Welfare and Warfare: Social Action for Algerian Migrants in Metropolitan France during the Algerian War

Abstract

This dissertation is a study of welfare services provided to Algerian migrants in France from the end of World War II through the Algerian War. The brutal war ending in Algerian independence in 1962 fell in the midst of thirty years of French industrialization fueled by the arrival of thousands of Algerian workers. It also followed over a century of definition and redefinition by the French state of what it meant that Algeria and France formed a single nation. In this period, Algerians' perceived cultural difference was the object of serious concern to state policy makers and local associations alike, concern rooted in assumptions that Algerians' capacity for assimilation was hindered by their presumably un-modern, Muslim lifestyle, as well as in fears that the Algerian National Liberation Front was gaining ground in the metropole. This dissertation argues that the realm of welfare became a second front during the Algerian War, in which social services became a wartime tactic and the stakes were the future of Alg??rie fran?¼aise and the validity of republican colorblindness.