A walk through various Parisian neighbourhoods exposes one to the sound of many French slang words. These are often the inverted forms of everyday words (created by transposing the sounds of the syllables), with an additional pinch of derogation added to them. One of the words is Beur, a word stemming from the inverse of the word Arab, used to designate Europeans of North African descent. Popularised in the 1980s during the March for Liberty and Against Racism, the echo of the word Beurs in the streets of Paris (and other French cities) hides an ugly truth in the backdrop of the city’s grand boulevards: colonial attitudes of discrimination towards Algerians still very much persist in France. Listen a little more closely to how people talk, and this fact becomes evident in the language and words used.
The role of the French white man as the saviour of the North African woman, supposedly subject to a patriarchal Algerian society, partly constitutes France’s colonial imagination. This narrative of the heroic legitimacy of the European man persists in contemporary society with the introduction of the instrumentalised word Beurette. Deriving from the word Beur and feminised in the 1980s, the Beurette is a woman of North African descent living in France who needs to be integrated into French society away from chauvinistic Algeria. By assimilating to French society as she is sexually freed and unveiled by the white man from the claimed constrained Algerian social structure, she becomes the Republic’s protégée and is débeurisée: she is saved. In this way, the quest to unveil the North African woman and the eroticisation of her body is a direct result of colonial imagination.
The word Beurette’s meaning has, however, evolved since the 1980s and has instead been used as a term to brand the North African woman not integrating into French society, and thus being a vulgar woman and prostitute. Despite this gap of interpretation, both significations refer to the hypersexualisation and exoticisation of North African women once depicted in paintings and postcards by European artists. At the beginning of the 2000s, the term Beurette was heavily used in the pornography industry, proving the persistence and legacy of the colonial fantasm of the Oriental woman. In 2014, it was the most searched term in France on sexually explicit content websites. Newer generations have additionally aggravated the usage of the term to denigrate women of North African descent, as the word Beurette is commonly used to describe a woman with heavy makeup, not conforming to feminine codes of conduct. This new generational interpretation deepens the gap between women of North African descent and the rest of the population and runs the risk of reproducing humiliating stereotypes.
Thus, it is worthwhile to consider the question: How precisely are certain French words used to address Algerians rooted in a history of colonial discrimination?
Roots of the Embedded Colonial Imagination
The problem stems from a centuries old colonial strategy, one which sought to mobilise waves of Frenchmen to support the colonisation of Algeria by giving it a perverse kind of justification, a pseudo-moral narrative that the French were actually there to save the land and its people from cultural convolution. The means to do this was to sell a fantasy involving tales of exceptionally beautiful Algerian women who supposedly needed white men to unshackle them from the constraints of an orthodox society.
Eventually, European writers started publicising various accounts attempting to elaborate the sexualisation of Algerians, albeit with dubious argumentation. In his essay De la Prostitution dans la Ville d’Alger, for instance, Edouard Duchesne argued that Islamic traditions were the reason behind high rates of prostitution. According to Duchesne, Islamic customs encouraged early marriages that were doomed for failure as the husband would leave his wife once she got older and her looks faded, and she would be left with no choice but to turn to prostitution. Like many of his contemporaries, Duchesne thus presented a skewed image of Islamic culture which blamed it for encouraging the sexualisation of women, with the implication that only the white man could save them from such a fate.
Paintings, postcards and photographs similarly spread false narratives about Algerian women. Even Eugène Delacroix, the famed painter of liberty, was complicit in this colonial gaze by producing staged scenes of Algerian women. His trip to Morocco and Algeria in 1832 allowed his shared fascination with ‘orientalism’ to come to life as he painted over one hundred pieces, one of them being Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement. Delacroix perceived himself as a liberator, much like his famous Marianne in the ‘Liberty Guiding the People’ – except that the People were not the French Third Estate of 1789 fighting to be freed from an oppressing Empire, but Algerian women supposedly needing to be freed from a patriarchal society by the European White Man. Feeding his colonial gaze on exotic, soon-to-be-free Algerian women, Delacroix unveiled, painted their skin, and staged them in a Harem. Their denuded bodies and averted gaze from the painter creates a sense of othering, Edward Said observed, and suggests that a chauvinistic society suffocates the beautiful, unveiled Algerian woman, who is desperately waiting for her liberation provided by the white man.
