Review of Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930

Review of Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930

Review of Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930

By : Darcie Fontaine

Judith Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930 (Cornell University Press, 2019).

[This review was originally published in the Spring 2021 issue of Arab Studies JournalFor more information on the issue, or to subscribe to ASJ, click here.]

Historians of gender, sexuality, and empire have long been at the forefront of the scholarly effort to analyze how the Western obsession with the sexuality of both white and non-white women has shaped modern class, race, and gender hierarchies across the world. Historian Judith Surkis’s new monograph Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria presents a tremendous new addition to this field, as she demonstrates that the Orientalist sexual fantasies at the heart of the French colonial project in Algeria were central to France’s effort to maintain sovereignty over the Muslim population of its most important colony. More specifically, Surkis argues that French fantasies about Algerian Muslims’ sexual behaviors and Islamic law—particularly as it pertained to issues of polygamy and child marriage—were not just fantastical French representations of the “Other.” Using case studies of what she describes as “multiple moments of legal uncertainty” in the first century of French colonial Algeria (1830–1930), Surkis analyzes how French sexual fantasies about Algerian Muslims shaped the practice and writing of colonial law in French Algeria (9). These fantasies, she argues, provided the affective basis for the construction of a complex legal framework in colonial Algeria that facilitated both the expropriation of Algerian property and the French regime’s marginalization of Algerian Muslims from French citizenship.

Surkis describes her book as an attempt to “reconstruct the ‘cultural life’ of Algerian colonial law” (8). One of the great achievements of this book is that it forces us, through its creative use of sources, to think differently about the Algerian colonial archive. Although historians of gender and empire have notably led the effort to “read against the grain” of the colonial archive, Surkis’s book is one of the first to apply these approaches to the analysis of the French empire, and specifically the Algerian colonial context. Her source base includes a fairly exhaustive survey of the existing French-language archives of colonial Algeria and legal treatises of the period, surveys of numerous journalistic and academic sources, and most intriguingly, salacious romance novels written by French lawyers working in Algeria during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet Surkis also brings her training in feminist and critical theory to her study of “legal Orientalism” in nineteenth-century Algeria (13). She clearly draws inspiration from the significant body of scholarship on gender, sexuality, and empire, which, with a few notable exceptions, has not made its presence felt in the broader historiography of colonial Algeria, a field that has been dominated by more traditional social history in recent decades. More directly, she adapts Jacques Lacan’s description of “extimacy,” or the “fascination with and jealousy of the Other’s excessive sexual pleasure that reveals deep-seated but unrecognized desires within the self ” (16) to analyze what she describes as the “negated memory of Muslim law in French law” (18).

The first half of the book explores the interconnected issues of sovereignty, property expropriation, and the development of colonial legal structures in Algeria in the aftermath of the French conquest in 1830 that enabled the creation of distinct legal categories for “French” and “Muslim” personal status and land. Surkis argues that in the immediate aftermath of the conquest, the uncertainty about French sovereignty and control over Algerian territory led officials to invest in law as a means to symbolically organize the chaotic landscape and legitimate the French claim to Algeria. An 1834 ruling enacted the new system of dual tribunals, in which Muslim jurists and Jewish rabbis (until rabbinical tribunals were abolished in 1841), who became French government officials, oversaw matters relating to “religious law” and “civil status” for indigenous Algerians. Yet French law still had primacy over Muslim and Jewish law in Algeria, and Surkis uses specific cases to illustrate how gender—and specifically issues of family law—shaped the constantly evolving power dynamics between French authorities and Algerian Muslims during the early decades of colonization.

