Commander of the Faithful

WORD HAD REACHED GUETNA by the beginning of 1828. The pilgrims were returning. Their last stop had been in Tripoli to visit the tomb of Mustapha, Muhi al-Din’s father, who had died there returning from the Holy Land. A great celebration was prepared by the Hachem to give thanks for Muhi al-Din’s safe return and to honor their patron saint, Abd el-Kader al-Jilani.

Fifteen cows and eighty sheep were slaughtered for their homecoming. From around the beylik, streams of people flowed toward Guetna to pay their respects to their beloved marabout. The douads came mounted on magnificent horses, followed by their retinues of slaves and servants. Marabouts and the simple people rode mules and donkeys. The poorest walked. For weeks they came, so many that even the hospitable Muhi al-Din grew embarrassed by the cost of the exuberant welcome-home party. But tradition wouldn’t allow him to stop the visits until he had received all the chieftains who wanted to pay their respects. Only then did Guetna return to its studious, meditative ways.

The numerous visitors also caught Muhi al-Din up with the news. Mentioned frequently was the “flyswatter incident” between the French consul and the Turkish Dey Hussein.

The provocation had occurred in 1827 at the annual reception marking the Feast of Abraham, held in the dey’s Moorish palace overlooking the port from the summit of the Casbah. Dey Hussein had asked the French consul about the long-overdue debt of twenty-four million gold francs that France owed the firm of Bushnach and Bacri. These two Jewish families had grown from being owners of a small épicerie in Algiers to becoming wealthy international grain merchants and bankers to the dey. The dey, who had supported their claims in the past, reminded the consul that Bushnach and Bacri had supplied wheat to the revolutionary French government when Europe’s monarchies were trying to suffocate it. They had financed the feeding of Napoleon’s armies. Hussein was annoyed that King Charles X had never responded to his letter proposing a compromise over the back interest.

In front of the dey’s entourage, the consul, Pierre Deval, superciliously reminded Hussein that the French king didn’t write letters to his inferiors. The offended Turk struggled to control himself before swatting the Frenchman in the face with his fly fan, calling him an “insolent infidel.” The consul was recalled to Paris, and, escalating the affair further, the dey made all French citizens leave Algiers. King Charles ordered a naval blockade of the city, explained to the public as a retaliatory measure to restore “French honor.” Yet, few people believed it was anything but a pretext for the government to distract a disgruntled public with a foreign adventure. The insult was intentional.

Charles was unpopular. His government had tried to turn back the clock and undo twenty-five years of revolution and reform. The renewed influence of the clergy and of former royalists was disturbing to those who had enjoyed bathing in the fresh waters of secular republicanism. His ministers were not responsible to the parliament. The new, affluent middle class was unhappy — excluded, as it was, from an electorate of only ninety thousand large landowners. The economy was suffering and the government’s finances were in shambles. A naval blockade was a warm up to prepare the public for an invasion, one that would require three years of planning.

The case for premeditated aggression was made by the Duke of Clermont-Tonnère, King Charles’ minister of war: “There are many ports along Algeria’s coast whose possession would be of great utility to France and give us control of the Mediterranean. In the interior, there are immense, fertile plains. Algeria is a veritable El Dorado that would compensate for the loss of our colonies in America.” There was also the belief that Algiers possessed the greatest mother lode of treasure in the world — three hundred years of accumulated Barbary loot, ransom for passengers and crews captured on the high seas by corsairs.

A little war to punish an uppity Turk would shore up support at home, burnish the restored Bourbon dynasty’s faded glory and, of course, serve the cause of Christian civilization. A coalition was formed. A crusade was announced to root out slavery and piracy, and end the humiliating payment of tribute to this nest of thieves. Its chief rival, Great Britain, abstained, but France proceeded with the blessing of Austria-Hungary, Prussia, Russia, Holland and the Vatican.

In France, opposition voices became louder as the invasion date drew near. The republican left feared the adventure’s real purpose was to get the nation drunk on smoke and gunpowder before the new parliamentary elections took place in July 1830. A glorious little war would also curry favor with the army in case the monarchy needed it to beat down domestic enemies.

