The French Intifada
The Long War Between France and Its Arabs
By Andrew Hussey
Illustrated. 441 pp. Faber & Faber
Is this a cultural or socioeconomic problem? Hussey argues skillfully against commentators who reduce all discontents to poverty. Both economic and cultural factors are surely at play. France has struggled with obdurate unemployment rates for a long time, yet the globalization of aggressive Islamic radicalism in past decades merits no less consideration.
Critique du Wall Street Journal
A half-century on, France remains haunted by its colonial misadventures, its cities’ suburbs free-fire zones for disaffected Muslim youth.
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Andrew Hussey, dean of the University of London Institute in Paris, has written about French philosophy and cultural history, both rightly considered sources of national pride. His latest book, “The French Intifada: The Long War Between France and Its Arabs,” is primarily about French North Africa, which is a matter of national shame. France tarnished its reputation in the protectorates of Morocco (starting in 1912) and Tunisia (1881) with a program of military subjugation. The sensible decision to emancipate both countries in 1956 was undertaken in part to narrow French interests in North Africa and to focus on the perpetually restive Algeria, which for nearly all of the period from 1830 to 1962 was ruled as part of France, in a manner that combined the brutal and Clouseau-esque so sickeningly as to inspire sympathy with the mujahedeen.
Mr. Hussey’s book is mostly historical, spiced lightly with reportage from both France and its former colonies. He suggests that the result of past French involvement in North Africa today is the “intifada” (Arabic for “uprising”) among Muslim youth in the suburbs of Paris and other cities. In these areas, known as banlieues, even native-born Frenchmen of North African heritage don’t feel French, and they denigrate successful North African Frenchmen like soccer star Zinedine Zidane as collaborators. They call white Frenchmen “sons of Clovis,” after the fifth-century Frankish king (evincing at least some knowledge of European history). The crime and anarchism are bad enough to make the banlieues, in Mr. Hussey’s slightly hyperbolic phrase, zones of “anti-civilization,” where every norm and convention that binds people together as a society is aggressively flouted in favor of mayhem.
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“The French Intifada,” while fine as an introduction to the history of France’s African colonies, suffers from shallowness. Mr. Hussey’s reported sections are brief and largely hotel-based—a shame, because places like the Casbah of Algiers (a decrepit and ungovernable warren of poor Algerians) could generate a very fine book in the hands of an intrepid reporter. He relies too much on secondary sources and too little on the voices of North Africans themselves. Each country examined here has a better account in English (most notably Alistair Horne’s “A Savage War of Peace,” about Algeria’s war for independence). But Mr. Hussey’s portrayal of the tragedy of French colonialism is accurate and smart. The central mission of the French—to bring French culture overseas and turn colonial subjects into Frenchmen—suffered a fate worse than mere failure, in that it created not only resistance to Frenchness abroad but an attack on Frenchness in France itself. The British colonial desire to create overseas markets looks gentle and sane—even civilized—by comparison.