A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony

William Gallois

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137313706
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

Using newly-discovered documentation from the French military archives, A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony offers a comprehensive study of the forms of violence adopted by the French Army in Africa. Its coverage ranges from detailed case studies of massacres to the question of whether a genocide took place in Algeria.

1

Introduction

On 26 June 1842, Nicolas Jean-de-Dieu Soult, the French Prime Minister and Minister of War, reflected on the successes of his Governor General of Algeria, Thomas Robert Bugeaud:

Bugeaud’s report of 13 June on the operations undertaken by the columns of Chélif and Algiers, along with that of Marshal Changarnier, should be copied and sent to the Message and the Moniteur for publication, though certain passages detailing the burning of houses and the attack on the famous caverns ought to be excised. Those paragraphs must be edited. The publication of these quite remarkable reports will surely have a salutary effect upon public opinion. […] I myself applaud the excellent results which have been obtained, along with the political and moral effects which the operations of M. Bugeaud will doubtless produce across Algeria, and which will indeed echo across France and Europe. […] As is well known, I regret the inopportune skirmish at the famous caves, in which we lost a number of men who had acted rather rashly. In due course, it will be necessary to return to this theatre so that the local population should not think that they have been able to force us to retreat.¹

This quite typical report introduces a number of key themes of this study of violence in the early Algerian colony. What it makes most plain is the way in which violence was seen to function as a form of language or conversation, effecting communication with a whole series of groups. While the key dialogue here was with those tribes who had been sent a message through this series of French assaults on their people and property, Soult also claimed that disseminating news of these attacks had the potential to affect public and political opinion in Algeria, France and more widely across Europe. What might have been conceived of as a local action in a military campaign was revealed as being possessed of broader symbolic significance and it is clear that the declarative purpose of such violence served as part of its rationale. This was, after all, a ‘theatre’ in which the words writ and played by French actors echoed across a series of stages.

It was therefore imperative that these lines were carefully managed and edited. In this particular case, Soult stressed that publication of the details of the burning of houses and an attack on a series of caves would be counterproductive. The ‘editing’ of such details had the effect of writing the particularities of French violence and its effects upon Algerians from the story, such that readers might focus on the effects of such acts rather than on their execution. This allusive approach to the specific qualities of French violence in Algeria was borne from the experience of men like Soult and Bugeaud, who knew that their domestic opponents would use such information as a means of critiquing the brutality and futility of the policies of the armée d’Afrique. In particular, France’s reliance on the razzia – a form of raiding supposedly based on local norms of violence – was adjudged by critics of the government to be counterproductive as a means of pacifying the new colony. It had also been alighted upon by those European critics who contended that France was establishing a barbarous empire on the coast of Africa.

Nonetheless, it is important to register that the regrets which Soult expressed in the letter related not to the suffering imposed on Indigènes but to the small number of French casualties sustained in the operation.² As tended to be the case, the Minister and his Governor General conveyed the impression that any such losses were the result of foolhardiness or poor planning, for it was plain that the army did not face a set of concerted foes who could challenge their dominance in the new land they were making. The local population were conceived of as a problem which would need to be solved and it was plain that the burnings and attacks on their redoubts had become the tactics by which such goals would be achieved. What this constituted in practice, as we shall see, was often the systematic destruction of settlements and crops, along with the seizure of goods and cattle and the massacre of tribes. In the case of such assaults on caves, Soult refers here to the use of smoke as a weapon of asphyxiation, such that scores of villagers might be despatched in a fashion which would convince them that no hiding places remained in their land, in contrast to their experience of using such hideouts to evade their Ottoman overlords.

Our knowledge of such violence and the way in which it was planned and reflected upon by the French has tended to focus on a small number of emblematic instances of notorious incidents, such as the burning and smoking of the caves at Dahra in 1845. This book looks in greater detail at the everyday and systematic qualities of such forms of life in the early colony. It assesses the impact of such cultures on the indigenous populations of Algeria and on French constituencies, both abroad and at home. As is plain in Soult’s report, violence played an important role in the life of the colony, so we should not be surprised that its varieties, its efficacy and its evolution were much discussed both publically and privately in the 1830s and ’40s.

