FRENCH MEDITERRANEANS

FRANCE OVERSEAS:
STUDIES IN EMPIRE AND
DECOLONIZATION
Series editors: A. J. B. Johnston,
James D. Le Sueur, and Tyler Stovall
French Mediterraneans
Transnational and Imperial Histories

Edited and with an introduction by

Patricia M. E. Lorcin and Todd Shepard

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

Lincoln and London
© 2016 by the Board of Regents
of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United
States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-

in-Publication Data
Names: Lorcin, Patricia M. E. |
Shepard, Todd, 1969–
Title: French Mediterraneans: transnational
and imperial histories / Edited and with
an introduction by Patricia M. E. Lorcin
and Todd Shepard.
Description: Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2016.
Series: France overseas: studies in
empire and decolonization | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015023758
ISBN 9780803249936 (cloth: alkaline paper)
ISBN 9780803288751 (epub)
ISBN 9780803288768 (mobi)
ISBN 9780803288775 (pdf )
Subjects: LCSH : Mediterranean
Region—Relations—France. | France—
Relations—Mediterranean Region. |
Transnationalism—History. | Imperialism—
History. | French—Mediterranean
Region—History. | Mediterranean
Region—Ethnic relations—History.
Classification: LCC DE 85.5.F 8 F 74 2016 |
DDC 303.48/224401822—dc23 LC record
available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015023758

Set in Charis by L. Auten.

Designed by N. Putens.
CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vii
List of Tables ix

Introduction 1
PATRICIA M. E. LORCIN AND TODD SHEPARD

PART I. RETHINKING MEDITERRANEAN MAPS

(MAPS TO RETHINK THE MEDITERRANEAN)
1. Révolutions de Constantinople:
France and the Ottoman World in the Age of Revolutions 21
ALI YAYCIOĞLU

2. Barbary and Revolution: France and North Africa, 1789–1798 52

IAN COLLER

3. “There Is, in the Heart of Asia, . . . an Entirely French Population”:

France, Mount Lebanon, and the Workings of Affective
Empire in the Mediterranean, 1830–1920 76
ANDREW ARSAN

4. Natural Disaster, Globalization, and Decolonization:

The Case of the 1960 Agadir Earthquake 101
SPENCER SEGALLA
PART II. SHIFTING FRAMEWORKS OF MIGRATION
(MIGRATIONS ACROSS THE MEDITERRANEAN)
5. The French Nation of Constantinople in the Eighteenth Century as
Reflected in the Saints Peter and Paul Parish Records, 1740–1800 131
EDHEM ELDEM

6. An Ottoman in Paris: A Tale of Mediterranean Coinage 168

MARC AYMES

7. From Household to Schoolroom: Women, Transnational

Networks, and Education in North Africa and Beyond 200
JULIA CLANCY- SMITH

8. Europeans before Europe? The Mediterranean

Prehistory of European Integration and Exclusion 232
MARY DEWHURST LEWIS

PART III. MARGINS REMADE (BY THE MEDITERRANEAN)

9. Dreyfus in the Sahara: Jews, Trans-Saharan Commerce,
and Southern Algeria under French Colonial Rule 265
SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

10. Moïse Nahon and the Invention of the Modern Maghrebi Jew 293
SUSAN GILSON MILLER

11. The Syphilitic Arab? A Search for Civilization in Disease

Etiology, Native Prostitution, and French Colonial Medicine 320
ELLEN AMSTER

12. From Auschwitz to Algeria: The Mediterranean Limits of the

French Anti–Concentration Camp Movement, 1952–1959 347
EMMA KUBY

Bibliography 373

List of Contributors 409

Index 413
ILLUSTRATIONS

5.1. Staying French: Patterns of endogamy

among the Rambaud and Alléon families 160
5.2. Mixing blood I: French families
grafting upon a local dynasty 162
5.3. Mixing blood II: The Chénier and Amic
families’ Levantine heritage 164
5.4. Mixing blood III: The Dellarocca
family’s multiple French alliances 166
6.1. Three drafts of stamps to be used for
“authenticated documents” 176
6.2. Detailed view of stamp used for
“authenticated documents” 176
6.3. Letter from J. Anastassiades to the
consul general of Russia, 1884 177
6.4. Detailed view of letter from J. Anastassiades
to the consul general of Russia, 1884 177
6.5. Mold for an Ottoman debenture bond 185
6.6. Ottoman debenture bond, 1865 186
8.1. The Ceuta-Morocco border, February 2006 233
8.2. Tattered passport showing origin
in department of Algiers 243
11.1. Lacapère’s schematic of the
evolution of “Arab syphilis” 329
11.2. Children with dental abnormalities
from hereditary “Arab syphilis” 330
11.3. Infant born with birth defect from
hereditary “Arab syphilis” 330
11.4. Large X-ray machine used for
“radiothérapie” in the Lemtiyyine clinic 332
11.5. The malnourished, inadequately
clothed Bousbir prostitute 336
TABLES

5.1. Origin and gender of individuals in all parish records 135

5.2. Occupations in death, marriage, and baptism records 138
5.3. Occupations in death and baptism
records among major groups 139
5.4. Origin and gender in death records with
and without “itinerant” individuals 141
5.5. Endogamy and exogamy among the main communities
according to marriage and baptism records 142
5.6. Origin of the spouses of French individuals
according to baptism and marriage records 143
5.7. Occupation of French subjects residing
in Constantinople in 1723 144
5.8. Occupation of French subjects residing
in Constantinople in 1769 145
FRENCH MEDITERRANEANS
 Introduction

PATRICIA M. E. LORCIN AND TODD SHEPARD

The Mediterranean is associated with many images: the seat of Western

civilization, the domain of the crusaders, a site of Islamic learning and
culture, the playground of corsairs and slavers, a locus of exoticism and
sexual fantasy, a space of exchanges, migrations, and invented or rein-
vented identities, and—of relevance to this volume—an imperial sea.
Recent scholarship on the early modern history of the Mediterranean
proposes that the concept of this sea as a unified space is essentially a
Western one, devised by the imperial powers that patrolled its seas and
controlled its ports.1 The peoples of its southern shores (in particular
in the Islamic states), such work suggests, did not share this concep-
tion of the sea: rather, for them the Mediterranean was polymorphous,
shifting with the economic and seafaring exigencies of the moment.
By the nineteenth century, however, the idea that the Mediterranean
was a unified space had either been absorbed by, or imposed on, the
populations living along its southern shores. This volume reveals the
significant French element in the nineteenth- and twentieth- century
making of this singular Mediterranean. Mediterranean perspectives, in
turn, reposition current arguments that modern French history must
be understood as transnational and imperial. To these ends, French

1
Mediterraneans offers a critical study of space and movement anchored
in distinct methodological lenses and interdisciplinary approaches.
Since the early 1990s, efforts to “treat metropole and colony in a
single analytic field” have been crucial to the most important works
in Anglophone scholarship on modern France.2 More recently, trans-
national scholarship has turned to other frames besides “empire” as
well as non- colonial networks to explore “French histories.” We have
learned much about how French people and French states were shaped
in other contexts, and by non-French people. This volume aims to open
perspectives that shed light on what has been obscured by blind spots
apparent in such work. We seek to do so while maintaining the crucial
insights they offer into the circulation and play of power (notably, its
racialized and imperial forms). We also remain committed to the need
that such approaches highlight to think beyond the limits of national
histories and across or outside national boundaries, compartmentalized
cultures, and the presumed preeminence of state actors. Scholars trained
in French history, including the editors, have benefited enormously from
the colonial and transnational turns.
The approach we propose in this volume is different. A majority of
contributors to French Mediterraneans were not trained as historians
of France, the French empire, or other European polities, but rather
as Ottomanists, as historians of Jews and Judaism, of the Maghreb,
or of the Arab Levant. We have brought their work into conversation
with new efforts among historians of France and its empire to do more
than just take seriously colonial, non-European, or foreign actors and
spaces in order also to take account of sources and historiographical
questions from beyond “France.” Historians of formerly colonized
spaces have highlighted the risk that “new imperial” historians may
sweep aside histories that place non-Europeans at the center or that
concentrate on concerns peripheral to colonial relationships.3 So too,
Caribbeanists, Africanists, Asianists, Latin Americanists, or historians
of the Middle East have expressed surprise and concerns that many
“metropolitan” historians—students of the United States, of the United
Kingdom, of France—who now proclaim transnational agendas ignore
the conceptual (as well as much of the empirical) work that scholars

2 PATRICIA LORCIN & TODD SHEPARD

of these so- called peripheries have already produced.4 That is, “new
imperial” and transnational historians tend too often, in the name of
looking beyond the nation-state, simply to export questions important
to their national historiography beyond the usual borders. Our mapping
of “French Mediterraneans” works to rethink what questions matter in
conversation with the multiple historiographical discussions that have
labored this novel frame, with “French” questions part of the discussion,
rather than hegemonic.
We have sidelined the still important question of how non-French
or colonized peoples and developments “refashioned” France or the
French in order to foreground other questions and new approaches.
We also eschewed the more obvious topics, such French Orientalism or
France and the Berber question, which, though relevant to our concerns,
have already received considerable scholarly attention and did not fit
as comfortably into the framework of our volume. Our contributors
analyze why references to France and the French are so important to
understand the modern history of the Mediterranean, and indeed, why
they both allow us to map where the Mediterranean space is and to see
how it is multiple, in both diachronic and synchronic terms. Thinking
“France” and “French” histories in ways that embrace historiographical
presumptions and questions from outside of French history, we suggest,
has much to add to ongoing discussions of “the Mediterranean,” notably
in modern history.

Recent scholarship on the Mediterranean has provided a boost to

Mediterranean studies, which has grown exponentially. Most of the
groundbreaking work on the Mediterranean in the second half of the
twentieth century has been on the early modern period. The publication
in 1949 of Fernand Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à
l’époque de Philippe II set the tone for much future scholarship.5 Braudel’s
interest as a leading protagonist of the Annales was the longue durée, and
in processes rather than events. He foresaw the importance of the envi-
ronment on human activities and privileged everyday life rather than
the actions of the elites. Geography and environment shaped the unity
of Braudel’s Mediterranean, but the lens was Philip II’s world, not that of

Introduction 3
the other potentate in the region, the Ottoman sultan Süleyman (1520–
66), thus subtly advantaging its northern shores. Braudel’s methodology
served not only as a model for future studies of the area but also as a
methodological template. As the scholars who edited Braudel Revisited:
The Mediterranean World, 1600–1800 aptly stated, it was “undoubtedly
one of the most important historical works” of the twentieth century,
and one that “six decades after its publication continues to inspire and
fascinate.”6 Shlomo Goitein picked up and elaborated the concept of
unity in A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab
World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza.7 Although
this multivolume work (1967–93) was as inclusive as Braudel’s, it also
shared some of the ambiguities inherent in the narration of a space
considered to be all- encompassing. Unlike Braudel, however, Goitein
centered his analysis on the non-European East. He proposed a unity in
Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean due to social and
cultural similitude, and even went so far as to suggest similarities to
neighboring non-Jewish communities. In this interpretation, therefore,
the Mediterranean region shaped culture and society in a unique way.
This uniqueness, which created consonance among Mediterranean soci-
eties over the longue durée, was also the feature of Germaine Tillion’s
1966 anthropological study, Le harem et les cousins, which argued that
the social oppression of women in areas along the Mediterranean shores
was a legacy of cultural practices that predated historical accounts of
the region.8 In these interpretations of spatial unity, whatever their
focus, the Mediterranean is an environmental force, whether natural,
cultural or social, to which individual human agency is subjected. With
its specific particularities it becomes the prime factor in shaping the
lives of the communities living along its shores.
The publication in 2000 of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s
The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History, the first volume of
a projected two-volume work, opened a new chapter in the prehistory
of the area, not only in its chronological scope, which ranges from the
second millennium BCE to the Middle Ages, but also in its fragmented
postmodern approach.9 Horden and Purcell argue for the distinctive-
ness of the Mediterranean region, one that results from the connectivity

4 PATRICIA LORCIN & TODD SHEPARD

provided by the sea, coupled with the topography and climatic dif-
ferences of the many islands and varied coastlines that compose its
micro-regions. They reproach scholars such as Braudel or Goitein for
reducing the Mediterranean to a network of sea routes and towns, thus
overlooking the importance of its micro-regions and their impact on the
development of the area. More recently, David Abulafia has traced the
human history of the sea from prehistory to the present, emphasizing
the importance of networks, economic, political, and social.10 Abulafia
reserves the final part of his history for the modern period, and although
he evokes some of the imperial themes that are present in this volume,
the section is but a brief overview.
In the modern period, a shift occurs away from deep history, with its
emphasis on the topographical and ecological influences, to a preoccu-
pation with the importance of human activity in leaving its imprint on
the area. Migration has been a feature of the Mediterranean throughout
its history, but the increase in the number of networks and volume of
migrants in the twentieth century has been unprecedented. Julia-Clancy
Smith’s Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in the Age of Migrations,
c. 1800–1900 is a methodologically innovative work that foreshadows the
complexity of these migrations by focusing on precolonial Tunisia.11 As
the title of her book implies, for Clancy-Smith there are many Mediter-
raneans, all of which contributed to making up a borderland society in
which migrants, expatriates, and exiles created the social permutations
that prefigured the colonial Maghreb. It is this multiplicity across the
area that this volume explores.
The Mediterranean remains the spatial framework, therefore, but
whereas the emphasis of the early modern histories is on how the envi-
ronment acts upon the lives of the individuals living along its shores, in
the modern period the impact is gradually reversed until, more recently,
the region enters what is now termed the Anthropocene period, where
the impact of human activity is not only evident but also deleterious.12
The decade of the 1950s is usually considered the moment at which the
Anthropocene started to have a discernible (and perhaps irreversible)
impact on Earth’s environment.13 Decolonization and the acceleration
of globalization, with the economic and political violence that came

Introduction 5
in its wake, was concomitant with the accelerated progress of the
Anthropocene, and a history analyzing the linkages between these lat-
ter developments in relation to the Mediterranean has still to be written.
The time frame of the present volume encompasses the late eighteenth
century to decolonization, which set the stage for the Anthropocene.
Whether it is as an imagined space, one of ideological, political, social
or economic exchange, or even one of ecological activity, the subtext,
however tenuous, is the hegemonic impulse of imperialism—informal or
formal.14 The political and technological revolutions in the West, which
characterized the period from the mid-eighteenth century onward, had
repercussions throughout the region, as some of the articles in this vol-
ume attest. Furthermore, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw
the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of new Western
empires. The Mediterranean remained a space of networks and chan-
nels, as it had been in early periods, but the islands, micro-regions
and territories became enmeshed in the expansionary activities first
of Europe and then of United States. The many forms of violence the
modern empires have brought to bear on the Mediterranean region have
had long-term effects on its environmental, political, and demographic
configurations, creating new nation-states, triggering mass migrations,
and inflicting environmental damage.15
The Mediterranean as an imperial space predates the modern period,
of course. Roman imperialism, the longest-lived of the empires encom-
passing the Mediterranean, has served as an exemplar for subsequent
Western empires, suggesting that ideological connections over time, real
or imagined, are of significance.16 The deep history of Mediterranean
imperialisms remains to be written, but nineteenth- and twentieth-
century imperialisms have received attention.17 Of the various Western
powers active in the area, France was a major player, and as Gillian
Weiss suggests, the Mediterranean is “an essential vantage point for
studying the rise of France” in the modern period.18 The political and
intellectual reverberations of the French Revolution were felt across the
Mediterranean, as articles in this volume make clear. French military
expansion into the area started with Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt
in 1798. Although ultimately unsuccessful militarily, the expedition

6 PATRICIA LORCIN & TODD SHEPARD

set the tempo for further expansion into the area—ideologically and
culturally in the Levant, and militarily in the Maghreb.19 Throughout
most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries France left its imperial
imprint on much of the Mediterranean region.20 Napoleon’s dream that
the Mediterranean would one day become a French lake was revived by
ideologues in Algeria, the most durable of France’s militarized Medi-
terranean incursions. Its 132-year occupation and legacy have received
considerable attention.21 Scholarly interest in French imperial activities
in the Mediterranean has also taken on a global perspective and encour-
aged comparisons and parallels to other imperialisms.22
The influence of France on the area has not abated in recent times,
nor has the concept of a western Mediterranean. During the 1960s and
1970s, Iranian “revolutionaries” such as Ali Shariati or Mohsen Sazegar,
both of whom gravitated to Paris, were influenced by French revolu-
tionary ideologies, radical ideas circulating during the Algerian War
of Independence and the anti- establishment movement of May 1968.
When Ayatollah Khomeini moved from Iraq to Paris to live out his exile,
they formed part of the coterie of intellectuals who theorized radical
change in Iran.23 More recently, in 2008 Nicolas Sarkozy, then presi-
dent of France, conceptualized the idea of a European-Mediterranean
Union with France at its helm.24 Sarkozy was, in fact, merely echoing
the desires of many European bureaucrats who, as Vasiliki Tiakoumaki
has recently pointed out, want to portray the strong ties of the Medi-
terranean region to Europe in order to promote a Euro-Mediterranean
partnership.25 Mary Dewhurst Lewis’s essay in this volume foreshadows
this development.

The essays collected here adopt new approaches to rethinking the maps,
migrations, and margins of the sea in the French transnational and impe-
rial context. They focus intently on the roles that “Arabs,” “Ottomans,”
“Muslims,” “Arab Jews,” and other so- called non-Europeans played in
the establishment of “French connections.” These histories follow actors
from Africa, Asia, and Europe who, willfully or no, proposed or made
meaningful an imaginary space—“the Mediterranean”—which traversed
or linked cultures or societies, or ignored supposed distinctions between

Introduction 7
them. What focuses our historians’ attention are moments when this
happened on the basis of French references, French models, antipathies
to France, in the name of France, or that took place in France itself. To
do so they foreground the multiple effects of French influence, imperial,
colonial, or ideological. Like the boundaries of the French state across
the modern era, these are histories that move, movement that gave
definition to a “natural” phenomenon that actors and observers from
all over treated as a space of contact as much as it was of conflict. Such
connections, in turn, did much to convince many that, rather than just
“a multitude of . . . maritime societies,” as Andrew Arsan summarizes in
this volume Braudel’s description of “the Mediterranean,” there were in
fact some “societies” that were disappearing, some growing larger, some
that could establish dominance, and others condemned to be dominated.
Such work, the play of power, can disappear when, as in Braudel’s telling
(or differently, in that of Horden and Purcell), the sea becomes instead
a natural and naturally bounded foundation that fashioned human his-
tory. Perhaps most important, over time the French imprint on all of
these narratives helped anchor certainties that some societies were
Western and some “Oriental,” even as it also suggested that a set of
forms—of speech; of values; of thought; of government; of progress—
might be capable of making the latter more like the former. “France”
and “the French” appeared to be their source, which could explain both
why some looked to France and why the French state or French people
could justify efforts, such as imperial expansion, violent conquest, and
newly intense forms of racism and disdain, that, as many have noted,
seem to contradict the values and principles advanced to explain what
distinguished post-1789 France. As our contributors make clear, these
were paradoxes that did much to make modern France, even as they
also gave shape to the Mediterranean. Taken together, the articles that
follow highlight a number of ways to think “French Mediterraneans.”
They do so by taking seriously the existence of a Mediterranean space
that is never just geological context, but instead was made and presumed
in the past or is heuristically useful for present-day scholars to explain
past developments.
All of our contributions critique or nuance the argument that has

8 PATRICIA LORCIN & TODD SHEPARD

shaped so many histories about the Mediterranean, which presents it as
a place where diverse peoples looked to and benefited from France. In
“An Ottoman in Paris,” Marc Aymes details one key strand of this broad
historiography, which he terms “enfrenchisement.” In such histories,
France stands in for Europe as the “center,” whereas developments on
the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean become at once
peripheral and necessarily shaped by the modernizing forces emerging
from the center. Even as recent historians have challenged East/West
binaries, and critiqued, for example, how previous scholars shoehorned
diverse developments together into what they defined as “Arab,” “Mus-
lim,” or “Oriental” ways and forms, these critics still rely, in Aymes’
telling, on what he terms “area studies” models. These presume the
compartmentalization of distinct regions or societies in order to narrate
past developments. Against both binarization and compartmentaliza-
tion, Aymes, in his focus on “coinage” and “currencies,” foregrounds a
more holistic Mediterranean, where the productive power of exchange
at once diminishes the interpretive need for distinctions between center/
periphery, or between compartmentalized societies, and better maps
how modern phenomena and inventions actually emerged. In his study
of what he calls the “workings of affective empire in the Mediterranean,”
Arsan, too, unpacks a history of connections. He is attentive to the role
that economic interests and imperial ambitions played in arguments by
diverse Frenchmen over the nineteenth century that the eastern Mediter-
ranean had deep links to France that required direct French involvement.
Yet he points out how much can be gained by taking seriously talk of
family ties between France and the Levant. Without underestimating
the diverse roles of French imperialism, Arsan suggests that Napoleon’s
dreams of making the Mediterranean a “French lake” through conquest
cannot fully explain subsequent arguments for closer connections.
In their focus on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, how-
ever, a number of our contributors point out connections that make it
worthwhile to speak of what Ian Coller names a “revolutionary sea.”
Their revelatory explorations of the participation and contribution of
Ottoman and North African actors and debates in supposedly “French”
and “European” histories challenge presumptions about constitutive

Introduction 9
distinctions between separate histories. Taking up Coller’s definition of
“East of Enlightenment,” which attends to how Levantine discussions
were part and parcel of wide-ranging eighteenth- century intellectual
debates, Ali Yaycıoğlu details how contemporary observers, French and
Ottoman, made such connections during the French Revolution. In his
own contribution to this collection, Coller himself directly challenges
the erasure of North Africa and its peoples in existing narratives of the
revolutionary moment. He pays particular attention, on the one hand,
to how “common people” in and of North Africa took up the language
and arguments that the French Revolution catalyzed, and, on the other,
to how much attention French and European observers gave to their
participation. This allows him to argue that the French Revolution did
more than belatedly affect North Africans; North African actions and
understandings reveal that they were caught up in that revolutionary
world. Coller reminds us that, rather than a growing division between
European modernity, led by revolutionary France, and a backwards-
looking “despotic” North Africa, the revolutionary period set the stage
for French imperial conquests across North Africa.
Various ways that the French army’s 1830 conquest of Algiers altered
developments across the Mediterranean draw the attention of several of
our contributors. In her history of how the post-1880 French protectorate
in Tunisia worked to establish a “European” legal status, Lewis explains
how direct French rule depended on asserting stark differences between
“East” (North Africa) and “West” (Europe)—what Edward Said named
“Orientalism”—and thus erased more complicated forms of connec-
tions and distinction, or struggled to do so. Arsan’s exploration of the
important role that French claims to be connected to certain (Mount
Lebanese Christian) Arabs in the Levant also hinges heavily on the
after-effects of 1830. The end of Algiers-based privateering, he notes,
gave commercial and military anchor to affective arguments. What
Coller, Lewis, and Arsan all bring into view was how intellectual and
legal efforts to distinguish “French” and “Europeans” from “Orientals”
accompanied growing and new imperial entanglements between France
and the rest of the Mediterranean.
One aspect of such French Mediterranean entanglements, which

10 PATRICIA LORCIN & TODD SHEPARD

1830 set in motion, was the incorporation of coastal hinterlands—or,
more dramatically, inland areas. This is most clearly visible in Sarah
Abreveya Stein’s Saharan history, which examines how Mzabi Jews,
who lived in oases on the northern edges of the Sahara, became newly
implicated in Mediterranean developments through French rule. Like
Stein’s attention to the Saharan unfolding of reverberations of the Drey-
fus Affair, Susan Gilson Miller’s focus on the exceptional life and career
of Moïse Nahon draws attention to the workings of French influence in
Morocco, which grew alongside French rule in, first, Algeria and then
Morocco itself. These developments linked North African inland areas
to—and across—the Mediterranean. Spencer Segalla’s history of the
1960 Agadir earthquake maps out how “responses to the earthquake
became imbricated with relations between the Moroccan South, the
French Mediterranean, [and] an American- dominated Atlantic.” Segalla
argues that the establishment of a French protectorate in 1912 “pulled
Morocco away” from growing transatlantic links to North America,
inserting even Agadir into “French Mediterranean” circuits. Subsequent
events, notably World War II and the 1960 earthquake (unlike Morocco’s
decolonization), pulled it back toward larger bodies.
Evocations of the powerful pull of the United States highlight the
sustained attention our contributors pay to the role of other states in
making French Mediterraneans, notably other empires. The most impor-
tant presence, by far, is that of the Ottoman Empire. In his in-depth
exploration of the “French Nation of Constantinople” in the eighteenth
century, Edhem Eldem makes clear that this “nation”—like the Church
of Saints Peter and Paul that anchored its legal existence—was pro-
foundly diverse. While only a minority had personal origins in France,
others were “French” in widely varied ways. Both Coller, in his atten-
tion to North African Ottoman subjects in the revolutionary era, and
Aymes, who details lines of exchange between the Ottoman and French
capitals, explore how Ottoman decisions, contexts, and actors were
central to remaking French Mediterraneans. Lewis, with a focus on the
French takeover of the beylik of Tunis, maps out how Ottoman forms
of governing foreign—or, more accurately, non-Muslim—subjects and
their concomitant production of multiple legal regimes gave shape to

Introduction 11
French efforts to establish “European” legal status. They also helped
produce many of the French difficulties and boundary problems she
examines. Bookending Segalla’s American history in Morocco, Lewis
also examines the play of other Western powers in Tunisia, especially
the British and Italian empires.
Histories of the making of the Mediterranean reveal multiple means
to make people “French.” Although, since 1989, historians of France
have concentrated their attention on state and “republican” definitions
of citizenship, our contributors draw necessary attention to the ways
that frames beyond or besides “blood” or “the law” worked to produce
French attachments. This is particularly visible in Eldem’s focus on how
(Catholic) Christianity in Constantinople stimulated links to France
outside of explicitly imperialist activity. Lewis, although she focuses
on law, also highlights how (Protestant and Catholic) Christian identi-
ties set the stage for connections to France that, in Tunisia, imperial
expansion would cement. Both Julia Clancy-Smith, in her biographi-
cal approach to the importance of French education for North African
women, and Miller, who draws attention to the ways that “French”
education, advanced by the Alliance israélite universelle, produced a
French-focused Jewish elite in pre-protectorate Morocco, extend what
we know about French educational models and teachers from France
as incubators of attachment. Each also adds texture and specificity
to the formative role of the French language, as both “lingua franca”
and magnetic field. What all our contributors make clear is that recent
attention to bounded membership, whether fixed in reference to law
or blood, needs to pay more attention to the play of cultural, affective,
and religious factors in making identities linked to France.
Such a focus facilitates more nuanced accounts of the interaction
between modern French imperialism and minorities in the Ottoman
and Muslim worlds. Stein and Miller directly challenge the myth of
modernizing France as “savior” of Arab Jews.26 The history of Jewish
participation in the bloody resistance of Mzabis to the French conquest
of Laghouat (1852) has long been a touchstone of histories that counter
simple tales of Franco-Jewish collaboration in the French takeover of
much of the Maghreb. Yet Stein’s later history of the ways that French

12 PATRICIA LORCIN & TODD SHEPARD

officials deployed Dreyfus Affair–era anti-Semitism to disrupt con-
nections between local Jews and Muslims adds new depth to existing
challenges to celebratory histories of modernization and lachrymose
histories of Muslim-Jewish conflict. Miller, meanwhile, points out how
a French education could work to connect Jews within the Maghreb
as well as make visible connections between Jews and Muslims. In her
telling, this was in part because of (rather than despite) the fact that
the Tangiers-based congeries of intellectuals, to which Nahon belonged,
was in such dialogue with French intellectuals.
Other articles further develop the ways that local dynamics took up
and transformed “French” exports and connections. Like Stein, Ellen
Amster and Emily Kuby are particularly interested in how these reveal
the limits of supposedly universal models. Amster’s history of the rise
and fall of “Arab syphilis” among French medical experts, and of how
the lives of many Moroccans were affected by these French experi-
ments, emphasizes the destructive effects that studies of the “colonial
laboratory” too often elide.27 Kuby analyzes how the “Holocaust model”
of concentration camps facilitated the whitewashing, by a group of
well-intentioned “survivors,” of French treatment of Maghrebi detain-
ees. These men and women suffered internment at the “regroupment”
camps the government had established to fight against anticolonial
movements in Algeria and Tunisia. Kuby charts the observers’ failure
to take into account the markedly colonial and “French Mediterranean”
cast of French camps. Their effects could not accurately be assessed in
reference to the intra-European model these Holocaust survivors relied
on. The observers’ intra-European optics made it impossible to see what
France was doing south of the Mediterranean.
For historians, seeing requires primary sources just as much as it
requires historiographical questions and theoretical and methodological
lenses. The articles gathered here make both innovative use of types of
sources that have been widely used by scholars of France and the Medi-
terranean as well as bring into play the sorts of novel sources that have
recently transformed other historiographical discussions. One important
strand of recent historical work that turns to state archives has used
legal pluralism to complicate national histories.28 Articles by Lewis and

Introduction 13
Stein each expand our understanding of how French imperial authori-
ties and French colonial subjects deployed “civil status,” “Koranic law,”
“European status,” “Mosaic status,” and the like. Stein joins her use of
French documentation with sources from local rabbinical authorities
to deepen our understanding of how such legal categories shaped lives.
Each draws telling connections to the way that Ottoman- era capitula-
tions as well as the complicated play of international diplomacy affected
the meaning of plural legal statuses. In his history of the institutionaliza-
tion of such a capitulation in Ottoman Constantinople, Eldem focuses
wholly on the religious authorities who controlled “Christian” legal
status. His investigation of the archives of the Church of Saints Peter
and Paul allows him to trace the ways that the play between secu-
lar and sacred authorities changed over time, as French imperialism,
most notably, altered the legal landscape. In a parallel move, Amster,
Kuby, and Segalla bring governmental sources into conversation with
the archives of nongovernmental authorities—medical for Amster, the
humanitarian nongovernmental organization Commission internationale
contre le régime concentrationnaire in Kuby’s story, and architectural
as well as humanitarian for Segalla. Other contributors anchor their
histories in discursive evidence, to mount convincing challenges to exist-
ing historiographical certainties that depend on the authority of more
“materialist” sources. Arsan deftly mines wide-ranging written sources,
both published and archived, to identify and trace out what he terms
“tropes over time” that alter arguments premised in economic and mili-
tary claims, while Aymes makes use of what he terms “little stories” and
attends to the discursive power of “currencies” to insist that close read-
ing remains valuable to even the most archivally anchored history. Like
Aymes, Coller, in his innovative use of chronicles to link (rather than
distinguish) “Arab” and “French” histories, and Eldem, in his painstak-
ing exploration of parish records, draw on the burgeoning field of print
cultures to make sense of their sources even as they expand the range of
possible sources. Eldem also makes striking use of architecture to make
claims that written sources alone cannot explain, as does Segalla, who
combines both his own reading of buildings and built developments and
the ways that contemporary commentary on architecture and architects

14 PATRICIA LORCIN & TODD SHEPARD

can open up new perspectives. Taken together, the articles point to
ways of reformulating historical work that takes the Mediterranean as
frame, as well as that which explores French questions and influences
beyond national and colonial boundaries. French Mediterraneans cannot
wholly encompass either discussion. The way it addresses the need to
bring existing historiographies into conversation, however, may prove
more widely useful.

NOTES
1. Miriam Cooke, Mediterranean Passages: Readings from Dido to Derrida (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 8.
2. 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: University of California
Press, 1997), 4.
3. See, e.g., Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference (Princeton: Rutgers University Press, 2000).
4. For a compelling Caribbeanist perspective, see Harvey Neptune, “At Sea: The
Caribbean in Black Empire,” small axe 10, no. 2 (2006): 269–75.
5. Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe
II (Paris: Colin, 1949).
6. Gabriel Piterberg, Teofilo Ruiz, and Geoffrey Symcox, eds., Braudel Revisited: The
Mediterranean World, 1600–1800 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 3.
7. Shlomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab
World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1967).
8. Germaine Tillion, Le harem et les cousins (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966).
9. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediter-
ranean History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
10. David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011).
11. Julia Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in the Age of Migra-
tions, 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
12. See, e.g., Hans Günter Brauch, “Policy Responses to Climate Change in the Medi-
terranean and Mena Region during the Anthropocene,” in Climate Change, Human
Security and Violent Conflict: Challenges for Societal Stability, ed. Michael Brzoska
Jürgen Scheffran, Hans Günter Brauch, Peter Michael Link, and Janpeter Schilling
(Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 2012), 719– 94.
13. See, e.g., Stephan Barthel John Ljungkvist, Göran Finnveden, and Sverker Sörlin,
“Urban Anthropocene: Lessons for Sustainability from the Environmental History

Introduction 15
 of Constantinople,” in The Urban Mind: Cultural and Environmental Dynamics, ed.
Paul J. J. Sinclair et al. (Uppsala: Department of Archeology and Ancient History,
Uppsala University, 2010), 367–90.
14. For discussions of sexuality, women, and gender, see Robert Aldrich, The Seduction
of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy (London: Routledge,
1993); and Nabil el Haggar and Brahimi Denise, La Méditerranée des femmes (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 1998). For discussions of architecture, see Sheila Crane, Mediterranean
Crossroads: Marseille and Modern Architecture (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 2014); Zeynep Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers
under French Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Zeynep Çelik,
Julia Ann Clancy-Smith, and Frances Terpak, eds., Walls of Algiers: Narratives of
the City through Text and Image (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2009); and
Mia Fuller, Colonial Constructions: Architecture, Cities, and Italian Imperialism in the
Mediterranean and East Africa (London: Spon, 2003). For a discussion of scientific
activity, see Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, L’invention scientifique de la Méditerranée:
Egypte, Morée, Algérie (Paris: École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1998);
and George R. Trumbull IV, An Empire of Facts: Colonial Power, Cultural Knowledge,
and Islam in Algeria, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
For discussion of the concepts of modernity, see Ian Coller, Arab France: Islam
and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798–1831 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2011); Iain Chambers, Mediterranean Crossings the Politics of an Interrupted
Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); and Leila Tarazi Fawaz, C. A.
Bayly, and Robert Ilbert, eds., Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to
the Indian Ocean (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). For a discussion
of environmental history, see Diana K. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome.
Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Athens:
Ohio University Press, 2007); and Diana K. Davis, Environmental Imaginaries of
the Middle East and North Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013).
15. Ussama Samir Makdisi and Paul A. Silverstein, Memory and Violence in the Middle
East and North Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Marnia Laz-
reg, Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad: Human Rights and
Crimes against Humanity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Nadirah
Shalhub-Kifurkiyan, Militarization and Violence against Women in Conflict Zones
in the Middle East: A Palestinian Case- Study, Cambridge Studies in Law and Soci-
ety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Benjamin Claude Brower,
A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara,
1844–1902 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Abdelmajid Hannoum,
Violent Modernity. France in Algeria (Cambridge MA : Harvard University Press,
2010); Sylvie Thénault, Violence ordinaire dans l’Algérie coloniale: Camps, interne-
ments, assignations à résidence (Paris: O Jacob, Impr CPI Firmin-Didot, 2011);
William Gallois, A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony (Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

16 PATRICIA LORCIN & TODD SHEPARD

16. Patricia M. E. Lorcin, “France and Rome in Africa: Recovering Algeria’s Latin
Past,” French Historical Studies 25, no. 2 (2002): 295–329; Patricia M. E. Lorcin,
“Pax Romana Transposed: Rome as an Exemplar for Western Imperialism,” in The
Routledge History of Western Empires, ed. Robert Aldrich and Kirsten McKenzie
(London: Routledge, 2013), 409–22.
17. See, e.g., Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privi-
lege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2000); Mia Fuller, Colonial Constructions: Architecture, Cities, and Italian
Imperialism in the Mediterranean and East Africa (London: Spon, 2003); Eve Troutt
Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of
the Sudan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Ruth Ben-Ghiat
and Mia Fuller, eds., Italian Colonialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
18. Gillian Lee Weiss, Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern
Mediterranean (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 6.
19. Abd al-Rahman Jabarti, Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne , and Edward W.
Said, Napoleon in Egypt: Al-Jabarti’s Chronicle of the First Seven Months of the
French Occupation, 1798 (Princeton: M. Wiener, 1993); Charles Coulson Gillispie,
“The Scientific Importance of Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign,” Scientific American,
September 1994, 78– 85; Irene A. Bierman, ed., Napoleon in Egypt (Reading, UK:
Ithaca Press, 2003); Nina Burleigh, Mirage: Napoleon’s Scientists and the Unveiling
of Egypt (New York: Harper, 2007).
20. Fatma Müge Göçek, East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the
Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Max Roche, Edu-
cation, assistance et culture françaises dans l’Empire Ottoman (Istanbul: Editions
Isis, 1989); Michel Levallois and Sarga Moussa, L’orientalisme des Saint- Simoniens
(Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2006); Keith David Watenpaugh, Being Modern in
the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Zeynep Çelik, Empire, Architecture,
and the City: French-Ottoman Encounters, 1830–1914 (Seattle: University of Wash-
ington Press, 2008).
21. It is impossible to do justice to the literature on colonial Algeria. Some examples
of its legacy in France include Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The
Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006);
Vincent Crapanzano, The Harkis: The Wound That Never Heals (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2011); and Paul A. Silverstein, Algeria in France: Transpolitics,
Race, and Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).
22. Irwin M. Wall, France, the United States, and the Algerian War (Berkley: University
of California Press, 2001); Matthew James Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution:
Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post–Cold War Era (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002); Ian Lustick, Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain
and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1993); Lionel Babicz, “Japan-Korea, France-Algeria: Colonialism

Introduction 17
 and Post- Colonialism,” Japanese Studies 33, no. 3 (2013): 201–11 ; Lazreg, Torture
and the Twilight of Empire.
23. Christian Caryl, Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (New York:
Basic Books, 2014), 107–16; Gloria Osoba, Revolutions: An Analytical Comparison
between the French Revolution and the Iranian Revolution (Saarbrücken, Germany:
VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2010).
24. See the New York Times op-ed on the subject, Soner Cagaptay, “The Empire Strikes
Back,” New York Times, January 14, 2012.
25. Vasiliki Yiakoumaki, “On Bureaucratic Essentialism: Constructing the Mediterranean
in European Union Institutions,” in Contested Mediterranean Spaces: Ethnographic
Essays in Honour of Charles Tilly (Space and Place), ed. Maria Kousis, Tom Selwyn,
and David Clark (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 17–34.
26. See also Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans, which draws attention to the Algerian
Jews who fled the French occupation and sought refuge in Tunisia.
27. One that does not is Jordana Bailkin, “The Boot and the Spleen: When Was Murder
Possible in British India?” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48 (2006):
462–93.
28. See especially Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World
History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Clancy-Smith,
Mediterraneans; and Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization.

18 PATRICIA LORCIN & TODD SHEPARD

1 Révolutions de Constantinople
France and the Ottoman World
in the Age of Revolutions

ALI YAYCIOĞLU
To the Gezi Parkı protestors
[Istanbul, May 31, 2013]

There are no states that have not been subject to great revolutions.
—Antoine Futerière, 1690

In his book Révolutions de Constantinople (1819), Antoine Juchereau

de Saint-Denis (1778–1842), a French émigré and military engineer
employed by the Ottoman state as an expert in fortification and artil-
lery, narrated the stormy events that he observed in the Ottoman
capital in 1807 and 1808. During three révolutions, as Juchereau defined
them, two sultans were deposed and executed, several statesmen were
beheaded, poisoned, or lynched, and thousands of ordinary Ottoman
men and women became victims of violence and terror. Perhaps more
important, Juchereau maintained, these revolutions resulted from a
battle between the reform program of the New Order—a military and
administrative reorganization agenda under the Ottoman sultan Selim
III (r. 1789–1807)—and the general public, led by the guards of the old

21
order, the Janissaries, and ulama (learned hierarchy). When Juchereau
composed his book in 1819 he wrote in the genre of early revolution-
ary history-writing in France, with similar themes and topoi, such as
the struggle between corporate bodies of the old order and reform
of enlightened rulers, and the role of the crowd and public opinion.1
Juchereau’s book thus provides insightful perspective on the experiences
of a contemporary observer—and victim—of the Age of Revolutions
beyond the conventional boundaries of Europe. Moreover, Révolutions
de Constantinople is an illuminating text for historians of Orientalism, or
Western knowledge about the East, since it reflects how a French intel-
lectual depicted the Ottoman world in the Age of Revolutions, when not
only political systems but also knowledge about these political systems
was radically transformed.2
For a long time, historians have agreed that the Age of Revolutions,
the stormy period between the 1770s and the 1810s, was a trans-European
phenomenon. In 1959, R. R. Palmer argued that the American and French
Revolutions were not insular events. The transatlantic Enlightenment
and its radical manifestations in political culture triggered the con-
nected revolutions in America and Europe.3 This perspective later gave
birth to Atlantic World studies, which became one of the major fields in
early modern and modern history. Following Palmer, several historians,
such as J. G. A. Pocock, Bernard Bailyn, and Patrice Higonnet, defined
different aspects of the Atlantic context in the Age of Revolutions.4 In
another vein, Franco Venturi, in his massive survey The End of the Old
Regime in Europe, 1768–1776, argued that the seeds of revolution were
first planted not in western Europe but farther east, on the kaleidoscopic
Ottoman-Russian-Polish frontiers, in the entangled Hellenic, Slavic, and
Islamic cultural zones. Venturi masterfully illustrated that connections
between Europe, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and Poland were so pro-
found and lively in the late eighteenth century that it is impossible to
write their histories on separate pages.5 Recently, some historians, for
example, C. Bayly,6 David Armitage, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, have
proposed a wider scope of analysis and have exploited the possibilities
of a global or plural Age of Revolutions.7
A central question in this discussion is whether we can give similar

22 ALI YAYCıOĞLU
meanings to what happened, say, in Warsaw in 1772, Kazan in 1773,
Philadelphia in 1777, Paris in 1789, Sichuan in 1796, Cape Town in 1806,
and Istanbul in 1807–8. While we should resist the temptation to global-
ize historical events and cultures to the extent that their specificities lose
meaning, we can appreciate connections, interactions, and similarities
between different corners of the world in an age when the movement
of individuals and information dramatically intensified. In this regard,
one important aspect of the Age of Revolutions was the growing num-
ber of people living in foreign lands and writing about these places.
Emigrants, migrant workers, adventurers, refugees, merchants, mis-
sionaries, and diplomats wrote about the countries in which they lived
while struggling with epistemological dilemmas that resulted from what
they had learned about these foreign lands in their homelands and
what they personally experienced. Recent studies on the literature of
Orientalism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in western
Europe by Srinivas Aravamudan, Humberto Garcia, and others show
that Western writing on the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic world is
far more complicated and diverse than what was previously thought.8
While many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors cultivated stark
ontological and epistemological boundaries, others bridged the differ-
ences between the West and the Islamic world. Juchereau was one of
these men. A Frenchman educated in France and England, he ended
up in Istanbul during a crisis, observed an extraordinary episode, and
wrote about it. Did the horrors he witnessed in Istanbul when many of
his Ottoman friends, architects of the New Order who were executed
by the crowd, remind him of the horror he experienced when his father
was guillotined in the Jacobin Terror? Although we cannot know the
answer, it is hardly absurd to think that the revolutions in Paris and
Istanbul were related for Juchereau, beyond the stark epistemological
boundaries that divided Europe and the Ottoman world.
This essay is an attempt to make sense of Juchereau’s Révolutions de
Constantinople. In the first section I will discuss some of the phases of
interaction between the French and Ottomans worlds. This section also
provides context for Juchereau’s life and the events he witnessed and
described. In the second section I focus on Juchereau and his book and

Révolutions de Constantinople 23
examine how a Frenchman analyzed the Ottoman order and narrated
the episode of 1807 and 1808 in Istanbul.

The French and Ottoman Worlds in the Age of Revolutions

More perhaps than any other place in Europe, it was in France that
discussions of the nature of the Ottoman order created intrigue among
reading circles.9 By no means did this fascination produce a standard
conception of the Ottoman Empire (or the Islamic Near East), but
rather a range of narratives and theories persisted. Overall, however,
we can point to two competing views. Conventionally, the Ottoman
regime appeared as Oriental despotism, characterized by the arbitrary
and abusive rule of the sultan and blindly obedient subjects who did
not enjoy the rule of law, the possibility of public opposition, or secu-
rity of property and life. As Montesquieu systematized this theory,
the Ottoman order (like its Asian counterparts, which were depicted
as illegitimate and outdated) was incommensurable with Enlighten-
ment Europe.10 This totalistic argument, however, met challenges from
counter-interpretations, which were consolidated in the second half of
the eighteenth century, as a result of booming French-Ottoman diplo-
matic and commercial relations.11 Thinkers like Constantin François
de Chassebœuf (comte de Volney) and Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-
Duperron suggested that in fact the Ottoman regime was not naturally
different from regimes in the West.12 It was not more despotic than
other monarchies, perhaps even less so, because several groups, public
rebellions, and Islamic Law had profoundly curtailed sultanic author-
ity since the seventeenth century. According to Thomas E. Kaiser, in
pre-revolutionary France, discussions of the Ottoman Empire belonged
to domestic debates about the ancien régime.13 Those who promoted
Ottoman-French diplomatic and commercial relations sought to illus-
trate that the Ottoman regime was not a source of evil despotism and
that the Ottoman Empire and France could thrive as economic and diplo-
matic partners. This agenda coincided with a fascination with turquerie
in French polite society and translations of major Islamic texts, such as
One Thousand and One Nights by Auguste Galland.14 However, republi-
cans who wished to show that the French monarchy was as despotic as

24 ALI YAYCıOĞLU
Ottoman rule, or even worse, argued that European royal regimes did
not entirely differ from the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottomans were familiar with France and the French, more
acquainted even than the French in France with the Ottoman world.
French subjects living in Istanbul and the port cities, known as the
échelles du Levant, constituted a distinctive commercial community,
the result of multiple trade agreements that dated back to the sixteenth
century.15 In the eyes of Ottoman administrators, they proved the most
favored commercial community, since France was considered a natu-
ral ally against the Hapsburgs. Gradually, the Ottoman French began
intermingling with Christian and some Muslim segments of the Ottoman
elite in the transcultural milieux of Istanbul and other port cities. This
coincided with an increase in the number of French military experts
joining the échelles.16 Alexandre de Bonneval, who became Muslim
and took the name Humbaracı Ahmed Pasha, and Baron de Tott, the
Franco-Hungarian military expert and diplomat, were the best-known
in this group. Many wrote memoirs, some of which became best-sellers
in Paris.17 In fact, the vibrant exchange of information between France
and the Ottoman Empire, mediated by the échelles, gave birth to what
Ian Coller calls the “East of Enlightenment,” namely, the lively intellec-
tual interaction within French commercial and diplomatic circles and
other groups clustered around them in the Ottoman world. The East of
Enlightenment shaped ideas about the Ottoman world in Europe, but
it also became instrumental in disseminating European ways into the
Ottoman Empire.18
We should understand the East of Enlightenment in relation to other
enlightenments in the Ottoman world. In the eighteenth century, Greek
and Armenian communities in the Ottoman Empire, which tied together
the European and Ottoman markets through diasporal connections,
developed their own trans-imperial republic of letters. A vivid learning
culture, known as the Greek Enlightenment, flourished under the patron-
age of the notable Greek families of Istanbul, known as Phanariotes,
who were linked to Vienna, Paris, and Padua with centers in Istanbul,
Iași, Izmir, Athens, and Jerusalem.19 The massive translation campaign
from European languages into Western Armenian by the Mekhitarists,

Révolutions de Constantinople 25
the Catholic Armenian network, spread across the Armenian intellec-
tual community in the Ottoman Empire.20 But it was not only diasporal
networks that experienced the vibrant intellectual and political climate
of the Age of Enlightenment. Recent discussions of eighteenth- century
logics, cosmology, cartography, geography, mathematics, and engineer-
ing among Muslim intellectual circles, as well as the proliferation of
libraries and publication activities, have pushed some historians to
reconsider the rigid boundary between the Western Enlightenment
and Islamic traditions.21 They reject understandings of the Enlighten-
ment as a linear history of a particular secular tradition of radicalism
and instead, according to David Sorkin, propose a broader depiction
of variously connected and/or concomitantly secular, religious, or sci-
entific propagations—in other words as plural enlightenments.22 From
this perspective it makes sense to define the cultural, intellectual, and
scientific vitality of the Ottoman eighteenth century, with all its vari-
ants, as the Ottoman Enlightenment.
The Ottoman central establishment also became a part of this atmo-
sphere. Popular accounts by Ottoman diplomats in European centers
were not simply observations of Western ways, but veritable reform
pamphlets.23 Not surprisingly, Ottoman interest in the Western—and
particularly the French—way, or Ottoman Occidentalism, soon trans-
formed into a genuine political agenda. Toward the end of the eighteenth
century, we observe the formation of a political movement, a party of
Ottoman statesmen who were profoundly inspired by the French (as
well as Prussian, Russian, and Austrian) military and administrative
reforms that preceded the revolution. The leading figure of this group,
known as the New Order, was the young prince Selim. The sultan-in-
waiting exchanged letters with Louis XVI and asked the French monarch
for advice as he sought to formulate his reform projects. Selim became
sultan only three months before the storming of the Bastille in 1789, and
he unleashed his reforms following a general assembly of bureaucrats
and intellectuals who presented reform proposals.24
After the storming of the Bastille, thousands of French citizens in
the échelles experienced the tempestuous days of the revolution in
the relatively calm cities of the Eastern Mediterranean. In Istanbul’s

26 ALI YAYCıOĞLU
French community, some joyously celebrated the news, while others
anxiously protested the events shattering France. The tricolor cockade
became a familiar sight on the streets of Istanbul and a few other Otto-
man cities, and occasionally members of other communities, Muslim
or non-Muslim, participated in these celebrations and protests.25 While
the Ottoman public became familiar with the revolution, the Ottoman
central administration could not predict the far-reaching implications
of events in France. In fact, since the 1770s, radical changes, popular
rebellions, toppling of regimes, and partitions of countries frequently
occurred in the Ottoman Empire and thus no longer surprised the Otto-
man elite.26
Since the 1770s, the Ottoman Empire had been a theater for vari-
ous radicalisms. The Greek uprising in Morea in 1769, which Russia’s
involvement intensified, almost resulted in the disintegration of the
Ottoman Balkans. The Ottomans kept the Balkans intact but lost Crimea
to Russia. Crimea was one of the most strategic and symbolically sig-
nificant provinces, and it had been transferred to the Ottoman Empire
from the patrimony of the Mongolian Empire.27 The Russian annexation
of Crimea in 1782 became an important phase for Catherine the Great’s
large-scale project to create an enlightened Byzantium in the Black Sea
basin. Ottoman central elites developed a profound awareness of such
radical projects inspired by certain dicta of the Enlightenment. In fact,
this awareness encouraged Ottoman diplomats to vigorously struggle
against the partition of Poland, which fell victim to radical projects to
redesign Europe. In the early 1790s, it remained unclear how the French
Revolution would affect the geopolitics of the Ottoman Empire.28
Despite the unpredictable implications of the revolution, between
1789 and 1798 the administrations of the Ottoman Empire and French
Republic continued to foster diplomatic and military relations. Dur-
ing the Ottoman wars with Russia and Austria, the Ottomans and the
French were natural allies. After the war, when Selim III unleashed
his military and fiscal reforms in the name of the New Order, French
experts participated in these projects. French became the language of
instruction in new military schools. At the same time, studies in Ottoman
languages and cultures were institutionalized in French academia. In

Révolutions de Constantinople 27
1795, the École nationale des langues orientales vivantes was founded
in Paris. Now most French diplomats sent to Istanbul were more thor-
oughly acquainted than ever with Ottoman languages like Turkish,
Greek, and Arabic as well as Ottoman political manners. In 1793, the
Club de la société républicaine was founded with branches in Istanbul,
Izmir, and Aleppo. The Gazette Française de Constantinople and a printing
press, under the supervision of the French embassy, were established
to “spread the affairs of the Republic to the Ottoman communities.”
Revolutionary ideas, sponsored by the French government, found their
way to the Ottoman world.29
Bernard Lewis, in his renowned article “The Impact of the French
Revolution on Turkey,” from 1953, argued that members of the Otto-
man elite were indifferent to revolutionary ideas and regime change
in France.30 While the Ottomans saw the impact of the French Revolu-
tion in terms of its geopolitical effects on European diplomacy, Muslim
intellectual repugnance toward the secular ideas of the Enlightenment
summed up the ideological response. According to Lewis, the waves
of the French Revolution did not breach the religious barrier between
Europe and the Islamic world. Although civilizational boundaries drawn
by Lewis and others no longer limit historians’ intellectual horizons, the
1953 article still needs to be rigorously appraised. The reception of the
revolution in the Ottoman world seems to be more complicated than
what Lewis depicted. In fact, the Ottoman establishment’s reception
did not dramatically differ from responses by ruling elites in Europe or
Russia. Secularism and anticlericalism defined some reactions, mainly
articulated by Muslim and Greek Orthodox authorities. The mainstream
Ottoman critique, however, focused on the revolutionary principles of
equality and liberty. Jacobin republicanism, the Ottoman observers
maintained, resulted in the elimination of a regime of notables, and in
the handover of “the public administration to the populace.”31 In this
conservative reading of the revolution, in fact, the term yakoben signi-
fied the spokesmen of the rebellious urban crowd, which destroyed
not only the established order but also security of life and property.32
The Ottoman depiction of the yakobens invoked the popular Janis-
sary revolts, which since the seventeenth century had periodically

28 ALI YAYCıOĞLU
destabilized the Ottoman political order.33 If the French Revolution
broke out as a response to the fiscal policies of Louis XVI, it was the
military and fiscal policies of the New Order that provoked popular reac-
tion that concentrated around the Janissaries. The administration took
steps to close down public gathering places, such as coffeehouses, which
served as loci for the popular opposition.34 Emphasizing the affiliation
between the people and the Janissaries’ claims, some members of the
ruling elite wrote pamphlets against the role of the populace and mob
in political life.35 We should note the warm relations between some
Jacobin French diplomats and the Janissaries. When Ruffin, the French
chargé d’affaire, was taken to the famous prison of Yedi Kule after the
French expedition to Egypt, a Janissary team honorably escorted him
through the streets of Istanbul. An observer noted that when a woman
from the crowd approached to insult him, the Janissaries prevented it,
protecting Ruffin’s dignity.36 Did this happen because of an ideological
kinship between the Janissaries and the Jacobins? Probably not! But
friendship between a group that claimed to protect the rights of the
populace and the representative of a regime of the people would not
be surprising.
The Ottomans saw ideas of serbestiyet (liberty) as a threat to imperial
integration for potentially pushing different communities living under
the imperial umbrella closer to separatism. The Ottoman conception of
serbestiyet, which denoted the fiscal and administrative immunity of
certain tax units, gained new meaning during this time. The term now
referred to collective immunity, or communal independence, from the
authorities.37 Early signals of such collective tendencies in different
communities, especially in the Greek-speaking parts of the Ottoman
Empire, had emerged since the 1770s. However, concerns about the
spread of serbestiyet grew in October 1797, when the Treaty of Campo
Formio enabled the French to annex Venetian colonies in the Adriatic.
In the Ionian Islands and some coastal towns neighboring the Otto-
man lands, the Venetian regime was abrogated and revolutionary sister
republics were established, with the collective participation of urban
masses. The Greek Orthodox Church, acting against revolutionary pro-
paganda spreading from the French sister republics to the Ottoman

Révolutions de Constantinople 29
west, mobilized its clerical network in the provinces to discredit the
anticlericalism, separatism, and egalitarianism of the French Revolu-
tion. The church’s alliance with the Ottoman state gave birth to the
Dhidhaskalia Patriki, a moral text written by the patriarch of Jerusalem,
refuting revolutionary ideas that circulated among Greek communities.38
The Ottomans sensed that if the revolution hit the Ottoman lands,
the first target would be Ottoman Greece. Bonaparte’s arrival in Egypt
in the summer of 1798 was a great shock to the Ottoman administra-
tion. After Crimea, Egypt was the second Muslim province of historical
significance and geostrategic importance lost by the empire. The French
eradicated the Ottoman-Mamluk oligarchy and established a new
regime, an experimental Oriental republic. The expedition was colored
by several episodes of collaboration and resistance of local Muslim and
non-Muslim communities. The French assault inevitably pushed the
Ottoman administration to establish an alliance with Russia and Britain.
The British fleet, under the command of Admiral Nelson, and Ottoman
land forces, including Selim’s New Army, which was designed on the
French model, would soon put an end to the French regime in Egypt.
In 1800 the Ottoman-Russian alliance attacked and captured the Ionian
Islands. By 1802, the Ottoman, Russian, and British coalition had halted
the two overseas experiments that the French revolutionary regime set
up in the Eastern Mediterranean.39
France initially presented justifications for the expedition to Egypt:
to save Egyptian society from the tyranny of local oligarchs; to rees-
tablish order by means of the rule of law; and to create a sister republic
in Egypt as an extension of enlightened universalism, energized by the
revolution in a Muslim land. But imperial ambitions prevailed over
republican dreams. Gradually, the expedition was conceived as a phase
of the French post-revolutionary strategy in the Eastern Mediterranean
and as an effort to reconsolidate the French imperial presence in the
Indian Ocean World, which the French defeat thirty-six years earlier in
the Seven Years’ War had laid low. This global strategy did not mate-
rialize. Nevertheless, the short experience in Egypt left traces in the
French political and cultural imaginary. Fantasies and theories about
the Orient, which were an integral component of public discussion in

30 ALI YAYCıOĞLU
pre-revolutionary France, were now reconfigured in the framework of
Enlightened Orientalism. The republican project to create an Oriental
republic in Egypt intermingled with the ambitious project to build a
global empire premised on revolutionary principles. These efforts were
synchronized with the systematic accumulation of geographic, eth-
nographic, and archaeological knowledge about the Arab world, and
would form the antecedents of nineteenth- century Orientalism. The
Egyptian bodyguard employed by Bonaparte emboldened his image
as a global leader in the eyes of the European public. Less known were
the Egyptian émigrés in France, who left their homeland and lived
grim lives as members of a repudiated refugee community in early-
nineteenth- century France.40 The Age of Revolutions was also the age
of refugees and emigrants.41
The Ottoman-Russian expedition to the Ionian Islands in 1800 was
in many ways a response to the French expedition to Egypt. Since the
sixteenth century, the Ottomans had tried and failed to capture these
strategic islands, so this was a glorious victory. In addition to military
success, the annexation of the Ionian Islands had ideological meaning.
The Ottomans and Russians abrogated the French-style revolutionary
Ionian republic. In its place, they drafted a Venetian-style republican
constitution for the islands. Unlike French republicanism, the Ottoman-
Russian republican design for Corfu and the other six islands was inspired
by the pre-revolutionary republicanism popular among noble families on
the islands, at the expense of representatives of the urban and rural plebs.
It was an aristocratic republic with a flag featuring a lion of Saint Mark
(the symbol of Venice) combined with seven arrows (representing Otto-
man suzerainty) instead of ionic columns, the neoclassical insignia of the
Ionian republic.42 The creation of a conservative republic in the Ionian
Islands was an Ottoman and Russianresponse to French radicalism.
A treaty between France and the Ottoman Empire in 1802 officially
ended the war. From then until 1807, the Ottoman administration under
the reign of Selim III and the New Order party tried to avoid active
participation in either the Third Coalition led by Britain and Russia,
or Napoleon’s grand strategy to create an eastern bloc with Qajar Iran.
When Napoleon was declared emperor of France in December 1804, the

Révolutions de Constantinople 31
Ottoman center faced a challenging development. In short order, the
recognition of the emperorship of Napoleon with the title of padishah
(a title that the Ottoman sultans claimed exclusively for themselves)
by the Ottoman state became the hottest controversy in European dip-
lomatic circles. This interesting episode illustrates how European and
Islamic titular politics intermingled in the Age of Revolutions. Napoleon
and Selim exchanged personal letters, in which Napoleon declared his
commitment to the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. Selim, who called
Napoleon “His Majesty, our very august friend, very sublime, very mag-
nificent, and very affectionate friend,” rather than emperor or padishah,
wrote about his New Army, stating that he was proud of it, and described
his other reforms and the contributions of French experts.43
All these exchanges fostered a new image of Napoleon in the Otto-
man world. While poems about Napoleon circulated in coffeehouses, in
Turkish and other Ottoman languages, sometimes cursing, sometimes
honoring him,44 engravings of the emperor’s portrait became popu-
lar in Ottoman markets. Fascination with the image of Napoleon, or
Napoleonism, in Ottoman popular culture, spread as women of Mani
in Greece kept candles in front his portrait, as they did in front of
icons.45 Napoleon’s career was a source of inspiration for several power
holders in the Ottoman provinces during the period, from Ali Pasha of
Ioannina to Mehmed Ali Pasha of Egypt. Ali Pasha of Ioannina, named
the “Muslim Bonaparte” by Lord Byron, approached the British after
having been disappointed by the French. However, his image as the
Muslim Bonaparte added a new hue to British Orientalism.46 Osman
Pazvantoğlu of Vidin, a disobedient provincial magnate in Ottoman
Bulgaria, proposed a radical plan to Napoleon; he presented his friend,
Cengiz Mehmed Geray, a Crimean prince and descendent of Chinggis
Khan, as a possible ruler to replace Selim III and the Ottoman dynasty.
This surprising proposal, in which Napoleon and a descendant of Ching-
gis Khan appeared on the same page, illustrates broad horizons of the
age’s radicalism.47 Meanwhile, some Greek republicans, like Rhigas
Velestinlis, presented Pazvantoğlu as the new hero of revolutionary
waves in the Ottoman Empire that, with the assistance of France, would
encompass the Balkans.48

32 ALI YAYCıOĞLU
 The year 1806 was a turning point in Ottoman-French relations.
Horace François Bastien Sébastiani, the renowned French ambassador,
appointed by Napoleon for an extraordinary mission, almost convinced
the Ottomans to join a coalition against Russia and Britain. While Selim
and the pro-French party in the Ottoman administration were inclined to
leave the alliance with the Russians and British, which had been in place
since the French expedition to Egypt, the British fleet passed through the
Dardanelles, anchored in front of Istanbul, and threatened to bombard
the city. The fleet left Istanbul; however, the New Order under Selim
III fell in May 1807 as a result of an uprising in Istanbul. This episode
triggered a series of incidents and turmoil until the autumn of 1808.
The fall of Selim and the New Order was followed by the consolida-
tion of the anti–New Order restoration government under Mustafa IV,
Selim’s nephew. Another coup would topple the restoration government
within a year, this time at the hands of some New Orderists under the
leadership of a provincial power holder, Mustafa Bayraktar of Ruse.
Bayraktar restored the New Order and had himself appointed grand
vizier by Mahmud II, whom he made sultan. However, in a short time
the regime of Bayraktar would also fall to a coup initiated by Janissaries
with the enthusiastic support of Istanbul’s general public. Several Euro-
pean and Ottoman observers narrated this series of events, which took
place during a short period of less than two years, as a single episode,
a dramatic turning point in the Ottoman Empire with long-term and
transregional repercussions. They presented it as a sister episode of what
was transpiring in different polities in the blustery Age of Revolutions.

Antoine Juchereau de Saint-Denis and

Révolutions de Constantinople
One observer of this episode was Antoine Juchereau de Saint-Denis. In
1819, more than a decade after the events, Juchereau published Révolu-
tions de Constantinople en 1807 et 1808, précédées d’observations générales
sur l’état actuel de l’Empire Ottoman, in which he narrated the 1807– 8
episode in great detail, along with his general observations on the
Ottoman Empire.49 Juchereau was born in 1778 in Corsica to a French
noble family. He was attending the École royale du génie in Mézières

Révolutions de Constantinople 33
when his father, a former colonel of artillery, was executed during the
French Revolution. His uncle, who lived in Canada, took him in after
this tragic event. After spending time in Canada, the young Juchereau
went to London and attended the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich,
probably the best engineering school in artillery at the time. Juchereau
returned to France after the Treaty of Amiens of 1802, which temporar-
ily ended the revolutionary wars between the French Republic and the
United Kingdom.
After a short stay in France, Juchereau went to Istanbul and accepted
a position in the British service. In his book he noted his loyalty to
his mission and testified that he acted “free from his political orienta-
tion.”50 Was this the statement of an émigré, who had abandoned any
loyalty to nationhood, or that of an eighteenth-century professional
cosmopolitan, who separated his political beliefs and military mission?
Soon after he arrived in Istanbul, he entered the Ottoman service. When
Selim III offered him the opportunity to be director and instructor of
the new military school, he accepted the position. During this time,
Juchereau was able to enter the inner circle of Selim III and the New
Orderists. In 1806 he was asked to prepare feasibility reports about the
fortification and artillery of the Dardanelles, Bosporus, and the city of
Istanbul. During his stay in Istanbul, Juchereau was close to the British
diplomatic mission. During the crisis of 1807, however, he broke with
the British, joined the Ottoman-French-Spanish initiative, and played a
major role in the fortification of Istanbul’s defenses and the perfection
of its artillery. After the Janissary revolt he remained in Istanbul for a
while and witnessed dramatic episodes that he went on to describe in
his book. Following the death of Selim III in July 1808, Napoleon called
Juchereau back to France. He was sent to Spain, where as a military
engineer he participated in the Siege of Cádiz (1810–1812) and the Battle
of Bornos (1811). Later Juchereau served as colonel in the French army
in Dalmatia and at Waterloo. Following the Restoration, he worked on
his book Révolutions de Constantinople and published it in 1819. He then
served the French administration in England and wrote a report on the
steam cannon, which was under development in Britain. Juchereau’s
subsequent career included the expedition of Morea in 1828, during the

34 ALI YAYCıOĞLU
Greek War of Independence, and the expedition to Algiers in 1830, which
led to his other important work, Considérations statistiques, politiques
et militaires sur la Régence d’Alger.51 Juchereau died in 1842.52 After he
died, his Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman depuis 1792 jusqu’en 1844, which
was an extended version of Révolutions, was published in Paris.53

L’état actuel de l’Empire Ottoman

In the first volume of Révolutions de Constantinople, Juchereau examines
the structure of the Ottoman order. Looking closely at the Ottoman con-
stitution, he analyzes the institutional structure of the empire, corporate
groups constituting the Ottoman state, and the communities forming
Ottoman society. This volume is written in the genre of constitutional
study, which examines how power is exercised and limited in the insti-
tutional orders of various polities.54 Juchereau briefly mentions earlier
analyses of the Ottoman constitution, refuting previous literature that
depicted the Ottoman Empire as a despotic polity of omnipotent sultans
and obedient subjects, or solely from the perspective of legal codes.
While mentioning several sources in European languages Juchereau
specifies two well-known books: Observations on the Religion, Law, Gov-
ernment, and Manners of the Turks (1768), by the British diplomat James
Porter, and Tableau general de l’Empire Othoman (1788–1820), by the
Ottoman-Armenian dragoman Ignatius Mouradgea D’Ohsson.55 Accord-
ing to Juchereau, Porter, while examining the power of the sovereign,
ignores other forces that limited or balanced it. D’Ohsson, although
informative about institutions, remains formalistic and anachronistic in
his analysis. Ignoring political events, D’Ohsson writes as if only old laws
and regulations shape people’s behavior. Juchereau claims to examine
not only the Ottoman constitution but also how different groups and
people in general showed their “claims, ambitions, and power” to their
sovereigns. To understand events in Istanbul, Juchereau largely relies
on information he gathered during his years in the city. Most likely he
did not speak or read Turkish but through his contacts in diplomatic
circles had access to popular narratives. Juchereau mentions how con-
teurs publics (public storytellers) functioned as news outlets, telling
detailed stories about current events in coffeehouses and mosques.56

Révolutions de Constantinople 35
 Juchereau begins his book by comparing the two reformist rulers
Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725) of Russia and Selim III (r. 1789–1807) of
the Ottoman Empire. Both emperors, he argues, intended to change the
old order through military and administrative reforms to end ignorance
and increase prosperity in their realms. In doing so, they tried to crush
the guards of the old order, the popular but unruly military classes,
namely, the Strelets in Russia and Janissaries in the Ottoman Empire,
along with religious oligarchies, namely the Orthodox Church in Russia
and the ulama in the Ottoman Empire. Only by crushing these military
and religious corporate powers, according to Juchereau, could these
leaders reform their empires. Peter was successful, while Selim failed.
Juchereau promises to explain to readers why and how the reforms in
the Ottoman Empire collapsed.57
According to Juchereau, the legitimacy of the Ottoman dynasty,
which combined Islamic and Turco-Mongolian traditions, was not
questioned. The Ottoman sultans were considered both sultans and
caliphs. The absence of an aristocracy capable of challenging sultanic
authority meant that only the sultans of the Ottoman dynasty could
make legitimate claims to sovereignty. Juchereau, following in the path
of most European commentators, notes as one of the main institutional
characteristics of the Ottoman order the sultanic right to execute office-
holders and confiscate their property without legal justification. But he
argues that this does not mean that sultanic power was limitless and
arbitrary. The Janissaries and the ulama were two corporate powers
that often allied to balance sultanic might by exploiting their capacity
to control military power and religious authority as well as mobilizing
the populace. In fact, the Ottoman order was not despotic; since the
sixteenth century, several popular rebellions (incited by the Janissaries
and ulama) had prevented Ottoman sultans from consolidating absolute
power. However, Juchereau contends, the Janissaries and the ulama
used their capacity to limit sultanic authority not to increase liberty
and prosperity but for their own corporate interests.58 Their leverage
over the Ottoman constitution, while preventing despotism, perpetu-
ated “ignorance and barbarity.”59
Juchereau uses archetypical notions of eighteenth- century

36 ALI YAYCıOĞLU
Orientalism, such as ignorance and barbarity, to define the Ottoman
social order. But he diverges from classical Montesquieuian Orientalism,
which envisioned the Ottoman Empire as a despotic order under an
omnipotent sultan, a cruel despot using arbitrary power over his sub-
missive people. Rather, he leans toward Volney and Anquetil-Duperron,
who conceptualized the Ottoman regime as a constitutional order with
several competing actors and corporate groups that challenged the sov-
ereign on a regular basis. In Juchereau’s view, this did not help the
Ottoman people leave behind ignorance and backwardness. Reform
would come not via ulama and Janissary limitations on sultanic power
but from an enlightened sultan who would crush the old order and
build a new one.
Establishing enlightened despotism was not an easy task. Both the
Janissaries and the ulama were profoundly integrated into the Muslim
public, which would resist such reform efforts. The ulama hierarchy,
from the imams in the neighborhoods and villages to the judges and
muftis (legal consultants) in Istanbul, constituted one of the most highly
organized bodies in the empire. Its members were not to be touched
by the sultans, thanks to the public’s respect, owing to their monopoly
of legal and religious knowledge and privileges they acquired over the
centuries.60 The implicit parallels Juchereau drew between the French
clergy and the Ottoman learned oligarchy made him depict the ulama as
a far more homogeneous corporate body than it was.61 By comparison,
his account of the Janissary corps is much more profound. He maintains
that the Janissaries were deeply integrated with Muslim youth. For an
ordinary young Muslim who was not born into wealth and status, join-
ing the Janissary corps meant status and social security.62 Juchereau
depicts the transformation of the Janissary corps from a slave army
with unquestionable loyalty to their sultans into an autonomous insti-
tution that claimed to represent the old laws and rights of the general
public. The subtle connections of the Janissaries and ulama with the
Muslim people enabled them to establish control over public opinion.
The hegemony of these two groups over the Muslim public could only
be broken if a ruler built a new army from “the heart of the people.”
This idea of a new “national” army founded by an enlightened ruler to

Révolutions de Constantinople 37
break the hegemony of existing corporations echoes the French revolu-
tionary army and, later, the Grande armée of Napoleon. In great detail,
Juchereau analyzes the new army, the Nizam-i Cedid, constituted by
new conscripts from Anatolian Muslim youth, with a modernized artil-
lery corps, military engineering, navy, and new military schools.63 The
reorganization of the Ottoman military under the patronage of Selim
III was to be combined with fiscal reorganization.64 Such a popular
military force and centralized fiscal system would raise the enlightened
sultan’s hand against the guards of the old order and foreign powers,
and enabled him to lead his empire to prosperity.
What is the Ottoman public? Juchereau’s focus lies on the people of
Istanbul, the political theater where the sultans and political elites were
acclaimed or toppled. The provinces, which remained under the sway of
obedient or unruly power holders, would not challenge the legitimacy
of the sultan and the ruling party in Istanbul, but would often negotiate
with the existing order in the capital. Second, in Jucherau’s view, the
Ottoman public consists of Muslims rather than non-Muslims. Juchereau
examines Greeks, Armenians, and Jews as separate groups that were
suppressed and lived under the Muslim yoke, but he does not grant them
an important role as part of a larger Ottoman public. He anticipates a
national revival for the Greeks, who had the capacity to start a process
that could lead to the disintegration of the empire. The Armenians,
on the other hand, naively continued their communal loyalty to their
Muslim masters and participated in political life as minor actors, while
the Jews proved indifferent to Ottoman politics.65
Juchereau’s third point is that the Ottoman public was not limited
to elites or reading circles in the form of a republic of letters. Rather,
it was a predominantly Muslim urban crowd. Juchereau presents a
subtle argument about a distinctive feature of Ottoman society. Due to
the absence of aristocratic privileges based on inheritance, except in
certain ulama families, Ottoman society was constituted not by fami-
lies but by individuals. Since the early Ottoman conquests, the average
Ottoman Muslim man had opportunities to ascend in the Ottoman order
without the help of pedigree lineage, reaching high positions if he was
lucky. Without nobility, the high level of social mobility increased the

38 ALI YAYCıOĞLU
importance of public opinion in Ottoman politics, since Muslim men saw
themselves as essential components of the regime. In other words, social
mobility and an active populace were the key elements of Juchereau’s
theory of the Ottoman social order.66 The voice of the people proved
particularly decisive in times of crisis, such as the revolutions of Con-
stantinople, during which “the people alternatively became the subjects
and the master.”67

Histoire des Révolutions de Constantinople:

May 1807–November 1808
The overview on the l’état actuel of the Ottoman Empire in volume 1 is
followed by a narrative history of a chain of three revolutions, occur-
ring between May 1807 and November 1808, in volume 2. Juchereau
maintains that only by analyzing these extraordinary events can
one understand the social dynamics of the Ottoman Empire, which
were not obvious in times of peace and tranquillity.68 During these
revolutions, two sultans were deposed and killed, and hundreds of
statesmen, officers, soldiers, and common people were executed,
poisoned, or lynched. Behind the scenes, however, the real battle
was between “an innovative government, which wanted to change
the civil and military institutions,” and general “resistance” to these
innovations. Therefore, these revolutions were not just a momen-
tary struggle between individuals or groups for self-aggrandizement.
Rather, they were the consequence of an ideological struggle, with
global connotations, between two political agendas: maintaining or
changing the existing order; conservatism or reform; old or new;
ignorance or enlightenment.
The first revolution was triggered by a diplomatic crisis, when Selim
III sought to leave the British-Russian coalition and approach Napoleonic
France. When a British fleet passed the Dardanelles and threatened
the Ottoman capital, Juchereau was employed by Selim III as chief
military engineer to lead a group carrying out the fortification of the
artillery system in the Dardanelles and the Bosporus. During these days,
Juchereau had observed the role of the populace in the Ottoman capi-
tal. “The popular ebullience changed the disposition of the ministers,”

Révolutions de Constantinople 39
he wrote, explaining the massive and enthusiastic mobilization of the
people of Istanbul for the fortification. While initial panic gave way to
collective heroism, the reluctant administration was carried along by
the enthusiasm of the populace: “The fear of falling victim to the fury
of the people was stronger than [the possible] shame of degrading their
sovereign and the name of Muslim.”69 The British fleet failed to attack
the city, thanks to the heroic mobilization of the people of Istanbul,
as well as an unfavorable wind. But this crisis, which energized the
public, activated popular prejudices against the New Order. As a result
of a conspiracy, plotted by the grand mufti and deputy grand vizier,
the Janissaries, who were deployed around artillery batteries along
the Bosporus during the British assault, started to march to Istanbul.
During the march, which lasted a couple of days, the crowd was able
to recruit thousands of Janissaries and civilians and eventually ended
up in the hippodrome of Istanbul, the historical locus of urban riots.
Meanwhile, the crowd’s leadership was established and mottos of the
revolutions were formulated. A petty Janissary, Kabakçıoğlu Mustafa,
who gave voice to the will of the populace and negotiated with ruling
elites, became the heroic leader of the crowd. Selim III was unable to
refuse the demands of the crowd. The New Army was abolished, and
many leaders of the New Order were sacrificed and lynched in the days
of terror that followed. Eventually, Selim III was pressured to resign
due to mediation by the mufti, who was one of the conspirators, and
leading members of the ulama.70
The abrogation of the New Order was followed by a restoration under
a weak sultan, Mustafa IV, Selim’s nephew, and a Janissary-ulama oli-
garchy. The restoration government found itself in the middle of a war
with Russia. Meanwhile, another plot was organized, this time by a
committee of leading Ottoman bureaucrats, who fled Istanbul during
the earlier revolution, with a common political motivation: to restore
the New Order under Selim III. The committee was protected by Mustafa
Bayraktar, the provincial magnate in Ottoman Bulgaria and the central
figure in the war against Russia on the Danubian front. Bayraktar was
not well acquainted with imperial politics but soon would become a
protagonist in the second and third revolutions. According to the plot,

40 ALI YAYCıOĞLU
the committee would convince the leading wings of the restoration
government, whose members were at odds with Janissary oligarchs in
Istanbul, to annihilate their opponents without making clear their real
aim. The first stage of this plot was successful, when Bayraktar marched
to Istanbul with the army backed by other provincial magnates from
the Ottoman Balkans. The leaders of the earlier revolution, including
Kabakçioglu, who held lofty positions in the restoration government,
were assassinated. But when Bayraktar entered the palace he saw the
dead body of Selim, who had been executed by order of the sultan.
At the last minute, Mahmud II, the only heir of the throne, was saved
from the same fate. By the end of the second revolution, Bayraktar and
the committee deposed Mustafa IV and enthroned young Mahmud II.
Bayraktar, who ascended from regional magnate to kingmaker, was
declared grand vizier. Members of the committee occupied key posi-
tions in the Ottoman bureaucracy and started working to rebuild the
reform agenda, while the severed heads of the members of the earlier
regime decorated the corners of the city walls.71
Bayraktar started out well. He restored the New Army. He summoned
his provincial notable peers to an unprecedented imperial assembly to
legitimize his authority, but also to obtain support for reforming the
unruly Janissary corps. In a short time Bayraktar “became a hero of
the time and everybody’s hope.”72 However, Bayraktar’s swift rise from
petty provincial notable to grand vizier went to his head. He became
enchanted with his self-image as untouchable, an idea that set the stage
for his tragic end. Bayraktar’s credibility in the eyes of the public dete-
riorated in a couple of months, owing to his arrogance and imprudent
policies. When he removed several grandees from the central adminis-
tration, they disseminated negative information about the grand vizier
to the public. Bayraktar’s end came in November during Ramadan. In
coffeehouses, some openly declared that this “infidel dog” should leave
the capital. Flyers inviting people to exact revenge went up on walls. All
night, coffeehouses filled with Janissary affiliates who warmed up for
the upheaval. Bayraktar, drunk and tired from overindulging, would be
caught in a mutiny at his palace. After several skirmishes between the
New Army and the Janissaries, the pendulum of the revolution swung

Révolutions de Constantinople 41
in favor of the latter. When the Janissaries found Bayraktar’s corpse in
the ruins of his burned palace, they put it on display. At this moment,
the populace turned against the New Army and joined the Janissaries.
Mahmud II once again abrogated the New Order and promulgated an
amnesty to protect the insurgents.73
In Juchereau’s narration, the revolutions are oriented around three
key protagonists: Selim III, Kabakçıoğlu Mustafa, and Bayraktar, or a
sultan, a Janissary, and a provincial notable. Selim III was an enlight-
ened sultan who appreciated the virtues of Western ideas about military
and administrative reform and military sciences. When Selim III was
leaving the throne to his nephew, as Juchereau told it, Selim said to him:
“My nephew, God will make me descend from the throne. I wanted the
happiness of my subjects. However, I irritated the people that I love and
to whom I wanted to give back their glorious past. Since they do not
want me anymore and I cannot do anything for their happiness, I quit
the throne without any grief and I sincerely congratulate you on your
ascendance.”74 Kabakçıoğlu, in contrast, was the man of the people. He
was elected leader of the Janissary crowd during its march to Istanbul,
thanks to his personal charisma. When he addressed thousands gath-
ered in the Hippodrome, he “had the dignified tone suitable to the role
he was assuming as interpreter of the national will.”75 The revolution
transformed him into a Robespierre, a leader who became the virtuous
translator of the collective will to end the New Order. If Kabakçıoğlu
was a Robespierre-like figure, Bayraktar was a cross between Crom-
well and Napoleon. Coming from the relatively humble background of
the provincial gentry, he quickly climbed the social ladder. Juchereau
depicted Bayraktar as someone who used his luck skillfully to become
the leader of the revolution and kingmaker and grand vizier. During
his short tenure, however, Bayraktar failed to grasp the dynamics of
the imperial city. Juchereau persuades his readers by reproducing calls
against Bayraktar that circulated in the coffeehouses: “A vile chief of a
brigand became the lord of the Ottomans; our sultan became dependent
to him. He persecuted two pillars of our empire, the Janissaries and
the ulama, crushed religion and law, and wants to enslave us under the
yoke of the infidels by assimilating us with them.”76 Once an enlightened

42 ALI YAYCıOĞLU
despot following in Selim’s footsteps, Bayrakar is portrayed as an Ori-
ental autocrat, intoxicated by his power, during the third revolution.
Although the three individuals failed, the pivotal actors in this story
were the people of Istanbul. Juchereau shifts the emphasis from power-
ful figures to the public and its orchestrators, the Janissaries and the
ulama. Sometimes by granting silent approval or disapproval, at other
times by transforming into a violent crowd, the public determined the
winners and the losers of the revolutions. If enlightened despotism
acquired the public’s tacit and active support, it could be successful.
Both Selim and Bayraktar had failed to steal the public from the Janis-
saries and the ulama, and thus became victims of the revolutions.
How does Juchereau define the revolution? In his analysis of changes
in the concept of révolution, Keith Baker illustrates the transforming
meanings of revolution in eighteenth- century France. While in the
earlier period, révolution was used generically to define dramatic and
sudden events in the political order, it gradually came to mean a single
dramatic event that brought down the old order and built the new
one. This moment was singularized as the definitive turning point for
the new regime that came about through an expression of the will of
the public/nation and took on the significance of a world-historical
event in the universal trajectory of history.77 According to Juchereau,
the term révolution corresponds to its conventional meaning, namely,
political and social turmoil, sudden and dramatic events, and radical
and violent governmental changes. The revolutions in Istanbul did not
produce a cataclysmic social and political collapse of the old order
and formation of a new one. Unlike the Glorious Revolution and the
American and French Revolutions, the revolutions of Istanbul were
not a singular event and were not celebrated as a reference point for
the new regime. On the contrary, after a series of three revolutions,
Juchereau maintains, the old order prevailed and attempts to create a
new one collapsed. The Ottoman order persisted almost as if nothing
had happened. After the revolutions,

the old order was fully restored. The Janissaries and the ulama
resumed their political influence. The government, recognized that

Révolutions de Constantinople 43
 abuses, which caused the decadence of the empire, and would cause
its inevitable end, were too strong to be destroyed. . . . [The ruling
elites] closed their eyes to the dangers, only talking about the past.
They not preoccupied by the present, despite the future; and waited,
without anxiety, for the process which was written in the book of
destiny.78

The sequence of revolutions in the Ottoman capital did not produce the
revolution. However, the historical context in which Juchereau situates
Istanbul’s revolutions explains why these episodes were not ephemeral
and provisional, events that just happened de novo as a result of con-
ventional and recurrent struggle in the Ottoman capital. Rather, these
episodes belonged to a larger battle that mattered beyond the bound-
aries of the Ottoman Empire, a battle between the forces of reform
and resistance, transformation and corruption, and enlightenment and
ignorance. In some polities reform was successful, as in Russia; in oth-
ers resistance prevailed, as in the Ottoman case. In this trajectory of
progressive and universal history, some countries were ahead, others
behind. Juchereau’s interpretation is based on tenacious binaries of old
and new, corrupted regime and enlightened despotism, neglecting to
leave room for the possibility of a third option.

