Subversive Sound: Transnational Radio, Arabic Recordings, and the Dangers of Listening in French Colonial Algeria, 1934–1939

Abstract

In November of 1934, Algerian Governor General Jules Carde asked the Algiers Police Prefecture to investigate a rumor circulating through the French bureaucracy that “natives” in the Arab cafés ( café maures ) of the city were tuning in to biweekly Arabic broadcasts transmitted by an unspecified Italian radio station that featured “commentaries unfavorable to France” and “openly attacked France's Muslim policy.” As the governor of three overseas French départements , Carde had already received notification that the airwaves over North Africa were becoming dangerous. A few months earlier, Jean Berthoin, the director of national security, or Sûreté, in France's Interior Ministry, warned regional prefects, “In a number of cities a large portion of the radio-electric industry—sales and the construction of devices—is in the hands of foreigners.” Berthoin feared that the dominance of France's radio-electric market by large, multinational firms would allow enemy agents to mask radio transmitters beneath the cover of radio sales and report clandestinely on troop maneuvers and defense preparations. He therefore instructed prefects to begin “discreet investigations” into the civil status, political affiliation, and nationality of radio merchants and their personnel. While ostensibly directed at metropolitan prefects, these Sûreté directives resonated in Algeria—a strategic periphery of “Greater France” and home to a sizeable European population of German and Italian descent and to multiple garrisons of France's indigenous-based African Army (Armée d'Afrique). By 1935, rumors about radio espionage and subversive auditory propaganda circulating through the Algerian colonial bureaucracy compelled Governor Carde to construct a colony-wide surveillance web to monitor radio sales, investigate Algerian listening habits, and assess the effects of radio propaganda on the “native mentality.”