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Acknowledgements
This section is the most important, because this book would not have been possible without the material and emotional support of many people and institutions.
James McDougall taught me to think of colonial Algeria as a real place where people lived, dreamed, and died. Most of all, first as supervisor, then as editor, he gave me the freedom to keep on doing what I found most interesting. This work was supported by a doctoral research grant from the AHRC and St Cross College, and then a fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. At All Souls, conversations with Liz Chatterjee, Arthur Downing, Celia Heyes, Alexander Morrison, Judith Scheele, Claudio Sopranzetti, George Woudhuysen, and many others fed into this project extensively. Stephen Smith generously gave his time as a mentor. The final stages of revising this into a manuscript were made possible by a position at the University of Cambridge and the support of Trinity College. In Cambridge, I benefited tremendously from discussions with Andrew Arsan, Helen Pfeifer, Khaled Fahmy, Julia Guarneri, Amira Bennison, and José Ciro Martínez.
Tracing news involves a fair bit of travelling. In Algeria, Bob Parks and Karim Ouaras at CEMA made my research in Algeria possible, along with the staff at the ANA in Birkhadem and the archives of the wilayat of Algiers, Oran, and Constantine. In Algiers, I owe so much to Kaltoum Meidane who took time off to show me everything I needed to know. Thanks to Rym Terbeche and Lalia Behidj, I was given a warm welcome at the headquarters of Radio algérienne and the Musée de la radio algérienne. Coffees around town with Hakim Addad, and conversations with Père Teissier, Guillaume Michel, and other residents of the Glycines taught me far more than the archives. In Oran, the Centre Pierre Claverie gave me a place to stay and audiences at CRASC pushed my research by asking great questions. In Constantine, Ouarda Siari Tengour showed me around and Johanna Wagman was a great travel companion. Idir Igoudjil, Pierre-Antoine Picand, and Chloé Domat put up with me when I diverted a road-trip to have a look at Baghlia, ex-Rébeval. In Tunis, Kmar Bendana and the IRMC pointed me in the right direction, and the staff at the ANT made it a smooth archival experience.
In Paris, I am thankful to the staff of the BNF, the Archives diplomatiques at La Courneuve, the BULAC, and the SHD in Vincennes. In Marseille, Paula Hénin and Marcel Roncayolo’s family generously gave me a home which was a piece of historical research in itself. In Aix-en-Provence, I benefited from the support of Noël Coulet and the Association PaulAlbert Février. Hassan Moukhlisse at the MMSH and the staff at the CDHA guided me through their collections. More than any other, the ANOM were a delight to work in, thanks to Isabelle Chiavassa and all the staff there. The Hermann-Boutys, Sarah Zimmermann, Diana Kim, and Arad Gigi provided welcome escapes from the archive.
At various points in the research, many scholars gave feedback and fielded queries: Noureddine Amara, Hélène Blais, Emmanuel Blanchard, HannahLouise Clark, Morgan Coriou, John Darwin, Claire Fredj, John-Paul Ghobrial, Abigail Greene, Jim House, Idriss Jebari, Augustin Jomier, Annick Lacroix, Alex Middleton, Hadj Miliani, Hussein Omar, M’hamed Oualdi, Susan Pedersen, Terry Peterson, Rebecca Scales, Berny Sèbe, Kathryn Schwartz, Miranda Spieler, Glenda Sluga, Ann Laura Stoler, Sylvie Thénault, and Heidi Tworek. The late Chris Bayly and Jan-Georg Deutsch are much missed.
Several mentors and teachers deserve special thanks. Carol Gluck always asked the hardest and best questions. Conversations with Jennifer Sessions and with Malika Rahal have shaped this work a great deal. Martin Thomas and Mary Lewis were crucial in helping reshape this from a messy PhD thesis into a hopefully slightly less messy book. Ruth Harris is the model of the kind of historian I would like to become: intellectually creative and, more than anything, a generous and warm person. Ouijdane Absi initiated me in the pleasures and difficulties of the Arabic language. It is thanks to a string of patient teachers from her to Ammar al-Samar that I have been able to conduct an important part of this research, though they would all probably be dismayed by my many grammatical mistakes and general laziness. All the Arabic translations have benefited hugely from the insights of Yousif Qasmiyeh, first as teacher then as friend.
