In an exposé published in the summer of 1852, the political commentator Edward Warmington began his examination of French society with a familiar and by most standards commonplace narrative. Since 1789, the country had been torn apart by revolutionary antagonisms, public prosperity had dwindled, and faith in French government was increasingly diminishing with each fallen regime. “Our political divisions have degenerated into personal hatreds and hostilities,” he apprised his readers, “and our differences of opinion have nearly made us forget our nationality, our interests, and our common duties.” France required a government “suffused with a patriotic spirit,” one that was “politically national and democratic,” if prosperity and confidence were to be restored.1 Neither erudite nor exceptionally shrewd in its analysis, Warmington’s book nonetheless epitomized what historians have called the “Franco-French wars,” the vicious political antipathies and partisanship that continued to plague French society long after the French Revolution’s ambiguous conclusion.2 The tenor of Warmington’s rhetoric and the suggestive title of his book—What Is Bonapartism?—left little doubt as to the agenda it sought to advance and prefigured the objectives and political language that would remain central to the Bonapartist platform over the next two decades.
Although Bonapartist modernity defended and actively promoted the interests of French capitalism, Napoleon III always insisted that Bonapartism was, at heart, a “social idea” capable of uniting a divided nation. The architects of the Second Empire envisioned a form of social organization that an inherently cosmopolitan capitalist system structured by economic relationships and practices of free exchange and commodity could not realize. As Anthony Giddens has noted, “a capitalist society is a ‘society’ only because it is a nation-state.”3 A Bonapartist France might be capitalist in content but it was to be unquestionably national in form, according with the ideals of liberty and nationality first enunciated by French patriots in 1789. Pronouncements celebrating the nation’s revolutionary legacy not only allowed the Bonapartists to represent the imperial regime as a national government and capitalize on the eminent mystique of the Bonaparte name; they were also essential. Napoleon III comprehended the situation facing his regime. The Second Empire would survive only by “assuring the future, by closing the era of revolutions, and by consecrating the conquests of ’89.” 4
Under the pax Napoléon, peace and order would be restored as the old hatreds and ideological enmity stimulated by years of social and political unrest were effaced. Over time, the population would be instilled with the necessary values to sustain a liberal, democratic society. Liberty, according to Napoleon III, developed with the political education of a nation, “crowning” the political edifice “when time has consolidated it.”5 Only once a “new political generation, young, vigorous, and independent” came of age and replaced “the souls enervated by revolution” would France be fit to enjoy the fruits of true liberty.6 Needless to say, this future generation would reflect a new type of individual inculcated with the values and patriotic ideals proper to the imperial regime. The advent of the Second Empire constituted a revolution of sorts, but one that intended to mold individuals and society pacifically and progressively, constituting what Persigny described as a “new political evolution.”7 “We come from revolutionaries,” Prince Jérôme Napoleon Bonaparte, one of the more radical members of the Bonapartist clan, stated before the senate in 1862, “but honest ones.” 8
As “honest” revolutionaries, the Bonapartists fashioned themselves defenders of liberty and national self-determination, identifying these dual principles as the core ideological precepts of France’s revolutionary heritage. The nationalist currents evident in Bonapartist rhetoric owed much to the political and intellectual atmosphere generated by the events of 1848 that inflected revolutionary and political discourse with an eminently national gestalt.9 The pan-European revolutions of 1848 had set out to consummate the work of 1789 and emancipate nations from the oppressive yoke of monarchial tyranny.10 Failure had not quashed the hopes of European republicans and nationalists, and the movements for national unification that emerged during the 1860s in Italy and Germany encouraged critics to believe that the ideals of 1848 were, indeed, still alive. “We must recognize that the time of nationalities has come, that it is the breath of their emancipation that shakes the old thrones and shatters the foundations of that old society,” an anonymous French pamphlet stated in 1860.11 The Bonapartist government remained sensitive to these currents and exploited every opportunity to express its commitment to the cause of European and in particular French nationalism. However, these nationalist aspirations went beyond validating the Second Empire’s revolutionary credentials. In their speeches, imperial spokesmen frequently tied the Bonapartist state to a set of traditions deemed “natural” to the French people and soil. Efforts to indigenize the Second Empire and associate it with a primordial Gallic nation went hand in hand with the revolutionary identity it encouraged, producing a specific brand of nationalism that spoke to both left and right while coating the imperial government in a patina of national legitimacy. If the Bonapartist were inaugurating a revolution, it was often difficult to tell on what side of the political spectrum this revolution lay.12
Bonapartist nationality policies would also see this revolution brought to North Africa during the 1860s as the emperor breached the troublesome “Algerian question.” Napoleon III endeavored to use Algeria as a symbol of his sincerity to the cause of national liberation, bolstering an explicitly Arab national identity intended for France’s Muslim subjects. While the promotion of Arab nationality was in line with the spirit of the imperial regime, efforts to spread the Bonapartist revolution to the North African frontier proved highly problematic and, ultimately, brought to light many of the inherent contradictions at the heart of the state’s nationality policies. As statesmen and officials grappled with the tensions between national identification and cultural diversity, two competing logics of Frenchness and the nation emerged that were not easily reconcilable. Political and cultural forms of nationalism were often promoted at will, resulting in a contradictory and, at times, incoherent ideology centered on nationalité that attempted to make sense of a French society that was diverse while in theory unified.
Bonapartist modernity aspired to modernize both state and people, and the promotion of nationalité represented a distinct form of modernization employed by the government. Attempting to achieve order through force and violence had only served to add salt to old wounds in the past, leaving the country divided along regional, political, ethnic, and confessional lines. Suturing these divisions necessitated a unifying idea, and to this end the Bonapartist leadership readily placed the concept of national association at the heart of its modernizing program. According to Napoleon III, national unity constituted “a holy cause” that had “the sympathies of the civilized world” as it consolidated its moral conquest over human barbarism and savagery.13
“I am going to fight for Liberty, not for a party,” the young journalist Philippe Faur claimed in 1848 as he welcomed the collapse of the July Monarchy that February. “From men and parties I expect nothing. My hopes are in the action of Providence, in a religious transformation to regenerate society.”14 Disillusioned with the interest-driven politics and elitism of Orléanist liberalism, Faur, like many of his contemporaries, zealously placed his faith in the new revolution’s promise of national unity and revival.15 In the wake of the June Days, Louis Napoleon proved adept at appealing to this widespread desire, bolstering a nationalist platform that catered to a yearning for solidarity and a sense of national mission lacking in postrevolutionary politics. A nation-builder and exponent of national liberation abroad, he was representative of the nationalist ambience prevalent in post-1848 Europe, a period in which the idiom of nationalité came to suffuse the political discourse of both the left and right.16 “Nationality is the real religion of France,” one critic remarked in 1861. “It is more than a principle or sentiment. At present, it is an unyielding instinct.”17 For imperial ideologues, nationalité, a concept pregnant with indigenous and historical connotations, was the vital center of the community, the lifeblood of society, and the primordial substance of the individual. “A people possess force,” Napoleon III reminded his followers, “only by virtue of their nationality.”18 Such pronouncements became ubiquitous as the Bonapartists consolidated their power, making nationalité a rallying call of the new imperial regime.
