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)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Oh my goodness, Sophie, I 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?

Speaker 1 (00:17):
You can see me and I'm sitting.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
It's it's it's simply behind the Bastard, 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?

Speaker 1 (00:32):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (00:32):
I live for it.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
You live for it? Well, we all live. We live
because of it. We pay, we pay our bills because
of which is different from living for something. But you
know what I live for, Sophie, do tell introducing the
guests to this podcast and nothing else. So every moment
before and after this has just been just been an
unbroken string of pain, just just endless and ceaseless. But

(00:58):
for this one moment where I introduced our guest for today,
Danish Schwartz, host of Hoax and the Noble Blood Podcast.
For that one moment, I feel bliss, Oh my goodness,
and you are so good at it. Thank you thank you,
Welcome to the show. How are you doing today?

Speaker 3 (01:13):
Thank you so much for having me. That was an
excellent introduction.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
I know, back to pain, nothing but pain from here on.

Speaker 1 (01:19):
App Before we get to the pain, do you want
to tell the good folks about your new show Hoax?

Speaker 2 (01:23):
Exclamation exclamation point load bearing?

Speaker 3 (01:27):
It is a load bearing exclamation point, and if you
don't include it, and that is not canonically the name
of the podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
And let's be fair, if you're a good writer, every
exclamation point you use is load bearing.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
I was really taught that no unnecessary exclamation points.

Speaker 3 (01:41):
I'm not throwing them around willy nilly unless they're in
an email with someone that I want to like me.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course, of course, or a text
and you're drunk. Yeah, I do that a lot, Just so,
just exclamation points.

Speaker 3 (01:53):
Hoax is a new show that I'm doing with my
good friend Lizzie Logan. He's a comedy writer. I come
from a history back 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

(02:17):
our first episode the cuttingly Fairies, which were two young
girls took pictures of what they said were fairies that
convinced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in our next episode story
Yes it's nuts right.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
It was so easy to trick too. People were so
much easier to trick back then.

Speaker 1 (02:32):
He was.

Speaker 3 (02:32):
You think the guy who wrote Cherlock Holmes would have
had like a little bit more in deductive reasoning skills.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
But no, no, absolutely not. Look, that's the problem with
writing a super genius character is the writer is never
as smart as the character.

Speaker 3 (02:45):
That's the thing. And he probably thought he was a genius.
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,
unfortun very pertinent these days. So listen, listen to hoax
excavation point. Excellent point, thank you.

Speaker 2 (03:06):
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. I could travel
back of photoshop and like a photo printer, I could
change everything. I could really fuck some shit up.

Speaker 3 (03:25):
Honestly. Yeah, people believed a lot of stuff, but here's
the really messed up stuff. Unfortunately, people believe a lot
of stuff today too.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
Oh yeah, it's almost the only thing people believe is bullshit.

Speaker 3 (03:38):
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
no more than people believe bullshit today.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
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,
it's a really good both those things that are wise
you're going to understand history.

Speaker 1 (04:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:02):
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. Okay, and
I got it. This is European football. It'd be a
different guy if we were talking about the American football right.

Speaker 3 (04:21):
Yeah, I mean there were some evil American football players.

Speaker 2 (04:25):
No, and if we're doing the most Evil Man in Football.
Obviously this would be our eight parter a on Jerry Jones,
but I simply don't have the time to write forty
thousand words on Jerry Jones this week. We'll get to
it one of these days 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. So our

(04:54):
subject for this week is a sports star, one of
the very first football stars in European street, 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 or amateurs that's amateurism is a big thing

(05:17):
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. Okay, his name.

Speaker 3 (05:39):
So when you say evil, you mean like like evil
evil evil evil.

Speaker 2 (05:42):
No, we're not just talking about 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. This guy's like evil on a level
where the number of people he's affecting is much higher. Right,
This guy really went for it in terms of human evil.
His name was Alexander villa Plaine, and he often you

(06:05):
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 bastardury 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 the culture he comes out of, we

(06:26):
have to start way before his birth. In nineteen oh five,
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, and he wouldn't have primarily identified
as a French citizen. He came into this world in Algiers,

(06:48):
the capital of Algeria, which since eighteen thirty had been
a colonial possession of France. When the French invaded in
eighteen thirty, Algeria had been a possession of the Ottoman
Sultan for a four hundred years, right, so from like
the fourteen hundreds 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

(07:10):
away from Turkey, and the Ottoman Empire not great at
running shit by the eighteen hundreds, 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
as they got some taxes, and so yeah, it's kind
of that situation, you know, it's being ruled the way

(07:33):
California was by the government in DC in the early
eighteen hundreds, where it's like, yeah, it's part of the US,
but not really.

