Messali Hadj was born on March 16, 1898, in the western Algerian city of Tlemcen. He was the youngest of seven children in a traditional family whose economic circumstances were extremely marginal. He attended a Qur'anic (Koranic) school and also a local French primary school. But because his parents sent him out to work during his tenth and eleventh years, Messali was 18 years old before he completed the primary curriculum. That ended his formal education.Just before his 20th birthday, Messali Hadj was drafted into the French army, where he served three years, mostly in the Bordeaux region. In France the young man was astonished at the vastly higher living standards of French peasants and working people. Army life exposed him to the order, discipline, and relatively higher status that went with military service, while at the same time embittering him at the institutionalized prejudice to which colonial troops were subjected. It was in Bordeaux, also, that he first became acquainted with Marxist writings and with the activities of the Communist-dominated French labor movement.