The degree to which the sum of such acts constituted a distinct system of violence in Algeria has inspired considerable recent debate, which has tended to be hindered both by a focus on a small number of cases and by a reliance on polemic texts debating violence rather than evidence of its practice. Archival documentation reveals the extent to which commanders in Algeria used the term ‘système’ in a quite specific manner to describe their practices and its effects, as seen in Bugeaud’s remark of 1841 – that the razzia was ‘systematised because of its usefulness’³ – and in the following report from the Cercles managed by the Bureaux Arabes. Writing in August 1847, Tellmann was pleased to relate that a general state of calm reigned across most of the circles in the Province of Algiers, excepting the Cercle d’Aumale, where ‘A state of anarchy reigned amongst the Kabyles’:

All in their turn have come, all have offered proofs of their submission, either by paying a part of the achour [a harvest tax] or in returning stolen objects, though we have not been able to fully subdue all of the Djemma, for fractions of this chaotic tribe turn on each other ceaselessly. In order to put an end to this deplorable situation, the commander of the Cercle has established a base on their territory so as to be able to utterly reduce them. All of the tribes who are protected by our fort now use this opportunity to seize the grain of the Beni Sala. It seems probable that in persevering with this system, we will eventually completely eliminate this tribe.⁴

At the close of the period covered by this book, what was being described here was a system that had evidently evolved according to the circumstances that the French had encountered in Algeria. While they had succeeded in pacifying most of the tribes in the land, they had also developed tactics with which to pursue more recalcitrant groups such as the Beni Sala. This entailed the systematic reduction or elimination of those tribes with whom the standard modes of violent communication had failed. In this instance it was quite plain that the expected ‘moral effects’ of earlier assaults had not succeeded in altering the character and allegiance of the tribes, so an intractable problem might only be solved through their erasure, such that complete, rather than partial, tranquillity should reign over the land.

This strategy of elimination is currently poorly understood: in terms of its enactment, its extent, the manner in which it compared to contemporaneous ‘die-outs’ and assaults in other settler colonies, and in the ways in which it evolved in Algeria. As we see in this instance, the army’s purgative goal was to be achieved in both direct and indirect fashions, through waging war, through the destruction of the habitat and the ecology of the tribes, and through sanctioned confiscations of foodstuffs by local allies. Intriguingly, at the close of the text there is a slight equivocation with regard to the destruction of the tribes, with the claim introduced that this is merely ‘probable’ rather than certain.

Such a contention is of interest in part because it contradicts with what was described as a deliberate strategy only lines earlier, but also because it reveals a latent uncertainty as to the morality of such actions that is often found in such documents. So many potential justifications were offered for the outcomes of such policies that a feeling endured that French soldiers and administrators used their writing as a means of explaining to themselves how they might justify the slaughter of others. The role which nature was alleged to play as man’s helpmeet in such killing was especially complex, for Indigènes were routinely associated with the barrenness of their lands, which then somehow became complicit in the destruction of their own peoples.

That the French were obsessed with violence – in their thoughts, acts and records – in the first two decades of the life of the colony is quite apparent not only across the documentary archive but also in the mutations of the French language, where the term ‘razzia’ (and its accompanying verb forms ‘se razzier’ and ‘razzier’) became the dominant Arabic loan word (from the word ghaziya), at a time when relatively few such terms migrated into French. The case of the razzia is especially interesting for its meaning changed considerably over time, beginning in the way in which it was selectively misinterpreted from the Arabic term for ‘raid’ so as to include a level of brutality generally unapparent in its original usage (where it denoted practices more akin to rustling) and continuing through the period 1836–47 as French razzias upon Indigènes focused more and more on environmental destruction and the complete reduction of tribes.

This book looks at the evolution of such razzias in detail, with case studies that extend beyond the well-known examples of the massacres of the El Ouffia in 1832 and the Ouled Riah in 1845, in part to show how such atrocious violence was far more unexceptional than has been supposed. Existing bodies of work on nineteenth-century Algeria, excepting very recent work by Benjamin Brower and Abdelmajid Hannoum, have tended not to look at violence as a theme or to convey any sense of strangeness in describing the particularities of the warped and quite temporally specific conventions of French behaviour at this moment. While the early colony was understood to be a violent place, too little is known about the detail and fabric of this aspect of its culture, and, as compared with the central place of Algeria in twentieth-century thinking about colonial violence (especially in the work of Fanon), the qualities of this earlier moment remain remarkably under-conceptualised and -theorised.

