Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844-1902

346 Pages·2016·0.98 MB·English

by  Benjamin Claude Brower

A DESERT NAMED PEACE
History and Society of the Modern Middle East
HISTORY AND SOCIETY OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST
Leila Fawaz, general editor
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THOMAS PHILIPP
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LEILA FAWAZ AND C. A. BAYLY
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SAMIR KHALAF
Shi‘ite Lebanon: Transnational Religion and the Making of National Identities
ROSCHANACK SHAERY-EISENLOHR
A DESERT NAMED PEACE
The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara,
1844–1902
BENJAMIN CLAUDE BROWER
Columbia University Press
New York
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2009 Benjamin Claude Brower Paperback edition, 2011
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-51937-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brower, Benjamin Claude.
A desert named peace : the violence of France’s empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902 /
Benjamin Claude Brower.
p. cm.—(History and society of the modern Middle East)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-231-15492-5 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-15493-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)—
ISBN 978-0-231-51937-3 (ebook)
1. Algeria—History—1830–1962. 2. Sahara—History—19th century.
3. Algeria—Colonization. 4. French—Algeria—History—19th century.
5. Algeria—Ethnic relations—History—19th century.
6. Violence—Algeria—History—19th century.
7. Slave trade—Algeria—History—19th century.
8. France—Colonies—Africa, North. 9. France—Territorial expansion.
10. Imperialism—History—19th century. I. Title. II. Series.
DT294.B76 2009
965'.03—dc22 2009007514
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].
References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia
University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration of Arabic
Introduction: Understanding Violence in Colonial Algeria
Part 1: The “Pénétration Pacifique” of the Algerian Sahara, 1844–52
1: The Peaceful Expansion of Total Conquest
2: Theorizing the “Pénétration Pacifique”
3: The “Pénétration Pacifique” in Practice, 1847–52
Part 2: Exterminating the French at Djelfa, 1861
4: The Ouled Naïl and Colonial Rule
5: The Leadership Crisis and Rural Marabouts
6: A Holiday Gone Wrong: The Attack on Djelfa
Part 3: Slavery in the Algerian Sahara Following Abolition
7: Saaba’s Journey to Algerian Slavery
8: The Saharan Slave Trade and Abolition
9: Colonial Accommodation
Part 4: Imagining France’s Saharan Empire
10: Romanticism and the Saharan Sublime
11: The “Blue Legend”: Henri Duveyrier and the Tuareg
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Research Aids and Archival Inventories
Archival Sources
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Index
PREFACE
How to withstand mourning for our friends, our colleagues, without first having sought to understand the why of
yesterday’s funerals, those of the Algerian utopia? The white of a sullied dawn.
—Assia Djebar, Algerian White (1995)
Like all books, this one has a history. It begins in the late 1990s, when the war
between Algeria’s military-led government and the armed groups who claimed to fight
in the name of an Islamist revolution degenerated into unintelligible violence. In a rare
piece about the conflict to appear in the New York Times, correspondent Roger
Cohen described this period as follows: “There is an air of gruesome ritual to the
Algerian conflict. Each year, with the onset of Ramadan, the killing intensifies, and
with the massacres come unresolved questions about responsibility and an
international outcry.” Cohen’s article appeared in 1998, following the mass murder
near the city of Relizane, a farming region, where some of the cruelest and most
incomprehensible acts of violence occurred in an internal war that was then beginning
its sixth year and had already claimed roughly one hundred thousand lives. In a series
of attacks, assailants entered small villages at dusk, just as the muezzin announced
the call to evening prayer, and slew the entire population of each hamlet. Terrified
neighbors heard cries through the night. When they investigated at morning’s light,
they found whole families dead, their corpses horribly mutilated. Reflecting on this
wave of killings, Cohen continued, “Terrorism has gained all the appearances of
complete arbitrariness, losing any military or moral logic,” concluding that this violence
serves “only the causes of instability and murkiness.”1
The Algerian violence began in early 1992, when the government suspended an
election process that promised to bring to power the Islamic Salvation Front (Front du
salut islamique, or FIS), an alliance of Islamist political parties that enjoyed
widespread popular support. Combat groups formed and began an armed struggle
against the state, with attacks against police stations and military bases.
Assassinations soon followed. Anyone associated with “douly” (a word for the state
that came to have a pejorative connotation), including army conscripts, police officers,
and civil servants, fell in the sights of various armed assailants, as did intellectuals,
feminists, musicians, and entertainers, who were associated with “al-ghazu al-
thaqafi,” the West’s cultural invasion. Meanwhile, the government had started an
aggressive program of repression. Rumbling Soviet-made tanks seized strategic
parts of the capital, while security forces occupied mosques in violent displays of the
state’s power designed to intimidate. Indiscriminate and widespread roundups
ensued. Wearing a beard was grounds for arrest. People held in government
detention were tortured and many disappeared.2 At this stage the mass rallies and
heated debates that had characterized political life since 1988 largely ceased,
replaced by nameless corpses dropped along roadsides, which silently greeted
Algerians each morning.
Early on this violence claimed the lives of the innocent—feminists, singers,
teachers, lawyers, foreigners, and countless simple citizens—and by 1998 it targeted
the inconsequential—the aged and the ill, children and their parents.3 As the journalist
and novelist Juan Goytisolo wrote following a visit to Algeria, the victims were “men,
women and children who lived with nothing and died for nothing.”4 Their lives being
worth so little, both sides reaped the political capital of their deaths, and a civil war
