Provocation, Difference, and Public Space

This chapter assembles a broad array of archival sources on street-level interactions involving soldiers, café patrons, brothel owners, market-sellers, landlords, tenants, as well as children and adolescents that were retroactively seen as contributing to a rise in tension between Muslims and Jews in the city, beginning as early as 1914, but accelerating considerably in the late 1920s. This accumulation of incidents leading to interpersonal violence converged with and reinforced an atmosphere of political uncertainty related to the activities of the Federation of Muslim Elected Officials led by Mohamed Bendjelloul.

French Algeria’s Dual Fracture

This chapter explores the way that political polarization in the 1920s and 1930s played out in both metropolitan France and in French Algeria. Extremisms of both the right and the left challenged the legitimacy of the Third Republic. This confrontation between left and right was complicated in French Algeria by the appearance of an active cohort of Muslim politicians running for office under the terms of the 1919 law. By the early 1930s this cohort was led by a dynamic politician from Constantine named Mohamed Bendjelloul, whose activities created tension within the local political establishment.