Rewriting the Battles of Algiers

Abstract

Following conventions in metropolitan France, colonial Algiers was a city of posted proclamations. During the war for independence, officially declared in 1954, posters supporting “French Algeria” transformed buildings into agents of propaganda. Counterclaims by the National Liberation Front advocating Algeria’s independence were scrawled on walls throughout the city, and later aggressively contested by the far-right Secret Army Organization’s own poster campaign. New housing estates were animated by painted inscriptions and more fleeting actions, from choreographed illuminations to coordinated choruses from apartment balconies. Here Henri Lefebvre’s analysis of the ephemeral provides a critical framework for understanding how urban spaces were given multivalent meanings. Such ephemeral tactics challenged the logic of buildings designed as structures of containment to reimagine them as sites of collective resistance. These performative interventions served to actively produce a conjectural space, one in which it became possible to envision a different future for the city and its residents.

Keywords

urban space ephemera war graffiti writing architecture

On December 11, 1960, Magnum photographer Nicholas Tikhomiroff captured a dramatic view of protests in Algiers (Figure 1). The previous day, ultra-rightist European Algerians organized demonstrations criticizing President Charles de Gaulle’s proposed referendum to decide the question of self-governance in Algeria. The referendum was a potential first step toward Algerian independence, and was fiercely resisted by a paramilitary faction that wished to maintain the French colonial regime at all costs. In response, thousands of Muslim Algerians joined in counterdemonstrations, which elicited the military crackdown featured in Tikhomiroff’s photo.¹ These events marked a critical turning point in the war for independence, which had been initiated in November 1954 by the FLN (Front de libération nationale, or National Liberation Front), although the French government did not officially recognize the war as such for decades to come.² In the photograph, French soldiers dominate the foreground, clad in protective helmets with weapons at the ready, as they order the assembled civilians to disperse. The image vividly documents the emphatic dissolution of boundaries between home front and battlefront during the war for independence, as cities, villages, and even domestic interiors became terrains of violent conflict. In this case, security forces infiltrated the interior streets of Diar el-Mahsul, a housing estate designed by the French architect Fernand Pouillon the year the war began. Here the impassive bulwark of soldiers in the foreground echoes the encircling massive limestone walls of Pouillon’s complex, which together define an architectonics of containment and militarized order.

Figure 1.

Nicolas Tikhomiroff, Diar el-Mahsul, view of interior street running through the section of the complex designed for Muslim Algerian residents, Algiers, December 1960.

If we shift our attention from the monumental outlines of Pouillon’s buildings and the dramatic confrontation between soldiers and civilians that they frame to the less prominent marks of graffiti visible on a far wall of the complex, Tikhomiroff’s photograph might open a distinctly different view onto the city at war. Considerable attention has been paid to how the tools of architecture and urban planning were harnessed, following the French invasion of Algiers in 1830, to assert foreign domination and consolidate colonial sovereignty. This tendency continued into the late colonial period and the early stages of the war for independence when numerous mass housing complexes, including Diar el-Mahsul, were constructed in hopes of redressing dire housing conditions for Muslim Algerians in the capital and stemming the escalating nationalist movement. Such monumental incursions have effectively overshadowed more fleeting, ephemeral interventions in the urban landscape intended to challenge or resist colonial authority. While broadsides and publicity posters had long been visible elements of the urban landscape in colonial Algiers, the war for independence inaugurated a concerted battle of words and images that radically redefined the ideological stakes of ephemera in the city. Indeed, posters and leaflets were vital instruments in the so-called psychological war initiated by the French military. The main organs of the resistance, the FLN and the ALN (Armée de Libération Nationale, or National Liberation Army), responded in kind, as did the ultra-rightist, clandestine paramilitary group, the OAS (Organization de l’armée secrète, or Secret Army Organization), in the final stages of the conflict.

Historians have drawn considerable attention to the French military’s active role in producing visual images intended to promote official claims about the future of French Algeria. This war of images, however, has often been characterized as an unequal one, given the seeming lack of a similarly robust archive of visual imagery produced by the resistance and its supporters (Gervereau & Stora, 2004). While Hannah Feldman (2013) has challenged this claim through her examination of photographs long excluded from consideration, my aim here is to further this reassessment while expanding the analytic frame to the broader urban landscape. In Algiers, significant ideological battles were waged through diverse media explicitly intended to activate and make visible competing topographies of persuasion.

In what follows, I begin by examining the visual and textual rhetoric of ephemeral artifacts produced and disseminated by competing factions during the Algerian war. Moving from examining ephemeral artifacts—whether in the form of printed posters or graffiti—I also consider a broad range of temporary constructions and coordinated appropriations of urban space, understood in relation to Henri Lefebvre’s reflections on ephemera and the city. Especially during the later stages of the conflict, concerted efforts were made to temporarily recreate buildings and streets through orchestrated, multimedia attacks. Lefebvre’s call to register the effects of relatively transitory materials and events provides a critical lens for understanding the significance of such ephemeral tactics on the contested territories of the city at war. Reconsidering the ephemeral through an expanded and emphatically spatial frame orients us not only to the claims made through images and words prominently emblazoned along city streets but also to those tactics whose performative qualities and appeals to the senses actively worked to reimagine Algiers and indeed the very conditions of citizenship the city made possible.

