Preliminary Programme

In Pondicherry in the 1870s a group of elite Francophone and Francophile Indians began claiming their right to renounce their indigenous personal status, submit to the French Civil Code, and thereby gain civil equality with Frenchmen in the colony. They actively encouraged their fellow Indians from the lowest social orders to do the same, making the ‘renunciation movement’ one which sought equality both with the French colonisers and within Indian society itself. Indians in the French possessions had already been granted political franchise, and thus those who chose to renounce their personal status effectively became recognised in French India as French citizens.

The frame within which French Indian ‘renouncers’ argued for equality expanded even as their struggle was underway. Many people who ‘renounced’ were also among those who left for Indochina from the 1870s, mainly to seek work in the expanding colonial administration in Cochinchina (now the southern part of Vietnam). The renouncers’ status as citizens was questioned by French colonial authorities in Cochinchina from the 1880s. Lively debates ensued in which European arguments used to justify inequalities between Europeans and migrant Asians were skilfully subverted by Indians petitioning their superiors in the Metropole.

Meanwhile, the Indians’ success in defending their right to exercise their citizenship in a colony other than their own opened up a yawning gap of inter-colonial inequality. On one side were French Indian migrants to Cochinchina who could voluntarily choose citizenship. On the other was a much larger group of indigenous ‘Annamites’ [Vietnamese] who held the most meagre of civil and political rights, and could only access citizenship through a restrictive process of naturalisation. The relative privileges enjoyed by French Indians in Indochina, while they blurred ideas of a colonial hierarchy based strictly on race, also challenged Vietnamese notions of where the dark-skinned Tamils should be placed in a proper social order. With the introduction of constitutionalist politics to Cochinchina in the 1920s, the privileges of Indian French citizens resident in Cochinchina spurred on demands among moderate Vietnamese reformers for electoral reforms and access to citizenship.

These different frameworks of social inequality together reveal variations in how the nineteenth century assimilationist project was put into practice across the French empire. The role of local peoples in France’s ‘old colonies’ - such as its possessions in India - was vital in shaping the forms of political and civil franchise they obtained. But by the latter half of the century changes in the ways in which colonial citizenship was accessed reflect a growing idea in French colonial thinking that the privileges of citizenship were better preserved for an elite in society rather than extended to whole populations. Thus naturalisation laws introduced for ‘Annamites’ in Cochinchina in the late 1880s brought in a new exclusionist notion of assimilation. Colonial citizenship by the twentieth century, in the context of mobility within the French empire, became itself a producer of inequality and a reason to question – as Vietnamese reformers did so ardently in the 1920s - the French civilising mission.
(Show less)

In April 1901, members of the Righa tribe of central Algiers province attacked the European village of Margueritte (today Aïn Torki), demanding that colonists convert to Islam by reciting the shahada, killing five who refused, taking others hostage, and sacking European homes and businesses before fleeing into the countryside. For their alleged role in these events, one hundred and seven Righa men were charged with crimes ranging from organized rebellion to murder, theft, and refusing the orders of French state agents. Unlike most colonial subjects accused of such offenses in French Algeria, however, the Righas were tried not by a military tribunal or the Algiers criminal court, nor interned by administrative decree. Their lawyers convinced France’s supreme court that a colonial jury dominated by European settlers would not give them a fair trial and that the case should be transfered to mainland France. This decision turned a relatively minor incident into a full-fledged “affair,” as the trial, ultimately held in Montpellier in the winter of 1902-1903 brought the harsh realities of settler colonialism in Algeria into sudden and dramatic public light.
The proposed paper will explore the legal debates surrounding the Montpellier trial, which turned on the political and social inequalities of settler colonialism in French North Africa. For the accused rebels’ defenders, the uprising of April 1901 was a legitimate expression of dissent within a settler colonial state that denied indigenous Algerians access to the democratic institutions of the press, the courtroom, and the ballot box. Violent resistance, defense lawyers and sympathetic journalists argued, was an understandable response to the privileges enjoyed by Algeria’s European colonists in stark violation of French republican principles. To prosecutors, and the vast majority of Algeria’s Europeans, by contrast, the Righas were ordinary criminals whose actions threatened settlers’ rights as French citizens to life and property and undermined the authority of the French Republic in Algeria. Such challenges, colonial officials and settler authors insisted, must be punished to the full extent of the law and prevented by extending the rights of local self-government to the colony’s enfranchised European minority.
The outcome of the Righas' trial was mixed: defense arguments largely carried the day with the Montpellier jury, which convicted less than one-quarter of the defendants and refused to impose any death sentences on the grounds that France had outlawed capital punishment for political crimes, but the settlers won the larger political battle, gaining autonomy in financial affairs and scuttling any reform of indigenous Algerians’ status. In the process, however, the Margueritte Affair opened a critical window onto the inequities of Algerian colonial society and provoked an unprecedented public contest over the legitimacy of settler sovereignty in French North Africa. At stake was the proper framework for measuring equality in French Algeria: was it equity among French citizens, whether resident in metropolitan or overseas France, or equality among the inhabitants of French Algeria that counted?

The proposed paper will explore the legal debates surrounding the Montpellier trial, which turned on the political and social inequalities of colonial society in French North Africa. For the accused rebels’ defenders, the uprising of April 1901 was a legitimate expression of dissent within a settler colonial state that denied indigenous Algerians access to the democratic institutions of the press, the courtroom, and the ballot box. Violent resistance, defense lawyers and sympathetic journalists argued, was an understandable response to the privileges enjoyed by Algeria’s European colonists in stark violation of French republican principles. To prosecutors, and the vast majority of Algeria’s Europeans, by contrast, the Righas were ordinary criminals whose actions threatened settlers’ rights to life and property, disrupted public order, and undermined the authority of the French Republic. Such violence, colonial officials and settler authors insisted, should be punished to the full extent of the law and future unrest prevented by extending the rights of self-government to the colony’s enfranchised European minority.

The outcome of the trial was mixed: defense arguments largely carried the day with the Montpellier jury, which convicted less than one-quarter of the defendants and refused to impose any death sentences on the grounds that France had outlawed capital punishment for political crimes, but the settlers won the larger political battle, gaining autonomy in financial affairs and scuttling equalizing reform of colonial law. In the process, however, the Margueritte Affair opened a critical window onto the inequities of Algerian colonial society and provoked an unprecedented public contest over the legitimacy of settler sovereignty in French North Africa. (Show less)