In August 1857, young republicans had cause to celebrate as the results of the Parisian runoff elections were announced and the victory of Les Cinq confirmed. As friends and cohorts gave their felicitations and sent congratulatory notes in the coming days, Jules Favre, one of the five republican candidates set to take a seat in the Corps législatif, was noticeably absent. As the ballots were being counted, Favre surprisingly left the capital for the Algerian city of Oran to plead a case in the local cour d’assises, one of the French law courts set up in the colony to try criminal offenses. The trial in question involved Auguste Doineau, a captain in the Armée d’Afrique and commander of the Arab Office in Tlemcen charged with malfeasance and secretly orchestrating the assassination of the Muslim notable Ben Abdullah. Pleading his case before the Oranais court, Favre used the scandal to condemn the military regime and, by association, the imperial government, insisting that the Affaire Doineau exposed the authoritarian character of the colonial administration and its preference for personal power over justice and liberty.1 “If what occurred in Tlemcen is indicative of all the Arab Offices, then it is necessary to eliminate or profoundly reform them as quickly as possible,” Favre boldly charged.2
The tenor of Favre’s diatribe and the timing of his arrival in Algeria were not insignificant. With the entrance of Les Cinq into the Corps législatif set to give a political voice to republicans, it was essential to find issues capable of building an opposition platform and attracting reform-minded allies. Concerned with the progress of the nation’s civilizing mission being carried out in the colonies, Favre had come to Oran believing that Algeria could provide republicans with a possible forum for promoting their ideas and demonstrating their disapproval of the government. He even confessed that recent events in Algeria and the incessant grievances of colonial settlers held the potential of cementing a “common cause” between metropolitan democrats at home and disaffected Algerian colons across the Mediterranean.3 From the very beginning of the republican resurgence, Favre and a select number of other republicans were capable of recognizing the importance that the Algerian question had for national politics in general. More to the point, Favre’s visit revealed the first indications of a political strategy aimed at integrating colonial concerns into the broader issues of liberty and state reform championed by republican spokesmen on the continent, setting the stage for a possible trans-Mediterranean opposition movement spanning from Paris to Algiers.
This idea was neither idealistic nor necessarily novel, and even perpetuated a long-standing republican tradition. During the First Republic, the Jacobins had extended national citizenship to the Atlantic colonies while in 1848 republicans resurrected the ideal of universal French citizenship with the abolition of slavery throughout the empire and the recognition of the new Algerian provinces as de facto French departments. In both instances, a Bonaparte had undermined the promise of broad inclusion championed by republicans. Despite the vicissitudes of national and colonial policy since the Revolution, the French republics had both been national-imperial regimes committed to the principle—if not the practice—of universal citizenship. The rhetoric of French republicanism remained indebted to an ideological tradition of colonial integration and national unity that republicans of the 1860s would continue in their fight against the Second Empire, a feature often overlooked in accounts of the republican opposition of the period. In more specific terms, the short-lived Second Republic marked the beginning of a national and political discourse focused on Algeria that increasingly became integral to the language and ideology of French republicanism on both sides of the Mediterranean.
In light of the vicious anti-Semitism and racism that became staples of colonial politics in Algeria, colon commitment to republicanism has often been considered questionable. Settler support for the republic, critics claim, was pragmatic rather than ideological, entailing that colonists tolerated republican governance only as far as it upheld the repressive institutions and racial hierarchies that buttressed white European rule.4 Although the racism and xenophobia rife within settler outlooks cannot be denied, the notion that colonial republicanism was merely a metropolitan export stomached by the settler population out of practical concerns is in need of reevaluation. The year 1848 proved instrumental in fostering a culture of republicanism in the colony, one that drew upon both local and metropolitan influences as it developed. Between 1848 and 1851 some twelve thousand French laborers were transferred to North Africa under the Second Republic followed by an additional six thousand to eight thousand transportés, radical workers and republican insurgents exiled by Louis Napoleon after the coup.5 While idealized hopes of transforming political prisoners and urban workers into colonial farmers proved largely elusive, this influx did fuel existing republican sympathies and nurture anti-Bonapartist sentiments among the colonial population. Transportés equally served as an important conduit between metropolitan political circles and settler communities throughout the following decade.6 The raw elements of an Algerian republicanism were already in place as the young republican movement gained traction in France. Writing in 1860, the transporté Wilfrid de Fonvielle asserted that the ambitions of radicals were “devoutly conserved” among the colony’s French population. “They have not grown indifferent to the plight of humanity or to the success of their doctrines because they have abandoned Europe to establish themselves in a less agitated environment,” he claimed, indicating that the republican spirit had by no means been extinguished in North Africa with the downfall of the Second Republic.7
In the early 1850s, Napoleon III had demonstrated a tepid commitment to Algerian assimilation through a policy of colonisation departmental. Intended to attract colonists to the region and infuse Algerian life with a sense of provincial patriotism noticeably absent among colons, these projects authorized the construction of settler communities directly modeled on French towns and cities.8 The institutional framework of 1848 was, moreover, left intact, allowing for a civilian administration monitored by the government in the settler territories. The creation of the colonial ministry under Prince Napoleon in 1858 had sought to empower the existing general councils and prefectures to a greater extent while equally retaining government control over official appointments. Yet in 1860, these reforms were significantly scaled back and the office of the governor general reestablished, subjecting local offices in the civilian provinces to military authority once again. Although the return of the colonial military regime did not signal a complete rupture with the former policies of civilian administration, the governor general did enjoy wide-ranging powers, including the nomination of prefects and representatives sitting on the general councils. This arrangement effectively sidelined colon opinion outside of the small number of colonial notables favored by the regime, granting the military a strong influence over local policies and state spending in the civilian provinces.9
Despite tensions between military and civilian authorities, administrative assimilation had, for the most part, proceeded apace during the 1850s, witnessing the creating of new subprefectures and the expansion of civilian institutions in areas inhabited by European settlers. The announcement of the Arab Kingdom and the promotion of an Arab nationality in the colony, however, officially signaled the cessation of these initiatives. Colon critics rankled by their lack of political rights and the government’s Nativist policies came together under the banner of L’Algérie Française, mounting an opposition campaign that republican elites were well-positioned to use and encourage for their own ends by the 1860s. The commonalities and consensus that developed between republican circles and colonial activists throughout the decade would effectively transform the “Algerian question” into a national one as colons increasingly came to apply the terms of republican modernization to the colony. Under the Second Empire, the politics of modernity brought Algeria into the mainstream of national political life once again, crystallizing an idea of la France transméditerranéenne that would play a significant role in the brand of republican colonialism to come.
