(^440) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
settlement, lands of opportunity for Westerners seeking to start over
or get away. Some of these settiers developed a great love for their
new homelands, for the earth, the streams, the landscapes, the towns
and markets and soukhs; and yes, for the people, whom they loved
for their dependency, or their mystery, or their strangeness, or their
innocence. Many of them thought that they had found a new
paradise, were founding a new race—not by mixture but by
coexistence in newness. Read Albert Camus on his boyhood in
Algeria. He was not the only European to feel this way; he just
wrote better.
It came, then, as a terrible shock to learn that many natives did
not return this love and resented the intrusion of these strangers—
their appropriation of the best soil, their political and social
privileges, their unavoidable, irresistible condescension.
Not all natives felt this way. But as independence movements
simmered and boiled, as consciousness awoke, it was hard to remain
neutral ("Which side are you on?"). And so, when independence
came, the colonials withdrew. Most could not abide the loss of their
privileges and withdrawal of deference, and even those who would
have stayed, who wanted to stay, were sped on their way by insults,
threats, violence, seizures back of property seized in the first place.
Algeria was paradigmatic: over a million Europeans among ten
times as many natives. These colons did not want independence. They
wanted France to stay; indeed, many were ready to fight to keep
Algeria French. (The French themselves almost had a civil war over
the issue.) The new government of Charles de Gaulle was ready at
first to make concessions to persuade the Algerian independence
movement to remain united with France; to no avail. And once the
French government decided the game was not worth the candle, that
was it. The colons were told they were on their own, that France
would recognize Algerian independence. Some die-hards would have
fought on, but who was going to help them in a world pledged to
the demise of colonialism? Within a couple of years, all the pieds-
noirs pulled out. Not all these Europeans were rich; they had come
there poor and often stayed poor. But the successful ones owned the
best land, grew the wine and wheat that were the great exports,
handled the shipping, managed the banks, made the economy go.
- The First Man (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1995), an autobiographical novel.
t Pieds-noirs: literally "blackfeet." The term given to European senders in Algeria, by
analogy with barefoot natives.