Taking their cue from the emperor, propagandists for the new government played upon fears of national dissolution and lauded Napoleon III as the savior of the French nation. “French nationality no longer existed,” the political writer Charles Piel de Troisments remarked when recounting France’s turbulent history since 1789. “Napoleon III has given it a new life.”19 The Napoleonic parvenu embodied the “sentiments and providential instincts” of the French people, as one writer insisted.20 “Before [the Empire] rallied all the forces of the nation,” proclaimed Persigny with typical patriotic flair, “it was born in the cottages of the people.”21 Such nationalist rhetoric equally extended to Napoleon III’s foreign policy and was especially encouraged in garnering public support for the government’s Italian and Romanian policies in the 1860s. A particularly admiring pamphleteer blandished the emperor for his keen understanding of nationality’s importance in the modern era. “The world moves along this path, proceeding more surely and quickly because it has found in Napoleon III, who understands its aspirations, its pilot.”22
While Second Empire politics exhibited a brazenly nationalist tenor and attitude focused on the cult of the emperor, nationalism itself was nothing new to French politics. The concept of la nation already possessed a long history rooted in the intellectual and political culture of the ancien régime.23 Many Enlightenment thinkers looked askance at the growing talk of “patriotism” in the mid-eighteenth century, preferring worldly cosmopolitanism to the “prejudices” nurtured by national identification. “It is sad that often in order to be a good patriot one is the enemy of the rest of mankind,” Voltaire despaired. For his part, he was inclined to reject the senseless worship of the fatherland (patrie) and serve humanity as a “citizen of the world.”24 Although a tradition of cosmopolitanism retained an appeal among French intellectuals throughout the nineteenth century, maintaining the status of a world citizen became increasingly difficult in an age of proliferating national identification.25 The revolutionary nationalism of the late eighteenth century proposed a new type of community that redefined established understandings of identity and territory across the continent.26 National association implied that “France is, and must be, a single whole” as the revolutionary Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès declared in September 1789.27 More specifically, it was a unity constituted through the collective will of a sovereign people. Much as Rousseau and his republican acolytes anticipated, a nation was understood to be a political community formed of individuals invested with equal rights and, theoretically, partaking in the general will through an active civic participation.28 The Napoleonic Code issued in 1804 may have muted these democratic elements, but it continued to adhere to egalitarian principles, equating nationalité with legal equality and the rights enjoyed by all French citizens.29
Declarations of natural and universal rights gave substance to the idea of a French national community, but these principles also rested upon broader ideals that transcended national boundaries. In the most radical phase of the French Revolution, republicans endeavored to carry the revolutionary élan across Europe, declaring that the ideals of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity were not only French, but those of humanity and civilization in general. French national identity was, from its origins, tied to a universal and inclusive rhetoric that identified France as the repository of common values and aspirations.30 “In England, Germany, Italy, and Spain there is expressed only the destinies of England, Germany, Italy and Spain,” the republican Hippolyte Marlet claimed in 1854. “In France the destiny of mankind is expressed.”31 The jurist Jean-Gabriel Cappot expressed as much in his study on nationality, insisting that while other nations were composed of distinct groups that “retained the name of their race and the mark of their nature as a form of protest . . . France alone truly represented a unity, a nationality.”32 Despite Cappot’s belief in French universalism, he, like Marlet, could not resist the temptation to attribute something definitively French to this universalism. “Undoubtedly, every great nation represents an idea important to universal man,” the historian Jules Michelet would write in 1846. “But, good God, how much more true is this of France!”33
This distinctly French character noted by writers like Michelet hinted at a second idea of la nation, one diverging from civic and universal understandings. From the early years of the Revolution, a certain tension was evident within concepts of nationality.34 The civil code of 1804 may have defined the nation in accordance with the rights of the citizen, but it concomitantly laid out more restrictive criteria regarding who in fact was to be considered part of the nation. Under article nine, French nationals were determined by jus sanguinis and residency requirements were established for foreigners and national minorities living within the country.35 Although tied to a language of universal rights and citizenship, nationality was not a concept reducible to purely political and legal categorizations and over time became divorced from an overtly democratic-revolutionary context. During the Restoration and July Monarchy, liberals suspicious of popular sovereignty made distinctions between “civil” and “political” rights that favored legal rather than democratic ideas of citizenship.36 They similarly endorsed a vision of the nation stressing historical and organic unity that judiciously marginalized the importance of the Revolution in favor of continuity with the past.37 In contrast to the abstract and often cosmopolitan outlook of the philosophes, the postrevolutionary generation cultivated an appreciation for the particular historical experiences and cultural influences that shaped the character and mentality of a people. “Every people has its distinct genius,” affirmed Taine, “that is why each people has its distinct history.”38
Whereas revolutionaries interpreted the nation as a violent rupture with the past, postrevolutionary generations were inspired by desires to endow nations with a history and genealogy, eliciting a search for origins and “aboriginal essence.”39 This obsession with roots could extend down to the most elemental levels of society, cultivating an appreciation for the cultural specificity of the varying regional localities constellating the country—the pays. Nineteenth-century provincial elites wrote local histories, staged regional exhibitions, and encouraged the promotion of a localism rooted in the familiarity of provincial life and the individual’s emotional attachment to both pays and nation. This vision of a France symbolizing “diversity in unity”(variété dans l’unité) frequently ran counter to the top-down nation-building policies endorsed by state authorities. Yet it did resonate with many liberals and conservative notables of the postrevolutionary period seeking alternative means of restructuring French society. More to the point, localism spoke to the romantic desire for an intimate and organic sense of belonging that linked local forms of experience, patriotism, and culture with the nation.40
If thinkers of the eighteenth century prized the universal equality and unity associated with revolutionary nationhood, their successors emphasized the unique, the historical, and the indigenous. With its focus on customs handed down over generations, language, and organic social development, romanticism inscribed nationality with an ethnological and particular content that did not always rest easily alongside its revolutionary counterpart. National essentialism encouraged the “culturalization” of peoples and societies, producing a discourse that could be just as reductive and exclusionary as the variants of biological racism taking hold in the nineteenth-century social sciences.41 Indeed, as Stuart Hall has argued, cultural differentialism constituted one of “racism’s two registers,” producing a discourse in which cultural distinctions seamlessly merged with categories of biological and racial difference.42
In their veneration of nation and nationality, Bonapartist spokesmen frequently made little distinction between the varieties of nationalism they promoted, seeing fit to employ one or the other model as the occasion warranted. In the wake of the coup, statesmen were keen to emphasize the revolutionary and democratic orientation of imperial politics, insisting, as Persigny did, that the Second Empire was built upon “the principles and ideas of the Revolution of 1789.” 43 The principal goal was to transform the illegal government into a popular one. Universal manhood suffrage, won by the people in 1848, was maintained even if the Second Republic was not. In 1852 the Bonapartists held a referendum asking the nation to go to the polls and either approve or reject the creation of the imperial state. With political opponents exiled and polling closely monitored, the Second Empire received the popular mandate desired by the leadership. The people had empowered the government through a single vote, “clear, simple, and understood by all,” providing a democratic foundation for a regime that had violated the republican constitution and installed itself through military force a year earlier.44 Popular approval, according to Napoleon III, was the “first guarantee” of a people’s liberty, giving the nation “the right to choose the government that suits it.” 45 In affirming the institutions and laws that presided over the nation, the French people were expected to view the state as an expression of their collective ambitions and values. The Bonapartists had made the French people “masters of their own destiny,” as Persigny later explained, rendering the Second Empire the fulfillment of the nation’s democratic and revolutionary ideals and the purest manifestation of the general will.46
The revolutionary and popular dimensions of Bonapartist nationalism owed much to the efforts of Persigny, a man of moderate republican conviction whose loyalty to the Bonapartist cause was incontestable. Whether through his use of the press and pamphlets to slander political opponents or his insistence that prefects encourage displays of popular support for the empire during public ceremonies and speeches, Persigny played an instrumental role in creating a Bonapartist movement capable of appealing to the great majority of French citizens over the fractious political elites of the country.47 His populist inclinations were never radical in substance, and although he understood the utility of appealing to the masses over the political classes, he also understood the danger in alienating social elites. Persigny sought to define a Bonapartist program that was revolutionary and popular in spirit but capable of instilling trust in French notables. As minister of the interior during the 1850s and early 1860s, he dedicated himself to incorporating former politicians and statesmen into the government through appeals to patriotism and national devotion. “Do not neglect any occasion for convincing them that the country could profit from their wisdom and experience,” he once advised prefects, “and remind them that while it is noble to reflect fondly on the past, it is still nobler to be useful to their country.” 48
