Recent Work on Colonial Violence in French Algeria
La prise de Constantine by Horace Vernet (1838)
“And from the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.”
Introduction
“No one engaged in thought about history and politics,” Hannah Arendt observed in 1969, “can remain unaware of the enormous role violence has always played in human affairs, and it is at first glance rather surprising that violence has been singled out so seldom for special consideration.”[1] She acknowledged, however, the abundance of scholarship about war and warfare but remarked that such work “deals with the implements of violence, not with violence as such.”[2] Fortunately for us, in the half century since the publication of Arendt’s extended meditation, On Violence, especially in the discipline of history, a voluminous body of literature has been made available that treats of “violence as such.”[3]
The field of French history is no exception to this trend, in part because the “colonial turn” has become a mainstay and sub-field in scholarship, albeit sometimes contested in the public sphere.[4] This paper, then, is a historiography about recent historical work on colonial violence in the French empire, specifically in French Algeria, written since 2007.[5] First, I will trace some intellectual trends beginning in the mid twentieth century, at which point scholars began to treat violent French imperial activities (primarily in the Maghreb) with sustained empirical analysis. Second, I will bring attention to several monographs and articles that contribute important developments to our understanding of colonial violence in Algeria from the beginnings of French colonialism in 1830 to the formal end of the Algerian War in 1962. The scope of this paper is selective; I have chosen a representative sample of texts that I understand to offer fresh ways of thinking through the problems posed by violence occurring in the French colonial field. Where relevant, I indicate related literature by way of citation.
The primary texts under discussion include Benjamin Claude Brower’s A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844-1902 (2009); Jennifer E. Sessions’s By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (2011); Judith Surkis’s Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in Algeria, 1830-1930 (2019); and Joshua Cole’s Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria (2019). Taken together, these texts provide insight about four typologies of violence and violent behaviors in the French Algerian colonial field: physical violence (including structural violence), ideological violence (including symbolic violence), juridico-discursive violence, and inter-communal violence (by way of) provocation.
Intellectual Trajectories of French Colonial Studies
Anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler and historian Frederick Cooper co-authored an introduction to their 1997 edited volume, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World entitled “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda.”[6] In 56 pages, Stoler and Cooper together set out to criticize, among other things, what had been a dominant tendency in colonial historiography that, through various methods, ultimately reinscribed the “colonizer/colonized” dichotomy. For Stoler and Cooper, and for the authors published in the edited volume, such a dichotomy neither reflects the complexity and fluidity of the lived colonial experience nor is attested to in the colonial archive—even in cases of extreme subjugation and violence. They argue that scholarship needs “to attend more directly to the tendency of colonial regimes to draw a stark dichotomy of colonizer and colonized without themselves falling into such a Manichean conception.”[7] Their essay has set the stage for much contemporary scholarship about empire by calling for attentiveness to a fundamental “tension of empire,” namely, that historians (and anthropologists or sociologists) should examine “how a grammar of difference was continuously and vigilantly crafted as people in colonies refashioned and contested European claims to superiority.”[8] Scholarship in the 1990s had begun to understand (and in some cases rediscover) the fact that “the tensions between the exclusionary practices and universalizing claims of bourgeois culture were crucial to shaping the age of empire.”[9]
Scholars working in the field of colonial history prior to the publication of Stoler and Cooper’s essay subscribed to roughly four methodological commitments. First, much work in the mid 1970s was committed to an economistic or Marxian approach to political economy. Second, work in the late ‘80s and ‘90s theorized a “repressive model of history” in which European colonizers sought to escape the suffocating norms of bourgeois Europe and treated non-European landscapes as a kind of colonial playground, a canvas onto which they could project Orientalist fantasies.[10] Third, some scholars understood the colonial landscape as a “laboratory of modernity,” in which “experiments in social engineering” could take place.[11] This third trend is especially connected to the scholarship of Paul Rabinow (1989) and Gwendolyn Wright (1991). Finally, scholars (especially in cultural and literary studies) underscored that colonies contain “the Other against whom the very idea of Europeanness was expressed.”[12] With this fourth category, Stoler and Cooper have in mind the paradigm shifting scholarship of Edward Said (1978). They also suggest that all four trends, taken by themselves, pose risks that could result in misleading conclusions by way of overstatement. They instead call for an integrative approach that merges the recent scholarly attentiveness to cultural and discursive approaches to colonial studies with a renewed commitment to the somewhat mundane archival and statistical work of political economy. Stoler and Cooper, in warning against the Manichean dichotomy of colonizer/colonized, remind us that when historians “engage colonial archives further,” they “see how much protracted debate, how much political and cultural energy went into defining dichotomies and distinctions that did not have the predicted effects.”[13] Summarizing this observation, they note that colonial states “were often in the business of defining an order of things according to untenable principles that themselves undermined their ability to rule.”[14]
Stoler and Cooper argue that late twentieth century developments in the field of colonial studies “probably” arose because of a “growing disillusionment with the entire range of progressivist ideologies.”[15] Indeed, “[a] critical reading of colonial texts gradually became a way of showing that cultural domination, racist exclusivity, and violence were written into modernizing, nationalist, and socialist projects.”[16] Yet, even before this, in the politically combustible climates of the Cold War, the failure of modernization theory to convey empirical deliverables in “Third World” countries, and the enclaving of regionally defined “area studies” in the academy, some scholars had already worked towards defining new analytic fields and “[setting] out...new agenda[s].”[17] One example is the important scholarship of George Balandier, whose seminal 1951 essay “La situation coloniale” called for such a new research agenda. His was not taken up by other specialists interested in colonial questions until much later, a paradoxical phenomenon in and of itself that is covered in Cooper’s essay “The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Colonial Studies, 1951–2001,” in Colonialism in Question. Balandier “cogently argued that the colonial situation had to be understood in its own right as the cultural and political construction of a particular moment and that those doing the colonizing were part of the story.”[18] But given his lone-wolf status at the time of the publication of Balandier’s essay, Cooper argues that the subsequent “burst of interest in colonial studies in the 1980s needs explanation.”[19] Very briefly, Cooper appeals to the Cold War logics of psychologizing the colonial situation in the 1960s and ‘70s that silenced the pointed critiques Balandier made. It wasn’t until anthropological work in the 1980s led to “rehistoricizing the colonial situation” that “one can see at last a return to the agenda that Balandier left on the table thirty years previously.”[20]
Historians Daniel J. Sherman and Robert Aldrich wrote articles examining the renewal of interest in French colonial history among scholars in the 1990s in 2000 and 2002, respectively.[21] In 2007, updating the syntheses offered by Aldrich and Sherman, Alice L. Conklin wrote a review article that discusses more recent scholarship on French colonialism produced in the first decade of the 2000s.[22] In her essay, Conklin argues that a distinction should be made between research conducted by colonial historians (e.g., Elizabeth Thompson, Peter Zinoman, and Gregory Mann) and French historians interested in colonial questions (e.g., Eric Jennings, J. P. Daughton, and Emmanuelle Sibeud). Generally speaking, this second group takes “discrete groups of French colonizers as…[a] principle focus of research.”[23] The present historiography focuses on work that falls into this category, recognizing that such scholarship relies heavily on the insights provided by colonial historians and anthropologists who have done extensive field research in non-European archives and settings.