Despite upholding a basic level of authority for Muslim law, the French saw it as a symbol of Muslim inferiority. Surkis analyzes how polygamy became a “sexualized symbol of native legal difference” (55), defined as “decadent and primitive” (56) in contrast to the French Civil Code, which defined marriage as the engagement of two individuals. This seeming incompatibility between the “civilized” secular French law and the primitive, sexually deviant Muslim law was codified through the 1856 Senatus-Consulte, which declared that Muslim and Jewish “indigènes” of Algeria were subjects, rather than citizens, of France and could only become citizens through the full renunciation of their personal status (i.e., adherence to shari‘a or Mosaic law) and the adoption of the French civil code. The material consequences of this legal distinction can be seen in the implementation of the 1873 Warnier Law, which assimilated Algerian property law into French civil law but maintained Muslim “personal status and inheritance” as a separate legal category (most Algerian Jews had been assimilated as French citizens through the 1871 Crémieux decree). In other words, property was assigned to territory, but “personal status” was assigned to bodies; even if an Algerian Muslim left Algeria for France, their citizenship status would remain tied to their “personal status” or their adherence to Islamic law. As the Warnier Law was designed explicitly to facilitate the transfer of Algerian property into French hands, this distinction forced French officials to legally define who held the title to Algerian properties, which involved defining “Muslim families” within a structure that was legible to the French.

The second half of the book explores the issue of legal reform. Although some reformers sought to extend political rights to Algerian men in exchange for military service in the early twentieth century, French fantasies about the sexual rights of Muslim men and their incompatibility with French law and values continued to dominate discussions over citizenship, rights, and the reform of colonial law. While French discourses, from jurists in Algeria to metropolitan feminists, saw the “plight” of oppressed Muslim women as the target of reform, Algerian Muslim elites spoke up in defense of Muslim law and culture, in some cases directly addressing French Orientalist fantasies at the root of reformist projects. These are the subjects of the final two chapters of the book, and the space where Surkis drives home the point—largely through her analysis of civilizational discourses about Muslim sexuality and marriage customs in romance novels and popular fiction—that these fantasies functioned most effectively at the level of elite discourse. She argues that because it was French jurists themselves who wrote these “sentimental fictions,” they illustrate how colonial law itself drew on feelings and fantasy as much as reality.

One key question the book raises, however, concerns the issue of race, and more specifically, how the relationship between French Orientalist sexual fantasies and colonial law influenced the development of a racial conception of Algerian Muslims. Surkis carefully avoids directly using the term race, despite building a significant body of evidence and an analytical framework that specifically illustrates the evolution of French discourses on Algerian Muslims as a racial category, rather than just a religious minority. This is particularly evident in her analysis of the implications of both the 1865 Senatus-Consulte and the 1873 Warnier Law on the embodiment of Muslim “personal status,” which she discusses over multiple chapters. She analyzes, for instance, how French colonial officials frequently rejected the assimilation of Algerian Muslims into French society due to their adherence to “incompatible” sexual “privileges” such as polygamy, child marriage, and repudiation. Yet cases of religious conversion illustrate that the converts maintained their originary personal status, despite their change in religious status. Thus, an Algerian Muslim convert to Christianity became an “indigène Catholique” rather than a French citizen. Likewise, a French woman who converted to Islam did not automatically become an “indigène,” as this status belonged solely to those born in Algerian territory. Surkis describes this situation as an “ethnicized understanding of personal status,” and makes the case that this is tied directly to the secular nature of French law, in which conversion was a matter of personal belief, rather than legal status, and became bound directly to Muslim bodies rather than territory (186). Considering that historians have long been analyzing similar processes of European antisemitism against Jewish populations during this same period as the development of a specifically racial mythology about Jews, it is somewhat disconcerting to see this ongoing attachment to the narrative that the French systems of discrimination against Muslim Algerians—which are documented in great detail in this book—were only about religion, rather than race.

Nevertheless, Surkis’s analyses also offer up important new paths for further research, including the consideration of other spaces we might look for evidence of Algerians working within and against colonial law, and what opinions we might find about the reform of “backward” customary law among less elite Algerians. More broadly, this book’s introduction of gender and sexuality into colonial Algerian history brings a wave of new energy to the field. Yet scholars who work outside of the geographical boundaries of the Maghreb and the French empire, and particularly those working in the global history of gender and sexuality, will appreciate its combination of rigorous archival research and theoretical insights; it is a book that will certainly serve as a model to future scholars.

