Schools, control and resistance in colonial Algeria: discourses on Muslims’ education from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century

Abstract

During the colonial period, the issue of education for Algerian Muslims informed French debates about how to govern and control the colonised, what limited rights should be bestowed upon them in a discriminatory colonial context, and more broadly what role the colonised were to play under French rule in the longer term. This article examines French discourses on the schooling of Algerians in the late nineteenth century. It shows how debates about education and the values that it conveyed were inextricably linked to a racialized conception of ‘civilisation’. This study also considers how particular conceptions of education informed the political discourse of Algerians during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It focuses more particularly on the discourse of the small group of French-educated Algerians who became known as the Young Algerians and considers how they appropriated salient French cultural and political references and values to develop their own political voice and mobilise around demands for colonial reform, rights and justice for the colonised.