Nineteenth-century Algeria Research Articles

A Complaint with the Cadi, ca. 1896: an East/West Cultural Encounter

This article presents a case study of A Complaint with the Cadi (Algeria), ca. 1896 – a painting by the French Orientalist artist Marie Lucas-Robiquet (1858–1959). Using cultural and social history as prisms, it explores what Lucas-Robiquet’s visual record communicates to the cultural ‘outsider’ about Muslim social life in French colonial Algeria. Attention is given to this artwork because it depicts the Islamic judiciary system as practised in late nineteenth-century Algeria. This article argues that this painting and its subject matter are rare in the Orientalist canon; that the artist was female, is, I posit, crucial to the ways in which this work can be read. Lucas-Robiquet, a decorated Orientalist, used a Naturalist style of painting which was both nuanced and sensitive to Islamic cultural traditions. I contend that A Complaint with the Cadi (or qāḍī meaning judge) is an important work because it represents a locus of historicised forms of Otherness: the French female artist and the Algerian cultural attribute.

Women and French Empire

Women and French Empire Jennifer Sessions (bio) Sarah Curtis. Civilizing Habits: Women Missionaries and the Revival of French Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. x + 373 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-19-539418-4 (cl). Marie-Paule Ha. French Women and the Empire: The Case of Indochina. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. xi + 283 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-19-964036-2 (cl). Doris Kadish. Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves: French Women Writers and French Colonial Slavery. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012. ix + 186 pp. ISBN 978-1-8463-1846-7 (cl). Patricia M. E. Lorcin. Historicizing Colonial Nostalgia: European Women’s Narratives of Algeria and Kenya, 1900–Present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. xi + 317 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-230-33865-4 (cl). Rebecca Rogers. A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story: Madame Luce in Nineteenth-Century Algeria. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. xviii + 267 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-8047-8431-3 (cl). As an undergraduate in the mid–1990s, I tried on several occasions to write term papers on women in the French colonies. Inspired by coursework and reading on the British Empire, I wanted to explore the experiences and roles of women in the French imperial context. But at that time my university library could provide neither primary sources nor secondary literature to sustain even those modest ambitions, much less the kind of advanced scholarship that was already developing on British women’s engagements with empire. Twenty years later, the scholarly landscape has changed dramatically. The so-called “colonial turn” in French studies has produced a wealth of new research on the French empire, in which gender is a key category of analysis. The convergence of gender theory with postcolonial theory has inspired new investigations of French imperial ideologies and practices, allowing today’s undergraduates to read and write about such topics as the connections between feminism and abolitionism during the French Revolution, the politics of sexual relationships between colonial troops and French women during World War I, or the debates about Muslim [End Page 186] girls’ headscarves in postcolonial France. Meanwhile, women’s and gender history approaches have taken hold in the fields of African, Asian, Caribbean, and Atlantic history, illuminating the experiences of enslaved and colonized women in French-ruled territories around the globe. For all of these important advances, students interested in French women in the empire or in French women’s involvement with imperial questions will remain frustrated. The relatively late arrival of the “colonial turn” in French history in the 1990s has meant that scholars of French empire moved directly into gender analysis, largely bypassing the historiographical phase in which British women’s historians of the 1980s focused substantial attention on recovering the presence and stories of white women in the colonies.1 This “recuperative” feminist work on British women and imperialism has come under heavy—and not unjustified—fire from postcolonialist critics for perpetuating Eurocentric imperial discourses that privilege the subjectivity of the female colonizer over that of colonized people.2 Scholars have since turned to the concepts and methods of gender analysis to better grasp the complexity of colonial societies and the gendered character of imperial rule. The result is a powerful new understanding of the critical role that gender played in structuring colonial power relations and in justifying Western domination, including in the French empire. Despite their limitations, however, earlier histories of British women and empire developed an important body of empirical knowledge largely without parallel in the French case.3 The books under consideration here seek to redress this relative neglect, bringing welcome attention to the history of women across the modern French empire and making a persuasive case that women played a far more important role in the construction of French colonialism than scholars have previously recognized. Although all five authors make excellent use of the insights of postcolonial criticism and gender theory, they clearly situate themselves within the traditions of women’s history. Their titles—which use the terms “woman” or “women,” rather than “gender,” to describe their subject matter—clearly reflect this positioning. All five also adopt, to a greater or lesser degree, an explicitly biographical approach, a classic method of women’s history...