In February 1863, reports of protests in the major cities of the Algerian Tell began to trickle in to the office of the governor general from the various prefectorial bureaus. Recording his observations of agitated colonists in the streets of Constantine, the doctor Auguste Vital remarked that “the beautiful days of 1848 returned as people prepared to leave behind them the legal monotony and partake in a fevered and disordered existence.”10 The cause of the disorder concerned the publication of Napoleon III’s letter to General Pélissier on 6 February outlining the government’s intentions of recognizing the colony as an Arab Kingdom. The revolutionary overtones of the situation were not lost on Frédéric Lacroix, who noted with mild sarcasm that Algeria could now claim its own “day of the barricades” ( journée des barricades). For a Nativist like Lacroix, the event hardly possessed the same popular and insurrectionary implications observed by Vital. Where Vital saw the reawakening of Algerian political life, Lacorix saw only a “violent explosion” of settler racism.11
These conflicting interpretations mapped two distinct ideological positions that were becoming central to Algerian politics under the Second Empire. Whereas Nativists desired to integrate North Africa’s Muslim population into a nominally multicultural Franco-Algerian society, colonists demanding cultural and administrative assimilation with the French metropole demanded an end to colonial segregation and a more vigorous colonizing initiative. The declaration of the Royaume Arabe had made the divergent objectives of these two platforms evident. Disgruntled colonists assailed the military for perpetuating Oriental barbarism and officials fired back at their critics with accusations of racism and religious prejudice. “The publication [of the emperor’s letter] and the commentaries that accompanied it generated a profound disquiet among the European population,” General Patrice de MacMahon, the governor-general of Algeria from 1864 to 1870, recalled in his memoirs. “Establishing an Arab Kingdom had a strong impression on them.”12
While the “day of the barricades” that threw the colony into a momentary state of crisis quickly dissipated, the “strong impression” that the emperor’s declaration had on colons did not. Questions regarding the viability and significance of an Arabized French territory would continue to agitate Algerian politics for the next seven years. “In Algeria and France,” the polemicist Auguste Warnier fulminated in 1865, “[there is] a raucous party more Arab than the Arabs that has shown itself disposed to sacrificing everything, even the interests most dear to France, in order to arrive at the creation of a so-called Arab Kingdom.”13 The Nativists were not only sacrificing “the interests of their patrie and civilization” out of a “hatred for European society,” one colon petition accused, but were demanding that France “abdicate its civilizing role.”14 An Arabized—and hence Orientalized—Algeria embodied all the connotations of that old and barbaric world beyond the pale of Europe’s modern horizon. At a time when modernity established a powerful rationale for inclusion and exclusion, the emperor’s announcement that Algeria be considered an Arab Kingdom was a stinging affront to colonist desires for integration with France proper. It summarily cut colons asunder from their coevals across the Mediterranean and erected social and cultural boundaries threatening the very foundation of a French Algeria. “All those devoted to the prosperity of the colony, to the grandeur of France, and to the progress of civilization will understand that the moment has come for us to act together,” the republican transporté Alexandre Lambert urged. “We must seek what will unite us. To act otherwise would make us accomplices to the deplorable doctrines that seek to perpetuate barbarism here.”15
Colonial journalists and activists were quick to present the Algerian situation in stark terms, contrasting the patriotic colon dedicated to progress and civilization with the authoritarian military regime bent on perpetuating Arab barbarism across North Africa. Yet these divisions were always more imagined than real. The image of the colon touted by polemicists tended to obscure the diversity of a settler population consisting of aristocratic landowners, middling entrepreneurs and merchants, small-scale agriculturalists, and various insular immigrant communities.16 Social and national differences provided a major obstacle to cohesion within settler communities, and opinions regarding colonial assimilation and the detrimental influence of the military were hardly shared by all.17 Colon signified a cultural rather than an explicitly social category, one that assumed greater saliency as colonial activists attempted to mobilize support for their vision of an Algérie Française tied culturally and politically to the European continent. In their opposition to Nativists, colon agitators sought to imbue settlers with a collective sense of purpose and furnish the base of a common Algerian identity uniting a settler population consisting of French, Italians, Greeks, Maltese, and Spaniards, groups nominally categorized by the colonial government as “European” for administrative purposes but which, in reality, possessed little formal unity. Appeals to civilization and modernity offered a potent means of dissolving these existing ethnonational differences and imagining a new class of people bound by a shared culture, worldview, and spirit of innovation distinct from the native tribes.
In publicizing this identity, activists aggressively took aim at the putative “civilizing” initiatives of the government’s policies. Encouraging Arab nationality was, Alexandre Lambert insisted, delusional, since the Arabs possessed neither a national identity shaped by deep historical roots nor a shared national consciousness. “To mention an Arab Kingdom is to speak of the thousands of douars and tribes continually fighting, pillaging, stealing, and killing each other without cause,” he scoffed.18 Colon criticism was practically unanimous on this point, noting the lack of solidarity and tribalism rampant among Maghrebi natives.19 “There are no intimate relations and solidarities that constitute a nationalité [among the native tribes],” Jules Duval observed. “The idea of a patrie is unknown to them.”20 Although maintaining that “in the name of humanity” the natives were entitled to property, good administration, and equitable treatment, “in the name of nationality” they had a right to nothing, he insisted.21
If colon opinion leaders criticized the Arab Kingdom as an ethnographic fallacy, they equally questioned its moral premise. Rather than “civilizing” the natives, the military permitted indigenous populations to fester under a feudal regime dominated by religious zealots and tribal sheikhs. According to Andrieux, editor of the Courrier de l’Algérie, the Arab world was marked by “opulence without limits above and the most wretched proletarian misery below.” By preserving the inequalities and traditional social hierarchies of the tribe, the military administration only served to perpetuate these miseries. “You are not the friends of the Arab people,” he charged. “You are the friends of the aristocracy, a feudal order a hundred times more severe than ours ever was that allows a minority to devour the multitude!”22 Opponents argued that efforts to safeguard traditional Arab society constituted an obstacle to developing a modern, liberal Algeria, not to mention a blemish on France’s identity as the bearer of enlightened and progressive values. According to the author and colonial newspaper correspondent Henri Verne, the government’s policies were misguided and left much to be desired from a nation consider the vanguard of liberty and human progress in the world. “Can we hope to be moving along the path of social and political progress when, as partisans of democracy in Europe, we leave tribes under the oppression of powerful leaders and support a completely feudal system?”23
With its tribal mores and “feudal” hierarchies, Arab society was depicted as the antithesis of the progressive spirit and productivity emblematic of Europe. The nomadic lifestyle and collective ownership practiced by Arab tribes amounted to a chronic idleness and “horror of work” that left the earth “sterile in their hands,” portending stagnation and widespread underdevelopment for the entire colony.24 Land was not viewed as a commodity in Maghrebi societies and ownership was commonly understood in terms of conserving family patrimony rather than a source of private wealth.25 Various forms of land tenure stemming from centuries of Ottoman rule remained in place in Algeria, with different groups adhering to distinct practices of proprietorship. Colons typically ignored these complexities, framing their observations in simplified distinctions between a primitive tribal society and the individualism and private ownership constitutive of European selfhood. In 1863, Napoleon III had pushed through measures aimed at dividing communally held lands and transforming Algerians into individual property holders. Just as the French Revolution had broken up provincial and church lands in an attempt to create modern proprietors in France, the sénatus-consulte of 1863 similarly intended to modernize Algerian land tenure by prescribing legal conditions for the sale and exchange of land between natives and settlers. In theory, the ruling was designed to protect native land rights from rapacious speculators and simplify the multiple Ottoman tax systems then in place. In reality, the reforms proved limited in scope and did little to protect native rights.26 Perturbed by the government’s feeble policies, critics persisted to levy allegations of sloth and waste against natives, holding out aggressive economic modernization and capitalist practices as the surest remedy to the feudalism and tribal “communism” ossifying North African society.
Under the military, Algeria was subject to what the editor of the Progrès de l’Algérie, Amand Favré, deemed the “inertia and lethargy sustained by the communist principle.”27 This communism “discouraged individual initiative” and encouraged the indolence and poverty familiar to tribal life.28 The Arab tribe evoked all the connotations of the invidious “spectre rouge” that haunted Europe, and critics adeptly played upon this association, equating support for colonialism with the fight against socialism in France. Jules Favre drove the point home in 1866 when giving an address before the Corps législatif in which he accused Arab society of practicing “the most dangerous and destructive social system contrary to every type of individual activity.” “It is communism,” he charged, “the communism that certain people among us do not want to see implanted on the European continent.”29 In his view, Nativism was fundamentally flawed in its very principles and encouraged the same forms of moral barbarism and proletarian savagery that imperiled European civilization at home. Jules Duval shared a similar opinion. Bonapartist nationality polices promoted under the banner of tolerance and civilization were nothing short of catastrophic, both for the colony and the natives they claimed to protect. As he contended, “the salvation of the Arab race can only be achieved by sacrificing Arab society.”30
Through these criticisms, colons and critics implicitly condemned their Nativist antagonists by drawing parallels between Arab society and the colonial administration. Much like the feudal and aristocratic Arabs, the “regime of the saber” abided by a martial ethos that respected only force and authority. It was hostile to liberty and conserved a petrified social order for personal gain. “After four successive revolutions, seventy-nine years after the abolition of privilege, is there not something abnormal and antiegalitarian in this organization from another age?” speculated Favré.31 Not only was the military impugned for its authoritarian and illiberal comportment; its persistent opposition to colonial settlement within the Arab territories provided clear evidence of its disdain for modern civilization. The military was content to sit on the territory it possessed “without sacrificing a parcel of it to the monster it calls progress,” one journalist exclaimed, adding: “We French citizens have not come to Algeria to move backward, to cede the path to the barbarians.”32 The liberal-minded writer Frédéric Morin went even further in his censure, labeling the military administration a “monstrous regime . . . a homicidal regime, a regime of ruin and death” that was completely at odds with modernity.33 “The most imperfect civilian regime is worth more than the most perfect military regime,” Duval summed up. “The latter is the past while the former the future.”34
Binaries such as “primitive” and “modern,” “barbaric” and “civilized” were salient terms of colon protest during the 1860s, effectively constructing an identity for the settler population as “pioneers of modern civilization” opposed doubly to military authority and Arab barbarism.35 In contrast to the sterile and impoverished communities administered by the Arab Offices, the villages and farms built by settlers were “schools of civilization,” Auguste Warnier claimed.36 The journalist Joseph Guérin rhapsodized on the mission that the Europeans were destined to fulfill, asserting that the colons represented the very essence and embodiment of modern civilization in the French Orient. “The colons have a force more powerful than steam, more invincible than lightning. They are civilization [and] civilization does not regress.”37 As modern civilization incarnate, colons waxed lyrical on the material benefits and improvements that would result from an energetic policy of colonization. “In a third of a century,” Duval boasted, “the French have built more towns, cleared more fields, planted more trees, carved out more canals, constructed more roads, and spread more ideas than the Arabs have in twelve centuries.”38 Unlike the Arabs who left the land barren and unproductive, French settlers promised to inaugurate a new era of commercial and agrarian productivity that would restore North Africa as the major grain-producing region it had once been under the Roman Empire.
