Fanon, 1969

Arendt's best-known remarks on Algeria appear in her 1969 essay “On Violence.” The first mention occurs in passing as a seemingly accidental effect of her argument with Fanon on decolonization and as a derivative expression of her more general concerns about his influence on the “student generation.”Footnote ²⁰ She writes, “The adherents of nonviolence are on the defensive, and it would be futile to say that only the ‘extremists’ are yielding to a glorification of violence and have discovered—like Fanon's Algerian peasants—that ‘only violence pays.’”Footnote ²¹ A great deal has been said about Arendt's reading and misreading of Fanon.Footnote ²² In this context, the peculiarity of her interpretation comes through an equivocal citational gesture. On the one hand, Arendt attempts to shield Fanon from direct criticism by suggesting that he was “much more doubtful about violence than his admirers” and keenly aware of the self-destructive danger that the use of “unmixed and total brutality” poses to anticolonial movements.Footnote ²³ On the other hand, her manifest reference to the violence of “Algerian peasants” has the strange effect of eliding his broader reflections on the dynamics of colonial violence. Fanon ends the passage quoted by Arendt with the candid affirmation that “colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state [la violence à l'état de nature], and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”Footnote ²⁴ So even as Arendt insists on naming and condemning the “glorification of violence” among students, “extremists,” and Algerians, she also silently elides the institution of violence that Fanon himself condemns and names: the French colonial state.

One could pursue the problem further by comparing Arendt's reticence on colonial violence in Algeria with her proximate claims about the “criminal violence” of Nazism: its “concentration and extermination camps,” its “genocide and torture,” and its “wholesale slaughter of civilians.”Footnote ²⁵ But any assessment of this historical relation will depend on how Arendt defines “violence” throughout her essay. According to one prominent tradition, she says, “violence [Gewalt] is nothing more than the most flagrant manifestation of power [Macht].”Footnote ²⁶ It is a conceptual grammar that she follows in circuitous ways from the Hebrew Bible (divine law) and Greek antiquity (monarchy) to sixteenth-century absolutism (sovereignty) and modern bureaucracy (the rule of nobody). In this lineage, power always rests upon the asymmetric structure of command and obedience: a tyrannical formation that reduces government to the threat or exertion of superior force and sees “no greater power than that which grows out of the barrel of a gun.”Footnote ²⁷ This is the thought that Arendt seeks to reverse through a series of theoretical transpositions meant to fracture the equation between power and violence. The result is a fundamental distinction. While violence represents the human capacity to expand personal strength by means of instruments—i.e. through the development and deployment of weapons—power represents the human capacity to affiliate as a group (zusammenzuschließen) and act in concert with others (im Einvernehmen mit ihnen zu handeln).Footnote ²⁸

The difference allows Arendt to turn the tables on a certain thinking and naming of violence by relocating the source of power from sword to consent, arms to alliance, and instrument to institution. Power no longer emerges organically from an individual's prior monopolization of violence; it instead precedes violence as the collective sanction for any organization of political rule. In arguing for this shift, Arendt makes clear that the “ascendency of power over violence” hardly constitutes an advance in governance.Footnote ²⁹ Since power fortifies the foundations of all political systems, it lies at the base of even the most violent and “most despotic” forms of domination: the rule of masters over the enslaved.Footnote ³⁰ And just as democratic regimes often suppress the “rights of minorities” and suffocate “dissent without any use of violence,” totalitarian regimes inevitably look beyond instrumental violence (“torture”) to secure their “power basis” in bodies like the “secret police and its net of informers.”Footnote ³¹ The point, Arendt thinks, is that governments in power never need violence to command obedience. When violence does appear on the scene, it means that governmental power has already begun to decline: “Rule by sheer violence comes into play where power is being lost.”Footnote ³² Instrumental repression is power's “last resort” against those who refuse to obey the order of things.Footnote ³³

In outlining the theoretical claim, Arendt delineates several historical examples: spatializing the conflict between violence and power across a political geography that once again includes “Hitler's Germany” and “Algeria.”Footnote ³⁴ She returns to the former as a case of “totalitarian domination” or, in a later definition, government by terror.Footnote ³⁵ It is a mode of rule that deploys violence not only to bring about the “massacre and submission” of its enemies but also to eliminate its “friends and supporters” in a reflexive activity of self-destruction.Footnote ³⁶ The name “Algeria,” by contrast, licenses Arendt's efforts to distinguish such suicidal excess from the relative moderation displayed by “European imperialism.”Footnote ³⁷ At a certain point in time, she thinks, the French Empire became aware of its “shrinking power” and had to confront the “alternative between decolonization and massacre.”Footnote ³⁸ That “France in Algeria” chose to follow the path of “restraint” demonstrates that it was not ready to “substitute violence for power” and, in so doing, endanger the stability of its “constitutional government” at home.Footnote ³⁹ Unlike the Nazis, in other words, the French seem to have intuited Arendt's own concluding formulation: “Where violence is no longer backed and restrained by power, the well-known reversal in reckoning with means and ends has taken place … with the consequence that the end will be the destruction of all power.”Footnote ⁴⁰ This too is Arendt's silent response to Fanon. What he identified as “violence in its natural state” she calls restraining power.