The allure of a Bonapartist government, Persigny believed, was in its synthetic nature just as much as its revolutionary heritage. The French Revolution had left a legacy of sharp ideological division. There were “four or five nations within the nation,” Persigny claimed, each identifying with different political principles and heritages believed to be incompatible.49 Yet with its ambitions of establishing a Bonaparte dynasty at the head of the nation, the Second Empire could appeal to Legitimists while its dedication to order and prosperity curried favor with liberals. The commitment to universal manhood suffrage central to republican ideology was, moreover, shared by the government, holding out the possibility of rallying moderate and conservative republicans to an imperial state with a liberal and progressive orientation. Representing a “vast fusion of old opinions,” the Second Empire could, in Persigny’s opinion, potentially reconcile the old political hatreds dividing the nation and form a “great national party” attractive to both the masses and political society.50 Owing to its broad appeal, Bonapartism offered the most solid foundation for a truly liberal France. “Between the monarchial habits of eight centuries and the republican form—the natural aim of all political perfection—there can still be an intermediary phase,” Persigny claimed, “and I [think] that the blood of Napoleon, inoculated in the blood of France, could prepare a completely liberal regime better than all others.”51
The marked republican and revolutionary nationalism that colored the speech of Bonapartist spokesmen remained, however, tempered by a persistent mistrust of popular participation. Napoleon III and his entourage never repudiated their commitment to the principle of national sovereignty, yet they also made it clear that the new empire would not perpetuate the revolutionary turmoil that had enervated the country. The regime intended to wage war on the forms of “savage liberty” that imperiled order and to develop the values and habits conducive to “the liberty of civilized people.”52 To this end, it was first necessary to “discipline the parties” and extirpate the source of conflict, advised Morny. Political groups would be reined in and inflammatory newspapers and extremist elements suppressed.53 In time, the old rivalries would dissipate as the French people came to see themselves as compatriots bound by a common culture and national sentiment. In combating that “savage liberty” inspired by radicals, Bonapartist liberty endeavored to remove politics from the civil sphere, offering a robust and interventionist state committed to national prosperity and public welfare as an alternative to the unruly factionalism of party rule.54 Parliamentarianism was discouraged on the grounds that it was particularly English and, therefore, alien to the temperament and character of the French people.55 “The formation of English nationality has proceeded from totally different means than those followed for the formation of French nationality,” Louis Napoleon pronounced in 1851 when presenting his constitution to the nation.56 It was unfeasible just as much as unnatural to expect France to follow the English model of representative government. For the emperor as well as his most faithful followers, “national character” was the essence of any successful polity, necessitating a government derived from French traditions and customs. “The theory that seeks to impose the same forms of liberty everywhere,” Persigny contended, “is as contrary to history as it is to reason.”57
From its origins, therefore, the Second Empire was identified with a primordialism distinct from the nation’s revolutionary tradition. Liberty was “susceptible to all forms,” Persigny claimed. It varied with “the social state, history, and thousands of other circumstances of climate, race, and place” that formed a nationality.58 Rather than an English-style parliament, France required a strong central authority. The French state, first created to suit the needs of the absolutist monarchs and subsequently used by the revolutionaries to carry out their agenda of radical reform, had evolved with the political development of the nation. What Persigny styled “the spirit of centralization” was natural to the French nation, for it was the state that had traditionally arbitrated between rowdy factions and defended public authority against the violence of the masses.59 For an étatiste like Persigny, the heavy-handed bureaucracy maintained by the Napoleonic government conformed to this time-honored and native model of governance just as the democratic liberties guaranteed by the regime adhered to the nation’s revolutionary heritage. By “submitting to the nation the principles of a constitution derived at once from the traditions of leadership belonging to his race and his own informed reflections,” Napoleon III had, Persigny boasted, “elevated a monument” to France built upon “the natural foundations found on its soil.” 60
In cultivating a native identity for the government, imperial officials relied heavily upon a discourse of national particularism that associated the state with a certain history, set of traditions, and even ethnic identity. This was not the universal language of the French Revolution speaking, but rather the primordialism familiar to conservative and right-wing ideologues. Bonapartist populism spoke to the nation’s revolutionary nationhood, placing the government on a popular footing. Yet these elements scarcely concealed the government’s more illiberal and authoritarian elements. The highly centralized and interventionist state that, ultimately, constituted the instrument of the Bonapartist civilizing mission found its legitimacy elsewhere in the traditions of royal leadership and state authority that had forged the historical character of the nation. While studies on Bonapartism and the Second Empire have frequently stressed the national tenor of imperial politics, the evident contradictions and paradoxes replete in this nationalist agenda have yet to be fully appreciated. In French political discourse, arguments rooted in long-standing cultural associations and historical experience were liberally blended with a universal and revolutionary nationalist ideology vested in a language of rights, citizenship, and civic participation.61 “To understand what we are it is necessary to know what our fathers were,” Napoleon III asserted.62 This verdict included not only understanding the revolutionary inheritance left by the nation’s forefathers. It encompassed the historical lineage and patrimony extending down to the bedrock of the historical nation.
The Bonapartists certainly employed the idiom of nationalité, but they inscribed it with a dualism, imparting a Janus-faced character to French nationality, which was at once universal and particular.63 These inconsistencies spoke to the acute need for legitimacy, whether to efface the illegal foundations of the regime or justify the actions of an illiberal, modernizing imperial state. Yet if the promotion of nationalité sought to validate the Second Empire, it also conformed to the modernizing impulses of the regime, promising an end to the “savage” conflicts of the past. Nationality was, in the final assessment, the mark of a modern people, a conviction that appeared self-evident as the government turned its attention to the project of nation building in Algeria.
Walking through the streets of Paris in the spring of 1852, a spectator might have encountered a curious sight: Arabs dressed in military uniforms with the Croix de la Légion d’honneur pinned to their open burnoose. In preparation for military festivities scheduled to be held at the École Militaire that May, Louis Napoleon summoned a half dozen Arab military commanders from Algeria to the capital. The prince president’s intentions were not only to reward the native commanders for their service to France in North Africa where they had fought valiantly alongside the Armée d’Afrique. The celebration, staged seven months before the revived Napoleonic Empire, would be presented to the people for approval, clearly possessed value as a tactful piece of Bonaparist propaganda. It permitted Louis Napoleon to demonstrate his support for the nation’s “civilizing mission” in Africa and to warm the public to a Napoleonic restoration. As guests of the state, the commanders and their retinues were free to visit museums, attend the opera, and tour the city, much to the amusement of Parisian onlookers. Over the next two months French newspapers carried regular updates on the comings and goings of the exotic visitors, noting their cosmopolitanism, sociability, and European demeanor that stood in stark contrast to the stereotype of the “barbaric” Arab. “There were numerous women with them who have clearly adopted French habits and values and taken to wearing our style of dress,” Le Presse informed its readers.64
On the day of the festivities, throngs of Parisians gathered to watch as the Algerian commanders received Napoleonic eagles among fluttering tricolors and artillerymen spanning the length of the Champ de Mars. Recounting the festivities, the journalist Henry Chauvin was less impressed with the decorated warriors than with the young men in their retinues donning western garb and speaking French. “These others belong to the young generation of natives who are familiar with our institutions and laws and who have witnessed their racial antipathies and religious prejudices dwindle due to contact with us,” Chauvin admired. “They have only known fidelity to us and one can only attribute their influence and example to the progress that we have imprinted on the Arab population.” 65
Chauvin’s adulation for France’s “civilizing” initiative was representative of the national and colonial mentality growing up in the country. Since the Revolution, French engagements with religious and ethnic minorities had been inconsistent. The revolutionaries insisted that “foreign” communities living within the country must be subject to the civil code, thereby precluding minority groups from forming a “nation within a nation,” as Napoleon would later brand French Jews. Despite certain efforts to dissolve ethnoreligious subgroups and integrate their members into the nation as individual citizens, the First Empire in fact tolerated ethnic minorities, establishing state institutions that worked with different ethnic groups and retained particular religious and customary laws in civil affairs. The consistoires israélites created in 1808 to liaise with Jewish notables and rabbis were matched by similar attempts to coordinate relations with Arab, Italian, and Polish refugee communities arriving in France during the early nineteenth century. This “cosmopolitan” polity in which the state acted as an arbitrator between various ethnic communities was continued under the Bourbon Restoration and would not be seriously challenged until the early 1830s as growing alarm over “foreigners” in the country and the Algerian conquest prompted a more xenophobic nationalism.66 The nationalist resurgence of the late 1840s reanimated traditional republican demands for assimilation and national uniformity, emboldening colonialists to call for the creation of L’Algérie Française and the assimilation of North Africa’s “barbaric” Oriental races.
