ABSTRACT
The distant aim towards which this article hopes to contribute is that of elucidating the emergence of ideas of the nation, and the structures of the ‘nation’ state, in North Africa, a process of which the beginnings, I argue, ought to be situated in the early 1920s. This decade has long been considered as encompassing the ‘hollow years’ (les années creuses) of the history of Maghribi nationalism, a lull preceding the stormy nationalist agitation of the 1930s, and there has thus been a tendency for the study of this period to be somewhat neglected. This has largely remained the case despite the evident effervescence which the 1920s saw throughout North Africa.1 Nationalist politics took shape from the early years of the decade in Tunisia, with the founding of the Destour (Hizb al-hurr al-Dustur al-Tunisi, the Independent Tunisian Constitutional Party, often referred to as the ‘Old’ Destour), on 4 June 1920. Contestation took a very different form in Morocco, with the emergence of the armed resistance movement in the Rif led by Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Krim al-Khattabi in 1921, and his ‘Republic of the Rif’ which expressed both wholly modern desires for statehood-at least on the part of its architect-and an older established style of authority.2 In Algeria, there was an unprecedented flowering of the Arabic language press, the coalescing of the Islamic reformist movement (‘Abd alHamid ben Badis’ first journal al-Muntaqid appeared in 1925), and massive labour migration to France, where the Étoile Nord-Africaine, first expression of revolutionary-populist nationalism, was formed in 1926.