Classical statements by Fanon, Césaire, and Du Bois are enough to contest Arendt's all-too-easy division between Nazism and imperialism, colonial power and totalitarian violence.Footnote ⁴¹ But the comparative problem can also obscure a simpler issue: what does Arendt mean by “restraint”? Where does she draw the line between moderation and excess? How does she define the limits and containment of violent power? Even a brief glance across the historical archive of French Algeria will surely disturb (and make quite disturbing) the mild portrait that Arendt sketches in her analysis.Footnote ⁴² During the first forty-five years of colonial rule, the French settler state's “multiple logic of violence”—mass killings, economically induced famine, the spreading of epidemic disease—resulted in the estimated death of close to two million Algerians.Footnote ⁴³ Central to the exterminatory campaign of this period was the practice of so-called razzias: violent incursions undertaken by the French military to destroy the livelihood and social networks of rural communities.Footnote ⁴⁴ In addition to crop burnings, kidnappings, summary executions, sexual assaults, and torture, these operations involved the perpetration of collective enfumades.Footnote ⁴⁵ Perhaps the most infamous of these “smoke-outs” occurred in June 1845, when a unit led by Colonel Aimable Jean Jacques Pélissier asphyxiated approximately one thousand members of the Ouled Riah tribe in a cave of the Dahra mountains.Footnote ⁴⁶ A century later, just as Europe was declaring its liberation from Nazi violence, the French again displayed “restraint” in Algeria by responding to political unrest with the massacre of between six thousand and seventeen thousand civilians.Footnote ⁴⁷ The ensuing eight-year war (1954–62) to suppress the Algerian Revolution—“the longest and most violent anticolonial uprising of the twentieth century”—would end only after the death of 250,000–300,000 Algerians.Footnote ⁴⁸ It was a war that also saw numerous atrocities, including maiming, mass detention, and the creation of millions of displaced persons. The violence even extended to the streets of Paris. On 17 October 1961, the municipal police, headed by the Vichy collaborator Maurice Papon, acted in concert to arrest, injure, and murder Algerian demonstrators (many by drowning in the Seine).Footnote ⁴⁹

There are other ways to nuance, correct, and/or rebuke Arendt's evaluation of colonial power and violence in Algeria. A more detailed genealogy, for instance, would elaborate the French state's “everyday and insidious” modes of imperial rule: the legal, bureaucratic, military, and racial codes that “constituted an apparatus of permanent, routinised low-intensity warfare” against the Algerian population.Footnote ⁵⁰ An investigation of this kind would also likely compel a reversal of Arendt's reversal of the power–violence relation—one lesson of French Algeria being that violence does precede power whenever the formation of a single “body politic” depends on the naming of certain bodies as superfluous, disposable organs.Footnote ⁵¹ The even more troubling irony here, however, is that Arendt's description of all this as “restraint” stems less from a position of ignorance than from a long-standing negotiation with the contradictions traversing the French imperial nation-state.Footnote ⁵² That is why no critique of Arendt's encounter with Algeria can afford to ignore the studied path that conditions her apologetic and negationary discourse on colonialism. My wager is that Arendt's writing on Algeria betrays (against its own intentions) something more than an extortionary choice between restraining power and explosive violence. Arendt's text instead testifies to the violent power of colonial rule as the trembling antinomy of two conflicting temporal orders: the “inherent immediacy and swiftness” of violence and the “deliberate speed” of power.Footnote ⁵³

Crémieux, 1943

In October 1940, the Vichy government of France passed the Statut des juifs: legislation that instituted a vast and complex set of anti-Semitic laws across the empire. This included the abrogation of the Crémieux decree, which in 1870 had granted full French citizenship to almost all Algerian Jews.Footnote ⁵⁴ When Allied forces eventually regained control of Algeria in late 1942, the French high commissioner, General Henri Giraud, faced sustained pressure to repeal the Vichy regime's racial codes. He relented on 14 March 1943, in a decision that ended legal discrimination against Jews in Algeria; and yet, in a curious supplemental move, Giraud also immediately chose to reabrogate the Crémieux decree and rescind French citizenship from Algerian Jews for a second time in four years.Footnote ⁵⁵ He justified the pronouncement by appealing to “the principles of equality and justice.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Since the passage of the Crémieux decree in 1870 had “created a difference between native Moslems and Jews,” its continued existence perpetuated an intolerable hierarchy of racial divisions and threatened to incite Muslim Algerians to violence.Footnote ⁵⁷ An international effort to publicize the affair, overturn Giraud's act, and reestablish Jewish citizenship quickly found its way to Arendt, who responded the following month with a short article on the history of French colonial law in Algeria.Footnote ⁵⁸

