Popular Culture and Mass Politics in Wartime North Africa, 1939-1945

The invasion of North Africa by the US Army on 8 November 1942 met little resistance. Large crowds cheered on their liberators as the Vichy regime collapsed unceremoniously. Basic civic freedoms slowly returned to the region during subsequent months. Journalists quickly began castigating the old regime, but it took considerably longer for Jews to regain their citizenship rights. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the local population – native Muslims – remained at the bottom of an oppressive legal order based on strict racial differentiations. True "liberation" was reserved exclusively for European settlers.
Yet despite the importance of this historical period several questions are still waiting to be answered. How did World War II transform the Maghrib? In what ways did its inhabitants react to the events that changed the world around them? And how did the war contribute to the decolonization of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia? My project addresses these issues through a cultural history from 1939 until 1945. By integrating all of the region’s communities—Muslims, Jews, and European colons—into a single narrative, it provides an in-depth account that will be of interest to scholars far beyond the confines of North Africa.
A series of laws enacted by the Vichy authorities in 1940 and 1941 deprived Jews in Algeria of their French citizenship and banned those in all three North African colonies from a number of white-collar professions. Access to universities was severely restricted. Public displays of antisemitism became part of everyday life and exposed the hollowness of seven decades of French assimilationist policies. 
A considerable number of European settlers supported the new social order imposed by the reactionary Vichy regime. The right-wing Parti Populaire Français became the sole active party in North Africa and many young Frenchmen joined youth camps to strengthen themselves physically while being indoctrinated with the values of the so-called "national revolution": Work, Family, Fatherland.
A dramatic shortfall of all kinds of goods made life increasingly difficult. Grain, cooking oil, soap, cloths and many other items were strictly rationed by the French authorities. The state thus reached much deeper into people's lives and the daily competition for calories created new zones of friction between the different communities. Colonial officials continuously worried about the decline of French "prestige", which they deemed essential for maintaining control over their colonial subjects.
The Vichy authorities sent "undesirable" elements – mainly Communists, but also Spanish Republicans and Jews – to forced labor camps. Some prisoners built a huge damn at Im Fout near Casablanca; others worked in coal mines or on railroads further south.
Hundreds of thousands of Muslim North Africans served in the French army during the war. Some of them became POWs such as these Moroccans in Stalag 8c. The money earned by the enlisted men secured the survival of entire communities, especially in the countryside.
​Anticolonial nationalism—hitherto mainly the purview of the urban elites—rapidly spread among Muslims of all social classes, leading to the publication of independence manifestos in Spanish and French Morocco (14 February 1943 and 11 January 1944 respectively) as well as calls for “autonomy” and “self- determination” in Algeria (10 February 1943) and Tunisia (30 October 1944). Local protests against the increasingly desolate living conditions and oppression by the colonial authorities now often turned overtly political.
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