EPILOGUE
Sex and the Centenary
The official volume devoted to the centenary of French Algeria began with an enticing overture: “To celebrate the Centenary of Algeria: does there exist a task that is more seductive, more instructive, more evocative of memories, of emotions, and promises?” Summoning the “smiling beauty” of the country, the event’s general commissioner, Gustave Mercier, elaborated on the fantasy that animated the project of French Algeria. Avoiding any reference to the violence of conquest, he called forth an alluring image: a desirable land that had been successfully incorporated into French national territory, and a colonized population that embraced their legal subordination with gratitude, even “love.”1
Educing emotional attachments between France and Algeria, the centenary elided the brutality of colonization. This mythic fabrication of historical memory followed the lines elaborated in this book. French Algeria relied on a legal and sexual fantasy, but by 1930, that fantasy was increasingly difficult to sustain. As the preceding chapters have demonstrated, the exercise of French sovereignty depended on the legal construction and regulation of both religious and sexual difference. These legally constituted differences structured policies that were elaborated over the course of the nineteenth century, laying hold to Algerian land and disqualifying Muslims from full citizenship. They nullified Muslim land law, while imposing and then naturalizing Muslim personal status under the guise of upholding local law and custom, whose subjugation of women they at once presumed, affirmed, and lamented. This logic of dispossession and exclusion proved radically double-edged. The political subordination of Algerian men depended on authorizing their sexual privileges, including polygamy and child marriage. French juridical fantasies of Algerian men’s sexual rights not only gave rise to fears of moral degeneracy, but also incited sexual resentment. Their erotic fascination with Algerian women sentimentalized female oppression and symbolized French men’s legal and sexual frustration. Jealously maintaining their own privileges, many French jurists and politicians denied extending political rights to French women and to Algerians, despite claiming to defend legal equality. By 1930, French feminists and increasingly militant Algerians foregrounded these contradictions in demanding substantive political and legal reform.
In light of this legal and logical bind, the festivities of 1930 represented an ambivalent apogee. The year’s events produced revelatory denials at every turn. Military parades, speeches, awards, photograph collections, posters, stamps, congresses, and desert car races romanticized a brutal conquest that official discourse resolutely refused to name. In 1927, the délégations financières unanimously approved a project “to commemorate with great splendor the Centenary of the liberatory landing of France in Algeria, and the foundation of its colonizing and peaceful influence on the African side of the Mediterranean.”2 In his justification of the proposed budget for the celebrations, which would ultimately cost 130 million francs, Deputy Gaston Thomson (Constantine) confirmed that “the taking of Algiers is a glorious act, but it is not only that which we want to commemorate. It is [also] the introduction of French civilization in all of North Africa.”3 Governor-General Pierre Bordes hoped that the celebration would have a powerful psychological impact, by creating “everywhere an obsession with Algeria.”4 Invocations of peace and fraternity notwithstanding, the project was a costly exercise of negation, which revealed by denying the violent and covetous desire that had animated French colonization over the course of a century. In retrospect, and from the critical-historical perspective adopted in this book, it appears as a compensatory fantasy that marshaled funds and feelings to secure a status quo that never was and could never be.5
The rhetoric of France’s civilizing mission publicly held sway, despite mounting political challenges from Young Algerians as well as from new militant movements, including Messali Hadj’s Étoile nord-africaine, Abdelhamid Ben Badis’s Islamic reformism, and the French Communist Party. Critics at the time highlighted the political hazards involved. Former governor-general and current senator Maurice Viollette, who had been forced from power by opponents of his assimilationist agenda, warned against “wounding the Arab’s legitimate pride by making him participate retrospectively in the defeat of his ancestors.”6 According to Jean Mélia, the liberal president of the Ligue en faveur des indigènes musul-mans, the centenary would remind Algerians of “how we have taken their native land, recalling to them their defeats with all that they entailed, of massacres, ruins, and humiliations.”7 Demain, the Socialist daily in Algiers, denounced the military pomp surrounding the conquest as a “clumsy masquerade” and called instead for an official “Day of Remorse.”8 For Ferhat Abbas, the occasion evinced how “the century which is dying has been a century of tears and blood. And it is particularly we, natives, who have cried, who have bled. We bury it without regret and without joy.” Liberals such as Viollette and Mélia and Young Algerians like Abbas kept alive a “timid hope” that political and social reform would more fully integrate Algerians into the French polity.9 In the decade that followed, they would repeatedly meet with disappointment.
