Part One: The Evilest Football Player of All Time

Robert sits down with Dana Schwartz to tell the dark tale of Alexandre Villaplane, the French Football star and gangster who became a member of the SS. (2 part series) See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  Oh my goodness, Sophie, I have some shocking news for you, some information that's just come in through the wire. Are you ready? Are you sitting down? Are you, are you prepared to take in some information that may hurt you?

• 0:17Speaker 01

  You can see me and I'm sitting.

• 0:19Robert Evans?

  It's, it's, it's simply behind the bastards, Sophie, the podcast that we do for a living every week. That's what we're doing this week. Are you, are you able, are you able to handle this? Are you in an emotional state where you're prepared?

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I live for it.

• 0:33Robert Evans?

  You live for it. Well, we all live, we live because of it. We pay, we pay our bills because of it.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  It's 100% true.

• 0:39Robert Evans?

  Which is different from living for something. But you know what I live for, Sophie?

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Do tell.

• 0:46Robert Evans?

  Introducing the guest to this podcast and nothing else. So every moment before and after this has just been, just been an unbroken string of pain.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:56Robert Evans?

  Just, just endless and ceaseless. But for this one moment where I introduce our guest for today, Dana Schwartz, host of Hoax and the Noble Blood Podcast, for that one moment, I feel bliss. Oh my goodness.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  And you were so good at it.

• 1:10Robert Evans?

  Thank you. Thank you. Welcome to the show. How are you doing today?

• 1:13Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me. You were, that was an excellent introduction.

• 1:16Robert Evans?

  I know. Back to pain, nothing but pain from here on out.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Before we get to the pain, do you want to tell, tell the good folks about your new show, Hoax?

• 1:23Robert Evans?

  Exclamation point. Exclamation point. That's load bearing.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  It is a load bearing exclamation point. And if you don't include it, that is not canonically the name of the podcast.

• 1:33Robert Evans?

  And let's be fair, if you're a good writer, every exclamation point you use is load bearing, you know?

• 1:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38Robert Evans?

  I was really taught that. No unnecessary exclamation points.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  I'm not throwing them around willy nilly unless they're in an email with someone that I want to like me.

• 1:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course, of course. Or a text and you're drunk. Yeah, I do that a lot. Just, just exclamation points.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  Hoax is a new show that I'm doing with my good friend, Lizzie Logan, who's a comedy writer. I come from a history background and every other week we swap off bringing each other stories of exciting, unbelievable, fantastic, strange hoaxes throughout history. My hoaxes are more of the historical bent. Lizzie's are slightly modern. I talked about in our first episode, the Cottingley Fairies, which were two young girls took pictures of. What they said were fairies that convinced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

• 2:25Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, I love that story. Yeah.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  It's nuts, right?

• 2:28Robert Evans?

  He was so easy to trick, too. People were so much easier to trick back then.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  He was, you think the guy who wrote Sherlock Holmes would have had like a little bit more inductive reasoning skills, but no.

• 2:37Robert Evans?

  No, absolutely not. Look, that's the problem with writing a super genius character is the writer is never as smart as the character.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  That's the thing. And he probably thought he was a genius. And, and, but my friend Lizzie also loves hoaxes, like balloon boy, more modern hoaxes. And we just get into these conversations about why we believe things that aren't true, which feels unfortunately very pertinent these days. So listen, listen to hoax. Exclamation point. Excellent point. Thank you.

• 3:06Robert Evans?

  I think a lot about, people talk about, oh, if you could travel back in time with like a modern guns or something and you could change, you know, this battle where the world went in a wrong direction. And no, no, no, go back in time with fucking Photoshop. If I could travel back in time with Photoshop and like a photo printer, I could change everything. I could really fuck some shit up.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Honestly, yeah, people believed a lot of stuff, but here's the, the really messed up stuff, unfortunately. People believe a lot of stuff today, too.

• 3:34Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. It's almost the only thing people believe is bullshit.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, that is the thing we sort of are learning, going back and examining these hoaxes. We're like, yeah, people did believe a lot of bullshit, but kind of know more than people believe bullshit today.

• 3:49Robert Evans?

  No, there's two things that are important to understand, which is that people are as dumb as they ever were and people are no dumber than they ever were. Right? And if you have to get both of those things, otherwise you're going to misunderstand history.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And that's partly relevant to the subject of our episode this week, because this week we are talking about the most evil football player of all time.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh.

• 4:14Robert Evans?

  I got it. This is European football. It'd be a different guy if we were talking about the American football, right?

• 4:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, that, there were some evil American football players.

• 4:25Robert Evans?

  No, and if we're doing the most evil man in football, obviously, this would be our eight parter on Jerry Jones. But I simply don't have the time to write 40,000 words on Jerry Jones this week. We'll get to it one of these days.

• 4:38Robert Evans?

  When he finally shuffles off this mortal coil. No, we are talking about what we Americans call soccer player. Although I'm going to use the term football since we're exclusively talking about France.

• 4:50Speaker 03

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• 4:54Robert Evans?

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• 6:28Robert Evans?

  So, our subject for this week is a sports star, one of the very first football stars in European history, because the sport is still like a fairly new idea at this point, is like a major thing, right? Because we're, this guy's career happens right, not only as football is taking off in Europe, but as they're going from like, the only people who can play at what we would call a professional level are amateurs, that's amateurism is a big thing in sporting, this is why it's a big thing in the Olympics, right? The idea that like, well, these people shouldn't be doing it for a living, right? This is, so this guy's career is like right at the transition of that to like, we're paying guys to play this motherfucking sport, right? And this guy is a footballer who becomes a brutal enforcer for the SS during the Nazi occupation of France. A real piece of shit.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 7:13Robert Evans?

  His name was-

• 7:13Speaker 02

  So when you say evil, you mean like, like evil, evil?

• 7:16Robert Evans?

  Evil, evil. No, we're not just talking, this isn't just a guy who like cheated at some sports games, you know? This is just a guy who was like personally abusive. No, this guy was evil, evil. I mean, it's evil to be personally abusive, but this guy's like evil on a level where the number of people he's affecting is much higher, right?

• 7:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:33Robert Evans?

  This guy really went for it in terms of human evil. His name was Alexander Villaplain, and he often, you can find a number of articles that are like the most evil football star ever. Like, that's, the titles will be variations of that sentiment. And while he was a right bastard, there's also a lot of bastardry behind how he came into being in this world, because in order to properly set up the context of who this guy is and what he, the culture he comes out of, we have to start way before his birth in 1905. Because while Alexander was born a subject of France, he was not born French in the sense that like a lot of people who grew up in France would have seen him as, right?

• 8:16Robert Evans?

  And he wouldn't have primarily identified as a French citizen. He came into this world in Algiers, the capital of Algeria, which since 1830 had been a colonial possession of France. When the French invaded in 1830, Algeria had been a possession of the Ottoman Sultan for about 400 years, right? So from like the 1400s up until the French come in, Algeria is owned by the Ottomans, they're ruled by the Sultan. But if you look at a map, it's pretty far away from Turkey, and the Ottoman Empire, not great at running shit by the 1800s, you know? Like, there's a lot of distance, and like a lot of kind of ailing empires, they more or less let local rulers kind of have a free hand in things as long

• 9:01Robert Evans?

  as they got some taxes. And so, yeah, it's kind of that situation, you know? It's being ruled the way California was by the government in DC in the early 1800s, where it's like, yeah, it's part of the US, but not really, yeah.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  Or like the American colonies for a little bit at the front end.