Conklin begins her article by citing British historian Stephen Howe. Howe is dismissive of the idea that there is just one new imperial history of Great Britain; he suggests instead that there are several.[24] This observation is important because it goes further than the two-fold distinction mentioned above: scholars in recent years have been working with a greater diversity of sources, methodological and interdisciplinary approaches, and with a stronger command of non-European languages. Howe’s own work has included an empirically grounded countermeasure to what historian Paul Gilroy, in 2004, termed “postimperial melancholia,” particularly in the case of the United Kingdom.[25] Gilroy’s book attempts to demonstrate that, since the end of World War II,
the life of [Britain] has been dominated by an inability even to face, never mind actually mourn, the profound change in circumstances and moods that followed the end of the Empire and consequent loss of imperial prestige. That inability has been intertwined with the apprehension of successive political and economic crises, with the gradual breakup of the United Kingdom, with the arrival of substantial numbers of postcolonial citizen-migrants, and with the shock and anxiety that followed from a loss of any sense that the national collective was bound by a coherent and distinctive culture.[26]
Briefly, Gilroy’s argument is that the empire became a source of shame, which led to widespread cultural, political, and social forgetting of the violence of empire, among other things. In 2010, Howe wrote an article in which he reviewed recent scholarship that looked at “how a range of claims about colonial massacre, atrocity and genocide have been made, used and contested” in both the public sphere and in historical scholarship.[27] Howe suggests that, even though there are significant intellectual and contextual differences between the politics of memory, memorialization, and collective forgetting between Britain and France, “recent and present British contestations over colonial pasts significantly parallel the concurrent French ones, and those which have emerged in most other formerly imperial states.”[28] Indeed, in the French case, scholarship centered on analyses of France’s colonial past is “sometimes seen as a direct and powerful challenge to central national ideas, especially republican universalism.”[29] Before and since Conklin’s review article was published, Howe suggests that historians have aggressively fought back against this “postimperial melancholia,” and not always to beneficial or empirically rigorous ends.[30]
While looking at the state of the field in 2006, Conklin runs with Howe’s (earlier) insight regrading multiple imperial histories and argues that scholarship published in the 1990s and the 2000s moved away from the abstract style and method of postcolonial theory, which had “made far less use of archival sources than previous work….”[31] Agreeing with historian Frederick Cooper’s criticism of this kind of (important yet insufficiently historical) scholarship, Conklin concedes that, while this work “[introduced] certain key concepts,” which historians regularly invoke, they have in fact lost much of their analytical and historical force because of “excessive and often imprecise use.”[32] She cites as examples the terms “globalization,” “identity,” and “modernity;” terms which, without sufficient historical context, run the risk of functioning as conceptual placeholders and analytical silos that ultimately flatten the diversity contained within both the colonial field and the agents acting within it. To this trio, I would add the concepts of “hybridity” (from Homi Bhabha), “culture” (discussed as a general, anthropological phenomenon), and “power,” in light of critiques offered by Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood (d. 2018).[33]
Cooper argues that postcolonial theory has been insufficient for historians because “discussion at the general level of the colonial does not tell us enough about the ways in which conflict and interaction have reconfigured imaginative and political possibilities.”[34] For his part, he provides what he calls a “family description of empire.”[35] Cooper’s description facilitates concrete, locally situated empirical research that is not beholden to Weberian ideal types that foreground questions about liberalism, universalism, whiteness, and Christianity. These questions have loomed large in the literature about colonialism since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978. The “family description of empire” will provide a lens through which the lived reality of people in colonies can be better understood. Cooper understands an empire to be a “political unit that is large, expansionist (or with memoires of an expansionist past), and which reproduces differentiation and inequality among people it incorporates.”[36] This definition tries to foreclose the temptation to teleological narratives of imperial domination, be they Orientalist or nationalist. For historians, what is necessary is a “critical and sensitive historical practice” that has the ability to “help us retain our focus on the possibilities of political imagination and the importance of accountability for the consequences of our actions.”[37] Cooper’s book, critical of postcolonial theory, was published in 2005. Yet, while agreeing with Cooper’s criticism of the abuses of postcolonial theory, Conklin suggests that Cooper’s concerns, at least by 2006, are somewhat exaggerated in the French case given the abundance of what the former sees as richly argued and “rigorously historical scholarship.”[38] In fact, Conklin confirms the emerging diversity of methods, questions, and archival practices in the field of French colonial scholarship mentioned earlier.
On the other hand (and written against the backdrop of American military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan), anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler argued in 2006 that “colonial studies,” as an academic discipline, “has subscribed to a myopic view of empire that sidelines a wide range of imperial forms as anomalous….”[39] For her, this has had the effect of “casting their [i.e., the imperial forms’] political and territorial ambiguities as idiosyncratic.”[40] Stoler views this hesitance among scholars to classify the trends of imperial habits negatively and suggests that colonial studies should “start from the premise that… ‘imperial formations’ are macropolities whose technologies of rule thrive on the production of exceptions and their uneven and changing proliferation.”[41] Despite somewhat divergent methodological commitments, both Cooper and Stoler share similar definitions of empire.
Keeping in mind Cooper’s call for local, empirically grounded scholarship that highlights the various modes through which “conflict and interaction have reconfigured imaginative and political possibilities,” the question of colonial violence can also benefit from recourse to Stoler’s deployment of “imperial formations.” Much scholarship since 2007 has managed to attend to both of these concerns: avoiding the temptation to teleology, on the one hand, and the temptation to an “area studies” mindset, on the other—one that fails to account for overarching colonial motifs that characterize imperial formations from the nineteenth century onward.[42]
Physical Violence
Benjamin Claude Brower’s 2008 monograph, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902 is in many ways a companion text to Julia Clancy-Smith’s 1994 text, Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800–1904).[43] Both texts seek to push back against the static dichotomy of colonizer/colonized, which in effect discursively reproduces French practices of colonial violence in the very practice of scholarship. Brower’s introduction (“Understanding Violence in Colonial Algeria”) is a précis of the French invasion and conquest of the Algerian Tell. It highlights the political motivations of the 1830 conquest[44], the flash points of extreme colonial violence from 1830-38 and 1839-47, and it offers some theoretical and methodological reflections for his study of colonial violence in the Algerian Sahara, the desert region south of the Tell.