The centenary showcased more than a violent and tragic past. It also marked Muslim Algerians’ ongoing legal and social exclusion by bringing into sharp relief their “paradoxical” status as legal French nationals who did not fully participate in national sovereignty. Articles in assimilationist journals such as L’Union (El Tihad), Attakadoum (Progress), Le Tribune Indigène, and La Voix des humbles continued to support proposals for “indigenous representation in parliament” launched by the Fédération des élus musulmans in 1927 as well as by Viollette and Mélia. They spoke forcefully against incessant claims that Muslim personal status was incompatible with the exercise of political rights. At the high point of the centenary celebrations, Saïd Faci insisted that while Muslim Algerians had been legally French since 1834 and formally recognized as such by the sénatus-consulte of 1865, “the indigène is French, but not [sans l’être], because he is deprived of political rights: that is his paradoxical situation.” Faci’s pithy statement underscored how French pretensions to legal sovereignty gave rise to contradictions by simultaneously including and excluding Muslim Algerians. He cited mixed-marriage jurisprudence as proof of this untenable state of affairs. A foreign European woman who married an indigène became a French citizen (albeit a diminished one), while the indigène who married her remained legally subordinated. For Faci, the policy “seriously defied logic.”10 It did, however, effectively establish a racial and sexual order in which European women were granted precedence and privileges over Algerian men who were already French.
French political resistance to Muslim Algerians’ representation regularly summoned long-standing fantasies of Muslim men’s legal privileges. Officially “protected” by the 1865 sénatus-consulte and the 1873 Warnier property reform law, Muslim personal status came to be seen by jurists and journalists, politicians as well as novelists, as the embodiment of Algerians’ sexual and religious difference. Sexual envy and horror intensified political animus against Algerian men. For instance, the colonial administrator Octave Depont attacked proposals in favor of Algerian representation by rehearsing arguments against these purported privileges, including polygamy, repudiation, and the droit de djebr. Alongside familiar condemnations of patriarchal cruelty, Depont revealed the jealous resentment of Muslim pleasure—what I have described as an extimate desire—that aroused these accusations. According to his complaint, “Muslims take the right to marry European women, but it is not reciprocal, because under no pretext can their girls be given over to Christians.” Comparing this attitude to that of “prehistoric” men, he decried how the “tribe jealously guards the excess of its feminine element, wanting to keep it exclusively for itself.” Depont depicted Muslim Algerians as a primitive horde who kept a surplus of women and sexual pleasures for themselves, hence denying equal enjoyment to French men. Obscuring the violence and violation of colonization, the statement performed a fantasmatic reversal in which Algerians appeared as privileged victors, while French men seemed to be at a loss.11
A contemporary caricature in the erotic humor magazine Le Sourire portrayed this unsettling inversion. In “The Centenary of Algeria in Montmartre,” a stereotypically grotesque Algerian delights in the city’s abundant pleasures, as two young scantily clad parisiennes attend to him, effectively becoming part of his “harem.” The satire mocks the Algerian as illegitimately occupying a position that was desirable for—and an implicit prerogative of—French men (as the illustrated magazine’s very existence attests).
Claims that Muslim men possessed a surfeit of pleasure and power by virtue of their family law justified their political exclusion. In hoarding women, they rejected a sexual contract that, as Carole Pateman has argued following Freud, grounded men’s political equality in the exchange of women.12 The focus on Muslim personal status made civil legal distinctions between the Algerian and French populations politically, physically, and psychically salient. This assertion of legal and religious difference was anchored by claims about gender and sex. A notorious opinion piece on the centenary by Henry Vidal in Le Figaro illustrates this refusal to cede a political and sexual place to Algerian men: “So, we will see them in the Palais Bourbon voting on justice, on marriage and the family, they who have a personal status and who are polygamous, these fanatic believers, in charge of laïcité. Crazy!” While claiming to champion republican secularism, Vidal in his defense of French sovereignty linked sexual anxiety to biopolitics. The prospect of representation even by a select few elicited fears of French legal and demographic subjugation. “‘The elite,’” he warned, “belong to a race that grows every day in number. A number—terrible, obsessive word—to whose law we will sooner or later submit.”13 Vidal’s commentary demonstrates how sexual insecurity linked French men’s concerns about religious difference to a visceral fear of the size of the Algerian population. It makes clear, in other words, how Algerian men’s reproductive sexual prowess was at the heart of French men’s political concerns.
