ABSTRACT
On 14 April 1962, shortly after the signing of the Evian Accords on the independence of Algeria, Ahmed Ben Bella, one of the leaders of the National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale – FLN), who had just been released from prison, declared at a press conference in Tunis: ‘We are Arabs, ten million Arabs!’ This statement is still often interpreted as a thundering announcement of adherence to Arabism. In fact, and although Ahmed Ben Bella was already at the time committed to Nasserist Pan-Arabism, the statement is less about Algerians blending seamlessly within the Arab nation than about underlining their radical difference to the French ‘Other’, to whom they had been legally assimilated since the country’s annexation in 1834. France’s settler colonization of Algeria had been extremely brutal from an economic (large-scale expropriations, etc.) as well as linguistic perspective. While in the neighbouring Tunisian protectorate, Fuçhâ had never stopped being taught, in colonial Algeria the language had been systematically ostracized, to the extent of being relegated to the status of foreign language in 1935.
