Conquest Of Algeria Research Articles

La France se dévoile: revealing remnants from the age of empire

Despite systematic efforts to repress memories of the colonial past in the French collective psyche, evidence of the country’s “fracture coloniale” continues to surface (Bancel et al.). This article outlines some of the ways in which remnants of this past become visible in the form of politico-legal debates and in fixations in popular culture, most notably in literature, and even within state organizations such as the army. Following an overview of these contemporary issues, the article revisits the 1989 “affaire du foulard” as a case study which encompasses ever-present concerns about the banlieues, identity, education, Islam, and memories of Algeria, and which provides a particularly useful illustration of how discourses from the age of empire are visible in France today. In considering the “affaire du foulard,” the article acknowledges the backdrop of an international focus on Islam but also examines relevant practices from the conquest of Algeria in 1830 to its War of Independence (1954-1962) as well as the crucial context of circumstances in Algeria at the time of the “affaire.” The article thereby points to “l’effet de retour” of colonial practice, whereby colonial mechanisms of power were transported back to the West (Foucault 89). Finally, the analysis turns to contemporary discussions on (un)veiling in light of President Macron’s April 2020 statement that citizens should systematically wear “un masque grand publique” as part of COVID-19 health measures. In this way, the article considers how the 2011 law stating that “Nul ne peut, dans l’espace public, porter une tenue destinée à dissimuler son visage” reconciles with representations of face coverings that evoke Republican values in the context of the pandemic.

Islam in the Colonial Policy of France: from the Origins to the Fifth Republic

History of relations between France and the Islamic world goes back to the first centuries of Hijra, when the Franks first faced the Caliphate and its troops in the Eastern and Western Mediterranean. On the eve of the New times Paris had already developed its numerous contacts with Turkey, Iran and the Arab West — the Maghreb area. The conquest of Algeria (from 1830) formed a basis of the French colonial empire in Africa and Asia with the growing role of Islam in political activities and ambitions of Paris. Millions of Muslims in French colonies contributed to growth of political and economic progress of their metropoly with its pretensions to become a great Muslim power. Meanwhile, thousands of them lost their lives during two great world wars of the 20th century. Waves of immigration gave birth to an impressive Islamic community (‘umma), in France, reaching about a million of residents by the middle of the 20th century. With the growth of Muslim immigration from Africa and the Middle East a number of Muslims among the natives of France also augmented. By the end of the last century the Muslims formed as much as about 10 % of the whole population of France. The “French Islam” born at the dawn of the 20th century. after a century of its evolution became an important civilizational reality of Europe, at times more attractive for the local youth than traditional Christian values, or the new ideals, brought with the winds of globalism, multiculturalism and a “non-stop consumerism”.

Naming the suffering of victims in the French conquest of Algeria

In 1845 a scandal broke out in France with regard to a particularly cruel and destructive act of repression at the close of General Bugeaud’s war of conquest in Algeria: the ‘smoking of Dahra’, in ...

‘What we have done is shameful’: interrogating the relationship between France and its Algérie in Jean Renoir’s Le Bled (1929)

Funded to commemorate the centenary of the conquest of Algeria, Le Bled is widely dismissed as propagandist fodder and remains among the most critically neglected of Renoir’s key works. This article argues that the film marks a landmark in the director’s output for three main reasons: first of all, Le Bled was Renoir’s first attempt to criticise contemporary bourgeois society, specifically the newest generation of French immigrants to Algeria. Secondly, Renoir’s class critique is articulated through a highly politicised usage of deep staging, a technique that would form a key aspect of the director’s mise en scène during the golden age of French cinema, most notably in La Chienne (1931), Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936) and La Règle du jeu (1939). Finally, Renoir’s depiction of the natural landscape as both a physical and social space foreshadows later works ranging from The Southerner (1945) to The River (1951). Key to this argument is a textual reading of Renoir’s exploitation of deep space, décor and costume design within a broader narrative framework of upper-class satire. Drawing on previously unpublished materials held at UCLA’s Jean Renoir archive, this article ultimately aims to re-evaluate Le Bled as a crucial turning point within the context of Renoir’s work.

