Ferhat Abbas is a native Algerian politician in the French Republic and a known advocate of Algerian autonomy within France. Different to many of his equally nationalist compatriots however, Abbas does not strive towards a truly independent Algerian nation, but sees the future of his people as a part of the French State. He closely cooperates with Charles Maurras' integralist Action française and founded a similar organization called Action algérienne, built upon the ideals of freedom and equality for all Algerians regardless of religion on a local level, land reform, recognition of Arabic as the national language, freedom of press and association, free education for male and female children and a state-enshrined Islam.
Biography[]
Early Life[]
Ferhat Abbas was born to a local chief in the village of Taher, Algeria in August 1899. He was educated first at Phillipeville, Constantine, where he received his baccalaureate in the midst of the Weltkrieg. Before finishing his education, he was required to serve in the French army medical corps where he reached the rank of sergeant.
Involvement in French Algerian politics[]
Following the end of the war, Abbas attended the pharmacy school at the University of Algiers. Around the same time, the French Civil War led to the escape of ten thousands of Frenchmen from the mainland to North Africa, when it had become clear that there was no chance of defeating the Communard troops. Over night, Abbas' native Algeria had become the centre of National French politics.
After graduating, Abbas worked as a pharmacist in Sétif during the 1920s. Around the mid-1920s, he started to become involved in politics: The military coup of Philippe Pétain drastically deteriorated the situation of the African natives and introduced harsh restrictions - all under the guise of "National Salvation". Abbas was not pleased with these restrictive developments and was soon elected to the municipal council and then to the general council of Constantine. At his heart, he remianed deeply pro-French - considering it had been his colonial overlords who had brought Western education and progress to Northern Africa - but Pétain's rule slowly stripped the native population of their hard-earned rights and turned the French State into a corporatist dictatorship.
Abbas was a young man when France was defeated by German arms, plunged into syndicalist revolution and later was divided between rabid nationalists and socialists with no regards for traditional values; having believed in assimilationist rhetoric before the Weltkrieg, France’s deep downfall left a deep impression on him. While on the surface, he continued to espouse assimilationism and to advocate cooperation and support for the Nationalist regime in order to earn political equality with the native-born French, on a deeper level he began to question whether it would be possible to achieve this goal.
In the late 1920s, he became involved with the increasingly bold Action Francaise, a monarchist and integralist party which proposes a strict segregation of Frenchmen and natives and stands in for autonomy zones in the colonies, and led the foundation of the Action Algerienne, a complementary organization to the AF. The Action Algerienne’s purpose was to grow support for the AF and their Maurrasian ideals among indigenous Algerians. Abbas still remains doggedly pro-French, even as the laws of the Indigenat that ruled French Africa become harsher and harsher. However, now, in the mid-1930s, as Pétain's dictatorship is more entrenched than ever and no possibility of reform is in sight, his pro-French attitude is on its very last legs, and his hopes ride entirely on the success of the Action Francaise in the near future.