Nowadays it's neither fashionable nor conscionable to feel nostalgic for the colonial era. But it's clear that some colonial powers left more fragrant legacies than others, and one of the smelliest of them all was that of France. The country amassed a near perfect record of mismanagement, everywhere from Algeria and Indochina to the Central African Republic, and France is the only great colonial power whose misdeeds abroad keep haunting it, more or less constantly, at home. The British way of colonialism, at least in some interpretations, was motivated mainly by economics, whereas the French focused on cultural conquest, the "civilizing mission" that continues to drive, in diluted form, efforts to ban the veil—a popular form of Muslim cultural expression today.
Andrew Hussey, dean of the University of London Institute in Paris, has written about French philosophy and cultural history, both rightly considered sources of national pride. His latest book, "The French Intifada: The Long War Between France and Its Arabs," is primarily about French North Africa, which is a matter of national shame. France tarnished its reputation in the protectorates of Morocco (starting in 1912) and Tunisia (1881) with a program of military subjugation. The sensible decision to emancipate both countries in 1956 was undertaken in part to narrow French interests in North Africa and to focus on the perpetually restive Algeria, which for nearly all of the period from 1830 to 1962 was ruled as part of France, in a manner that combined the brutal and Clouseau-esque so sickeningly as to inspire sympathy with the mujahedeen.
Mr. Hussey's book is mostly historical, spiced lightly with reportage from both France and its former colonies. He suggests that the result of past French involvement in North Africa today is the "intifada" (Arabic for "uprising") among Muslim youth in the suburbs of Paris and other cities. In these areas, known as banlieues, even native-born Frenchmen of North African heritage don't feel French, and they denigrate successful North African Frenchmen like soccer star Zinedine Zidane as collaborators. They call white Frenchmen "sons of Clovis," after the fifth-century Frankish king (evincing at least some knowledge of European history). The crime and anarchism are bad enough to make the banlieues, in Mr. Hussey's slightly hyperbolic phrase, zones of "anti-civilization," where every norm and convention that binds people together as a society is aggressively flouted in favor of mayhem.
The French Intifada
By Andrew Hussey
(Faber & Faber, 441 pages, $35)
It's easy to imagine how these youth might have found a model for their misbehavior in the Algerian war of liberation, which finally succeeded in 1962 after many decades of dirty fighting by both sides. Ask one of those sons of Clovis what his heritage consists of and he might say wine, cheese and Victor Hugo. The Algerian French have a much more scarred collective memory. France, tellingly, administered its colony under the portfolio of the Minister of War, and at various points its French military commanders exhibited genocidal intent toward their subjects. They killed for pleasure and for purpose, and they perfected torture methods—such as waterboarding and electrocution—later used by Saddam Hussein. Mr. Hussey paraphrases the clinical reports by Frantz Fanon from psychiatric wards during the war: They were filled with Muslims whose "symptoms included anorexia, pins-and-needles, stomach pains, aching legs, a fear of electrical equipment, of even turning on a light or touching a telephone. . . . a fear of being bled to death or 'vampirized' was common."
The Algerians repaid blood with blood. They bombed civilian targets, took lips and ears as trophies from French Algerians, and pioneered the now familiar technique of assassination on city streets, with a scooter as a getaway vehicle. Saadi Yacef, a leader of the Algerian urban guerrillas, later starred in
Gillo Pontecorvo's
film "The Battle of Algiers," still the greatest movie about insurgency ever made. In 2006, I met Mr. Yacef at a party in Algiers and asked what he thought of the comparison of the insurgents of Baghdad to his own National Liberation Front. He resisted the comparison and said the Iraq insurgents crossed lines that he and his compatriots never would;
Mr. Hussey's book gives reason to doubt that.
The author is open about his lack of answers to the question that France really cares about, which is how to end the intifada at home and pacify the thousands of angry Muslim Frenchmen on the fringes of Paris and Lyon. These cities' banlieues have, increasingly, become free-fire zones for disaffected and pyromaniacal French Muslim youth. Mr. Hussey's visits reveal the familiar pathologies: hatred of Jews, near-complete alienation from society, flagrant criminality. The intellectual genealogy of the violence is revealed in its methods. In the most notorious case, Mohamed Merah, a Frenchman of Algerian extraction who had already killed three French soldiers, publicly murdered three children and a 30-year-old rabbi in front of a Jewish school near Toulouse in 2012. The getaway vehicle? A scooter.
"The French Intifada," while fine as an introduction to the history of France's African colonies, suffers from shallowness. Mr. Hussey's reported sections are brief and largely hotel-based—a shame, because places like the Casbah of Algiers (a decrepit and ungovernable warren of poor Algerians) could generate a very fine book in the hands of an intrepid reporter. He relies too much on secondary sources and too little on the voices of North Africans themselves. Each country examined here has a better account in English (most notably Alistair Horne's "A Savage War of Peace," about Algeria's war for independence). But Mr. Hussey's portrayal of the tragedy of French colonialism is accurate and smart. The central mission of the French—to bring French culture overseas and turn colonial subjects into Frenchmen—suffered a fate worse than mere failure, in that it created not only resistance to Frenchness abroad but an attack on Frenchness in France itself. The British colonial desire to create overseas markets looks gentle and sane—even civilized—by comparison.
Mr. Wood is a contributing editor at The Atlantic.