• 9:19Robert Evans?

  Exactly. I mean, that's another really good like comparison where you're generally left alone as long as they get their kind of due, right? And Algiers is a, a, a regency. It's ruled by a day, which is like DEY is like the name of the, the kind of ruler who's governing Algiers. Uh, there's a couple of other cities, Tunis and Tripoli that are also regencies ruled by days. And these guys are under theoretical control of the Sultan. However, in reality, the days were more or less on their own, independent from each other, and mostly from the Sultan, as long as they paid regular tribute. The Sultan is not gonna back you up in much. He's not gonna really come in and fuck with you a lot, but like, if you're having problems with a foreign power, you, you probably,

• 10:01Robert Evans?

  you can't really rely on the Ottoman army being anything but a basket case, right? You know? Yeah. Their ability to project power is, is kind of declined a lot by the early 1800s. And there had been ongoing issues for a couple, like, almost, I think, 200 years at this point, really, with the Barbary Pirates, uh, who were based, I mean, they're based all around North Africa. You know, the US has some early issues with them right at the birth of our country, uh, in, I think, Tripoli. Um, but the Barbary Pirates, or at least some of them, are based out of ports in Algeria, right? In what is today Algeria. And they had been for more than 100 years at the start of the 1800s. These pirates had carried out raids across Europe as far afield as Ireland, taking slaves for generations,

• 10:46Robert Evans?

  right? Like, these guys are slave-taking pirates. They're not, they're not the nice, cool pirates that you get like, uh, uh, an HBO mini-series about, right? These guys are real, real tough sons of bitches and really mean sons of bitches. Um, and they are, are, you know, for generations, they'll take slaves from wherever they can, and it prompts erratic reprisals, right? You know, we talked about the US gets involved in Tripoli at one point. Um, that's why, you know, the Marine Corps and their song, "From the halls of Mokta Zuma to the shores of Tripoli." That's them, us fucking with these pirates, right? Ah. Yeah, yeah, that's why that's in there. And France had gotten militarily involved for, for the first time in the 1600s. So by the 1800s,

• 11:29Robert Evans?

  Almost 200 years, there had been on again, off again, military involvement because these guys, these pirates, right? They're a real issue. Um, now, aside from these, because they're not, France isn't the only European power that has their entanglements with the Barbary Pirates, but Algeria itself, which isn't really, I say Algeria, I'm talking about Algiers, and there's some like, low-lying areas that grow food and some villages and you're, as the day, you're kind of controlling some roads. The whole territory that we call Algeria, you're mostly not even governing, right? Like, it's really up to local, you know, tribal leaders and villages in a lot of the cases. You're not, you're not running things on a day-to-day basis in the middle of the desert, right? They can go months without having

• 12:11Robert Evans?

  contact with the capital, let alone the outside world, right? That's just the way rural North Africa is working at this period of time. Um, now, while European powers in France will get involved with these pirates periodically, they try to stay out of Algiers proper and, you know, the broader Algerian territory, because for most, from the 1600s up to the 1800s, the Ottoman Empire still theoretically has shooters, right? Those shooters are less and less good at their job as time goes on, but you don't want to fuck with the Ottomans too hard in the 1600s, because they could still, they could still throw some weight around. You know, like the US, right? Uh, when we talk about failing empires, they're kind of like, at that, at that, this is like their post-Vietnam stage.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're gonna get messy. They have nothing to lose.

• 12:57Robert Evans?

  They have nothing, yeah. So, the Ottomans by the 1800s, though, they're too much into their sick man phase of history to really do much here. And right around the turn of the century, as the 1800s start, France has their revolution, right? You know, so they overthrow the king, the guillotines come out, they have their, you know, a republic, and they also murder rebels who'd helped make the republic, but, you know, all that stuff is going on. And while France, if you remember your French revolutionary history, shortly after the French Revolution, France winds up at war with basically everyone else in Europe. And when you're at war with everyone else in Europe, and you're doing the way that France is competitive with the rest of Europe, is they're doing like mass conscription, right? You have like- A mass people's army for like the first time in European history,

• 13:42Robert Evans?

  which allows you to compete with these much smaller professional armies that theoretically have a lot more resources behind them. But when you're taking all these guys, you don't have as many guys to like grow food, right? So the French revolutionary government, for a while, they're kind of trying to stay on the day's good side because Algeria is providing the grain that revolutionary France needs to keep being revolutionary France, right? During this time when they're at war with everybody. But this is a constant, while they need Algiers, there's constant political instability. Within Algiers, the day is never on a steady, like, he's never super safe in his position. And there's constant, like, you know, unrest throughout the territory, right? And so periodically, for about 30 years after the revolution, these post-revolutionary

• 14:27Robert Evans?

  French leaders will mull the possibility of like, look, we need this grain. We can't trust the current government. They're just not stable. Should we just invade? Should we just conquer Algeria? Like, we could probably knock that out in like a weekend, right? Like, that's like a long weekend for us, you know? They have like a rack brain where they're like, oh yeah, we can just knock this out and fuckin', as soon as we kick this guy out, everyone will be chill to be a part of France. This'll be easy, right?

• 14:51Speaker 02

  Who among us hasn't just thought that it'd be easy enough to take over Algeria?

• 14:55Robert Evans?

  Right. I think about this constantly. I still feel like I could. I feel like I'm a contender, you know?

• 15:00Speaker 02

  How hard could it be?

• 15:01Robert Evans?

  I'm gonna go on vacation there, just see if I can wind up taking it over, you know? Probably not. Sorry, Algeria. But this is an enticing prospect for post-revolutionary French leaders, Napoleon among them, right? Because Algeria, if you just look at it on the map, it's in a great location. There's really good ports, right? Really important ports, and there's a lot of really good farmland. And so Napoleon, actually, he sends spies over to Algiers and he draws up plans for an invasion, but Napoleon's got a lot going on. The French military is going to be tapped for a significant portion of his time in power, and he never gets around to it, which is a real tragedy. Just one more war Napoleon could have gotten to, but didn't have the time. You know, you always think you're gonna have more time to go to war with Algeria than

• 15:46Robert Evans?

  you do, which is another message for our audience, you know? Don't, don't let time pass you by. Invade Algeria today. Like the sponsors of this podcast are looking to do. This podcast is sponsored entirely by the pre-1812 Napoleonic government. So please, you know, support Napoleon with his invasion of Russia. It's gonna work.

• 16:11Robert Evans?

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• 17:10Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit dovato.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

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• 18:21Robert Evans?

  We're back. It didn't. Bad, bad stuff in Russia for the French Army. Which is why Napoleon gets forced out, right? He's no longer the guy running things. You've got a king in France again, but he's not on a super stable footing. And neither is the day. And the two of them wind up in constant conflict over debts, right? Algeria owes France money.

• 18:45Robert Evans?

