The Blood of the Colony

Owen White

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780674249455
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

The surprising story of the wine industry's role in the rise of French Algeria and the fall of empire. "We owe to wine a blessing far more precious than gold: the peopling of Algeria with Frenchmen, " stated agriculturist Pierre Berthault in the early 1930s. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Europeans had displaced Algerians from the colony's best agricultural land and planted grapevines. Soon enough, wine was the primary export of a region whose mostly Muslim inhabitants didn't drink alcohol.Settlers made fortunes while drawing large numbers of Algerians into salaried work for the first time. But the success of Algerian wine resulted in friction with French producers, challenging the traditional view that imperial possessions should complement, not compete with, the metropole. By the middle of the twentieth century, amid the fight for independence, Algerians had come to see the rows of vines as an especially hated symbol of French domination. After the war, Algerians had to decide how far they would go to undo the transformations the colonists had wrought—including the world's fourth-biggest wine industry. Owen White examines Algeria's experiment with nationalized wine production in worker-run vineyards, the pressures that resulted in the failure of that experiment, and the eventual uprooting of most of the country's vines.With a special focus on individual experiences of empire, from the wealthiest Europeans to the poorest laborers in the fields, The Blood of the Colony shows the central role of wine in the economic life of French Algeria and in its settler culture. White makes clear that the industry left a long-term mark on the development of the nation.

1

Roots

Antiquity to 1870

Much about the French invasion was disorderly. There was the march on Algiers that lost its bearings in fog; there was also the unauthorized if predictable pillaging of the Casbah. Most of the highest-ranking officers would face criticism for their handling of the expedition. Everyone, however, agreed on one thing: the invasion force had come equipped to succeed. On June 14, 1830, the first French troops set foot on the low shoreline at Sidi-Ferruch, about twenty kilometers to the west of the city of Algiers, and there they began to offload several months of supplies. An aide to General de Bourmont, the expedition’s commander, described the scene that unfolded at the beach. There were immense stockpiles of “cannonballs, shells, and bombs of every caliber”; tents, beds, mattresses, and blankets for a landing force over 37,000 strong; tools, building supplies, and medical equipment; “mountains” of fodder for the horses; as well as food for the men, casks of flour for making bread, and three “long, high walls” of barrels filled with wine.¹

Reflecting on these events, one contemporary Algerian observer, a student in a religious institution, wrote that the French had been “vomit[ed] on our shore.” Amid his disgust, however, this author sought explanations for the rapid defeat of the local ruler, the dey of Algiers. Clearly, there were military factors behind the inability of Algiers to resist the infidels: the scale of the French invasion party, which revealed itself “like locusts at their prime,” and the terror inspired by their weapons; the Turkish troops who abandoned their positions; the agha (military commander) who “lost judgment” at a crucial moment. But this observer believed such explanations only went so far. There must also have been moral factors, other reasons for Allah in his wisdom to allow this calamity. Above all there was the “tyranny and injustice” of the rule of the dey, and the corruption of a Muslim polity in which “wine was honored and debauchery tolerated.” In a statement that could be read either as history or as prophecy, the author added: “The place for license can last, but must inevitably perish.” It was Allah who had brought the French to Algiers, but one day he would “chase away our corruptors” and restore order.²

Wine was already a culturally embedded presence at the outset of the French colonization of Algiers, meaning one thing to the French soldiers who “laughed and sang” on the shore at Sidi-Ferruch, and something very different to a pious Muslim trying to interpret (but not question) the will of Allah.³ Yet the eventual outcome of the conquest, a territory called French Algeria, would become known not so much for the consumption of wine as for its production. Speculation about Algeria’s wine-producing capacity began soon after the initial invasion. As the French added territory to the east around Bône and to the west around Oran, colonists would plant grapevines and begin to experiment with winemaking in a land that was known to have produced it in the distant past. Hopes for the new colony were high, and for some people wine represented part of the basis for that hope. In May 1831 a French merchant in Algiers wrote that it would only take “manpower and enlightened farmers” to produce an abundance of “cereals, wine, cotton, indigo, coffee, sugar, and in general all the transatlantic commodities that we are now obliged to seek in another hemisphere.”⁴

The merchant’s statement reinforces the historian Jennifer Sessions’s argument that the colonization of Algeria was to some extent a side effect of developments in the Atlantic in the late eighteenth century, especially the slave revolt that lost France its prized colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti), a key source for several of the “transatlantic commodities” to which the merchant alluded.⁵ It also underlines that an economic rationale for conquest lay not far from the much better known political machinations of the unpopular Bourbon monarch Charles X. While merchants hoping to attract investment often do well to convey optimism, however, the optimism of this one was neither shared by all nor necessarily well placed. First, it was not clear where exactly the projected “enlightened farmers” would secure their manpower, as slavery was in retreat and other forms of coerced labor also subject to criticism. Second, though the merchant situated Algiers geographically in what he called “a hot latitude,” it was by no means certain that the Algerian land and climate would cooperate in replacing the kinds of commodities formerly supplied by tropical Saint-Domingue. Lastly, there was no guarantee that the commodities whose success could be more reliably predicted would even be welcome in a metropole that produced those very same goods. If Algeria were to produce wine, in particular, it might well face opposition not only from French vignerons but also from imperial planners who did not believe it was the role of a colony to compete with the homeland.

While it was not inevitable that colonial Algeria should become a major wine producer, it would have been surprising had the new arrivals not attempted to produce it at all, for wine production was often a feature of new colonial ventures, and North Africa had an ancient history of viticulture. In the first four decades after the invasion of 1830 the topic of wine production was often contentious, and some influential figures actively tried to dissuade settlers from embracing it. By around 1870, however, many of the obstacles seemed to be lifting, and wine began to play a more central role in defining what “French Algeria” was going to be.