FIGURE 11 /PEM, Le centenaire à Montmartre, from Le Sourire, 1930. Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Young Algerians tried to counter these projective fantasies about their personal status, arguing, as did Ioulalen, a columnist for La Voix des humbles, that polygamy was only tolerated, rather than mandated, by Muslim status. Drawing an implicit comparison to French law, he suggested that the tolerance was comprehensible “given man’s inconstancy and the prohibition on prostitution and adultery in Islam.” For Algerian critics of French prejudice, civil legal difference should not affect political status. As they pointed out, citizens with Muslim status in the four communes in Senegal and in India had long exercised voting rights, as did Alsatians, who also had a “local status.”14 These legal arguments found little traction with politicians and jurists who vehemently opposed granting Algerian Muslims political representation out of deep-seated fears of being sexually and demographically overwhelmed.
Jurists who extolled French colonization instead represented Muslim status as a symbol of French legal tolerance. In his contribution to the centenary volume on law, Dean Marcel Morand summarized France’s legal achievements as a “work of civilization—accomplished by procedures whose legality and morality cannot be contested.” He insisted that throughout a century of judicial reforms, France had continued to “respect the religious sentiments of natives.”15 His emphasis on the tolerance for religious feeling obscured the long history of land reform that had, in fact, profoundly transformed Muslim property and encouraged dispossession. As we have seen throughout this book, France’s religious “respect” reinforced a presumptive distinction between spiritual and material concerns. In the centenary volume, real estate law was, symptomatically, treated in a separate section. Morand’s chronological overview of native institutions, meanwhile, recapitulated the hubristic project of the centenary itself, presenting major material and moral transformations as if they had been moderate and uncontested ameliorations.
In the double discourse of these legal experts, French law had both maintained indigenous law and had a “civilizing” effect on it. Since it required French intervention, the prospect of further family law reform continued to project the “civilizing mission” into the future. A centenary report in the Revue algérienne, tunisienne et marocaine de législation et jurisprudence by Georges Henri Bousquet, a professor at the law faculty in Algiers for the next three decades, made the argument explicitly. In his view, the changes wrought to “indigenous family law” over the course of the century had remained overly “modest,” leaving its principal differences from French law largely in place. He asserted, on the one hand, that “the indigenous conception of family law is opposed to ours: marriage is a purely carnal union in which the despotism of the husband alone reigns.” At the same time, he lamented how, after one hundred years of colonization, a father could be allowed “to sell his young daughter of nine or ten to a lubricious old man, whose only goal is to rape her.” This denunciation of Algerian women’s subjection to vile and violent patriarchal power justified his rejection of “more or less absurd electoral projects.” For Bousquet, Morand’s revised Muslim Law Code “would be a much more advantageous gift than the ballot.”16 The modification of Algerian family law appeared here as a substitute for substantive political reform.