Fighting Fire with Fire: Mobile Pastoralists and French Discourse on Wildfires in Nineteenth-Century Algeria

Fighting Fire with Fire: Mobile Pastoralists and French Discourse on Wildfires in Nineteenth-Century Algeria

Museum-building in nineteenth-century Algeria

Museum-building in nineteenth-century Algeria

A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story: Madame Luce in Nineteenth-Century Algeria, by Rebecca Rogers

<i>A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story: Madame Luce in Nineteenth-Century Algeria</i>, by Rebecca Rogers

A Conflicted Sense of Nationality: Napoleon III’s Arab Kingdom and the Paradoxes of French Multiculturalism

Abstract Les débats les plus récents à l’égard de l’identité nationale française ont révélé la résistance républicaine à la diversité culturelle dans la communauté nationale, exposant les problèmes de l’État pour encourager actuellement l’intégration musulmane. En revoyant les débats relatif à la nationalité et l’Algérie pendant le dix-neuvième siècle, cet article examine l’origine du multiculturalisme pathologique français en rapport avec la politique du Royaume Arabe. Il affirme que les débats sur la « question algérienne » sous le Second Empire déterminaient considérablement les conceptions de la nationalité et la modernité en France. En dépit de l’intention du Royaume Arabe d’établir une place pour les musulmans dans la nation française, il a confirmé en fin de compte les distinctions entre les ressortissants français et a sapé le but de réaliser une communauté cosmopolite française. Malgré cet échec les années du Second Empire constituait une époque dans laquelle les imaginaires nationaux parallèles ont émergé dans la politique française, mettant en lumière les possibilités alternatives à la nationalité républicaine française et le communauratisme républicain qui persiste au present.

La fiancée était à dos d’âne by Vénus Khoury-Ghata

badminton to tapioca. Ironically, these enterprises prove successful, but Ludovic withdraws from the management team before he can profit from these initiatives. What follows is the downward spiral. He drifts through a few jobs and a few mistresses until, at rock bottom, a wealthy girl many years his junior falls in love with him, finds him a job in the family business, and declares her desire to marry him. His trip to Zermatt was simply a little bachelor holiday before the marriage. What makes this novel stand out is certainly not the plot, but the combination of irony and insight with which Grimbert treats Ludovic. The story really unfolds in the main character’s mind, and details the steps leading to Ludovic’s painful recognition that the great love of his life has always been himself. Such a pattern flirts with nombrilisme, but Grimbert skillfully avoids that danger as she teases out the stages of Ludovic’s “almost” discoveries . It is a tribute to the subtlety of the novel that the main character proves as successful at forgetting what he has learned about himself as he is at occasionally breaking through the barrier of his narcissism to achieve some fleeting insight. One way Grimbert sustains the reader’s interest is by slowly shifting from the comic flourishes in the early portions to a depiction of Ludovic’s growing confinement, not in a marriage, a job, or a relationship, but within himself. The young Ludovic could complacently express indignation at his ex-wife’s introducing their son to her new boyfriend “only” a month after she met the man, but the older Ludovic, alone in the ski resort, can only imagine that the young woman who loves him now, will be divorcing him in ten years. All his life Ludovic has been in flight, from his responsibilities , and from himself. This pattern does not change at the novel’s end. Instead of meeting his fiancée at the Zematt station, he just leaves the hotel on foot, marching into the snow and cold toward a distant village one has no reason to believe he will reach. Florida State University William Cloonan Khoury-Ghata, Vénus. La fiancée était à dos d’âne. Paris: Mercure de France, 2013. ISBN 978-2-7152-3435-2. Pp. 159. 16,50 a. Nineteenth-century Algeria and France furnish the background for the novel’s historical as well as fictional characters. The plot is woven around the captivity of Abdelkader ibn Muhieddine, Islamic scholar, Sufi, political and military leader, regarded by some Algerians as a national hero. He had fought against the French colonial invasion. The chief rabbi of Mascara, acquainted with the Muslim warlord, crosses the desert to visit the Qurayzas, a nomadic tribe, from whom he selects a young woman to offer as fiancée for Emir Abdelkader. Rabbi Haïm’s intention is to secure, through marriage, protection for the Jewish community condemned to wander in fear of extermination. Eight thousand Jews had already been killed in the massacre at Mascara in 1835. The city was founded by the Turks as a military garrison in 1701 256 FRENCH REVIEW 87.4 Reviews 257 who also settled a Jewish community there around 1790. In 1832 Abdelkader chose Mascara as his headquarters. In 1835, the town was reduced to ruins by the French. Control of the town was contested until 1841.Abdelkader, continuously embroiled in military maneuvers, was finally captured and taken to France. For most of the novel he remains imprisoned.Yudah, the chosen one, is led across the desert to Abdelkader’s encampment only to find he is away at war. His defeated followers are later shipped to the island Sainte Marguerite in the Mediterranean. In Abdelkader’s absence, his wives ignore Yudah. Her arrival, unexpected and inopportune, leaves her in isolation, spending her time in long meditative walks. Nostalgia for the desert and wisdom of her people’s ways accompany her. Expelled from the island to France, she continues her quest to find the Emir, to fulfill the mission and expectations entrusted to her. The theme of rapprochement permeates the novel. Symbolic is Yudah’s ride on the donkey: straddling two worlds...