The structure of Brower’s book is inspired by American Gothic author William Faulkner. Brower claims that his study of France’s incursion into the Algerian Sahara is not a “formal” contribution to Franco-Algerian historiography, but a “single story, several times told,” in the words of Faulkner.[45] This is an overstatement, as the key contribution of Brower’s book is the introduction of the Sahara into the sphere of French colonial domination in the late nineteenth century, a topic that had been mostly overlooked in the French imperial historiography. In a review, Emmanuelle Saada argued that “[the] greatest merit of this work is to offer a polyphonic description of the violence committed by different populations, without presupposing a ‘colonial action’ followed by ‘indigenous reactions.’”[46] It is precisely this archival polyphony (even heteroglossia) that Saada notes in Brower’s text that deserves some discussion with reference to the problem of colonial violence. Brower recognizes the national and linguistic limitations of the French colonial archive, but he powerfully asserts the “infinitely complex” diversity found within them, suggesting that they reflect a multilayered polyphony of voices and contexts, all of which deserve to be examined on their own terms.[47]
A Desert Named Peace examines the “multiple logics” of colonial violence in Algeria. The crucial starting point for Brower’s definition of violence is his argument that “violence is not a singular phenomenon,” and that is “assumes many forms.”[48] Franco-Algerian colonial spaces never produced a singular or universal logic in regard to how, when, and why violence was inflicted, let alone in terms of projecting a universe of French imperial domination unilaterally throughout the colonial field. In light of this multiplicity of logics, Brower cites the need for a multi-regional work of history. He justifies this necessity by highlighting Algeria’s unusual status as a “Mediterranean borderland.”[49]Even at the height of French imperial domination, state apparatuses of power never formed a “seamless institution.”[50] These institutions never formed the “robust disciplinary grid” that French politicians and bureaucrats sometimes made it out to be, and in this way, Brower pointedly rejects a view of Foucauldian biopower as a practice of the management of life in the colonial setting during this period.[51] Colonial rule in the Algerian Sahara was incomplete and disjointed. Yet, thinking through the various modes and senses of violence, these modes “eluded the logic of colonial oppression and anticolonial resistance.”[52] Finally, Brower argues that colonial violence “reflected the social makeup of the country itself, and it expressed a variety of political strategies, tensions, hopes, and anxieties.”
Rather than relying on Foucauldian theoretical insights, Brower’s theorist of choice is French philosopher and historian Etienne Balibar. By way of citation, Brower is inspired by Balibar’s assertion that “[there] are layers of violence which do not gravitate around the alternative of power versus counter-power, although they inevitably return to them—infect them, so to speak.”[53] Recognizing the difficulty of defining colonial violence, Brower continues to work towards a provisional and practical understanding of its significance. He proposes that such a provisional definition must “unfold in several stages.”[54] The historian must think about colonial violence as a series of processes and as a “phenomenon with effects.”[55] Moreover, a study such as his looks at both “actions and actors.” Brower defines actors as “those who perpetrated and suffered the effects of violence, that is, its victims.”[56] He recognizes that “the earliest [form] of French violence” was reducing the field of actors in colonial violence to the binary of colonizer/colonized. Think about the actions of colonial violence is understandably more difficult. One way to get at this problem, Brower suggests, is to focus on violence’s “relationship to power and the production of social inequalities.”[57] He looks at the cases in which physical force amounted to political power in addition to French imperial structures of symbolic and structural violence, as informed by the sociological work of Pierre Bourdieu, himself an anthropologist who did fieldwork in Algeria.
Brower’s book is divided into four parts while the whole of his work traces the “history of the Saharan lands that become a part of France’s Algerian colony in the second half of the nineteenth century.”[58] Part one examines the conquest of the Algerian Sahara and the profound contrasts between the rhetoric of “pénétration pacifique” and the “immoderate forms of violence” that were actually deployed on the ground. Brower documents the ultimate failure of the infamous Governor General of Algeria Thomas Robert Bugeaud’s (1784–1849) efforts to win the hearts and minds of Algerian actors opposed to Emir Abdelkader. Bugeaud took command in 1840, and after 1844, in light of the mutiny at Biskra and many French and Algerian deaths, the French Chamber of Deputies began to grow impatient with Bugeaud; they wrote that “France bears with reluctant patriotism the burdens of this conquest…” and that “It is through negotiations and by the intermediary of indigenous leaders, facilitating communications and exchanges [and] establishing marketplaces, rather than by arms that we can complete the conquest.”[59] Nevertheless, the Chamber’s posture of a “restricted occupation,” (also that of Louis-Philippe) of the Algerian Sahara was, by the end of the 1830s, no longer a reality on the ground as “ambitious military leaders chafed under the limitations placed upon them.”[60] Bugeaud’s vision of “total conquest” was beginning to take hold despite the hesitations of politicians in Paris. The Saint-Simonian Père Enfantin, among others, helped to imagine a fantastic vision of the Algerian Sahara that was amenable to Bugeaud’s efforts of empire building through the lens of “pénétration pacifique,” even if this lens distorted the real activities of French soldiers inflicting acts of violence. Despite the Balzac-like work of imagining the Sahara as a fertile oasis, and given that the vision of the “pénétration pacifique” “freed the political paths southward,” it did not “open the desert to the French empire,” or “provide knowledge of the Sahara to advance French empire.”[61] While the Saint-Simonians eventually began to oppose Bugeaud, his resignation in 1847, along with the surrender of Abdelkader, signaled a hope for “the beginning of a new chapter marked by peace and prosperity.”[62] The extreme violence of this new chapter (1847-52) belied these hopes as the campaigns in Ksour (1847), Zaatcha (1849), and Laghouat (1852) demonstrate.
Part two looks at the case study of an Algerian attack on a French village. Here, Brower shows how this obscure event tells us something about the complexities of violence in the Algerian Sahara. Brower spends three chapters discussing the 1861 uprising at Djelfa led by the Sufi mystic Si Tayeb ben Bou Chandougha from various perspectives, providing a detailed analysis in chapter six. One of Brower’s aims is to “rethink the national-resistance model of popular movements in the Middle East and to seek new ways to explain the dynamics of their violence.”[63] The French were unprepared to conquer the Sahara, having neither sufficient manpower nor technology. At the same time, French imperialism in the trans-Saharan region was socially and economically disastrous. The conquest of the Ouled Naïl tribal group disrupted the balance of power between nomadic and settled populations. French policies of appointing exogenous leaders led to political destabilization: “[in] the short term, the policy left local society without effective voices of direction and authority.”[64]
In a particularly striking example of colonial violence reminiscent of the activities of the Belgians in Congo, Brower writes,
At Djelfa the caids of the Annex were fined (limogés) and subjected to various symbolic abasements that marked them as lackeys of the administration. In one case a caid of the Ouled Naïl carried the most visible signs of his subordination to the French: he was missing both ears, cut off by French troops in 1852 (to collect the bounty that the army paid on Algerian ears).[65]
French policies were, nevertheless, unable to completely overwrite the political situation of the Ouled Naïl. Brower recognizes that “the attack on Djelfa poses serious interpretive challenges.”[66] For him, “[it] neither fits neatly into a story of Islamic revolt nor one of colonial accommodation, and it does not match the paradigm presented in studies of national resistance.”[67] His analysis of Si Tayeb’s motivations reveals their socio-political and religious origin, seeking to “prove to his followers that he continually partook of God’s favor.”[68] Si Tayeb was to demonstrate this by attacking the French and destroying them. Ultimately, Brower highlights the overdetermined character of Si Tayeb’s revolt, as “[economic] insecurity unleashed a host of social tensions and crises that created conditions for conflict rather than assuring a Pax Francus. With daily existence having become precarious, and the fabric of the social order having frayed, the people of Algeria sought solutions by following increasingly dangerous paths.”[69] Here we see how Brower’s detailed analytical work reflects a commitment to Stoler and Cooper’s research program about the complexity and fluidity of various actors in the single colonial field.