  France is pissed off about it. And periodically, when the two countries are at odds, the day will kind of tell the Barbary pirates, "Hey, go back to doing your thing." You know, he can exert a little bit of control over them when he wants to keep France happy. But when he's pissed, he'd be like, "All right, you guys, you know, go fuck around, you know? Fuck around with some shit, right?" And this time, the Barbary pirates fuck around, and all of Algiers finds out. Because France is like, "Uh-uh. First off, we're pissed because we just lost a war with all of Europe, right? We're feeling kind of bad about ourselves. Like the US in Iraq, right? We need a, we need an easy win, you know, to make us feel better about ourselves. We lost this disastrous series of wars. So we really, you know, this is for our egos.

• 19:30Robert Evans?

  We've got to invade and conquer Algeria, right?"

• 19:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:33Robert Evans?

  And I'm smoothing things out a little bit, but this is generally what happens. And kind of things come to a height when there's a series of arguments between the French ambassador and the day. And in April of 1827, the day smacks the French consul to Algeria in the face with a fly swatter. It's a moment that's memorialized in this beautiful painting. Look at this. Look at this. First off, they couldn't have made the day look like more of a Chad and the fucking, the consul looked like more of a soy jack if they tried. Like, it's the original Chad and soy image.

• 20:07Speaker 02

  When you said fly swatter, like, I thought you were being metaphorical.

• 20:10Robert Evans?

  No, it's a literal fly swatter. It's a literal fly swatter. He smacks him in the face. We don't know, you know, this is one of those things. There's a couple of different stories about what happens. In an article for EBSCO, Grove Coger describes differing accounts of what went down. Quote, Hussein bin Hassan either tapped or struck, depending on conflicting accounts, visiting French consul Pierre de Val with a fly whisk. The incident may simply have been intended to indicate by the day that their interview was at an end, or it may have constituted, as the French chose to interpret it, a horrible and scandalous outrage. So either he's like, hey, we're done. Or he like hits him and he's like, fuck you, man. You know, we don't really know which. It's kind of, but the French assume it's a fuck you and that he really hit him, you

• 20:55Robert Evans?

  know? So this is the most direct provocation that leads to the French invasion and conquest of Algeria. Again, I tried to make the point, there had been ongoing and escalating difficulties between them and the fact that France, you know, has lost this series of wars is a big part of like, why they want to get involved. There's an added, there's an aspect of this that's like, we need to kind of revitalize our national pride by winning a war. This is about 50 years before the scramble for Africa. So they're not caught up in the scramble for Africa. In fact, this is kind of one of the inciting incidents in the scramble for Africa, right? The fact that France winds up taking Algeria will lead 50 years later to, because I don't know, I wasn't actually aware of this until I started doing the research.

• 21:39Robert Evans?

  The Algerian colony that France controls is the single largest portion of Africa that's controlled by anyone during this period. Algeria is the largest country in Africa, geographically. So this is a huge chunk of Africa. And so 50 years or so down the line, the fact that France has this, as these European powers awaken to like, how much money there is in Africa, they're going to be, oh shit, we're running out of Africa. We gotta get some, you know? It's kind of why Belgium winds up controlling the Congo. There's, there's a piece of that here. Now, a more direct reason why France gets involved and invades Algeria is the oldest reason of all time. I keep making George W. Bush comparisons, but like, the new king of France, Charles X, is like a Bushy figure. He's very unpopular.

• 22:24Robert Evans?

  He is struggling to govern a country that is not thrilled to have him in power. And he kind of needs to distract everyone from the fact that he sucks at what he's doing and nobody likes him, right? So Charles, Charles the 10th is like, I said X, sorry. Charles, he's Charlie XCX. Charles the 10th. That's how I'm choosing to picture this now is Charlie XCX. Very brat. Yeah, starting the slow genocide of Algeria. That is very brat, Sophie. It's not brat. Is brat good? Brat is good. Brat is good. Brat is good. It's not brat. Genocide is bad. It is not brat.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Genocide in Algeria is not brat.

• 23:01Robert Evans?

  I was literally just saying it's pretty bratty to do a genocide, but okay. This is, I'm glad I'm getting this context. That would have been really embarrassing. So Charlie the 10th decides, this flyswatter thing, this is the excuse I need to get into a foreign war that absolutely won't threaten my power or involve the rest of Europe. Safe. It's gonna be super easy. We're gonna be in and out, you know? Kojir writes, quote, "Announcing publicly that he was eradicating Algerian privateering, Charles quickly dispatched a naval squadron under the command of Rear Admiral Joseph Collet. Collet reached the port of Algiers on June 11th. After taking the consul and other French citizens on board, he set up a naval blockade. Through the next three years, Sultan Mahmoud II of the Ottoman Empire tried in vain to persuade Daé Hussein

• 23:44Robert Evans?

  bin Hassan to come to terms with the French. He was supported in these efforts by the British, who were anxious to maintain a balance of power in the Mediterranean and protect their own interests. In March of 1830, Mahmoud sent an emissary, a former grand mufti, which is a judicial official of Algiers, who had since retired to Turkey, to insist that Hussein bin Hassan make peace. By that time, the French government, in ever-increasing need of a distraction from its internal affairs, had decided to launch a direct invasion." So this really is like a war on terror moment for them where they're like, oh yeah, we gotta deal with these pirates. Yeah, that's why we're stealing all this stuff.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  For the, you know, we're protecting, protecting everyone.

• 24:20Robert Evans?

  Protecting everyone. Yeah. Yeah, France, French 9/11. Was this guy getting hit by a flyswatter? That's the, that's the fucking plane hitting the second tower? Is this flyswatter smacking, fucking this, this consul in the face? So on May 11th, 1830, a French fleet of 600 ships set sail for the African coast and arrived there on June 12th. Utilizing intelligence gathered during the Napoleonic era, 34,000 troops landed and carried out a rapid and successful invasion. The Algerians outnumbered French soldiers. They have like 20% more guys on board. And normally, if you're attacking, you want like 2 to 1 numerical odds against the defender. If like, everything else has parity, right?

• 25:01Robert Evans?

  That's generally like, best wisdom across the last like 10,000 years of military history. But these forces are not in parity, right? The Algerian military is just a militia. They're armed with weaponry that would have been outdated even for like, the regular Ottoman army. And France has a modern army with a lot of experienced troops, right? They've got modern guns, they've got modern cannons. They just steamroll the Daes army. The actual fighting is not really ever in doubt, right? And that's not, the problems that France is going to encounter is not in straight up land battles, right? It's going to be in an insurgency. By July 4th, Algiers had been bombarded by sea and the Daes army had been shattered in two decisive land battles.

• 25:44Robert Evans?

  French civilians who'd been evacuated from Algiers before the invasion, watched the shelling from yachts anchored offshore. It's one of those classic like, start of the civil war moments where people are like, picnicking to watch the battle? You know, they're sitting on their yachts, watching the city get shelled?

• 26:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:01Robert Evans?

  Really makes you sympathetic for these rich French people.

• 26:05Robert Evans?

