Liberalism and empire in a nineteenth-century Algerian mirror

Modern Intellectual History

Volumn 6, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 287-313

  Pitts, Jennifer ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

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EID: 77951821027     PISSN: 14792443     EISSN: 14792451     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S1479244309002108     Document Type: Review

References (120)

1. Hamdan Khodja, Le Miroir, ed. Abdelkader Djeghloul (Arles: Sindbad/Actes Sud, 1985), 206
2. Originally published as Sidy Hamdan-ben-Othman Khoja, Aperçu historique et statistique sur la Régence d'Alger, intitulé en Arabe le Miroir (Paris: Goetschy fils, 1833). I cite the 1985 edition except when otherwise noted
3. A pamphlet by an Englishman, S. Bannister, was another document to propose an indigenous government for Algeria; see Appel en faveur d'Alger et de l'Afrique du Nord par un Anglais (Paris, 1833)
4. See e.g. the debate of 9 June 1836, in which Adolphe Thiers sought to explain his current support for a French Algeria in light of his earlier opposition to the Algiers expedition. Archives Parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 (Paris, 1902), 105: 155-7
5. See the superb account in Todd Porterfield, The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism, 1798-1836 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 13-41
6. Benjamin Constant, De l'Esprit de conquête et de l'usurpation dans leurs rapports avec la civilization européene, in Oeuvres, ed. Alfred Roulin (Paris: Pléiade, 1957)
7. Passages cited are from Benjamin Constant, The Spirit of Conquest, in idem, Political Writings, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 54
8. See especially 63-70 for Constant's analysis of conquest's corruption of public life. I discuss Constant's views on empire at greater length in A Turn to Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005)
9. 'Alger et les élections', Le Temps, 20 June 1830
10. reprinted in Constant, Positions de combat à la veille de juillet 1830: Articles publiés dans "Le Temps," 1829-1930, ed. Ephraïm Harpaz (Paris: Campion-Slatkine, 1989), 190-92. Constant insisted that the episode was 'an affair of honor' between the Dey of Algiers and Charles X
11. John Ruedy, Modern Algeria (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005; first published 1992), 54; the ordinance created a military colony named "les possessions françaises dans le Nord de l'Afrique."
12. See the speeches of Xavier de Sade, Amédée Desjobert, and André Dupin in the Archives Parlementaires: de Sade, 82: 190 (3 April 1833); Dupin, 89: 490-91 (29 April 1834); Desjobert, 89: 509-12 (29 April 1834)
13. As de Sade argued, "I see perfectly the advantages we could gain from several provinces on the Rhine. . . If someone can show us that we could gain the same fruits from our possession in Algiers, I will join the ranks of its most decided partisans" (Archives Parlementaires, 82: 190). Dupin maintained that they had only to consult French interests: "If it is useful, we must keep Algiers," he said, though insisting that it was not (89: 491)
14. Desjobert knew the Miroir and cited the book's memorable image of the sale of bloodied jewelry at a market, after the massacre of the tribe of El Ouffia. La Question d'Alger (Paris, 1837), 219
15. I discuss Desjobert in A Turn to Empire, 185-9
16. J.-J. Hémardinquer, "Henri Fonfrède ou l'homme du Midi révolté (1827-38)," Annales du Midi 88 (1976), 451-64
17. See also David Todd, L'Identité économique de la France: Libre-échange et protectionnisme, 1814-1851 (Paris: Grasset, 2008) I am grateful to David Todd for alerting me to Fonfrède's critique and to the novelty of the term "decolonization" at this moment
18. Henri Fonfrède, Oevures, ed. C.-A. Campan, 10 vols. (Bordeaux, 1844-7), 8: 170
19. Henri Fonfrède, Oevures, Ibid., 8: 185
20. Procès-verbaux et rapports de la Commission d'Afrique, instituée par ordonnance du Roi du 12 décembre 1833 (Paris: L'Imprimerie royale, 1834), 45-59 (Séance du 23 janvier)
21. hereafter Procés-verbaux vol. 2
22. He was one of two Algerians to testify; the other, Bouderba, was a man he mistrusted, as he described in a letter to a friend reprinted in Abdeljelil Temimi, Recherches et documents d'histoire Maghrébine: La Tunisie, l'Algérie et la Tripolitane de 1816 à 1871 (Université de Tunis, 1971), 151
23. Procès-verbaux et rapports de la Commission nommée par le Roi, le 7 juillet 1833, pour aller recueillir en Afrique tous let faits propre à éclairer le Gouvernement sur l'état du pays et sur les mesures que réclame son avenir (Paris, 1834)
24. hereafter Procés-verbaux vol. 1
25. See Xavier Yacono, "La Régence d'Alger d'après l'enquête des commissions de 1833-34," Revue de l'Occident Musulman et de la Méditerranée 1 (1966), 229-44
26. and Xavier Yacono, idem, "Comment la France décida de rester en Alger," Atti del I Congresso internazionale di studi nord-africani (Cagliari, 1965), 321-37