Part three is a creative yet careful examination of indigenous forms of slavery and how French abolition rhetoric and colonialism merged to preserve it. Brower is straightforward in analyzing the competing discursive traditions that cover North African slavery before and after French colonial intervention. Through the example of Saaba, an enslaved Fulani, who was purchased by a French man in Ouargla, Brower reveals the inconsistencies of French rule and its accommodationist practices. While French slavery was officially abolished in 1848, colonial forces maintained it and turned a blind eye when they came across it, employing emerging scientific racist rhetoric to justify its continued presence in the Sahara.
Part four looks at culture struggles in France and how they were dangerously linked to “a fascination with the extreme and the archaic.”[70] He examines romantic and “moody pessimism” found in late nineteenth-century literary tropes including Corneille Trumelet’s apocalyptic “Sahara sublime” and Henri Duveyrier’s romantic depiction of the Tuareg’s “blue legend,” which saw them as Saharan versions of medieval knights.[71] The 1881 massacre by the Tuareg of the Flatters Mission demonstrates the limits of Duveyrier’s (and broadly French-Algerian) mythmaking practices that sought to “understand” and identify with Algerians to a variety of ends.
Ideological Violence
Jennifer E. Sessions’s 2011 monograph, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria, is an example of a (richly illustrated) text that could be added to the growing body of research that Conklin celebrated in her 2007 article. Sessions understands the history of France’s colonies as integral, rather than peripheral, to the very identity of the metropole. The book borrows its title from a turn of phrase penned by Bugeaud. The text is organized into two parts (“By the Sword,” and “By the Plow”) with six chapters, three in each section, plus an introduction that sets the stage for thinking about the cultural origins of French Algeria and a conclusion that treats of later nineteenth-century (and contemporary) implications of her argument.
In many ways, Sessions’s work is an elaboration of the research agenda plotted out by Cooper’s 2005 book, mentioned earlier. Both Cooper and Sessions are reluctant to endorse what the former calls “modes of looking at history ahistorically”.[72] For Sessions’ part, her Introduction stresses a concern for recovering causality and moving beyond a merely descriptive analysis of abstract power relations. Indeed, purely discursive approaches to the study of empire risk vitiating the “explanatory force required to answer historical questions about empire’s origins.”[73] Instead, by appealing to the need to examine everyday life practices, the relationship between labor and discourse, and the production of cultural commodities, Sessions argues for the need to combine theory and practice in historical analysis.
Already in 1960, Henri Brunschwig argued that French imperialism could be understood by contrasting it with British styles of imperial domination. British imperial domination, especially in the Indian subcontinent, the argument goes, was driven by economic incentives (in the mind of colonizer, at least). “French imperialism by the end of the nineteenth century,” on the other hand, “was driven by nothing more complicated than a passion for national honour and cultural extraversion.”[74] For Brunschwig, this expansion “took the form of ambitious colonels and admirals conquering vast tracts of commercially insignificant territory….”[75] Sessions, echoing Brunschwig’s conclusions, notes that historians have long been unable to find rational, economic motivations for the activities of French imperialists. Sessions’s arguments about the role of capitalism in French imperialism leads me to add her book to a growing list of texts that debate the “New Imperialism,” the period of extractive European imperialism informed (by contested degrees) by capitalism in the late nineteenth century, mentioned earlier. In effect, Sessions’s book thinks through the causal mechanisms at play in French imperial endeavors.
Dismissive of econometric and statistical frameworks for approaching the history of the relationship between capitalism and French imperialism, Sessions points out “historians found that the colonies offered little, if any net economic benefit and that empire impeded rather than promoted the development of capitalism.”[76] In fact, “the economics of colonialism in France appeared highly irrational, as evidenced by the fact that decolonization met with little opposition from business circles and caused no crisis of French capitalism.”[77] Scholarly investigation of capitalism in the French empire did not yield much by way of addressing the question of causality. Sessions’s conclusions about the role of capitalism in French imperialism sit uncomfortably with Conklin’s 2007 call for scholars to “consider more carefully how evolving forms of capitalism also shaped the many political conflicts and cultures of colonialism and postcolonialism….”[78] After exhausting economy-centered explanations for French imperialism, Sessions notes that historians began to look at the political dimensions of empire: noting the work of historians Charles-Robert Ageron and Stuart Persell on the French colonial lobby, though, we learn that a purely political frame did not shed much light on “the popular image of empire developed in cultural fields including...travel literature, advertising, and film.”[79] Sessions, then, calls for a carefully historicized attention to the French cultural frame, in addition to the political one.
To this end, Sessions introduces the concept of “political culture.” By way of citation, she invokes the term in ways similar to Keith M. Baker’s use of the phrase in his 1990 text Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century.[80] Using Baker’s definition, Sessions posits that political culture is “the set of discourses or symbolic practices by which…individuals and groups in any society articulate, negotiate, implement and enforce the competing claims they make on one another and upon the whole….”[81] It was this political culture that “provided the map by which nineteenth-century Frenchmen made sense of the colonial conquest unfolding on their public squares, stages, canvases, and print stalls.”[82]
According to Sessions, the received wisdom has it that the Algerian conquest was, in the words of Ageron, “a makeshift expedient for internal political consumption, carried out by a government in difficulty seeking the prestige of a military victory.”[83] While it was very much the case (and quite the understatement) that the governments under both the Bourbon Restoration (6 April 1814 – 21 January 1830) and the Orléanist July Monarchy (7 August 1830 – 26 February 1848) were “in difficulty,” Sessions’ project demonstrates that the invasion was by no means a “makeshift expedient,” rather it was a means of reconciling conflicting political logics by virtue of assuring political legitimacy. In fact, the “Algerian conquest…stood at a critical crossroads both between the ‘first’ and ‘second’ French empires, and between continental and overseas empire.”[84] Both of these regimes “sought to reconcile the revolutionary principles of popular sovereignty and participation with prerevolutionary ideals of kingship and royal authority.” In an effect, “to legitimize these experiments with constitutional monarchy, both turned to aggressive warfare and overseas expansion.”[85]
In the case of Charles X, liberals traversed the rhetoric of “Oriental despotism” to accuse the (extremely conservative and authoritarian) king of hypocrisy as he sought to “punish” the dey of Algiers for being despotic. In the case of the “bourgeois monarch,” Louis Philippe I, a careful balance was (unsuccessfully) sought between meritocratic soldiering and monarchical legitimacy. The slippages of meaning-making between state-level propaganda and wider cultural production frustrated both regimes, but the case of Louis Philippe and his five soldier-sons is particularly acute. Here, Sessions’ examines the logics of political culture implied by the displays in the Musée Historique de Versailles. The king’s commissioning of the understudied artist Horace Vernet and the latter’s production of hyper-realistic battle scenes is the background upon which Sessions foregrounds an evaluation of changing artistic mentalities and styles that complicated, and ultimately undermined, the political goal of legitimization after which the July Monarchy aggressively sought.