The irony of these jurists’ critiques of Muslim patriarchy was not lost on contemporary French feminists who continued to fight for women’s equality in both public and private law. After all, French women were also “paradoxical” citizens, without voting rights and subject to their own discriminatory personal status.17 The centenary offered an occasion to revisit the question of their rights. Rather than drawing parallels between their own subordinated status and that of Algerian men, however, many suffragist activists underscored French women’s legal and civilizational superiority. They laid claim, that is, to their embodied legal prestige in order to claim republican political inclusion. Like “imperial feminists” elsewhere, they showcased French women’s contributions to the colonial project in order to secure rights for themselves.18 An issue of La Française devoted to the centenary events overtly pursued this strategy. The journal featured statements by two prominent Algerian suffragists, Lucie Richardot and Jeanne Alquier, that negatively compared the status of Algerian men to that of French women. For Richardot it was “sad that the political men representing our nation are thinking of giving the vote to natives of our colony while continuing to refuse political rights to their mothers, their sisters, their wives, and their daughters.”19 Alquier registered her outrage more forcefully, denouncing how “natives, who are only French subjects, which is to say that they renounce our code, our civilization, our ancestors and who are all too often still our enemies…can be financial delegates, general councilors, municipal councilors, and vote in the Djemâa.” In short, she found it unacceptable that they had “a major share of citizen’s rights,” while women, “who are submitted to French law, remain nothing for the nation.”20 Several articles on the abject condition of Algerian women appeared alongside these briefs. The journal thus contrasted French women’s role in Algeria as colonial aides and exemplars to the moral and legal failings of Algerian men.21
The journal’s editor, Cécile Brunschvicg, embraced the feminist civilizing mission, undertaking a trip to Algeria in 1931. Touched by the experience, she praised in her reports the influence of literary magistrate Ferdinand Duchêne, who wrote on the subject of Algerian women “with so much emotion.”22 Following the voyage, she proposed addressing the question of Algerian women during the “États Généraux du Féminisme” organized as part of the 1931 Colonial Exposition held in Paris. Among her suggestions, Brunschvicg imagined “the adaptation of native mœurs to our French Code” as one potential solution. Registering the apparent incongruity in this endorsement, she commented ironically: “O Napoleonic Code, how we condemn you in our feminist meetings; but how good, just, and prestigious you seem to us, next to the Arab or Kabyle Code!”23 In other words, she adopted prevailing arguments about the civilizational superiority of the French Civil Code, even while her newspaper frequently castigated how it subordinated women.
During the “États Généraux” themselves, Jeanne Alquier reported on recent transformations in Algerian women’s legal and social condition, upholding the 1930 and 1931 legal reforms to Kabyle women’s status as exemplary. Brunschvicg also championed these reforms, again crediting Duchêne’s work. Alquier’s speech shows how feminist expressions of solidarity with Algerian women also served to target Algerian men’s political rights. She urged the feminists at the congress, and implicitly the French government as well, to refuse granting them suffrage: “At this moment, Muslim natives are asking for the vote, they are asking for the same votes as French citizens. We should respond: We cannot give the right to vote to people who rape young girls, to people who have contempt for women, who make them into martyrs.”24 Suffragists used these arguments to explain why French women were more deserving of full voting rights then Algerian men.
They lodged a similar appeal to the senatorial commission presided over by Viollette when he toured Algeria in May 1931. These feminists represented the exclusion of French women from the franchise as a source of “humiliation,” given that “new ‘French subjects,’” who had “barely achieved our level of civilization,” were granted the right to vote.25 In subscribing to a form of what political theorist Sara Farris has described as “femonationalism,” they endorsed the supremacy of French civilization.26 Seeking the embrace of French law and imperial sovereignty, their claims to full citizenship reproduced the sexual logic of racial prestige that had historically structured Algerian colonial law. They aimed to take advantage of this privilege, rather than denouncing its gendered presumptions.
Another feminist meeting in Constantine in 1932, the Congrès des femmes méditerranéennes, coupled demands for French women’s suffrage with legal measures targeting Algerian women (the official adoption of the Code Morand, a mandated marriage age of fifteen years for women, and marital consent), thus affirming “the primordial role played by the French Woman in North Africa.” The congress concluded with a call to elevate French women’s status, proclaiming “the authority of the French Woman would be increased if she possessed the fullness [la plénitude] of her civil and political rights.” If the “fullness” of French law enhanced the authority of French women, they would, in turn, improve the imperial nation’s status, because “France itself has a great interest in augmenting the prestige of its Nationals.”27 In both a symbolic and a numerical sense, women promised to strengthen French sovereignty in North Africa. Increasingly under attack by new political and social movements in Algeria, the colonial fantasy of French law would, according to this argument, be supplemented by French women’s political participation.
