| Titre | Législation foncière et société rurale. L'application de la loi du 26 juillet 1873 dans les douars de l'Algérois | |
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| Auteur | Alain Sainte-Marie | |
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Revue | Etudes rurales |
| Numéro | no 57, 1975 | |
| Page | 61-87 | |
| Résumé anglais |
Land Legislation and Rural Society: the Application of the Law of July 26, 1873 in the Douars of Algérois.
The author narrates the turbulent history of the Warmer law, a series of measures concerning land titles and designed to extend French civil territory and encourage official colonization in Algeria. The great number of incidents provoked by the application of this law indicates the extent to which it upset rural Algerian society, inciting community conflicts over ancestral lands and undermining family solidarity by contesting hereditary property rights. A wide variety of problems were encountered in trying to determine the "rightful" owners of both melk (private) and arch (collective or tribal) lands, and the numerous complaints and rectifications following various decisions, casts doubts on the value of such a law and on the competence of the commissioners recruited to enforce it. The accomplishments of these commissioners are reviewed in the light of their qualifications, prejudices, powers, and interpretations of the law in question. The author explains how the sequestrations and expropriations resulting from this legislation contributed to the impoverishment and confusion of rural populations, and he then discusses why the law was progressively abandoned, revealing the contradiction between colonial imperatives and traditional administrative and judiciary procedure. Above all, the failure of this land legislation, hastened by the mediocrity and inconsistency of its application, proves that it is impossible to impose an imported law on a coherent society with a profoundly different form of economic, social and judiciary organization. Source : Éditeur (via Persée) |
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| Article en ligne | http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/rural_0014-2182_1975_num_57_1_1969 |