Speaker 3 (07:40):
Are like the American colonies for a little bit at
the front end exactly.

Speaker 2 (07:44):
I mean, that's another really good like comparison where you're
generally left alone as long as they get their kind
of do right. And Algiers is a regency. It's ruled
by a day, which is like dey is like the
name of the kind of ruler who's governing Algiers. There's
a couple other cities, Tunis and Tripoli that are also

(08:05):
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 going to back you
up in much. He's not going to really come in
and fuck with you a lot. But like if you're
having problems with a foreign power, you probably you can't

(08:27):
really rely on the Ottoman army being anything but a
basket case, right, you know, their ability to project power
is kind of declined a lot by the early eighteen
hundreds and there had been ongoing issues for a couple
like almost I think two hundred years at this point,
really with the Barbary Pirates who were based I mean
they're based all around North Africa. You know, the US

(08:49):
has some early issues with them right at the birth
of our country and I think Tripoli. But the Barbary Pirates,
or at least some of them, are based out of
ports in Algeria, right and what is today Algeria, and
they had been for more than one hundred years. At
the start of the eighteen hundreds, these pirates had carried
out raids across Europe as far afield as Ireland, taking

(09:09):
slaves for generations. Right, Like, these guys are slave taking pirates.
They're not. They're not the nice, cool pirates that you
get like an HBO mini series about right. These guys
are real, real tough sons of bitches and really mean
sons of bitches, and they are you know, for generations.
They'll take slaves from wherever they can and it prompts

(09:30):
erratic reprisals. Right. You know, we talked about the US
gets involved in TRIPLEI at one point. That's why you
know the Marine Corps and their song from the halls
of Mocta Zuma to the shores of Triple Lee. That's
the US fucking with these pirates, right, yeah, yeah, that's
why that's in there. And France had gotten militarily involved

(09:51):
for the first time in the sixteen hundreds, so by
the eighteen hundreds, for almost two hundred years there had
been on again, off again military involvement because these guys,
these guys, these pirates, right, they're real issue now aside
from these because they're not France's in't the only European
power that has their entanglements with the Barbary pirates, but
Algeria itself, which isn't really I say Algera, I'm talking

(10:12):
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, le tribal leaders
and villages. In a lot of the cases, you're not
running things on a day to day basis. In the

(10:34):
middle of the desert, right, they can go months without
having contact with the capitol let alone the outside world. Right,
That's just the way rural North Africa is working at
this period of time. Now. While European powers in France
will get involved with these pirates periodically, they try to
stay out of Algier's proper and you know, the broader
Algerian territory because for most from the sixteen hundreds up

(10:56):
to the eighteen hundreds, 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 sixteen hundreds because
they could still they can still throw some weight around,
you know, like the US. Right when we talk about
failing empires, they're kind of like at that, this is

(11:18):
like their post Vietnam stage.

Speaker 3 (11:20):
Yeah, they're going to get messy. They have nothing to lose.

Speaker 2 (11:22):
They have nothing. Yeah, So the Ottomans by the eighteen hundreds, though,
they're too much into their sick man phase of history
to really do much here. And right around the turn
of the centuries the eighteen hundred starts. 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 to help make the republic. But

(11:43):
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

(12:05):
army for like the first time in European history, 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 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,

(12:29):
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 thirty years after the revolution,

(12:51):
these post revolutionary French leaders will mold the possibility of like, look,
we need this grain. We can't trust the current government,
they're just not stable. Should we just should we just
conquer Algeria? Like we could probably knocked that out in
like a weekend, right, Like that's like a long weekend
for us.

Speaker 3 (13:06):
You know.

Speaker 2 (13:08):
They have like a raq brain where they're like, oh, yeah,
we can just knock this out in a fucking as
soon as we kick this guy out, everyone will be
chill to be a part of France. This'll be easy, right.

Speaker 3 (13:16):
Who among us hasn't just thought that it'd be easy
enough to take over Algeria?