  So the Daes goes into exile and France takes nominal control of the capital. This is the end of things going well for France, right? They get a nice, quick victory, they occupy the city, but they can't actually govern Algeria. That's a lot easier in theory than reality. The war had ended very rapidly, but France is then left with this uncomfortable reality that the Daes had never governed Algeria. He had controlled the capital and like, some roads and towns. But for the most part, there's this patchwork of regional leaders and warlords who've been handling their shit for the Daes. And primarily on their own terms. There's no functional Algerian state for France to just plug into. There's this vast and hostile territory that they know very little about and has no interest in being part of France.

• 26:50Robert Evans?

  The fact that French soldiers act like occupying soldiers, once they take the capital, does not help matters, right?

• 26:57Speaker 02

  No, that doesn't endear, endear them?

• 26:59Robert Evans?

  No, no, they're pillage, they pillage the capital, right? They, they desecrate mosques and cemeteries because soldiers are assholes a lot of the time. They're like, really going out of their way to make these people angry. Yeah, everybody loves it when you desecrate their holy buildings and cemetery. They're cemeteries? Come on, man. Yeah. So France, and a big part of why, you know, this isn't just the soldiers are losing control and, you know, being let off the leash by their officers. France has sent 600 ships to Algiers, right? Right after losing a series of hideously expensive wars, they're broke. They need to rob Algiers blind to pay for the invasion, right?

• 27:42Robert Evans?

  So they absolutely just steal the entire treasury, which wrecks the local economy. So this makes the Algerian people very unhappy. Sure. And they attempt to register their displeasure at this state of affairs. When, you know, it becomes clear that the natives are restless or restive, the king sends an interpreter who speaks the language to deliver a message to the people of Algiers. It's called a proclamation to the Arabs. And in this proclamation, the king's interpreter tells the people of Algiers that France only wants to help them and they really hope they'll obey their new overlords. And if they don't, this guy warns, "God will inflict, quote, 'the most rigorous punishments on those who commit damage against the land and who ruin the country and its inhabitants.'"

• 28:28Robert Evans?

  Now, it's really worth noting the way that's framed, right? In her study, "French land Algerian people," Paige Gully notes of this proclamation, "significantly, this statement emphasized above all harm to the land and the country, listing the inhabitants last, almost as an afterthought." In other words, it depicted the well-being of the country and the land itself as the primary concerns of the French. So from the jump, they're like, "You guys better not fuck up this land with your being people and your living on it, you know? We need this stuff."

• 29:01Robert Evans?

  Nice guys, we love, we love a colonial overlord. So things start off on a bad foot and over the next few decades, they don't get better. This evolves, this attitude that like, we're putting the land before the people who live there, becomes official state policy of the French occupiers. And the Algerians aren't stupid. They know immediately, as soon as this proclamation comes out, they know that like, oh. These people are going to steal our land from us and they don't care what happens to us just because we happen to be living on it, right? So they're not motivated to be loyal to the crown. To make matters worse, right after Algiers gets taken in July of the same year, there's a revolution in France called the July Revolution that forces King Charles XCX, you know, out

• 29:46Robert Evans?

  of power, right? Just a couple of weeks after his great victory. Now, he gets replaced by his cousin, so not a wild difference between these two guys. And he has to go, it's very funny, he forces the day to go into exile and he has to go into exile so his cousin can run things.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  That's karma.

• 30:04Robert Evans?

  That's karma. If only the Iraq war had worked out this way. George Bush is hiding in like Argentina or something right now, uh, doing his paintings from, yeah, I dream. So the government behind the next monarch are not supportive of this latest foreign adventure, right? The people who wind up, because the king gets deposed and like the officials around his cousin are the guys who had opposed the king invading Algeria, right? They'd been the ones being like, this is going to be disastrous and expensive, but now they're in charge and Algeria is a French possession and you can't just leave it, right? Like you can't just go even though you know it's a bad idea.

• 30:44Robert Evans?

  You have to maintain the occupation that you know is a bad idea because otherwise you're going to be admitting that you failed and with, and national pride won't let you leave this possession behind, right? Like the French people have invested their egos now into controlling Algeria. So you can't, it's like an Afghanistan thing. Even though you didn't start this, if you take over and leave, you're going to get blamed for it not working out. It's cool how often the same shit happens in history.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  I know, you're saying that and it's like, that can be applied to so many situations.

• 31:18Robert Evans?

  Ah, fuck, we didn't want to be here, but we have to figure out how to make this war work and we're going to wind up committing so many crimes against humanity to try to make this war that we didn't want work for us, right? In her study, Frenchland Algerian people, which I really do recommend if you're, if you're trying to get an idea on how this occupation went, Paige Gully describes what happened next. "After the initial conquest, Algeria was left under the control of largely autonomous generals who waged brutal warfare against the local Arab and Berber populations." So- Because they're Westerners, under like a quote unquote "modern state", we don't call these guys warlords, these generals that France just gives power to do whatever in Algeria,

• 31:59Robert Evans?

  but they're warlords. And they're primarily, when they get frustrated, these guys are military men. So they don't have any idea of like, okay, well, the population's angry because the cost of living has increased and because of this policy and that policy. So if we set up this like broad-based series of policies, look to changing the economic status, then like we can improve people's quality of life and gradually the level of resistance will fade because people will have like, they won't be willing to die fighting because they'll actually have things and they'll have a life. They don't think that way. They're like, people are angry, guess we'll shoot them. They're still angry. Let's try shooting some more. Maybe we'll starve them. Let's poison the water. You know, that's the only fucking, that's the only way they're capable of thinking, right? And so for the next 70 years, there are regular uprisings against the French occupation,

• 32:42Robert Evans?

  right? I cannot exaggerate the degree to which this is not a situation in which the Algerian people are passive or just letting this shit happen to them, right? For an idea of how intense an occupation they require because of how effective their resistance is, for the first 20-something years, France occupies Algeria, a third of the French military is constantly deployed in the territory, right?

• 33:08Speaker 02

  Feels like a big investment.

• 33:09Robert Evans?

  That is a huge investment. Like, that's so much money. And throughout this first 20-something years, more than 1.6 million Algerians will be killed by the French, largely people who like disease and starvation, right, as a result of different military and like other policies being pursued by the occupiers, along with at least 100,000 French soldiers, right? So this is a brutal occupation. We are talking a massive body count here. Algeria is not annexed formally until 1841 and until the 1880s, the colony is governed by military officers, right? There's no like civil administration.

• 33:49Robert Evans?

  It's not until the close of the 19th into the 20th centuries that the territory of Algeria becomes anything close to a functional colony in the way that we usually talk about when we're discussing colonies of European powers during this period, right? Because it's just too violent for it to be really functioning the way a colony is supposed to.

• 34:10Robert Evans?

  Now, again, Algeria today, the country Algeria, is about 900,000 square miles, right? The largest country in Africa, so it's not surprising the French have difficulty tying things up. And the sheer amount of bloodshed and the consistency of resistance from the population does two things. First, it inculcated within the French people a feeling that this land was theirs in a way that separated it from even their other colonial possessions because they bled so dearly for it, right? A lot more of us died for this than the other places we owned, so we own this in a different way, right? And the fact that a lot more of them died doesn't really, that's not really hitting us, hitting our books, you know? The second thing this does is it further separates the Algerian people from the land and from French citizens, right?