Conclusion
Juchereau’s reading of political crisis in the Ottoman Empire in the Age
of Revolutions provides us with a case for the limits and possibilities of
universal and comparative history in early-nineteenth-century France.
Juchereau’s work intersects with French Orientalism and the genre of
histoires des révolutions during the period. He refuses the conventional
Orientalist thesis, systematized, among others, by Montesquieu, that
the Ottoman regime, like its Asian counterparts, was composed of pure
despotism, arbitrary rulers, and slavish subjects. Instead, Juchereau tries
to understand the constitutional and political conditions limiting the
power of the sovereign. Then, he situates the Ottoman Empire in the
turbulent waters of the revolutionary and Napoleonic ages, where just
about everything was radically transformed by reform or revolution.

44 ALI YAYCıOĞLU
Here, Juchereau tries to answer how revolutions, namely, radicalisms
energizing the common people, prevented, rather than produced, reform
in the Ottoman Empire. In many ways, Juchereau reversed Montes-
quieu’s reading of the Ottoman Empire. Only despotism, and a good
one, could save it. Juchereau was not alone in this interpretation. Some
British and Austrian observers of the Ottoman Empire had similar under-
standings of the revolutions in Istanbul.79
I would like to conclude with a note about the reception of Juchere-
au’s book in post-revolutionary France. Perhaps the most important
review was by Augustin Thierry (1795–1856), a historian of medieval
Europe, who was one of the founders of French national history dur-
ing the Romantic era.80 In his review, Thierry compares the medieval
Franks and the Turks and describes two conquering peoples, pointing
out the parallels between post-Roman Europe and the post-Byzantine
Ottoman Empire.81 Both conquering Germans and the Ottomans/Turks
(Thierry uses the two terms interchangeably) established their rule over
conquered people. The servitude of non-Muslims, Thierry maintains,
was not because of the Ottoman Empire’s despotism but because this
was the regime of a conquering nation. Muslims, especially Turks who
associated themselves with Ottoman conquest, were not subjects in the
conventional sense, but were masters of the Ottoman order. While reject-
ing the conventional Orientalist scheme, like Juchereau, Thierry places
Juchereau’s story in the context of his national historical framework.
It was the Janissaries, Thierry argues, who represented the Ottoman
nation during this period. “This militia, at first purely Pretorian, com-
posed of prisoners of war, and young men furnished as a sort of tax by
the conquered nations, has gradually become filled by free men; it had
thus become national; and it now contains all that is most active in the
Turkish population; it is the mirror of opinions; the organ of the popu-
lar passions; it is the security for the nation against the projects of the
government, a security which may be an obstacle to useful innovations.”
In Thierry’s rereading of Juchereau, revolutionary history is replaced
by national history, and the public is replaced by the nation.
When Thierry wrote these lines in the 1830s, the Janissary corps had
just been abolished after a bloody massacre orchestrated by Mahmud

Révolutions de Constantinople 45
II in which thousands of Istanbulites participated. The authors of
nineteenth- century Ottoman history would see this moment as the
“Auspicious” Incident, which, they believed, broke through the most
important obstacle blocking the reforms. Soon, Mahmud II unleashed
his radical reforms in a despotic manner, much as Juchereau would have
wished to see. Reform of the ulama and religious establishment would
come later, in the early twentieth century. The Ottoman Empire was
fragmented into nation-states, and as Juchereau predicted, it was the
Greeks who left the empire first. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed
and the Republic of Turkey was founded by its elites in 1923, histori-
ans of the new nation depicted Selim III’s era as the beginning of the
hundred-year battle between “reactionary” and “progressive” forces.
This narrative of reform from Selim III to Atatürk demonstrated that
eventually the “nation” emancipated itself from the guards of ignorance
and, with the republic, joined the forces of “modernity.” The reception
of the French Revolution by Turkish republicans was a complex phe-
nomenon. They saw kinship between 1789 and 1923. But the Janissary
movements were not viewed as relevant in this context. Rather, modern
Turkish reformers saluted autocratic enlightenment with its secular and
republican components that would shape the political culture of Turkey
in the twentieth century.

NOTES
I would like to thank Keith Baker, Aron Rodrigue, Fatih Yeşil, Darin Stephanov,
Vladimir Troyansky, and Patricia Blessing for their valuable comments on this essay.
1. François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. E. Forster (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981), 1–79; Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolu-
tion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 203–23.
2. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979); Robert Irwin, Dangerous
Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents (Woodstock NY : Overlook Press, 2006),
109–88.
3. R. R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and
America, 1760–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959).
4. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the
Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Bernard
Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2005); Patrice Higonnet, Sister Republics: The Origins of French and American

46 ALI YAYCıOĞLU
 Republicanism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). Also see Jack P. Greene
and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009); and Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A
Comparative History (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
5. Franco Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1768–1776: The First Crisis,
trans. R. Burr Litchfield (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
6. C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Malden MA : Blackwell,
2004), 86–120.
7. David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global
Context, c. 1760–1840 (New York: Palgrave, 2010); Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and
William Max Nelson, eds., The French Revolution in Global Context (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2013).
8. Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Humberto Garcia, Islam and the
English Enlightenment, 1670–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2012).
9. Thomas Kaiser, “The Evil Empire? The Debate on Turkish Despotism in Eighteenth
Century French Political Culture,” Journal of Modern History 72, no. 1 (2000): 6–34;
Henry Laurens, Les origines intellectuelles de l’expédition d’Egypte: L’orientalisme
islamisant en France (1698–1798) (Istanbul: ISIS , 1987); Irwin, Dangerous Knowl-
edge, 109– 40; C. D. Rouillard, The Turk in French History, Thought, and Literature
(1520–1660) (Paris: Boivin, 1941); N. Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an
Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1960).
10. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. A. M. Cohler, B. C. Miller,
and H. S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 60– 65, 74–75,
220–22; Franco Venturi, “Oriental Despotism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 24,
no. 1 (1963): 133– 42; Sven Stelling-Michaud, “Le mythe du despotism oriental,”
Schweizer Beiträge zur allgemeinen Geschichte 18/19 (1961): 328– 46.
11. Fatma Müge Göçek, East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the
Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Edhem Eldem, French
Trade in Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 13–34, 206– 83.
12. C. F. Volney, Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte pendant les années 1783, 1784 et 1785
(Paris: Volland & Desenne, 1787); M. Anquetil-Duperron, Législation orientale:
Ouvrage dans lequel, en montrant quels sont en Turquie, en Perse et dans l’Indoustan,
les principes fondamentaux du gouvernement (Amsterdam: Chez Marc-Michel Rey,
1778); Jean Gaulmier, L’idéologue Volney (1757-1820): Contribution à l’histoire de
l’orientalisme en France (Beirut: Imprimerie catholique, 1951), 47– 55.
13. Kaiser, “The Evil Empire?”
14. Marie-Loise Dufrenoy, L’Orient romanesque en France 1704–1789: Étude d’histoire
et de critique littéraires, 3 vols. (Montréal: Beauchemin, 1946).
15. Eldem, French Trade in Istanbul; Elena Frangakis-Syrett, The Commerce of Smyrna
in the Eighteenth Century: 1700–1820 (Athens: Centre for Asia Minor Studies, 1992).

Révolutions de Constantinople 47
16. Frédéric Hitzel, Intégration et transformation des savoirs: Itinéraire de passeurs dans
la société Ottomane (Istanbul: Isis, 2015), 27–45. Mehmet A. Yalçınkaya, “Osmanlı
Devleti’nin modernleșme sürecinde Avrupalıların istihdam edilmesi (1774–1807),”
in Osmanlılar ve Avrupa: Seyahat, karșılașma ve etkileșim, ed. Seyfi Kenan (Istanbul:
ISAM , 2010), 421–47.
17. Septime Gorceix, Bonneval Pacha, pacha à trois queues: Une vie d’aventures au
XVIII. siècle (Paris: Plon, 1953); Baron de Tott, Mémoires du baron de Tott: Sur les
Turcs et les Tartares (Amsterdam, 1785); Virginia Aksan, “Breaking the Spell of the
Baron de Tott: Reframing the Question of Military Reform in the Ottoman Empire,
1760–1830,” International History Review 24, no. 2 (2002): 253–77.
18. Ian Coller, “East of Enlightenment: Regulating Cosmopolitanism between Istanbul and
Paris in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of World History 21, no. 3 (2010): 447–70.
19. Paschalis M. Kitromilides, “The Enlightenment East and West: A Comparative
Perspective on the Ideological Origins of the Balkan Political Traditions,” Canadian
Review of Studies in Nationalism 10, no. 1 (1983): 51–70.
20. Richard G. Hovannisian and David N. Myers, eds., Enlightenment and Diaspora:
The Armenian and Jewish Cases (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999).
21. Khaled el-Rouayheb, “Was There a Revival of Logical Studies in Eighteenth Cen-
tury Egypt?” Die Welt des Islams 45, no. 1 (2005): 1–19; Reinhardt Schulze, “Was ist
die islamische Aufklärung?” Die Welt des Islams 36, no. 3 (1996): 276–325; Orlin
Sabev, İbrahim Müteferrika ya da İlk Osmanlı matbaa serüveni (1726–1746): Yeniden
değerlendirme (Istanbul: Yeditepe, 2006). For an excellent interpretation on Adam
Smith and the eighteenth-century Sufi, moralist, and cosmologist Erzurumlu İbrahim
Hakkı (1703– 80), see Selma Karıșman, Erzurumlu İbrahim Hakkı ve Adam Smith:
“Marifet” ile “Zenginlik” arasında iki düșünce iki dünya (Istanbul: Ötüken, 2010).
22. David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from
London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 1–21.
23. Fatih Yeșil, Aydınlanma çağında bir Osmanlı kâtibi: Ebubekir Râtib Efendi (1750–1799)
(Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2010); Stéphane Yerasimos, Deux ottomans à
Paris sous le directoire et l’empire: Relations d’ambassade: Morali Seyyid Alî Efendi
et Seyyid Abdürrahim Muhibb Efend (Arles: Sindbad, 1998).
24. Stanford J. Shaw, Between Old and New: The Ottoman Empire under Sultan Selim III,
1789–1807 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971); Seyfi Kenan, ed., Nizâm-ı
Kadîm’den Nizâm-ı Cedîd’e: III. Selim ve dönemi (Istanbul: ISAM , 2010).
25. Germaine Lebel, La France et les principautés danubiennes, du XVIe siècle à la chute
de Napoléon Ier (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1955), 63– 64.
26. Albert Sorel, The Eastern Question in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Howard
Fertig, 1969), 16–27, 150– 63.
27. Alan Fisher, The Russian Annexation of the Crimea, 1772–1783 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1970).
28. İsmail Soysal, Fransız İhtilali ve Türk-Fransız diploması münasebetleri (1789–1802)
(Ankara: TTK , 1987).

48 ALI YAYCıOĞLU
29. Hitzel, Intégration et transformation des savoirs, 11–25 L. Lagarde, “Notes sur les
journaux français de Constantinople à l’époque révolutionnaire,” Journal Asi-
atique, no. 236 (1948): 270–76; Fatih Yeşil, “Fransız İhtilali’nin ardından İngiltere,
Avusturya ve Osmanlı’da devlet inşaasının bir aracı olarak ihtilal propogandası
(1789–1801),” Toplumsal Tarih 214 (2011): 2–16; Onnik Jamgocyan, “La Révolution
Français vue et vécue de Constantinople, 1789–1795,” Annales Historiques de la
Révolution Française, no. 282 (1990): 462– 69.
30. Bernard Lewis, “The Impact of the French Revolution on Turkey,” Journal of World
History 1 (1953): 105–25.
31. Kahraman Şakul, “Adriyatik’de Yakobinler: Mehmed Şakir Efendi’nin ‘Takrir-gûne’
tahriri,” Kebikeç 33 (2012): 237.
32. Fatih Yeșil, “Looking at the French Revolution through Ottoman Eyes: Ebubekir
Ratıb Efendi’s Observations,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
70, no. 2 (2007): 283–304.
33. Cemal Kafadar, “Janissaries and Other Riffraff of Ottoman Istanbul: Rebels without
a Cause?” in Identity and Identity Formation in the Ottoman World: A Volume of
Essays in Honor of Norman Itzkowitz, ed. Baki Tezcan and Karl K. Barbir (Wisconsin:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 114–33; Baki Tezcan, The Second Ottoman
Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 153– 90.
34. Cemal Kafadar, “How Dark Is the History of the Night, How Black the Story of
Coffee, How Bitter the Tale of Love: The Changing Measure of Leisure and Pleasure
in Early Modern Istanbul” (unpublished paper, Stanford University, 2012).
35. Koca Sekban Bașı, Hulâsat ül-kelâm fi Redd il-avâm (Istanbul: Hilal Matbaası,
1332/1916).
36. Eudoxiu de Hurmuzaki, ed., Documente privitoare la istoria românilor (Bucharest:
Socecŭ, 1885–1900), supp. 1, vol. 2, p. 256. For a biography of Ruffin, see Henri
Dehérain, La vie de Pierre Ruffin, orientalistes et diplomate (Paris: Librairie orien-
taliste Paul Geuthner, 1929).
37. Yeșil, “Looking at the French Revolution,” 290–91.
38. Richard Clogg, “The ‘Dhidhaskalia Patriki’ (1798): An Orthodox Reaction to French
Revolutionary Propoganda,” Middle Eastern Studies 5, no. 2 (1969): 87–115.
39. Henry Laurens, L’expédition d’Egypte, 1798–1801 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1997).
40. Ian Coller, “Egypt and the French Revolution,” in Desan, Hunt, and Nelson, The
French Revolution in Global Context, 115–31; Ian Coller, Arab France: Islam and the
Making of Modern Europe, 1789–1831 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
41. Julia A. Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migra-
tion, c. 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
42. Kahraman Şakul, “Ottoman Attempts to Control the Adriatic Frontier in the Napo-
leonic Wars,” in The Frontiers of the Ottoman World, ed. A. C. S. Peacock (New York:
The British Academy, 2009), 253–70; Norman E. Saul, Russia and the Mediterranean,
1797–1807 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 65–101.

Révolutions de Constantinople 49
43. Vernon J. Puryear, Napoleon and the Dardanelles (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1951), 23– 40.
44. Cahit Öztelli, ed., Uyan padișahım (Istanbul: Milliyet, 1976), 157– 60.
45. Clogg, “The ‘Dhidhaskalia Patriki,’” 91.
46. K. F. Fleming, The Muslim Bonaparte: Diplomacy and Orientalism in Ali Pasha’s
Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 156– 80.
47. Hakan Kırımlı and Ali Yaycıoğlu, “Heirs of Genghiz Khan in the Age of Revolu-
tions: The Gerays and Cengiz Mehmed Geray Sultan between the Ottoman and
Russian Empires in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries” (work
in progress).
48. Rossitsa Gradeva, “Osman Pazvantoğlu of Vidin: Between Old and New,” special
issue, Princeton Papers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 12 (2005):
115– 61.
49. Antoine Juchereau de Saint-Denis, Révolutions de Constantinople en 1807 et 1808,
précédées d’observations générales sur l’état actuel de l’Empire Ottoman, 2 vols.
(Paris: Brissot-Thivars, 1819).
50. Juchereau, Révolutions de Constantinople, 2:53– 57.
51. Antoine Juchereau de Saint-Denis, Considérations statistiques, historiques, militaires
et politiques sur la régence d’Alger (Paris: Delaunay, 1831).
52. G. Sarrut and B. Saint-Edme, Biographie des hommes du jour (Paris: H. Krabe,
1835– 41); A. Jadin, “Juchereau de Saint-Denis (Antoine),” in Nouvelle biographie
générale depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’à nos jours, ed. J. C. F. Hoefer (Paris:
Firmin Didot, 1853– 66).
53. Antoine Juchereau de Saint-Denis, Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman depuis 1792 jusqu’en
1844 (Paris: Comptoir des imprimeurs-unis, 1844).
54. The archetypical examples of this genre are Montesquieu’s Esprit de lois, Jean-
Jacques Rousseau’s Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne (London: Valade
for Cazin, 1782), and Jean Louis Delolme’s Constitution de l’Angleterre (Amsterdam:
Chez E. van Harrevelt, 1771).
55. For Juchereau’s main sources, see Richard Knolles, The Generall Historie of the
Turkes (London: A. Islip, 1638); Demetrius Cantemir, The History of the Growth
and Decay of the Othman Empire (London: J. J. and P. Knapton, 1734–35); M. de
Salaberry, Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman, depuis sa fondation jusqu’à la paix d’Yassy,
en 1792 (Paris: Chez Bossange et Masson, 1817); James Porter, Observations on the
Religion, Law, Government, and Manners of the Turks (London: Nourse Bookseller,
1768); Ignatius Mouradgea D’Ohsson, Tableau général de l’Empire Othoman: Divisé
en deux parties, dont l’une comprend la législation mahométane, l’autre l’histoire de
l’Empire Othoman (Paris: De l’imprimerie de monsieur Firmin Didot, 1788–1824).
56. Juchereau, Révolutions de Constantinople, 2:192.
57. Juchereau, Révolutions de Constantinople, vol. 1, preface.
58. Juchereau, Révolutions de Constantinople, 1:1– 60.
59. Juchereau, Révolutions de Constantinople, 1:8– 9.

50 ALI YAYCıOĞLU
60. Juchereau, Révolutions de Constantinople, 1:22–35.
61. For the ulama hierarchy in the Ottoman Empire, see Madeline C. Zilfi, The Politics
of Piety: The Ottoman Ulema in the Postclassical Age (1600–1800) (Minneapolis:
Bibliotheca Islamica, 1988).
62. Juchereau, Révolutions de Constantinople, 1:35– 60.
63. Juchereau, Révolutions de Constantinople, 1:60–108.
64. Juchereau, Révolutions de Constantinople, 1:108–27.
65. Juchereau, Révolutions de Constantinople, 1:142– 63.
66. Juchereau, Révolutions de Constantinople, 1:142– 44.
67. Juchereau, Révolutions de Constantinople, 1:2, 182– 83.
68. Juchereau, Révolutions de Constantinople, 1:2–3.
69. Juchereau, Révolutions de Constantinople, 2:74, 78.
70. Juchereau, Révolutions de Constantinople, 2:106–38.
71. Juchereau, Révolutions de Constantinople, 2:138– 92.
72. Juchereau, Révolutions de Constantinople, 2:190.
73. Juchereau, Révolutions de Constantinople, 2:190–238.
74. Juchereau, Révolutions de Constantinople, 2:139.
75. Juchereau, Révolutions de Constantinople, 2:135.
76. Juchereau, Révolutions de Constantinople, 2:218.
77. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, 202–23; and Keith Baker, “Revolution 1.0,”
Journal of Modern European History 11, no. 2 (2013): 187–220.
78. Juchereau, Révolutions de Constantinople, 2:238–39.
79. Ali Yaycıoğlu, Partners of the Empire: Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of
Revolutions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), chap. 4.
80. Ceri Crossley, French Historians and Romanticism: Thierry, Guizot, the Saint-Simonians,
Quinet, Michelet (London: Routledge, 1993), 45–70.
81. Augustin Thierry, “Sur le veritable constitution de l’Empire Ottoman,” in Dix ans
d’études historiques (Paris: Furne, 1851), 209–16.

Révolutions de Constantinople 51
2 Barbary and Revolution
France and North Africa, 1789–1798

IAN COLLER

In 1795, a Muslim merchant from the city of Tripoli in modern Libya

wrote to a French deputy to express his support for the ideals of the
French Revolution. Invoking the name of the Prophet, Muhammad
D’Ghies declared that this support did not stem from his commercial
interests, but was instead a sincere emotional attachment to the out-
comes of the revolutionary transformation. He emphasized in particular
the revolutionary notion of fraternity, insisting that “No matter where I
first drew breath, or the religion in which I was born, we are brothers.
Indeed, we are more than brothers when every moral precept is shared
by two thinking beings.” The words that followed, however, contained
a gentle prod at French ignorance of North Africa. “You will always
have a devoted friend in Barbary,” D’Ghies wrote, “which is much less
barbarous than people imagine.” The events that tied France and North
Africa together in the revolutionary decade were crucial in shaping the
destinies of both. Yet even today they remain little studied, and framed
by obsolete assumptions that this essay will seek to challenge.
The term Barbary, originally associated with the Berbers who lived

52
across the crescent-shaped promontory of the North African coast
extending from Morocco to Libya, still leaves its legacy in European
conceptions of the history of this region. Whereas in Arabic this region
is called al maghrib, the West—and in Ottoman Turkish, the garb odjak-
lar, or Western Provinces,1 Europeans often spoke of it as part of the
“Orient,” the cultural East. Even today it is often appended to consid-
erations of the Middle East. Whether East or West, North Africa or the
Southern Mediterranean, this region has too often been defined by the
geography of others. The term Barbary has at least the advantage of
designating a region in itself. Yet it carries implications not only of the
inverse of civilized values but of a primitive past from which Europe
emerged centuries earlier.2 This terminological weight helped to anchor
the widespread conception of its societies as no more than “nests of
pirates” living a parasitical existence by preying on honest merchants.
Few observers chose to register that the most active piratical power of
the age was the Christian order of Malta, nor that these city-states were
embedded in commercial, political, and religious networks stretching
into Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
Nowhere is this challenge greater than in the study of the eighteenth
century, and particularly the critical period of the French Revolution.
It is in this period that the destiny of Europe is often seen as diverging
most radically from that of Africa and Asia, through utterly different
responses (or lack of response) to political modernity. In fact, this period
did not push France and North Africa apart, but involved them instead
in the beginnings of an entangled imperial history—a French colonial
attempt at territorial integration between the French mainland and the
African coastline, just as North African “Moors” had integrated large
parts of southwestern Europe into their own territories centuries earlier.
The French Revolution was as much a Mediterranean revolution as it
was an Atlantic one. The relation was not one of center and periphery—a
transition to modernity centered in Paris and radiating outward toward
Italy, Spain, Greece, with weaker echoes on the opposite shores—but
rather one of concatenating events that flowed back and forth, shaping
the course of the revolution itself. The Mediterranean has been called a
“liquid continent,” and although this formulation helps us to recognize

Barbary and Revolution 53

that the sea is not a boundary but a highway, it conceals the complexities
of territory, sovereignty, religion, and human mobility that connected
and divided the two shores of the western Mediterranean, like two
banks of a river whose destinies are both distinct and inseparable. His-
torians of North Africa have had little choice but to consider Europe in
the history of their own state formation and relations with the world.
Historians of Europe, in contrast, have rarely been compelled to ask
how North Africa contributed to the shaping of their own modern his-
tory, or indeed how it came to be territorially entangled with all three
major Mediterranean nations of western Europe during the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.
In the two decades after 1789, political revolution and continental
war embroiled almost all of Europe, bringing about great changes in the
Caribbean, the emergent United States, and Central and South America,
and catalyzed shifts across the European- controlled areas of Asia, with
repercussions stretching as far as Australia. Yet if we judge from the
historiography, the one region left almost untouched by this period was
Africa, whose northern coast is the closest of all world regions to the
European mainland. The major cities of North Africa were located along
the Mediterranean littoral, and within a few hundred miles of European
shores. The distance between Algiers and Marseille is almost the same
as that between Marseille and Paris. In this period North African cities
were connected intimately to the sea, perhaps more so than they were
to the towns and villages of the interior. Their ruling classes drew much
of their wealth from the Mediterranean, whether through the seizure of
ships, the ransom of captives, or more peaceable forms of commerce.
European powers held valuable concessions on the North African
coast, and occasionally they maintained military outposts there by force.
The last remnants of the Spanish presidios that once dotted the North
African coast exist today in the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in
Morocco, and until the late eighteenth century the city of Oran remained
a presidio under Spanish rule.3 Many thousands of North African inhab-
itants were Europeans by birth: some had been seized and enslaved by
corsairs, while others had absconded from the presidios, preferring a
life of Barbary slavery to the dreadful conditions inside the walled forts.

54 IAN COLLER
As French trade in the Mediterranean expanded exponentially during
the later part of the eighteenth century, the treaties with the three prin-
cipal Ottoman North African cities—Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli—and
with the independent sultanate of Morocco became crucial. In changing
internal conditions, and under pressure both from the Ottoman Porte
and from the growing maritime power of European fleets, the North
African powers began to accept new international norms that substituted
diplomatic reciprocity for the complex exchanges of tribute and slaves
that emerged in the Mediterranean.4 Rather than retreating from the
world system, North Africa appears to have been joining it more fully,
albeit in ambivalent and sometimes perilous ways, during this period.5
Yet in historical accounts of this period of revolutionary transforma-
tion, political confrontation, and continental war in Europe, North Africa
is almost nowhere to be found. Equally, in histories of North Africa,
this revolutionary period has occupied an awkward position either as
the last moments of a failing Ottoman rule or as the eve of a violent
European conquest. For this period, the southern shores of the Mediter-
ranean have remained a blank space, despite being the closest neighbor
of Europe and being enmeshed with European societies in economic,
political, and even territorial ways. Even the least “internalist” accounts
of the French Revolution and its sequels have largely ignored the exotic
“Barbary coast,” looking primarily across the Atlantic to the emergent
United States and the valuable Caribbean islands to discover Europe’s
global context.6 Until recently this has been equally true of the Otto-
man historiography. Lucette Valensi suggested that these years might be
called the “obscure centuries” of modern North African history.7 Andrew
Hess called North Africa the “forgotten frontier” of an Ottoman Empire
primarily concerned to defend against growing European encroach-
ments into its western provinces, the war with Russia, and rivalry with
Persia in the East.8 But such negative formulations risk reinforcing the
idea that North Africa was somehow marginal, neglected, or of little
importance during this period, an impression that is easy to gain from
the historiography but not borne out by the documents of the time.
Prior to North African independence, French colonial historians took
a considerable interest in the revolutionary period, but that interest was

Barbary and Revolution 55

guided explicitly or implicitly by the inevitability of French colonial
intervention. Two contradictory conceptions emerged from this histo-
riography, and they have persisted more or less as the ruling tropes for
understanding North Africa in this period. The first of these conceptions
is that piracy was the sole economic and social activity of the North
African coast: a “Barbary legend” that has been effectively dismantled
by Daniel Panzac, who has shown that North African corsairing activities
were reined in during this period, not simply by the fear of European
reprisals but as a result of internal decisions shaping the formation of
new state structures and the turn toward the interior.9 It was in the
context of a new European war on the open seas immobilizing com-
mercial shipping that North Africans returned to privateering activities
in a flurry of raids and seizures.
The second of these ruling conceptions is that the cities of North
Africa had all but ceased to be a part of the Ottoman Empire by the
eighteenth century in anything but a purely symbolic sense, paying
lip service to the sultan while defying his decrees and seizing power
for local elites. In European eyes, therefore, the weakening of imperial
control left the “Barbary regencies” as willful republics who endangered
the good order of the seas and provoked European powers (and the
emergent United States) with their arrogance, fanaticism, and unwilling-
ness to abide by the new international norms. This interpretation was
not invented during the colonial era, but it was given greater credence
because it helped to explain and legitimate colonial empire. Moreover,
for the post-independence states of North Africa this story of quasi-
autonomy prior to French colonial intervention was equally serviceable.
Nationalist historiographies emphasized resistance against imperial rule,
whether that rule was Ottoman or European, and looked for evidence
of national impulses prior to colonial intrusion.
More recent scholarship has suggested that this “autonomy
thesis”—as it has been called—is ripe for radical revision.10 Historians
of Tunisia have rightly emphasized that Tunis remained a province of
the Ottoman Porte from the sixteenth century until the imposition of a
French protectorate in 1881.11 Similarly, studies of Algeria in this period
have argued for the centrality of Ottoman forms, and even a particular

56 IAN COLLER
kind of “Turkish ideology” in the structures of the state of Algiers.12
However, we should not be too hasty in waving the wand that trans-
forms the “autonomous regencies” into “loyal provinces.” As elsewhere
in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire, centrifugal and centripetal
forces were struggling violently against one another. After the failure of
the Siege of Vienna in 1683, when the sultan signed peace treaties with
Austria in 1699 and Russia in 1700, it became clear that the Ottoman
Empire was no longer expanding as it had been for four centuries. Many
Europeans believed that this stasis at the frontier implied stagnation
at the center, and even imminent collapse, and began to argue prema-
turely over the division of the spoils. In fact, this much-heralded demise
would not occur for another two centuries. The eighteenth century was
a period of significant shift and experimentation both in the center and
in the provinces of the empire. The emergence of powerful local leaders
seeking to increase their autonomy at the expense of the empire was a
phenomenon common to many of the outer provinces of the empire, just
as revolutions became a relatively frequent occurrence at the center.13
During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, this insta-
bility was evident in North Africa through rapid and violent changes
of regime. In Algiers, for example, across the period from 1671 to 1711,
ten out of eleven deys died by assassination.14 One managed to remain
on the throne for only fifteen minutes before he was dispatched by his
fellow soldiers. Similarly, fratricidal conflicts and the struggles between
aristocratic and military elements of the emerging state apparatus led
to a series of violent overthrows in Tunis during the first decades of the
century. Religion as well as politics contributed to this ferment: power-
ful new Sufi orders such as the Tijaniyya were opposed by the radical
Wahhabi purism coming out of the Arabian peninsula and by Ottoman
orthodoxy.15 Popular uprisings in this period often took on religious
and even millennial undertones: a dynamic of “rebel and saint,” in the
words of Julia Clancy-Smith.16 Christopher Bayly has suggested that such
“conjunctural revolutions” should be considered as part of the wider
context of the revolutionary age.17 There is considerable evidence that
revolutionaries in France were aware of these movements and of their
impact on the existing order in the Muslim world.

Barbary and Revolution 57

 By 1789, regime instability had largely been brought under control
across North Africa, through new accommodations between Ottoman
imperial power and local rulers. This is demonstrated in the long rule
of Moulay Muhammad in Morocco (1757–90), Muhammad ben Oth-
man in Algeria (1766–91), Hammuda Pasha in Tunis (1782–1814), and
Ali Pasha Qaramanli in Tripoli (1754– 93).18 However, as this list sug-
gests, the early years of the French Revolution saw three of these four
reigns come to an end—two through natural causes and the third in a
coup d’état sponsored by Istanbul. Although not in themselves causally
related to the revolutionary changes occurring in Europe, these events
took place in a context powerfully shaped by the revolution across the
Mediterranean, and the maritime war it unleashed.
These events in one sense directed the attention of North African
societies inward toward the crisis at the center, and toward neighboring
regimes that sought to expand their own power by offering support for
rival claimants or even by military intervention. But they also created
conditions in which the outcomes of the French Revolution were of
considerable importance in the shifting balance of power between North
Africa, Europe, and the Ottoman Porte, and even in the relationship
between the competing states of the Maghreb itself. The events and
choices of those years had great consequences for the history of both
North Africa and France. Each of the four emergent North African states
took a different path in this period of transformation, and in particular
during the period of war and radicalization after 1792, which brought
the French Revolution onto the world stage.
The year 1789 was of signal importance in North Africa: not because
of the storming of the Bastille or the creation of a National Assembly
in France, but because a new sultan, Selim III, ascended to the throne
of one of the largest empires in world history, a title that also carried
the claim to religious leadership of Muslims throughout the world.
Although the new sultan came to power through the natural death of
his predecessor, he was the grandson of a ruler who had been deposed
by a popular uprising, and would himself also be overthrown and assas-
sinated in 1807.
The Muslim religion provided a crucial legitimation for such revolts,

58 IAN COLLER
almost a “right of insurrection” in the name of principles that were no
longer the exclusive possession of the dynastic rulers of the empire.
Ottoman modernity had to negotiate the transition away from a concep-
tion of the state built on five centuries of expanding borders. During his
twenty-year reign, Selim III would begin this process in earnest, and
after his death his project would be continued by his cousin Mahmud.
The task was made more urgent, and more difficult, by the encroach-
ments of Russia to the north and the war that had begun the year
before Selim arrived in power, with a notable absence of French sup-
port for the Ottomans. After the conclusion of a fragile peace in 1791,
the Russians sought to use their new influence to push Selim to join
the coalition against France, but the Ottomans remained scrupulously
neutral throughout this period, leaving open crucial lifelines for the
revolution, one of which was the connection to North Africa.
In comparison with the situation in the Crimea and the Balkans,
the western frontier in North Africa appears more stable: no major
alterations of territory had occurred since the end of the wars of the
sixteenth century. But this was a cessation of warfare, not a situation
of peace. As Hess observed, piracy needs to be understood as “a naval
war of separation” that continued the land-based conflicts of previous
centuries, a battle both for religious and political dominance in the Med-
iterranean.19 The Catholic Order of Malta—most of whose recruits were
French—remained one of the key “corsair states” during this period,
taking thousands of Muslim slaves, a fact often neglected by European
historians but very present in the minds of eighteenth-century North
Africans. However, as Panzac has argued, an overemphasis on piratical
warfare—the “Barbary legend”—can mask the “multiple but unequal
relations” between Europe and the Maghreb.20 Magali Morsy suggests
that by the late eighteenth century corsair activities had become a key
element of politics, a way of maintaining diplomatic relations against
stronger powers, and “a useful and indeed necessary way of upholding
trade.”21 Throughout the late eighteenth century North African states
were turning from the sea toward the land. The revolutionary wars
shifted this course dramatically: maritime warfare and diplomacy went
global.

Barbary and Revolution 59

 In 1689, after aggressive actions by the government of Louis XIV
against the Barbary powers, and Algiers in particular, French diplomats
had negotiated a hundred-year peace treaty that protected French ship-
ping in the Mediterranean. By an unfortunate coincidence, therefore,
this agreement was destined to end in 1789. Without a new treaty, French
shipping would rapidly become the prey of North African corsairs, and
French passengers and crews could be sold into slavery, even when trav-
eling on board the vessels of other nations. French trade to the Levant
had doubled in the four decades prior to 1789, seizing dominance in
the Mediterranean while the British were distracted by rebellions in the
Americas and in India.22 The French government thus had a great deal
to protect, and the diplomatic wheels heaved into motion. These nego-
tiations were still in progress when the Bastille fell and the Constituent
Assembly began to deliberate on a new order for France.
Debate arose on both sides of the Mediterranean over the terms upon
which a new treaty was to be signed between France and the Barbary
States. Under the ancien régime, reciprocity remained the key principle
upon which the French government signed treaties with other powers.
For the Ottoman Porte, however, the very presence of French diplomats
in Istanbul constituted a unilateral acknowledgment of Ottoman power,
and for this reason no permanent Ottoman diplomat resided in Paris
or any other European capital before 1797. Instead, plenipotentiary
missions were sent to discuss important matters and on occasion to
conclude treaties. The North African states followed Ottoman practice:
unlike other provinces, they regularly sent their own plenipotentiaries
to European capitals, or invested merchants residing there with tem-
porary powers of negotiation. Behind the mask of imperial hauteur,
issues between European and North African states were increasingly
articulated in a bilateral context, between territorial states, rather than
in terms of dynastic agreements or religious war.
However, as the complex fabric of privilege in France itself came into
question, the reciprocal privileges exercised by North African nations
through the threat of piracy were perceived by many in France as con-
trary to “natural right.” The Abbé Siéyès, in his famous pamphlet, “What
Is the Third Estate,” compared the relationship of the aristocracy to the

60 IAN COLLER
French people with the relationship of European and North African
states:

If a general parliament of the maritime peoples were to be called,

to decide on the liberty and safety of navigation, do you imagine
that Genoa, Leghorn, Venice etc. would choose their plenipotentiary
ministers among the Barbaresques? . . . I don’t know if this is an
exaggerated comparison, but it seems to me to shed light on what
I have to express. Since the Enlightenment cannot fail to have its
effect, like everyone else I hope that the aristocrats will soon cease
to be the Algerians of France.23

This was a throwaway line, perhaps, but it demonstrates that from a

very early point in the revolution, France’s external relationships could
be thought of in ways that mirrored its internal struggles.
During the first months of the revolution, the new National Assembly
in Paris, engaged in a vast internal transformation of a corporate social
system that had existed for centuries, addressed North Africa only as a
side issue. Its address to these neighboring states was almost entirely
reactive, usually provoked by infringements regarding the accepted
“rules” of corsairing activity in the Mediterranean. Like other aspects
of France’s internal and external policy, these “rules” would come radi-
cally into question in the revolutionary era. Between 1789 and 1791 they
seemed far distant from France’s chief concerns. But this was a mistake,
as the rupture of relations between France and North African powers
could endanger commercial activities, and in particular the supply of
wheat to southern France, already reeling from famine, with potential
consequences in escalating radical demands in the countryside and the
towns. Soon the perils of war would be added to the dangers of famine
in turning French attention toward the Mediterranean. But North Africa
was not, as we might imagine, quiescent during this period, or engaged
solely in the piratical adventures imagined by overheated European
imaginations then and since.
In perusing the Parliamentary Archives of 1789– 90, one is tempted
at first to dismiss as marginalia the issues arising over, for example, the
capture of a Tunisian xebec within the maritime boundary of Corsica

Barbary and Revolution 61

by a ship belonging to the Papal States, or the sinking of an Algerian
ship by the Parthenopea, a Neapolitan vessel. However, in the context
of the failure to conclude a permanent treaty, these differences could
become very serious, putting shipping, trade, and the freedom of French
citizens at risk. Fortunately, then, Comte de la Luzerne informed the
National Assembly on April 26, 1790, that “the quarrel that had arisen
with the regency of Algiers, and which had provoked such alarm for
our commerce, is about to be brought to a happy conclusion.”24 At a
tense moment in the evolving relationship between Louis XVI and the
National Assembly, the Comte pointedly reminded the parliament of the
monarch’s essential role in “a negotiation so important for the safety
of shipping.” Treaties, the deputies should remember, were concluded
between monarchs, not between nations. Not only did these concerns
affect the material interests of the rich bourgeoisie who exerted such
weight in the new regime, but the presentation of the issue was cleverly
directed toward their ideological preoccupation with liberty. Luzerne
noted that a number of French men captured and enslaved in the pre-
vious year by Algerian corsairs were given their liberty and brought
back to Toulon.25
In spite of the fact that slavery remained legal across the French
possessions in the Caribbean, the capture and enslavement of French
citizens in North Africa was a scandal that could unite both sides of an
otherwise powerfully divided house. The abolitionists opposed slavery
everywhere, whether in the Americas or in Africa. At the same time, the
“colonial lobby” of the Club Massiac—a counter-revolutionary group of
planters who blocked the application of the Declaration of the Rights
of Man and Citizen to the colonies—were only too keen to use North
African slavery to distract from the atrocious conditions of slavery on
their own plantations, and the evident contradiction it offered to the
principles of the revolution.
But North African states were not a passive instrument for such ideo-
logical sleight of hand. Indeed, they sought to turn the situation to their
own advantage, not only in relation to Europe but in their regional
rivalries. In early 1790 the Moniteur Universel reported that the sultan
of Morocco had issued a letter in French dated January 16 in which he

62 IAN COLLER
declared his intention to “pay the ransom of all the Christian slaves in
Algiers, in order to exchange them for Muslims.”26 The sultan clearly
saw an opportunity to increase his credit with revolutionary France,
with other powers such as Spain and the United States, and in the wider
Muslim world at the same time—an astute investment indeed. As Panzac
has suggested, this path formed an important “diplomatic lever” for
Morocco in establishing new relationships with European states and
buying credit with the Ottoman Porte.27 But the statement carried a
sting in its tail: if the Algerians “refuse[d] to second his Majesty’s pious
intention,” the Algerian slaves in Europe would be left in their chains
while other Muslims were freed.
There were important reasons for this shot across the bows.28 Algiers’s
star had been rising throughout the years leading up to the French
Revolution. It now exercised suzerainty over Constantine, a powerful
influence in Tunis, and considerable authority in Tripoli. In 1756 an army
from Algiers had marched on Tunis and succeeded in restoring the rule
of the Husaynid family. In 1775 Spain attempted a landing near Algiers
with the intention of menacing Morocco but was disastrously defeated
by the Algerians. This victory had placed Algeria in prime position
across the region, and this prominence would only be magnified by the
events of the revolutionary decade.
Thus, in 1791, when the French government wrote to its North Afri-
can homologues regarding the change that the National Assembly had
decreed in the national flag to be flown henceforth by French ships
and in French consulates abroad, both the sultan of Morocco and the
dey of Algiers agreed, but the bey of Tunis “gave evidence of a wish to
discuss it first with the regency of Algiers, and to determine what they
had decided in this matter.”29
The year 1792 brought about a fundamental change in the course of
revolutionary events in France. The revolutionary government declared
war on Austria, leading Prussia to join the coalition against France. The
attempted flight of the king and his family, and their arrest in the town
of Varennes, led ultimately to a popular uprising against the king, fol-
lowed by his trial and execution. This “second revolution” overthrew
the constitutional monarchy of 1789 and replaced it with republican

Barbary and Revolution 63

rule. But the radical “regeneration” of France went much further, reach-
ing from the highest levels of the state deep into the ordinary lives of
citizens and even those who had not been given the status of citizen:
the sansculottes, slaves in the Caribbean, Jews, and others previously
excluded from citizenship. In the Mediterranean, as in the Atlantic,
sailors became important vectors of revolutionary ideas, symbols, and
conflicts. The sister of the British consul in Tripoli, Miss Tully, wrote a
series of letters describing her experience of these events, including the
arrival on the Libyan shores of sailors who planted liberty trees, sang
revolutionary songs, and commemorated the festivals of the revolution,
menacing the consul when he attempted to constrain them.30
But North Africans also made the journey in the opposite direction,
arriving in Paris at key revolutionary moments. A Tripolitan merchant
and later minister in the Karamanli government, Muhammad D’Ghies
(or al-Daghis) wrote a passionate letter of support for the principles of
the revolution that was read aloud to the National Assembly in 1795.31
D’Ghies may well be the “Si Hamed de Tripoulie” who signed the peti-
tion presented on behalf of the Committee of Foreigners in Paris by
Jean-Baptiste Cloots on June 19, 1790.32 If so, then as a result of the
success of this petition he would have been present at the Festival of
the Federation several weeks later, on the anniversary of the storm-
ing of the Bastille, along with another North African, whose signature
reads “Hajj Monakmeti [or Abou Ahmeti] de Tounisse.” The striking
Islamic dress of these participants in the delegation played an impor-
tant role in inspiring the rapturous response of the assembly. In this
atmosphere of global fraternity, deputies raised a vote to destroy all
marks of distinction and noble titles in France, which was passed later in
the evening.
In North Africa, too, these were very momentous times, not because
of distant echoes from these events in Paris but due to literally seismic
changes much closer at hand. By 1789 the city of Oran, long occupied by
Spain, had become a locked-in enclave, its Spanish population looking
only to the mainland, and many of its forced recruits willing to enter
slavery in Algiers rather than continue at their post. Revolutionary
events reverberated powerfully in Spain, a country with a Bourbon

64 IAN COLLER
monarchy and a wide land border with France. In the years that fol-
lowed, disciples of liberty flocked to Paris, while priests who refused to
swear the Constitutional Oath fled across the border in the other direc-
tion. There is little doubt that this instability, and the threat it posed
to their monarchy and to their faith, hastened the Spanish resolve to
remove themselves from the further shore of the Mediterranean and
focus on the defense of their own territory.
The last straw was the earthquake that destroyed a large part of
the city’s formidable defenses on October 8, 1790, leaving the Span-
ish demoralized and providing a perfect excuse to abandon this costly
possession. For the Muslims, however, this was a divine signal of the
long-awaited punishment of the infidel, and the deliverance of the city
they had been struggling to recapture for most of a century. However,
this divine sword cut both ways. In bringing down the defenses of Oran,
it also brought to a sudden end the special status claimed by Algiers as
the defensive bastion of the empire and the faith. Algiers was henceforth
in important ways a province like any other.
Thus, the cession of Oran announced the end of Algiers’s role as a
frontier state, but it also completed the east-west axis of modern Algeria,
with the provinces of Oran and Constantine now under the command
of Algiers in the center. It followed rapidly on another important event,
the death of Dey Muhammad ibn ‘Uthman, who had been in power
for a quarter of a century. Muhammad was a low-ranking officer who
had been promoted by accident and through his own abilities to high
office, and was elected to become dey. In this sense, his long rule was
the product not only of a stabilization in the transfer of power but of
emergent forms of limited democracy. In the words of the French colo-
nial historian Henri de Grammont, the election of the dey was “based on
the exaggerated principle of absolute equality” by which any member
of the military ocak (numbered in tens of thousands) could aspire to
become the ruler.33 Whereas this had once produced the “anarchy” that
many Europeans of the ancien régime predicted, by the late eighteenth
century the institution seemed to have stabilized. Muhammad also began
the process of rebuilding Algiers’s international relationships, estab-
lishing a series of bilateral treaties with states seeking to navigate the

Barbary and Revolution 65

Mediterranean, and rebuilt the city’s defenses to strengthen its capacity
to resist bombardment by European fleets.
These ramifications were observed by one young scholar among a
significant circle of intellectuals and artists attracted to the court of
Muhammad al-Kabir, the bey of the newly liberated Oran. Ahmad Ben
Sahnun was commissioned by the bey to write a chronicle of past and
contemporary events. His description of the conditions of transforma-
tion occurring in Europe, in a manuscript titled at-Taghr al-Jumani fi
ibtisam at-Taghr al-Wahrani, is the earliest such description that has yet
been discovered in North African writings.34 The passage was included
only as commentary on a word used in his qasida (narrative poem)
recounting the sieges of Oran and its ultimate reconquest from the Span-
ish. The word franj, or Frank, referred to all the European Christians
indiscriminately (and distinct from rum, the eastern Christians). But
the commentary itself suggests Ben Sahnun’s need to distinguish anew
between different groups of franj as a result of the revolutionary changes
afoot in Europe.
In his note, Ben Sahnun described the revolution with surprising
exactitude, noting the distinction between the three estates, the con-
troversy over voting in the Estates General, the storming of the Bastille,
the impact of the introduction of the assignat (promissory note), and
many other details, using Ottoman categories to translate these distinc-
tions. But he emphasized above all those dimensions that impacted most
directly on Algeria: “During this year, the people known as the French,
who are Franks, rose up against their clergy (ulama) and forced them
into exile in Spain and other countries. They killed their king and took
their people into anarchy (fawda).”35 Some of these clergy may even have
continued on to Oran, along with merchants and other informants speak-
ing the lingua franca barbaresca, a mixture of Italian, Arabic, Turkish,
and other languages.36 Despite Ben Sahnun’s own derogatory response
to the revolution (“May God keep their treason among themselves and
ensure they occupy no one else!”), the crucial dimension of his com-
ments is the directness with which he describes the connection to these
events, and their communication into North Africa: “astonishing news
about them reaches us every day.”37

66 IAN COLLER
 This curiosity regarding the political origins and consequences of the
French Revolution may have been encouraged by the particularity of
Algiers in contrast to the other Barbary States. According to the Abbé
Poiret, whereas Tunis was “a monarchical state which passes directly
from father to son, Algeria is a republic whose elected government is
extremely tumultuous. When the moment comes to name a new dey,
the regency, composed of the chief commanders of the militia, meets
to carry out the election, which usually nominates one of the chief
ministers. . . . But if some other person has formed a powerful party
among the troops, and if he has enough courage to assassinate the
dey and replace him on the throne, the sovereign authority rests in
his hands until someone equally audacious wrests it from him by the
same means.”38
Like most European observers prior to the revolution, Poiret con-
sidered such “democracy” a precarious and unsustainable principle of
government, and compared it unfavorably to the strength and stabil-
ity of monarchy. But this struggle to establish a strong executive in a
republican government built on a principle of equality (however distinct
the social bases of that equality may be) found echoes in France after
1792, a lone republic in a sea of monarchies, and provided the basis
for a closer relationship between the revolutionary regime and North
Africa after the “second revolution.”
In July 1791, on Muhammad’s death from illness, a new dey, Sidi Has-
san, was elected. Hassan was the khasnaji (chief minister) and adopted
son of Muhammad, avoiding in this unusual fashion rival claims to suc-
cession. French observers heaped praises on the new leader: the royalist
Mercure Universel wrote that “his talents and his qualities raise hopes
for a distinguished reign.” The journal noted, perhaps with some irony
given the political instability in France: “This is the second dey to take
office without the need of a sword; it is a great step toward civilisation
and philosophy. The friendship of the new dey toward the French sug-
gests that in the double respect of commerce and politics, France will
henceforth enjoy the consideration, respect and advantage she deserves
under so many titles.”39
Similarly, writing to Thomas Jefferson, the American agent in Algiers

Barbary and Revolution 67

suggested that “I have reason to think that U.S. will more easily obtain a
Peace with the present dey, than the Former as he always Seemed Inclin-
able to Serve the Americans. I hope his present exalted Station will not
errace [sic] from his Memory his former Friendly Sentiments toward
the Americans.”40 Hassan also agreed to a peace treaty with Spain, and
to allow these former enemies to establish commercial concessions on
the coast, on the same footing as other powers. But these arrangements
were not made out of kindness; they were bilateral agreements carefully
calculated to put Algeria on a new footing in the new international order,
and in particular to affirm its leading role in North Africa. Whereas
once agreements had been made concurrently with all three Barbary
Regencies, now the French and the Americans negotiated with Algiers
first and left the other states until later.
After the conclusion of the treaty in 1790, the dey requested a French
warship to take his ambassador to Istanbul to congratulate the new
sultan. This was an important recognition of Franco-Algerian ties and
was voted and agreed by the National Assembly. But events in France
put this request on the back burner, leading to a diplomatic disaster
and a perilous slide toward a rupture of relations. Spanish agents now
convinced the Algerians that the French failure to provide the ship
proved that the revolution had destroyed the king’s authority and that
he was no longer in any position at all to fulfill his treaty obligations.
As a result, French subjects residing in Algiers were instructed to return
to Marseille, and the consul was confined to his quarters. Using their
newfound peaceful relations with Algiers, the Spanish hastened to offer
the dey a frigate to carry the ambassador to Istanbul, along with the
present of a ship presently at anchor in the harbor. Hassan decided
to accept these gifts and to proceed toward a rupture with France. In
giving an account of this alarming situation to the National Assembly,
the minister of the marine, Moleville, explained that in fact the French
frigate had been waiting in the port of Toulon, but its departure had been
delayed because the dey had asked specifically that the vessel should be
placed under the command of Captain Doumergue, who was “French
by origin, but a longtime resident of Algiers, and close protégé of the
dey, who was also involved in most of his commercial enterprises.”41

68 IAN COLLER
This evidence of close personal connection between the dey and indi-
viduals within the French government recurs at other points through
the revolutionary period and suggests far more frequent traffic across
the Mediterranean than most historians have imagined. Indeed, in 1794
the French minister of foreign affairs wrote to Hassan thanking him for
assistance to France, and promising that the Committee of Public Safety
would soon fulfill the dey’s desire to establish regular passenger boats
between Algiers and Marseille.42
In August 1792 two Algerian ships were seized in the port of Nice,
newly part of France. This confusion was heightened when a French
ship returned the crews of two Algerian xebecs that had been captured
on the coast of Provence. It was reported that Hassan ordered one of the
hapless captains executed and the other severely beaten. At the same
time he declared his fury to the French consul, who was ordered to sur-
render the treaty signed between the dey and the king of France and to
leave Algiers with all the French subjects within five days. But Hassan
withdrew his order of expulsion shortly afterward, on the basis that
the French would pay 200,000 sequins in compensation. This behavior
appears erratic unless we view it in terms of Algiers’s transition from a
corsair city to a territorial state: Hassan was demonstrating his authority
over the corsair crews and equally over the French representative. It is
impossible to judge from the French sources what the political machi-
nations behind these decisions may have been: the French invariably
interpreted them as evidence of the dey’s capricious will.
When Vallière, the French consul, called to an audience with the dey,
protested that France could not possibly pay this exorbitant sum, the
dey “seemed to soften,” according to the Moniteur, calling in the consul
and telling him in a frank and open manner that the republic had been
at peace with France for more than a century and that he had no wish
to declare war.43 Shortly afterward, the dey declined to help starve
the French by cutting off supplies of grain from North Africa. Vallière
reported that under intense British pressure “the dey replied as a man
fully master of his country, and as a friend of the French,” and refused
to buckle. “I leave it up to you,” the consul wrote, “to tell the Republic
and its children of the dey’s conduct toward France on this occasion.

Barbary and Revolution 69

Under the circumstances it is valuable beyond all reckoning.”44 Through
ideological alignment with France, the dey achieved a new kind of
recognition as a territorial ruler.
In the period after 1792, when almost all of the European powers
turned against the fledgling republic, Algiers threw its support more
and more fully behind the French. The dey declared peace with Genoa
in order to facilitate the movement of grain into southern France, and
he lent money to French merchants in order to help them purchase
grain. At the Jacobin Club, a representative from Marseille declared: “I
announce to the Society that the dey of Algiers, understanding the needs
of Marseille, has sent supplies, saying that as long as he has grain, he
will share it with his brothers, the French. Thus, while all the kings of
Europe conspire against the liberty of the people, we can see one king
who is becoming more human.”45
On 20 May 1793, Sidi Hassan wrote to the “ministers and other leaders
of the French Republic” in response to a letter dispatched two weeks ear-
lier from Paris, informing him of the political changes which had taken
place in France during the six preceding months.46 Algiers thus became
one of the first powers to recognize the Republic officially. The hostile
powers in Europe had pressured the Ottoman sultan not to receive the
French ambassador, Sémonville, who was left in limbo in Bosnia and
not permitted to travel to Istanbul. Algeria, however, recognized the
Republic without waiting for the Ottoman response, and long before
any of the European states. As the commissioner of external relations
(the revolutionary foreign minister) wrote to the Committee of Public
Safety in 1793: “We may well conclude that the despots of Africa are
worth much more than the despots of Europe.”47
This role of the dey of Algiers is a surprising one, but it leaves open
the question of the attitudes and responses of wider Algerian society,
and other ordinary North Africans, to the events and ideas of the French
Revolution. Most historians have simply assumed that the inhabitants
of this region remained completely unaware or willfully ignorant of
these changes. There is certainly reason to imagine that tumultuous
local conflicts in North Africa, the religious ferment coming from mar-
abouts and Wahhabis, and the struggles at the center of the Ottoman

70 IAN COLLER
system, as well as the everyday struggles against famine and epidemic
disease, may have commanded their attention more than the decrees
of the National Assembly in Paris. But there is scattered evidence that
this may not have been so blank an indifference as we might expect.
In 1798 the French Revolution erupted into the North African region,
when fifty thousand Frenchmen disembarked on the shores of Alexan-
dria and took control of Cairo within a matter of weeks. This was long
considered the date of Egypt’s—indeed, of the whole Muslim world’s—
entry into the “modern” world heralded by the revolution, but when
we place this event in the context of a far more extended relationship
with North Africa, it may begin to look less like an exotic and doomed
distraction from events at home. To ensure the safety of their shipping,
the French sought to maintain their alliances with the Barbary States,
expecting them to act independently of the Ottoman Porte. However
the Directory drastically underestimated the strength of the bonds con-
necting these further provinces to the sultan.
Tripoli was the closest neighbor to the invasion force France dis-
patched in 1798. In the preceding years Tripoli had been rocked by
revolutionary events of its own. One powerful dynasty, the Qaramanli
family, had seized power in the early eighteenth century, and maintained
hereditary control of the position of pasha (governor) and bey (the civil
ruler). The youngest son of the pasha, Yusuf Qaramanli, was ferociously
ambitious and sought power at all costs. The popularity of his eldest
brother, Hassan, as bey presented a barrier to Yusuf ’s rise. On July 20,
1790, Yusuf invited his brother to a meeting and murdered him in cold
blood, leading to intense anger from the people, who acclaimed the
second son, Ahmad, as bey. In 1793, a disaffected Algerian rival sent into
exile by the dey Hassan, arrived with military force in Tripoli, bearing a
decree from the sultan. He seized control in the city and tried to subject
it to restored Ottoman control. This forced Yusuf and Ahmad to fight
together, with Tunisian backing, in order to liberate the city. Ahmad
was appointed as pasha, but Yusuf waited until Ahmad ventured outside
the city gates and barred them against him, proclaiming himself both
pasha and bey. Ahmad was named governor of Derna, but, still seeking
to regain his position in Tripoli, he returned to Tunis to gather support.

Barbary and Revolution 71

 When the French consul, Pierre Alphonse Guys, sought to gain Yusuf’s
support for the French action in Egypt, he reminded Yusuf that Mourad
Bey, the Mamluk commander of the Egyptian forces fighting against the
French, had given asylum to the fleeing usurper, Ali Burghul. However,
the consul reported that Yusuf’s concerns really awoke “when in learning
of the invasion by the French, he discovered that the Moors had enthusi-
astically taken to wearing the revolutionary cockade, and that according
to rumour, those in Derna, which is itself in insurrection, were doing the
same.”48 After rupturing with murderous violence the ruler’s contract to
the Muslim community, disobeying the sultan/caliph, and betraying his
own family, Yusuf now feared that his own people might rise against him
under the symbols of liberty, equality, and fraternity—ideals, however,
that were already tarnished by the brutal French invasion of Egypt. The
defeats inflicted by the British-Ottoman alliance against France in Egypt
would mark the end of the expansion of revolutionary principles and
provoke the return of Napoleon Bonaparte to France, where the coup
d’état of 18 Brumaire effectively brought the revolution to an end.
North Africa was inalienably a part of the world that made, and
was made by, the French Revolution. This was no stagnant backwa-
ter but a vital region of the late- eighteenth-century world, linking the
Mediterranean to the Sahara and the powerful winds of Islamic reli-
gious revival, connected to the Atlantic with its changing currents of
slavery and abolition, and to the Levantine shore of the vast Ottoman
Empire that stretched deep into Asia. The turbulence of the revolution-
ary age brought France and North Africa closer in economic, political,
and even geographical terms, as new sea routes and forms of mobility
emerged. This new intimacy would, however, have deeply ambivalent
consequences for North Africa. The conflict over debts accrued by
revolutionary France to the dey of Algiers was the immediate catalyst
for the French invasion of 1830, leading to the colonial occupation of
Algeria, and later Tunisia and Morocco. This sequence of events made
the immediately precolonial period unpalatable to post-independence
North African historians, abandoning this history largely to the version
left by their colonial predecessors.
Recent scholarship has begun to strip away the accretions of exoticism

72 IAN COLLER
associated with “Barbary pirates” and the mythmaking associated with
colonial and postcolonial states. Looking more closely at North Afri-
ca’s burgeoning relations with France in the decade after 1789 reveals
the remarkable extent of this region’s connections with Europe, the
Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia during the tumult of the revo-
lutionary age—an age that we may now understand as a more fully
global experience.

NOTES
1. Magali Morsy, North Africa, 1800–1900: A Survey from the Nile Valley to the Atlantic
(London: Longman, 1984), 40.
2. See Ann Thomson, Barbary and Enlightenment: European Attitudes towards the
Maghreb in the 18th Century (Leiden: Brill, 1987).
3. See Ruth Pike, Penal Servitude in Early Modern Spain (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1983).
4. See Christian Windler, La diplomatie comme expérience de l’autre: Consuls français
au Maghreb (1700–1840) (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2002).
5. A similar argument is made very persuasively for eighteenth-century Egypt by
Peter Gran in his Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt, 1760–1840 (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1979).
6. See, e.g., David Andress, 1789: The Threshold of the Modern Age (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2009), 130, 192; Bailey Stone, Reinterpreting the French Revo-
lution: A Global-Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002); and Robert Roswell Palmer, The World of the French Revolution (New York:
Harper and Row, 1971), 22–24.
7. Lucette Valensi, On the Eve of Colonialism: North Africa before the French Con-
quest 1790–1830, trans. Kenneth J. Perkins (London: Africana, 1977), xvii. See
also Abderrahmane El Moudden, “The Eighteenth Century: A Poor Relation in
the Historiography of Morocco,” in The Maghrib in Question: Essays in History and
Historiography, ed. Michel le Gall and Kenneth Perkins (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1997), 201–12.
8. Andrew C. Hess, “The Forgotten Frontier: The Ottoman North African Provinces
during the Eighteenth Century,” in Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic History, ed.
Thomas Naff et al. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), 74– 87.
9. Daniel Panzac, The Barbary Corsairs: The End of a Legend, 1800–1820 (Leiden: Brill,
2005).
10. Asma Moalla, The Regency of Tunis and the Ottoman Porte, 1777–1814 (London:
Routledge Curzon, 2004), xiii. See also Amy Aisen Kallander, Women, Gender,
and the Palace Households in Ottoman Tunisia (Austin: University of Texas Press,
2013).

Barbary and Revolution 73

11. Mohamed El Mansour, “Challenging the ‘Autonomy Thesis’ in Maghrebi Histori-
ography,” Journal of African History 46 (2005): 162– 63.
12. Tal Shuval, “The Ottoman Algerian Elite and Its Ideology,” International Journal
of Middle East Studies 32 (2000): 323– 44.
13. See Dina Rizk Khoury, “The Ottoman Center versus Provincial Power-holders: An
Analysis of Historiography,” in The Cambridge History of Turkey: The Later Ottoman
Empire, 1603–1839, ed. Suraiya Faroqhi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), 133– 56.
14. See Ernest Watbled, “Pachas—Pachas-Deys,” Revue Africaine 17 (1873): 438– 43.
15. See the discussion of “Islamic Revolutions” in A. A. Boahen, “New Trends and
Processes in Africa in the Nineteenth Century,” in General History of Africa, ed. J.
F. Ade Ajayi (Paris: UNESCO , 1989), 41– 43.
16. Julia Ann Clancy-Smith, Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial
Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800–1904) (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1994), 67.
17. Christopher Bayly, “The Revolutionary Age in the Wider World c. 1790–1830,” in
War, Empire and Slavery, 1770–1830, ed. Richard Bessel, Nicholas Guyatt, and Jane
Rendall (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 23.
18. Morocco was, of course, not an Ottoman province, but evidence indicates the
strength of its ties with the Ottoman Porte, which was also the seat of the Islamic
caliphate. See Susan Gilson Miller, A History of Modern Morocco (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013), 8– 9.
19. Hess, “Forgotten Frontier,” 75
20. Panzac, The Barbary Corsairs, 135.
21. Morsy, North Africa, 66.
22. Edhem Eldem, French Trade in Istanbul in the Eighteeth Century (Leiden: Brill,
1999), 16.
23. Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Qu’est- ce que le tiers-état? Troisième edition (N.p., 1789),
40.
24. Journal des débats et des décrets, April 26, 1790.
25. Journal des débats et des décrets, April 26, 1790.
26. Gazette National ou le Moniteur Universel, April 17, 1790.
27. Daniel Panzac, “Les esclaves et leurs rançons chez les barbaresques (fin xviiie–début
xixe siècle),” Cahiers de la Méditerranée 65 (2002), http://cdlm.revues.org/47.
28. See Gillian Weiss, Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern
Mediterranean (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 136.
29. Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860, ed. J. Mavidal and E. Laurent (Paris: Librairie
administrative de P. Dupont, 1867), 25:232.
30. Miss Tully, Letters Written during a Ten Years’ Residence at the Court of Tripoli
(London: Colburn, 1819), 2:245– 46.
31. Gazette Nationale ou le Moniteur Universel, May 1, 1795.

74 IAN COLLER
32. John Goldworth Alger, Paris in 1789–94: Farewell Letters of Victims of the Guillotine
(London: G. Allen, 1902), 69.
33. Henri D. de Grammont, Histoire d’Alger sous la domination turque (1515–1830) (Paris:
E. Leroux, 1887), 226.
34. Tayeb Chenntouf, “La Révolution Française: L’évènement vue d’Algérie,” in La
Révolution Française et le monde arabo-musulman (Tunis: Editions de la Mediter-
ranée, 1989), 61–70.
35. Chenntouf, “La Révolution Française,” 67. It is worth noting, however, that the
word fawda was used in 1859 by the earliest Arabic newspaper established in
Paris, Birjis Baris, to mean “republic.” See Ami Ayalon, Language and Change in
the Arab Middle East: The Evolution of Modern Arabic Political Discourse (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987), 104.
36. See Jocelyne Dakhlia, Lingua franca (Arles: Actes Sud, 2008).
37. Chenntouf, “La Révolution Française,” 68.
38. Poiret, Voyage en Barbarie, ou lettres écrites de l’ancienne Numidie pendant les . . .
(Paris: Née de la Rochelle, 1789), 1:208.
39. Mercure Universel et Correspondance Nationale, August 8, 1791.
40. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition, ed. Barbara B. Oberg and J. Jefferson
Looney (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2008–15), http://
rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/TSJN-01-22-02-0122. Original source: Main
series, volume 22 (August 6, 1791–December 31, 1791).
41. Sieyès, Qu’est- ce que le tiers-état?, 40.
42. Eugène Plantet, Correspondance des deys d’Alger: Avec la cour de France, 1579–1833
(Paris: F. Alcan, 1889), 2:440.
43. Gazette Nationale ou le Moniteur Universel, August 29, 1792.
44. Grammont, Histoire d’Alger, 349.
45. Club des Jacobins, Séance du vendredi 7 décembre 1792, l’an 1er de la République,
in La société des Jacobins: Recueil de documents pour l’histoire du Club des Jacobins
de Paris, ed. François-Alphonse Aulard (Paris : Jouaust Noblet Quantin, 1892),
4:553.
46. Plantet, Correspondance des deys d’Alger, 2:436–37.
47. Archives du ministère des affaires étrangères, Paris CCC Tunis 32 (1793) 13 messidor
an 2, Commissaire des relations extérieures (Buchot) to Comité du salut public.
48. François Charles-Roux, Bonaparte et la Tripolitaine (Paris: Société d’éditions
géographiques, maritimes et coloniales, 1929), 23.

Barbary and Revolution 75

3 “There Is, in the Heart of Asia, . . . an
Entirely French Population”
France, Mount Lebanon, and the Workings of
Affective Empire in the Mediterranean, 1830–1920

ANDREW ARSAN

Over the course of three days in January 1919, a host of French busi-
nessmen, functionaries, politicians, schemers, and scholars met in
Marseille for the Congrès français de la Syrie.1 Gathering in the grand
halls of the Marseille Chamber of Commerce, the assembled dignitaries
sought to stake France’s claim to “Syria,” as the region that would soon
be divided into the Mandate states of Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and
Transjordan was then commonly known. Many of the attendees were
members of the Marseille and Lyon Chambers of Commerce, whose
long-standing economic ties to “Syria” predisposed them toward push-
ing for its formal acquisition. But they also included such luminaries
of the French colonial party as Henri Franklin-Bouillon, head of for-
eign affairs of the Chamber of Deputies, and the Beirut-born political
schemer Shukri Ghanim, head of the Comité central syrien, a favorite
of the Quai d’Orsay, and a tireless booster for French involvement in
the Eastern Mediterranean.2

76
 Historians have traditionally stressed the economic aspects of this
gathering. In this view, the conference’s agenda was the crystallization
of the demands for a French “invasion” of Syria that proliferated during
the war years among colonial lobbyists and businessmen eager to secure
for France a safe and potentially prosperous market. More than that,
it represented the climax of the long commercial relationship between
France, Beirut, and Mount Lebanon, whose silk looms, clearinghouses,
and banks depended upon the insatiable demand of the Lyonnais tex-
tile industry.3 As Dominique Chevallier put it, there existed a striking
“consonance” between the “political and territorial program” of Lyon-
nais business interests and “French . . . policy.” Scholars are perhaps
not wrong to lay such emphasis upon economic considerations. After
all, contemporaries like Aristide Briand—who declared in 1920 that a
“nation” could only be “great” if it “possessed” another country “truly,
and that is to say economically”—were all too ready to draw direct links
between political ownership and economic exploitation.4
However, in focusing on such economistic claims, scholars have per-
haps overlooked the various other ways in which France sought to take
possession of “Syria.” Also assembled in Marseille were a number of
Orientalists, historians, and antiquarians determined to give a scholarly
imprimatur to French claims. These men retraced the “uninterrupted
tradition” of intellectual, spiritual, and commercial exchange between
France and Syria to show that a French protectorate over this land
would be the culmination of the “historic mission France has continued
to pursue in Syria for eleven centuries.”5 These were tales of posses-
sion, narratives of sovereignty designed to demonstrate that Syria—the
“France of the Levant”—was already, in some ways, French.6 Some
treated these claims still more literally, arguing that while the “rights”
of the French royal house to the title of king of Jerusalem had gradu-
ally been forgotten, the “legal situation created by the will of Charles of
Anjou . . . still subsists,” keeping the Latin kingdom in French hands. As
the “supreme power over France” had now passed to the Third Repub-
lic, it was possible to argue the latter “is invested with these historic
rights.”7 Few French accounts of the postwar years were quite as fanciful.
Nevertheless, most proponents of French involvement in the Eastern

“There Is, in the Heart of Asia” 77

Mediterranean—particularly in Mount Lebanon, whose numerous
silk factories and missionary schools had made it the hub of France’s
informal empire in the region—agreed that “there exists in Syria a sort
of ‘overseas France,’” bound to the mother country by “relations” of
exceptional “vintage, intimacy, and continuity.”8
It is upon these sentimental narratives of possession and kinship,
friendship and filiation that this article focuses. These accounts, it con-
tends, were more than simply tardy justifications for the transformation
of France’s informal empire of silk factories and schools, roads, railways,
churches, and orphanages into a set of formal possessions in the face
of British appetites and Hashemite ambitions. Nor were they a mere
superstructure, fancy constructs resting upon the deep foundations of
economic interest. On the contrary: the arguments for territorial control
over Mount Lebanon and the adjoining regions French propagandists,
politicians, and diplomats made amid the thick welter of demands,
desiderata, claims, and counterclaims of the postwar years rested upon,
and recycled, earlier accounts that presented France and Syria—and,
especially, Mount Lebanon—as indissolubly bound together. Reliant
upon the same, small set of tropes, these were essentially reiterative.
French rulers from Charlemagne, Saint Louis, and Louis XIV to Napoleon
III and Poincaré, they insisted, had shown an unyielding commitment
to caring for France’s Uniate Christian protégés in the region, and the
latter had reciprocated in kind, showing time and again their fondness
for France—that “tender mother,” as they called her in unmistakably
Marian language. As the diplomat and historian René Ristelhueber
acknowledged, such harping upon familiar themes could make of them
wearying “commonplace[s].”9
However, we should not dismiss them too easily, for the familial
register on which they relied reveals something quite particular about
these accounts. These were not simply tales of association or possession,
but of propinquity: Frenchmen and Christians alike were animated, in
their view, not merely by friendship, but by kinship and consanguinity.
This was no symbiotic relationship framed by political exigency, but a
family affair, founded upon the natural ties of affection. From the 1830s
onward, French and Lebanese propagandists, travelers, litterateurs,

78 ANDREW ARSAN
pamphleteers, clerics, and parliamentarians crafted accounts that drew
Mount Lebanon into the fold of Europe and treated its Christian inhabit-
ants as surrogate Frenchmen, bound to their distant relatives by ties of
enduring and reciprocal love and loyalty. The Lebanese mountains were,
in the eyes of some, a small part of Europe dropped onto Asian terri-
tory: with their topography and distinctive climate, they were almost
indistinguishable from the Alps or the highlands of southern France.
Their denizens, meanwhile, were Christian in faith and European in
comportment and dispositions. Pious Catholics and studious pupils of
civilization, they were worthy recipients of the sympathy, charity, and
benevolence of France’s religious orders and secular institutions.
In the first part of this article I will strive to reconstruct the contours
of these affective discourses as they developed in the works of writers
as varied as Gérard de Nerval, the belletrist Saint-Marc de Girardin,
and the Lebanese clerics Jean ‘Azar and ‘Abdallah Bustani. The decades
from the July Monarchy to the Second Empire, I will argue, saw the
formulation of their key tenets. Two events in particular prompted a
flurry of anxious words, hastening the crystallization of these narra-
tives. The first was the “Eastern crisis” of 1840. Precipitated by France’s
refusal to acquiesce in the Convention of London, which called on its
ally, the autonomous ruler of Egypt, Mehmet Ali, to pull his troops
out of Syria, which they had occupied since 1831, it brought the Thiers
ministry to the brink of war with Britain. The eventual withdrawal
of Egyptian troops, after Louis-Philippe installed the more emollient
Guizot at the head of the government, brought the exile of the local
potentate Bashir Shihab and the establishment of direct Ottoman control
over Mount Lebanon. These events did not just lead the mountain’s
notables and religious dignitaries to call on France to preside over
a restoration of the old regime; they also precipitated much pained
scrutiny of French policy by figures like Tocqueville and Lamartine.10
The second was the outbreak of internecine strife between Christian
and Druze inhabitants of the Lebanese mountain in the summer months
of 1860, which precipitated a torrent of appeals for swift imperial
intervention from Maronite clerics and French pamphleteers, whose
hopes were realized when Napoleon III dispatched an expeditionary

“There Is, in the Heart of Asia” 79

force to Mount Lebanon. At both these moments, “family romances”
depicting Mount Lebanon as a distant relation of France came to serve
as precedents, pretexts, and props for French involvement.11 Imagining
Mount Lebanon as a space that already belonged to France and whose
inhabitants were members of the French body politic, they made it
possible to envision investment and intervention as the most natural
of things, for, they suggested, France, in doing so, was merely tending
to its own affairs.
I will then place, in the article’s second part, these love stories in the
broader contexts of French international and imperial thought. Even
as they attempted to cleave Mount Lebanon and its inhabitants off
from the remainder of the Ottoman Empire, treating it as an island of
civilization amid the seas of barbarity, French and Lebanese writers
considered its place within a wider set of priorities, born of their concern
to strengthen France’s position in the Mediterranean and to consolidate
its hold over Algeria. The “Eastern question” was never, for French
thinkers and politicians, simply just that. Nor was it primarily about
maintaining the continental balance of power, though such concerns
were undoubtedly of great consequence. Rather, their eyes were trained
upon the Mediterranean—upon securing French supremacy upon its
waves and around its shores and on preventing Britain from establishing
its own hold on the middle sea. Mount Lebanon, that distant outpost
of France, served an important function in such strategic calculations.
Furthermore, it was an analogue of sorts to Algeria. Bound to the latter
by the circulation of personnel and discourses, it appeared to present a
solution to the most pressing problems of Algerian colonization, just as
Algeria seemed to offer up a potential remedy to the ills of Syria, that
land of endemic disorder and sectarian brutality.
Revealing the contours of these family tales and replacing them
within the wider story of French “global expansion” in the long nine-
teenth century may tell us a great deal about this enterprise. Scholars
have only recently begun to draw attention to the French “imperial
meridian,” the decades between 1815 and 1870, long thought an undis-
tinguished and uninteresting hiatus before the renewed colonial drive of
the Third Republic. These were years of informal imperialism in which

80 ANDREW ARSAN
France extended its presence through the world by forging a network
of enclaves, commercial establishments, coaling stations, and schools.12
The politicians, pamphleteers, officers, and adventurers who stitched
together this patchwork empire lived in the long shadow of Napoleon,
who bequeathed to these generations not just a stifling “reduced Hexa-
gon” but also a new “imaginary” “geography” of expansion.13
On the one hand, Napoleon’s defeats left successive generations in
search of legitimacy and glory: as they lived through a series of post-
revolutionary regimes, the French saw overseas expansion as a means
of fostering social harmony and enhancing France’s tattered interna-
tional standing.14 On the other hand, Bonaparte’s ambition to make of
the Mediterranean a French lake whose littoral might provide a “new
and great colony” that might replace “Saint-Domingue and the Antilles”
proved an enduring preoccupation for his successors.15 Like Volney, who
inspired Napoleon’s visions of the Orient, mid-nineteenth- century pam-
phleteers continued to hanker after a “great man” who might rule over
the East and gather up its fragmented forces to France’s benefit.16 And
like Napoleon himself, who insisted that Alexandria, “more than Rome,
Constantinople, Paris, London, [or] Amsterdam,” had the potential to
sit “at the head of the universe,” these writers showed an inexhaustible
faith in the possibility of the Orient’s regeneration under France’s aegis
as well as a fondness for grand schemes.17
However, these writings differed sharply from Napoleonic visions
of the East in one important respect. Bonaparte had spoken largely in
material terms, of a new “civilization” in Egypt that, harnessing the
formidable power of the Nile, would be sustained by “commerce” and
“emigration . . . from the depths of Africa, Arabia, Syria, Greece, France,
Italy, Poland, [and] Germany.”18 His successors, meanwhile, focused
insistently upon issues of sentiment, sympathy, and consanguinity. For
while scholarship has focused upon the ways in which ideas of progress
and civilization were put in the service of colonialism, mid-nineteenth-
century fantasies of French resurgence rested not just on the “mastery of
reason” but also upon the “assessment” and management of “affective
dispositions.”19 The empire they envisaged was founded upon “love and
sacrifice,” trust and kindness.20 Its contours were “amorously defined”;

“There Is, in the Heart of Asia” 81

just as important as the task of inculcating the values of civilization was
that of instilling love.21
Particularly significant to the construction of France’s informal
empire in the Eastern Mediterranean were the figures of the family—of
the fatherly, the fraternal, and the filial. As Lynn Hunt has noted, such
“narratives” are “central to the constitution of all forms of authority.”22
But these notions spilled beyond the realm of the metaphorical. Just
as advocates of French involvement in the Eastern Mediterranean and
protection of the Maronites were passionately committed to their cause,
they expected similar devotion and sentimental intensity from their
charges. This was imperial politics in a “visceral register.”23 For the
manufacture of amity—of a love that encompasses but is not defined
by friendship, also incorporating “familial” and “fraternalist” feeling—
served as the fundamental operation of the political.24 Only amity
could mark the division between friend and enemy, between those who
belonged to the community and those who lay beyond its pale.25 This
insistent recourse to the language of family worked to demarcate the
world in unexpected ways. Far from treating the Orient as of a piece, it
drew certain districts into the fold of the French body politic, blurring
the apparent lines between self and other. In such writings, intervention
in Mount Lebanon was no benevolent act on behalf of others, but rather
a self-interested operation—if for no other reason than that Maronites
were a part of the French political family.