Sessions’ analysis of gender and sexuality are crucial to making sense of the place of Algeria in nineteenth-century French political culture. The persistence of the Napoleonic legend around the Armée d’Afrique inflected cultural and political anxieties about purity, virility, masculinity, and manhood. Even in light of the atrocities committed by Bugeaud, “French lawmakers proved unwilling to refuse the budgetary requests of the Armée d’Afrique’s commanders or to reject plans for colonization.”[86] In fact, these lawmakers ended up endorsing a “a colonization policy that enlisted thousands more French men to take up the struggle for domination in Algeria by the plow, rather than the sword.”[87] Sessions concludes, “If the Bonapartist vision of masculine citizenship helped to undermine the Orléans royal family’s claims to power, it also provided the legitimizing foundation for a large-scale project of settler colonialism in Algeria. Settlers and soldiers would become partners in making Algeria the jewel in the French imperial crown.”[88] The second part of Sessions’ book shifts its approach from cultural history to a set of questions informed by social-historical concerns. She examines the movement of French (and others) into Algeria who were granted “free passage” and revealed that most of the people who were granted government appeal to migrate were primarily urban and north of the massif central.
Juridico-Discursive Violence
Judith Surkis’s 2019 monograph, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930, is a colonial legal genealogy that examines how the Franco-Algerian “Muslim question” became a sexual question.[89] Her “history of French Algeria” is one that seeks to counteract the “work of historical forgetting in order to reveal the neglected memory of Muslim law in French law.”[90] In this way, Surkis’s book is an example of the anti-forgetting scholarship discussed by Howe in his 2010 article.[91]
The book is a cultural history of imperial legality that illustrates “how contests over the legal status of Algerian men and women were implicated in wider conflicts over French efforts to assert colonial sovereignty.”[92] Beyond closely reading French legal texts, Surkis’s source base includes French state archives, journalism, professional ethnographic writing, and novels. Surkis structures her arguments in eight chapters, bookended by an introduction and an epilogue. Surkis’s first book, Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870–1920, traces how women became less free in France in light of the cascading consequences of the 1804 Napoleonic Civil Code.[93] In her 2019 book, Surkis argues that French sexual fantasies about Algerian women (and men) went beyond influencing cultural and artistic endeavors, they bled into the “writing and practice of law.”[94] I understand Surkis’s project, therefore, to be an example of documenting instances of France’s juridico-discursive violence in the Algerian colonial field.
Whereas the mature work of Michel Foucault sought to look at diffuse forms of power beyond the apparatus of the state, Surkis’s goal is to examine this writing and practice of law to the effect of making evident sovereignty’s contingency by “highlighting legal indecision over the organization and regulation of sexual and familial order.”[95] In other words, Surkis seeks to re-center the role of the state in questions of colonial power dynamics. The conservative promises of protecting an imagined Algerian Muslim gender hierarchy did not exist independently of a colonial logic of land expropriation and novel forms of legal classification. Throughout the nineteenth century, “desirable” Algerian real estate was classified as le statut reel (real property law), subject to a “purportedly universal French civil law,” and therefore easier to expropriate, while the signification of Muslim difference by “masculine privilege” and French ethnographic understandings of Algerian gender dynamics allowed for the creation of le statut personnel (personal status law).[96] Beyond economic or political motivations, the legacy of “sexualized conceptions of Muslim legal difference” proved to be lasting.[97] We cannot, Surkis suggests, get to the heart of the matter by these motivations alone. Instead, we must understand how they were “also imbued with powerful affective investments.”[98]
Surkis is therefore also concerned with questions about the legitimation and application of French imperial sovereignty and its affective, juridico-discursive instabilities. Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria reveals that the imperialists’ categorization of Algerian legal status based on sexual difference unintentionally destabilized the centrality of French sovereignty at several key moments. Here, Surkis’s argument about the contingency of French imperial sovereignty in the late nineteenth century shares many parallels with Sessions’s analysis of the post-Revolutionary quest for political legitimation as a causal, or explanatory force, behind French imperial activities. Surkis shows how “texts and trials refracted and ramified concerns that extended beyond the confines of technical legal argumentation on the one hand, and the interests of jurists and litigants in the colonial legal field on the other.”[99] She does this for a reason, namely, “to illustrate how contests over the legal status of Algerian men and women were implicated in wider conflicts over French efforts to assert colonial sovereignty.”[100] Surkis then seeks to understand what she calls the “cultural life” of Algerian colonial law. She defines this as the “material, political, and affective resources and resonances on which its elaboration and its powerful effects depended.”[101] Surkis’s deployment of “cultural life” shares many characteristics of “political culture” as deployed by Baker and Sessions.
Returning to the aforementioned “powerful affective investments,” Surkis is concerned with attending to not only the legal power of fantasy but also French fantasies of legal power. The affective investments of French journalists and jurists revealed in her sources demonstrate “unrecognized desires and fantasies that were regularly displaced or projected onto Algerian men and women.”[102] Connecting the work of theoretical psychoanalysis and Jacques Lacan with her study of the cultural life of Algerian colonial law, Surkis notes that “[the] operation of colonial law always relies on a compensatory fantasy, which is to say a denial of the inevitable gaps and uncertainties of knowledge entailed by rule over a distant and often defiant population.”[103] Agreeing with Ann Stoler, Surkis concurs that these affective and libidinal investments were not simply par for the course of colonial ideology, nor were they “metaphors for rule.”[104] With Stoler, Surkis believes that these investments are at the “heart of colonial governmentality.”[105]
From Lacan, Surkis borrows the concept of the “extimate.” For Surkis, the extimate “displays…a fascination with and jealousy of the Other’s excessive sexual pleasure that reveals deep-seated but unrecognizable desires within the self.”[106] This “unacknowledged desire represents an intimate foreignness that is actually created, by the structure of social and psychic rules, as an integral excess.”[107] So, to avow this “intimate foreignness” would “rupture, to use the terminology of the Civil Code, both ‘public order’ and the subject of the law.[108] Surkis argues that “a totalizing and gendered fantasy of the Civil Code prompted such extimate projections.”[109]
The first chapter, “Bodies of French Algerian Law,” begins with the case of the Colombon Affair of early 1832 and ends with the case of Aïcha, an Algerian Muslim woman who attempted to convert to Catholicism. With this chapter, Surkis demonstrates that debates between French officials in the government and those in the military were often contentious. These debates concerned the legitimacy and viability of the colonial enterprise in Algeria itself. About these debates, Surkis importantly concludes that “[the] French colonial state consistently sought the assimilation not of Algerian people, but of Algerian land.”[110] The case of Aïcha reveals how “contingency and uncertainty, as much as strategic planning, shaped Algeria’s legal order.”[111] Surkis demonstrates that, “[as] scenes of affective and erotic investment, gendered fantasies about women’s place in Muslim law and religion came to ground a regime of colonial law that was eventually adopted in 1834.”[112] The first four years of France’s conquest of Algeria also reveal how “the ‘period of uncertainty’ was fantasmatically staged and provisionally resolved in law.”[113] Chapter two, “Polygamy, Public Order, and Property” examines the specter of polygamy as far as it applied to the expropriation of Algerian land. Before the 1860s, polygamy was not viewed as essential to Algerian Islamic identity. From the 1860s forward, polygamy was configured as central to a timeless Muslim identity that differentiated it from Algerian Jews, who gained citizenship in with the Crémieux Decree of 1870. Surkis argues that “[new] concepts and categories of Muslim legal, religious, and sexual difference emerged at this moment and in connection with property reform that consolidated the legal construction of the ‘Muslim family.’”[114] Chapter three, “Making the ‘Muslim Family’” reveals how French imperialists constructed the difference between le statut reel and le statut personnel, mentioned above. Surkis explains that this difference was embodied in “disingenuous rhetoric,” and that as the law sought to preserve a fantasmatic Muslim cloistered life of women, it simultaneously created categories of family property. This distinction effectively separated the land on which Algerian Muslims lived from imagined spheres of private intimacy.[115] Following the Moqrani Rebellion (Unfaq urrumi, 16 March 1871), imperialists and reformers extended their jurisdiction to vast swaths of Algerian Muslim territory and continued the process of land expropriation tied to French conceptions of Algerian Muslim customary law.