• 34:55Robert Evans?

  The Algerians are seen as damaged. They're not just inferior in the sense that like, you know, white supremacists see all non-white people as inferior, but they're also broken in a way that can't be fixed. Because in most, you know, these are all whites, all of these colonial states are white supremacists, right? But not necessarily in the way that we think about today. There's an attitude of like, especially like if you look at the way the British talked about their Indian possessions, there's an attitude of like, well, we can uplift these people and make them civilized, right? And that's also very racist and problematic, but there's still that, this attitude that we're there to leave behind a functional state. The French never feel this way in Algeria.

• 35:39Robert Evans?

  They don't feel, we're not, we're not here to do anything but kill these people and take their, we don't give a fuck about these human beings, right? We're not even pretending to. Eugene Bourdichon, who's a French doctor who settles in Algiers in the 1850s, is one of the first intellectuals to lay this out clearly, right? Because he's a, you know, he's a medical professional, he's a, he's a learned man, and he's engaging with other learned men of this, of this, you know, the state that has these kind of, within sort of the French population, these attitudes of like egalitarianism, right? And so, we're all kind of debating, you know, the kind of empire we want to have. And he starts to complain that there's- Couple of issues we have, a couple of major issues in Algeria governing it, right?

• 36:24Robert Evans?

  First off, when you send Europeans to Algeria, they die really fucking quickly, right? Because the climate is not hospitable to French people, you know? You're in the desert, there's a lot of different diseases that, you know, French people aren't used to getting. It's just like not a good place for French people to be. And so you can't get that large a European population, or at least not a French European population. Spaniards do okay, right? And there's some French possessions that are basically Spanish in this period, like in the Mediterranean and, and some like allies. So like they will take in Spanish colonists to colonize Algeria. Cause like, you know, Spain is hotter, right? Like they're more used to the climate, right?

• 37:07Robert Evans?

  If you look at like southern Spain, it's not a wildly different climate from North Africa in a lot of ways, right? So you can kind of do that, but you can't really get a large French population in Algiers because they just keep dying, right? But also you can't trust the native Algerians because they keep rebelling, you know? They're fundamentally, and there's this idea that, that Bodichon has that like they're never going to be, will never be able to trust them. So what we need to do is replace them with other Africans, right? From different parts of Africa. Quote, this is Bodichon writing, "Such colonists could be best found by diverting captives from the Saharan slave trade and directing them towards Algeria. Here they could be legally emancipated and put to work on the land."

• 37:52Robert Evans?

  I got an idea, guys. Look, post-revolution, we're an ethical state now. France is, you know, modern and enlightened. What if we take slaves from the slave trade and just use them to grow food in this other possession and we ethnically cleanse the native people? And technically we say we're not doing slavery anymore. Is that, can we, can we make that work, right? That's, that's Bodichon's idea.

• 38:19Robert Evans?

  These people suck so bad. Um, now slavery is made illegal in France in 1848, which is a fact that, you know, the French like to bring up to the Americans because it takes us a bit longer. But it's like illegal, right? You can't have slaves in France. You're not supposed to have them anywhere else, but slavery still exists. And also state like situations for workers that is not technically slavery, but it basically is slavery. You know, you've got prisons and colonies and stuff that function that way, too. And guys like Bodichon are going to argue that we actually, even though it's illegal, we need slavery, at least to get Africans from elsewhere in Africa, from Sub-Saharan Africa to Algeria,

• 39:02Robert Evans?

  right? We can do away with the system once they're in Algeria, but only, quote, "the devotion of African slaves of color can counteract the bellicose nature of the native Algerians", right? That's, that's his argument. Um, so just the most racist people that you can imagine. Now, the abolition of slavery in France is further complicated by the fact that there's a lot of slave owners in Algeria. And they're one of the, there's two types of Algerians at this point, right? There's two types of people who call themselves Algerians. There's what we would call Algerians, which is like the native indigenous peoples of the area who had lived there before French conquest. And then there's these foreign Europeans

• 39:42Robert Evans?

  who have settled in Algeria and to some extent have intermarried with the local population, but also keep to themselves a lot. And they also call themselves Algerians, right? So the upper strata of like the, the people who had been closer to the day, who are wealthier and are, you know, native Algerians, they have slaves and the European Algerians have slaves. And the French authorities are supposed to enforce the laws against slavery in Algeria, but they don't, or at least they do it unevenly, right? Historian Benjamin Brower noted that colonial authorities allowed Algerians of both kinds who are friendly with the French government to continue to hold and trade slaves. Quote, "French administrators

• 40:25Robert Evans?

  granted permission to trade in slaves and keep those they owned. And in some cases, the French administration even returned fugitive slaves," right? You only take slaves from people if they're unfriendly Algerians, right? If they're, if they're opposed to the French government, then you take their slaves and you try to turn them into farmers, right? We're using this as a way to try to colonize, you know, and keep a working population we can trust in the colony. Now, this doesn't work very well. It's hard to make something like this work at the scale you need to. And so in the 1850s, our favorite French king, Napoleon III, who we talked about a lot on this show a year or two ago, old Nappy Three sends a group of French political prisoners who had tried to leave.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  Call him Nappy Three.

• 41:11Robert Evans?

  Nappy Three, Nappy Trace, baby.

• 41:13Speaker 02

  We got Charlie XCX and Nappy Three.

• 41:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there we go.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ.

• 41:18Robert Evans?

  So he had come to power. He, you know, it was a coup, right? He like, he takes power as the king. And there's a counter-revolution against him that fails. And he arrests like 6,000 people. And he sends them, he starts sending these guys over to Algeria. And his attitude is like, well, I'll send these arrestees and they'll create farms. And once they've got a farm going, they'll send for their families to join them. And that's how we'll get like a trustworthy population base in Algeria going, right? So that we can make this appropriately French. And eventually the idea is we'll just kind of genocide ethnically cleanse, push out all of the native people, right? Like, that's the hope. It's never gonna work for them because this is a bad idea for a lot of reasons. And, you know, Napoleon III being Napoleon III,

• 42:03Robert Evans?

  he can't even be consistent about this. And in short order, he pardons most of these prisoners because his popularity takes a dive. And he's like, maybe this will make people like me. Ultimately, less than-

• 42:14Speaker 02

  So he's trying, which is something.

• 42:16Robert Evans?

  He's trying, right? So less than 50 of these 6,000 guys actually wind up settling in Algeria, which is kind of shit like this keeps happening where they'll have these grand ambitions. This'll let us get a popular, this'll do it. And it never really works. So for the next 50 years or so, France struggles to convince any French people to move to a place where they aren't wanted and the climate and native illnesses will kill them very quickly in most cases. French intellectuals and political elites only grow more dedicated to holding on to Algeria during this time because they're continuing to pour troops and bullets into the territory while complaining that without French farmers, this project can't work. So by the end of the century, you know, in 1870, 71, we have Germany goes to war with France.

• 42:59Robert Evans?