Such geographical and cultural reckonings were evident in the writings

of figures like Gérard de Nerval. To be sure, his account of his voyage
to the East stated baldly that the “social constitution” of its peoples,
with their “primitive traditions” and the “ardor of their beliefs,” “differs
a great deal of our own.” But beneath such a seemingly unequivocal
sense of Oriental alterity, there ran in his writings a more motile sense
of the differences between East and West. This was evident not just in
his contemplation of religion but also in his evocations of landscape and
people.26 Arriving at Beirut, he found a “landscape full of freshness, of
shadows and silence, a view of the Alps taken from a Swiss lake”; giving
the impression of “Europe and Asia melting into one another,” it stood

82 ANDREW ARSAN
in stark contrast to the “dust-sullied horizons” of Egypt. Everywhere,
he saw reminders and signs of Europe. Venturing into the Christian
parts of Mount Lebanon, their hills dotted with monasteries, he wrote
that its “physiognomy” bore comparison with “the Apennines or the
lower Alps.” However, such similarities between the Eastern Mediter-
ranean and Europe went beyond the appearance of landscape. Beirut
seemed an echo of a place he had left behind: its “crenellated towers”
and “castles” gave “this land an aspect, feudal and at the same time
European,” reminiscent of medieval “miniatures.” This impression only
grew stronger as Nerval ventured into the mountains of Lebanon; the
“manor” he visited in the Christian region of Kisrwan had “wholly the
appearance of a Gothic castle.” One might be tempted to regard such
language as a means of underlining the Orient’s otherness, by treating
it as out of time with Europe—a foreign country in which one still
lived in the past.27 But Nerval found reminders of the present, too. He
compared the house he rented on the outskirts of Beirut to the “bastides
that surround Marseille”; the mountain hamlet of Beit Meri, he thought,
had the appearance “of one of our Midi villages.”28
This was more than a sort of picturesque shorthand, a way of sum-
ming up the unfamiliar by assimilating it to known things. On the
contrary, there were palpable similarities between Mount Lebanon
and Europe. In Kisrwan he “found again in reading [and] conversa-
tion . . . those European things that weariness and ennui push us to
escape, but which we begin to dream about after a certain time, just
as we dream of the unexpected, the strange, . . . the unknown.” Living
among people whose “ways were hardly different from those we see in
our southern provinces,” he found “that sympathy” he found wanting
in Muslims hardened “by the prejudices of race.” Mount Lebanon was
to Nerval a “little Europe, industrious, free, intelligent,” whose people
had reached a higher degree of social sophistication than the “popula-
tions of Asia.” That this was so was largely because of the “prodigious
contrast” between its climate, which allowed its inhabitants to “live in
the midst of an eternal spring,” and the “great heats” of the lowlands,
which enervated their denizens and arrested their development. One
could almost forget there, Nerval put it in telling fashion, that one was

“There Is, in the Heart of Asia” 83

in a “Muslim country, only a few miles from the desert of Damascus and
the powdery ruins of Baalbek.”29 For if climatic theory played a part
in such reckonings of difference, so did religion—and the undeniable
proximity it created between the Christians of Mount Lebanon and their
European brethren. In Nerval, then, could be found the insistence on
the spiritual and sentimental sympathy of Maronite and Frenchmen that
marked many mid-nineteenth- century narratives of the French Orient.
These tropes were not the preserve of French writers. On the con-
trary, they were given full voice in the supplications of the Maronite
clerics who addressed France in the last years of the July Monarchy and
the first of the Second Empire, seeking the abolition of direct Ottoman
rule over Mount Lebanon and the restoration of the Shihabi family. In
many ways these were archetypal humanitarian writings; saturated
with sentiment and piety, they depended upon the careful, “insistent”
use of telling “detail” to convey the “particularity” of suffering as well
as its scale.30 Thus, Monsignor ‘Abdallah Bustani appealed in his 1847
letter to the “women of France,” whose “courage, charity, ardent zeal
and sensibility” underwrote the nation’s “honor,” to “hear our pleas” and
“save us from our enemies,” who had laid ruin to “churches, convents,
and colleges,” ravaged “women, young girls, and virgins consecrated to
the Lord,” burned “sacred images and blessed crosses,” and razed the
“homes of Christians.”31
However, more than a humanitarian tract, this was a political state-
ment whose demands took up both Lebanese and French concerns.
Its strident Catholicism and call for the “return” of our “old prince,”
the guarantor of “liberty,” reflected not just Bustani’s Shihabi commit-
ments, but also the legitimism of his allies, who themselves pined for
a lost monarch. The political inclination of Bustani’s French supporters
is evident from the names of the members to the Société de secours
en faveur des Chrétiens du Liban he established; these included such
eminent figures of the old aristocracy as the Duchesse de Narbonne, the
Vicomtesse de Sailly, and the Princesse de Beauvau. Moreover, it sought
to collapse these two worlds into one.32 More than just “members of
the same Catholic church,” Maronites and Frenchmen were “bound in a
most special way.” “Our children,” Bustani wrote, “are your children, for

84 ANDREW ARSAN
in the time of the Crusades we marched together to the conquest of the
Holy Land.” But, though the Maronites were “tied to France” by “love”
and France’s traditional “protection” of these surrogate “children,” these
connections ran deeper still: “a great number of Crusaders settled in
our mountains, and . . . are today Maronite”; “our blood mixed with
yours is none other than your blood.” This was no mere metaphorical
evocation of friendship between peoples, in which “alliances” might
approximate family relations; the Maronites were linked to France by the
consanguinity, inheritance, and devotion that underwrote the legitimist
political order into which he sought to fit his claims.
Monsignor Jean ‘Azar, the Maronite patriarch’s vicar apostolic to
Rome, sought to substantiate these claims by an elaborate historical
sleight of hand. Adjusting to the new political realities of the Second
Empire, he opened his work with the words of Napoleon Bonaparte:
“the Maronites have been French from time immemorial.” But he also
buttressed this claim with a lengthy quotation from what purported to
be a letter from Saint Louis to the “Prince of the Maronites of Mount
Lebanon, and the Patriarchs and Bishops of this Nation,” in which the
holy king declared himself “persuaded that this nation . . . is a part
of the French nation, for its friendship for the French resembles the
friendship the French show among themselves.” As a consequence,
this epistle went on, “it is just that . . . the Maronites should enjoy the
same protection from us as Frenchmen do.” Insisting that the “original of
this letter is still religiously preserved” in the archives of the Maronite
patriarchate, ‘Azar saw it as incontrovertible, “authentic” proof that “the
Maronites were not just France’s protégés, but veritable Frenchmen.”33
However, this document was nothing more than a hoax perpetrated
by Niqula Murad, ‘Azar’s predecessor as Maronite vicar apostolic to
Rome. Like ‘Azar and Bustani a partisan of the restoration of Bashir
Shihab, Murad had appealed in 1842 to Guizot, assuring him that all
that was needed for an “oppressed people to . . . claim its rights” was
the dispatch of “four or five warships, laden with arms.”34 Finding little
success in using the language of national liberty with Guizot, Murad
sought to play instead upon the dynastic vanity of Louis-Philippe, to
whom he addressed his work, and to give historical weight to his claims

“There Is, in the Heart of Asia” 85

by fabricating an ancient link between France and the “emir[s] of the
Maronites,” an anachronistic slip that gave away his contemporary
preoccupations.35
Taken up in the mid-1840s by French propagandists, these claims of
unbroken fraternity and reciprocal obligation permeated the pamphlets
published in the wake of the fighting that tore through Mount Lebanon
in mid-1860. As their authors clamored for an imperial intervention in
the Eastern Mediterranean, they readily fell back upon the narratives of
sentimental attachment and familial duty first propagated by Maronite
clerics. Thus, one insisted that France had the “right to intervene,” both
by dint of its long-standing claim to protect “Christian . . . nations in the
Levant” and “by virtue of the community of origins, race, religion and
memories, which makes of the Maronites the French of the Lebanon.”
It was “beyond doubt that, strengthened by time and mutual service,
the links connecting France to the Christian populations of Lebanon
are more than ties of alliance, and have something intimate, domes-
tic, fraternal” about them. These “sentiments of mutual confraternity,”
which had led the Maronites to remain markedly loyal to the French,
in turn compelled France to act in their defense.36 These tropes were
echoed throughout the second half of 1860, as propagandists insisted
that “the desolation of the Maronites is . . . the object of the same com-
miseration and generous readiness as a great French misfortune,” for
the “Maronites” could rightly lay “claim to the title of Frenchmen.”37
As one anonymous pamphleteer put it, “there is, in the heart of Asia,
in Lebanon, an entirely French population; its faith, its memories, even
its blood unite us.” It was not just that this people, the Maronites, had
once given refuge to their “brothers,” the “last crusaders”—an act of
hospitality that merited reciprocation. More than that, they deserved
to be treated as members of the French body politic. Citing Murad’s
Ossian-like letter of Saint Louis, this pamphlet noted that “the Maronites
had fought under the sacred standard by the side of the Crusaders . . .
marriages had mixed their blood with ours, and they had lived under
the suzerainty of the French kings of Jerusalem.”38 More than just acqui-
escing to the sovereignty of French rulers, this people had given of
their own blood in fighting for them, making the ultimate sacrifice of

86 ANDREW ARSAN
military service, and had married into the French nation, giving rise to
generations of mixed stock. These were compelling arguments. After
all, French thinkers of the long nineteenth century read the “state in
the body,” considering only those whose physical and spiritual devotion
to the nation was deemed sufficient as belonging.39 Thus, the pamphlet
pleaded with Napoleon III, the Maronites were “almost as French as we
are; it is under the wings of your eagle, in the shadow of the French
flag, that they must find refuge.”40

Just as France was to provide the Maronites with succor and support, so
Mount Lebanon was to play a role in the extension of French power in
the world. For all its stated particularities, this region was rarely consid-
ered in isolation. Rather, pamphleteers and politicians placed it in the
context of the Mediterranean and the world, regarding Lebanon—and
“Syria” more generally—as one of the underpinnings of France’s empire
in the middle sea, if not its global position. This is clear, for instance,
from the writings of Tocqueville, who began his career as a deputy
against the backdrop of the “Egyptian crisis” of 1840, making show at
times of a vociferous bellicosity born of his deep concern for France’s
prestige and standing. As Jennifer Pitts has argued, the projection of
France’s power in the world, whether through imperial acquisition or
the play of informal influence, was not merely an external matter for
Tocqueville. On the contrary, France’s “internal stability” hinged in his
eyes upon its “international standing,” for foreign engagements offered
a “salvation” from the turmoil of post-revolutionary politics, granting
a callow state a much-needed measure of legitimacy.41
These views shaped Tocqueville’s stance on the “Eastern crisis” of
1840. While agreeing with Thiers that France “should not seek to found
colonies” in the Eastern Mediterranean, concentrating its strength
instead “on its borders and in Europe,” Tocqueville nonetheless insisted
it would be disastrous to cease “counterbalancing” English “influence.”42
Should the “commercial, industrial, and political power of England . . .
increase in the Mediterranean,” this would allow a “single maritime
power to become preponderant,” shutting France out and granting her
most bitter rival a monopoly of the waves.43 The loss of the middle sea

“There Is, in the Heart of Asia” 87

was utterly inconceivable to Tocqueville, who regarded it as tantamount
to abandoning “our political, industrial, and commercial future.”44 As he
argued in the unpublished “work on Algeria” of 1841, the Mediterranean
was “the political sea of our day”; mastery over its waves would play
a decisive role in the fate of Europe. It is worth remembering that this
essay was written only a few short months after the Egyptian crisis was
resolved in a manner that Tocqueville found deeply dissatisfying. The
dogged insistence upon holding on to Algeria he showed in 1841 was in
large part the product of his disappointment at Guizot’s handling of the
crisis, which he regarded as a humiliating climb down that had relegated
France to the “second rank” of nations, a state “resigned to watch the
running of European affairs pass into the hands of others.” Indeed, this
language directly echoed his earlier claim, made during the “Eastern
crisis” of the late 1830s, that “a nation that stands by and leaves the
greatest thing of the century be decided without it falls to the second
rank.” By 1841, this had come in his eyes to pass. To give up Algeria at a
time when a diminished, humbled France was facing the consequences
of Guizot’s timorous policies would be “the certain announcement of
our decadence.”45 Some might argue that such repetition was simply a
product of Tocqueville’s recursive working methods of the time, return-
ing time and again to sentences and ideas he rehearsed for his speeches
and articles. The allusion, though, is unmistakable: just as Tocqueville’s
view of domestic political life influenced his understanding of foreign
affairs, so his stance on the “Eastern crisis” shaped his changing sense
of the importance of Algeria. Syria and Algeria were frequently bound
together by such ideological and strategic considerations.
The importance of the “Eastern question” went further still, spill-
ing over the confines of the Mediterranean. The events unfolding “in
Egypt or in Syria were only . . . the beginning of an immense scene,”
just one small piece of an “entire world in transformation.” This was,
Tocqueville wrote in an unpublished fragment, the “question of the
century. It dominates all others. All others must be subordinated to
it.” Across “Asia, from India to the Black Sea,” one could glimpse only
“disorganization . . . depopulation. Anarchy.” The veritable “movement
of the century” was the “movement of the European race toward Asia,”

88 ANDREW ARSAN
wresting control of its potential from the senescent peoples who had
long squatted its vast expanses. Throughout the continent, “societies are
shaken, . . . religions are weakened, . . . the old Asiatic world is disap-
pearing; and in its stead is gradually being erected a European world.”
Europe was dominant, rampant even, “puncturing, enveloping, taming”
the fallen beast that was Asia. There was no mistaking the identity of
those at the “forefront of this movement: Russia, which occupies itself
a large part of Asia, [and] England by its colonies and empire upon the
seas, which makes it, as it were, contiguous to all shores.” France could
not stand idly by, observing the takeover of these vast resources, for “a
nation . . . that allowed its neighbors prodigious increases in strength
ends by finding itself dependent upon them.” The nation’s standing—its
very future—hinged upon its playing a role in the “Orient”; to “remain
great,” France had to secure a share of that “vast inheritance.”46
Lamartine, too, considered the “Oriental question the question of
the century and the question of the world.” As he wrote in 1840, the
“entire foreign policy of France was there”; it was in the East that it
would find the “peace” and “alliances” that would guarantee its future
position, allowing it to protect its “interest in equilibrium and liberty
of the seas.” For the “French system” was founded upon a “European
balance.” Unlike Tocqueville, Lamartine felt that France should need-
lessly antagonize neither Russia nor Britain. Rather, it should seek the
establishment of a “general and collective protectorate of the Occident
upon the Orient.” Founded upon shared rule and joint intervention,
this would serve as the “basis of a new European political system” that
would bolster France’s global position. Once the Ottoman Empire col-
lapsed, an event he saw as imminent, “you will have before twenty years
hence millions of men on all the shores of the Mediterranean to feed
your manufactures, strengthen your navy, and adopt your civilization.”
This would be the realization of Napoleon’s dream: “the Mediterranean
would become the French lake and the great path of the two worlds,”
joining together East and West. Syria and the Maronites would have a
role to play in this vast enterprise. The former, that “magnificent prov-
ince,” might—Lamartine bewailed in 1840, his grand scheme a dead
letter—have become an “Ancona in the Orient,” a bridgehead that would

“There Is, in the Heart of Asia” 89

have allowed the creation of a French “sphere” on the eastern shores of
the Mediterranean, and “advanced humanity by several centuries” by
bringing about the meeting of Occidental progress and Oriental poten-
tial. If Syria “offered itself armed” to France, it was largely because of
Mount Lebanon—and, in particular, the Maronites, the “important,
dominant nation of these lands,” naturally well disposed toward France
because of their Catholicism.47
Many of those who wrote in support of French intervention in Mount
Lebanon in 1860 shared not just this sense of the Mediterranean and
global significance of such a move but also the mechanical logic of so
many French writings on international affairs of the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury. Viewing the world as a machine, they imagined that the workings
of the whole could be manipulated by pulling or prodding at this or that
part. However, the pamphleteers of 1860 wrote with a newfound confi-
dence in the ability of Bonapartist France to play a leading role on the
world stage as the promoter of peace and a new European order founded
on the principle of nationality. Intervention in Mount Lebanon—that
“French Gibraltar of the Mediterranean,” which ensured domination
over the Orient and the waves—assumed a central role in such dreams
and schemes of glory.48 The propagandist Louis de Baudicour, who had
called since the early years of the Second Empire for the bolstering of
France’s presence in the Mediterranean by an active policy on its east-
ern shores, was quick to stress the “political importance of Syria.” “The
discovery of the New World,” he conceded, had “changed commercial
interests,” shifting their center from the Mediterranean to “the shores
of the Ocean.” This had benefited “England,” which had succeeded in
establishing a “monopoly” upon “industry and commerce.” The French
“conquest of Algeria,” however, had changed “the commercial current
of the world,” freeing the middle sea of pirates and making it safe for
navigation. This development had reawakened interest in the “Orien-
tal basin of the interior sea.” The “birthplace” of the human race and
the site of its “redemption,” Syria was once again “at the center of the
world.” Britain pined for a “protectorate” over this country, through
which she might forge a “direct route” to the Euphrates and on to India,
unencumbered by the “difficulties she encountered at the Isthmus of

90 ANDREW ARSAN
Suez,” controlled by the truculent viceroys of Egypt. For France, already
in possession of “Toulon, . . . Corsica, . . . [and] 250 miles of coast in
Africa,” maintaining its “ancient protectorate over . . . the Levant” was
a means of denying Britain the “empire of the Mediterranean.” Control
over Syria, then, would determine the “prosperity of Europe,” and even
“the Italian question . . . could not divert attention away from the lat-
est events in the Orient, which matter as much to the habitués of the
Bourse as to the sons of the crusaders.”49
Others echoed such claims, viewing the dispatch of an expeditionary
force as essential to upholding France’s protectorate over the Christians
of Syria, maintaining its position in the Orient, and overturning British
dominance of the Mediterranean. France’s “preponderance” and “con-
siderable interests” could not be ignored: “Europe must follow France in
the Orient.” Napoleon III should not be hamstrung by the 1856 Treaty of
Paris, which had committed France to joint resolution of the “affairs of
the Orient” with Britain, its “eternal rival.” Such an alliance was riddled
with “contradictions and inconveniences” and was fatally undermined
by the “commercial struggle” between the two states for Syria. Since
the “great disaster of Abukir,” when “England had almost lost in a sin-
gle sweep Egypt, Malta, and the Ionian Islands,” Britain had nurtured
a desire to “establish a solid . . . political, religious and commercial
supremacy” in Syria. The events of 1860 presented a timely opportunity
to “return . . . to the traditions” of French political benevolence and
commercial dominance in the Eastern Mediterranean. A country with
“six hundred leagues of coastline, . . . uniquely situated ports,” and an
empire on the other shore of the middle sea that “ends only with the
desert” seemed “predestined for Mediterranean supremacy.”50
For others still, the events of 1860 were of a global magnitude. Res-
urrecting the grandiose fantasies of Chateaubriand, they offered the
prospect of the final collapse of a senescent Ottoman state and a defini-
tive victory for European civilization and Christianity over the decrepit
forces of Islam. And, in doing so, they promised a global order in which
France would once again be preponderant. This was in keeping with
much political thought of the time, rich in “utopian” longings to create
a “future and final form of society,” and “apocalyptic” prophecies of

“There Is, in the Heart of Asia” 91

a “final struggle that would abolish injustice and liberate and ennoble
mankind.” The Ottoman Empire was, for many, central to such schemes.
This was especially so for Bonapartists, who frequently quoted Napo-
leon’s prediction that the “dominion of the world” would fall to the
state that controlled Constantinople.51
The civil conflict that spread through Mount Lebanon was thus
for many writers a moment of immense political potential. Thus, one
argued, the time had come for the “last crusade,” the “emancipation”
of the “peoples of the Orient,” and their integration into the “European
circle.” The states of Europe were willing to “go into China to avenge a
slight and satisfy commercial appetites”; they “could,” they “had to go
to Constantinople and Syria to stop the massacre of Christians.” This was
not just a matter of humanitarian principles. Europe had a duty to “orga-
nize” the “nationalities” of the East, for before long the Turkish “hordes
were to up camp” and abandon the “Golden Horn, taking under their
trailing robes their dead god, who must return to the dead civilizations”
of Asia. The liberation and “protection” of these populations would,
in turn, guarantee Europe’s “security” and prosperity. Sweeping away
“obstacles” standing before the “Suez canal and the way of the Indies,”
it would open up to European colonization an immense new space on
the “borders of Germany and Hungary.” Emigration toward “America
and Australia” went against the flow of civilization; this “current . . .
must first cover the Orient.” The “sentiments, ideas, and interests” of
the age “pulled civilization” toward these lands.52

Mount Lebanon, Syria, the Orient: these overlapping spaces of concern

were seen as crucial to the vast geopolitical calculations underwriting
France’s Mediterranean and global positions. However, some came to
focus particularly on the connections between Mount Lebanon and
Algeria, France’s key colonial possession. Little might seem to tie these
two territories together. One was awkwardly and unevenly incorpo-
rated into the legal structures of the French body politic, the other an
informal protectorate, but one whose inhabitants were deemed sur-
rogate Frenchmen by dint of love, not law. However, the circulation
of both personnel and ideas bound these territories together. Beaufort

92 ANDREW ARSAN
d’Hautpoul, the commander of the French expeditionary force sent to
Mount Lebanon in 1860, had participated in the Algiers expedition in
1830 and served in Oran for much of the 1850s. Charles Lavigerie, made
archbishop of Algiers in 1867, acquired his first experience of mission-
ary work as the director of the Œuvre des écoles d’Orient, supervising
a vast fund-raising operation on behalf of the “Christians of Syria” in
the wake of the events of 1860. With the contacts forged by the move-
ments of these men came a tendency on the part of French thinkers to
bracket together Algeria and Mount Lebanon.
Some set out to compare them and weigh up their relative merits,
like the “Lebanese exile” who reminded France of the promises of glory
“Syria” held for its soldiers and empire builders and called on it to
make the “Holy Places a French province.” “Be my Queen, O France,”
he implored, and “God will bless you”; “Lebanon and Jerusalem will
shine resplendent among the pearls of your diadem,” their acquisition
ensuring that the “dynasty of the Bonaparte will be the most illustrious
that history has seen.” To be sure, Algeria had witnessed the foundation
of a “beautiful and great colony,” potentially “fertile in profits.” However,
this was “neither richer nor more fertile than our own.” What’s more,
“land” was not everything; just as important were the “inhabitants” of
a colony. The contrast between Algerians and Lebanese could not be
greater. While the former could only ever be “defeated” subjects, full
of “rage” and “repulsion,” the latter were France’s “adoptive children.”
They had no “greater ambition than to become the brothers” of French-
men and “to see them live among us.” “Come, O France, my liberator,
to settle in my smiling homeland . . . you will find among our tribes
precious assistance for your projects; your fortune and hopes will be
our own . . . Keep us under your magnanimous hand; establish among
us counters and trading houses; create stores; dig or improve ports;
train our children in war and the arts; make us French, at last.”53 In
this sentiment-saturated vision, the work of economic infrastructure
rested on amorous foundations. The partnership between colonizer
and colonized could only be built upon mutual love and trust; without
these, nothing could be achieved.
Others saw Algeria and Mount Lebanon as essentially complementary,

“There Is, in the Heart of Asia” 93

France’s involvement on one shore of the Mediterranean helping to but-
tress its investments on another. These connections were evident in the
schemes to transfer a portion of the Maronites to Algeria as a means of
simultaneously solving the seemingly intractable problem of confes-
sional coexistence in Mount Lebanon, on the one hand, and peopling
a colony that remained troublingly short of settlers, on the other. First
mooted in 1847 by the propagandist Louis de Baudicour, who established
a Compagnie d’Afrique et d’Orient for the purpose, they were soon
taken up by members of the small Catholic “pressure group” around
the good father ‘Azar. Though Baudicour succeeded in persuading the
duc d’Aumale of the merits of transforming the Maronites into goums
(military auxiliary corps), and ‘Azar later won over Eugène Daumas to
his proposals, their plans were fated to remain pipe dreams.54
To Baudicour, such an undertaking could offer solutions to “two of the
gravest problems” facing France, allowing it to “preserve her protector-
ate” over its “faithful allies” while consolidating “its African conquest, by
strengthening it with the Christian element most suited to the country’s
ways.” In his grand vision, the Maronites would be “the most precious
auxiliaries” to French agriculture: they would require no adaptation
to the climate; could face the most “arduous” labor; and were able to
“associate the natives”—who, like them, spoke Arabic—to such work.
More important still were the commercial benefits of Maronite migra-
tion. “A thousand or two Maronite merchants,” Baudicour enthused,
“would suffice to cover all the Arab markets, Kabyle villages, and centers
of population of the Algerian Sahara, thus creating from the coast to
the limits of the great desert a vast network of Arabic-speaking Chris-
tians devoted to our interests.”55 The Algérois scholar Vayssettes, who
briefly resurrected this idea in 1860, shared much the same optimism.
It was incumbent upon France to “save the Maronites by Algeria, and
for Algeria”; their settlement there was necessary on grounds of “policy,
humanity, and colonization.” Not only had all other schemes to resolve
the “Eastern question” and to curb the cruelty and fanaticism of the
Ottomans and Syrian Muslims failed, but Algeria was still in dire need
of people. Various settlement schemes had been tried and abandoned,
and the colony—unable to “divert . . . the . . . emigrations which leave

94 ANDREW ARSAN
each year from . . . Europe for . . . America and Australia”—remained
empty, “its countryside deserted, its land fallow.”56
These schemes were notable not so much for their grandiosity as
for their striking understanding of population and desire to give to the
world the neat coherence of paper schemes. After all, Baudicour averred
that his aim was not to resettle the Maronites en masse but merely to
“give a useful direction to those migrations” that might arise from the
continued “persecution” of the Christians of Syria, for France’s “interests
in the Orient” were too great for it “to want to see Lebanon bare of its
Christian” inhabitants.57 But his understanding of the Maronites as a
discrete, undifferentiated population bloc that might be moved at will
was an early example of the techniques of international governance
founded upon demographic “homogeneity” and the “handling” of par-
ticular groups that could be “protected, deported, or civilized,” which
came to the fore from the 1860s onward.58 Moreover, it was typified by
a desire for comprehensiveness—a belief that such political endeavors
were like moves on a checkerboard, neat operations that might swiftly
resolve niggling problems in their entirety.
Much the same longing for completeness and tidiness underwrote
the writings of those who pushed for the appointment of ‘Abd al-Qadir
as the ruler of an “Arab empire” in Syria.59 Driven by the search for a
“new organization of Syria” that might finally provide a “solution . . . to
the Eastern question,”60 figures ranging from the litterateur Saint-Marc
Girardin to the emperor himself latched on to the idea of a new state
in Syria founded upon the principle of Arab nationality. Girardin thus
suggested the nomination of ‘Abd al-Qadir as “governor-general” or
“viceroy” of a grande Syrie, a single “principality,” in which there would
be no “distinction of jurisdiction between the Christians of Lebanon
and other inhabitants.” This had the dual advantage of promoting the
national life of Syria, placing at its head “an Arab who speaks with ease
the language” of its inhabitants, and preserving the Ottoman Empire’s
integrity. This was the only sustainable policy in the Orient—to “sup-
port the Ottoman Empire by reviving its parts, and to revive its parts
by separating them from a stricken centre.”61
Others went further still. In the face of the Syrian “hecatomb,” the

“There Is, in the Heart of Asia” 95

“Christian holocaust made by the Turks to Mahomet,” there was only
“one man and one solution.” The time had passed for the “eternal”
discussion of “diplomatic protocols.” The status quo was no longer sus-
tainable. The Turks showed none of the “vital elements” that might
give them “the title of a people”; they were “condemned to disappear,”
for the “dogmatic . . . fanaticism” of their faith left them “unable to
understand the successive, progressive transformations of society.” The
Turks had “appeared as a horde, and as a horde they would disappear.”
Deliberately standing outside the currents of history and progress, they
could only commit “offense[s] against humanity” like the late massacres
of Mount Lebanon. A “new idea, a providential man” were needed.
Mehmet Ali could once have provided the solution. Indeed, “much of
the work of aggregation had already been accomplished when the hour
struck at the European courts to dismember this renascent, regenerated,
reconstituted nationality.” But where Egyptian ambitions had foundered
on the rocks of European reaction, a new Napoleonic order founded
upon the principle of nationality was now in place, and the time had
come to place ‘Abd al-Qadir—that “Arab hero” and “protector of the
oppressed”—at the head of a new “empire of the Orient.”62

As Fernand Braudel once noted, there is no single Mediterranean, but

a multitude of small maritime societies. This article has focused on
one of those worlds—the highlands of Mount Lebanon—and its place
in French imaginings of empire and world from the July Monarchy
to the Second Empire. By the time of World War I, the French trav-
eler or propagandist—though forever stalked by fears of decline and
degeneration—could find some consolation in this small corner of the
world:

Climbing the slopes of the Lebanon in a French car, he would see

beneath his feet the magnificent panorama of the port of Beirut, with
its steamships bearing our colors . . . and [all around] our schools,
hospices and silk factories, and, hearing our language spoken around
him, welcomed at every instant with a touching joy, he could think
of himself in a French land; for this truly was an overseas France.63

96 ANDREW ARSAN
These material achievements, this essay has contended, depended upon
the imaginative labors of the mid-nineteenth century, when French and
Lebanese thinkers had first sought to make of Mount Lebanon a space
French in sentiments and substance. Although France only took pos-
session of Lebanon in the years after World War I, it had already long
owned it figuratively. But even as the writings of the 1840s, 1850s, and
1860s sought to uphold the “locality and particularity” of this land,
stressing the features that distinguished it from its surroundings and
bound it to Europe, they also came to stress its global significance and
to regard it as a key part of a greater “geographical . . . [and] human
whole”—that Mediterranean which stood at the center of the French
world of the mid-nineteenth century.64

NOTES
1. Congrès français de la Syrie, 3, 4 et 5 Janvier 1919: Séances et travaux (Marseille:
Chambre de commerce de Marseille, 1919); Simon Jackson, “Mandatory Devel-
opment: The Political Economy of the French Mandate in Syria and Lebanon,
1915–1939” (PhD diss., New York University, 2009), 149.
2. Jackson, “Mandatory Development,” 149. See also Christopher Andrew and Sydney
Kanya-Forstner, France Overseas: The Great War and the Climax of French Impe-
rial Expansion (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981); Gérard Khoury, La France et
l’Orient moderne: La naissance du Liban, 1914–1920 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1993);
and John Spagnolo, France and Ottoman Lebanon, 1861–1914 (London: Ithaca Press,
1977).
3. Dominique Chevallier, “Lyon et la Syrie en 1919: Les bases d’une intervention,” in
Villes et travail en Syrie du XIXe au XXe siècle (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1982),
41–86; John Laffey, “Roots of French Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century: The
Case of Lyon,” French Historical Studies 6 (1969): 78–92. On France’s broader eco-
nomic policies in the Ottoman Empire, see William Shorrock, French Imperialism
in the Middle East: The Failure of Policy in Syria and Lebanon, 1900–1914 (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1976); and Jacques Thobie, Intérêts et impérialisme
français dans l’Empire Ottoman, 1895–1914 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1977).
4. Chevallier, “Lyon,” 85, 82.
5. Louis Bréhier, “Les origines des rapports entre la Syrie et la France: Le Protectorat
de Charlemagne,” in Congrès français, 16, 38.
6. Babelon, “Allocution inaugurale,” in Congrès français, 7.
7. Paul Durrieu, “Le titre de ‘Roi de Jérusalem’ et la France,” in Congrès français, 15.
8. René Ristelhueber, Traditions françaises au Liban (Paris: F. Alcan, 1919), x, 2.
9. Ristelhueber, Traditions françaises au Liban, ix.

“There Is, in the Heart of Asia” 97

10. Carol Hakim, The Origins of the Lebanese National Idea, 1840–1920 (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2013).
11. Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992).
12. David Todd, “A French Imperial Meridian, 1814–1870,” Past & Present, no. 210
(February 2011): 155– 86.
13. Annie-Rey Goldziguer, “La France coloniale de 1830 à 1870,” in Histoire de la France
coloniale des origines à 1914, ed. Jean Meyer et al. (Paris: Colin, 1991), 324.
14. Jennifer Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Ithaca,
2011).
15. Général Bertrand, Campagnes d’Egypte et de Syrie, 2 vols. (Paris, 1847), 2:19–20.
16. Henry Laurens, Les origines intellectuelles de l’expédition d’Egypte: L’orientalisme
islamisant en France (1698–1798) (Istanbul: Isis, 1987), 189– 90.
17. Bertrand, Campagnes d’Egypte et de Syrie, 1:123.
18. Bertrand, Campagnes d’Egypte et de Syrie, 1:122.
19. Ann-Laura Stoler, “Affective States,” in A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics,
ed. David Nugent and Joan Vincent (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 4– 5.
20. Paul Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2005), 12.
21. Matt Matsuda, Empire of Love: Histories of France and the Pacific (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), 3– 4.
22. Hunt, Family Romance, 8.
23. Stoler, “Affective States,” 7.
24. Jacques Derrida, Les politiques de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994), 24–25, 12.
25. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1996).
26. Paul Bénichou, L’école du désenchantement: Sainte-Beuve, Nodier, Musset, Nerval,
Gautier (Paris: Gallimard, 1992); Jean-Nicolas Illouz, “Les religions de Nerval,” in
Savoirs en récits II: Eclats de Savoirs. Balzac, Nerval, Flaubert, Verne, les Goncourt,
ed. Jacques Neefs (Saint-Denis: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 2010), 49– 69.
27. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1983). See also Pierre Campion, Nerval: Une crise
dans la pensée (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2002), 32– 4.
28. Gérard de Nerval, Voyage en Orient (1851; Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 410, 433, 427,
372–73, 376, 424–25, 419.
29. Nerval, Voyage en Orient, 424–25, 436.
30. Thomas Laqueur, “Mourning, Pity, and the Work of Narrative in the Making of
‘Humanity,’” in Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy, ed.
Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009), 45, 55.
31. Abdallah Boustani [Bustani], Lettre de Mgr l’Archevêque de Saïda (Paris, 1847),
2– 6.

98 ANDREW ARSAN
32. Boustani, Lettre de Mgr l’Archevêque de Saïda, 23–24, 4– 6.
33. J. ‘Azar, Les Marounites (Cambrai, 1852), 50– 51.
34. Youssef Mouawad, “Aux origines d’un mythe: La lettre de St Louis aux Maronites,”
in Les Européens vus par les Libanais à l’Epoque Ottomane, ed. Bernard Heyberger
and Carsten Walbiner (Beirut: Orient-Institut, 1998), 108.
35. Nicolas Murad, Notice historique sur l’origine de la nation Maronite (Paris, 1844),
25.
36. M. De Lescure, La nouvelle question d’Orient (Paris, 1860), 5, 7–8, 10.
37. Alexandre de Saint-Albin, L’Europe chrétienne en Orient (Paris, 1860), 6–8.
38. Les Maronites et la France (Paris, 1860), 5– 6.
39. Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place, 247.
40. Les Maronites et la France, 22–23.
41. Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Liberal Imperialism in Britain and France
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 220; Jennifer Pitts, Introduction,
in Alexis de Tocqueville, Writings on Slavery and Empire, ed. and trans. Jennifer
Pitts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), xxxiv.
42. Alexis de Tocqueville, Ecrits et discours politiques, ed. André Jardin III, vol. 2 (Paris:
Gallimard, 1985), 270–71.
43. De Tocqueville, Ecrits et discours politiques, 2:315.
44. De Tocqueville, Ecrits et discours politiques, 2:270.
45. Alexis de Tocqueville, Ecrits et discours politiques, ed. André Jardin III, vol. 1 (Paris:
Gallimard, 1962), 213, 216.
46. De Tocqueville, Ecrits et discours politiques, 1:280.
47. Alphonse de Lamartine, Vues discours et articles sur la question d’Orient (Paris,
1840), 1, 19, 45, 32, 20, 5, 6.
48. ‘Azar, Les Marounites, 67.
49. Louis de Baudicourt [sic], La France en Syrie (Paris, 1860), 3, 12.
50. De Lescure, La nouvelle question d’Orient, 5, 12–13, 17–18.
51. Robert Tombs, France, 1814–1914 (London: Longman, 1996), 86, 36–37.
52. Alfred Poissonnier, Expédition de Syrie: La nouvelle croisade (Paris, 1860), 3–7.
53. La Syrie à la France (Paris, 1861), 16, 8– 9.
54. Gérald d’Arboit, Aux sources de la politique arabe de la France: Le Second Empire
et le Machrek (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 178–80.
55. Louis de Baudicour, La colonisation de l’Algérie: Ses éléments (Paris, 1856), 237, 239,
244.
56. E. Vayssettes, Sauvons les Maronites par l’Algérie et pour l’Algérie (Alger, 1860), 6,
38.
57. Baudicour, La colonisation de l’Algérie, 244.
58. Eric Weitz, “From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the
Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Mis-
sions,” American Historical Review 113 (2008): 1314, 1319.

“There Is, in the Heart of Asia” 99

59. Charles-Robert Ageron, Politiques coloniales au Maghreb (Paris: Presses universi-
taires de France, 1972), 93–108.
60. Melchior de Vogüé, Les évènements de Syrie (Paris, 1860), 23, 25.
61. Saint-Marc Girardin, La Syrie en 1861: La condition des Chrétiens en Orient (Paris,
1862), 172–75.
62. La question d’Orient: Un homme et une solution (Paris, 1860), 5–8, 14–15, 40.
63. Ristelhueber, Traditions françaises au Liban, 284.
64. Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, “De la Méditerranée,” in L’invention scientifique de la Médi-
terranée: Egypte, Morée, Algérie, ed. Marie-Noëlle Bourguet et al. (Paris: Editions
de l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1998), 9, 11.

100 ANDREW ARSAN

4 Natural Disaster, Globalization,
and Decolonization
The Case of the 1960 Agadir Earthquake

SPENCER SEGALLA

When an earthquake struck Agadir shortly before midnight on Febru-

ary 29, 1960, the port city was a struggling provincial capital in the
Moroccan south. Prior to the earthquake, the city had been of little
concern to elite decision makers in Rabat, Paris, Washington, and Mos-
cow, who were preoccupied with the geopolitical cataclysms of Cold
War and decolonization that were reshaping the world. Yet Agadir, too,
was engaged in these global transformations, through the continuing
projection of French power in Morocco, the war raging in Algeria, and
new forms of transatlantic and Euro-Mediterranean economic relations,
including flows of American consumer goods and European tourists.
The earthquake, although measuring only 5.75 on the Richter scale,
devastated Agadir, killing over fifteen thousand people, injuring three
thousand, and sending fourteen thousand refugees fleeing to camps
around the nearby towns of Inezgane and Aït Mellal.1
This article investigates the intersections of tectonic activity with the
political and cultural shifts that shaped modern Agadir, taking up the

101
challenge posed by environmental historians to consider the impact of
the environment on human history.2 Historians have noted how shared
environmental challenges such as nuclear fallout and climate change
motivate scholars to confront, on a global scale, the history of these
man-made problems.3 Likewise, discourse about earthquakes played a
significant role in the development of early globalist thinking: before we
had global warming and nuclear winter, tremors of the Earth inspired
ideas about the connectedness of local humanity to the planetary envi-
ronment. Earthquakes are localized events—much more so than, say,
epidemics or wars. Yet their terranean provenance has long inspired
ideas that they might have universal significance, whether eschatologi-
cal, philosophical, political, or architectural.4
Natural disasters are often revelatory, exposing social conditions and
cultural attitudes kept hidden under normal circumstances. But the Aga-
dir earthquake demonstrates that disasters can also be transformative,
creating abrupt changes in political, social, and cultural landscapes as
well as physical ones. The earthquake made the city’s built environment
central to transnational struggles over the Cold War, decolonization, and
culture. Responses to the earthquake became imbricated with relations
between the Moroccan south, the French Mediterranean, an American-
dominated Atlantic, and the Moroccan state, and with global networks
focusing on seismology and urbanism. The catastrophe facilitated the
Moroccan monarchy’s production of new forms of authority and sov-
ereignty and revealed divisions in French responses to decolonization.
The earthquake disrupted French hegemony in Morocco and created
an opening for new forms of American influence in urban planning and
technical assistance. However, Franco-Moroccan networks of urban
planners, civil servants, and architects triumphed over the American
usurpers. This triumph demonstrated the resilience of Morocco’s ties to
France, but the reconstruction of Agadir revived colonial-era tensions
between claims of Gallic universalism and enunciations of Moroccan
cultural essentialism. For decades, the new, modernist Agadir became
a focus of Moroccan anxieties about decolonization and national iden-
tity, a symbol of a community destroyed, not by natural disaster, but
by neo-imperial urban planning.

102 SPENCER SEGALLA

The Local, the Mediterranean, and the Global
In the words of Pierre Mas, one of the principal designers of modern
Agadir,

few cities occupy a geographic position as remarkable as Agadir.

After passing Cap Ghir, where the foothills of the High Atlas plunge
into the Atlantic, the voyager coming from the north travels along a
narrow shore of Mediterranean character for forty-some kilometers,
before discovering the large bay of Agadir open to the south-west.
The last foothill, adorned with ancient Portuguese fortifications,
the Kasbah, dominates from its height of 230 meters the city and
the plain of the South.5

Mas’s vision of southern Morocco’s Atlantic coast as “Mediterranean”

reflects more than just topological similarity. Agadir was tied to the
French Mediterranean through the legacy of French and Spanish imperi-
alism, both along the “vertical” axis of the metropole-colony relationship
and along the “horizontal” axis with French Algeria. Consequently, the
Agadir earthquake, although it occurred on Morocco’s Atlantic coast-
line, was experienced as a Mediterranean event in many respects, a
sibling catastrophe to the 1954 earthquake in Algeria’s Orleansville
and the 1959 dam collapse in Fréjus, on the Côte d’Azur. The human
tragedy afflicted a multinational community of Moroccans, French,
Spanish, and Algerians, and responses to the disaster, both immedi-
ate and less immediate, arose not only in France and Spain but also in
Greece, Turkey, Tunisia, Algeria, and Egypt. The city was reconstructed
as a Mediterranean-style beach resort, designed by a team of French
and French- educated Moroccan urban planners.6 The Agadir disaster
therefore offers an interesting lens through which to explore the Medi-
terranean relations of this former French protectorate at the dawn of
the postcolonial age. Discussing méditerranité in the twentieth century,
however, is complicated by phenomena of globalization. Responses to
the Agadir earthquake came from northern Europe, the Americas, and
West Africa as well as the Mediterranean basin; seismologically, Agadir
was suddenly of significance even to the Japanese. Investigating the

Disaster and Decolonization 103

case of Agadir thus requires the exploration of a variety of globalizing
relationships.
The study of a particular city offers certain advantages to historians
seeking to illuminate the history of globalization, permitting us to fore-
ground processes that might seem peripheral to the study of a larger
unit such as a country, empire, or oceanic “world.” As Eric Wiebelhaus-
Brahm has pointed out,

A focus on cities helps reinforce the notion that globalization has

uneven effects even within states. Contrary to those who think space
no longer matters, cities remain highly concentrated areas of activ-
ity. Increasingly . . . cities have greater ties to each other than to the
nation or region in which they are physically situated. In some ways
they serve as microcosms for the integrating and disintegrating forces
that other scholars see at the global level.7

Although Agadir is a provincial city, and not one of the great hubs of
international finance and migration that Wiebelhaus-Brahm refers to as
“global cities,” the use of space in Agadir became a matter of national
and international contestation and controversy, even as Agadir’s par-
ticular relationship to globalization produced its marginalization within
historiographies of Morocco. Popular, Orientalist, and touristic depic-
tions of Morocco have often focused on the supposed exoticism and
authenticity of “imperial” cities such as Fez and Marrakesh.8 Historians
have not been immune from such discourses: Julia Clancy-Smith has
pointed out “an earlier tendency among historians of Islamic societies
to prefer the ‘bona fide’ Muslim,” a tendency that led to the neglect, in
Western historiography, of the “culturally promiscuous” port cities.9
This early neglect has been addressed by excellent accounts of urban
Morocco’s encounters with the global and the Western that privilege the
French protectorate’s capital at Rabat-Salé.10 The history of a periph-
eral city in southern Morocco offers a complement to these studies of
the national-imperial “center.” Agadir, with its transnational history
and modernist architecture, provides an opportunity to enhance our
understanding of Moroccan transnationalism and the globalization of
provincial cities.

104 SPENCER SEGALLA

Transcontinental Connections
In the sixteenth century, Agadir had been a vibrant hub of commerce and
migration between West Africa, the Souss valley, and Europe, a crucial
node in the trade of gold, sugar, and gunpowder under the control of
the Portuguese, Saadiens, and Dutch.11 However, Sultan Mohammed
ibn Abd-Allah’s closure of the port in 1774 distanced Agadir from the
intensification of Mediterranean and transatlantic contacts that took
place in northern Morocco.12 The sultan signed a treaty with the United
States in 1786, and the success of the transatlantic steamship in 1819 and
the transatlantic cable in 1858 brought the three continents suddenly
closer.13 Yet Agadir had become peripheral to Morocco’s international
commercial and diplomatic networks and was little more than a fishing
town at the beginning of the twentieth century.14
Then, the possibility that the Souss region might contain iron ore
made Agadir a place of interest to Europeans for the first time since
1774 (hence the city’s sudden reappearance in narratives of Western
international relations in 1911). The establishment of the French protec-
torate in 1912, however, pulled Morocco away from its North American
connections—as a “protectorate,” the Moroccan state no longer had
independent transatlantic relations—and for several decades Agadir’s
relations to the cultural- economic “West” were primarily through
Europe and through French Algeria.15 In this sense, Agadir became a
Mediterranean city. However, two sudden events would stimulate a new
orientation toward the Atlantic. The first was World War II; the second
was the 1960 earthquake.
Even before the landing of a North American army on the shores of
northwest Africa, the war prompted a renewed intensity of transatlantic
contacts. After the Fall of France in June 1940, French authorities in
Rabat sought American aid and trade to alleviate the economic hardships
caused by the collapse of the French metropole. The British grudgingly
consented, and a modest American aid program operated, with some
interruptions, until November 1942.16 As rumors of the impending Amer-
ican invasion spread, French prestige faltered and there were reports of
Moroccan troops “refusing to obey their French officers because they

Disaster and Decolonization 105

knew the Americans were coming.”17 In November 1942 they came, and
by the end of the month there were sixty-five thousand U.S. soldiers in
Morocco.18 Along with these troops came American lend-lease and an
end to the partial British blockade: Morocco was “now open again to
the markets of the world.”19
Most American forces were evacuated from North Africa at the end of
World War II, including those at a wartime base at Agadir, but the United
States maintained a naval presence at Port Lyautey, just north of Rabat.
The Cold War soon precipitated a re-expansion of the American military
presence. A 1950 agreement with France permitted the construction
of three new Strategic Air Command (SAC ) bases, making Morocco
an important part of the American nuclear deterrent against a Soviet
assault on Western Europe.20 Again, economic contacts accompanied
military ones. A new commercial boom occurred after the war, based
on the export of fruit, canned fish, and minerals, some of which was
destined for American markets. As in other parts of Morocco, American
imports began to arrive, including cars and durable goods for the benefit
of the more well-to- do colons and the Moroccan elite. Agadir was far
from the postwar American bases of northern and central Morocco, and
the garrison just outside of the city was French: consequently, it was
the United States’ economic influence that was most notable.21 In 1960,
however, American troops would return to Agadir, to rescue victims
of the earthquake and—some hoped—to rescue the American bases
of northern Morocco from the continuing process of decolonization.

The Built Environment

Compared to Moroccan cities such as Rabat, Casablanca, or Fez, pre-
earthquake Agadir exhibited a more limited imprint of the French
colonial philosophy of the 1910s and 1920s promoted by Morocco’s first
French resident-general, Hubert Lyautey, and his chief urban planner,
Henri Prost. Lyautey had hoped that urban planning in Morocco would
be a remedy to the two things he hated most: French republican uni-
versalism on the one hand, and cultural hybridization on the other. For
Janet Abu-Lughod, Lyautist urbanism amounted to a system of “cul-
tural and religious apartheid.” This system was based on the creation

106 SPENCER SEGALLA

of new European districts separated from the Moroccan city centers,
or medinas, by greenspaces or cordons sanitaires (sanitary cordons) to
minimize cultural contamination. The result was “minimum alteration in
the Moroccan quarters” accompanied by “the design and construction of
the most modern, efficient, elegant cities that Europe could produce.”22
However, Agadir’s growth as a French city did not begin until the
1930s, when “pacification” neared completion. By 1931 the population
had reached approximately 3,900, including 1,650 Europeans,23 and
rampant land speculation led to the declaration of an official urban
development plan in 1932.24 By this time, the influence of Lyautey and
Prost was waning in a new, settler- dominated Morocco. Nevertheless,
the 1932 plan, in Lyautist fashion, called for a new European “ville nou-
velle,” separated spatially from the two historic Moroccan quarters: the
towering heights of the Kasbah, and the fishing hamlet Founti adjacent
to the beach below. The slopes of the Kasbah provided a sort of natural
cordon sanitaire, as did two riverbeds: the Wadi Tildi, which separated
the Talborjt and administrative plateaus from the Ville Nouvelle, and the
Wadi Tanaout, separating the Ville Nouvelle from the industrial quarter.
On the Talborjt plateau, however, geography and events were already
producing a spatially separated commercial-residential center, which
attracted both Europeans and Moroccans. This district, not the Ville Nou-
velle, remained the heart of the city. As the Moroccan population had
grown in the overcrowded Kasbah and Founti, which could not expand
due to the steepness of the slope abutting the Kasbah, Moroccans had
moved into the Talborjt, where they were soon joined by Europeans.25
As a result, unlike Rabat or even Casablanca, where residential segrega-
tion broke down as new neighborhoods were built beyond the initial
Ville Nouvelle, the Lyautist separation in Agadir was not just imperfect
but peripheral to the life of the city. At its core, Agadir remained an
ethnically integrated city.
During the postwar economic recovery, construction blossomed in
both the Talbordjt and the Ville Nouvelle. By the early 1950s the total
population had grown to around forty thousand, including close to fif-
teen thousand Europeans. The tourist industry also began to develop,
as new hotels were constructed and the International Federation of

Disaster and Decolonization 107

Travel Agencies promoted Agadir as the “Moroccan Nice,” “Pearl of the
South,” and “city of three hundred days of sunshine.”26 Boom, however,
was followed by bust. Crises in agriculture and in the cannery business
between 1955 and 1958 converged with political crisis, as Moroccan
independence provoked an exodus of Europeans. In Agadir the Euro-
pean population dropped to 4,700 by 1959. Only the tourist industry
seemed to be thriving: the city’s two hundred first-class rooms and sixty
second-class rooms were, reportedly, fully booked when the earthquake
struck.27 Over-construction of both buildings and roads gave observers
the sense of a half-empty city: “one sees there a network of roads, often
unnecessary, delimiting numerous vacant lots, interspersed with a small
number of buildings.”28 To Pierre Mas, planner of the new Agadir, the
old Agadir was “inorganic, dissolute, a city with neither a center nor
coherence.”29 This critique would have discursive staying power, and
would be echoed in critiques of the new, post-earthquake Agadir as well.

Quake and Decolonization

The morning after the earthquake, King Mohammed V and Crown
Prince Hassan flew to Agadir, and the king put Hassan in charge of
rescue operations. This was not, however, solely a Moroccan event.
The French military base just outside of the city had been spared, and
the U.S. military presence at Port Lyautey and the three SAC air bases
meant that foreign forces would play a prominent role in the immediate
response, alongside Royal Moroccan Army troops arriving from around
the kingdom. Because Agadir was destroyed by an earthquake rather
than by fire, war, or flood, the city became connected to an international
network of information, individuals, and organizations interested in
the study of earthquakes and the mitigation of earthquake hazards. A
team of West German engineers and scientists accompanied the German
consul to Casablanca on an inspection of the site, and they were soon
followed by engineers from the American Iron and Steel Institute and
by Japanese seismologists.30 In the global press, Agadir was discussed
in terms of a category of cities including San Francisco, Santiago, Mes-
sina, and Tokyo.31 In the discourse of disasters, the earthquake had
made Agadir a global city.

108 SPENCER SEGALLA

 Although the press around the world and the diplomatic cable
networks buzzed with expressions of global solidarity and universal
humanity, some responses were less sanguine, situating the disaster
within French imperial contexts rather than global-tectonic ones. In
such accounts, the disaster in Agadir could not be viewed separately
from decolonization and the Cold War. A month after the disaster, the
president of Liberia, William Tubman, accused the French of causing the
earthquake by conducting nuclear arms tests at Reggane in the Algerian
Sahara on February 13.32 This idea was also reflected in a memoir by
a French officer at the base outside Agadir, who described the anger
of Moroccans arriving at the base immediately after the earthquake,
which the officer attributed to their belief that the atomic tests had
caused the earthquake.33 The specter of man-made causes might have
been linked to the memory of the Fréjus dam collapse, a man-made
disaster that had initially been mistaken for an earthquake, or to the
resemblance of the disaster’s aftermath to a war zone akin to Dresden
or Hiroshima. Clearly, however, commentators who were intimately
engaged with the experiences of colonialism and decolonization, and
the terrors of the Cold War, saw the Agadir earthquake in terms of these
geopolitical events.
This was true for those French officials and politicians who linked the
disaster to their anxieties about France’s crumbling empire. Emotions
flared in Tangier, the most international of Moroccan cities. Concerns
about France’s new, post-independence relationship with Morocco
erupted, concerns that centered on the apparent lack of a sense of
dependence on the part of the Moroccan leadership and on fears of
France’s waning influence vis-à-vis other foreign powers in the kingdom.
Pierre Bouffanais, the French minister plenipotentiary at the Tangier
consulate, accused Radiodiffusion Marocaine of “pettiness” and “dis-
loyalty” for “systematically minimizing the contributions of the French
armed forces in organizing relief.”34 Crown Prince Hassan had declared
in a speech that a new Agadir would be inaugurated on March 2, 1961,
and had connected this inauguration with the five-year anniversary of
Morocco’s independence. According to Bouffanais, the French of Tangier
interpreted this speech as a continuation of Moroccan “anti-French

Disaster and Decolonization 109

excitation campaigns” and had “reacted forcefully” against this alleged
ingratitude. The result was that the colonists’ “initial grand élan of
solidarity with all the victims” became more “nuanced,” and the French
community quickly shifted their generosity toward the goal of assist-
ing only the French disaster victims, making it difficult to coordinate
relief efforts with the Moroccan authorities. French colonists, accord-
ing to Bouffanais, also denounced the hostility and incompetence of
the Moroccan state, characterized by “panic and inefficiency” as well
as by publicity-seeking egotism. Bouffanais linked this purportedly
new “cleavage” between Moroccans and foreigners to networks link-
ing Morocco to the Arab world, “where Islam reigns, [and] where the
forces of pan-Arabism are unleashed.”35
By March 12 the uproar in Tangier had reached Paris. Senator Bernard
Lafay formally asked whether the Ministry of Foreign Affairs might
request that the Red Cross conduct an inquiry into the “hesitations” and
“counter-orders” that had resulted in the deaths of individuals, buried
in the ruins, who might have been saved by quick and resolute action.36
More explicitly, Paris Jour accused Crown Prince Hassan of misconduct
for his decision to halt rescue operations on the third day after the earth-
quake. This anti-Moroccan hostility alarmed French diplomats in Rabat,
who pointed out that Hassan was one of France’s most important allies
within the Moroccan government. For French and American diplomacy,
the most vital issue was the future of foreign troops on Moroccan soil.
The French embassy feared that the anti-Moroccan sentiments expressed
in Tangier might undermine any possibility that the positive role played
by the French base in Agadir would soften the Palace’s demands for the
evacuation of all French bases.37 Attempts to remedy the situation fol-
lowed, including a conciliatory visit by Senator Lafay to Morocco and
a statement of gratitude by the Moroccan state’s Service of Press and
Information, broadcast by Radiodiffusion-Television in Paris.38
This did not end the hostilities in the press. On March 21 the Moroccan
newspaper Al Istiqlal accused Lafay and the French press of insensitiv-
ity toward Moroccan suffering and of violating Moroccan sovereignty
by questioning Moroccan handling of internal affairs. (When catastro-
phe had struck Fréjus, the paper noted, Moroccans had sent donations

110 SPENCER SEGALLA

without meddling in French domestic matters.)39 Meanwhile, Europe-
Magazine in Brussels mocked Moroccan ambitions for base evacuation
and for the reconstruction of Agadir (“With what money? Undoubtedly
with ours, and that of the other European powers, and America.”)40
André Figueres, in Figaro, blamed the French left for handing over
power to such incompetents: the problem, for him, was inherent in
decolonization, which spelled doom for the accomplishments of the
colonial period.41
Critics on the French right soon shifted their targets from the Moroc-
can monarchy to the French state’s alleged neglect of the survivors. Two
years before the independence of Algeria in 1962, when the stream of
repatriated colonists would become a flood, hostility toward an inde-
pendent North Africa was already linked to the concerns of repatriated
French refugees—as it would be in the politics of the far right in France
for the next four decades. Lafay became a supporter of victims’ orga-
nizations in Agadir,42 and a Figaro article by General Bethouart titled
“Le scandale d’Agadir” accused the French government of a double
standard with regard to French citizens. According to Bethouart, the
state favored the victims of the disasters in Orleansville and Fréjus and
neglected those of Agadir: “For the administration, the French victims
of cataclysm occurring abroad have rights to nothing. . . . There are thus
two categories of French, treated differently: those of the metropole
or overseas departments and those abroad.”43 After 1962 the politics of
decolonization and repatriation would center on the fate of Algeria’s
pieds noirs, who migrated to France by the hundreds of thousands at
the end of the Algerian War of Independence. Since the mid-1950s,
however, increasing numbers of French colonists had been repatriating
from Morocco and Tunisia as well as Algeria, and in 1960, when the
French exodus from Agadir occurred, the decolonization of Algeria did
not yet seem inevitable.44 Bethouart’s concern about the commitment
of the French state to Agadir’s French refugees was intertwined with
fears that the government was turning its back on colonists through-
out the declining empire. In Bethouart’s essay, however, such fears did
not extend to the French victims of the Orleansville quake; Bethouart
still depicted Algeria as securely French. The Agadir earthquake thus

Disaster and Decolonization 111

unearthed fault lines among French attitudes regarding the process of
decolonization and the future of the French empire.

Disaster Diplomacy, Reconstruction, and the “Battle of the Plans”

The dissatisfaction expressed by the French press in Tangier and Paris
with Moroccan “ingratitude” for the French military’s disaster response
operation was also linked to official French hopes for what scholars
would later term “disaster diplomacy,” and to fears about the growing
influence of the United States.45 When the quake hit, French airmen
from the nearby naval base arrived quickly, as did a French fleet on
March 2, along with American sailors and airmen from Port Lyautey
and American air bases in Morocco, followed by the USS Newport News
the following day.46 Both French and American diplomats hoped that
disaster aid would facilitate negotiations over base tenure, but expressed
frustration with the resulting press coverage.47
The Moroccan press and the Palace were quick to capitalize on the
apparent crassness of French hopes that gratitude for disaster aid would
translate into the extension of the French military presence. On March
12, Minister of Information Ahmed el Alaoui stated that “Aid from a
foreign country in such a catastrophe does not mean the foreign country
has a right to bases there.”48 The Istiqlali Arabic-language daily, Al Alam,
was more acerbic, stating that if disaster aid were to result in permission
to maintain bases, then it was the Americans and Spanish who should
keep their bases, since, according to the paper, these countries had
played the largest role in rescue efforts. The paper asserted sarcasti-
cally that Moroccans might as well invite Italy and West Germany to
establish bases.49
The weekly Al Istiqlal was less hostile but equally firm, expressing
gratitude for the French military’s rescue efforts but arguing that the
hazards of the Cold War era outweighed any benefits that might derive
from the foreign bases: “The Agadir catastrophe should be, for us, an
additional reason to demand the evacuation of foreign troops. The hor-
ror which this city experienced for several seconds is nothing compared
to the terrible effects of war, and it is to at least shelter our country
from these human follies that we seek evacuation.”50 The editorial also

112 SPENCER SEGALLA

warned against letting the earthquake become a distraction from the
pursuit of Moroccan control of the Sahara, from opposition to French
atomic testing at Reggane (portrayed as Moroccan territory), or from
the Algerian problem. The author concluded with a call to rebuild “not
only a new Agadir, but also, and above all, a new Morocco.”51
For those elites who were able to give public voice to their vision for
the post- earthquake rebuilding of Agadir, there was a powerful mod-
ernist consensus about the goals for reconstruction. Al Istiqlal’s linkage
of the city’s recovery to the future of the nation as a whole was shared
by King Mohammed V, who desired an ambitious plan for a new city
that would be “an expression of modern Morocco.”52 One of the earliest
enunciations of the idea that the Agadir disaster had created a unique
opportunity (a common response to modern earthquakes) was found
in the report by the West German technical assistance team, which
concluded by declaring that

The unique possibility offered by the reconstruction of the new

Agadir should be fully utilized. . . . [D]ecisions concerning the recon-
struction of the city, and the plans, should of course be governed
by the general welfare of the city, without any consideration for
certain private interests. This is the only way to build a new modern
Agadir. Certain mistakes made in the past could be avoided, and the
city could become an example of a modern progressive Morocco.53

The authoritarian disregard for private interests embodied in this

modernist response provided an opportunity for a Moroccan monarchy
interested in consolidating its power over the country. This was not
at all unprecedented: ambitious urban planning had long been linked
to authoritarian rule, and disasters have often provided opportunities
for authoritarian modernism. The destruction and reconstruction of
Lisbon in the eighteenth century had provided the opportunity for the
rise of Carvalho’s absolutism in Portugal. In 1830s France, cholera epi-
demics had spurred some intellectuals to advocate “the equivalent of
a technician’s coup d’etat, arguing that only a planned and hierarchi-
cally coordinated effort was adequate to the crisis. Engineers could
save France, but only if far-reaching changes in private property were

Disaster and Decolonization 113

undertaken.”54 In contrast, grand urban schemes after the Great Fire of
London in 1666 and the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 were stymied
by the assertions of property rights by the bourgeoisie.55 Hassan would
not allow this to happen in Agadir, and he initiated a vast project of
property expropriation and state regulation of reconstruction.56 This
approach was enthusiastically endorsed by planners such as Mourad
Ben Embarek at the Moroccan Service of Urbanism. For Ben Embarek,
one only needed to look north across the Mediterranean to Spain to see
a coastline that had been “ravaged” by a lack of regulation.57 For the
monarchy, Agadir was important not just as a laboratory for the asser-
tion of royal power but because of its historic role as a crucial outpost
for the assertion of northern Moroccan power over the south, a role it
would reprise in the 1975 Green March.
In 1960, however, planning for permanent reconstruction quickly
became a field of controversy and contestation, in what became known
at the time as the “Battle of the Plans.” Reconstruction became a test
of the ability of the Moroccan sovereign to respond to the needs of the
nation, for the French to maintain their influence in the post- colony,
and for the Americans to demonstrate their resolve as Morocco’s new
benefactors. On March 4, Crown Prince Hassan outlined his vision to
the American ambassador, Charles Yost, and requested an “imaginative,
modern” American planner.58 Over the next several days it became clear
that Hassan sought as much American support as possible. American
budgetary concerns were offset by the fear, voiced also by the British,
that the Soviet Union might step in with “a spectacular offer of aid which
Morocco would be unable to refuse.”59 French reluctance, meanwhile,
was mitigated by the fear of losing, to the Americans, their role as the
primary provider of technical assistance. The French state arranged
for the renowned planner Le Corbusier to visit Morocco, but he failed
to reach an agreement with Moroccan authorities, who reportedly
refused to offer him the free hand he required.60 Instead, the contract
was awarded in April 1960 to the American Harland Bartholomew,
chairman of the Washington DC National Capitol Planning Commission,
paid for by the U.S. State Department.61
By inviting Bartholomew to Agadir, the Moroccan monarchy appeared

114 SPENCER SEGALLA

to usher in a new era of transatlantic connections in urbanism. The
American role in the planning of “New Agadir” proved fleeting, however.
A year later, in August 1961, the Moroccan government abandoned the
plan developed by Bartholomew. Several factors were involved in this
decision. The Moroccan authorities complained that Bartholomew’s
firm lacked commitment to the project and that Bartholomew’s initial
proposals were too vague, too ambitious, and too costly. Opposition
also came from the professional urbanists and architects at the Moroc-
can Service of Urbanism, who began developing an alternative plan.62
These Francophone professionals, working within the Ministry of Public
Works, saw the hiring of Bartholomew as an affront; they were already
chafing at the decision to bring an American, George Schobinger, to
Rabat to oversee housing projects.63 There was also a divide between
the pro-American minister of public works, Abderrahmane ben Abde-
lali, who reportedly aspired to a post as Moroccan ambassador to the
United States, and the pragmatist governor of Agadir, Mohamed Ben-
hima, who wanted a plan that could be implemented more readily in
order to house the displaced population of the city.64 When Abdelali
was engulfed in an embezzlement scandal involving the Agadir recon-
struction fund, Benhima was appointed minister of public works, and
the Palace rescinded plans for an American-designed “New Agadir.”65
This turn of events constituted a victory for France’s position as
Morocco’s primary provider of technical assistance, and was pivotal in
shaping Agadir’s future relation to the cultural and touristic worlds of
the French Mediterranean. Due to efforts to “Moroccanize” the newly
independent Moroccan state, the Service of Urbanism was directed by
Abdesalem Faraoui, and then Mourad Ben Embarek, who rose rapidly
from his position as an intern in February 1960 to succeed Faraoui.66
There was, however, no discernible dichotomy between the Service
of Urbanism’s French and Moroccan professionals in terms of their
approach to urbanism.67 According to historian Thierry Nadau, who
interviewed the principal planners and architects, Faroui and Ben
Embarek were “little influenced by traditional architecture, [and
were] even hostile to the medinas in which they had grown up.”68
Having received their professional training in postwar France,69 they

Disaster and Decolonization 115

had imbibed little of the Lyautist anti-assimilationism promoted in the
pre-1945 schools of the protectorate and embraced by much nationalist
discourse. Under the leadership of Faraoui and Ben Embarek, the heart
of the Agadir design team consisted of the urban planner Pierre Mas
and the landscape architect Jean Challet, who would lead a group of
European and Moroccan architects to design state- owned buildings in
modernist style, and to set the guidelines imposed on private builders.70
The new Agadir, as designed by these French and Moroccan urban-
ists, reflected the prevailing modernist ideas of the postwar era, ideas
that diverged from the principles of cultural segregation that had domi-
nated urbanism in Morocco under Lyautey and Prost (Paul Rabinow’s
“middling modernism”) in favor of Corbusier’s functionalist, univer-
salist modernism. The rise and fall of Vichy had largely discredited
Lyautey’s “culturalism” in French colonial thinking, and in 1944 the
Office of European Habitat had taken on the task of housing the Moroc-
can population and had dropped the word “European” from its name.71
As Rabinow points out, under Michel Ecochard, Lyautey’s fetishiza-
tion of Moroccan culture and tradition was replaced by Ecochard’s
universalist “neglect, which bordered on contempt, of economic and
political considerations,” and his “refusal to acknowledge local prac-
tices.”72 This attitude toward Moroccan urban planning guided Mas,
the leading designer of the new Agadir, who has been described as the
“spiritual successor of Ecochard.”73 Ben Embarek later presented the
reconstruction of Agadir as a welcome opportunity for Le Corbusier to
make his mark on Africa indirectly, through the impact he had made
on the younger generation.74
The new shape of the city was conditioned by both tectonic and cul-
tural shifts. The earthquake had destroyed the “traditional” Kasbah. It
would not be rebuilt. This was due, on the one hand, to seismologists’
advice against rebuilding north of the Wadi Tildi, and on the other,
to the fact that Lyautey’s fetishization of Moroccan tradition was no
longer in vogue among Francophone urbanists. Architects designing
individual buildings such as the new modernist city hall drew loose
inspiration from the architectural traditions of southern Morocco, but
this Moroccan-inspired modernism represented the sort of cultural

116 SPENCER SEGALLA

hybridity that Lyautey had despised.75 Moreover, the urban planners,
according to Mas, aimed to “link the quarters by means of constructed
elements, creating a sense of urban unity and avoiding all social segre-
gation.”76 This was the antithesis of Lyautism.
Seismic considerations tempered the ambitions of the modernists:
unlike much of housing development in Morocco since 1947, there would
be no high-rises.77 In other respects, however, the planners undertook
to reshape the natural environment. A new urban unity, hitherto made
impossible by geography, was to be achieved by eliminating the division
created by the ravine of the Wadi Tanaout: the ravine was filled in with
debris from collapsed buildings, and an aqueduct was constructed with
reinforced concrete to handle the water flow. According to Mas, “This
operation permitted the unification of the site of the new city, making
disappear a geological accident troublesome for its development.”78 The
old ravine, a division in the urban terrain, was replaced by a pedestrian
walkway connecting the commercial center to the beach.79
It is important to recognize that the nadir of urban Lyautism in the
1960s was also the result of structural and demographic changes in
Moroccan cities in general and earthquake-ravaged Agadir in particular.
What place was there for the Lyautey legacy of cultural separation and
modernism-for-Europeans, if the old medina was gone and the Europe-
ans were leaving? The disaster had greatly accelerated the shrinking of
the European population, a process begun by political independence
and economic crisis. Tectonics had destroyed the old city; demography
meant that the new city was intended for Moroccans. Yet, as Rabinow
has noted, it was the culture of postwar urbanism that led the new city’s
designers to treat Agadir’s residents as cultureless, universal inhabitants
of a theoretical modern world.80

The Anti-Agadir Reaction: “A City without a Soul”

The seismic intrusion into Morocco’s human history in 1960 created
a disruption in French hegemony, as alarmed voices from the French
right and the Tangier settler press recognized. This event provided an
opportunity for the Moroccan monarchy to assert its authority, and
opened the door to new forms of American influence. Nevertheless,

Disaster and Decolonization 117

France salvaged its role as Morocco’s provider of technical assistance
in the field of urbanism. The destruction of Agadir permitted Morocco’s
urban planners to apply their Corbusierian ideas of universalist modern-
ism on the scale of an entire city, untainted by the legacy of Lyautey’s
effort to ensure that Moroccan cities preserve an essentialist conception
of Moroccan culture.
The planners’ vision of urban modernity was soon countered by dis-
courses about the new Agadir that emerged after the official completion
of reconstruction in 1965. Agadir, with its modernist design centered
around a Mediterranean-style beach resort, became a pervasive symbol
of disorientation and rootlessness. This view was conveyed in Moham-
med Khaïr-Eddine’s 1967 novel Agadir, in professional and academic
discussions about urban design, and in popular discourse.
By 1967, Agadir was already being described as a city “without a
soul,” a meme still popular in Morocco today.81 In 1973 the Belgian
architect Jean Dethier argued that the division of the city into func-
tional quarters had “atomized” the urban environment, separating it
into disconnected sections,82 and that the post- quake city (like the pre-
quake one) was too spread out and insufficiently dense: “This dispersion
[éclatement] of the modern city, established in all good faith in the
name of hygiene, space, and circulation, annihilates in large measure the
sentiment of the city, of community and animation.”83 The description
of the new city bears a noteworthy resemblance to Mas’s description of
pre-earthquake Agadir. But in Dethier’s post-earthquake critique, it was
more than just a lack of urban density that killed the soul of the city:
the modernist attention to open spaces and function had produced “a
series of yawning, solemn spaces, and abstract and imperative zones.”84
Dethier argued that postwar urbanism’s disregard for culture and
local tradition was based on an imperialist assertion of the Western as
universal. He argued for a new urbanism that would “permit the aboli-
tion of systems of mental, economic, and technical dependence on the
rich countries, and favor the development of new authentic cultures in
the third world.”85 For Dethier, the Corbuserian modernists, however
well intentioned, were neocolonialists, practicing “a new paternalism,
oppressive and constraining.”86

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 Condemnations of the new Agadir found fertile ground not only
in the ideas of European critics like Dethier but also in the culture
promoted by the Moroccan monarchy. King Hassan II, who as crown
prince had been the driving force behind the reconstruction of Agadir,
began advocating a Moroccan modernity that was rooted in Morocco’s
history and Islamic heritage. After Agadir, Hassan’s building projects
promoted traditional crafts and architecture.87 This royal traditional-
ism was echoed in the arabesque “green tile” trends noted by Thierry
Nadau in the architectural choices of the Moroccan elite in the 1980s
and 1990s.88
In 1986 the king gave a speech in which he urged architects to
“preserve the characteristics and beauty of our country” and to see
themselves as bearers of Moroccan heritage.89 Agadir became the antith-
esis of this approach to Moroccan architectural discourse and practice,
and descriptions of Agadir as a “dead city, without a soul and without
a center” appeared repeatedly in the work of students graduating from
the National School of Architecture in Rabat.90 At a conference in Agadir
in 1994, Moroccan scholar Mohammed Charef described Agadir as “a
city orphaned of its past and its memory, reconstructed by adopting
the image of the Occident, in style as in organization. The inhabitants
find themselves with difficulty within this mechanistic conception; they
feel lost, crushed, and would have certainly imagined a different city
conforming to their culture, if one had asked their opinion. Yet this
conversation did not happen, leading to the ambiguous detachment
from the central space which reflects both ‘fear’ and ‘indifference.’”91
Like Dethier, Charef connected Agadir’s soullessness to its modernist
use of space and to the crushing cultural violence of a neo-imperialist
universalism.
Worldwide, criticisms of modernist urban planning have been wide-
spread and intense. In Morocco, however, critiques of the new Agadir not
only expressed anxieties about Western domination and globalization
but also reflected a nationalist desire to assert and defend the integrity
of a unitary Moroccan culture against claims of French universalism.
The lament that Agadir is “without a soul” echoed the fears of Resident-
General Lyautey that social and cultural hybridity or assimilation might

Disaster and Decolonization 119

lead to the atomization of Moroccan society, suggesting the persistence
of protectorate- era ideas about urbanism’s role in preserving cultural
identity.92
This discourse of Agadir as a city without a soul suggests that,
although the earthquake facilitated a break with traditionalist urban
design in Agadir, this break fed anxieties that contributed to a back-
lash against the Franco-universalist ideas of the city’s planners.93 The
monarchy’s recent support for monumental architecture in Casablanca
and ambitious urban renewal in Rabat-Salé now suggests a shift in
Morocco’s urban inspiration away from the Franco-Mediterranean
toward the examples of the Persian Gulf ’s “global cities,” particularly
Doha and Dubai.94 Recent economic catastrophes in both the Gulf and
the Mediterranean might disrupt this trend, however, with the seismic
future of both regions remaining largely unpredictable.

NOTES
The writing of this chapter was made possible by funding from the University of
Tampa’s David Delo Research Grant and Dana Foundation Grant, and by Pollock
Research Professor Grants. I would like to thank the editors of this volume and
members of the Florida Maghreb group—Ann Wainscott, Adam Guerin, Amelia
Lyons, and Darcie Fontaine—for their valuable input on my early drafts; any flaws
that remain are my own.
1. Mohamed Charef, “Agadir, une ville orpheline de son passé,” in La ville d’Agadir:
Reconstruction et politique urbaine (Agadir: Royaume du Maroc, Université Ibn
Zohr, 1997), 167–80.
2. See Ted Steinberg, “Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History,” Ameri-
can Historical Review 107 (2002): 798–820.
3. Wolf Schäfer, “Global History and the Present Time,” in Wiring Prometheus: Glo-
balisation, History and Technology, ed. Peter Lyth and Helmut Trischler (Aarhus:
Aarhus University Press, 2004), available at www.stonybrook.edu/globalhistory/PDF
/GHAndThePresentTime.pdf, 108.
4. Globalism in thinking about earthquakes predated seismic wave theory. In addi-
tion to provoking theological conclusions about divine punishment and debates
among French philosophes about the rightness of the cosmos, the 1755 Lisbon-
Meknes earthquake prompted thinkers such as Llano Zapata and Immanuel Kant
to draw upon Aristotelian precedents to link earthquakes to the physical structure
of an Earth riddled with tunnels of fire. Nicholas Shrady, The Last Day: Wrath,
Ruin, and Reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 (New York: Penguin,
2009), 43; Charles F. Walker, Shaky Colonialism: the 1746 Earthquake-Tsunami in

120 SPENCER SEGALLA

 Lima, Peru, and Its Long Aftermath (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 23.
Tectonic plate theory has also focused attention on the global character of these
disasters, and the responses to the 1960 Agadir earthquake were conditioned by
this attention. For modern manifestations of seismology’s influence on globalist
thinking in scientific and popular culture, see Deborah R. Coen, The Earthquake
Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2013), 163–86.
5. Pierre Mas, “Plan directeur et plans d’aménagement,” A+U: Revue Africaine
d’Architecture et d’Urbanisme 4 (1966): 6. All English translations are by the author
unless otherwise noted.
6. These planners followed the principles developed in 1933 by the European urban-
ists of the Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne (CIAM ), most notably
Le Corbusier, who had used the Mediterranean as an international platform for
the development of a modernist manifesto, the “Athens Charter,” while sailing
from Marseille to Athens and back. Jean Dethier, “Soixante ans d’urbanisme au
Maroc,” Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc, nos. 118–19 (1970): 34–35; Eli
Rubin, “The Athens Charter,” Themenportal Europäische Geschichte, at http://www.
europa.clio-online.de/site/lang__de/ItemID__372/mid__12201/ 40208770/Default
.aspx; John Gold, “Creating the Charter of Athens: CIAM and the Functional City,
1933– 43,” Town Planning Review 69 (1998): 225– 47.
7. Eric Wiebelhaus-Brahm, “Globalization, Modernity, and Their Discontents” (August
27, 2002), available at SSRN : http://ssrn.com/abstract=1666871 or http://dx.doi.org
/10.2139/ssrn.1666871, p. 7.
8. For example, Pierre Loti, In Morocco (Au Maroc), trans. W. P. Baines (New York:
Stokes, 1930); Edith Wharton, In Morocco (New York: Hippocrene, 1984).
9. Julia Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migra-
tion, c. 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 13.
10. For example, Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Envi-
ronment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Janet Abu-Lughod, Rabat:
Urban Apartheid in Morocco (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Ken-
neth Brown, People of Salé: Tradition and Change in a Moroccan City 1830–1930
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976); Jamila Bargach, “Rabat: From
Capital to Global Metropolis,” in The Evolving Arab City: Tradition, Modernity and
Urban Development, ed. Yasser Elsheshtawy (London: Routledge, 2008), 99–117.
11. Richard Smith, Ahmad al-Mansur: Islamic Visionary (New York: Longman, 2006).
12. The Alaouite sultan’s closure of the Agadir port in favor of Mogador (Essaouira)
was most likely related to the independent-mindedness of the Agadir region’s
segmented society, an episode in the long, complex interactions between the
Moroccan makhzan, or central state, and the blad al-siba, the lands beyond direct
control of the sultan (literally, the “land of dissidence”). Abu-Lughod, Rabat, 79–
80; M. Péré, “Agadir, ville nouvelle,” Revue de Géographie du Maroc 12 (1967): 44.
On makhzan and siba see Edmund Burke III, “The Image of the Moroccan State

Disaster and Decolonization 121

 in French Ethnological Literature: a New Look at the Origins of Lyautey’s Berber
Policy,” in Arabs and Berbers, ed. Ernest Gellner and Charles Micaud (Lexington
MA : D. C. Heath, 1972), 175–99; and Patricia Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyp-
ing, Prejudice, and Race in Colonial Algeria (New York: I. B. Tauris, 1995), 227–28.
Seismic events also played a role in the eighteenth-century history of Morocco’s
Atlantic ports. As Abu-Lughod recounts, Agadir was struck by a severe earthquake
in 1731, with reportedly total destruction, but soon recovered. The 1755 Lisbon/
Meknes earthquake may have played a significant role in the decline of Rabat in
the late 1700s, exacerbating the tidal and/or sandbar inconveniences of the Bou
Regreg harbor. Abu-Lughod notes that there is some uncertainty about both the
environmental and political events.
13. Schäfer, “Global History,” 109. See also Wolf Schäfer, “The New Global History:
Toward a Narrative for Pangaea Two,” Erwägen, Wissen, Ethik 14, no. 1 (2003): 76,
available at http://www.stonybrook.edu/globalhistory/PDF/Hauptartikel.pdf.
14. Péré, “Agadir,” 43– 44; Marie-France Dartois, Agadir et le sud marocain (Paris:
Editions de Courcelles, 2008), 476.
15. French rule after 1912 brought the construction of a new port, and European com-
merce increased as trucks operated by the Compagnie des transports marocains
began to transport goods in the region in the 1920s. As with the Portuguese and
then the Saadiens, the empire building of the French intensified Agadir’s relations
to the south as well as to the north, linking Agadir by sea and by air to Senegal.
Moreover, under the French, the city regained its Saadien-era importance as a stra-
tegic outpost for surveying the Sahara. Dartois, Agadir et le sud marocain, 490–97.
See also William Hoisington, “The Selling of Agadir: French Business Promotion
in the 1930s,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 18 (1985): 315–24.
16. William Hoisington, The Casablanca Connection (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1984), 194–218.
17. Hoisington, The Casablanca Connection, 221.
18. El-Mostapha Azzou, “La présence militaire américaine au Maroc, 1945–1963,”
Guerres Mondiales et Conflits Contemporains 2 (2003): 126.
19. Hoisington, The Casablanca Connection, 241.
20. Five SAC bases were authorized by the treaty; three were completed and operational
in 1960, at Ben Guerir, Sidi Slimane, and Nouacer. There were also several U.S.
Air Force communications and radar installations. Azzou, “La présence militaire
américaine,” 128–29.
21. Dartois, Agadir et le sud marocain, 553. However, economic ties to the United States
should not be overstated, especially in terms of their impact on U.S. policy, which
emphasized geostrategic goals. According to one U.S. State Department report,
“Economically, Morocco has no great importance to the U.S. nor is it likely to have
in the foreseeable future. Trade with the U.S. is small.” International Cooperation
Agency, “Country Economic Program,” September 2, 1959, United States Archives
and Records Administration [hereafter NARA ], RG 84, UD 300 5B , box 12. Even by

122 SPENCER SEGALLA

 1969, when phosphate exports had increased, trade with the United States made
up less than 4 percent of Moroccan exports and 7.5 percent of Moroccan imports.
Paul Zingg, “The Cold War in North Africa: American Foreign Policy and Postwar
Muslim Nationalism, 1945–1962,” The Historian 39 (1976): 44 n. 14.
22. Abu-Lughod, Rabat, 142, 144– 45. My discussion of urban history in Morocco is
heavily indebted to the work of Janet Abu-Lughod, Paul Rabinow, Jean Dethier,
and Thierry Nadau. Dethier and Rabinow have offered important critiques of Abu-
Lughod’s description of the cordon sanitaire as an effective barrier to intra-urban
migration and cultural mixing. Dethier, “Soixante ans d’urbanisme au Maroc,” 11;
Rabinow, French Modern, 300–301.
23. Péré, “Agadir,” 45.
24. Mas, “Plan directeur,” 7.
25. Péré, “Agadir,” 45.
26. Péré, “Agadir,” 48.
27. Péré, “Agadir,” 48– 49, 57.
28. Péré, “Agadir,” 50.
29. Mas, “Plan directeur,” 7.
30. The Japanese Ministry of Reconstruction sent two seismologists in April 1960
for a one-month mission; Japanese interest was also expressed by co-sponsoring
a UN resolution exhorting member countries to assist the people of Agadir, and
one of the French cooperants in Agadir, engineer Robert Ambroggi, was invited
to participate in a conference in Toyko in July 1960. Jean Daridan to Affaires
étrangères, April 7, 1960, archives of the Ministère des affaires étrangères, Centre
de la Courneuve [hereafter MAEC ], Maroc 1956–1968, box 9/10, folder “Généralités
1960”; Agenda Item 21, April 6, 1960, United Nations Economic and Social Council,
29th session, NARA , RG 59 UD - 07D , box 10, folder “Emergency Aid to Agadir”;
Hamer to ICA [International Cooperation Administration], May 25, 1960, NARA ,
RG 469, UD 376, box 330, folder “Morocco—Disasters: Earthquake.”
31. For example, “La liste déjà longue des grands séismes,” Figaro, March 2, 1960.
32. Homer Bigart, “Tubman Assails South Africans,” New York Times, March 24, 1960,
10.
33. Roger Le Toullec, Agadir 1960: Mémoire d’un séisme (Nantes: Éditions marines,
2002), 90.
34. Bouffanais to Parodi, March 3, 1960, MAEC , Maroc 1956–1968, box 9/10, folder
“Diplomatie Franco-Marocaine.”
35. Bouffanais to Parodi, March 3, 1960.
36. Bernard Lafay, “Question Écrite No. 708,” March 12, 1960, MAEC , Maroc 1956–
1968, box 9/10, folder “Diplomatie Franco-Marocaine.”
37. Le Roy to Affaires Étrangères, March 12, 1960, No. 305/308, MAEC , Maroc 1956–
1968, box 9/10, folder “Diplomatie Franco-Marocaine.” In late 1959 the United
States had agreed to evacuate its bases in 1963, but U.S. diplomacy continued to be
occupied with the preservation of this agreement, and with the goal of extending

Disaster and Decolonization 123

 the presence of U.S. troops in some other guise; the French would yield to Moroc-
can pressure and sign an evacuation agreement in September 1960. I. William
Zartman, “The Moroccan-American Base Negotiations,” Middle East Journal 18,
no. 1 (1964): 27– 40.
38. Benkirane to Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, March 22, 1960; Thibault to
Benkirane, March 28, 1960, MAEC . Maroc 1956–1968, box 9/10, folder “Généralités
1960.”
39. “De la calomnie,” Al Istiqlal, March 21, 1960, 2.
40. “Scandale à Agadir,” Europe-Magazine, March 30, 1960, extract in archives of the
Ministère des affaires étrangères, Nantes [hereafter MAEN ], Agadir Consulat,
15PO /1/box 378, folder “Divers notes.”
41. André Figueres, “Le crime d’Agadir,” Figaro [circa March 30, 1960], extract, MAEN ,
Agadir Consulat, 15PO /1/box 378, folder “Divers notes.”
42. Jestin to Ambafrance Rabat, April 30, 1960, MAEN , Rabat Ambassade 1956–1989,
box 827.
43. Bethouart, “Le scandale d’Agadir,” Figaro, April 5, 1960, MAEC , Maroc 1956–1968,
box 9/10, folder “Généralités 1960.”
44. Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2006), 271.
45. Cf. Jean-Christophe Gaillard, Ilan Kelman, and Ma Florina Orillos, “U.S.-Philippines
Military Relations after the Mt. Pinatubo Eruption in 1991: A Disaster Diplomacy
Perspective,” European Journal of East Asian Studies 8 (2009): 303.
46. Leon Borden Blair, Western Window in the Arab World (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1970), 272–76; Lt-Cmdr J. H. Fordham, “Agadir,” Postgraduate Medical Journal
36, no. 421 (November 1960): 652– 57.
47. Bouffanais to Affaires étrangères, March 4, 1960, and Jean Basdevant, Minis-
ter of Foreign Affairs, to French Embassy, Washington, March 9, 1960, MAEC ,
Maroc 1956–1968, box 9/10, folder “Généralités 1960”; Ambafrance to Affaires
Étrangères, March 7, 1960, MAEC , Maroc 1956–1968, box 9/10, folder “Diplomatie
Franco-Marocaine.”
48. “Morocco Assails French on Quake,” New York Times, March 13, 1960.
49. Excerpted and translated in Le Roy to Affaires étrangères, March 12, 1960, no.
1314/1316, MAEC , Maroc 1956–1968, box 9/10, folder “Diplomatie Franco-
Marocaine.”
50. “Des problèmes qui demeure,” Al Istiqlal, March 12, 1960, 3.
51. “Des problèmes qui demeure,” 3.
52. Rabat to ICA , March 31, 1960, NARA , RG 469, entry UD 376, ICA Deputy Director,
box 330, folder “Morocco: Disasters: Earthquake.”
53. Lehman, “The Reconstruction of Agadir,” trans. Language Services Section (Rabat:
United States Operations Mission to Morocco, April 1960).
54. Rabinow, French Modern, 39.