became a war against civilians. Each massacre had the effect of effacing the original
cause of the war—a quite ordinary struggle for power—and threw it into the realm of
a metaconflict beyond question or critique, negotiation or resolution. They created
what philosopher Jean-François Lyotard has called differend, and the only solutions
seemed to be final ones: eradication of an enemy ever more difficult to specify.5
Foreign reporters shunned the country and world leaders looked away from the
fighting. With the violence becoming increasingly brutal, it seemed as if the gods
themselves demanded blood.
Although this horrifying conflict called out for immediate answers, the intensity of
the violence and the occult circumstances in which the killings occurred provided little
opportunity to articulate a coherent set of questions. This information deficit was filled
by sensationalism and rumor.6 Foreigners living outside Algeria stressed the former.
Frenchman Bernard-Henri Lévy, a philosopher serving the mass media, published
multipage, voyeuristic spreads in Le Monde on the pain of others, bearing titles like
“Le Jasmin et le sang” (Jasmine and Blood). And Canadian author Robert Young
Pelton got his book The World’s Most Dangerous Places mentioned on the New York
Times best-seller list, telling puerile stories about Algeria, the “world’s most
dangerous place.”7 On the other hand, people in Algeria—those actually threatened
by the violence—saw their lives consumed by rumor.8 People throughout the country,
like villagers along the Chélif River, circulated stories of terrorists possessed of
superhuman powers while they watched state-security forces kill unknown men along
rural roads in not very discreet assassinations.9 At the same time, critics of the
government began to ask: “Who is killing whom?” This was less a question than an
accusation of state complicity in the massacres at Bentalha (22–23 September 1997)
and Raïs (29 August 1997), where entire communities were slaughtered while state
security forces stationed nearby did nothing to protect them.10 Bitter rounds of
accusations followed, amplifying the situation’s confusion.
For me this gave new meaning to a historian’s comment, made in a quite different
context: “There are times when for once the formulation of problems is more urgent
than their solution.”11 A conference held at Cornell University in 1996, where I had just
arrived as a graduate student, set me on the path that ended with this book. This
conference brought together artists and intellectuals who discussed the Algerian
conflict in an emotional atmosphere marked by urgency, frustration, and despair.12
The debates moved me, an American witnessing events playing out far away. I came
to Cornell to work on questions of historical memory and trauma, and it was simple
enough for me to seek understanding in Algeria’s past. It was here, I thought, that the
political and social fields in conflict originally formed. Surely in these decades long
past there was a response to Algerian novelist Assia Djebar’s “Why?,” a question she
posed in 1995, following the murders of three friends.
At the end of this project, I did not find the anticipated answers—simple ones—but
I have been disabused of many certainties with which I began. I found no “taproot” of
violence, one that can be pulled up and eliminated, nor did I find the “Labroussian
paradigm” that might bestow violence in Algeria with structural truths. That much was
to be expected. Another false certainty I developed during the course of my research
—one that I relinquish painfully—was that the violence had neared its end. Contrary to
so many hopeful expectations, peace has not come to Algeria. The violence grinds
on, mutating into new forms rather than disappearing.
Algiers, mid-morning, 11 April 2007. Two explosives-packed vehicles explode at
separate locations in the Algerian capital. Together the bombs claim some two dozen
lives, shattering the decade-long peace the city had enjoyed since the government
gained the upper hand on security. This spectacular act of violence rudely shocks
residents of the capital, who had come to see terrorism as a far-off problem limited
to Algeria’s rural wilāyas (provinces). It shocks me also. I look out onto the street and
see ambulances rushing the wrong way up the one-way street, their drivers urgently
waving oncoming traffic out of the way. A telephone call confirms the worst: “Don’t go
outside.”
I had just arrived in the Algerian capital days earlier by boat with my family to begin
a three-month research trip involving newly inventoried documents in the national
archives. The visit’s length and the fact that our children accompanied my wife and
me were the expression of our confidence that Algeria had rounded a corner. The
sight of Algiers from the sea confirmed this belief. Gleaming white from its recent
repainting, Algiers (“Alger la blanche”) was a much different place than the city I had
first visited in 2000. Then it appeared tired and foreboding, a place where nighttime
fell far too early, draping the poorly lit city in darkness and bringing with it a long wait
for morning light. Seven years later, Algiers is a different city, one living up to the
modernity traced out in its colonial-era colonnades decorating the port, the sweeping
lines of the Monument of the Martyrs, and the majestic profile of the El-Aurassi Hotel,
both built after Algerian independence in 1962 and giving the city its proud skyline.
International banks had returned to Algiers, a French hypermarket had opened its
doors, and Asian auto dealers now filled their gleaming showrooms with Algerian
buyers eager for the new models. Although something of a Luddite by nature, I did
not pause to regret Algeria’s transformation into a consumer society nor to bemoan
the ills of materialism that come with it. Not being from Algeria, I had little to mourn,
not even my own fantasies. In this explosion of the new—named Nokia, Daewoo,
Carrefour, and China State Construction—I saw, first and foremost, security and
stability.
Following the attacks of 11 September 2001, the world is told that everything has
changed. Two bombs go off in Algiers on 11 April 2007 and nothing seems to have
changed. More people have been lost forever to their families and their country’s
future—that is certain. But has a new era of violence dawned in Algeria or did a
previous one never end? In any event, the pain of the 1990s is not over for those