Crémieux Decree

The Crémieux Decree (French: [kʁemjø]) was a law that gave French citizenship to about 35,000 Jews in French Algeria, signed by the Government of National Defense on 24 October 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War. It was named for French-Jewish lawyer and Minister of Justice Adolphe Crémieux, who had founded the Alliance Israélite Universelle a decade earlier.

It was signed as Decree 136 of 1870 by Adolphe Crémieux as Minister of Justice, Léon Gambetta as Minister of the Interior, Alexandre Glais-Bizoin and as a naval and colonial minister. The ministers were members of the military government in Tours, the Gouvernement de la Défense nationale, since France was still at war, and the provisional government had its seat in Tours.

At the same time the naturalization regime in French Algeria was confirmed in Decree 137, determining that Muslims are not French citizens in the French colony of Algeria. The aim was to maintain the status quo, the sovereignty of France over its North African colonies. Five years later, in 1875, this was confirmed in the framework of the Code de l'indigénat.

The decree allowed for native Jews to automatically become French citizens while Muslim Arabs and Berbers were excluded and remained under the second-class indigenous status outlined in the Code de l'Indigénat. They could, on paper, request French citizenship, but requests were very seldom accepted. That set the scene for deteriorating relations between the Muslim and Jewish communities and proved fateful in the Algerian War of Independence, after which the vast majority of the French Jews of Algeria emigrated to France.

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