Part murder mystery, part social history of political violence, Lethal Provocation is a forensic examination of the deadliest peacetime episode of anti-Jewish violence in modern French history. Joshua Cole reconstructs the 1934 riots in Constantine, Algeria, in which tensions between Muslims and Jews were aggravated by right-wing extremists, resulting in the deaths of twenty-eight people.

Animating the unrest was Mohamed El Maadi, a soldier in the French army. Later a member of a notorious French nationalist group that threatened insurrection in the late 1930s, El Maadi became an enthusiastic supporter of France's Vichy regime in World War II, and finished his career in the German SS. Cole cracks the "cold case" of El Maadi's participation in the events, revealing both his presence at the scene and his motives in provoking violence at a moment when the French government was debating the rights of Muslims in Algeria. Local police and authorities came to know about the role of provocation in the unrest and killings and purposely hid the truth during the investigation that followed. Cole's sensitive history brings into high relief the cruelty of social relations in the decades before the war for Algerian independence.

Joshua Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He teaches nineteenth and twentieth century European history and has published work on gender and the history of the population sciences, colonial violence, and the politics of memory in France, Algeria, and Germany. His book The Power of Large Numbers was selected as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2000 by Choice Magazine. He is also coauthor, with Carol Symes, of Western Civilizations.

Meticulously researched and deftly constructed, Cole's work delineates how the riots, long mischaracterized and misunderstood by contemporaries and historians alike, shed new light on the activities of neofascist elements of the French right in Algeria. The author offers not only a fascinating glimpse into the conspiracy and the official coverup, but in reconstructing social relations on the local level, he illuminates the twisted racial logic(s) of the French colonial state.

Cole has done a great service in unpacking all of this, and has managed to do so while producing a gripping history that will keep readers on the edge of their seats.

Joshua Cole's fascinating and extremely well-researched and well-written Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders adn the Politics of French Algeria is like a strong wind in the sails of the microhistorical method.

Moving seamlessly between a range of historical registers, Cole offers at once a history of religious life under French colonial rule, a portrait of socio-cultural change in a transforming colonial city, an analysis of the intersections of metropolitan and colonial politics in the 1930s, and a granular reconstruction of the events worthy of a great criminologist. Lethal Provocation will remain a classic in French colonial studies for decades to come.