124 SPENCER SEGALLA

55. Shrady, The Last Day, 156–60; Kevin Rozario, “What Comes Down Must Go Up,” in
American Disasters, ed. Steven Biel (New York: New York University Press, 2001),
72–102.
56. The Moroccan state’s regulation and expropriation of property built upon the
legacy of the French colonial state. See Rabinow, French Modern, 290–93; Abu-
Lughod, Rabat, 168– 69.
57. Mourad Ben Embarek, “Tourisme et urbanisme,” A+U: Revue Africaine d’Architecture
et d’Urbanisme 4 (1966): 65.
58. Yost to State, March 4, 1960, NARA , RG 469, entry UD 376, ICA Deputy Director,
box 330, folder “Morocco: Disasters: Earthquake.”
59. Department of State, “Memorandum of Conversation,” March 14, 1960, NARA ,
RG 59, entry A 1 3109D , folder “M -2 Agadir Reconstruction.”
60. Thierry Nadau, “La reconstruction d’Agadir,” in Architectures françaises d’outre-mer,
ed. Maurice Culot and Jean-Marie Thivead (Liège: Mardaga, 1992), 150; Parodi to
Affaires étrangère, March 28, 1960, MAEC , Maroc 1956–1968, box 9/10, folder
“Reconstruction.”
61. U.S. Embassy/ICA Rabat to State, April 19, 1960, NARA , RG 469, entry UD 376,
ICA Deputy Director, box 330, folder “Morocco: Disasters: Earthquake.”
62. ICA , “Monthly Summary—August,” September 2, 1960, NARA , RG 469, entry
UD 376, ICA Deputy Director, box 331, folder “Morocco: Reports”; Nadau, “La
reconstruction d’Agadir,” 150.
63. Nadau, “La reconstruction d’Agadir,” 150; Marcus Gordon (State) to Joseph Brent
(ICA Rabat), May 2, 1960, NARA , RG 469, entry UD 376, ICA Deputy Director,
box 332, folder “Programs.”
64. Hamer (ICA Rabat), “Plans for Reconstruction of Agadir,” August 30, 1961, NARA ,
RG 469, ICA Deputy Director, entry UD 376, folder “D -G .”
65. Jestin to Ambafrance Rabat, June 8, 1961, MAEN , Rabat Ambassade 558PO /1,
box 828. See also SDECE , “Stagnation des Projets de Reconstruction d’Agadir,”
MAEC , Maroc 1958–1968, box 9/10, folder “Généralités 1960.”
66. Nadau, “La reconstruction d’Agadir,” 150.
67. “Memorandum of Conversation,” Thomas Larsen (U.S. Foreign Service) with André
Millot, Affaires étrangères, February 14, 1961, NARA , RG 59, entry 3109D , Box 1.
68. Nadau, “La reconstruction d’Agadir,” 160.
69. Dethier, “Soixante ans d’urbanisme au Maroc,” 37.
70. Nadau, “La reconstruction d’Agadir,” 49.
71. Dethier, “Soixante ans d’urbanisme au Maroc,” 27.
72. Rabinow, French Modern, 4.
73. Dethier, “Soixante ans d’urbanisme au Maroc,” 49.
74. Mourad Ben Embarek, “Chroniques africaines,” A+U: Revue Africaine d’Architecture
et d’Urbanisme 4 (1966), i.

Disaster and Decolonization 125

75. I thank Mohamed Bajalat for pointing out the echoes of the southern Moroccan
agadir (ksar or fortress), in the new Hôtel de Ville. However, as Dethier notes, even
the “neo-traditional” New Talborjt commercial district reflected modernist plan-
ning with putatively Moroccan inspiration, rather than Lyautist preservationism,
bearing greater resemblance to the postwar construction projects in Casablanca’s
Aïn Chock and Mohammedia’s new medina, with their “much less literal interpre-
tation” of the traditional medina, and the obvious “modernist influence of cubism
and Bauhaus.” Dethier, “Soixante ans d’urbanisme au Maroc,” 28.
76. Mas, “Plan directeur,” 11.
77. Dethier, “Soixante ans d’urbanisme au Maroc,” 39.
78. Mas, “Plan directeur,” 10. As Mas noted, aspects of the natural setting considered
more desirable were made integral to the new plan, such as the elevation of the
area that became the “new Talborjt,” hills in the residential areas, and dunes and
valleys in the beachfront zone designated for hotels.
79. Mas, “Plan directeur,” 10.
80. Rabinow, French Modern, 3.
81. Péré, “Agadir,” 89.
82. Dethier, “Soixante ans d’urbanisme au Maroc,” 35.
83. Dethier, “Soixante ans d’urbanisme au Maroc,” 48.
84. Dethier, “Soixante ans d’urbanisme au Maroc,” 48.
85. Dethier, “Soixante ans d’urbanisme au Maroc,” 6.
86. Dethier, “Soixante ans d’urbanisme au Maroc,” 35.
87. Jennifer Roberson, “The Changing Face of Morocco under King Hassan II,” Medi-
terranean Studies 22 (2014): 79. Hassan became king after his father died during
minor surgery in February 1961.
88. Nadau, “La reconstruction d’Agadir,” 160– 65.
89. Quoted in Mohamed Elyazghi, “Dialogues sur la ville: A Genèse,” in Urbanités en
recomposition: Dialogues sur la ville, textes et références: Commémorations du discours
royal adressé aux architectes à Marrakech (Rabat: Ministère de l’aménagement du
territoire, de l’urbanism, de l’habitat et de l’environnement, 2013), 18.
90. For example, Abderrahman Sbenter, “Eléments d’articulation urbaine, ville d’Agadir”
(Fin d’études thesis, École nationale d’architecture, Rabat, 1990), 58. For skeptical
views of the “sans âme” trope, see My Ahmed Achehaifi, “L’urbanisme moderne
à l’épreuve : Cas d’Agadir” (Fin d’études thesis, École nationale d’architecture,
Rabat, 1994), 131, 161, 195; Mohamed Ben Attou, “Agadir gestion urbaine, stratégies
d’acteurs et rôle de la société civile: Urbanisme opérationnel ou urbanisme de fait?”
Insaniyat: Revue Algérienne d’Anthropologie et des Science Sociales 22 (2003), http://
insaniyat.revues.org/6881, section 2.1; Mohamed Bajalat [interview], Libération
(March 12, 2011), www.libe.ma.
91. Charef, “Agadir,” 173.
92. Roberson notes that by attempting to define and preserve selected aspects of
Moroccan tradition, Hassan was following in the footsteps of Lyautey. Roberson,

126 SPENCER SEGALLA

 “Changing Face of Morocco,” 97. This shift can be seen as part of the monarchy’s
broader promotion of Islamic and traditionalist notions of Moroccan identity in
response to political threats from the left embodied in the 1965 student riots in
Casablanca. Ann Wainscott, “Opposition Failure or Regime Success? Education,
the Decline of the Left, and the Rise of Islamism in Post-Independence Morocco”
(unpublished manuscript, 2013). Synergy between the colonial theories of the
French right and the goals of anticolonial nationalists was not unique to Morocco.
See Eric Jennings, “Conservative Confluences, ‘Nativist’ Synergy: Reinscribing
Vichy’s National Revolution in Indochina, 1940–1945,” French Historical Studies
27 (2004): 601–35.
93. Such anxieties have done nothing to diminish the demographic and economic
growth of Agadir since 1960. Agadir’s population reached 346,106 in 2004. Haut-
Commissariat au plan, Recensement général de la population et de l’habitat de 2004:
Population légale du Maroc (2004).
94. Joomi Lee, “The Urban Politics of the Bouregreg Project: Monarchial politics of
Morocco and the Mobilization of Salé,” unpublished manuscript.

Disaster and Decolonization 127

5 The French Nation of Constantinople in the
Eighteenth Century as Reflected in the Saints
Peter and Paul Parish Records, 1740–1800

EDHEM ELDEM

The Church
Walking down the steep winding street leading from the famed Tower
of Galata to the bustling heart of the commercial district of Galata, one
may fail to notice a rather modest-looking building on the right-hand
side. The grayish structure could easily be mistaken for a small han,
one of these structures used to stock commodities and conduct business
in Ottoman cities, a local version of the fondaco. Yet a few incongru-
ous details belie such assumptions: a tiny, almost unnoticeable iron
campanile on the roof, a small and plain cross crowning the entrance
door, and just below it a Latin inscription: “D . O . M . ECCLESIA SS . AP .
PETRI et PAULI ORD . PP . PRAED .”1 It appears then that the building is
a church, or rather the visible part of a church, dedicated to the apostles
Peter and Paul, and entrusted to the Order of Preachers, also known as
the Dominicans. A reminder of Catholic presence in Galata, together
with the neighboring churches of Saint George and Saint Benedict, this
church also speaks of a time when churches needed to keep a very low
profile and hide their identity behind a grim and noncommittal facade,

131
quite different from the triumphal style adopted by later examples of
Christian architecture in Istanbul, such as Saint-Antoine on Pera Avenue
or Hagia Triada on Taksim Square. Saints-Pierre- et-Paul as it stands
today was built, or rather rebuilt, in 1841– 43 by the Swiss architect
Gaspare Fossati, who would later owe his reputation to the restoration
work conducted on Hagia Sophia in 1847. Architecturally speaking,
it illustrates the essence of Ottoman toleration toward non-Muslims
before the Reform Edict of 1856: although rather lavishly decorated
from within, and coupled with an impressive monastery, it remains
safely hidden from public gaze behind high walls and a grim facade.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, much like their places of worship, the
non-Muslim communities living in the Ottoman capital knew how to
blend into the scenery and make the best of the freedom they enjoyed
at the price of self-effacement.
The status of non-Muslim communities was uneven and depended on
the amount of legal or political protection they could foster and mobi-
lize. This was particularly true of foreigners, whose fate was a direct
reflection of the influence and credit of the ambassador or envoy they
were attached to and of the efficiency of the legal protection they were
granted through the capitulations. Non-Muslims who were subjects of
the sultan had a very different standing, based on their insertion into
Ottoman society as zimmis (tribute-paying non-Muslim Ottoman sub-
jects), that is, through the Islamic notion of the dhimma, which granted
them a considerable degree of autonomy and religious freedom in return
for political submission, the payment of a poll tax, and varying ways of
acknowledging a status of inferiority. If foreigners had the advantage
of diplomatic protection and capitulatory privileges, they were also
subject to the vicissitudes of politics and to the general weakness of
small communities with limited local rooting. Zimmis, on the contrary,
benefited from the power of numbers and of a total involvement in local
dynamics, while they suffered from the inherent fragility caused by the
uncertainties of a life of subjection combined with the stigma of reli-
gious difference. Not surprisingly, the existence of these two different
statuses inevitably led to overlaps, especially in the eighteenth century,
with some individuals wishing to make the best of both worlds. Marriage

132 EDHEM ELDEM

was a typical way in which such alliances could be forged, especially if
both sides belonged to the same faith and creed. Yet a more secular and
less personal device was also available to Ottoman non-Muslims seek-
ing admission into the ranks of the European “nations.” By acquiring a
berat (patent), they could become protégés, that is, enter the protection
of an ambassador or consul and thus gain access to the privileges and
exemptions guaranteed by the capitulations.2
Interestingly enough, throughout its long career the church of Saints
Peter and Paul seems to have deftly navigated the troubled waters of
the Levant in more or less the same way as some of its parishioners.
The origins of the church can be traced back to the thirteenth cen-
tury, when the church of Saint Paul was first established in Galata by
the Dominicans, possibly during the Latin occupation of the city; the
Gothic structure that still stands today, however, seems to have been
erected at around the turn of the fourteenth century. The conquest of
Constantinople by Mehmed II in 1453 brought no immediate disruption,
as the church benefited from the sultan’s magnanimity in return for
the Genoese’s peaceful surrender. Some twenty years later, however,
the church—the largest of Galata—was confiscated in order to be con-
verted into a mosque, and a couple of decades later it was given to an
incoming community of Moors expulsed from Granada by the Spanish
Reconquista. As the story goes, the dispossessed Dominicans took refuge
in the home of a certain Angelo Zaccaria, who helped them establish a
new church on the grounds of a modest chapel dedicated to Saint Peter.
The new Saint Peter, often named Saints Peter and Paul, flourished under
the patronage of the Magnifica Comunità di Pera, or what remained
of the Genoese colony, reduced to subjection under Ottoman rule after
1453.3 In 1608, in order to reduce the risk of seizure and dispossession
always looming over the churches of Constantinople, the priests of
Saint Peter managed to obtain an imperial decree (ferman) that placed
it under the protection of France, in the person of its ambassador at the
Sublime Porte. The seventeenth century was thus characterized by a
rather strange system whereby the church was funded by the Magnifica
Comunità, controlled by Venice, and nominally protected by France.
Following the dissolution of the Comunità in 1682 and a serious dispute

French Nation of Constantinople 133

with Venetian authorities over the possession of a sacred image, in
1705 the church passed from French protection to the outright author-
ity of the French ambassador. From that date on, Saints-Pierre- et-Paul
became the French parish of Galata, where the spiritual and ritual needs
of practically all the French community—traders, artisans, seafarers,
dragomans . . .—were met, alongside the major celebrations linked to
its French allegiance, such as prayers for the preservation of the king,
or a solemn mass on Saint Louis’s day.4

The Parish
The church of Saints Peter and Paul still holds a considerable number of
archival documents pertaining to its funding, properties, administration,
and major functions. Among these, the parish records are of particular
interest. The first volume, entirely kept in Latin and rather predictably
titled Liber I: Baptizatorum, Matrimoniorum et Mortuorum, records the
three major moments of the life of the parishioners from 1740 to 1823.
The overall volume of this documentation for the sixty-year period I
have chosen to study, from 1740 to 1800, can be broken down under
the following three categories: 1,075 baptisms, 299 marriages, and 893
deaths.5 These raw figures look rather convincing at first sight: a 3.5:1
ratio between baptisms and marriages seems rather plausible, as well
as a number of baptisms slightly superior to that of deaths. Yet a closer
look at the records’ contents reveals that the sample is far from pos-
sessing the kind of consistency and homogeneity that would make such
rough computations meaningful.
The most striking aspect of the data’s heterogeneous nature is the
relatively marginal representation of French subjects among recorded
individuals. Indeed, the fact that the church functioned as a parish for
the French nation should not be taken to mean that it serviced only the
French. Table 5.1 provides a rather accurate picture of this diversity.
Looking at baptismal records, it is rather striking that about one in five
were born to a French father, and only one in fifteen to a French mother.
These proportions are only slightly reduced when the same records
are filtered by removing multiple births to a same couple.6 Marriage
records give almost exactly the same figures; the proportion of French

134 EDHEM ELDEM

Table 5.1. Origin and gender of individuals in all parish records

National Baptisms Baptisms Marriages Deaths

origin (children) (parents)

Father Mother Father Mother Groom Bride Men Women

French 196 68 68 28 61 18 160 43

(18%) (6%) (14%) (6%) (20%) (6%) (25%) (17%)

Armenian 24 101 10 39 7 (2%) 21 5 (1%) 6 (2%)

(2%) (9%) (2%) (8%) (7%)

Greek 596 677 255 287 184 204 218 141

(55%) (63%) (51%) (58%) (61%) (68%) (34%) (55%)

Eastern 5 (0%) 34 5 (1%) 12 2 (1%) 9 (3%) 3 (0%) 1 (0%)

(3%) (2%)

Dalmatian 23 8 (1%) 10 4 (1%) 9 (3%) 7 (2%) 76 9 (3%)

(2%) (2%) (12%)

Italian 93 38 33 18 23 11 102 14
(9%) (4%) (7%) (4%) (8%) (4%) (16%) (5%)

Spanish 16 5 (1%) 2 (1%) 9 (1%) 4 (2%)

(1%)

Other 14 17 8 (2%) 4 (1%) 5 (2%) 4 (1%) 25 5 (2%)

European (1%) (2%) (4%)

Unknown 72 67 72 67
(7%) (6%) (14%) (13%)

Unspecified 36 65 31 38 6 (2%) 25 35 32
(3%) (6%) (6%) (8%) (8%) (6%) (13%)

Total 1,075 1,075 497 497 299 299 633 255

Source: Liber I: Baptizatorum, Matrimoniorum et Mortuorum.

subjects increases slightly in death, totaling one-quarter of men and
almost one-fifth of women. The rest of the sample consisted of a wide
variety of national and ethnic groups, some represented by just a few
individuals. For purposes of simplification, they can be regrouped under
somewhat wider categories, with all the risks that such operations
entail: “Dalmatians” include all individuals noted as originating from
the area extending from Corfu to Trieste, prominently from Ragusa;
likewise, “Italian” is a convenient label to describe any inhabitant of
the peninsula, together with Sicilians and Maltese; and “other Europe-
ans” describes all Europeans north of France and of the Mediterranean.
Most of these groups made up for very little of the parish population.
The only numerically significant categories, other than the French,
consisted of the “Italians”—between 5 and 15 percent of the sample,
according to gender and circumstance—and of two major local com-
munities, namely, the Armenians and the Greeks. An apparent difficulty
in defining the members of the latter two groups is the implicit conflict
between their religiously defined identity and the parishioners’ assumed
profile. Indeed, by premodern standards it is primarily Orthodoxy that
defines Greek identity, much like Armenians whose common denomi-
nator is essentially the Armenian Gregorian Church; in both cases
they should hardly be expected to appear in the records of a Catholic
parish under French custody. One needs therefore to dig a little further
beneath the surface of this terminology, and realize that these Greeks
were not really Greeks, in the sense that they were Catholics of Greek
culture and language, originating mostly from three islands in the
Aegean—Chios, Tinos, Syros7—and from Constantinople proper.8 These
three islands had particularly strong Latin communities, inherited from
former Genoese or Venetian domination.9 Strangely, then, the parish
records of Galata went against the grain by using the term Greek to
define, not a religious group, but local Catholics who were considered
to belong to a cultural and geographical entity defined as Greece.
This explains why some prominent families of (probably) Genoese or
Venetian extraction who had remained in Constantinople after the Otto-
man conquest of 1453 were lumped under this same category for lack
of a better term.10

136 EDHEM ELDEM

 The situation is a bit more complicated for the Armenians. It was only
in the early eighteenth century that the first signs of allegiance to the
Catholic Church started emerging from within the Armenian popula-
tion of the empire. Given the pressure this movement was subjected
to and its consequent flight away from the capital and the Gregorian
Patriarchate, it is highly unlikely that all the Armenians recorded at
Saints-Peter-and-Paul should have been Catholics. Further doubt is cast
by the striking disproportion between male and female representation in
the sample—three or four times more women than men—and the very
marginal number of death records. All these clues seem to suggest that
the Armenian element in the parish records consisted of a small number
of Catholics and an overwhelming majority of (not necessarily Catholic)
Armenian women marrying or married to Catholic parishioners.
The most striking aspect of the sample is the remarkable demographic
weight of the “Greek” community, representing between one-half and
two-thirds of the whole population in baptismal and matrimonial
records, and one-third to half of all recorded deaths. This overwhelm-
ing presence can be explained by the combination, on the one hand, of a
noted migration from the Aegean islands to Constantinople,11 and, on the
other, the simple fact that this community, as it lacked any official rec-
ognition, had no choice but to use the few existing Catholic churches of
the city, among which Saints-Peter-and-Paul held a prominent place.12 It
was pretty clear, then, that the whole parish rested on, and serviced, two
major groups: the politically powerful French and the demographically
strong “Greeks,” probably best described as the local Latin community.
Other groups were much weaker: on the “local” side, Armenians were
the strongest group after the Greeks, yet they barely amounted to 5
percent of the sample; among foreigners, “Italians” formed a sizable
community, but merely about half of the size of the French.
Of course, numbers do not tell the whole story. To understand the
overall profile of each community, one needs to dig deeper into the
records to unearth potentially meaningful clues. Among these, two
are of particular interest: occupation and gender. True, any informa-
tion concerning the occupation or status of individuals was only very
rarely given: 3.5 percent of grooms in marriage records, 5 percent of

French Nation of Constantinople 137

Table 5.2. Occupations in death, marriage, and
baptism records: Total and (French) population

Occupation Death records Marriage Baptism records

records

him/ spouse of child of groom father mother

herself

Diplomats and 9 (6) 1 1 (1)

dragomans

Traders 4 (4) 3 (3) 8 (7) 6 (5) 15 (15)

Physicians 7 (5) 1 1 (1)

Priests 19

Emancipated 3 1
slaves

Slaves 7 3 9 (1) 2

Sailors and 130 (54) 1 (1)

soldiers

Total 886 (203) 299 (61) 497 (68) 497 (28)

Source: Liber I: Baptizatorum, Matrimoniorum et Mortuorum.

fathers, and almost none of the mothers in baptism records had this
privilege; only in death records does this proportion rise to 20 percent.
Yet despite the marginal and inconsistent nature of this information, the
little it reveals is truly significant. First is the presence of a population of
uprooted or itinerant individuals: seamen, soldiers, slaves, and priests,
who clearly did not belong with the bulk of the settled population, but
were recorded as a result of some “accident.” The typical example is
that of sailors, captains, soldiers, or deserters, who made up about 15
percent of all deaths recorded but were totally absent from baptismal
or marriage records. Clearly, these were individuals who died while
their ship was calling at Constantinople and, as such, did not form part
of the Catholic community residing in the city.

138 EDHEM ELDEM

Table 5.3. Occupations in death (D) and baptism (B)
records among major groups

Occupation French Greek Italian Dalmatian Spanish

D B D B D B D B D B

Envoys and 6 1 2
dragomans

Traders 4 15

Physicians, 5 1 1 1
pharmacists, and
surgeons

Priests, bishops, 14 1
and nuns

Slaves and 1 1 3 2 1 2 4
emancipated
slaves

Sailors, captains, 54 1 29 33 2
and soldiers

Source: Liber I: Baptizatorum, Matrimoniorum et Mortuorum.

Looking at the distribution of these occupations among the major

“national” groups, it is rather telling that every other “Dalmatian” man
and about one in three French and “Italian” male individuals belonged to
this itinerant population. The same would apply to an evidently settled
but still socially uprooted category, that of slaves. The simple fact that
four of the five Spanish fathers appearing in the baptismal records were
slaves clearly indicates that these were captives at the arsenal and that,
as such, they did not truly participate in the normal everyday life of the
Latin community of the city.
By and large, then, the professional dimension allows for a better
assessment of the degree of settlement and integration of some commu-
nities, especially from the perspective of its male population. Typically,
one could look at the changing representation of communities in death

French Nation of Constantinople 139

records depending on whether or not “itinerant” individuals are included
(table 5.4): the fact that French male presence is slightly reduced while
Greek male presence is considerably enhanced certainly underlines the
much more “local” profile of the latter. In that sense, the French and
the “Italians” possess the same profile of a foreign community made
of a combination of settled and itinerant individuals, with the major
difference that the most socially settled category of traders seemed, at
least on paper, to be the privilege of the former, no doubt a reflection
of their preferential standing in the parish.13
Yet much more than occupation and status, it is gender that betrays
the basic profile of each community and the dynamics behind their
interaction. Particularly striking is the variation in the gender balance
from one group to the other. While some communities show a clear
predominance of men over women—the French, the Italians, the Span-
iards, and the Dalmatians—some others on the contrary are highly
feminized, most notably the Armenians and other Eastern Christians.
Greeks, once again, stand apart, with the most balanced gender distri-
bution (table 5.1). The imbalance between men and women is relatively
easy to interpret. It is rather striking that the predominance of men
over women appears to have been common to foreign communities,
which suggests that they were dominated either by single men or by
men who would marry outside of their own community. A balanced
gender profile, like in the case of the Greeks, was clearly an indication
of a strong local and settled character. Interestingly, female- dominated
groups were also of local character, but in a very different way. The
relative absence of men and the overwhelming—three- to fourfold—
presence of women obviously meant that these communities’ link to
the parish was through marriages contracted between their women and
men from other communities.
The key to understanding these differences lies in analyzing the pro-
pensity of each group to practice endogamy or exogamy (table 5.5).
Clearly, the only fully endogamous community was that of the “Greeks,”
with a strikingly high proportion of intra-communal marriages, reach-
ing up to 85 percent for men and 78 percent for women. “Italians”

140 EDHEM ELDEM

Table 5.4. Origin and gender in death records
with and without “itinerant” individuals

National Origin Total death records Itinerant deaths Resident deaths

Men Women Men Women Men Women

French 160 43 54 106 43

(25%) (17%) (22%) (17%)

Armenian 5 (1%) 6 (2%) 2 1 3 (1%) 5 (2%)

Greek 218 141 14 204 141

(34%) (55%) (42%) (57%)

Eastern 3 (0%) 1 (0%) 1 3 (1%)

Dalmatian 76 9 (3%) 34 42 (9%) 9 (4%)

(12%)

Italian 102 14 (5%) 32 1 70 13 (5%)

(16%) (14%)

Spanish 9 (1%) 4 (2%) 2 2 7 (1%) 2 (1%)

Other European 25 (4%) 5 (2%) 2 1 23 (5%) 4 (2%)

Unspecified 35 (6%) 32 7 3 28 (6%) 29

(13%) (12%)

Total 633 255 147 9 486 246

Source: Liber I: Baptizatorum, Matrimoniorum et Mortuorum.

stood at the opposite end, with male endogamy at barely 10–20 percent
and female endogamy at 30– 40 percent. The Armenians were male-
endogamous (60 percent) and female- exogamous (80 percent); and
French men generally married outside the group (70–80 percent) but
kept their women to themselves in 70 percent of the cases. To each of
these situations corresponded a different profile: a comfortably settled
and solidly rooted community of “Greek” local Catholics; a small group
of Armenians defined by a still marginal creed and mostly by provid-
ing brides to foreign and local Catholics; relatively weak “Italians,”

French Nation of Constantinople 141

Table 5.5. Endogamy and exogamy among the main communities
according to marriage (M) and baptism (B) records

Women French Armenian Greek Italian

Men
M B M B M B M B

French M 13 3 24 4

B 19 6 24 5

Armenian M 3 2 1

B 8 1

Greek M 4 7 159 2

B 5 8 224 1

Italian M 3 12 3

B 3 16 7

Source: Liber I: Baptizatorum, Matrimoniorum et Mortuorum.

dependent on their capacity to contract marriages with members of

the other communities; and finally, a French nation, strong enough
to maintain some cohesion by favoring female endogamy but flexible
enough to forge alliances with other Catholic communities, mostly by
marrying their women.14
A closer look at the French community’s matrimonial practices shows
that the main interplay was mostly taking place with the “Greeks” (table
5.6). More than one-third of French men married women from that
community, followed by a much smaller proportion of Armenians and
“Italians.” French women were much more restricted in their choices,
being married off to their compatriots in about 70 percent of the cases,
but the remaining 30 percent overwhelmingly displayed a preference
in the direction of marrying a local “Greek” Catholic.
To pursue further the analysis of the French community and its pat-
terns of integration, we will now need to sketch a more precise picture
of this “nation.”15

142 EDHEM ELDEM

Table 5.6. Origin of the spouses of French individuals
according to baptism and marriage records

Spouse’s French husband French wife

nationality/origin

Baptisms Marriages Baptisms Marriages

French 19 (28%) 13 (21%) 19 (68%) 13 (72%)

Armenian 6 (9%) 3 (5%)

Greek 24 (35%) 24 (39%) 5 (18%) 4 (22%)

Eastern 3 (4%) 3 (5%)

Dalmatian 1 (1%) 4 (7%) 1 (6%)

Italian 5 (7%) 4 (7%)

Other European 1 (1%) 2 (3%) 1 (4%)

Unspecified 9 (13%) 8 (13%) 3 (11%)

Total 68 61 28 18

Source: Liber I: Baptizatorum, Matrimoniorum et Mortuorum.

The French Nation

A secular parallel to the information kept in the parish registers is to be
found in the rare but rather detailed censuses established in the eigh-
teenth century by the administration of the French trading community
of Constantinople. The first is a table drawn in 1723 and sent to the
Marseille Chamber of Commerce, giving a detailed account of the 343
individuals residing in the Ottoman capital under French authority (table
5.7). This census gave a detailed distribution of specific professions
among the general category of artisans: there were 17 watchmakers, 5
innkeepers, 4 bakers, 3 goldsmiths, 2 cernisseurs (in charge of the condi-
tioning and packaging of wool), 2 tailors, 2 hairdressers, a painter (the
famed Jean-Baptiste Vanmour), an ironmonger, a dealer in preserves, a
barber, a gunsmith, a carpenter, an engraver, and a box-setter. As to the
medical profession, it was represented by 6 surgeons and 1 apothecary.

French Nation of Constantinople 143

Table 5.7. Occupation of French subjects
residing in Constantinople in 1723

Men Wives Children Total

Household of the 82 82
ambassador

Traders 35 12 16 63

Traders’ clerks 12 12

Artisans 43 27 59 19

Priests 42 42

Medical profession 7 3 5 15

Total 221 42 80 343

Source: Archives de la Chambre de commerce de Marseille, J 192, Correspondance

des députés, État des François à l’échelle de Constantinople, March 1, 1723.

Perhaps more importantly, this census also included no less than 75 Prot-
estants under French protection, generally citizens of Geneva, among
whom were 20 artisans (not surprisingly, 16 of them watchmakers), 1
surgeon, 1 apothecary, 16 women, and 37 children. The Catholic popu-
lation was thus reduced to 268 individuals: 199 men, 26 women, and
43 children. While it may be difficult to compare these figures with
the parish records at hand, the French population of Istanbul seems
to have revolved around the benchmark of 200, if one considers that a
slightly less detailed census, dated 1769 (table 5.8), counted a total of
217 individuals—this time excluding protégés—constituting the largest
French community in the Levant, where a total of 1,211 French subjects
were established.16
The general outlook of the nation explains many of the phenomena
observed in the parish records. In 1723 women made up a mere 10 per-
cent of the Catholic French population, and children about 16 percent.
In fact, women (and children) were totally absent from three major
categories of French subjects—priests, the ambassador’s household, and

144 EDHEM ELDEM

Table 5.8. Occupation of French subjects
residing in Constantinople in 1769

Household of the ambassador 31

Dragomans and student interpreters 12

Traders 12

Traders’ clerks 32

Artisans and physicians 40

Travelers, old families, women, and children 90

Total 217

Source: Archives de la Chambre de commerce de Marseille, J 59, Dénombrement

des François établis dans les diverses échelles du Levant et de Barbarie, 1769.

the traders’ clerks—and were only found in relatively small numbers

among traders and artisans. Some forty-six years later, the situation was
not very different. Although gender was not specifically recorded in
the 1769 census, the broad category of “travelers, old families, women,
and children” made up only 40 percent of the whole population, which
allows us to think that women must have certainly represented less than
20 percent of the community.
This demographically abnormal situation was the direct result of
the policies regulating the residence of French subjects in the Levant
throughout most of the eighteenth century.17 The main objective of
both supervising authorities—the Crown and the Marseille Chamber
of Commerce—was to avoid having French subjects take root there and
thus relinquish their ties to the homeland. For some of these men, the
matter was of no great difficulty: the “household of the ambassador”
consisted mostly of diplomats, secretaries, officials, lackeys, or servants,
who were either directly under the supervision of the government or
in the direct service of the ambassador himself. Their presence in the
Levant was by definition limited in time, and the imposition of celibacy
or of temporary separation from wife and family was a tolerable depri-
vation that came with the job. The same was true of the traders’ clerks,

French Nation of Constantinople 145

the commis, who were clearly the underdogs of the trading houses and
were generally recruited at a very young age in order to be formed
in the profession. They were kept under strict control, which made it
easier to force them to abide by the demanding rules of their mission
in the Levant.
Things were less easy in the case of the traders themselves and of
the artisans. These men were older, and more importantly, they gener-
ally tried to prolong their stay in the Levant and pass on their trade to
their descendants. Marriage and family formed therefore a crucial part
of the stability of their settlement in the Levant; in much more mod-
est ways, artisans were in the same situation. And yet the Crown and
even more, the chamber of commerce considered that married life or,
even worse, contracting marriages in the Levant with Ottoman subjects
constituted a great threat to the conduct and preservation of trade. The
relatively lenient ordinance of 1716, which had allowed the wives and
daughters of traders to seek permission to join them in the Levant, was
replaced in 1726 by a much more drastic one, which revoked this right
and imposed severe sanctions on individuals who would get married
in the Levant. By 1728, any marriage in the Levant, even between two
French subjects, was considered to be an infraction to the regulations;
the children born of a mixed union were labeled as being of “French
origin” (originaires français) and were threatened with the loss of rights.
As to the men engaging in such unions, they could endure punishment
varying from the exclusion from professional assemblies to an outright
ban from trading with France.18

The Difficulties of Marriage

Under such circumstances, one understands that French men should
have felt the need to practice exogamy; but one also wonders how the
few women and marriages that did appear in the censuses managed
to circumvent these bans. The answer is simple but also very vague:
these ordinances were never upheld as seriously as they should have
been, especially by those individuals in the Levant who were expected
to see to their implementation but were very often in a situation very
similar to that of the offenders. An extreme but telling case is that of the

146 EDHEM ELDEM

Chevalier de Vergennes himself, French ambassador at the Porte from
1755 to 1768, who, sometime around 1760, fell in love with a certain
Anne Testa, née Duvivier, the widow of a local physician. It is not clear
whether the couple contracted a private or secret union, but they had
two sons, in 1761 and 1766, who were baptized at the church of Santa
Maria Draperis, and they finally proceeded with a formal and public
marriage in 1767. For eight years the ambassador had kept this union
secret, and had revealed it to the Duc de Choiseul, the minister of for-
eign affairs, in April 1768 only because he had been recalled to France
precisely at a time when his wife was expecting a third child—whom
she would lose a few months later—and wanted to beg for a short exten-
sion of his stay in Istanbul.19 If the French ambassador, who arrived
at Constantinople a bachelor at the age of thirty-four, found himself
enmeshed in a secret affair with the widow of a local Catholic, what
does that tell us about the difficulties with which modest traders and
artisans were confronted?
In all likelihood, the census figures of 1723 and 1769 were as bogus
as Vergennes’s celibacy. Ironically, it is the seventy-three Protestant
protégés who seem to have enjoyed full liberty to settle and organize
their lives as they wished: twenty-two men, sixteen women, and thirty-
seven children describe a rather normal situation, especially compared
to that of traders, only one-third of whom seemed to have enjoyed the
comfort of a family. Even more striking is the celibacy ascribed to the
dragomans, the interpreters of the embassy and the nation, when we
know to what extent intermarriage was at the root of the large dynas-
ties of such professionals throughout the period.20 In short then, one
has to conclude that the censuses simply chose to ignore the reality of
an almost systematic contravention to the drastic and inhumane rules
imposed by Paris and Marseille. In a sense, this may not even have been
a lie, since these censuses were meant to count French subjects residing
in the Levant; why would a multitude of local women, for the most part
subjects of the Grand Signor, be included in these figures?
Circumventing the law was not that difficult, after all, and not just
because the local authorities tended to look the other way. Generally
speaking, the church did not share the government’s views, and forcing

French Nation of Constantinople 147

its parishioners to refrain from taking the sacred vows of matrimony
was certainly not among its priorities. Thus, although piety and devo-
tion were no longer at the center of most of the traders’ and artisans’
concerns,21 the church and the parish did end up playing the role of a
kind of compensation mechanism against the protectionist and exclu-
sionist policies of the secular order.22
The situation, by any standard, was bound to create unease, ten-
sion, and frustration. If some of the French subjects established in
Constantinople—about a third of them—managed to solve their prob-
lem by circumventing the ban by marrying female compatriots, either
in France or in the Levant, it was more than likely that the remaining
majority would be strongly tempted to resort to an even greater fraud,
that of marrying “local” women, the daughters of Catholic families of
Ottoman subjection. Hidden behind the official figures of the censuses,
these unions were the ones that popped up in the pages of the parish
records of the churches of Galata and Pera, among which was that of
Saints Peter and Paul. Deprived of the possibility of marrying their
compatriots, these men tapped into what was the most obvious alterna-
tive, the Catholic communities of the city, among which the so- called
Greeks held such a prominent place.
Yet, can the whole matter really be reduced to a simple question
of compensation for a discrepancy between demand and supply, as it
were? Probably not, and one has to seriously consider the possibility that
other factors may have been at play, starting with matrimonial alliances
and family strategies. But before doing so, we will investigate a little
further the logic behind the administrative measures taken to prevent
French subjects in the Levant from marrying, especially local women.

Protectionist Principles and Liberal Practices

If the French authorities were so eager to ban such unions, one of the
main reasons was the fear of seeing their subjects cross over into a
novel and dangerous identity. Behind this fear lay a practical reason,
which was not entirely devoid of logic. The maintenance of the status
of autonomy and extraterritoriality granted to the king’s subjects by
the capitulations could sometimes become a challenge in the face of the

148 EDHEM ELDEM

Ottoman administration’s propensity to assimilate müste’mens (foreign
non-Muslim subjects protected by the capitulations) into the status
of zimmis. The risk was obviously much higher in the case of French
subjects who married zimmis, thus relinquishing, in the eyes of the Otto-
man state, their preferential status to fall under Ottoman jurisdiction.
Even if such subjects could be “saved” with some diplomacy and legal
argumentation, matters could—and often did—become much more
complicated when it came to the progeny of such mixed couples.
Yet, beyond these legal and political considerations, the French
authorities—especially the Marseille Chamber of Commerce—had still
other reasons to try to prevent such unions. French trade in the Levant
was considered a monopoly, reserved exclusively to French subjects—in
actual fact, mostly from Marseille—and the mercantilist policies of
the time were geared toward the prevention at all cost of any foreign
interference in this lucrative but fragile trade. Among those foreigners
who were perceived as potential interlopers, Ottoman subjects held
a prominent place, and for understandable reasons. With the power
they could draw from their solid knowledge of the local and their
numerous connections with domestic trade networks, they possessed
a clear comparative advantage over the French, which the latter could
hardly counter by any other means than protectionist and exclusionist
measures. Under these circumstances and in this state of mind, it was
obvious that any union of a French subject with a local was perceived
as a dangerous breach opened in the protective walls erected around
the fragile monopoly of French trade in the Levant.
Not surprisingly, this economic protectionism ran parallel to a social
and cultural condemnation of the practice and of its alleged conse-
quences, and more generally, of all the Levantine in-betweens who
navigated between identities. The French administration had come up
with a special term to describe the progeny of mixed marriages: origi-
naires français or Français d’origine, in other words, people of (only)
French origin.23 Yet common practice went further in finding demeaning
ways, often heavy with racial connotations, to stigmatize the half-French
issue of such unions. In 1727 the nation of Sidon called them mestifs
for métis or mixed-race;24 in 1760 the consul in Smyrna declared that

French Nation of Constantinople 149

“we have too many of these kinds of amphibious half-Frank, half-raya
individuals, of whom we would hope to be able to get rid. They are the
rotten members of the nation in Smyrna.”25 Vergennes himself, just a
few months before his own “coming out,” described the local protégés
of France as “people of rather dubious origin, most of whom wear the
hat for reasons of convenience and would repudiate it were they to find
it more convenient to do so. If French law does not agree with them
and ruins them, they will invoke Turkish law.”26 Surely, given his own
romantic affair with a local belle, he should have known better than to
use such harsh words, but he was probably reassured by the fact that
“his” Anne Duvivier, before marrying a member of the local Testa fam-
ily, had allegedly been the daughter of a gentleman from Chambéry.27
However, it was clear that despite all this opprobrium, there were
some substantial perks to forging such alliances. Many of the traders’
personal view of their business had little to do with the mercantilist
policies of the French state. On the contrary, they were often quite
conscious of the considerable advantages that could accrue from a mat-
rimonial alliance with some of the well-established and well-connected
families of the city. It could mean anything from the widening of their
commercial scope to the acquisition of property, or from an efficient
way of grafting onto local networks to ensuring a greater longevity for
their business venture. As for the locals themselves, they could obvi-
ously envisage to draw serious benefits from their association with
respectable members of the French nation, from indirect participation
in the well-guarded turf of French trade to the very appealing prospect
of acquiring French protection and of consequently benefiting from the
advantages of the capitulatory regime.

Strategies and Alliances

Interestingly, then, as the evidence of the parish records clearly sub-
stantiates, members of the French community in Istanbul could choose
between the two major matrimonial strategies of endogamy and exog-
amy: they could either marry members of the same community to
increase internal cohesion, or on the contrary marry outside of the
group and seek the alliance of local families to expand their network.28

150 EDHEM ELDEM

 The best way to illustrate this phenomenon is to pick concrete exam-
ples from the parish records, knowing that the fragmentary nature of
these archives makes it often difficult to reconstitute entire family
structures. Nevertheless, it seems that a few well- chosen groups of
individuals do offer enough consistency to allow for the constitution of
genealogical charts over three generations, revealing some of the major
strategies used and their outcome. An excellent illustration of endogamy
is given in fig. 5.1, showing the web formed by the alliances contracted
between four major French families established in Constantinople: the
Alléon, Rambaud, Olive, and Fonton families. Taking the Alléon family—
established in the Ottoman capital in the early eighteenth century—as
its central axis, the chart shows how marriages among these prominent
members of the nation end up creating an arborescence which, in less
than a century, manages to produce a relatively numerous third gen-
eration of cousins who can all claim to be of “pure” descent, with the
additional advantage of forming a compact group at the core of the
French trading community. Interestingly, this scheme also manages
to combine trade with its necessary complement, administration and
translation, by connecting to one of the most important dynasties of
dragomans of the time, the Fonton.
In rather similar ways, figs 5.2 and 5.3 describe the way in which
French traders came to graft themselves upon local dynasties, mostly by
marrying the daughters of prominent Catholic families. Fig. 5.2, start-
ing with the d’Argenta family, originating from the island of Santorini,
shows how the third generation, issued from an alliance with the Riva
Insubri family—generally described as being from Constantinople, but
with a name evidently harking back at northern Italian origins—comes
into contact with two French traders, Jean-Baptiste-François Aimé
Florenville and Vincent-Pierre Pech, who marry sisters from the Riva
Insubri family, thus ensuring themselves a numerous progeny bearing
their surnames. The situation is very similar in fig. 5.3, which depicts
one of the best-known genealogies of Constantinople, due to its rather
sensational connections to the history of France. In this case the start-
ing point is again a local Catholic, Antoine Santi Lhomaca, said to be
a jeweler and a native of Chios, but best known for having been one of

French Nation of Constantinople 151

the dragomans attached to the person of the Ottoman envoy to Paris
in 1740, Said Efendi.29 Two of Lhomaca’s daughters, from two consecu-
tive marriages, first to the Chian Argiri Mamachi and then to Zephira
Elisabetha Petris, from Mykonos, married French traders, namely, Louis
Chénier and Claude Amic, thus leading once again to the creation of a
new generation of French subjects of “mixed blood.” Yet is there any
better example than this particular case to prove that all the bans of
the administration and all the demeaning and degrading commentaries
of contemporaries on the evils of mixing with the Levantine were of
little, if any, effect? In 1762, Louis Chénier’s wife, Élisabeth Lhomaca,
gave birth to André-Marie Chénier, considered one of France’s greatest
poets; and some thirty-five years later, her sister Maria Santi Lhomaca’s
daughter, Marie-Madeleine Amic, brought into this world one of the
most prominent French politicians of the nineteenth century, Adolphe
Thiers.

Conclusion: Toward a Fluid Society

Very similar trees could be drawn for many other Franco-Latin alliances.
The Glavany were allied with the Maynard, the Pellicot, and the Sarmet;
the Lorando with the Crespin; the Stefano with the Segond; and so
forth. A most telling example was that of the Dellarocca, who managed
to forge alliances with no fewer than three families of French traders:
the Rémuzat, the Laflèche, and the Auzet, with striking unions such as
that between a Dellarocca uncle and his twenty-years-younger Rémuzat
niece (fig. 5.4). What all these alliances had in common, however, was
the preponderance of marriages between French men and local women,
rather than the other way around. Obviously, this was a reflection of
the skewed gender profile of the nation; but it is more than likely that
the phenomenon was further accentuated by a conscious choice on
part of the French. “Taking” women from another group was much less
threatening than “giving” one’s own to outsiders: as the Chénier and
Amic examples illustrated, the family’s destiny was essentially deter-
mined by male lineage, and despite the administration’s claims to the
contrary, there is no indication that French men who married local
women showed a propensity to “go native.” The reverse, however, was

152 EDHEM ELDEM

probably much less straightforward: given the patriarchal structure of
these families, a French woman marrying a local Catholic man would
probably have to recast her identity in order to conform to the cultural
preferences of her new family.
The error, however, would be to insist on seeing these relations
and exchanges as a zero-sum game, which would reproduce the way
French authorities of the time imagined or represented it. In fact, the
situation was much more fluid, as a number of clues and indications
suggest. Among these, one of the most difficult to measure but also
one of the most convincing is the high degree of interaction between
the two communities revealed in the secondary functions in the parish
registers, namely, witnesses and godparents. Without engaging in the
highly problematic and risky process of a systematic study of these
relations, just a cursory browsing of the data shows that children born
to “Greek” couples very often had French godparents, much in the
same way that marriages between “Greeks” were frequently certified
by French witnesses. Such intermingling needs to be taken as an unmis-
takable sign of the existence of contacts and alliances that went well
beyond the formal surface of marriage and baptism records. The fact
that the French did not reciprocate, and that “Greeks” were not called
upon to witness Franco-French unions or to christen babies born to
such couples, seems to confirm our earlier impression that a form of
hierarchy existed between the two communities, whereby the French
tended to “call the shots” rather than the other way around.
Generally speaking, however, the best way to assess the intensity and
success of these intercommunal exchanges and alliances is to follow
some of the outcomes throughout the nineteenth century. Most strik-
ing in this respect is the longevity shown by a great number of family
names appearing in the parish records a century earlier. Throughout the
nineteenth century, and sometimes well into the twentieth, the names
of the Dellarocca, Lorando, Riva, Testa, Glavany, Privileggio, Corpi, or
Cingria families, with the addition of a number of similar families from
Izmir, will repeatedly appear among the most prominent trading, bank-
ing, and other economically important groups of the Ottoman capital,
alongside the descendants of some of the major French families of the

French Nation of Constantinople 153

time, such as the Crespin or the Alléon.30 What this points to is a phe-
nomenon of convergence between the local Catholics—the “Greeks” of
the records—who were gradually being Gallicized, and the members of
the French nation, who were acquiring an increasingly local identity.31
In reality, matrimonial alliances and familial strategies were just
one facet of a much wider process in the making, that of the birth of
a new and fluid society in the Ottoman Empire, one that would often
be labeled as “Levantine.” Indeed, the larger picture had to do with a
complex interaction between political, economic, social, and cultural
factors, which characterized the rapid transformation of the Ottoman
Empire and of its relations with the West at the end of the eighteenth
century. Some of the basic equilibria between local and foreign commu-
nities in the major ports of the Levant, among which Istanbul occupied
a prominent place, had been substantially modified. This resulted from,
on the one hand, the growing political leverage of Europe in general,
and France in particular, in the face of the weakening of the Ottoman
Empire, and, on the other, a considerable development of French and
European trade in the Levant. As French diplomats and policy makers
were comforted in their belief that they had the Ottomans under their
thumb, and as French traders gained self-assurance against their much
feared local rivals in trade, a gradual shift occurred that encouraged the
latter to seek forms of collaboration with the French nation. The system
of protection developed through the sale or granting of berats, letters
patent initially designed to provide protection to dragomans serving
the embassies. This soon developed into a full-fledged system through
which prominent non-Muslim Ottoman subjects—mostly traders and
financiers—found ways of securing their economic interests against the
vicissitudes and arbitrariness of local politics, while at the same time
grafting themselves upon Western social and commercial networks.32
These transformations were yet to come, and they would certainly
not come smoothly. The repercussions of the French Revolution, the
consequences of Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt, and the great instabil-
ity caused by the Napoleonic Wars would greatly alter the political
and economic relations between the Ottoman Empire and France in
the following decades; on the Ottoman side of the picture, the Greek

154 EDHEM ELDEM

and Egyptian crises of the 1820s and 1830s would seriously disrupt the
economic stability of the region. In a sense, then, it would not be before
the 1840s that the movement initiated in the eighteenth century would
start bearing its fruits. The parish records of Saints Peter and Paul thus
appear to have been an early prelude of a new kind of hybridity that
would mature about a century later. The Levantine cosmopolitanism
of the second half of the nineteenth century resulted from the mixing
of a much wider spectrum of ethnic, religious, and national identities.
Yet, it would preserve a hard core of “Frenchness” that linked it directly
back to the alliances forged between the French and the local Catholic
community in Galata and Pera throughout the eighteenth century.33
One needs, however, to look also at the larger picture from the per-
spective of French history. How much of this is really relevant to the
grand narrative of French presence in the Mediterranean? The answer
to this question is ambiguous, to say the least. Indeed, most of the his-
torical constructs involving France and the Mediterranean focus on the
nineteenth century and tend to take Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign
as the starting point of an imperial and colonial process that would
continue well into the twentieth century. On the contrary, our study of
the French nation of Constantinople really ends where French dreams
of hegemony are supposed to have started. Yet, unless one is willing to
indulge in teleological constructs, there is nothing in this ancien régime
story that allows foreseeing and forecasting the transformations of the
following century. When ambassador Choiseul-Gouffier declared in 1788
that he thought that the Ottoman Empire should be considered “one
of the rich colonies of France,” he was to a large extent mistaken and
merely expressing a wishful hope that French presence in the Levant
might attain some degree of supremacy.34 (To a large extent, in fact,
it was losing ground.) Choiseul’s claims were not unrelated to the fact
that in this second half of the eighteenth century, France had lost much
of its colonial empire during the Seven Years’ War; its overseas claims
were seriously reduced in the face of a rising British hegemony. The
argument that France had supremacy in the Levant was a tempting
consolation for the marginalization of French power at a global level.
Little did Choiseul know that the revolution would soon wreak havoc

French Nation of Constantinople 155

on French trade and presence in the Ottoman lands, while he himself
was forced into exile.
Bonaparte may have dreamed of turning the Mediterranean into a
French lake, but his ancien régime predecessors had to make do with
the illusion of a powerful France in a marginalized Mediterranean, a
rather fat fish in a shrinking pond. Viewed through the microcosm of
the parishioners of Saints Peter and Paul, French presence in the Levant
had certainly matured after centuries of insecurity and hesitations. Yet
rather than signaling the rise of a colonial situation, it pointed in the
direction of greater integration with local social and economic forces
through a wide range of strategies. Under normal circumstances, it is
likely that the French nation would have tended gradually to dissolve
into the hybridity of a Levantine world culturally and linguistically
dominated by Greek and Italianate elements, whose integration at a
local level was much deeper than the French could ever have claimed.
Yet the cataclysmic transformations of the Napoleonic era and the con-
sequent transformation of the entire European scene would completely
upset the normal course of events by empowering the French in an
unprecedented way. If the hybrid society in the making continued to
prosper well into the nineteenth century, it could only do so by adopting
a subservient position with regard to France’s newly acquired status as
a colonial and hegemonic power in the Mediterranean.

NOTES
1. “Deo Optimo Maximo. Ecclesia Sancti Apostoli Petri et Pauli. Ordine Patribus
Praedicatoribus.”
2. Edhem Eldem, “Capitulations and Western Trade,” in The Cambridge History of
Turkey, vol. 3, The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603–1839, ed. Suraiya N. Faroqhi (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 283–335.
3. Louis Mitler, “The Genoese in Galata: 1453–1682,” International Journal of Middle
East Studies 10 (1979): 71– 91
4. For a history of the church, see François-Alphonse Belin, Histoire de l’église latine
de Constantinople (Paris: Challamel aîné, 1872), 91– 98; François-Alphonse Belin,
Histoire de la latinité de Constantinople (Paris: Alphonse Picard et fils., 1894), 218–31,
399–405; Eugène Dalleggio d’Alessio, Le couvent et l’église des Saints-Pierre-et-Paul
à Galata (Istanbul: Milli Neşriyat Yurdu, 1935); Benedetto Palazzo and A. Raineri,

156 EDHEM ELDEM

 La chiesa di S. Pietro in Galata: Note storiche illustrative in occazione del 1. centenario
delle consecrazione (Istanbul: Harti, 1943).
5. My first contact with these registers occurred in the mid-1980s, when I was work-
ing on my dissertation on French trade in Istanbul in the eighteenth century.
Although I did systematically browse all the records for the years between 1740
and 1800, I ended up making only a limited use of their contents. In the early
1990s I passed on this material to one of my students, Angelina Santa Catalina,
in preparation of her master’s thesis. However, as she opted for a career in the
Philippine diplomatic service, I inherited back this material, with the advantage
of the digital formatting to which she had subjected the raw data. My thanks go
to her and to the Convent and Church of San Pietro, particularly Fr. Fabio Alberto
Ambrosio, who has made it possible to make a copy of these registers available
for research through the Ottoman Bank archives, at SALT Galata.
6. The typical problem of baptismal records is that because the number of births per
couple may vary substantially, they need to be filtered by deleting repetitive births
to a same couple before they can be used to say anything about the parents. I have
shown the difference between the two figures by using two separate columns for
baptismal records in table 5.1, the first (children) giving the total figures, and the
second (parents) the figures filtered down to couples. While the proportional rep-
resentation of different groups may remain more or less the same in both counts,
it is obvious that counting births produces a risk of over-representing individuals
who, for one reason or another, have more births recorded than others.
7. To this one should add small numbers from Mykonos, Naxos, Paros, Santorini,
and Siphnos.
8. On the Greek Catholic community of Istanbul, see Charles A. Frazee, Catholics and
Sultans: The Church and the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983); Elçin Macar, İstanbul’un Yok Olmuş İki Cemaati: Doğu Ritli Katolik
Rumlar ve Bulgarlar [Two lost communities of Istanbul: Greek Catholics of the
Oriental Rite and Bulgarians] (Istanbul: İletişim, 2002); Méropi Anastassiadou and
Paul Dumont, Une mémoire pour la ville: La communauté grecque d’Istanbul en 2003
(Istanbul: IFEA , 2003), 5. On the “island Catholics,” see Oliver Jens Schmitt, Levan-
tiner: Lebenswelten und Identitäten einer ethnokonfessionellen Gruppe im osmanischen
Reich im “langen 19. Jahrhundert” (Munich : R. Oldenbourg, 2005), 55, 129– 41.
9. Syros was conquered by the Ottomans in 1522, Chios in 1566, and Tinos as late as
1715.
10. A typical example is the Testa family, of Genoese ancestry, and whose presence
in Constantinople can be documented as far back as the early fifteenth century.
While most authors from the nineteenth century on would describe this and other
similar families as either Italians or Perotes—descendants of the families estab-
lished in the Genoese colony of Pera at the time of the Ottoman conquest—the
parish records label them as “Greeks.” On the origins of the Testa, see Marie Testa

French Nation of Constantinople 157

 and Antoine Gautier, Drogmans et diplomates européens auprès de la Porte ottomane
(Istanbul: Isis, 2003), 130.
11. Frazee, Catholics and Sultans, 171–77; Rinaldo Marmara, Précis historique de la
communauté latine de Constantinople et de son église: De l’empire byzantin à la
république de Turquie (Istanbul: Vicariat apostolique, 2003), 70–72.
12. As the parish records for Saint-Georges and Saint-Benoît are not available, a com-
parison is not possible; however, the baptismal records of Santa Maria Draperis
for the same period attest to a very similar population of parishioners.
13. Indeed, it would be absurd to assume that none of the hundreds of Greeks recorded
were traders; the problem is that the church recorded this information only for
the French, because this was a meaningful mention from the perspective of its
patron administration.
14. For figures concerning the period 1788–1800, see Schmitt, Levantiner, 137–39.
15. Besides studying marriage patterns, the parish registers should ideally allow for a
proper demographic analysis of the community at hand. However, beyond the fact
that such a work would require special competence in historical demography, the
sample at hand is simply too limited and fragmentary to conduct such research.
16. Archives de la Chambre de commerce de Marseille [hereafter ACCM ], J 59, Dénom-
brement des François établis dans les diverses échelles du Levant et de Barbarie,
1769; Eldem, French Trade in Istanbul, 206.
17. Paul Masson, Histoire du commerce français dans le Levant au XVIIIe siècle. Paris:
Hachette, 1911), 149– 59; Eldem, French Trade in Istanbul, 207–10.
18. Masson, Histoire du commerce français, 154– 59; Marie- Carmen Smyrnelis, Une
société hors de soi: Identités et relations sociales à Smyrne aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles
(Paris: Peeters, 2005), 62– 63.
19. Louis Bonneville de Marsangy, Le Chevalier de Vergennes: Son ambassade à Con-
stantinople, vol. 2 (Paris: Plon, 1894), 352– 65.
20. See, e.g., Livio Missir de Lusignan, “Une aristocratie ‘inclassable’: Les drogmans,”
in Istanbul et les langues orientales: Actes du colloque organisé par l’IFEA et l’INALCO
à l’occasion du bicentenaire de l’École des langues orientales, ed. Frédéric Hitzel
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), 153– 59; Testa and Gautier, Drogmans et diplomates
européens.
21. Masson, Histoire du commerce français, 160– 61; Jean-Pierre Farganel, “Les com-
portements religieux des négociants marseillais au Levant: Anticléricalisme ou
recul précoce de la dévotion? (1685–1730),” Annales du Midi 95 (1983): 185–208.
22. Masson, Histoire du commerce français, 156; Smyrnelis, Une société hors de soi, 62,
138–39.
23. “All the ports are filled with children of Frenchmen who have contracted wrong
marriages and have left no other resource to their family than that of their origins.
Most of these people of French origin are a burden to the nation; they almost always
live a lowly life; they corrupt the mores of the young people who come to these

158 EDHEM ELDEM

 ports.” From the commentary of the 1781 ordinance on French trade, administra-
tion, and settlement in the Levant. Masson, Histoire du commerce français, 156– 57.
24. Masson, Histoire du commerce français, 156.
25. Smyrnelis, Une société hors de soi, 63.
26. ACCM , J 168, Correspondence of Ambassador Vergennes, Vergennes to the Cham-
ber, January 22, 1768; Eldem, French Trade in Istanbul, 282.
27. Bonneville de Marsangy, Le Chevalier de Vergennes, 359.
28. In her study of the French community in Smyrna, Marie-Carmen Smyrnelis speaks
of “mariage au plus près” and “mariage au plus loin.” Smyrnelis, Une société hors
de soi, 140– 46.
29. Gian Battista Toderini, De la littérature des Turcs, 3 vols. (Paris: Poinçot, 1789),
2:106–7, 121, and 3:14. The editor of Chénier’s mother’s letters, Robert de Bon-
nières, had it all wrong, claiming that Lhomaca originated from Cyprus, placing
him in the retinue of Said Efendi’s father and predecessor, Yirmisekiz Mehmed
Çelebi, and linking him to the Phanariots of the capital, forgetting that this Greek
“aristocracy” was exclusively Orthodox. Élisabeth Chénier, Lettres de Madame
Chénier précédées d’une étude sur sa vie par Robert de Bonnières (Paris: Charavay,
1879), 11–16.
30. For a thorough account and analysis of Levantine families, see Schmitt, Levantiner,
2005.
31. A rather telling indication of the blurring of boundaries between identities is that
Oliver Jens Schmitt, whose work dwells on Levantine society in the nineteenth
century, retrospectively lumps a number of French family names—Alléon, Beuf,
Chabert, Dantan, Fonton, Meynard, Roboly, and so forth—under the “Levantine”
category for the preceding century, alongside a majority of “Greek” Catholic fam-
ily names. Schmitt, Levantiner, 128–29.
32. Eldem, French Trade in Istanbul, 279– 82.
33. Edhem Eldem, “Istanbul as a Cosmopolitan City: Myths and Realities,” in A Com-
panion to Diaspora and Transnationalism, ed. Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani
(Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), 212–30.
34. Masson, Histoire du commerce français, 279.

French Nation of Constantinople 159

 ∞ ∞ 20.11.1774
Martha Ange RAMBAUD
? – 1758 ?–?

Christophe RAMBAUD Marie-Madeleine ALLÉON

?–? 11.09.1749 – ?

Claude ALLÉON
12.06.1748 – ?
Jean-François ALLÉON
ca. 1735 – 30.12.1775

∞ 03.05.1747
Thérèse MARCHAND Jacques-François ALLÉON
?–? 10.05.1753 – ?

∞ ∞

Catherine
Sophie FONTON
?–?
15.05.1770 – 13.03.1845
Antoine FONTON Claude-François ALLÉON
17.10.1724 – 08.02.1802 13.03.1761 – 18.09.1784

Jean-Augustin OLIVE Catherine Claude ALLÉON

?–? 05.05.1757 – ?

∞ ∞ 02.06.1782
? Pierre OLIVE
?–?
Vincent OLIVE
?–?

FIG. 5.1. Staying French: Patterns of endogamy among the Rambaud and Alléon fami-
lies. Note: Birth and death dates, when known, are given in the day-month-year format
in the genealogy charts.
Marie-Thérèse RAMBAUD
02.02.1776 – 10.08.1780

Thérèse RAMBAUD
02.02.1776 – 10.05.1780

Victor-Étienne RAMBAUD
26.02.1778 – ?

Jean-Lazare RAMBAUD
27.02.1780 – 05.05.1780

Sophie RAMBAUD
26.08.1781 – ?

Pierre RAMBAUD
13.10.1783 – ?

Julie RAMBAUD
06.06.1785 – ?

Jacques-François Antoine ALLÉON

25.07.1792 – 29.07.1792

Élisabeth-Marie ALLÉON
29.11.1793 – ?

Marie-Thérèse ALLÉON
30.01.1795 – ?

Antoine-Théodore ALLÉON
03.04.1797 – ?

Jean-François ALLÉON
15.07.1798 – ?

Josèphe-Christine ALLÉON
03.08.1800 – ?

Jeanne Anastasie OLIVE

22.04.1783 – ?

Justinien OLIVE
29.07.1784 – ?

Élisabeth-Sophie-Catherine OLIVE
26.10.1786 – ?
 Petrus D’ARGENTA
ca. 1722 – 05.07.1762 ∞ 03.02.1757
Ioannes RIVA INSUBRI
ca 1713 – 07.05.1783
∞
Martha Rosa D’ARGENTA
?–? ? – 02.06.1773

Clara D’ARGENTA
03.07.1754 – ?

Antonius Josephus D’ARGENTA

26.05.1756 – ?

FIG. 5.2. Mixing blood I: French families grafting upon a local dynasty
 Fços-Sébasten FLORENVILLE
Ioannes Petrus RIVA INSUBRI 04.08.1784 – ?
01.09.1758 – 15.08.1763
Anne-Lucie-Rose FLORENVILLE
∞ 03.11.1783 29.09.1785 – ?
Jn-Bte-Fços-Amé FLORENVILLE
?–? Fços-Jean-Casmr FLORENVILLE
17.01.1787 – ?
Ma Magdalena RIVA INSUBRI
11.01.1761 – ?
Constance-Marie FLORENVILLE
Antonius RIVA INSUBRI 30.12.1787 – ?
16.08.1763 – ?
Ioannes Bta RIVA INSUBRI Catherine-Lucie FLORENVILLE
22.10.1765 – ? 26.02.1791 – ?

Marie-Lucie FLORENVILLE
11.04.1793 – ?

∞ 08.12.1786
Vincent-Pierre PECH
?–?
Pierre-Vincent-Jn-Bte PECH
20.01.1788 – ?
Catharina RIVA INSUBRI
12.05.1768 – ?
Jn-Bte-Gaspard-Alexandre PECH
14.12.1789 – 06.03.1790
Constantia RIVA INSUBRI
05.11.1770 – ?
Joseph-Constantin PECH
02.07.1791 – ?
Anna RIVA INSUBRI
23.04.1773 – 10.12.1774
Marie-Madeleine-Rose PECH
06.01.1794 – ?

Mathieu-Denis PECH
25.05.1796 – ?

Marie-Julie-Béatrice PECH
01.02.1798 – 11.02.1798

Amédée-Jn-Bte-Antoine PECH
07.08.1800 – ?
 Antoine SANTI LHOMACA
1705 – 02.07.1793 ∞ 25.10.1754
Louis CHÉNIER
03.06.1722 – 25.05.1795
∞ 1728
Élsabeth SANTI LHOMACA
Argiri MAMACHI
1729 – 06.11.1808
ca. 1710 – ca. 1733

∞ ca. 1735
Zephira Elisabetha PETRIS Jean-Baptiste SANTI LHOMACA
1710 – 27.11.1775 14.02.1736 – 1814

Joseph SANTI LHOMACA

01.05.1742 – 13.08.1742

François-Thomas SANTI LHOMACA

20.07.1743 – ?

Louis-Basile SANTI LHOMACA

27.11.1746 – 13.01.1747

Ange-Augustin-Joseph SANTI LHOMACA

16.02.1748 – ?

Maria SANTI LHOMACA

29.09.1740 – 04.04.1814

∞ 19.04.1765
Claude AMIC
1721 – 1797

FIG. 5.3. Mixing blood II: The Chénier and Amic families’ Levantine heritage
Sophie CHÉNIER
ca. 1756 – 24.04.1762

Marie-Zoé CHÉNIER
23.07.1759 – 06.12.1763

Marie-Adélaïde CHÉNIER
21.09.1760 – 12.11.1763

Louis-Sauveur CHÉNIER
27.11.1761 – ?

André-Marie CHÉNIER
30.10.1762 – 25.07.1794

Joseph-Marie CHÉNIER
22.02.1764 – 1811

Élisabeth-Sophie CHÉNIER
16.06.1766 – ?

Constantin-Xavier CHÉNIER
04.08.1767 – ?

Hélène-Christine CHÉNIER
10.08.1768 – ?

Marie-Joseph-Simon AMIC
27.04.1766 – ?

Marie-Madeleine AMIC Adolphe THIERS

06.07.1774 – 04.01.1852 14.04.1797 – 03.09.1877

∞ 13.05.1797
Pierre-Louis THIERS
09.09.1759 – 23.02.1843
 Georgius DELLAROCCA
?–?
∞ 26.06.1792
Maria DELLAROCCA
∞ ca 1732 – ?
Clara SARGOLOGO Maria DELLAROCCA
ca. 1739 – ?

Elisabeth DELLAROCCA
22.10.1741 – ?

Anna DELLAROCCA
13.01.1744 – 09.06.1788

∞ 19.12.1772
Simon LAFLECHE
1721 – 1797
Catharina DELLAROCCA
05.04.1747 – ?

Victoria DELLAROCCA
27.04.1749 – 16.06.1749

Lucia DELLAROCCA
03.05.1750 – ?

Claudius DELLAROCCA
16.04.1751 – ?

∞ 19.04.1774
François AUZET
?–?
Agnete DELLAROCCA
16.04.1751 – ?

Ioannes Antonius DELLAROCCA

29.01.1753 – ?

Ioannes Antonius DELLAROCCA

29.01.1753 – ?

FIG. 5.4. Mixing blood III: The Dellarocca family’s multiple French alliances
Elisabeth REMUZAT
14.04.1763 – ?

André-Antoine François REMUZAT

25.04.1767 – ?

Gabriel-Constantin REMUZAT
24.07.1769 – ?

Catherine REMUZAT
26.11.1765 – ?

∞ 21.12.1781
Franciscus Nicolaus DELLAROCCA
02.02.1746 – ?
∞ 11.09.1793
Petrus CINGRIA
?–?
Jean-Georges LAFLECHE
26.11.1773 – ?

Lazare-Marie LAFLECHE
08.12.1774 – ?

Elisabeth Catherine LAFLECHE

26.11.1776 – ?
6 An Ottoman in Paris
A Tale of Mediterranean Coinage

MARC AYMES

Introduction: Embodiments of Knowledge

This essay is a tentative exploration of the concept that the phrase
“French Mediterranean” epitomizes. By tracing the progress of a forger’s
scheme of things, it works to identify some of the unstable foundations
on which the field of Mediterranean studies has been resting so far.
As evidenced by the present volume’s road map, commitments to the
history of the Mediterranean(s) share in ongoing reflections on the geo-
political constructs that are part of what constitutes knowledge. These
do not only amount to taking issue with the institution of knowledge
through academic “disciplines” or “fields”: they also help reframe our
“moral economies of inclusion and exclusion.”1 Epistemic and political
issues run side by side.
In view of the volume’s commitment to Mediterranean interactions,
several of the contributors have aired to compound the “French element”
with an Ottoman one. Down to the demise of the sultan’s “Sublime State”
in 1922–23, much of the Eastern Mediterranean world remained under
Ottoman aegis. Nonetheless, multiple polities and states interacted in

168
this region and took part in transformations that have most often been
understood as “reform,” in part because they were accompanied by an
apposite discourse. Ottoman rulers themselves, while they embarked on
a series of administrative overhauls from the late 1830s onward, found
it judicious to substitute the keyword of ıṣlāḥāt (reforms) for that of
mere tanẓīmāt (reorderings). Ever since, the term reform has functioned
like a time capsule for Ottomanists dealing with the history of this
period, as it seems to encompass the whole set of its key ingredients:
“administrative rationalization, scientific and technological progress,
market economy and monetarization, bureaucratization, centralization
and individualization.” What is more (and of particular importance
here), the term presents yet another advantage to its users, that of “not
predetermining the question of agency. Reforms may be launched by a
government or by foreign powers, and different social groups may also
instigate them.”2 In other words, “reform” may be embodied in many
simultaneous ways.
Profiling key protagonists often helped historians to better under-
stand what Ottoman reform looked like. While group portraits aimed
at a sociology of the “Men of the Tanzimat,”3 evidence documenting
the lives and deeds of high-profile statesmen or intellectuals imparted
a more personalized hue to the topic.4 In what follows I will be focus-
ing on a much dimmer protagonist of reform: a man named Vaḥdetī
Efendi, who served as a designer of stamps, bonds, and deeds issued
at the Sublime Porte in Istanbul in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1864
he was dispatched to Paris (then to London) for a few months, with a
commission to help prepare the issuance of certification stamps and
debenture bonds for the Ottoman Treasury. Three years later he stood
trial in Istanbul, charged with having fraudulently kept and circulated
some of the paper money he had been testing out. For this, he was sen-
tenced to one year in prison. What is important about Vaḥdetī Efendi’s
coinage story is that it helps shift the emphasis from the roaring voices
of key protagonists to the nondescript “little tools of knowledge” that
shaped the practice of everyday reform.5 In so doing it provides us with
a blueprint for thinking of Mediterranean history as a synchronic set of
technical and symbolic currencies.

An Ottoman in Paris 169

The Mediterranean Enfrenchised: Set Theory
All things Mediterranean did not turn French—of this there is no deny-
ing. Yet Mediterranean history is never quite far from turning, to coin
a word, into a Frenchise. Let us begin by pondering this rather incon-
gruous dictum.
The phrase “French Mediterraneans” calls to mind a complex set of
mare nostrum reminiscences, making it sound eerily familiar. It was
not that long ago (indeed, still today, in too many cases) that students
would have been taught, in Julia Clancy- Smith’s terms, “that older
historical narrative still structured around binaries, ‘the French’ or
‘Muslims’ and so forth,” anchored in “the nation-state framework and
nationalist narrative undergirding research on the modern Maghrib.”6
“Heading eastwards”7—toward countries that were once part of the
Ottoman realms—does little to change this general framework, as simi-
lar binary chains of thought also applied there. In André Raymond’s
words, “the long French presence on the southern and eastern Mediter-
ranean shores” helped produce a “classic concept of the Muslim city”
that lumped together Aleppo, Algiers, Damascus and Fes, all subsumed
into a category defined by “a morose enumeration of all those elements
[they] obviously lacked.”8 Approaches that rest on a distinction between
a “center” and one or more “peripheries” have been imbued with a
similar sense of dichotomy. Inasmuch as “Eurocentrism is constitutive
of the geoculture of the modern world,”9 the Ottoman realms have
been enshrouded in a dialectic that relies on “peripheralization.”10 This
helps explain why textbook histories of the modern Mediterranean have
given center stage to “the piecemeal incorporation or integration of the
Ottoman Empire into the European economic and political orbits.”11
In the longer time frame of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
this geometry also played out in scholarly accounts of “Middle Eastern
ideas”: “here were nationalisms modularly imagined; the common good,
a shaky transcript of some Lockean commonweal or Benthamite utility;
Pan-movements, belated emulations of the Continental counterparts.”12
Key to such “modular” thinking is the metaphor of “technology transfer,”
meaning “an ‘interaction’ between cultures,” with the Ottoman Middle

170 MARC AYMES

East standing at the receiving end of this unequal trade.13 Even today,
critical reappraisals of the issue of modernity in the region often need
sheathing in painstaking examinations of how not to consider (post-)
Ottoman “modernization” either “incomplete” or “failed.”14 It can seem
as if anyone seeking to understand the Mediterranean as a whole must
rehearse a preliminary set theory that distinguishes between haves
and have-nots.
One may certainly object that no contemporary scholar in the field
would argue for the analytical purchase of such a polarized render-
ing, which has been thoroughly unraveled by advocates of “multiple
modernities,” “global” or “connected” history, and “postcolonial stud-
ies” over the past few decades. No one would argue for it, yet does this
imply that none of such thinking remains at work? To quote but one
example: a recent study of radical ideas and networks in the Middle
East aims at “deprovincializing the Eastern Mediterranean” by “using
a synchronic lens . . . to conjure up a polyvalent, polyglot, and global
leftist radical movement,” thus “circumventing the whole project of
genealogy and decentering it from northwestern Europe.” In view of its
promising argument, this undertaking would appear to yield perplexing
results, as the author concludes: “The appropriation of socialism and
anarchism by networks of intellectuals, dramatists, and workers and
their recasting, reinvention, and ultimate subversion of these two Euro-
pean ideologies in ways that made them appealing to local audiences
sheds light on the very active participation of peripheral locals in the
making of a global world.” From this statement one understands that
“radical” ideas were first and foremost “European,” while their Cairene
or Beiruti protagonists remained “peripheral” once and for all. Rather
than “deprovincializing” the Eastern Mediterranean, the set theory
implicitly endorsed here only helps to reprovincialize it. Furthermore,
the author concedes in the following sentence that “appropriation is
perhaps not the only way to think of these processes by which socialism
and anarchism were indigenized.”15 One is left wondering which other
ways could be envisioned. In a similar fashion, the expectations raised
by Juan Cole’s criticism of the “binary opposition of Western hegemony
and Middle Eastern resistance” may seem only partially fulfilled by the

An Ottoman in Paris 171

suggestion that “in order to understand colonialism we must appreciate
the mutual appropriation of cultural forms by colonized and colonizer.”16
Even though one conceives of “appropriation” as “mutual,” this notion
leaves the aforementioned binary set theory undisturbed. As it turns
out, then, terminological moves do by no means entail logical shifts.
Nomenclatures are easier to replace than heuristic rules.17
Such an observation cuts across issues of periodization. Formerly,
when historians narrated the “impact of the West” on the Middle East,
Bonaparte’s campaign to Egypt in 1798–1801 marked the symbolic
terminus a quo of the story. Significantly enough, later critiques of
“Eurocentric” approaches did little to alter this chronology. Conse-
quently, Edward Said’s critical theory of “Orientalism as a Western style
for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient”
maintained the date of 1798 as a defining moment for the nineteenth-
century Mediterranean.18 However pervasive the shift in nomenclature
that the Saidian critique introduced, it reasserted the watershed value
of a supposedly initial French impetus. Bleu blanc rouge remained the
primary colors of its historiographical heuristics.19
Similar patterns of long-lasting (if intermittent) recurrence apply
to the idea that the nineteenth- century Ottoman experience patterned
itself on “the French model.”20 To be sure, the protagonists of such
a conception warn that this “model” was never without competitors,
starting with its German archrival,21 and hence that it often involved an
eclectic mode of “appropriation.” But these caveats ultimately serve to
highlight how very Frenchified the Ottomans became over the course
of the nineteenth century. Recent pieces of scholarship still consider
French to have been the only non-native language that, in the Ottoman
Empire (and later post-Ottoman countries like the Turkish Republic),
provided the means to self-representation, cultural extroversion, and
social distinction.22 Pushed to the extreme, this line of reasoning is self-
vindicated by arguing that the French (language and people) played a
determining role in “inventing” the Mediterranean.23
All in all, modern Mediterranean history comes down to a process of
ineluctable enfranchisement, in both senses of the term. On the one hand
it means that civil rights could be secured and came hand in hand (or so

172 MARC AYMES

it is often assumed) with cultural extroversion; on the other it denotes
a license to trade in privilege, obtained via social distinction. Since this
enfranchisement of the Mediterranean has been systematically equated
to a Frenchification, it ought really to be termed an enfrenchisement. In
this way we get back to the idea of a “Frenchise” first suggested above.
Schematic though it is, this outline points to the long- established
mappings that replicate the scholarly geopolitics of “area studies” and
split up the Mediterranean according to their topoi.24 Recent develop-
ments in the history of circulations, transfers, or diasporas may certainly
be credited with unsettling area- coded notions of agency.25 Yet such
approaches evince a translational metaphor that tends to reintroduce
the idea of incommensurable regions under a different guise: more often
than not, “connection” and “encounter” are viewed as a stage subse-
quent to localized production.26 In the last resort compartmentalization
prevails, and with it a certain idea of the enfrenchised Mediterranean
endures.

Little Currencies of Reform:

The Miniaturization of Authentication
By contrast, what follows aims to put forward an approach to currencies,
that is, devices produced and reproduced by the experience of circula-
tion itself. Here, then, the Mediterranean is being approached with a
focus on the “little tools” of knowledge and authority that circulate
throughout. What the notion of currency aims to stress is that we are
dealing with concrete abstractions endowed with a technical efficacy, a
semiotic relevance, and a symbolic energy.27 Convertible paper money
is a case in point,28 yet other kinds of officially sanctioned made-for-
circulation documents may be considered as well.
“Reform” indeed affected both the technical and symbolic features
of administration, as its implementation often went hand in hand with
a change in their material form—to begin with, on paper. Starting in
the second half of the nineteenth century, administrative proceedings
developed into an ever-growing paper economy of their own, where
large-scale fabrication and circulation of pre-printed documents of
many kinds became common.29 Among these were the evrāḳ-ı ṣaḥīḥe

An Ottoman in Paris 173

(authenticated documents, lit., valid documents), a kind of stamped
paper that the Istanbul authorities started implementing from the mid-
1840s onward as a technique of certification and revenue raising. Except
for matters involving canon law, any legal proceeding or commercial
transaction was to be sanctioned (upon payment of a fixed or propor-
tional issuance fee) by an official certificate, the “validity” of which
manifested itself by the use of a specific pre-printed and embossed
paper.30
This mechanical reproducibility of the government’s paper cur-
rencies, which was supplementary to the mostly calligraphic mode of
sultanic rule to date, allowed bureaucrats keen on a renewed notion
of state control to multiply and disembody the signs testifying to their
authority. But while the authentication tool kit of government multi-
plied, its circulation put public finances under strain:

Authenticated paper that is currently in use has been causing much

complication and waste when dispatched to the provinces, which
makes it impossible to keep these kinds of pieces available in all
places; besides, it has been found that most of the revenues [derived
from issuance fees] are being absorbed by shipping expenses, and
that even when available authenticated paper is not being used
when putting together bills of exchange and contracts with foreign
subjects.31

“Authenticated documents,” as a means to reforming the Ottoman

paper economy, thus turned out to be a costly and cumbersome tool of
administration. Such difficulties forced new symbolization techniques
for government’s hallmarks. Rather than entrusting authentication to
the document’s sheet of paper itself, the Ottomans made it incumbent
on stamps to perform this task:

Arrangements are being made to produce printed stamps that it would

be quite feasible to deliver to all places at low cost, so that public
interest ensues, and whose conception would allow to substitute
them for the current documents, in accordance with the rule drafted
as per the Council of Ministers’ decision.

174 MARC AYMES

 As with embossed and pre-printed headings, stamps could certify
that the document came from a trusted official source and that issuance
fees had been properly paid. They also testified to the authenticity of
the document’s production and to that of its “consumption.” What made
them more handy than previous headings is that they remained distinct
from the document’s sheet of paper until the final stage of issuance.
Any paper near at hand could be used and become, once stamped, an
authenticated document in its own right. What is more, small stamps
could be circulated throughout the empire much more easily than whole
paper wads.
The reverse of the previously quoted document (see figs. 6.1 and
6.2) provides us with one instance of such stamps, as they were first
drafted in the 1860s. What emerges here as a first draft became a widely
adopted standard in the following decades. Notwithstanding variations
and diversifications in pattern, it inspired the design of other stamps
also in use for Ottoman legal proceedings (figs. 6.3 and 6.4).
These glimpses of the micro- diplomatics of Ottoman governmental
practice help make visible the kinds of “currencies” that are the focus
of the present study. There is, however, more to it than can meet the
eye. As it turns out, this miniaturization story closely dovetails with
the set theory of the enfrenchised Mediterranean outlined earlier. To
determine how this occurred, let us examine the people who originally
designed these little currencies of reform.

Men of Movable Types

Starting in the 1860s, the Ottoman government commissioned drafts-
men to design miniaturized means of authentication. Records indicate
that among those who took charge of producing the examples above,
an odd couple of travelers stands out:

Arrangements are being made to produce printed stamps that it would

be quite feasible to deliver to all places at a low cost. . . . To that
end it has been resolved that Mösyö Çörçīl would set off for Paris,
and that Vaḥdetī Efendi, who counts among the attendants to the
Office of Imperial Protocol, would accompany the aforementioned

An Ottoman in Paris 175

FIG. 6.1. Three drafts of stamps to be used for “authenticated documents.” Each
drawing measures about one inch in height. Courtesy of Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi
[Prime Ministership Ottoman Archives], Istanbul, I .MMS . 27/1193, #2 (reverse), late
B. 1280 [January 1–8, 1864].

FIG. 6.2. Detail of stamp used for “authenticated documents.”

Courtesy of Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, I .MMS . 27/1193,
#2 (reverse), late B. 1280 [January 1–8, 1864].

and provide him with assistance in the duty of engraving the molds
as required, for which he would be paid twenty thousand piastres to
cover his travel expenditures. The Ministry of Finance memorandum
pertaining thereto has been read during a special conference meeting
[of the Council of Ministers], and when inspecting and examining
the drafts of the aforesaid stamps [see fig. 6.2] it appeared that nice
arrangements for their use in lieu of authenticated documents would
result in admirable features; meanwhile the engraving of the molds
in the desired way was deemed contingent on the aforementioned
efendi’s travel. Assignment has therefore been sent to the aforesaid
Ministry so that the aforementioned be sent to the place in question
in Mösyö Çörçīl’s company, and receive the above-said amount to
cover for his travel expenditures.32

The currency of reform here materializes in a sequence that is

familiar to scholars studying modern Mediterranean history—one

176 MARC AYMES

FIG. 6.3. Letter from J. Anastassiades to the consul general of Russia in Istanbul.
Courtesy of Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, şD . 2584/12, April 16/28, 1884.