Seeking to bolster popular support for his government, Louis Napoleon catered to these aspirations in the spring of 1852 by presenting the public with a spectacle assuring his commitment to assimilating and civilizing France’s North African subjects. Yet over the next decade, the Second Empire’s colonial aspirations would undergo a considerable transformation and, in many ways, revert back to the old “cosmopolitanism” of the First Empire. Foreign policy objectives in Italy and Eastern Europe compelled support for national liberation movements in these regions, publicly committing the emperor to the principle of national self-determination. Moreover, the nativism touted by the government proved difficult to square with demands for colonial assimilation. If the political institutions and practices of the Second Empire were deemed legitimate by virtue of their supposed Gallic character and profound connection to the French people and soil, how was the government to consider the North African borderlands inhabited by a sizable Muslim population? Overt assimilation fit neither with the government’s interpretation of nationalité nor with the emperor’s support for the “sacred cause” of national liberation, and by the early 1860s Napoleon III had begun to sing a different tune, replacing the language of assimilation with that of “regenerating” a fallen and moribund Arab nationality. “When France placed its foot on African soil thirty-five years ago,” he declared during an official visit to Algiers in 1865, “it did not come to destroy the nationality of a people but, on the contrary, to lift this people from an old oppression.” 67
As the government’s politique de nationalité reached a crescendo during the 1860s, the value of Algeria was difficult to ignore. Support for Arab nationality certainly reinforced the Second Empire’s image as a champion of national liberation; yet it also served to validate the brand of nationalism that imperial ideologues like Persigny claimed was integral to the government. The confluence of these two ideological positions revealed an increasing penchant to represent the modernizing impulses of colonialism as a trans-Mediterranean program of national revival and nation-building. “France, which especially sympathizes with the idea of nationality,” the emperor stated when clarifying his position on the Algerian question, “cannot justify to the world the dependence in which it is obligated to hold the Arab people if it does not impart the benefits of civilization and lead them toward a better existence.” 68
From the start, the North African campaign had been marked by shameful acts of looting and vandalism. Muslim cultural artifacts, monuments, and architectural relics were systematically removed during the first wave of the conquest, and the July Monarchy hardly found it in questionable taste to display them like trophies in the galleries of the Louvre.69 Just as little consideration was shown to the native inhabitants as military personnel occupied mosques and Muslim cultural centers and rapidly converted them into hospitals or garrisons for military use. As late as the 1860s, certain sections of Algiers continued to resemble a French barrack. The novelist Alphonse Daudet found the city filled with “military men, more military men, and always military men but not a Turk in sight.”70 Charles Theirry-Mieg was astounded to find the palace of the Algerian dey being used as a French garrison. The colorful wall murals had been covered by whitewash, he complained, and the grand terrace now sported an office for the sale of tobacco.71 Native inhabitants who had fled the invading French forces returned to find their homes occupied by European residents and their farms sold off to land speculators. Possessing few means of redressing their grievances, North African proprietors had little choice but to sell their land and buildings to foreign buyers at a fraction of their actual value.72
In addition to military appropriations, mosques were also allocated to Christian missions or transformed into churches to accommodate the arriving European settlers. The majority of established religions outside of Islam lacked sufficient buildings in which to worship and in certain cases public offices were temporarily offered as spaces to hold services on the Sabbath. Typically parsimonious when it came to doling out funds for the construction of new churches in the colony, the government found it more practical and economic to relocate religious groups to existing mosques.73 In any given Algerian city, newly minted Christian iconography could be found adorning the minarets and walls of mosques while chiming bells rather than the Islamic adhān summoned the faithful to worship. In 1841, the Abbé Bargès, a French Catholic inspired by dreams of re-Christianizing Africa, extolled the opening of the Cathedral of Algiers, remarking, “a cross sits at the summit seeming to triumph over the thousand crescents that surround it on all sides.”74
Whether due to the needs of security or the demands of confessional groups, Muslim centers of worship were significantly affected by the arrival of the French.75 With mosques closed indefinitely, transformed into churches or converted for military use, Islamic educational institutions and bureaucratic channels did not remain immune to the effects of war and conquest. A report delivered before the Chamber of Deputies in May 1847 warned of the disastrous consequences that would result if the current policy was continued. “Around us the lights have been extinguished, the recruitment of men of religion and law has ceased. That is to say, we have rendered Muslim society much more miserable, more disorganized, more ignorant, and more barbaric than it was before contact with us.”76 More than two decades later, some critics found little improvement in the situation. In a speech given before the Oranais general council in 1869, the commander of the province, General Édouard-Jean-Étienne Deligny, reminded that Algerian Muslims continued to experience acute social dislocations. “As a new civilization is imposed on them and their social order is undermined, [the natives] find their ideas cast into disorder and their material interests attacked.”77
If war and military occupation severely disrupted Algeria’s Muslim communities, the influences of the newly arriving colonists on the natives appeared just as devastating. Although colonial ideologues commonly flaunted the image of the virtuous and hardworking colon as the agent of European civilization in Africa, the realities of Algerian life usually paled in comparison with the ideal. Colonial settlements possessed all the vices that European society had to offer. “The village is a small city and has all the faults of one,” the polemicist Clément Duvernois complained in 1858. “Despite their small size, one can find not one, but three, four, and five cabarets.”78 In European settlements, prostitution, drunken carousing, and gambling made up familiar aspects of colonial life, and the pernicious influence of these European imports on the natives was plain for all to see. Encountering a Berber outside of Jemmapes, Thierry-Mieg was appalled by his brazenness and overtly European demeanor. “He was the type of indigène that we have civilized, possessing all our vices without our qualities,” he remarked sardonically. “He spoke with ease about the cabaret where he went to get drunk or play billiards and cards with the Europeans.”79 Rather than spreading civilization, colonists appeared more adept at disseminating bad habits and moral debauchery among Muslims. The influential publicist Frédéric Lacroix was not being facetious when he deemed such depraved colonists “professeurs d’absinthe.” 80 The traditional sobriety and piety that many French observers associated with Islam appeared to be under siege as European tastes and forms of entertainment proliferated throughout Algerian towns and cities. “It is a very distressing sight,” Ernest Feydeau remarked while watching Arabs sitting at French cafés in Algiers, “to see them publicly imbibing glasses of absinthe and aping the manners of their vanquishers under the pretext of civilization.” 81
While the unscrupulous seizure and sale of native property and flagrant disregard for indigenous residents in the major cities of the Tell raised questions as to whether or not France was indeed exercising a supposed “civilizing” influence on Algeria, the influx of European colonists posed a particular concern for the military command. Excepting the brief interlude of the Second Republic, Algeria remained under the war ministry and the Armée d’Afrique that assumed responsibility for the overall governance of the colony and administration of the native populations. Commanders understood that land-hungry settlers had the potential to generate conflicts with native communities as colonists spread further into the interior and attempted to establish themselves in tribal areas. Having pacified the native resistance after nearly thirty years of combat, military officials cautioned that unbridled European settlement might reignite ethnic tensions in the predominantly Arab and tribal territories of the south. To obviate this threat, the military placed restrictions on the areas open to colonization, relegating the growing colon population to the coastal zones north of the Tell Atlas Mountains. The boundary lines distinguishing the nominally Arab territories from the northern civilian provinces of the settlers established a framework for the dual administration of the two colonial populations. In the Tell, a government of civil servants attended to the European colonists while in the Arab territories the military exercised virtually unchecked authority over the indigenous populations.82
The institutionalized segregation enforced by the military remained the lynchpin of France’s Algerian policy throughout the nineteenth century. This strategy was recommended by an array of military officials and civilian observers, among them Prosper Enfantin who in his lengthy tome on Algerian colonization noted the utility of cordoning off the bulk of native inhabitants.83 “The first condition, the absolute condition of organizing the Muslim natives is to separate them from us.” 84 A conquered people could not be expected to adopt the social conventions and institutions of a foreign power immediately. Old customs and traditions would have to be modified over time and the vanquished populations slowly integrated into the new society created by the French.85 Algeria was composed of “two distinct societies” and it was essential to recognize that the “diversity of races and nations [constituted] different needs,” the former governor general, Viala Charon, urged.86 Attempting to implement a uniform policy capable of accommodating both the Europeans and natives was, officials argued, imprudent. “It is necessary to lead [the Arabs] successively and progressively in receiving our civilization,” the government spokesman on Algeria Baron Frédéric David explained in 1861. “Yet it is a chimerical idea to believe that today policies could be extended outside the civil territories, treating the Arabs . . . as one treats a European population.” 87 This outlook was informed by practical concerns over control and authority, as well. Subduing native resistance during the first two decades of the French invasion had required upward of 100,000 troops, and directly subjecting Algerian natives to French rule threatened once again to stoke the flames of revolt.