Speaker 2 (13:20):
Right? I think about this constantly. I still feel like
I could. I feel like I'm a contender, you know
where 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

(13:41):
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 and power,

(14:01):
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 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

(14:22):
are looking to do. This podcast is sponsored entirely by
the pre eighteen twelve Napoleonic government. So please, you know,
support Napoleon with his invasion of Russia. It's gonna work.
We're back. It didn't bad stuff in Russia for the

(14:43):
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,
the Furia owes France money, France is pissed off about it,

(15:05):
and periodically, when the two countries are at odds, the
day we'll kind of tell the Barbary pirates, hey, go
back to doing your thing. You know, he can exert
a little bit of control over him 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 it

(15:27):
out because France is like, uh, first off, we're pissed
because we just lost war, a war with all of Europe. Right,
We're feeling kind of bad about ourselves, like the US
in Iraq. Right, we need 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. We've got to invade and

(15:49):
conquer Algeria, right, yeah, 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 in the day and
in April of eighteen twenty seven, the Day smacks the
French console to Algeria and the face with a fly swatter.

(16:10):
It's a moment that's memorialized in this beautiful painting. I
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 console looked like more of a
Soyjack if they tried, like it's the original Chad and Soy.

Speaker 3 (16:25):
When you said fly like, I thought you were being metaphoric.

Speaker 2 (16:28):
No, it's a literal water. It's a literal fly swatter.
He smacks him in the face. Probably we don't know,
you know. This is one of those things. There's a
couple different stories about what happens. In an article for EBSCO,
Grove Cooger describes differing accounts of what went down. Quote
Hussein ben Hassan either tapped or struck, depending on conflicting

(16:49):
accounts visiting French console. 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, He's like, fuck
you man. You know, we don't really know which it's

(17:09):
kind of dealing, but the French assume it's a fuck
you and that he really hit him, you know. So
this is the most direct provocation that leads to the
French invasion and conquest of Algeria. Again, I tried to
make it a 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

(17:30):
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 fifty 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
French winds up taking Algeria will lead fifty years later

(17:53):
to a Because I don't know if I wasn't actually
aware of this until I started doing the research out,
the Algerian colony that French controls is the same 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 fifty years
or so down the line, the fact that France has this,

(18:13):
as these European powers awaken to like how much money
there is in Africa, they're gonna like, oh shit, there's
we're running out of Africa. We got to get some,
you know. Is 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 invades Algeria
is the oldest reason of all time. I keep making

(18:34):
George W. Bush comparisons, But like the new King of France,
Charles X, is like a bushy figure. He's very unpopular.
He is struggling, 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 Tenth is like I said, X, sorry, Charles,

(18:57):
he's Charlie xxx Charles the tenth. That's how I'm choosing
to picture this now. Is Charlie XIX starting the slow
genocide of Algeria. That is very brad brat. It is bratt.

Speaker 1 (19:13):
Good is good, brad is genocide.

Speaker 3 (19:17):
Aside in Algeria is not brat.

Speaker 2 (19:19):
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 Tenth decides this fly Swater 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 going to be super easy. We're going

(19:39):
to be in and out, you know, Koja writes quote,
announcing publicly that he was eradicating Algerian privateering. Charles quickly
dispatched a naval squadron under the command of Rear, Admiral
Joseph coleay Cola reached the port of Algiers on June eleventh,
after taking the console and other French citizens on board.
He's set up a naval blockade through the next three years.
Sultan Mahmood, the second of the Autumn Empire, tried in

(20:00):
Vain to persuade day Hussein ben 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 eighteen thirty, Mahmoud sent an emissary, a
former Grand Mufti, which is a judicial official of Algiers
who had since retired to Turkey, to insist that Hussain
ben Hassan make peace. By that time, the French government,

(20:22):
and 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.

Speaker 3 (20:35):
All this stuff, protecting, protecting.

Speaker 2 (20:37):
Protecting everyone. Yeah. Yeah, French nine eleven. Was this guy
getting hit by a fly swatter? That's the fucking plane
hitting the second tower. Is this splicewater back in fucking
this console in the face. So on May eleventh, eighteen thirty,
a French fleet of six hundred ships set sail for
the African coast and arrived there on June twelfth, Utilizing

(20:59):
intelligence gathered during the Napoleonic era, thirty four thousand troops
landed and carried out a rapid and successful invasion. The
Algerians outnumbered French soldiers. They have like twenty percent more
guys on board. And normally, if you're attacking, you want
like two to one numerical odds against the defender. If
like everything else has parody, right, that's generally like best

(21:20):
wisdom across the last like ten thousand years of military history.
But these forces are not in parody. 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.