But most crucial have been the friends who kept me sane, Ozren Jungic, Daniel Lee, Elizabeth Marcus, Fatemeh Shams, and Diego Rubio in Oxford, and Donál Hassett, Michelle Mann, and Chris Silver during bouts of archival fever. Muriam Davis taught me that sometimes a great friend and a great colleague are the same person. Clare Bucknell already knows she is the better twin. Valentina Zagaria, Dagna Rams, and the sisterhood of the Bialowieza forest have proven that communities with no territorial bounds really exist.
A special group of people provided editorial as well as emotional support. Kači Peringer and Anne Irfan kept the nonsense away. Being read by Sally Davies was a privilege. Kevin Brazil saved me from many a crisis. Sara Rahnama has helped me grow more than I ever thought I could. And Julia Nicholls is in many ways the true author, reading everything I wrote at every hour of the day and night.
My aunt Caroline got me thinking about news, and though I did not know this at the time, this project really began many years ago by observing work at a news channel thanks to my cousin Mathieu. My father Alexandre sat at the back of all of my talks, gently falling asleep. My debt to my mother, Martine, is so great that I know whatever I write here will disappoint her. To them both I owe the most.
I started studying history in order to understand the baffling world from which my grandmother came. Though she started this project, she did not live to see its end. Kamel, on the other hand, I had not yet met when I started, but with him this book and many more things finally feel finished, complete, whole.
Introduction
Algiers, May 1881. On the Place du Gouvernement, the heart of the city that connects the harbour to the heights of the Casbah, kiosks sell the local newspapers: La Vigie algérienne, L’Akhbar, or Le Petit colon algérien. Some of the best illustrations have been cut out of the papers and left to dry in the sun, on what look like clothes lines, for passers-by to gawk at. A shoal of raggamuffin street children, the yaouleds (from ya awlad!, ‘hey kids!’), shout out the day’s headlines in between shoe-polishing jobs. Down in the harbour just below, boats offload passengers from Marseille, along with a few packs of newspapers from the metropole. In the cafés under the arcades, European men drink cheap anisette and comment on the story of the day: the French army’s success in neighbouring Tunisia, where the conquest that will lead to the establishment of the French protectorate has just begun.1
As the invasion of Tunisia unfolds, the city of Algiers is bustling with people flocking in from the countryside, ‘eager for news concerning these events’.2 Their movements are watched and their packages systematically searched: the head of the Algiers police, Étienne Delignac, has been tasked with a ‘special surveillance [. . .] as to what Algerian Muslims might say or do on the occasion of events happening at the Tunisian border’.3 The police scour packages looking for prints and private letters in Arabic—two trunks full of scripture, brought back by a Moroccan traveller returning from Mecca, are seized by anxious policemen who cannot read their contents.4 In the cafés maures, where Muslim men meet to drink coffee and chatter, in the
1 On illustrations and visual culture in Algiers, see Omar Carlier, ‘L’émergence de la culture moderne de l’image dans l’Algérie musulmane contemporaine (Alger, 1880–1980)’, in Carlier (ed.), Images du Maghreb, Images au Maghreb (XIX–XXe siècles) (Paris, 2010), 11–40. On the yaouled and their marginal position in Algerian colonial society, see Christelle Taraud, ‘Les yaouleds: entre marginalisation sociale et sédition politique’, Revue d’histoire de l’enfance “irrégulière”, 10 (2008), 59–74. For a romanticized description of Algiers cafés in the late nineteenth century, see Louis Bertrand’s retrospective panorama of arriving in Algiers in 1891: Alger (Paris, 1938).
2 ‘Rapport spécial du commissariat central de police d’Alger’, 2 May 1881, ANOM/GGA/1H84.
3 Ibid., 26 April 1881. 4 Ibid., 23 May 1881.
bath-houses, in the fondouks where merchants barter and sleep, all the ‘places where Muslims gather’, the police watch over potential subversive activity.5 In the house of a certain Mustapha ould el Malitim, Muslim notables and holy men assemble to read the newspapers and comment on the latest news away from prying ears. Crowds form in the streets around a blind man nicknamed Adoul, who sings the praise of former heroes of Islam, and announces the imminent defeat of the Christians at the hands of the Turkish boats that are already rushing, he promises, towards Tunis. The meddah, or public bard, singing in an elegant variant of the Algerian dialect of Arabic, is promptly arrested.6 He is not the only singer detained by the police: a family of Italian ambulant musicians, resentful that their home nation is losing out on its own claim to colonize Tunisia, is deported back to the region of Naples, though what seditious music they had played is not recorded.7 News is read, news is spoken, news is sung, and though Tunis is some 500 kilometres away, Algiers is buzzing.