Chapter four, “Civilization, the Civil Code, and ‘Child Marriage’” focuses on the “droit de djebr,” that is, the “right to force a minor’s marriage in Islamic and Berber customary law.”[116] Surkis demonstrates how the specter of child marriage was deployed to establish French legal supremacy and colonial dominance, and therefore establish French sovereignty and the legitimacy of the Civil Code over Algerian Muslims and their property. Chapter five, “Special Mœurs and Military Exceptions,” further examines jurisdictional conflict between military and non-military French interests in colonial Algeria. When civilian rule was established in 1870, the continued presence of military forces in barracks was a continuing source of legal confusion for French and Algerians alike. In this chapter in particular, Surkis examines how “sex, gender, and civilizational difference inflicted [civilian and military conflicts.]”[117] She shows how “[an] 1891 case involving a military doctor’s charges of sexual misconduct against a fellow officer in the native cavalry unit…showcases how the fantasmatic integrity of colonial legality, masculinity, and racial dignity remained precarious, vulnerable to charges of perversion and corruption, even as French domination appeared to be reaching its height.”[118] Chapter six, “Conversion, Mixed Marriage, and the Corporealization of Law” analyzes the “problem” of mixed marriages in colonial Algeria—particularly between European women and Algerian men. Even though instances of these mixed marriages were infrequent, similar to the infrequency of Muslim conversion to Catholicism as in the case of Aïcha, these episodes provoked profound colonial anxiety and ambivalence as they tested the static and racialized boundaries of the colonizer/colonized dichotomy. Surkis adds that, while “pondering these cases, jurists elaborated an embodied and civilizational account of personal law. Their agonizing over the legal effects of marriage for citizenship and nationality defined the exigencies of ‘public order,’ the presumptive ‘dignity’ of the Civil Code, and the secularity that it was supposed to enshrine.”[119]
Chapter seven, “The Sexual Politics of Legal Reform,” analyzes the “political and psychic denials at work in assertions about the sexual superiority of French civil and political law.”[120] Surkis looks at two debates about reform in colonial Algeria, the Code Morand and post-World War I attempts to revise the political status of Algerian men and women. Centenary celebrations of the Algerian colony coincided with these debates and ultimately witnessed a simultaneous refusal of the colonial government to recognize the political rights of “non-Kabyle” Algerian Muslims, especially with regard to questions of divorce and inheritance. This chapter serves as a useful empirical analysis of the ways in which memory is weaponized, reformulated, and deployed for the sake of actualizing particular colonial logics of forgetting and remembering. Chapter eight, “Colonial Literature and Customary Law,” discusses the political and artistic production of indigenous intellectuals in La Voix des humbles and the furious reaction of the Young Algerians to the Kayble-centric mythologies of French romantic authors like Ferdinand Duchêne. Both French romantic authors and the Young Algerians offered “sentimentalized [visions] of Algerian women,” that served their own political, imperial, and counter-imperial purposes.[121]
Inter-Communal Violence
Joshua Cole’s 2019 monograph, Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria, tells the “story of a terrible event that unfolded in the harsh glare of imagined futures that never arrived.”[122] This event was the most lethal episode of antisemitic violence on “French” soil during peacetime, with 28 deaths in total. Cole takes a two-pronged approach to interpreting the significance of these episodes of explosive violence in French colonial Constantine in Algeria over the course of three days in August 1934. First, by reconstructing the fragmentary evidence of police records and official police reports, Cole threads a narrative that reveals how the colonial government in Algeria conspired to hide evidence of far right-wing French nationalist provocation of hatred and violence between Jews and Muslims in Constantine. Based on detailed research in colonial archives, Cole lays some of the responsibility for these acts of provocation at the hands of the “notorious figure in the history of political extremism in France,” Mohamed El Maadi.[123] Second, Cole’s broader synthesis of the “social history of political violence” in French Algeria renders legible the political field through which El Maadi moved as well as the sources from which he drew his motivations to execute these acts of provocation, which resulted in bloody violence.[124] With fourteen chapters, the book is organized into four parts and bound by an introduction and conclusion. Parts one and two map onto Cole’s efforts to frame Constantine’s political and social history, while parts three and four contain a detailed analysis of the events of 3-5 August 1934 and the subsequent police investigation and institutionally sanctioned coverup. The 1934 events took place less than a decade before the formation of a mass base Algerian nationalist movement. Our familiarity with examples of extreme political violence and socio-economic instability in Algerian during the course of the twentieth century put us at risk of misconstruing the causal factors behind the Constantine murders. Analysis of Algerian political and social fields in the 1930s require careful treatment so as to not introject contemporary preoccupations into the colonial archive.
Cole’s analytical frame adopts and rehearses a critical posture toward essentialist approaches to inter-community violence in the French colonial Maghreb. Lethal Provocation joins a chorus of scholarship insisting on a firm rejection of these simplistic explanations, which, “[easily exp lain violence] as a resurgence of precolonial atavistic hatreds between two peoples whose violent conflicts predated the settlement of Europeans in North Africa.”[125] This posture is also evident in scholarship produced by Ussama Makdisi, Hafid Gafaïti, Patricia Lorcin, David G. Troyansky, and Julia Clancy-Smith.[126] In this way, as well, Cole’s work is in dialogue with Surkis’s monographs in rejecting “atavistic” accounts for inter-communal difference.
Conclusion
Research on the question of violence in general, and especially on violence in France and its colonies shows no signs of abating. With the publication in 2020 of the extensive, four-volume series, The Cambridge World History of Violence, interdisciplinary approaches to historicizing and contextualizing violence are gaining more ground and academic recognition, continuing the reversal of the trend that Hannah Arendt documented in 1969.[127] From the fluid and incoherent nature of French imperial formations and their expansion into the Algerian Sahara, to the introjection of French strategies of ideological domination through political legitimation; from French juridico-discursive regimes of land expropriation and fantasmatic gender ideology to the provocation of inter-communal violence by way of exogenous provocation, recent scholarship has helped us to better understand the complexities and inconsistences of the uses of force for political power in the French colonial field in Algeria.