FIG. 6.4. Detail of Anastassiades’s letter to the consul general

of Russia in Istanbul. Courtesy of Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi,
Istanbul, şD . 2584/12, April 16/28, 1884.

that may be dubbed “An Ottoman in Paris.” It foregrounds men of

many skills, many of them still “students,” whom the Sublime Porte
commissioned to travel abroad (most notably to France, but also to
Great Britain and Austria) to bring back technical devices that might
foster the Ottoman government’s “modernizing” project.33 At the core
of this story lies a craftsmen’s tradition akin to “the practice of a grand
tour—travels aimed at acquiring knowledge and experience through
observation, formal studies and contact with other men of science.”
The question then arises as to whether “the interpretation of such
practice in terms of technical and scientific dependence becomes highly
relevant” with regard to the nineteenth- century Mediterranean.34
Insofar as enfrenchisement remains the rule, it is quite difficult to even
think about any answer that looks elsewhere. Clearly then, the “Otto-
man in Paris” story line ties in with the reform- cum- enfrenchisement
overall set theory.35

An Ottoman in Paris 177

 Let us now take a closer look at the present episode’s two protagonists.
Not much is known about either of them, but a few supplementary
documents may allow for some basic information about who they
were, what they did, and even what they experienced. Vaḥdetī Efendi,
we learn, was a ẖaṭṭāṭ (calligrapher).36 In 1856, while serving as a
“secretary to the Office of Imperial Insignia,” he (along with two
others) received praise and promotions for “having deployed lusti-
ness in the service of drafting and designing the sublime badges and
imperial peace certificates to be delivered and granted to classes
of officialdom, servants of the exalted sultanate and more espe-
cially officials, officers and private soldiers from the helper states.”37
Vaḥdetī Efendi therefore reached the rütbe-i sālise (third rank) in
the hierarchy of principal Ottoman civil servants—which, as per
its reorganization in 1832–33, included five different levels. Eight
years on, he now “count[ed] among the attendants to the Office of
Imperial Protocol,” which situated him at the core of the Ottoman
Palace.38 This testifies to his ascending career as a court official.
Meanwhile, his cursus honorum highlights that he was trained in
the use of various writing techniques, ranging from calligraphed to
printed and engraved letters—a training very similar to the one that
some “intellectuals,” publishers, and newspapermen could receive at
about the same time, though at varying levels and in more strictly
bureaucratic services.39
This is how Vaḥdetī Efendi came to meet Mösyö Çörçīl, also known
as Alfred Churchill.40 The latter’s father, William Churchill, was an
English merchant long established in the Ottoman Empire. He first
settled in Smyrna in 1815, before he moved to Istanbul in 1831 for a
two-year stint as a secretary to the United States embassy.41 In 1836
he was briefly involved in what became known as the “Churchill
affair,” when after a few days in prison for hurting a child in a hunt-
ing accident he was released under British diplomatic pressure.42
In compensation for such avanies (humiliations) he obtained, along
with a decoration set with diamonds and a sultanic ferman (decree)
granting him the right to export olive oil from the Ottoman realms,43

178 MARC AYMES

the right to publish a newspaper: this became the Cerīde-i Ḥavādis
(Minute book of news)—which his son took over upon his death in
1846.44
The reason for Alfred Churchill’s Paris assignment was undoubtedly
his expertise in letterpress printing and movable types and his pro-
longed experience of collaboration with the Ottoman authorities. His
father had founded the Cerīde-i Ḥavādis at a time when the Ottoman
government was busy ensuring the regular publication of the official
gazette Taḳvīm-i Veḳāyi‘ (Almanac of events). Though privately owned,
his paper enjoyed the Sublime Porte’s financial and technical support:
types and proofreaders were employed for the design of both publica-
tions.45 It therefore is hardly surprising that the younger Churchill would
contribute his expertise to the design of other printed currencies, by
appointment to His Majesty the Sultan.
In many respects Alfred Churchill’s features may seem to match
the generic profile of the “foreign experts [who] were invited to
carry out particular projects” on an occasional basis, namely, “to
supply ideas on the innovation and reorganization of existing institu-
tions, to design new ones and even to carry out the reforms.”46 In all
likelihood Churchill remained categorized an ecnebī (foreigner) in
the Ottoman administrators’ parlance, not least because he enjoyed
legal protection from British consular authorities.47 Still, the endur-
ing character of his “minute-keeping” for the Ottoman state sets his
business apart from occasional, freelance consultancy. As a matter of
fact, this collaboration ran so deep as to be called a ẖiẕmet (service).
Moreover, not only did Churchill serve the Ottoman state, but he
must also have been versed in Ottoman Turkish, which gave him an
insider’s acquaintance of the “Ottoman way.” Under such circum-
stances his profile could be likened to that of a generic “Ottoman,”
as per the tentative definition once provided by Norman Itzkowitz
and Max Mote:

The term Ottoman here is used to signify those who qualified for first-
class status in that society by serving the religion (being Muslim),
serving the state (holding the position that gave them a state income

An Ottoman in Paris 179

 and a privileged tax status), and knowing the Ottoman Way (using
the Ottoman Turkish language and conforming to the manners and
customs of the society that used Ottoman Turkish).48

Clearly there is much to distinguish this ideal type from what we know
of Alfred Churchill’s standing. In contrast to Vaḥdetī Efendi, he was
no official member of the Ottoman chancery, and to the best of our
knowledge, he never “turned Turk,” that is, became a Muslim. And
yet, to judge by the above-quoted definition, there remains something
Ottoman about him. To this extent one may conclude that the two Paris
companions had several traits of “Ottomanness” in common.49

A Portrait of the “Attendant” as a “Unique Master”

What is gained by reflecting at length on Alfred Churchill’s and Vaḥdetī
Efendi’s profiles and roles? The payoff is the possibility of significantly
altering our understanding of the “Ottoman in Paris” story line. Portray-
ing Churchill as a “foreign expert” would almost automatically define
Vaḥdetī Efendi as a typical enfrenchised Ottoman—an eternal “student”
sent to Paris in the hope of coming back learned and “modern” at last.
Conversely, the Ottomanization of Churchill’s foreignness makes it prob-
lematic to abide by the set theory of Mediterranean enfrenchisement.
To be sure, at the time Vaḥdetī Efendi traveled to Paris he was still
called a ẖalīfe (attendant)—a word that testifies to his junior status
within the patronage- cum-bureaucracy Ottoman chancery system.50
Should we then conclude that he was sent abroad to complete his edu-
cation under the tutelage of “Professor” Churchill? This does not stand
up to a close reading of the document excerpted above. Vaḥdetī Efendi
was mandated not to learn from Churchill’s towering experience but
to “accompany the aforementioned and provide him with assistance”
(mūmaileyhe terfīḳen).51 Since the adverb terfīḳen refers to somebody
being sent “as companion, attendant, guide,” the Ottoman wording
makes it difficult here to decide whether Vaḥdetī Efendi joined Churchill
as a mere auxiliary or actually as a guide—or maybe both, depending
on how their mission was to unfold.52 This is why my rendering of the
previous Ottoman quotation into English had to remain deliberately

180 MARC AYMES

ambiguous. Hence “we shall be careful not to interpret the presence
of foreign experts, significant as it might be, automatically in terms
of backwardness or dependence.”53 Similarly, there is no necessity to
conclude that Churchill and Vaḥdetī Efendi simply lived out behaviors
presumed by the enfrenchisement set theory. Rather, the two travelers
may well have teamed up as equals.
Existing listings and biographies make clear that Vaḥdetī Efendi was
no ordinary “attendant”; he was one of the finest calligraphers active
at the Ottoman court in this period, better known under his full name,
Meḥmed Şevḳet Vaḥdetī Efendi. Born in 1833, “he became a unique
master in all eighteen handwriting patterns used by Muslims,” accord-
ing to the early-twentieth- century compiler Clément Huart, whose
biographical sketch provides us with the most complete information
to date. “The task of drawing imperial diplomas, Huart continues, was
granted exclusively to him.” He also penned “gilded calligraphic panels
in celi style that are to be found in most mosques throughout Constanti-
nople,” including Hagia Sophia. Upon Sultan ‘Abdül‘azīz’s accession to
the throne in 1861 it was Vaḥdetī Efendi who designed his ṭuġrā (sultanic
monogram). In accordance with an imperial decree, this henceforth
set the standard for the design of ṭuġrās. Huart also mentions Vaḥdetī
Efendi’s travels to London and Paris. While in France, he relates, the
calligrapher took due care to earn the sovereign’s favor: he designed cuf-
flinks for Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie, with their names
enciphered on them, of which both were very fond. Yet his mission’s
key purpose, Huart stresses, was “to direct the etching and printing of
postal stamps, Ottoman Bank notes and debenture bonds.”54 Judging
the banknotes to be “particularly remarkable,” the biographer then
attempts to describe them in minute detail:

At the top, under the European numbering placed on both sides, are
the words “five Turkish pounds” repeated twenty times, in so fine
a writing that it takes a magnifying glass to read them; on the right
side these same words are written twice in oval divānī celi style, and
repeated twenty times on a blue background. No calligrapher in our
time has been capable of such a tour de force.55

An Ottoman in Paris 181

Judging from this ex post facto record of Vaḥdetī Efendi’s achievements,
it is clear that he by no means played second fiddle. In particular, Huart’s
account shows (and other documents concur) that Paris was the prime
destination of his travels, and that this “Ottoman in Paris” mission was
much wider-ranging than mere stamp design.56
Still, this panegyric needs to be read with precaution for several
reasons. What it provides is nothing but an inverted mirror image of the
enfrenchisement set theory: whereas mastery was previously identified
with the Westerner’s expertise, and therefore presumed to rest in Alfred
Churchill’s hands, it now becomes the exclusive privilege of Vaḥdetī
Efendi, the gifted Ottoman. If one is to eschew the old dichotomous
pattern of analysis, a different scheme of things is in order.

Now on Trial, the Enfrenchised Speaks

While meticulously compiling the list of Vaḥdetī Efendi’s illustrious
achievements Huart said nothing of the shameful affair the master cal-
ligrapher found himself embroiled in following his European travels.
Unbeknownst to readers of eulogistic biographies, the draftsman’s mis-
sion to Paris brought about a serious setback in his prestigious career.
Only a couple of years after he came back to Istanbul, he was accused of
misusing some documents he had designed and printed during his mission
to Paris. Early in 1868 he was indicted for “daring to sell coupons of public
bonds that were out of order” and was given a one-year jail sentence.57 We
learn this thanks to a few reports from within the Ottoman bureaucracy,
which interestingly enough include minutes of Vaḥdetī Efendi’s inter-
rogation at the Sublime Porte. These reports provide us with precious
(though ex post facto) insights into what the draftsman did, thought he
did, or said he thought he did while in Paris. The enfrenchised speaks.
However cautious and at times indecisive our reading remains, Vaḥdetī
Efendi’s trial file helps to put the enfrenchisement set theory to the test.
Let us start by quoting a few lengthy excerpts of the report summing
up Vaḥdetī Efendi’s case:

Certain coupons of public bonds turned out to be redundant and

erroneous in numbering, so that investigations had to be carried out

182 MARC AYMES

 as a result. It was thus ascertained that these pieces had been circu-
lated by Vaḥdetī Efendi, himself a mold engraver for public bonds.
Once placed under arrest and trialed . . . the above-mentioned efendi
admitted that being in Paris at the time when the molds were com-
pleted he took with him as a souvenir thirteen 100-pound bonds and
some bits of damaged coupons among those which had been printed
first for the sake of experiment, since he considered them a work of
art, and that subsequent needs forced him to sell them. He pointed
out that all in all fifty-four coupons were in his possession, out of
which twenty-six had been detached from the thirteen mentioned
bonds, whereas the other twenty- eight consisted of fragments and
blank coupons.
.  .  . According to the summary proceedings [of the case] the
above-mentioned efendi took great care over the printing of the
public bonds, which he drew and had printed by official appoint-
ment to the state: each was processed five or six times through the
machine tool, some two or three thousand ended up torn or mashed
to pieces, others that lacked inking were torn and thrown away, so
the mentioned thirteen documents and twenty- eight coupons were
the most valid, and since the coupons were split into three parts he
cut the surplus to a four-part format. This being done he withheld
them for more than a year, as he would keep a talisman, until he
changed them for money after his salary shrank. He declared that
all of them remained as they came out of the machine, except for
two which had Frankish and Turkish numbering that conflicted, so
he rectified the French figure on the first piece and the Turkish figure
on the second to make them tally.58

The meaning and implications of this quote are analyzed in the fol-
lowing sections.

What Small Print, Numbers, and Slips Have to Tell

Understanding what “went wrong” with Vaḥdetī Efendi requires us to
pursue a bit further the micro-diplomatics of Ottoman governmental
practice initiated above. We need a better sense of what the “public

An Ottoman in Paris 183

bonds” the draftsman drafted and printed looked like in order to under-
stand what prompted his indictment. While the files kept at the Ottoman
archives do not provide us with a sample, other such bonds (eshām-ı
‘umūmiyye-i devlet-i ‘aliyye) issued in the Ottoman realms at that time
help illustrate what Vaḥdetī Efendi’s work looked like. Molds mentioned
in the report could have looked like the one in figure 6.5. All the same,
the reference to “coupons” leads us to presume that what Vaḥdetī Efendi
produced looked more like the one in figure 6.6. At the bond’s bottom
right corner, one may notice a tiny mention which allows us to ascertain
that it was issued in “Paris—Imprimerie Poitevin, Rue Damiette 2 et
4.” A letter from the Ottoman embassy in Paris pertaining to Vaḥdetī
Efendi’s work on “mobile stamps” identifies “Monsieur Poitevin” as “the
provider of the aforesaid stamps.”59 It therefore stands to reason, given
the match of date and place, that Vaḥdetī Efendi himself contributed
to designing the document above.
Moreover, the facsimile is particularly helpful in making sense of the
difference between “bonds” and “coupons” affirmed in the above- quoted
report. The bond proper consists of the sheet’s largest section, laid out
in a triptych composed (from left to right) in English, Ottoman, and
French. Below are the coupons themselves—the coupons of interest,
that is, which could be detached one by one from the document’s main
body whenever the bondholder claimed repayment for his initial loan
(in the present case this was to happen in biannual installments, at a 5
percent annual rate).
Printed on the same sheet of paper, bond and coupons are further
bound together by a common numbering system. The same number
appears in both Arabic and Indic numerals (for the English/French and
Ottoman Turkish sections of the document, respectively). It shows up
again at the bottom left corner of each and every coupon. Finally, the
use of gray-tinted boxes makes clear that these numbered zones were
deemed crucial to the document’s validity, while signaling a concern
for possible tampering. In short, this sprouting of numbers throughout
each and every segment of the document testifies to the same minia-
turization of authentication that was studied above.
These numbers were responsible for Vaḥdetī Efendi’s misfortune. It

184 MARC AYMES

FIG. 6.5. Mold for an Ottoman debenture bond, undated. Courtesy of Ali Akyıldız,
Osmanlı Finans Sisteminde Dönüm Noktası: Kağıt Para ve Sosyo-ekonomik Etkileri
(Istanbul: Eren, 1996), xlviii.
FIG. 6.6. Ottoman debenture bond, March 18–30, 1865. Courtesy of Ali Akyıldız,
Osmanlı Dönemi Tahvil ve Hisse Senetleri, “Ottoman Securities” (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı
Yurt yayınları, 2001), 309.

was because “certain coupons of public bonds turned out to be redun-

dant and erroneous in numbering” that the draftsman ended up being
indicted and put on trial. Later on, in the confession quoted above,
Vaḥdetī Efendi admits that among the bonds he produced there were
“two which had Frankish and Turkish numbering that conflicted, so
he rectified the French figure on the first piece and the Turkish figure
on the second to make them tally.”60 This slight “rectification” is what
allowed the Ottoman authorities to sniff out the draftsman’s inside job
and catch him red-handed.
Vaḥdetī Efendi could thus be declared guilty of “altering numbers”
on official documents that were considered “the Sublime State’s exclu-
sive insignia.” By tampering with paper money in such a way he clearly

186 MARC AYMES

usurped the sovereign’s fiduciary privileges. Judging from the corre-
spondence, the Ottoman authorities did not feel the need to label this
misdeed a “forgery.” Still, one may argue that, while in Paris, Vaḥdetī
Efendi did indeed forge a bond of a different kind, and a quite distinc-
tive one at that.

Public Bonds, Intimate Ties

There is more to Vaḥdetī Efendi’s confession than a tarnished reputa-
tion. His story has a considerable bearing on our understanding of the
“Ottoman in Paris” experience—hence, of the patterns of transaction
that are involved in Mediterranean history.
On the face of it, the draftsman’s story dovetails nicely with the
concept of enfrenchisement, that is, the idea that through servile
reproduction of a presumed “French model” a framework of cultural
extroversion and social distinction arose that brought about the “inven-
tion” of the modern Mediterranean. To proponents of the set theory
that such a concept entails, Vaḥdetī Efendi’s misfortune appears to be
a case in point. It appears to show how an Ottoman strove to learn from
abroad yet failed to articulate imported expertise into a full-fledged
technical adoption, that is, a technology.61
Indeed, the draftsman fully embraced the commitment to mechani-
cal reproduction that was involved in his Paris mission. Feverishly he
attempted to reproduce the printing process until satisfied with the
outcome. His exertions may thus appear symbolically to materialize
the Ottomans’ attempt to align their history with that of other Mediter-
ranean empires, under the spell of belated transfer and appropriation.
Emerging from such views is the idea that all such attempts ended
up failing, due to an irreducible incongruence of “cultures” between
European technologies of power and their “Ottoman-in-Paris” counter-
parts. Vaḥdetī Efendi’s treatment of debenture bonds “as [one] would
keep a talisman” could well lend itself to such an interpretation, since
it seems to signal a confusion of values and an unbridgeable cultural
chasm.62 By the same token, it is revelatory that a few torn slips of paper
money could become “a work of art” in the draftsman’s eyes. For all his
mastery of the fine arts of calligraphy, and perhaps precisely because

An Ottoman in Paris 187

he was such a master, Vaḥdetī Efendi seems to have misconstrued his
mission as having to do with “art,” whereas its primary purpose was to
provide the Ottoman administration with reliable tools of miniaturized
authentication. To be sure, the draftsman also fully grasped the impor-
tance of bureaucratic technicalities, such as keeping an eye on numbers:
hence his readiness to “rectify” them whenever inconsistency arose. To
name this “rectification” Vaḥdetī Efendi used the word taṣḥīḥ—literally,
restoring to health or authenticating—by which he meant to convey that
he acted in good faith.63 But the Sublime Porte bureaucrats understood
this move quite differently. To them it amounted to a taġyīr (alteration)
that would inevitably deprive the document of its preordained regis-
tration value, and thus showed Vaḥdetī Efendi’s lack of reverence for
authentication procedures.
As a matter of fact, the draftsman was less concerned about the
correction of small numbers than about their consistency: in an era of
technical reproducibility he looked for authenticity not in bureaucratic
cross-checkability but in the aesthetic coherence of a “work of art.” Trust
in numbers was trivial to him; what really mattered was whether the
design of the larger picture turned out successfully, the same thing that
mattered most when drafting calligraphic panels for the Hagia Sophia
mosque, or etching the sultan’s name on an emerald jewel. This is what
one may call putting two and two together to make five.
Vaḥdetī Efendi’s understanding of his mission to Paris was thus more
that of an artist-in-residence than of a “foreign expert.” Does this mean
he missed the point? And should we conclude that he remained the
enfrenchised Ottoman whom many would claim he was? The ambigui-
ties that linger on in the draftsman’s account suggest something else.
Vaḥdetī Efendi did choose to turn the technical specimen he had been
designing into a non-reproducible unicum—by calling it a “work of art,”
considering it a “talisman” and bringing it back to Istanbul as a “souve-
nir.” But while withholding his precious and secret talisman, he never
lost sight of its fiduciary value. If the bond could be converted into such
an object of affection, so could the talisman be converted back again
into the impersonal technology of paper money—which it eventually
was, when “he changed [it] for money after his salary shrank.” Rather

188 MARC AYMES

than a sign of cultural incongruence, Vaḥdetī Efendi’s play on values
testifies to his sense of ambiguity and convertibility.
Last but not least, the bond the draftsman forged while in Paris dif-
fered from one of enfrenchisement inasmuch as it pledged no aping
allegiance to its presumed “model.” Vaḥdetī Efendi’s attitude was not
one of sheer technical reproduction: his confession offhandedly insists
that he relished the “experimental” thrill of the production process.64
This comes as a clear reminder that there is simply no such thing as
ingenuous mimicry. Vaḥdetī Efendi’s performance encapsulates both
the quest for a technology of reproduction and a personal eagerness to
experiment driven by singular fantasies. The “public bonds” he drafted
were intimate ones indeed: made both out of duty and out of curiosity.

Conclusion: A Forger’s Scheme of Things

To think about Mediterranean history, the present study weaves together
two different lines of reasoning: an Ottoman paper money story on
the one hand, and the historian’s involvement in the Mediterranean
“Frenchise” on the other. This approach highlights how the Ottoman
draftsman’s experiment with paper money may help unsettle the tenets
of the enfrenchisement set theory.
There have been, of course, many similar or equivalent undertakings
at work of late in studies of Mediterranean worlds. With the specter
of “globalization” starting to haunt studies premised on regionalized
topoi, the use-value of “areas” has been shaken to its foundations. As
opposed to the topical and chronic regularity that an area is supposed to
symbolize, accounting for the global has meant working to transcend the
fixity of time and place framings. Works that question how to “mov[e]
away not only from theories of territorial sovereignty but also from
theories of spatialized sovereignty” have flourished.65 One means to
that end, in studies dealing with the Mediterranean world at large, has
been an increased focus on “troublemakers”—whether named transla-
tors, converts, or more generically, even, brokers—whose “intercultural
prowess” overrode the area’s “culture.”66 While in many regards Vaḥdetī
Efendi the draftsman may be counted among this motley crew, there
also is specific historiographical relevance in further characterizing his

An Ottoman in Paris 189

performance. And although his misdeed never was labeled a “forgery”
by the Ottoman authorities, to us this wording may become critically
helpful when trying to think of the kind of disenfrenchised Mediter-
ranean that his coinage story brings to light.
The idea of forgery conveys a sense of Janus-faced agency that brings
it close to, yet sets it apart from, frameworks of “brokerage.” Those
historians who propose the latter approaches, mindful though they
may be of the possibility of crossing or straddling boundaries, actually
presuppose and perpetuate the overarching category of “boundary.”67
Declaring borders now open to circulation by no means implies that
guards and patrols went off- duty. In such accounts, any understanding
of historical trajectories requires that they be premised on preordained
compartmentalizations, whether cultural, religious, jurisdictional, or
otherwise. Thus, emphasis is laid “on connections between ‘cultures’
rather than the cultural conditions of connection.”68 One is therefore
led to endorse the same old “production-then-circulation” sequential
pattern, whereby all that circulates throughout the Mediterranean is pri-
marily defined by its origins in one “area” or another. In sum, brokerage
analysis is still invested in the kind of set theory that has been buttress-
ing the historiography of Mediterranean enfrenchisement all along.
Forgers may be considered to resemble “brokers” at first sight, yet
they critically differ. While the latter always appear to live “in between”
multiple orders or modernities without being indentured to any, the
former faithfully abide by all that is legal tender. The forger’s tale is
one of perpetually reforming—that is, simultaneously reproducing and
renewing—the authority of reigning legitimate currencies. So Vaḥdetī
Efendi strove to work out a reliable system of made-for- circulation
fiduciary tools. He was no loose cannon sprung from some unspecified
in-between, but a craftsman dedicated to exploring new means of aes-
thetic achievement while pursuing his commitment to calligraphy, and
also a chancery man keen to keep pace with changing tools of certifica-
tion while upholding the authenticity of his master’s rule. On these two
accounts he had a say in the technology of authority and could testify
to the intricacy of its currencies. What he did was experiment with this
intricacy: surely this implied allowing for possible conflicts between

190 MARC AYMES

aesthetic and bureaucratic requirements to emerge in the process. More
importantly still, given the fact that these currencies were designed to
circulate as both symbols and techniques, their making could by no
means be premised on an idea of compartmentalized, bounded worlds:
it required devising specific cultural conditions of connection to start
with, irrespective of whether this would imply connecting “cultures”
in any way. That meant approaching culture as a matter of coinage,
that is, of production that could only take place at the same time that
circulation itself occurred.
Maybe, then, one should adopt, when thinking of Mediterranean
history, a forger’s scheme of things.69 In it, concomitances and inter-
dependencies take center stage, unlike enfrenchised studies, which
narrate Mediterranean history in terms of belated appropriation and
mimetic transfer. In so doing one may also hope to draw up a revised
chronology of the modalities of governance and change throughout the
Mediterranean world, detached from the great rifts that have marked
narratives of its history. Rather than in the mediating, let us approach
the Mediterranean in the forging.

NOTES
Primary research for this work was carried out in Istanbul with the support of the
French National Research Agency through two successive funding frameworks:
“Ordonner et transiger: Modalités de gouvernement et d’administration en Turquie
et dans l’Empire Ottoman, du XIXe siècle à nos jours” (ANR - 08-GOUV - 045) and
“Trans-Acting Matters: Areas and Eras of a (Post-)Ottoman Globalization” (ANR -12-
GLOB -0003). I owe many thanks to the seminar participants who kindly provided
feedback on earlier versions of the essay over the past few years, at the Central
European College (Budapest), the Columbia Global Center (Reid Hall, Paris), Cornell
University, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris), the École normale
supérieure (Paris), and the Institut de recherches sur le Maghreb contemporain
(Tunis). My gratitude also goes to Darina Martykánová for her inspiring suggestions
on the topic in general and her kind remarks on the present paper in particular.
With regard to Ottoman Turkish language, I have here adhered to the trans-
literation system of the International Journal of Middle East Studies. Translations
from all non-English sources are mine unless otherwise noted.
1. Ariel Salzmann, “The Moral Economies of the Pre-Modern Mediterranean: Pre-
liminaries to the Study of Cross-Cultural Migration during the Long Sixteenth
Century,” in Living in the Ottoman Ecumenical Community: Essays in Honour of

An Ottoman in Paris 191

 Suraiya Faroqhi, ed. Vera Costantini and Markus Koller (Leiden: Brill, 2008),
463.
2. Christoph K. Neumann, “Ottoman Provincial Towns from the Eighteenth to the
Nineteenth Century: A Re-Assessement of Their Place in the Transformation of
the Empire,” in The Empire in the City: Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman
Empire, ed. Jens Hanssen, Thomas Philipp, and Stefan Weber (Beyrouth: Ergon
Verlag Würzburg in Kommission, 2002), 131–32.
3. Stanford J. Shaw, “Some Aspects of the Aims and Achievements of the Nineteenth-
Century Ottoman Reformers,” in Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East:
The Nineteenth Century, ed. William R. Polk and Richard L. Chambers (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1968): 29–39. Cf. Olivier Bouquet, Les pachas du
sultan: Essai sur les agents supérieurs de l’état ottoman (1839–1909) (Paris: Peeters,
2007).
4. For instance, Engin D. Akarlı, Belgelerle Tanzimat: Osmanlı Sadrıazamlarından Âli
ve Fuad Paşalarının Siyasî Vasiyyetnâmeleri [The Tanzimat in documents: Political
testaments of the Grand Viziers Âli and Fuad Pashas] (Istanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversi-
tesi, 1978); Mithat Paşa’nın Hatıraları [The memoirs of Midhat Pasha], ed. Osman
Selim Kocahanoğlu (Istanbul: Temel Yayınları, 1997); Les Musurus: Une famille de
diplomates ottomans. Lettres et documents (1852–1910), ed. Olivier Bouquet and
Sinan Kuneralp (Istanbul: Isis, 2015).
5. William Clark and Peter Becker, eds., Little Tools of Knowledge: Historical Essays
on Academic and Bureaucratic Practices (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2001).
6. Julia A. Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migra-
tion, ca. 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), xii.
7. Hamit Bozarslan, “Pourquoi Daniel Rivet est-il parti à l’Est?” in De l’Atlas à l’Orient
musulman: Contributions en hommage à Daniel Rivet, ed. Alain Messaoudi and
Dominique Avon (Paris: Karthala, 2011), 33– 42.
8. André Raymond, “Islamic City, Arab City: Orientalist Myths and Recent Views,”
British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 21, no. 1 (1994): 3– 4.
9. Immanuel Wallerstein, “Eurocentrism and Its Avatars: The Dilemmas of Social
Science,” New Left Review, no. 226 (1997): 93.
10. See Immanuel Wallerstein, Hale Decdeli, and Reşat Kasaba, “The Incorporation
of the Ottoman Empire into the World-Economy,” in The Ottoman Empire and the
World-Economy, ed. Huri İslamoğlu-İnan (Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press and Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1987), 88– 97; Reşat Kasaba,
The Ottoman Empire and the World-Economy: The Nineteenth Century (New York:
SUNY Press, 1988).
11. Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus,
1700–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 3. Doumani counts
among those who made the case for re-“localizing” such world-economic processes.

192 MARC AYMES

12. Dyala Hamzah, “The Making of the Arab Intellectual (1880–1960): Empire, Public
Sphere, and the Colonial Coordinates of Selfhood,” in The Making of the Arab Intel-
lectual: Empire, Public Sphere, and the Colonial Coordinates of Selfhood, ed. Dyala
Hamzah (London: Routledge, 2013), 3.
13. Virginia H. Aksan, “Breaking the Spell of the Baron de Tott: Reframing the Ques-
tion of Military Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1760–1830,” International History
Review 24, no. 2 (2002): 264.
14. Constantin Iordachi, “The Making of Citizenship in the Post-Ottoman Balkans:
State Building, Foreign Models, and Legal-Political Transfers,” in Ottomans into
Europeans: State and Institution Building in South-East Europe, ed. Wim van Meurs
and Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (London: Hurst, 2010), 179–220; Tassos Anastassiadis
and Nathalie Clayer, “Introduction: Beyond the Incomplete or Failed Modernization
Paradigm,” in Society, Politics, and State Formation in Southeastern Europe during
the 19th Century, ed. Tassos Anastassiadis and Nathalie Clayer (Athens: Alpha Bank
Historical Archives, 2011), 11–32; Olivier Bouquet, “Is It Time to Stop Speaking
about Ottoman Modernisation?” in Order and Compromise: Government Practices
in Turkey from the Late Ottoman Empire to the Early 21st Century, ed. Marc Aymes,
Benjamin Gourisse, and Élise Massicard (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 45– 67.
15. Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radical-
ism, 1860–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 16, 168.
16. Juan Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2007), 247– 48.
17. My point here harks back to Marc Bloch’s take on “nomenclature” in The Histo-
rian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (New York: Knopf, 1953), 159– 60. See also Albert
Hourani, “The Changing Face of the Fertile Crescent in the XVIIIth Century,” Studia
Islamica 8 (1957): 90.
18. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 2–3. Debates
on these issues have been going on ever since: “The absence of anything approach-
ing a consensus on the meaning of the French expedition may be a fair reflection
of the state of the field,” as Kenneth M. Cuno noted in “The Napoleonic Moment in
Egyptian History: Not Such a Watershed?” (review of Irene Bierman, ed., Napoleon
in Egypt [Reading: Ithaca Press, 2003]), Journal of African History 45, no. 3 (2004):
505. See also Dror Ze’evi’s insightful discussion in “Back to Napoleon? Thoughts
on the Beginning of the Modern Era in the Middle East,” Mediterranean Historical
Review 19, no. 1 (2004): 73–94.
19. See Edhem Eldem, Pride and Privilege: A History of Ottoman Orders, Medals, and
Decorations (Istanbul: Ottoman Bank Archives and Research Centre, 2004), 16:
“Our story begins towards the end of the summer of 1798, in the wake of Napoleon
Bonaparte’s daring invasion of Ottoman Egypt.” Rather than one of “appropria-
tion,” Eldem’s story is one of “the familiarization of Ottomans with medals” over
the course of the nineteenth century (144).

An Ottoman in Paris 193

20. Thus in İlber Ortaylı and Tekin Akıllıoğlu, “Le Tanzimat et le modèle français:
Mimétisme ou adaptation?” in L’Empire Ottoman, la République de Turquie et la
France, ed. Hâmit Batu and Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont (Istanbul: Isis, 1986),
197–208. A recent attempt at rekindling the interest for such a framework is found
in Emmanuel Szurek, “Extraversion et dépendances: Les termes de l’échange cul-
turel franco-turc de la guerre de Crimée à la guerre froide,” in Turcs et Français:
Une histoire culturelle, 1860–1960, ed. Güneş Işıksel and Emmanuel Szurek (Rennes:
Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014), 27– 69, more explicitly on 58– 59.
21. İlber Ortaylı, Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Alman Nüfuzu [German leverage in the
Ottoman Empire] (Istanbul: Kaynak, 1983); Hamit Bozarslan, “Modèles français
et allemand au miroir ottoman,” in Plurales Deutschland–Allemagne plurielle: Fest-
schrift für Étienne François–Mélanges Étienne François, ed. Peter Schöttler, Patrice
Veit, and Michael Werner (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1999), 58– 65.
22. Most notably in Heidemarie Doganalp-Votzi and Claudia Römer, Herrschaft und
Staat: Politische Terminologie des Osmanischen Reiches der Tanzimatzeit (Vienna:
Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2008), 42, 45, 74, 99,
106, 122, 224. See also Aylin Koçunyan, “Negotiating the Ottoman Constitution,
1856–1876” (PhD thesis, European University Institute, Florence, 2013), 78– 80;
Einar Wigen, “Ottoman Concepts of Empire,” Contributions to the History of Concepts
8, no. 1 (2013): 44– 66; and Szurek, “Extraversion et dépendances,” 42, 60– 62. Cf.
Roderic H. Davison, “The French Language as a Vehicle for Ottoman Reform in
the Nineteenth Century,” in De la Révolution Française à la Turquie d’Atatürk: La
modernisation politique et sociale. Les lettres, les sciences et les arts. Actes des col-
loques d’Istanbul (10–12 mai 1989), ed. Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont and Edhem
Eldem (Istanbul: Isis, 1990), 125– 40.
23. Marie-Noëlle Bourguet et al., eds., L’invention scientifique de la Méditerranée: Égypte,
Morée, Algérie (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS , 1998); Marie-Noëlle Bourguet et al.,
eds., Enquêtes en Méditerranée: Les expéditions françaises d’Égypte, de Morée, et
d’Algérie (Athens: Institut de recherches néohelléniques/FNRS , 1999); Anne Ruel,
“L’invention de la Méditerranée,” Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’Histoire 32 (1991): 7–14;
Florence Deprest, “L’invention géographique de la Méditerranée: Éléments de
réflexion,” L’Espace Géographique 31, no. 1 (2002): 73–92.
24. Patrick Cabanel offers a more “archipelagic” approach to “the immaterial empire
of French language” in the Mediterranean: see his “Introduction—Trois France
en Méditerranée orientale: L’empire immatériel de la langue,” in Une France en
Méditerranée: Écoles, langue, et culture françaises, XIXe–XXe siècles, ed. Patrick
Cabanel (Grâne: Creaphis, 2006), 9–29.
25. For an elaborate critique see Jocelyne Dakhlia and Wolfgang Kaiser, eds., Les
musulmans dans l’histoire de l’Europe, vol. 2, Passages et contacts en Méditerranée
(Paris: Albin Michel, 2013).
26. E.g., Stephen Ortega, Negotiating Transcultural Relations in the Early Modern Medi-
terranean: Ottoman-Venitian Encounters (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).

194 MARC AYMES

27. Christian Bromberger, “Technologie et analyse sémantique des objets: Pour une
sémio-technologie,” L’Homme 19, no. 1 (1979): 105– 40.
28. Roderic H. Davison, “The First Ottoman Experiment with Paper Money,” in Türkiyenin
Sosyal ve Ekonomik Tarihi (1071–1920). Social and Economic History of Turkey (1071–
1920). Papers Presented to the First International Congress on the Social and Economic
History of Turkey, Hacettepe University, Ankara, July 11–13, 1977, ed. Osman Okyar
and Halil İnalcık (Ankara: Meteksan, 1980), 243– 51; Ali Akyıldız, Osmanlı Finans
Sisteminde Dönüm Noktası: Kağıt Para ve Sosyo-ekonomik Etkileri [The Ottoman
financial system at a turning point: Paper money and its socioeconomic effects]
(Istanbul: Eren, 1996); Edhem Eldem, Osmanlı Bankası Arşivi ve Tahsin İsbiroğlu
Koleksiyonundan Osmanlı Bankası Banknotları (1863–1914) [Banknotes issued by
the Ottoman Bank found in the Ottoman Bank Archives and in Tahsin İsbiroğlu’s
collection] (Istanbul: Osmanlı Bankası, 1998); Ali Akyıldız, Osmanlı Dönemi Tah-
vil ve Hisse Senetleri, “Ottoman Securities” [Debenture bonds and shareholding
deeds from the Ottoman period] (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt yayınları, 2001). See
also Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 1, s.v. “Ashām” [Shares], by B. Lewis,
and vol. 4, s.v. “Ḳā’ime” [Banknote], by R. Davison; Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm
Ansiklopedisi, vol. 11, s.v. “Esham” [Shares], by M. Genç, and vol. 24, s.v. “Kāime”
[Banknote], by A. Akyıldız.
29. Marc Aymes, “Un grand progrès—sur le papier”: Histoire provinciale des réformes
ottomanes à Chypre au XIXe siècle (Paris: Peeters, 2010).
30. Mehmet Zeki Pakalın, Tanzimat Maliye Nazırları [Finance ministers of the Tanzi-
mat] (Istanbul: Kanaat Kitabevi, n.d. [1939]), vol. 1, 67–72; Abdüllatif Şener,
“Tanzimat Dönemi Osmanlı Vergi Reformları” [Ottoman tax reforms during the
Tanzimat period], in 150. Yılında Tanzimat [The 150th anniversary of Tanzimat],
ed. Hakkı Dursun Yıldız (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1992), 265– 66; Stanford
J. Shaw, “The Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Tax Reforms and Revenue System,”
International Journal of Middle East Studies 6, no. 4 (1975): 434–38.
31. Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi [Prime Ministership Ottoman Archives], Istanbul
[hereafter BOA ], I .MMS . 27/1193, memorandum to the Sultan’s offices, 21–30
receb 1280 [January 1–10, 1864]. Also for the following quotation.
32. BOA , I .MMS . 27/1193, memorandum to the Sultan’s offices, 21–30 receb 1280
[January 1–10, 1864]
33. Klaus Kreiser, “Étudiants ottomans en France et en Suisse (1909–1912),” in Histoire
économique et sociale de l’Empire Ottoman et de la Turquie (1326–1960), ed. Daniel
Panzac (Leuven: Peeters, 1995), 843– 54; Hamiyet Sezer, “Tanzimat Dönemi’nde
Avrupa Şehirlerine Gönderilen Öğrenciler” [Students sent to European cities during
the Ottoman reforms], in Osmanlı Dünyasında Bilim ve Eğitim Milletlerarası Kon-
gresi. İstanbul 12–15 Nisan 1999. Tebliğler [Proceedings of the international congress
on knowledge and education in the Ottoman world: Istanbul, 12–15 April 1999]
(Istanbul: İslam Tarih, Sanat ve Kültür Araştırma Merkezi, 2001), 687– 711; Adnan
Şişman, Tanzimat Döneminde Fransa’ya Gönderilen Osmanlı Öğrencileri (1839–1876)

An Ottoman in Paris 195

 [Ottoman students sent to France during the Ottoman reforms] (Ankara: Türk
Tarih Kurumu, 2004); Mustafa Gençoğlu, “Osmanlı Devleti’nce Batı’ya Eğitim
Amacıyla Gönderilenler (1830–1908): Bir Grup Biyografisi Araştırması” [Those
the Ottoman state sent to the West for educational purposes (1830–1908): Study
of a collective biography] (doctoral diss., Hacettepe Üniversitesi, Ankara, 2008).
Cf. Darina Martykánová, Reconstructing Ottoman Engineers: Archaeology of a Pro-
fession (1789–1914) (Pisa: Edizioni Plus/Pisa University Press, 2010), 18–19.
34. Martykánová, Reconstructing Ottoman Engineers, 182.
35. Rifa‘āh Rāfi‘ al-Ṭahṭawī’s account of his travels to Paris in 1826–31, Taẖlīṣ-i ibrīz fī
talẖīṣ-i Bārīz [Extracting fine gold in a condensed report of Paris] (Bulaq: Maṭba‘āt
Ṣāḥib al-Sa‘ādah al-Abadīyah, 1839), has become a source endowed with a landmark
value in this regard: cf. An Imam in Paris: Al-Tahtawi’s Visit to France (1826–1831),
ed. Daniel L. Newman (London: Saqi Books, 2004).
36. BOA , I .DH . 535/37193, telegram translation, n.d. [~ ẕī’l-ḳā‘de 1281/March–April
1865]. Cf. Meḥmed Süreyyā, Sicill-i ‘Osmānī yāẖūd Teẕkire-i meşāhir-i ‘Osmāniyye
[Ottoman register, or memorial of famous Ottomans], ed. Nuri Akbayar (Istanbul:
Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları 1995–98), vol. 5, 1647.
37. BOA , I .DH . 359/23762, memorandum to the Sultan’s offices, 9 rebī‘ü’l-evvel 1273
[November 7, 1856].
38. Mehmet Zeki Pakalın, Osmanlı Tarih Deyimleri ve Terimleri Sözlüğü [Dictionary of
Ottoman historical terms and phrases] (Istanbul: Milli Eğitim Basımevi, 1946–53),
vol. 3, 478; cf. Hakan Karateke, Padişahım Çok Yaşa! Osmanlı Devletinin Son Yüz
Yılında Merasimler [Long live my Sultan! Ceremonies during the last hundred
years of the Ottoman state] (Istanbul: Kitap, 2004).
39. See, e.g., the case of Ebüzżiyā Meḥmed Tevfīḳ Beg as studied by Özgür Türesay,
“Être intellectuel à la fin de l’Empire Ottoman: Ebüzziya Tevfik (1849–1913) et
son temps” (doctoral diss., Institut des langues et civilisations orientales, Paris,
2008), 61–70. Cf. Orhan Koloğlu, “La formation des intellectuels à la culture jour-
nalistique dans l’Empire Ottoman et l’influence de la presse étrangère,” in Presse
turque et presse de Turquie: Actes des trois colloques organisés par l’Institut français
d’études anatoliennes et l’École supérieure de la presse de l’Université de Marmara,
ed. Nathalie Clayer, Alexandre Popovic and Thierry Zarcone (Istanbul: Isis, 1992),
123– 41.
40. BOA, HR .SFR .(3) 85/31, “Lettre d’introduction de Djemil Pacha pour Mr Churchill
& Vahdetti Eff.—1864,” February 6, 1864.
41. Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi, vol. 7, s.v. “Cerîde-i Havâdis,” by Z.
Ebüzziya.
42. O. Koloğlu, Miyop Çörçil Olayı: Ceride-i Havadis’in Öyküsü [The myopic Churchill
affair: The story of the “Minute book of news”] (Ankara: Yorum, 1986).
43. BOA , HAT . 1175/46438, multiple documents, ẕī’l-ḥicce 1252 [March–April 1837].
44. BOA , I .MVL . 83/1666, recommendation to award the “cerīdecilik ẖiẕmeti” (service
of keeping the minute book) to Alfred Churchill, 28 şevvāl 1262 [October 19, 1846].

196 MARC AYMES

45. Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi, vol. 7, s.v. “Cerîde-i Havâdis,” by Z.
Ebüzziya.
46. Martykánová, Reconstructing Ottoman Engineers, 182.
47. One may here refer to architect Fossati, who, in spite of his well- established
relationships with the Ottoman authorities, was in 1847 denied the right to buy a
house in Beyoğlu on account of not being an Ottoman subject: Göksun Akyürek,
Tanzimat Döneminde Mimarlık, Bilgi ve İktidar [Architecture, knowledge, and gov-
ernment during the Tanzimat period] (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt yayınları, 2011),
94– 95.
48. Norman Itzkowitz and Max Mote, eds., Mubadele: An Ottoman-Russian Exchange
of Ambassadors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 11.
49. For a further discussion with regard to this notion of “Ottomanness” see Marc
Aymes, A Provincial History of the Ottoman Empire: Cyprus and the Eastern Mediter-
ranean in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2014), 40– 52 and 114–26.
With regard to debates about “Ottoman identity” see F. Asli Ergul, “The Otto-
man Identity: Turkish, Muslim, or Rum?” Middle Eastern Studies 48, no. 4 (2012):
629– 45.
50. Pakalın, Osmanlı Tarih Deyimleri, vol. 1, 709; Necdet Sakaoğlu, Tanzimat’tan
Cumhuriyet’e Tarih Sözlüğü [Historical lexikon from the Tanzimat until the Repub-
lic] (Istanbul: İletişim, 1985), 54.
51. BOA , I .MMS . 27/1193, memorandum to the Sultan’s offices, 21–30 receb 1280
[January 1–10, 1864], quoted above.
52. Here referring to the standard definition for terfīḳ provided by Sir James W. Red-
house’s Turkish and English Lexikon (Istanbul: Boyajian, 1890), 535.
53. Martykánová, Reconstructing Ottoman Engineers, 182.
54. Clément Huart, Les calligraphes et les miniaturistes de l’Orient musulman (Paris: E.
Leroux, 1908), 198–200. Other available biographies, most importantly one by
İbnülemin Mahmut Kemal İnal in Turkish, amount to little more than a translation
of Huart’s work: İnal, Son Hattatlar [The last calligraphers] (Istanbul: Milli Eğitim
Bakanlığı, 1955), 434– 41. My thanks to Özgür Türesay for kindly providing me
with a copy of this latter text.
55. Huart, Les calligraphes, 200.
56. BOA , I .DH . 535/37193, copy of an imperial decree to the Ministry of Finance, 5
ẕī’l-ḳā‘de 1281 [April 1, 1865], states that Vaḥdetī Efendi is being commissionned
“to take with him to Paris the public bond sample that has been prepared, so as
to trace and draw there what ought to be written on it.” For other documents
showing that Vaḥdetī Efendi’s logistics were primarily organized around Paris see
I .HR . 207/11953, A .MKT .MHM . 333/15 (draft order to the Ministry of Finance,
dated overleaf 28 ẕī’l-ḥicce 1281 and 2 muḥarrem 1282 [24 and 28 May 1865]).
Documents giving short details on trips to London include A .MKT .MHM . 356/71
(draft order to the Ministry of Finance, dated overleaf 8–11 muḥarrem 1282 [June
3– 6, 1865]), where Vaḥdetī Efendi is said to be sent there “for postal stamps.”

An Ottoman in Paris 197

57. BOA , A .MKT .MHM . 400/25, #4, draft order to the Żabṭiye müşīrīni (command-
ers of Public Order) and to the Ministry of Finance, 19–25 şevvāl 1284 [February
13–19, 1868]. As this document indicates, Vaḥdetī Efendi’s jail term began on 24
cemāẕīü’l-āẖır 1284 [October 23, 1867]; his release was ordered three months in
advance of the original sentence (I .şD . 6/316, #4, memorandum to the Sultan’s
palace and appended sultanic order, 13–14 rebī‘ü’l- evvel 1285 [July 4– 5, 1868]).
58. BOA , A .MKT .MHM . 400/25, #3, round robin of the Meclis-i vālā-yı aḥkām-ı ‘adliyye
(High Council of Judicial Ordinances), 12 şevvāl 1284/25 kānūn-ı sānī 1283 [Febru-
ary 6, 1868]. Other similar documents include BOA , MVL . 1036/81, fezleke (police
report), 17 receb 1284 [November 14, 1867].
59. BOA , HR .TO . 75/33, letter (in French) from the Ottoman embassy in Paris to “Son
Altesse Aali Pacha Ministre des Affaires Etrangères de S.M.I. le Sultan,” August
25, 1865 (along with draft of Ottoman translation). Using Corinne Bouquin and
Élisabeth Parinet’s online Dictionnaire des imprimeurs-lithographes du XIXe siècle,
one may ascertain that Étienne Poitevin’s printing press was at the time in charge
of imperial stamps designed for railways, banks and other manufacturing compa-
nies. See http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/imprimeurs/node/22959.
60. BOA , A .MKT .MHM . 400/25, #3, round robin of the High Council of Judicial
Ordinances, 12 şevvāl 1284/25 kānūn-ı sānī 1283 [February 6, 1868]. Also for the
following quotation.
61. Cf. Tuncay Zorlu, Innovation and Empire in Turkey: Sultan Selim III and the Mod-
ernisation of the Ottoman Navy (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008), 42– 46, 75, 164– 66.
62. For background on talismans involving a certain “science of letters” see Encyclopaedia
of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 1, s.v. “Abdjad” [Use of Arabic characters for numeration],
by G. Weil and G. S. Colin, vol. 2, s.v. “Djafr” [Divinatory technique], by T. Fahd,
vol. 3, s.v. “Hurūf (‘ilm al-)” [Science of letters], by T. Fahd, and vol. 12 (supple-
ment), s.v. “Budūh” [Talismanic word], by D. B. Macdonald.
63. All the more so since this “rectification” was, in the words of the Ottoman authori-
ties, a defining notion of Vaḥdetī’s assignement: e.g., see BOA , HR .TO . 377/45,
letter (in French) from the “Agence financière du gouvernement ottoman” in Paris
to “Son Altesse Fuad Pacha, Grand Vizir de l’Empire Ottoman,” February 18, 1864:
“Mr Churchill se [rend] à Londres avec Vhadity [sic] Effendy, pour y procéder à la
rectification des poinçons des pièces de 5, 10, et 20 paras.” Included is a draft of the
letter’s Ottoman translation, which uses taṣḥīḥ as the equivalent for “rectification.”
64. BOA , A .MKT .MHM . 400/25, #3, round robin of the High Council of Judicial
Ordinances, 12 şevvāl 1284/25 kānūn-ı sānī 1283 [February 6, 1868]: Vaḥdetī Efendi
speaks of “coupons . . . which had been printed first for the sake of experiment
[berā-yı tecrübe].”
65. Ruth Miller, “Save Our State: A Decade of Writing on Jurisdiction and Sovereignty
in East and West Asia,” International Journal in Middle East Studies 45 (2013): 159.
66. Jocelyne Dakhlia, “ ‘Trickster Travels’ o la prodezza interculturale,” Quaderni
Storici 126, no. 3 (2007): 903–15, on Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A

198 MARC AYMES

 Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006); see,
among others, Giovanni Levi, Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988); Christine M. Philliou, “Mischief in the Old
Regime: Provincial Dragomans and Social Change at the Turn of the Nineteenth
Century,” New Perspectives on Turkey 25 (2001): 103–21; and E. Natalie Rothman,
Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2011).
67. For example, Linda Darling, “Mediterranean Borderlands: Early English Merchants
in the Levant,” in The Ottoman Empire: Myths, Realities, and “Black Holes.” Contri-
butions in Honour of Colin Imber, ed. Eugenia Kermeli and Oktay Özel (Istanbul:
Isis, 2006), 173– 88; Ziad Fahmy, “Jurisdictional Borderlands: Extraterritoriality
and ‘Legal Chameleons’ in Precolonial Alexandria,” Comparative Studies in Society
and History 55, no. 2 (2013): 305–29.
68. Naor Ben-Yehoyada, “Transnational Political Cosmology: A Central Mediterranean
Example,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 56, no. 4 (2014): 895.
69. See also Marc Aymes, “Changeur d’empire,” in Penser, agir, et vivre dans l’Empire
Ottoman et en Turquie: Études réunies pour François Georgeon, ed. Nathalie Clayer
and Erdal Kaynar (Paris: Peeters, 2013), 261– 82.

An Ottoman in Paris 199

7 From Household to Schoolroom
Women, Transnational Networks, and
Education in North Africa and Beyond

JULIA CLANCY- SMITH

A little Arab girl going to school for the first time, one autumn
morning, walking hand in hand with her father. A tall erect figure
in a fez and a European suit, carrying a bag of school books. He is a
teacher at the French primary school. A little Arab girl in a village
in the Algerian Sahel.
—Assia Djebar, Fantasia1

Assia Djebar’s poignant sketch of her first school day hints at the con-
tradictions of “colonial education.” Her father, Tahar Imalhayène, a
Berber, taught French at the local primary school near Cherchell that
she herself attended, which surely explains why she enrolled there. As
telling is the father’s attire—a suit combined with the fez. However,
Tahar’s own father had joined the spahi corps in 1884, fighting under
the French flag in Tonkin, and later served in Paris as a member of the
garde d’honneur that welcomed the czar to France sometime in the late

200
nineteenth century. Thus, the road to the classroom, whether as pupil
or instructor, was far from linear and full of surprises.
Educational systems in Africa and Asia were forged, for the most
part, within the crucible of colonialism, combining resistance to, and
accommodation with, various forms of cultural imperialism. By the late
nineteenth century, women were viewed as either beacons of, or obsta-
cles to, modernity within the household; learning deemed morally and
socially appropriate for women was highly charged in the colonies as
well as elsewhere. In North Africa the most passionate polemics centered
upon whether “native” women should receive formal instruction—and
if so, what kind? Implicated in these debates were political projects and
social reform movements in the metropole, the empire, and worldwide.
Until recently, histories of education employed top-down approaches
that posed two basic queries: How did colonial regimes address the con-
tentious matter of indigenous schooling, principally for boys? And how
did contests over education shape the nature of colonial rule as well as
national liberation struggles and postcolonial states?2 While these are
critical, equally fundamental issues arise specifically for girls. Currently,
scholars of education in the late Ottoman Empire and colonial Maghreb
pose new questions and deploy approaches that are simultaneously
institutional and biographical.3 One issue yet to be explicitly raised
is, how did household and lineage dynamics converge, either to block
or to promote non-kin-based female schooling, which held enormous
potential to transform communities?
This essay reconstructs the biographies of three North African
women—Fadhma Amrouche (c. 1882–1967), Tawhida Ben Shaykh
(1909–2010), and Dorra Bouzid (b. 1933)—who came from different
generations, places, and social classes. While they are well known in
their own societies, they appear only episodically in conventional his-
torical accounts. By situating their trajectories in relation to lineages
and households within the larger context of colonialism, we see that
access to learning constituted the framing narrative.4 Each woman cre-
ated a different authorial relationship with her autobiography: Fadhma
Amrouche initially composed an exclusively family memoir; Tawhida

From Household to Schoolroom 201

Ben Shaykh demurred to write about herself, leaving that to others; and
Dorra Bouzid postponed writing her memoir until recently.5 However, a
striking similarity exists: the record of their lives is embedded in school-
ing chronicles. Indeed, Amrouche’s first chapter is titled “The Road to
School.” Thus, I argue that classroom remembrances constituted a legiti-
mate space for North African women’s voices to be raised, heard, and
committed to writing, and thus a distinct, if unacknowledged, genre.6
There is nothing uniquely female about this. Indeed, a striking feature
of autobiography in colonial North Africa and the Middle East is the
trope of schooling. In Out of Place, composed shortly before his death
in 2003, Edward Said observed: “One of the things I tried to explore
implicitly is the hold those very early school experiences had on me, why
their hold persists, and why I still find them fascinating and interesting
enough to write about for readers fifty years later.”7 In contrast, Albert
Memmi, a Tunisian Jew born in 1920, expressed starkly unsentimental
feelings about the classroom, emphasizing the crushing alienation of
French education in La statue de sel (The Pillar of Salt), published in
1953: “How blind I was to what I really am, how naive it was of me to
hope to overcome the fundamental rift in me, the contradiction that
is the very basis of my life.”8 While literary analyses of memoirs such
as these focus principally on the subject of clashing and irreconcilable
identities, whatever their guise, life stories as micro-history offer a
portal into the operation of households.
The undermining of the older culture of girls’ moral and practical
instruction, legitimated by religion as locally received, and centered
in the domestic unit, signaled a profound transformation. Anthropo-
logically, it represented a shift from a “house-based” society where the
lineage oversaw the gendered transmission of learning, largely oral
in nature, to a social order that accommodated, however unevenly or
reluctantly, new ways of knowing, bodies of knowledge, and spaces of
education.9 Enrolling female family members in colonial or “foreign”
educational institutions, whether secular or missionary, entailed enor-
mous social risks. Inflected by power, class, and generation, modern
schooling ensnared lineages in unforeseen circumstances that at times
repositioned them not only in local socioscapes but also transnationally.

202 JULIA CLANCY-SMITH

 My years of interviewing North African women, who had attended
a range of institutions, uncovered unsuspected processes, social actors,
and forces.10 What struck me was that many families defined modernity
largely by reference to schooling; one could call it “the local household
modern.” However, a distinction must be made between household
and family in the strict sense of lineage, because then, as now, non-kin
members often participated in decisions about educating children. And
the ridicule of the neighborhood—very real fears of hostile rumors
by those residing nearby—were factored into the calculation to send
girls “outside” for education. Changes, small or drastic, in household
composition frequently exerted an immense impact on personal and col-
lective destinies. Here the status of widowhood emerges as a significant
variable under certain conditions. If grown sons were absent from the
household, the widowed mother might chart her children’s futures, even
in the face of clan disagreement.11 Moreover, educational aspirations
sometimes encouraged families to relocate to another region, city, or
country. In consequence, it is argued here that households moved out of
some social filaments even as—or because—they engaged with novel or
alternative exchange circuits, or vainly sought to keep things the same.
Finally, contingency—unforeseen circumstances or serendipity—also
influenced outcomes.
Thus, the questions posed demand that we triangulate between inter-
related problematics: girls’ education and schooling (which should not
be conflated); domestic or kin-based dynamics and configurations; and
women/gender norms, within the bigger historical envelope of the
state. In recounting other peoples’ stories, we need be mindful of how
we narrate those tales. My methodology is to recount each woman’s
life, pausing at strategic moments to analyze the convergence between
larger social fields and households. The sources are primarily archival
as well as what these women said about their own lives either orally,
in writing, or both, as well as what others said about them.12 In terms
of self-biography, the performative dimensions of life stories, including
that elusive, yet critical factor, memory, and audiences, obviously shape
the corpus of documents.13
Memmi’s tortured encounters with schooling, cultural humiliation,

From Household to Schoolroom 203

and conflicted identities resonate with those of our first story. Fadhma
Amrouche, however, was more than thrice marginalized—as an ethnic
minority (a Berber), a woman, convert, poor, and “illegitimate.”

Fadhma Amrouche (c. 1882–1967): From Kabylia to Paris

The Kabyles are overly eager for schooling, they learn too well and
too rapidly. It is terrifying to see so many acquiring an education;
what will they become when they grow up?14

Muslim by birth, Fadhma Amrouche attended missionary and secular

schools, embraced Christianity, composed the first autobiography by
an Algerian woman, became a naturalized French citizen, and raised a
number of children, two of whom remain well-known literati—Marie-
Louise-Taos Amrouche (1913–76), a poet, singer, and novelist, and Jean
Amrouche (1906– 62), a writer, essayist, and early radio pioneer. But
her early circumstances were unpromising.
Amrouche was born either in 1882 or 1883 in the remote village of
Tizi-Hibel in the rugged mountains of the Kabylia in northeastern Alge-
ria.15 Before Fadhma’s birth, her mother, Aïni Aït Mansour, had been
married very young to an elder from another tribe; when he died, she
was only twenty-two and had two small boys. As was the custom, Aïni’s
older brother demanded her immediate return to her maternal family
until she could remarry. Defiant, Fadhma’s mother refused to abandon
her own household: “my mother never saw her family’s house again.”16
This meant that Aïni and her children were deprived of patriarchal pro-
tection which led to Aïni’s determination to send her daughter away to
school—not solely for an education but to shield her from harm. All of
this came about after the young widowed Aïni fell in love with a kins-
man and conceived a child out of wedlock.
According to village tradition, both mother and unborn child should
be murdered to remove the moral stain of adultery. Yet by 1874, eight
years before Fadhma’s birth, profound changes had occurred in the colo-
nial legal system; French magistrates exerted personal status jurisdiction
over Muslims in Kabylia. When it became apparent that the widowed
Aïni was pregnant, and the father refused to acknowledge his child,

204 JULIA CLANCY-SMITH

the family of Aïni’s deceased husband attempted to expel her from the
village in order to seize her sons and property. Fully cognizant of the
danger to herself and her baby, plucky Aïni denounced her in-laws to
colonial authorities, placing herself under their legal protection. In
Histoire de ma vie, published many years later, Fadhma relates what
her mother told her: “The [French] magistrates came to the village.
The tribunal appointed a guardian and a deputy guardian . . . drew up
an inventory of my mother’s property and left with the decree that no
one must harm the widow or orphans.”17
Here is a glaring contradiction of colonialism, a striking example of
the fact that women did not necessarily experience foreign rule in the
same way as men. A double patriarchy, French and indigenous, that
was often mutually reinforcing, nevertheless offered small spaces for
women to exploit and maneuver. Moreover, the composition of Aïni’s
household was significant. Alienated from her own clan and shunned
by the villagers, Aïni was the breadwinner, educator of her sons, and
protector of the “child born of sin,” critical factors in subsequent events.
She thus enjoyed a relative liberty to make decisions regarding her
beloved daughter’s future based upon calculations about potential dan-
gers “out there.”
Soon after Fadhma’s birth, Aïni embarked on a three-year campaign
with local French colonial authorities, hounding them to use any means
available to force her kinsman to publicly declare paternity in the vil-
lage. “All this time, through heat and cold, my mother returned to plead
and harass the magistrates.”18 In one sense, she won because the father
was finally ordered to pay damages; but in another, she lost since French
law did not yet admit the establishment of paternity, which was only
legislated in 1912. She came to know local colonial officials rather well
because the magistrate’s wife, herself childless, even proposed to adopt
the little girl. When it became apparent that Fadhma would always suffer
persecution by the villagers, her mother entrusted the three-year-old
child to a nearby Catholic convent so that her daughter might enjoy a
better life, or at least survive.
The presence of missionaries in the region is fundamental to
Amrouche’s story. Proselytizing among the Muslim population increased

From Household to Schoolroom 205

with the appointment of Charles Lavigerie (1825–92) in 1867 as arch-
bishop of Algiers; he founded the Missionaries of Our Lady of Africa
(or “White Fathers” and “White Sisters”). The archbishop initiated an
intense conversion campaign in Kabylia, since it was wrongly believed
that the Berbers were lukewarm Muslims and retained elements of
their ancient Christian faith.19 Foreign missionaries—both Catholic
and Protestant—helped to stabilize France’s military occupation by
providing health and social services to the army, European settlers,
and the indigenous population. In addition, they opposed organized
prostitution, such as the military brothels, which recruited indigent
Arab or Berber women as well as immigrant European women. During
the terrible famine of 1867– 68, the missionaries took in thousands of
orphaned girls who might have otherwise ended up as prostitutes.20
However, in 1886, after Aïni learned about the severity of mission-
ary discipline for small children, she removed her daughter from the
Catholic convent school and they returned to the inhospitable village.
The qaid (a local, French-appointed Muslim official) told Aïni about
another girls’ institution, a secular boarding school near Fort-National at
Taddert-ou-Fella, and urged her to enroll Fadhma there for her safety. In
this period, the colonial regime pressured Muslim subalterns to expand
primary school enrollments. Indeed, one of the first secular schools in
Kabylia was founded in Aït Hichem by such an official who sent his
daughter there, both as a model for the Kabyles, and surely to curry
favor with the colonial hierarchy. The same dynamic transpired in Fort-
National, where an administrator, Monsieur Sabatier, established also
a girls’ school.

He summoned all the kaïds [sic], cavalrymen and rural police in his
area and asked them to ride through the douars [villages] and col-
lect as many girls as possible. The kaïds and the horsemen set off,
with the rural police, who set the example by bringing their own
daughters. There were girls of all ages: some already adolescents
and some still toddlers.21

The history of this particular institution illustrates the convergence

of diverse and often contradictory political agendas and its impact upon

206 JULIA CLANCY-SMITH

schooling. Created in 1882 as an orphanage and then refashioned two
years later as a native girls’ school just outside the city, it experienced
vicissitudes, including forced closures that reflected the battles fought
over female learning. Fadhma spent ten years (1887– 97) at this board-
ing school that nurtured her passion for reading and nature. However,
prior to enrollment, her mother insisted on a personal interview with
the commune’s male administrator, which again demonstrates Aïni’s
understanding of the colonial order. The larger context was the passage
of the 1881–82 Ferry Laws, which made primary education free, secu-
lar, and compulsory, although enormous discrepancies existed within
the colonies. In North Africa these laws aimed principally at enrolling
Muslim boys, but the tug of local politics determined how they were
applied.22 Schooling for girls was considered unimportant, or more fre-
quently as constituting a social danger.
The life story of the school’s first director, Madame Malaval, also
reveals the interplay between mobility and households. She and her
husband emigrated from the Aveyron (Midi-Pyrénées) after the phyl-
loxera pest destroyed their vineyards, which suggests that they were
not originally trained as teachers. However, Mme Malaval, whose social
origins appear solidly bourgeois, had attended a highly respected con-
vent school in her native city of Rodez and maintained close connections
with the sisters even after her departure for Algeria. The couple was
hired to run the Fort-National orphanage, but after the death of Mr.
Malaval and their only child around 1884, Mme Malaval was invited
by French administrators to serve the new girls’ school as directrice.
Though a devout Catholic, she followed the secular policies of the Ferry
Laws in the classroom. Also significant for her career was the status of
widowhood, which paradoxically conferred greater liberty of action.23
In addition to overseeing the Taddert-ou-Fella institution, Malaval estab-
lished several other primary schools and was even named inspector for
these institutions. Changes in France shaped Malaval’s career because
previously women had been barred from holding the post of inspector,
as it had been deemed socially inappropriate for women to travel alone
to inspect schools.24
In 1892 Amrouche earned the coveted “certificate of study,” one of

From Household to Schoolroom 207

the first and few Kabyle girls to so do. The next year, the commune
administrator closed the school, claiming that it was too expensive.
Undaunted, Malaval, who was well connected with metropole official-
dom, kept it alive by mobilizing her trans-Mediterranean influence and
writing petitions to members of the Chamber of Deputies. Her political
clout was heightened because the school had turned into a colonial
showcase: “We were visited by a succession of members of the French
government, including Jules Ferry, and often tourists came simply out
of curiosity, like the Grand Duke George of Russia.”25
Another closure was averted by transforming it into a normal school,
which earned it a professional teaching staff, a library, and decent food.
Two years later, Fadhma and several other girls journeyed to Algiers to
sit for the brevet élémentaire examination, a great opportunity but also a
risk. Well prepared for the exam, they all failed—or were failed on pur-
pose. Worse, the fact that Kabyle girls dressed in “native” costume had
gone to the capital provoked a scandal; the school was once again shut
down to appease public opinion. After the closure was announced, some
pupils contacted the English Methodist mission in Kabylia, begging to
pursue studies there, but to no avail. By this period, many administrators
opposed girls’ schooling because at best it produced women rejected by
both societies; at worst, it bred prostitutes, or so male officials and their
native allies reasoned.26 Fadhma returned to her village for a while, only
to be called back to the school, which struggled on for another two years,
although its fortunes declined rapidly after Mme Malaval was forced to
resign. In 1897 the doors were locked for good. Therefore, one major leit-
motif is the institutional instability that beset “native” girls’ education.
Thus far we have teased out the components that together shaped
Amrouche’s early life—birth in an unconventional household (female-
headed but rejected by local society), appeals to French magistrates, and
proselytizing by educational missionaries, both religious and secular.
Other forces were at work in Kabylia, where Catholic missionaries pro-
moted “Christian French unions” by arranging marriages for converts
and founding villages peopled by these families. Thus, they greatly
interfered in the intimate realms of kinship and households, producing
intractable social fissures in Kabyle communities.

208 JULIA CLANCY-SMITH

 Devastated that her education had ended, Fadhma returned to the
village for seven months and labored in the fields with her mother.
Realizing that acceptance would never be forthcoming—she was too
educated and bore the “indelible mark” of the illegitimate child—she
wrote a letter to the White Sisters mission in Tagmount, inquiring about
employment. In 1898 Fadhma was hired by the Saint Eugénie Hospital
in Aïth Manegueleth to care for the sick, diseased, and dying, many of
whom were converts and outcasts. At first she energetically insisted upon
her Muslim and Kabyle identity and attracted opprobrium because of
her secular schooling. Nevertheless, as one of the best-educated women
there, Fadhma was allowed to teach catechism despite her religion.
But the atmosphere was stifling and unwelcoming; she attempted to
leave several times, even appealing to the Mother Superior to find her
a post in France. Her plight became known in the region, and she was
offered a position by the local French administrator in Michelet. She
also rejected several marriage proposals.27
Eventually the White Sisters engineered a meeting with Belkacem-
ou-Amrouche (c. 1881–1959), a Kabyle convert, whom Fadhma married
in 1899 as she also formally embraced Catholicism. Lacking ade-
quate resources, the newlyweds were soon forced to relocate to the
Amrouche village to reside with Belkacem’s clan in their multigenera-
tional household in Ighil-Ali. That they were Christians—mturnis, or
“renegades”—while the rest of the family remained Muslim created
daily tensions. Conversion deeply undermined “lineage-based identity,”
without totally breaking familial ties. It is noteworthy that Belkacem’s
grandfather, the patriarch Hacène-ou-Amrouche, had sent his grandson,
the only son of his father, to a missionary school on the outskirts of their
village. Why had Hacène-ou-Amrouche taken such a decision? After
his own mother was widowed, he had enrolled in the colonial army to
make a living, not an unusual step for the Kabyles. Sent to the Crimean
War, Hacène survived the battle of Sebastopol (1854– 55), which, given
high mortality rates, was nothing short of miraculous. The experience
shaped his life trajectory. He mastered French and upon his return
to Algeria in 1871 gained the post of interpreter and then joined the
spahis (elite native cavalry regiments). He introduced French into his

From Household to Schoolroom 209

household, which reveals his positive thinking on schooling provided
by the “Rumis.”28 Here we see language acquisition as not only the
product of migration, or mobilization for war, but also as a motor for
status mobility.29
As household relations deteriorated in Kabylia, the couple and their
growing number of children decided after 1908 to cross the border to
settle in Tunis. This was a well-trodden path of expatriation, as many
Algerians had fled for the safety of Tunisia after France’s 1830 inva-
sion.30 By then the country had been under French rule for twenty-five
years. Colonial rule differed in many respects from Algeria, and these
difference molded the family’s fortunes over several generations. The
French Protectorate did not merely superimpose the machinery of
governance upon existing state and social structures; it appropriated
precolonial modernizing reforms from Khayr al-Din’s years as prime
minister (1874–78), if not before. These included significant educa-
tional advances, notably the establishment of the Sadiqi College in
1874, which produced a sophisticated political class with nationalist
sensibilities.31 In addition, the Amrouche family relocated to Tunis at
a key moment in the politics of schooling. By then officials in Algeria
and France viewed l’Algérie française as a moral parable for how not to
govern the empire. In contrast, Tunisia was imagined as a place where
the wrongs of Algeria could be righted through more enlightened poli-
cies toward Islam and Muslims. Indeed, the most powerful figure in
France’s Protectorate, Resident-General René Millet (in office from 1894
to 1900) often observed that policies governing Tunisia were superior
to those in force in most other colonies. For Third Republic liberals
such as Louis Machuel, the most glaring failure lay in instruction for
indigenous Algerian children, especially girls, in part because European
settler resistance was so fierce. Nevertheless, if French advocates of
native schooling were a minority, the issue was less contentious than
in Algeria. Tunisian reformers collaborated with protectorate officials
to improve institutions of learning.32 From this confluence of thinking
came the École Louise-Réne Millet, founded in 1900 in Tunis, the first
non-missionary academic school for native girls, and the institution
where Tawhida Ben Shaykh later studied.

210 JULIA CLANCY-SMITH

 Fadhma was to spend the next forty-five years of her life in Tunis.
Belkacem found employment with the French railroads, which provided
steady income, exposure to labor unions, and connections. Employees
enjoyed free rail travel, which allowed them to send several sons to their
Catholic village in Algeria for schooling. This in turn preserved the fam-
ily’s Kabyle convert culture, while impeding full assimilation to Tunis
society. The Catholic Church and missionaries were well embedded in
Tunisia by then, so the couple relied upon them for social assistance.
As significantly, Belkacem was awarded full French nationality (de plein
droit) which offered advantages but when World War I erupted, all male
nationals in the colonies were mobilized. Anticipating that Belkacem
would serve under arms in France, Fadhma and her children took the
train to Kabylia, but fortune smiled upon them when he was accorded
a military dispensation from conscription as father of a large family.33
The war years were difficult in North Africa. Despite familial strains,
impecunious members of Belkacem’s extended family imposed upon
the couple, moving into their humble flats in Tunis whenever things
went badly in Algeria. Fadhma bore eight children in grim circum-
stances; only one, her sole daughter, outlived her. Since she did not
veil and spoke no Arabic, she lived as a cultural hyphen. She belonged
neither to local Tunis society nor to the diverse communities of largely
impoverished subsistence migrants—Sicilians, Maltese, and Spanish—
who called Tunis home. What they all had in common was deprivation,
sharing the same city spaces, apartment blocks, courtyards, or streets,
which did not soothe communal tensions.
However, their household differed from most others. Fadhma was not
only literate but well versed in French, which distinguished her from
neighbors, associates, and kin. She and her husband collaborated in
all matters pertaining to family life, including the highly valued mat-
ter of schooling. Their children attended missionary as well as secular
institutions in Tunis and in Kabylia, where some of the boys were sent
as boarders. However, the most important dimension was that she her-
self served as an instructor on a number of occasions, preparing her
son Paul for his secondary-school certificate using “a very old general
course book, second-hand, in which all the exercises were explained.”34

From Household to Schoolroom 211

By the eve of World War II, diverse strands of feminism had emerged
globally and “the woman question” was debated in Arabic, Turkish,
and European languages. However, we can speculate that Fadhma was
unaware of these debates, nor did she presumably have access to femi-
nist journals, newspapers, and tracts, which were mainly produced for
bourgeois readers. However, one might argue that “ordinary” (if we
can use that term) women like Fadhma not only participated in modern
reform ideas and policies proposed by governing, literate elites but
also instrumentalized them—in daily life and in familial settings. In
fact, she and Belkacem lived as a “modern” couple, as that notion was
understood at the time.
Occupied by five armies, Tunisia was devastated during World War
II, but somehow the couple survived the Axis invasion, incessant bomb-
ings, and enormous destruction. Just after the war ended, Jean, by then
a recognized writer in France, asked Fadhma to compose her memoirs.
For an entire month, she wrote feverishly, recalling her life with intense
ethnographic detail. It was a stark autobiography destined, at that time,
only for her children’s eyes.35 In the preface, Fadhma stated:

I bequeath you this story, which is the account of my life, for you
to do what you like with, after my death. This story is true, not one
episode has been invented, all that happened before my birth was
told to me by my mother as soon as I was old enough to understand.
I have written this story because I think it deserves to be known to
all of you. . . . I wrote this story in memory of my beloved mother
and of Madame Malaval who gave me my spiritual life i.e., the gift
of reading, writing, and education.36

It is uncertain if her husband knew of the existence of these personal,

often painful, remembrances. In 1959 her beloved Belkacem died in
Tunis. That year Amrouche moved to France to reside with her only
daughter, Marie-Louise-Taos. In 1962, when Jean died, Marie-Louise
persuaded Fadhma to write the epilogue for the autobiography. She
ended her days in Brittany in 1967, still in exile. Her memoirs were
published the next year in Paris in a series edited by Albert Memmi.37
In the decades since her death, Amrouche has been celebrated as an

212 JULIA CLANCY-SMITH

inexhaustible repository of Kabyle songs, chants, legends, and lore then
in grave danger of disappearing. Indeed, it was Fadhma who instilled
in her daughter a love for, and ability to perform, traditional music and
dance. Marie-Louise-Taos Amrouche (born in Tunis in 1913, also known
as Marguerite Taos) was truly her mother’s child. In 1934 she obtained
the brevet supérieur in Tunis and pursued studies the next year in France
at the prestigious École normale de Sèvres, for young women, founded
in 1881. (In 1955, Assia Djebar enrolled in this same institution.) From
1936 on, Fadhma, Jean, and Marie-Louise worked to collect Kabyle
songs and commit them to paper; this collaboration resulted in the
publication in 1966 of Le grain magique. With the publication in 1947
of her work Jacinthe noire, Marie-Louise became one of the first female
novelists from North Africa.38
From a Berber village in Algeria, to Tunisia, and then to France,
Fadhma Amrouche’s life odyssey constitutes a singular chapter in the
history of education, households, and colonialism. It demonstrates
that the armature of dual patriarchy was not invincible and, given an
opportunity, women exploited its soft spots to ensure a decent existence
for their offspring. In addition, Amrouche grasped the urgency of con-
serving a rich oral heritage endangered by the very spread of literacy
and modern education that she, somewhat paradoxically, celebrated
so movingly.39
It is tempting to interpret her memoirs in their frankness and ethno-
graphic density as an anomaly. However, even seemingly inaccessible
places such as the mountains of the Kabylia and Aurès had since the
1920s hosted field research by female ethnographers—Mathéa Gaudry,
Germaine Tillion, and Thérèse Rivière, to name the best known. As
conceived in Paris, these scientific missions aimed to document “the
Berber” household and family, regarded as the unadulterated residue
of ancient cultural traditions. Soon after arriving in the Aurès in 1934,
Tillion realized that its peoples had long been imbricated in transna-
tional forces, in many cases, to their detriment.40
Through modern schooling, the “child of sin” not only survived but
also achieved literary fame, as did her son and daughter—and preserved
Berber traditions. But this entailed emotional loss. Fadhma never lost

From Household to Schoolroom 213

her yearning for home. While much of her adult life was spent in Tuni-
sia, those years are curiously characterized in her Histoire as “L’exil de
Tunis”:

I always remained the “Kabyle woman”; never, in spite of the forty

years I have spent in Tunisia, in spite of my basically French educa-
tion, never have I been able to become a close friend of any French
people, nor of Arabs. I remain for ever the eternal exile, the woman
who has never felt at home anywhere.41

The social milieus of Fadhma Amrouche and Tawhida Ben Shaykh

could scarcely have been more divergent. Nevertheless, critical similari-
ties can be discerned in the workings of households and girls’ schooling.
Now we travel to the old quarters of Tunis, to Nahj Basha, “the street
of the pasha” (or pacha), where the Ben Shaykh (or Ben Cheikh) family
resided in a hawma, or neighborhood, much preferred by notables.42

Dr. Tawhida Ben Shaykh (1909–2010): Women’s Health Activist

I arrived in Paris in July 1928 and at first resided at a dormitory on
the Boulevard St. Michel, known as the “Foyer International de Jeunes
Filles,” which housed about one hundred young women students
from around the world.43

A class photo of graduates from the Faculté de médecine de Paris from

1936 shows a group of elegant young men whose poise betrays the status
conferred by an advanced degree. In their midst sits the sole woman;
wearing a hat and white dress, she seems slightly uncomfortable. Taw-
hida Ben Shaykh was the first North African Muslim woman to earn a
French medical diploma in 1936. But identifying her only deepens the
mystery. By the interwar period, French feminists and North African
nationalists alike condemned the colonial educational system as a sig-
nal failure due to high illiteracy rates, especially among Muslim girls.
Ben Shaykh’s intellectual and social odyssey from the Tunis madina, to
European neighborhoods in that city, and then on to Paris illustrates the
transnational contradictions of education and empire. The schoolroom
had become central to the very practice of colonialism—to struggles

214 JULIA CLANCY-SMITH

over its nature and future. This photograph elicits a number of ques-
tions: What journey brought this woman into the charmed circle of
male graduates? How did she get from Tunisia to France? What schools
had she attended? And why had her family consented to studies so far
from home?
I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Ben Shaykh in her home in
modern Tunis during the summer of 1998. She was eighty-nine years old,
and while she moved about with a walker, she was exuberant in mind
and spirit; she confided that bathing in the Mediterranean provided
relief from her ailments. I asked her to relate the stages leading to her
medical studies in Paris during the interwar period. She recalled the
decisive actions of her widowed mother, Haluma Ben Ammar:

I come from a well-known Tunisian family. I never knew my father;

we were four children, three girls and a boy. The son was born after
my father’s death. I was thus raised by my mother who was a most
extraordinary woman.44

Here is another example of a widow who remained in control of the

household after her husband’s death. Significant too was that Tawhida’s
only brother was much younger. She hinted during the interview that
if an adult brother or uncle had been present to influence daily family
decisions, perhaps her life would have unfolded differently.45
A serendipitous event reveals an essential, although unrecognized,
dimension of female schooling—the issue of social space and neigh-
borhoods. In 1909, the year of Tawhida’s birth, the École Louise-Réne
Millet relocated near her residence on Rue du Pacha. In 1918, Tawhida’s
mother enrolled her and an older sister, Zakiya, in this institution, from
which they both obtained the certificat d’études.46 The importance of
the school’s proximity to the family compound cannot be overempha-
sized. Indeed, a comparative analysis of African women’s memoirs
demonstrates that households always preferred schools within the
neighborhood—often regarded by its denizens as an extension of
domestic space. Moreover, the director of the École Louise-Réne Mil-
let, Madame Charlotte Eigenschenck, resembled Malaval in several
ways. She was the widow of a colonial official as well as a formidable

From Household to Schoolroom 215

missionary for secular education, exhorting her pupils to excel in their
studies. And, as was true of Amrouche’s institution at Taddert-ou-Fella,
the École Louise-Réne Millet had become a colonial showpiece, attract-
ing many foreign visitors and fanfare in the national and international
press. Nevertheless, as in Algeria, many colonial settlers opposed school-
ing for native girls, while excoriating Tunisian women for their illiteracy.
A typical example, published in 1907 as an anonymous editorial in a
colonial newspaper, intoned: “What a cause for decadence for a race
to only have frivolous and ignorant mothers raising the children.”47
In 1922 the question of secondary education arose but no school
existed in the old city near the Ben Shaykh household. In a bold move,
Haluma sent Tawhida and Zakiya to the Lycée Armand Fallières, in the
European quarter on Rue du Rome. Once again, the family strategy
was directly inspired by spatial and moral concerns. This particular
lycée was attractive because it boasted an internat (boarding facilities),
although only a few Muslim girls were enrolled. Tawhida and Zakiya
resided there on weekdays, which avoided exposure to public streets
and the socially awkward trip across town several times per day; they
returned home on weekends. Special arrangements ensured that pupils
could observe religious duties, such as fasting during Ramadan; the staff
awakened the girls for their last meal before sunrise. Tawhida spent six
years at the lycée obtaining her bac in 1928, the first Tunisian Muslim
woman to so do.48
During the 1920s, the feminist movement emerged in Tunisia with a
watershed event in 1924: Manubiya Wartani, a young Muslim woman,
attended a public conference on women’s rights. Inspired by what she
heard, and perhaps by Huda Shaarawi’s public unveiling in Cairo in 1923,
Wartani removed her veil, stood up, and addressed the crowd. In 1930
the Tunisian Muslim jurist Tahar Haddad published an impassioned plea
for women’s emancipation in his essay “Our Women in Islamic Law and
Society.” Its publication stirred up acrimonious debates within the con-
servative branch of the Tunis ulama (clergy). Furthermore, these years
witnessed the expansion of well-organized Tunisian labor and nationalist
movements.49 During this time, Tawhida had a chance encounter that
utterly changed the course of her life. She made the acquaintance of a

216 JULIA CLANCY-SMITH

well-known researcher in microbiology, Etienne Burnet (1873–1960),
and his Russian wife, Lydia.
Burnet had come to Tunisia from Paris in 1919 after contracting
tuberculosis, which North Africa’s warm, sunny climate was to heal. A
school inspector’s son, Burnet had achieved the coveted aggregation in
philosophy prior to his medical studies at the Faculté de médecine de
Paris in 1899. His philosophical training and service in a World War I
ambulance corps on the French front convinced Burnet of the biological
link between nutrition and disease immunity; his ideas had won him
a reputation among epidemiologists. Upon his arrival in Tunis, Burnet
was appointed health director from 1920 to 1928 and deputy director
at the Institut Pasteur, among the most prestigious of these institutes
established outside of France. Founded in 1893, the Institut Pasteur was
under Charles Nicolle’s direction from 1903 to 1936; Nicolle was awarded
a Nobel Prize in 1928 for his medical research in Tunisia, regarded as a
premier laboratory for scientific studies of malaria, typhus, and other
diseases.50
Recalling that encounter seven decades later, Dr. Ben Shaykh stated
in 1998: “I met Dr. Burnet here in Tunis quite by accident but first I made
the acquaintance of Mme. Burnet.” One of Tawhida’s high school pro-
fessors had introduced her to Lydia Burnet to encourage her to pursue
advanced studies. When Lydia asked Tawhida about her plans after the
bac, she responded: “I hope to engage in social welfare work and aid
those who are needy.”51 Lydia promised to consult with her husband,
and in the summer of 1928 Tawhida was invited to their home in the
largely European quarter, Belvédere, where the Institut Pasteur was
located. Burnet could see her potential and offered to contact profes-
sional associates about a medical career.
At the time, only one institution in North Africa granted medical
degrees—Algiers. Neither Dr. Burnet nor Tawhida’s family would enter-
tain the notion of her enrolling there, perhaps because of Algeria’s
“racially” charged atmosphere. This left the Faculté de médecine in
Paris where Burnet commanded a large following. For Tawhida’s sol-
idly bourgeois and religiously conservative family, studying in France,
even with the Burnets as mentors and chaperones, was unthinkable—at

From Household to Schoolroom 217

first. Because of her intellectual qualities, her professors once again
intervened—this time they visited Haluma at home to seek her assent.
One of them observed: “It would be a crime if she does not pursue her
studies in Paris.”52 Her mother agreed.
Some members of the family still opposed the project, character-
izing Haluma as “mad.” Indeed, on the day of Tawhida’s scheduled
departure in 1928, as she packed her bags to sail to Marseille with Lydia
Burnet, a delegation of male relatives arrived; one was a shaykh from
the Zaytuna Mosque-University, who characterized Paris as “une ville
de perdition.” However, Haluma stood firm, challenging him to find a
verse in the Koran forbidding women’s education. During the heated
family discussion, Tawhida secretly sent word for the ship to wait.
She sailed together with Lydia for France; Ben Shaykh had never been
outside of Tunis until then!53
Only a handful of women attended the Faculté de médecine at the
time, and most were nationals. Tawhida spent eight years in the French
capital. She first boarded at an international students’ residence, funded
by a wealthy American woman, and then moved into the Burnets’ home
as a kind of adopted daughter. There, thanks to the well- connected
couple, she met leading scientists, writers, and medical figures from the
French capital; thus familial friendship with the Burnets increased the
range and density of Tawhida’s own networks. Since she was regarded
as unusual—an Arab Muslim woman from the colonies, alone in the
city, but enrolled at the prestigious school—many people in Paris sought
to make her acquaintance. Her medical ability in pediatrics won her
posts in Parisian hospitals. Later her sole brother joined her in Paris to
study law.54 In 1931, Ben Shaykh joined the Association des étudiants
musulmans Nord-Africains (AEMNA ) and also lectured at the Congrès
de l’union des femmes françaises, where she provided a vivid portrait of
the negative circumstances of Muslim women within France’s empire.55
Diploma in hand, Dr. Ben Shaykh returned in 1936 to Tunis, where
local physicians welcomed her with a dinner in her honor. Despite the
accolades, she was forced to go into private practice in an underprivi-
leged quarter of the madina, Bab al-Manara, where she provided free
reproductive health services to poor women, a decision motivated by a

218 JULIA CLANCY-SMITH

cruel paradox of colonialism: “I did not attempt to find a position in one
of the colonial hospitals. . . . While there were several European women
doctors in the public hospitals, a Tunisian female physician had little
chance of being accepted.”56 This is all the more astonishing because in
1936 Burnet was named director of the Institut Pasteur in Tunis, which
means that even a mentor of his stature could not overcome the torque
of colonial racism.
In her own fashion and on her own terms, she was active in the
nationalist movement, which was intertwined with feminism, although
in complex ways. Dr. Ben Shaykh collaborated with the women’s journal
Leila from 1937 on by writing articles signed with a pen name. An illus-
trated weekly published from 1936 to 1941, Leila was devoted to “the
evolution and emancipation of the North African Muslim woman.”57 In
1942 she married a Tunisian who had trained as a dentist in Paris. The
couple had three children, dispelling the myth that educated women
could not attract spouses. Tawhida was vice president of the Tuni-
sian branch of the Croissant rouge (Red Cross) when the French army
bombed villages in Cap Bon Peninsula in 1952 to suppress nationalist
unrest. Tawhida investigated the scene of the attack against unarmed
villagers, finding numerous casualties as well as widespread destruction;
she personally submitted a detailed on-site report to French authorities
in protest. With independence in 1956, she established one of the first
family planning clinics in 1963, and played an influential role in the
Association tunisienne pour le planning familial. However, she refused
a plum government post in 1970 offered by the prime minister: “I pre-
ferred to care for my patients and exercise my calling as a physician.”58
Modest in character, she declined to write her life story, despite constant
urgings by family and friends.
In 2000 a centenary celebration commemorated the 1900 establish-
ment of the École Louise-Réne Millet that Tawhida and numerous other
women had attended. In a calculated policy of appearing to promote
women’s rights to deflect international attention from its abysmal
human rights record, the (recently dethroned) Ben ‘Ali regime attempted
to highjack the festivities.59 On December 6, 2010, at the age of 101,
Dr. Ben Shaykh died at her home in Tunis. She was greatly mourned

From Household to Schoolroom 219

by the nation about to embark upon revolutionary changes; the “Arab
Spring” had erupted that month. Many of those transformations were
incubated not only during Ben Shaykh’s long life but also by her and
by women and men like her.60
Less well known perhaps, but equally revealing, is Dorra Bouzid.
Despite differing historical context, social class, region of origins, and
generation, Ben Shaykh’s and Bouzid’s stories intersect. Both under-
took medical studies in Paris with the encouragement of their mothers
and while there participated in student organizations. Upon returning
to Tunis, they practiced medicine in the private sector and wrote for
feminist journals. Both women came from atypical households. Bou-
zid’s mother, however, relocated the family in a socially radical act for
professional reasons and to ensure her children’s education.