27. Report by the deputy de la Pinsonnière; Procès-verbaux, vol. 1, 333-4
28. Translation from Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 50
29. Procès-Verbaux vol. 2, 140; see also one member's protest against such "giving in to [public] opinion" (116)
30. also see Yacono, "Comment la France." The dissenters were Hippolyte Passy and Xavier de Sade
31. Archives Parlementaires, 89: 676-7 (2 May 1834)
32. See Desjobert's rejection of such claims: Archives Parlementaires, 89: 510
33. Archives Parlementaires, 105: 155 (9 June 1836)
34. "Alger, Algérie," by [J. J. O.] Pellion, in Dictionnaire politique (Paris: Pagnerre, 1843), introduction by Etienne Garnier- Pagès, 46-8
35. Tocqueville's "Letters on Algeria" of 1837 strongly resemble La Rochefoucauld's position described above; his later invocation of national honor and arguments that a country like France could not retreat from Algeria without signaling its decline to the world echo the Lamartine speech just quoted
36. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres complètes, ed. J. P. Mayer (Paris, 1958-98), 3: 1, 129-53 and 213
37. and Alexis de Tocqueville, idem, Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp 5-26 and 59
38. Also see Melvin Richter, "Tocqueville on Algeria," Review of Politics 25 (1963), 362-98
39. Cheryl Welch, "Colonial Violence and the Rhetoric of Evasion: Tocqueville on Algeria," Political Theory 31 (2003), 235-64
40. and Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire (Princeton University Press, 2005), chaps. 6 and 7
41. While many of his French contemporaries referred to him as Hamdan (or Si Hamdan), I follow Djeghloul in referring to him as Hamdan Khodja. The epigraph reads, "When it is egoism that overturns tyranny, it can only share the tyrants' plunder"; the source is Constant's De la Religion considérée dans sa source (Paris, 1826), xxxvi
42. See Allan Christelow, "The Western Mediterranean in an American Mirror: The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania (1787)," Maghreb Review 31/1-3 (2006), 80-102
43. and Mohamed Amine, "Les Commerçants à Alger à la veille de 1830," Revue d'histoire Maghrébine 77-78 (May 1995), 11-112
44. Also see the brief account in Daneil Panzac, Barbary Corsairs: The End of a Legend, 1800-1820 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 224-6
45. "Refutation," Miroir, 306
46. For biographical information and supporting documents, see Abdeljelil Temimi, "A Propos du Miroir," in idem, Recherches et documents, 109-71
47. and Abdeljelil Temimi, idem, Le Beylik de Constantine et Hadj Ahmed Bey (1830-1837) (Tunis: Revue d'histoire Maghrébine, 1971), 101-26
48. Amine "Les Commerçants à Alger," 19
49. Hamdan Khodja was in France in 1820 (see Miroir, 205)
50. Miroir, 1833, 372
51. Bentham wrote that Hamdan Khodja's "only son" studied for three years at a boarding school near London and was apparently able to pass in speech and writing for an Englishman. Jeremy Bentham, Securities against Misrule and other Constitutional Writings for Tripoli and Greece, ed. Philip Schofield (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 150
52. See Temimi, Recherches et documents, 166-71
53. and Temimi, idem, "A Propos du Miroir," 112-13
54. For an account of Hamdan Khodja's two journeys to Constantine on behalf of the French, and the relevant documents, see Temimi, idem, Le Beylik de Constantine, 101-26, and, on Hadj Hassan, 159
55. On Abd al-Qadir (1807-83) see Allan Christelow, "Re-envisioning Algerian Cultural History in the Imperial Age," Maghreb Review 24 (1999), 108-15
56. and Bruno Étienne, Abdelkader (Paris: Hachette, 1994)
57. As Julia Clancy-Smith has noted, Abd al-Qadir's "subtle, calculated blend of accommodation with opposition undermines 'resistance' theory's binary approach to political movements"; the same might be said of Hamdan Khodja's efforts, combining as they did engagement with opposition. See Julia A. Clancy-Smith, Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800-1904) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 293, n. 28
58. Djeghloul, "Introduction," Miroir, 32
59. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), chap. 6
60. Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983; first published 1962), 43-54
61. See Rifa'a Rafi' al-Tahtawi, An Imam in Paris: Al-Tahtawi's Visit to France (1826-1831), trans. Daniel L. Newman (London: Saqi, 2004), 303-29. Hourani argues that Tahtawi believed liberal ideas were inappropriate for Egypt (69 ff.). Tahtawi was in Paris at the time of the Algerian invasion, but he left in 1831 before the French had moved much beyond Algiers, and his brief account of the event does not indicate any concern that it presaged the conquest and colonization of the entire Regency
62. In a later work calling for the adoption of European quarantine practice, Hamdan Khodja drew on the Koran and authorities such as Ghazali to rebut the view that quarantines were inconsistent with Islam and argued that the use of certain European scientific practices was laudable, though emulation out of mere admiration for unbelievers was not. Hamdan Khodja, Itahaf El-Monssfien (Algiers: Société Nationale d'Edition et de Diffusion, 1968)
