Nearly sixty years after the demise of French Algeria, both colonizer and colonized continue to grapple with its legacy. In January, the French government published a report intended to enable a “reconciliation of memories between France and Algeria,” and announced the establishment of a “Memories and Truth Commission” to conduct a fuller review of the countries’ colonial past. But the commission’s remit will be limited—President Emmanuel Macron has already ruled out both a formal apology and reparations payments, and critics have alleged that the initial report whitewashes colonial atrocities (a ploy, some say, for right-leaning votes ahead of France’s presidential election next year). The government of Algeria likewise sees this soul-searching as insufficient, confidently maintaining that “France’s escape from recognizing its colonial crimes in Algeria cannot last long.”
But if the non-material effects of French rule endure, its physical traces have proven far more ephemeral. After independence, the vast majority of Europeans departed Algeria’s cities, leaving their homes, churches, and civic buildings to be repurposed or demolished. Streets and squares were rechristened, the names of French administrators replaced by those of fallen independence fighters. Equally sweeping changes occurred in the countryside: perhaps most dramatically, the vineyards that had once covered 400,000 hectares of the best Algerian farmland began to vanish, ultimately dwindling to a fraction of their former extent.
One could therefore be forgiven for not realizing that this arid, Muslim-majority nation was ever a major wine producer. But as Professor Owen White reveals in The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria, for much of the twentieth century Algeria was the world’s fourth largest exporter, churning out hundreds of millions of gallons annually. Its robust, high-alcohol wines were staples of European tables, drunk on their own or blended with weaker French vintages. At its peak, the wine trade employed hundreds of thousands, dominating the colony’s agriculture and constituting (in the opinion of one French historian) “the most important economic fact in the modern history of Algeria.”
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