Mediacity Algiers

Colonial Algiers was a city of posted texts and proclamations, following established conventions in metropolitan France.³ A photograph taken in the 1880s by Étienne and Antonin Neurdein featuring the 17th-century al-Jadid Mosque (or the Mosquée de la Pêcherie, as it was then often known) provides a revealing view onto this phenomenon (Figure 2). Framed as a seemingly spontaneous moment of chance encounter, the photograph foregrounds the city’s marked cosmopolitanism, which was a significant consequence of settler colonialism in Algeria. Here two bourgeois men in top hats, just visible at the photo’s far left edge, are set apart from their working-class compatriots lingering at the top of a staircase. Nearby a priest crosses paths with a turbaned Arab notable, while a woman of European descent clutches the hand of a child, who in turn stares at a barefoot Algerian boy holding a bird in a cage. The image thus dramatically stages the remarkable ethnic and racial diversity of the capital city’s residents, most of who had immigrated there from southern European countries, including France, or from rural areas across Algeria (Clancy-Smith, 2009, p. 50). This carefully composed vision of Algiers as a multiethnic crossroads is set against the recognizable backdrop of one of its defining landmarks, the al-Jadid Mosque. In this setting, the broadsides plastered across the entrance façade figure merely as incidental details. For my purposes, however, these elements indicate the pervasive presence of print ephemera in the urban landscape. Remarkably, even the walls of the city’s most prominent mosque were strategically appropriated to this end.

Figure 2.

Étienne and Antonin Neurdein, La Mosquée de la Pêcherie [al-Jadid Mosque], Algiers, albumen photograph, c. 1880.

As Cesare Birignani (2012) has vividly recounted, single-sheet printed texts had a long history of use in France, initially as the primary vehicle for royal orders and official communications. While their administrative and juridical function made posted notices (affiches) and their ceremonial reading key mechanisms for asserting sovereign power, the same forms were also avidly embraced as indispensable tools of political resistance. Historians have painstakingly documented how the liberalization of the printing and publishing trades that followed the French Revolution encouraged the proliferation of tracts, broadsides, and leaflets targeting an ever-expanding urban audience (Darnton & Roche, 1989; Taws, 2013). In 1881, the passage of new laws prohibiting unauthorized posting on governmental and other select public buildings aimed to ensure that official announcements would retain their authority even as they vied for attention with a rapidly expanding array of private and commercial notices adorning city streets (Gervereau, 1991). The Neurdein brothers’ photograph provides an index of such tensions around this very moment in Algiers. In this case, al-Jadid Mosque’s entrance porch was largely given over to posters and printed notices, all of which were written in French. The building’s façade adjoining the Place du Gouvernement, then the defining city center, thus functioned as a dynamic signboard, one that signaled the linguistic priority of the settler population. Dedicated framed areas, like the one on the far right, featured advertisements for entertainments and theatrical performances, which competed for attention with more informally mounted posters, like the nearby notice of property for sale.⁴ Viewed from this vantage point, the photograph demonstrates how seemingly banal artifacts of urban modernity, like the broadside or the poster, actively served to rewrite the architectural structures and urban spaces they adorned.

The creation of the Place du Gouvernement (now the Place des Martyrs) and the concomitant transformation of the neighboring al-Jadid Mosque were among the first actions undertaken by the French military after the invasion of Algiers in 1830. The creation of an expansive public square along the waterfront necessitated extensive demolition of the city’s dense built fabric and thus became a critical means of asserting French sovereignty over this terrain (Çelik, 1997, 1999-2000, 2008). Unlike other nearby mosques, al-Jadid was preserved, but its relationship to the surrounding city was irrevocably altered, not least because the adjacent Place du Gouvernment was strategically misaligned with and slightly elevated in relation to this building. As Zeynep Çelik (2009) has argued, the equestrian sculpture of the Duke of Orleans erected in 1845 at one end of the square “underlined the statement of French control over Algerians,” as the general pointedly turned his back on the al-Jadid Mosque (p. 206). At some point thereafter, a clock was mounted on the mosque’s minaret, effectively muting its intended role in announcing the call to prayer in favor of timekeeping on a Western clock (Çelik, 2009, p. 206). Not unlike the seemingly modest addition of a timepiece, the transformation of the mosque’s entrance façade into an authorized site for bill posting might be read as a further attempt to desacralize this contested site. Particularly given that the law of 1881 expressly forbade the posting of notices on “buildings dedicated to worship” (Gervereau, 1991, p. 52), the mosque’s recreation as commercial signboard became an additional means of asserting French authority over the Muslim population of Algiers through the subtle reworking of the built landscape.