A commitment to rigorous empirical analysis and an attentiveness to the broader trends of bourgeois European imperial hegemony have helped to situate historiography in the last decade on thoroughly solid ground. This scholarship has resisted the tendency to reproduce the colonizer/colonized dichotomy by emphasizing the empirical dimensions of Cooper and Stoler’s foundational premise that “social transformations are a product of both global patterns and local struggles,” and that “metropole and colony” should be treated in “a single analytic field, addressing the weight one gives to causal connections and the primacy of agency in its different parts.”[128] Even though the works examined in this historiography have been situated primarily in French Algeria, they have all benefited from transnational and multi-regional approaches to doing history. The works all move away from the body of colonial scholarship as it existed at the time of Cooper and Stoler’s essay. These works are no longer “so nationally bound that [this] has blinded [them] to those circuits of knowledge and communication that took other routes than those shaped by the metropole-colony axis alone.”[129] Above all, and especially in the works of Brower, Sessions, Surkis, and Cole, we are reminded, finally, of the purpose for scholarly focus on questions of complexity, fluidity, and exchange: Cooper and Stoler note that “Identifying the competing agendas of colonizers and analyzing how cultural boundaries were maintained are not academic exercises in historical refinement” and that “Social taxonomies allowed for specific forms of violence at specific times. How a person was labeled could determine that a certain category of persons could be killed or raped with impunity, but not others.”[130]
The memory of French-Algerian relations is still a controversial topic of discussion in the metropole itself. Article 4 of Law No. 2005-158 of 23 February 2005 “regarding recognition of the Nation and national contribution in favor of the French repatriates,” defended in parliament by Michèle Alliot-Marie under the Chirac administration, belongs to a body of laws about memory and memorialization of France.[131] The legislation required a pedagogical emphasis on the “positive role” of French imperial activities overseas. After a massive public outcry, both in France and in its overseas territories, Article 4 was partially repealed. The law itself is still criticized by left-wing activists and historians for promoting reactionary revisionism. There remains much room for fruitful scholarship that combines interest in the memorialization and memory of French imperial activities in general and the uses and abuses of the memory of colonial violence, in scholarship and in the public sphere.
Works Cited
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———. “Chapter 12: Genealogies of Modern Violence: Arendt and Imperialism in Africa, 1830–1914.” In The Cambridge World History of Violence, edited by Louise Edwards, Nigel Penn, and Jay Winter, 4:246–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
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———, ed. North Africa, Islam, and the Mediterranean World: From the Almoravids to the Algerian War. History and Society in the Islamic World. London and Portland, OR.: Frank Cass, 2001.
———. Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800-1904). Berkeley, CA.: University of California Press, 1997.
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Surkis, Judith. Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930. Corpus Juris. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019.
———. Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870-1920. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006.
Teow, Jeremy, and Peter McPhee. “Chapter 17: Change and Continuity in Collective Violence in France, 1780–1880.” In The Cambridge World History of Violence, edited by Louise Edwards, Nigel Penn, and Jay Winter, 4:347–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Notes
[1] Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), 8.
Parenthetically, Arendt adds, “In the last edition of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences "violence" does not even rate an entry” (8) Explaining the significance of this observation, she suggests that “[this] shows to what an extent violence and its arbitrariness were taken for granted and therefore neglected; no one questions or examines what is obvious to all.”
[2] Arendt, 8, fn. 6.
[3] Bibliographies…
[4] Broadly, the colonial turn refers to the effort to reframe France’s role in the world by emphasizing the centrality of its imperial activities.
[5] I explain my reasoning for this starting point below.
[6] Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley, Los Angeles, & London: University of California Press, 1997), 1–56.
[7] Cooper and Stoler, 3.
[8] Cooper and Stoler, 3–4.
[9] Cooper and Stoler, 37.
[10] Cooper and Stoler, 6.
[11] Cooper and Stoler, 6.
[12] Cooper and Stoler, 6.
[13] Cooper and Stoler, 8.
[14] Cooper and Stoler, 8.
[15] Cooper and Stoler, 16.
[16] Cooper and Stoler, 16–17.
[17] Cooper and Stoler, 15.
[18] Cooper and Stoler, 15.
[19] Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, Los Angeles, & London: University of California Press, 2005), 34.
[20] Cooper, 47.
[21] Robert Aldrich, “Imperial Mise En Valeur and Mise En Scène: Recent Works on French Colonialism,” The Historical Journal 45, no. 4 (2002): 917–36; Daniel J. Sherman, “The Arts and Sciences of Colonialism,” French Historical Studies 23, no. 4 (October 1, 2000): 707–29.
[22] Alice L. Conklin, “Histories of Colonialism: Recent Studies of the Modern French Empire,” French Historical Studies 30, no. 2 (April 1, 2007): 305–32.
[23] Conklin, 315.
[24] Conklin, 305–6. See also Stephen Howe, ed., The New Imperial Histories Reader, Routledge Readers in History (London and New York: Routledge, 2010).
[25] Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?, Reprinted (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 98.
[26] Gilroy, 98.
[27] Stephen Howe, “Colonising and Exterminating? Memories of Imperial Violence in Britain and France,” Histoire@Politique 11, no. 2 (2010): 2.
[28] Howe, 3.
[29] Howe, 5.
[30] Howe cites, for example, Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison’s book Coloniser, exterminer. Sur la guerre et l’État colonial, published in 2005. Le Cour Grandmaison received substantial criticism for his “selective use of sources, alleged neglect of internal debates and complexities among colonialists, his focusing on only the most spectacular incidents of colonial violence (‘une anthologie des horreurs coloniales,’ say Gilbert Meynier et Pierre Vidal-Naquet), and his frequently white-hot rhetorical language, are said by critics to contribute to an over-polarised debate” (1).
[31] Conklin, “Histories of Colonialism,” 307.
[32] Conklin, 307.
[33] For a stinging critique of Bhabha (among others’) theorization of hybridity, see Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Hybridity, So What?: The Anti-Hybridity Backlash and the Riddles of Recognition,” in Recognition and Difference, ed. Scott Lash and Mike Featherstone (London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2002), 219–46. For a more moderate critique, see Dominique Schirmer, Gernot Saalmann, and Christi Kessler, eds., Hybridising East and West: Tales Beyond Westernisation. Empirical Contributions to the Debates on Hybridity, Southeast Asian Modernities 2 (Berlin: Lit, 2006). Schirmer et al. suggest that the move toward hybridity carries little to no conceptual weight and results in a flattening synecdoche for transnational encounters. For a review of the debate, see Amar Acheraïou, “Critical Perspectives on Hybridity and the Third Space,” in Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 105–20. For critiques of culture and power in general, see Talal Asad, “Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz,” Man 18, no. 2 (1983): 237–59; Saba Mahmood, “Islam and Gender in Muslim Societies:,” in Observing the Observer: The State of Islamic Studies in American Universities, ed. Mumtaz Ahmad, Zahid Bukhari, and Sulayman Nyang (International Institute of Islamic Thought, 2012), 70–87.
Regarding the tendency in cultural studies scholarship and research informed by postcolonial theory to examine the Foucauldian analytic of “power” differentials in general, at the expense of precise, local empirical analysis, Frederick Cooper argues that “if every form of asymmetrical power is termed empire, we are left without ways of distinguishing among the actual options [for analysis] we might have.” Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, 29.
[34] Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, 31.
[35] Cooper, 26-27, emphasis in original.
[36] Cooper, 27.
[37] Cooper, 32.
[38] Conklin, “Histories of Colonialism,” 331.
[39] Anne Laura Stoler, “On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty,” Public Culture 18, no. 1 (January 1, 2006): 127.
[40] Stoler, 127.
[41] Stoler, 127–28.