Review of "Citrons doux : l’Aînée"

Dora Latiri, Citrons doux : l’Aînée, Sousse: Contraste Editions, collection “Tsawar”, 2020, 95 pages. ISBN 978-9973-878-69-4. www.contraste.tn

In Citrons doux, Dora Latiri (Sousse, 1957) offers us a beautifully written account of pieces her life, through the memory of her eldest sister, l’âinée, whom she pays homage to.[1] Like her previous photographic autofictional account, Un amour de tn, Citrons doux combines beautiful photographs in black and white with various languages, and scripts.[2] All of it endows the account with a richness that is unapologetically founded on multiplicity, diversity, even contradiction. Dora uses collage and evokes the figure of the matryoshka to enhance the multi-layered nature of memory and history. She plays with light, with words and sayings which signal the journeys back and forth in time, across different spaces and lieux de mémoire.

The pages of Citrons doux are full of food and recipesthe sweet lemons which give the account its title being the eldest sister’s favourite fruitof songs, flowers, and books in different languagesa shelf with Mourid Barghouti’s رأيت رام الله, I saw Ramallah, J’ai vu Ramallah side by sideall of which evoke distinct memories and emotions. Dora’s work exudes nostalgia, tenderness, pain, love. It’s an act of mourning, of remembrance, of deliberation: “Through the memory of my eldest sister, of the moments we shared and of my experience of migration, I evoke a Tunisia of the past. I search for what is gone, what remains, and what is to come” (“À travers le souvenir de ma soeur âinée et de nos années partagées et à travers mon vécu migrant, c’est une Tunisie du temps passé que j’évoque. J’y cherche ce qui s’en va, ce qui demeure, ce qui vient”, p. 12).

In this search, many reflections emerge. She enquires into kinship bonds, and more specifically about the relationship between sisters: “Among the words to name the relationships between sisters there is mutual understanding and rivalry, love and jealousy, contradictory words which come in pairs” (“Parmi les mots pour dire les relations entre soeurs il y a complicité et rivalité, amour et jalousie, des mots contradictoires qui viennent par paires”, p. 11). Dora then continues to explore the cultural and symbolic meanings attached to eldest siblings in Tunisia, where they often still represent a parent (“Chez nous, trop souvent encore, l’âiné.e est aussi un père, une mère”, ibid). And she ends up playing with words in the different languages that inhabit her world: “My father and mother used to call their respective eldest brother sidi, which I translate into English as sir, which comes back to me as an homophone echo of the word soeur [sister, in French]” (“Mon père et ma mère appelaient chacun leur frère âiné sidi, que je traduis en anglais par sir et qui me revient en écho homophone du mot soeur”, ibid).

Through the memory of her eldest sister, Dora Latiri evokes a Tunisia of the past. She searches for what is gone, what remains, and what is to come.

Through her eldest sister’s passions and routines, Dora takes the reader to the so-called Karraka, the Citadel that the Spaniards began to build when they invaded Tunis in 1535, and that the Ottomans continued to develop after they took over the Spaniards, and where she confesses to have always imagined Cervantes imprisoned (p. 80). Dora’s account weaves fragments of history, her own story, individual as well as collective memory. The fort is located at the port whichas in many Maghrebi coastal locationsprotected the capital from the perils of the open sea; its French name, La Goulette, derives from La Goletta, the Italian translation of the Arabic Halq al-Wad, literally ‘the river’s throat’, where Dora grew up. But the linguistic mix which results from the superposed layers of history does not end here: Karraka has come to mean ‘prison’ in Tunisian Arabic, although it probably derives from the Spanish carraca or the Italian caracca, the name of an early-modern Mediterranean vessel which the imperial Spanish and Ottoman armies used in their fight for the control of the North African coast. In Barg el-Lil (1961), a historical novel by the Tunisian writer Bachir Khreyif set in the turbulent events before and after the Spanish invasion, the protagonista Central African slavecalls in the Citadel after he has escaped his master Sidi Ahmed b. al-Nakhli, the man whom Cervantes metafictionally claimed to have authored El Quijote.[3] Dora is arguably not alone in having pictured Cervantes in the Goulettian Karraka. Indeed, as does Khreyif’s historical novel, Citrons doux signals asymmetrical relations and processes, and at the same time claims to be heir to a historical and cultural polyphonyà la ‘Abdelkebir Khatibi.[4]

