CONQUEST OF ALGERIA / REPRESSION IN FRANCE: TWO SIDES OF A FIGHT WHOSE TRACES LINGER
The king seizes Algiers, hoping that victory will crush domestic opposition: "The white banners were the monarchy, sailing from the port as did Saint Louis..."
-- René Chateaubriand
Le Débarquement à Sidi-Ferruch, July 14 1830 by Pierre-Julien Gimbert / zoom
The monarchy falls nevertheless, and the new regime inherits
a war that goes badly and serves mainly to let officers advance in rank:
Le Combat à Habrah (en 1837), 1840, detail, by Horace Vernet / zoom |
On the white horse, a son of Louis-Philippe. "Don't send any more princes!" the commander begs.
An attack is so poorly prepared that starving French soldiers fall back, abandoning civilians, sick and wounded (in 1835). They are decapitated.
-- Morny, le Vice-Emperor by Michel Carmona, 2005
The insurrection of 1848 makes Algeria suddenly useful as a place...
- To deport rebels:
Internet, source unknown
Deported rebels
- Where the turbulent can go as colonists:
"Pushing back an attack of pillaging Arabs"
"We'll be farmers and fighters," says Martial, a repented offspring of criminals. He and his mistress, the ferocious Louve ("she wolf"), start a new life in Algeria.
-- Les Mystères de Paris, by Eugène Sue, 1843.
- The colonists' version resembles Hollywood's "conquest of the West:"
By the Sword and the Plow, Algeria in the time of General Bugeaud, 1994
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"I will burn your villages and your harvests," says the notorious General Bugeaud, who led the Parisian repression of 1834 and is the bogey-man "Bujo" who frightens children a century later.
-- Les Luttes et les rêves (Struggles and Dreams) by Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, 2016
by Charles-Philippe Larivière, between 1843 and 1845 / zoom
Gone from the web
Version with smoke from burning village in background
"The goal [...] is to keep Arabs from sowing, harvesting, pasturing [...] burn their harvests every year [...] or exterminate every last one of them."
-- General Bugeaud, February 22, 1841, Wikipedia
The population drops by at least 20% between 1830 and 1875.
-- Le Crépuscule [Twilight] des revolutions, 1848-1871 by Quentin Deluermoz, 2012
Other estimates are 30%
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Effect on France:
- The army learns savagery, which intensifies the barbarity of repressions at home.
- "He remembered his two years in Africa, and how he had ransomed Arabs in the little outposts of the South..."
"and a gay and cruel smile passed over his lips at the recollection of an escapade that had cost the lives of three men from the Ouled-Alane tribe and given them, his companions and himself, twenty chickens, two sheep, gold, and a subject to laugh about for six months."
They tore off the earrings of women, the ears too, and cut off their fingers for the rings."
-- Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant, 1885.
In 1881 he had been a journalist in Algeria.
In 1881 he had been a journalist in Algeria.
- "It was not rare to see soldiers throw children to their comrades, who received them at the tip of their bayonets... .
-- Victor Hugo citing a general who visits him in 1871, Choses vues (his diary), 1871
- "To be rid of ideas that sometimes assail me I cut heads, not heads of artichokes but heads of men."
-- Colonel Lucien de Montagnac, Lettres d'un soldat, toward 1848
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Zoom |
- The war was terrible for French soldiers as well, many of whom were peasants enrolled by force.
Badly fed, clothed and equipped, made to commit atrocities and living in fear of unpredictable Arab reprisals, they suffered from wind and heat during the day and cold at night, and from malaria, dysentery, scurvy, typhus, cholera and depression.
One-third of the army was hospitalized (in 1846). Two-thirds of the sick had no beds, three-fourths no mattress, some lay outside, and there was not enough water, food, or medicine.
There were seven times more deaths in the army than among civilians, whose life expectancy was already short.
-- Struggles and Dreams (mentioned above)
- The Arabs fought in traditional ways and victories over them give a sense of omnipotence, with no experience of modern warfare. To be continued.
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The war broke out again in 1954-1962. Algerian rebels obtained independence, with help from the left in France...
In very small print, upper right: Volume IV, The Suitcase Carriers
"Les porteurs de valises" (suitcase carriers) were French carriers of funds and false identity papers to Algerian rebels in metropolitan France.
...and after a massacre in Paris, when 100-250 unarmed Algerian men, women and children demonstrating for independence were killed,* including wounded thrown into the Seine.
*Official count, seven.
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Account in French with more pictures / zoom |
The photographer took only two pictures before fleeing from the police. The authorities had the inscription erased a few hours later and it was published only in l986, during the trial for crimes against humanity of Maurice Papon, who had deported Jews under the collaborationist Vichy government — and tortured Algerian fighters and as Chief of Police and ordered the repression just mentioned.
The photo became the symbol of the massacre that until then had been deleted.
Commemorative plaque, 2001.
Hollowed silhouettes depicting demonstrators
thrown into the Seine,
October 17 2019.
End of this section.
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