Dorra Bouzid (b. 1933): Pharmacist,

Journalist/Writer, Activist, Artist
No single rubric does justice to Dorra Bouzid. She was born in 1933 in
Sfax, Tunisia’s second largest city, where her father was involved in
publishing as well as the theater, which perhaps explains her lifelong
devotion to the arts. Decidedly avant-garde, her mother, Cherifa, whose
family had relocated from Algeria, was educated beyond primary school,
which was somewhat rare for the period. Dorra’s father had forbidden
Cherifa to teach in Sfax, as she fervently desired, but with his passing
she declared her intent to enter the classroom. The family opposed her
decision. Refusing to bow to the clan in Sfax, Cherifa and her brother
moved to Nabeul in the late 1930s, where they organized an unusual
household that included Dorra and her siblings. There Cherifa taught
primary school sometime around 1943. Dressed primly in a black veil,
she scandalized the community by riding a bike to work, something
few women did. One needs to ask, however, what impact World War
II exerted upon Tunisian society. The country’s brutal military occu-
pation and liberation in 1943 from Italo-German armies introduced a
number of profound transformations, which call for more research,
particularly from the perspective of war’s influence upon conventional
gender norms.61

220 JULIA CLANCY-SMITH

 Since no educational institutions for Tunisian girls existed in Nabeul,
Dorra studied in French schools from the age of four, sitting in class
with students from diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds. Dorra’s
mother eventually received a teaching post in Tunis and married again,
to Mahmoud Messaâdi (1911–2004), an ardent nationalist and towering
figure in contemporary Arabic literature as well as national education
after independence. In the capital, Dorra and her sister attended a
French lycée, where they were often the only Muslim girls in class. Dorra
recalled that the worst manifestations of racism came from Sicilian and
Maltese classmates.62 The postwar era witnessed heightened national-
ist agitation against colonial rule across North Africa. Dorra’s mother
and stepfather organized meetings in their home—another indication
of the household’s centrality in political resistance.
Dorra enrolled during the late 1940s in the École des beaux arts
in Tunis, where she excelled. Nevertheless, her mother believed that
women must be financially independent; since she could not earn a
decent living in the arts, her daughter should study pharmacy abroad.
Somewhat reluctantly, Bouzid left home in 1951 to enroll in the Faculté
de pharmacie in Paris, which had only a few Muslim students. It was,
furthermore, a time of fierce anticolonialism in Europe, the Maghreb,
and the globe.
As seen in Ben Shaykh’s biography, North African students in the
metropole were highly politicized and often collaborated with the
French left; in 1927 the AEMNA was formed in Paris, and three years
later it publicly denounced the Islamophobia of the 1930 Eucharistic
Congress held in Carthage.63 Bouzid joined the AEMNA and helped
organize a newspaper that combined nationalist and syndicalist ideolo-
gies.64 Indeed, students in exile at the heart of the empire formulated
the idea of the “Greater Maghreb,” a regional entity of independent
states united in purpose. During the tumultuous end of French North
Africa, Bouzid returned to Tunis with her newly earned diploma to
practice pharmacy, which then, as now, is a highly esteemed branch of
the medical arts, notably for women. To understand the next phase, we
need to consider the earlier evolution of the women’s press in Tunisia,
by then enmeshed in trans-Mediterranean circuits.

From Household to Schoolroom 221

 In 1936 the first Francophone feminist magazine, Leïla, was founded,
but it shut down during the war years.65 In 1955, L’Action, a nationalist
newspaper, introduced a women’s column, “Leïla Speaks to You” which
soon ceased publication; there were not yet sufficient numbers of Tuni-
sian female journalists to make a go of the column. However, the editor
had known Bouzid since their student days in Paris and recruited her
to relaunch the column. Eventually, her column was expanded to a full
page titled “Feminine Action.” On June 13, 1955, Bouzid, the magazine’s
only woman writer, published, under the pseudonym Leïla, “Call for
Emancipation Law,” demanding full rights for women. The next year, the
new president of the republic, Habib Bourguiba, promulgated the Code
of Personal Status, the most radical change in family law for the Arab
or Muslim world; female education was also made a priority. However,
the motives for pushing through the Code were complex. Bourguiba and
his allies sought to break the power of the great patriarchal lineages by
promoting the modern couple, “a conjugal unit in which ties between
spouses and between parents and children” formed the core of the
nation.66 In sum, the ultimate objective was to forge a novel household
competing with kin-based loyalties that compromised full allegiance
to the state.
On the occasion of the Code’s promulgation, Bouzid published
another piece, “Tunisian Women Are Adults,” reminding readers that
prominent Muslim clerics had collaborated in drafting the legislation—
after considerable arm-twisting by Bourguiba. In 1959, Safia Farhat
founded the magazine Faïza, which Bouzid joined as head editor after
the third issue. Published until 1967, it became well known in the
Maghreb, and more generally in Africa, as the first Arab-African femi-
nist magazine.
During the Algerian War the magazine and its staff were politically
active; they assisted wounded fighters of the National Liberation Front
(FLN ) who had clandestinely passed into Tunisia to obtain medical
assistance. In fact, Djebar had relocated to Tunis as well. Married in
March 1958 in Paris, where she was enrolled in university, Djebar’s
political militancy made her persona non grata in France. Slipping
clandestinely across the border to Switzerland, she made her way to

222 JULIA CLANCY-SMITH

Tunisia where she joined the FLN newspaper staff of Al-Mujahid in exile;
Frantz Fanon served as its chief editor. Djebar carried out investigative
reporting in numerous refugee camps strung across the Algerian-
Tunisian borders.
Soon after independence from France in 1956, Bouzid’s stepfather,
Messaâdi, was appointed to several key ministerial posts: from 1958
until 1968 he served as minister of national education, followed by
minister of cultural affairs in the 1970s. During the Bourguiba era,
Bouzid’s relationship with Messaâdi brought her into the inner rul-
ing circle, where she campaigned for women’s rights, advocating legal
changes for women accused of prostitution.67 Bourguiba sent Dorra on
an informal, but effective, diplomatic mission to Morocco after relations
soured in the early 1960s; here she acted upon her older commitment
to trans-Maghrebi accord. She remained committed to journalism as
a force for social progress, playing a lead part in L’Action, later known
as Jeune Afrique, and worked as a radio commentator in Tunisia and
France.68
Recent decades have seen Bouzid launch publications, including
founding Femmes et Réalité, as well as promote international conferences
dedicated to social and political justice. Devoted to tolerant cosmopoli-
tanism, she is fluent not only in Arabic and French but also Italian and
English. In 1995 she recaptured her years at the École des beaux arts in
the volume École de Tunis: Un âge d’or de la peinture tunisienne, which
examined the works of diverse artists who developed a distinctively
Tunisian style that translated and celebrated its multicultural identi-
ties.69 Long involved in artistic events, Bouzid was publicly recognized as
a pioneer of modern dance during the 2008 international festival titled
“Le printemps de la danse,” held in Tunis. “Due to Bouzid’s efforts, danc-
ers and choreographers have come to prominence in Tunisian arts.”70
When I inquired about her feelings toward France, she characteristically
replied: “We were opposed to racism and colonialism, not to Europe or
the West.”71 Currently, Bouzid is writing her memoirs. Not surprisingly,
she is a front-line activist for women’s rights in the ongoing democrati-
zation of the Tunisian political and legal system following the outbreak
of the Arab Spring in late December 2010.

From Household to Schoolroom 223

Conclusions
One of the many paradoxes of the French Empire’s demise was a surge
in the number of youth from former colonies to the metropole for edu-
cation. This movement—from the Mediterranean’s Muslim shores to
Europe—dates back to the mid-nineteenth century and state- driven
modernization within the Ottoman Empire; but those cross-cultural
“study abroad” students were male and generally from elite families
in Cairo or Istanbul. At the end of the nineteenth century, a select
few North Africans studied in Europe. After World War I, their ranks
steadily increased. However, the educational odysseys of women such
as Marie-Louise Amrouche, Tawhida Ben Shaykh, and Dorra Bouzid
have scarcely been acknowledged, although they illuminate significant
historical processes through the portals of biography.
Unconventional households, widowhood, social communication con-
duits, colonialism, and sheer chance converged in their trajectories. Yet,
modern schooling often came with a high social price. Maherzia Amira-
Bournaz, born in the Tunis madina in 1912 and of the same generation
as Tawhida Ben Shaykh, records her mother’s daring: “Alone, opposed
by all, she insisted on enrolling us in school, my sisters and me, during
a period when girls’ education was negatively perceived. For this, she
had to endure my father’s disapproval and sarcastic derision from fam-
ily and neighbors.”72 Yet it would be inaccurate to portray widows or
mothers as the single greatest driver for education; fathers also braved
opprobrium when sending daughters or female kin outside the home
to learn. Thus, as male and female nationalists mobilized in the streets,
another semi- concealed struggle transpired within the domestic unit.
Ultimately, a seismic shift occurred after World War I. Male moralists,
who a generation earlier opined that education would utterly com-
promise female virtue, rendering girls unfit to be wives and mothers,
acknowledged that schooling provided a moral shield and trained the
mothers of the nation.73
In Foucault’s thinking, schooling is emblematic of modern social dis-
ciplining, something that male-authored memoirs poignantly reveal, as
seen, for example, in Jean Amrouche’s “Notes pour une esquisse de l’état

224 JULIA CLANCY-SMITH

d’âme du colonisé.”74 And many women remember the racism encoun-
tered in colonial schools. Gladys Adda, a Tunisian Jew, labor activist,
and nationalist journalist born in Gabes in 1921, attended primary school
with Muslim, Jewish, and European pupils. Since native teachers were
excluded from secondary education, all instructors were French or Euro-
pean; their undisguised contempt for the colonized awakened Adda to
the harsh realities of France’s rule—as did the exclusionary policies
of hospitals for Ben Shaykh when seeking employment as a physician
after 1936.75 Nevertheless, for girls the schoolroom represented a more
ambiguous social space than Foucault’s theory admits; paradoxically, it
offered liberation, however fleeting, from housework, from limitations
on physical mobility, from the household itself. A number of women
have recalled that disciplinary actions for schoolwork deemed unac-
ceptable did not displease them—quite the contrary, for the punishment
was to attend school for extra hours, when others did not.
Non-kin- centered associative life was incubated in girls’ schools,
which goes to the core of networking. Today the École Louise-Réne
Millet (later transformed into a high school) boasts a vibrant alumnae
association that publishes an illustrated journal and organizes an array
of sociocultural events in Tunis. These increasingly dense social bonds
forged within and outside the classroom bear witness to women’s height-
ened participation in, indeed creation of, a public sphere, constructed
through contestation of, and accommodation with, colonial regimes
in dialectical fashion. If schooling progressively became ensnared in
trans-Mediterranean networks, it enlarged and thickened those same
connectivities. Analyzing large, small, and in-between historical pro-
cesses from the viewpoint of individuals and households, rather than
from a state- centered perspective, bestows a face and voice upon the
local modern, thus raising questions about linear—often teleological—
modernization narratives and the life stories they have tended to
privilege.

NOTES
1. Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, trans. Dorothy S. Blair (London:
Quartet Books, 1993), 3. Djebar (1936–2015), whose real name was Fatima-Zohra

From Household to Schoolroom 225

 Imalhayène, needs little introduction, as she has been an internationally acclaimed
writer, novelist, and filmmaker for decades. She was elected to the Academie
française in 2005, the first North African to win such recognition and one of this
institution’s few female members. The scholarly literature on Djebar and her works
is extensive; see Jane Hiddleston, Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2006). Djebar passed away in February 2015; see “Assia Djebar
décédée: Perte d’une intellectuelle majeure,” El Watan, February 7, 2015, http://www
.kabyleuniversel.com/2015/02/07/assia-djebar-decedee-perte-dune-intellectuelle
-majeure.
2. Spencer D. Segalla, The Moroccan Soul: French Education, Colonial Ethnology, and
Muslim Resistance, 1912–1956 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). Indeed,
some male nationalists muted women’s voices for political expediency, while giv-
ing lip service to women’s emancipation through schooling. See Beth Baron, Egypt
as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2005).
3. Examples include Rebecca Rogers, “Telling Stories about the Colonies: British
and French Women in Algeria in the Nineteenth Century,” Gender and History 21,
no. 1 (April 2009): 39– 59; and Rebecca Rogers, A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story:
Madame Luce in Nineteenth-Century Algeria (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2013); Frances Malino, Teaching Freedom: Jewish Sisters In Muslim Lands (London:
Palgrave, 2008); Julia A. Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in
an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011),
chap. 7; Sarah A. Curtis, Civilizing Habits: Women Missionaries and the Revival of
the French Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
4. In The Household and the Making of History: A Subversive View of the Western Past
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Mary Hartman argues that stud-
ies of modernity should center upon the household, which represents a major
theoretical advance. See also Marilyn Booth, ed., Harem Histories: Envisioning
Places and Living Spaces (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
5. Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, (New
York: Routledge, 1997); see also Carolyn Duffey, “Berber Dreams, Colonialism, and
Couscous: The Competing Autobiographical Narratives of Fadhma Amrouche’s
Histoire de ma vie,” Pacific Coast Philology 30, no. 1 (1995): 68–81.
6. Habib Kazdaghli, ed., Mémoire de femmes: Tunisiennes dans la vie publique, 1920–
1960 (Tunis: Édition média com, 1993); Maherzia Amira-Bournaz, C’était Tunis
1920 (Tunis: Cérès, 1993); Maherzia Amira-Bournaz, Maherzia se souvient: Tunis
1930 récit (Tunis: Cérès, 1999); and Effy Tselikas and Lina Hayoun, eds., Les lycées
français du soleil: Creusets cosmopolites du Maroc, de l’Algérie et de la Tunisie (Paris:
Autrement, 2004). There are numerous remembrances of school days written by
Egyptian women, mainly in Arabic but also in French, such as Huda Shaʿrawi,
Mudhakirrati [My memoirs] (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1981); and Nabawiya Musa, Tarikhi

226 JULIA CLANCY-SMITH

 biqalami [My life story] (Cairo: Women and Memory Forum, 1999). The school
memoirs of one of the first Turkish female writers, Halide Edib Adivar, House with
Wisteria: Memoirs of Turkey Old and New (New Brunswick NJ : Transaction, 2009),
are particularly revealing of social networking and female education.
7. Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Vintage, 1999), xii.
8. Albert Memmi, The Pillar of Salt, trans. Edouard Roditi (New York: Criterion
Books, 1955), 10. On Memmi, see Joëlle Striker, Albert Memmi: Autobiographie
et autographie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003); and also Julia Clancy-Smith, “Albert
Memmi and The Pillar of Salt,” in African Literature and Its Times, ed. Joyce Moss
(Los Angeles: Moss, 2000), 337–46. Schooling has furnished the grist for much of
North African literature, for example, Mouloud Feraoun, Le fils du pauvre: Menrad,
instituteur Kabyle (Le Puy: Les cahiers du nouvel humanisme, 1950).
9. Joëlle Bahloul, The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial
Algeria, 1937–1962 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 51.
10. The in-progress monograph is titled “From Household to Schoolroom: Education
and Schooling in North Africa, c. 1840–1956.”
11. Willy Jansen, Women without Men: Gender and Marginalty in an Algerian Town
(Leiden: Brill, 1987), 238–39.
12. “AHR Roundtable: Historians and Biography,” American Historical Review 114, no.
3 (June 2009): 573–78; see also Liat Kozma, “Moroccan Women’s Narratives of
Liberation: A Passive Revolution?” Journal of North African Studies 8, no. 1 (Spring
2003): 112–30.
13. On the problems of interviewing, see Brinkley Messick, “A Subordinate Discourse:
Women, Weaving, and Gender Relations in North Africa,” American Ethnologist
14, no. 2 (1987): 210–25.
14. Germaine Laoust- Chantréaux, Kabylie côté femmes: La vie féminine à Aït Hichem,
1937–1939, intro. Camille Lacoste-Dujardin (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1990), quote
from the Algerian newspaper Al-Akhbar, 7.
15. Fadhma Amrouche, My Life Story: The Autobiography of a Berber Woman, trans.
and intro. Dorothy S. Blair (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989). First
published as Histoire de ma vie in 1968 and republished by Éditions la découverte
in 2000. Unless otherwise noted, I have used the 1989 translation.
16. F. Amrouche, My Life Story, 4. See also Nathalie Malti, “Voix, mémoire et identité:
Transmission de la mémoire et identité culturelle dans l’oeuvre de Fadhma et Taos
Amrouche” (PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 2006).
17. F. Amrouche, My Life Story.
18. F. Amrouche, My Life Story. On paternity suits, see Jean Elisabeth Pedersen, Leg-
islating the French Family: Feminism, Theater, and Republican Politics, 1870–1920
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 139– 61.
19. Karima Direche-Slimani, Chrétiens de Kabylie: Histoire d’une communauté sans
histoire. Une action missionnaire de l’Algérie coloniale (Paris: Bouchène, 2004);

From Household to Schoolroom 227

 and Patricia M. E. Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Race in
Colonial Algeria (London: I. B. Tauris, 1995); and Patricia M. E. Lorcin, Historicizing
Colonial Nostalgia: European Women’s Narratives and Kenya, 1900–Present (New
York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012).
20. Christelle Taraud, La prostitution coloniale: Algérie, Tunisie, Maroc (1830–1962)
(Paris: Payot, 2003).
21. F. Amrouche, My Life Story, 10–11.
22. Sarah A. Curtis, Educating the Faithful: Religion, Schooling, and Society in Nineteenth-
Century France (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000).
23. F. Amrouche, My Life Story, 10–29.
24. Christina de Bellaigue, Educating Women: Schooling and Identity in England and
France, 1800–1867 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Linda L. Clark,
“Bringing Feminine Qualities into the Public Sphere: The Third Republic’s Appoint-
ment of Women Inspectors,” in Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France,
1870–1914, ed. Elinor Accampo, Rachel G. Fuchs, and Mary Lynn Stewart (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 128– 56.
25. F. Amrouche, My Life Story, 15.
26. Julia Clancy-Smith, “Éducation des jeunes filles musulmanes en Tunisie: Mission-
aires religieux et laïques,” in Le pouvoir du genre: Laïcités et religions, 1905–2005,
ed. Florence Rochefort (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail, 2007), 127– 43.
27. F. Amrouche, My Life Story, 44– 55.
28. Jean el-Mouhoub Amrouche, Journal (1928–1962), ed. and intro. Tassadit Yacine
Titouh (Paris: Non Lieu, 2009), 9.
29. James McDougall, History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005).
30. Julia Clancy-Smith, “Algeria as mère-patrie: Algerian Expatriates in Tunisia, c.
1830–1914,” in Identity, Memory and Nostalgia: France and Algeria, 1800–2000, ed.
Patricia Lorcin (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 3–17.
31. Julia Clancy-Smith, “Ruptures? Expatriates, Law, and Institutions in Colonial-
Husaynid Tunisia, 1870–1914,” in Changes in Colonial and Post-Colonial Governance
of Islam: Continuities and Ruptures, ed. Veit Bader, Annelies Moors, and Marcel
Maussen (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 2011), 65– 88.
32. Kenneth J. Perkins, A History of Modern Tunisia (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004). An urgent plea for modern schooling was made by Mohamed Bach
Hamba (1881–1920) in “Questions économiques: Prospérité!” La Revue du Maghreb
(Genève), October 30, 1916, 181–84.
33. J. Amrouche, Journal, 10–11.
34. F. Amrouche, My Life Story, 129.
35. Jean Amrouche, Chants berbères de Kabylie (Tunis: Monomotapa, 1939).
36. F. Amrouche, My Life Story, 193.
37. Albert Memmi, collection Domaine maghrébin (Paris: Maspero, 1968).

228 JULIA CLANCY-SMITH

38. Taos Amrouche, Jacinthe noire (Paris: Maspero, 1972); Taos Amrouche, Le grain
magique: Contes, poèmes, et proverbes berbères de Kabylie (Paris: La découverte,
1996); and Taos Amrouche, Rues des tambourins (Paris: Éditions Joëlle Losfeld,
1996).
39. Amourche is revered by Kabyle nationalists as a cherished mother; in his preface
to the Histoire, Kateb Yacine calls her “la muse matriarchale” (13); see also Judith
Scheele, Village Matters: Knowledge, Politics, and Community in Kabylia, Algeria
(Suffolk: James Currey, 2009).
40. Nancy Wood, Germaine Tillion, une femme-mémoire: D’une Algérie à l’autre, trans.
Marie-Pierre Corrin (Paris: Éditions autrement, 2003); and Julia Clancy-Smith,
“La question de la femme,” in Le siècle de Germaine Tillion, ed. Todorov Tzvetan
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2007), 239– 50.
41. Amrouche, My Life Story, 159.
42. One of the most vivid social mappings of this city quarter is found in Jacques
Berque, French North Africa: The Maghrib between Two World Wars, trans. Jean
Stewart (London: Praeger, 1967), 195– 99.
43. Tawhida Ben Shaykh, interview by the author, Tunis, June 9, 1998
44. Perdita Huston, Motherhood by Choice: Pioneers in Women’s Health and Family
Planning (New York: Feminist Press, 1992), 96–98.
45. Ben Shaykh interview.
46. Julia Clancy-Smith, “Envisioning Knowledge: Educating the Muslim Woman in
Colonial North Africa, 1850–1918,” in Iran and Beyond: Essays in Middle Eastern
History in Honor of Nikki Keddie, ed. Beth Baron and Rudi Matthee (Los Angeles:
Mazda Press, 2000), 99–118. On architecture and social space, see Isabelle Grangaud,
“Masking and Unmasking the Historic Quarters of Algiers: The Reassessment of
an Archive,” in Walls of Algiers: Narratives of the City through Text and Image, ed.
Zeynep Çelik, Julia Clancy-Smith, and Frances Terpak (Los Angeles and Seattle: The
Getty Research Institute and the University of Washington Press, 2009), 179– 92.
47. La Quinzaine Coloniale, July 10, 1907, Archives nationales de Tunisie, E Series,
271– 4.
48. Clancy-Smith, “Éducation de jeunes filles”; Ben Shaykh interview; and S. R., “La
famille médicale tunisienne en deuil: La doyenne des médecins tunisiens n’est
plus,” La Presse de Tunisie, December 9, 2010.
49. Perkins, History of Modern Tunisia, 73–104; Nadia Mamelouk, “Anxiety in the Bor-
der Zone: Transgressing Boundaries, in Leila: Revue Illustree de la Femme (Tunis,
1936–1940) and in Leila: Hebdomadaire Tunisien Independent (Tunis, 1940–1941)”
(PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2007); and Kazdaghli, Mémoire de femmes.
50. Service des archives de l’Institut Pasteur, biographie, “Etienne Burnet (1873–1960),”
http://www.pasteur.fr/infosci/archives/e_bur0.html; and Kim Pelis, Charles Nicolle:
Pasteur’s Imperial Missionary, Typhus and Tunisia (Rochester: University of Roch-
ester Press, 2006).

From Household to Schoolroom 229

51. Kazdaghli, Mémoire de femmes, 23–24.
52. Ben Shaykh interview.
53. Kazdaghli, Mémoire de femmes, 24–26; and Ben Shaykh interview. By then, Dr.
Burnet had already left Tunisia—after a dispute with Nicolle—for a post in Geneva
at the League of Nations Health Organization.
54. Ben Shaykh interview; and Kazdaghli, Mémoire de femmes, 26. Another Tunisian
studied medicine in Paris, psychiatry, during the 1920s—Salem ben Ahmad Esch-
Chadely—who earned his diploma in 1929 and subsequently returned to practice
in La Manouba hospital outside of Tunis.
55. “Biographie de Tawhida ben Cheikh,” 02/03/2011, http://www.africansuccess.org
/visuFiche.php?id=981&lang=fr.
56. Kazdaghli, Mémoire de femmes, 27; and Fatima Sadiqi, Amira Nowaira, and Azza
El Kholy, Women Writing Africa: The Northern Region (New York: Feminist Press,
2009), 155.
57. On the history of Tunisian women’s literature, see Lorna Lunt, “Mosaïque et
mémoire: Paradigmes identitaires dans le roman feminin tunisien” (PhD diss.,
McGill University, 2000).
58. Kazdaghli, Mémoire de femmes, 28; and Huston, Motherhood by Choice.
59. Jamila Bahri Benous et al., Dar El Bacha: Reflet d’un siècle, 1900–2000 (Tunis:
Editions caractère, 2000); and Julia Clancy-Smith, “From Sidi Bouzid to Sidi Bou
Sa’id: A Longue Durée Approach to the Tunisian Revolutions, c. 1900–2012,” in
The Arab Spring: Change and Resistance in the Middle East, ed. Mark L. Haas and
David Lesch (Boulder: Westview Press, 2012), 13–34.
60. Tahar Melligi, “Tunisie: Tawhida ben Cheikh, première femme médecin de Tunisie,”
La Presse (Tunis), December 20, 2010.
61. Dorra Bouzid, interview by the author, La Marsa, Tunisia, June 2009; and Dorra
Bouzid, “De ‘Leïla’ et ‘Faïza’ à ‘Femmes et Réalités,’” Femmes et Réalités, Septem-
ber 1998, 8–9. The history of Tunisian suffering due to ferocious military battles
has only been recently reconstructed by Mark W. Willis in “Not Liberation, but
Destruction: War Damage in Tunisia in the Second World War, 1942–43,” Journal
of North African Studies 20, no. 2 (March 2015): 187–203.
62. A number of school recollections cite similar incidents in French colonial schools.
See Lilia Labidi, “Thinking of Violence,” in Remembering Childhood in the Middle
East: Memoirs from a Century of Change, ed. Elizabeth J. Fernea (Austin: University
of Austin Press, 2002), 297.
63. Clement H. Moore and Arlie R. Hochschild, “Student Unions in North African
Politics,” Daedalus 97, no. 1 (Winter 1968): 21– 50.
64. Guy Pervillé, Les étudiants algériens de l’université française, 1880–1962 (Paris:
Editions du CNRS , 1984); and Bouzid interview.
65. Nadia Mamelouk, “Leïla: 1936–1941 bien plus qu’une revue féminine,” in Leïla:
Revue illustrée de la femme, 1936–1941, ed. Hafedh Boujmil (Tunis: Editions Nirvana,
2007).

230 JULIA CLANCY-SMITH

66. Perkins, History of Modern Tunisia, 135–41; Mounira M. Charrad, States and Women’s
Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2001), 219; and Bouzid interview.
67. Bouzid interview.
68. Bouzid interview. On Djebar’s activism in Tunisia, see Assia Djebar, Children of
the New World: A Novel of the Algerian War, afterword Clarisse Zimra (New York:
Feminist Press, 2005), 206; see also Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization:
The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2006).
69. Dorra Bouzid, ed., École de Tunis: Un âge d’or de la peinture tunisienne (Tunis: Alif,
1995).
70. Julia Clancy-Smith, “Dorra Bouzid,” in The Oxford Dictionary of African Biography
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
71. Bouzid interview.
72. Amira-Bournaz, C’était Tunis 1920, 39.
73. Why are these household struggles, so significant to North Africa’s evolution,
rarely evoked in the literature? Perhaps because educated women, a problematic
category to be sure, were not necessarily in agreement with nationalist leaders
regarding the nation’s postcolonial social order.
74. Jean Amrouche, “Notes pour une esquisse de l’état d’âme du colonisé,” Etudes
Méditerranéennes 11 (June 1963): 76–77.
75. Julia Clancy-Smith, “Gladys Adda,” in Oxford Encyclopedia of African Biography
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

From Household to Schoolroom 231

8 Europeans before Europe?
The Mediterranean Prehistory of
European Integration and Exclusion

MARY DEWHURST LEWIS

In 1986, shortly after Spain and Portugal joined the European Economic
Community (EEC , the precursor to today’s European Union, or EU ),
the Spanish government constructed a fence around Ceuta and Melilla,
territories located in North Africa but part of Spanish sovereign space.1
The accession of the Iberian states to the EEC had been controversial
because they were economically so much less developed than northern
Europe and because their democracies were still so young. Regardless of
how EEC members felt about Iberian membership in their ranks, there
was one thing upon which they could all agree: Spain’s accession to
the EEC required securing its border with Morocco.2 Over the ensuing
quarter century, and especially following the Schengen Agreement of
1990, which allowed for free circulation of persons within a “common
European space,” Spain and the EEC /EU fortified these fences multiple
times: they made them higher, added more barbed wire, and installed
watchtowers, as shown in figure 8.1. Less apparent in the photograph are
the spotlights, radar, motion detectors, and infrared cameras installed

232
FIG. 8.1. The Ceuta-Morocco border, February 2006. From Xavier Ferrer-Gallardo,
“The Spanish-Moroccan Border Complex: Processes of Geopolitical, Functional and
Symbolic Rebordering,” Political Geography 27 (2008): 313. Photo courtesy of Xavier
Ferrer- Gallardo.

to track migrants’ movements, techniques presaging those later used to

securitize the English Channel tunnel at Calais.3 Spain instituted visa
requirements for entry into the cities, stationed guard ships in coastal
waters, and deployed hundreds of gendarmes and police to patrol the
two cities, all with one purpose: to prevent illegal African migration
into the EEC /EU via the Spanish exclaves.4
Installing a fence is one way of distinguishing “Europe” from “Africa.”
But it is hardly the first. A century earlier, colonizing powers throughout
much of North Africa drew a different kind of boundary: a juridical
one. Implanting new legal systems in their territories, they demarcated
Europeans from Africans by differentiating their rights.5 The process of
harmonizing European rights in North Africa, however, was not pro-
duced by the desire for an “ever closer union” among Europeans but
rather by the clash of empires in the Mediterranean region.6

Europeans before Europe? 233

 It is a truism to say that European imperial expansion was a competi-
tive venture. We would not have terms like “The Great Game” or the
“Scramble for Africa” if this were this not so. The southern Mediterra-
nean was no exception. In fact, competition between imperial powers
was sustained there longer than many other places, because even after
Spain had been forced to give up its American empire it still played the
imperial game in the Mediterranean along with France, Great Britain,
and eventually Italy.7 For much of the nineteenth and into the early
twentieth century, Tunisia—a small territory with strategic importance
given its location—lay at the heart of this struggle. I have argued else-
where that even after formal European competition for territorial control
of Tunisia ceased and France was recognized as the protecting power
in 1881, rivalries between France, Italy, and Great Britain continued in
Tunisia for decades on a sub-rosa level, profoundly affecting the evolu-
tion of French rule in the protectorate and, ultimately, helping to shape
the Tunisian nationalist movement.8
And yet, the very process of competing with other European nations
for colonies prompted states to establish legal agreements recognizing
Europeans as individuals belonging to a rights-bearing colonial class.
In other words, late-nineteenth- century imperialism and colonialism
not only created “Homo Europeanus” as a collective cultural identity
but also, in many respects, laid the groundwork for a collective legal
identity. More than a century before the Schengen Agreement gave EEC
citizens the opportunity to freely cross borders into other member coun-
tries and enjoy most of the rights of that country’s citizens, European
imperial powers active in the Mediterranean negotiated arrangements
to protect the interests of their nationals within a competitor’s impe-
rial domain. These nascent Europeans would share rights with each
other even as their governments continued to compete for influence
and territory. Although the phenomenon I am describing could not yet
be called “European law,” it could and did entail the collective applica-
tion of the national laws of various European countries. Thus, the very
concept of a shared legal identity among several European states was
born in Europe’s colonies before it was resurrected from the ashes of
World War II rivalry in the Treaty of Rome (1957), which envisioned a

234 MARY DEWHURST LEWIS

borderless future for the nascent EEC when it called for the “abolition,
as between Member States, of obstacles to freedom of movement for
persons, services and capital.”9
Let me be clear. I am not suggesting any direct lineage between bilat-
eral accords conferring rights to nationals of European countries when
living in the colonial territories of their imperial rivals and the future
borderless Europe that the multilateral accords of the EEC at Schengen
would endeavor to create. Nor am I suggesting that EEC integration was
or EU integration is itself imperialist. But it is helpful to think of some
inter-imperial arrangements as early forms of European “integration,”
however differently motivated than today’s EU integration they might
have been. To illustrate this point I draw on the case of Tunisia, not only
because it is the case I know best but also because Tunisia—located
at the gateway between the western and eastern Mediterranean—
exemplified the underlying problem that drove this process of creating
a class of Europeans before there was a legal entity called Europe.

France invaded Tunisia in the spring of 1881, using border skirmishes

with the Khmir tribe as an excuse for securing a buffer to the east of its
colony in Algeria. After establishing a “protectorate” over Tunisia and
putting down the local rebellions that ensued in the wake of the inva-
sion, French authorities had a new problem on their hands: the diversity
of non-French “settlers” from Italy, Malta, and elsewhere around the
Mediterranean. Such people outnumbered the French, and their home
countries continued to exercise a form of extraterritorial sovereignty
on their behalf via the “capitulations” treaties they had signed with
the bey of Tunis. As in other parts of the Ottoman Empire where they
were negotiated with the sultan, capitulations in Tunisia originally had
aimed to protect the subjects of “Christian” nations from falling under
Islamic and beylical law by allowing signatory countries to administer
justice with regard to their own citizens or subjects, usually through a
consular court. France had been a major beneficiary of such arrange-
ments before 1881, but now that France was the sole “protector” of
Tunisia, the proliferation of these European jurisdictions posed a threat
to French control. As Paul-Henri-Benjamin d’Estournelles de Constant,

Europeans before Europe? 235

an adviser to France’s resident-general in Tunisia, characterized the
problem, the “omnipotence [toute-puissance] of European jurisdictions
in Tunisia” had given rise to “inextricable complications and abuses.”10
D’Estournelles very much regretted that the May 1881 Bardo Treaty,
which had established French preponderance over Tunisia, also guar-
anteed the bey’s existing agreements with third countries. This allowed
there to be as many “States within the State as there were European
nations represented in Tunisia.”11 Seeking to end the extraterritorial
sovereignty of other European states in Tunisia—and especially that
of their rivals Great Britain and Italy—French leaders demanded that
Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Greece,
Italy, Norway, Russia, Spain, and Sweden close their consular courts.12
The idea was not to force all other Europeans in Tunisia to be French.13
It was that French courts would have jurisdiction over all “Europeans,”
which became the term of art for nationals from states that had closed
their consular courts. The term “European,” as Jean-Robert Henry has
remarked with regard to Algeria, emerged as a mark of distinction
designed to differentiate the rights of its bearers from those of the
“natives.”14 As a result, beginning in 1883 and 1884 and continuing for
the life of the protectorate (–1956), French courts would adjudicate not
just French codes but an array of laws from other European nations as
well.
What were “European” laws, and who was a European? And what
difference did belonging to this socio-legal category make? It is easier
to answer the latter question first. Being European made a very big
difference in terms of the rights and responsibilities of people living
in the protectorate. Europeans were exempt from paying the onerous
head taxes applying to all male subjects of the bey who had reached
puberty. They also were exempt from conscription. These were the two
most resented responsibilities in Tunisia and had been the cause of
rebellion in the 1860s.15 European status also determined one’s rights
under the law. Criminal cases involving Europeans were adjudicated
by French courts, as were all matters concerning inheritance, marriage,
divorce, and most other dimensions of civil law. The main exception
was property, which remained under Muslim jurisdiction until reforms

236 MARY DEWHURST LEWIS

were instituted in 1885 allowing “registered” property to be adjudicated
by French courts.16 While French legal procedure could be lengthy and
sometimes quite expensive, it offered the advantage of a clear system
of due process and the potential for appeal.17 For those not qualifying
as Europeans (whom officials called “indigènes,” natives), legal mat-
ters were to be settled in the first instance by local qā’ids and would be
turned over to the court system only if they “exceed[ed]” the qā’id’s
“expertise.”18 That court system combined wizara (administrative)
courts, Muslim sharia courts, and, for cases of Jewish personal law,
grands rabbins who served as judges.19
The first question—who was a European—seemed more straight-
forward than it actually was. On paper, a European was anyone whose
country of origin, before the advent of French rule in Tunisia, had
negotiated a capitulations treaty with the bey to protect nationals of
that country (generally presumed to be Christian) from falling under
the jurisdiction of Islamic law. French protectorate officials desiring to
shut down competing loci of European sovereignty in the protectorate
had created a new legal category called “European” and promised the
states operating consular courts—especially but not exclusively France’s
imperial rivals—that the new French court would ensure their charges
all the same rights that their own courts had hitherto guaranteed. Thus,
persons whose cases had previously been adjudicated by national con-
sular courts became, by proxy, “Europeans” as they were absorbed into
the jurisdiction of the French courts. Thereafter, French courts would
try cases of not just French men and women but also Italians, Greeks,
Spanish, British subjects from Malta or Gibraltar, and so on. There was
no European citizenship as such; what distinguished an individual as
“European” was precisely that he or she had the right to have his or
her nationality recognized and protected. Juridically speaking, it was
as if they had not left home at all, except that now French rather than
consular courts were the ones that enforced the national laws of these
European states.20
The European legal status of these individuals was, in many ways,
a historical accident: many of them had never set foot on the Euro-
pean continent but hailed from places like Malta or Gibraltar that were

Europeans before Europe? 237

under European dominion, or could claim origins in Europe by virtue of
ancestry (this, for instance, was the case of the so- called Livornese Jews
whose ancestors had left Spain, Portugal, Trieste, and Livorno genera-
tions before).21 As the Tunisian author Albert Memmi points out in his
classic analysis of colonial domination, Europeans in Tunisia were not
French, but they were “substantially separat[ed]” from the colonized
and closer to the colonizer in part because they were “protected by inter-
national laws.”22 For Memmi, the law helped transform an otherwise
liminal social category into one that sympathized primarily with the
colonizer.23 That sympathy was important, because if a “French” Medi-
terranean of settler colonies were to be crafted, its craftsmen were often
non-Frenchmen. In Algeria, as is well known, non-French Europeans
made up at least one-half of the settler population until the nationality
code of 1889 began to take effect in the three departments that were
considered an integral part of France.24 In Tunisia at the time of the
invasion, the relative lack of French colonists was even more conspicu-
ous: the French settlement, at around 700 people, was tiny compared
to that of Maltese British subjects (around 7,000) and Italians (at least
11,000). Over the years, as the French population grew, so did the Ital-
ian settlement, which was still more than double that of the French by
1906 (a minimum of 81,000 compared to the French 34,000), though
the French now outnumbered the Maltese (10,300).25 It was not until
after World War II that French nationals in Tunisia finally outnumbered
Italians (and this was largely due to a new law that ascribed French
nationality retroactively to Tunisian-born Italians). Indeed, the Italian
presence was so significant that, according to lore, the French econo-
mist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu once referred to Tunisia as “an Italian colony
administered by French functionaries.”26
As these settlement numbers make clear, French leaders embarking
on their colonial project in Tunisia needed other Europeans (and thus
other European states) to achieve the kind of “colony” they were aim-
ing for—one where settlers had dominion. It was for this reason that
they wound up granting non-French Europeans so many rights.27 Italy,
although a young nation with a weak state, had the most leverage in
negotiating these rights, thanks to the sheer numbers of Italians living

238 MARY DEWHURST LEWIS

in the protectorate. Before officials in Rome would agree to recognize
French jurisdiction over Italian nationals and suspend the operation of
Italy’s consular court, French authorities had to concede that Italian
law be applied to Italian nationals in matters pertaining to personal
status, that Italians found guilty of capital crimes be spared the death
penalty, that half of the assessors in a trial concerning an Italian defen-
dant should be Italian nationals, and that Italian nationals would be
admitted to the French bar, magistracy, and court employment (even if
trained in an Italian court).28 These latter demands thereby anticipated
the mutual recognition of degrees and licenses across EU member states
by more than a century.29
While negotiators for Great Britain did not raise the issue of the death
penalty, because capital punishment was not illegal under British law,
Britons and Maltese British subjects otherwise garnered similar rights
to those granted Italians. Under French protection, therefore, Tunisia
was not just the social crossroads of the Mediterranean that it always
had been; it was also a legal crossroads—where French judges were
regularly called upon to adjudicate conflicting European laws in the
name of a broader ideal: creating a European colonial class.30
In differentiating European and native systems of justice, French
authorities had presupposed a clear distinction between the two.31 But
soon they found themselves trying to rein in a capacious legal category
and give it a clearer cultural content. In negotiating the closure of con-
sular courts, British and Italian government officials had taken care to
ensure that not only their citizens but also their “subjects” or “protected
persons” were included as beneficiaries of European rights. This broad
definition of European made sense for Britain and Italy, whose lead-
ers wanted as much as possible to maintain the status quo that had
prevailed in Tunisia under the capitulations. For France, however, sub-
jects and protected persons often posed vexing problems because they
enjoyed the legal rights of Europeans without necessarily originating
from Europe, thereby upsetting the power hierarchy upon which they
hoped to base their rule.
Protected persons exemplified this problem. Consular protection
in Tunisia, as elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, originally had been

Europeans before Europe? 239

intended to confer special rights on embassy and consular employees.
Later, it expanded to include a much larger group of people—frequently
minorities—who acquired protection from one or another Christian
power in order to avoid local jurisdiction, which they deemed preju-
dicial. These “protégés” often served as important intermediaries in
commerce, but over time European states granted protection to North
Africans as a more general means of extending influence in what
Mohamed Kenbib calls a “protection rush.”32 Shortly after establishing
the protectorate’s dual system of justice, therefore, French authorities
confronted the fact that a number of persons whom officials might
culturally regard as native were in fact legally European. Expounding
upon this problem, d’Estournelles, one of the early architects of the
protectorate, decried the

negro, Arab, or native who does not speak any of the languages
of our continent, but who has disguised himself with a borrowed
nationality in order to escape common law. . . . From one day to the
next they no longer fall under the authority of their natural judges,
are excused from paying the heaviest taxes, and are exempt from
military service.33

Much like mixed-race individuals whose very existence called into

question the color line between “colonizer” and “colonized” elsewhere
in the French empire, protected persons (this “race apart, the proté-
gés,” as d’Estournelles put it) exposed the arbitrary nature of colonial
hierarchy.34
Throughout the French Mediterranean, legal structures had been
designed to uphold this hierarchy.35 Europeans settlers were granted
different rights from “native” populations, although the implications of
doing so were unique in Algeria, where settlers (and eventually Jews)
had the vote. Because Tunisia was a protectorate, not a department
with parliamentary representation, European status did not confer the
vote there. But it did exempt one from head taxes and conscription,
and it granted access to the French courts. In order to maintain these as
the privileges of the ruling class, French authorities devoted consider-
able energy over the next decades trying to align the legal and social

240 MARY DEWHURST LEWIS

categories of Europeanness by narrowing the legal definition. First, after
1898, French authorities ceased allowing foreign states to “protect”
native Tunisians thenceforth. Existing protégés would be registered
and their protection would expire upon their death, with no rights
of protection passing to their children. No new patents of protection
would be conferred. Then, officials took aim at their own practices of
protection by trying to limit the number of Algerian French subjects
who could claim European status in Tunisia by virtue of being French
nationals. This same status subjected them to discrimination as long
as they remained in Algeria, where, as in many colonies, “indigenous
codes” were designed to control the movement and behavior of the Mus-
lim population.36 Since the border between Algeria and Tunisia marked
an international (and not just intercolonial) boundary, the same people
who encountered legal discrimination by the French state within Algeria
were entitled to “protection” by it as French nationals when outside
Algeria.37 Auguste Fabry, the district attorney in Tunis, pointed to this
irony in 1891 when he wrote that Algerians “do not differ in general from
Tunisians in terms of mores, dress, or personal status.” When Algerians
invoked their status as Frenchmen in legal proceedings, therefore, they
“manage[d] to live,” according to Fabry, “outside all laws and to escape
the control of all authorities.” This was of course untrue; they did not
live outside all laws, only outside those of the local jurisdiction. If Fabry
had had his way, Muslim Algerians in Tunisia would have been subjected
to “special regulations similar to those established by the indigenous
code in Algeria.”38
French courts in Tunisia soon followed Fabry’s lead. As one judgment
regarding detention for nonpayment of the head tax ruled, a “large num-
ber of Algerian Muslims” live in Tunisia and “do not differ from Tunisian
Muslims by their social status or mores.” These Algerians “invoke their
nationality in order to evade actions taken by Tunisian authorities to
enforce the payment of taxes on natives,” and this situation “presents
drawbacks” of a very serious kind “because the disciplinary legislation
to which Algerians are subjected in their own country does not apply to
them in Tunisia.”39 Similar viewpoints prevailed regarding Algerian Jews
and migrants from France’s empire in sub-Saharan Africa. A justice of

Europeans before Europe? 241

the peace opined in 1905 that “nothing is more shocking” than Jews who
had lived in Tunisia “a quarter of a century or more” and who differed in
no way from Tunisian Jews, making use of their Algerian origins only in
order to “thwart the action of local authorities.”40 Whether to “thwart”
local authorities or merely to assert rights to which they saw themselves
as entitled, Tunisia-based Algerians regularly invoked their Algerian
(and thereby French) origins, as evidenced by the tattered passports
and other identity papers that they carried with them in anticipation
of needing to prove their legal status (see fig. 8.2).
The “protection rush” was so vexing to administrators in Tunisia that
they actually found themselves downplaying France’s recent triumphs
in French West Africa and arguing instead that French authority was
“much less effective” in its Soudanese colony than in the Tunisian pro-
tectorate.41 It would be perverse, they thought, to offer West African
migrants protection that they were unwilling to give Tunisians.42 Courts,
which were ostensibly independent but in fact closely aligned with
protectorate leadership, addressed this situation by adopting a doctrine
whereby Muslims and Jews were presumed Tunisian unless and until
proved otherwise—with a burden of proof progressively more impos-
sible to meet. Religion was used as a proxy for nationality.43 Neither
a passport, nor a marriage certificate, nor proof (for Algerian Jewish
citizens) of having voted in French elections in Algeria was considered
probative, while sub-Saharan migrants were dismissed as possessing
no claim on French nationality whatsoever.44 An acte de notoriété (an
affidavit of identity signed by several members of the community from
which a person claimed to originate) indicating Algerian origins was
regarded as prejudicial if not outright false.45 Liberal French jurists
protested such decisions in doctrinal notes published with the court
cases, but to little avail.46
By the turn of the twentieth century, French courts and protectorate
officials in Tunisia blatantly thwarted international law in the interest
of colonial control. When Aoued ben Abdallah, an Algerian clerk in a
Tunis attorney’s office, claimed that the chancellery fees he was asked to
pay for his nationality certificate were the legal equivalent of the head
tax (from which he was exempt as a French national) and refused to

242 MARY DEWHURST LEWIS

FIG. 8.2. Tattered passport showing origin in department of Algiers (Algeria) and signs
of continual use, presumably in an effort to prove European status. From Archives du
ministère des affaires étrangères et européennes, Nantes, Tunisie, Versement 5-135.
Photo courtesy of Archives du ministère des affaires étrangères et européennes, Nantes,
1TU /500/135.
pay, he was expelled to Algeria. A note from the residency’s chancellery
office conceded that Abdallah “was perfectly right” about the fee, but it
went on to explain that Abdallah’s treatment had been merited by the

arrogance with which he claimed to escape from the rules that all
other Algerians submit to, and his threat to contact the press. If we
had given in at that moment, it would have been the end of the little
authority we have over Algerians. He was thus escorted to the border
by a measure that is legally not very defensible but that is the only
form of coercion we have at our disposal with regard to Algerians.47

This statement was a rare admission of the extent to which colonial rule
relied on coercion. France could not control Algerians if they had the
same rights as Europeans; it needed coercive power over them, which
would be a lot easier to achieve in Tunisia if they simply were not Alge-
rian (and thereby French) at all. This realization predated the Abdallah
case and had prompted a massive albeit incomplete effort to review all
nationality claims with the intention of forcing most Muslims and Jews
who claimed European status to be considered Tunisian subjects.48 By
the turn of the twentieth century, Homo Europeanus in Tunisia was
defined less by who he (or she) was than by who he (or she) was not:
not native, not Muslim, and not Jewish.49

In the early twentieth century, North Africa became once again the site
of inter-imperial intrigue, as France, Germany, and Spain sparred over
the fate of Morocco, and Italy invaded Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. The
diplomatic story of how North Africa’s borders were redrawn in the
1910s is well known, but renewed Great Power interest in the Mediter-
ranean did more than shake up international relations; it also solidified
the juridical boundary between “Europeans” and “natives.” Absent from
well-known diplomatic accords such as the Entente Cordiale of 1904 or a
similar agreement between France and Italy of a few years earlier (both
of which tried to channel imperial competition by setting up spheres of
influence in the Mediterranean) was the much more mundane question
of who counted as a European and what rights this status conferred in
the colonial context.

244 MARY DEWHURST LEWIS

 When Italy annexed Tripolitania and Cyrenaica as “Libya” in 1912,
Italian leaders made Tripolitanians “Italian subjects” and immediately
demanded that they be treated as “European” in Tunisia, analogizing
that “since Algerian Muslim subjects of a European power are exempt
from the head tax in the Regency and fall under the jurisdiction of
French courts, Tripolitanians have a right to the same advantages the
moment they became subjects of a European power.”50 In response,
French officials in Tunisia were emphatic that the thousands of Libyans
who lived in Tunisia were not Italian (and therefore not European).
France’s “recognition of the annexation of Libya,” according to the
minister of foreign affairs, Stéphen Pichon, did “not at all imply that
all natives originally from this territory who are established in Tunisia
have acquired, as far as the government of the Republic is concerned,
the status of Italian subjects, nor that Italy’s new colonial subjects (sud-
diti) have the right to demand in the Regency the same treatment as
Italians (cittadini).”51 Rather, wherever they were from, Muslims owed
allegiance to the Tunisian bey as a Muslim ruler.52
The dilemma stemmed from the fact that thousands of Tripolitanians
lived and worked in Tunisia and had done so for generations. French
authorities generally had treated them as beylical subjects, but the
invasion of Libya complicated their legal status when Italian authori-
ties began demanding that their subjects be considered Italian. “If Italy
claims to consider Tripolitanians living in Tunisia as Italian subjects,”
opined Raymond Poincaré, the president of France’s council of ministers
and minister of foreign affairs in November 1912, “we will confront the
most serious internal troubles” due to the fact that they would be con-
sidered European and thereby judged in French courts while a Tunisian
working in the same industry would remain under native jurisdiction.
The possibility that Tunisians might resent seeing “foreign” Muslims
receiving preferential European treatment was, of course, a reason that
French authorities in the protectorate had not wanted to grant European
status to other non-Tunisian colonial subjects, such as Algerians and
Soudanese, in the nineteenth century, and it was partly why they now
objected to regarding Libyans as Italians.53 But the problem was not only
one of how Tunisians would react. It was also an ontological question

Europeans before Europe? 245

of who deserved what kinds of rights. Poincaré, for instance, predicted
major “difficulties [les embarras]” if “Tripolitanians, who are certainly
closer to barbarism than Tunisians, demand the prerogatives of Euro-
pean populations and elude the only jurisdictions that really function
in the southern territories, which is to say the native jurisdictions.”54
Italian leaders, by contrast, adopted a capacious view of European
status because they perceived it as necessary to winning the hearts and
minds of Libyans, who resisted the Italian occupation mightily. Hoping
to lure refugees and workers back to Libya by giving them amnesty and
granting them nationality, the Italian leadership actually gave them even
more incentive to stay in Tunisia, where Italian nationality was worth
more. While Italy’s success in pacifying Libya was abysmal, its poten-
tial for gaining greater influence in Tunisia via its subjects was great.
This was what the Italian leadership had in mind when it proposed to
backdate the Italian nationality of Libyan subjects to 1881.55 Backdating
nationality would have brought the number of Libyan Italian subjects
living in the Regency, estimated as ranging from 20,000 to 50,000, to
some ten times that—far exceeding the present numbers of Italians
(88,000–113,000) and French (46,000) combined.56 Needless to say, the
French wanted no part of this. Italy’s demands, argued Camille Barrère,
the French ambassador in Rome, would lead to “innumerable national-
ity conflicts” between the two governments and engender “jealousy”
between Tripolitanians and Tunisians. Moreover, granting European
status to so many Libyans would be “materially impossible” because
of the costs it would engender, particularly in the judicial domain.57
Barrère’s comments were a reminder that, for France, drawing the line
between “Europeans” and “natives” was not just a matter of principle
but also one of cost. Conceding to Italian demands would pervert the
objectives of the French justice system, which had been established to
“satisfy the Europeans.”58
What troubled French leaders besides the prospect of hundreds of
thousands of Libyans claiming rights as Europeans was also the notion
that Tunisians would have an incentive to claim (not implausible) family
connections in Libya, so that they too might be considered Italian and
therefore European. Indeed, French civil controllers in Tunisia soon

246 MARY DEWHURST LEWIS

began observing precisely this phenomenon.59 These new would-be
Europeans claimed exemption from Tunisian head taxes, regained fishing
rights along the Libyan coast (where Tunisian fishermen now saw their
livelihoods cut off by an Italian decision to close the Libyan coastline to
foreign boats),60 attempted to have their civil disputes heard in French
court, and, local officials feared, might also claim exemption from mili-
tary service.61 As the qā’id in Cape Bon urgently reminded the general
secretary of the Tunisian government in the fall of 1913, some 50 percent
of Cape Bon natives had paid to be replaced when called for military
service during the conquest of Morocco: “If we open to them the door
to Italian subjecthood, they will see in it a way out of the majbā [head
tax] and military service.” Already in his region, a prominent local
notable had obtained Italian protection. Turning alarmist, he predicted
that these new subjects could become the “avant-garde of an Italian
occupation army.”62
Fearing a large-scale defection of Tunisian subjects to Italian (and
thereby European) status, protectorate leaders finally equalized the tax
burden between Tunisia’s Europeans and natives, a reform that they had
hitherto always refused. The onerous head tax that had applied only to
natives was now replaced with a “personal tax of 10 francs, applicable
to all the inhabitants of the Regency, Europeans (French included) and
natives alike.”63 By removing Italy’s main rationale for complaint, the
reform put one chink in Italy’s armor, but there still remained the ques-
tion of legal jurisdiction. If Italy succeeded in securing the right for
Libyans to fall under European jurisdiction, it would have “disastrous
consequences for [French] prestige in Tunisia,” for Tunisians would not
accept “without bitterness a situation where they found themselves
inferior to Italian subjects.”64 Prestige, this French official intimated, was
not only essential to colonial power but also depended on maintaining
a clear hierarchy between rulers and ruled.
In the end, Italy did not succeed in backdating the nationality of its
new subjects to 1881. But it did succeed in having France accept October
28, 1912, the date France had recognized Libya’s annexation by Italy,
as the base date for considering Libyans to be Italian subjects.65 And
Italy finally agreed, in exchange, to allow Tunisians living in Libya to

Europeans before Europe? 247

be treated as French.66 Beyond that, the Italian and French leadership
had to agree to disagree; rather than reach a definitive accord, they
adopted “transitional provisions” whereby Libyans in Tunisia would
fall under the native justice system for a period of five years while
waiting for Italy and France “to conciliate their respective points of
view with regard to the matter of principle.”67 This truce worked to
French leaders’ advantage, since it achieved their original objective of
relegating Libyans to Tunisian native status while preserving European
rights for the privileged few. When, after World War II, Tunisians began
the long process of negotiating autonomy from France, one of the
sticking points in discussions was precisely the special rights enjoyed
by Europeans.

With the end of World War II and the Allied victory over the Axis powers,
imperial rivalry in North Africa ceased—beyond a few disagreements
between France and Great Britain regarding the fate of Italian Libya,
which was soon made a United Nations Trust Territory and then granted
independence. In this context, French officials no longer had to worry
about the rights of Europeans in the protectorate and successfully forced
most of them to become French. By that time, of course, the bigger prob-
lem for the French government did not concern reining in the category
of European but rather controlling Tunisian nationalists, who, among
other things, objected to the special rights and privileges granted only
to Europeans. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries these
special rights and privileges had been essential to creating a class of
colonizers in Tunisia; to achieve this, a fragile form of cross-border Euro-
pean cooperation was forged in North Africa—long before any similar
kind of integration was on the agenda on the European continent. The
aim was to give Europeans rights that natives did not have as a way of
shoring up European privilege, prestige, and power. The case of Tunisia
was exemplary: since French men and women there were thin on the
ground compared to other southern Europeans, French leaders sought
willing collaborators in the nationals of their imperial rivals, whom
they treated much as any signatory to the Schengen Agreement today
is required to treat citizens of other participating countries. Taking over

248 MARY DEWHURST LEWIS

where the capitulations had left off, France guaranteed that it would
apply European laws to these individuals while it relegated everyone
else to so- called native jurisdictions.
Fairly quickly, French authorities realized that this endeavor was
complicated by the legal structure of its own empire, which created
obstacles to drawing such clear and easy distinctions. Most troubling
for them was the fact that Algerians, as French nationals, could claim
European status when they were outside of Algeria—a phenomenon
that threatened to undermine the hierarchy they believed lay at the
heart of colonial power. Later, Libyans who could claim to be Italian
and thus European posed a similar threat to colonial authority. French
officials in Tunisia thus spent a great deal of their time trying to narrow
the scope of who could be considered European.
Fast-forward to 2011. In the wake of the ouster of Zine El-Abidine ben
Ali in Tunisia, tens of thousands of refugees fled the uncertain politi-
cal situation and traveled by boat to Lampedusa, Italy. Even closer to
Tunisia than Sicily, Lampedusa—like Ceuta and Melilla—is a European
outpost in the Mediterranean. As such, it is not only a physical space
but also a legal one. That is what makes it so attractive, of course, much
as European laws in Tunisia were attractive to the forebears of these
refugees, who nonetheless found themselves “block[ed] as intruders”
to the European courts, as one doctrinal note appended to a 1905 court
case concluded.68 The circumstances, of course, have changed. Colonial
ties have (mostly) been severed, and the rationale for “blocking intrud-
ers” today is at least as much about the economics of immigration as
it is about prestige.
And yet, if one looks at a longer history of the Mediterranean, the
boundary lines drawn over time evince some interesting patterns.
Until Spain joined the EEC in 1986, the Muslim population of Ceuta
and Melilla was barred from enjoying Spanish citizenship—much as
“natives” were barred from enjoying European rights in colonial North
Africa. With Spain’s accession to the EEC , its leaders promised Spanish
citizenship to a small number of Berber Muslims living in Ceuta and
Melilla—primarily because they wanted their cooperation, as these two
exclaves became outposts of what some now call “Fortress Europe.”69

Europeans before Europe? 249

Everyone else became “extra- community nationals”—a term that, as
Jean-Robert Henry has observed, has replaced “natives” as the juridical
inverse of “European.”70 Spain’s gesture of inclusion, therefore, was no
less aimed at preserving European privilege than was France’s integra-
tion of the Italians, Britons, Maltese, and other “Europeans” living in the
French protectorate of Tunisia a hundred years before. In the exclaves
of Ceuta and Melilla, Spaniards and a small Berber minority are granted
special rights, while a much larger group are “blocked as intruders”—to
borrow a phrase from French colonial jurisprudence.71 Expulsions of
Moroccan Arabs and other Africans from Ceuta and Melilla far outnum-
ber recognitions of European status.72 Moreover, the fact that Berbers are
the ones assimilated to Europeans eerily mirrors divide-and-rule tactics
used under colonial rule.73 A crucial difference is that the legal border
erected between European and native rights in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries reflected the expansionist logic of imperialism, while
the physical barrier around Ceuta and Melilla signals a European turn
inward. Indeed, the inclusion of Ceuta and Melilla residents in Spanish
citizenship had inadvertently furthered a broader logic of exclusion by
making it all more pressing to draw a line between these new Span-
ish citizens and the Moroccans whose emigration the EEC wanted to
discourage. The physical fence built by Spain and the EEC /EU is also
a legal barrier, and in this sense, the conundrum it presents is not so
different from the one that faced protectorate officials in Tunisia a hun-
dred years earlier. Before the Algerian War and the construction of the
Morice Line between Tunisia and Algeria, no one ever erected a fence
between Tunisia and its neighbors, but it must have been tempting as
officials in Tunisia dealt with an incessant back-and-forth across these
legal and physical borders that called into question the very nature of
what it meant to be European in a colonial context.74
Ensuring European privilege (and domination) had been deemed so
important to the colonial project that it created surprising partnerships
between European governments that were otherwise locked in imperial
competition. Putting their differences aside in the name of European
privilege, the accords they signed with each other in the 1880s were,
in a way, an early form of European integration. These agreements

250 MARY DEWHURST LEWIS

defined Europeans by what they were not: they were not subject to local
North African laws but instead benefited from the laws of Europe (not
yet “European laws”), adjudicated by a body (in this case France) that
assumed supranational authority on behalf of their home countries. The
“Scramble for Africa” was not just a zero-sum game where one European
nation’s gain of territory was another’s loss, for it also yielded one of
the first formal steps toward a pan-European legal identity since the fall
of Rome. Before there was Europe, there were Europeans.

NOTES
This article draws on research that also served as the basis of “Geographies of
Power: The Tunisian Civic Order, Jurisdictional Politics, and Imperial Rivalry in
the Mediterranean, 1881–1935,” Journal of Modern History 80, no. 4 (December
2008): 791–830, and Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881–
1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). While much of this essay was
written expressly for this volume, I thank both the University of Chicago Press
and the University of California Press for allowing me to reprint small amounts of
material from previous work here. I also thank Todd Shepard for his close reading
and insightful comments.
1. The government of Morocco considers them as rightfully Moroccan, but its efforts
to gain international recognition of this at the United Nations have so far not
altered Spanish claims. See Gerry O’Reilly, “Ceuta and the Spanish Sovereign Ter-
ritories: Spanish and Moroccan Claims,” Boundary and Territory Briefing 1, no. 2
(1994): 1–36, esp. 15–19; and Yves Zurlo, Ceuta et Melilla: Histoire, représentations,
et devenir de eux enclaves espagnoles (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005), 129–34.
2. On the implications of Spain’s joining the EEC for the border with Morocco, see
Xavier Ferrer- Gallardo, “The Spanish-Moroccan Border Complex: Processes of
Geopolitical, Functional and Symbolic rebordering,” Political Geography 27 (2008):
301–21.
3. Nadia Kohmami, “UK and France to Sign Calais Security Deal,” The Guard-
ian, August 18, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/aug/18/uk
-france--calais-security-deal-migrants.
4. Ferrer-Gallardo, “The Spanish-Moroccan Border Complex”; Xavier Ferrer-Gallardo,
“Border Acrobatics between the European Union and Africa: The Management
of Sealed-Off Permeability on the Borders of Ceuta and Melilla,” in Borderlands:
Comparing Border Security in North America and Europe, ed. Emmauel Brunet-Jailly
(Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2007), 75– 93; Olivier Clochard and Bruno
Dupeyron, “The Maritime Borders of Europe: Upstream Migratory Controls,” in
Brunet-Jailly, Borderlands, 19– 40; Peter Gold, “Immigration into the European
Union via the Spanish Enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla: A Reflection of Regional

Europeans before Europe? 251

 Economic Disparities,” Mediterranean Politics 4, no. 3 (1999): 23–36, esp. 26–27;
and Matthew Carr, “Policing the Frontier: Ceuta and Melilla,” Race and Class 39,
no. 1 (1997): 61– 66. The evidence suggests that illegal immigration continues via
these cities nonetheless.
5. This happened in different ways in each territory. In Egypt, “mixed courts” and
consular courts adjudicated cases pertaining to Europeans, while “native courts”
handled those pertaining to everyone else. In Algeria, Tunisia, and eventually
French Morocco, French courts replaced consular courts and assumed jurisdiction
over all Europeans; “natives” fell under various forms of local justice systems,
from wizara (administrative) and sharia courts in Tunisia to highly bureaucratized
Muslim courts in Algeria. Despite their differences, colonial powers throughout
North Africa were similar in that they established dual legal systems that conferred
legal privilege upon “Europeans” while relegating “natives” to a second- class
status. On the mixed courts of Egypt, see esp. Jasper Yeates Brinton, The Mixed
Courts of Egypt, rev. ed. (1930; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968); Byron
Cannon, Politics of Law and the Courts in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Salt Lake City:
University of Utah Press, 1988); Nathan J. Brown, “The Precarious Life and Slow
Death of the Mixed Courts of Egypt,” International Journal of Middle East Studies
25, no. 1 (February 1993): 33– 52. The definitive work on the bureaucratization of
sharia courts in Algeria under the French is Allan Christelow, Muslim Law Courts
and the French Colonial State in Algeria (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1985). On the relationship between European and Moroccan legal systems, see
especially Mohamed Kenbib, Les protégés: Contribution à l’histoire contemporaine
du Maroc (Rabat: Faculté des lettres et des sciences humaines, 1996); Edmund
Burke III, Prelude to Protectorate: Precolonial Protest and Resistance, 1860–1912
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), esp. chap. 2, “Morocco and the
West, 1860–1900”; C. R. Pennell, “The British Consular Courts and Moroccan
Muslim Identity: ‘Christian’ Justice as a Tool,” Journal of North African Studies
1, no. 2 (1996): 172– 91; and C. R. Pennell, “Law on a Wild Frontier: Moroccans
in the Spanish Courts in Melilla in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of North
African Studies 7, no. 3 (2002): 67–78. On Tunisia, see Mohamed Dabbab and
Tahar Abid, La justice en Tunisie: Histoire de l’organisation judiciaire (essai): De
1856 à l’indépendance (Tunis: Centre d’études juridiques et judiciaires, 1998); Ali
Noureddine, La justice pénal française sous le protectorat: L’exemple du Tribunal de
première instance de Sousse (1888–1939) (Tunis: L’or du temps, 2001); G. de Sorbier
de Pougnadoresse, La justice française en Tunisie (Paris: L. Larose & Forcel, 1897);
and Lewis, Divided Rule, esp. chap. 2.
6. The Treaty of Rome begins: “DETERMINED to lay the foundations of an ever-
closer union among the peoples of Europe.” Treaty of Rome, March 25, 1957, http://
ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/emu_history/documents/treaties/rometreaty2
.pdf.

252 MARY DEWHURST LEWIS

 7. Germany, of course, notoriously participated too, contributing to the Moroccan
Crises of 1905 and 1911, but its participation was fleeting compared to these other
powers.
8. Lewis, Divided Rule.
9. Article 3 § c, Treaty of Rome, March 25, 1957.
10. Paul d’Estournelles de Constant, La conquête de la Tunisie: Récit contemporain (repr.
ed. of La politique française en Tunisie: Le protectorat et ses origines, 1891) (Paris:
Les éditions Sfar, 2002), 311.
11. D’Estournelles de Constant, La conquête de la Tunisie, 311–12.
12. This was achieved during 1883 and 1884. Foreign consular courts were closed as
follows: Portugal (June 1883); Sweden and Norway (July 1883); Denmark (Sep-
tember 1883); Great Britain (January 1884); Spain (January 1884); Belgium and
Germany (February 1884); Greece (March 1884); Austria-Hungary (July 1884); Italy
(July 1884); Russia (August 1884). See Stéphane Berge, De la juridiction française
en Tunisie: Étude de législation et de jurisprudence (Paris: F. Pichon, 1895), 9.
13. In Algeria, by contrast, the idea of forcing non-French Europeans to become French
would soon become law, when the 1889 law ascribed French nationality at birth
to children born in French territory to parents also born there, and at adulthood
to children born in French territory to foreign-born parents. Since Algeria was
“French territory,” the descendants of the large number of Maltese, Italian, and
Spanish migrants living there became French in this manner. On the 1889 law
as it pertains to Algeria, see Patrick Weil, Qu’est- ce qu’un français? Histoire de la
nationalité française depuis la révolution (Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2002),
esp. 55– 57.
14. Although Jean-Robert Henry focuses on the Algerian case exclusively, he finds a
very similar binary opposition at play with regard to the law. According to Henry,
the opposition Européen/indigène (European/native or indigenous) became the
primary axis around which juridical rights in colonial Algeria were organized from
the 1840s to the 1940s. Although Muslim Algerians were technically “French” from
1865, it was only in the 1940s, during a period of colonial reform, that “French”
replaced “European” as the primary reference point for rights, and even then it
was split between “French citizens” of the “first [electoral] college” and “French
citizens” of the “second college” or “local status” (i.e., “French Muslims”). Henry,
“L’identité imaginée par le droit: De l’Algérie coloniale à la construction europée-
nne,” in Cartes d’identité: Comment dit-on “nous” en politique, ed. Denis- Constant
Martin (Paris: Presses de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1994),
esp. 44– 46, 54– 56.
15. Sylvia Marsans-Sakly, “The Revolt of 1864 in Tunisia: History, Power, and Memory”
(PhD diss., New York University, 2010); on conscription see esp. Thomas Patrick
DeGeorges, “Bitter Homecoming: Tunisian Veterans of the First and Second World
Wars” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2006), 18.

Europeans before Europe? 253

16. The 1885 property law was designed to circumvent the fact that property previously
fell entirely under the jurisdiction of Islamic courts. By creating the possibility of
property immatriculation (registration), the 1885 law gave a legal “personality”
to registered property. The law was based primarily on the French Civil Code but
apparently drew inspiration from Australian land law as well. Newly established
“mixed” Franco-Tunisian courts would be responsible for registering property; once
property was registered, it would be adjudicated by French courts. On Tunisian
property law, see Béchir Yazidi, La politique coloniale et le domaine de l’état en
Tunisie, de 1881 jusqu’à la crise des années trente (Tunis: Éditions sahar et faculté des
lettres de Manouba, 2005), esp. 44– 53; P. Piollet, Du régime de la propriété foncière
en Tunisie (Paris: Librarie nouvelle de droit et de jurisprudence, 1897); Georges
Soulmagnon, La loi tunisienne du 1er juillet 1885 sur la propriété immobilière et le
regime des livres fonciers (Paris: Librarie du recueil sirey, 1933).
17. I elaborate on this point in Divided Rule, chap. 2.
18. Circular to qā’ids, April 10, 1886, cited in Dabbab and Abid, La justice en Tunisie,
124.
19. It should be noted that rabbis ruled only on matters pertaining directly to Jewish
personal status and that Jews often found themselves before the sharia and wizara
(French ouzara) courts in other matters. Prior to the French institutionalization
of the tribunal rabbinique in 1898, the great rabbis who served as judges for the
Jewish community had been selected by the qā’id of the Jews, who, in turn, was,
of course, selected by the bey. For further elaboration, see Lewis, Divided Rule,
chap. 3.
20. This being the case, this essay will refer, where appropriate, to individual
nationalities—e.g., Italian—and not always to the broader collective identity
“European.” Because the nationals of former capitulations countries were under-
stood collectively as “Europeans,” the adjective “European” will also be used as
an umbrella term.
21. Sometimes they even included Jews of North African origin who had become
Tuscan subjects. For more on this group, see the discussion in Lewis, Divided Rule,
41.
22. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld (1965;
Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), 13–14.
23. Even while insisting on this point, Memmi still contends that non-French Europe-
ans maintained less social distance from the colonized than did most Frenchmen
(Colonizer and the Colonized, 14–15). This might be due to their long history of
migration to Tunisia, which allowed them to become socially quite ensconced
in local Tunisian life. See Julia Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and
Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2011), esp. 5, 8, 48, 54, and 343.
24. For approximate figures, see Charles-Robert Ageron, “Français, juifs et musulmans:
L’union impossible,” in L’Algérie des français, ed. Charles-Robert Ageron (Paris:

254 MARY DEWHURST LEWIS

 Seuil, 1993), 107– 8. The Nationality Code of 1889 ascribed French nationality at
birth to children born in French territory to foreigners also born in French territory
and at the age of adulthood to children born in French territory to foreigners born
outside French territory. In this way, according to Ageron, it created “some 190,000
French citizens” in the twenty years following its implementation in Algeria and,
as such, constituted a “veritable birth certificate for the French people of Algeria”
(107– 8).
25. Census report from 1906 in Régence de Tunis, Protectorat Français, Direction
Générale de l’Agriculture, du Commerce, et de la Colonisation, Statistique générale
de la Tunisie, année 1914 (Tunis: Société anonyme de l’imprimerie rapid, 1915), 6.
The gap had narrowed by 1911, though Italians (88,182) were still almost twice
as numerous as the French (46,054). These numbers are to be taken with some
caution, since Mark Choate notes that “no scientific population census was car-
ried out, as French administrators did not want to know the precise numerical
importance of the Maltese population, who were British subjects, or the Italian
population, under the tutelage of the Italian consul.” Choate, “Identity Politics
and Political Perception in the European Settlement of Tunisia: The French Colony
versus the Italian Colony,” French Colonial History 8 (2007): 99. Indeed, records
for official declarations of foreigners in December 1913 showed 112,982 Italians;
this number increased to 116,856 by December 1914. For both these and census
figures, see Régence de Tunis, Statistique generale de la Tunisie, annee 1914, 6, 28.
Stephen Roberts estimates that the 1911 census undercounted the Italian presence
by as much as half and overestimated the French presence by several thousand.
Roberts, The History of French Colonial Policy, 1870–1925, vol. 1 (London: P. S. King
& Son, 1929), 286. See also Helen Broughall Metcalf, “The Problem of Tunisia in
Franco-Italian Relations, 1835–1938” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 1942),
500– 506.
26. The phrase “la Tunisie est une colonie italienne administrée par des fonctionnaires
français” is attributed to Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, according to Juliette Bessis, La
Méditerranée fasciste: L’Italie mussolinienne et la Tunisie (Paris: Éditions Karthala,
1981), 19 n. 13, where she observes that fascist writers like Margherita Sarfati
“borrowed the phrase from Paul Leroy-Beaulieu” and recycled it in the interest
of fascist empire-building in North Africa, citing as exemplary Sarfati, Tunisiaca,
preface by Latinus (pseud. of Mussolini), Editions Mondadori, 1924. I have not
found an exact match to this quote in Leroy-Beaulieu’s work; however, it fits the
tone of his view on Italy’s role in Tunisia. In L’Algérie et la Tunisie, Leroy-Beaulieu
writes that France should be careful it “does not hatch an Italian egg in Tunisia.”
Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, L’Algérie et la Tunisie, 2nd ed. (Paris: Guillaumin et cie, 1897),
571.
27. In Algeria, French leaders solved the problem of being outnumbered by Italians,
Spanish, and Maltese by granting nationality to the Algerian-born children of these
migrants. That was possible because Algeria, which had been annexed in 1848, was

Europeans before Europe? 255

 considered French “soil.” Since Tunisia remained a nominally independent state
that was merely “protected” by France, granting jus soli nationality (nationality
based on birth in the territory) was deemed legally impossible—at least initially.
Later, French authorities, frustrated with the “lien” that foreign governments had
over Tunisia by virtue of the rights held by their nationals, tried to ascribe French
nationality to Tunisian-born “Europeans.” See Lewis, Divided Rule, chap. 4.
28. For all stipulations except the death penalty, see Archivio Storico Diplomatico
del Ministero degli Affari Esteri [hereafter ASD ], Documenti diplomatici, Serie
IX, Tunisi, 1883, no. 1008 (IX), Aide Memoire (July 18, 1883); Mancini to Italian
ambassador in France, no. 1009 (IX), Roma, July 10, 1883. For the death penalty,
see Museo Centrale del Risorgimento a Roma, Busta 650, fascicolo 19, foglio 10:
telegram 1343, December 26, 1883, 5:30 p.m.; arrived, 7:35 p.m. (Paris to Foreign
Ministry, signed Menabrea); and reply, foglio 11.
29. For EEC and EU policies requiring recognition of professional qualifications out-
side one’s state of origin, see, for instance, Directive 2005/36/EC of the European
Parliament and of the Council, September 7, 2005, on the recognition of profes-
sional qualifications. http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/qualifications/policy
_developments/legislation/index_en.htm.
30. On Tunisia as a social crossroads see Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans. Prior to the
protectorate, Tunisia was also the site of legal pluralism, but this pluralism was
institutionalized in the consular courts of different nations; under French rule
the pluralism remained, but the French applied the laws of the various European
nations in their stead. This was a unique arrangement, comparable perhaps only
to Egypt’s mixed courts, although in Egypt, mixed courts (as the name suggests)
were operated by several nations at once. For other examples of colonial- class
construction, see Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire:
Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997), esp. vii–x, 1– 56, 198–237.
31. Later jurisprudence would uphold this presumption by insisting, for instance, that
a case had to belong to one or the other jurisdiction, not both, for these jurisdic-
tions “derive from two different sovereignties.” Consorts Escheriffat c. Enriquez,
Tribunal de Tunis (1ere ch.), Audience du 23 mai 1893, Revue algérienne, tunisienne
et marocaine de législation et jurisprudence [hereafter RAT ], 2e partie, 1893, 387. For
an elaboration on this presumption, see Lewis, Divided Rule, esp. chaps. 2 and 3.
32. “Course à la protection.” Kenbib, Les protégés, 78. For advantages that accrued to
protecting nations by offering protection, see especially Sarah Abrevaya Stein,
“Protected Persons? The Baghdadi Jewish Diaspora, the British State, and the
Persistence of Empire,” American Historical Review 116, no. 1 (February 2011), esp.
88– 89. See also Lewis, Divided Rule, esp. 68.
33. D’Estournelles de Constant, La conquête de la Tunisie, 312–13. Sorbier de Pougna-
doresse, Justice, 105, expresses an almost identical view; Leroy-Beaulieu, L’Algérie
et la Tunisie, 458, also had a similar viewpoint on the protégés.

256 MARY DEWHURST LEWIS

34. On “métis” as calling into question the distinction between colonizer and colonized,
see Emmanuelle Saada, Les enfants de la colonie: Les métis de l’empire français
entre sujétion et citoyenneté (Paris: La découverte, 2007), esp. 29. D’Estournelles
de Constant, La conquête de la Tunisie, 312.
35. For the Algeria case, see Henry, “L’identité imaginée par le droit”; Christelow, Muslim
Law Courts; Michael Brett, “Legislating for Inequality in Algérie: The Senatus-
Consulte of 14 July 1865,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
51, no. 3 (1988): 440– 61; Laure Blévis, “Les avatars de la citoyenneté en Algérie
coloniale ou les paradoxes d’une catégorisation,”Droit et Société 48 (2001): 557–
80; Judith Surkis, “Propriété, polygamie, et statut personnel en Algérie coloniale,
1830–1873,” Revue d’Histoire du XIXe Siècle 41, no. 2 (2010): 27– 48. For Morocco,
see especially Kenbib, Les protégés, and Jessica Marglin, “The Two Lives of Mas’ud
Amoyal: Pseudo-Algerians in Morocco, 1830–1912,” International Journal of Middle
East Studies 44 (2012): 651–70. For Tunisia, see Lewis, Divided Rule; Dabbab and
Abid, La justice en Tunisie; Noureddine, La justice pénale française sour le protectorat.
36. François Marneur, L’indigénat en Algérie: Considérations sur le régime actuel. Cri-
tique. Projets de réformes (Paris: Receuil Sirey, 1914). See also John Ruedy, Modern
Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1992), 89–90, 129.
37. On this ironic situation, see Marglin, “The Two Lives”; Noureddine Amara, “Être
algérien en situation impériale, fin XIXème siècle—début XXème siècle: L’usage
de la catégorie ‘nationalité algérienne’ par les consulats français dans leur relation
avec les Algériens fixes au Maroc et dans l’Empire Ottoman,” European Review of
History 19, no. 1 (February 2012): 59–74; Noureddine Amara, “La question de la
nationalité des Algériens dans leurs relations avec les consuls français au Maroc et
dans l’Empire Ottoman, fin 19ème siècle—début 20ème siécle” (unpublished manu-
script, 2010); Kamel Kateb, “La gestion administrative de l’émigration algérienne
vers les pays musulmans au lendemain de la conquête de l’Algérie,” Population,
no. 2 (1997): 399– 428; Allan Christelow, Algerians without Borders: The Making
of a Global Frontier Society (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012); Lewis,
Divided Rule, esp. chap. 3.
38. Centre des archives diplomatiques de Nantes [hereafter CADN ]—Tun. 1er vers
988A : Parquet du procureur de la république, no. 5054, Tunis, May 16, 1891.
39. Mohamed ben Amor et al c. Le Contrôleur Civil de Souk-el-Arba, le caïd de Djendouba,
et le Gouvernement Tunisien, Tribunal de 1ere instance de Tunis (1ere chambre), June
14, 1899, Journal des Tribunaux Français en Tunisie [hereafter JTT ] (1900), 367;
364–69. Identical transcript in RAT (1900). The language used here is remarkably
similar to that of Fabry in his note of May 1891 (see note 38 above). Interestingly,
similar problems with would-be Algerians develop in pre-protectorate Morocco at
around the same time. See Leland Bowie, “An Aspect of Muslim-Jewish Relations
in Late-Nineteenth-Century Morocco: A European Diplomatic View,” International
Journal of Middle East Studies 7, no. 1 (1976): 3–19.

