Women played a very active role in the independence struggle in Algeria as portrayed in the classic film The Battle of Algiers. As members of the underground and the resistance in the National Liberation Front (FLN), they are shown in a wide variety of roles that were ‘nontraditional’ in both Arab and Western society. They were not simply preparing food and bandaging the wounded, but smuggling weapons and explosives, spying and gathering intelligence, planting bombs, organizing strikes and demonstrations, shooting enemy police and soldiers and running safe houses. In short, women took part in the revolution in the same way as men, and even children, making it very unsafe for the French administration to function at all in Algiers. They ran the same risks as men, which in the context of this very brutal and repressive counterinsurgency war meant torture and death. Because the French were less likely to suspect them, no matter whether they wore covering (hajib) or disguised themselves as Europeans, they could often carry out their resistance activities unnoticed. At the very end of the movie, there are clearly many women organizing and participating in the mass protests that caught the French authorities completely by surprise, and finally led to the independence of Algeria in 1962. Simon de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre also campaigned actively for the independence of Algeria, and Sarte was even mentioned in the film by the counterinsurgency special Col. Mathieu, who was angered by his opposition to the war. As a radical feminist, de Beauvoir made an explicit connection between the tradition oppression of women and slaves, workers, colonial subjects and members of racial and religious minority groups, who were all treated as the ‘Other’ by the ruling elites in society. Even so, these ‘Others’ also had the power to take charge of their own destinies and become active participants in historical change through revolutionary action.
In The Battle of Algiers, women are shown as active revolutionaries and supporters of the FLN resistance, which would not have been nearly as successful had they not participated. Early in the film, women wearing covering could pass more easily through police checkpoints than men, carrying weapons, messages and explosives, because Muslim custom dictated that they could not be searched by men and the French soldiers and police were reluctant to do so initially. They would also hand pistols to FLN men who would shoot French police and soldiers, and then quickly conceal them and move away after the assassination. Women served as messengers and couriers, as well, such as the one who gave Ali La Pointe his first assignment and then led him to the underground leader Jaffar. When the French started blowing up Muslim houses in the Casbah in retaliation, the FLN ordered Arab women to change their clothing and appearances so that they looked European, and could carry out revenge bombings against enemy targets. They carried them in bags and left them in bars, restaurants, racetracks, dance halls and airline offices frequented by French civilians, causing many deaths and injuries. In this film, the guerilla war is portrayed as brutal, grim and remorseless, with no mercy asked and none given on either side. From the start, the French made it clear that they would never leave Algeria unless they were forced out, and war took on the character of a mass atrocity, just like the one in Indochina that was also occurring at the same time.
Col. Mathieu was a counterinsurgency specialist who had fought in Indochina as well as other French colonies, and his main goal was to discover the how the FLN functioned and then destroy it. He denied being a fascist, Nazi or sadist, and was rather surgical and precise in his use of torture and violence, but his purpose was to preserve a highly unjust and oppressive colonial order. Mathieu uses Gestapo-style methods to obtain intelligence and fill in names on his chart, and is even willing to stage bombings and terrorist ‘incidents’ in order to give the French military a totally free hand in Algeria. Arab women appear as genuinely heroic figures in the film as Mathieu’s men occupy the Casbah, especially when they provide cover and hiding places for the guerillas, and help them organize strikes and demonstrations. When Mathieu captures Jaffar, he tells Zakia that he will blow up her house and everyone in it unless he finally surrenders, which he does. When he is taking them away in the car, she calls him a monster and defies him by claiming the resistance will still continue while Ali was still free. In the end, he discovers Ali’s hiding place through torturing a prisoner, which turns out to be hidden behind a false wall with a women sleeping in the bed in front of it. Ali was concealed with another man, a young boy and a woman named Hassiba, and even gave them permission to surrender when Mathieu threatened to blow up the building. All of them refuse and were killed in the explosion, while outside a large crowd of Arabs, including women and children, were crying and saying prayers for them. Although Mathieu and his superiors believed they had defeated the FLN in Algiers, two years later, thousands of protesters appeared on the streets demanding independence, and would not be stopped even by French tanks and machine gun fire. In these protests as well, women played a very important part as organizers and participants.
Simon de Beauvoir was one of the leading opponents of the war in Algeria and supported the FLN. In her 1949 book The Second Sex, before the beginning of the war, she rejected the racism and imperialism of France and the other great powers, which was also shown constantly in The Battle of Algiers. She found that modern science no longer accepted “the existence of unchangeably fixed entities that determine characteristics” which had always been used to oppress women, minorities and nonwhite peoples (Giancola and Torres-Gregory 302). None of them and ever been treated as free and equal human beings, but as alien ‘Others’ and inferior, defective persons. Only radical or revolutionary change could alter this situation, and freedom could be obtained through seizing it rather than meekly accepting what the ruling elites were willing to grant (Giancola and Torres-Gregory 305). All the points she made about women also applied to colonial peoples in that political, economic and military power in the world were in the hands of privileged ruling groups, while the oppressed meekly accepted paternalism and subordination. Liberation would only occur when they struggled free of this mentality with a “continual reaching out toward other liberties” rather than willingly taking on “the status of the Other” (Giancola and Torres-Gregory 308).
Although The Battle of Algiers was released in 1966, it was set at the beginning of the Algerian War in the 1950s, and showed women playing roles in the war that were very different from the ‘normal’ domesticity expected of them at the time. This has also been the case in the various Resistance movements during the Second World War, though, and one of the ironies of the movie is that Col. Mathieu and the other French officers keep mentioning the heroic roles they played in the underground war against the Nazis then, but this time they are on the other side. They are occupying and invading troops in a colonial society, using the same methods to maintain ‘law and order’ as the Nazis and their collaborators did in France in 1940-45. For the most part, this irony was lost on them, although not so with the opponents of the war like Sartre and de Beauvoir. Feminism and equal rights for women are simply assumed in the movie rather than preach, since they are fighting ass equals alongside men, taking the same risks and suffering the same consequences. They perhaps even had reason to hope that their status would also be much improved in society after independence, despite the rather strongly Islamic character of their revolution. In this particular case, however, it was definitely not a conservative or reactionary type of Islam that planned to turn back the clock to the Middle Ages.
WORKS CITED
The Battle of Algiers. DIR: Gillo Pontecorvo. Italy: Rialto Pictures, 1966.
Giancola, Donna and Wanda Torres-Gregory. World Ethics. Wadsworth Publishing, 2002.
