansion of the cities continued uninterrupted even after the war, and especially during the revolution as a result of military operations. Between 1954 and 1963, the population of Algiers rose from 162,000 to 870,000, that of Oran from 119,000 to 300,000. In Constantine, the figure increased from 103,000 to 275,000.Footnote ³¹ Most of the farmers expelled from their lands were destined to become part of the subproletariat in the urban centres. They had neither the means, nor the mental attitude to become independent entrepreneurs and there was no economy present able to absorb them all as free wage labourers. Thus, from the 1930s onwards, around all the medium and larger cities, a large belt of bidonvilles mushroomed. In the words of Algiers’ Mayor Jacques Chevallier, “in 1938 the Muslim population living in the bidonville did not exceed 4,800 people, while there were 125,000, twenty-five times more, in 1953–1954”.Footnote ³² This explains why, following an inquiry carried out in the Massif region of Aurès in the 1930s and then further data collection in the mid-1950s, the ethnographer Germaine Tillion coined the term clochardisation to describe the change that had occurred before her eyes.Footnote ³³

Lastly, the material catastrophe had cultural corollaries. Colonization grafted systems of thought and capitalist practices onto attitudes, patterns of perception, and lifestyles modelled around a supportive and anti-individualistic social structure. Time measured by economic value, wage labour, unemployment, credit, profit, private property, and the market were all categories imported from France.Footnote ³⁴ Naturally, this process involved several generations of Algerians. Nevertheless, the impact on the mindsets of the peasants produced large-scale uprooting. Caught between a shattered world and another installed with brutality, accompanied by the subversion of the previous symbolic order, the Algerians showed a range of reactions that went from outright rejection to frenetic adhesion. These two extremes were punctuated by a spectrum of intermediate behaviours, where the old ways persisted while being clearly influenced by the new.Footnote ³⁵

With the start of the war of independence (November 1955), Algeria suffered the blow of the centres de regroupement, which deepened the decomposition of the country’s social structure and amplified its effects.

The Concentrationary Universe

The word regroupement covers various meanings, including “different types of settlements (camps, centres, villages) to which inhabitants of all areas declared inaccessible were transferred, and the movement of nomadic or sedentary populations that ensued”.Footnote ³⁶ From November 1954, the French army began “emptying” certain zones defined as “unsafe”. The escalation of the conflict led to a decree on 17 March 1956 that established “zones where residency is regulated or prohibited, with the possible delegation of this power to the prefects and the military authorities”. This decree legitimated practices that were already being enforced by the army and encouraged the authorities to clear territories that were identified as dangerous, moving not only men, women, and children, but also livestock. The houses were then gutted, burned, and, in many cases, their roofs were removed so that they could be monitored from the skies. There was a population exodus from the “prohibited zone”. Initially, no preparations were made to receive these people, and their movements were completely disorganized. They were uprooted ruthlessly, and while some managed to save a few possessions, others lost everything.

After an initial phase of uncontrolled overcrowding, which persisted until 1957, French authorities started to monitor the flow of these civilians and to decide where they were to be placed, partly in an attempt to avoid a public health disaster. Soon, however, the army took over from the civilian authorities and the centres began mushrooming beyond control and often quite unbeknown to the political authorities in Paris.Footnote ³⁷ The military considered these centres as one of the most effective weapons for fighting the guerrilla war.Footnote ³⁸

At the same time, however, the function of the centres became independent of the struggle against the FLN and took on its own ends: the resettlement was used to conduct a war on civilians, and to directly apply pressure on the inmates of the camps to get them to support France. By engendering the total dependence of the population on colonial rule, the centre became a dispositive that permitted the regulation, surveillance, and psychological conquest of the people, and enabled them to be punished as desired.Footnote ³⁹

Finally, the centre provided cheap labour for the colonists. The resettlements located at the edge of the economically lively areas (Algiers, Oran) were used as reservoirs of labour by private firms. Indeed, many colonist settlers pressed to have resettlements near their properties as this would afford them not only a workforce that was desperate, but also the discipline guaranteed by the military presence; thus, the centres served to entrench the establishment of the colonial order.