Material concerns were not, however, the only prospect French colonization had to offer. Indeed, Great Britain was sharply criticized for its explicit concern with trade and commerce in acquiring its empire. Unlike the British, the French were engaged in “a work of national conquest” that subordinated profit making to a nobler mission: spreading civilization.39 “Be convinced, the destiny that the future holds for Algeria is not that of a simple colony,” affirmed one critic. “[Our] conquest is made in the name of progress and civilization.” 40 Much like the messianic outlooks articulated by the Saint-Simonians and Nativists, colons professed that France had a civilizing mission to fulfill in the world as it established its empire of universal fraternity. Yet unlike that of the Nativists, this mission was the property of neither military commanders nor officers in the Arab Offices claiming a specialized knowledge of the indigènes. According to Joseph Guérin, it was “the colons alone” who would furnish the Arabs with a moral education, and for this reason it was “essential that [colonists] be numerous and penetrate into the hearts of the native populations.” 41
This “moral” education implied nothing short of radically reforming native tendencies and outlooks. Colonists were obliged to teach the Arabs how to be productive farmers and responsible landowners, casting off “the dead hand of feudalism” that consigned North Africa to permanent sterility, as Émile Thuillier put it.42 This task necessitated breaking down traditional social hierarchies, abolishing outmoded forms of collective ownership, and creating a new type of individual befitting the dynamic agrarian capitalism endorsed by proponents of colonization.43 “The emancipation of work and the dissolution of the tribe” were, according to the pro-colon publicist Arsène Vacherot, the essential ingredients in this “peaceful and indispensable revolution.” 44 The revolutionary implications of colonial economic reform were hardly lost on critics. As one colonist boasted, “agriculture, the mother of liberty, dignity, and the robust and healthy virtues of the domestic hearth, will extend its salutary influence to [the Arabs]. They will become useful, honest, and moral citizens that will make the French family proud.” 45 Drawing on a familiar language of citizenship, industry, and emancipation, colons tied their moral mission closely to the nation’s revolutionary heritage, insisting, as Guérin did, that French colonization would transform savage Arab tribesmen into sedentary and productive individuals, “elevating them to the dignity of free men, the final aim of civilization for all countries.” 46 Redolent of the Bonapartists’ civilizing mission on the continent, colon critiques revealed a willingness to equate civilisation with core attitudes and values central to liberal ideology. Civilization meant individual initiative and private ownership; it promised economic development and mutually beneficial commercial interests.47 It similarly translated the forcible uprooting and destruction of existing cultures into moral terms, obliging the imposition of such “civilizing” acts on a less-evolved and backward Muslim society.
Plans to discipline the natives and instill a work ethic in them may have found expression in lofty ideals and sentiments, but these rhetorical flourishes concealed a more troubling reality facing colonists: namely, the lack of a dominant European population in the colony. By the late 1850s, the European population consisted of nearly 190,000 inhabitants of which over 100,000 were French. These numbers paled in comparison to an indigenous population of over 2 million.48 Immigration rates revealed, moreover, the unsettling fact that the French possessed little interest in leaving Europe for Africa. In 1857, over 10,000 French emigrated to foreign countries but less than 8,000 to Algeria. Rates for the following year were similarly disappointing.49 French and European settlers continued to remain a small minority in the midst of an imposing Muslim population. As late as 1870, a colonial newspaper lamented the dearth of French compatriots to be found in the colony, writing, “unfortunately after forty years of occupation the inhabitants of the metropole have not shown themselves prepared to flock to Algeria en masse.”50 Sheer demographics made it difficult to rationalize the creation of a civilian government just as much as it did claiming a French identity for Algeria. To achieve these goals, colons would have to propose a solution mindful of Algeria’s Muslim population even while simultaneously claiming a hegemonic role for Europeans in colonial society. Modernity offered a convincing ideological rationale and narrative for this objective, portending a “fusion of mores” and “unity of interests” as the modernization of North Africa’s land and people proceeded under French stewardship.51
Whereas men like Lacroix and Urbain assailed assimilation as a racist policy that would aggravate existing social tensions, colons contended that it was, in fact, the Nativists who posed the greater threat. “On this earth where numerous indigenous races have lived enervated for centuries because they have remained hostile to one another and because different tribes have conserved the legacy of their hatreds and particular passions, the colon admirably understand the strength of concord and union,” Fonvielle claimed in 1860.52 Maintaining distinct communities would only perpetuate the ethnic and religious feuds that had long destabilized North Africa. More specifically, colons professed that the military’s “systematic opposition” to fusion and its support for Arab nationality was a flagrant betrayal of French nationalité.53 Was there a Bureau Basque or Bureau Corse in France to administer the populations in the provinces of the Pyrénées or Corsica, Devernois sarcastically asked? The idea was ludicrous.54 Unité, that core tenet of French nationality, was just as much an ideological imperative as it was a strategic necessity. Without assimilation, there could be no Algérie Française. “The interest of the colony, the honor of France, and the triumph of civilization,” declared Lambert in 1863, “demand that we search by all possible means to unify the diverse populations within a single people.”55
In their struggle against Oriental primitivism, colons drew upon themes of modernization and nationalité prevalent within French national politics during the 1860s. These concepts were hardly unique to colon protest and often brought to light commonalities with their Nativist opponents that were marginalized for the sake of ideological consistency. Despite their differences, the Arab Kingdom and Algérie Française reflected a shared aspiration for Algerian modernization and an idea of France that transcended reductive ethnic and confessional affiliations. The fundamental divergence resided, however, in whether French nationalité would best be promoted through the association of Muslims and Europeans or the direct assimilation of North Africa’s native populations.56 For Jules Duval, a dedicated partisan of the colon cause, the choice was simple. Compulsive assimilation alone and the unity brought by a common nationalité offered the surest means of demonstrating France’s great “cause to humanity” as it transformed a balkanized and stagnant Oriental world into a modern, progressive society.57
A writer and landowner with influential ties to the Parisian press, Duval stood as one of the most vociferous proponents of colon interests. Inspired by the ideas of the socialist Charles Fourier, he had come to Algeria in 1847 with the intention of founding an agricultural commune owned and operated by laborers. When the enterprise failed, Duval turned to journalism and politics, serving as a representative in the general council of Oran and editing a local newspaper, L’Echo d’Oran.58 He fiercely opposed the Arab Kingdom policy on the grounds that it placed “Arabs at the level of the Europeans,” a flagrant offense to “the superior intelligence, patriotism, work, national sentiment, and private interests” of the colonists.59 A staunch defender of colonization, Duval saw the natives as a constant obstacle to economic modernization and a severe threat to the security of the European settlers. The tribes must either “be transformed or disappear” if the colony was to grow and prosper.60 Only then would France be capable of fulfilling its mission in Africa, bringing order to the continent, and “raising monuments of civilization on the ruins of an Arab society crumbling into dust for a thousand years.” 61
For Duval, colonization was not simply an economic question, but a struggle between the forces of human progress and barbarism. “Colonization embraces at once moral, religious, and political interests,” he wrote. “It founds new societies and concomitantly initiates savages and barbarians into the arts and civilization; it is the moral education of all young societies.” 62 Man’s incessant migration and continual need to exploit the natural world for his own productive ends motivated the colonial enterprise, and as “young and vigorous swarms,” colonies constituted the field on which humanity’s dynamic energy and desire for expansion were shaped and realized.63 In his theories on settler colonialism, Duval saw colonies as “the progenitors of nations” and the essential first phase in a people’s moral and social education.64 They were the seeds that produced great nations, and for Duval the colonization of Algeria was never distinct from this purpose. In “pacifying” the warring clans scattered across North Africa and inducting them into civilized life, France was preparing the “mixed elements” of the colony for a “more intimate relationship” with the metropole, he believed.65
