7

New America

Landing on the African continent and conquering Algiers was the easy part for the French military. From then on, the war was never that simple. The ‘Fall of Algiers’ in 1830 may have looked to the world like a brilliant victory, but the French were confused about what to do next. Algeria is a huge country and even the most organized armies had found it impossible to control the movements and supply lines of the native inhabitants, who not only knew the terrain but knew how to turn it to their advantage. This would be the defining fact of the military struggle during the 130 years of French occupation. Yet when they planned their invasion, the French had no idea of these real dangers.

The situation was further confused by the turmoil and shifting political sands in Paris. Even as the ‘Fall of Algiers’ was announced, Charles X was succeeded as monarch by Louis-Philippe, the last king of France and an Orléanist. Louis-Philippe had not instigated this war and privately complained about the burden he had inherited. Publicly, he was forced to pursue the Algerian adventure with as much vigour as possible, mainly because he could not afford to lose face in Paris or be seen to be conceding ground to the English, who had been observing all French manoeuvres with predatory eyes from the outset. For the time being, now that the party was over, Parisians themselves were largely indifferent to the project.

The new reality facing Louis-Philippe was that a strategy had to be developed on the ground. Politicians and military commanders were arguing about whether the occupation should be ‘total’ or ‘partial’. These policy divisions in turn determined the local response to the ‘natives’ – should they be driven out of the territory, on the model of the native Americans, or co-opted and assimilated into the political structures of the French Republic? Either way, the invasion of Algeria triggered a frenzied land grab, as Europeans poured first into Algiers and then into the outlying areas. They bought out shops, farms and other properties at rock-bottom prices or, in many cases, simply took them by force of arms.

In 1834, under Louis-Philippe’s guiding hand, France officially annexed the occupied territories as a colony. This meant that the area was under the jurisdiction of a governor-general, Bertrand Clauzel, who reported directly to the Minister of War in Paris. This is when the term ‘European’ came to have legal status. At the same time three million Muslim inhabitants were not given French citizenship but were placed under the ‘régime du sabre’ (the régime of the sword) – effectively a permanent state of martial law. This marked a key political turning point: Algeria had become a legal possession of France and it was now more costly and dangerous to withdraw from Algeria than to remain.1

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The pressure for martial law came from the Europeans, both French and non-French, who had established themselves in the country before the formal annexation had been ordered but who were unofficially protected by the French military from the Muslims, whose homes and businesses were being stolen. Effectively, the Europeans were calling for force of arms to protect them from the local people.

This disgraceful state of affairs became official French policy in 1835 when Governor-General Clauzel set up a company to take over agricultural land. Clauzel fantasized about building ‘a new America’, with cotton plantations in the Mitidja plain served by a workforce of ‘natives’ and administered by French officials.2 Clauzel invested his own money in these plans and speculated profitably, expanding the French zone of occupation at bayonet point. This colonization of the countryside and the ousting of the Muslims who had lived there for centuries was the single biggest factor in the destruction of traditional society, creating a displaced population of several hundred thousand Muslims who, within the space of a few short years, lost the ties of religion, birth and language that held them together as a community.

The divisions deepened as settlers arrived en masse from the European mainland to work in Algeria. One of the dilemmas facing the nascent French authorities was how to regulate the settlement of this ‘empty land’. France itself was not particularly over-populated at this period and the areas with a tradition of emigration, such as Auvergne or Brittany, sent their sons and daughters to Paris as a first port of call, so the first colons (colonists) were mainly non-French – they were most often low-paid urban workers or peasant farmers from the poor southern areas of Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, Catalonia, Murcia, Almería and Malta.3 There were also criminals and political dissidents, deported from France in the same way that Britain sent its convicts to Australia.

Most of the colons came driven by poverty in their own countries and rumours of wages ten times higher than Europe in the ‘new America’. When they got to Algeria, they settled at first in the coastal towns and cities, before fanning out into the hinterland, where they aggressively drove native Algerians off their land. They proved impossible to regulate or police. French bureaucratic frustration is evident in a law passed in Algiers in 1831, which forbade captains of visiting ships to allow any passengers to disembark without a passport. But this was a futile gesture as the new Algeria was beginning to take shape.