(21:41):
They just steam roll the day's 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 fourth, Algiers had been bombarded
by sea and the Day's army had been shattered into
decisive land battles. French civilians who'd been evacuated from Algiers

(22:05):
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 shelt.

Speaker 3 (22:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:19):
Really, it makes you sympathetic for these rich French people.
So the Day goes into exile and France takes nominal
control of the capitol. 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

(22:40):
had ended very rapidly, but Frances then left with this
uncomfortable reality that the Day 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 have been handling their shit for
the day and primarily on their own terms. There's no
functional Algerian state for France to just plug into. There's

(23:02):
this vast and hostile territory that they know very little
about and has no interest in being part of France.
The fact that French soldiers act like occupying soldiers once
they take the capitol does not help matters, right and
dear them, no, no, no, they're pillaged. They pillage the capitol, right,
They desecrate mosques and cemeteries because soldiers are assholes a

(23:26):
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 their 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

(23:47):
by their officers. France has sent six hundred 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, so they absolutely just steal
the entire treasury, which wrecks the local economy. So this
makes the Algerian people very unhappy and they attempt to

(24:10):
register their displeasure at this state of affairs. When you know,
it becomes clear that the natives are restless, arrestive, 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

(24:31):
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. Now, it's really worth noting the way
that's framed right in her study French Land Algerian People,

(24:54):
Page Goalie notes of this proclamation. Significantly, this statement emphasized
above all harmed the land and the country listed 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 you're living on it.

(25:16):
You know, we need this stuff. Nice guys, 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

(25:37):
know immediately as soon as 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

(26:00):
called the July Revolution that forces King Charles XCX, you know,
out of power, right, just 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. 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.

Speaker 3 (26:21):
That's karma.

Speaker 2 (26:22):
That's karma. If only the Iraq war had worked out
this way. George Bush is hiding and like Argentina or
something right now, 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

(26:44):
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. You
can't just leave it, right, Like, you can't just go
even though you know it's a bad idea. You have
to maintain the occupation that you know is a bad idea,

(27:07):
because otherwise you're going to be admitting that you failed,
and with a 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

(27:27):
for it not working out. It's cool how often the
same shit happens in history.

Speaker 3 (27:32):
I know you're saying that, and it's like that can
be applied to so many situations.

Speaker 2 (27:37):
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 French Land
Algerian People, which I really do recommend if you're trying
to get an idea on how this occupation went, page
Gully describes what happened next. After the initial conquest, Algeria

(27:59):
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. But they're
warlords and they're primarily when they get frustrated. These guys

(28:22):
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
looked at 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.

(28:43):
They're like, people are angry, guests will shoot them. They're
still angry. Let's try shooting some more. Maybe we'll starve them,
let's poison the water.

Speaker 1 (28:51):
You know.

Speaker 2 (28:51):
That's the only fucking That's the only way they're capable
of thinking. Right, And so for the next seventy years,
there are regular uprisings against French occupation. 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

(29:13):
how intense an occupation they require because of how effective
their resistance is. For the first twenty something years France
occupies Algeria, a third of the French military is constantly
deployed in the territory.

Speaker 3 (29:26):
Right, yeahs like a big investment.

Speaker 2 (29:27):
That is a huge investment, Like, that's so much money.
And throughout this first twenty something years, more than one
point six million Algerians will be killed by the French,
largely people who like disease and starvation, right, as a
result of different military and other policies being pursued by
the occupiers, along with at least one hundred thousand French soldiers. Right,

(29:51):
So this is a brutal occupation. We are talking a
massive body count here. Algeria is not annexed formally until
eighteen forty one, and until the eighteen eighties, the colony
is governed by military officers. Right, there's no like civil administration.
It's not until the close of the nineteenth into the
twentieth centuries that the territory of Algeria becomes anything close

(30:14):
to a functional colony. And 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.
Now again, Algeria today, the country Algeria is about nine
hundred thousand square miles, right, the largest country in Africa,

