Early in 1839, Abd el-Kader wrote a surprising letter to the Sultan of Morocco. His people, he said, were finally united and lawful—so much so that “a young girl could cross the country alone, east to west, night or day, without fear of a single bad encounter.”1
By the fall of 1839, however, both French and Algerians were itching to start fighting again. What had happened—and why would either side have preferred the horrors of war to even the uneasy peace achieved by the Tafna Treaty?
The moment of optimism had passed. Abd el-Kader knew that if he held to the truce in hopes of gaining strength, his adversary would surely grow even stronger. European settlers were arriving all the time and seizing the Algerians’ land. The most compelling reason for renewing hostilities, however, was that delay would undermine Abd el-Kader’s own strength. His councilors kept reminding him that he must revive the call for jihad, or the tribes would not stay with him. And why should they have to pay the special jihad tax if they weren’t fighting jihad? Some tribal leaders even thought Abd el-Kader’s treaty with the French, which looked more like an alliance, made him a poor leader of jihad.
The interlude of peace had given Abd el-Kader time to start on his grand plan of revitalizing his people and forming a unified state. But if the tribes defected and made their own peace with the French, his Algerian state would soon disintegrate. He would have to set aside that goal for a while and take direct action against the invaders.
The French, meanwhile, were still debating the basic question: should they limit their control to a few coastal towns plus some settlements on interior plains near Algiers—or go all-out and take the whole country? Voices for the latter choice were growing louder.
Then fresh scandal erupted over the Tafna Treaty. The French government had always disliked the treaty because it gave Abd el-Kader so much territory, and now secret provisions revealed that thanks to the Emir’s skillful bargaining, France had given away even more. Abd el-Kader would be supplied with a large quantity of rifles and gunpowder, and in return he would give General Bugeaud a considerable sum of money. The government in Paris was starting to wonder whether the Emir really needed all those arms only to keep the tribes in line. Or, with his increasingly impressive army, could he actually be preparing for renewed war with France? Maybe it was time to scrap that treaty.
Both sides, therefore, wanted to bring about a crisis, a cause for war. The opportunity lay in the vague language of the Tafna Treaty. Although in effect this treaty gave Abd el-Kader control of about two-thirds of the entire country, it reserved for France the territory around Algiers extending to a point “above” a certain river. Or did the Arabic word in question mean “beyond” that river, as the French argued? Abd el-Kader could not accept the French interpretation, because “beyond” the river would mean the entire country to the east.
Nothing came of either side’s efforts to solve this confusion. Abd el-Kader even wrote to the French king—one of the last services that Léon Roches performed for him.
In October of 1839, Governor-General Valée decided on a test. He would send a contingent of soldiers overland from Constantine to Algiers. For the French, this was a logical way to develop contact between the inland city of Constantine, recently captured, and the capital city on the coast. The French soldiers’ route, however, went through territory that Abd el-Kader considered under his control. If the French thought they could march through his territory without his permission, wouldn’t they try to claim all the land between Constantine and Algiers?
Abd el-Kader wrote a sharp protest, to which Valée answered that the excursion was nothing important, little more than a pleasant outing. In a second message, Abd el-Kader took a different tack. He did not want war, he explained, but his councilors were all calling for jihad and he had to obey religious law in such matters.
Having warned the French and sought legal counsel, Abd el-Kader then took action: well planned, sudden, and lethal. In November his army attacked the Mitidja plain south of Algiers, where a European population had settled. Many lives were lost and virtually all the homes and farms destroyed. The war was on.
This campaign brought the Emir the closest he ever came to driving the French back to the sea. In 1840 the tribes were fully behind him, he could command about 80,000 men, and he was at the height of his power. It was still an uneven fight, as the French had at least as many soldiers, much better trained, and many more in reserve. Nonetheless, with Abd el-Kader’s forces attacking European settlements around Algiers, Oran, and Titteri province, the French government grew alarmed. Valée’s counter-offensive did not produce results quickly enough to satisfy Paris, and he was relieved of his duties as governor-general in December of 1840. His replacement in early 1841 was General Bugeaud.