Prolegomena to a Cosmopolitanism in Deep Time

When Assia Djebar ([1985] 1993) recounted the nineteenth-century French conquest of Algeria, was she obliged to recognize the earlier conquest of the Algerian Arabs by the Ottomans? Are we sure that this should not also count as colonialism? Was Djebar obliged, going even further back, to recognize the conquest by the Arabs of the Berbers? Would not this too have to be called an imperial conquest? The moment seems to have come when such awkward discipline-stretching issues are unavoidable. The cosmopolitanism with which we are familiar is geographical – an impulse to undo centuries of Eurocentrism by factoring in cultures and viewpoints from outside Europe and its settler colonies. But geographical cosmopolitanism entails a temporal cosmopolitanism that is less familiar – an expansion back in time to take in cultural texts, events and moments, like the classical canons of China and India or premodern empires, that are not merely non-European but also untethered to Europe by the usual relation of unequal power. This essay explores some alternative but not mutually exclusive descriptions of this move into deep time. Is it a depoliticizing shift from the postcolonial to ‘world literature’? A necessary recalibration of the moral balance between ‘our’ and ‘their’ imperialisms? A return of ‘grand narrative’ in the name of ecology, or a ‘new’ materialism, or evolutionary science? A rehabilitation of European identity and European modernity?

History of malaria control in the French armed forces: from Algeria to the Macedonian front during the first World War

The French joint military health corps has long experience in malaria control. Many military physicians played an essential role in the 19th century: Maillot revolutionized malaria treatment by using quinine during the conquest of Algeria, and Laveran discovered the causal parasite (the genus Plasmodium) there. This experience continued under the direction of Laveran and the Sergent brothers on the eastern front in Greek Macedonia during World War I. The vast coordinated control plan established on this front from 1917 delivered the French infantrymen from malaria and led to victory over the Bulgarian forces, which capitulated in September 1918.

By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria, by Jennifer E. Sessions

By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria, by Jennifer E. Sessions

By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria by Jennifer E. Sessions (review)

By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria by Jennifer E. Sessions (review)

By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria

By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria

By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria. By Jennifer E.Sessions. Cornell University Press. 2011. xvii + 365pp. £30.95.

By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria. By Jennifer E.Sessions. Cornell University Press. 2011. xvii + 365pp. £30.95.

By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria by Jennifer E. Sessions (review)

By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria by Jennifer E. Sessions (review)

By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria

By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria

Jennifer E. SESSIONS, By Sword and Plow. France and the Conquest of Algeria

Jennifer E. SESSIONS, By Sword and Plow. France and the Conquest of Algeria

JENNIFER E. SESSIONS. By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria.

JENNIFER E. SESSIONS. By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria.

FROM MEDITERRANEAN MERCHANT TO FRENCH CIVILIZER: JACOB LASRY AND THE ECONOMY OF CONQUEST IN EARLY COLONIAL ALGERIA

AbstractThe story of the Oran-based Jewish merchant Jacob Lasry (1793–1869) illustrates how preexisting North African business practices survived and adapted to the radical dislocations of the French conquest of Algeria. In the 1830s, French political turmoil and indecision helped foster a chaotic situation where French generals with nebulous goals “outsourced” financing and even military campaigns to local experts in Algeria. Lasry's business success in the economy of the early conquest invested him with a degree of power vis-à-vis the French administration, whose other proxies sometimes ended up in severe debt to him. With the rise of a “civilizing mission” discourse in the 1840s and 1850s, aspects of this mission, too, were outsourced to local experts. Despite his Moroccan birth, Gibraltarian family, and British subjecthood, Lasry used his stature to secure the official position of president of the province'sconsistoire israélite, charged with advancing French civilization among Oran's indigenous Jews.

By sword and plow: France and the conquest of Algeria

By sword and plow: France and the conquest of Algeria

On the edge: the internal frontiers of architecture in Algiers/Marseille

From the mid-nineteenth century, when its port infrastructure was radically expanded following the French conquest of Algeria in 1830, the city of Marseille embraced the appellation ‘Gateway to the...

The Concept of Piracy (1937)