(30:34):
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

(30:56):
other places we owned, so we own this in a
different way way, right, And the fact that a lot
more of them diet doesn't really that's not really 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. The Algerians are seen as damaged.
They're not just inferior in the sense that, like you know,

(31:19):
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 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 were taught talked about their Indian possesions, there's

(31:41):
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 this attitude that we're there
to leave behind a functional state. The French never feel
this way in Algeria. They don't feel we're not We're
not here to do anything but kill these people and

(32:01):
take there. We don't give a fuck about these human beings, right,
we're not even pretending to. Eugene Boudhichon, who's a French
doctor who settles in Algiers in the eighteen fifties, 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

(32:22):
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 a couple of issues. We have a nowt couple
of major issues in Algeria governing it. Right. First off,
when you send Europeans to Algeria, they die really fucking quickly, right,

(32:47):
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,

(33:08):
And there's some French possessions that are basically Spanish in
this period, like in the Mediterranean, and some like allies,
so like they will take in Spanish colonists to colonize
Algeria because like you know, Spain is hotter, right, Like
they're more used to the climate. Right. If you look
at like southern Spain, it's not a wildly different climate
from North Africa in a lot of ways. Right, So

(33:31):
you can kind of do that, but you can't really
get a large French population in Algiers because they just
keep dying.

Speaker 1 (33:36):
Right.

Speaker 2 (33:36):
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 Bodaschon 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,
for different parts of Africa. Quote this is Bodacheon writing.

(33:59):
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. I got an idea, guys. Look, post revolution,
we're an ethical state now, France's you know, modern and enlightened.
What if we take slaves from the slave trade and

(34:21):
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 can we can
we make that work? Right? That's that's Bodashan's idea. These
people suck so bad. Now. Slavery is made illegal in
France in eighteen forty eight, which is a fact that

(34:43):
you know, the Frinch 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 situation for workers that is not
technically slavery, but it basically is slavery. You know, you've

(35:06):
got prisons and colonies and stuff that function that way too.
And guys like Bodischan 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. 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

(35:29):
the native Algerians, Right, that's his argument. 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 of the There's two types of Algerians at this point, right,
There's two types of people who call themselves Algerians. There's

(35:52):
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 who have
settled in Algeria and to some extent of intermarried with
the local population, but also keep to themselves a lot,
and they also call themselves Algerians. Right, So the upper

(36:12):
strata of like 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 Brauer noted that colonial

(36:34):
authorities allowed Algerians of both kinds, who are friendly with
the French government to continue to hold and trade slaves. Quote,
French administrators 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 opposed to

(36:57):
the French government, then you take their slaves and you
try to turn and the 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 eighteen fifties, our favorite French king, Napoleon

(37:17):
the Third, 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
Snappy three, Nappy three, Nappy trace baby.

Speaker 3 (37:31):
Got Charlie xx and that trace.

Speaker 2 (37:34):
Yeah, there we go. So he had come to power.
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 six thousand
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

(37:57):
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 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 going
to work for them because this is a bad idea

(38:18):
for a lot of reasons. And you know, Napoleon the
Third being Napoleon the Third, 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.

Speaker 3 (38:32):
Ultimately he's trying, which is something.

Speaker 2 (38:34):
He's trying, right, So less than fifty of these six
thousand guys actually wind up settling in Algeria, which is
kind of shit, Like this keeps happening where they'll have
these grand ambitions, this will let us get up popular,
this will do it, and it never really works. So
for the next fifty 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

(38:56):
kill them very quickly in most cases. French in a
ellectuals and political elites only grow more dedicated to holding
on to Algeria during this time because they're continuing to
pour troops and boets into the territory while complaining that
without French farmers this project can't work. So by the
end of the century, you know, in eighteen seventy seventy one,
we have Germany goes to war with France. Germany also

(39:18):
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 are Algeria, which is that it's
not a colony in the same way that like Indo
China is right. And for a description of how they're

(39:41):
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 least combined to
nationality and say ship Algeria constituted a colonial territory fully

(40:03):
integrated into the republic that, as politicians like to say,
ran from Dunkirk in the north to tam and Rasset
and the Sahara the Mediterranean, separating French in Algeria like
the Sin 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.