By their very nature, colonial societies possessed a hybridized quality consisting of various languages, religions, ethnicities, and interests.66 Yet by founding schools, undertaking public works, and developing a viable economy, these “disparate elements” would “rapidly combine to form a living and sufficiently homogeneous body” that transcended natural differences, Duval posited.67 “The special glory of Algeria,” he extolled, “is [its] being the tomb of racial prejudices, national jealousies, religious hatreds, political parties, and all vain agitations.” 68 Observing the festivities held in the colony on 13 June 1858, a day of state-sponsored celebration commemorating France’s invasion of the Barbary Coast, Duval witnessed his vision of a unified Algerian society momentarily come to life. “In the joyous or grave gatherings, all the people of diverse origins, mores, dress, languages, races, and religions form only a single people: the Algerian people.” Such gatherings and festivities exemplified to Duval “how tolerance and the admirable sociability of the French spirit” were capable of triumphing over old hatreds and prejudices. “[The] general reconciliation of religions and races is a legitimate hope of our epoch,” he professed, and Algeria was the stage upon which this aspiration would be displayed for all to see.69
Through their opposition to the Nativists, colons and metropolitans found the means of articulating desires for an Algérie Française and framing their program in a language familiar to contemporaries. Assimilation and rattachement, rather than simply objectives in their own right, became intimately bound to a settler identity embodying modernity itself. In portraying the colonial administration as a relic of aristocracy and absolutism, activists made the case for a modern and Gallicized Algeria tied to France proper. “For us, Algeria should not be a colony but a second France and better still a part of France itself, ” declared Henri Verne.70 This conviction rested on the assumption of a common culture and worldview shared among trans-Mediterranean coevals. By framing resistance to the Arab Kingdom as a struggle against Oriental primitivism, colon protestors lay claim to a modern identity that aimed to unify a diverse settler community and mobilize support for their cause of national integration. The universal pretentions evident in this vision of Algerian modernity consistently eclipsed the fact that “modern civilization” implied French civilization, condoning the brand of ethnic domination essential to sustaining a French Algeria. Yet in the terms of opposition employed by colonial elites during the 1860s, Algérie Française entailed only a question of whether North Africa would conform to the progress of modern time or remain mired in a barbaric past. The Algerian administration had revealed itself ill-disposed to bring modern society to fruition in North Africa. It was, therefore, up to the colons as partisans of colonization and modernization to come to its defense.
Colon protest took place against the backdrop of an evolving French Algerian press that was becoming increasingly central to the worldview and sociability of colonial elites. During the 1850s and 1860s, colonists promoted their cause through a growing number of newspapers, pamphlets, and petitions that circulated in the three civilian provinces and abroad. Upon arriving in the colony, Albert de Broglie compared the atmosphere of lively debate and discussion he found there to the early days of the Second Republic. “I believed I was dreaming or had gone back in time,” he remarked with shock. Newspapers published polemics “that did not appear contained within any limits, not even those of polite discourse” while “conversation and publications possessed an energy and bravado” lacking in France.71 On evening strolls through the heart of the governmental Marine quarter in 1860, the dramatist Ernest Feydeau reported that the merchants, soldiers, officials, and travelers congregating there had only one topic on their lips: “nothing else than the great question of the future of the colony!”72 The late 1850s and early 1860s witnessed an “explosion of liberalism” in Algeria, as one colon claimed, that infused colonial life with a noticeably political character.73
The importance placed in colonial journalism derived from the political realities associated with French colonization itself. Colonists had no direct political representation in the French government and, therefore, no direct influence over colonial policymaking. Subject to the authority of the governor-general and, ultimately, Paris and the whims of the emperor, colons regularly protested against their lack of political rights and influence on policies. Auguste Warnier reiterated a familiar grievance in 1865 when criticizing the government’s authoritarian attitude, complaining that “not a single colonist is asked for the slightest advice on questions concerning the future of the entire country.”74 The colonial administration’s supposed disregard for the needs and interests of the settler community became a centerpiece of colon opposition as reformers held the government accountable for the slow pace of the colony’s economic development, the troublingly low emigration rates, and the misuse of public funds for grandiose and impractical building projects in the major cities of the Tell Atlas region.75
If colonists could expect little sympathy from state and military officials, the same could also be said of metropolitan politicians and opinion leaders. In 1868, Akhbar’s Parisian correspondent chided the majority of deputies in the Corps législatif for the uninformed opinions and general disregard they revealed when it came to Algeria. “I do not fear I am going too far by claiming that in the Chamber there are not ten deputies who are familiar with [Algeria] or have bothered to study it,” he reported.76 This disinterest similarly extended to national newspapers as well. “Practically no organ of the Parisian press seems disposed to discuss our interests,” Wilfrid de Fonvielle lamented in 1860. “They assume that they are of no concern to the French public.”77 These frustrations only further encouraged demands for the political rights enjoyed by compatriots across the Mediterranean. “Between the citizens of France and the citizens of the colonies,” Jules Duval asked indignantly in 1869, “are we to presume that there exists such a difference in nature that one has the right of universal suffrage while the other only a privileged suffrage?”78
Unable to plead their case directly before the nation, colonists were obliged to rely upon metropolitan spokesmen to air their grievances, circumstances that necessitated courting public opinion and political allies through informal channels. This task, activists insisted, invested the colonial press with a specific mission and purpose. Journalists were obliged “to clarify public opinion and show things as they truly are,” Joseph Guérin, the Algiers notable and future mayor of Sidi Moussa, explained in 1865.79 Arnold Thomson, a regular contributor to the moderate Akhbar, was equally supportive of the role the Algerian press had in the colony, claiming the publicist was “to seek out and elucidate each one of the colonial questions and inspire thoughts in the diligent and intelligent part of the population.” 80 In 1868, Émile Thuillier commended the efforts of his colleagues, remarking, “Algeria is recruiting new defenders each day.” Yet he was also careful to reiterate the ongoing mission of Algerian journalism, reminding readers that “to draw people’s attention, it is first essential that they understand [the colony].” 81
The sense of unity and optimism conveyed by journalists often belied, however, a more complex reality. Censorship frequently made the hope of “clarifying” perceptions of Algerian society difficult. Colonial officials would fine or altogether suppress journals critical of the administration, imposing limits on the scope and tone of public discourse.82 The spectrum of opinion found in the Algerian press was, moreover, far from uniform. In addition to the official state organ, Le Moniteur algérien, the only fairly regular newspaper in the colony during much of the nineteenth century was Akhbar, established in 1839 by Auguste Bourget. Bourget’s success was due primarily to his political flexibility and willingness to work within the acceptable limits of public discourse set by the state without compromising the paper’s overall independence.83 More censorious journalists often chided Bourget for his moderation, and comparatively short-lived papers run by reform-minded liberals and anti-Bonapartist transportés like Thuillier considered it a duty to maintain an oppositional stance reflecting explicitly colon interests and opinions.84 Journals such as the Progrès de l’Algérie and Courrier de l’Algérie—both of which tended to reflect republican attitudes—or Duval’s pro-colon L’Echo d’Oran were typically the most critical of the colonial administration, and official efforts to mute criticism only further encouraged hostility. As one observer remarked in 1868: “Should you want to commend an act of state, send your prose to Le Moniteur or Akhbar; if you want to vent your spleen, send it to the Courrier.” 85 Ideological differences aside, however, colonial journalists collectively saw themselves as spokesmen for settler interests and as mediators between the settler community and metropolitan policymakers. It was in the pages of colonial broadsheets and journals that colon identity was most effectively publicized and criticism of the government expressed.
