I am here for a little while longer. My hope is that by the time I leave I will have graduated from "Internet smart" to the ranks of the "sort of knowledgeable." I'm talking to everyone I can. I'm reading as much as I can. I'm endangering previously agreed-upon deadlines. History is happening around me and I am not equipped to understand. I am mostly unequipped because I only have the barest understanding of the emotional aspects of patriotism. I have spent the past week asking people what, precisely, they believe themselves to be defending. The answers have been fascinating. Just yesterday someone told me that this was really about "the dream of Europe" itself. I have more of an idea of what that means today than I did last week. It can't be forgotten that the deadliest conflict in world history was fought here, and it was fought well within living memory, and this came on the heels of centuries of bloodletting—much of it, allegedly (and that word deserves emphasis), over religion.

I've tried to go back to the history. I'm thinking of Tony Judt and "national forgetting" a lot. I'm thinking of Antony Beevor. I'm thinking of C.V. Wedgwood. I'm taking long walks through the city listening (via Audible) to Alistair Horne's A Savage War Of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962. I have always started from the premise that one should be skeptical of comparing the problems of home with the problems of a country that one does not know. And yet here is Horne describing the attitudes of the pied noir (colonizer of Algeria, often—but not exclusively—French) toward the native Algerians:

Equally a host of preconceived inherited notions about the Algerian were accepted uncritically, without examining either their veracity or causation: he was incorrigibly idle and incompetent; he only understood force; he was an innate criminal, and an instinctive rapist. Sexually based prejudices and fears ran deep, akin to those elsewhere of white city-dwellers surrounded by preponderant and ever-growing Negro populations: “They can see our women, we can’t see theirs”; the Arab had a plurality of wives, and therefore was possibly more virile (an intolerable thought to the “Mediterranean-and-a-half”); and with the demographic explosion spawned by his potency, he was threatening to swamp the European by sheer weight of numbers. The pied noir would habitually tutoyer any Muslim—a form of speech reserved for intimates, domestics or animals—and was outraged were it ever suggested that this might be a manifestation of racism. Commenting on this, Pierre Nora (admittedly a Frenchman often unduly harsh in his criticism of the pieds noirs), adds an illustration of a judge asking in court: “Are there any other witnesses?” “Yes, five; two men and three Arabs.” Or again: “It was an Arab, but dressed like a person.…”

Horne quotes the French writer Jules Roy, who is told that the native Algerians "don't live like we do" and that "their happiness was elsewhere, rather, if you please, like the happiness of cattle." This racism, like all racism, was not a bout of madness, but an actual tool which made Roy's lifestyle possible:

I was glad to believe it. And from that moment on their condition could not disturb me. Who suffers seeing oxen sleep on straw or eating grass?

The Jewish peoples of Algeria also predated the pied noir, tracing their roots back to the Spanish expulsions of the 16th century and even further. Horne says that Algerian Jews "tended to find themselves being caught between two fires: between the European and the Muslim world." The French effectively turned Algerian Jews into a kind of buffer class, granting them citizenship under the Crémieux Decree in 1870, and denying it to Berbers and Arabs. This award was tenuous—70 years later it was rescinded by Pétain. "Jewish teachers and children alike were summarily flung out of European schools," writes Horne. "The whole community was menaced with deportation to Nazi camps."