Delignac’s police reports allow us a peek into a rich world of news, both print and manuscript, written and oral, serious and rowdy, public and private, in formal Arabic, Algerian dialect, Italian, and French. News is exchanged through newspapers, conversations in cafés or other meeting-places, and professional singers. The final ingredient is Delignac himself, part of that great apparatus of news circulation that is the surveillance state, with its endless chain of reports on the most minute details.
This book describes the circulation of news in Algeria under French rule from 1881 to 1940. This was the period of maximum French power in North Africa—a period of intense technological revolution, global high imperialism, and the Third Republic, a regime that granted settlers in Algeria considerable civil liberties while denying them to the majority of Algerians. In a society divided between its native majority and a substantial settler minority, I focus my attention on the thing that by its very nature is meant to circulate— news. By looking at how accounts of recent events generated conflict as they moved between different social groups, I suggest that circulation and polarization were two aspects of the same phenomenon. Under colonialism, Algerians became more connected and more divided at the same time.
5 Ibid., 27 April 1881.
6 Traditionally paid by men of power to extol their virtues (the verb maddaha literally means ‘to praise’), equivalents of the meddah existed for languages other than Arabic. In Berberspeaking areas, amusnaw (plural imusnawen) were wandering wise men who spread their lore and news.
7 ‘Rapport spécial du commissariat central de police d’Alger’, 1 May 1881.
What’s News?
As the brief sketch above suggests, news can circulate in a bewildering variety of forms in the same place. Yet it is all too common to conflate news with a particular medium. Many people, for instance, confuse news with newspapers. But news is, in the words of Robert Darnton, ‘stories about what happened’: any report of an event regardless of the medium.8 To be more specific, news has a temporal aspect: as the English word suggests, ‘news’ is new information. This temporal aspect overlaps with an emotional one: news is a kind of report that is not merely new but interesting to the audience, as in the expression ‘that’s news to me!’ Moreover, news is not just any ‘story’: it is a report that is understood to be factual by its audience. As a genre, news is understood to be distinct from fiction, regardless of whether the content is accurate or not.9 To summarize, news is a report of a recent event deemed to be interesting and factual.
The use of the English word ‘news’ is my own, as people in Algeria used a variety of words in French, Arabic, and other languages to describe the news, none of which are a perfect translation for the English ‘news’. Sometimes, their concepts of news overlapped with the one outlined above. For instance, the French nouvelle is a close calque of the English ‘news’, but there were other words in French with no exact equivalent such as actualité. The common word in Arabic was akhbar, which could be better translated as ‘report’ and which has no particular temporal quality.10 What was considered to be interesting, factual, or recent differed widely between different audiences, and it is precisely the overlaps and distinctions between different conceptions of news that this study will probe. As the American sociologist Michael Schudson has pointed out, news is a ‘historically situated category rather than a universal and timeless feature of human societies’.11 Does that mean that the news can change? Or, if we to refer to both the singing of a blind man and the headlines of newspapers as ‘news’, does that mean that there can be multiple forms of news at the same time? In summary, what is the relationship between news, time, and the historian?
8 Robert Darnton, ‘An Early Information Society: News and the Media in EighteenthCentury Paris’, American Historical Review, 105:1 (2000), 1.
9 Michael Schudson, Sociology of News (New York, 2011), xvi. Jason Hill and Vanessa Schwartz, Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News (London, 2015), 4–5.
10 These terms will be explained further in subsequent chapters: for akhbar, see Chapter 3. Actualité has a more specific meaning than the English ‘news’ and usually refers to visual forms of news: see Chapter 4.
11 Schudson, Power of News, 38.
Media theorists and historians usually answer these questions only in very limited ways, as ‘news’ is primarily used in a modern context to refer to a particular development—the development of the ‘news industry’ in Europe and North America in the nineteenth century.12 Scholarship on news is thus too often both Eurocentric and presentist, and histories of ‘the news’ are often actually histories of journalism that read our current news practices backwards.13 Yet the experience of receiving and sharing exciting accounts of events is not characteristic of the modern era and of this specific industry. Taking the standards of the contemporary commercialized news industry for granted does not help us critically understand what the news is.