63. I am grateful to Loubna el-Amine for research into and translations from this text. On other Ottoman intellectuals with similar views, including Tahtawi and Hasan al-Attar, see Newman, "Introduction," in Tahtawi, An Imam in Paris, 35
64. Roxanne Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), chap. 4
65. and, on Bustani, Hourani, Arabic Thought, 100-1
66. C. A. Bayly, "Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in India, 1800-1830," Modern Intellectual History 4/1 (2007), 25-41 and his "Afterword" in the same issue, 163-9
67. I thank an anonymous reviewer for MIH for suggestions about these thinkers' similarities. On Roy's critique of colonial knowledge and violations of liberal principles see, e.g., "Remarks on the Settlement in India by Europeans," in The Essential Writings of Raja Rammohan Ray, ed. Bruce Carlisle Robertson (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 226-7
68. on his use of the idea of "nation" see Bayly, "Rammohan Roy," 33.Tahtawi, too, repeatedly described Egypt using a related term, watan, which Hourani calls "the equivalent of the French patrie" (79-81)
69. Bayly, "Afterword," 164-5
70. David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)
71. Bentham, Securities, xxxii-xxxiii
72. The report was apparently drafted in January 1823 by D'Ghies, based on a letter from Hamdan Khodja; see Schofield, "Editorial Introduction," in Bentham, Securities, xxxiii
73. and "D'Ghies to John Quincy Adams," in Securities, ibid., 159-60
74. See Patricia Crone, God's Rule: Government and Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 148-65
75. Robert Dankoff, "Introduction," in idem, The Wisdom of Royal Glory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)
76. and Ann Lambton, "Islamic Mirrors for Princes," Atti del convegno internazionale sul tema Persia nel Medioevo (Roma, 31 marzo-5 aprile 1970), Rome, 1971, 419-42
77. Although the phrase "mirror for princes" comes from medieval Europe (specula regis) rather than Arabic, it may well have been one with which Hamdan Khodja and D'Ghies were familiar, and, as Crone notes, the image of the mirror can be found in Muslim texts as well (149). Hamdan Khodja wrote a work about the philosopher al-Ghazali (in Princeton's Islamic manuscript collection, Garrett no. 3036Y), whose thought was influential in this tradition; see Lambton, "Islamic Mirrors," 242 ff
78. and Eric L. Ormsby, Theodicy in Islamic Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 126-9
79. Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Harvey Mansfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 4
80. Aperçu historique, statistique, et topographique sur l'état d'Alger à l'usage de l'armée expéditionnaire d'Afrique, rédigé au Dépot Général de la Guerre (Paris: Ch. Picquet, 1830)
81. Hamdan Khodja's figure of ten million, which he defended against the far lower French estimates with an account of his painstaking techniques of estimation and his superior access to populations throughout the country, was stridently contested by Clauzel and others. In this figure, as in some of his other factual claims, Hamdan offered an assertion that was plausible but also calculated to impress upon his audience the insuperable difficulties facing France's colonial efforts. Liberals in this period regarded significant population as indispensable to nationhood, though the threshold was disputed. Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalisms since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 30 and 36-7
82. On a similar theme in the context of British India see C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
83. "Mémoire de Si Hamdan," Archives Nationales, F. 80 9
84. reprinted by Georges Yver, Revue Africaine 57 (Algiers, 1913), 122-38, 123
85. "Mémoire de Si Hamdan," 123-4, 123 Yver's n. 3
86. "Mémoire," 128
87. Amédée Desjobert, in one of many echoes of Hamdan Khodja, charged French oppression with having ravaged Algeria's potential futures: acknowledging that what he called "le système arabe" would be difficult to accomplish, Desjobert wrote, "we have nearly covered the Regency with impossibilities." La Question d'Alger, 307
88. Hamdan Khodja ruefully notes the July Monarchy's reputation for liberalism, noting that while at first he celebrated Louis-Philippe's accession, "Alas! We have been patient a long time, our hope is fading and disenchantment has set in." Miroir, 206
89. See James McDougall, History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 74-6, 83
90. Ferhat Abbas, Nuit coloniale (Paris: Julliard, 1962), 110; quoted (and translation) by McDougall, 76
91. Ferhat Abbas, L'Entente franco-musulmane, 27 Feb. 1936
92. quoted by McDougall, History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria, 85 (McDougall's emphasis)