Algerian observers understandably approached the event with trepidation. An “Open letter to the French Women of the Constantine Congress” published in La Voix indigène emphasized that the “egotism of the stronger sex,” rather than Qur’anic prescription, was responsible for the subordination of the “Muslim Woman.” To reinforce the point that masculine privilege rather than religion was at issue, the author noted how native resistance to “the improvement of women’s lot” actually resembled the “French senators” who stood in the way of women’s suffrage.28 In another letter addressed to the organizers and read to the assembled delegates, Mme. Seghir Hacene, the wife of the caïd of Sigus, corrected presuppositions about Algerian women as “savage and resistant to all civilization and progress.” In her view, the causes of their “atrocious and silent suffering” had “nothing to do with religion, as some people assume.” Polygamy was a case in point. From her perspective, men “did not actually grasp or did not want to grasp, the true directives” regarding the practice. Addressed to French feminists, these interventions pointed to patriarchy itself, rather than religious tradition or “Muslim law,” as the source of women’s subordination.29 According to an article published in La Française, some Algerian men in attendance favored women’s suffrage, confirming that “if women voted in France, the situation of the French woman and the Muslim woman would be improved.”30
Rather than seeking out such solidarity, many advocates for women’s suffrage appealed to civilizational arguments against Muslim men’s political rights. They renewed their resistance when proposals to extend suffrage to some twenty thousand “elite” Muslim men were endorsed by the Algerian Muslim Congress in June 1936 and concretized in a bill that Viollette submitted to parliament later that year. Settler politicians such as Senator Pierre Roux-Freissineng (Oran) unsurprisingly denounced the legislation as a “juridical monstrosity,” which created “two categories of electors”—one of whom “maintained a status of a religious order” that was contrary to “French civil laws,” most notably by authorizing polygamy. In his view, it would be a “death blow to French sovereignty.”31 A survey of critical opinions in La Française echoed these statements. Gabrielle Vallé-Genairon declared that adoption of the law would be “a veritable insult to our women [les femmes de chez nous].”32 Denouncing Viollette’s measure for upholding “Muslim status,” which was the “basis for the enslavement of women,” the Comtesse de Brazza intimated that no woman could support the legislation without “dishonoring herself.” C. Bouchard likewise condemned Muslim men who wanted to keep their status because “it authorizes polygamy, maintaining the woman in a position of subject vis-à-vis man.” Castigating the bill for reinforcing “male domination,” she encouraged French women to resist its adoption.33 These suffragists thus staked their claims to citizenship on a civilizational conception of French women’s honor and dignity. Refracting male politicians’ extimate fantasies, their defense of French women’s privileged status presumed a sexual and racial threat: their political and legal subjection to Algerian Muslim men.
The suffragist journalist Lucienne Jean-Darrouy was one notable exception. Writing in her regular column on women’s rights in L’Écho d’Alger, Jean-Darrouy objected to the use of distorted representations of Muslim men’s sexual privilege to defeat the Viollette law. Without denying “the material and moral poverty of some Muslim and Kabyle women,” she urged that “this is not a reason to invent and decry tyrannical mœurs that are purely imaginary.” Well aware of tenacious colonial clichés, she noted that “it is especially with respect to polygamy that the authors’ inventions go too far.” As a regular critic of the patriarchal excesses of French law, Jean-Darrouy observed how claims that “all Algerian natives have four wives” were a fantasmatic projection that also served to deny the impoverishment of Algeria’s Muslim majority. As she sardonically concluded, “it is not because one is posing as a defender of women that one has the right to create legends.”34 Jean-Darrouy refused to sanction the instrumentalization of feminism to buttress the sexual fantasy of French sovereignty. And she remained wary of suffragists who appeared willing to fuel that fantasy. In her view, the cause of feminists and Algerians alike would be better served by showing how, by denying their privileges and projecting their desires, French men jealously guarded their rights.
As a powerful historical and political fiction, the centenary constructed a progressive idea of French colonial history against an image of Algerian Muslim legal and social backwardness that endures to this day. Settler colonialism conflated Islam and a corporealized conception of Muslim law that supposedly conflicted with the secular (but far from gender-equal) French Civil Code. This erotically charged legal imaginary has endured beyond the end of the legal regime that was French Algeria. Brought into being by the historical exigencies of colonial law, it can be understood in its persistence as a symptom of a historical disavowal or denial.