It should be clarified that these centres de regroupement differed from the Nazi lagers both because labour was formally free and extermination was never an aim. However, mortality was extremely high, especially among children, due to malnutrition, insufficient health care, and the overall conditions of degradation. In 1959, there were an estimated 500 child deaths per day. Thus, while the centres for Algerian civilians were not designed to be a “genocide factory”, they did leave the human beings confined there – people who had been deprived of citizenship by the Code d’Indigénat in 1881Footnote ⁴⁰ – to sink into death.Footnote ⁴¹

Faced with this scenario, the delegate general of the French government, Paul Delouvrier, attempted to stop the proliferation of the resettlements by issuing a decree in March 1959 to block the creation of new centres without his authorization. The measure proved to be ineffective, given that by July 1960 the centres had more or less doubled in number, reaching a total of roughly 1,700.Footnote ⁴² Even in 1961, close to the ceasefire, the expansion continued. Every attempt to dismantle the camps failed until the war had actually ended, and even after Algerian independence many of the inmates were unable to leave as they had no place to go. The data relating to April 1961, provided by the commissionership for urgent action, speak for themselves, and yet they probably underestimated the numbers. The “Muslim” population in Algeria totalled 9,000,000; there were 2,392 centres; the “Muslim” population collected in all types of centre numbered 1,958,302, almost twenty-two per cent of all Algerians labelled as “Muslims”. If we consider that, in addition to these inmates, approximately 1,175,000 peasants had abandoned their homes due to the war, the overall number of uprooted farm workers was roughly 3,525,000, or fifty per cent of the rural population.

Figure 1 Centres de regroupement in Algeria. Sources: Ageron, “Une dimension de la guerre d’Algérie”, pp. 359–361; Cornaton, Les camps de regroupement de la guerre d’Algérie.

This extended concentrationary dispositive (see Figure 1), common to European colonial history,Footnote ⁴³ accelerated the disintegration of traditional society. Although within the centres work remained predominantly free and the population were allowed to farm cultivated land, in practice the distance between such land and the centres often discouraged farmers from doing so. Perhaps it is reasonable to question whether a clear distinction between free and unfree labour is indeed pertinent in such a context.Footnote ⁴⁴ There were two, possibly co-existing, alternatives for those who had abandoned or lost their lands: degradation and reliance on colonial aid alone, or the search for a paying job. Those who had a family and were pursued by the problem of feeding their dependants every day were especially willing to accept any job whatsoever. At the same time, this spread of wage labour both outside and within the centres as employees of the French authorities introduced an element of disintegration that was alien to the ethos of traditional society. Against the background of the colonial war, the majority of labour was temporary and precarious, often meted out on a daily basis.

The effects of the social vivisection inflicted on Algeria, the disastrous unfolding of the war, and the pressure of French public opinion following the revelations surrounding the centres de regroupement Footnote ⁴⁵ induced the colonial authorities to promote two large inquiries under the auspices of the ARDES.

Who Were The Workers In The Colonial Situation?

In collaboration with a group of statisticians who were responsible for the quantitative section, the first inquiry was carried out on a representative sample of the entire population.Footnote ⁴⁶ The choice of the object clearly indicates the breadth of research: the work was considered a key observation point to document the conflict between “traditional models” and “models imported and imposed” by colonization, or, if you will, between “rationalization imperatives” and “cultural traditions”.Footnote ⁴⁷ From this point of view, Travail et travailleurs en Algérie presented an “Esquisse pour un tableau des classes sociales”, in which Bourdieu roughly outlines five broad groups with different internal structures.Footnote ⁴⁸ On the one hand, the “Esquisse” underlines a certain essentialism in defining social classes. In fact, Bourdieu himself would review this approach critically about fifteen years later when, in dialogue with Edward ThompsonFootnote ⁴⁹ – among others – he provided an innovative and anti-essentialist approach to the understanding of social classes.Footnote ⁵⁰ This is confirmed by the removal of the Tableau when the Travail et travailleurs en Algérie was republished under the title Algérie 60 Footnote ⁵¹ in 1977 in the early stages of a period of intense review of classifications, nomenclatures, and reflexivity in the social sciences. On the other hand, however, the “Esquisse” is highly rich in its representation of work, not strictly linked to wage labour alone. Within this framework, for example, the self-employed feature in their own right and not as an anomaly.Footnote ⁵² There are, moreover, many grey areas that Bourdieu identifies as workers shifting between unemployment, daily and precarious employment, odd jobs, and the trading of anything that the most deprived groups could manage to scrape together to allow them to survive physically and above all to gain self-respect, as Figure 2 shows. According to the imperatives of the traditional ethos – as one interviewee commented – “a worthy man, who does not want to be maintained by others, must work, even if this means accepting whatever comes along”.Footnote ⁵³

Figure 2 Pierre Bourdieu, a traveling merchant with his son, Orléansville, Chlef, R14. From: In Algeria. Testimonies of Uprooting, 1957–1961. © Pierre Bourdieu/Fondation Pierre Bourdieu, St. Gall. Courtesy: Photographic archive Pierre Bourdieu, Camera Austria, Graz.