93. See e.g. Miroir, 91, 179, 197 (on theft of weapons purportedly being temporarily held), 232 (on the diversion of charitable funds from their intended purpose)
94. and "Mémoire de Si Hamdan," 129, 133, and 138, where he cites translation by D'Ghies of Vattel's Droit des gens (he mentions Book 2, chap. 5, parag. 63 and book 3, chap. 16, para. 263 on the obligation to observe capitulation agreements)
95. Hourani quotes Tahtawi as arguing similarly that "there was not much difference. . . between the principles of Islamic law and those principles of 'natural law' on which the codes of modern Europe were based." Hourani, Arabic Thought, 75
96. quoting Tahtawi's al-Murshid
97. The work opens with historical self-consciousness: "Will the horrors of the sixteenth century return in the nineteenth?" The Spanish conquest of the New World was a specter often invoked in French discussions
98. see e.g. Alexis de Tocqueville, "First Report on Algeria," in idem, Writings on Empire and Slavery, 146
99. Ussama Makdisi, "Ottoman Orientalism," American Historical Review 107 (2002), 768-96, 769-70
100. Also see Abdeslam Maghraoui, Liberalism without Democracy: Nationhood and Citizenship in Egypt, 1922-1936 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), xvi
101. See Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 32
102. See e.g. his August 1833 letter to the Sultan translated in Temimi, Recherches et documents, 144-9
103. On the meaning of the term nation in French discourse, see Hagen Schulze, States, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996)
104. and William F. Sewell, "The French Revolution and the emergence of the nation form," in Michael Morrison and Melinda Zook, eds., Revolutionary Currents: Transatlantic Ideology and Nationbuilding, 1688-1821 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 91-125
105. Thiers, debate of 9 June 1836, Archives Parlementaires, 105: 159-60. He also argued that Algerians did not form a unified ensemble national; rather, there were a variety of populations - Turks, Koulouglis, Arabs in the towns, conflicting Arab tribes in the countryside - whose divisions could be manipulated by the French to entrench their power. The article on nation in the republican Dictionnaire politique exemplifies the conception of the nation as a highly advanced stage in the development of human unity, as well as the view that Arabs, being among the "last in the scale of civilization," possessed none of the preconditions of nationhood
106. Elias Regnault, "Nation," Dictionnaire politique (Paris: Pagnerre, 1843), 624-5
107. See La Question d'Alger, 307, 324-7
108. Like Hamdan Khodja, Desjobert later drew a parallel with Poland: "While we raise our voices on behalf of Catholic Poland, do we want foreigners to be able to hold up against us the Muslim Poland that is struggling in Algeria?"Desjobert, L'Algérie en 1846 (Paris: Gillaumin, 1846), 91. Hobsbawm notes the ambiguity of the term "nation" among European liberals at this time, its simultaneous use in the senses of nation state and of smaller linguistic or cultural groups (nationalities) that might be subsumed into a nation state
109. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalisms, 24-5
110. In his splendid recent account of twentieth-century Algerian nationalism, James McDougall argues that an essentialist idea of the Algerian nation as a "prior, deep truth" that arose in the later colonial period, especially among salafi reformists in the 1920s, came to "dominate political culture and cultural politics in Algeria after independence." McDougall, History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria, 15-16
111. Reprinted in Abdeljelil Temimi, Recherches et documents, 124-41
112. Khodja submitted his complaint to the ministry on 3 June 1833 (and printed it in the 1833 Miroir, 328-51); the ministry's reply is undated
113. The fifty-nine-page pamphlet appeared in the L'Observateur des Tribunaux, Tome IV, Livraison 1, Paris, June 1834
114. reprinted in the 1985 Miroir, 265-304
115. "Refutation," Miroir, 275, 304
116. Hamdan Khodja's travels in Europe allowed him to combine "European enlightenment with Moorish finesse and. . . corruption"; see Miroir, 266, 268, 277
117. "Refutation," Miroir, 264, 294. The Moors are "a class of men disseminated throughout the Barbary cities without in any way forming a nation" who "have nothing of that primitive character, the origin of that proud independence of the Arabs and Kabyles."
118. Hamdan Khodja, in his reply, criticized this derision of the Moors and added that, although his father was in fact not a Moor and he himself was Kouloughli, "Moors or Bedouins, we are all brothers and creatures of God." Miroir, 306
119. Mostefa Lacheraf, "Sens d'une revolution: Résistance urbaine et lutte nationale depuis 1830" (1956), in idem, L'Algérie: Nation et société (Paris: François Maspero, 1965), 161
120. Michel Habart, Histoire d'un Parjure (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1960), 19-20