  Germany also becomes the thing. We have the Franco-Prussian War, right? Napoleon falls at the end of the Franco-Prussian War and France becomes a republic yet again. Right? And by the time the republic is back, French policy has settled into this uneasy conclusion, RE Algeria, which is that it's not a colony in the same way that like Indochina is, right? And for a description of how they're looking at Algeria in this period, I want to quote from an article written by Jim House for the University of Leeds. Algerians were French subjects, but not French citizens. For decades, Algerians embodied a significant exception to the established French republican model that, for men at

• 43:40Robert Evans?

  least, combined nationality and citizenship. Algeria constituted a colonial territory, fully integrated into the republic that, as politicians like to say, ran from Dunkirk in the north to Taman Rasit in the Sahara, the Mediterranean separating French and Algeria like the Seine running through Paris. Right? So I think that's really important to dwell on a little. After the revolution, there are attempts to say, look, France is an empire. We govern a lot of territory that's outside of Europe, but all the men there are equal, right? Because, you know, liberty, equality, fraternity, right? We're all equal. There are, now, they're never perfect. We can talk about Haiti, right? The French are never perfectly consistent, but there is an attempt in most of their colonial possessions to

• 44:25Robert Evans?

  say, we recognize the equality of all men, right? They don't really believe it. They're not consistent about it, but they are at least signposting that. And they don't even try to do that with Algeria, right? The final establishment of French policy is that Algerian land is ours and the people don't belong anywhere, right? They can move. They can move to Paris even if they want, but they won't have rights there. They can't vote. They're not citizens, right? And because shit is bad in Algiers and Algeria, there's a lot of poverty. There's a lot of desperation. A lot of Algerians moved to Paris, right? Both native Algerians and kind of people. People who, for a couple of generations, had been part of this European population

• 45:08Robert Evans?

  that called themselves Algerians in Algeria, they also moved to Paris. And there's an extent to which they're all viewed kind of the same by Parisians, right? And they come to form a permanent underclass. And this is, by the way, still a thing in France, and particularly in Paris. The Algerian population, which is consistently mistreated and not treated equally and abused by the police, and like, that is still a problem in France to this day, right? And this is kind of where that all starts, you know? And so, these Algerians who are living in Paris are abused by the police, they're abused by their employers, they're unable to advocate for themselves in any legal way. This is not a happy situation for the Algerians who are living in Paris, and there's a lot of anger as a result of that.

• 45:53Robert Evans?

  In 1892, the French Senate ordered an inquiry into Algerian affairs, which was written by Emilien Chatriot. His 350-page report essentially summarized the final conclusion of the French state into the Algerian question. Chatriot was not only a government official who was supposed to be analyzing the country, he'd lived for years in Algeria. During a chapter in the history of colonial policies towards land use, he praised the richness of Algeria's land and blamed its constant famines, which had been incited by the government during Napoleon III's reign to starve Algerians and break the rebel movement, as instead being caused by negligence and lack of foresight by Algerian farmers. They didn't foresee that we were going to kill them, you know? That's why they died.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  Lack of foresight. Classic, that's the issue.

• 46:37Robert Evans?

  Lack of foresight. Right, yeah. He concluded, "Only the European, with his civilization, knows how to subject the soil to the intensive cultivation that will return 100% of its potential." Page Gully summarizes the rest of the report. "In reviewing past colonization policies, Chatriot was complimentary of the French government's recognition of the potential value of Algerian land. We have understood that the future of North Africa had to be rooted in the progressive acquisition of land for the European settlers, who bring with them their scientific methods and their sophisticated equipment. However, despite this recognition, many colonization policies failed to significantly increase the cultivation of Algerian land." Algeria. Chatur blamed this failure largely on what he perceived as French leniency in allowing Algerian

• 47:21Robert Evans?

  people to keep their own land that their relatives had owned for forever, or to even buy land, labeling that imprudent generosity that always weighed heavily on the colony. This generosity of letting people stay in their homes sometimes, sometimes, stopped France from using Algeria's land to its full potential because the people who live there cultivated it ineffectively. And again, Chatur was ignoring the fact that French people can't survive there, right? And also have no interest in being subsistence farmers because it sucks. This guy sucks. Uh huh. French leniency. French colonial administrators, always shitty. You know who else is always? No. Not always shitty. There we go. Sometimes shitty, sometimes shitty.

• 48:06Robert Evans?

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• 49:18Robert Evans?

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• 50:29Robert Evans?

  We're back. Oh, my goodness. Everyone having a good time? We're still talking about French genocide and colonialism in Algeria. Just because it's one of my favorite topics and it ties into our bastard here. So, Chatruse's report not only concludes that the French have to be more assertive in Algeria in being dicks to the locals, but that we need to focus more on the Frenchness of Algeria. His work argued, quote, "In Algeria, it is necessary to carry out French policies. That is the lesson of history." He asserted, "We have tried time and time again to create an Algeria for the Arabs. Events have always cruelly demonstrated that this was nothing but a dangerous illusion. Because we conquered Algeria, we must make it a colony that is for neither the Arabs nor the foreigners nor the Jews, but for the French."

• 51:14Robert Evans?

  Some antisemitism just sliding in there and I just T-boning that sentence.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  I was waiting for when it was, you tease Nazis. I was waiting for the antisemitism.

• 51:23Robert Evans?

  Yes, and this is important. The fact that you could have put these words in the mouth of a Nazi, right? If you just replaced French with German and it would sound right, you know? That's important because we're going to spend most of these episodes talking about... The German occupation of France. And a lot of what the German occupation of France is, is Germany doing to the French a less brutal version generally than what the French had done to the Algerians? They're certainly going to kill a smaller portion of the population, shall we say? So that's, that's what these French colonial administrators are being like, well, Algeria obviously doesn't belong to the Arabs or the foreigners. And he's talking about like the Spanish and other European Algerians, right? Nor the Jews, it belongs to the French, natural French territory.

• 52:07Robert Evans?

  Algeria, the place we can't survive in, we die immediately there. Of course this belongs to us. Now, I told you at the top of this episode, we're talking about a goddamn football player, right?

• 52:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was like, where is the kickball situation?

• 52:22Robert Evans?

  Well, he's, he's an Algerian, right? He's a European Algerian, right? He is born in Algiers, right? And he's going to wind up becoming a colonial enforcer in France for the Nazis, which I find a really fascinating dichotomy, right? That you have this horrible history of French colonialism in Algeria. This guy is a product of it. He's French and Spanish, but he's born and raised in Algeria. He would have called himself an Algerian, other people called him an Algerian. And he moves to France and winds up an occupying soldier, carrying out a brutal insurgent war against the native people of France, which is a really interesting thing to me, right?

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:02Robert Evans?

  Like what a, what a wild switcheroo we're going through here. And I, among other things, I felt it would be fucked up to just talk about how brutal this guy was as an occupier and like pretend, as we often do when we're talking about the European powers around this period, pretend they didn't get up to Nazi shit before the Nazis did, right? You know, I think it's important to, it's like we say about the British Empire, were they absolutely much better than the Nazis, of course? Were they also for most of their history, just slower than the Nazis? Yes, that's also true, right? You know, we could, we could talk about the genocide, the, the starvation genocide in Bengal, right? You know, 20, 30 million people dead. Uh, and we have on this show. Um, and we just talked

• 53:45Robert Evans?

  about the French killed 1.6, 2 million Algerians, you know, in this period of time. Now we're starting with the story of our actual bastard. On December 24th, 1904. 50 minutes in. Yeah, hell yeah. Who are you, Margaret Killjoy? Yeah, context, baby. The people love it. Context. Yeah. On December 24th, 1904, Alexander Eugene Villa Plana was born in Algiers. By the time of his birth, there were more than 100,000, close to 200,000 foreigners, which are Europeans who are living in Algeria. And they have their own patois dialect, because again, they are intermarrying to some extent. So there, it's a mix of like Arabic and French. And there's, I think there's some Spanish in there and they call themselves Algerians.