This book contends that French violence was not possessed of one cause or form but was driven by an evolving, interlocking system with its own internal logic. While violence could be enacted for quite pragmatic military or strategic goals, it was often of a more ritual character, designed to convey a series of messages to its victims, its perpetrators and to more distant audiences. That violence could be as much about the self as the other was a reflection not only of the idea that through violence the encumbrance of the other might allow the self to speak more clearly but also because thinking about and practising violence induced a form of internal monologue, often almost a stream of consciousness, in the French colonial mind. As this dialogue played itself out, Algerians as victims, or even as actors, in this play became more and more absent, or coded into generic groupings which erased distinctions between types of peoples such as combatants and civilians.

This absence of the other in the dialogue of the self may seem unsurprising when we consider the more general shift in European mentalities from the early eighteenth century to the enlightened minds of the early nineteenth century. In the earlier period there is evidence from a variety of colonial settings, including North Africa, of a European fascination with local cultures which included within it the notion that it may be of value to try to see the world through the eyes of the other. In the generations after the enlightenment, this capacity to imagine alterity disappeared, nowhere more so than in Algeria, where the blinkered failure to ever imagine the ways in which Algerians might perceive the effects of their being invaded was almost complete. Even in the extremes of the Australian colony, there existed a more developed sense of such thinking-as-the-other, with British critics of state policy wondering ‘Where Aboriginal warriors had committed “depredations” or “outrages” […] were they not reacting to white violations of their food supplies and women?’⁵

This book therefore adds to the growing literature on the ‘French colonial mind’, offering a detailed study of the French army in Africa in their own words, looking at how they saw themselves and how they came to imagine and construct a new world.⁶ The culture of the army, the forms of violence it deployed and the morals and norms of the wars it fought are remarkably under-researched, so the bulk of this book draws on the huge corpus of documents which the army produced as an institution in its first years in Algeria.⁷ This necessarily entails a consideration of the relationship between political decision-making in Paris and military imperatives in Africa, as we have seen in the examples of letters to and from Soult, but the book does not look more broadly at the role Algeria played in the metropolitan imaginary (which has been the subject of an illuminatory new work by Jennifer Sessions). This distinction between the French at home and abroad makes especial sense in this case for the army saw itself as creating a new and distinct culture in Algeria, while, in terms of its violent practices, the details of such work were not designed for popular consumption in France.

Although such an investigation necessarily entails some emphasis on particular individuals (especially Soult, whose role in formulating policy in Algeria has tended to be underestimated or misunderstood⁸) as architects of that culture, its chief focus is on the generality of a way of life and is therefore as much concerned with everyday practices as it is with ideological or policy pronouncements. The danger of a focus on such proclamations has been threefold. Firstly, because it has often promoted a stress on understanding history through polemic texts, whose relation to social praxis might be more complex than initially imagined. Second, because a focus on personalities can induce an unwillingness to look beyond events and individuals to locate structures and their determinants. Third, because the canon of individuals who come to assume the roles of ‘history makers’ can quickly become calcified. This book therefore aims also to include the perspectives of ‘outsiders’, especially Algerians, sometimes those who are well known, such as Hamdan Khodja, but also tribal leaders whose communications with the French lie in the military archives, and foreign travellers to Algeria, such as the Englishman Dawson Borrer.

The value of works such as Borrer’s lies in their form as well as in their content, for while his descriptions of the massacres of Algerians are uniquely detailed, the literary form of Borrer’s memoir and the manner in which he framed such bloody reminiscences are of equal worth to the historian studying the mental world which produced a culture of massive targeted violence. In order to make sense of the things that he had seen, Borrer resorted to a form of tragi-romantic mode of description, adjoining his accounts of massacres with the work of other poets, as though he feared that only the depths which they conveyed in language might adequately account for such acts and a meditation upon them:

It was grievous to meditate upon the retired villages of the Beni Abbès transformed to smoking ruins. […] It was grievous to think how a few short hours had transformed one of the more retired seats of tranquillity and native industry into a hell of devastation and misery. Mirth hailed the glorious sun as he rose to run his daily course: as he sank to his golden couch, the voice of lamentation and bitter mourning rose on high: the moon threw her cold beams on desolation.

Strange – that where Nature lov’d to trace,

As if for Gods a dwelling place,

And every charm and grace hath mix’d

Within t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. ‘Algeria’: The Archaeology of Barbary
• 3. L’armée d’Afrique
• 4. Violence in Algeria, 1830–37
• 5. The Evolution of the Razzia, 1837–47
• 6. A Future Painted in Sombre Colours
• 7. An Algerian Genocide?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index