French Justice

Within a few years of 1830, the Turkish language disappeared, while French, Spanish, Italian, Corsican, Catalan and Maltese were all superimposed on the local dialects of the Arabs and Berbers. This massive cultural shift reflected the efficiency and speed with which Algeria changed course; it was now effectively conquered by Europeans on all fronts.

The first ‘European Algerians’ quickly developed a tough frontiersman mentality. During an extended stay in Algiers during the late 1830s, the Swiss artist Adolphe Otth noted in his journal that nearly all crimes in Algiers, from robbery to murder, were committed by ‘undesirable Christians that the galleys and prisons of Europe have vomited up upon this country since its conquest by the French’.

The worst crimes were mostly committed in the countryside, a long way beyond French attempts to impose judicial order on the anarchy they had unleashed with the conquest. French justice was arbitrary, at best, and at times actively sadistic. One of the most notorious examples of this was a revenge attack by the French in 1832 on a tribe called the Ouffia, on the grounds that they had committed a robbery against a local sheikh loyal to the French. The order to put the whole tribe to the sword was given by the Duc de Rovigo – a former police commander under Napoleon and now an elderly figure known for his cruel severity – while he was at a dinner party, gambling and drinking. The mission was ruthlessly carried out by the Foreign Legion and the Chasseurs d’Afrique, a new regiment made up of European and Muslim soldiers, who were becoming notorious as the most efficient ‘Arab-killers’ in the French army.

The tribe, numbering a hundred or so men, women and children, were taken by surprise in their encampment in the Maison-Carrée, an old Turkish fort on a small hill outlying Algiers. A contemporary described the scene as ‘old men waiting for the death blow, women crying for mercy, children who did not know what was to befall them’.4 The soldiers returned to their camp, caked in blood and with the gory heads of the Ouffia on lances and bayonets. They drank and sang their way through the night. In the morning, bloodied earrings or a bracelet still attached to a severed wrist were on sale at the open market at rue Bab Azoun.

Such casual slaughter was clearly meant to spread terror and terrify the population into submission. Instead it stoked a slow-burning hatred of the French and all Europeans among the native Algerians. The Ouffia were revenged within a few weeks of the original atrocity when the Foreign Legion were ambushed near the site of the crime and all killed without mercy. The bodies were beheaded and mutilated – an act meant to dishonour the enemy.

‘The Algerian Cromwell’

It was not enough for the Algerians simply to oppose the French with isolated acts of vengeance. At first the resistance was fragmented, led by individual tribes who took up arms in response to a particular crime in their territory (such as the killing of the Ouffia). But any concerted response needed a military command with a political mind. This came eventually in the form of a marabout (a Muslim holy man) and great warrior who would lead the Algerian resistance through the 1830s and the 1840s, and indeed at one stage almost drove the French back into the sea.

This leader was a quietly spoken young man called Abd el-Kader, who was brought to power by a wave of popular acclaim in the Mascara region in 1837. Famous throughout the various territories for his piety, his poverty and his melancholy disposition, he had witnessed the French invasion and their crimes with rising horror and finally decided that no Muslim could watch this suffering and continue to serve God. He was a charismatic speaker and this clear statement of intent became a watchword among the rival tribes throughout Algeria, bringing former enemies together for a political and religious cause.5

Most importantly for his political prestige, Abd el-Kader had been prophesied as a sultan by a dervish in Mecca when he made his first pilgrimage to the holy city. He knew the power of gestures and symbols among his people and how to manipulate them for propaganda. Above all, he understood how to act like a prophet: it was therefore with a single gold coin in his pocket and wearing a ragged, torn burnous that Abd el-Kader walked purposefully into the Palace of the Dey in Mascara on the day of his election as leader and declared a ‘holy war’ on the French nation.

In Paris, no less a man than the great philosopher of democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, would later hail Abd el-Kader as the ‘Algerian Cromwell’. This was not too far from the truth: one of Abd el-Kader’s great achievements was to fuse religion and Algerian patriotism into a single force. He denounced the Turks as corrupt and weak and heralded a new Algerian nation, led by Algerians themselves.