By contrast, a number of historians have looked at the circulation of information from a broader perspective. Early modernists in particular have shown that only looking at printed material excludes a whole world of gossip, rumour, manuscript, and song, all of which intersected to form a single ecosystem.14 This study draws upon the methodology of these works, which have frequently made use of state surveillance archives to better understand how information moved through society. In turns, this suggests that our contemporary division between surveillance and media needs to be broken down, as these are two sides of the same coin.
Yet it is no coincidence that most of these histories of information deal with the early modern period. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
12 For some notable histories of the news industry, see Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know about Itself (London, 2014), Terhi Rantanen, When News Was New (New York, 2009), Menahem Blondheim, News Over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844–1897 (Cambridge, MA, 1994), Richard John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb (eds.), Making News: The Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet (Oxford, 2015), or beyond an AngloAmerican context, Louise McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press (Princeton, 1991).
13 For a critique of the centrality of the model of modern journalism, see James Carey, ‘The Problem of Journalism History’, Journalism History, 1:1 (1974), 3–5. John Maxwell Hamilton and Heidi Tworek, ‘The Natural History of the News: An Epigenetic Study’, Journalism, 18:4 (2017), 391–407.
14 Edwards et al., ‘AHR Conversations: Historical Perspectives on the Circulation of Information’, American Historical Review, 116:5 (2011), 1393–435. For France and the Mediterranean region, see Darnton, ‘Early Modern Information Society’ and his Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, MA, 2011), Filippo De Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford, 2007), and John Paul Ghobrial, The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London and Paris in the Age of William Trumbull (Oxford, 2013). For some other cases, see Mary Elizabeth Berry, Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period (Berkeley, 2006), Alejandra Dubcovsky, Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (Cambridge, MA, 2016), and Katherine Grandjean, American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England (Cambridge, MA, 2015).
the explosion of news circulation through telegraphy and mass media created a proliferation of sources that makes it harder for the historian to see the whole panorama of news circulation. From the French seizure of Algiers in 1830 to the proclamation of Algerian independence in 1962, Algeria saw the introduction of the printing press, the optical and electric telegraphs, newsreels, the radio, and at the very end of the colonial period, television broadcasts. As this modern technology implies fundamentally different research methods for the researcher, it has tended to make the modern news industry look exceptional and detached from what happened before.15
Yet the communications revolution of the nineteenth century did not affect everyone in the same way. Far from creating an equidistant world, these technologies were linked to ideas of progress and Western superiority, and their spread created new inequalities.16 Several historians have thus pointed out that the spread of the global news system was intimately connected to the colonial expansion. However, they have tended to do so from the perspective of the empires themselves.17 On the ground, these technologies intersected with existing networks of information circulation. But in May 1881, Algiers was a city in which supposedly ‘modern’ news coexisted and interacted with ‘traditional’ networks of rumour and song. In the words of Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury on India, ‘There is little justification in calling these various channels of communication as traditional or modern. Some were older than others but not necessarily any less technologically aware or progressive in terms of communication.’18 In order to focus on this
15 Works on the eighteenth century have rightly challenged this division: see Will Slauter, ‘Forward-Looking Statements: News and Speculation in the Age of the American Revolution’, Journal of Modern History, 81 (2009), 759–92 and Pierre Rétat (ed.), L’Attentat de Damiens: discours sur l’événement au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1979).
16 Oliver Boyd-Barrett and Terhi Rantanen (eds.), The Globalization of News (London, 1998). Terhi Rantanen, ‘The Globalization of Electronic News in the 19th Century’, Media Culture Society, 19:4 (1997), 605–20. Roland Wenzlhuemer, ‘The Dematerialization of Telecommunication: Communication Centres and Peripheries in Europe and the World, 1850–1920’, Journal of Global History, 2:3 (2007), 345–72.
17 Daniel Headrick, The Invisible Weapon: Telecommunications and International Politics 1851–1945 (Oxford, 1991). James Brennan, ‘International News in the Age of Empire’, in Richard John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb (eds.), Making News: The Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet (Oxford, 2015), 107–27. Simon Potter, News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System 1876–1922 (Oxford, 2003). Ana Paula Silva, ‘Shaping the Portuguese Empire in the 20th Century: The Telegraph and the Radio’, Icon, 7 (2001), 106–22.