In May, the influential Le Journal des Débats summarized the counterarguments:

Let reason try to tell us what we are doing in Africa. Is it to seek glory? What glory is there in attacking Arabs in poorly fortified towns that cannons can easily demolish? Can one speak of glory when 35,000 French soldiers face a garrison of 5,000 demoralized Janissaries? Is it for the glory of our sailors in the face of pirates who can’t sail a bark? The glory of our officers defeating imbecilic tribal chiefs of barbarian hordes? So, is it a point of honor? But have the insults and impertinences of the dey hurt France? The interests of Christianity? They are nonexistent, just as are the supposed acts of piracy.4 The expedition will be easy but what will we gain? What is really behind the undertaking? A system of illusions and deceptions which have pushed our poor country to the edge of the abyss. There are bad ministers without a majority in the chambers, without a majority in the electoral colleges who foolishly think they can escape their fate with grapeshot and empty glory.

Neither side, however, was allowed to express doubt about the success of the mission. To question the capacity of the French soldier was unpatriotic. Had not Napoleon in Egypt, outnumbered ten to one, defeated the Mameluke hordes that vainly threw themselves at his disciplined squares of infantry, whose controlled fire shredded horse and rider into mounds of intermingled flesh?

On May 25, 1830, an enormous fleet of one hundred warships and five hundred and seventy-two supply vessels assembled off the coast of Toulon. They had come from Cherbourg, Brest, Bayonne and Marseille loaded with thirty-one thousand infantry, twenty-three hundred artillerists, five hundred cavalrymen, over a thousand engineers, one hundred and seventy-four cannons, eighty-two thousand cannonballs, four thousand horses, food and forage supplies for four months, forty translators (few spoke the correct dialects), numerous painters, including the great Horace Vernet, and hundreds of sacrificial dogs for testing water.

General Auguste-Louis de Bourmont had been a controversial choice for leading the invasion army. Bourmont had a Catholic royalist’s natural revulsion against the excesses of the Revolution — one that left hated priests crucified upside down on their parish doors. Later, he sided with Bonaparte and the Empire. But the night before the battle of Waterloo, Bourmont abandoned his emperor to bargain with the returning Bourbons. He was now in command of the newly formed Army of Africa. To many of his soldiers, however, he was still a traitor.

Dey Hussein was not surprised when French ships appeared off the coast on June 14, just west of Algiers. The place and date of the invasion had been announced months before in the French press. The old maps of North Africa drawn by Napoleon’s spies had been put to use by Bourmont’s invasion planners. The army would disembark in the half-moon bay of Sidi Ferruch, named after a local marabout.

Turkish cavalry watched French soldiers carrying the Bourbon fleur de lis as they came ashore from rowboats that shuttled back and forth like swarming waterbugs. Soldiers kneeled in the soft white sand and sung the Te Deum, led by chaplains in long black cassocks. Five days later, seven thousand Turkish infantry and forty thousand irregular cavalry raised from the local tribes charged Bourmont’s army on the Plain of Staoueli. Algier’s defenders disintegrated in the face of French cannon fire.

On July 4, Dey Hussein sent a delegation to negotiate a truce wrapped in words of unctuous submission. “Oh invincible head of the army of the greatest sultan of our century, God favors you and your banners. But the mercy of God commands moderation in victory. Wisdom counsels mercy as the best way to disarm a conquered enemy. Hussein kisses the dirt on your feet and repents having broken relations with the great and powerful Charles X.”

He offered to make amends for the insult inflicted on the French consul, to renounce the debt owed by France and to pay France for all the costs of the campaign. In exchange, the dey asked to retain his position as ruler and to keep his militia, ships and personal property. “Tell your master,” Bourmont replied, “that the fate of your city is in my hands. In a few hours French cannons will reduce the city and the Casbah into a pile of rubble. He must put himself at my mercy and turn over to French troops the Casbah and all the forts in and outside of the city.” The next day, the Army of Africa entered Algiers.

Algiers had no more than thirty thousand inhabitants when Bourmont’s army descended upon it from the heights overlooking the city. The city had a curious past. In 1516, a local Arab potentate sought foreign protection from the Spaniards who were chasing Muslims and Jews out of Spain. He found assistance in the form of two Greek brothers from the island of Mitylene who had gained fame as privateers. Accepting the flattering request for protection, the brothers consolidated their position by murdering their client and placing themselves under the protection of the Ottoman Turks, whose resurgent new Islamic empire had Christian Europe trembling from Paris to Warsaw. The Sublime Porte dispatched to Algiers a garrison of janissaries⁵ to occupy the important administrative posts in what became known as The Regency of Algiers.

When the French arrived in 1830, Algiers was a mosaic of fifty ethnic quarters and thirty-three guilds that ranged from bakers, potters and tanners to garbage collectors, fishnet makers, policemen and moneylenders. There were 159 mosques, four synagogues for its five thousand Jews, and one church for the Christians. Religion, more than anything else, wove together the complex tissue formed from corporate identities of ethnicity, tribe and tradecraft. It was a society not unlike the one that the revolution in France had recently destroyed, one in which communal identities and rights prevailed over individual rights.