The story that Arendt tells begins with an overview of French ideology in the colonies. She knew from a variety of sources that the empire had long pursued a distinctive program of assimilation: “The colonial policy of France since the days of Jean Baptiste Colbert—and contrary to the colonial policy of other European nations—had favored complete assimilation of the natives in its possession.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Her article supports the claim with a quote from Colbert, who had once instructed the French governor of New France to call the natives “to a community of life with the French … so that they may ultimately make with those of us who migrate unto Canada, one and the same nation.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Other statements collected by Arendt confirm the view. One from 1839 stated the goal of colonization as “the fusion of races and of interests”; another made a century later described France's “duty to see to the amelioration of the lot of the natives and to lead them gradually [progressivement] into the great French family.”Footnote ⁶¹ For the historian and diplomat Gabriel Hanotaux, colonialism's “final aim” maintained an “old and ever constant ideal” running from Louis XIV and Richelieu to the French Revolution: the reinvigoration of French civilization “through the ever closer [de plus en plus étroite] collaboration of natives and French.”Footnote ⁶²

Assimilation in its most capacious sense indicated “that the colony was to become an integral, if non-contiguous, part of the mother country, with its society and population made over” in France's image.Footnote ⁶³ This might entail “incorporating colonial territories into the national domain by governing them with uniform political institutions, legal codes, and commercial tariffs.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Or it might consist in the administration of “colonies as ‘overseas departments,’ subject to the conventions, customs, and norms of the metropole, and without special dispensation” for local traditions.Footnote ⁶⁵ Arendt more or less endorses this basic, spatial understanding of France's imperial mission and even lends her support to the idea that its principles stand in accord with the Declaration of the Rights of Man.Footnote ⁶⁶ In the case of Algeria, she observes that its special status lay in the fact that “it was the first French colony which was close enough to be directly incorporated into the body politic of France, to become an integral part of the mother country.”Footnote ⁶⁷ At least since 1870, and perhaps as far back as 1848, France had indeed governed the provinces of Algiers, Oran, and Constantine as internal départements of the state.Footnote ⁶⁸

But the assimilatory paradigm also relied on a complex and frequently changing system of legal structures. As Arendt rightly points out, one of the most significant was the sénatus-consulte of 1865, which codified a set of administrative distinctions that would underwrite and regulate the process of assimilation.Footnote ⁶⁹ The first and second articles of the decree announced:

In a certain respect, Arendt's interpretation of the law echoes more recent scholarship by emphasizing its essential division between “nationality” and “citizenship.”Footnote ⁷¹ She explains that after 1865 Muslim and Jewish Algerians officially belonged to two different legal spheres: one governed by French civil courts and the other by personal status. As French nationals, native Muslims and Jews enjoyed “the same civil rights as French citizens” and could participate in various sectors of government; as non-citizen subjects of France, they remained bound by the customary laws of their local communities—with few rights and “little representation in the decisive political bodies of the country.”Footnote ⁷² This meant that one could be a Jewish French or a Muslim French without being a French citizen. And because the law predicated individual naturalization on the renunciation of personal status, one could become a French citizen only by transforming the meaning of the terms “Muslim” and “Jew” from legal designations to private marks of “religious ‘confession’.”Footnote ⁷³

Arendt understood the consequences. The sénatus-consulte formed the cornerstone of a legal architecture designed to ensure the “dictatorship” of the French colons: a “selfish and arbitrary” system based on the “inferior political status of the natives” and the denial of their “share in the rule of the country.”Footnote ⁷⁴ She was also attentive to a line of thinking that commonly compared the regime in Algeria “to a feudal state, with the French enjoying rights and privileges similar to those of former feudal lords.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In 1881—a decade after both the Crémieux decree and the departmental incorporation of Algeria—the Third Republic reaffirmed the subjection of Muslim Algerians by organizing an array of older legal directives into the so-called Code de l'indigénat.Footnote ⁷⁶ This “exorbitant regime” gave systematic coherence to a set of infractions applicable only to natives and approved exceptional powers of enforcement for state administrators ruling over them.Footnote ⁷⁷ Some of these special crimes included unauthorized gatherings, unsanctioned travel, disrespectful actions, and offensive remarks to figures of authority.Footnote ⁷⁸ Punishments for the violations ranged from house arrest and administrative detention (at the dépôt des internés arabes in Corsica) to the levying of collective fines and the confiscation of property.Footnote ⁷⁹ As one of Arendt's sources put it, “While Europeans, French, and other foreigners are judged by ordinary courts [des tribunaux de droit commun] and benefit from all the guarantees provided by French law, the natives are subject to an exceptional penal regime [soumis à un régime pénal exceptionnel] and are deprived of essential guarantees. This state of things sanctions a flagrant inequality of justice.”Footnote ⁸⁰

