The Ethnic Republic: The European Contours of the French Universal Idea and the Making of French Algeria, 1870-1919

This dissertation explores the development of France’s republican project of national assimilation in and through colonial Algeria. It investigates the efforts of French republicans to assimilate Catholics, Muslims, and Jews in Algeria into the nation, and maps the integrationist strategies that members of each group deployed in order to fight or modify the republican assimilationist project. By bringing the history of these three groups into a shared analytical framework, the dissertation bridges the divide between national and colonial histories of France, and demonstrates that cultural and legal practices confined republican universalism to the boundaries of Christian Europe. Three non-French groups – Algerian Muslims, Algerian Jews, and Catholic immigrants from Italy, Spain, and Malta – inhabited colonial Algeria alongside a minority of settlers with origins in metropolitan France. The minority status of “original” Frenchmen prompted republican intellectuals and policymakers to consider which ethno-religious groups were capable of becoming French and assign to each group a distinct place within the nation. Republicans assumed that Catholic immigrants shared ethnic origins with Frenchmen. They consequently rejected immigrants’ aspirations to preserve their communal identities and worked to advance their “ethnic fusion” with settlers with roots in France. In contrast, republicans maintained that an insurmountable “civilizational” and “ethnic” gap separated Muslims and “Europeans.” They therefore accepted that Muslims retain their particularist identities, but rejected their demands for integration and excluded them from the French body politic. Jews occupied an in-between position between Catholics and Muslims. Unlike Muslims, they were seen as “civilized” enough to become citizens. Yet because republicans believed that they formed an unbreakable ethnic group, they tolerated that Jewish citizens retain their communal identity and institutions