Content area
Full text
Samuel Kalman. French Colonial Fascism: The Extreme Right in Algeria, 1919-1939. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013. ix + 268 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $95.00. Cloth.
While the extreme politics of the OAS during the Algerian War of Independence are well known, the longer history of extremism within the settler community of French Algeria has not been widely studied. Samuel Kalman's French Colonial Fascism seeks to rectify this imbalance through an examination of extreme right-wing political parties and organizations in interwar Algeria and the ways in which they appealed to the "fascist" tendencies of the settler population. Relying on a wide range of archival sources, Kalman traces the ebbs and flows of a range of organizations, comparing their platforms, their appeal, their reladonship with their metropolitan counterparts, and their rates of success across all three departments of French Algeria. The evolution of these organizations is framed, furthermore, by the broader context of metropolitan politics and policies and the emergence of Algerian nationalist and reformist movements.
Kalman contends that the European Algerian community of the 1920s and 1930s demonstrated a propensity for authoritarianism and violence, and that it was deeply xenophobic, anti-Semitic, and anti-Muslim. At the heart of settler politics was the articulation of a "distinctly colonial consciousness that . . . incorporated French politics and mores, yet simultaneously demanded the formation of a uniquely Algerian national construct" (25). Settler identity was characterized...