Praise for the resourcefulness and tenacious spirit of the colons often accompanied more pessimistic appraisals of the state and its excessive interference in nearly all aspects of public life. From the beginning of the French occupation, the colonial administration and its staff of civil engineers had spearheaded the various public works projects and industrial ventures associated with Algerian modernization. Yet as various critics pointed out, these efforts could often be slow to materialize or incongruous with the practical needs of settler communities.86 Colonists habitually complained about state restrictions on land purchases and the persistent interference of authorities in the daily activities of settlers.87 In his observations of Algeria, Albert de Broglie noted that the values of “individual initiative” and the “spirit of enterprise” seemed feeble among the French colonists. Their “political institutions have habituated them over the years to being governed, administered, controlled, supervised, and protected at all times and on all points,” he dismally concluded.88 According to Akhbar, nine years later little had changed. “It seems Algerians can do nothing without the intervention of the government, and this intervention is indispensable to the execution of projects,” the journal claimed.89
Critics complained that constant bureaucratic oversight encouraged settlers to remain idle and reliant on the state, and the effects of this dependency were most pronounced in the settler communities outside the cities. In 1858, Clément Duvernois sketched a depressing picture of rural colonial life, offering a tableau of poor farmers, barren fields, squalid towns filled with degrading cabarets, and streets populated by children shirking work. Travelers who visited only Algiers and Constantine—cities that received the lion’s share of public funds and government attention—saw the newly laid roads and European houses and returned to France praising the administration’s progress. “But,” Duvernois countered, “if they even minutely examined the situation in the villages, they would lose the enthusiasm that had initially been inspired.”90 Rural Algeria was characterized by isolation, fields dotted with small shanty farms, debauchery, and penury, and this startling reality was the consequence of what Thuillier described as an egregious and ineffective “officialisme” smothering the colony.91 “Here, where there is everything to be done,” Andrieux warned, “centralization only serves to prevent everything from taking shape.”92
Grievances over state policies were not merely complaints lodged against the colonial administration by angry settlers. The targets chosen by colons were strategic in nature and dovetailed nicely with the calls for decentralization emanating from prominent liberal and republican circles in the metropole. Algerian critiques of centralization were intended to portray the colony as an example par excellence of the shortcomings and impediments of the Bonapartist state and underscore the commonalities linking France and its North African periphery. The colon battle cry of “war on administrative centralization and bureaucracy!” was a sentiment shared by like-minded republican and liberal thinkers on the continent, and such declarations encouraged an oppositional language that elided the conceptual boundaries traditionally distancing metropole and colony.93 Much like liberal and republican critiques of centralization, moreover, colonial assessments of state power also provided a context against which desires for liberal reform, democratization, and political rights could be articulated, and colons rarely missed an opportunity to address such issues in their writings.
In editorials and political tracts, colons drew comparisons between “the spirit of liberty” and the practical work required for founding a prosperous and dynamic society in North Africa. Liberty, as the founder of the Courrier de l’Algérie, Charles de Guerle, informed his readers in 1862, was “the only true principle underlying the drive and progress of colonies.”94 “We ask for a greater freedom of action for our communes than in the mother country because here everything has to be created,” explained a colon petition submitted to the senate in 1863. “Liberty is not to be feared and is necessary in the struggle against the numerous obstacles that nature offers against the action of man.”95 Only free and autonomous individuals were aptly suited for the arduous task of founding a new society in the colonial wilderness, and it was, therefore, unsurprising that reflections on liberty frequently translated into debates on the general health and vitality of French colonial society. In the opinion of one colonist, liberty was the most essential element in the growth and development of a settler community, warning that “without it, colonies wilt.”96
Calls for reform focused attention on the necessity of civic participation and the need for liberalization at the local level of government. “[We must] open our hearts and spirits to liberty through the free choice of general and municipal councils,” de Guerle explained, because it was at the departmental and communal levels that the decisions relevant to daily life were effectively made and implemented.97 De Guerle’s entreaty reflected a widespread desire on the part of colonial publicists to combat the debilitating influences of state power through the rehabilitation of municipal political life. Rather than constituting administrative entities akin to “companies and regiments” that knew only obedience, the Algerian municipalities would be “reborn” through the participation of citizens, Alexandre Lambert believed.98 Liberty and individual initiative, rather than being abstract concepts, made up the cornerstone of any healthy society, obliging greater reflection on the more intimate contours of colonial life, government, and the local institutions that shaped them.
Like metropolitan republicans, colons attributed a particularly crucial role to the commune, the principal unit of French government. Much as Amand Favré claimed, the commune was the essential base of social organization, the “natural nucleus” of society. “Thanks to the commune, men coming from diverse points can undertake the apprenticeship of association to which they are destined and freely unite their efforts against the obstacles of nature.”99 The senator and Algerian landowner Ferdinand Barrot readily concurred when addressing the senate in 1863, claiming that the “municipal element” constituted “the first stage of all societies” and imparted the necessary education in self-governance and shared sociability without which society could not exist. In Barrot’s opinion, the municipality was “the first guarantee of interests, the first element of the spirit of association and solidarity.”100 As the foundation of all social life, the commune provided an indissoluble link between the individual and the community, serving as the locale upon which social and commercial transactions came to shape common interests and associations. De Guerle proffered a familial metaphor in 1862, describing the commune as an “enlarged family.” “Municipal life,” he affirmed, “is what touches us at all points and all moments of our life.”101
The central role attributed to local government extended far beyond the domain of commercial and social engagements. Algeria’s diverse ethnonational composition remained a point of real concern, and not only regarding the questionable loyalties of certain populations. In a broader perspective, the ideological foundation of Algérie Française was at stake. Colon views on municipal government and citizenship remained, therefore, closely tied to desires for assimilation. Giving a speech before the conseil général of Constantine in 1865, the councilman Champroux expressed his support for communal organization in Algeria on the grounds that it would mark a progressive step toward “a solid political and administrative organization” in the colony. It was not only advisable, but essential in his opinion, since the commune provided “the first link attaching [an individual] to a new patrie. . . . In a colony composed of such diverse elements the commune becomes ever more necessary in uniting these elements.”102 Duval shared a similar perspective: “the municipality becomes the principal patrie for the majority of inhabitants and on its horizon they concentrate their affections, activity, and ambitions.”103 The idea of Algérie Française, colonists contended, must take root at the local level if it was to become a reality, and the commune was envisaged as the primary vehicle for shaping this French community on African soil.