Stoler’s essay focuses on the place of the United States as an empire or colonial power. Fn. 33 above condenses her first two points of departure to introduce the field of scholarship on which this paper reflects. Elaborating on the phrase “imperial formations,” she adds that one of its “critical features…include[s] harboring and building on territorial ambiguity, redefining legal categories of belonging and quasi-membership, and shifting the geographic and demographic zones of partially suspended rights” (128, emphasis in original). Stoler’s third point of departure concerns the topographic representation of empire, arguing against the idea of geographic boundedness. She suggests that these “imperial formations” are better seen as “scaled genres of rule that produce and count on different degrees of sovereignty and gradations of rights” (128). Indeed, these formations “thrive on turbid taxonomies that produce shadow populations and ever-improved coercive measures to protect the common good against those deemed threats to it” (128). Stoler adds a final observation to these three points of departure by highlighting both the constricting and generative effect of “imperial formations” on populations. They “give rise both to new zones of exclusion and new sites of—and social groups with—privileged exemption” (128, emphasis in original).
[42] One important issue that this historiography will not treat is the question of imperial circulation, that is, what was the nature of the movement of ideas about imperial practices of domination and the movement of these practices themselves. Did they circulate from Europe to the colonies and then back again in every case? See Cooper and Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” 24.
Cooper and Stoler argue, in summary, that “[metropolitan] states with extensive colonial ‘holdings’ shrank back before the implications of extending their universalistic social engineering theories overseas, but that very process unsettled the security of colonial rule itself. The problem came home to the metropole: former colonial subjects, now the citizens of sovereign countries within francophone or anglophone communities, migrated to their former metropoles-where they had for some time been an unsettling presence-rekindling forms of exclusion and racism and setting off political pressures for the narrowing of citizenship within Great Britain and France.”
[43] See Julia Clancy-Smith, Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800-1904)(Berkeley, CA.: University of California Press, 1997).
[44] The subject of Jennifer E. Sessions’ 2011 book—see below.
[45] Benjamin Claude Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844-1902, History and Society of the Modern Middle East (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011), 5.
[46] Emmanuelle Saada, review of A Desert Named Peace. The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844-1902, by Benjamin Claude Brower, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle 41, no. 2 (2010): 171–72.
“[Le] plus grand mérite de cet ouvrage est d’offrir une description polyphonique des violences commises par les différentes populations, sans présupposer une « action coloniale » suivie de « réactions indigènes ».”
[47] Brower, A Desert Named Peace, 5.
[48] Brower, 6.
[49] Brower, 6.
[50] Brower, 6.
[51] Brower, 6.
[52] Brower, 7.
[53] As quoted in Brower, 7.
[54] Brower, 7.
[55] Brower, 7.
[56] Brower, 7.
[57] Brower, 8.
[58] Brower, 6.
[59] Brower, 46.
[60] Brower, 32.
[61] Brower, 74.
[62] Brower, 75.
[63] Brower, 93.
[64] Brower, 116.
[65] Brower, 116.
[66] Brower, 135.
[67] Brower, 135.
[68] Brower, 136.
[69] Brower, 137.
[70] Brower, 6.
[71] Brower, 200.
[72] Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, 17.
[73] Jennifer E. Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 11.
[74] Ronald E. Robinson, “Introduction,” in French Colonialism 1871-1914: Myths and Realities, by Henri Brunschwig, trans. William Glanville Brown (London: Paul Mall Press, 1966), ix.
[75] Robinson, ix.
[76] Sessions, By Sword and Plow, 10.
[77] Sessions, 10.
[78] Conklin, 332.
[79] Sessions, By Sword and Plow, 11.
[80] Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century, Ideas in Context (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
[81] As quoted in Sessions, By Sword and Plow, 14–15.
[82] Sessions, 15.
[83] As quoted in Sessions, 1.
[84] Sessions, 3.
[85] Sessions, 2.
[86] Sessions, 173.
[87] Sessions, 173.
[88] Sessions, 173.
[89] Judith Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930, Corpus Juris (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 6.
[90] Surkis, 18.
[91] Howe, “Colonising and Exterminating?”
[92] Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930, 8.
[93] See Judith Surkis, Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870-1920 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006).
[94] Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930, 4. Surkis’s book shares many similarities with another recently published monograph by Todd Shepard, Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962-1979 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017). Shepard’s work, while less explicitly focused on the fantasmatic extimacies of legal texts, can be seen as a chronological extension into the twentieth century of Surkis’s analysis of French imperialism and gender in the nineteenth century.
[95] Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930, 9. See also the introduction to JaKob Nilsson and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, eds., Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality, Södertörn Philosophical Studies 14 (Huddinge: Södertörn Univ, 2013).
[96] Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930, 4.
[97] Surkis, 5.
[98] Surkis, 5.
[99] Surkis, 8.
[100] Surkis, 8.
[101] Surkis, 8.
[102] Surkis, 15.
[103] Surkis, 14.
[104] Surkis, 15.
[105] As quoted in Surkis, 15.
[106] Surkis, 15.
[107] Surkis, 15.
[108] Surkis, 16.
[109] Surkis, 17.
[110] Surkis, 19.
[111] Surkis, 49.
[112] Surkis, 31.
[113] Surkis, 31.
[114] Surkis, 21.
[115] Surkis, 21.
[116] Surkis, 22.
[117] Surkis, 23.
[118] Surkis, 23.
[119] Surkis, 24.
[120] Surkis, 24–25.
[121] Surkis, 25.
[122] Joshua Cole, Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 9.
[123] Cole, 5.
[124] Cole, 7.
[125] Cole, 8.
[126] See especially Ussama Samir Makdisi, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (Oakland, CA.: University of California Press, 2019); Hafid Gafaïti, Patricia M. E. Lorcin, and David G. Troyansky, eds., Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World, France Overseas (Lincoln, NE.: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Julia Clancy-Smith, ed., North Africa, Islam, and the Mediterranean World: From the Almoravids to the Algerian War, History and Society in the Islamic World (London and Portland, OR.: Frank Cass, 2001); Julia Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800-1900, The California World History Library 15 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
[127] See for example Howard G. Brown, Mass Violence and the Self: From the French Wars of Religion to the Paris Commune (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2019). Also see Benjamin Claude Brower, “Chapter 12: Genealogies of Modern Violence: Arendt and Imperialism in Africa, 1830–1914,” in The Cambridge World History of Violence, ed. Louise Edwards, Nigel Penn, and Jay Winter, vol. 4, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 246–62; James P. Daughton, “Chapter 23: Quotidian Violence in the French Empire, 1890–1940,” in The Cambridge World History of Violence, ed. Louise Edwards, Nigel Penn, and Jay Winter, vol. 4, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 468–89; Jeremy Teow and Peter McPhee, “Chapter 17: Change and Continuity in Collective Violence in France, 1780–1880,” in The Cambridge World History of Violence, ed. Louise Edwards, Nigel Penn, and Jay Winter, vol. 4, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 347–66.
[128] Cooper and Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” 4.
[129] Cooper and Stoler, 28.
[130] Cooper and Stoler, 6.
[131] Loi № 2005-158 du 23 février 2005 portant reconnaissance de la Nation et contribution nationale en faveur des Français rapatriés.