The rise of the illustrated poster in the 19th century and the rapid proliferation of new forms of advertisement in the 20th century radically transformed the visual character and visibility of urban ephemera in Algiers as elsewhere. By the 1920s, Imprimérie Baconnier had become the city’s leading printer and publisher of full-color, lithographic publicity posters, which were commissioned by private industry and the colonial administration alike (Baconnier, 2009). A photograph taken during the celebrations that erupted in the wake of the official declaration of Algeria’s independence in July 1962 bears witness to the ensuing transformation of city walls by a dense, multilayered skin of publicity materials (Figure 3). In contrast to the relatively restrained textual mediation of the al-Jadid Mosque evident in the Neurdein brothers’ photograph, a temporary wooden fence, or palissade, enclosing a construction site is here almost entirely covered by layered signage clamoring for attention along an unidentified street.⁵ Billboard-sized frames, managed as part of the Africa Company’s extensive publicity empire, featured a large-scale, full-color film poster with dramatically glossy images and a painted billboard promoting the daily newspaper Le Parisien, both of which competed with smaller notices advertising an apartment building for sale, horse races, and the opening of a new supermarket in Algiers.

Figure 3.

Marc Riboud, Algiers at independence, July 1962.

Although posters on city streets were routinely subject to deterioration over time and even to explicit acts of vandalism, the visible failure to maintain this authorized advertising wall in Algiers might itself be read as revealing evidence of disruptions brought by war. Well before this photo was taken, of course, posted ephemera had come to serve predominantly commercial rather than administrative or juridical ends, in what had become a new vernacular of urban consumption (Cronin, 2008; Hahn, 2009). Given these realities, it is all the more striking that the rising tide of nationalist sentiment in Algeria in the 1930s and the outbreak of armed conflict in the mid-1950s led to the resurgence of printed media as instruments of political contestation, notably harnessed in the service of divergent ideological ends.

A War of Words and Images

The Algerian revolution was definitively launched via print ephemera, albeit in a different form than the broadside or the publicity poster. On November 1, 1954, the FLN issued its first formal proclamation, announcing its establishment as a unified nationalist organization, calling for the restoration of Algeria’s autonomy, and pledging its commitment to “the struggle, by all means necessary, towards the realization of our goal” (in Harbi, 1981, p. 101). Produced clandestinely on a typewriter and reproduced with the aid of a mimeograph machine, this defining tract was distributed widely across Algeria and sent directly to key domestic and international press outlets. New technologies of mass communication were thus harnessed as a convenient means of dissemination, even as the inexpensive and decidedly low-tech process of the document’s production set the tone for the FLN’s strategic use of tracts and proclamations throughout the ensuing conflict.

As the war in Algeria escalated, the French military offensive launched in 1956 was accompanied by a massive, multimedia propaganda campaign undertaken by the Army’s newly expanded Bureau régional d’action psychologique, or Regional Office for Psychological Action, later designated as the army’s Cinquième bureau, or Fifth Office (Ageron, 1997; Descombin, 1994). The Cinquième bureau aimed to quell the resistance movement and to rally various factions to the cause of maintaining French Algeria. Numerous posters, pamphlets, and leaflets were produced, most of which were directed toward a specific audience, whether the general populace of European settlers or Muslim Algerians, or more discrete groups, such as French soldiers, resistance fighters, or Algerians who had served in the French army (Aggoun, 2002). Military trucks, outfitted as open-air cinemas, descended on villages and rural areas, where they screened films created by the army’s film service (Denis, 2009). In Algiers, the so-called psychological war was waged in part from the offices of the SAU, or Urban Administrative Sections. Created in September 1956, the SAU attempted to forge Franco-Algerian solidarity by providing limited social services to underserved Muslim Algerian populations—primarily targeting women and young men—while simultaneously policing their everyday activities (Mathias, 1998). Following the example of their rural counterparts, SAU directors created a network of Muslim Algerian officers in the capital who worked the front lines as liaisons and informants and whose duties included the distribution of posters and leaflets as well as the orchestration of seemingly impromptu open-air broadcasts via amplified reel-to-reel tapes.

Given the French army’s desire to quell the intensifying conflict, it is perhaps not surprising that the propaganda campaign initially took intercommunal reconciliation as its central theme. Bold tricolored posters featured harmonious visions of Franco-Algerian brotherhood (and, at least in one instance, sisterhood), frequently with bilingual captions. One example featured two standing male figures, together holding a French flag, while each clutched a sheaf of wheat in one arm in reference to the colony’s celebrated status as the breadbasket of France (Figure 4). Although the two men were nearly identical in stature, stance, and even facial features, the “Muslim” Algerian was distinguished by his high-collar shirt and red fez, while the “European” Algerian was set off by the tricolore unfurled behind him. The poster’s bilingual text, “France Remains,” further underscored the strategic mirroring of the two figures. Designed by illustrator and poster artist Berney Forien and produced by Imprimérie Baconnier, this full-color lithographic poster followed earlier examples commissioned by the colonial administration for explicitly propagandistic and promotional ends, most notably to mark the 1930 Centennial celebration of French colonization of Algeria. While the theme of Franco-Algerian fraternité had long been a staple of official imagery, Forien’s version was a marked departure. Earlier incarnations, including a poster produced to mark the Centennial celebrations in the city of Oran, used dramatic contrasts in attire to underscore differences between European colonists and indigenous subjects, while the paternalistic gesture of the former expressed the unequal, dependent relationship on which the colonial project was founded (Figure 5). By contrast, Forien’s version radically reduced markers of difference to project an image of Franco-Algerian reconciliation through similarity, thus interpolating both Europeans and Muslims as French Algerian subjects, even at a moment when the vast majority of Muslim Algerians did not possess full rights of citizenship (Shepard, 2006).