(40:23):
We govern a lot of territory that's outside of Europe.
But all the men there are equal, right, because you know, liberty, egality, fraternity, right,
we're all equal. There are a tent 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 say we recognize the equality of

(40:46):
all men. Right. They don't really believe it, they're not
consistent about it, but they are at least sign posting that,
and they don't even try to do that with Algeria. Right.
The final establishment of French policy is that Algerian land
and the people don't belong anywhere. Right, they can move,
they can move to Paris even if they want, but

(41:06):
they won't have rights there. They can't vote, they're not citizens, right.
And because shit is bad in Algiers. In Algeria, there's
a lot of poverty, there's a lot of desperation, a
lot of Algerians move to Paris, right, both native Algerians
and kind of people who for a couple generations have
been part of this European population that call themselves Algerians

(41:27):
in Algeria, they also move 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

(41:50):
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 these Algerians who
are living in Paris are abused by the police, they're
abused by their employers, they're nable 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. In

(42:11):
eighteen ninety two, the French Senate ordered an inquiry into
Algerian affairs, which was written by Emilion Chatrue. His three
hundred and fifty page report essentially summarized the final conclusion
of the French state into the Algerian question. Chatrue 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,

(42:34):
he praised the richness of Algeria's land and blamed its
constant famines, which had been incited by the government during
Napoleon the Third'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.

Speaker 3 (42:52):
Died like a foresight classic.

Speaker 2 (42:54):
That's the issue 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 one
hundred percent of its potential. Page Gulli summarizes the rest
of the report. In reviewing past colonization policies, Chatru was
complementary of the French government's recognition of the potential value

(43:15):
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 Algeria.
Chatru blamed this failure largely on what he perceived as

(43:36):
French leniency in allowing Algerian people to keep their own
land that their relatives had owned 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

(43:58):
to its full potential because the people who live there
cultivated ineffectively. And again, Chetrue was ignoring the fact that
French people can't survive there right and also have no
interest in being subsistence farmers because it sucks.

Speaker 3 (44:10):
Guy sucks.

Speaker 2 (44:11):
Uh huh.

Speaker 1 (44:12):
French leniency.

Speaker 2 (44:13):
French colonial administrators always shitty. You know who else is
always no, not always shitty, sometimes shitty, sometimes shitty. We
don't pick them sponsors of this podcast. Oh great, yeah, no,
they do sometimes suck.

Speaker 3 (44:30):
They do sometimes super suck.

Speaker 2 (44:32):
No way to know, no way to know. We're back.
Oh my goodness, everyone having a good time. We're still
talking about French jittocide and colonialism in Algeria just because
it's one of my favorite topics and it ties into

(44:52):
our bastard here, so she had. True's report not only
concludes that the French have to be more assertive in
Algeria and being dicks to the local, 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

(45:13):
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. Some anti Semitism just sliding in there out
of just t boning that I was.

Speaker 3 (45:29):
Waiting for one Nazis, I was waiting for the anti Semitism.

Speaker 2 (45:33):
Yes, and this is important, the fact that you could
have put these words in the mouth of a Nazi,
right if you just replace 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

(45:54):
a less brutal version generally than what the French had
done to the Algerians. They're certainly going to kill a
a smaller portion of the population, shall we say, so,
that's that's what these French colonial ministrators 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,

(46:14):
nor the Jews. It belongs to the French natural French territory, 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.

Speaker 1 (46:30):
Where is the kickball situation?

Speaker 2 (46:33):
Well, 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

(46:55):
guy is a product of it. He's French and Spanish,
but he's born and raised in Algeria. He would call
himself 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, like
a what a wild switcheroo. We're going through here and

(47:18):
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

(47:38):
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 starvation genocide and Bengal, right, you know,
twenty thirty million people dead, and we have on this show,
and we just talked about the French killed one point
six two million Algerians, you know, in this period of time.

(48:00):
Now we're starting with the story of our actual bastard.
On December twenty fourth, nineteen minutes Yeah, hell.

Speaker 1 (48:07):
Yeah, Margaret Kiljoy, Yeah, context, the people love context.

