The Mokrani Revolt

7 Mar, 2024 960 History of Africa

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the revolt that broke out in 1871 in Algeria against French rule, spreading over hundreds of miles and countless towns and villages before being brutally suppressed. It began with the powerful Cheikh Mokrani and his family and was taken up by hundreds of thousands, becoming the last major revolt there before Algeria’s war of independence in 1954. In the wake of its swift suppression though came further waves of French migrants to settle on newly confiscated lands, themselves displaced by French defeat in Europe and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, and their arrival only increased tensions. The Mokrani Revolt came to be seen as a watershed between earlier Ottoman rule and full national identity, an inspiration to nationalists in the 1950s.

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Guests

  • Natalya Benkhaled-Vince No other episodes
    Associate Professor of the History of Modern France and the Francophone World, Fellow of University College, University of Oxford
  • Hannah-Louise Clark No other episodes
    Senior Lecturer in Global Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow
  • Jim House No other episodes
    Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone History at the University of Leeds

Reading list

  • The Making of Contemporary Algeria: 1830-1987
    Mahfoud Bennoune (Cambridge University Press, 1988) Google Books →
  • Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters, Algeria and Tunisia 1800-1904
    Julia Clancy-Smith (University of California Press, 1994) Google Books →
  • 'The Islamic Origins of the French Colonial Welfare State: Hospital Finance in Algeria'
    Hannah-Louise Clark (European Review of History, 2021)
  • 'Of jinn theories and germ theories: translating microbes, bacteriological medicine, and Islamic law in Algeria'
    Hannah-Louise Clark (Osiris, 2021)
  • Ecologies of Imperialism in Algeria
    Brock Cutler (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) Google Books →
  • 1871: L'Algerie sous Sequestre
    Didier Guignard (CNRS Editions, 2023)
  • 'Histoire social de l'insurrection de 1871 et du proces de ses chefs
    Idir Hachi (University of Aix-Marseille, 2017)
  • 'L'insurrection kabyle de 1871'
    Abdelhak Lahlou, Idir Hachi, Isabelle Guillaume, Amelie Gregorio and Peter Dunwoodie (Etudes francaises, 2021)
  • A History of Algeria
    James McDougall (Cambridge University Press, 2017) Google Books →
  • Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation
    John Ruedy (Indiana University Press, 2005, 2nd edition) Google Books →
  • By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria
    Jennifer E Sessions (Cornell University Press, 2011) Google Books →
  • 'Lalla Fatma N'Soumer, 1830-1863: Spirituality, Resistance and Womanly Leadership in Colonial Algeria
    Samia Touati (Societies, 2018)
  • Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, Memory and Gender in Algeria, 1954-2012
    Natalya Vince (Manchester University Press, 2015) Google Books →

Related episodes

Programme ID: m001wymz

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001wymz

Auto-category: 965.04 (Algerian history)

Hello (First sentence from this episode) Hello. In 1871, the Macranium Revolt broke out in Algeria against French rule, spreading over hundreds of miles and countless towns and villages before being brutally suppressed.