A Frenchwoman's Imperial Story. Madame Luce in Nineteenth-Century Algeria

A Frenchwoman's Imperial Story. Madame Luce in Nineteenth-Century Algeria

‘Water mania!’: drought and the rhetoric of rule in nineteenth-century Algeria

This article explores the confluence of water crisis and social-political power in the 1860s in Algeria. An unprecedented series of environmental events – ongoing drought, locust invasion, the outbreak of epidemic disease – conspired with the privations of three decades of colonial rule to kill around 800,000 people between 1865 and 1870. This crisis was the impetus for a reconfiguration of the practice and discourse of water control and hygiene into a unique architecture of power relations. The colonial state appeared in this environment as a singular, unitary entity that could act on the environment for the benefit of society. Actions such as washing streets, repairing wells, building dams, and mandating hygienic measures to protect the population suggested a coherence of power different from what had existed in the colony previously. This apparent coherence, I argue, was an effect brought about by the confluence of hydraulic infrastructural projects, settler rhetoric about water, hygiene, and modernity, and massive environmental crisis. Rather than demonstrating the coherence of state practice, a focus on water allows us to see how the apparently external combination of environmental crises brought disparate social processes together in a relationship that evoked a unitary state.

Genocide in nineteenth-century Algeria

While the French colony of Algeria was known to have been a violent place, historians have rarely compared the specificities and contours of its violent culture with those of other nineteenth-century settler colonies such as Australia and America. This review article asks why this has been the case and whether new definitions of genocide that have emerged from the study of other colonies might not be applied to Algeria. It contends that the systematic qualities of organised French violence—chiefly in the form of massacres known as ‘razzias’—have been underestimated and that the Algerian case merits study by functionalist and intentionalist scholars of genocide. While work still needs to be undertaken connecting French ‘exterminationist’ literatures to the practice of mass killing in the colony, a series of recent histories of Algeria have suggested that traditional literatures underestimated the scope and effects of French violence upon the indigenous peoples of Algeria.

GALLOIS, William. The administration of sickness. Medicine and ethics in nineteenth-century Algeria

GALLOIS, William. The administration of sickness. Medicine and ethics in nineteenth-century Algeria

William Gallois, The Administration of Sickness: Medicine and Ethics in Nineteenth-Century Algeria

As the author of this volume points out, the history of medical ethics remains an underexamined field. Many recent works in the history of medicine have highlighted a past that shocks contemporary sensibilities with its apparent disregard for the most basic human rights and dignities. Studies of the rise of experimental medicine, the management of epidemics, and the aggressive character of colonial health programmes, for example, often portray biomedicine as a discipline stripped of any ethical foundation or concern. Given this tendency, it is surprising that so few historians have engaged that medical past on specifically ethical grounds. The irony is deeper given the importance of historical case studies, including the infamous Tuskegee study or the experimentation at Auschwitz, to contemporary bioethics. The Administration of Sickness attempts to correct this oversight with what its author calls an explicitly moral analysis of medical ideals and practices in French Algeria. William Gallois begins with a narrative history of colonial medical and sanitarian efforts in Algeria in the nineteenth century. He essentially divides the century into three periods. From 1830 through the 1850s, French military and civilian officials wove health into expansionist discourse. Foreshadowing Marshall Hubert Lyautey's famous dictum that ‘medicine is the only excuse for colonialism’, French authorities justified their presence in the colony by articulating a medical ideal for the sanitary reconstruction of North Africa. But as early as the late 1840s, it became clear that such ideals were unrealisable. The hygienic modernisation of cities such as Oran and Algiers was belied by the limited reach of health care in rural communities. By the end of the century, a racial health politics replaced the idealism of the early colonial period even as the language of civilization through health provision continued as the order of the day.

William GALLOIS, The Administration of Sickness. Medicine and Ethics in Nineteenth-Century Algeria

William GALLOIS, The Administration of Sickness. Medicine and Ethics in Nineteenth-Century Algeria

Local Responses to French Medical Imperialism in Late Nineteenth-Century Algeria

This article offers the first account of the lives of Algerian-born doctors working in the French colonial medical service between 1870 and 1900. Their stories reveal the manner in which the idea of medical imperialism had collapsed in Algeria, as a result of maladministration, racial policies, competition between civil and military authorities, budgetary constraints and the rise of the colons. The article also indicates the way in which medicine became a locus of opposition to French rule. It shows how the first decades of the Third Republic were critical in terms of a shift from the earlier idea of medicine serving as an emblem of the mission civilisatrice to the ideological potential of medicine being seen in much more nuanced terms by both French settlers and Algerian locals. It is argued that the notion of cultural resistance to imperialism through medicine emerges in the 1870s and 1880s, thereby prefiguring the work of Fanon and the Front de Liberation Nationale's later analysis of the 'sickness' of colonial Algerian society.