• 54:30Robert Evans?

  Alexander's father is of Spanish extraction. His parents had come from a Mediterranean island called Menorca and had immigrated to Algeria in the 18th century. Spain had let, uh, France use the island as a staging area for their invasion. And once France took Algeria, uh, they urged Menorcan farmers to leave their homes. Uh, and per Luke Briens' biography of Villa Plana, Menorcan farmers were encouraged to leave the poor and stony land to exploit that of Algeria, the women especially, right? And what you get with that, the women especially, what's going on here is France recognizes these people who live on this island that's pretty close, that they're European. So, you know, in terms

• 55:11Robert Evans?

  of our racial supremacy, it's better for us that we consider them more trustworthy and better people, but they can survive being on the land better. So we really want to get as many of those women over there as possible, get them pregnant and start building a European expat population in Algiers, right? Um, however, the, these kind of Menorcan farmers are more, can survive in North Africa better than the French, but not all that well, because, uh, Alexander's grandparents die when his dad is seven. Uh, so he, you know, shortly after they arrive, they die. Joseph, his father. Is left an orphan. He eventually grows up. He gets married to Nathalie, a French woman who whose family came from the mainland, but who had moved to Algeria to try and

• 55:56Robert Evans?

  colonize it. And yeah, they get married. This is not Joseph is married at least once before and has one divorce because he's abusive and jealous. Like he's physically abusive enough that they make a note of it in like the 1890s, right? Which is hard. He also gets in trouble at one point for assaulting a tax official who's makes eyes at his wife before they're married. Right. This guy, this tax official looks at his future wife, Rog, and he assaults him. So this is our, this is our bastard's dad. This is Joseph, Alexander's father. And Joseph, again, I've just said, he's a European. These are, these are, we see them rightly as

• 56:38Robert Evans?

  the colonizers. Joseph doesn't see himself that way, nor does he see their family as colonizers. He sees himself as one of the common people of Algeria, right?

• 56:47Speaker 02

  So he sees himself as Algerian, even though he's like European in his heritage.

• 56:52Robert Evans?

  Yes. And he sees himself as a European Algerian. So he certainly does. One would assume see himself as probably better, or at least different from the Arab Algerians. But he still sees himself as a, because he's poor, right? And so, most of the Europeans are on the wealthier side of things, right? And the European descent. And he sees himself, he identifies as, I am of the common people of Algeria, right? We're not these rich assholes, right? That's very important to Joseph. And that's going to be a major aspect of like, the way he raises Alexander. Alexander's going to be raised to believe, these rich French assholes are like, kind of our natural enemy, right? Because like, we're poor, working class Algerians, right? Like, fuck these guys, you know? And that's, that's going to be important

• 57:35Robert Evans?

  to how Alexander views the world as he grows up. So Joseph is, you know, he's poor by the standards of Europeans in Algeria, but he's rich by the standards of probably Arab Algerians. He starts like, three different barrel making businesses that all fail. But he's got enough family money coming in from his money and then his wife's family that he's able to repeatedly start and fail at new barrel making businesses. At some point, man, just stop making barrels, homie. Like, what the hell? Like, it's not working. How many barrel business? Come on, one more, one more. He keeps like switching towns, like this is the town that wants barrels. None of them do.

• 58:13Speaker 02

  I mean, it seems like people would need barrels. I get the logic.

• 58:17Robert Evans?

  Sure. I mean, people, people need a lot of stuff, but that doesn't mean that you're gonna be the one to provide it.

• 58:22Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 58:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So, um, from his earliest memories, Alexander would have been told by his father, again, we're working poor, we're not like these wealthy foreign landowners. And the reality is that his, his wife's family, so Alexander's mom, has like family with some amount of, I don't think they're rich, but they're comfortable back in France and they visit them regularly. So as a little kid, Alexander is going from North Africa to France. The Villa Planas are thus much better off than most native Algerians. And his, because of this, because he's traveling back to France, he gets a head start on the rest of the kids in Algeria in playing football, right?

• 59:04Robert Evans?

  And this is the thing, football, it's kind of started off in the UK, right? And it's traveled down Europe at this point. It's going to hit, obviously today, North Africa, the whole Arab world, football's a massive deal, right? Like, I can tell you, just like all of the time I've spent in Iraq, I saw so many fucking Messi jerseys, right? It was like the one thing everyone could agree on is how much they fucking love that guy.

• 59:28Speaker 02

  Everybody loves Lionel Messi.

• 59:30Robert Evans?

  Everybody loves fucking Messi for like, um, in his book, Le Bressard, Luke Briand writes about Alexander's early family trips back to France. Quote, "The family, which now included two daughters and this little boy, regularly returned to Huroe. And later, some would remember seeing young Alexander, a child of the century, treading the football fields of Set when he was barely four years old. Legs like matchsticks, running tirelessly, and laughter in the sunset over the ponds. Four years is young, but it is true that the child shows predispositions, always laughing in live, uh, lively, spinning enthusiastically, a ball in his hands or at his feet." He's one of these kids, he's just born to play football, right? The instant he gets a ball in his hand, right?

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:13Robert Evans?

  He's just losing his mind over the sport. Like, you can't stop him. Football remains his main concern throughout his childhood. He does OK in school. Brian describes him as performing honorably in primary school, which I had to translate the book because it's in French, so maybe I'm just getting that one wrong.

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  It kind of sounds like honorably is like, oh, fine.

• 1:00:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he does OK. He doesn't shame himself, right?

• 1:00:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:40Robert Evans?

  So he starts primary school in 1910. He attends a free school in a town near Algiers, which is a free school because, like, it's basically a more affluent suburb. And they're like, we don't want to pay into the public schools that these Arab kids are using, right? So we'll pay for a free school in our suburbs, right? Where it's like our tax. It's one of those things. It's a charter school deal, right?

• 1:01:06Robert Evans?