Europeans before Europe? 257

40. Boukhris c. Cattan et Gallula, Justice of the Peace, Tunis—Northern Canton, Janu-
ary 20, 1905, RAT (1905), part 2, 216, including doctrinal note by Émile Larcher.
41. Archives nationales de Tunisie [hereafter ANT ] C -18, dossier 2, folio 111: Monsieur
Benoit, résident général par interim, à Monsieur Spire, procureur de la république à
Tunis, No. 1326, a/s de la situation en Tunisie des indigènes originaires des centres
africains soumis à l’influence française, March 22, 1901.
42. ANT C -18, dossier 2, folio 111: Parquet du procureur de la république, April 3, 1901.
43. On this point, albeit in Algeria, see Laure Blévis, “Citoyenneté, civilité, et religion
en Algérie coloniale: L’interprétation doctrinale de la conversion” (paper presented
at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies, Paris,
June 17, 2004). See also Henry, “L’identité imaginée par le droit.”
44. ANT C -18, dossier 2, folio 111: Parquet du procureur de la république, April 3, 1901.
45. See, e.g., the argument about actes de notoriété in Mohamed ben Amor et al., JTT
(1900), 367; RAT (1900) part 2, 410.
46. For instance, see the scathing doctrinal note by Émile Larcher, where he wrote:
“Indigeneity is a fact. . . . If birth in Tunisia is a presumption of Tunisian nation-
ality, why wouldn’t birth in Algeria be proof of French nationality?” Moreover,
Larcher wondered, where was it written that “every native Israelite is presumed
Tunisian”? If an individual claims and provides evidence for Algerian status, can
he really be said to be a “native”? Larcher, doctrinal note appended to Boukhris
c. Cattan et Gallula, Justice of the Peace, Tunis—Northern Canton, January 20,
1905, RAT (1905), part 2, 216.
47. CADN —Tun. 5e vers 135: Undated and unsigned note, responding to Abdallah’s
open letter to the resident-general in 1902. The Abdallah affair garnered consider-
able attention both within the administration and in the press. For the unfolding
of the controversy, see also, under the same archival filing number: “Arbitraire,”
L’Indépendant, May 17, 1900, 2; “La medjba et les Algériens,” Le Promeneur, May
13, 1900; excerpt from L’Indépendant, June 28, 1900, 2; excerpt from La Tunisie
Française, June 23, 1900, 2; “Expulsion d’Abdallah,” La Petite Tunisie, June 22, 1900,
2; “Croquis,” Le Promeneur du Dimanche, January 27, 1901; “Tant pis!” L’Avenir
Tunisien, June 19, 1900, 2; A. Abdallah, “Une vieille affairs: La question des Algéri-
ens,” newspaper clipping from June 21, 1902, title of newspaper not indicated;
résidence générale de la république française en Tunisie, May 19, 1900; contrôleur
civil to rés. gén., April 26, 1900; Note pour le résident général, April 28, 1900;
feuille de renseignements, June 15, 1900; direction de la sûreté publique, no.
8329, May 23, 1900, and response; délégué à la résidence générale to gouverneur
général (Alger), July 20, 1900; governeur général de l’Algérie, Service des affaires
indigènes et du personnel militaire, no. 1681, July 11, 1900; Abdallah à M. le délégué
à la résidence générale, July 22, 1900; open letter from Abdallah to the résident
général, 1902; undated note [1902]; Aoued Abdallah to résident général, March
26, 1909.
48. I discuss this review in detail in Divided Rule, chap. 3.

258 MARY DEWHURST LEWIS

49. Jews living in the three annexed departments of Algeria were collectively natural-
ized by virtue of the Cremieux Decree of 1870. An effort to buttress the colonizing
class by adding Jews to it, the measure remained controversial in Algeria for many
years. In Tunisia and Morocco, Jews were considered “natives,” and lobbies to
grant them greater rights than Muslims were not successful.
50. ANT A 280 dossier 9: Note sur la situation des Tripolitains en Tunisie, n.d. [1913]
(French note paraphrasing Italian position).
51. ANT A 280 dossier 9, subdossier 4: M. Stéphen Pichon, Ministre des affaires
étrangères, à M. le résident général de la république française, December 6, 1913.
Italian in original.
52. See, e.g., ASD Ministero dell’Africa italiana, Busta 111/1, fascicolo 7: Le ministre
plénipotentiaire délégué à la résidence générale, André Dobler, à M. le consul
général, April 29, 1913. French authorities had made an identical argument about
Algerians and other Muslims from outside Tunisia at an earlier date. Interestingly,
the assumption was that Libyans living in Tunisia were, in the main, Muslim.
However, in the wake of the Italian annexation it was often Jews in Tunisia who
claimed family connections to Libya in an effort to gain the rights of Europeans.
See Lewis, Divided Rule, chap. 3.
53. For discussion of Soudanese and Algerians, see Lewis, Divided Rule, chap. 3. For
the same argument being made with regard to Libyans, see, e.g., ASD Minis-
tero dell’Africa italiana, Busta 111/1, fascicolo 7: Summary of objections raised by
France’s French Embassy secretary in Rome (Robert de Billy) to Italy’s proposals
that Libyans be regarded as Italians in Tunisia, annexed to letter dated July 11,
1913, from Pietro Lanza di Scalea (undersecretary for foreign affairs) to Minister
of Colonies Bertolini; and Camille Barrère, Pro-mémoire, Rome, December 1, 1912.
54. CADN —Rome Quirnal 479: Ministère des affaires étrangères, Direction des affaires
politiques et commerciales, Tunisie. No. 960. Paris, November 11, 1912, Le prési-
dent du conseil, Ministre des affaires étrangères, à M. Barrère, ambassadeur de
la république française à Rome.
55. ANT A 280 dossier 9, subdossier 13: Note sur la situation des Tripolitains en
Tunisie, n.d. [1913].
56. The French census of 1911 recorded 46,054 French nationals and 88,182 Italian
nationals. However, records of official declarations of foreigners in December 1913
showed 112,982 Italians; this number increased to 116,856 by December 1914. For
both sets of figures, see Régence de Tunis, Statistique générale de la Tunisie, année
1914, 6, 28. For a discussion of the limitations of these statistics, see note 25. For
the Libyan figures, see ANT A 280 dossier 9, subdossier 13: Note sur la situation
des Tripolitains en Tunisie, n.d. [1913]; note, Ministère des affaires étrangères,
Direction des affaires politiques et commerciales, April 23, 1913; Ministre des
affaires étrangères à M. de Billy, chargé d’affaires de la république française à
Rome, August 9, 1913; ANT A 280 dossier 9, subdossier 14: Note sur la première
proposition dated May 5, 1913.

Europeans before Europe? 259

57. ASD Ministero dell’Africa italiana, Busta 111/1, fascicolo 7: Camille Barrère, Pro-
mémoire, Rome, December 1, 1912.
58. On the courts being designed for “Europeans,” see ANT A 280 dossier 9, subdos-
sier 13: Note, Ministere des affaires étrangères, Direction des affaires politiques
et commerciales, April 23, 1913.
59. Indeed, arguably Tunisians saw a greater interest in being “Libyan” than did the
Libyans who remained in their home country, where acceptance of Italian rule
was minimal to say the least.
60. France had enacted similar legislation off the Algerian coast in 1888, forcing Italian
fishermen to seek their livelihoods elsewhere. See Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans,
167.
61. A partial list follows. All are from ANT A 280 dossier 9. Subdossier 3: Con-
trôleur civil de Béja, no. 1264, October 23, 1912; Consolato generale di S.M. il
Re d’Italia, November 19, 1912; Contrôleur civil de Sousse, no. 465, January 21,
1913; Contrôleur civil de Sfax, October 9, 1913; Contrôleur civil de Sfax, no. 1598,
April 29, 1914. Subdossier 5: Consolato generale di S.M. il Re d’Italia, April 19,
1913. Subdossier 10: Contrôleur civil de Sousse, marked confidential, no. 4573,
August 27, 1913; Caidat des Soussi to Contrôleur civil de Sousse, September 8,
1913. Subdossier 11: Télégramme, Contrôleur civil de Sfax à la résidence générale,
October 29, 1913. Subdossier12: Caïd du Cap Bon, October 6, 1913; Contrôleur
civil de Grombalia, September 29, 1913. Subdossier 20: Télégramme, délégué
résidence générale à Affaires étrangères, no. 131, September 10, 1913; le délégué
à la résidence générale à M. Dubourdieu, directeur général des finances, no.
6041, Tunis, October 24, 1913; Contrôleur civil de Gabès à M. Alapetite, ministre
plénipotentiaire, résident général de la république française, no. 2438, Gabès,
October 31, 1913. See also CADN —Rome Quirnal 479: Adjim, November 10,
1913, Le maître de port à M. l’Ingenieur des ponts et chaussées, chef du service
de l’arrondissement de Sfax.
62. ANT A 280 dossier 9, subdossier 12: Caïd du Cap Bon, October 6, 1913.
63. ANT A 280 dossier 9, subdossier 13: Note sur la situation des Tripolitains en
Tunisie, n.d. [1913].
64. ANT A 280 dossier 9, subdossier 13: Note sur la situation des Tripolitains en
Tunisie, n.d. [1913].
65. ASD Ministero dell’Africa italiana, Busta 111/1, fascicolo 9: Copia di telegramma
del regio ministero degli affari esteri, San Giuliano, November 6, 1913, no. 7488,
diretto alla R. Ambasciata in Parigi.
66. This was a symbolic gesture, since the Tunisian population in Libya was tiny
compared to the number of Libyans in Tunisia. Nonetheless, the Italian leadership
had resisted this concession. See Lewis, Divided Rule, 104.
67. ANT E 504 dossier 13: “Dispositions transitoires,” signed in Rome, May 29, 1914,
article 3, paragraph 1.

260 MARY DEWHURST LEWIS

68. Zeneikha bent Hassin c. Mohamed ben el Hadj Amor, Tribunal de Tunis (2e ch),
jugement October 18, 1905, RAT part 2 (1906): 268– 69 and unsigned doctrinal
note.
69. On the Berber origins of the Spanish citizens of the exclaves, see Carr, “Polic-
ing the Frontier,” 63. The literature on “Fortress Europe” is too vast to cite in its
entirety. A good place to start is Matthew Carr, Fortress Europe: Dispatches from a
Gated Continent (New York: The New Press, 2012); and Andrew Geddes, Immigra-
tion and European Integration: Towards Fortress Europe? (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2000).
70. Henry, “L’identité imaginée par le droit,” 59.
71. Again see doctrinal note for Zeneikha bent Hassin c. Mohamed ben el Hadj Amor,
Tribunal de Tunis (2e ch), jugement October 18, 1905, RAT part 2 (1906): 268– 69.
72. On expulsion practices in Ceuta and Melilla since the 1980s, see Carr, “Policing the
Frontier”; Gold, “Immigration into the European Union”; Ferrer-Gallardo, “Border
Acrobatics”; and Ferrer-Gallardo, “The Spanish-Moroccan Border Complex.”
73. On cultivating the Berber/Arab split in colonial rule, see Patricia Lorcin, Imperial
Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (London: I. B. Tauris,
1995); Ernest Gellner and Charles Micaud, eds., Arabs and Berbers: From Tribe to
Nation in North Africa (London: Duckworth, 1973); Robin Bidwell, Morocco under
Colonial Rule: French Administration of Tribal Areas, 1912–1956 (London: Cass, 1973);
Charles-Robert Ageron, “Du mythe kabyle aux politiques berbères,” in Le mal de
voir—Ethnologie et orientalisme: Politique et épistémologie, critique et autocritique
(Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1976); David M. Hart, “The Berber Dahir of 1930
in Colonial Morocco: Then and Now (1930–1996),” Journal of North African Studies
2, no. 2 (Autumn 1997): 11–33; Jonathan Wyrtzen, “Colonial State-Building and the
Negotiation of Arab and Berber Identity in Protectorate Morocco,” International
Journal of Middle East Studies 43 (2011): 227–49. Such divide-and-rule tactics back-
fired and helped trigger the Rif War, which pitted the Spanish protectorate (later
aided by France) against the Berbers of the Rif region. The French subsequently
issued a “berber dahir” which endeavored to administratively separate the Berber
and Arab populations of French-protectorate Morocco; it too backfired. In Tunisia,
French officials never actively tried to divide the Berber and Arab populations,
probably because the former was very small, in contrast to Morocco, where it
constituted as much as two-thirds of the population.
74. On the Morice Line, see Martin S. Alexander and J. F. V. Keiger, “France and the
Algerian War: Strategy, Operations, and Diplomacy,” Journal of Strategic Studies
25, no. 2 (2002): 1–32.

Europeans before Europe? 261

9 Dreyfus in the Sahara
Jews, Trans-Saharan Commerce, and Southern
Algeria under French Colonial Rule

SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

In the early winter of 1898, French military representatives stationed in

Algeria’s Mzab Valley (a valley of five fortified, oasis cities in the north
of the Algerian Sahara, about 370 miles south of Algiers) noted with
alarm that Jews from the town of Ghardaïa were extending loans to
Muslims in neighboring Touggourt at what the authorities considered
usurious rates of interest. In response, military officials commenced a
furious investigation into Mzabi Jews’ involvement in loan-sharking,
ultimately arresting thirty-three Jewish lenders. For decades, the French
had attempted to manipulate trans-Saharan commerce to their advan-
tage, but their interest in the ostensibly “usurious” practices of the Jews
of the Mzab was carefully timed. Ghardaïa’s thirty-three Jewish lenders
were arrested at the very height of the Dreyfus Affair, when anti-Jewish
hostility inspired by the arrest of Captain Alfred Dreyfus (a military
officer of Alsatian Jewish descent accused of passing state secrets to the
German Embassy) rippled across Algeria and many French metropolitan
centers, finding favor in the eyes of certain military representatives in

265
the Mzab.1 It is well established that the Dreyfus Affair had an Algerian
as well as a metropolitan dimension. More striking, for the purposes
of our story, is that when military representatives in the Mzab pun-
ished the Jewish lenders of Ghardaïa they inadvertently undermined
the legal typologies that colonial law imposed upon Jewish residents of
the Southern Territories, a 316,629-square-mile administrative region
of Algeria that existed under military rule, outside the departmental-
ized system that structured Algeria’s north, from 1902 to 1957. In this
episode, colonial law and military policy collided, shedding light on
the complex shaping of French jurisprudence in the Algerian Sahara.
With the passage of the Crémieux Decree in 1870, France granted
Jews in the northern departments of Algeria French citizenship forty
years after the colonization of Algeria began. When the minister of
justice and governor-general of Algeria shaped a legal supra-structure
for southern Algerian Jewry in the immediate aftermath of the 1882
conquest of the Mzab, however, it determined that Jews, like Muslims
throughout Algeria, would be categorized as indigènes (indigenous sub-
jects) and subject to “local civil status” laws, with their political rights
radically curtailed.2 These laws recognized the legitimacy of Koranic,
Berber, Mozabite, or Mosaic (also called Israélite) laws and institutions
in matters pertaining to marriage, divorce, paternity, and inheritance
and assigned a qadi (Muslim jurist) or, in Algeria’s Southern Territories,
a rabbi to oversee related legal matters, including the maintenance of
communal ledgers. This legal arrangement echoed that which existed in
Tunisia and Morocco when they were French protectorates (established
in 1881 and 1912, respectively).3 In these contexts, as with the conquest
of the Mzab, French colonial and military officials were loath to repeat
the experiment that had been initiated earlier in Algeria, and which
they had quickly come to see as failed, if not disastrous—of natural-
izing colonized populations of autochthonous Jews. Thus in the Mzab,
as in Protectorate Tunisia and Morocco, the French state’s legal and
administrative posture toward Jews bore the anxious imprint of events
that had unfolded in northern Algeria.
With the application of Mosaic personal status laws in Algeria’s
Southern Territories, the several thousand Jews who lived in this region

266 SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

became, over eighty years of French colonial rule, the only Jews in Alge-
ria, France, or North Africa to live, in sustained fashion, under military
rule (rather than civilian rule or protectorate status), simultaneously
beholden to rabbinical law.4 This was also the only Jewish community
across the colonial world systematically constrained in their access to a
culture of legal pluralism—that is, the existence of multiple, decentral-
ized legal orders.5 In the Mzab, Jews had no opportunity to earn protégé
status (i.e., the protection of foreign powers), to acquire standing as
foreign nationals or extraterritorial subjects, or (until the very end of
the colonial period) to serve the colonial administration, as did Jews
elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East, even if they did have
access both to Muslim and colonial courts for civil matters.
And yet, if French law proceeded from the assumption that the south-
ern Algerian Jewish community consisted of indigènes who should be
treated, legally speaking, like their Muslim peers, in shaping quotidian
policy military officials sometimes assumed otherwise—calling these
Jews “foreigners” and crafting policies to disaggregate them from their
Muslim neighbors. Such was the case with the arrest of the thirty-three
Jewish lenders from Ghardaïa in 1898—a determination based upon
local officials’ sense that these Jews were ill-intentioned outsiders poised
to upset a fragile balance in southern Algeria.
For the purposes of the current article, the importance of this
episode is threefold. First, this case study allows us to explore yet
another variation of colonial rule that was produced as the French
authorities sought—sometimes methodically, sometimes with frantic
desperation—to achieve mastery over and control of their diverse sub-
ject populations in North Africa.6 This in turn provides evidence of
the technologies of rule that Ann Laura Stoler has labeled “imperial
formations”—macropolities that “thrive on the production of excep-
tions and their uneven and changing proliferation” and “scaled genres
of rule that produce and count on different degrees of sovereignty and
gradations of rights.”7 France’s treatment of southern Algerian Jewry is
less a story of Jewish exceptionalism than further documentation of the
creative (though hardly logical or humane) manner in which colonial
authorities imposed power upon individuals and their communities.8

Dreyfus in the Sahara 267

 Second, exploring the ways in which the Dreyfus Affair took form in
the Sahara lays emphasis upon the importance of regionality as a dimen-
sion of Mediterranean and North African history. In recent decades,
a tremendous wealth of scholarship has muddied the binary of East/
West (and with it the associated binary of colony/metropole), such that
further discussion of regional dyads could scarcely seem to warrant
attention. It is nonetheless striking that for southern Algerian Jews,
the crucial legal duality was not East/West but South/North. From the
perspective of Jewish history, the division of Algeria into two regional,
administrative, and legal zones created new sets of legal binaries and
parallels that lacked contemporary peer or model. Yet, scholarship on
Algerian Jewish history has, for the most part, tended to treat this
population as a whole, undifferentiated by place (to say nothing of class
and gender). Attending to the history of southern Algerian Jewries—
and, especially, their encounters with French military rule—allows us
to begin to mottle this story, suggesting that law and regionality are
two metrics that allow for the reassessment of a varied colonial and
cultural terrain.
As with the history of Algerian Jewry, so with the history of Algeria
writ large. The third and final argument of this essay is that it may
be fruitful—ironic as it might first seem—to expand our sense of the
French Mediterranean well beyond the coastal cities of North Africa. For
although French colonial policy unfolded in distinct fashion in Algeria’s
Southern Territories, it nonetheless reverberated with events athwart
the Mediterranean—from the perspective of Jewish history, perhaps
never more than during the years of the Dreyfus Affair.

French Colonialism in the Mzab and the

Creation of the Jewish Indigène
As Benjamin Brower has demonstrated, the occupation of the Sahara
was a protracted, uneven, and, most of all, intensely violent process,
marked by an extremity of physical aggression that continued military
practices that had been applied in the north.9 This incursion touched the
Mzab in stages. In 1853, after the French military occupation of Lagh-
ouat, Governor-General Jacques Louis Randon negotiated a protectorate

268 SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

agreement with the Berberophone, Ibadite leadership of the region. In
return for an annual tribute of funds and a gesture of submission, the
Mzabis continued to control matters internal to the region and were
given the right to move freely through French-controlled territories. At
the same time, Mzabi notables were offered the unprecedented assurance
that their institutions and cultural mores would be respected—indeed,
the French boasted of Ibadite egalitarianism, thrift, and order, calling
the community the “Puritans of the Desert.”10 (As others have explored,
cognate fantasies surrounded colonial visions of the Kabyles.)11 French
admiration for the Ibadites did not prevent them from violating the
1853 agreement. In 1882 the military occupied and annexed the Mzab,
establishing an administrative base, military garrison, and Bureau arabe
(Arab Office, or Department of Indigenous Affairs) in Ghardaïa.12 Like
the Sahara more generally, the administrative district that encapsu-
lated the Mzab Valley, the Circle of Ghardaïa, was not integrated into
any of the three departments—of Oran, Constantine, and Algiers—that
structured Algeria’s north.13 It fell, instead, under the control of French
commands in Ghardaïa, representatives of a military-ruled zone that
would, in 1902, be named the Southern Territories. Officials within
this structure reported to the governor-general of Algeria, but they
maintained a great degree of independence in determining quotidian
policies on the ground.14
French authorities would never overturn the terms of the 1853 protec-
torate agreement. This was not due to the authorities’ sustained belief in
Mozabite cultural distinctiveness or autonomy, but rather to the fact that
the governor-general’s office viewed the Ibadite leadership of the Mzab
as a strategic ally, and the Mzab itself as a distant and inconsequential
territory. As a result, the Mzab occupied an exceptional administrative
status for the first four decades of colonial rule in the Sahara, until, in
1925, the state began a decades-long process of regularizing the legal
identities of Muslim residents of the Southern Territories. Just where
the limits of autonomy lay was never precisely defined, however, and
well before 1925—and, indeed, long after—French authorities fielded
manifold legal challenges from Ibadites protesting violations of the
tenants of protection.15

Dreyfus in the Sahara 269

 Arabophone (and likely bilingual Berberophone) Jewish communi-
ties have lived in the Sahara since the medieval period.16 Concentrated
in the northern portion of the Algerian Sahara, in eastern Libya, and
in southeastern Morocco, Saharan Jewish communities were histori-
cally connected by commerce and culture, by migratory waves, and
by the exchange of religious texts and practices—though the incur-
sion of colonial boundaries and law often served to divide them along
novel lines. For centuries, Jewish merchants, peddlers, and religious
emissaries traveled through the Sahara, utilizing trading routes that
stretched both south to north and east to west and which served to
connect Saharan oases with one another, with entrepôts in western, sub-
Saharan, and eastern Africa, and with northern Mediterranean centers.17
Some of those Mzabi Jews who participated in trans-Saharan caravan
commerce helped fill niches as artisans or conveyors of henna, ostrich
eggs, and ostrich feathers. Others were engaged in cultural exchange,
as was the chief rabbi of Ghardaïa, Haroun ben Khalfallah, who died
of typhoid while traveling home by caravan in 1899.18 To call these
Jews—or indeed, the region itself—‟Algerian” before the period of
French conquest is a misnomer yet very nearly unavoidable: such is the
all but unshakable imprint that colonial (and, subsequently, national)
boundaries place upon the historical imagination.19
Sources do not agree on whence, when, and why Jews arrived in
southern Algeria, or to the town of Ghardaïa, where they came to be
demographically concentrated.20 The most plausible theory is that the
Jewish settlement of the Mzab dates to the fourteenth century, at which
time a small number of Jewish families from the Tunisian island of
Jerba were brought to Ghardaïa by its Ibadite leadership in order to
serve as metalworkers and jewelry makers. This community was supple-
mented in the fifteenth century by the immigration of Jews from Tuwat
(Tamentit) after the outbreak of anti-Jewish sentiment and violence in
that historically richly Jewish center and was likely bolstered further
by the arrival of Jews from Jerba, whose Ibadite community was linked
to the Mzab through a network of satellite communities that stretched
from Libya to Algeria.21 Jews continued to be well represented in these
professions into the twentieth century, though they also served as shop

270 SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

owners, tanners, wool carders, cobblers, and weapon repairers, as well
as in various other artisanal capacities.22 (In the late nineteenth century,
a middle-upper class began to form in the community, including Jew-
ish families that amassed considerable wealth.) The first generation of
Mzabi Jews remained and proliferated, and the community was supple-
mented through various modest waves of immigration. As a result, the
Jews of Ghardaïa were a socially heterogeneous, if compact, community
whose members could rightly point to various origins.
The Jewish population of the Algerian Sahara was, in any case,
always a small one, demographically dwarfed by the various coastal
communities to which scholars have typically paid greater heed. Likely
peaking at about three thousand, southern Algerian Jews constituted
tiny percentage of the overall population of Algerian Jewry, estimated
at 30,000 in 1881, just over 57,000 in 1901, and 74,000 in 1921.23 And yet
significantly, though Jews were a minority in these Sarahan localities,
there was an unceasing Jewish presence in the Mzab Valley for some six
centuries. Thus while it is narrowly true that in the aggregate, Saharan
Jews “moved from one place to another when patron-client relations
changed and religious tolerance decreased,” such that “Saharan Jews
were not fixed to any Saharan space,” in Ghardaïa specifically, as in the
Mzab Valley more generally, the Jewish presence was unusually long
lived and continuous.24
Even as the particular status of the Mzab was being ironed out in the
wake of conquest, the governor-general determined that the region’s
Jews would be governed by Mosaic personal status laws, a curious
admixture of Ottoman, Jewish, and French legal precedents.25 But
determining who was an indigenous Jew of the Southern Territories
proved difficult. Not only was the physical boundary between north
and south difficult even for French functionaries to identify, but the
constant movement of bodies and goods across this border undermined
its rigidity. Meanwhile, some Algerian Jews who might be considered
“southern” or “Saharan” by cultural, commercial, or geographic measure
(including those who resided in Aflou, Gerryville [El Bayadh], Laghouat,
Djelfa, Bou-Saada, Biskra, and Guemar El-Oued) were incorporated
into “northern” Algerian territory as part of the 1830 conquest and

Dreyfus in the Sahara 271

thus were naturalized as French citizens in 1870 with the passage of
the Crémieux Decree.26 What’s more, cultural boundaries proved far
more porous than the governor-general’s rulings seemed to appreciate.
Social scientists and French officials alike found themselves mistaking
“indigenous” Saharan Jews for “northern” Saharan Jews with French
citizenship and unable to distinguish between Saharan Jews and their
Muslim neighbors, or between Saharan “Algerian” Jews and Saharan
“Moroccan” Jews who lived in border communities such as Figuig and
Colomb-Béchar (Béchar). In the absence of technical precision, colonial
jurisprudence and military policy forcefully manufactured a form of
legal difference for southern Algerian Jewry in the Mzab.
If classifications such as “northern” and “southern” were elastic, they
certainly were not merely semantic, and nor was their import limited to
the legal realm. These designations signaled entirely different relation-
ships between France and its varied Jewish subject populations. As in
its treatment of Muslims, in its treatment of Jews the French colonial
state in Algeria eschewed standardization in favor of compartmental-
ization. In the north of Algeria, as Joshua Schreier has demonstrated,
a “civilizing mission” guided French policies toward Jews: here the
colonial state, through the apparatus of the consistorial system, assumed
oversight of all aspects of Jewish communal affairs, including the hiring
of officially approved rabbis, the standardization of Jewish education,
and the regulation of Jewish space and family practices. In this manner,
the French state sought to assimilate Algerian Jewry into French civil
society, according to republican and bourgeois norms.27 By contrast, a
civilizing mission did not guide French colonial policy toward Jews in
Algeria’s Southern Territories—nor, until French colonial rule in Alge-
ria was all but expired, did French colonial or military leaders express
any desire to absorb southern Jews into the French body politic. In
the absence of a reformist agenda, French policies toward Jews in the
Southern Territories favored stasis over change; if there was to be no
civilizing embrace, better that the relationship should remain entirely
at arm’s length.28
Rejecting the view that Mzabi Jews were akin to northern Algerian
Jews, military policy in the Southern Territories sought to actualize

272 SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

what colonial law codified: that Algeria’s Saharan Jews were indigènes
whose daily lives were indelibly imprinted by their local civil status.
Thus in matters of criminal law, the Jews in the Sahara were brought
before the same French institutions (the Bureaux arabes), as were Mus-
lims. They were funneled into a public health care system that catered
to the region’s indigenous residents. Though Jewish boys received a
religious education from Ghardaïa’s rabbi, they (and, in time, Jewish
girls) attended the same public schools as did their Muslim neighbors.
French military authorities imposed administrative structures on the
Jewish community of the Southern Territories that mimicked those
that ordered Algeria’s Muslim communities (but had been eradicated
relative to Jews in Algeria’s north). Finally, in the south of Algeria, Jews
were granted independence from the state in their pursuit of sexual and
marital practices that had been carefully policed relative to Jews in the
north: in particular, here polygamy was permitted despite the fact that
colonial officials had earlier denied the practice to northern Algerian
Jews as one component of a complex civilizing campaign.29 In all of
these ways, and over time, colonial law aligned Algeria’s Saharan Jews
with Algerian Muslims, and this legal alignment was in turn instrumen-
talized through military policy. That Mzabi Jews were eventually granted
French citizenship with “common” civil status in June 1961, when the
French National Assembly’s Law 61-805 transformed “French citizens
of Algerian departments and the Departments of the Oasis and of the
Sahara who have kept their Israélite civil status” into French citizens
prone to “common” law, should not be seen to undermine this general
trend.30
A legal trend, dictated by the minister of justice and the governor-
general of Algeria, could not forestall the implementation of divergent
military policy. Indeed, though colonial offices in Algiers had developed
a legal rationale for those military policies that were implemented in
Algeria’s Southern Territories, civil and military representatives on the
ground at times appeared confused or misinformed about the moti-
vations for and nature of these policies—especially when they ran
counter to those that were in place in Algeria’s north. Local officials
also seemed to have their own agenda to advance, even at the expense

Dreyfus in the Sahara 273

of undermining established legal precedent; so it was in the last years
of the nineteenth century, when the Dreyfus Affair took unexpected
form in the Mzab.

Dreyfus in the Sahara: Affairs Local and Metropolitan

In the final years of the nineteenth century, anti-Semitic sentiment
reached an apogee in France and Algeria. This wave of hostility was
inspired by the arrest of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a military officer of
Alsatian Jewish descent who was accused of passing state documents
to the German Embassy in Paris. With evidence of his innocence sup-
pressed by the military authorities, Dreyfus was convicted of treason
in 1894 and sent to the French penal colony on Devil’s Island. His arrest
served as a pretext for stoking the flames of anti-Semitism in France and
Algeria: between 1896 and 1899, violence was directed against Jews in
Oran, Algiers, Constantine, and other Algerian (as well as numerous
French) metropolitan centers.31 Though Dreyfus was exonerated and
reinstated in the military in 1906, the anti-Semitic energy and political
authority unleashed by the Dreyfus Affair lingered on.
In Algeria’s north, the settler colonial population was principally
responsible for this spate of aggression against Jews. This internally
diverse population had various motives, with the violence they wrought
synthesizing a range of resentments. In southern Algeria the Dreyfus
Affair interacted with local politics quite differently, “spilling over
directly into the Sahara,” as Brower has put it relative to another con-
text.32 Even without an anti-Dreyfusard colon presence rallying against
an imagined Jewish fifth column in the Mzab, the military in Ghardaïa
(as in other regions of France and Algeria) manifested the intense anti-
Semitism of 1896– 99. The spark to this conflagration was a report
submitted by the commanding general of the Mzab to his superior,
apparently by the general’s own volition. The report suggested that
there was an acute need to prevent Jews in Ghardaïa from extending
loans with punishing rates of interest to Muslims in the region. Its author
warned that prosecution would be difficult because the “usurers” had
taken precautions to conceal their actions, falsifying their receipts such
that they registered “merchandise” rather than “interest” received. And

274 SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

he advised that the only effective way to stop usury was to deny Jews
access to the Circle of Touggourt, where the effrontery was said to have
taken place.33
A formal inquiry ensued, with the Service des affaires indigènes of
Constantine generating a detailed account. The Jews of Ghardaïa, this
office claimed, had been traveling among the five cities of the Mzab in
order to lend money to Muslim residents at 30–40 percent compound
interest, resisting collection of the original sum in order to accrue ever-
greater fees. The investigator in charge of the matter was so outraged by
these findings that he took it upon himself to urge the Muslim leadership
of Touggourt to inform the city’s residents to cease borrowing from Jews,
who, he argued, had no other legitimate commercial business in the
region. The residents of Touggourt were cautious, but the official pressed
his audience, urging them to provide information about their debts and
the Jewish usurers who had extended them. Overcoming the Touggourt
residents’ initial hesitations, the officer (“finally,” in his words) suc-
ceeded. The residents of Touggourt identified a list of 242 borrowers:
collectively, they claimed to owe 68,796 francs to Jewish lenders, only
a small portion of which, it was claimed, reflected their original debt.
Thirty-three Jewish lenders, all residents of Ghardaïa, were named. On
the basis of these accusations, the Service des affaires indigènes forbade
the thirty-three from returning to Touggourt for a period of up to six
months. It also promised to fine them an unidentified amount.34
This judgment was not exceptionally punishing, for it came at a
time when most pastoralists were beginning the seasonal movement
of their sheep and goats northward, signaling a temporary slackening
of southern commerce. (Indeed, the period of punishment aimed at
the lenders from Ghardaïa seemed timed to lapse when the herders
were due to return to Touggourt.) The symbolic value of the episode
was nonetheless high. Even as the case against the thirty-three Jewish
lenders was being formulated, the Service des affaires indigènes was
anticipating its outcome. A frantic, coded telegram from this office to
the governor-general in Algiers suggested that the military authorities
both presumed the results of the investigation and commenced action
against the accused before it was complete. The encoded telegram read:

Dreyfus in the Sahara 275

 GY 12 [Jews] from the Mzab came to Touggourt to JN 35 [lend
money] to the needy indigenous population[.] This exploitation [has
prompted] widespread poverty undermining the intentions of the
government which has generously come to the aid of the popula-
tion[.] [The exploitation] threatening to ruin the country[,] I ask for
your authorization to send these GY 12 [Jews] to the Mzab[,] what-
ever the claims produced[.] I will see to security up to Guerrera[.]35

In this reading, French military rule was poised to rescue the indigenous
Muslim population of southern Algeria from destitution while (pre-
sumably non-autochthonous) Jews stood poised to spoil their efforts,
thereby bringing ruin to Algeria. Though indigènes in the eyes of the
law, Mzabi Jews had become “usurers” in the eyes of French officials
because they were Jews and because, amidst the climate of the Dreyfus
Affair, it became possible to assume that Algerian Jews (be they north-
ern or southern) shared the same economic instincts and practices with
which European Jewry had so long been associated.
In this context, it must be remembered that the anti-Semitic instincts
that undergirded the Dreyfus Affair had deep roots. In the Touggourt
Affair one can detect the reverberation of accusations launched against
the Jews of Alsace nearly a century earlier, when anti-Semitic pamphlets
denounced Alsatian Jews’ “immoral” lending practices. These accusa-
tions sparked the passage of Napoleon Bonaparte’s “Infamous Decree”
of 1808, which limited the economic mobility of Jewish lenders across
France (among other things) and sparked the activism of prominent
Jewish integrationists, Adolphe Crémieux among them.36 Through the
Touggourt Affair, members of the French military transmitted a range of
sentiments and experiences from the continent to southern Algeria. In so
doing, they mirrored the anti-Semitism of the colons of northern Algeria
in a region where there was no substantial settler colonial population.
Even as it provided an outlet for anti-Semitic sentiment unleashed by
the Dreyfus Affair, the Touggourt Affair provided military authorities
with a pretext to intervene into local commercial relations in a man-
ner that served their own interests. As others have explored before me,
manipulating trans-Saharan trade to France’s advantage was a clear

276 SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

aspiration of colonial authorities, and it was a policy that created vast
instability for trans-Saharan traders (despite their commercial elastic-
ity). This dynamic began to unfold even before the French conquest
of the Sahara, as, for example, when an 1843 ordinance prohibited
the importation of goods from the Sahara (as well as from Morocco
and Tunisia) into northern Algeria.37 The abrogation of laws dating to
the Ottoman period that extended advantageous treatment to certain
protected merchants, along with the imposition of taxes, tolls, and reg-
istration sites such as at Laghouat, further discouraged trans-Saharan
traders from utilizing French-controlled routes, while the introduction of
political boundaries provoked intra-regional disputes, rendering trans-
Saharan travel dangerous and difficult. In the decades after the French
conquest of northern Algeria, northbound commerce from the Sahara
to the Tell (but for the exchange of certain staples) flagged as traders
turned to western sites of export such as those in Libya, southeastern
Morocco, and western Nigeria.38
As much as it echoed events in northern Algeria and metropolitan
France, then, the Touggourt Affair of 1898 also bore the mark of French
zeal and misapprehension vis-à-vis trans-Saharan trade. In branding the
Jewish traders from Ghardaïa “usurers,” military officials betrayed a
lack of understanding of the quotidian function of regional commerce,
misjudging the credit-based arrangements that were so ubiquitous to
trans-Saharan trade. A fundamental feature of trans-Saharan commerce
was, after all, reliance on credit; it was typical for a caravan financier
to receive merchandise as interest on a loan in exchange for a loan. The
value of this merchandise was often a sizable proportion of the money
advanced due to the amount of time it took for the loan to be repaid
(a duration equal to the time it took a caravan to reach its destination
and return with new merchandise) and because of the considerable
risk involved. Labeling such financing “usury” transplanted European
anti-Semitic stereotypes to a regional context to which they bore little
relationship.39 Strikingly, military representatives were not alone in their
prejudice: similarly guilty of this tendency were certain representatives
of the White Fathers (or “Pères Blancs,” a Catholic missionary organiza-
tion that established a presence in Algeria in 1876 and in Ghardaïa in

Dreyfus in the Sahara 277

1892), one of whose representatives described the Jews of Ghardaïa as
“rapacious for profit.”40
If accusations of “usury” betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of
trans-Saharan commerce, so too did accusations of “Jewish usury” miss
the mark. Trans-Saharan trade depended upon the economic entangle-
ment and mutual reliance of myriad groups (Ghadamasi, Swiri, Sanusiya,
Tuareg, and Jewish, among others), and Jews involved in regional and
extra-regional commerce never acted on their own.41 In the Mzab and
Ouargla, for example, Ibadite and Jewish investors collaborated in
acquiring land and water rights from other local landowners—causing
friction that the French had little means of exploiting for their own
ends.42 What’s more, French officials were keenly aware that the accused
Mzabi Jewish lenders were not operating independently in Touggourt in
1898. One Jewish lender from Ghardaïa, a man by the name of Necim
(Nissim) ben Chemouil, had his loans drawn up and witnessed by Tala-
bas (young students of the Koran, exegesis, and jurisprudence) and
certified by qadis in Touggourt.43 The prosecutor general in Algiers was
aware of these facts, but they did not arise in the case against the thirty-
three Jewish lenders from Ghardaïa. In the eyes of this official, each of
the parties in Touggourt—Jews, qadis, Talabas—had facilitated usury.
However, each of these parties should, in his view, be assigned distinct
levels of guilt contingent upon their level of involvement. While ben Che-
mouil was clearly guilty of a “real act” of usury (albeit one sanctioned
by various qadis), the Talabas were primarily guilty of usurping the role
of notary public, for which they were not authorized. To the prosecutor
general, the qadis involved should be held to a higher standard, for they
were expected to understand and obey the French injunction against
usury, which, in this instance, they helped ben Chemouil violate; the
qadis also had no legal authority to legitimate the commercial activities
of a “foreign” Jew. Disciplinary punishment against both ben Chemouil
and the qadis was warranted, in the view of the prosecutor general, and
such were the findings he directed to the governor-general’s office.44
The governor-general offered immediate acknowledgment that the dos-
sier on the collusion of the qadis in Touggourt had been received, but
there is no evidence that his office pursued punishment against these

278 SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

parties.45 Eight months later, paperwork pertaining to the ben Chemouil
affair was still winding its way through the governor-general’s office,
suggesting that legal action against the Talabas and qadis was proceed-
ing far more tentatively than it did relative to the thirty-three Jewish
lenders from Ghardaïa.46
There is little reason to doubt that individual Mzabi Jews operated
as financiers in Touggourt. What does strain credulity is the notion that
242 of them were operating in concert. Social scientific, military, and
ethnographic sources of the period describe the Jews of the Mzab as
working overwhelmingly as petty artisans—especially jewelers, metal-
workers, tanners, weapon repairers, wool carders, and cobblers. Some
Jewish men, it was said, owned small shops: others sold their wares in
Ghardaïa’s weekly market. Jewish women and girls assumed responsibil-
ity for the carding of wool, but they seem not to have entered the formal
workforce until sometime after the turn of the century.47 When a girls’
school was opened in Ghardaïa in or around 1939, housecleaning and
cooking were among the only practical pursuits in which pupils were
trained.48 Certainly some Mzabi Jews were imbricated in trans-Saharan
commerce in some fashion or another, for Jews’ participation in regional
and extra-regional trade in the Sahara was ubiquitous and indeed
responsible for Jewish migration patterns to and within the region since
the medieval period. One source, an 1893 travelogue on the Mzab by
Jules Liorel, confirms—typically, with no reference to evidence—that
some Mzabi Jews did engage in financiering and banking.49 This being
said, it is statistically unlikely—given the military authorities’ own find-
ings, as well as that of contemporary ethnographers—that financiers
represented as significant a percentage of the adult male population of
the valley as indicated by the claims of 1898. Ten years after the Toug-
gourt Affair, this figure would have represented roughly 20 percent of
the total Jewish population of the Mzab, and an astronomically high
percentage of working-age male adults.50
If the authorities were aware that qadis and Talabas participated in
the lending practices they so abhorred, and if their own evidence under-
mined the theory that the Jewish community of Mzab benefited greatly
from loan-sharking, why did punishment focus on the thirty-three Jews

Dreyfus in the Sahara 279

of Ghardaïa? Why did a military representative pressure Muslims in
Touggourt to accuse these Jews in the first place? Stoking a “Touggourt
Affair” had three interrelated advantages for the military leadership
in Algeria’s Southern Territories. By vilifying Mzabi Jews as the “for-
eign” enemy of local Muslim populations (an entity so dangerous that
it was, in the words of the official cited above, “threatening to ruin
the country”), military authorities corroborated the theory that Mzabi
Jews, though technically indigènes, were outsiders whose physical and
economic interactions with their non-Jewish neighbors should be delin-
eated and limited. That “Jewish usury” per se had no precedent in the
Mzab proved irrelevant to French officials, for this practice did have
precedent in Europe: Mzabi Jews, “foreign” as they were, seemingly
contracted the practice through their Jewishness, leading them to infect
the Circles of Ghardaïa and Touggourt. Within this conceptual frame-
work, the arrest of the thirty-three Jews from Ghardaïa gave evidence
to just how contradictory were the conceptual and legal typologies that
colonial and military authorities asserted upon the Jews of the Mzab.
It must be stressed that anti-Semitism was not consistently an engine
of military policy in southern Algeria. On the contrary, administra-
tive stasis and self-interest tended to be more significant trademarks of
military officials. For this reason, not every accusation of Jewish usury
resulted in aggressive action against the lenders in question. In 1907,
for example, the governor-general dismissed a charge of loan-sharking
that had been leveled against the tiny Jewish population of Metlili, a
town twenty-eight miles southwest of Ghardaïa that was closely linked
to the Mzab economically. The legal grounds summoned in this case
varied dramatically from those summoned in the Touggourt case; in this
instance, the administration determined that southern Jews’ “foreign-
ness” actually provided them a measure of legal protection.51 While
military authorities in Metlili ought to reprimand the Jews in question
for their economic practices, concluded the governor-general, the mili-
tary did not have the authority to prevent Jews from extending abusive
loans. This position was explained by the uncertain logic that the Jews
in question were “foreign,” and therefore not under the military’s legal
purview. The most that military representatives could do to curb usury

280 SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

in Metlili, wrote the governor-general, was to encourage local Muslim
authorities to supervise—and, if they judged it worthy, censor—Jews’
commercial activities.52
Juxtaposed against one another, the accusations of Jewish usury
in Touggourt and Metlili highlight that neither consistency nor anti-
Semitism was a hallmark of the French military administration’s
treatment of southern Algerian Jews’ economic lives. Southern Algerian
Jews’ “foreignness” could be summoned as justification for administra-
tive inaction, as it was in Metlili in 1907, but it could also be used to
justify the military’s interference in Muslim-Jewish commercial rela-
tions, as in the Touggourt Affair of 1898. The converse of this was also
true: Jewish indigeneity was a fungible concept, existing on a spectrum
of official attitudes and practices.
Here we have considered the uneasy existence of legal reality along-
side military and colonial officials’ own, crenellated view of Mzabi
Jewry. French law proceeded from the assumption that this commu-
nity consisted of indigènes who should be treated, legally speaking,
like their Muslim peers; in shaping quotidian policy, however, military
officials could assume otherwise—treating southern Algerian Jews as
foreigners who should be disaggregated (spatially, economically, and
typologically) not only from Jews in Algeria’s north but also from their
Muslim neighbors. There is no doubt that French administrative confu-
sion about Saharan Jewry (which one can detect through all ranks of
the military and colonial apparatus) reflected the limits of individual
representatives’ knowledge. Time and time again, military correspon-
dence referred back to the legal precedents pertaining to Mzabi Jewry
that were established in 1882—not so much to exhibit what they did
know as to remind themselves of what they ought to know. And yet there
is more to this confusion than naïveté. The cacophonous typecasting of
southern Algerian Jewry served the shifting strategic interests of the
French military and ( just as importantly) allowed for the upholding of
the status quo, which seems almost always to have been the preference
of the individual officers involved.
The military’s kaleidescopic treatment of southern Algerian Jewry
served multiple functions. It existed as a self- correction for policies that

Dreyfus in the Sahara 281

had been implemented relative to Jews in Algeria’s north but which
had become discredited in the eyes of colons and a growing right wing
in France. It allowed for the recycling of familiar tropes, such as those
concerning Jews’ usurious nature. It left space for the expression of
anti-Dreyfusard sentiment when it arose within the ranks of the mili-
tary. It aligned with a colonial vision that privileged vertical power
over horizontal alliances and commercial relations, including those
between Jews and Muslims. Finally, infinitely flexible legal categories
were instrumental in rationalizing inequality, of Jews and Muslims alike.
The Mzab was both less French and less Mediterranean than many
parts of colonial Algeria. Geographically, it was Saharan rather than
coastal. It did not have an extensive settler colonial population. The
terms of rule ironed out in this valley were exceptional in the context of
Algeria writ large, and even French officials stationed in Ghardaïa felt
themselves to be at a confused distance from their superiors. Its Jewish
community, not subject to the Crémieux Decree, was segmented off from
the rest of Algerian Jewry in the eyes of French law. Yet despite these
factors, there were moments in which French military representatives
read the Mzab, and shaped their policies, through events and a logic
that was more responsive to Mediterranean than Saharan contexts. The
imbrication of the Touggourt and Dreyfus Affairs provides one such
instance: an occasion in which military presuppositions proved more
salient than colonial law, and in which, consequentially, an essentially
Mediterranean drama found Saharan form.

NOTES
1. On the various ways in which the Dreyfus Affair played out in Algeria, see James
P. Doughton, “A Colonial Affair? Dreyfus and the French Empire,” Historical Reflec-
tions/Réflexions Historiques 31, no. 3 (2005): 469–83; Geneviève Dermenjian, La
crise anti-juive oranaise (1895–1905) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986); Elizabeth D. Fried-
man, Colonialism and After: An Algerian Jewish Community (South Hadley MA :
Bergin & Garvey, 1988); Pierre Hebey, Alger 1898: La grande vague antijuive (Paris:
NiL éditions, 1996); David Ralph Prochaska, Making Algeria French: Colonialism
in Bône, 1870–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Sophie Beth
Roberts, “Jews, Citizenship, and Antisemitism in French Colonial Algeria” (PhD
diss., University of Toronto, 2011); and Steven Uran, “La réception de l’affaire en
Algérie,” in L’Affaire Dreyfus de A à Z, ed. Michel Drouin (Paris: Flammarion, 1994),

282 SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

 521–29. On contemporaneous anti-Semitic sentiment in France, which generated
fifty-five separate anti-Jewish riots, see especially Michael Marrus, The Politics
of Assimilation: The French Jewish Community at the time of the Dreyfus Affair
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); and Stephen Wilson, “The Antisemitic
Riots of 1898 in France,” Historical Journal 16, no. 4 (1973): 789–806.
2. On the history of Muslim civil status laws in colonial Algeria, see Louis-Augustin
Barrière, Le statut personnel des musulmans d’Algérie de 1834 à 1962 (Dijon: Centre
Georges Chevrier pour l’histoire du droit, 1993); Todd Shepard, The Invention of
Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 2006). On the fraught history and shifting authority of the Muslim
court over roughly the same period, see Allan Christelow, Muslim Law Courts and
the French Colonial State in Algeria (Princeton NJ : Princeton University Press, 1985).
For a wonderful excavation of the term indigène, which has linguistic roots in the
Latin indegena (“from the country”) but which first found colonial application
in reference to Native Americans, see Benjamin Claude Brower, A Desert Named
Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2009), 19–20.
3. In reading the histories of Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco as entangled, I am inspired
by the work of Mary Dewhurst Lewis and Julia Clancy-Smith: Mary Dewhurst
Lewis, “Geographies of Power: The Tunisian Civic Order, Jurisdictional Politics,
and Imperial Rivalry in the Mediterranean, 1881–1935,” Journal of Modern His-
tory 80 (2008): 791– 830; Mary Dewhurst Lewis, Divided Rule: Sovereignty and
Empire in French Tunisia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Julia
Clancy-Smith, “Women, Gender, and Migration along a Mediterranean Frontier:
Pre- colonial Tunisia, c. 1815–1870,” Gender and History 17, no. 1 (2005): 62–92;
Julia Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migra-
tion, c. 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
4. Primary sources pertaining to the delineation of the status of the Jewish indigène in
Algeria’s Southern Territories include the following: Service historique de la l’armée
de terre, Vincennes [hereafter SHAT ], 1H 1026, “Sahara, occupation et organisa-
tion du Mzab et création du Cercle de Ghardaïa, 1882–1883,” Governor-General
[hereafter GGA ] Tirman, Service des affaires indigènes, “Instructions du gouverne-
ment général de l’Algérie pour l’organisation du Cercle de Ghardaïa,” November
1, 1882. On the legal status of the Mzab as decreed by the 1853 negotiations, see
the various legal analyses in Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix- en-Provence
[hereafter ANOM ], 81F /1295, “Consultation et conclusion des juristes sur la con-
vention de 1853 entre le Mzab et la France, M. Henri Robert, Batonnier de l’Ordre
des Avocats, M. Monard, Avocat au Conseil d’État et près la Cour de Cassation, M.
Pillet, Professeur de la Faculté de Droit de Paris.”
5. On the concept of legal pluralism, see John Griffiths, “What Is Legal Pluralism,”
Journal of Legal Pluralism 24 (1986): 1– 55. For examples of its scholarly application
to colonial contexts, see Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes

Dreyfus in the Sahara 283

 in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); John
Camaroff, “Colonialism, Culture, and the Law: A Foreword,” Law and Social Inquiry
26, no. 2 (2001): 305–14; Frederick Cooper and Ann L. Stoler, eds., Tensions of
Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1997); Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Will Hanley, “Foreignness and
Citizenship in Alexandria, 1880–1914” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2007);
Nasser Hussain, ed. The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of
Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003); Elizabeth Kolsky, “Codifica-
tion and the Rule of Colonial Difference: Criminal Procedure in British India,” Law
and History Review 23, no. 3 (2005): 631–83; Lewis, “Geographies of Power”; Sally
Engle Merry, “Law and Colonialism,” Law and Society Review 25, no. 4 (1991): 889–
922; Sally Engle Merry, “Legal Pluralism,” Law and Society Review 22, no. 5 (1988):
869–96; Laura Tabili, “Outsiders in the Land of Their Birth: Exogamy, Citizenship,
and Identity in War and Peace,” Journal of British History 44 (2005): 796–815. On
its manifestations in North Africa: Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans; Clancy-Smith,
“Women, Gender, and Migration”; Jessica Marglin, “In the Courts of the Nations:
Jews, Muslims, and Legal Pluralism in Nineteenth-Century Morocco” (PhD diss.,
Princeton University, 2012); Jessica Marglin, “The Two Lives of Mas’ud Amoyal:
Pseudo-Algerians in Morocco, 1830–1912,” International Journal of Middle East
Studies 44, no. 4 (2012): 651–70; Lewis, “Geographies of Power”; Lewis, Divided
Rule. I have previously written about these issues as they pertained to one diasporic
community of Middle Eastern Jews in “Protected Persons? The Baghdadi Jewish
Diaspora, the British State, and the Creation of the Jewish Colonial,” American
Historical Review 116, no. 1 (2011): 80–108.
6. A most evocative comparison could be made with the Berber dahir, a law prou-
mulgated in 1930 by the French administration in Morocco that mandated that
Berber tribes be governed by their own laws and customs, and which proved a
crucial catalyst to the shaping of a cohesive national voice in Morocco. The subtly
nuanced treatment of subjects of French protection in Tunisia provides another
useful point of reference to our case, as does the favoritism showed Algerian
“Kabyles” and Tuareg by colonial administrators and European ethnographers
alike. I build, here, on the work of Patricia Lorcin, Benjamin Brower, and Mary
Dewhurst Lewis: Brower, A Desert Named Peace; Patricia M. E. Lorcin, Imperial
Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (London; New York:
I. B. Tauris, 1995); Lewis, Divided Rule. The Berber dahir has received a great deal
of scholarly attention, including C. R. Ageron, “La politique berbère du protectorat
marocain de 1913 à 1934,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 18, no. 1
(1971): 51– 53; Kenneth Brown, “The Impact of the Dahir Berbere in Sale,” in Arabs
and Berbers: From Tribe to Nation in North Africa, ed. E. Gellner and C. Micaud
(London: Duckworth, 1973), 201–15; David M. Hart, “The Berber Dahir of 1930 in
Colonial Morocco: Then and Now (1930–1966),” Journal of North African Studies 2,

284 SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

 no. 2 (2007): 11–33; Jonathan Wyrtzen, “Colonial State-Building and the Negotia-
tion of Arab and Berber Identity in Protectorate Morocco,” International Journal
of Middle East Studies 43, no. 2 (2011): 227– 49. For a recent, elegant synopsis, see
Susan Miller, A History of Modern Morocco (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013), 125–29.
7. Ann Laura Stoler, “On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty,” Public Culture 18, no. 1
(2006): 128. For an exploration of how “different degrees of sovereignty” were
shaped in protectorate Tunisia, see Lewis, Divided Rule.
8. I am enormously indebted to an anonymous reader of my manuscript for his or
her insights along these lines.
9. Brower, A Desert Named Peace.
10. André Chevrillon, Les Puritains du désert (sud-algérien) (Paris: Plon, 1927). Cited
in Brower, A Desert Named Peace, 181.
11. Lorcin, Imperial Identities; James McDougall, “Myth and Counter-Myth: ‘The Ber-
ber’ as National Signifier in Algerian Historiographies,” Radical History Review,
no. 86 (2003): 66– 88; James McDougall, History and the Culture of Nationalism
in Algeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), esp. chap. 5.
12. SHAT 1H 1026, “Sahara, occupation et organisation du Mzab.” On the legal status
of the Mzab as decreed by the 1853 negotiations, see the various legal essays in
ANOM 81F /1295 and Donald Holsinger, “Migration, Commerce, and Community:
The Mizabis in Nineteenth- Century Algeria” (PhD diss., Northwestern University
Press, 1979), especially chaps. 5 and 6. For a brief history, see Brower, A Desert
Named Peace, 181–84.
13. The Sahara, formally classified as the Southern Territories in 1902, would not be
departmentalized until 1957, three years into the 1954– 62 war of Algerian inde-
pendence and a year after the French struck oil in the Sahara. At this point two
departments were created, the Département des Oasis, of which the Mzab was
a part, and the Département de Saoura, which contained the western half of the
Algerian Sahara. Each had various administrative subdivisions.
14. A useful mapping of these structures of authority appears in an unpublished
inventory to the National Archives of Algeria’s collection on the Southern Ter-
ritories: Malek Djohra, “Repertoire numerique simple du funds territoire du Sud,
1870–1962: Partie I” (Algiers: Republique algerienne democratique et populaire
archives nationales d’Algerie, 2006), 3.
15. As early as 1894, Omar b. Aïssa b. Brahim brought such grievances before the
French Chamber of Deputies; see Omar b. Aïssa [b. Brahim], Pétition adressée à
la Chambre des Députés, par Aïssa ben Mohamed ben Aomar, . . . tant en son nom
personnel, en sa qualité de M’zabite, qu’au nom des 13 membres de la Djemaâ (assem-
blée municipale) de la ville de Beni-Isghen (M’zab) . . . Elle a pour objet d’obtenir du
Gouvernement le rétablissement dans cette ville des kanouns, lois, usages et coutumes
du rite musulman hadite . . . (Paris: Grande imprimerie, 1894). Omar ben Aïssa and
others would renew their challenge in response to the initiation of conscription

Dreyfus in the Sahara 285

 in the Mzab in 1918, as well as thereafter. For more on the legal nuances of the
1853 protectorate agreement, one can consult various legal proofs filed as ANOM
81F /1295. These were written in the wake of the issuing of the 1947 Statut de
l’Algérie, which incorporated the Southern Territories of Algeria (and the Mzab
along with it) into Algeria as a whole. The legality of this move, which was per-
ceived to undermine the internal autonomy of the Mozabites guaranteed by the
treaty of 1853 (and, according to some interpretations, confirmed in 1884), was
challenged before the Algerian Assembly in 1950.
16. The linguistic makeup of medieval Saharan Jewry is difficult to hazard. Though no
original sources refer to this community as Berberophone, one could conjecture
that it became bilingual over time. On Saharan Jewries generally, see Michael
Abitbol, “Juifs maghrébins et commerce transsaharien du VIIIe au XVe siècles,” in
Le sol, la parole et l’écrit: Mélanges en hommage à Raymond Mauny (Paris: Société
française d’histoire d’outre-mer, 1981), 561–78; Michel Abitbol, “Juifs maghrébins
et commerce transsaharien au Moyen-Âge,” in Communautés juives des marges saha-
riennes du Maghreb, ed. Michel Abitbol (Jerusalem: Institut Ben-Zvi et l’Université
hébraïque de Jérusalem, 1982), 229– 52; Michel Abitbol, ed, Communautés juives
des marges sahariennes du Maghreb (Jerusalem: Institut Ben-Zvi, 1982); Aomar
Boum, Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2013). Aomar Boum, “Saharan Jewry: History, Memory
and Imagined Identities,” Journal of North African Studies 16, no. 2 (2011): 1–17;
Aomar Boum, “Southern Moroccan Jewry between the Colonial Manufacture of
Knowledge and the Postcolonial Historiographical Silence,” in Jewish Culture and
Society in North Africa, ed. Emily Gottreich and Daniel Schroeter (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2011), 73– 92; I. D. Haidara, Les Juifs à Tombouctou:
Receuil des sources écrits relatives au commerce juif à Tombouctou au XIXe siècle
(Bamako: Éditions Donniya, 1999); Joseph Julien Huguet, “Recherches sur les
habitants du Mzab,” Revue d’École d’Anthropologie de Paris, January 1906, 559–73;
John Hunwick, “Al-Maghili and the Jews of Tuwat: The Demise of a Community,”
Studia Islamica 61 (1985): 155–83; Jacob Oliel, Les Juifs au Sahara: Le Touat au
Moyen Âge (Paris: CNRS , 1994); Jacob Oliel, De Jérusalem à Tombouctou: L’odyssée
saharienne du rabbin Mardochée (Paris: Éditions Olbia, 1998); Jacob Oliel, Les
camps de Vichy: Maghreb-Sahara, 1939–1945 (Montréal: Éditions du Lys, 2005);
Jacob Oliel, Les Juifs au Sahara: Une présence millénaire (Succursale Côte-St-Luc,
Québec: Éditions Élysée, 2007). On Berber Jews and the shifting way in which
this group has been understood by social scientists, see H. Z. Hirschberg, “The
Problem of the Judaized Berbers,” Journal of African History 4, no. 3 (1963): 313–
39; Daniel Schroeter, “On the Origins and Identity of North African Jews,” in
North African Mosaic: A Cultural Reappraisal of Ethnic and Religious Minorities,
ed. Nabil Boudraa and Joseph Krause (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Pub-
lishing, 2007), 164–77; Daniel Schroeter, “The Shifting Boundaries of Moroccan
Jewish Identity,” Jewish Social Studies 15, no. 1 (2008): 145– 64. Saharan Jewish

286 SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

 histories also filter through these excellent works: Stephen Baier, An Economic
History of Central Niger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980); Holsinger, “Migration,
Commerce, and Community”; Ghislaine Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic
Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western
Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
17. The scholarship on trans-Saharan trade is voluminous. Especially important to my
research have been Stephen Baier, “Trans-Saharan Trade and the Sahel: Damergu,
1870–1930,” Journal of African History 18, no. 1 (1977): 37– 60; Baier, An Economic
History of Central Niger; A. Adu Boahen, “The Caravan Trade in the Nineteenth
Century,” Journal of African History 3, no. 2 (1961): 349– 59; Dennis D. Cordell,
“Eastern Libya, Wadai, and the Sanusiya: A Tariqa and a Trade Route,” Journal of
African History 18, no. 1 (1977): 21–36; Ahmed Said Fituri, “Tripolitania, Cyrenaica,
and Bilad as-Sudan Trade Relations during the Second Half of the Nineteenth
Century” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1982); Ulrich Haarmann, “The Dead
Ostrich: Life and Trade in Ghadames (Libya) in the Nineteenth Century,” Die Welt
des Islams 38, no. 1 (1998): 9–94; Marion Johnson, “Calico Caravans: The Tripoli-
Kano Trade after 1880,” Journal of African History 17, no. 1 (1976): 95–117; Paul E.
Lovejoy, “Commercial Sectors in the Economy of the Nineteenth- Century Central
Sudan: The Trans-Saharan Trade and the Desert-Side Salt Trade,” African Economic
History 13 (1984): 85–116; Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails; Jean-Louis Miège, “Le
commerce trans-saharien au XIXe siècle: Essai de quantification,” Revue de l’Occident
Musulman et de la Méditerranée, no. 32 (1981– 82): 93–111; C. W. Newbury, “North
African and Western Sudan Trade in the Nineteenth Century: A Re-Evaluation,”
Journal of African History 7, no. 2 (1966): 233–46; Paul Pascon, La maison d’Iligh
et l’histoire sociale du Tazerwalt (Rabat: Smer, 1984); Daniel Schroeter, “The Jews
of Essaouira (Mogador) and the Trade of Southern Morocco,” in Abitbol, Com-
munautés juives des marges sahariennes du Maghreb, 365– 90; Daniel Schroeter,
Merchants of Essaouira: Urban Society and Imperialism in Southwestern Morocco,
1844–1886 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). My own work on this
subject includes Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost History of Global Com-
merce (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
18. It is likely that these commodities reached the Mzab on an east-to-west caravan
route emanating from the Yemeni port of Aden. Bibliothèque de l’Alliance israélite
universelle, Paris [hereafter AIU BIB ], Kleinknecht, “Les Juifs du Mzab: Contri-
bution à l’étude d’une communauté saharienne dispersée par le vent de l’histoire
en juin 1962,” 132; ANOM 22H /12, “Exposée sommaire des faites,” June 3, 1880;
ANOM 22H /16, letter from General Pédoya, Commandant de la Division d’Alger,
to the GGA [Tirman], April 27, 1899.
19. Inspired by the alternative model offered by Julia Clancy-Smith in a recent book that
“recreates a borderland society—or societies—forged by migrants and mobilities in
the central Mediterranean corridor,” I choose here to employ phrases such as “the
Algerian Sahara” or “southern Algerian Jews” while nonetheless problematizing

Dreyfus in the Sahara 287

 their stability. The dexterous resistance to colonial vocabularies that Clancy-Smith
maintains in her discussion of the precolonial period is, I find, much more cumber-
some in a discussion rooted in the colonial era. Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans, 4.
20. For a discussion of these divergent origin stories, see Pessah Shinar, “Réflections
de la symbiose judéo-ibadite en Afrique du Nord,” in Abitbol, Communautés juives
des marges sahariennes du Maghreb, 81–114 .
21. Hirschberg, A History of the Jews in North Africa; Hunwick, “Al-Maghili and the
Jews of Tuwat”; Oliel, Les Juifs au Sahara: Le Touat au Moyen Âge; Oliel, Les Juifs
au Sahara: Une présence millénaire; Abraham L. Udovitch and Lucette Valensi, The
Last Arab Jews: The Communities of Jerba Tunisia (Chur: Harwood, 1984).
22. One annual report issued by the French authorities in Ghardaïa noted that Jews
engaged in “precious metal work,” proving a problem for the local police as they
were so often robbed. ANOM 63I , Cercle de Ghardaïa, Rapports annuels, 1899.
On their work in this and other professions, see also Abel Andre Cöyne, “Le
Mzab,” Revue Africaine 23 (1879): 186– 87. Archives de l’Alliance israélite uni-
verselle, Paris [hereafter AIU ] (IB 4, 1918–1927), letter from the director of the
Algiers section to the president, June 14, 1921; AIU BIB , Kleinknecht, “Les Juifs du
Mzab,” 44–35; and ANOM Oasis 87—Cercle de Ghardaïa, Rapports annuels, 1907,
995–96, in which it was reported that in Ghardaïa Circle, “jewelry-making, gold-
and silver-smithing are in the hands of the Jews.” Jules Liorel suggests, further,
that Jews had subspecialties within the jewelry trade, including the making of
ornate bracelets. The Getty Research Institute, Special Collections, Jules Liorel,
“Dans le Mzab,” in Algérie artistique et pittoresque, ed. Eugène Larade (Alger: J.
Gervais- Courtellemont, 1893), 12–13. Writing five years after Liorel published
his article, a French official mused that although the Jews of Ghardaïa had his-
torically dominated jewelry making in town, local (non-Jewish) consumers had
come to prefer jewelry imported from artisans in the north. ANOM 63I , Cercle de
Ghardaïa, Rapports annuels, 1898. On sales of silver and gold jewelry (presumably
by Jews) in Ghardaïa’s weekly market, see Adolphe Calassanti Motylinski, “Notes
historiques sur le M’zab: Guerrera depuis sa fondation,” Revue Africaine 28 (1884):
427. An interesting range of Mzabi Jewish mercantile practices is encapsulated
on the 1915 board of the Association culturelle des Israélites de Ghardaïa, which
references eight jewelers, five merchants, three water porters, one hotelkeeper,
one tinsmith, and one “cordonier,” which might refer to the synagogue beadle.
Archives nationales d’Algerie, Wilaya de Ghardaïa, 361, “Association culturelles
israélites de Ghardaïa et correspondance échangé à ces sujets.” But one source,
the diaries of the White Fathers (or “Pères Blancs,” a Catholic missionary orga-
nization that established a presence in Algeria in 1876 and in Ghardaïa in 1892),
stationed in Ghardaïa, speaks of Jews selling absinthe to soldiers—but this is not
corroborated by any other account. Archivio generale, Missionarie d’Africa (Pères
Blancs), Rome, “Ghardaïa I. 1884–1892,” White Fathers’ diary entries of April 7,
1884, and May 31, 1884.

288 SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

23. Kamel Kateb, Européens, “indigènes” et Juifs en Algérie (1830–1962): Représentations
et réalités des populations (Paris: Institut national d’études démographiques, 2001).
120.
24. Boum, “Saharan Jewry,” 17.
25. I have explored the reasons for this legal designation in Saharan Jews and the
Fate of French Algeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014) and “Dividing
South from North: French Colonialism, Jews, and the Algerian Sahara,” Journal
of North African Studies 15, no. 7 (2012): 773– 92.
26. This list has been generated with reference to archival documents of the Alliance
israélite universelle, which, in 1918, attempted to track the status of “southern
Algerian” communities for the purposes of philanthropic work. From the perspec-
tive of the AIU , “southern” was a cultural and geographic category, not a legal
designation. It should be noted that Laghouat was absorbed into the Southern
Territories in 1905 and thus effectively de-departmentalized. AIU IB 4, 1918–1927,
letter from the director of the Algiers section to the president of the AIU , June 14,
1921. Additional information about these Jewish communities, including demo-
graphic data, is scattered throughout the archives of the ANOM . These data are
not easy to locate, as they tend not to appear in inventories. On the Jews of Lagh-
ouat, see Claire Lalou, “Histoire et mémoire des Juifs de Laghouat: 110 ans de vie
juive a Laghouat, 1852–1962” (master’s thesis, 1988); Todd Shepard, “Laghouat,”
in Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, ed. Norman Stillman (Leiden: Brill
2010), 34–35. On Touat, see Oliel, Les Juifs au Sahara: Le Touat au Moyen Âge; and
Hunwick, “Al-Maghili and the Jews of Tuwat.” For a rather more general account,
see Oliel, Les Juifs au Sahara: Une présence millénaire.
27. Joshua Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria
(Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 2010). For a comparative perspective, see
Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and
West Africa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
28. The same could be said of French policies toward the Tuareg, though (as Brower
has argued) in this case Tuareg “traditionalism” was understood to be a positive
phenomenon, thanks in large part to the myth making of Henri Duveyrier. Brower,
A Desert Named Peace, 230–37.
29. This policy, which would become highly controversial in the 1950s, allowed south-
ern Algerian Jewry to practice polygamy, divorce, and unilateral repudiation for
the duration of colonial rule. Though outlawed by the Ashkenazi rabbinate in the
tenth century, polygamy was sanctioned by the Sephardic legal tradition into the
modern period. Unheard of among the Judeo-Spanish communities of southeastern
Europe and Ottoman Anatolia, polygamy was practiced by Jews in the Maghreb
and Mashriq well into the twentieth century: due to colonial law, in the Mzab it
persisted far longer, and in a more concentrated setting, than in other regions.
On the role of polygamy in the “civilizing” of Algerian Jews in in the north, in the
decades after the French conquest, see Joshua Schreier, “Napoleon’s Long Shadow:

Dreyfus in the Sahara 289

 Morality, Civilization, and Jews in France and Algeria, 1808–1870,” French His-
torical Studies 30, no. 1 (2007): 77–103; Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith; Judith
Surkis, “Presumptions of Poygamy: Civil Law and Public Order in French Algeria,
1830–1870,” in Scandalous Subjects: Intimacy and Indecency in France and French
Algeria (forthcoming). On the French demonization of polygamy as an uncivilized
practice: Lorcin, Imperial Identities, esp. chap. 3.
30. I explore this episode in more detail in Saharan Jews. For a useful summary of the
1961 legislation, see Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 242– 47.
31. Prochaska, Making Algeria French, 204.
32. Brower refers, here, to the peculiar charge by the marquis de Morès, in 1897, that
the Tuaregs were “actors in a vast Judeo-Anglo-Saxon conspiracy.” Brower, A
Desert Named Peace, 243.
33. ANOM 22H /16, undated [ca. 1898] report from the general commandant de la
division to an unnamed “General.”
34. ANOM 22H /16, letter from the Service des affaires indigènes, Constantine, to the
GGA [Lépine], March 15, 1898. This case is also discussed in Charles Kleinknecht’s
unpublished study on the Jews of the Mzab, in which he includes a number of
original military sources on the theme. AIU BIB , Kleinknecht, “Les Juifs du Mzab,”
36, appendix 4–7.
35. ANOM 22H /16, telegram from the Division of Constantine’s Service des affaires
indigènes to the GGA [Lépine] regarding, March 2, 1898. This document features
handwritten decoding of the original coded text.
36. The resulting controversy pivoted around the question of whether Jews should
be obliged to take the more judaïco, the medieval oath that Jews in France were
obliged to take in the course of lawsuits with non-Jews. The more judaïco was
formally abolished in 1846, after Adolphe Crémieux, then a relatively unknown
lawyer, defended the right of Jews to be sworn in courts of law in the same man-
ner as all other Frenchmen. Crémieux’s victory in court is seen as resulting in the
nullification of the last legal distinction between Jews and non-Jews in France.
My thanks to Aron Rodrigue for drawing my attention to the evocative interplay
of the 1808 events in Alsace, Crémieux’s lawsuit, and the Touggourt Affair. On
the incident in Alsace and so-called “Infamous Decree,” see Paula Hyman, The
Jews of Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 37– 52;
Lisa Leff, “The Impact of the Napoleonic Sanhedrin on French Colonial Policy in
Algeria,” CCAR Journal 54, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 35– 54. On the more judaïco, see
Phyllis Albert Cohen, The Jewish Oath in Nineteenth-Century France (Tel Aviv: Tel
Aviv University, 1982).
37. Holsinger notes that the expansion of French rule did also reanimate the trade
of certain staples between the Tell and the Mzab. See Donald Holsinger, “Muslim
Responses to French Imperialism: An Algerian Saharan Case Study,” International
Journal of African Historical Studies 19, no. 1 (1986): 62. See also Holsinger, “Migra-
tion, Commerce, and Community,” chaps. 2 and 3.

290 SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

38. Also drawing merchants westward was the slave trade, which was more (but not
entirely) regulated in areas under French control. Brower, A Desert Named Peace,
139–97.This synopsis is based upon the wide range of sources on trans-Saharan
commerce, including those works cited in note 17.
39. These stereotypes may well have played off of local sentiment—there is evidence,
e.g., that non-Jewish merchants in the Mzab benefited from the suspicion of
trading partners who distrusted Jewish agents and chose to sell their products to
Mzabi (Ibadite) merchants in their stead. Holsinger, “Muslim Responses to French
Imperialism,” 132–33, 36.
40. Archivio generale, Suore Missionarie di Nostra Signora d’Africa (Sœurs Blanches),
Rome, A 5026/5, “Débuts de Ghardaïa (Textes copiés par S. André du Sacré- Cour
in ‘Chronique des missions d’Afrique [November 4, 1892, March 17, 1893; July–
September 1893],’” 7. On the history of the White Fathers’ station in Ghardaïa,
see Archivio generale, Missionarie d’Africa (Pères Blancs), Rome, “Historique par
Denis Pilet 09.1997,” “Quelques souvenirs sur le poste de Ghardaïa (par une Sœur
Blanche).”
41. The literature on this point is extensive. For a theoretical approach to the ques-
tion, see B. Marie Perinbaum, “Social Relations in the Trans-Saharan and Western
Sudanese Trade: An Overview,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 15, no. 4
(1973): 416–36. Empirical accounts may be found in the previously cited sources
on trans-Saharan commerce in note 17.
42. My thanks to Benjamin Brower for his assistance with this argument.
43. Given that Chemouil/Chemouiel was a common name within Ghardaïa’s Jewish
community, there is no reason to think this is the same Chemouil who requested
the right to dwell outside the Jewish quarter of town some years earlier. On the
Talabas, see Osama Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity: Saint- Simonians and the
Civilizing Mission in Algeria (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010), 51. It is
surprising that the involvement of the Talabas in this affair did not spark more
official outrage, as military representatives had long since identified the Talabas
as “a powerful religious corporation” that was “hostile” to French domination.
ANOM 22H /12, letter and report from provisional commander Service des affaires
indigènes to acting GGA [Grévy], February 9, 1880. See also ANOM 22H /17, “The
Tolbas of the Mzab—Origins,” July 10, 1912.
44. ANOM 22H /16, report from the prosecutor general of Algiers to the GGA [Laf-
ferrièr], September 7, 1898. Ben Chemouil was said to operate under the name
Brahim ben Himan: ANOM 22H /16, letter from the GGA [Lafferrièr] to the chef
du Service des affaires indigènes and military personnel in Algeria, September
23, 1898.
45. ANOM 22H /16, letter from the GGA [Lafferrièr] to the chef du Service des affaires
indigènes and military personnel in Algeria, September 23, 1898.
46. ANOM 22H /16, telegram from May 31, 1899, from the GGA [Lafferrièr] to the
Service des affaires indigènes (Constantine); response from the Service des affaires

Dreyfus in the Sahara 291

 indigènes (Constantine) detailing that eighty-three items were sent in response to
the GGA ’s request. Whether these documents were preserved is unclear: attempts
to locate them have come to naught.
47. Eliahou Sebban, Va-yikah ‘Amram: Traditions des israelites du Mzab, Eliahou fils
de Rebbi Amrane Sebban de Ghardaia, oasis dans le desert d’Algerie (Netanya: Elia-
hou Sebban, 2001), 22; Lloyd Cabot Briggs, The Living Races of the Sahara Desert
(Cambridge: Peabody Museuem, 1958), 67.
48. On women’s labor in the Mzab more generally, see S. Pauline-Marie, “Le tissage
dans la vie féminine au Mzab,” Bulletin de la Société Neuchateloise de Géographie 55,
no. 8 (1949– 51): 15–30; A. M. Goichon, La vie féminine au Mzab: Étude de sociologie
musulmane (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1927–31). By the 1950s, Jewish girls and women
also participated in the wool industry, particularly as carders.
49. Liorel, “Dans le Mzab,” 12.
50. Régine Goutalier, “La ‘nation juive’ de Ghardaia,” in Abitbol, Communautés juives
des marges de Maghreb, 118.
51. Metlili served as a crucial meeting point and administrative hub for the Chaamba
(Sha’anba) confederacy, a traditionally nomadic group that historically served
as transporters, associates, and agents for the Ibadites of the Mzab: Holsinger,
“Migration, Commerce, and Community,” 140– 44; Motylinski, “Notes historiques
sur le M’zab,” 422–23.
52. GGA [Jonnart] to commandant militaire de Ghardaïa, September 28, 1907, repro-
duced in AIU BIB , Kleinknecht, “Les Juifs du Mzab,” appendix 7.

292 SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

10 Moïse Nahon and the Invention of
the Modern Maghrebi Jew

SUSAN GILSON MILLER

A striking example of the rapid integration of the two halves of the Medi-
terranean world in the waning years of the nineteenth century is the
transformation in the status of the Jews of the southern shore. Maghrebi
Jews—that timeless, subordinate, and often invisible minority—sprang
to life under the Gallic sun, taking an unaccustomed lead in bringing
about economic and social change, to the surprise of their European
mentors and the dismay of their Muslim neighbors. The story of the
“regeneration” of Maghrebi Jews has been retold often, usually in tones
inflected with admiration for the French-inspired “civilizing mission,”
that all- encompassing doctrine that allied brute force with republican
ideals to promote France’s overseas expansion. For a broad strata of
North African Jews, initiation into French culture came through the
agency of the Alliance israélite universelle (AIU ), a Jewish-funded net-
work of schools built throughout that Middle East and North Africa
aimed at introducing native Jewish youth to basic values of the Euro-
pean Enlightenment—secularism, freedom, and “progress”—in all its
forms. While the tenets of the civilizing mission evolved over time,
its fundamental promise of Jewish “emancipation” founded on the

293
principles of 1791 never lost its appeal. Yet for a modernizing Maghrebi
Jewish elite, the attraction to France and French culture was an ambiva-
lent one, tempered by a wariness of the disappointments it might bring.
Remarkably absent from the historiography of French colonialism is
notice of the profound skepticism of some Maghrebi Jewish intellec-
tuals toward France’s vaunted role as “savior of the forgotten Jew,”
along with their doubts that republican imperialism would protect them
against persecution. This skepticism was based on an understanding that
their own cultural hybridity did not fit easily into standard templates
of Frenchness, Jewishness, Spanishness, or Arabness, but straddled and
partook of all of them, producing a complex, pluralistic, and multi-
layered subjectivity that defied categorization.1
In this essay I turn my attention to someone whose literary voice
captures the ambiguities of this problem of Jewish self-identity. Through
the figure of Moïse Nahon, I will examine the various tonalities influ-
encing modernizing Jewish intellectuals in northern Morocco in the
period 1895–1912. Nahon belonged to a vibrant group of Tangier writers
and thinkers who pondered what Europe’s permanent presence in the
Maghreb would mean for them and their co-religionists. They debated
this question publicly in the local press and in French scientific journals
where the condition of North African Jews had drawn the attention of
professional social scientists and the general reading public. Uppermost
in their minds was the question of their place in an altered landscape
in which a European-inspired modernity would override the “densely
textured and creative public and private intellectual lives” of indig-
enous Jews of the Muslim world.2 Would they find a home in a rapidly
Europeanizing milieu without sacrificing the inherent markers of their
own distinctive culture? What chance for them in a coming colonial
order organized, on the one hand, according to narrowly defined racial,
national, and social hierarchies, and on the other, by supposedly univer-
sal values of reason, science, and progress? Most important, what shape
would Moroccan Jewish identity take under the influence of a rising,
patently illiberal “politics in a new key”—marked by anti-Semitism,
hypernationalism, and cultural exclusivity—that promised to arrive in
the baggage of France?3 These issues were hardly theoretical; rather,

294 SUSAN GILSON MILLER

they were discussed and argued over by Jewish intellectuals in smoky
cafés, in posh salons, at weddings and social gatherings, in shaded gar-
dens over morning coffee, and in countless other settings where the
gathering debate over the meaning of modernity implicit in France’s
imperial venture took center stage.4
In the background to this debate were developments in the wider
French Mediterranean world that had a dramatic impact on local Jewish
mentalities. In 1894, French newspapers brought regularly to Tangier by
paquebot from Marseille conveyed news of the Dreyfus Affair, transfixing
their minds and raising doubts about the genuineness of full assimila-
tion to European culture, despite nearly a century of legal, social, and
political reform in the metropole. And from the Arab East, word of a
renaissance of Arabic letters known as the Nahda also reached Morocco,
opening a conversation among Jews about a modernized, secular Arabic
literature and its relation to their own Moroccan cultural specificity.
Although the largely Francophone Moroccan Jewish intellectuals were
marginal to the Nahda (unlike their Arabophone co-religionists further
east, in Tunis, Cairo, and Baghdad, who became enthusiastic participants
in it), the spirit of the Nahda was nevertheless infectious. A counter-
part response among educated Moroccan Jews, many of whom had
been exposed to the ideas of Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment) and
modern Western literature through the work of the AIU , was an explo-
sion of popular writing in Judeo-Arabic and French that covered “all
imaginable areas of creativity” and exerted “a powerful influence in
shaping the spiritual portrait of the North African Jew.”5
Meanwhile, within Morocco, other important changes were afoot:
signs of progressive reform of the Moroccan monarchy, a lively native
press centered in Tangier, frequent exchanges with European intellectu-
als across the Mediterranean world, ready access to the latest books and
journals, enhanced communications within Morocco, a ferment of new
ideas and the means for expressing them. These factors combined to
create Mediterranean crosscurrents that moved with startling velocity,
opening a new era of Jewish self-reflection and a robust engagement
with questions of modernity far earlier and with far greater intensity
than historians had previously imagined.

