Ferhat Abbas

Premier of the Provisional Government of Algeria (1958-1961)

• Born: October 24, 1899
• Birthplace: Taher, Algeria
• Died: December 24, 1985
• Place of death: Algiers, Algeria

Abbas, regarded as the “grand old man of Algerian politics,” was an assimilationist in the 1930’s and nonviolent radical nationalist in the 1940’s. His Manifesto of the Algerian People marked a turning point in the development of an Algerian national independence movement. Realizing that peaceful means would not bring an end to colonialism, Abbas became a revolutionary nationalist, joined the National Liberation Front in 1956, and quickly became its international spokesperson.

Early Life

Ferhat Abbas (fehr-HAT ahb-BAHS) was the seventh of thirteen children born to Abbas Sáid and Achoura (Maza) Abbas. His father, a rather prosperous cáid (local administrative chief) in the northern Constantine village of Chahna, who possessed clear ties to the French government, had received the rosette and silver braid of a commander of the Legion of Honor for his service to France. Abbas received a typical French education, attending primary school in Djidjelli and the lycée at Phillippeville. After obtaining his baccalauréat, he did three years of compulsory military service in a medical corps at Bône. Discharged in 1923 with the rank of sergeant, he then entered the College of Pharmacy at the University of Algiers.

Spending eight years rather than the usual six pursuing his diploma in pharmacy, Abbas was more interested in politics and literature than in chemistry and biology. His years at the university were an apprenticeship for his future public life. He avidly read the works of Victor Hugo and Sophocles as well as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and began publishing articles in At-Takaddoun (progress) and Le Trait d’Union (connecting link) that were highly critical of French colonialism. Writing under the pseudonym Kémal Abencérages, the young Abbas argued against the regime’s systematic humiliation imposed on the Arabo-Berber Algerian population.

Elected president of the Association of Muslim Students at the University of Algiers in 1926, Abbas appealed in his writings to young educated Algerian men like himself, but he also wrote about the discrimination endured by Muslim soldiers in the French army, Algerian workers in France, and the Algerian intelligentsia. His ideology at that point was assimilationist; he argued for Algerian Muslims to be granted French citizenship with full equality and an end to discrimination. In 1933, he opened a pharmacy in Sétif, which would be his political base for many years. The following year, he married the daughter of a wealthy landowner from Djidjelli, but the marriage, an unhappy union, did not last. With his first book, Le Jeune Algérien (1930; the young Algerian), a series of articles on colonial injustices, he began a career in literature and politics that would last thirty-five years.

Life’s Work

The struggle for political and economic emancipation of Algerians was the major work of Abbas’s life. His plans for realizing that goal and its final form were not always the same, for his ideas and strategies changed over time. In the February 23, 1936, issue of L’Entente, a weekly that he founded in 1933, Abbas asserted in an article entitled “Je suis la France” (I am France) that the Algerian nation had never existed, a statement that was used against him by his rivals for years to come. He also argued at that time that there could be no French Algeria without the emancipation of the indigenous people. In the 1930’s, Abbas was willing to criticize the colonial system and work to dismantle it from within. He argued for assimilation, the full integration of Algerians as citizens of France. His position differed from that of the Muslim modernists such as Shaikh Abdulhamid ben Badis of the Association of Ulama (Muslim scholars), who popularized the idea of the Algerian nation, and secular nationalists such as Messali Hadj of L’Étoile Nord-Africaine (North African star), who identified with European socialists. Between 1933 and 1936 he was a town councillor from Sétif, a district representative for Constantine, and a fiscal delegate to Algiers. Early in 1938, he founded the Algerian People’s Union, a party intended to mobilize the masses around a program of Algerian integration into France but with full recognition of Muslim Algerian customs, tradition, and language.

