Catholic Missionaries and the Colonial State in French Algeria, 1830-1914

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Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects CUNY Graduate Center
2-2015
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Kyle Francis
Graduate Center, City University of New York
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CIVILIZING SETTLERS: CATHOLIC MISSIONARIES AND THE COLONIAL
STATE IN FRENCH ALGERIA, 1830-1914

by

KYLE FRANCIS

A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in History in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York

2015
© 2015
KYLE FRANCIS
All Rights Reserved
ii
This manuscript has been read and accepted for the
Graduate Faculty in History in satisfaction of the
dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Professor David Troyansky

______________________ _________________________________________
Date Chair of Examining Committee

Professor Helena Rosenblatt

______________________ _________________________________________
Date Executive Officer

Professor Dagmar Herzog

Professor Clifford Rosenberg

Professor Megan Vaughan

Professor Judith Surkis
Supervisory Committee

THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
iii
Abstract

CIVILIZING SETTLERS: CATHOLIC MISSIONARIES AND THE COLONIAL
STATE IN FRENCH ALGERIA, 1830-1914

by

Kyle Francis

Advisor: Professor David Troyansky

This dissertation argues that between 1830 and 1914, with increasing intensity
over time, French Catholic missionaries sowed divisions among the European population
of French Algeria. The French government initially welcomed missionaries to cater to
religiously devout Spanish, Italian, and Maltese settlers in Algeria and to foster their
loyalty to the colonial state. Missionaries, however, incited the professional jealousy and
personal animosity of the territory’s generally less devout French population, who saw
Catholicism and missionaries as little different from Islam and the “fanatical” Muslim
population. Throughout this period, missionaries thus occupied a liminal space in the
racialized hierarchy of colonial rule. As such, their presence disrupted colonial
taxonomies that positioned a “civilized” European population as superior to an
“uncivilized” indigenous one.
For their part, missionaries saw Algeria as a blank slate in which to create a
Catholic society they perceived as increasingly foreclosed in a secularizing Europe. At
the same time, in the extralegal space of Algeria, missionaries relied on seemingly “pre-
modern” networks of privilege and patronage to win support. The stress caused by
navigating these dense patronage networks in an increasingly hostile environment created
discord among missionaries. On the most localized level of power, missionaries
competed with each other to carve out their own niches of authority. Male missionaries
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competed to administer sacraments to female missionaries, while the latter sought to
assert their own autonomy by procuring friendly spiritual advisors or secular authorities
who would allow them the most individual latitude. In the end, these political ploys only
undermined their efforts to spread the Catholic faith and to portray themselves as useful
to government officials.
Ultimately, this dissertation reveals that colonial officials of all types framed the
need to govern the settler population as a crucial component of the larger goal of ruling
over the conquered indigenous population. As such, it re-conceptualizes France’s well-
known civilizing mission as directed as much towards this settler population as towards
the indigenous one. At the same time, in showing that colonial officials utterly failed in
their attempt to mold a unified settler community, this dissertation further reveals the
fragility of the bonds that supposedly held the colonial settlers together and the tenuous
foundations of imperial rule in nineteenth-century French Algeria.

v
Acknowledgements
This dissertation would not have come together without the generous assistance of
many individuals and institutions. I would like to thank the Graduate Center, CUNY, for
providing an Enhanced Chancellor’s Fellowship that funded the first four years of my
graduate work as well as a Dissertation Writing Fellowship that allowed me to devote my
fifth year of graduate school solely to the work of writing the dissertation. I would also
like to thank the history department, and especially Executive Officer Helena Rosenblatt,
for procuring funds for two research trips to Europe in the summers of 2012 and 2013.
This dissertation entailed research in a number of archives that I would have
never gained access to without the kindness and generosity of many individuals. I would
like to thank Sister Laura Huerta at the archives of the Soeurs Trinitaires in Lyon; Louis
Pierre at the Centre Jean Bosco in Lyon; Monseigneur Luis Ramos at the Archivio
Storico di Propaganda Fide in Rome; Frère Ricousse at the archives of the Frères des
Ecoles Chrétiennes in Rome; Lâm Phan-Thanh and Father Lautissier at the archives of
the Congregation of the Mission in Paris; and Sister Fromaget at the archives of the Filles
de la Charité in Paris. I would also like to thank Professors Sarah Curtis, Owen White,
and J.P. Daughton for sharing their extensive knowledge of missionary archives, without
which I would have never discovered many of these resources.
Over the past five years, numerous professors have generously read early and
later drafts of this dissertation in part or in whole. Most importantly, I thank my advisor,
Professor David Troyansky, for taking the time to provide thoughtful and critical
feedback on conference papers, grant applications, and dissertation chapters throughout
my time in graduate school. Over the past two years especially, he has carefully read the
dissertation manuscript on countless occasions and has always come up with new and
insightful suggestions for improvement. It has been an invaluable asset to have an advisor
who knows his profession so well. Over the last five years, Professor Dagmar Herzog has
also overseen my work every step of the way and encouraged me to approach my topic
from new and innovative methodological angles and to ask questions of my sources that I
had not previously considered. Her rich theoretical insights are, I hope, evident
throughout this dissertation. Finally, Professors Judith Surkis, Clifford Rosenberg, and
Megan Vaughan have all provided critical feedback that has improved this dissertation
immeasurably. Any errors, of course, remain solely my own.
Many of the ideas in this dissertation have come from lively discussions with
fellow graduate students. The members of the History and Humanities Seminar at the
Graduate Center read and provided helpful commentary on Chapter Two of this
dissertation. I would also like to thank my fellow members of the French History Group
at the Graduate Center, especially Scott Johnson, Megan Brown, and Lauren Saxton, for
taking the time to discuss my work on many occasions throughout the last two years. In
particular, Chelsea Schields has generously donated so much of her time in person and
via email to improving nearly every aspect of this dissertation. Our stimulating
discussions over both its content and style have indelibly left their mark on everything
from its title to its conclusion. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Jenny Francis, for
serving as an intellectual and professional inspiration in everything she does. Her well-
deserved successes and her tireless work ethic push me every day to make the most of
myself, both professionally and personally.
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Contents