This was the tough, campaign-hardened, opinionated Bugeaud who had signed the Tafna Treaty with Abd el-Kader in 1837. At that time, he had praised the Emir to the skies: honest, competent, reliable, just the man with whom France could work out territorial arrangements that would suit both sides. Furthermore, in 1837 Bugeaud was still only half-hearted about the French presence in Algeria. What really interested him was upgrading the roads and bridges of his home province in France! That was how he intended to use the money secretly promised under the treaty.
By the time Bugeaud returned to Algeria as governor-general, however, his views had turned around completely. Now he was all for full-scale war and a thoroughly French Algeria. France should quickly clear away the native people, so that Algerian soil could be populated with European colonists. Only the French flag would fly in Algeria. Under Bugeaud’s leadership, the debate was settled at last. He immediately undertook a vigorous, aggressive, no-holds-barred military strategy that earned him a decidedly mixed reputation.
At the top of Bugeaud’s instructions from the French government was the specific order to get rid of Abd el-Kader. The Emir, at first unaware that he was the main target, sent conciliatory messages, but it soon became evident that Bugeaud had other plans.
As 1841 progressed, the war took on a terrible nature. In the early years of the conquest, the French had destroyed cities and massacred their populations. Now they turned the same tactics upon the rural people. They raided villages, destroying and killing; they cut down olive groves and fruit orchards, burned fields of grain. In summer they made the term “scorched earth” an all-too-accurate description of the Algerian countryside. In winter they drove people from their homes to die of cold in the mountains. They learned how to find the peasants’ stores of grain hidden in large containers underground by systematically walking along and prodding the ground with their bayonets until they hit the tell-tale stone lids.
It was a war waged on a people, not on a state or army. Bugeaud’s objectives were to make life virtually impossible for the rural people, and at the same time to turn the tribes away from Abd el-Kader. Tribes were compelled to fight against the Emir under threat of being de-ported to distant French possessions in the Caribbean and the South Pacific. French strategy not only demoralized the Algerian people but disrupted the whole economy of the country. The destruction of rural life cut off both the income and the military intelligence that Abd el-Kader needed to continue the fight.
Meanwhile, Bugeaud brought about major changes in the French army and its methods of warfare. Earlier, the soldiers had been sent out in armies of several thousands, as in European campaigns, each man heavily burdened with his equipment, bedding, and food. They had to drag heavy cannons and baggage wagons wherever they went—not to mention wearing tight woolen uniforms in the desert heat. They dropped along the way from sickness, exhaustion, and suicide. For this recklessly conceived adventure, France paid a huge price in the suffering and sacrifice of its own men.
One reason Bugeaud had wanted the time-out provided by the Tafna Treaty was to undertake major reorganization of the army. He created much smaller contingents of soldiers that could move swiftly through the countryside, without heavy artillery and other equipment. When war resumed, the “flying columns” were much more successful in carrying out destructive sorties against the tribes and villages.
The French army reflected local realities in another way as well. Starting as early as 1831, it included a few companies of indigenous soldiers: the zouaves, light infantry, and the spahis, light cavalry. The zouaves were mostly Berbers from the Kabyle mountains and thus somewhat separate from the main population of Arabs. Both spahis and zouaves wore colorful uniforms, bright red and blue—and this fact would play an important role in one of the major crises of the whole war.
Looking ahead, Bugeaud had ambitious plans for his military. Expecting that the tribes would all ultimately submit to France but would never really be loyal, he decided that France would run the country with its army. French soldiers would police the tribes through a military administration, and also build the roads and bridges that would encourage more Europeans to come. Before long, Bugeaud predicted, the Algerians would see that the “wheel of fortune” now definitely favored the Europeans—and would never turn their way again.
Like any military leader, Abd el-Kader did what he thought had to be done to achieve his objectives, no matter how much he might have preferred not to take actions that were ruthless or deceptive. But whenever possible he tried to prevent brutality, and he demanded a remarkably high standard of behavior from his followers.
