Les Maghrébins et la Grande Guerre 1914–1918

The mobilisation caused a great social mobility in the Maghreb countries that had never been seen before. More than two hundred thousand men participated in the war operations, and almost a hundred and fifty thousand went to work in the metropolitan factories. They have discovered a new world: a more egalitarian society than that of their country. They were influenced by new ideologies: nationalism, Pan-Islamism, bolshevism, and Wilson’s 14 points. The contact with the workers’ world transformed them into thinking beings – says one of their spokesmen, El Emir Khaled. The author presents the activities of Charles-André Julien (1891–1991), a social-communist militant (in 1924 he left the Communist Party) describing the awakening to self-consciousness of the Maghrebis (the “natives”) and the realization of their national and social situation. This militant, and later prominent historian of the Maghreb, contributed a lot to making the colonial problem an important matter in French political life at the beginning of the 1920s.