Within this cross section of the entire Algerian society, the most important “clivage sociale” is not that between free and unfree labour, but rather between “permanent workers” and “intermittent workers” (the unemployed, daily workers, small traders). Considering that the unemployed accounted for forty-three per cent of the workforce (people over fourteen years), the scope of this cleavage is evident.Footnote ⁵⁴ Furthermore, these figures, far from being a legacy of the previous society that was destined to be reabsorbed, were actually the effect of the process of imposing a capitalist society. Indeed, this group consisted overall of the dispossessed peasants who had migrated to the cities and become “clochardisés”. Against the colonial narratives, and indeed the anti-colonial progressive narratives that supported a vision of the positive outcomes of the French presence in Algeria, Bourdieu was careful to recognize the damage arising from an inoculation of capitalism; “unemployment and intermittent work”, he wrote, “prepare a disorganization of conduct which we must be careful not to mistake for innovation”.Footnote ⁵⁵

The inquiry’s findings dealt with conduct and its link to the control of time and predictions for the future: permanent workers, who possessed material and cultural resources and career prospects, were able to develop a life plan based on a “rationalist ethos” and on a reasonably accessible future. On the other hand, the unemployed and precarious workers faced with no prospects in a job they despised were geared to satisfying “immediate needs” and remain trapped in the circle of the present or at most projected towards a utopian or mythical future.Footnote ⁵⁶

While wage labour was not the only measure of work, it was, nevertheless, considered by Bourdieu as a powerful element of disruption to the equilibrium of rural society. This function is particularly evident in the second inquiry into the peasants who had been uprooted and interned in the centres de regroupement. On this occasion, Bourdieu, in collaboration with Abdelmalek Sayad, developed a reasoning behind peasants’ self-perception as workers. Although there are differences between areas where capitalist relationships are most prevalent (Collo) and those where they are less so (Chélif), the interpretation of sources was the same: the direct or indirect experience of wage labour reflexively led to criticism of the rural world. While peasants in traditional society felt themselves employed throughout the day for the whole year, they were unaware of the word “unemployment” and had no concept of a monetary calculation for labour. Once the relationship between work and monetary remuneration had been apprised, anything lying outside a relationship of “employment” became devalued. The “discovery of labour” as connected to a wage simultaneously caused the discovery of unemployment. Hence, any type of occupation – keeping watch in the fields or guarding the cattle, which was generally the responsibility of the elderly – that had previously had meaning within the context of a coherent social system now appeared not to be work, or even, in the absence of any monetary payment, to be a sort of “veiled unemployment”.Footnote ⁵⁷

What kind of job was preferred by the peasants interviewed? For the younger ones, especially, the greatest aspiration was stable wage labour, even if this required moving away from the centre de regroupement, migrating, and running the risk of “clochardisation”. Thus, within the centres the depeasantization of Algerians that had begun with the colonial intervention continued, not only as a result of the physical detachment from the land, but also due to a mental detachment from traditional peasant culture.

Placing The Inquiries Within The Context Of Global Labour Studies

On closer inspection, the social vivisection imposed on Algeria by France is actually a specific form of “primitive accumulation”.Footnote ⁵⁸ In a Marxian sense, it is the founding historical experience of capitalism through the separation between workforce and means of production.Footnote ⁵⁹ Bourdieu never used the expression primitive accumulation. However, although he preferred the approach of Weber and Sombart to the Marxist lexicon,Footnote ⁶⁰ he was fully aware that this process was exactly what he was describing. What, then, does his analysis tells us in this regard?

Far from what happened in Europe being mechanically replicated in the colony, as might be in line with a linear and progressive conception of history,Footnote ⁶¹ Bourdieu highlighted the asymmetries while taking into account his own mental categories; these had been formed in the West and could unconsciously lead to a transfer of “the patterns of experience of industrialized societies” instead of understanding “events and men in their irreducible originality”.Footnote ⁶²

Given that the timescale required to change a mindset is different from that required to change economic structures, the inquiries brought to light a discrepancy in Algeria between the behaviour patterns forged by the moral order of traditional society and the new capitalist configuration. Of course, this also happened to a lesser extent at the origins of capitalism. However, in North Africa – Bourdieu explained – the phenomenon was macroscopic as it was linked to the particular historical mode of violent dispossession. He thus found that, more than one hundred years after the beginning of the “assimilation” of Algeria, behaviours and attitudes not “in tune” with the new economic system persisted. Beyond the ways in which things were done and existed, the affirmation of these capitalist “economic structures” continued alongside those of traditional society, engendering a layering of diverse temporalities that was particularly evident in the plurality of labour relations, of which wage labour was just one. Research, therefore, is alien to the point of proposing a “teleology of modern wage labour”, destined to spread wage earning throughout the whole society after its introduction with capitalism, and thus to squeeze out the acceptance of other forms of employment being represented as labour, reinforcing the dichotomous contrast between modern wage labour and traditional work. This dichotomy was evident in earlier positions.Footnote ⁶³