If the “municipal principle . . . must penetrate into the heart and blood of the population,” as Duval anticipated, the hope of encouraging integration among settlers also dictated cultivating the necessary “public mores.” For Duval, the solution lay in allowing greater liberties at the municipal level through local elections. Municipal elections would provide the “education of the citizen” in the colony, nurturing an attachment to the patrie through civic engagement. “Without elections,” he warned, “[the people] will see themselves as only a cog in a central administration estranged from their affections if not their interests.”104 In pleading his case for greater municipal freedoms in 1865, the journalist Montain-Lefloch argued that reform at the local level was paramount if colonists expected to regain representation at the national level, since it was through the commune that love for the patrie was born and the individual came to understand the “interests of the country.” Only “by proving that the fibers of the most vibrant patriotism runs in us as in the most humble peasant of France,” he claimed, would colonists win the right to elect deputies to the Corps législatif, and this could not be achieved without first liberating the communes from their administrative shackles, and developing citizens.105
While colonists looked back to the years of the Second Republic when Algerian deputies had sat in the National Assembly and appealed to a common body of rights shared with compatriots, Algerian citizenship was hardly a zero-sum game, especially given the government’s Nativist leanings. As Urbain keenly observed, if common law was applied to the colony, “it would not be the natives who suffer.”106 Natives’ demographic majority would, by necessity, eclipse the settlers, swallowing them up in a Muslim majority. To the alarm of colonists, moreover, by the mid-1860s government policy appeared to be moving toward the prospect of native enfranchisement. An official decree in late 1866 authorized the creation of special councils for Muslims, Jews, and foreigners, with supporters urging that, at least at the local level of society, “Muslims and Jews have a right to be represented just like the French.”107 The military, as Governor-General MacMahon made evident in an administrative circular, was coming to see native political participation as a “civilizing” vehicle capable of establishing a permanent link between the European and indigenous populations.108
Ardent defenders of colon civil and political rights, activists nonetheless stood firmly against extending political participation to North African natives. Addressing the issue directly in 1867, Arnold Thomson expressed fears that Muslims and Jews would vote along ethnic lines, warning that such a denouement would inflect Algerian politics with deep-rooted prejudices and hatreds.109 One councilman in Constantine went as far as to claim that proportionate representation and democratic politics would result in “the despotism of material interests over moral interests” since to enfranchise the indigène majority would unquestionably mean abandoning the civilizing mission that ascribed a leading role to French and European settlers.110 It was, furthermore, undeniable that the political status of Algerian natives in the colony would have a direct impact on the question of Algerian national representation overall. Addressing the issue before the Corps législatif in 1870, Jules Favre candidly spelled out the problem that native enfranchisement posed to Algerian national integration. If Muslims were allowed to participate in nominating deputies to the national legislature, France would be subject to what Favre described as an “invasion of the indigène element.” “If the indigène element should be represented do you know how it will be? An indigène appearing in this body would be nominated by his conationals and would come to defend the principles that they defend on their soil.”111 Giving Muslims political power would not only undermine the French character of Algerian society; worse still, it would give them a voice before the nation, imperiling national unity and infecting French politics with a divisive tribalism.
The Maghrebi populations were deemed incapable of exercising the rights belonging to French citizens. While the senatorial ruling of 1865 recognized a distinction between indigène and citoyen on legal grounds, opponents of the government went further to insist that the practice of citizenship itself required specific intellectual and social qualifications that natives clearly lacked. This rationale was, by the 1860s, a familiar concept within French republican thinking, having been employed in the 1790s and again after 1848 to undermine political and civil liberties in the postemancipation Atlantic colonies. The energetic rights talk espoused by metropolitans and colonists during the years of the Second Empire demonstrated the resilience of liberal notions of capacité as well as that unique brand of republican racism that allowed for the existence of “particular laws” and exceptions so effective in excluding colonial subjects, nominal “foreigners,” and undesirables from the political nation. The republican imperial nation-state may have consistently been imagined and legitimated through a rhetoric of universal and abstract rights, but this universality was persistently conditioned by a discourse of legal identification and assumed qualities exclusive to a Europeanized and primarily white citizenry.112
Even if colons and their supporters assured metropolitans that Algerian integration would not mean an Islamicized electorate, this hardly settled the issue of Algerian representation in the Corps légisalatif. For colons eager to regain the rights they had enjoyed prior to the Bonapartist seizure of power, the prospect that the current government would countenance such a measure appeared unlikely. As Thomson surmised, were Algeria to receive deputies in the Corps législatif they would vehemently oppose the government’s Nativist policies. Why, therefore, would the Second Empire freely invite new members to fuel the growing opposition movement taking shape in the national legislature?113 If Algeria was to secure deputies in the metropole it was evident that this aspiration could come about only through the victory of the liberal-republican platform endorsed by the Bonapartists’ political rivals. The liberalization of the metropole was, colons inferred, closely tied to the success of administrative and liberal reform in the colony, establishing the context for a trans-Mediterranean opposition movement oriented around common principles of civic participation, decentralization, and the rights of citizens. “Algeria will float on the wind, find itself year in and year out between different systems,” opined one critic in 1868, “until the day when a freer France gives more liberty to the colony and consults it on the important question of colonization.”114 The journalist Paul Capdeveille summed up the situation more robustly the following year in his appeal to support the metropolitan opposition. “Our plight is . . . intimately linked to that of France,” he avowed. “Its triumph and its defeat will have here their inevitable corollary. Its interests are identical to ours and cannot be separated.”115
In the autumn of 1868, Jules Favre appeared before a crowd in Algiers to deliver a much-anticipated speech. Addressing his audience as fellow “citizens” to loud applause, Favre went on to outline his hopes for the future of the colony and the French nation. “I am grateful that the defense of our cause has been entrusted to me,” he declared. “I say our cause because I don’t know what is meant by the Algerian question. Algeria is France and to deny this is to close our eyes to the truth. . . . Between us there is a bond that exists between all men who support a common idea and [this bond] is now strengthened at this very moment by our personal contact.”116 A prominent lawyer known for carefully selecting his cases to promote the young republican cause in France, Favre had earned a reputation as both a political trailblazer and tough critic of the Bonapartist government by the late 1860s. As with his tactful use of legal precedent and political opportunity, he was insightful enough to recognize the utility that the Algerian question held for the opposition movement and diligently emphasized themes of citizenship and national unity central to republican ideology in his Algerian speeches. Yet he was hardly being insincere when stressing the collective nature of this struggle, for by the end of the 1860s the cause of Algeria had become a collective concern and aspiration.
Throughout the decade, colon critics had worked to tailor metropolitan ideas to the unique contours and problems of colonial society, placing the Algerian question within a larger framework of national debates over state power, liberalization, and citizenship. In 1858, Clément Duvernois had foreshadowed Favre’s rousing speech given in Algiers with his assertion that “since the conquest, political life in Algeria has been marked by numerous vicissitudes corresponding more or less to the events that have taken place in the metropole. . . . Algeria is not a colony. Nobody has considered it such for a long time.”117 In many ways, Duvernois’s political career exemplified the complementary nature of colonial and national politics. The son of a French emigrant, he had received a formal education at the lycée d’Alger before taking up a career in Algeria as a political journalist. Through travel and correspondence during the 1850s and early 1860s, Duvernois situated himself at the nexus of an emerging trans-Mediterranean political culture by cultivating ties to prominent metropolitan opinion leaders such as Auguste Nefftzer, editor of the popular daily Le Temps, and the newspaper magnate Émile de Girardin.118 Settling in Paris, Duvernois contributed articles to Le Temps on a semiregular basis between 1862 and 1864. Nefftzer, an influential publicist allied with the liberal-republican camp in the capital, openly gave his endorsement to the colon cause, deeming it “a movement whose importance cannot be mistaken.”119 Armed with a major Parisian daily that reached a broad audience of educated, middle-class readers, Duvernois continued his attacks on the colonial regime unabated, apprising metropolitans of the issues central to Algerian colonization and urging a “new path” for French North Africa that would give a voice to the disenfranchised settler community.120 In the coming years, Le Temps increasingly dedicated greater attention to the Algerian question, whether by reprinting excerpts from the Algerian press, publishing articles written by colonial polemicists, or drawing attention to republican activities in Algeria and the Corps législatif.121
