The French Intifada review – the 'long war between France and its Arabs'

This is a disturbing book, in two very different ways. The first does credit to the author, Andrew Hussey, dean of the University of London Institute in Paris. It recounts in vivid detail the long, painful history of the relations between France and the Muslim populations that it conquered and subjugated in the 19th century, and between France and its present-day Muslim minority. Hussey is a talented writer, and knows his subject. He captures in arresting phrases both the poor, heavily Muslim cités, or council estates, of suburban France ("designed almost like vast prison camps"), and the great capitals of North Africa ("walking through Algiers is like walking through the wreckage of a recently abandoned civilisation"). He deftly weaves personal anecdote with historical research. After an initial section dealing with alienated young Muslims in France, he takes on Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia in turn, in each case moving from the first encounters with French imperialism through postwar decolonisation, down to the present day.

Going well beyond news reports, the book shows just how hot and fierce a vein of hatred for France runs through the Muslim populations that have experienced French rule. More than half a century after the North African states achieved independence, France remains an object of deep loathing for many of their citizens, who often associate the former imperial overlord with oppressive French-speaking elites. Even the Moroccans who carried out the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, Hussey argues, ultimately linked Spain with these elites, and thus with "the hated nation of France". Meanwhile, in the book's striking opening scene, Hussey describes how young Muslims he encountered at a riot at Paris's Gare du Nord in 2007, most presumably born on French soil, broke into a chant in colloquial Arabic: "Na'al abouk la France" – "Fuck France!"

But if The French Intifada is disturbing for these revelations, it is even more so because Hussey has written so carelessly, and in so needlessly inflammatory a manner. He repeatedly makes large, highly questionable generalisations without anything resembling evidence. "For most French people," he asserts, "Tunisians … had the same supposed racial and cultural defects of all North Africans, ranging from stupidity, criminality and a taste for violence." Most French people? How does he know? Or: "The British were mostly interested in money and therefore mainly indifferent to the cultures of the 'natives' they colonised." Hussey seems not to have encountered the relentless British campaign to ban suttee in India, or to have noticed that an imperialist writer such as Kipling, for all his faults, was not exactly "indifferent" to Indian culture.

The subtitle of Hussey's book makes for a strange generalisation, since many of the people he discusses are Berber, or black African, not Arab. He also makes numerous factual errors, mostly trivial, but which collectively do nothing to bolster the reader's confidence. Napoleon did not invade Egypt "in the early 1800s" but in 1798. The Algiers expedition of 1830 was not the largest French force assembled since the Napoleonic wars (France invaded Spain in 1823 with a larger one), and it did not promise Algerians "democracy". Thousands of Jews did not die in the 1942 "Vel d'Hiv" roundup itself, but afterwards, in German extermination camps. And so on. Hussey's historical research is thin, with his account of the Algerian war of independence taken largely from Alistair Horne's classic, but now woefully outdated, A Savage War of Peace.

More serious a problem is his inflammatory style when discussing violence. It is unfortunate, to say the least, that when he describes violence committed by the French, he mostly gives quick, summary accounts, but when he turns to violence committed by Muslims, he cannot resist lurid detail. He describes scenes of an eight-year-old child being shot through the temple, of the chopping off of fingers, ears and lips, of babies being tossed into ovens, of bodies doused with petrol and set alight, of train lines "scattered with bloodied, limbless trunks, arms, legs, and severed heads". "One frequent act of sadism," he writes, apropos of the treatment meted out by Algerians to compatriots who had served the French (the Harkis), "was to burn the victim alive, feeding the cooked flesh to dogs". He quotes an account of Muslim killers "gripped with a frenetic laughter" while smashing (Muslim) children's heads against concrete pillars. At one point, he defends this approach by insisting that "a flavour of the viciousness of the violence is given not by the figures but by the details", and then proceeds to tell the story of Algerian terrorists who beheaded a teacher (also Algerian) in front of a class of small children, and then placed her severed head on her desk. "This is not warfare," he comments, "but psychosis."

To be fair, Hussey's overall argument is that "France's Arabs", as he calls them, collectively suffer from a psychological trauma. Invoking Frantz Fanon, he speaks of "the devastating psychological effects of colonialism", and traces the hatred that seethes in both the French cités and the North African countries to this same cause. The disaffected young Muslims who hate France do so in large part, he explains, because the legacy of colonialism has destroyed in them "all sense of authentic identity, all sense of self, to the extent that they don't feel that they properly exist". Whether in Algiers or France, they have the impression of living in a giant prison, and strike out viciously against the "colonisers" whom they hold responsible.

This approach, however, has the unintended effect of reducing the complex histories of these different societies to a single French-Muslim dialectic. Even Islam enters the story mostly as a vehicle for subaltern rage, as in the story of a Tunisian man who, frustrated in his request for a French work visa, moves towards fundamentalism. Hussey quotes him: "I can't get to France. There's nothing else here now. Why not fight for God?" The book gives little sense that some currents of Islam might appeal to contemporary Muslims for reasons that have little to do with France, or the colonial past – for reasons that are shared across the breadth of the Islamic world, including parts of it that experienced very different forms of European rule, or no European rule at all. Hussey also largely ignores the fact that millions of North African Muslims have forged satisfying and successful lives for themselves in France. The angry rioters of the cités do not represent the whole of the French population of North African descent.

So focused is Hussey on the legacy of colonialism that he pays little systematic attention to what is, in fact, one of the book's most striking and disturbing themes: Muslim antisemitism. As he notes, hatred of Jews now runs deep in Muslim populations, including in France and North Africa. In France, the worst examples of individual violence committed by alienated Muslim youth have been against Jews, notably the torture and killing of the mobile phone salesman Ilan Halimi outside Paris in 2006, and the shooting of four Jews, including three children, in front of a Hebrew school in Toulouse in 2012. In this sense, present-day Muslim violence against France can indeed be called an "intifada". But why the hatred of Jews, especially since – as Hussey also notes – French imperialists in North Africa were not exactly philosemitic? (The only actual killings of Jews during the Dreyfus affair took place in Algeria, at the hands of white settlers.) The role of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the formation of contemporary Muslim identities, and the way that Jews have come to stand, in much of the Muslim world, for the worst tendencies of the "west", and even of modernity, deserve more analysis than Hussey provides.

He knows the story amounts to more than just trauma and "psychotic" reaction. In one of the book's most eloquent passages, he writes: "There has been a long history of complicity and intimacy between France and Algeria. This is not the straightforward binary relationship between coloniser and colonised; the question of Algerian identity, for Muslim and non-Muslim, has always been fraught with double binds and contradictions." In other words, the relationship between France and "its Arabs" is not just a "long war", and at moments The French Intifada does provide the sensitivity and subtlety the subject deserves. Hussey includes, for instance, a fascinating short chapter on European homosexuals and their exploitation of Arab youths in "Queer Tangier", being careful to provide the youths' own perspective. His portrayals of Arab independence leaders, notably Tunisia's Habib Bourguiba, are nuanced and persuasive. But more often, the lurid accounts of torture and massacre simply overwhelm the attempts at subtlety.

Hussey is right that the colonial past still haunts the French present, like the "ghosts in daylight" whom Baudelaire saw as haunting 19th-century Paris. But he concludes, overly enchanted with the metaphor, that perhaps "what France needs is not hard-headed political solutions or even psychiatry, but an exorcist". Hardly. Hatred does not always need violent excision. It can be leeched away by constructive policies, by greater understanding between communities and simply by the passage of time. The situation of Muslims in France, while volatile, is hardly as desperate as Hussey suggests. Portraying it as irredeemably cursed does not help.