Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria

by Joshua Cole

Part murder mystery, part social history of political violence, Lethal Provocation is a forensic examination of the deadliest peacetime episode of anti-Jewish violence in modern French history. Joshua Cole reconstructs the 1934 riots in Constantine, Algeria, in which tensions between Muslims and Jews were aggravated by right-wing extremists, resulting in the deaths of twenty-eight people.

Animating the unrest was Mohamed El Maadi, a soldier in the French army. Later a member of a notorious French nationalist group that threatened insurrection in the late 1930s, El Maadi became an enthusiastic supporter of France's Vichy regime in World War II, and finished his career in the German SS. Cole cracks the cold case of El Maadi's participation in the events, revealing both his presence at the scene and his motives in provoking violence at a moment when the French government was debating the rights of Muslims in Algeria. Local police and authorities came to know about the role of provocation in the unrest and killings and purposely hid the truth during the investigation that followed. Cole's sensitive history brings into high relief the cruelty of social relations in the decades before the war for Algerian independence.

Genres: Nonfiction, Algeria, History

336 pages, Hardcover

First published September 15, 2019

About the author

Joshua Cole is a Professor of History at the University of Michigan, where he has been teaching since 2004. His research and teaching deal primarily with the social and cultural history of France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and he has published work on gender and the history of the population sciences, colonial violence, and the politics of memory in France, Algeria, and Germany.

Reviews

[Sarah Sinclair]

Book summary on Goodreads provides great overview of Lethal Provocation

Thoughtful and well researched portrayal of the social and political history of French Algeria in the interwar period, with the previously unsolved Constantine murders at the center. The last third focuses on solving the case, while the first two-thirds provide a detailed social history of electoral politics unlike anything I’ve read before.