The concept of a native administration was by no means novel and in fact looked back to Napoleon I’s abortive Egyptian campaign of the late eighteenth century. Occupying the Nile Valley in an effort to strike a blow against British commercial interests in the Near East, Napoleon had overthrown the Mamluk sultanate in 1798, leaving him in possession of a diverse and, by French standards, “uncivilized” Oriental population resistant to foreign rule. The French opted for a policy of indirect rule over the local communities, turning to sheikhs, Coptic elites, and Islamic ulemas in an effort to stabilize the country. Presenting himself as a liberator, Napoleon pledged to “regenerate” the Egyptians and transform them into a modern and enlightened people. Yet attempts to rally the Arabs and Copts against their Mamluk overlords proved futile, and by 1800 Napoleon’s army was being driven out of the region by local resistance movements. In spite of the obvious failure that loomed over the brief Napoleonic occupation, the Egyptian campaign nevertheless prefigured the ideology and practice of nineteenth-century French colonialism, outlining both a method and moral justification for a new brand of “enlightened” imperialism.88
These lessons were taken to heart by the Armée d’Afrique as it overtook Algeria, perpetuating a veritable Napoleonic tradition. Although notorious for violent policies against Muslim combatants on the battlefield, Thomas Robert Bugeaud, governor general of Algeria from 1840 to 1846, experimented with the idea of subduing resistance through cooperative efforts. “Select the most influential [natives] to govern in our name,” he strategized, but “don’t give them enough power to become dangerous.” 89 To accomplish this aim, Bugeaud created the Arab Offices (Bureaux Arabes), a special division within the military administration to serve as a liaison between Muslim notables and the French administration. Through the Arab Offices, the military implemented a form of indirect rule based on the Egyptian model, effectively monitoring the actions of tribal leaders, supervising Muslim judicial and religious institutions and enforcing taxation.90 Sheikhs and local notables were permitted to retain some of their traditional autonomy in their communities while the qadi—Muslim judges practicing Sharia and customary law—continued to preside over civil courts within their respective jurisdictions. By exercising a measure of indirect control at the local level, the Arab Offices successfully used native authority to curb outright resistance and fortify the tenuous présence française in North Africa.91
For idealistic officials, the Arab Offices represented more than a tactical provision; they were vehicles for the diffusion of French modernization. Officers and military spokesmen readily encouraged this impression and, following the end of major combat operations in the 1850s, increasingly presented the “civilizing” work performed by the Arab Offices as a rationale for prolonging military rule in the colony. Bureaux officers took credit for introducing Muslims to the practices and procedures of state administration and eroding the feudal Arab tribalism that estranged native communities from modern society. “Absolutist sheikhs” were being transformed into fonctionnaires and learning to serve the interests of the French regime.92 The Arab Offices were a vital link between the natives and Europeans, reminded the former bureau commander Ferdinand Hugonnet in 1858. They demonstrated France’s commitment to “pushing the indigène race along the path of progress and civilization” by providing justice, maintaining order, and encouraging local participation.93 Three years later, Ismael Urbain, a military translator who would soon became one of Napoleon III’s most influential policy advisers on Algeria, reiterated the mission of the army in North Africa and its significance for the future: “In the zones where the Muslims are the majority and where our civilization has not yet planted deep roots, it is the army that must apply French institutions in the most effective measure and prepare the natives for their entrance into the civilian territories.”94
It was fitting that an homme de couleur from French Guiana would present himself as a tenacious defender of native interests in Algeria. Born in Cayenne in 1812 from the union of a colon planter and creole mother, Ismael Urbain was no stranger to the ambivalence and exclusion that characterized European colonial societies in the nineteenth century. Declared illegitimate by consequence of the laws prohibiting interracial marriage in Guiana, Urbain’s status as a “man of color” estranged him from both white society and the native community in the colony. Divided between two worlds by dint of his mixed blood, he was denied a place in either. “Men of color are not white,” he conceded in a youthful poem. “They are not black. They are not slaves nor are they masters.”95 The isolation and displacement experienced early in life would exercise a profound influence on his more mature thinking, nurturing a profound sympathy for the alienation that colonial subjecthood imposed.
As an homme de couleur educated in France, Urbain saw himself as a product of two divergent and even oppositional worlds characterized in the binary terms of Occident and Orient familiar to the nineteenth century. Owing to his mixed blood and composite identity, he expressed a personal obligation to serve as a mediator between East and West and work toward reconciling these two civilizations historically locked in conflict. This aspiration encouraged him to seek employment in the Armée d’Afrique as a translator and plunge into “the immense ocean of Oriental life” accessible in North Africa.96 It equally prompted his conversion to Islam. “I thought that in giving to the Muslims such a great testimony of sympathy for their beliefs I would dispose them to welcome me with more confidence, to listen to me, and to reduce their aversion to the ideas of the Occident.” Urbain never fully renounced his Christian beliefs in spite of his conversion and consciously appropriated a polytheistic identity that he reconciled in his association as a Frenchman. “I am at once Christian and Muslim because I am French, and this title is for me, at this moment, the most elevated religious and civilized qualification.”97 Both Occidental and Oriental, black and white, Christian and Muslim, Urbain stood as a living testament to French universalism and its capacity to transcend reductive religious and racial identifications. Through artful self-fashioning, he crafted an identity that was cosmopolitan, pluralistic, and civilized: an idea of Frenchness incarnate, as Urbain understood it.
This conviction in France’s universal attributes, much like his ambitious goal of uniting East and West, were products of the Saint-Simonian education Urbain had received while living in Paris during the early 1830s. Urbain became introduced to the cult through pamphlets lent to him by a friend. “Within the first hour [of reading them],” he later claimed, “I became a fervent apostle of the Saint-Simonian religion.”98 The camaraderie and fraternity cultivated among the Saint-Simonians at Ménilmontant was a welcome change for a man accustomed to living at the margins of society, and the Saint-Simonian vision of a new world order driven by industrial and scientific progress—the “one common interest of all men,” as the great master Saint-Simon had proclaimed—appealed to a generation hungry for change.99 Above all, Urbain was intrigued by the movement’s comprehensive scope, its religious-like veneration of progress, and its increasing insistence that the Orient was to play a crucial role in the coming transformation of human society. In 1833, he accompanied leading Saint-Simonians on an expedition to Egypt with the intention of assisting the progressive-minded khedive Muhammad Ali in his modernizing reforms.100 While the khedive regard this unsolicited foreign aid with suspicion and the expedition ultimately came to nothing, the Egyptian venture did little to dispel the cult’s messianic ideology or its zealous dedication to advancing their cause beyond Europe. “What is essential for France to undertake without delay,” Urbain’s mentor and friend Émile Barrault urged in 1835, “is a great deployment of industrial activity abroad.”101
That Barrault considered this reconfiguration of the global economy an explicitly French enterprise was quite telling. Enfantin and his acolytes may have sermonized on the universal applications of industry and humanity’s collective destiny, but they never considered this transformative project anything less than a national mission. Embracing the spirit of the Enlightenment and inspired by a messianic impulse to spread universal principles of liberty and fraternity, France possessed the necessary cultural capital and humanitarian values to direct man’s progressive evolution and suffuse it with a unity of purpose. “Today,” Enfantin avowed in 1840, “the French prophecy is universal. It is for the Orient as much as for the Occident, for the Muhammadan as for the Christian. It is association, the affamilation of people.”102 As Enfantin indicated, the new world on the horizon was, ineluctably, to be a world remade in accordance with the values and ideals of the French nation.