For these reasons and others, Arendt could have easily diagnosed assimilation as a “political myth”: one specifically devised to suture the gap between colonial domination and republican ideals.Footnote ⁸¹ She could have also turned her analytic gaze to another ambivalent fact of French colonial ideology, namely its near-constant attempt to contain assimilation within the structure of association. One handbook consulted by Arendt defines the difference as a choice between policy and pragmatism: “The aim is to assimilate colonial peoples to the French people, or, where this is not possible in more primitive communities, to ‘associate’ them, so that more and more the difference between la France métropôle [metropolitan France] and la France d'outremer [overseas France] shall be a geographical difference and not a fundamental one.”Footnote ⁸² But in the end, Arendt does not advance a ruthless critique of French colonization or even adjudicate the incongruities of its ideological program. When faced with the evident “failure of the traditional policy of assimilation,” she falls back on two exculpatory explanations: an account that reiterates the progressive, civilizational discourse of the mission civilisatrice and its “fundamental assumptions about the superiority of French culture and the perfectibility of humankind.”Footnote ⁸³

The first adopts the terms of association by attributing the problems of assimilation to the “natives” and their “customs.”Footnote ⁸⁴ According to Arendt, Algerian Muslims “did not want to renounce their personal status (which permitted polygamy and the denial of all rights to women)”; and “France could hardly grant them citizenship under this circumstance.”Footnote ⁸⁵ She notes that “French civil law and the French Penal code have their bases in the equality of the sexes, and the Islamic concept of paternal authority is in fundamental conflict with this principle of individual liberty.”Footnote ⁸⁶ If France “hesitated” to grant citizenship to indigenous Algerians, that is because their “assimilation had to be watched more carefully” than the “backward tribes” living in other parts of the empire.Footnote ⁸⁷ In this sense, Arendt does not see the slow, halting pace of assimilation in Algeria as an effect of French colonial policy; she sees it as a legitimate strategy of temporal accommodation for the supposed persistence of Muslim cultural difference.Footnote ⁸⁸ That polygamy has “almost disappeared” in Algerian cities gives her hope that Muslims are making steady progress toward a future of full inclusion.Footnote ⁸⁹ But the continued inequality of Muslim women remains in Arendt's eyes an acceptable reason for the colonial state's continued refusal of Muslim equality.Footnote ⁹⁰ She deems them not yet ready for civilization.Footnote ⁹¹

Arendt quickly admits that this tells only a secondary part of the story. Even “more important than these customs and even more important than the influence of the native aristocracy was the attitude of the French colonials.”Footnote ⁹² The shift in focus, however, does not lead her to a revised presentation of French colonial ideology or to a repudiation of her previous justifications for colonialism's injustices. In making the turn from “natives” to “settlers,” Arendt instead seeks to divert the responsibility for such obvious abuses from the metropole to the colony. She writes, “While the national government sought the naturalization of the Arabs and regarded the Crémieux decree as a beginning and a way to attract the Arabs by the privileges it gave to its citizens, its intentions have been frustrated during the last seventy years by the colonials, who use their legal power to prevent naturalization of the natives.”Footnote ⁹³ Here, as elsewhere, Arendt suggests that the whole “sad story” of colonialism in Algeria was a “perpetual conflict” between the guiding principles of French imperialism and their corruption at the hands of local administrators.Footnote ⁹⁴ French settlers, she argues, came to think of themselves as “a kind of master race” and, in the process, “acquired a feeling of racial superiority that never had been known in France itself.”Footnote ⁹⁵ From then on, the settlers jealously guarded their power by opposing all national legislation for the “progressive naturalization of Algerian Muslims”: successfully defeating the “numerous bills” introduced by the French parliament in the period after 1870.Footnote ⁹⁶

The entirety of Arendt's essay, then, appears to obey a strict logic. The categories of “settler” and “native” frame a geographic argument that from beginning to end strives to absolve “France itself” (la France hexagonale) for the colonization of Algeria (la France d'outremer). This same reasoning also elucidates Arendt's final conclusions about French colonial law and the fate of Algerian Jews. In her summary judgment, “General Giraud's abrogation of the Crémieux decree introduces into Algeria a new criterion for French citizenship and creates a distinction between natives and citizens that is in flagrant contradiction to all French laws, all French institutions and to the whole of French colonial policy.”Footnote ⁹⁷ As Arendt clarifies, the real problem with the abrogation of the Crémieux decree lies not in its continuity with the history of colonial “dictatorship,” in its inheritance of a distinction between “citizen” and “subject,” or in its exposure of the exceptional paradoxes of the mission civilisatrice. The offense comes rather from its apparently novel disavowal of the progressive movement and liberal futurity of assimilation: the “normal process” that had always sought the ultimate transformation of “subjects into citizens.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Arendt contends that Giraud's decision produced the opposite, regressive “absurdity that for the first time in a non-fascist country citizens were turned into subjects.”Footnote ⁹⁹ She speculates, on this score, that one can find only a single precedent for Giraud's revocation of Algerian Jewish citizenship: the Nazi Reichsbürgergesetz of 1935.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Despite its ongoing complications, inequities, and prejudices, “French colonial policy” never abandoned the liberal horizon by reversing or terminating the developmental trajectory established in the promise of assimilation.