Figure 4.

Berney Forion, France Remains, Éditions Baconnier, Algiers, c. 1957 (Baconnier 2009, p. 193).

Figure 5.

Algeria’s Centenary, Exposition in Oran, Affiches Jules Carbonel, Algiers, 1930 (Baconnier 2009, p. 175).

In 1958, after de Gaulle assumed the presidency and as the war in Algeria intensified, the visual approach of official propaganda posters shifted radically again. Dramatically cropped black-and-white photographs with bold graphics and eye-catching texts replaced full-color lithographic prints, a transformation that heralded a broader shift in poster production from full-color lithographic prints to black-and-white photos that Laurent Gervereau (1992, p. 178) has argued accompanied the popularization of television in the 1960s. At the same time, harmonious visions were abandoned to emphasize instead French Algeria’s modern dynamism and technological advancements (Aggoun, 2002). One such poster featured a black-and-white photograph of a densely packed crowd viewed from above and superimposed with the red-lettered text, “Algeria—ten million Frenchmen” (Figure 6). In this image, differences were effectively subsumed by the homogenizing mass of the crowd.

Figure 6.

Algeria—10,000,000 French People, Éditions Baconnier, Algiers, 1958 (Baconnier 2009, p. 193).

Although it is difficult to reconstruct the precise circuits through which official posters were distributed and viewed, a photograph taken during President de Gaulle’s visit to Algiers in June 1958 reveals that this one was used during a carefully orchestrated rally staged in his honor (Figure 7). While many posters produced by the army’s propaganda service were pasted onto city walls, others served as mobile props in organized demonstrations of support for the colonial regime. Minimal notices devoid of visual imagery were also produced, whether featuring concise slogans, such as “The new Algeria will remain French,” or rallying residents to action, like the bilingual tracts that blanketed the city before de Gaulle’s election in 1958 and in anticipation of the referendum on Algeria’s self-determination in January 1961. By design, these materials transformed buildings, streets, and the city’s most prominent public squares—especially when filled with rallying crowds—into active agents of persuasion.

Figure 7.

Erich Lessing, Demonstration organized at the Forum d’Alger in front of the Palais du Gouvernement Général during General de Gaulle’s visit to Algiers, June 4, 1958.

Whereas the French government poured considerable capital into the production of full-color graphic posters, the resistance movement embraced comparatively inexpensive and low-tech strategies. Rather than professionally printed brochures, the leaders of the FLN relied on typewritten and mimeographed tracts, produced in secret or outside the country, as the essential medium for official pronouncements. Most of the tracts created by the resistance movement, however, were not intended for public display but were circulated more discreetly to targeted domestic audiences. Select communiqués were also strategically distributed to international media, like the proclamation of November 1, 1954, famously given voice on Radio Cairo. Ephemera thus played a critical role in forging collective identity among a widening network of participants in and sympathetic supporters of the resistance. The emphasis was on pithy phrases, frequently printed on one eighth of a standard sheet of paper, for ready and economical distribution (Ageron, 1997; Ihaddaden, 1997). Similar slogans were also painted on available building walls. Rallying cries for the FLN and ALN were especially popular, as were catchphrases of the resistance, such as “Long live independent Muslim Algeria,” visible in another of Tikhomiroff’s photos from December 1960 (Figure 8). Graffiti not only served as a tool for mobilization and as visible testament of a given neighborhood’s support of Algerian independence, but it also defiantly expressed an alternative discourse on the nation’s future.⁶

Figure 8.

Nicolas Tikhomiroff, graffiti at Diar el-Mahsul, Algiers, December 11, 1960.

After the 1961 referendum ensured Algeria’s self-determination, far-right OAS militias accelerated their bomb attacks and assassinations in the capital in a last-ditch effort to preserve the colonial regime. These acts were also accompanied by further contributions to the war of words and images. Adopting both the FLN’s guerrilla tactics of surreptitiously painted slogans and the official strategy of the printed poster, the OAS used these techniques to threaten its detractors and to assert its authority over the city. Significantly, a prominent poster produced by the OAS resurrected the visual style of the Cinquième bureau’s initial propaganda campaign, even as its silk-screen printing technique diverged considerably from the high production quality of the earlier lithographic prints (Figure 9). Indeed, silk-screening facilitated the creation of full-color posters that could be produced clandestinely, without a full-scale printing press (Gervereau, 1992). In this image, the two gestural figures outlined in black and prominent focus on the French flag recalled Forien’s earlier poster, here recast in a defiantly aggressive stance. The earlier image of Franco-Algerian reconciliation was displaced by a radically different vision of fraternité, one that extended solely to well-armed European men. At the same time, both text and image adopted iconic tropes of the French revolutionary tradition, from the text, “To arms, citizens,” excerpted from “La Marseillaise,” to the self-conscious reworking of the central figures in Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 painting, Liberty Leading the People. With this defining poster, the OAS aligned itself with the French state precisely to question its legitimacy and usurp its authority. Even as the OAS laid claim to the most hallowed symbols of the French Republican tradition, it radically inverted their meaning in this anti-Republican call to arms aimed at the destruction of the Gaullist state, which it accused of having betrayed the nation.

Figure 9.