In simple terms, Abd el-Kader was a fine soldier and a brilliant military tactician. He ran an intelligent and sophisticated campaign and had spies at work in Paris, following debates in the Chamber of Deputies and assessing the popular mood. At one stage Abd el-Kader was in correspondence with Léon Roches, a former French ambassador and spy, who was under orders to establish a ceasefire. But Abd el-Kader had other operatives in place who told him how unpopular the war in Algeria was and, based on this knowledge, he fought hard to drive the French into brokering a peace. He began his war by launching lightning raids against all French interests in the territory. His soldiers constituted a regular army of some 75,000 men. They attacked French forts, trading posts and colon settlements, making it impossible for the French to govern outside the larger towns and cities. The strength of Abd el-Kader’s hand at this stage was such that it forced the French into an uncharacteristic compromise: at the Treaty of Tafna in 1837, Abd el-Kader was grudgingly recognized by the French authorities as the sovereign leader of two-thirds of Algeria.

The treaty did not last, partly because the borders were badly defined, but, more importantly, the colons’ lust for land could not be denied, even by the ‘Commander of Faithful’, as Abd el-Kader was known to the Muslim population. Despite his military prowess, Abd el-Kader was a poor policeman, and ordinary Algerian Muslims all too often found themselves driven from their farms and villages by armed colons, tacitly aided and abetted by the French military. Muslim anger soon became a wave of righteous violence – but attacking and killing isolated packs of colons was not a military campaign and only exacerbated French frustration with this difficult and murderous mission.

‘Exterminate Them to the Last Man!’

By 1838 Louis-Philippe’s exasperation with Algeria was at breaking-point. Despite the brokered peace, the newspapers in Paris reported massacres and attacks on colons and the king was criticized as a weak and gluttonous bourgeois with no understanding of the fact that French honour was at stake across the Mediterranean. In his impatience, Louis-Philippe had declared that all methods of winning the war were justified. ‘What does it matter,’ he famously announced, ‘if a hundred million shots are fired in Africa. Europe does not hear them.’

In 1840 Marshal Thomas-Robert Bugeaud was appointed as military commander in Algeria. Bugeaud was the right man for the job. French historians have exalted Bugeaud as the strong man who had the stomach for a fight and made the French colonial project a reality. Initially, however, Bugeaud had misgivings about the Algerian project, describing it as a useless possession that France would find hard to lose. But having committed himself to his command in 1841, he declared that total conquest could only be achieved by total war. Bugeaud executed a scorched-earth policy of no mercy and maximum cruelty, strangling the Algerian resistance wherever he found it. ‘The aim is not to hunt down Arabs,’ he announced to his generals. ‘That is simply a waste of time. Instead, we must stop the Arabs from sowing, making a harvest or pasture. We must burn down their crops everywhere, and exterminate them to the last man!’6

He revamped the army’s tactics: instead of marching long columns of infantry deep into the hinterland where they were easy targets for ambushes and snipers, he broke the regiments into small groups which, copying Abd el-Kader’s own strategy, could surprise and harry the enemy, punching them out of position at will. With every fresh success, ordinary French soldiers became harder and more brutal. Louis-Philippe was delighted, assuming that this was the way to win the war as well as the hearts and minds of his sceptical domestic audience in Paris.

The Parisian public was in fact deeply shocked by the methods of the French army. Parisians were even less inclined to sympathize with their own government when they learned that the general with responsibility for such massacres was Bugeaud, the so-called ‘butcher’ responsible for the massacres in the rue Transnonain in Paris in 1834. These were carried out by soldiers who were searching the streets for insurgents during the popular uprising of April 1834. A shot was fired towards a captain in Bugeaud’s brigade; in swift revenge the soldiers marched into the nearest building on the rue Transnonain and bayoneted to death twelve of the occupants, including women and children. Another twenty civilians were seriously wounded. The event was grimly commemorated in a painting by Honoré Daumier, a work of realist propaganda produced in horror at the events, which depicts a dead man whose body is slumped over a dead baby. The painting caused a sensation at the time, for political as well as aesthetic reasons, but it did stop the rise of Bugeaud and his increasingly cruel methods.

In Algeria Bugeaud promoted a new genocidal tactic, les enfumades (smoking-out), which led to the death of tens of thousands of Algerians who had never even heard of France until the French army arrived on their land. The first enfumade was ordered by a General Cavaignac, whose men had pursued a group of Arab fighters, as well as women and children, into mountain caves. Cavaignac ordered his men to wall up the caves and set fires at the entrances. After a day or so, as people died of asphyxiation and bodies began to pile up, the fighters emerged to ask for pardon. Cavaignac refused and continued with his plan to turn the area into ‘a vast cemetery’.