Although the affirmation of capitalism occurred primarily through military intervention, it cannot be reduced to the mere act of violence and its coercive dimension.Footnote ⁶⁴ The picture painted by Bourdieu is nuanced. The range of reactions recorded in his inquiries, displayed not only a retreat to tradition (“traditionalism of despair”) as a form of rejection,Footnote ⁶⁵ but also a whole spectrum of adhesion, especially among the sectors of society that had been most drastically uprooted and among those who had most heavily suffered the effects of the concentrationary universe. Bourdieu thus highlighted the productive dimension of the spread of capitalism. He understood its ability to produce consensus even in a colonial situation, where explicit force blatantly outweighs the simple mechanism of accumulation and anonymous control of labour.

Overall, was this a residual scenario destined to be integrally reabsorbed and to render the Algerian economic and social landscape the same as that of France? Rather, Bourdieu described a certain possibility that remained open, which he summed up with the term “creative reinvention” to concisely render the events underway, thus distancing the fate of the French colony from any preconceived outcome.Footnote ⁶⁶ While the 1950s saw the successful spread of stadial theories, both in the realms of sociology of modernization and Marxism, which, however, considered the present as belonging to the West and the future to the Rest, one of Bourdieu’s most original aspects was his avoidance of any stadial or determinist leanings in the relationship between the West and the colony.Footnote ⁶⁷ For example, his works of this period contain no concept of any progress proposed by the West to the colonies, although this view was highly fashionable at the time.Footnote ⁶⁸

Research results at a historical and socio-anthropological level attribute to Bourdieu a belief that the knowledge he had gained meant he felt equipped to judge the chances of the Algerian revolution in a more realistic way than any political ideology that was removed from an in-depth analysis of the relationships of domination. However, far from being linear, his considerations on the revolution were the outcome of a circuitous course whose genealogy necessarily involved a comparison with the ideas of Frantz Fanon and Germaine Tillion.

Fanon Against Bourdieu?

Both men – Bourdieu and Fanon – were in Algeria between 1955 and 1957, although they almost certainly never met.Footnote ⁶⁹ Fanon arrived in the French colony in 1954 after his graduation in neuropsychiatry in Lyon, having accepted a position at the hospital of Blida, near Algiers. Bourdieu was to take a series of photographs in the same place between 1959 and 1960.Footnote ⁷⁰ Fanon’s desire to create a non-oppressive approach to psychiatry at Blida was shattered by the reality of colonialism: if psychiatry should serve to free men from the chains of madness, in a colonial situation this is impossible to achieve unless we remove the main cause of estrangement: colonial rule itself.Footnote ⁷¹ Fired by this belief, Fanon established and strengthened his contacts with the FLN. This led to his expulsion from the hospital, and from Algeria, at the end of 1956. At the beginning of 1957, he moved to Tunis, where he began his militancy in the FLN, which had established its political headquarters there. By this time, Bourdieu had been in Algiers for a number of months. While practising medicine, Fanon also continued his political activity by writing first for the paper Résistance Algérienne and then later for the official organ of the FLN: El Moudjahid. Fanon met Raymond Aron at Tunis in 1957 after the publication of the latter’s La tragédie algérienne, in which the sociologist affirmed his support for Algerian independence.Footnote ⁷² It was Aron who offered Bourdieu the post of assistant lecturer at the Sorbonne in 1960; he also signed the preface to the English edition of Sociologie de l’Algérie.Footnote ⁷³

Fanon and Bourdieu were two French intellectuals taking a public stand against the colonial war at this time, and their position created quite a stir, especially among the pieds-noirs. Their stance was to influence the course of both their lives, although Bourdieu was not at the time the charismatic public figure he would become after the 1980s and Fanon had not yet been assigned the role of “bible of the decolonization movement”,Footnote ⁷⁴ as would happen following the publication of Les Damnés de la Terre and his early death in 1961.Footnote ⁷⁵

Born in 1907 in Allègre (Haute-Loire), while at university, Germaine Tillion studied ethnology under one of this discipline’s most eminent scholars, Marcel Mauss. In 1934, she was awarded a scholarship to study the Berber peasant population in the Aurès, in southern Algeria. Tillion carried out research in the field until 1940. On her return to France, she opposed the Nazi invasion and joined the Resistance, but was captured two years later and deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. At the end of the war, she became an activist with the Association nationale des Anciennes déportées et internées de la Résistance (ADIR), collecting evidence and conducting research on the resistance and on deportation.

