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Although Right and Centre initially backed governments of national unity, the Great War ultimately provoked Right and Centre to unite against the Left. Conservatives associated the left with the German enemy, and saw Socialist efforts to ‘organize’ the war economy as evidence of a Germanic fetishisation of organization. Right and Centre accepted the need for total war, but came to agree that prosecution of the war required the expulsion of the Left from government. Conservatives embraced an alternative organizationalism designed to restore the predominance of the male elite in an organic hierarchy, improve the quality and quantity of the population, counter degeneration, win the war, and defeat Socialism. Religious and other tensions among conservatives remained, but a fundamental realignment had occurred, which would be perpetuated in the post-war Bloc national. The war reinforced the domination of elitist, male, bourgeois conservatism.

This chapter analyses the place of the Great War in the rhetoric of the extreme-right movements that played a central role in the politics of interwar Algeria. It argues that the visions of the Great War that they promoted reflected an intrinsically racial understanding of Algeria’s wartime contribution. It examines the rhetoric these organizations developed around the participation of the Jewish, Muslim, and European communities, considering how these organisations’ evocation of the war embodied their wider aspirations for the reshaping of colonial society in line with imagined racial hierarchies. It also explores how those who resisted these exclusionary visions of Algeria’s past, present, and future mobilized their own counter-narratives of the colony’s contribution to the First World War in the struggle against the extreme right. In doing so, the chapter demonstrates both the potential positives and the potential pitfalls for political movements who mobilized the memory of the Great War in Algeria.

This chapter examines the left’s attempts to mobilize the wartime ‘moral economy of sacrifice’ in support of its vision of a just post-war order in the colony. Focusing on the immediate post-war moment, it examines how the campaigns of strike action and political protests led by socialists and trade unionists in the colony relied heavily on egalitarian notions grounded in the wartime experience. It also considers the response this provoked from conservative forces, which sought to counter the left’s rhetoric by stressing the ‘fraternity of arms’. Finally, it assesses the place of indigenous workers in these debates, asking how the left reconciled its use of an egalitarian language, drawn in part from the experience of the war, with its ambiguous attitude toward any erosion of European hegemony in the colony.

In 1919, the conservatives won their first election victory since the establishment of the Republic. The transfer of the culture of war from the German to the Bolshevik enemy reinforced unity, while opposition to the excesses of wartime ‘organization’ provoked convergence around a liberal version of the organizational project. Thus, a parliamentary coalition captured the brew of anti-communism, nationalism, and expectation of change that led to Fascism in Italy. By 1923, most of the Bloc's partisans believed that it had failed, and a gulf opened between Right and Centre. Some centrists turned to the Left, which they saw both as a guarantor of secularism and as the vehicle for a revived organizational project. The Right turned to orthodox liberalism or to a regionalist, corporatist organizationalism. As disenchantment with the Bloc grew, activists began to revive party organizations as a means to ensure that deputies did not betray them again, and some turned to the extreme right. The hegemony of elitist parliamentary conservatism began to fracture.