18 Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury, ‘Sinews of Panic and the Nerves of Empire: the Imagined State’s Entanglement with Information Panic, India c.1880–1912’, Modern Asian Studies, 38:4 (2004), 983.
juxtaposition of different forms of news, I have adopted a broad view of the full news ecosystem, at the expense of detail on individual publications or media.19
Algeria is a particularly helpful case for this approach. Conquered in fits and starts from 1830 and recognized as a full part of French territory in 1848, Algeria was both a colony in which settlers ruled over a native majority and also an integral part of a metropolitan European state. These peculiar and confusing institutional arrangements have often led Algeria to be taken as an exceptional case. Indeed, recent scholarship has emphasized the distinctiveness of settler colonial societies more broadly, at the risk of making them look completely different from other situations across the world.20 Without erasing the specificities of settler colonialism, this book examines the juxtaposition of a fully fledged European settler society with all the trappings of modernity alongside a vastly larger society with its own networks for distributing information, as a microcosm for understanding what happened to news across the world at this time.
If such a context has been dismissed as exceptional up to now, the challenge is less to make sense of communications theory in a colonial context and more to understand the colonial context in which communications theory emerged. It is not a coincidence that one of the foundational works in modern communications theory was the Canadian historian Harold Innis’ Empire and Communications (1950), which came out of Innis’ concern to explain the material bases of Canadian expansion across the North American continent. In turn, Innis’ work was fundamental to that of another Canadian, Marshall McLuhan, possibly the most famous scholar of media in the twentieth century. As products of a European settler society themselves, both Innis and McLuhan tried to understand how European men had extended their control over much of the world at the very moment when they were worrying that this system was collapsing.21
19 The phrase ‘news ecosystem’ has come to be used recently to refer to a whole range of news producers beyond ‘traditional’ commercial news outlets such as newspapers. See Pew Research Center, ‘How News Happens: A Study of the News Ecosystem of One American City’, 11 January 2010, http://www.journalism.org/2010/01/11/how-news-happens/. By using it as a category of historical analysis I hope to show that the interacting multiplicity of forms of news is not a recent development.
20 There has been a resurgence of interest in settler colonialism in recent years, particularly around the creation of the journal Settler Colonial Studies. For an overview, see Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Basingstoke, 2010). For a more historically specific approach, see Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen (eds.), Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices and Legacies (New York, 2005).
21 Harold Innis, Empire and Communications (Oxford, 1950). Marshall McLuhan’s most explicit attempt at history is The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto,
Innis and McLuhan had in common a certain technological determinism that cast the media as the secret agent of historical change. The age of the manuscript was followed by the age of print, and then radio, in a neat, linear sequence. This narrative has come under heavy criticism, and it is now well established that the appearance of new media hardly ‘replaces’ older ones, and that talk of each medium producing an ‘age’ is largely an illusion.22
One of the particular side-effects of this linear narrative is that it makes it impossible to conceptualize multiple forms of media coexisting at the same time. In the process, it reduces the kind of uneasy jumble in Algiers described above to a problem of periodization: Algerians were still using manuscript; they were not yet in the age of print. Modernization theory has often found places like Algeria confusing because it seemed like completely different stages of historical development were present at once.23 Thus while it might seem obvious to say that Algerians both read newspapers and sung news at the same time, in fact this synchronicity has quite radical implications for how we understand the importance of media in historical change.
In any given society, no individual medium is responsible for conveying all news. Though one medium may become particularly dominant at a given time, there are always a number of ways of exchanging news that interact with each other. Each of these different media is not neutral and comes loaded with a particular social value, yet the news itself circulates between them.
In turn, looking at news as a social phenomenon that goes beyond a single medium exposes the flaws in another entrenched historical narrative: that changes in media were responsible for the emergence of nationalism. In Imagined Communities (1983), the title of which has become a catchphrase for nationalism, Benedict Anderson made the argument that the most important and widespread modern form of political organization, the nation, emerged because of ‘print-capitalism’. Print-capitalism is the process by which the printing press, starting in the sixteenth century, created unified markets
1962). For more on the racist aspects of McLuhan’s work, see Arthur Asseraf, ‘What’s So New about News?’, Aeon, 9 May 2017.
22 On the notion of technologies producing their own ‘age’, see Gabrielle Hecht, ‘Rupture Talk in the Nuclear Age: Conjugating Colonial Power in Africa’, Social Studies of Science 32:5–6 (2002), 691–728. For a critical perspective on these theories in Middle Eastern studies, see Walter Armbrust, ‘A History of New Media in the Arab Middle East’, Journal of Cultural Research, 16:2–3 (2012), 155–74.
23 Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford, 2002), 9–10. For a classic modernization theory focusing on media in the Middle East, see Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (Glencoe, 1958).