From the start of his command, the Emir had deplored the savage traditions of tribal warfare. At the battle of the Macta River in June 1835, the first major loss for the French, he had been horrified to see piles of severed French heads. Yet he knew that making changes too quickly would alienate the tribes. Therefore, he enforced new rules gradually but with firm discipline, and it usually took only a few examples of harsh punishment, such as heavy beatings, to get the message across.
As for strategy, Abd el-Kader was well aware that pitched battles would never work. He had fought in this way only once, in July of 1836 at the Sikkak River, and his army had been crushed. The French were too strong in numbers, disciplined training, and arms. Guerilla warfare was the only way: harassing the enemy, cutting supply and communications lines, attacking without warning and disappearing just as quickly.
For a few years Abd el-Kader held lines of defense—major towns and fortifications—running roughly east and west. All were lost to the French army, however, by the end of 1841. In most cases the inhabitants had been warned to leave in time, so the French found only empty streets and buildings.
What about allies, or help from outside? In the spring of 1840, soon after the French counter-offensive, the Emir sought help from Britain and even from the Ottoman sultan; both refused. He continued to obtain arms from Britain through Morocco, but his relations with the Moroccan sultan were getting worse. Without bases, limited to guerilla warfare with only partially dependable fighters, Abd el-Kader was on his own against a military superpower, possibly the strongest modern army in the world at that time.
Psychologically as well as militarily, however, guerilla warfare could be highly effective. Since the Emir and his army could move so swiftly on horseback through both the countryside and rugged mountainous areas, the war became a cat-and-mouse affair. The French certainly tried, but they could never quite catch Abd el-Kader. He would evade, escape, cover seemingly impossible distances in a night, strike a target, and vanish. Bugeaud complained that to find Abd el-Kader he needed a magician, and the soldiers needed wings to catch him. At the same time, the Algerians could not inflict blows hard enough to stop the relentless progress of the French army.
But the Emir’s men did have military successes, and they took French prisoners—who had been told by their officers that their fate, if captured, would be worse than horrible. What the prisoners actually experienced is one of the most interesting aspects of Abd el-Kader’s whole military career. Although the war was bitter and bloody, the Emir was careful to treat all prisoners properly. It was a matter of policy, religion, and human values for him. Indeed, he enjoyed talking with the captives, especially the well educated officers, and learning more about the people and country who had become his enemy.
Abd el-Kader’s insistence on decent treatment of prisoners was not only humane but wise strategy, as it undermined French propaganda intended to stiffen soldiers’ determination to fight to the death. In trying to set humane standards, he provided a model for later international conventions on treatment of prisoners-of-war.
European women, too, were sometimes taken prisoner. Some were women who managed canteens for the armies in the field, others were from the settlements. Abd el-Kader put his mother, the hardworking and capable Lalla Zohra, in charge of the women, and she saw to it that they were fed, clothed, and protected against possible abuse. Lalla Zohra also took it upon herself to look after sick and wounded French prisoners.
All this time, Abd el-Kader had to fight on two fronts: against the French, and against the fragmented nature of tribal society. From 1840-42 the tribes could see that he was carrying on jihad, and they supported him. That is, they would be loyal until the French military put them under too much pressure. Whenever a tribe defected, Abd el-Kader had to weigh carefully the particular circumstances. Was the tribe weak-willed, opportunistic? Then they probably deserved punishment by raiding. Or had they resisted until they were exhausted and had no resources left? In that case the Emir’s response would be much milder.
What soon became devastatingly clear, however, was the fate of Abd el-Kader’s unified Algerian state. As the war went on, the cities that might have served as his political capitals—Mascara, Tagdempt, Tlemcen—all fell to the French. Even the small village of Guetna and its zawiya, where Abd el-Kader had grown up, was deliberately destroyed as a blow to his morale. Likewise, the towns that served as the khalifas’ headquarters and depots for supplies had to be abandoned. Abd el-Kader’s state simply disintegrated. One can only imagine his emotions as he observed the vanishing of his dream. With it went all hope of an authentic Algerian state for more than a hundred years.