Algeria’s hard-won independence refounded French sovereignty on new terms, while also granting its sexualized imagery a significant postcolonial afterlife in the former metropole. France relinquished its territorial claims and established that Muslim Algerians, who had since become citizens despite their personal status, were no longer French. But even after decolonization and the “forgetting” of French Algeria, a corporealized conception of Muslim law remained, as did the problem of securing French sovereignty over postcolonial migrant populations. Decolonization reconfigured these problems without resolving them, as the enduring preoccupation with the figurative and literal challenges posed by Algerian men to the bodily integrity of French citizenship makes clear.35
This recurrent insecurity points to why sexual fantasies about Muslim law have continued to haunt the imaginary of French sovereignty.36 Present-day debates over the integration of Muslim French citizens, from controversies over head scarves and burqas to fears of violent fundamentalism, display a recurrent public fascination with Muslim men’s sexual excess and women’s victimization, including on the part of feminists. The ongoing political and legal mobilization of sexualized claims about Muslim men and women continues to justify discriminatory policy, despite politicians’ prima facie claims to protect the universalist and egalitarian principles of laïcité.37
Michel Houellebecq’s sensationalist 2015 novel Submission offers a striking distillation of the extimate fantasies of Muslim men’s sex that continue to operate in the present. Weaving together literature and politics, eroticism and disgust, the work purports to envision France’s sovereign and sexual future. In reality, it manifests a deep attachment to an exclusionary fantasy of the French past. Houellebecq’s novel imagines a “Muslim Brotherhood” president who comes to power and immediately legalizes polygamy. Male converts rally to the new regime in order to take up young and submissive wives. Initially skeptical, the narrator, an impotent academic, relents in the final pages of the book so that he can access Muslim men’s sexual rights by taking his pick of the “pretty, veiled, shy” students who flock to his classes.38 Polygamy appears in the novel as both a provocation and a panacea. A symptom of a perceived crisis of European (and Christian) civilization and demography, Muslim men’s sexual privilege returns as the repressed to prop up France’s deficient sovereignty. The novel, like its narrator, displays little interest in documenting or imagining Muslim French existence—past, present, or future. Whether read straight or as a satire, the trope of “Muslim” polygamy is politically and socially stigmatizing, based on debilitating stereotypes of Muslims and women. By lamenting the loss of French potency, Houellebecq’s fantasy of France’s “Muslim” future inverts the triumphalist image of the centenary of French Algeria. It also indicates how that historical fiction was already haunted by fears of France’s sexual and racial decline.
Submission’s dalliances with sexual decadence rest on a fantasy with a long French history. The present work documents its emergence and offers tools with which to analyze its recurrence. Rather than confirming an eternal return, these insights into the role of desire and difference in the history of French law demonstrate that exclusionary fantasy of sovereignty can never be secured.
1. G. Mercier, Le centenaire de l’Algérie, 1:9.
2. Gustavino in Délégations financières algériennes, April 8, 1927, 305.
3. J.O., Débats, Chambre, November 30, 1928, 3092.
4. Edmond Gojon, “Les leçons d’un centenaire,” L’Afrique du nord illustrée, April 27, 1929, 3.
5. Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 402–11; Henry, “Le centenaire de l’Algérie”; Jansen, “Fête et ordre colonial”; Kaddache, Histoire du nationalisme algérien, 223–54.
6. Maurice Viollette, “Proposition de loi relative à la célébration du centenaire de la liberation des états barbaresques,” in La Voix des humbles, December 12, 1928, 13; Cantier, “Les gouverneurs Viollette et Bordes.”
7. Mélia, Le Centenaire de la conquête de l’Algérie, 21.
8. Albert Truphemis, “Mascarade Balourde,” Demain, May 3, 1930.
9. Abbas, Le Jeune Algérien, 1930, 29.
10. Saïd Faci, “Assimilation,” La Voix des humbles, May 1930, 5.
11. Depont, L’Algérie du centenaire, 373, 118. Depont’s fears of miscegenation also underwrote his calls to regulate North African migrants in the metropole. See Rosenberg, Policing Paris, 136.