Speaker 2 (48:14):
Yeah. On December twenty fourth, nineteen o four, Alexander Eugene
Villa Plana was born in Algiers. By the time of
his birth, there were more than one hundred thousand, close
to two hundred thousand 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

(48:35):
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. Alexander's father is of Spanish extraction. His parents
had come from a Mediterranean island called Minorca and had
immigrated to Algeria in the eighteenth century. Spain had let
France use the island as a staging area for their invasion,
and once France took Algeria, they urged Minorcan farm to

(49:00):
leave their homes and per Luke Brien's biography of Laplana,
Minorcan 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
in this island that's pretty close that they're European. So

(49:21):
you know, in terms 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. However, these kind
of minorcan farmers are more can survive in North Africa

(49:44):
better than the French, but not all that well. Because
Alexander's grandparents die when his dad is seven, so he
you know, shortly after they arrive they die. Joseph, his
father is left an orphan. He eventually grows up. He
gets me married to Nathalie, a French woman whose family
came from the mainland but who had moved to Algeria

(50:06):
to try and 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 eighteen nineties, right, which is hard.
He also gets in trouble at one point for assaulting

(50:28):
a tax official who makes eyes at his wife before
they're married. Right, this guy is tax official looks at
his future wife rog and he assaults him. So our
this is our bastard's dad. This is Joseph, Alexander's father.
And Joseph again, I've just said he's a European. There
these are we see them rightly as the colonizers. Joseph

(50:51):
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.

Speaker 3 (50:58):
So he sees himself as Algab even you know, he's
like European in his heritage.

Speaker 2 (51:03):
Yes, and he sees himself as a European Algerians. We
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

(51:25):
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 to

(51:46):
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 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

(52:07):
he's able to repeatedly start and fail at new barrel
making businesses. At some point, man just stop making barrels, homie,
Like the hell, it's not working. How many barrel business
come off?

Speaker 3 (52:18):
With one more?

Speaker 2 (52:19):
One more? He keeps like switching towns, like this is
the town that wants barrels? None of them do.

Speaker 3 (52:24):
I mean, it seems like people would need barrels. I
get the logic.

Speaker 2 (52:28):
Sure, people need a lot of stuff, but that doesn't
mean that you're gonna be the one to provide it.

Speaker 1 (52:35):
Well.

Speaker 2 (52:35):
Yeah, So 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 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

(52:59):
to France. The Villaplanas are thus much better off than
most native Algerians. And because of this, because he's traveling
back to France, he gets a head start on the
rest of the kids in Algeria and playing football. Right,
And this is a thing football. It's kind of started
off in the UK, right, and it's traveled down Europe

(53:21):
at this point it's going to hit obviously today in
North Africa. The whole air world football is 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
messy jerseys, right, it was like the one thing everyone
could agree on is how much they fucking love that guy.

Speaker 3 (53:39):
Everybody MESSI, everybody.

Speaker 2 (53:42):
Loves fucking MESSI. Like in his book, Lebresard. Luke Briand
writes about Alexander's early family trips back to France. Quote
the family, which now included two daughters in this little
boy regularly returned to Hero 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,

(54:03):
legs like match sticks, 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 life, 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,

(54:24):
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 okay in school. Brion 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.

Speaker 3 (54:43):
It kind of sounds like honorably is like h fine.

Speaker 2 (54:46):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, he does okay. He doesn't shame himself.

Speaker 1 (54:49):
Right.

Speaker 2 (54:50):
Yeah, So he starts primary school in nineteen ten. He
attends a free school in a town near Algiers, which
is a free school because like it's basically a 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 we'll pay for a free school in our suburbs,

(55:10):
right where it's like our attack. It's one of those things.
It's a charter school deal.

Speaker 1 (55:14):
Right.

Speaker 2 (55:16):
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 they're not really believers.
Quote in the Villaplana Household, Luke Brion writes, weddings and
funerals are resolutely civil. Alexander was a decent student. He's
good enough that he gets in the local papers for

(55:37):
his grades, but he doesn't graduate with honors. Since Villaplane
is a Spanish name and not a French one, his
father starts using the name Villaplan 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's lonely in

(55:59):
Algeria at that point because it's starting to take a hold,
but it's still very new to the colony. Football doesn't
reach North Africa until eighteen ninety seven, 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

(56:19):
nineteen oh eight, Josephin rolled 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

(56:42):
again he's not just interested in it, 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 nineteen thirteen nineteen fourteen, right, So he he
exhibits excellence from an early age and wins helped win
a competition with this team. Now, he's generally very good

(57:04):
at athletics. He wins a diving competition when he's fifteen,
and he's good enough at football. But by age sixteen
he's made a name for himself as a player, and
he's able to leave Algeria for good. Right in nineteen sixteen,
he like bounces, he's never got to come back. He
moves to set to live with his in France, to
live with his uncles, and he joins the local club there,

(57:27):
FC Set. Now the team was managed by a Scotsman,
Victor Gibson, and as soon as Gibson got a look
at Vilaplon, he decided his 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.