In the mind’s eye of the average European, Algiers was thought to be an unholy nest of filthy pirates and slavers living from robbing and ransoming crews and passengers on ships. To more knowing eyes, it was a little architectural jewel of Turkish imperialism whose inhabitants were quite different from the common view of them. William Shaler, the American consul in Algiers, observed qualities of this white-washed triangle of a city pitched like a sail against the green Sahal Hills that were out of phase with the common, uninformed prejudices toward its inhabitants:

They are far from being the ferocious barbarians that the term ‘Algerines’ seems by common consent to imply… I have found them civil, courteous and humane… nor have I discovered in their character extraordinary bigotry, fanaticism or hatred of those who profess a different religion; they profess the Mohammedan creed and fulfill with utmost scrupulousness the rites which it ordains, and as far as I have remarked, without hostility toward those who adopt different measures to conciliate the Divine favor…Domestic slavery in these countries has been of the mildest character, implying rather reciprocal rights of service and of protection, than of slavery…The horrors of the slave market of which so much has been said have no foundation in fact since the suppression of privateering in Algiers (according to treaties of 1815)…

“There is possibly no city in the world,” Shaler went on, “where the police are more vigilant and persons and property so secure.” So, too, its sinewy alleyways “were paved and generally well maintained.” Municipal cleanliness was strictly enforced. Residents were required to deposit their refuse into pre-made slots in the thick ramparts of the city. Every day garbage collectors would come by the walls and transfer the refuse into large baskets mounted on donkeys.

The city was administered through a complex balance of communal powers. Each community lived according to its own customary laws: Turks, Moors, Kougoulis, Jews, Christians (mostly those captured on the high seas for ransom), foreigners and slaves from the Sahara who were freed upon converting to Islam. Each of these corporate organizations elected an intermediary, or amin, to the central Turkish authority. The amin represented his community, which had a collective responsibility for the conduct of its own members. Thus, governance rested more on self-policing rather than on the direct use of Turkish enforcement powers. Using the self-regulating powers of traditional communities, six thousand Turks governed a diverse population in an area almost the size of France.

Such was the broth of cultures, races and languages into which France plunged willy-nilly. Bourmont prepared a magnanimous capitulation proclamation to soothe the anxious Muslims. France would “respect the free exercise of the Mohammedan religion; the liberties of all classes as pertaining to their religion, property, commerce and industry will not be harmed; their women will be respected; the commander-in-chief will uphold these commitments as a matter of honor.”

One soldier who took the proclamation seriously was a young officer fired with the energy of new ideals for creating a better world, free of class and racial distinctions, guided by reason and Christian ethics. Lieutenant Lamoricière had just been commended by Bourmont. He was the first soldier to replace the red-and-gold embroidered flag of the Turks with the white fleur de lis. However, the lieutenant was not the average officer seeking military glory.

The dark-eyed, compact, intellectually curious native of Nantes was born into an aristocratic Catholic family that had been divided by the Revolution. His mother’s side was “red.” She sympathized with the young, revolutionary republic’s unsettling universal principles of liberty, fraternity and equality that had upset Europe’s hierarchical order of birthright. Lamoricière’s high-Catholic father had been opposed to the revolution’s atheist tendencies and its violence against the Church. A natural aptitude in mathematics had won Lamoricière a position in the new, elite École Polytechnique in Paris where he fell under the influence of the mathematician and philosopher, Auguste Comte. He graduated fourth in his class of 104 students and was accepted into the engineering branch of the army.

Professor Comte guided Lamoricière into the new, utopian world of the Saint Simonians. Their rational, progressive faith combined Christian ethics, stripped of the mystery of the cross, with social planning guided by a technocratic elite. The Saint Simonians promoted emancipation of women and equality for Jews and Negroes. They wanted to transform the world through a new morality of love and peace aided by reason and knowledge that would do away with servitude and slavery of all kinds. “From each according to their capacities and to each according to their work,” was the dictum that underpinned their doctrines.