By the mid-1860s, French politics was assuming a conspicuous trans-Mediterranean character, one shaped and elaborated through journalism, advocacy, and parliamentary debate. In their effort to build a broad opposition platform against Napoleon III’s imperial regime, republicans exhibited a willingness to turn the Algerian question to their own benefit. Criticism of Napoleonic despotism, although a centerpiece of the opposition platform, always proved exceedingly difficult to substantiate in light of the government’s alleged commitment to revolutionary ideals and universal manhood suffrage. Yet as Favre’s defense of colon interests made clear, Algeria offered an alternative theater in which the hypocrisy and pretensions of the detested regime could be laid bare. In an address before the Corps législatif in 1861, Favre drew attention to the disenfranchised citizens currently inhabiting France’s North African colony and accused the Second Empire of reneging on its supposed democratic principles. “The right to elect representatives belongs to all Frenchmen who reside on French territory,” he declared, adding that he awaited the day when the Algerian colonists could “march under the same banner” as their metropolitan compatriots and enjoy the common institutions and rights guaranteed to all French citizens. “Algeria and the colonies are French,” Favre proclaimed among a mixture of applause and hissing from the assembled deputies, “and I ask why they are placed beyond this common right.”122
Favre’s attempts to portray Algeria as a microcosm of Bonapartist tyranny drew praise from activists and publicists in the colony who blandished him as “the illustrious defender of all just causes” and the “most noted orator of our century.” In an open letter addressed to Favre in 1868, Akhbar thanked him for his continual support and commitment to the universal cause of freedom. “A day will come—and it is not far off thanks to your constant efforts—when these ideas of justice and liberty that you have expressed with such noble language and warm honesty will find a common place in France,” the journal’s Parisian correspondent wrote. “On this day, neither the eloquence of a minister skillfully sidestepping the issues of debate nor the hostility of an incompetent majority will be capable of hindering the triumph of law over force and civilization over ignorance and barbarism.”123
In the late 1850s, Favre’s stringent defense of civilian government in the colony could have been considered exceptional. Yet within a decade his efforts had proved instrumental in giving a voice to colons and transforming their plight into a national cause taken up by a small but growing number of opposition deputies. “Algeria finally begins to be known and appreciated by the metropole and our courage is working to bring about what up until now we have only imagined,” exclaimed one critic in 1868.124 In light of the flagrant violations to the nation’s democratic and revolutionary ideals perpetrated by the Bonapartists, opposition spokesmen insisted they were obliged to speak on behalf of their silenced compatriots, fashioning themselves defenders of “public opinion” and “unofficial representatives” of all Frenchmen suffering under the yoke of Napoleonic despotism.125 “It is our principal argument, and we will not stop repeating it,” Jules Simon stressed in 1870, “that our overseas cocitizens are, at this moment, deprived of their liberties.”126
Speaking in the name of disenfranchised Frenchmen not only offered opponents a means of contesting the Second Empire’s apparent commitment to democracy; it also assisted in constructing a political identity for the opposition and the young republican movement. Republicans maintained that their commitment to the colons was not motivated by personal interest but rather by a dedication to universal values of justice and democracy. It was not the Algerian cause that the deputies explicitly sought to defend, Ernest Picard claimed, “but the cause of rights and justice, which desires that all parts of France be represented in [the national parliament].”127 In construing support for Algerian liberty as a matter of conscience and principle, republicans sought to fashion a political identity for themselves rooted in respect for public opinion and liberal practices contrary to Bonapartist tyranny. “You place force in the arbitrary while I put it in opinion and law,” Favre remarked sharply when confronting Bonapartist supporters in 1866. “You place force in the dictator while I put it in the regime of law.”128 Such arguments naturally extended to support for representative government and the influence of public opinion on political decision making, with opponents using their status as “unofficial representatives” of the colonial citizenry to indicate the necessity of overall liberal reform in France.
Employing the issue of Algerian representation to attack the democratic shortcomings of the imperial regime entailed, however, defining Algeria as part of the national body rather than a mere colonial appendage and affirming that Algerian settlers belonged to a French community extending beyond continental Europe. As the liberal Léopold Le Hon explained to his fellow deputies in 1870, “Algeria has a right to be represented [before the nation] and it will only see itself as completely French the day that its deputies come to sit among us.”129 Republican opinion leaders readily concurred, envisaging a national community of citizens that encompassed France’s North African periphery and settler population. “France has always wanted to attach itself to Algeria,” Favre insisted, “and it has understood perfectly that these two earths separated only by a French lake should be united.”130 With the rise of the opposition movement in the Corps législatif during the 1860s, Algeria quickly became a debate on the French nation itself. Ferdinand Barrot was not mistaken when in 1863 he claimed, “The Algerian question is posed in daily polemics with an eminently national character.”131 If Bonapartist statesmen extolled the government’s respect for national sovereignty and democratic politics, republican and liberal deputies saw fit to correct this misrepresentation by reconceptualizing the contours of the nation and using the plight of Algerian colonists to expose the contradictory claims and practices that buttressed an illegitimate Napoleonic state.
Efforts to portray Algeria as a symbol of Bonapartist despotism and hypocrisy encouraged opponents to associate their own demands for liberty at home directly with the colonial opposition, validating assertions that France and North Africa were, indeed, engaged in a common political struggle. The issues of French liberty and the Algerian question were portrayed as two sides of a national resistance movement against arbitrary rule and power. In professing his support for the liberalization of Algeria’s general councils in 1869, Favre tellingly inscribed the issue within a larger national context with his assertion that free departmental elections would realize “that true liberty, which it is necessary to assure in Algeria as in France.”132 The next year he went further, maintaining, “Algeria has constantly protested and protests still against personal power, and in this it has followed the movement of France in its sentiments, thoughts, and aspirations. Its heart has beat with ours.”133 Like Favre, Jules Duval interpreted the Algerian resistance as nothing less than “a new episode in the struggle between centralization and liberty” that had characterized French politics since the Revolution.134
In the growing consensus taking shape between metropolitans and colons, French elites were urged to imagine the nation in geographic and conceptual terms compatible with a republican imperial nation-state. France was a community of citizens that extended beyond the territorial limits of the continental metropole. This claim effectively deterritorialized French nationality and reconfigured it within a broader framework of universal rights and emancipation consistent with republican principles yet equally adaptable to the vision of Algérie Française, a national territory built upon an ethnopolitical colonial order.135 These contradictions were products of the modernity and modernizing ideology that political elites claimed to represent. Trans-Mediterranean France proposed a basis for a common identity and imagined community opposed to the injustice of the past that threatened “to smother the modern world.”136 The Bonapartist state reviled by metropolitans as a remnant of absolutism found its relevant counterpart in a colonial administration personifying the “despotic spirit” of the old Orient that modern society could neither assimilate nor tolerate. “Does it not seem logical, even indispensable, to refrain from importing the faults of old societies into Africa, to not found a colony in decadence?” Fonvielle asked pointedly when speculating on Algeria’s future. “Can something truly great be created without the enthusiasm of liberty?”137 More caustic, Favre did not hesitate to carry these allegations directly into the chambers of the Corps législatif, denouncing Nativism and the Arab Kingdom as an abomination. French contact with the Orient was not expected to preserve an atrophied Oriental society but rather “disrupt its mores, change its habits, and lead [the Arabs] in a completely opposite direction.”138 The Second Empire and its military allies had failed in this goal, leaving a dispirited France to “kneel before the remains of barbarism” as modern civilization “regressed.”139
Writing to Jules Ferry during a trip to Algeria in 1862, his friend Marcel Roulleaux informed him that “the military makes a sad government. . . . [It] is not suited for the evolution of the Arabs, not because it carries a saber but because it knows nothing and is infatuated with its arbitrary power.”140 Roulleaux’s appraisal of military incompetence appeared vindicated in the coming years as a series of natural disasters and epidemics in the mid-1860s provided the opposition with new ammunition for their attacks against the colonial administration and Arab Kingdom. Beginning in 1866, locust blights, droughts, and poor harvests severely affected grain and cereal cultivation throughout the colony, with the most extreme cases of crop failure reported in the southern Arab territories ravaged by the military during periods of intermittent rebellion. With the price of barley more than tripling in some regions, famine soon devastated a significant portion of the native population residing outside the civilian provinces. Virulent outbreaks of cholera only compounded the misery already generated by natural disasters, with more than 86,000 natives dying from disease in 1867 and some 120,000 starving to death by 1868.141 Catholic spokesmen led by the Archbishop Lavigerie wasted little time in exaggerating accounts of native hardship. Resentful of military rule and the limitations placed on the North African missions, Lavigerie made appeals to international Catholic networks for the purposes of collecting aid and mobilizing support for a stronger Christian influence in the colony. In doing so, he shaped a particular view of the crisis that saw Muslims resorting to cannibalism and other deplorable acts of savagery. Although inaccurate, these efforts to “Africanize” Algeria and demonstrate the inadequacies of the military government had a strong influence on public perceptions. As rumors of Arab raids on European farms and cannibalism began circulating in the press, military officials found it difficult to soften the demoralizing blow delivered by natural disaster and rising mortality rates.142