OAS, silk-screen poster, c. 1961 (Gervereau, Rioux, and Stora, 1992, p. 158).

As much as the war of words and images in Algiers took distinctly different forms, it is striking that the French military apparatus, the resistance movement, and an extremist militia group all embraced ephemera as crucial instruments of battle. Of course, the textual and graphic examples I have considered thus far were merely select elements within the iconosphere, or what Ella Chmielewska describes as “the palpable environment of information that encompasses all elements of the visual landscape” (2007, p. 155). Indeed, posters, tracts, and graffiti were far from free-floating artifacts, whether they were grafted onto walls or transformed into mobile props paraded through the streets. Such dynamic relationships between artifact and urban space have often served to actively project territorial claims onto the city (Brighenti, 2010). Indeed, the specific urban areas where these materials were deployed as well as the process of their inscription into the cityscape further inflected their meaning. By expanding the purview beyond posters, tracts, and graffiti to include multimedia ephemeral interventions in Algiers, it might be possible to excavate more precisely the overlapping and highly contested topographies of persuasion that were forged in the city during the final years of the war for independence.

Topographies of Persuasion

Henri Lefebvre’s reflections provide a provocative framework for understanding the relationship between the ephemeral and urban space. In his detailed history of the 1871 Paris Commune, Lefebvre was fascinated by the formative role that posted proclamations, leaflets, and other printed ephemera played in mobilizing the population and in imagining an alternative city (Lefebvre, 1965). Throughout his account, he insisted on situating these documents within the urban landscape. In so doing, Lefebvre emphasized, for example, the symbolic importance of the notice displayed in the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville, the public square adjoining city hall, which served to officially proclaim the Commune. As Lukasz Stanek has observed, the historical events of the Commune resonated with Lefebvre’s own experience of political protest in 1968 and contributed to his theorization of centrality as a condition of urban space that was not static but always produced relationally (Stanek, 2011). Although the relatively new university in Nanterre, where Lefebvre taught, was located on the suburban periphery of Paris, the events of May 1968 invested it with newfound magnetic force.

Lefebvre’s fascination with ephemera as a catalyst for urban revolution provided a springboard for his articulation of “the ephemeral” as a means of producing an alternative space in the city, or in Lefebvre’s own terms, a differential space. In his view, mass housing projects, or grands ensembles, that first emerged in the 1950s in Algiers and in cities across France, had effectively produced an undifferentiated space—the city of state-driven, industrialized production. In the face of such abstract rationality, Lefebvre imagined the possibility of another space, one produced through concrete appropriations, no matter how momentary. As he observed, “the differences that are established in space do not come from space as such but from that which settles there, that which is assembled and confronted by and in the urban reality” (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, p. 125). The city must then be understood as the product of a dynamic dialectic of form and content, within which the shifting rhythms of event and occupation might carry transformative potential. Urban space is defined simultaneously by the visible and invisible limits that divide it into discrete units—such as the residential building, the neighborhood, or the administratively defined electoral district—and by its openness and indeterminacy—the possibility that “virtually anything can happen anywhere” (p. 130). The ephemeral, then, is the means by which “every place becomes multifunctional, polyvalent, transfunctional, with an incessant turnover of functions; where groups take control of spaces for expressive actions and constructions, which are soon destroyed” (p. 130). Importantly, in this formulation, the ephemeral is a conjectural space, a space of projective anticipation that is necessarily fleeting.

In the early stages of the war, the city center became a primary terrain of contestation in Algiers. While the Casbah was the focus of sustained tensions and violent conflict throughout the war, another significant area of activity comprised the series of stepped esplanades and public squares stretching between the colonial administration’s headquarters, the Palais du Gouvernement Général, and the Central Post Office (Grande Poste; Figure 10). Whereas the Place du Gouvernement, featured in the Neurdein brothers’ photograph (Figure 2), was the colonial city’s defining crossroads in the 19th century, the development of new commercial and residential quarters along the waterfront shifted the imagined center of Algiers. President de Gaulle’s visit to the city in June 1958 and his carefully orchestrated address from the balcony of the Palais du Gouvernement Général to the crowd assembled on the esplanade below helped further reinforce this site’s symbolic importance as the crucial urban axis of French colonial power. In late January 1960, demonstrators once again descended on these same squares and streets. This time, however, the capital became the stage for the overt display of resistance to de Gaulle’s stated position that Algerians should have the right of self-determination by a hard-line faction who aimed to rally the military to their cause.

Figure 10.

View of the area between the Palais du Gouvernment Général and the Central Post Office (Grande Poste), map of Algiers, 1961.

Beginning on January 24, vocal advocates for French Algeria erected barricades across the rue Charles Péguy, near the central Post Office and within view of the Palais du Gouvernement Général further up the hill (Figure 11). These sprawling constructions, patrolled by armed insurgents in military fatigues, served as the point of departure for demonstrations spanning several days. This carefully orchestrated urban siege aimed to catalyze a broader insurrection against de Gaulle, who had recently broached the possibility of Algerian independence, albeit within the framework of a continued formal political and economic partnership with France. While the barricades were an amalgamation of hastily assembled cobblestones, sandbags, salvaged boards, and even pillaged street furnishings, the crowning element was a product of calculated bricolage. Suspended by rope from a wooden post erected at the barricade’s center point, a battered and subtly modified traffic sign was surmounted by a French flag (Figure 12). The subtle reinscription of a banal prop of everyday urban order proclaimed the surrounding area, at least temporarily, to be a “French zone.” The aim of this ad hoc construction was to reterritorialize the symbolic urban axis it defined as the immutable terrain and symbolic heart of French Algeria. At the same time, demonstrators employed barricades to dramatic effect, self-consciously summoning up their long history of use as instrumental tools of political revolution in France. Although these events failed to generate the intended coup d’état, they marked the hardening of lines between advocates for independence and intransigent supporters of maintaining the colonial project at all costs.