The twenty-four-year-old convert to Saint Simonianism was shocked by what he saw in those first days of France’s civilizing mission. The ordinary soldiers, like those everywhere, were not concerned with lofty ideas about the unity of races and peoples. More practical needs were on their minds: firewood, water, shelter and opportunities for plunder. Orchards, forests and wainscotting in houses were burned for fuel, mosques turned into stables, palaces and villas became caserns. “Perhaps never, even in the age of the barbarians, has there been an occupation carried out with such disorder as that of Algiers. The hordes of the north who grabbed the remnants of the Roman Empire behaved with more reason and wisdom,” wrote Lamoricière’s fellow officer, Pellissier de Reynaud, who would also make his career in Algeria and leave for posterity his voluminous memoirs.

No plan for administration had been anticipated. Many Turkish administrators simply abandoned their posts, not knowing if they were expected to serve the new masters and not knowing where to turn. Most simply disappeared when they learned the dey had departed for Alexandria with his family as part of the secret capitulation terms that gave Bourmont and certain officers access to the fabled treasury of the Casbah.

How did the dey manage to leave after submitting so abjectly to Bourmont? “If one tolerates a little pillage,” Pellissier explained, “that only serves to cover the big pillage. The big pillage was certainly the treasure of the dey.” Hussein’s only bargaining leverage with Bourmount was the threat to blow up the treasury containing huge quantities of gold, silver, diamonds, jewelry and merchandise. A value of forty-eight million gold francs was placed on the treasure, which was officially transferred to the French government. Its true value would never be known. Bourmont’s officers used compromising documents to light their pipes and otherwise destroyed papers that could reveal the true value of the treasury.

While soldiers plundered the city, France yawned. The Paris Bourse did not respond favorably to the news of the military success, new parliamentary elections went ahead as planned, and the minister president of the royal council opened talks with the Sultan about possibly giving back Algiers. In return, France would keep certain coastal towns.

Upon learning of the fall of Algiers, the tribes, too, were at first indifferent. Invaders had come and gone over the past centuries. Yet most were pleased to see their Turkish oppressors flee. Inactivity and power exercised for too long had gradually ruined a ruling class that once had been admired by the Arabs for its discipline and natural authority.

Now it was the turn of the French. Would they bring stability and order? Or would they remain, as others had, only occupiers of coastal enclaves that were useful for developing trade? What were the intentions of these franci? In the past, Spanish and English flags had flapped above the cities of Tangiers and Oran. Algiers had also submitted for short periods to the demands of European civilization. None of these adventures had endured. The tribes watched and waited, unsure of how to react to this new foreign presence on their soil.

A month later, Bourmont received startling news. King Charles had abdicated. A coup to nullify the election results of July 26 had failed. The crown had been transferred to Charles’s cousin, Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orleans, who agreed to establish a constitutional monarchy with ministers responsible to the parliament.

Bourmont considered rallying the army to restore Charles to his throne. But his army was in turmoil, divided between royalists and republicans. When a consensus finally emerged, the tricolor replaced the fleur de lis. The republican fleet admiral refused to allow the royalist Bourmont to return home on one of his ships, forcing the general to beg a berth on an Austrian brig that was headed for Marseille.

Bourmont left in his wake a trail of mistakes. Once Algiers had surrendered, some of the powerful douad tribes, called makhzen, that had long served the Turks, immediately offered their submission to the new boss in town. Bourmont optimistically assumed that all of the Regency would follow. He decided to march inland up to Blida in the foothills of the Atlas, believing he would receive a great welcome from the liberated natives who had suffered under Turkish oppression. Instead, Boumont’s column was ambushed in the mountain passes. He assumed he had been attacked by Turks, but in fact, had been attacked by resentful Arab tribesmen.

Like most of the French in the beginning, he had wrongly believed the Turks were the main enemy. He retaliated by expelling the Turks who remained in Algiers, leaving the city without any knowledgeable administrators. This rash action left him with no experienced intermediaries familiar with the languages and customs of their new subjects.

The general’s misguided decisions fueled the anxiety of the tribes. Did the franci want to rule directly rather than through experienced Turkish administrators whose laissez-faire habits had left the tribes in relative freedom so long as they paid their taxes? Weren’t they going to simply occupy coastal enclaves as other invaders had? The punishment of the wrong people and the unusual foray into the interior seemed to present a threatening new kind of presence.

The general was hardly alone in his ignorance. The French knew little of the people, customs and even the geography of the land that Bourmont too quickly imagined himself to have subjugated. Tactical blunders might have been forgivable, but not untrustworthiness. The French general had not kept his word. His glorious proclamation of July 5 had become a dead letter. Muslim property and places of worship were not being protected, and compensation not offered. Nor had Bourmont punished those who had violated his orders. Tribes that had initially submitted in the wake of the quick conquest of Algiers began to have second thoughts.