Following the outbreak of the Algerian uprising in November 1954, she returned to Algeria thanks to the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), which was called upon by the French authorities to study the colony. She spent a total of a year and a half there, partly in the Aurès region and partly in Algiers. While in Algeria, moved by a genuine desire for reform, she agreed to collaborate with the Governor-General Jacques Soustelle.Footnote ⁷⁶ This decision attracted much criticism and vitriolic attack.Footnote ⁷⁷

By June 1956, she had returned to Paris. At the urging of the ADIR, which was very keen to communicate information on Algeria, she published a long article entitled L’Algérie en 1956 in the September issue of the journal Voix et Visages. To increase its dissemination, the ADIR decided to print 1,500 copies in the form of a small volume that was distributed directly through its network of militants. As this publication actually came out at the very beginning of the following year, it was entitled L’Algérie en 1957. Thanks to the high public profile of the author and the ADIR’s network of relations, the text had a profound resonance in the politically active sectors of both France and Algeria, circulating in the “spongy sectors” of Algeria and reaching the FLN. In fact, Tillion was actually contacted more than once by Saadi Yacef, leader of the autonomous zone of Algiers during the battle of 1957. According to the anthropologist’s own account, their first meeting started with a discussion of the arguments set out in L’Algérie en 1957.Footnote ⁷⁸ Given the reception it received, the publishing house Minuit chose to bring out a second edition of the book in June of the same year.Footnote ⁷⁹ Le Monde discussed the publication on its front page on 11 June.Footnote ⁸⁰

L’Algérie en 1957 described the impoverishment of the peasants of the Aurès and the state of “underdevelopment” prevailing in the country as a result of social and economic change. The causes of this poverty were to be traced back to the “contact” between a “modern economy” and an “archaic” society and the inability of the latter to become more dynamic or modern due to its closure to outside influences.Footnote ⁸¹ Therefore, according to Tillion, it followed that democratic France was duty bound to remain in Algeria to bring about reform and create the conditions necessary for the country’s modernization. A further consequence was the “absolute necessity” for the Algerian economy to function in symbiosis with the French economy, as an “unlimited and unconditional” independence would expose the country to “extreme danger”.Footnote ⁸²

The renown of the book, but simultaneously its condemnation by both French and Algerian intellectuals in favour of independence, increased due to public praise from one of the most famous pieds-noirs. Born in the village of Mondovi in 1913 to a French worker and a Spanish domestic help, Albert Camus was supported through his youth thanks to the hard, menial work of his mother, who was widowed in 1914. He had a French education in French Algeria, and even after his move to France in 1940 his relatives remained in Algeria. The start of the terrorist attacks by the FLN against French (and Algerian) civilians generated questions of life and death that were more than idealistic. The statement Camus made when he dramatically distanced himself from the use of terrorist violence by the FLN while collecting his Nobel Prize in Stockholm in December 1957 should be considered within this biographical perspective: “I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice”. This statement unleashed furious controversy.Footnote ⁸³ At this delicate juncture, Camus met with Tillion several times both in Algeria and in France between 1956 and 1957 and remained in contact with her until his death in 1960.Footnote ⁸⁴ They shared the same basic ideas on the future prospects of Algeria and which were the correct means to use, thus considering the aspects of a revolution. As regards the first issue, while condemning colonial oppression Camus opposed national independence for various reasons. In addition to a wish to safeguard the pieds-noirs, he feared that if his country were to be left to itself by France it would plunge headlong into poverty and be attracted to the growing “Muslim imperialism” of which he had glimpsed some signs in the Arab world.Footnote ⁸⁵ Moreover, he did not believe there was an Algerian nation; in his opinion the Jews, Turks, Greeks, Italians, and Berbers would have had just as much right as Arabs to reclaim the leadership of this nation.Footnote ⁸⁶ His reasoning led him to propose a federal solution that could hold together the various intertwined communities in Algeria and France.Footnote ⁸⁷ As regards the second issue, which was closely related to the first, the question regarding the revolution and the most appropriate social subjects to embody it completely lost interest and realism. He held steadfast, however, to his moral condemnation of both the torture and to terrorism, which Camus completely ruled out from any ideal of revolution.Footnote ⁸⁸ The views shared with Tillion are evident, and in fact he wrote the introduction to the American edition of her L’Algérie en 1957, defining it as the only “true, fair and constructive” account.Footnote ⁸⁹

In 1957, just after the publication of the first two editions of Tillion’s book, Fanon published a series of articles criticizing the European “sociologists” and “Islamologists”, whom he considered guilty of being unable to comprehend the colonial world.Footnote ⁹⁰ Although Tillion (and Camus) was never actually mentioned, the popularity of the author and the acclaim the work had received both in Algeria and France mean that it is reasonable to assume she was one of the main targets.Footnote ⁹¹ It is impossible that Bourdieu was the one under fire, as at that point in his career he was not a sociologist and had not yet published his study nor finished his inquiries.