Arendt commits herself in these short pages to defending colonial power as an emancipatory, restraining force. Standing in the gap between past and future, she plots the normal, evolutionary course of events as a rectilinear advance from custom to law, Islam to Europe, barbarism to civilization, and subjection to citizenship: an imperial time of improvement menaced only by the abnormal deviations, distortions, and reversions of fascist temporality.Footnote ¹⁰¹ This point of view, however, leaves Arendt unable to resolve a familiar dilemma: “Why set up a special law for a country where it is precisely a question of applying the general law”?Footnote ¹⁰² Her stalwart faith in the civilizing mission prevents her from reading this tension between norm and exception as anything other than a breakdown of colonial ideology.Footnote ¹⁰³ It impedes her from considering the possibility that the simultaneous assertion and denial of citizenship represents a distinctive mode of colonial governance: one in which denaturalization is not a perversion but the rule.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Arendt does not entertain the idea that the gap between past (“subject”) and future (“citizen”) has no existence outside the “dynamic of difference” first instituted by the colonial order.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Nor does she recognize the deliberate speed of assimilation and the interim delays of association as twin ideological techniques for regulating the velocity of passage across an imperial chasm founded on the separation of races.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ What Arendt's analysis of colonial law in Algeria nonetheless illustrates—if fails to adequately theorize—is that the central axis of French colonial ideology “is time, and its cognate, patience” (to borrow Uday Mehta's phrase).Footnote ¹⁰⁷ For those caught in its “macropolitics of deferral,” the orthogonal clash between past and future produces something like a “treadmill effect”: the slow, graduated, and vertiginous movement of a system that lives off (and not in spite of) its own incessant provisionality.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Such pace-making is perhaps the essential characteristic of a colonial power that composes itself—forms its political body—in a territorial space of inclusive exclusion and a time of “indefinite postponement.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In Algeria, this meant occupying the interval between assimilation (e.g. the elimination of Jewish difference) and association (e.g. the segregation of Muslim difference).

Larcher, 1951

Nearly a decade after her first encounter with the name “Algeria,” Arendt published her most significant contribution to the question of imperialism in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).Footnote ¹¹⁰ The critique returns to a number of earlier themes, including progress, citizenship, and the civilizing mission.Footnote ¹¹¹ But across these extended discussions, Arendt largely focuses her theoretical attention on the space of the British Empire and its programmatic articulation in texts like Lord Cromer's “The Government of Subject Races.”Footnote ¹¹² When she does name France, she frequently passes over its role as a colonial power to emphasize its status as the nation par excellence, and the handful of references to Algeria similarly replicate the ambivalent discourse that appears both in her article on Crémieux and in her debate with Fanon.Footnote ¹¹³ While she acknowledges the “inner contradiction” between France's national “body politic” and its pursuit of “conquest,” the “nonsensical hybrid” it created between “nationals” and “subjects,” and the “brutal exploitation” it visited upon its colonies, she also mitigates France's comparatively “feeble imperialist attempts” and again displaces responsibility for these abuses from the government of Paris to the settler administration.Footnote ¹¹⁴ By 1967—two years before her reflections on violence and only five years after the liberation of Algeria—Arendt could still applaud France's decision “to give up Algeria” as an act of restraint: proof of its adherence to the “moral scruples and political apprehensions of the fully developed nation-states that advised against extreme measures.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Notable here too is Arendt's silence on Algeria in her concluding account of imperialism with its famed analyses of denaturalization, statelessness, and human rights.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In making no mention of Algeria, Arendt trades the difference between “citizen” and “subject” for the difference between “citizen” and “refugee.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

So it is that Algeria withdraws as a major topos in Arendt's writing and recedes as a key coordinating frame for her interventions into the perplexities of nation, state, and empire. But like all disappearances, this one leaves a spectral remainder that continues to haunt Arendt's text, until, in a nearly vanishing moment, it reemerges as a name for one of the “main political devices of imperialist rule”: bureaucracy.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In a first definition, Arendt classifies bureaucracy as the form of “administration by which Europeans had tried to rule foreign peoples whom they felt to be hopelessly their inferiors and at the same time in need of their special protection.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ She knew from her research on Crémieux that the French military government in Algeria had from early on embraced and implemented the practice.Footnote ¹²⁰ Between 1844 and 1870, the Ministry of War ruled over its Muslim subjects through an intermediary branch known as the Bureaux arabes. The officers of the Bureaux considered themselves experts in Algerian affairs (e.g. history, language, sociology, law) and used their technical knowledge as a means of enforcing French authority over everything from policing and taxation to economic and social policy.Footnote ¹²¹ On an ideological level, the Bureaux also played a concrete role in imagining and managing the “coexistence of asynchronic civilizations”: toggling between the universalizing ambitions of assimilation and the parochializing restrictions of association.Footnote ¹²² In its disciplinary and repressive aspects, the Bureaux inaugurated an administrative system that would long support a “remarkable derogation of the rules of modern penal law and the principle of the separation of powers.”Footnote ¹²³