Figure 11.

Unknown photographer, rue Charles Péguy/esplanade de la Grande Poste, Algiers, January 28, 1960 (Miquel, 1993, p. 212).

Figure 12.

Eppe (photographer), rue Charles Péguy/esplanade de la Grande Poste, Algiers, January 1960 (Miquel, 1993, p. 212).

Significantly, the dismantling of the barricades was followed by the concerted reorientation of the city’s topography of persuasion from the commercial and administrative center to the recently erected housing estates in the hills along the urban periphery. In early December 1960, renewed demonstrations and actions by advocates for the colonial regime ignited new grassroots opposition centered in these housing complexes, as Nicolas Tikhimeroff’s photograph taken at Diar el-Mahsul documents (Figure 1). By all accounts, mass protests in favor of Algeria’s independence originated in the Clos Salembier and Climat de France quarters, areas that were home to a rapidly expanding, majority population of Muslim Algerians and to ambitious new housing developments recently designed by French architect Fernand Pouillon in part to accommodate these residents.⁷ Diar el-Mahsul (or “city of plenty”) was heralded from Pouillon’s initial designs in 1954, the year the war began, as the city’s first intentionally integrated housing estate, with over half of the apartments reserved for Muslim Algerians (Figure 13). Nevertheless, Diar el-Mahsul was structured by clear divisions separating apartments intended for inhabitants of European origin and those of North African origin. Whereas the European section was prominently sited at the crest of the hills overlooking the bay of Algiers, the Algerian section featured considerably smaller apartments sequestered well below the grade of the new major thoroughfare that spatially separated the two areas of Diar el-Mahsul. In contrast to the generous courtyards and terraces in the European section that framed dramatic views of the city and the water below, the buildings in the Algerian section were tightly clustered along narrow streets, disconnected from the surrounding city.

Figure 13.

Fernand Pouillon, Diar el-Mahsul, Algiers, 1954-1955 (Jean-Lucien Bonillo, 2001, p. 30).

Diar el-Mahsul was located in the Clos Salembier quarter at the crest of the hills above Belcourt, an area with a majority European Algerian population. While the Climat de France development took shape in the hills above the Casbah, it was also close to Bab el Oued, a popular neighborhood comprised predominantly of working-class residents of European origin (Figure 14). In both cases, Pouillon’s housing complexes defined significant boundaries between urban areas with majority European Algerian or majority Muslim Algerian populations. Climat de France was conceived on an even grander scale than Diar el-Mahsul, as the entire complex was originally intended to accommodate some 30,000 Muslim Algerian residents (Figure 15). Described as the new Casbah, the sprawling Climat de France development was designed as a city within the city, with clusters of apartment buildings organized in terrace formation on either side of the monumental 200 Columns Building, which took its name from the grandiose portico lining its vast rectilinear courtyard. Even more than the Algerian section of Diar el-Mahsul, Climat de France explicitly imagined housing in the guise of fortification, especially in the 200 Columns Building, where markedly small apartments were subsumed behind the structure’s thick stone walls. Whereas Pouillon claimed he wanted to design a palace for the city’s poorest inhabitants, the courtyard building’s aggressive monumentality defined a rigidly ordered and highly controlled residential structure.

Figure 14.

Map of Algiers, 1961.

Figure 15.

Fernand Pouillon, Climat de France, Algiers, 1954-1957, aerial view taken around 1960. The 200 Columns Building, with its massive courtyard, dominates the foreground, while the Cité Boucle-Perez is visible at the far end of Pouillon’s complex.

Like Diar el-Mahsul, Climat de France was a highly publicized contribution to what Mayor Jacques Chevalier repeatedly described as a “battle for housing,” initiated shortly after he took office in 1953. Through the employment opportunities these vast construction sites would make available and the modern apartments they would provide, Chevalier hoped these projects might serve as effective means of quelling increasingly strident demands for Algeria’s independence (Çelik, 1997, 2003; Crane, 2008, 2011). Shortly after Pouillon’s housing complexes were constructed, they became instrumental in the intertwining surveillance and propaganda activities undertaken by the SAU, or Urban Administrative Services. During the war, 11 SAU offices were established in Algiers, each with jurisdiction over one of the city’s arrondissements and many strategically located in areas that had a significant Muslim Algerian population. Both Diar el-Mahsul and Climat de France accommodated SAU offices, in a move that further concretized the original intention that these housing estates would serve to control, pacify, and acculturate their inhabitants. Extensive reports compiled by SAU officers offer glimpses, albeit from a biased perspective, onto daily life in these new housing complexes, including revealing clues about how official posters were distributed. In 1958, Algerians in the employ of the Climat de France SAU office were charged with postering in the vicinity.⁸ Although the content of these notices is unknown, the walls of Pouillon’s buildings were likely used for their display, which may have contributed to mounting tensions in these sites in the final years of the war.