The Concept of Piracy (1937) Carl Schmitt (bio) The Nyon Conference, which convened on September 11, 1937, has been dubbed the piracy or antipiracy conference; in the official text of their signed resolution of September 14, the nine participating powers announced that the sinking of commercial shipping by submarines, in violation of the rules of Part IV of the London Naval Treaty of April 22, 1930, should be treated as “acts of piracy.” According to the old formula—one often repeated at the conference—the pirate is defined as the “enemy of mankind,” hostis generi humanis. This label was once justified in terms of his “general hostility,” because his predatory aims affected all states indiscriminately, so that each state could disarm him. “The consensual enemy,” as Karl Bindung puts it, “must give rise to consensual opposition.” According to the development of continental international law so far, it was essential to the concept of piracy that it took place in an empty space in which the state was completely absent. From this point of view, a whole sequence of negative conceptual markers was incisively and logically worked out. It was not only that the free sea—understood as a state-free space untouched by any state’s territorial sovereignty—was piracy’s stage. It was also considered to be essential that the perpetrator, either as precondition or as consequence of his act, became “denationalized,” i.e., that he was not considered a member of any state or authorized by any state, even if he did not become stateless. Further, the pirate’s attack was not directed against a specific state, but must (at least hypothetically) be directed against all states, the goal being private enrichment, out of a so-called animus furandi, and so forth. As a result, given this equation between the state and the political, piracy was understood as a characteristically unpolitical act. The best German monograph on the subject by Paul Stiel, Der Tatbestand der Piraterie [nach geltendem Völkerrecht unter vergleichender Berücksichtigung der Landesgesetzgebungen (1905)], concludes in agreement with Hall, Rougier, and Bishop, that “an undertaking that aims at political ends is not piracy.” From which it directly follows that the actions of revolutionary parties—even when they are committed against authorities who do not recognize them as belligerents—cannot be classified as piracy, “as long as the political end of the measures they undertake is evident” (p. 80). Correspondingly, action against pirates is unpolitical as well. It is not a war, but either criminal justice (according to the English view) or a measure of international maritime police power (according to the Continental construction). Ancient, medieval, and modern conceptual elements are mixed together in this entire controversial theory of piracy; and there is the danger that the reality of the current state of affairs remains hidden behind deceptive formulas and conceptual residues. We are speaking, after all, not of the pirates of antiquity or the Middle Ages, [End Page 27] but those of the Mediterranean Sea today. Given the current world order of states, the essentially non-state, unpolitical character of piracy immediately becomes problematic. In particular, whoever calls to mind the political situation of the Mediterranean must immediately face the question of where exactly that unpolitical buccaneer could find a legally empty space, free of any state, in which he could ply his trade. Fortunately, the “robber states” and the Barbary States no longer exist; they have disappeared since the conquest of Algeria over a hundred years ago. Because of their political character, revolutionary parties are, as mentioned, not supposed to count as pirates. The modern technology of maritime transportation and armaments has created new possibilities for the use of force on the high seas; at the same time, it has replaced inert, feudal structures with the tightly centralized organizations of the modern state, whose mechanisms of control it has enormously expanded. One need merely compare the technical means of a modern police force with those of its eighteenth- or even nineteenth-century predecessor to understand what is meant here. Through these technical means the modern state is becoming ever more self-contained, in this sense ever more “total,” and the empty space beyond the...

Les injustices révoltantes : Gustave de Beaumont and the Pre-history of Crimes Against Humanity

If Alexis de Tocqueville was the anthropologist of modern equality, his companion in America and lifelong associate Gustave de Beaumont was the horrified observer of the anachronistic persistence of inequality: morally polarized worlds of black and white, slave and master, bound and free, conquered and conqueror, famine and opulence. Beaumont’s writings in fact cluster around a set of cases that have often been retrospectively collected as “crimes against humanity” avant la lettre: enslavement of Africans, extermination or “ethnic cleansing” of indigenous peoples by the English in Ireland the US in America, and the French conquest of Algeria. I read Beaumont’s texts as a privileged entre to reconstructing what nineteenth-century liberals understood to constitute conduct that was morally beyond the pale, either in peace or war. In the last half century the notion of a category of crimes that shock the conscience of humanity has emerged at the intersection of humanitarian and human rights law. Yet the notion of scandalizing or sinning against humanity, and even the phrase “crimes against humanity” itself, was used earlier and more widely—in both English and

The New Centurions: French Reliance on the Roman Past During the Conquest of Algeria

This article studies the psychological, educational, organisational and structural factors that wedded the French conquest of Algeria (from 1830)to the conquest by the Romans of the same territory and the same tribes. The Roman Empire had expanded beyond Europe to (present day) Turkey, Lebanon, and Syria, through Libya and Tunisia to Algeria and Morocco, thereby turning the Mediterranean into a Roman lake, and leaving plentiful monuments in the conquered, romanised lands. The later Byzantine empire extended over the same territories. Although 'modem' war might seem much removed from Roman conquest, the conditions the French met in Algeria were similar to those faced by the Romans, with the addition of 'gun-powdered weapons. Except for their invasion of Egypt, the French had had little experience of fighting mounted tribes in desert conditions, with over-stretched lines of communication far from France. They needed accounts of the Roman conquest as practical intelligence in spite of the time-gap since the 'reports' were relayed by the ancient authors. They saw their conquest as the beneficent gift of civilisation, and they found themselves, quite consciously thanks to their classical education, follo~ing not just Roman tactics, but re-using Roman and the later Byzantine forts, bridges, roads and aqueducts, and frequently their lines of communication as well. Just as it is perfectly possible today to drive around Tunisia or Algeria using a map of the Roman roads, so the French quickly discovered that the remains of ancient wars of occupation were at first vital to their survival. What is more, unavoidable facts of geography and hydrography ensured that the French followed the Romans' settlements, communications and water supplies. They were encouraged by the plentiful Roman remains to believe that semi-deserts could once more be made fertile.