At the end of 1957, Fanon returned to the same theme: “Les intellectuels et les démocrates français devant la révolution algérienne”.Footnote ⁹² Once again, there is a strong indication that writers such as Germaine Tillion are being targeted when he rails against those who limit themselves to condemning only the “excesses” of the French, together with those of the FLN, while avoiding a condemnation of the very presence of France, which they regard as a reforming and modernizing force.Footnote ⁹³ This stance was based on blindness in the face of the “truth” regarding colonialism: “every Frenchman in Algeria has a relationship with the native people that is based on force”.Footnote ⁹⁴

Bourdieu With Fanon

In the second half of 1959, Fanon published L’an V de la révolution algérienne.Footnote ⁹⁵ It is a clearly political book, containing a compilation of a number of essays that had previously appeared separately. The aim of the volume is threefold. Firstly, to describe the unravelling of the relations of dominion provoked by the revolutionary mobilization. Secondly, to recount the formation of an Algerian nation through struggle, which Fanon referred to as the “revolutionary pedagogy of nation-building”, and which was not, therefore, linked to any supposedly unalterable, essentialist identity. Lastly, given that Fanon was writing as a militant actively engaged in the cause being described, he aimed to use the public debate to weaken colonial dominance by discussing the social and mental advancement triggered by the uprising.

Bearing in mind this threefold perspective, Fanon’s observation of women had a paradigmatic function because it illustrated their emancipation both in relation to deference to the foreign colonial power and towards the men of their own culture, which was indisputably centred on male domination. At the basis of everything is the participation in the revolutionary process, and all share in the destiny of the new Algeria that will emerge.Footnote ⁹⁶

The passage that most strongly criticized the French sociologists appeared in the Appendix and reproduced the article that had originally appeared on 16 May 1957 in “Résistance algérienne”.Footnote ⁹⁷ Hence, that article had actually been conceived and written before Bourdieu’s Sociologie de l’Algérie appeared. This circumstance would make it difficult to maintain that there was a distinct contrast between Fanon and Bourdieu in this period, as argued by Robert Young, for example.Footnote ⁹⁸

Furthermore, if we consider the effects of Fanon’s public stance, we will have to recognize his undoubtable influence on the development of Bourdieu, who read the psychiatrist’s writings carefully, as evidenced by notes on the book found by Amin Perez in Abdelmalek Sayad’s archive in Paris.Footnote ⁹⁹ When L’an V de la révolution algérienne came out, the two young intellectuals certainly held greatly differing views of the actions of the FLN. Although Bourdieu acknowledged the FLN’s political role, he gave voice to a certain uneasiness, while Fanon remained close to Abane Ramdane right up until his death in December 1957. The two men differed also due to the links between Fanon’s theories and Sartre’s philosophy of freedom, while Bourdieu had been critical of this approach from the time he had been a student at the École normale supérieure.

Nevertheless, they did have certain points in common. Both were favourable to Algerian independence. Furthermore, they both felt a deep dissatisfaction with the “scientific” studies of colonialism, especially the ethnological studies; they used the concept of the “colonial situation” to indicate a power relationship of total domination. In addition, both intellectuals focused their approach on the habits of daily life and the symbolic dimension these have; they were both sensitive to the cleavages produced in society by the uprising.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In this regard, the passages of L’an V de la révolution algérienne describing the “clever tricks” of the veil and Western goods are surprisingly in line with the writings of Bourdieu in the early 1960s.Footnote ¹⁰¹

In two important writings, “Guerre et mutation sociale en Algérie”Footnote ¹⁰² and “Révolution dans la révolution”,Footnote ¹⁰³ Bourdieu came close to Fanon’s thesis. A large portion of these articles – which are very similar – is dedicated to the cleavages caused by the revolutionary war in the power relations both between the French and the Algerians and, within Algerian society itself, between men and women, between the young and the old, and between fathers and sons. The same subjects that were described by Fanon also reappear in Bourdieu’s writings: the veil, the radio, school, and healthcare. See, for example, Bourdieu’s photograph in Figure 3, taken in Algeria during the war.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Bourdieu’s conclusion is actually very close to Fanon’s revolutionary tension and expresses a passionate adherence not only to the national revolution, but, above all, to the prospect of social change that was described at this stage as though it had already come about. This passage is illustrative:

Figure 3 Pierre Bourdieu, Untitled, R 1. From: In Algeria. Testimonies of Uprooting, 1957–1961. © Pierre Bourdieu/Fondation Pierre Bourdieu, St. Gall. Courtesy: Photographic archive Pierre Bourdieu, Camera Austria, Graz.