More detailed evidence may be gleaned from SAU reports about how residents in the Climat de France and Clos Salembier quarters resisted ongoing propaganda and policing efforts through distinctly ephemeral tactics. According to SAU reports about the demonstrations of early December 1960, youths from the Climat de France housing estate erected barricades along the Rue de la Bouzareah, on the fringes of the Bab el Oued quarter, using stones from a nearby construction site.⁹ The exact form these improvised constructions took is not indicated, but they likely did not exhibit the relative solidity of carefully stacked sandbags and cobblestones used by militant defenders of the colonial regime to create the barricades erected months earlier in the city center. Sound was likewise an important, and even more clearly ephemeral, strategy. In the Clos Salembier quarter, residents in Diar el-Mahsul’s European section orchestrated concerts de casseroles, with instrumentations of pots and pans accompanied by whistles and shouts for “French Algeria.” Their neighbors in the Algerian section across the road responded with united cries for “Muslim Algeria.”¹⁰ The insistent interiority of the apartments Pouillon designed for Muslim Algerian residents was further challenged by coordinated choruses of women who, not only from the streets but also from their apartments, joined their voices together in ululations, as a defiant mourning cry and call to action.¹¹

Such strategic uses of sound took shape within the already highly politicized auditory culture of late colonial Algeria. In the decades preceding the war for independence, sound became a critical tool of political resistance. In the 1930s, new Arabic-language radio programming became available through both international and domestic channels, the latter predominantly via Radio Algeirs, founded in 1929. In tandem with the expanding transnational Arabic-language music industry, these sound broadcasts helped forge a new political vocabulary, one that helped inspire emerging nationalist organizations in Algeria (Scales, 2010, 2013). In response, the colonial state directed increasing energy toward policing the urban soundscape. Arabic-language broadcasts and records, cafés that made such media available for collective listening, and even private radio owners were the focus of concerted surveillance and outright censorship, especially in the capital.¹² As a result, Rebecca Scales (2010) has argued that “broadcast sound, whether surfacing from phonograph or radio speakers, had become the soundtrack to anti-colonial resistance” (413-414). During the war, the airwaves became key sites of contestation, as the Cinquième bureau’s half-hour broadcast on Radio Algiers stood in stark contrast to the FLN broadcast on Radio Tunis and programming on Radio Cairo, both of which were subject to repeated interference by French authorities (Sabbagh, 1999). Given these developments, it is significant that sound was seized on as a formidable and symbolically loaded medium of protest during the war for independence.

The architectural logic and relative density of new mass housing projects in Algiers, including those designed by Pouillon, provided ready scaffolding for conjoining multiple voices. The atomized structure of apartments could, at least temporarily, be overcome as dispersed voices were united in collective chorus. The imposing limestone walls of Diar el-Mahsul and Climat de France offered an additional sense of protection for residents ensconced in their apartments or poised at their windows. Indeed, coordinated chants and ululations were particularly difficult to police using conventional strategies of visual surveillance, as participants could be dispersed throughout the building, rather than gathered together on the street in a visible mass. Such tactics were particularly potent in the face of the ubiquitous militarization of daily life in Algiers, facilitated by the state of emergency, first adopted in 1955 and expanded the following year, that suspended the right, among others, to gather freely in public or private.

With these observations in mind, it might be possible to break the silence that seems to pervade the photographs Nicolas Tikhomiroff took at Diar el-Mahsul in early December 1960 in order to reimagine into these spaces the multiple reverberations that would have echoed from the seemingly impassive stone façades of Pouillon’s buildings (Figure 1). Visible graffiti might in turn be seen to intentionally reiterate, in at least somewhat more lasting visual form, phrases like “Long live independent Muslim Algeria” that were chanted in the streets and from the apartments above. The light-colored and generously proportioned limestone blocks that Pouillon used to construct the walls of his buildings in Algiers provided ready surfaces for paint and made these consistently black inscriptions, executed with wide brushes, easily legible from a distance. The architectural forms and material properties of these structures offered their inhabitants particular opportunities—what Andrea Mubi Brighenti (2010) calls, in reference to Iain Borden’s work on skateboarding in the city, “spatial affordances” (p. 317). The very qualities that lent the section of Diar el-Mahsul designed for Muslim Algerians its fortress-like appearance—its massive stone walls, restrained fenestration, and relative lack of decorative flourishes (Crane, 2008)—made it well suited for embellishment by graffiti.