One of the foremost expositors of this “political and juridical monster” was the early twentieth-century jurist Émile Larcher (1869–1918), distinguished professor of law at the University of Algiers, an avocat before the Court of Appeals of Algiers, and author of the definitive study of French Algerian law, Traité élémentaire de législation algérienne (1903).Footnote ¹²⁴ Like others in this tradition, Larcher proclaims his steadfast belief in assimilation. He agrees that “in principle, the laws in force in the metropole must be applied to the colony and to the people who inhabit it.”Footnote ¹²⁵ But he also confesses that it would be “impossible in a country so vast, with so much variety in its configuration and in the races that inhabit it, so different from the metropole in its customs and its aspirations, to apply metropolitan laws entirely without modification.”Footnote ¹²⁶ From this perspective, France cannot surrender its dominion over the “natives” or relinquish the authority that “keeps the calm” and “imposes respect” upon them.Footnote ¹²⁷ A “politics of subjection,” Larcher concedes, remains an unavoidable necessity for a place and a population “so distant from our civilization.”Footnote ¹²⁸

Larcher adds elsewhere that assimilation is not a process capable of hastily overcoming the profound differences separating French society from “the poor, ignorant, and fanatical tribes” of Algeria.Footnote ¹²⁹ Should assimilation ever succeed, it will come only at the culmination of “a long evolution, of slow and progressive changes in the economic situation and in the customs of the natives.”Footnote ¹³⁰ In this light, Larcher calls for a compromise between three political exigencies: the deliberate pace of the “assimilationist tendency,” the “obvious need” for racial separation in the sphere of law, and the government's “right to take swift action and modify legislation according to the progress or the dangers of a constantly evolving country.”Footnote ¹³¹ He explains, in this regard, that juridical thought normally distinguishes between the concept of loi and the concept of règlement. Laws are legislative powers: general, permanent, and an expression of a fundamental right. Regulations are executive powers: particular, secondary, and a vehicle for bringing laws to application.Footnote ¹³² Larcher qualifies, however, that the distinction becomes less clear in the colonies, where “the legislative power and the regulatory power are often exercised by the same agents”: effectively installing in the colony's administrative bureaucracy an exceptional authority to make law (loi) in the form of regulations (règlements).Footnote ¹³³ The politics of subjection, Larcher argues, demands a system “flexible and mobile enough to respond to the rapid changes of a society in formation.”Footnote ¹³⁴ It is that “need for speed” that submits Algeria—like all French colonies—to a veritable régime des décrets.Footnote ¹³⁵

Arendt explicitly cites Larcher's formula as part of her political-theoretical inquiry into the operations of bureaucratic governance.Footnote ¹³⁶ She writes, “Legally, government by bureaucracy is government by decree [Regime der Verordnungen].”Footnote ¹³⁷ This means that “power [Macht], which in constitutional government only enforces the law [nur der Ausführung und Innehaltung der Gesetze dient], becomes the direct source of all legislation [wird hier, wie in einem Befehl, zur direkten Quelle der Anordnung].”Footnote ¹³⁸ Like Larcher, Arendt sees the characteristic feature of government by bureaucracy as its inversion of the normal relation between law and power. Whereas constitutional regimes uphold the rule of law by restricting the use of power to the regulative enforcement of legislative decisions, bureaucracy manages to confound this difference by giving every act of regulative enforcement the authority of law. The reversal, says Arendt, creates a troubling legal situation, where parliamentary bodies and legislative assemblies dissolve as identifiable sources of legal right (loi): their place now occupied by an “anonymous” decree (règlement) that has no justification and needs no prior statutory grounding.Footnote ¹³⁹ In its legal structure, bureaucracy represents nothing more than an administrative apparatus for a government of “lawlessness” and “despotism.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰

By the time Arendt invokes Larcher and his phrase régimes des décrets, her analysis of bureaucracy has already moved from colonial imperialism to continental imperialism and from British India to the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires. The geographical transition strikes a familiar chord in its comparative minimization and disavowal of the effects wrought by colonial rule: “Colonial imperialism, which also ruled by decree and was sometimes even defined as the ‘régime des décrets,’ was dangerous enough; yet the very fact that the administrators over native populations were imported and felt to be usurpers, mitigated its influence on the subject peoples.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ In a parallel statement, Arendt also returns briefly to France in another attempt to shield the nation par excellence from any essential connection to its history of colonization: in this case, pausing to refuse any interpretation of “government by bureaucracy” as “the mere outgrowth and deformation of civil services which frequently accompanied the decline of the nation-state.”Footnote ¹⁴² If Algeria fades once more into the peripheries of Arendt's vision, it is because her distinction between empire and nation-state also endorses the spatial marginalization of a colony that, as she had written, was “legally as much a part of France as the Département de la Seine.”Footnote ¹⁴³