As Frantz Fanon pointed out in his essay, Algeria Unveiled, this suggestion was promoted institutionally when the French administration drew attention to the veil worn by women. The strategy was simple: convincing Algerian women that the veil subjugated them within a patriarchal Islamic society would incite them to challenge the system, eventually disrupting it. Initially, the French government encouraged civic groups to target poor women by giving them food while blaming their culture for their economic condition. Gradually, this obsession with unveiling took a much darker turn. The frenzy within the imaginations of European men to unveil Algerian women became so intense that it yielded systematised violence against them: Algerian women were perceived to be so phenomenally beautiful that the veils hiding them had to be removed at all costs, even forcefully. Instances of dragging women to public areas before symbolically unveiling them while praising French culture became common. As such, part of France’s discomfort with veils and similar traditional clothing, whilst often under the guise of laicite (the French conception of secularism), is likely linked to their historical perception as symbols of oppressive patriarchal societies.
All of this contributed to the creation of a particular image of North African women in the French colonial imagination. As Hubertine Auclert noted in her book Arab Women in Algeria, these women faced discrimination on two fronts. On top of the burden of colonial discrimination was also a gendered form of discriminatory representation. Although much has changed politically with the emergence of the French Fifth Republic and the independence of Algeria, prejudiced ideas remain far more difficult to eradicate, particularly ones that have been rooted over such a vast span of time. The result is that words like Beur are loaded with meaning which persist subconsciously in the minds of many in France, driving them to reinforce biases against the Algerian population by blaming their character and cultural norms rather than the reality of systemic marginalisation.
The Never-Ending Uphill Climb for Algerians in France
The issue is not just confined to one word. If anything, there is no shortage of popular slang that encompasses a range of colonial influences. Take, for instance, the animalisation of Algerians. The word Raton, which translates to a small rat in French, was used to designate Algerians during the colonial period. From this dehumanising term stems the word Ratonnade, used to qualify a series of murders against Algerians following the funeral of the 1956 mayor of Algiers. The peaceful 17th October 1961 protest led by the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) against a discriminatory curfew imposed only on Algerians became one of the bloodiest massacres against them, with hundreds killed by police forces under the command of Police Prefect Maurice Papon. Despite the current French Government recognising its fault in what has been called the Cleansing of the Ratons, police repression and violence against Algerians persist. Indeed, the summer of 2023 similarly saw police repression against Algerians with the murder of French-Algerian teenager Nahel Merzouk by a French police officer. Today, the word Ratonnade is still used to designate racially motivated violence even when it is not targeting Algerians directly. In the context of the Israel-Palestine war, the word Ratonnade has been used by the popular French news outlet Le Monde to designate the violence between both sides. By integrating the racially connotated word into contemporary discourse to cover the Middle Eastern crisis, colonial discourse seems to be normalised and reintegrated into contemporary vocabulary.
Not only is animalisation a recurrent way of referring to Algerians, but the process of simply not naming them is also prominent in literature. Albert Camus, the infamous Pied Noir – meaning a French man born in Algeria – is considered one of the most renowned authors of the twentieth century whose work questioned the absurdity of the human condition. Yet, as Edward Said points out, although Camus set his scenes in Algeria and integrated Algerian characters, he chose not to name them, unlike the rest of the characters, most of whom are French. In The Stranger, for example, the main character Meursault kills an ‘Arab man’. Camus did not give that character a name or backstory. In his work The Plague, he did the same again by designating Algerians killed by the disease simply as ‘Arabs’. As the writer of human conscience and, more specifically, French conscience, Camus thus subconsciously reinforced a colonial mindset.
The most frustrating aspect of all of this is that there is no way for people from an Algerian background to circumnavigate these all-too-evident forms of ‘othering’. Even if they do their utmost to assimilate into French society or acquire wealth, they are still referred to as outsiders. For instance, Arabs in gentrified communities are often referred to as Beurgeois (evidently a play on the words Beur and bourgeois). The underlying connotation is disturbing. Even upon acquiring wealth and breaking away from poverty, people from an Arab background are always marked as outlanders in French society.
Words embody subconscious forms of mentalities packed with centuries of historical meaning. In the case of Beur and other French slangs, they are a lens through which to look at the world – a lens which unfortunately tints Paris white. A lens which scopes in on the glitz and glamour of the central arrondissements either side of the Seine, conveniently ignoring the parts of the city which stand decrepit, ruined by discrimination and stereotypes. For words like Beur are loaded with implications, dripping with condescension, rife with one very evident connotation: Algerians in France are shackled as inferior in the minds of many, burdened by the omnipresent colonial expectations that French society rigidly continues to hold onto. Ultimately, the only true route to expel divisions is to resurrect égalité. This long climb starts with rooting out the discrimination embedded in one particular place: language.
This article was originally published in OPR’s Issue 13: Language.
Dhruv Banerjee is a political journalist affiliated with Sciences Po Paris, who has written for numerous prominent outlets such as the Diplomat and OPR. Leela Boudjema is student at Sciences Po and King’s College London, particularly interested in neo-colonisation and global inequality.