12. Pateman, Sexual Contract, 109; J. W. Scott, Sex and Secularism, 96–97.
13. Henry Vidal, “Le centenaire de la conquête d’Alger: Aux urnes, citoyens!,” Le Figaro, March 21, 1930.
14. Ioualalen, “Représentation parlementaire,” La Voix des humbles, July 7, 1931, 11–14. See also “La polygamie dans l’Islam,” L’Union, September 1, 15, 1927.
15. Marcel Morand, “Les institutions judiciaires,” in Milliot et al., L’oeuvre législative de la France en Algérie, 157, 89.
16. Georges-Henri Bousquet, “La législation française et son influence sur le droit de famille indigène,” RA, 1930, pt. 1, 193, 201. See also Solus, “L’évolution de la condition juridique de la femme indigène.”
17. J. W. Scott, Only Paradoxes.
18. Lorcin, Historicizing Colonial Nostalgia, 129. Also, Kimble, “Emancipation through Secularization”; Boittin, “Feminist Mediations of the Exotic”; Guiard, “Être féministe en contexte colonial”; Andersen, Regeneration through Empire.
19. Richardot, “Les indigènes d’Algérie voteront-ils avant nous?,” La Française, May 17, 1930.
20. “Ce que pense du suffrage des femmes une Française de Constantine,” La Française, May 17, 1930.
21. Colonel Godchot, “Les femmes indigènes de l’Afrique du Nord,” La Française, May 17, 1930; Cécile Brunschvig, “La propagande suffragiste en Algérie,” La Française, May 17, 1930.
22. Cécile Brunschvicg, “Au pays des femmes voilées,” La Française, February 14, 1931.
23. Cécile Brunschvicg, “La situation des femmes en Algérie,” La Française, February 28, 1931.
24. États généraux du féminisme, 115–16. And Régine Goutalier, “Les États généraux du féminisme à l’Exposition coloniale.”
25. “Une commission sénatoriale en Algérie,” La Française, May 30, 1931.
26. Farris, In the Name of Women’s Rights.
27. Yvonne-Noel Cunéo, “Le Congrès international des femmes méditerranéennes,” Annales Africaines, May 1, 1932, 141.
28. “La femme musulmane: Lettre ouverte aux dames Françaises du Congrès de Constantine,” La Voix indigène, March 10, 1932. Republished as Zenati, “La femme musulmane,” La Française, April 17, 1932.
29. “Le Congrès des Femmes Méditerranéennes et la femme musulmane,” La Voix indigène, April 21, 1932. Also, La Française, April 17, 1932.
30. Jeanne Bottini-Honot, “Congrès de Constantine: Impression d’un élu musulman,” La Fran-çaise, April 17, 1932.
31. “Le projet de la loi Viollette sur l’accession des musulmans aux droits politiques,” L’Écho d’Alger, December 31, 1936.
32. G. Vallé-Genairon, “Le vote des indigènes et les femmes françaises,” La Franç aise, January 30, 1937.
33. M. L., “Le projet de loi Viollette, confirmera-t-il l’asservissement des musulmanes algériennes?,” La Franç aise, February 6, 1937.
34. Lucienne Jean-Darrouy, “Sur les femmes musulmanes,” L’Écho d’Alger, February 20, 1937. Also, Guiard, “Être féministe en contexte colonial,” 144.
35. Shepard, Invention of Decolonization, and Sex, France, and Arab Men.
36. Surkis, “Hymenal Politics.”
37. Souilamas and Macé, Les féministes et le garçon arabe; Fassin, “La démocratie sexuelle et le conflit des civilisations”; J. W. Scott, Politics of the Veil, and Sex and Secularism; Tissot, “Excluding Muslim Women”; Dorlin, “Le grand strip-tease”; Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves; Fernando, “Save the Muslim Woman, Save the Republic”; Selby, “Polygamy in the Parisian Banlieues”; Fredette, “Becoming a Threat”; Farris, In the Name of Women’s Rights; Vauchez, “Is French Laïcité Still Liberal?”
38. Houellebecq, Submission, 238.