Introduction
Missionaries, Settlers, and the Colonial State .................................................................. 1

Chapter 1
Algeria: A Land of Opportunity, 1830-1846 .................................................................. 28

Chapter 2
A “Golden Age” for Catholic Missionaries in Algeria? 1846-1866 .............................. 68

Chapter 3
The Decline of Patronage and the “Long Decade” of 1867-1883 .............................. 117

Chapter 4
Foreign Citizens and Foreign Missionaries in French Algeria, 1883-1914 ................ 179

Conclusion
The Paradox of Settler Colonialism ............................................................................. 224

Bibliography ................................................................................................................. 236

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Introduction: Missionaries, Settlers, and the Colonial State

Between 1830 and 1914, with increasing intensity over time, French Catholic
missionaries sowed divisions among the European population of French Algeria and
preoccupied the French colonial government. Although fully European in birth and
nationality – that is, in no way a métis population in the traditional sense of the word –
missionaries occupied a liminal space between European rulers and North African
subjects that further disrupts the notion that a clear racial divide separated colonizer from
colonized.1 Never fully subject to the rule of law, but neither entirely servants to the
arbitrary regime of exception that ruled native Algerians, missionaries floated uneasily in
a contested and ever-changing colonial space, appearing variously as nodes of
communication that either transmitted or subverted expressions of power between the
imperial regime and its diverse subjects, citizens, and functionaries.2
Missionary work in Algeria did not fail to garner publicity. An array of actors,
including the colonial press, the military and civilian governments, lay settlers, and
indigenous subjects, all offered their opinions on the benefits and liabilities of welcoming
missionaries to the territory. The multiple and varied discourses that surrounded and
enveloped these missionaries did little to clarify their potential to facilitate or undermine

1 Recent historiography has portrayed the mixed-race populations in the colonies as the group that most
disrupted imperial taxonomies and hierarchies. See Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial
Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), Owen
White, Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa, 1895-
1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), Emmanuelle Saada, Les enfants de la colonie: les métis
de l’Empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté (Paris: La Découverte, 2007), Philippa Levine,
Prostitution, Race & Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge,
2003), Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda, eds., Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family
Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998).
2 The arbitrary regime of exception was embodied, after 1881, in the law code known as the indigénat. See
Isabelle Merle, “Retour sur le régime de l’Indigénat: Genèse et contradictions des principes répressifs dans
l’empire français,” French Politics, Culture, Society 20:2 (2002): 77-97, and Gregory Mann, “What was the
Indigénat? The ‘Empire of Law’ in French West Africa,” The Journal of African History 50/03 (November
2009): 331-353.
1
colonial rule. Throughout the period from 1830 to 1914, the nature of the relationships
between and among missionaries and settlers, as well as the political dangers these
relationships posed to the state, remained remarkably confused; and this confusion and
the anxiety it engendered stemmed directly from the weakness, instability, and
incoherence of the colonial state.
Beginning in the 1830s, the French military government welcomed Catholic
missionaries from France and from the Vatican as part of its effort to encourage European
settlement in Algeria. Officials encouraged missionaries to provide religious services for
Catholic settlers in Algeria in order to tie them and their families to the colony. If settlers
could find sufficient religious resources in their adopted homeland, officials reasoned,
they would have less of an incentive to return to France or elsewhere in Europe. From the
very beginning, though, reality never corresponded to expectations. Unlike in France, the
French population in Algeria constituted a minority of the overall Catholic European
population.3 French colonial officials were thus faced with the dilemma of having to
choose whether to use missionaries to “assimilate” these foreigners (and the minority of
French Catholics) by spreading their universalist ideal of French culture and language or
to allow missionaries to provide for these settlers’ particular needs by fostering their own
religious customs and preaching and ministering to them in their own native languages –
typically Spanish, Italian, and Maltese.4
To complicate matters, French rule throughout much of the nineteenth century
resembled a system of dual power, in which after 1848 civilian officials theoretically

3 For foreign Catholics in France, see Gérard Cholvy, “La religiosité populaire dans la France méridionale:
jalons pour une sociologie historique,” L’Année sociologique, Troisieme série 28 (1988): 169-192.
4 Julia Clancy-Smith analyzes in depth the multi-ethnic population of North Africa, especially Tunisia, in
Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, 1800-1900 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2010).
2