Speaker 1 (57:47):
Right.

Speaker 2 (57:47):
You're not allowed to pay players, it's against the rules, right,
But football is 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

(58:08):
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 twenties, by the time that Alexander gets to France,
a system is developed by which good players are offered jobs,

(58:29):
other jobs right where it's like, hey, if you move
to FC Set, we'll get 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, you know, every many years,

(58:50):
I'll give you a night club 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, Alexander has to

(59:12):
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

(59:32):
the time he's in his early twenties, like twenty one
to twenty two, he's verging on like rich because of
how good he is at football and how much everyone
wants him on their team. Alexander 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 Vergus, which is sponsored

(59:56):
by Perrier, the bottled water company. That's his Yeah, that's
the sponsor of his second team. Is Perry A Right,
they're like buying him a nightclub or something. I forget
which 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 them, his original team recruits

(01:00:17):
him back. You know, they're all offering you know, different
jobs and whatnot to do this. But he's good enough that,
you know, he keeps getting poached, and so he gets
poached back by his original team, and in the nineteen
twenty seven he gets poached by a team in nim
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 Neme,

(01:00:38):
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 ballheader is? No am I
giggling a little when I wrote it.

Speaker 3 (01:00:48):
Is it someone who hites a ball with their head?

Speaker 2 (01:00:52):
I think that's probably it, right or not. There's a
lot of anything about it, at least 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 ballheading, which also probably is giving in some cte.
He's later going to exhibit some signs of maybe, you know,

(01:01:12):
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 ballheader in France. 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 nineteen twenty six, and in short

(01:01:36):
order he's made the captain of this team in nime. Right,
So he's by nineteen twenty six, he is at the
top of the world, right, or he's close to. 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.

Speaker 1 (01:01:55):
Right, So he's gonna become a huge fucking Nazi.

Speaker 2 (01:02:00):
No, he's gonna He's going to become a huge fucking Nazi.
He's going to destroy all of the cool guys. Yeah,
it's gonna be great.

Speaker 3 (01:02:07):
He has talent, he has opportunity, and he's just going
to become a complete monster.

Speaker 2 (01:02:12):
That's right. He is going to nuke it because he's
an asshole and then he's going to become a Nazis.
It's going to be cool.

Speaker 1 (01:02:19):
What if I did uh fascism? That sounds yeah, yeah, yeah,
you know what.

Speaker 2 (01:02:25):
We'll talk about it. But he doesn't even have the
moral consistency to be like an ethical fact like not ethical,
but like he's not a fascist ideologically, it's just where
the money is. He doesn't even give a shit about fascism.
Like that's how much he's. It's one of those like
uh fucking Walter from the Big Lebowski moments of like
he doesn't even have any ethos, you know, he's but yeah,

(01:02:47):
we'll talk about that, but first, Danna, let's talk about
your pluggables.

Speaker 3 (01:02:52):
My pluggables. Uh. My instagram is Danas Schwartz with three
z's at the end. Two extra disease uh, and my podcasked.
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.

Speaker 2 (01:03:13):
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 one
hundred years since any it's been like eighty years since
anyone conquered France. Go do it. You can take them,
all right, Yeah, I think you got it. I think
you got it, you know, Thank you so much. Just

(01:03:35):
don't go in through Belgium. That doesn't work.

Speaker 3 (01:03:37):
Well, thank you so much for this encouragement. I've been
waiting for someone to tell me that I'm capable of
conquering France.

Speaker 2 (01:03:43):
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. I'm also offering two hundred thousand
men and tanks and arms transports. Don't ask where I
got them. Yeah, yeah, it'll be an it'll be.

Speaker 3 (01:04:04):
An amazing all right.

Speaker 2 (01:04:07):
That's the episode.

Speaker 1 (01:04:12):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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(01:04:33):
At Behind the Bastards