The Virgin Mary of Algeria: French Mediterraneans En Miroir

ABSTRACT

Implanted in 1846 as a pilgrimage site on Algerian soil after France's 1830 conquest, the majestic Virgin Mary of Santa Cruz statue overlooks Oran, Algeria's second city. This essay traces trans-Mediterranean journeys by Virgin Mary statues between France and Algeria that call for reflexive, mirrored readings. A key concept is the ‘repatriated,’ a French legal category for European settlers of Algeria that extends to objects and statues they carried with them along the ‘French Mediterraneans’ corridor. At Algerian independence in 1962, a smaller Virgin Mary statue used for mobile pilgrimages throughout Algeria was removed to Nîmes, France, where a recreated Oran Marian pilgrimage for the ‘repatriate’ settler community is celebrated to this day. Post-1962, statues and their roles have multiplied multi-directionally and trans-culturally as objects of veneration as well as reconfigured pilgrimages and cultural heritage reunions that enact and invent layered histories for the cities of Nîmes and Oran.

KEYWORDS:

• French Algeria
• Virgin Mary
• pilgrimage
• settler colonialism
• repatriation

Acknowledgments

To the memory of Pierre Claverie (1938–1996), bishop of Oran, with my profound gratitude for his counsel and presence during my first fieldwork in Algeria from 1990 to 1992, which was funded by grants from the American Philosophical Society and the American Institute of Maghrib Studies. Subsequent return visits to Oran and Nîmes were supported by a variety of faculty research grants especially from the University of California, Los Angeles. I thank the Fondation IMéRA, Aix-Marseille University for the time to rewrite over twenty-five years of interrupted fieldwork on this topic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See ‘La loi francaise du 26 décembre 1961’: http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFTEXT000000508788. All translations from French are mine.

2 Although much of the Anglophone scholarly literature (and of course the French language as an orthographic principle) do not capitalize ‘Pied-Noir’ but italicize pied-noir, I acknowledge the Pied-Noir as belonging to the category of a community, hence to be capitalized in English.

3 ANOM/ Oranie / 1U4 / Culte catholique, ‘Interdiction des Processions religieuses,’ Oran, l'Hôtel de Ville, May 10, 1882: ‘ … en dehors des edifices consacrés en culte catholique dans les villes ou il y a des temples consacrés à differentes cultes.’ This ruling is based on Article 45, Organic Articles on the Catholic Church (law on worship, 18th GerminalYear X / April 1, 1802).

4 Aerial photograph available in L'Echo d'Oran, Friday, May 27, 1949, front-page. For reports on the Virgin’s ‘tour d'Algérie,’ see the same newspaper between April and May, 1949, also summarized in La formidable épopée des Oraniens: Le livre d'or de l'Oranie (Gasser and Roux-Freissineng 1990).

5 According to Laurent Saez, a repatriate from the Oran region, only this 1949 statue of the Virgin is a genuine Vierge visiteuse as opposed to the newer statue sculpted in wood by his son, Gérard Saez, in 1989, which the father defined as merely la Vierge qui visite. Laurent Saez, email correspondence, 29 July 2016 (cf. Baussant 2013, 238).

6 I could not verify the tale recounted to me by several Algerians in Oran that after Algerian independence, a delegation of Pieds-Noirs had requested permission to remove the giant Virgin Mary statue overlooking the city of Oran to France, which the Oran municipality of the time vehemently refused.

7 There is also an annual pilgrimage to Lourdes usually in mid-August dedicated to former residents of the Oran region as well as specific calendar days in Nîmes designated for Pied-Noir associations who represent a single town in Algeria.

8 Interviews with Mgr Jean-Paul Vesco, bishop of Oran during the month of May 2014, Oran, Algeria. A Lyon native, he has made fundraising for the Oran restoration a priority in Lyon: http://www.santacruz-oran.com/un-site-patrimonial-exception/

9 See as examples, case studies of Pied-Noir recreated pilgrimages in Malta (Smith 2003b, 2006) or Cuban-American Catholics and their replica statue smuggled from Cuba in 1961 to be reunited with the exiled Cubans of Miami (Tweed 1997).

10 I first visited the mausoleum, said to have been built in 1525, in 1990. It was allegedly blown up by Islamists in the 1990s. The current edifice which I revisited in 2014 is a reconstruction and usually kept locked, an instance of Algerian ‘doubling.’

11 Kouider Metair (2011), Bel Horizon’s founder, estimated 20,000 people made this walk (4). YouTube videos posted by the organization are available for 2009 and 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QhEW0HYMMQ and https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=association%20oran%20bel%20horizon.