Café Maure Algérie, Between 1929 and 1946, Charles Courtin, born in Blida in 1884, published six colonial novels, also known as “Algérianist” works, including Café Maure (1939).
With thirty years of experience as an administrator of mixed communes in southeastern Algeria, Courtin had an intimate knowledge of the mentality and aspirations of the Muslim population, as well as those of his fellow pieds-noirs and metropolitan French citizens, whom he portrays with striking precision and objectivity.
His assessment of Algeria’s political situation in the 1930s is alarming: in Café Maure, the reader confronts the clashes between the various nationalist movements in Algiers. All the elements that would inevitably lead to the May 1945 uprising in the North Constantinois, and to that of November 1, 1954, are already present.
Although we step into a fictional world, it must be emphasized that the author draws on his own experiences, and several of his characters correspond to very biased events during the colonialism.