Chaos spread throughout the Regency while the new government in Paris fecklessly debated the value of the African adventure. The order the Turks had maintained by periodically terrorizing the tribes was followed by another form of terror: anarchy. Warfare among the rival tribes was rekindled, thievery flourished and individuals settled old scores with impunity. No one left his village, marketplaces were empty, goods didn’t get delivered and scarcity replaced abundance.

One of anarchy’s victims was Bey Hassan, the former jailor of Abd el-Kader’s father. Hassan was despised and his authority ended at Oran’s city walls. The bey’s tax collectors were the powerful Smela and Douair, who had been willing to serve new masters at first. They had urged Hassan to submit after they learned of the fall of Algiers. Like the dey of Algiers, Hassan was willing to recognize French sovereignty and pay tribute, but he wanted to keep his forts and his janissaries. The French rejected the bey’s demand to keep his forts and Hassan didn’t have the stomach to resist, notwithstanding the urging of the Smelas and Douairs. His cowardliness lost him the protection of his makhzen at a time when less powerful tribes had virtually surrounded the city, suspecting him of plotting to turn it over to the French. In desperation, Hassan sent a messenger to Guetna. He wanted Muhi al-Din to come to Oran.

Abd el-Kader was alarmed by the news. Was this another ruse by Hassan to settle old scores with his father? Muhi al-Din believed it was still his duty to obey the constituted authority in the beylik, however isolated and weak. Indeed, it was Hassan’s lack of any real power that made Muhi al-Din confident that he was not going to be ill-treated. If he were, Hassan would be lynched by the Arabs surrounding the city.

A few days later, Muhi al-Din returned. He had received a request from the bey too controversial for him to decide alone. The Hachem leaders were told to come to Guetna for consultation. They gathered in the mosque, where the men sat on rugs in a circle with their feet tucked underneath their monk-like abayas. The marabout, Sidi Laradj, occupied the place of honor next to Muhi al-Din. There was also Abd el-Kader’s uncle, Sidi Ali Abu Taleb, who had been his demanding riding instructor; his learned brother-in-law, Mustafa Ben Thami, as well as the sheiks from the eastern and western Hachem tribes. Abd el-Kader and his younger brother, Ali, sat apart from the elders. Muhi al-Din allowed a meditative silence to fall over the group before slowly explaining what Hassan had requested.

The bey wanted the Hachem to give him its aman — a pledge of protection that, once given, would become a sacred commitment. Hassan would be part of their family. Muhi al-Din spoke of the past. He acknowledged that Hassan had treated him and his son badly when they had set out on their pilgrimage to Mecca five years earlier. The bey had shown no compassion toward the tribes during periods of drought. He extorted as much as fifty percent of their harvest. He was widely hated. Yet, despite this bill of complaints against Hassan, Muhi al-Din was a man of the Book. The Book counseled forgiveness over revenge. It was better to return evil with good. Providing hospitality to those in distress was a sacred obligation of the faith. Hassan was a fellow Muslim as well. To grant Hassan protection might also enhance the prestige of the Hachem. This would demonstrate the tribe’s devotion to the duty of hospitality. Furthermore, the bey would be humiliating himself by coming to the Hachem asking the favor of their protection. Not to help him, on the other hand, would be a stain on their reputation.

Each man had his say in quiet tones. Out of respect for their master, and knowing well the Koran’s injunctions, the group finally agreed with Muhi al-Din. Abd el-Kader had been listening attentively, and as usual had remained silent. This time, he felt compelled to speak. He asked for their forgiveness, and especially for his father’s, but he did not agree with their thinking.

“What will happen if we cannot protect him?” Abd el-Kader asked, reminding the men of the anarchic state of the beylik and of the widespread hatred of the bey. “He will risk being attacked or insulted. His presence among us could even provoke a popular outbreak of violence. Who will extinguish those flames and at what cost? This will only bring dishonor on those who have promised his protection and show themselves incapable of doing so.” Abd el-Kader continued. “There is another reason for not welcoming the bey into our family. Such a gesture will be regarded as a tacit pardon by the Arabs who have been badly treated by him. In other words, we will make ourselves the enemies of all the tribes in the beylik.”

Muhi al-Din listened impassively. A long silence followed. The father then acknowledged the wisdom of his son’s arguments. Other members of the council agreed. A message was sent to Hassan telling him that his request could not be granted. Two months later another French officer was dispatched to occupy Oran. In December 1830, Hassan surrendered the keys of the city, and more than likely some of his wealth, in return for free passage to Alexandria.