Antonin PlarierATER in History, Sciences Po Grenoble

In the early hours of the Algerian War of Independence, the Prefect of Batna was alarmed at the the presence of "bandits" in National Liberation Army groups. From this observation, he deduced the need to regroup the Algerian Algerian populations into camps in order to thwart the relays and support support these "bandits" had among them.

These archival documents, which I came across while working on my Master's degree, led me to question the apparent contradiction between the superimposition of a criminal phenomenon and a political one. This questioning was fuelled by my reading of Eric Hobsbawm, an essential yet controversial reference on the subject. In Bandits, published in 1969, he pioneered the analysis of banditry as a reaction to the transformations undergone by rural societies. He also added that the "social bandit" was as much a figure of peasant resistance as he was of resistance. Half a century later, this approach retained its appeal, prompting us to interpret banditry in a colonial context as an anti-colonial phenomenon.

However, this was clearly not the only avenue explored in the thesis project under Sylvie Thénault 's supervision, and the sources consulted confirmed the need to broaden the approach. The question then shifted to the bandits themselves, in other words, to the connections constantly forged between them and their rural world.

How the history of banditry?

This issue called for the cross-referencing of several sources. Judicial and police sources were very incomplete, and were not sufficient to understand a phenomenon that needed to be seen in its own context. The communal, land and forestry archives of the Archives Nationales d'Outre-Mer (Aix-en-Provence) and the Archives Nationales Algériennes provided snapshots of the bandits and their environment at a given moment. The clues provided by these scattered snippets cast a furtive but vivid light on certain episodes or actors in the banditry. This stripped-down approach also provided a framework for the environment in which the bandits emerged, a framework that was essential to the reconstruction of banditry as a "total social fact", to quote Marcel Mauss.

And besides, what is banditry banditry? Eminently disqualifying, this term is used in a multitude in a multitude of writing situations, all of which have one thing in common a moral condemnation. However, the authors of the time, from the gendarme to the outspoken journalist, express not only indignation or, or, on the contrary, a symmetrical admiration, when they evoke banditry. They also bring to light facts, actions, relationships, conflicts - sometimes even even emotions. It then becomes possible to take an interest in those who, having who, having committed a crime or misdemeanor, are pursued by the administration to submit to its orders. In this refusal lies banditry, as fugitives eventually end up appropriating this label.

Constant connections with rural life

The conflictuality expressed by the bandits is first and foremost that of everyday rural life, which they know and share. Their paths illustrate those of peasants grappling with dispossession. One of the contributions of this thesis lies in the analysis of this dispossession, not so much of land - a phenomenon that has been and is the subject of other historians from André Nouschi to Didier Guignard - as of forests.

This complex process unfolded unevenly across Algeria's forested territories. Although the Forestry Code, adopted in 1827, was theoretically applied from the time of the conquest in 1830, its actual implementation was spread out over the long rhythm of the assertion of colonial authority on a day-to-day basis. The forestry administration gradually expanded, with priority given to the lucrative cork oak forests. Until the early ^20th century, certain forest areas were not covered by the administration.

Similarly, delimiting these areas requires time and resources, and is not without its share of resistance. Maintaining grazing rights, continuing to use fire as an agricultural technique for fertilizing the soil, and preserving rights to gather or cut wood are all casus belli. These long-term confrontations fluctuated, but they punctuated the entire colonial period, even if they faded momentarily in favor of the accommodation processes demanded by the relative isolation of forest rangers in the exercise of their activity.

What banditry?

In this context, what meaning can banditry have, i.e. what significance did the actors give to their actions? Clearly, the difficulty of this question lies not only in the fact that these actors wrote very little, but also in the fact that only a tiny fraction of their writings have reached us.

It was therefore necessary but also to try and illuminate them in the light of the context in which they were context in which they were spoken. From this point of view, it's clear that the scale of dispossession of dispossession is not lost on any of the protagonists. Consequently, in the repetition of an act prohibited by the administration (grazing in the forest, woodcutting or theft) is a form of opposition to the authorities, whose whose colonial character accentuates the violence of the exchanges. The banditry is thus part of a continuum that starts with rural illegalism to insurrection.

This colonial dimension is not the exclusive determinant of banditry. The approach adopted is more of a than a colonial history in the strict sense, which would make the colonial the sole driving force behind social in such situations. I have thus demonstrated the recurrence of direct or indirect direct or indirect involvement of rural Europeans in banditry. The corpus of bandits studied includes a few Italians and Spaniards, testifying to the the administration's perception of European immigrant populations. This European involvement complicates the reading of banditry, a phenomenon which, as an integral part of rural life, merely expresses its conflicts in paroxysmal form.

Tracking and repression of banditry

In the final analysis, the anti-establishment nature of banditry only exists in relation to the administration that decides to repress the phenomenon. It is through its repressive choices that it contributes to giving it meaning. The range of coercive measures put in place includes a variety of administrative, military and judicial procedures, all of which combine in what is first and foremost a battle of intelligence, leading, though not always, to a physical confrontation between two camps.

In this battle for intelligence, the players involved each hold a variety of cards and trump cards. Contrary to popular belief, the administration may have difficulty in knowing what's going on among the Algerian population on an ongoing basis, but it's not ignorant of local realities either. Conversely, bandits also had the resources to face up to or evade colonial authority.

These chapters are written in a micro-historical mode. Individual convict files have enabled me both to reconstruct the singular paths taken by convicts and to place the history of a particular group - Algerians transported to the penal colony of French Guiana or New Caledonia - within an imperial history. It is thus a characteristic of this thesis that it does not seek to privilege one approach over another, but rather to seize upon a social, environmental and imperial history that enables us to understand this subject from various angles and phases of its existence.

Banditry and insurrection: the moment of the First World War

During the Great War, banditry banditry was fuelled by a refusal to mobilize the military. mobilization. This refusal gave it an unprecedented scope and vigor. Simple individual thieves were able to take up the cause. Intertwined, these two processes fed the concerns concerns of the colonial administration, which saw it as a potential threat to its its domination.

This danger was realized the 1916 uprising in Belezma. A bandit named Mohammed ben Nouï played a leading role, giving substance to the colonial anxieties colonial fears that banditry was a pre-insurrection phenomenon. Several anger overlapped in this major episode. Within the gang that led the initial assault, during which a sub-prefect and a a sub-prefect and a commune administrator were murdered, individuals who had banditry as a result of convictions for forestry offences, and others who joined others who had joined the gang as rebels or deserters. This anger intermingle in a millefeuille of protest. Banditry is but an avatar avatar of its environment. The transformation of the latter in the process of war the war, banditry became a banner for the social and political demands the social and political demands of rural Algeria.