The Saint-Simonian conception of humanity was, by all standards, abstract, partial to sociological generalizations, and often dismissive of cultural difference. Yet quite paradoxically, these universal pretensions coincided with a pronounced appreciation for cultural relativism and disdain for Eurocentric narcissism.103 In light of the unique features and cultural particularities Oriental societies possessed, Enfantin warned that France could not simply promulgate its beliefs and systems like a pedantic educator. There existed, he assured, “a future proper to the Orient” that could not be made in Europe’s image.104 “The Orient is not in a state of tabula rasa or total disintegration,” Barrault concurred. “If the Orient wants to draw inspiration from the genius of the Occident today it does so not to be a copy, an imitator, a parody, or an eternal student. It does it in order to add to its own nature and manifest itself with its originality.”105 Much like the antinomies informing prevailing conceptions of nationality in France, Saint-Simonianism was premised on a set of contradictory principles that defined man and society in both universal and particular terms. At its core, it advocated a novel type of imperialism aimed at spreading European values and forms of social organization to “primitive” societies while simultaneously claiming to remain sensitive to their distinctive cultural and historical characteristics.
Despite claims to French technological and cultural superiority, Enfantin nevertheless maintained that France could not assume that it had “everything to teach and nothing to learn.”106 The implacable forces of global commerce, military expansion, and cultural exchange were sowing the seeds for a dynamic world civilization built upon the ruins of the old, effete social order currently in a state of disintegration. “The civilization of the Occident, today mixing with the effervescent and disorderly civilization of the Orient, is destined to enliven it and be enlivened in turn,” Barrault prophesized. “From this mixing will come a rejuvenated civilization no longer oriental or occidental but rather human.”107 Enfantin welcomed the oriental influences that would no doubt spring from France’s North African venture, believing that the French would renounce the materialism and selfish individualism besetting modern Europe and adopt the communal ethics and spirituality prevalent in the East.108 Was it too absurd to imagine “a France a little Bedouin, a little rustic . . . or perhaps a little pasha,” he asked while speculating on the contours of a world revitalized through cultural intercourse, mutual interests, and collective harmony?109
As he acquired greater influence in the Algerian administration over the 1840s and 1850s, Urbain drew upon the ideas and inherent contradictions of Saint-Simonianism in formulating a new North African policy committed at once to France’s “civilizing” enterprise and the equitable treatment of Maghrebi natives. He rejected the plan of colonization and cultural assimilation favored by staunch imperialists, seeing it as both impractical and contrary to French interests. “We preoccupy ourselves too exclusively with introducing a European population in Algeria,” he wrote in 1842. “Yet pushing the natives into the desert will only serve to inflame the hatred and sentiments of vengeance that, in the heart of a vanquished people, are sometimes muted but never entirely extinguished.”110 Not only did unbridled Gallicization hold the prospect of inciting native resistance; the very idea of overt assimilation ran counter to Urbain’s understanding of France. Stalwart nationalists may assert that a French Algeria implied giving it the same institutions and cultural identity as the continent, but for Urbain, this unity promised nothing more than a “general uniformity.”111 The France that Urbain identified with could not be distilled so easily into reductive understandings of culture and identity. His France was a rich and diverse mosaic of customs, languages, and people united by common values. “Can we still not distinguish the diversity of its origins in the different provinces despite the fact that France is one of the most homogeneous nations in Europe today?”112 France embodied a natural and organic diversity, according to Urbain—that classic sentiment of “variété dans l’unité” appreciated by postrevolutionary thinkers. What set his views apart from the mainstream of French nationalism was, however, a willingness, at least in theory, to extend this celebration of diversity to non-European peoples.
This outlook formed the kernel of an alternative vision of Algeria that would find support among a loose-knit group of former Saint-Simonians entrenched in the military bureaucracy and publishing industry. Touting his program as a native policy (politique indigène) opposed to national chauvinism and assimilation, Urbain attacked the strategy of settler colonialism, insisting it was naive to believe that France could “suddenly change the habits, customs, and laws of a population.”113 A more effective course of action was to abandon compulsory assimilation and chart a course for Algerian Muslims “in line with their normal development, linking their past, present, and future.”114 “For each individual as for each group there is a point of departure and a particular aim,” Urbain contended. It was vital “to consult the traditions and memories of each and all” in formulating social and political policies.115 Much as Bonapartist ideologues in France avowed, government, if it was to be considered legitimate, must be indigenous and accord with the historical development and customs of the people it represented. To proceed otherwise was not only to invite disaster; it would mean flouting the sacred principle of nationalité central to France’s revolutionary heritage.
Urbain’s nativism framed the Algerian question as one of national rights and oppression, and in doing so invited reflection on what France’s “civilizing” initiative in North Africa actually implied. Frédéric Lacroix, a well-connected Parisian journalist supportive of Urbain, ridiculed the state of affairs in Algeria, insisting that in yielding to the desires of a small minority of settlers and nationalists France had sacrificed its claim to “moral conquest.” Recounting examples of the abuse and exploitation settlers meted out on Algerian natives, Lacroix did not hesitate to draw a comparison to the demoralizing slave regimes of the West Indies. “France believes that by emancipating its slaves it destroyed racial antipathies and that there are no longer either serfs or pariahs within its limits,” the fiery polemicists railed. “This is an error. Pariahs and serfs may no longer be found in the distant colonies but they are at the door of the metropole two days from Marseille. . . . The prejudices that once separated whites from the black race in the Antilles are today projected onto the Arabs in Africa in all its violence and blindness.”116 France, passionately outspoken for the cause of oppressed nationalities abroad, nonetheless appeared willing to countenance the suppression of an Arab minority on its very soil, making it no better than the absolutist Habsburgs or Russian tsars. It was, Lacroix concluded, a matter of conscience and principle to support the cause of Arab nationality in Algeria, to declare without reservation: “Algeria will never become a French Poland!”117
Emphasizing and, at times, even exaggerating the racial antipathies that threatened to violently divide Algerian society, Nativists painted a dismal portrait of the Maghrebi Arabs as an oppressed nationality suffering under the yoke of a foreign power. This assertion, hardly shared by all, armed officials with a convincing rationale for limiting civilian governance and maintaining the Armée d’Afrique’s presence in North Africa. Although major combat operations had ceased and native resistance was temporarily suppressed, the military administration was now obliged to defend the Arab population from the European settlers. “I believe that the Arabs need to be protected and cannot be delivered to the designs of the colonists,” argued Baron Jérôme David when discussing the role of the military in the colony.118 Unlike the colonists, the military possessed an intimate knowledge of Arab society acquired through direct experience and the Arab Offices’ regular interaction with local communities. Few Frenchmen, Ferdinand Hugonnet argued, “had lived the Arab life of the tribes . . . [and] showed themselves to be sympathetic to the natives or desirous of studying their needs and aptitudes in a consistent manner. In a word, very few have sufficiently put on the Arab burnoose to observe all the movements of heart and spirit that interest these populations.”119 The centrality of the Arab world to the authority and ideology of the Armée d’Afrique encouraged various military officials and Bureaux officers to lend their support to Urbain’s native policy and the cause of Arab nationality. As Charles Nicolas Lacretelle, a general stationed in the northwestern district of Sidi Bel Abbès, opined in 1868: “France does not conquer a people to precipitate their ruin but rather to improve their lot and accelerate their progressive march.”120 This task could only be achieved, the argument ran, under the military’s benevolent supervision.