However, the distance between the positions of Bourdieu and Fanon was to become evident only in 1961.

The Peasants: Force Of The Revolution And Not … Revolutionary Force

Before he died prematurely of leukaemia in December 1961, Fanon provided Maspero with a dictation of his last work: Les Damnés de la Terre. The book is an ideal extension of the previous one, and was published with a famous preface by Sartre. While L’an V de la révolution algérienne talks of the molecular change produced in Algerian society by the struggle for freedom, Les Damnés de la Terre identifies the way in which the colonial system may be undermined, and by whom, as well as the means for advancing the struggle for a socialist political system. The means is violence.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The actor will be someone who has nothing to lose but his shackles, and while, according to Fanon, the workers, artisans, and traders are all urban classes that profit from the colonial economic system and identify with the nationalist parties that call for reform, compromise, and “assimilation”, “in colonial countries only the peasant class is revolutionary”.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The need for decolonialization to triumph would drive this group to besiege the towns, where an ally would be found in the lumpenproletariat, made up of the peasant fringe that had been uprooted from the countryside in the previous decades.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

In 1961, Bourdieu, who had left Algeria between the end of 1959 and early 1960, was teaching in the Faculty of Arts in Lille. During that summer, he returned to Algeria to carry out further interviews. It is quite plausible that up to then, given the conditions in which his inquires were carried out, the complexity of his methods (which involved statistical data, interviews, participant observation, and photographs), and the fact that he was continuously on the move, Bourdieu had not found the time to process all his data or extract the essence of their significance. The new stance on the Algerian issue, “De la guerre révolutionnaire à la révolution”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ was a first embryonic presentation of his theme of habitus and is particularly significant as all his publications up to 1964, centred on his inquiries between 1958 and 1960, develop along the same lines. In fact, the original edition of the text hinted at an evolution of his ideas that would appear later in Travail et travailleurs en Algérie.Footnote ¹¹⁰

We may hypothesize that Bourdieu started processing his data in 1961, or early the following year, while his position with reference to Fanon’s book had matured by the first half of 1962. In the article, Bourdieu explicitly uses for the first time material from the “inquiries carried out between 1958 and 1961” and gives the impression of rattling off the results.Footnote ¹¹¹ In Travail et travailleurs en Algérie he repeats an earlier statement that would seem to be a direct reaction to Les Damnés de la Terre: “force of the revolution, the peasant world is not a revolutionary force in the true sense of the word”.Footnote ¹¹² The same conclusion applies to the subproletariat. Bourdieu’s arguments hint at the outlines of a theory of domination that he would go on to refine over the years: social subjects that are imprisoned in a condition of life that is characterized by “insecurity” and “incoherence” generally have an “uncertain” and “incoherent” vision of this condition. Conversely, the proletariat, which enjoys economic and social stability, shows a rational vision of the world that may be considered a precondition for the formation of a “rational revolutionary consciousness”.Footnote ¹¹³

This is a kind of reversal of Fanon’s thesis, which is never explicitly mentioned. Yet, Bourdieu also believes at this point in time that the possibility of a “révolution dans la révolution” is still a reality. Nevertheless, he argues that the “radicalism of sentiment” should be combined with a “revolutionary radicalism”, stemming from a realistic analysis of the circumstances and therefore unfettered by “the myth of the revolutionary revolution”.Footnote ¹¹⁴

When Bourdieu prepared the material for the two publications entirely dedicated to his inquires – Travail et travailleurs en Algérie and Le déracinement – his tone was darker. In the first work, he reuses the passages cited from “De la guerre révolutionnaire à la révolution”, though this time he felt the need to name Fanon explicitly, leaving no room for ambiguity.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Figure 4 offers a synthesis of Bourdieu’s trajectory in Algeria.

Figure 4 Bourdieu’s trajectory in Algeria. Sources: Bourdieu et al., Travail et travailleurs en Algérie; Bourdieu and Sayad, Le déracinement; Bourdieu, Sketch for a Self-Analysis; Awal. Cahiers d’Études Berbères, 27–28 (2003); Bourdieu, “Secouez un peu vos structures!”, in Jacques Dubois, Pascal Durand, and Yves Winkin (eds), Le symbolique et le social. La réception internationale de la pensée de Pierre Bourdieu (Liège, 2005), pp. 325–342; Bourdieu, Algerian Sketches.

