By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria by Jennifer E. Sessions

Author:Jennifer E. Sessions [Sessions, Jennifer E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2015-01-25T22:00:00+00:00

The addition of “war” may seem incongruous in this otherwise passionate condemnation of colonial violence, but the author’s ardent Bonapartism, conjoined with a Romantic conception of war as “ the way to enforce justice and as the occasion for self-expression,” made combat commensurate in his eyes with the peaceable virtues of liberty and agriculture.52 Widely held views of the Algerian conquest as a crusade against Oriental despotism and fanatical Islam only reinforced Lerminier’s assertion that war was among the noble undertakings possible in Algeria. Both the just war of conquest and the eradication of slavery’s unjust violence therefore lay fully within what he considered “the new spirit, the spirit of the nineteenth century.”53 War’s inclusion in the list in no way diminished the larger argument that a noble form of modern colonialism could be imagined under a free labor regime untainted by the moral stain of slavery.

Without recourse to a servile labor force, settlement by European emigrants became a necessary feature of the Algerian colonial enterprise. “There is no longer any question of slavery, it is therefore citizens who are called to become colonists [and] owners of the Algerian soil,” wrote the author of one colonization project in 1845.54 This was partly a matter of necessity. Algerians responded to the French invasion with a combination of flight and armed resistance that made a local work force difficult to recruit.55 Military officers proposed that Kabyles, supposed to be more dexterous, hardworking, and reliable than Arabs, might provide a labor source, but insurrection in Kabylia soon put paid to this idea.56 A few early colonists were able to recruit Algerian laborers; most notable was the Polish Prince de Mir, whose Rassauta farm was lauded for employing some eight hundred Arabs alongside three hundred Europeans.57 But negative views of Arab Algerians’ work ethic carried the day among French colonists and officials, especially after even Mir’s farm was attacked in the Hadjoutes’ 1839 offensive against settlers in the Mitidja. Even though Algerian workers commanded lower wages than Europeans, politicians, administrators and theorists considered them “so indolent in body and spirit” as to be more costly in the long run.58 Ignoring the fact that declining Algerian output was largely due to the disruptions caused by the French invasion and seizure of land, French writers interpreted the uncultivated territory they observed as proof that Algerians were unsuited to modern, European-style agriculture.

European emigration was more than an economic solution to the problem of colonial labor in the age of abolition, however. As an alternative to chattel slavery, it became the defining feature of a new vision of empire to be inaugurated in Algeria, where social virtue could flourish to the benefit of both metro-pole and colony. The economists who assumed Jean-Baptiste Say’s mantle during the July Monarchy declared that it would be a terrible mistake to “confuse this conquest and this colony with the things that we in Europe ordinarily understand by these two words.”59 Adolphe Blanqui, Say’s student and successor to his chair at the Conservatoire,

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