  So this is a religious school, but Alexander's family is not, right? They're very much kind of a French Republican family in that area. And that, like, they're not really believers. Quote, "In the Villa Plana household," Luke Brian writes, "weddings and funerals are resolutely civil." Alexander was a decent student. He's good enough that he gets in the local papers for his grades, but he doesn't graduate with honors. Since Villa Plana is a Spanish name and not a French one, his father starts using the name Villa Plana to try and sound more French, right? Like, instead of P-L-A-N-A, it's P-L-A-N-E, right? And Alexander is not unique in the fact that he is a nut for football from an early age, but he is lonely in Algeria at that point because it's starting to take a hold,

• 1:01:51Robert Evans?

  but it's still very new to the colony. Football doesn't reach North Africa until 1897, right? So by the time he's born, North Africa has had football for like eight years, right? And the first club hadn't been established in Algiers until the year before Alexander's birth. In 1908, Joseph enrolled his son in a military preparatory program that included a football team, right? So it's like a broader school. Thing and it's technically like an ROTC deal, but they also they have a football club, right? And so from the time he's a little kid, this kid is going to be one of the first people in North Africa, period, to play football, right? And he's again, he's not just interested in,

• 1:02:33Robert Evans?

  he's really good at it. And his team, this first team he plays on, this first Algerian team, wins the youth North African football championship in 1913, 1914, right? So he exhibits excellence from an early age and wins a comp helped win a competition with this team. Now, he's generally very good at athletics. He wins a diving competition when he's 15. And he's, he's good enough at football, but by age 16, he's made a name for himself as a player, and he's able to leave Algeria for good, right? In 1916, he like bounces, he's never going to come back. He moves to Set to live with his in France, to live with his uncles, and he joins

• 1:03:14Robert Evans?

  the local club there, FC Set. Now, the team was managed by a Scotsman, Victor Gibson. And as soon as Gibson got a look at Villeplin, he decided this kid's got what it takes to go professional, right? You know, I say professional, because that's how we would look at the team that Alexander's about to join. At this point, they're all still amateurs, right? You're not allowed to pay players. It's against the rules, right? But football's already a big business. And so if you want to get the best talent, you have to offer players something, you know? This isn't the kind of situation where there's as crooked a racket around it as like we have in the NCAA, where you're just taking these kids in and not giving them shit and permanently

• 1:03:57Robert Evans?

  injuring them in a lot of cases, in order to make millions and millions of dollars off of them playing college ball. You actually have to provide an incentive. It just can't be their salary job to play football. So by the 20s, by the time that Alexander gets to France, a system is developed by which good players are offered jobs, other jobs, right? Where it's like, hey, if you move to FC Set, we'll give you this job, like managing a butcher shop. And you don't have to come to work, you just get money from it. But you're technically employed, right? Or if you're really good, they'll be like, hey, If you move and you agree to work at this team and play here for at least however

• 1:04:38Robert Evans?

  many years, I'll give you a nightclub. It's already operational. It's already selling. Or I'll give you a theater, right? And you can see, here's the bank statements. This is how much money it makes. And that'll be your theater. And so you'll support yourself off of the income from this business that we're handing over to you, right? That's how you get paid if you're like a top footballer, right? So when he first comes to France, Alexandre has to kind of take whatever they can give him. He's not immediately getting good deals. But within five years or so, he's one of the best players in the entire country, right? In this first wave of football stars, he's one of the brightest stars. Like he is good enough that in very short order, he is getting poached, right? He's getting offered turnkey businesses and huge amounts of money. He's by the time he's in his early

• 1:05:23Robert Evans?

  twenties, like 21, 22, he's verging on like rich because of how good he is at football and how much everyone wants him on their team. Alexandre becomes the first Algerian pro football player in France. He's often called the Algerian. And after a year and a half on Gibson's team, he's poached by a team in Verges, which is sponsored by Perrier, the bottled water company. Like that's his, yeah, that's the sponsor of his second team is Perrier, right? They're like buying him a nightclub or something. I forget what business they hand him. But like, he's getting different business. He's accumulating businesses, basically, during this period of time. Now, he, once Perrier gets him, his original team

• 1:06:06Robert Evans?

  recruits him back, you know, they're all offering, you know, different jobs and whatnot to do this. But he's good enough that he keeps getting poached. And so he gets poached back by his original team. And in the 1927, he gets poached by a team in Nîmes, who promised that he'll be given a business of his own, which will, you know, really make him wealthy if he continues to play for them. So he moves to Nîmes, which is where he becomes known as the best ball header in the country and one of the best passers. Do I know what a ball header is? No. Am I giggling a little when I wrote it?

• 1:06:37Speaker 02

  Is it someone who hits a ball with their head?

• 1:06:41Robert Evans?

  I think that's probably it, right?

• 1:06:42Speaker 02

  Or not. I don't.

• 1:06:44Robert Evans?

  There's a lot of that in football, right? I've seen one professional European match and everybody was hitting the ball with their head. So that's my guess is he's the best at ball heading, which also probably is giving him some CTE. He's later going to exhibit some signs of maybe, you know, the kind of aggression that you sometimes get when you've repeatedly taken on head injuries for sporting purposes. But he's really good. He's the best ball header in France. Again, I'm sorry, I'm seven. He's really good at passing. He wins a France cap, which is a big football award in a game against Belgium in 1926. And in short order, he's made the captain

• 1:07:26Robert Evans?

  of this team in Nîmes, right? So he's by 1926, he is at the top of the world, right? Or all he's close, he's actually going to raise some from this, but he is, he is rich, he's famous, he has succeeded, right? This life is going as well for him as it could possibly be going for somebody in his situation, right?

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  So he's gonna become a huge fucking Nazi? Is what you're telling me?

• 1:07:49Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. No, he's gonna, he's gonna become a huge fucking Nazi. He's gonna destroy all of-

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  What a cool guy.

• 1:07:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's gonna be great.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:07:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, he has talent, he has opportunity, and he's just gonna become a complete monster.

• 1:08:01Robert Evans?

  That's right. He is going to nuke it because he's an asshole and then he's going to become a Nazi. It's gonna be cool.

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  What if I did fascism? That sounds-

• 1:08:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah. You know what? We'll talk about it, but he doesn't even have the, the moral consistency to be like an ethical fat, like not ethical, but like, he's not a fascist ideologically. It's just where the money is, right? He doesn't even give a shit about fascism. Like, that's how much he's, it's one of those like, fucking Walter from the Big Lebowski moments of like, he doesn't even have any ethos, you know? He's, but yeah, we'll talk about that. But first, Dana, let's talk about your pluggables.

• 1:08:41Speaker 02

  My pluggables? Uh, my Instagram is Dana Schwartz with three Z's at the end, two extra Z's. And my podcast, Noble Blood, is about historical nobles. And Hoax is a brand new show, talking about historical hoaxes. Please go check it out, listen to it, like, subscribe, rate, review, all of the above.

• 1:09:02Robert Evans?

  Excellent. We'll do all of that and, you know, do something else. Go try to conquer Algeria. Or you know what? People have been doing that. Conquer France. It's been a long time. It's been like, it's been almost 100 years since anyone, it's been like 80 years since anyone conquered France. Go do it. You can take them.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  All right. Yeah.

• 1:09:21Robert Evans?

  I think you got it. I think you got it, you know?

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 1:09:24Robert Evans?

  Just don't go in through Belgium. That doesn't work well.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for this encouragement. I've been waiting for someone to tell me that I'm capable of conquering France.

• 1:09:32Robert Evans?

  Sophie brought that up before the call. She was like, you know, Dana, really? She's got what it takes to conquer France. I think she just needs, you know, some encouragement. So we're offering that. Uh, I'm also offering 200,000 men, uh, and, and tanks and armored transports. Don't ask where I got them.

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it'll be enough. It'll be enough.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 1:09:55Robert Evans?

  All right. That's the episode.

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedi.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

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