French Conquest Of Algeria Research Articles

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 ...

Civilizing through Cork: Conservationism and la Mission Civilisatrice in French Colonial Algeria

The French occupation of Algeria began in 1830 and lasted over 130 years. In the decades following the initial conquest, French imperial agents emphasized the colonial enterprise's social and environmental aims. Claiming that centuries of misuse and abuse had decimated Algeria's environment, they presented the colonial project as an opportunity to adapt indigenous inhabitants to more sustainable uses of land. This civilizing mission helped elevate Algerian cork production into one of the colony's most profitable industries. In the process, it had a detrimental impact on Algerian forests and mobile pastoralists. This article uses cork as a case study to explore the meaning of the French civilizing ethic and its role in France's occupation of Algeria. It makes three main claims. First, it argues that the nineteenth-century French civilizing mission combined social and environmental values, perceptions, and concerns. Second, it demonstrates that this ethic was a guiding factor in the French conquest of Algeria. Finally, it posits that the Algerian cork industry succeeded in part because it purported to embody the French colonial mission's social and environmental ideals.

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?

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.

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...

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

Teaching the History of Architecture in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco: Colonialism, Independence, and Globalization

The teaching of architectural history in North Africa is closely linked to the history of French colonization in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. It was only during the period of colonial rule that architecture was first taught in these countries, and architectural education varied according to the approach the colonizing power adopted in each case. Through a succession of reforms, the educational system was transformed from an exogenous, imported one into an endogenous one, in an effort to respond to the cultural and historical realities of each country. However, the cultural identity born of a long history shared by the three countries led to the convergence of the three systems toward similar objectives, focusing ultimately on the same concerns.' The French conquest of Algeria in 1830 was followed by a systematic annexation that divided the new territory into departments, or administrative divisions, of France. All actions by the new settlers were long-term imperial investments intended to turn the region into a fully integrated part of France on all levels-social, political, economic, and cultural. Cultural differences were not considered instrumental to development, with the assumption that the French civilizing mission would eventually overpower local cultures. The traditional educational system was consequently abandoned, and the Arabic language was relegated to a secondary status and eventually taught as a foreign language, of far less importance than English, German, Italian, or Spanish. With notable exceptions, indigenous youth who had access to schools were discouraged from pursuing higher education; hence, their chances of reaching management or decision-making jobs in the administrative and economic structure tailor-made for the new settlers was restricted.

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.