The (; ; : ) are an ethno-cultural group of people of French and other European descent who were born in Algeria during the period of French colonial rule from 1830 to 1962. Many of them departed for mainland France during and after the Algerian War of Independence.
From the French invasion on 18 June 1830 to its independence, Algeria was administratively part of France; its ethnic European population were simply called Algerians or (colonists). The Muslim people of Algeria were called Arabs, Muslims or indigènes. The term came into common use shortly before the end of the Algerian War in 1962.
As of the last census in French-ruled Algeria, taken on 1 June 1960, there were 1,050,000 non-Muslim civilians, some 10 percent of the population. Most were Catholic and of European descent, but their population included around 130,000 indigenous Algerian Jews who were granted French citizenship through the Crémieux Decree and were viewed as a part of the community.
During the Algerian War, a vast majority of were loyalists and overwhelmingly supported colonial French rule in Algeria. They were opposed to Algerian nationalist groups such as the (English: National Liberation Front) (FLN) and (English: Algerian National Movement) (MNA). The roots of the conflict lay in political and economic inequalities perceived as an "alienation" from the French rule as well as a demand for a leading position for the Berber, Arab and Islamic cultures and rules existing before the French conquest. The conflict contributed to the fall of the French Fourth Republic and the exodus of European and Jewish Algerians to France.
After Algeria became independent in 1962, about 800,000 of French nationality evacuated to mainland France, while about 200,000 remained in Algeria. Of the latter, there were still about 100,000 in 1965, about 50,000 by the end of the 1960s and 30,000 in 1993."Pieds-noirs": ceux qui ont choisi de rester, La Dépêche du Midi, March 2012 During the Algerian Civil War between 1992 and 2002, the remaining population of and others of European descent plummeted, as they were often targeted by Islamist rebel groups. By the 2000s, the French consulate in Algiers recorded that around 300 persons of European descent remained in the country, whereas an Algerian census company recorded the number as higher. The who have stayed since independence are now overwhelmingly elderly.
Those who moved to France suffered ostracism from some left-wing political movements for their perceived exploitation of native Muslims, while others blamed them for the war and thus for the political turmoil surrounding the collapse of the Fourth Republic. In popular culture, the community is often represented as feeling removed from French culture while longing for Algeria. The recent history of the has been characterized by a sense of twofold alienation, on the one hand from the land of their birth and on the other from their adopted homeland. Though the term implies that prior to Algeria they once lived in France, most were born and raised in Algeria.
Etymology
There are competing theories about the origin of the term pied-noir. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it refers to "a person of European origin living in Algeria during the period of French rule, especially a French person expatriated after Algeria was granted independence in 1962". The Le Robert dictionary states that in 1901 the word indicated a sailor working barefoot in the coal room of a ship, who would find his feet blackened by the soot and dust. Since in the Mediterranean this was often an Algerian native, the term was used pejoratively for Algerians until 1955, when it first began referring to "French born in Algeria" according to some sources. The Oxford English Dictionary claims this usage originated from mainland French as a negative nickname.
There is also a theory that the term comes from the black boots worn by French soldiers compared to the barefoot Algerians. Other theories focus on new settlers dirtying their clothing by working in swampy areas, wearing black boots when on horseback, or trampling grapes to make wine.
History French, along with Spanish, Italian and other European settlers, moved to France's overseas colonies and territories. The largest group of one million settled in Algeria, followed by 200,000 in Morocco and proportionally fewer in other colonies. These settlers often took land that had been forcibly taken from the local population. While they had full political representation in Paris and the French government, the native population did not. Many settlers were fiercely committed to maintaining the overseas empire because they came from impoverished European backgrounds. Nearly half of the Algerian settlers in the 1880s were from Spain, southern Italy, or Malta, and the remainder were mostly poor French. They had nothing to return to if a local nationalist movement won its war of national liberation.Eric Savarese, "After the Algerian War: Reconstructing Identity among the PiedsNoirs." International Social Science Journal, 58#189 (2006), pp. 457–466. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2451.2007.00644.x.
French conquest and initial settlement
European settlement of Algeria began during the 1830s, after France had commenced the process of conquest with the military seizure of the city of Algiers in 1830. The invasion was instigated when the Dey of Algiers struck the French consul with a fly-swatter in 1827, although economic reasons are also cited. In 1830 the government of King Charles X blockaded Algeria and an armada sailed to Algiers, followed by a land expedition. A troop of 34,000 soldiers landed on 18 June 1830, at Sidi Ferruch, west of Algiers. Following a three-week campaign, the Hussein Dey capitulated on 5 July 1830 and was exiled.