The premise of Algerian nativism rested upon the claim that Maghrebi Arabs had in fact conserved the distinctive traits of their nationality despite centuries of foreign rule and oppression. In this context, Urbain and his allies were proposing to revitalize a defunct Muslim society and invest the “old Orient” with a new life that accorded with the organic and natural elements of the Arab people. Looking back to the medieval Caliphate, Lacretelle believed that the Muslims of North Africa could, with the aid of France, once again reclaim this glorious heritage and enter upon the path of progress first laid out by their ancestors. “The blood that flows in the veins of our Algerians is the same as the Arabs during the first age of Islam,” he affirmed, “[and] what their forefathers were, the Arabs of our day can and must become again.”121 Urbain concurred: “Among the Arab race there are all the necessary elements to constitute a nation, not by the models of European nations, but an Oriental and Muslim nation that will take from our civilization only what its faith, mores, and character permit it to assimilate.”122
Allusions to Arab nationality and “regenerating” a fallen people pervaded Nativist rhetoric, invoking both the old Napoleonic imperial ideology and the emancipatory nationalism prevalent in the period. Nativists saw themselves engaged in a project to create both a patrie for France’s Arab subjects and a Muslim pays bound to the nation. Yet the prescribed formula of civilizing through nationalizing central to Urbain’s plan often undercut the supposed cultural relativism upon which it rested. The notion of “regenerating” Arab nationality was always more ideological fiction than reality. “Arab” constituted a generic term applied by French administrators to a diverse and heterogeneous North African population and, consequently, carried little currency among native groups who neither spoke Arabic nor identified with an Arab ethnicity.123 In deeming Algeria an “Arab” territory, French officials were, in actuality, working to create the very Arab nationality that their cultural and political policies claimed to represent and protect, in the process authorizing the wholesale Arabization of various non-Arab groups such as the Turks and Berbers. In 1861, Baron David illuminated the contradictions at the heart of the nativist proposal when he openly applauded the military’s intention of “creating what had not previously existed, the Arab nationality that has begun to appear.”124 Although Urbain candidly admitted that concepts of nationhood and nationality were European imports, stating that “nationality, as it is known to Europe, still remains only a latent idea among these populations divided into tribes attached to diverse and hostile origins,” he nevertheless continued to believe that national identification, when pursued with consideration for the “normal development” of a people, signified a universal stage in humanity’s social evolution.125
“The idea of progress,” Urbain wrote in 1861, “implies multiplicity but at the same time unity in the human destiny.”126 This sentiment both constituted the crux of Urbain’s native policy and, ironically, undermined its very foundation. Endeavoring to inculcate an Arab national consciousness among the Algerian indigènes and revive a decadent Oriental civilization, Nativists relied upon a conception of Arab modernity defined in exceedingly Eurocentric terms, imposing revolutionary constructs like nationality and the nation-state on a society estranged from Europe’s revolutionary experience. Regenerating Arab nationality amounted to a policy of “assimilative regeneration” that at once recognized the Arabs as a culturally distinct group while intending to “civilize” them in accordance with European norms.127 Urbain, like many of his contemporaries, equated Frenchness with civilization itself. He never doubted the universality that French values purportedly embodied or their potential for transcending the varieties of human diversity and experience. He also never doubted his cultural relativism either, perennially affirming the notion of “harmonic multiplicity” that French nationality was best suited to realize.128
Blending cultural nationalism with universalized notions of civilization and progress, Nativists saw little conflict in cultivating indigenous and particular forms of national identification while integrating them into an expansive and exceedingly cosmopolitan idea of Frenchness. Fostering a common set of “ideas and needs” among the North Africans, as Lacroix argued, offered a just basis for the “moral conquest” of Algeria. “The development of human reason” was “perfectly compatible with Muslim piety,” he assured, leaving little doubt that the Algerians could adopt the civilized qualities of the French without disowning their own culture and heritage.129 “We do not seek a religious conversion that offends conscience and provokes social convulsions,” Urbain declared. “We only ask that the natives rally to our civilization, which will surround them and entice them with numerous benefits.”130 Blind to the contradictions contained within a policy at once seeking to preserve and revolutionize Muslim society, Nativists prided themselves on resolving the evident conflict between France’s expansionist ambitions and its revolutionary political culture, synthesizing them in the idea of a Franco-Arab Algerian society.
In theory, the politique indigène proposed to reconcile the divergent civilizations of the Occident and Orient though the progressive association of Algeria’s European and Arab inhabitants. With time and proper guidance, an ethnically diverse population would be molded into a single community that was neither European nor Arab but French. French universalism would receive its true baptism in Algeria as ideals of tolerance and equality united French, Europeans, and Muslims into a single people.131 Reflecting on this ambitious plan in 1864, General Yusuf Vantini anticipated the day when Algeria would see “the last remains of racial antagonism disappear.” A Muslim of Italian origin who participated in quelling native resistance during the conquest, Yusuf had witnessed firsthand the carnage and ethnic violence that had destabilized Maghrebi society following the collapse of the Ottoman dey. Now, thirty years later, he was willing to believe that the ethnic warfare and tribalism of the past was finished and that from the “racial ensemble” of a reconstituted Algerian society would come “the most useful and durable progress.”132
The growing recognition of Urbain’s native policy was, moreover, not lost on the government in Paris, especially as Napoleon III himself began reflecting critically on France’s North African quandary. Fruitless Algerian policies and unremitting disputes between colonists and the military had provided a source of endless frustration for French governments since the conquest. “Poor Algeria!” exclaimed the emperor. “We have attempted a great many systems, none of them successful.”133 Seeking a tenable administrative solution capable of mollifying the grievances of Algerian colonists on one hand and the military regime on the other, Napoleon III began drawing counsel from Nativist proponents such as Baron David and Lacroix, both of whom subsequently introduced him to the works of Urbain. Nativist pamphlets detailing the racial tensions and deplorable conditions of Algerian Arabs appealed to the emperor’s sympathies for oppressed nationalities while the politique indigène accorded with the spirit and ideology of Bonapartist nationalité. Within Urbain’s ideas, Napoleon III saw a potentially bold policy consistent with his sense of Napoleonic grandeur. Transforming the politique indigène into an official ideology, Napoleon III would present himself as the savior of Arab nationality, the benefactor of the oppressed, and the protector of Algerian Islam.134
Prior to the emperor’s endorsement, the Nativist platform had been confined to a small group of military officials, politicians, and journalists concerned with the issue of Algerian reform. In early 1863, however, the situation shifted dramatically. Following months of private deliberations and cabinet meetings in Paris, Napoleon III galvanized military officials and the settler community in February with a formal declaration outlining a new course of action. Addressing a public letter written in French and Arabic to the acting governorgeneral Aimable Jean Jacques Pélissier, Napoleon III declared that Algeria was not “a colony strictly speaking, but rather an Arab Kingdom (Royaume Arabe).” “The natives, like the colonists, have an equal right to my protection and I am the Emperor of the Arabs just as I am the Emperor of the French.” It was imperative, Napoleon III urged, “to convince the Arabs that we have not come to Algeria to oppress and steal from them, but rather to deliver the benefits of civilization.” “The first condition of a civilized society,” he continued, was “the respect for the right of each,” entailing that native property rights had to be guaranteed by the state and respect for their religious beliefs strictly upheld.135 In the coming months, Algerian natives would be promised access to positions within the colonial administration, voting rights in local elections, and freedom of religious worship. While Algeria may still have been a land “forever French,” as King Louis Philippe once declared, it was not, according to the emperor, to be a land solely dominated by the aspirations and interests of a small French minority.
