The Weaver Reads reviewed French North Africa by Jacques Berque
Goodreads Review of French North Africa
4 stars
This book gets four stars simply because it’s a landmark piece on the study of North Africa. But, it’s also filled with problems.
The argument, as much as one can be teased out, is that the primary conflict during North Africa’s colonial period was one between ideology and facts on the ground. France, and the French more broadly, claimed to be a vessel of enlightened civilization pulling North Africa into the future. But, North African peoples experienced expropriation of their lands, disease, famine, violent conquest, and more. Still, many—if not most—were inspired by “republican France” and anticolonial activism absorbed this ideology, which was then used to combat “colonial France.” France, throughout the period, was Janus-faced, and the failure of ideology gave way to nationalist activism. Berque identifies the turning point as 1934-35, and this seems about right to me.
Still, the book is paternalistic and nostalgic for the …
This book gets four stars simply because it’s a landmark piece on the study of North Africa. But, it’s also filled with problems.
The argument, as much as one can be teased out, is that the primary conflict during North Africa’s colonial period was one between ideology and facts on the ground. France, and the French more broadly, claimed to be a vessel of enlightened civilization pulling North Africa into the future. But, North African peoples experienced expropriation of their lands, disease, famine, violent conquest, and more. Still, many—if not most—were inspired by “republican France” and anticolonial activism absorbed this ideology, which was then used to combat “colonial France.” France, throughout the period, was Janus-faced, and the failure of ideology gave way to nationalist activism. Berque identifies the turning point as 1934-35, and this seems about right to me.
Still, the book is paternalistic and nostalgic for the colonial period, at best. The way Berque talks about North Africans is, at points, openly racist, in spite of his good intentions. He falls back on orientalist tropes in his description of sexuality (“the virile and erotic Maghribi man,” etc. for more on this see Todd Shepard’s Sex, France, and Arab Men), cuisine, etc. North African peasants are framed as timeless—change, in his view, has not really come to North Africa since the age of Carthage. Needless to say, this book could never be published today.
In spite of that, the book is valuable. There is an interesting through line about capitalism and “modernization,” in which we can read a “modernization” (which to me means the development of the Capitalist mode of production) that began BEFORE the colonial period, but was accelerated by colonial rule. He talks about how quickly everything changed, to the point people did not know where the ground was. “All that is solid melts into air” and all that. While Berque’s tone is off, his description of that phenomenon is correct. I couldn’t help but read my own experience of the 2020s into it. The pace of change feels similar, if not even more rapid.
All this is to say that, if you can get past Berque’s demeaning prose, his insights are actually quite good. He sees people, the structures they inhabit, and the way those structures transform their lives. I’d like to have seen more here about how ideology is constitutive of reality, but the book rarely goes that far.