Bugeaud was impressed with this tactic and exhorted his commanders to use it whenever they could. ‘If any of these rascals retreat to their caves,’ he said, ‘you must imitate Cavaignac and smoke them out like foxes.’ In 1845 Bugeaud’s own men killed almost a thousand Algerian men, women and children of the Ouled Riah tribe by lighting fires at the entrances to the caves where they lived and letting them choke to death.

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By this time, the Muslim state under the leadership of Abd el-Kader was in a state of near-collapse. The French now had 108,000 troops on Algerian soil. Bugeaud’s overall strategy had been to fuse the colonial mission with his military aims. As the army and the colonial authorities converged, the Muslim state began to melt away as more ‘native’ farms, villages and towns were arbitrarily seized and their inhabitants displaced for ever.

Abd el-Kader’s initial strategy had been to lure the French deep into the interior, where they would be isolated and overstretched. ‘You will die with disease in our mountains, and those whom sickness will not carry off, my horsemen will send with their bullets.’ However, this strategy was undermined by the ferocity of the violence which Bugeaud unleashed on the Arab armies. The French destroyed everything in their path in pursuit of their quarry, burning farms, driving cattle away, destroying crops and massacring women and children. The suffering became unbearable and many tribes and villages found the price of their holy war too high. Slowly, as the rural economy died, open support for Abd el-Kader declined and the Algerian leader began to lose the taxes from these farmers that were vital to support his campaign. In their anger, many poor Algerians threatened violence against Abd el-Kader and his soldiers as they travelled across the territory.

The wives and families of Abd el-Kader’s armies were protected in a zimala, a huge encampment, whose location was kept secret – such was the prize it represented to the French army – until it was betrayed by a spy. The French launched a vicious onslaught on the innocents who lived there. The troops moved silently among the civilian population, stabbing and shooting at will, the corpses of the dead heaped up inside the bloodied tents.

The massacre frightened and angered Abd el-Kader’s soldiers, who wondered what kind of moral criminal they were fighting. Most importantly, it started to break their morale. Soldiers deserted, fearing for the safety of their families more than they dreaded the anger of their commander or God. As his army began to disintegrate, Abd el-Kader retreated to the Moroccan border, near Oudja, and called upon the Moroccan sultan for military aid. This was in vain, and in 1846 Abd el-Kader was forced to surrender his armies and authority to the forces of Bugeaud. He negotiated an honourable exile to the Middle East (in fact to Damascus, where it is claimed he helped save the lives of several hundred Frenchmen during one of the periodic insurrections in the Syrian capital). In France Abd el-Kader was recognized as a noble and worthy opponent, but the reality was that the Algeria he tried to defend was lost.

In contrast, Bugeaud, the cold-blooded killer whose fanaticism gained him the total subjugation of the Arabs, was honoured with the title of the Duc d’Isly after his victory over Abd el-Kader at the Battle of Isly. In 1840 he had been made governor-general of Algeria, which meant that from this point Algeria would be wholly French territory. With this one brutal gesture, the French nation dispossessed all future generations of their land, their history and their heritage.

As a final insult, in 1852 Bugeaud was honoured with a statue and the Place Marshal Thomas-Robert Bugeaud in the centre of Algiers was named after him. This was a celebration of the governor-general whose ‘pacification’ of Algeria consisted of a systematic campaign of massacre and genocide.

In 1966, four years after Algerian independence, the elegant square was renamed Place Abd el-Kader. Lined by colonnades and palm trees, it is the focus for celebrating great football victories. In the 1840s Abd el-Kader had almost brought France, a great European nation, to its knees. Now, astride his horse, on a tall, modernist concrete plinth, he waves his sword defiantly at the blank sky as traffic chaos swirls around him and young Algerians hang out at the Quick Restaurant, a Belgian fast-food chain which has been here since 2007. Bugeaud’s statue has long since been returned to France, but in Algeria his name still persists, bowdlerized in dialectal Arabic as ‘Al-Bujea’: a bogeyman who still haunts the dreams and nightmares of small children.