Embarking for Algeria in May 1865, Napoleon III drove home the new course favored by his government, leaving little doubt as to the incentives behind his Arab Kingdom policy. Delivering a speech to apprehensive colonists in Algiers, he implored them to have “faith in the future.” “Attach yourself to the earth that you cultivate like a new patrie and treat the Arabs in the places where you live like compatriots.”136 For colonists, however, this injunction was difficult to fathom. Having maintained customary and traditional legal codes in Algeria for both ideological and practical reasons, the imperial government continued to uphold natives’ rights to practice Sharia and Hebraic law in civil affairs. While this conformed to the state’s commitment to religious tolerance and respect for indigenous and “natural” institutions, it entailed maintaining separate and distinct legal systems for the Europeans and Algerian natives, respectively.137 Yet French nationality, as prescribed by the Napoleonic Code, rested upon the premise of equality before the law, reflecting the revolutionary assertion that a French national was one subject to the unitary laws that governed the nation. If the natives remained subject to a different legal system, could Europeans be expected to think of them as compatriots? Moreover, if they were considered French nationals, did this entitle them to citizenship and political rights?
Urbain fully acknowledged that the Islamic faith posed an obstacle to Muslim enfranchisement. “Because the natives will not allow a radical separation between the spiritual and temporal, because their culture and religious dogmas are in contradiction with our codes,” he conceded, “they should not be invested with the title of French citizens.”138 France could hardly compel Muslims to repudiate their faith and espouse a secularism alien to their traditions, Urbain reasoned; yet it could not invalidate the basic principles upon which its society was founded either. Under the circumstances, citizenship would have to be a personal choice for Algerians rather than a universal condition. Only once the “civilizing” influences disseminated by France had taken root and the Qur’an became a purely religious book and not a text for civil legislation could Muslims be considered for citizenship.139 For Urbain, however, the question of citizenship was, ultimately, secondary. The primary question was how to make the natives French, and this had more to do with nurturing shared interests among the two populations of the colony and attaching them to a new patrie than it did with political rights. The objective behind the Arab Kingdom was, in Napoleon III’s view, to establish “perfect equality between the natives and Europeans.”140 To this end, Muslims were to be granted access to positions in the civil bureaucracy and made eligible for state benefits, privileges reserved exclusively for French nationals in principle. Native integration—the cornerstone of Urbain’s envisaged Franco-Arab society—hinged, therefore, on the nationality question, which, according to Urbain, was independent from questions of political rights.141
These assertions, like the Arab Kingdom itself, were highly controversial. While protest from the settler community and colonial lobbies was to be expected, opposition from within the military was becoming more vocal, especially at the level of the high command. The recently appointed governor-general, Patrice de MacMahon, did not conceal his doubts regarding the state’s encouragement of Arab nationalism, a policy that was, in his view, as counterproductive as it was dangerous.142 Tensions only escalated that June when Napoleon III drafted a memo to MacMahon and confirmed his personal support for Urbain’s program with the succinct pronouncement: “The Arabs are French since Algeria is a French territory.”143 Following a series of debates in the spring of 1865, a formal senatorial commission was called to address the thorny issue. On 14 July—Bastille Day—the senate ruled in favor of conferring French nationality on Algerian Jews and Muslims by virtue of jus soli. This blanket naturalization marked a clear victory for Urbain and his hope of attaining “the fusion of the two races in civil equality, freedom of religion . . . [and] tolerance for mores while bringing [the natives] more into line with our civilization.”144 In more specific terms, the resolution officially endorsed his policy of native integration by determining formal procedures through which Algerians might acquire French citizenship once they had obtained a sufficient level of civilization. Upon learning of the senate’s verdict, Auguste Vital, a doctor, former Saint-Simonian, and colonial publicist stationed in Constantine, wrote to Urbain and congratulated the efforts of his longtime friend, candidly remarking, “Your ideas have received baptism through their application.”145
Yet if the Arabs were French, the ruling of 1865 confirmed them so only as nationals, not citizens. Algerian naturalisés were not obliged to submit to the French civil code and, therefore, continued to retain their special status under traditional law, upholding the conviction that citizenship must be a personal and individual choice.146 While Muslims were recognized as French nationals sharing in the nation’s “great political unity,” as Urbain claimed, their legal status continued to affirm their attachment to an external community, rendering them nominal Frenchmen bereft of the civil and political liberties accorded to citizens.147 Long-standing and overly generalized assumptions regarding the incompatibility of Islam and secular society came together within a discourse of rights, French law, and national belonging to sanction the creation of an ethnopolitical colonial order.148 Legal categorizations distinguishing between citoyen and indigène revealed the persistence of classical liberal thinking and its logic of exclusion, providing a criterion through which ethnic and racial conceptions of difference were simultaneously effaced and reaffirmed to suit colonial rule.
If 14 July 1789 marked the birth of the French political nation and citizenry, exactly seventy-six years later to the day, French politicians and policymakers declared an end to the Rousseauian revolution. The conception of nationalité enshrined in the civil code was abandoned as legislators acknowledged a distinction between French nationals and French citizens that would possess ominous implications for the future. Unmoored from a political and legal context, nationalité became a distinct concept in its own right, yet one that proved to be exceedingly elastic and labile. Urbain’s hope of realizing a cosmopolitan, tolerant, and multicultural vision of France in North Africa always rested uneasily with his desire for unity and national affiliation. In the end, these two objectives proved irreconcilable and, under the republican state that came to power in the last decades of the nineteenth century, it would be the latter principle that would win out to the detriment of Algeria’s native inhabitants.
Revolution or Evolution? Such was the question that Bonapartist modernity raised. Through a mix of democracy and patriotism, Bonapartists managed to craft a revolutionary identity for themselves, one that flouted the radicalism of extremists and called for a return to the core values of the nation’s revolutionary heritage. Yet despite appeals to past Napoleonic grandeur and the principles of 1789, the Bonapartist movement demonstrated a strong commitment to creating a novel type of society that was in many ways distinct from past models. The senatorial ruling of 1865, inspired in equal measure by revolutionary ideas of equality and currents of postrevolutionary nationalism, indicated the extent to which the intellectual and political milieu of the mid-nineteenth century encouraged a rethinking of France’s revolutionary heritage and offered alternatives to imagining a nominally “modern” France consistent with the realities of postrevolutionary politics and colonialism. Revolutionary in spirit but not necessarily action, the imperial government sought to implement what the minister Adolphe Billaut described as a “pure, honest, and conciliatory revolution, at once prudent and progressive.”149
The twin principles of Nationalité and Unité provided the substance of this conciliatory revolution amounting to a Bonapartist trans-Mediterranean civilizing mission dedicated to forging a modern nation from the debris of fallen regimes, continuous political upheaval, and social collapse. Nationality occupied a central role in the state’s “modernizing” agenda as officials and ideologues outlined a policy of modernizing through nationalizing, applicable to both continent and colony. Pacifying populations, and constructing this envisaged modernity could not, however, be achieved overnight. “Progress is an evolution, not a revolution,” Urbain once remarked, dictating that time was essential to allow the work of progress to mature and bear fruit.150 “Time alone,” Persigny averred in 1858, “can bring about the reconciliation of parties that have for so long divided France.”151 The same could be said of North Africa where colonial officials engaged in the work of reconstituting a society torn asunder by war and lingering enmities. Creating an Algerian society, much like creating a French one, could only come about through sensible policies, modernizing acts, and patience. “Societies do not transform in a few days,” the prime minister Eugène Rouher acknowledged in 1868. “Time, labor, and daily efforts are necessary so that a nation with ossified institutions can gradually be united, fused together, transformed, and absorbed by a new civilization.”152
Yet time was not a luxury the imperial government could afford. With the resurgence of a republican movement and growing opposition in the Corps législatif during the 1860s, the Bonapartists found themselves in a precarious situation. Increasingly pressed to defend their policies in the press and before the national legislature, the government could only implore patience and understanding as its ambitious plans gradually came to fruition. “In a society as shaken as ours by numerous revolutions,” Napoleon III urged during the opening session of the legislative assembly in February 1859, “time alone can fortify convictions, remake characters, and generate political faith.”153 The question remained, however, whether indignant republicans and democratic reformers would give the Bonapartist government the time required to bring its vision of society to completion.