Médersas d’Alger, de Tlemcen et de Constantine

Abstract

At the age of enlightenment, a vast neo-humanist movement was born. It will be the catalyst of plural cultural productions, including those related to the fascination of the mysterious world of the Orient, subject of infatuation and desire, which will henceforth be known as Orientalism. Like any philosophical and artistical movement, the orientalist fantasy could not escape the physical materialization, which then began in Europe and the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, the hegemonic colonial enterprise of that century had long turned its back on local cultures, regarding them as minor and irrelevant to the civilizing building it had spread throughout the vast colonized lands, including those spread from the Maghreb to the Mashriq. Although the economic enterprise was successful, the cultural component was rather a big failure. It is in this context of the second half of the nineteenth century that the colonial enterprise made a total ideological shift, appropriating knowledge produced for over a century by the orientalist scholars to be used as an official policy. The alterity wasn’t always present, this spectacular use, in the early twentieth century, was then no less hegemonic than the first, because the dominant / dominated relationship was once more in the privilege of western rather than the aboriginal 'the indigenous'. So our historiographical contribution then returns to the historical-architectural context of nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Algeria. It does not fail to draw on funds from various archives, often of first and secondhand, while spanning on the careers of two famous architects, protagonists of the Algerian neo-Moorish style, officialized and formalized in the time of the General Governor Charles Jonnart. The study is limited in time as it meet the objectives of a first post-graduation in architectural and urban heritage; it will also review historiographical studies, in particular, architectural monographs kind. A research work dealing with many details of three studies cases, namely Algiers, Tlemcen and Constantine’s Franco-Arab Madrasah – another colonial enterprise that the history will probably not fail to reveal. This modest work, represents a first step in these vast fields of knowledge builded around the issue of Orientalism, which could be described may be as a post-saïdienne2 approach. It aims to increase the field of knowledge, while attempting to make an analytical-reading review on the architectural Orientalism characterizing the French colonial enterprise in Algeria, at the dawn of the twentieth century