Revolt Versus Revolution

I have argued that, in the wake of sentimental, civic, and political reasoning, Bourdieu committed to studying the various forms of work to measure the effects of the forced introduction of capitalism into traditional society in Algeria. Through two major inquiries he painted a rich and sophisticated picture of the attitudes of the colonial population in regard to work, to the world, to time, and to the future. As the population was predominantly agrarian, the peasants were perforce at the centre of his analysis. At the same time, however, his specific interest in the peasants was the result of the spread of an international political discourse that, on the basis of the experience in China, saw them as the revolutionary subject par excellence. Distancing himself from an approach he considered to be abstract, Bourdieu regards his inquiry, which was exceedingly original and pushed well beyond the borders of academic disciplines of the time, as the most suitable instrument for dealing with a political problem in a scientific way: the formation of the social conditions of access to revolutionary consciousness. Only in this way – he believed – can one judge the chances of a rupture of relationships of domination within Algerian society that might accompany decolonization.

In this light, he approached with enthusiasm the texts of Frantz Fanon, whose basic thesis regarding the “revolution” under way in Algeria he shared until 1961. At the same time, he rejected both the underestimation of colonialism and the perspective of a realignment between France and Algeria proposed by Tillion and Camus, who he never actually names. Subsequently, he moved away from Fanon due to the interaction of several factors. Undeniably, he was to an extent disillusioned by the management of the post-colonial phase by the revolutionary elites, an approach that had immediately raised concerns about the country’s future. At the same time, the theses on the uprooted peasants that appeared in The Wretched of the Earth are strident with the data of the inquiry that Bourdieu had not integrally interpreted until this time. Bourdieu’s shift is also undoubtedly influenced by Sartre’s famous preface, which Bourdieu had been developing “against” even while still studying at the École normale supérieure in Paris. In the early 1960s, the young sociologist judged Sartre wrong in his approval of the irresponsible speech by Fanon, as it was based on a lack of knowledge of the society.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Finally, it is plausible that the international success of Fanon’s theses, that had become a sort of Bible of Third Worldism, and the proposal of an Algerian paradigm within the global Left, had prompted Bourdieu to distance himself more strongly.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Hence, in his texts of 1963 and 1964, devoted to the processing of the vast masses of data he had produced, Bourdieu describes the peasants as a subject that does indeed take part in the national revolution and is prone to revolt, yet is incapable of either leading a social revolution or setting itself up as a ruling class in an independent Algeria. This holds at least if the concept of revolution is taken to be, as in this case, the ability to conceive the future on the basis of a lucid awareness of the mechanisms of reproduction of everyday life and social order in the present. For such an occurrence, then, voluntarism, the collective fervour, and simple thirst for justice of Algerian peasants cannot be sufficient. Instead sociological conditions are required that envisage the “likelihood” that it is possible to move beyond the present, and in which certain forward-looking mindsets can be perceived. By contrast, the interviews and statistical data collected reveal that a combination of economic misery and cultural poverty made the Algerian peasants prisoners of the past, of the present, or of a magical and millenarian future.Footnote ¹¹⁸

However central the problem of the revolution remains, around and beyond this issue Bourdieu’s inquiries can also be interpreted as a sophisticated historical anthropology of labour that should be considered within its temporal, geographical, and cultural context.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Labour in itself? Far from it. In fact, his research provides a contribution to the understanding of the historicity of labour that, by denaturalizing capitalism, demonstrates the resistible genesis of its specific wage form in a different context, outside Europe’s heart. Bourdieu debunks the myth of the autopoiesis of the labour market that would have been incomprehensible in Algeria without the pervasive intervention of the French state that created the conditions necessary for its existence.Footnote ¹²⁰ Subsequently, as though in a circle, the study of the colony led Bourdieu to return critically to “conditions of existence and functioning” of capitalism in Europe. Here – he wrote – mistakenly assuming the universality of the category homo economicus, is concealed its genesis, connected to particular economic and social conditions,Footnote ¹²¹ and it is assumed that the Western model of capitalism can be abstractly extended in the colony.Footnote ¹²² The same circular motion has been proposed in recent years by global labour history as it has returned to reconsider the prevailing approach of the later 1950s. For this reason, Bourdieu’s contribution is useful also to reinterpret the cultural assumptions of labour history and remove the Eurocentric overlay in the current period of European “provincialization”.Footnote ¹²³