In the 1830s the French controlled only the northern part of the country. Entering the Oran region, they faced resistance from Emir Abd al-Kader, a leader of a Sufi Brotherhood. In 1839 Abd al-Kader began a seven-year war by declaring jihad against the French. The French signed two peace treaties with Al-Kader, but they were broken because of a miscommunication between the military and the government in Paris. In response to the breaking of the second treaty, Abd al-Kader drove the French to the coast. In response, a French force of nearly 100,000 troops marched to the Algerian countryside and forced Abd al-Kader's surrender in 1847.
In 1848 Algeria was divided into three departments (Alger, Oran and Constantine), thus becoming part of France.
The French modeled their colonial system on their predecessors, the Ottomans, by co-opting local tribes. In 1843 the colonists began supervising through bureaux arabes operated by military officials with authority over particular domains.
This system lasted until the 1880s and the rise of the French Third Republic, when colonisation intensified. Large-scale regrouping of lands began when land-speculation companies took advantage of government policy that allowed massive sales of native property. By the 20th century Europeans held 1,700,000 hectares; by 1940, 2,700,000 hectares, about 35 to 40 percent; and by 1962 it was 2,726,700 hectares representing 27 percent of the arable land of Algeria.Les réformes agraires en Algérie - Lazhar Baci - Institut National Agronomique, Département d'Economie Rurale, Alger (Algérie)
Development as a society Identity
After French Algeria was redesignated from a colony into a Department of France in 1848, the country was considered an integral part of French national territory, and this sentiment was largely shared by the pieds-noirs community.
Although the majority of pieds-noirs were of French origin, many settlers continued to arrive from across the Western Mediterranean region from the 1830s into the twentieth century, particularly Italy, Spain and Malta. Some early European settlers in Algeria formed enclaves based on their country of origin, sometimes as a result of policies undertaken by the French colonial administration. For example, settlers from the Spanish island of Minorca were settled by the French army in the Hussein Dey and Bordj El Kiffan (at the time Fort de l'Eau) districts of Algiers in which they formed a substantial local community. The city of Oran contained a large European population of Spanish heritage which later increased as a result of the Spanish Civil War. As French Algerian society developed, European Algerians of all geographical background began to largely fall under the pieds-noirs label or be considered as Français d’Algérie (French of Algeria), and evolved into a society influenced by French language and social customs, but with their own unique identity and culture. French newspaper Le Figaro claimed in 1961 that "the Europeans of Algeria [...] have become increasingly independent of French tutelage, and having adapted to the environment, or better yet, to the soil, have become a new race." According to Ohio State University history scholar Daniela N. Edmeier, the French state even questioned how pieds-noirs could be integrated into French society after a majority fled to mainland France following Algerian independence due to the cultural and social differences that had built up over time.
The end of the French protectorate of Tunisia and of the French protectorate in Morocco in 1956 led to mass emigration of French settlers from both states to Algeria. These two countries had been placed under protectorate, whereas Algeria and its population fell under territory status and were considered part of overseas France.
As the colony of Algeria grew with each generation, pieds-noirs began to define themselves as distinct from the French citizens of metropolitan France; they identified as Algerian people. Some pieds-noirs considered themselves at one time to be "true Algerians", whereas they termed Muslim Algerians as "Indigenous" peoples. An exchange between a pied-noir student from Algiers and a metropolitan French student was recorded during a UNEF conference in 1922:No. 98, juin 2002,
"So you're Algerian… but the son of a Frenchman, aren't you?"
"Of course! All Algerians are sons of the French, the others are natives."
However, many pieds-noirs avoided using the term after the Second World War so as not to be confused with indigenous Algerian migrant workers who went to France. The pieds-noirs themselves also used several nicknames to designate the French in metropolitan France, such as French from France, Frangaoui, Patos and sometimes pied-blanc ().Mouloud Feraoun, Les Chemins qui montent, Le Seuil, 1957, pp. 208-209.
Other terms used internally within the pied-noir population included pied-rouge () to refer to pied-noir members of the Algerian Communist Party or those who held left-wing beliefs, including a minority of pieds-noirs sympathetic to the independence movement.Bernard Lecherbonnier, Le pied-rouge, Denoël, 1974, François Muratet, Le Pied-Rouge, volume 13 de Serpent noir, Serpent à plumes, 1999, The term Pied-Gris was used to refer both to children with parentage from both metropolitan France and French Algeria, and to French settlers from independent Tunisia and Morocco who moved to French Algeria in the late 1950s rather than to France. French writer René Domergue noted that Pied-Gris was used by both French settlers from Tunisia and Morocco and the pieds-noirs themselves to distinguish themselves from each other.H. Jay Siskin, Ouvertures : cours intermédiaire de français, Harcourt College Publishers, 2001, Algerian-born Pieds-noirs writer and historian Jean-Jacques Jordi documented that Mahonnais was used as a nickname for the descendants of settlers from the Balearic Islands who migrated to Algeria after the French conquest as agricultural workers.