The memory of the city places frequented by Dora’s elder sisterKawther Latirireveals transformations in the recent history of Tunisia, too. A street that used to be called Yugoslavia is now named after Radhia Haddad, a Tunisian feminist activist, Dora writes (p. 81). The decade-long Tunisian revolution has indeed impacted urban nomenclature. It has also led to the emergence of new debates – around race and blackness, for example, which are long silenced issues which Barg el-Lil, the novel with the enslaved black hero, arguably set to break. The revolutionary trail likewise enhanced the breaking of the taboo of acknowledging having suffered sexual harassment and violence, leading to the establishment of ‘Ena Zeda’, a Tunisian ‘Me Too’ of sorts. Dora courageously joins many Tunisian (and world) women: “1986. I’m in London for some months, I’m working as an editor, I’ve left Paris, I’ve run away from a violent husband […] EnaZeda (“1986. Je suis à Londres pour quelques mois, je travaille dans l’édition, j’ai quitté Paris, j’ai fui un mari violent […] EnaZeda, p. 61).

The motto ‘the personal is political’ is subsumed in Dora’s account, and that makes the readermy reader self, at leastidentify with the writer, her experience and back-looking gaze, and more importantly, it encourages empathy with the intricacies of human(e) experience, of genealogy, migration and exile, orphanhood, nostalgiaand many more profound issues with which Dora deals with as much simplicity as beauty. Citrons doux is a touching, aesthetically, and narratively powerful book.



[1] For a review of the book in French, see: Bourkhis, Ridha, “‘Citrons doux : l’Aînée’, photoautobiographie de Dora Latiri : Ombres et lumières”, La Presse, published 1 May 2021, https://lapresse.tn/95919/citrons-doux-lainee-photoautobiographie-de-dora-latiri-ombres-et-lumieres/?fbclid=IwAR3-CBpA82CI-FxOXFNTPWv4IZE5cSZOKBHjfltIHWiw3w4vgV2KbNA49Qc [accessed 20 May, 2021].


[2] Latiri, Dora, Un amour de tn. Carnet photographique d’un retour au país natal après la Révolution (Tunis: elyzad, 2013). For a review in French, see: Bourkhis, Ridha, “‘Un amour de tn. Carnet photographique d’un retour au país natal après la Révolution, de Dora Latiri: ‘Je suis d’ici et j’ai des souvenirs!’”, La Presse, published 3 April 2021, https://lapresse.tn/92952/un-amour-de-tn-carnet-photographique-dun-retour-au-pays-natal-apres-la-revolution-de-dora-latiri-je-suis-dici-et-jai-des-souvenirs/?fbclid=IwAR0xD4Gy3G_B9POvRCmU3pVAt4acvBJEOjcpPoksVKb3KaaZZZQKO6e_4jw#.YGh7sBRpH8M.facebook [accessed 20 May, 2021].


[3] Barg el-Lil echoes the Tunisian pronunciation instead of the Modern Standard Arabic one. Khreyif, Bachir, Barq al-Layl (Tunis: Dār al-Janūb, 2000 [1961]). The novel was translated into Spanish in the early 1980s and into French only very recently: Jrayyef, Bas̆īr, Barg el-Līl, trans. Ana Ramos (Madrid: Instituto Hispano-Arabe de Cultura, 1982); Khraïef, Béchir, Barg Ellil, trans. Ahmed Gasmi (Tunis: Éditions Arabesques, 2017).


[4] Khatibi, Abdelkebir, Maghreb pluriel (Paris: Denol, 1983).