As World War II began, Abbas volunteered to serve in the French forces. Captured by the Germans after a brief period in the medical corps, he was discharged in August, 1940, and returned to political journalism and his pharmacy in Sétif. After French general Hari-Honoré Giraud rejected his appeal to enlist Muslims in the war of liberation (from German occupation), Abbas turned away from the path of assimilation. On February 10, 1943, he published his Manifesto of the Algerian People, a document submitted two days later to the French administration and signed by twenty-two elected representatives of Muslim Algerians. The manifesto called for the abolition of colonialism, an Algerian constitution that would guarantee freedom and equality to all, the redistribution of settler land to Algerian peasants, the recognition of Arabic and French as official languages, the release of political prisoners, and the separation of church and state. It was an Algerian “declaration of the rights of man,” a call for an autonomous Algerian state within a French Union. Several months later, Abbas was interned for nationalist agitation but then released in December prior to the governor’s promulgation of a new ordinance (of March 7, 1944) granting French citizenship to an elite group of Muslims.

Opposition to the ordinance and its denial of Algerian nationhood crystallized around Abbas, who founded a new party, the Friends of the Manifesto and of Liberty, in Sétif on March 14, 1944. The party initially secured the support of Hadj’s followers and the ulama (Muslim intelligentsia). In September, a party journal, Égalité (equality), was launched to promote the party’s three-point program; the nonviolent struggle against colonialism, the creation of a self-governing Algerian republic in federation with France, and the elimination of special privilege. Militant nationalism, however, was developing rapidly. By March, 1945, delegates at the Congress of the Friends of the Manifesto rejected the idea of federation with France and endorsed an independent Algerian government free to choose its own alliances. Then in May, 1945, an uprising developed that permanently changed the character of the Algerian nationalist movement. It began in Sétif on May 8, 1945, with a demonstration at which police fired on placard-carrying demonstrators and quickly spread countrywide with Algerians attacking Europeans and vice versa. Algerian anticolonial protest met with fierce repression by police forces and armed settler vigilante groups. Estimates of Algerians killed during the following six weeks ranged from eight to twenty thousand.

In early 1946, Abbas formed a new party, the Democratic Union of the Algerian Manifesto (UDMA), a party of middle-class moderates and not a coalition that included Muslim factions and secular radicals. His party won eleven of the thirteen seats in the Second Constituent Assembly (an all-Muslim body) with a program calling for a secular Algerian republic secured through nonviolent means. Hadj, who had been jailed, was released in the summer of 1946 and established another party, the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties (MTLD), which won more seats in 1947 than Abbas’s party. The following year, unity talks between all the nationalist groups commenced. A secret organization (OS) to prepare for armed resistance also formed and came into public view in 1950 with a series of robberies that were carried out to finance the resistance.

Abbas, who on September 17, 1945, married an Algerian-born French woman, Marcelle Stoetzel (with whom he had a son, Halim) maintained his middle-of-the-road position within the nationalist movement. His political preoccupations equality, secularism, social justice, Algerian autonomy, and federalism were reiterated in the pages of La République algérienne (formerly Égalité), which he edited. From 1947 to 1955, he served as a member of the Algerian Assembly, and for a time he served in the intercolonial assembly, the French Union. Although labeled a moderate nationalist, on two occasions he was jailed by the French. The atmosphere in Algeria at the time was extremely tense, for there were trials of OS members and continued arrests of suspected militants. In 1953, the Revolutionary Committee for Unity and Action (CRUA) was formed by younger nationalists attached to the OS (Ben Bella, Muhammad Boudiaf Larbi Ben M’Hidi, Mourad Didouche) who were frustrated by Hadj’s control of the Algerian Progressive Party (PPA) and MTLD. The following year, CRUA created two interlocking revolutionary organizations, the National Liberation Front (FLN) and the National Liberation Army (ALN); the latter was the military wing and the former the political wing of a national independence movement. The FLN war for national liberation began on November 1, 1954.

Abbas, essentially opposed to violence, remained aloof and even tried to act as an intermediary between the French and the FLN. French repression of the struggle and their brutal counterinsurgency strategies drew indigenous support to the FLN, including that of Abbas. He apparently joined the FLN in May, 1955, but did not publicly announce it until April 26, 1956, in Cairo. There he proclaimed that UDMA no longer existed, that the FLN represented the force for liberation, and that there would be no peace until the French were out of Algeria. With his entrance into the FLN, the party gained increased respectability, for the “grand old man of Algerian politics” had abandoned “moderation” for revolutionary violence, having lost all faith in French goodwill.

