Kabyle myth

This myth was largely based off the Roman influence in the region of Kabylia. When the Roman Empire controlled North Africa, the region of Kabylia was integrated into Roman provincial life. By the 3rd-5th centuries, Kabylia was influenced by the Roman Empire, especially through the spread of Christianity and Roman culture. Christianity declined in North Africa after the Muslim conquest of the Maghreb. However, Kabylia’s mountainous geography meant many communities stayed relatively independent and less arabized than the rest of North Africa. When the French Conquest of Algeria happened, French thinkers developed the Kabyle Myth, as they argued that Kabyles were less influenced by Islam and closer to Europeans, later exaggerating these European/Kabyle connections to separate the Kabyles from the broader Algerian Identity, create a group more aligned with France, and use them as intermediaries in colonial administration.

History

While elements can be traced to the writings of Abbé Raynal and precolonial travelers, the myth was seriously elaborated by French colonists between 1840 and 1857. It emerged largely in the writings of French military men, such as Baron Aucapitaine and Adolphe Hanoteau. The Kabyle myth was diffused between 1860 and 1871, reaching its climax between 1871 and 1892 before finally being abandoned as a basis for social policy in 1915.

The French colony came to consider the Kabyle population more prepared to assimilate into French civilization "by virtue of the supposed democratic nature of their society, their superficial Islamicization, and the higher status of Kabyle women," as well as the belief that they were ancient Christians, of Celtic origin, who could easily be re-Christianized.

Among the proponents of this myth was the French officer Baron Aucapitaine, who claimed: "In one hundred years, the Kabyles will be French!" Camille Sabatier, a colonist theorist of "Berber separatism" and racist, claimed that the qanuns (customary laws) of the Kabyles came from someone who was "not of the family of Mohamed and Moses but of that of Montesquieu and Condorcet."

Eugène Daumas and Paul-Dieudonné Fabar published in 1847: "Beneath the Muslim peel, one finds a Christian seed. We recognize now that the Kabyle people, partly autochthonous, partly German in origin, previously entirely Christian, did not completely transform itself with its new religion ... [The Kabyle] re-dressed himself in a burnous, but he kept underneath his anterior social form, and it is not only with his facial tattoos that he displays before us, unbeknownst to him, the symbol of the Cross" (Daumas and Fabar 1847: I, 77).