With the civilian provinces inhabited by Europeans remaining relatively insulated from the “catastrophe,” colon activists saw fit to place blame for the crisis squarely on the military. “The great misery afflicting the indigènes has clearly exposed the vices of their nature and organization while showing the exact measure of vitality in our young European populations,” Émile Thuillier gloated in 1868.143 Famine and diseases clearly demonstrated the errors of preserving an archaic and defunct Arab society. Had the Arab territories been placed under a civilian administration dedicated to assimilation and developing settled agricultural production among the nomadic tribes, this deplorable state of affairs would have been avoided. Yet the military regime had persistently shielded the natives from modernity, leaving them to wallow in misery. According to one callous journalist, the famine exemplified the ineffectiveness of military rule as Arabs now died of hunger en masse “on a rich soil capable of feeding ten million European inhabitants!”144 “The Arab Offices reap what they have sown,” Jules Duval declared triumphantly. “They have celebrated and sought to conserve a society in which they are sultans. They have praised and supported their docile instruments, the indigène sheikhs. Today this society is crumbling into dust, roiled by famine and sickness, and the seigneurs of the tent reign over cadavers!”145
As the death toll rose throughout 1867, the military was forced to request a two million franc credit from the imperial government to supply the population with grain. Obtaining these emergency funds meant, however, submitting the issue to a budgetary vote in the Corps législatif where it would be subject to the criticism of the opposition deputies and exploited for the sake of national politics. Yet with the extent of the crisis growing and no tenable solution in sight, the military had little choice if it intended to salvage its reputation and assuage doubts regarding the viability of its antiassimilationist policies. The disease and famine decimating Algeria’s population not only reflected poorly on the military but also called into question France’s civilizing mission in North Africa as reports of the crisis circulated internationally thanks in large part to the efforts of Lavergerie and his Catholic allies. How could France claim to be spreading the benefits of civilization, critics demanded, if it allowed its colonial subjects to die of starvation and resort to bestial acts of cannibalism? Alleviating the problem as quickly as possible was not only a matter of recouping the military’s tarnished image; it was, ultimately, a question of rehabilitating France’s national honor and identity as a modern power. As the newspaper Progrès de L’Algérie informed its readers in the autumn of 1868, the Algerian crisis represented a pressing national concern: “for France it is a matter of not having five hundred thousand or more cadavers on its conscience.”146
When the session of the Corps législatif opened in 1868, the opposition deputies used the convocation as a forum for their grievances as expected. Favre led the attack, alluding to the relative stability of the civilian provinces in contrast to the territories governed directly by the Arab Offices. Echoing the accusations levied by colons, the inveterate republican once again insisted that he spoke in the name of Algerian public opinion. “It is their voices that cross the Mediterranean and penetrate this palace to warn you, to press upon you not to continue the current state of affairs that is the cause of ruin, that multiplies catastrophes, that has made possible the death of over one hundred thousand people,” he declared.147 Civilian institutions and an energetic policy of assimilation were the remedy to the problem in his opinion, and until the military regime gave up its vain hope of shielding a moribund society from the regenerative forces of modern progress and allowed law and freedom to prevail over authority and barbarism the future of the colony would continue to remain uncertain.
Taking the floor, Baron David, leading spokesman for the Nativists in Paris, refuted the points made by the opposition and reaffirmed the military’s dedication to civilization and alleviating the present catastrophe. “If you had had a civilian regime in Algeria during the current crisis you would have seen what happened!” he retorted. A civilian government dominated by the racist settler minority would have been content to sit back and watch idly as natives perished from hunger and disease.148 Military officials attempted to parcel out blame for the woeful situation, emphasizing the constant political feuding incited by opponents that undermined the colonial administration’s good intentions. General Lacretelle did not hide his disgust with the attempts to exploit the crisis for political ends, snapping: “The heart is saddened to see parties invariably pursue their hostile system in the presence of such extreme calamities!”149 Yet while officials made appeals to patriotism, humanity, and patience in their defense of the military’s Nativist policy, it was evident that by 1868 the toll of the catastrophe and the barbed criticisms of opponents had severely injured the prestige of the administration and placed the future of the Arab Kingdom in doubt.
With the elections of 1869 signaling a victory for the liberal-republican opposition and the Algerian cause attracting greater attention in the Corps législatif and metropolitan press, colon polemicists expressed a growing sense of optimism for their cause. “The apprehensions, fears, and black clouds” that loomed over Algeria were on the verge of “vanishing like a bad dream,” Paul Capdevielle sanguinely assured.150 The changing political atmosphere of the late 1860s and the promise of liberal reform made by the emperor were becoming evident in the declarations of prominent military officials. It was revealing when Baron David appeared before the Corps législatif in 1870 and “candidly and loyally” admitted to past errors in judgment. “I sincerely believed that only misfortune, oppression, and disaster would result from the contact of the two races,” he confessed. “I have now come to recognize that the situation of the indigènes in the civilian territories is better when compared with those in the military territories.” In his revised opinion, it was time to advance “a new system” based upon liberal principles and common rights.151 Speaking before the Oranais general council, the commander of the province, General Deligny, similarly espoused the changing perspectives in the military administration, remarking that in his eyes “a radical regime change would be better than a return to an organization already condemned.”152
With prominent military officials and government spokesmen admitting to the shortcomings and errors of the Nativist policy, it was evident that by 1870 the Arab Kingdom envisioned by Napoleon III was on the verge of becoming yet another failed colonial policy. Colonial polemicists and political opponents could both claim an active role in bringing about its destruction. Protesting against the “Arabophilic” designs of the Nativists and the emperor during the 1860s, colons and metropolitans had successfully managed to form a common front against the Second Empire in the final years of the regime. Placing the Algerian question in the larger context of national political concerns over liberty, sovereignty, and representational government, the grievances of colons and the liberal-republican opposition had come together to discredit the nationalist and modernizing identity of the Bonapartist state. The confluence of colonial and metropolitan interests and the formation of a common opposition front not only contributed to the waning popularity of the imperial government in France but also emboldened nationalists to press their case for Algerian integration, cementing a relationship between France and its North African frontier that would be nurtured and reinforced by republican statesmen in the wake of the Second Empire. Noting the emergence of a shared oppositional language and identity spanning metropole and colony in 1869, the journal Akhbar was correct to assert that an “uninterrupted current of people and affairs . . . [and] a constant exchange of ideas and sentiments” existed between France and Algeria. “Are there really two countries?” the newspaper asked. “Are they not rather different members of the same body, receiving life and pulsating movements from the same heart?”153
This assertion of a common Franco-Algerian people was indicative of the ways in which the politics of modernity had transformed colonial opposition under the Second Empire. In the Algerian question, republican opponents found a means of challenging Bonapartist modernity and exposing the illiberal facets of the imperial state. The colonists themselves had their part to play in this denouement. Colonial journalists and activists were instrumental in cultivating a brand of Algerian republicanism that successfully applied republican modernization to key issues focused on colonization and civilian government. In making their case for national inclusion and settler rights, colons persistently emphasized the strong link between colonization and modernization that lay at the heart of their program. They espoused the language of republican modernization and, in the process, furnished the basis for an idea of la France transméditerranéenne read in terms of a trans-Mediterranean republic, that single “body” animated by the same heart and sentiments. The “common struggle” remarked upon by metropolitans and colonists throughout the decade acquired saliency in the struggle for modern society itself. Condemning the Oriental barbarism and despotism that impeded Algerian modernity, opponents committed themselves to a modernizing ideology with both national and colonial implications. In arguing that colonists and metropolitans were, in fact, part of a single body, it was ultimately a shared vision of republican modernity that bound these communities together and provided the ideological content for imagining a French imperial nation-state as the embodiment of republican equality and fraternity.