But such symptomatic denegations only underline Arendt's inability to fully disentangle her reading of bureaucracy from the signature of Algeria's colonial archive. In the same context, she again alludes to Larcher by suggesting that “rule by decree has conspicuous advantages for the domination of far-flung territories with heterogenous populations and for a policy of oppression.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Larcher had observed on this point that the creation of laws normally moves through three discrete phases (production, promulgation, and publication), which correspond, in turn, to different moments in the passage from legislative to executive action.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Following the course of this analysis, Arendt affirms that the “superior efficiency” displayed by “regimes of decree” stems from their ability to avoid those “intermediary [vermittelnden] stages between issuance and application [Gesetzgebung, Veröffentlichung und Exekution].”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Because they rely on neither parliamentary discussion nor popular opinion, decrees can bypass the “slow process of development of general law” and escape the obstacles that “in a nation-state extraordinarily delay and retard [verzögern und verlangsamen] legitimate legislation.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ It is this juridical acceleration, Arendt adds, that accounts for the close resemblance between “regimes of decree” and “states of emergency.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

In his presentation of colonial law, Larcher had already speculated that the urgent velocity exhibited by Algeria's “regime of decree” descended in part from a specific ordinance from 1834, which, in the aftermath of the French conquest, delegated “legislative power” to the colony's governor general “pour le cas d'urgence,” or in case of emergency.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ He questioned the legal basis for the delegation of these emergency powers and stressed that the ordinance had originally restricted their use to “exceptional and provisional” circumstances.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ But he also recognized the historical reality that the governors general of Algeria rarely observed such limitations, continuing to exercise legislative power even in situations without a clearly “exceptional character,” so that decrees once made “provisionally, for emergency purposes [vu l'urgence], are today still in force.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ Arendt takes up Larcher's concern by insisting on a more precise distinction between “regimes of decree” and “states of emergency.”Footnote ¹⁵² She recalls that “the emergency decree [Notverordnung], which turns out to be necessary in every state of exception [Ausnahmezustand],” cannot derive its legitimacy from the normal legal order and, for this reason, must “call upon the state of emergency itself for its justification.”Footnote ¹⁵³ The difference, Arendt adds, is that an emergency always remains “limited in time” and “clearly recognized as an exception to the rule.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Regimes of decree, on the other hand, do not respect clear temporal borders. They swap transience for permanence by generalizing an evanescent deformation of law into an enduring form of government: “The state of emergency justifies in the exception what in despotism is the rule; namely, the concentration and boundlessness of power [Macht] over the subject [Untertan].”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Once stripped of all constraints, the decree appears as the “immediate outpouring [unmittelbarer Ausfluß] of an overwhelming omnipotence”: a power that needs no justification precisely because a justification would already interrupt its absolute power (Machtvollkommenheit).Footnote ¹⁵⁶

Arendt's commentary here resonates with a series of long-standing debates about the concept of law and the jurisprudence of emergency.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ But her reading of Larcher probably finds its most direct conceptual influence in Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt's tacit exchange on the “state of exception.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The general contours of the dispute concern the “force of law” and, more specifically, the “field of juridical tensions” that separate legal norms from their application.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Schmitt argues across his writing that “every concrete juristic decision [Entscheidung] contains a moment of indifference from the perspective of content.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ No textual appeal, he thinks, can ever bridge the “insurmountable chasm” between legal abstraction and concrete reality, between the formulation of a positive law and its force of realization (Verwirklichung), or between a judgment (Urteil) and its execution (Vollstreckung).Footnote ¹⁶¹ The state of exception, on this view, merely exposes these supplementary gaps in the legal order by attempting to fully usurp the normative act of the legislator (“powerless right”) with the material force of the executive (“lawless power”).Footnote ¹⁶² Schmitt calls it “the essence of dictatorship.”Footnote ¹⁶³ For Benjamin, the “ignominious agency” most likely to intervene where “no legal situation exists,” and no legal “decision” warrants it, carries a different name: Polizeigewalt, police power.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ In democracies, he says, the “right of decree” asserted by the police carries a trace of the absolute power—the unification of “legislative and executive supremacy [Machtvollkommenheit]”—that once belonged to the monarch.Footnote ¹⁶⁵

Even as Arendt calls almost no attention to this conceptual lexicon, she threads its vocabulary and theoretical insights into the fabric of a genealogy that runs through Larcher and the annals of colonial law in Algeria.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ When she finally arrives at her plenipotentiary figure for this exertion of “absolute power,” she chooses neither the dictator nor the police but the bureaucrat: the colonial administrator who “considers the law [Gesetz] to be powerless because it is by definition separated from its application [Ausführung].”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ In the “decree,” Arendt glimpses a form of law which “does not exist at all except if and when it is applied [unmittelbar exekutiert wird]”; which needs “no justification except applicability [ob sie anwendbar oder unanwendbar ist]”; and which, in its independence from all normative grounds, turns the bureaucrat into the sheer “executive organ,” or “accidental agent,” for the law's appearance as the anonymous “incarnation of power itself.”Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Arendt's inquiry into bureaucracy thus concludes with a striking affirmation of Larcher's thesis on the colonial “need for speed.” For if she has measured its velocity correctly, the decree—“the brutal naked event itself”—is nothing less than the immediate manifestation of a non-sovereign, purely instrumental power.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Or, as Arendt would later put it (in an almost Fanonian phrase), an unrestrained demonstration of “the immediacy and swiftness” of violence.