While slogans supporting the FLN and its political wing, the provisional government of the Algerian Republic, appeared on the exterior walls of the Diar el-Mahsul complex, it is striking that they were more highly concentrated along its relatively narrow interior streets. While these locations would have been more protected from view, at least by outsiders, this placement also served to assert shared identity and affiliation, effectively incorporating all residents in the section designed for Muslim Algerians into an imagined community of consensus about the future of independent Algeria. The fact that these inscriptions were predominantly in French suggests that they were simultaneously addressed to a broader audience, which might have included representatives of the military and the colonial administration, as well as the European Algerian population residing on the other side of the broad avenue bifurcating Pouillon’s complex. While Tikhomiroff’s photographs provide unusually detailed documentation of graffiti at Diar el-Mahsul, similar slogans could be found on walls elsewhere in the Clos Salembier quarter. Primarily located in urban areas with a significant Muslim Algerian presence, unauthorized writings on city walls actively lay claim to urban territory, exploiting the sense that these were spontaneous expressions of the people and asserting that the streets they marked were controlled by the FLN and its sympathizers. In effect, such inscriptions aimed to create an oppositional space in Algiers, one that had, at least symbolically, already been liberated.

The Climat de France quarter likewise witnessed the dramatic activation of its distinctive architectural landscape during the demonstrations that broke out in early December 1960. In an orchestrated call to arms, residents of the Cité Boucle-Perez—a complex designed in 1952 by François Bienvenu—illuminated their windows with alternating flashes of green and white lights, two of the three colors of the new Algerian flag. This fleeting spectacle of illumination exploited the topographic conditions that made the Cité Boucle-Perez readily visible from the neighboring Climat de France complex (Figure 15). Shortly thereafter, around 300 young men and women marched together through Pouillon’s complex and the monumental courtyard of its 200 Columns Building, defiantly unfurling the green, white, and red flag adopted by the nationalist movement and chanting “Muslim Algeria.”¹³ On the other side of town, near Diar el-Mahsul, youths from the Clos Salembier quarter likewise brandished handcrafted flags as mobile props of the protest, as captured in another of Tikomeroff’s photographs (Figure 16). Here, a crowd gathers on the avenue bordering Diar el-Mahsul, which, as this photograph reveals, towered over adjacent rows of two-storyed barracks that had been hastily constructed during the war as temporary dwellings for displaced residents of a nearby shantytown. At least temporarily, ephemeral tactics of anonymous, but defiantly collective, protest challenged the logic of monumental, limestone walled buildings that were explicitly designed to contain and control their inhabitants. For a time, Climat de France and Clos Salembier were transformed into the very kind of multivalent spaces Lefebvre theorized.

Figure 16.

Nicolas Tikhomiroff, demonstrators assembled near Diar el-Mahsul, Clos Salembier quarter, Algiers, December 11, 1960.

Images and inscriptions on city walls played an active role in the long struggle over decolonization, although they were used to opposing ideological ends throughout the conflict. Residents of Algiers, however, employed an even broader range of media in their attempts to appropriate and reimagine urban space, extending their purview to even more fleeting performative tactics. Significantly, these interventions were not confined to the street, the conventional space of mass protest. Apartment interiors, for one, were activated through coordinated displays of light and sound, transforming dispersed spaces into networked structures of resistance. Modern mass housing developments that were conceived as structures of containment and pacification unwittingly offered spatial affordances that could be used to quite different ends by their inhabitants. The relative density, ethnic segregation, and inward-turning focus that characterized Pouillon’s designs for Diar el-Mahsul and Climat de France created the very social and spatial conditions that were conducive to forging new networks of sociability and a sense of shared affiliation.

While the ephemeral tactics mobilized during the war for independence did not immediately result in the permanent restructuring of Algiers, they did serve as means of momentarily enacting another city, one imagined as a fleetingly liberated urban terrain. It is in this sense then that Lefebvre’s understanding of the ephemeral is useful. In the context of the prolonged war for independence, Lefebvre’s insistence that “a new space cannot be born (produced) unless it accentuates differences” is particularly trenchant (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, p. 52). Well before Algeria officially claimed its independence in July 1962, defiant acts of temporary spatial appropriation, often using impermanent materials like posters and graffiti, impromptu constructions, and performative displays, served to carve out a space of projective anticipation, one given increasingly concrete form within the rapidly shifting urban topography of Algiers. Although ephemeral tactics were not in themselves responsible for the FLN’s ultimate victory, they contributed to a broader reorientation of the capital away from the established commercial and administrative center of Algiers—the symbolic heart of French Algeria. It is not inconsequential that Maqam E’chahid, the highly visible monument to the martyrs of the revolution that now dominates the city skyline, was erected in the Clos Salembier quarter, down the street from Diar el-Mahsul, to mark the 20th anniversary of Algeria’s independence.

A mural visible today in what was formerly the Muslim Algerian section of Diar el-Mahsul evocatively suggests how temporary reinscriptions of this site were given more lasting expression in postindependence Algiers (Figure 17). Perhaps not surprisingly, the stakes and address of graffiti in Algiers have in recent years dramatically shifted from the insistent projection of a new national identity to the assertion of affiliation to a specific housing estate or residential area (Ouaras, 2009). During the war for independence, however, fleeting actions and provisional interventions served to actively produce a conjectural space, one in which it became possible to envision a different future for the city and its residents.

Figure 17.

Diar el-Mahsul, Algiers, June 2012.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Sheila Crane is an associate professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia where she teaches the history and theory of modern architecture and urbanism. The author of Mediterranean Crossroads: Marseille and Modern Architecture (University of Minnesota Press, 2011; winner of the 2013 Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians), her current research explores how urban landscapes and architecture in France and Algeria were transformed during the long struggle for independence and its continuing aftermath.

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