Although the Emir had to be constantly on the move, toward the end of 1842 he created a new means of holding his people together. This was the smala— literally “household”—a tent city that housed the Emir’s army and their families. It also housed tribes who had joined him, refugees from destroyed towns and villages, prisoners-of-war, French deserters, hostages from tribes being disciplined, and more. Since the people needed their livestock for food, the smala included tens of thousands of animals as well.
The smala set up schools, workshops, markets and bazaars, mosques, everything needed to keep a society going. Abd el-Kader’s mother handled the finances, mostly for purchase of grain, and Algerian Jews loyal to the Emir provided for the destitute.
The tents of the smala were carefully arranged in several concentric circles. The Emir’s family was in the center, his khalifas and their families in the first circle, and so on, with the tribes and common people on the outside. By early 1842, sixty or seventy thousand people were living in the smala, and at times possibly more. It became a sort of “floating capital,” because whenever necessary, the whole collection of tents—hundreds of them—could be dismantled, moved, and set up again somewhere else in the same order.
Unfortunately this became necessary quite often, as Abd el-Kader and his people always had to keep hiding from the French. Although the smala had to serve as the center of his political power, its unstable, nomadic nature was inevitably demoralizing. Wherever the smala settled, moreover, the concentration of people and animals nearly wrecked the environment. The sheep, goats, horses, camels, and donkeys needed a great deal of water and often reduced water sources to muddy holes. Sickness spread quickly. Abd el-Kader appointed officials to try to protect the land and water sources, but it was a losing struggle.
As soon as the French generals learned about the smala, they gave top priority to finding it. “Flying columns” went out frequently and in all directions, according to a regular plan.
In May of 1843 a mobile unit of about five hundred soldiers under the command of the king’s twenty-one-year-old son, the Duke of Aumale, went out searching. Suddenly—almost by accident—they discovered the tent city spread out before them. The people of the smala were frantically busy setting up in a new location. Seeing the bright red cloaks of the spahis, the indigenous cavalrymen in the French army, they at first thought that Abd el-Kader’s men—who also wore red uniforms—were returning. They sent up loud cheers of welcome. By the time they realized that the approaching soldiers were the enemy—and a very small number at that—it was too late. The French easily demolished the entire smala.
Abd el-Kader, who was elsewhere at the time, learned of the catastrophe a few days later. His own family had been spirited to safety, but three thousand prisoners, all the livestock, and the entire treasury had been taken. And—what especially stunned the marabout-warrior—his library of some five thousand precious manuscripts had been totally burned and scattered to the winds.
The heartbreaking destruction of Abd el-Kader’s smala was a turning point in the whole campaign of resistance. For at least a year and a half, the Algerians’ fortunes were low. Abd el-Kader set up a much smaller “floating capital,” actually just a large camp, and moved it to safety in Morocco—where the Algerians were never really welcome. His army remained in Algeria under the command of one of his most trusted khalifas, Ben Allal.
By the end of 1843, Bugeaud and his generals were rejoicing, confident that the war was nearly won. The fight against Abd el-Kader had become largely a man-hunt, and the French columns pursued him relentlessly. Although he always managed to elude them, barely escaping with his life on at least two occasions, they clearly had him on the run. In November the Emir’s khalifa, Ben Allal—respected by the French generals as well as the tribal leaders—was killed in a battle. To further demoralize the tribes and villages, the French displayed his severed head widely for days. Then Bugeaud ordered a burial with military honors.
The French established military control over the areas that they had pacified, up to the northern edge of the Sahara. Bugeaud—who always admired Abd el-Kader—kept the basic organization of the countryside that the Emir had created in his short-lived state. Muslim officials were appointed, but the French military held the power. More and more Europeans were settling on lands seized from the tribes. The military administration weighed heavily on the impoverished and exhausted Algerians . . . and underneath, anger was coming to a boil.