Kafka, 1944

At a later moment in her analysis, Arendt turns to Franz Kafka for insight into “the bitter but also desperately satirical distortion” of twentieth-century bureaucracy.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Like all her writing on the topic, Arendt's brief literary citation participates in a teleological hierarchy of imperialisms: a progressive distinction that encloses Kafka within continental Europe (Austria) and seals his texts from any relation to bureaucratic rule in the colonies (Algeria). There are, of course, obvious justifications for erecting such a partition. As Arendt reminds her readers, Kafka was “the greatest prose writer produced by Austria in the twentieth century.”Footnote ¹⁷¹ And yet there are other reasons for thinking about the contingency of Arendt's decision: for wondering whether her distinction between “Kafka” and “colony” does something more than reveal a sober devotion to historical accuracy. In an earlier 1944 essay on Kafka, for example, Arendt had already suggested that his novel “The Trial implies a critique of the pre-war Austrian bureaucratic regime.”Footnote ¹⁷² This was a system that coupled the interpretation of law “with the administering of lawlessness” and transferred the “privilege of ultimate decision” from individual judgment to the “senseless automatism” of the administrative machine.Footnote ¹⁷³ It was also a world, Arendt thought, that had actually “come to pass.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Those who “lived under the most terrible regime history has so far produced” had to learn from experience that the “terror of Kafka adequately represents the true nature of the thing called bureaucracy—the replacing of government by administration and laws by arbitrary decrees.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ For anyone reading back from her later writing on totalitarianism, Arendt's nameless referent is all too evident.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ The question is simply whether one can also hear in this reading of Kafka—in a text that Arendt wrote only a year after her research into Crémieux and the “regime of decree”—the silent reverberation of the name “Algeria.”

Arendt leaves the possibility in abeyance. But her unfinished project has found belated completion in the writing of the French Algerian philosopher and political theorist Seloua Luste Boulbina. Through a series of incisive readings, Luste Boulbina presents Kafka's texts as fictional testimonials to the “subjectivation of the colonial situation.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷ A guiding thread in these analyses is the dialectic of assimilation and decree. On the one hand, and like Arendt, Luste Boulbina sees in Kafka the anonymous operation “of an infernal machine, an organization with no subject, an empire of administration.”Footnote ¹⁷⁸ She recognizes as well that the terror of Kafka adequately represents the “preeminent dimension of any colony”: government by decree.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ That is, “not a law but an order, not a rule but a command, an injunction, an imperative.”Footnote ¹⁸⁰ On the other hand, Luste Boulbina also insists that Kafka depicts another aspect of colonial governance in its demands for transformation: “The African, the colonized person, is compelled to change. It is imperative that he or she no longer be what he or she is.”Footnote ¹⁸¹ As Luste Boulbina explains, “Everywhere, assimilation is pregnant with a promise: it is supposed to bring personal benefits and social gains to the one who assimilates and who makes the effort to assimilate … It is always presented as beneficial, oriented in the direction of history (Enlightenment), inscribed in social progress just as in the progress of humanity.”Footnote ¹⁸² What Kafka understood is that this emancipatory “door to humanity” often leads to a “terrible conclusion.”Footnote ¹⁸³

Arendt had too much trust in the civilizing mission to perceive its promise as a prison. A similar belief in imperial futures also likely kept her from understanding that in Algeria the distinctions between assimilation and association, citizenship and subjection, law and decree, norm and exception always depended upon a more originary “inscription of racial difference.”Footnote ¹⁸⁴ But Arendt's protracted if tangential engagement with the name “Algeria” can still yield an important geometric lesson about the space–time of colonialism. Whether Arendt knew it or not, her writing on Algeria gauges the vertiginous temporal effects of colonial rule as an interminable “speed race” between the point (violence) and the line (power): the long, slow, suspensive trajectory of assimilation and the sudden, immediate, polemical eruption of the decree.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ For Arendt to have thought otherwise and outside this transcendental grid would have meant engaging in an alternative, decolonizing “activity of thought”: a “diagonal force” capable of uprooting the indefinite oppression of a system that always “incrusted itself with the prospect of enduring forever.”Footnote ¹⁸⁶ And perhaps still does.Footnote ¹⁸⁷