THE WINE FRONTIER

The common grapevine, vitis vinifera, is a crop that demands sustained, devoted care. It may be true that Paleolithic hunter-gatherers were the first to realize that grapes go through an interesting transformation when they ferment, but any serious production of wine required a settled population with time to experiment.⁶ The spread of viticulture (or more properly viniculture, the cultivation of grapes to make wine) commonly followed when a population that had mastered the necessary technical skills uprooted itself from one location and moved to colonize another.

The diffusion of viniculture along western shores of the Mediterranean followed a series of such migrations from points further east. Among the carriers of the new culture were Phoenicians from the coast of present-day Lebanon and Syria. Toward the end of the ninth century BCE a group of Phoenicians traveled to northern Africa and founded the colony of Carthage in what is now Tunisia. Though the grapevine grew wild in northern Africa, it seems that these colonists were the first in the region to produce wine from domesticated grapes.⁷ Other migrants from the eastern Mediterranean instead took their expertise to northern shores. Greeks from Phocaea in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) established a settlement at Massalia—Marseille—around 600 BCE. Archaeological evidence shows that, within a few decades, ships were carrying amphorae of Massalian wine to other Mediterranean ports.⁸ In a sense this Greek colony gave birth to France’s wine industry.

Wine production continued when these Mediterranean regions fell under Roman control. It is doubtful, though, that the Romans were specifically looking to their provinces in southern Gaul or northern Africa to produce an exportable quantity of wine. At times they may even have been concerned about the impact of provincial wine on producers within the Italian peninsula; a decree passed in the second century BCE, for example, forbade peasants in southern Gaul from planting new vineyards, “in order,” as Cicero put it, “to increase the value of our own.”⁹ A much more important consideration was the need to supply grain to feed the Roman metropole, which strongly influenced the way imperial officials viewed agriculture in the provinces. In 92 CE the emperor Domitian issued an edict that ordered half of all the grapevines in the Roman provinces to be destroyed, “upon the occasion of a plentiful wine crop coinciding with a scarcity of grain.”¹⁰ This edict seems not to have been enforced, however, and wine continued to establish its importance both to the economy of southern Gaul and beyond.¹¹

Grain was the chief Roman priority across the Mediterranean in northern Africa, but wine production also had its place.¹² Archaeological evidence from the coastal town of Cherchell, about ninety kilometers west of Algiers, is particularly compelling. Founded as the Carthaginian settlement of Iol in the fourth century BCE, the Romans renamed the town Caesarea and in the first century CE made it the capital of Mauretania Caesariensis, the eastern half of the province of Mauretania. Though the region was something of an imperial backwater, excavations of private homes and public buildings have revealed that a prosperous landowning class flourished in the town from the late second century CE until the Vandal invasion of North Africa in the first half of the fifth century. Among the images on the mosaics with which these wealthy men chose to adorn their buildings were representations of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, as well as scenes of viticulture in which field workers tend vines and pick grapes (see fig. 1.1).¹³ As in other parts of North Africa, estate sizes in the area were relatively large, and, for the owners of these estates, wine served as a marker of social distinction.¹⁴

FIG. 1.1 Mosaic from a house in Cherchell (ancient Caesarea) depicting the grape harvest, fourth or fifth century CE. The workers’ red hair is a Berber trait. Wikimedia Commons.

Further to the east, yet still within what is now Algeria, the writings of Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) provide different kinds of insight into the place of wine in the everyday lives of the better-placed inhabitants of Roman North Africa. Augustine spent much of his childhood in Thagaste (now Souk Ahras) and eventually rose to the position of bishop of Hippo Regius (modern Annaba). In his Confessions, Augustine acknowledges no personal problem with wine in particular, though he does offer a general admission that “I struggle every day against uncontrolled desire in eating and drinking.” Wine is nonetheless woven into the fabric of the life he describes. In a key “confession,” we learn that it was close to his family’s vineyard that Augustine and his teenage friends stole pears from a neighbor’s tree, for no purpose other than the pleasure of “doing what was not allowed.” Augustine also reveals that his mother, Monica, discovered “a weakness for wine” as a girl. Entrusted with going to the cask to fetch wine for her parents, Monica began by sneaking just “a tiny sip.” On subsequent trips she drank progressively more, until eventually, as Augustine tells the story, she was “gulping down almost full cups” at each visit. Finally some harsh words from the enslaved girl who went with her to the cask shamed Monica out of this “foul addiction.”¹⁵

Augustine’s writings help to raise the question of wine’s relationship to religion and the spread of Christianity in particular. As a young man, Augustine followed Manichean teachings and as such would have had to renounce wine, since the Manicheans considered it “a diabolical poison.”¹⁶ In converting to Christianity in 386 he joined a faith that by contrast vested wine and the vine with immense symbolic significance. In the Gospel of John, Jesus characterizes himself as the “true vine” that is tended by God; the lesson is that through Jesus the believer may connect to God’s love.¹⁷ (Augustine echoes this imagery in the Confessions when he puts his trust...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note on Place Names
• Note on Metric Conversion
• Maps
• Introduction: The Empire of Wine in Algeria
• 1. Roots: Antiquity to 1870
• 2. Phylloxera and the Making of the Algerian Vineyard: 1870 to 1907
• 3. Companies and Cooperatives, Work and Wealth: 1907 to 1930
• 4. Algeria and the Midi: The 1930s (I)
• 5. Labor Questions: The 1930s (II)
• 6. Wine in the Wars: 1940 to 1962
• 7. Pulling Up Roots: Since 1962
• Epilogue: The Geometry of Colonization
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index