Abbas traveled often through Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East to secure support for Algerian independence. In 1957, he was appointed FLN delegate to the United Nations. The following year, he made a special appeal to the Vatican to intervene on behalf of a just peace. Shortly after the French Fourth Republic collapsed in May, 1958, and General Charles de Gaulle assumed power, the FLN based in Cairo announced on September 19, 1958, the formation of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Algeria (GPRA) with the dual purpose of intensifying the war for independence and extending the diplomatic offensive. As the most respected figure in Algerian politics, Abbas was unanimously regarded as the best choice for premier, a position he held until August, 1961, but which involved more prestige than power.

In September, 1959, Abbas responded to de Gaulle’s first offer of Algerian self-determination by means of a referendum to be held four years after a cease-fire. While agreeing with de Gaulle in principle, Abbas declared that the general had to deal directly with the GPRA to obtain a cease-fire and that a free referendum was impossible with the French army in control and thousands of Algerians in prison. De Gaulle’s partition plan to protect the rights of settlers, and French intentions to retain ownership of Saharan natural resources (such as oil) were rejected. Abbas issued his own appeal to European Algerians to cooperate in bringing about self-determination; the appeal met with great bitterness.

Amid continuing hostilities in 1960, preliminary negotiations for a cease-fire began in Melun, France, but quickly broke down. Later that year, Abbas visited both the Soviet Union, which granted de facto recognition to the FLN, and the People’s Republic of China, which offered military aid. Following de Gaulle’s referendum of January 8, 1961, in which (despite the FLN’s boycott) French voters supported Algerian self-determination, talks between France and the FLN began in earnest. These resulted within a year in the Evian Accords, arranging for Algerian independence on July 7, 1962. Abbas, though, was replaced as premier in August, 1961, by Benyoussef Ben Khedda, who was considered to be more sympathetic to the left wing in the FLN. With independence in 1962, Abbas became president of the National Assembly, serving one year. His commitment to liberal parliamentary politics led him to resist efforts by Ahmed Ben Bella , the first president, to have the FLN control the assembly, and in 1964 he was placed under house arrest. Released in 1965 after Ben Bella was deposed and also placed under house arrest, the “grand old man of Algerian politics” remained in retirement one of the honored leaders of Algerian independence.

Significance

The life of Ferhat Abbas, like that of his beloved nation, was a struggle for equality and dignity. His life manifested the search for identity prevalent in the politics and literature of Algeria. With his clipped mustache, avuncular features, and neatly sober dress, he epitomized the Westernized, middle-class Algerian évolué. His public career is key to understanding the story of Algerian nationalism and the revolution, for it was symptomatic of how the liberal moderate through repeated disillusionment became transformed into a revolutionary nationalist.

Abbas’s life, like his father’s, exemplified the way the French colonial system could work for a few. He rose successfully through the ranks of the legislative posts open to Muslims. Everything about him was oriented toward the West, France, and indeed, middle-class France. More comfortable with French than Arabic, educated and cultured, he still was not an equal citizen in his homeland. Hence, he sought equality his entire life, abandoning his integrationist views in the 1940’s, endorsing nonfederalist independence and eventually armed struggle. Equality and social justice remained his goals.

Bibliography

Abun-Nasr, Jamil M. A History of the Maghrib. 2d ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975. A multicentury survey of the region that contains an excellent description and analysis of French colonialism and Algerian national resistance.

Clark, Michael K. Algeria in Turmoil. New York: Praeger, 1959. This work includes extensive coverage of Abbas and the nationalist factions in the 1930’s and 1940’s. It is decidedly biased in favor of the French colonial administration.

Horne, Alistair. A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954-1962. London: Macmillan, 1977. Reprint. New York: New York Review of Books, 2006. The story of the Algerian war and its main players. This is probably the most readable and dramatic account of Algerian nationalism. Contains a succinct account of Abbas and his middle-class followers.

Ottaway, David, and Marina Ottaway. Algeria: The Politics of a Socialist Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. This work focuses on the final years of the liberation war and the first six years of independence. Sympathetic to the FLN, it contains valuable descriptions of the major figures, including Abbas.

Quandt, William B. Revolution and Political Leadership: Algeria, 1954-1968. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969. With a focus on political leadership in the national movement, especially the FLN, Abbas is one of the more sympathetic individuals here. He was interviewed extensively by the author.