Moïse Nahon and the Maghrebi Jew 295

 In fact, the historical development of a Middle Eastern Jewish moder-
nity is now receiving the scholarly attention it deserves. A revisionist
historiography is redefining older forms of interpretation and opening
the door to a reassessment of key transitional figures and the quali-
ties they represent. It now appears that actors in this modernity elude
hegemonic modifiers such as “Zionist,” “secularist,” or “traditionalist,”
as well as their epistemic opposites, undermining the usual taxono-
mies applied to intellectual Jews of the Arab world before World War
I. Instead of ideal “types,” these thinkers represent a mixed cohort of
cultural entrepreneurs seeking to reshape themselves to fit into unset-
tling conditions in which their faith in Enlightenment values would
soon be upended by the coming of colonial rule.6
Who were these Moroccan Jewish intellectuals so absorbed with ques-
tions of cultural identity, and why have they disappeared from history?7
They were teachers, journalists, poets, agents for foreign companies,
interpreters, and go-betweens whose livelihoods depended on their
ability to negotiate across languages and cultures. Natives of Tangier
educated in the local schools of the AIU , they were bourgeois in their
values, bound together through marriage and business ties, sharing a
worldliness acquired through travel and trans-Mediterranean connec-
tions. Standing out from this group of modernizers because of his prolific
writing and his sensitivity to changing social trends was Moïse Nahon,
writer, teacher, and spokesman for these new, polyvalent forms of Jew-
ish thinking. Nahon was an amateur social scientist who conducted
ethnographic investigations into the condition of North African Jewry;
he was a social commentator sensitive to changes in Jewish life at the
popular level; and later, after the establishment of the Protectorate in
1912, he became a supporter of the colonial project whose sketches of
Moroccan rural life laid bare the day-to- day frictions of the settler-
native relationship. He wrote prolifically from the early 1890s into the
1920s, as Morocco moved from a fragile self-rule to full-fledged colonial
domination.
Throughout these changes, Nahon’s claim to expertise in “local knowl-
edge,” especially in regard to his fellow Jews, set him apart. Instead of
bowing to the judgment of outsiders, he was one of the first Moroccan

296 SUSAN GILSON MILLER

social scientists to question the authority of European scientific expertise
and to replace it with the voice of the indigenous observer. Moreover,
he attacked head-on the biases that permeated European Jewish and
non-Jewish attitudes toward Maghrebi Jews: the Jew as “primitive,”
fanatical in his beliefs, more Arab than Jew, and unable to adjust to the
modern world. He challenged the notion that Moroccan Jews had no
culture of their own, or at best, one not worth preserving. He produced
carefully crafted essays showing that Moroccan Jews at every level were
drawn to the ideas and practices of European modernity but, at the
same time, were equally at home with their own Moroccan specificity.8
Despite these contributions, Nahon and his circle have vanished
almost completely from the history books documenting Morocco’s path
to modernity. The “liberal” moment that characterized his generation
was a fleeting one, supplanted by more powerful belief systems—on
the one hand, Zionism and ideologies of the left, such as socialism
and communism, on the other, Arab nationalism in its Moroccan
form—discourses that demanded different loyalties and commitments.
Moreover, these intellectuals were few in number, their literary produc-
tion was small, and they often left Morocco and migrated elsewhere,
leaving behind a meager archive that was easily lost. For these rea-
sons and others, the Jewish contribution to the making of Moroccan
modernity is a subject that awaits recovery from the left baggage of
that nation’s history.

The Life and Times of Moïse Nahon

Moïse I. Nahon was born in 1870 in Tangier, where he attended the AIU
primary school. Recognized for his brilliance, at age fifteen he was sent
to study at the École normale israélite orientale in Paris, the teachers’
training institute of the AIU . After four years in the French capital, he
returned to Morocco and was posted to the AIU boys’ school in Fez.
There he perfected his knowledge of literary Arabic and Hebrew by
studying with local Muslim and Jewish scholars. He left Fez in 1892 with
no regrets (he called it “a miserable hole”) for his hometown of Tangier,
to become deputy director of the AIU boys’ school. There he redesigned
the school curriculum to include the study of Arabic, a novelty for his

Moïse Nahon and the Maghrebi Jew 297

mostly Spanish-speaking students, and he organized the first public
lending library in Morocco under the auspices of the new AIU alumni
association.
Nahon stocked the shelves of the library with gritty novels about
Parisian street life written by the French literary avant-garde: Émile
Zola’s Fecondité, Oscar Metenier’s Le policier, Henri Murger’s Scènes de
la vie de bohème. These choices did not please his AIU superiors, but
they reveal Nahon’s passion for literature concerning social justice. Zola
was Nahon’s literary hero, not only because of his keen social awareness
and his principled defense of the wrongly accused Captain Dreyfus, but
also because of his naturalism, his meticulous character modeling, and
his careful attention to language—all qualities that Nahon admired and
introduced into his own writing. Nahon faithfully emulated Zola’s style,
depicting characters with a colorful choice of words, regaling the reader
with descriptions steeped in personal experience.9
Tangier in that era was Morocco’s principal port, surpassing Essaouira
and not yet overtaken by Casablanca. With its population of forty thou-
sand, a quarter of whom were Jews, Tangier was a place where religions
and ethnicities converged, creating what one nineteenth- century trav-
eler acidly called “a mongrelized and neutered city.”10 But for native
Tanjawis, regardless of their religious persuasion, the city provided
an idyllic setting; nestled on the edge of Africa with a clear view of
Europe, Tangier was home to a multifaceted intellectual class whose
concerns vacillated between an intense communitarian localism and
a far-reaching trans-Mediterranean cosmopolitanism. Between these
two poles, they busied themselves with societies, sporting clubs, com-
mercial associations, salons, and literary circles that offered multiple
opportunities for extensive inter- ethnic and inter-religious mingling.
Moreover, by 1900, Tangier had become the laboratory for novelties
that had not yet reached the interior: an elected city council, telegraph
and telephone services, regular mail service and steamship connections
with other Mediterranean ports, a sanitary commission overseeing pub-
lic health, a chamber of commerce, public hospitals, even a municipal
dog catcher. The town had also acquired a reputation as a safe haven
for continentals on the run; Polish aristocrats, Russian revolutionaries,

298 SUSAN GILSON MILLER

and Spanish anarchists sought refuge there, bringing with them new
forms of European-accented radicalism.11 Removed from the cities of the
interior and the oversight of the central government, home to a mixed
population that included non-Muslims and non-Moroccans, Tangier
enjoyed a liminal, nearly independent position, somewhere between
Europe and the Orient. Nahon’s Tangier youth was vital to shaping
his Weltanschauung: open and hospitable to new ideas yet at the same
time respectful of the differences among ethnic, national, and religious
groups.12
Casablanca was his next post in 1897, where he opened the doors of
the new AIU school, followed in 1899 by a move to Algiers, where he
remained for twelve years. The AIU had no primary schools in Algeria,
but Nahon’s new post was an important one, serving as the organiza-
tion’s “eyes and ears” in France’s most important colonial dependency.
During his Algerian period he wrote numerous articles for the Revue des
Écoles, an AIU publication that featured essays on Jewish culture from
AIU instituteurs of the Eastern world. Teachers were encouraged by their
Parisian mentors to collect “specimens” of Jewish folklore that would
captivate and amuse, and to send them to the Revue for publication.
Secretary-general of the AIU Jacques Bigart urged them to “transcribe
faithfully for the Revue all the legends and superstitions that exist in
your town. This will be a an important chapter to add to the studies of
folklore which engage so many enlightened spirits. . . . [D]on’t be afraid
to reproduce the most absurd customs and beliefs and even the most
unbelievable; the more bizarre they are, the more they are worthy of
being written down, saved, and explained.”13
Inspired by this edict, Nahon wrote prolifically for the Revue, pub-
lishing articles on Jewish folk practices, Jewish saints, sketches of local
communities, and the troubling rise of anti-Semitism in colonial Algeria.
He even took the plea from Paris a step further and began to contribute
to leading European scientific journals, such as the Revue des Études
Ethnographiques et Sociologiques, founded in 1908 by French folklorist
Arnold van Gennep. Nahon was drawn to the new science of ethnogra-
phy as a tool for discovering a modern Maghrebi Jewish sensibility, and
van Gennep’s influence was decisive. Both men were amateurs, in that

Moïse Nahon and the Maghrebi Jew 299

they did not hold formal academic appointments; both were insistent
on facticity; and both believed that direct observation was the proper
way to conduct ethnographic research.14
Nahon continued to build his reputation in AIU circles as a trusted
source of information about native practices. In 1906 he made a four-
month tour of inspection of Moroccan schools, visiting Tetuan, Larache,
Rabat, Casablanca, Fez, Saffi, and Mogador (Essaouira), traveling hun-
dreds of miles on horseback over dangerous backcountry roads and
seeing rural life at first hand. This journey led to a series of reports on
Jewish life in the interior. Rarely had a stranger penetrated this hidden
world, and rarer still someone who felt at home in it without the filter of
a translator.15 Filed as “intelligence reports” intended to map future AIU
activities, Nahon’s reports constituted field research of the first order—a
rare snapshot of rural Jewish communities on the cusp of change.
In his life as a teacher, Nahon was an apostle of positivism, his
values reflecting those inculcated by the AIU : a belief in a universal
humanism, a commitment to self-help, a suspicion of religious dogma,
anti- clericalism, and faith in the idea of progress. Nahon believed that
the “regeneration” of Maghrebi Jews should begin with young people
as the vanguard for a new age. As first director of the AIU agricultural
school at Regraia near Algiers, he endorsed the mission of introducing
Jewish youth to farming in order to create “a new class of Jewish peas-
ants” who would energize the colonial project in North Africa. Nahon
belonged to a transnational group of fin de siècle Jewish intellectuals
who shared a vision of Jewish rejuvenation through life on the soil. In
his view, rational science allied with a mystical belief in the goodness
of the natural world could lead the Jewish people to full liberation.16
Nahon tried to integrate these cultural values into his own life. After
the establishment of the French Protectorate in Morocco in 1912, when
he was already in his mid-forties, Nahon left the AIU and returned to
Morocco to participate in the colonization of the Gharb, the fertile
northern breadbasket. Now a farmer, he continued to write short stories
about rural life that were published in the daily settler newspaper, La
Vigie marocaine, and were later collected in two slim volumes, Notes
d’un colon du Gharb and Propos d’un vieux marocain, now classics of

300 SUSAN GILSON MILLER

Moroccan colonial literature.17 His later writing confirmed his affection
for country life and established his reputation as a staunch defender
of the French colonial oeuvre in North Africa. He acquired French citi-
zenship and served as a trusted adviser on Jewish affairs to Résident
Général Hubert Lyautey, head of the Protectorate administration from
1912 to 1925. Before his death in 1928, Nahon was decorated with the
Légion d’honneur for his service to France.18
Nahon’s world was defined by a rising French presence in North
Africa that began with the conquest of Algeria in 1830 and became
permanently entrenched with the occupations of Tunisia (1881) and
Morocco (1912). Foreign domination offered both promise and danger
to the indigenous Jew; in the colonial situation, all interactions were
seen in a new light, whether they were between one Jew and another,
between Jews and Muslims, or between Jews and Europeans. Intergen-
erational conflict and ancient battles within the Jewish community over
superiority of lineage intensified under the pressures of colonial rule,
compromising unwritten codes about hierarchy and respect for authority
that had regulated social life for centuries. Nahon noted these widening
gaps among Moroccan Jews: “Visit our communities,” he said,” and you
will find representatives of every epoch.”19 He argued that communal
cohesion had been disrupted, not by internal jealousies or the clash of
personalities, but rather by class warfare intensified by foreign competi-
tion. Furthermore, relations with Muslims were perturbed, not because
of religious differences, but for social causes—namely, resentment at the
apparent ease with which Jews slipped into the world of the colonizer,
abandoning older patterns of loyalty and submission.
In this turbulent setting, Nahon tried to find patterns of meaning,
explaining the condition of Jews to his French mentors, while promoting
among Jews the virtues of the new colonial order: science, rationalism,
and the development of the individual through education. He wrote
with a purpose, exposing the layered complexity of Moroccan Jewish
life, while demonstrating how Jews had become entangled with Euro-
peans in a process of historical change. The literary themes used to
express these ideas fall along three major axes: ethnographic writing
about Jewish communities of the western Maghreb; intimate portraits

Moïse Nahon and the Maghrebi Jew 301

of Jewish society and spirituality; and essays on settler colonialism and
the practices of rural life. It is the first two of these three categories of
writing that I will address here.

Ethnography and the Jews of North Africa

Nahon’s writing leans heavily on the new science of anthropology as it
was defined by an emerging generation of French social scientists far
more interested in questions of culture than their predecessors. Nahon
found this transition liberating, for it seemed to challenge the credibility
of pseudo-scientific theories about biological determinants of race and
the inheritance of innate physical and mental characteristics that were
widely held at the time—theories that were especially detrimental to
Jews, who were often negatively caricatured. Instead, Nahon stressed
social and cultural factors as determinants of behavior, privileging first-
person observations in real-world settings. This approach led directly to
the urge to improve conditions for the Jewish underclass; at the same
time, it meshed nicely with the concept of material and moral better-
ment implicit in the doctrine of the civilizing mission.
This approach also meant reworking the methods used in anthro-
pological research. The period of rampant French colonial expansion
between 1878 and 1914 was the heyday for anthropologists driven by
the belief that “men of science” had a “moral duty” to better understand
the native populations now in their charge.20 Marcel Mauss (1872–1950),
a contemporary of Nahon’s, did groundbreaking ethnographic work
that brought new insights into the causes of societal cohesion. Though
Mauss’s research was conducted in the metropole, his influence was
persuasive, especially when he insisted that fieldwork be conducted in
plein air by “amateurs driven by their curiosity.” He inspired others to
seek out subjects in colonized places, thus plotting a new direction for
the discipline of cultural anthropology.21
Nahon was an eager recruit to this point of view. He had no formal
training in anthropological research, but working within the parameters
of the discipline as Mauss defined it, Nahon opened new perspectives on
indigenous Jewish culture. By concentrating on history, social practices,
rituals, stories, and memory, he identified what he called the “social

302 SUSAN GILSON MILLER

facts” of the object caught in his ethnographic eye. Rejecting the notion
that Jews constituted a biological unit, he wrote: “There is no blood
less pure than Jewish blood; ethnographers have shown that the idea of
race does not correspond to any reality. Even if it were proven to me a
hundred times over that I belong to a race, I would revolt against it. I do
not want to be put into a prison cell, [but if I must], let me at least make
use of the space attributed to the prison known as the human race.”22
Nahon argued that in their social lives, Jews could be studied just
like any other group. The main distinction between Jews and other
“exotic” subjects was that Jews had no need for outside “experts,” since
they had produced their own intermediaries—investigators like himself
were especially qualified to perform the work of interpretation. Nahon
knew his subject intimately and blended seamlessly into the landscapes
he studied, using the new French scientific journals that proliferated
in the late nineteenth century to spread his ideas. They were read both
by specialists and by the general public, who were caught up in the
excitement of the imperial project. His report on the Jews of Tlemcen
is a prime example of his investigative abilities and why his writing had
such broad appeal. The report begins with a well-researched history of
the Jews of Tlemcen; to this introduction, Nahon added observations
of his own, drawn from reflections made on-site.23 The quality of his
fieldwork is evident in his description of the Jewish quarter. His writing
resonates with the sights, sounds, and smells of these neighborhoods:

The little Jewish houses . . . offer a spectacle that is unique and

unforgettable . . . everywhere, secret hiding places, the open maws
of ovens, the bizarre, dark grottoes where, from time to time, an
entire household is sheltered . . . these dwellings built centuries
ago constitute precious historical documents: no words can describe
with more fidelity or eloquence the misery, isolation, and terror that
generations of Jews have undergone.24

His report was more than a sketch in local color; it was a meticulous
ethnography based on careful observation. Nahon collected data on
the demography of the community (5,409 Jews out of a total of 36,373
inhabitants in 1901, the vast majority of whom were Muslim) and on

Moïse Nahon and the Maghrebi Jew 303

their occupational structure. He explained how Jews fit into the local
economy, how their salaries compared with those of other ethnic groups,
how they dominated certain crafts. He looked into the markets, report-
ing on how goods were manufactured, their prices, and their quality.
He was also interested in the work of women, and noted how it was
poorly compensated: “the condition of the men in the poorer classes
is satisfactory, that of the woman is deplorable,” he wrote. Most poor
Jewish women worked as maids in gentile houses, he noted, where they
became “easy prey” for their bosses, raising the dark specter of sexual
exploitation.25 Nahon also collected data on the schools, how many
Jewish children attended secular public school (total 845), and how
many were still taught by rabbis in the traditional manner (total 281).
Most Jewish youth of the lower classes still spoke only Arabic and were
“drowned in a Muslim sea. . . . abandoned and out of contact with the
new world that school is supposed represent.”26 He concluded that the
vast majority of the Jews of Tlemcen existed in a sub-proletarian state
on the margins of society: poorly educated, poorly paid, and engaged
in a harsh and never- ending struggle for existence.
His studies in colonial Algeria yielded a dark picture of arrested
development. Despite two generations of French rule, an expansive
Jewish underclass still lived in misery. “We ask how, after sixty years of
a French occupation . . . we are still doing things in the same old way,
with the same kind of talk as if in the most remote corners of Morocco.”27
His Tlemcen research reveals a growing command of the ethnographic
genre as a form of social advocacy. His observations destabilized the
image of the Jew frozen in a paralyzing traditionalism, replacing it with
a more nuanced yet still pessimistic portrait of communities in flux
making little headway in their struggle for self-improvement.
Closely allied to this topic was Nahon’s deep concern about the pre-
cipitous rise in anti-Semitic violence directed against Algerian Jews in
the wake of the Dreyfus Affair. After he arrived in Algiers in 1901, one
of his first observations concerned the prevalence of anti-Jewish feeling,
especially in contrast to Tangier, where “anti-Semitism was practically
unknown.”28 Anti-Semitism was not a new force in Algeria, but after
1894 a mounting crescendo of anti-Jewish feeling rippled out from the

304 SUSAN GILSON MILLER

metropole to the colonial periphery. European settlers openly advocated
reducing—if not totally dismantling—the substantive Jewish role in
the Algerian economy, politics, and social life. It was a long-standing
phobia tied into a bundle of other fears: anger at the preference shown
to Jews under the 1870 Crémieux Decree; fear of Jews as an electoral
force; suspicion of their “complicity” with French Jews and doubts
about their loyalty to France; resentment of the specificity of Jewish
culture and a feeling that Jews would not assimilate; and the belief that
Jews would never be “really French.” The Dreyfus Affair added fuel
to the fire. Circulating against a background of local politics, settler
expressions of hatred toward Jews became a condition for politicians to
remain in power. Different in quality from the predictable, traditional,
and largely bloodless discrimination against Jews found in traditional
Muslim society, Algerian settler anti-Semitism was a fearful and violent
apparition that terrified intellectuals like Nahon.29
The dark shadow of a rising anti-Semitism loomed over Nahon’s
reporting on Tlemcen. Unlike nearby Oran, where Jews had been assas-
sinated in the streets, Tlemcen was a site of a “passive” anti-Semitism: no
massacres or bloodletting, but doors closed to Jews, creating an atmo-
sphere of cold oppression: “Jews and Christians discuss business, buy
and sell from one to another, offer a drink, play cards in the cafés, but
that is all; ties of friendship, relations between families, not a chance,”
Nahon noted.30 Technically on a par with Europeans in the legal sense,
on the social and cultural level, Jews felt isolated and excluded.
Nahon’s ethnography of Tlemcen was designed to promote social
action and to ameliorate the bad conditions under which the majority
of its Jews were living. In fact, all of Nahon’s community studies had
the same intention: to draw the reader in through lively prose; to make
a powerful claim to scientific validity by using research methods bor-
rowed from contemporary French social science; to assess the “progress”
of his co-religionists in the spiritual and material sense and note the
indicators of that progress; and finally, to exhort his European audience
to continue to support “the work of religious and material regenera-
tion” yet to be done. “It is the task of the Alliance,” he concluded in his
report on Tlemcen, “to finish the work of civilization in both the Orient

Moïse Nahon and the Maghrebi Jew 305

and in Africa, and to make a reality the naturalization of Jews begun
on paper in 1870.”31

Representing Jewish Culture

How did Nahon understand indigenous Jewish culture, and how did
he transpose his understanding into effective prose? Nahon wrote for
a predominantly French-speaking audience, and he often presented
his views through the genre of a “dialogue” with French Jewry. Adopt-
ing Zola’s literary technique of creating ideal types where none really
existed, Nahon drew finely wrought portraits of the Jew in his “natu-
ral” setting. Moroccan Jews, for example, were depicted as a hybrid
society of migrants bound together by a common religious practice
whose reality becomes substantive only within the context of the larger
Muslim society. According to Nahon, life under Islam provided the total
framework for the native Jew, creating a form of sociability that was
sui generis. Jews and Muslims generally “live in peace,” their relations
based on “understanding, mutual sympathy, religious similarity, [and]
a community of language and custom.”32 Given this proximity, it was
amazing that any specific Jewish attributes had survived in a milieu
in which “so many borrowings and concessions have been made from
the surrounding people.”33 The symbiosis between the two cultures is
a leitmotif running through his writings:

The Jew sees the Muslim as his servant, his agricultural partner,
his faithful client, his protector, who will put his life in danger . . .
to defend him against attack. The Muslim would be isolated from
the rest of the world without the Jew as intermediary . . . ; the Jew
serves as interpreter and confidant who anticipates and calculates
for him. When a sick Muslim decides to consult a doctor, he goes to
the mellah [Jewish quarter] for treatment, advice, and medicine; if
he wants to know the contents of a letter or a publication written in
a foreign tongue, he asks a Jew to translate.34

The dependency was mutual, for according to Nahon, the Muslim

sees the Jew as his “spiritual ancestor” and his initiator into religious
matters. He does not hesitate to “get down on his knees next to him,” and

306 SUSAN GILSON MILLER

to “commune with him in the same adorations.”35 Muslim and Jewish
cultic practices share a proclivity toward heterodoxy; people worship
with an intensity that puts them “on a first name basis with God.”36
“Judaism and Islam, these two very spiritual faiths, bend in Africa under
the weight of the same degeneration toward idolatry,” he wrote. This
included a shared propensity for saint worship, pilgrimage to holy sites,
kabbalistic calculations, magical numbers, and other forms of sorcery.37
Jews and Muslims not only share saints but also congregate in the same
sacred sites, often at the same season, without “abandoning in the least
their own beliefs, and without encountering the least opposition from
their own religious leaders.”38 In fact, the two faiths are so close that on
a visit to a synagogue in Tlemcen, Nahon feels as if he is in a mosque
“with its niches and arcades and its liturgical air, its use of Arabic in
prayers, and its veneration of the rabbi as if he were a saint.”39
Nahon’s description makes it clear that Maghrebi Jewish religious
practice is far from the privatized form of worship adopted by Jews in
France over the course of the nineteenth century. He notes that some
European critics might say that North African Judaism has been “cor-
rupted” with elements borrowed from Islam, but that corruption is its
very strength. Judaism in the Maghreb is bound to Islam with a close-
ness that permits a continuity of practice between interior and exterior,
between private and public, between the Jew and his Muslim “other”
that is unknown in the West. The result is a particular form of Jewish
practice having its own personality within the Sephardic rite, its own
minhag (customary practice), its own liturgical music, its own fêtes
and celebrations, its own saints, legends, superstitions, and magical
practices, all shaped within the crucible of Islam.40
Nahon’s acknowledgment of this close relationship between two dis-
tinct and supposedly contentious groups no doubt came as a surprise to
his European readers. His years in France had exposed him to another
kind of Jewish religious practice, the result of generational efforts at
assimilation that resulted in a Judaism hidden from public view: pray-
ing behind closed doors, the disciplining of the more extravagant cultic
practices, and Jews conforming with non-Jews in dress, speech, and
social behavior. Nahon applauded this conformity and desired it for

Moïse Nahon and the Maghrebi Jew 307

his own people as a sign of their turning toward the West, but he also
feared its denaturing effect on Maghrebi Jewish cultural self- expression
and lamented the changes it would inevitably bring.
A public display of religious fervor was one way in which North
African Jews differed from their French counterparts; another was the
great diversity of each community and the mosaic-like nature of com-
munal structure, in which no overarching institution enforced religious
and social cohesion. While on the one hand Nahon’s general observa-
tions about the “character” of the Maghrebi Jew may have produced
an oversimplified image of uniformity, on the other hand he tried to
introduce nuance into the portraits of the communities he met on his
travels. Nahon’s skills as a native-born ethnographer were highlighted
in his reporting as a school inspector. He showed how each community
he visited was a unique mélange of ethnic and social types. In Fez, Jews
of Spanish, Berber, and Arab origins were “diverse elements having
different traditions and culture [who] live side by side without fusing
completely.”41 On a visit to Oran, eclecticism was the rule. Here, Spanish-
speaking Jews from northern Morocco mixed with Arabic-speaking
Jews from the Algerian desert in an uneasy and fragile détente. Nahon
could make these judgments because he knew the provenance of what
he saw: the signs and subtleties of dress and speech that an outsider
might miss were telltale signifiers to his practiced eye. Immersed in the
local milieu from childhood, he understood the narrative of the street,
and what sounded like babble to the non-native ethnographer was for
him the grammar of everyday life.42
The extraordinary mobility of Maghrebi Jews was another recurrent
theme in his writing. In Rabat he noted that the Jewish community was
a loosely joined pastiche of types coming from all different parts of the
country, each individual retaining a memory of his or her particular
place of origin, with hardly a sense of belonging to a wider Jewish
community, much less a wider nation:

The spirit of a race, the sentiment of collectivity, is practically non-

existent with us . . . it is with difficulty that we feel that we are
members of the great body called Judaism . . . with our co-religionists

308 SUSAN GILSON MILLER

 in other parts of Morocco, no continuous relations, no ideas held in
common, everyone is drawn inward, closed in their shell, regarding
each other with indifference and sometimes hostility.43

Social life was made up of uneasy and sometimes discordant conver-

sations among distant cousins, almost all of them newly arrived from
elsewhere, suffering from what he called “a fever of displacement.”
“The Jews of Morocco are in constant and restless movement,” he wrote,
“from the interior to the coast, from mountain villages to the cities,
escaping the misery and oppression of local tyrants, seeking with the
help of their half-Europeanized fellow Jews, a modicum of calm and
relief.”44 This absence of “solidarity” posed a dilemma, forcing Nahon
to consider how such a disparate society might be molded into the cohe-
sive unit necessary for social advancement in the modern world. Unlike
Algeria, where the consistory system had, for better or worse, brought
together most of the native Jewish population into one extensive orga-
nization, in Morocco each community remained distinct, often speaking
a different dialect from other parts of the country: Judeo-Arabic in Fez
and its environs; Tashelhit (or Shlouh, as he called it) in the far south; in
the north, Haketia, the Ladino of the Jews of Spain mixed with Arabic.
Nahon believed that the imposition of the French language would blend
this linguistic Babel into one common parlance, and he insisted that all
Jews learn French as “the official language” of Maghrebi Judaism.45
Central to Nahon’s vision of language reform was the education pro-
vided by the AIU . The primary task of the curriculum, in his view, was
to teach French and to remold the language, dress, and ideas of the
human material that entered the school. Within its walls, Nahon tells
us, he feels he is within the territory of “the infinite perfectibility of
the human family,” where, for example, children from the wild Atlas
Mountains can drop their “bizarre speech” and begin “to breathe the
fresh air of freedom.”46 He saw the AIU school as the vital link between
two worlds: the “somber Orient,” where nothing ever changed, and the
enlightenment and dynamism of modern Europe. The ultimate purpose
of the AIU education was to prepare Jewish youth for life in a non-
Jewish milieu.

Moïse Nahon and the Maghrebi Jew 309

 For it was desirous for all Jews to move both physically and mentally
into the gentile world, in Nahon’s view: to rub elbows with Europeans,
to adopt their habits by imitation, to mix with them and emulate their
ways. The Maghrebi Jew, he believed, was a prior form of the Euro-
pean, who would “blossom” in time and quickly “catch up.” Jews were
on a double trajectory: one of the body, the other of the mind. While
the physical movement may have been episodic, the spiritual one was
continuous, thanks to the education that the AIU provided. The cen-
trality of the notion of the “progress” of North African Jewry through
Western-style education was fundamental to his concept of colonialism
as a historical force representing a true break with the past. Indeed,
programmatically speaking, the “regeneration” of the Jew was his prior-
ity, and collaboration with the mechanisms introduced by the colonial
order, with all their attendant flaws, was simply a means to that end.

The Making of the Modern Maghrebi Jew

Nahon’s view of France was colored with optimism; for this reason, his
historical imprint has always been associated with a strong partisanship
toward the imperial authority and its supposedly willing surrogate,
the AIU . But that assessment should be balanced by the many condi-
tions and caveats that Nahon placed on his affection for the colonial
regime. For one thing, his enthusiasm for assimilation to France dimin-
ished sharply over time, even as he embraced the colonial order as the
framework for working out his own destiny. He continued to encourage
Maghrebi Jews to aspire to Frenchness in a legal and cultural sense, but
he ceased urging them to adapt in a social one. In his study of Tlemcen
he noted that the Jews of that day perpetuated the difference between
themselves and other citizens by calling themselves “Israelites” rather
than “French,” maintaining the invisible barrier that separated them
from their European counterparts. This distinction was realistic, he
believed, because they would never be fully accepted as social equals
in any case. Assimilation was beside the point, in his view, because
the objective was not to become “French” but rather to escape from
an underling status altogether and become a truly liberated person, a
true cosmopolitan.47

310 SUSAN GILSON MILLER

 The ideal objective for the Jew, in Nahon’s opinion—at least before
World War I—was a universalism that made no claims on one’s loyalty
but simply granted the ability to pursue life’s goals free from religious,
sectarian, or national constraints. There is no concept of patriotism in
Nahon’s early writing, no passionate call for adherence to a Moroccan
nation, or a French one, or even a Jewish one. Zionism, still in its infancy
as a political doctrine, was far from his thoughts as either a utopian or a
pragmatic objective. His studies of the North African situation convinced
him that national identity for the Jew—to be Moroccan, for example, in
the same sense that a Muslim was Moroccan—was an unattainable and
probably worthless object of desire. In its place, he chose a different
way of being in the world that allowed Jews to maintain connections
to place while practicing what James Clifford has aptly called “nonab-
solutist forms of citizenship.”48
In the heart of every Jew was the wanderer, Nahon believed, poised
to take on new social roles and identities as the situation demanded.
Nahon’s ethnographic work taught him that adaptation was the key to
the Jewish personality; it was a fundamental cultural trait, honed by
generations of forced wandering and the need to adjust quickly to new
environments. The truly perfected Jew was one who could fit in any-
where with ease, whether it was Fez, Tlemcen, Tangier, Paris, Algiers,
or Buenos Aires. It should come as no surprise that migration abroad
was a key element in Nahon’s—and the AIU ’s—program of reform at
the turn of the century. Preparing young Jews for exotic destinations
such as Senegal and Brazil was a solution to the problem of the lack of
opportunity at home. The AIU encouraged this movement, choosing the
“best students, the most robust, the best educated” to send abroad and
developing training courses to teach young men practical and portable
skills in traditionally “non-Jewish” crafts.49
Nahon was an early proponent of the virtues of transnationalism
and especially the benefits it would bring to the North African Jew.
Migration offered a pragmatic solution to the problem of a bifurcated
self-image, deficient economic opportunity, and the oppression that
subordinate status entailed. France—with all its shortcomings—offered
a passport to the world, stamped with the tricolors of the Republic. But

Moïse Nahon and the Maghrebi Jew 311

membership in the nation of France, even in a contingent status, was
not the goal. Like many others, Nahon quickly recognized the illiberal,
hypernational, and anti-Jewish nature of the colonial project. Yet he
refused to see these shortcomings as a reason for rejecting it out of hand;
instead, he advocated exploiting it fully as a path to self-liberation.
Nahon belonged to that particular moment when the promise of
emancipation introduced under the guise of imperialism carried a mixed
message for minority peoples. The agonistic relationship between the
intense cultural rootedness of the Maghrebi Jew and the diffuse oppor-
tunities offered by a modernizing colonialism were at the heart of his
thinking and writing. He tried to create, through his own writing, a
medium for bridging the divide between a deeply felt localism and
its worldly opposite, a modern consciousness designed by Europeans.
Toward this end, he was not unlike eastern European Jewish intellectuals
who were also looking for a blueprint of how to enter the modern age.
Like them, his goal was to define Jewish culture within a contempo-
rary idiom; but unlike them—for they struggled with the question of
what language to choose as the medium for their renaissance (Yiddish?
Hebrew? Polish? Russian?)—he was not confused or sentimental about
linguistic choices. For him, the only way forward was mapped through
the land of the French. He was mesmerized by the vision of a universal
order in which the Maghrebi Jew, as a culturally distinct, diasporic
personality, could play a starring role; at a first stage, as a protégé of
France, but later as a separate, autonomous, truly triumphant identity
of its own.50
Nahon never lost sight of the contradictions imposed upon him by
his position as intermediary between the colonial order and his fellow
Jews. Later in life, after he became a confidant of Lyautey and other Pro-
tectorate officials, his value to policy makers was precisely his ability to
stand both inside and outside of that Jewish world, to report on it with
the acuity of the insider and the detachment of the observer. He spoke
with the voice of the native, while at the same time, he understood the
settler mentality, with its fears, anxieties and more noble aspirations.
Nahon never lost hope in the possibility of Jewish renewal through
association with France.

312 SUSAN GILSON MILLER

 Born into the world of the AIU and its promise of Jewish rebirth into
a multicultural universalism, at his death in 1928 Nahon left behind
a different world, bloodied by the inventions of modern warfare and
already feeling the ill wind of strident and exclusive nationalisms. Did
he foresee the failure of his design for the future? Even in his lifetime,
his vision of a Jewish renaissance under the aegis of France was only
partially realized. For educated elites like himself, entry into a Franco-
phone world of openness and possibility passed through an open door;
but for the great mass of Maghrebi Jews, that way was blocked, and
other voices would be soon calling with different promises of redemp-
tion. For Moïse Nahon, child of the Enlightenment, lover of Zola, adviser
to French proconsuls, this second route was the road not taken. He
ended his days, in his own words, as a petit colon du Gharb, a small
farmer working the soil of Morocco’s rich northern plain. Alongside
his agricultural pursuits, he continued to write, providing glimpses into
the mind of a native Jew who had seized the golden apple offered by
Empire, yet remained aware of its bitter imperfections.

NOTES
My sincere thanks to Todd Shepard and Patricia Lorcin for their patient editing,
and also to Omnia El Shakry, whose comments and suggestions helped me frame
my topic with greater precision.
1. On diverse facets of the Moroccan Jewish personality, see Emily Benichou Got-
treich, “Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the Maghrib,” Jewish Quarterly
Review 98, no. 4 (2008): 433– 51, esp. 422–23.
2. I have borrowed this phrase from Ammiel Alcalay, “Intellectual Life,” in The Jews
of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times, ed. Michael M. Laskier, Reva
Simon, and Sara Reguer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 85.
3. This phrase is taken from Carl E. Schorske, “Politics in a New Key: An Austrian
Triptych,” Journal of Modern History 39, no. 4 (1967): 343– 86. It is meant to cap-
ture the ideological responses to a failing liberalism that emerged in fin de siècle
Austria. However, it could apply with equal validity to France in the same period.
See Pierre Birnbaum, The Anti-Semitic Moment: A Tour of France in 1898 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011). The notion of “modernity,” critical to under-
standing this era in French colonial history, has taken on multiple resonances;
here I am thinking of Frederick Cooper’s discussion of “multiple modernities”
in Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005), 114–27, as a formulation especially fitting to this context.

Moïse Nahon and the Maghrebi Jew 313

 Literature concerning Maghrebi Jewish intellectuals and the many paths they
followed toward modernity has expanded greatly in recent years; a choice sam-
pling would include Lucette Valensi, “Multicultural Visions,” in The Cultures of
the Jews, ed. David Biale, 3 vols. (New York: Schocken, 2002), 3:267–302; Harvey
E. Goldberg, “The Maskil and the Mequbbal: Mordecai Ha-Cohen and the Grave
of Rabbi Shim’on Lavi in Tripoli,” in Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries: History
and Culture in the Modern Era, ed. Harvey E. Goldberg (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press,1996), 99–116; Daniel J. Schroeter, “Yishaq Ben Ya’is Halewi: A
Moroccan Reformer,” in Struggle and Survival in the Middle East, ed. Edmund Burke
III (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 44– 58; and Jessica Marglin,
“Modernizing Moroccan Jews: The AIU Alumni Association in Tangier, 1893–1913,”
Jewish Quarterly Review 101, no. 4 (2011): 574– 603.
4. On the question of “emancipation” and its effect on minority-majority relations
in Europe, see Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson, Paths of Emancipation: Jews,
States, and Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), esp. chaps.
1 and 4; on the Jewish and foreign press read by the small literate public in late-
nineteenth- century Morocco, see Jamaa Baida, “La presse tangéroise: Relais de
communication dans le Maroc précolonial,” in Miroirs maghrébins, ed. Susan Oss-
man (Paris: CNRS , 1998), 21–28.
5. Judeo-Arabic is dialectal Arabic written in Hebrew script. It flourished in the
late-nineteenth- century Maghreb due to the importation into North Africa of
Hebrew printing presses from Europe. The first Hebrew press in Morocco was
set up in Tangier in 1891. On the role of Judeo-Arabic in the Maghrebi Jewish
literary awakening, see Yosef and Tsivia Tobi, Judeo-Arabic Literature in Tunisia,
1850–1950 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014), chap. 1; Robert Attal,
“Evocation de la France dans la littérature judéo-arabe tunisienne,” in Judaisme
d’Afrique du Nord aux XIXe–XXe siècles, ed. Michel Abitbol (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi
Institute, 1980), 114–24; Daniel J. Schroeter and Joseph Chetrit, “Emancipation
and Its Discontents: Jews at the Formative Period of Colonial Rule in Morocco,”
Jewish Social Studies, n.s., 13, no. 1 (Autumn 2006): 170–206.
6. Some recent examples of the historiographical “turn” aimed at recovering lost
voices of the Arab-Jewish past are Lital Levy, “Partitioned Pasts: Arab Jewish
Intellectuals and the Case of Esther Azhari Moyal (1873–1948),” in The Making of
the Arab Intellectual, ed. Dyala Hamzah (London: Routledge, 2013), 128– 63; Orit
Bashkin, New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2012); and Sarah A. Stein, Saharan Jews and the Fate of French
Algeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
7. Nahon’s small circle of intellectual friends included Abraham Pimienta, teacher for
the AIU , secretary of Tangier’s Hygiene Commission; Mosés Marrache, Talmudist
and Hebrew scholar; José Benoliel, philologist, compiler of dictionaries, poet,
translator, at home in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, and Hebrew,
onetime professor at the Marquês de Pombal University in Lisbon who wrote the first

314 SUSAN GILSON MILLER

 dictionary of Haketia (Northern Moroccan Judeo-Spanish) in 1920; the remarkable
Rahma Toledano, president of the association of graduates of the AIU school, poet,
journalist, Zionist, and companion to the philo-Semitic Spanish senator Angel Pulido,
who in 1910 created in Madrid the Hebrew Hispanic Union dedicated to restoring
ties between Spain and its dispersed Jewish communities. Nahon stood alone in
his interest in the ethnographic genre. See Isaac Laredo, author of Memorias de un
viejo tangerino (Madrid: C. Bermejo, 1935), who was also a member of this group
and chronicled many of their accomplishments; and a clutch of lesser-known yet
influential journalists, including Pinhas Assayag, who wrote for a Madrid news-
paper in the 1880s; Levi-Cohen, editor of the French-language Reveil du Maroc in
the same decade; and Abraham Pimienta, longtime correspondent of the Parisian
newspaper Le Temps. See also Moïse Nahon, “Les Israélites du Maroc,” Revue des
Études Ethnographiques et Sociologiques 2 (1909): 275; Abraham Laredo, Les noms
des Juifs du Maroc (Madrid: Arias Montano, 1978), 994.
For more details on Nahon’s biography, see Michael Laskier, “Moïse Nahon, un
intellectual juif marocain,” Les Nouveaux Cahiers 16, no. 61 (1980): 19–24; Nahon’s
obituary, “A la mémoire de Moïse Nahon,” l’Avenir Illustré, September 7, 1928,
9–10; and the Archives of the Alliance israélite universelle in Paris [hereafter
AIU ] series Maroc/Tanger/Ecoles/L .VE . 913, “Nahon.”
8. For an insightful discussion of this same phenomenon in Algeria, see Joshua
Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 1–10; and for the Moroccan case Daniel
J. Schroeter, “Orientalism and the Jews of the Mediterranean,” Journal of Mediter-
ranean Studies 4 (1994): 183– 96.
9. The literature on the Dreyfus case is immense; one might begin with Ruth Har-
ris, The Man on Devil’s Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair That Divided France
(London: Allen Lane, 2010).
10. A. Kerdec Chény, Guide du voyageur au Maroc et guide du touriste (Tangier: G. T.
Abrines, 1888), 95.
11. French Marxist historian Jean-Louis Miège wrote on the topic. See “Journaux et
journalists à Tanger au XIXe siècle,” Hespéris 41, nos. 1–2 (1954): 191–228; “Les
réfugiés politiques à Tanger, 1796–1875,” Revue Africaine 51, nos. 1–2 (1957): 129–
46; “Garibaldi à Tanger (1849–1850),” Hespéris 44, nos. 1–2 (1957): 139– 45.
12. On the history of nineteenth- century Tangier, see my History of Modern Morocco
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 82– 86 and related references;
Mohamed Kenbib, “1767–1957: Du ‘Paradis des Drogmans’ à la cité ‘internatio-
nale,’” Tribune Juive (Montreal) 2, no. 5 (1994): 62–73. Two recent publications are
especially informative on Mediterranean migratory culture: Julia Clancy-Smith,
Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); and Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, The
Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2010).

Moïse Nahon and the Maghrebi Jew 315

13. Jacques Bigart, “Legends and Superstitions,” Revue des Écoles 1 (1902): 81.
14. Arnold van Gennep (1873–1957) is widely recognized as the founder of folklore
studies in France. He learned more than a dozen languages, including Arabic, and
used linguistic facts liberally in his ethnographic studies. He spent most of his
life outside the academic establishment. His major work was Les rites de passage
(1909), in which he studied life transitions, believing they were a vehicle of social
regeneration. Van Gennep’s six-week stay in Algeria in 1911–12 overlapped with
Nahon’s final days there. An encounter between the two men so intellectually
attuned is more than likely, though not documented in our sources. Van Gennep
published two works based on his Algerian experience: En Algérie (Paris: Mercure
de France, 1914) and “Etudes d’ethnographie algérienne,” Revue d’Ethnographie et
Sociologie 11 (September–December 1911): 265–346. See Rosemary L. Zumwalt, The
Enigma of Arnold Van Gennep (1873–1957): Master of French Folklore and Hermit
of Bourg-La-Reine (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1988); E. Sibeaud,
“Un ethnographe face à la colonisation: Arnold Van Gennep en Algérie,” Revue
d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines 1, no. 10 (2004): 79–103. Whether Nahon ever
met social scientists such as William Marçais, René Basset, and Alfred Bel, whose
stays in Algiers coincided with his own, is a topic that bears further research. No
trace of such meetings is found in the archives.
15. Colette Zytnicki, Les Juifs du Maghreb: Naissance d’une historiographie coloniale
(Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2011), 42–3.
16. On Nahon’s Algerian period, see AIU /Algérie/I .E .1.10, and especially his letter to
Bigart dated July 5, 1901. On the Regraia training school, see AIU /Algérie/I .E .1.10,
Nahon to Jonnart, July 11, 1905. Nahon was aware of the ideas of eastern European
Jewish intellectuals such as Aaron David Gordon (1856–1922), who lauded physi-
cal labor as a means of freeing Jews of their “parasitical” tendencies in order to
become “new men,” but he was more impressed by French thinking on the same
subject. In “La foi juive et l’esprit scientifique,” Revue des Écoles 1 (April–June
1901): 18–25, Nahon evokes the values expressed in Zola’s Fecondité as an ideal
for Jewish youth. In this novel, a heroic couple work the soil with biblical zeal,
“triumphing in the eternal combat of life against death,” in order to achieve on
an individual basis a simulacrum of human progress.
17. Notes d’un colon du Gharb (Casablanca: Société d’editions marocaines, 1925); Propos
d’un vieux marocain (Paris: Larose, 1930).
18. Laredo, Memorias, 864. Nahon’s first documented exchanges with Lyautey con-
cerned the rebuilding of the Fez mellah (Jewish quarter), partially destroyed during
the fighting between the French army and Moroccan tribesmen in 1912. National
Archives, Rabat, Fonds du Protectorat, Dossier A 1712, “Note sur l’organization
des communautés israélites,” April 28, 1913. Nahon is frequently referenced in
Daniel Rivet’s Lyautey et l’institution du protectorat français au Maroc, 3 vols. (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 1988) as a trusted adviser on Jewish affairs. See also Colette Zytnicki,
“Moïse Nahon, Yomtob Semach, Samuel D. Levy et les autres: Des notables juifs en

316 SUSAN GILSON MILLER

 situation coloniale? Les directeurs des écoles de l’Alliance israélite universelle au
Maroc (fin XIXe–mi-XXe siècles),” in L’enseignement français en Méditerranée: Les
missionaires et l’Alliance israélite universelle, ed. Jérôme Bocquet (Rennes: Presse
universitaire de Rennes, 2010), 79– 92.
19. “Emancipation des marocains et situation morale,” AIU /Tanger/V .B . 24, July 15,
1896.
20. The literature on colonialism and anthropology is vast. In addition to Talal Asad’s
seminal Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (Atlantic Highlands NJ : Ithaca
Press, 1973), reading I have found useful includes George W. Stocking, Colonial
Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 3–7; James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Author-
ity,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and
Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 21– 54; Martin Thomas, ed.,
The French Colonial Mind, 2 vols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 1,
“Introduction,” xi–xlvii and note 10.
21. E. Sibeud, “La fin du voyage: De la pratique coloniale à la pratique ethnographique,”
in Les politiques de l’anthropologie: Discours et pratiques en France (1860–1940), ed.
C. Blanckaert (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 172–98; Elizabeth Williams, “Anthropo-
logical Institutions in Nineteenth- Century France,” Isis 76, no. 3 (1985): 331– 48;
Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies
(New York: Norton, 2000).
22. Quote is from La Liberté, September 22, 1916, AIU 4ºUBr1838 17bis. Nahon’s viewpoint
was fundamentally different from that of French scholars such as Octave Houdas
or Paul Topinard, whose race-based theories dominated the field of North African
social science up to the 1880s. In his monumental Ethnographie de l’Algérie, Houdas
wrote that the indigenous Jews have “conserved the general characteristics of their
race . . . and have followed the errors of their co-religionists in every corner of
the globe. . . . The younger generation does not differ at all in its appearance from
the new Algerian [pied-noir] race . . . but . . . at a mature age, the Jew voluntarily
adopts his old habits, practices his religion with greater fervor, and from this
arises a certain hostility (mépris) for those he calls the goyim” (94–95). On this
topic more generally, see Patricia M. E. Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping,
Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (London: I. B. Tauris, 1995), 131 ff.
23. “La communauté israélite de Tlemcen,” Revue des Écoles 8 (April–December 1903):
33– 51.
24. “La communauté israélite de Tlemcen,” 37–39.
25. “La communauté israélite de Tlemcen,” 44.
26. “La communauté israélite de Tlemcen,” 45.
27. “La communauté israélite de Tlemcen,” 49.
28. AIU /Algérie/I .E .1.10, Nahon to Bigart, April 26, 1901.
29. Geneviève Dermenjian, La crise anti-juive oranaise, 1895–1905: L’antisémitisme dans
l’Algérie coloniale (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986), 23, 28–30, 38– 45, 53– 61, 235– 41; P.

Moïse Nahon and the Maghrebi Jew 317

 Hebey, Alger, 1898: La grande vague antijuive (Paris: NiL, 1996); Zytnicki, Les Juifs
du Maghreb, 91.
30. Nahon, “La communauté israélite de Tlemcen,” 40. See also his “confidential” let-
ter to Bigart, AIU /Algérie/I .E .1.10, January 21, 1903, in which he documents the
local obsession with the case of Simon Kanaoui, president of the consistory, who
played the role of “catalyst of anti-Semitism” because of his political activities.
31. Nahon, “La communauté israélite de Tlemcen,” 51.
32. Nahon, “Israélites du Maroc,” 268. This article, published in a leading French
ethnographic journal, provides an overview of the situation of Moroccan Jewry,
with a bias toward the restorative work of the AIU .
33. “Le mauvais oeil,” Revue des Écoles 3 (October–December 1901): 199.
34. Nahon, “Israélites du Maroc,” 268.
35. M. Nahon, “Saints et sanctuaires judéo-musulmans,” Revue des Écoles 5 (1902):
336.
36. Nahon, “La communauté israélite de Tlemcen,” 48.
37. Nahon, “Saints et sanctuaires,” 336; Nahon, “Israélites du Maroc,” 261.
38. Nahon, “Saints et sanctuaires,” 334. In this book review, Nahon rebukes French
colonial scholar René Basset, director of the École des lettres d’Alger, for failing
to mention the syncretism between Maghrebi Judaism and Islam in his Nedroma
et les Traras (Paris: Leroux, 1901), a study of saintly traditions in western Oran.
39. Nahon, “La communauté israélite de Tlemcen,” 48.
40. On the closeness between Moroccan Jewish and Muslim religious practice, see
the landmark article by Simon Levy, “Un autre aspect de la culture populaire: La
composante juive,” in Littérature populaire marocaine (Rabat: Okad, 1989), 9–25;
Elie Malka, Essai d’ethnographie traditionnelle des Mellahs: Ou, croyances, rites de
passage et vieilles pratiques des Israélites marocains (n.p. [1946?]).
41. AIU /Maroc/Ecoles/L .VE 913, July 6, 1906.
42. See Nahon’s amusing meditation on the cultural rivalries between Tangier Jews
and their co-religionists (foresteros, or “strangers”) in the inland cities of Fez,
Meknes, and Marrakesh: “Roumis et Foresteros,” Bulletin Annuel de l’Association
des Anciens Élèves de l’AIU 12 (1904): 35– 42.
43. AIU /Maroc/Ecoles/L .VE 913, August 28, 1895.
44. Nahon, “Israélites du Maroc,” 258, 260.
45. AIU /Algérie/I .E .1.10, April 7, 1903; M. Nahon, “Nos écoles et l’antijudaïsme,”
Revue des Écoles 4 (January–March 1902): 257.
46. La Liberté, September 22, 1916.
47. While a large segment of Algerian Jewry had been “naturalized” under the Crémieux
Decree in 1870, and given the same legal rights as French citizens, in Morocco the
situation was quite different. The institution of “protection,” or the granting of
extraterritorial status to certain native Moroccans, Jews among them, had exempted
some Jews from the local system of justice. Yet many Jews still remained outside
the circle of protégés. Nahon campaigned vigorously but unsuccessfully for a

318 SUSAN GILSON MILLER

 change in the legal status of Moroccan Jews: “Naturalization and protection are
the two legal points of contact between Europe and Moroccan Judaism. . . . [T]hey
are the sole source of security for Jews against whatever pleases the indigenous
[Muslim] people” (“Israélites du Maroc,” 274–76).
The literature on “protection” and “naturalization” in the Maghreb is extensive,
with more recent works providing fresh insights. See especially Mohamed Kenbib,
Les protégés: Contribution à l’histoire contemporaine du Maroc (Rabat: Faculté des
lettres et des sciences humaines, 1996); Mary D. Lewis, “Geographies of Power:
The Tunisian Civic Order, Jurisdictional Politics, and Imperial Rivalry in the Medi-
terranean, 1881–1935,” Journal of Modern History 80, no. 4 (2008): 791– 830; and
Lewis’s more recent monograph, Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French
Tunisia, 1881–1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). On Moroccan
Jews specifically, see the admirable thesis by Jessica Marglin, “In the Courts of
the Nations: Jews, Muslims, and Legal Pluralism in Nineteenth- Century Morocco”
(PhD diss., Princeton University, 2013), 274ff. On the legal status of Moroccan Jews
under the Protectorate, the following two articles by Daniel J. Schroeter and Joseph
Chetrit are helpful: “The Transformation of the Jewish Community of Essaouira
(Mogador) in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Goldberg, Sephardi and
Middle Eastern Jewries, 111–13; and “Emancipation and Its Discontents.”
48. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 9.
49. Jewish emigration from Morocco to South America in the late nineteenth century,
undertaken with the help of the AIU graduates’ organization, is documented
in my “Kippur on the Amazon: Jewish Emigration from Northern Morocco in
the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Goldberg, Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries,
190–209.
50. A comparison between Maghrebi Jewish intellectuals and their eastern European
counterparts seeking similar modes of resolution to the Jewish “problem” would be
enlightening, but that work is yet to be done. European Jews who wrote (mainly in
Hebrew, but also in Yiddish and vernacular languages) about a new Jewish modernity
include Judah Leib Gordon, David Frischman, Hayim Zelig Slonimsky, and Nahum
Sokolow. For more on this, and material useful for comparison between Western
and non-Western Jewish intellectuals, see M. Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin
de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001); Kenneth Moss, “Jewish Culture between
Renaissance and Decadence” Jewish Social Studies 8, no. 1 (2001): 153–93. Also
important for this theme in the Ottoman world are two pertinent monographs:
Sarah A. Stein, Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian
and Ottoman Empires (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); and Julia P.
Cohen, Becoming Ottoman: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern
Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). My thanks to Professor Ela Bauer
of Haifa University for introducing me to some of these sources.

Moïse Nahon and the Maghrebi Jew 319

11 The Syphilitic Arab?
A Search for Civilization in Disease Etiology,
Native Prostitution, and French Colonial Medicine

ELLEN AMSTER

The Arab people are in a state of moral and physical degradation

that exceeds all our civilized ideas. Theft and murder on the moral
order, syphilis and mange on the material order. These are the
wounds that ravage [the Arabs] until they are scarcely recognizable
as members of the great human family.
—Charles Richard, De l’esprit de la législation musulmane (1849)

From Flaubert’s fascination with lesions in the anuses of Egyptian

soldiers at Qasr al-ʿAyni Hospital to the seeming ubiquity of eyeless,
noseless syphilitic death heads in French military, travel, and medical
accounts of North Africa, French travelers and physicians frequently
mention syphilis among the Arabs. Yet French physicians between
1860 and 1925 consolidated the various rashes, sores, and birth defects
observed in North Africa to invent a physiological racial type, the degen-
erate and diseased “syphilitic Arab.” The reification and incorporation
of racism to biomedical knowledge exists across colonial contexts, but

320
“Arab syphilis” reveals the peculiar role of native bodies to the French
mission civilisatrice, the location of irreducible difference between
French citizens and colonized French subjects in the French “imperial
family” envisioned by Minister of Colonies Albert Sarraut.1
Bodies mattered in different ways to French and British empire.
Whereas Britain separated the races through anthropology and biology,
the sciences of physical difference,2 policy makers of the Third Republic
theorized difference in the mind; the native could theoretically evolve to
civilization if he learned to think like a Frenchman. And the Pasteurian
biomedicine of the 1880s seemed to promise a race-blind republic, for
it was a transnational, microbiological laboratory science predicated
upon a universality of biological function in all human beings.3 But
as Gary Wilder has argued, republican France was founded upon an
antinomy between universality and particularity, generating a racist
republic and an “imperial nation-state.”4 Racial difference in French
medicine arose from Durkheimian sociologie; in nineteenth- century
North Africa, doctors used the ethnographically observed behavior of
colonized peoples to define and study native bodies and minds. French
compendia of “North African pathology” were not merely topologies
of disease in Algeria-Morocco-Tunisia; they were Islam-as-pathology, a
medico-social frame that shaped scientific inquiry even after Pasteur.5
Arab syphilis suggests how medical science could animate and natu-
ralize French rule in the Mediterranean. Richard Keller, Kim Pelis, and
others have shown that French Pasteurian physicians were a single
Mediterranean community circulating between metropole and colonies;
indeed, the architect of French anti-syphilis programs in Morocco was
Paris venerologist and former chef de clinique at Saint-Lazare, Georges
Lacapère. But as Michel Foucault argues, biopolitics is a way of govern-
ing that defines the political subject through his body,6 an analytical
frame that Ann Laura Stoler extended to French empire.7 In French
North Africa, Arab syphilis created the Muslim as a cultural, social,
and biological inferior, a non-évolué who could only be a non-citizen.
Medicine helped to draw a climatological, biological, and civilizational
topography of the Mediterranean, a natural order for the subjects of
the French empire.

The Syphilitic Arab? 321

 Yet social history reveals the ambivalence of medicine as a tool of
colonial projects, for Arab syphilis vanished in the 1950s. Invented in
the French clinic, Arab syphilis was dispelled by the French clinic, dis-
proven by the positivist logics of Pasteurian science itself. Colonial
anti-syphilis campaigns produced both a closed prison/brothel system
for North African Muslim and Jewish prostitutes, and a colonial ver-
sion of maternal and infant health programs, Protection maternelle et
infantile (PMI ), for Moroccan mothers. But PMI has survived the end
of colonialism to become global health and the public health of the
postcolonial Moroccan state.

The Syphilitic Arab: A Pathological History

Pierre Remlinger, director of the first Institut Pasteur in Morocco,
repeated what had become a worn French medical truism by
1913—Muslims had syphilis:

Venereal diseases, against which there does not exist any measure
of prevention or sanitation outside the zones of French occupation,
constitute the basis, the very essence, of Moroccan pathology. . . .
Syphilis is naturally the most widespread malady. It is the Moroccan
malady par excellence . . . among Muslims, it is the rule.8

“Syphilis is one of the most widespread infections in Morocco,” agreed

venerologist Georges Lacapère in 1918;9 he claimed that Fez was 70–75
percent infected,10 with ten thousand prostitutes who were all syphi-
litic.11 “Everyone knows syphilis is extremely common in the Moroccan
population,” agreed sous- directeur of the French protectorate health
service Jules Colombani in 1924, “around 80 percent.”12 Syphilis afflicted
most North African Muslims according to numerous, self-referential
studies by French physicians in Algeria and Tunisia, with infection rates
estimated between 75 and 90 percent.13
Unique to “Arab syphilis” was its etiology; syphilis was not merely a
disease of Muslims, Muslims were syphilitic because they were Muslim;
doctors argued that Islam produced syphilis. Syphilography, the sci-
ence of “reading” the body’s dermis, physiology, and morphology for
signs of syphilis infection, is the classic example of socially constructed

322 ELLEN AMSTER

scientific knowledge.14 But in North Africa, French social theories of
Islamic despotism, sexual promiscuity, and irrationality led doctors
to theorize and “find” widespread syphilis morbidity among Muslims,
even after the introduction of Pasteurian microbiology.15 “Arab syphilis”
was the corporealization and pathologization of Islam on the biological
human body.
The concept of the “syphilitic Arab” originates with the father of
French North African pathology, Émile-Louis Bertherand, a Bureaux
arabes doctor (1848– 53) who became medical-legal expert at Algiers
courts, editor of French medical journals for Algeria, founder of the
Société protrectrice de l’enfance algérienne, and author of Médecine et
hygiène des arabes: Études sur l’exercice de la médecine et de la chirurgie
chez les musulmans de l’Algérie, leurs connaissances en anatomie, histoire
naturelle, pharmacie, médecine légale . . . leurs conditions climateriques
générales, leurs pratiques hygièniques publiques et privées, leurs maladies,
leurs traitements les plus usités (1855).
Bertherand was one among many voices in a French medical debate
over the possibility of assimilating Muslim Algerians legally and cultur-
ally to France. Joanny-André-Napoléon Périer, the physician appointed
by the July Monarchy for its Exploration scientifique de l’Algérie (1840–
42), advocated full assimilation for Muslims as French citizens. Périer
had a fluid notion of race derived from the environmentalism of Isidore
Saint-Hilaire and Armand de Quatrefages; he argued Algeria could be
civilized through a Saint-Simonian program of grand public works,
environmental management, legislative reform, and popular education.16
Intermarriage between Algerians and Frenchmen would create a new
and vigorous Mediterranean race.17 By contrast, Bertherand rejected
the assimilation of Muslims. In his notion of race, the body is perma-
nently altered by morality, behavior, and society; he thus relocated the
cause of pathology from the environment to human social behaviors
and institutions.
Bertherand argued that the indigenous peoples of Algeria, “Arabs,
Kabyles, and Saharaouis,” were unassimilable to France because Islamic
despotism, law, polygamy, laziness, sexual perversion, and the African
climate had deformed the physical and moral organism. North African

The Syphilitic Arab? 323

Muslims shared “a particular physiological stamp,” a “special type of
organization,” “a congenital organic modality . . . generalized in the
entire race,” the hereditary, bilious “Arab temperament.”18 Character-
ized by a grotesque overdevelopment of the abdomen to the detriment
of the brain, the Arab’s physical economy directed energies to the sex
organs; the engorged perineal arteries predisposed “venereal excess,
syphilis, hemorrhoids, and tumefaction of the legs.”19 Concubinage,
child marriage, and polygamy stimulated the genitals to enormous size,
and “among women, the exuberance of the vulva explains perfectly the
necessity of excision . . . the clitoris is voluminous and very preeminent,
the vagina very ample.”20 Widespread sexual libertinage generalized
and transmitted syphilis between the generations, producing a degen-
erate heredity, sterility, and congenital deformity.21 Muslims were thus
corporeally different,22 and as Frenchmen and Muslims had distinct
physiologies, pathologies, and physiognomies, Bertherand advocated
separate hospitals and separate law codes; France must govern each
man in Algeria “as an individual and as a race.”23
The corollary to Arab syphilis was the feeble Arab intelligence—
the undeveloped, stunted Arab brain, starved of seminal and nervous
energy and crushed by a “simple, sterilizing, absolute submission” to
Islamic dogma.24 Islam suppressed the Muslim nervous system, render-
ing the Arab incapable of cleaning himself or curing his own diseases.25
Bertherand argued that Islamic political institutions had collapsed and
science had been lost: “All the sciences are sisters and daughters of civi-
lization, mothers of Progress; the medical sciences could never reach an
apogee among a people whose intellectual state is generally inferior.”26
In Médecine et hygiène des arabes, Bertherand’s object was to prove that
Muslims possess neither medicine nor hygiene; he claims that Arab
medicine is “empiric,” disorganized, magical, ungoverned by law, the
professions, or an enlightened state.
Bertherand’s Arab syphilis thus justified French colonialism with
three interrelated claims. First, political anarchy caused Muslims to fall
to a primitive and irrational Islamic condition. Second, ungoverned by
reason, the excesses of Islamic society (despotism, ignorance, sexual
libertinage, and the absolute debasement of women) degraded the body

324 ELLEN AMSTER

and generalized hereditary syphilis in the population. Third, disease
and degeneracy threatened the Arab/Islamic race, and Muslims required
scientific governance by French hygiene to rehabilitate them physically
and intellectually. But Bertherand could produce no evidence for any of
his claims—no morbidity data for Muslims, no statistics, no serological
proof. There was no evidence whatsoever that Muslims had syphilis.
Evidence or not, politics in Algeria guaranteed the victory of Ber-
therand’s race hygiene. After tribal leader Muhammad al-Muqrani and
the Rahmaniyya tariqa (Sufi brotherhood) led a general revolt against
French rule in the Kabyle uprising of 1870–71, the champions of racial
difference dominated the new civilian government of Algeria. They
embraced the medical theories of physicians like Bertherand and
Auguste Warnier, to justify unequal legal structures like the Code de
l’indigénat and the Warnier Law.27 From a multitude of medical voices,
colonial and metropolitan actors had selected one hygiene, race hygiene,
and guaranteed its victory through law and institutions.
The advances in French biomedicine by Louis Pasteur (1880s), the
isolation of the Treponema pallidum syphilis spirochete (1905), the
Wassermann blood test (1906), and the colonial network of Pasteur-
ian institutes did not at first contradict Bertherand’s claims. On the
contrary, Pasteurian physicians used the new sciences to expand,
document, and substantiate Bertherand’s Arab syphilis. Although Pas-
teurian microbiology has the potential for republican universalism,
Bruno Latour and Anne-Marie Moulin have shown that the variability
of virulence, a focus on the human “terrain” rather than the “seed” of
disease, was used to develop racially specific pathologies in colonial
contexts.28 In North Africa, French colonial hygiene became a mas-
sive, self-referential, interlocking, and sometimes racist edifice of data
analogous to the Orientalism of Edward Said. Medical photography
was often used metonymically; photos of an eyeless, noseless Moroccan
syphilitic visage were reproduced repeatedly in French colonial medi-
cal literature, emphasizing Islam in Morocco as pestilence and French
medicine as remedy.
But how could doctors document an epidemic that did not exist? Mili-
tary physicians in Morocco between 1900 and 1912 provided morbidity

The Syphilitic Arab? 325

data from tiny groups of soldiers and prostitutes, which they claimed
represented the whole Muslim population. Remlinger found 150 of 170
native soldiers in Mazagan syphilitic, 230 of 275 soldiers in Mogador
(Essaouira), and 428 of 500 soldiers in Tangier.29 During World War I,
military physician Laurent Leredde advised his colleagues to diagnose
syphilis by sight alone, despite the great potential for error;30 syphilis
lesions were (and are) easily confused with scrofula, lupus, yaws, favus,
impetigo, bacterial infections, and other skin eruptions.31 The Wasser-
mann blood test, even when used, was unreliable;32 Lacapère admitted
that the Wassermann yielded false positive results in the presence of
malaria, tuberculosis, and scarlet fever.33 Misdiagnosis could also come
from conversations with the patient himself, for French-Arabic medi-
cal dictionaries translated vague dialectical Arabic expressions such as
mard al-kabir (the great illness), al-bird (the cold), or mard al-nisa (the
disease of women) as “syphilis.”34
Medical data contradicting the diagnosis were reframed as the unique
qualities of a race-specific Muslim syphilis. Of the three thousand
patients Lacapère observed in Fez between 1916 and 1919, less than 1
percent had a primary syphilis chancre.35 But Lacapère concluded that
French doctors did not see this primary stage because Moroccans must
be hereditary syphilitics or infected in infancy.36 Several physicians
remarked that North African Muslim “syphilitics” did not manifest the
neurological symptoms of tertiary syphilis like tabès dorsalis (nerve
degeneration).37 Lacapère argued that the rarity of neurological symp-
toms proved the rudimentary nature of the Muslim brain. “Syphilis does
not like the Arab brain,” doctors reasoned, because neurological syphilis
afflicted only the civilized and culturally evolved.38 The Muslim brain
was never challenged by schooling, affirmed North African psychiatrist
Antoine Porot: “The intellectual life of the Arab is reduced to a minimum
and turns in a limited circle around elementary instincts necessary
for basic life and its conservation.”39 The proof lay in the paralysis of
Europeans who had been infected by natives: “For certain races, tre-
ponosomes have a special affinity for the nervous system [which shows
that] . . . syphilis develops according to the nature of the patient.”40 In

326 ELLEN AMSTER

reality, the high incidence of neurological symptoms among Europeans
was likely the result of French arsenic-based and mercury-based anti-
syphilis medications.41
Metropolitan syphilologist Edouard Jeanselme translated syphilis
pathology to the civilizing mission in his Histoire de la syphilis (1931).
Natives of the empire developed cutaneous “exotic syphilis” because
“the races of color live a style of life in which [mental] activity is
reduced to a minimum.”42 But with French education, natives could
manifest “civilized” symptoms;43 North African Jews were thought
to suffer “civilized” neurological syphilis because they attended
Alliance israélite universelle schools.44 Through disease, Lacapère
located Muslims outside civilization; their syphilis was a plague of the
Dark Ages:45

The syphilis that we see in the Arab, it is French syphilis of the Middle
Ages—that which existed before the generalization of therapeutic
methods introduced in Europe around the end of the fifteenth cen-
tury, a syphilis that few documents permit us to imagine.46

Syphilis in Morocco illuminates the interconnection of colonial

sociology, the clinic, and pathology; as Megan Vaughan argues, “Bio-
medical knowledge on Africa was itself both socially constructed . . .
and ‘social constructionist.’”47 Arab syphilis was a victory for French
empire; syphilis “proved” how Islam threatened the human body and
the Moroccan population; doctors “demonstrated” that Islam killed
infants in the womb and condemned survivors to a life of deformity
as hereditary syphilitics. The Muslim body in French colonial medical
journals is a house of horrors—the death’s head rotted by syphilis, eyes
that balloon from a misshapen head of subcutaneous tumors. In the
naked bodies of medical photography, the Muslim body was used to
testify to the “truths” French doctors claimed to know—that depravity
lay under the Muslim veil, that Muslims secretly suffered from Islamic
society, and that only French science could know and cure the Muslim
from the “inside- out.” As “martyr to civilization” Émile Mauchamp
wrote in his La sorcellerie au Maroc, hygiene would civilize the Muslim

The Syphilitic Arab? 327

through his body;48 “The Moroccan has not evolved in parallel with
other peoples . . . civilization and science will nevertheless finish by
impressing him, penetrating him, and fashioning him.”49

Documenting Arab Syphilis at the Lemtiyyine Clinic in Fez

The architect of anti-syphilis campaigns in Morocco was metropolitan
venerologist Georges Lacapère, former chef de clinique at the Paris Saint-
Lazare women’s prison, disciple of French syphilologist Alfred Fournier
(1832–1914), and member of the Ligue nationale française contre le péril
vénérien.50 Recruited by Resident- General Hubert Lyautey to Morocco
in 1916, Lacapère adopted the views of his mentor Fournier: syphilis
was a failure of governance, one that demanded a scientific education
of the Muslim public and the regulation of Muslim social behavior—
prostitutes, mothers, marriages, and the home. In France, Fournierist
anti-syphilis activists pursued positive eugenics to eliminate congenital
syphilis for a vigorous French race.51 As a world expert on hereditary
syphilis,52 Lacapère focused on Moroccan children: “Considering the dif-
fusion of [syphilis], which, in Morocco, reaches at least 75% of natives,
one can deduce that syphilis kills more than a tenth of the children born in
this country.”53 His colleagues at the Institut Pasteur attributed syphilis
to Muslim sexuality,54 but Lacapère insisted that Moroccans contracted
syphilis “innocently,” from the dirty razor of the barber-surgeon, the
breast of the infected nursing mother, or casual contact with open
lesions of family members. He dedicated himself to fighting a disease
that killed Muslim newborns and left survivors to “disappear after lin-
gering for a few years of miserable existence.”55
Lacapère and colleague Laurent Leredde founded a native syphilol-
ogy/dermatology clinic in the Lemtiyyine neighborhood of Fez (Arabic:
Lamtiyyin) by residential order of May 24, 1916, which became the
great documentary archive for “Arab syphilis.”56 Muslims could not
be compelled legally to undergo syphilis treatment,57 but thousands
came voluntarily to the clinic. From thousands of meticulously docu-
mented patient files, Lacapère composed his magisterial La syphilis
arabe: Maroc, Algérie, Tunisie (awarded the Academie de médecine’s

328 ELLEN AMSTER

 FIG. 11.1. Lacapère’s sche-
matic of the evolution of
“Arab syphilis.” From Georges
Lacapère, La syphilis arabe:
Maroc, Algérie, Tunisie (Paris:
Octave Doin, 1923).

prestigious Prix Ricord in 1923), and his assistants Georges Decrop

and Antoine Salle created a photographic dermatological atlas of Arab
syphilis (1921).58 Lacapère translated eight thousand Moroccan bodies
into text, assembling lesions, birth defects, skin ailments, tumors, bone
disorders, cancers, depigmentations, and dental abnormalities into a
disease biography, a pictorial voyage of the treponeme through the
Muslim body (figs. 11.1–11.3).59 Syphilis was said to be polymorphous,
attacking every organ and system, and thus photos of birth defects were
used to “prove” a ubiquitous hereditary syphilis. Even the absence of
symptoms proved syphilis: “It may be that a hérédo-syphilitique presents
without the least sign of hereditary syphilis.”60
I conducted fieldwork in Fez between 1998 and 2000 and interviewed
patients at Lemtiyyine, which is today a clinic of general medicine.
Elderly Fez residents remember especially coming for the fungal infec-
tion tinea captitis, colloquially called qraʿ, or “baldness”:

A: The time that I remember from the history of Morocco, there was
baldness (al-qraʿ ). No hair. There was a sore here, the sore gets big-
ger. . . . The situation of the baldness was very widespread. This is
the reason. I go out, for example, I go outside, to the uncultivated

The Syphilitic Arab? 329

FIGS. 11.2 and 11.3. Lacapère attributed an array of birth defects and disorders
to hereditary “Arab syphilis,” from abnormal dentition to cachexia. From Georges
Lacapère, La syphilis arabe: Maroc, Algérie, Tunisie (Paris: Octave Doin, 1923).

wilderness, to the countryside, I seize an apple in my hand, I hold

onto it. I eat it. Without washing it . . . and my hands are not clean.
EA: What is there that isn’t good?
A: “Microbe.” “Microbe” gives you baldness. It gives the sore, it gives
some things . . . sometimes there is liquid that runs from it . . . and
then we started to go to the doctor.

330 ELLEN AMSTER

 EA: And you went first to the doctor?
A: No, first we used to do traditional medicine (dawa’ bildy).
EA: First, traditional medicine (dawa’ bildy).
A: And then afterwards, we go to the doctor. I came here, to this
clinic here, to one French doctor. He was a doctor français. He
came in and examined me, what did I eat, what about this, where
do I sleep, what do I wear. Questions. He gave me a medicine . . .
some pommada. And he gave me a bottle that had medicine in it,
like water, and it is water that I should wash with. When I go to
the bath, and I finish there, I put it on a piece of cotton, deux jours,
trois jours that thing dies.
EA: And what is the reason of that thing in the head?
A: A question of the hairbrush. The soap, it must not be shared. Each
one must have his own soap for himself. . . . Us, we just took any-
thing, without thinking. And that’s why the sickness happened
to us.61

We glimpse in this interview the doctor-patient interactions of medical

Orientalism, the historical and translational processes through which
data were collected from individuals and reassembled as Arab syphilis.
As the speaker makes clear, Muslim patients came to the French after
traditional remedies failed, and they did not see Lemtiyyine as a vene-
real clinic (fig. 11.4). They did not know that personal photographs from
their case files were assembled and published by Lacapère as proof of
“Arab syphilis.”
Another population attracted to Lacapère’s clinic was potential
mothers, Muslim women anxious to birth a healthy child after multiple
miscarriages and stillbirths.62 Lacapère’s medical staff promised preg-
nant Muslim women that a series of eight Novarsénobenzol (arsenic)
injections of 0.15–0.20 grams would result in a healthy baby. As a world
expert on hereditary syphilis, Lacapère used the Fez clinic to test the
new Novarsénobenzol medication on newborns.63 One might consider
that arsenic is a potent neurotoxin that lodges in the fat cells sheathing
the nerves, and Novarsénobenzol is extremely toxic if prepared incor-
rectly.64 Fortunately, perhaps, for Moroccan mothers and babies, the

The Syphilitic Arab? 331

 FIG. 11.4. Several contemporary interviews demonstrate that Moroccans
were attracted to the Lemtiyyine clinic by the large X-ray machine used
for “radiothérapie.” Courtesy of Archives of the bibliothèque nationale
du Royaume du Maroc.

French protectorate did not offer Muslim maternal and infant health
programs until 1948; French women physicians, Catholic charities, and
the wives of the residents-generals provided care for native women
and children.65

The Quartier Bousbir: Muslim Prostitute as “Seminal Sewer”

In contrast to Muslim mothers, Muslim prostitutes were the target of
early, aggressive French hygiene interventions virtually unlimited by
civil law. Colonial doctors adapted the views of metropolitan hygien-
ist Alexandre Parent du Châtelet (1790–1836), who saw prostitutes as
a necessary “sewer of semen” for society who must be confined in a
maison de tolérance (closed brothel) to protect normal society from
syphilis and depravity.
But in metropolitan France, anti-syphilis measures moved from
confinement to “neo-regulation”; Alfred Fournier reframed syphilis
as a social problem demanding public education, voluntary public

332 ELLEN AMSTER

cooperation, and “prophylaxis cabins.”66 Closed brothels of the July
Monarchy (1830– 48) came under vigorous attack from a vocal aboli-
tionist movement (1876–84) of feminists, socialists, anarchists, workers,
and British abolitionist Josephine Butler, who championed the prosti-
tute as a human being whose natural rights were violated. Constantin
Levaditi of the Institut Pasteur denounced the mise en carte for making
daughters of the poor into professional prostitutes.67 Philippe Charles
Ernest Gaucher, chair of dermatology and syphilography at the Uni-
versité de Paris, denounced enclosure as an affront to “liberty, equality,
and human dignity.”68 The Commission extraparlementaire française
du régime des moeurs voted against regulation in 1904 and in favor of
public education in 1906.69 The closed brothel was formally abolished
in France by the law of April 24, 1946.
Abandoned in France, closed brothels found new life in French
Morocco (1912–56), with privately run quartiers reservés merging prison,
hospital, and brothel.70 This was not simply discredited metropolitan sci-
ence applied to the colonies; North African Muslim girls were excluded
from the new legal discourse of human rights in the International
Agreement for the Suppression of the “White Slave Traffic” (1904), the
International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women
and Children (1921), and the UN Universal Declaration of Human
Rights (1948). Nature defines human rights, as Lynn Hunt reminds us,
and Arab syphilis constructed the Muslim as “naturally” sexual and
“biologically” depraved.71 The social history of enclosed prostitution
in Morocco underlines the human cost of such medical theories, the
impact of colonial hygiene on the lives of individual Moroccan women
and children.
Before French rule, Moroccan prostitutes lived among the population
and formed a loose guild under the nominal surveillance of a muqa-
ddim, an urban municipal functionary. Prostitutes lodged in or near
caravanserais; in Keddan quarter in 1909 Fez, a caravanserai owned by
Idris ibn ʿAbd al-Hadi stabled donkeys on the first floor and prostitutes
on the second. A porter at the door received .25 francs for each visitor
who requested to go upstairs. The girls paid for tea, platters, and food,
but otherwise they lived without supervision.72 Prostitutes lodged near

The Syphilitic Arab? 333

mosques and madrasat, visited the public baths, and attended birth
celebrations and weddings. The French came into contact with small
groups of Moroccan prostitutes assigned to units in the sultan’s army,
which the French called bordel mobile de campagne (BMC ).
The French army developed the BMC into a military institution and
introduced medical visits, a price scale, and a time schedule for sex
acts.73 The French military recommended enclosure to combat high rates
of venereal disease among French soldiers in the large military garrisons
of Fez, Marrakesh, Meknes, Rabat, and Casablanca. The general in Fez
saw infection rise among his men from 933 to 1,179 (of 5,000) men in
1923 (50 percent Europeans), infection contracted mostly outside the
quartier reservé of Fez.74 At Maisonnave Hospital in Marrakesh, the
doctor attributed venereal infections at Camp Mangin to “clandestine
prostitutes”—women not registered—and advocated police raids on
native homes to arrest and intern “clean” girls for soldiers’ use.75
Civilian authorities ultimately implemented the closed brothel in
Morocco within a larger urban hygiene strategy, one that treated Mus-
lims as an environmental disease reservoir.76 The qaʿid of each city
issued an arrêté sur la police des moeurs regulating the “public women”
“notoriously and habitually engaged in prostitution,” who were required
to register with the police, carry an identity card, and submit to weekly
pelvic examinations.77 “Notoriety” of prostitution was defined so broadly
that any Muslim woman could be arrested, vaginally examined, and
interned; an administrator in Meknes admitted “excessive zeal among
subaltern agents” and the “arrest of girls from honorable families”; “The
most typical is that of two sisters, one divorced, the other a little girl,
whose mother is employed at Instruction publique, [they were] arrested,
taken to the dispensary, showered and examined, during which the girl
was found to be a virgin.”78
The degree of enclosure depended on French power in the city, for
Muslim elites blocked regulation at every opportunity. In Meknes, the
pasha required that vice raids be performed only with his permission
and an ʿarifa present, allowing girls time to escape;79 in Marrakesh,
Muslim notables proposed that the muqaddim handle all infractions of
public morality (not vice police);80 in Mogador, Sharif Sbai successfully

334 ELLEN AMSTER

argued against a closed brothel, for “if this house is clandestine, only
the personality of the women will be judged, but if it is authorized by
the Administration, it produces a very bad effect politically and low-
ers the French in native esteem.”81 But European private capital made
prostitution a lucrative business; the “Bab el Khemis” quartier reservé
in Marrakesh exemplifies the financial benefit—6,979,400 francs for
the city in the first year.82 In Meknes, when Muslim elites wanted to
replace the quartier reservé with housing for poor Muslims, the munici-
pality refused to break its concessionary contract for the brothel to M.
Filimondi.83
The closed brothel reached its full development in the “Bousbir” quar-
ter of Casablanca, a walled compound built in the Nouvelle Madina by
the La Cressonnière company in 1924, which included a medical clinic,
cinema, shops, restaurants, cafés, and hairdressers (fig. 11.5). Native
Jewish and Muslim girls were interned by race and served clients in a
Taylorized system of sex acts; one ejaculation in the vagina constituted
one “pass.” A madam kept the girls in subsistence-level poverty by tak-
ing their earnings and renting them tiny rooms, food, and clothing at
exorbitant prices. Theoretically, girls could leave Bousbir once a week
on a half- day pass, but the madam could forbid even this freedom.
Tourists eagerly consumed salacious French pulp novels celebrating
Bousbir as an exotic palace of sex tourism, a literature that obscured
the suffering of its young inmates.
Jean Mathieu, physician and coauthor of La prostitution marocaine
surveillée de Casablanca (1950), described Bousbir as “a form of slav-
ery condemned by the United Nations’ resolution for human rights of
1948.”84 The residents of Bousbir recounted similar life stories of poverty,
rural origin, childhood rape, and abandonment by family networks.85
Most women entered Bousbir between the ages of thirteen and eigh-
teen, voluntarily, if orphaned or fleeing abusive marriages (78 percent
of girls had been married by age thirteen in 1951), or involuntarily,
if arrested in one of the eighty to ninety monthly police raids on the
shantytown of Carrières Centrales.86 After enduring police harrassment,
hunger, and homelessness in the street, vulnerable girls were receptive
to the promises of Bousbir madams for food and safe housing.87 Women

The Syphilitic Arab? 335

 FIG. 11.5. The malnourished,
inadequately clothed Bousbir
prostitute beckons on a French
postcard. From the author’s
personal collection.

interned involuntarily in Bousbir were domestics and factory workers

who supplemented low wages with casual prostitution:88

Fatima bent Brahim of Meknes was married at thirteen to a laborer.

Six months later, abandoned, she married a carpenter from Rabat.
After two months of communal life, she left the conjugal home to
escape her alcoholic husband. After several adventures she finished
in Safi as a worker in a sardine factory. There she began to prostitute
herself to augment her salary. Operated for a venereal disease in a
hospital of Casablanca, she was rounded up by the police a few days
after her cure.89

Prepared as a sociological study of Bousbir, Mathieu’s report documents

terrific physical and sexual violence against young Muslim girls:

F. is nineteen years old. . . . An orphan, she was married to a soldier

who went to France and never returned. Servant in Casablanca for

336 ELLEN AMSTER

 a Jew, she complemented her meager salary with rapid “passes.” . . .
One night along the ocean . . . having responded to the advances of
some men, she was beaten and successively sodomized by twenty
men who, after having left her half-unconscious, urinated on her
successively as a sign of contempt. Seriously injured, she was hos-
pitalized four months. Cured, she continued to prostitute herself,
specializing in anal sex.90

To leave the brothel and the police register, a woman had to prove
economic self-sufficiency and a “return to regular conduct.” But French
administration could reject even offers of marriage to the woman;
according to report, “[these prospective fiancés are] unemployed young
men who seek only to live from the proceeds of prostitution.”91
Pro-enclosure colonial physicians and syphilologists argued for con-
finement as “the only medical means, however precarious, to monitor
and limit the venereal peril.”92 Using discarded languages from their
Paris Saint-Lazare confrères of fifty years prior, these doctors essential-
ized Muslim prostitutes as animalistic degenerates of low intelligence,
insensitive to pain or emotion. Émile Lepinay of the Jeanselme dis-
pensaire de prophylaxie anti-vénérienne in Casablanca casually used
Muslim prostitutes for medical experimentation; he injected the live
syphilis spirochete into the vaginas of Muslim prostitutes to see how
long it could survive in a woman’s vaginal canal (1932).93 Enclosed
Muslim prostitutes were also used to test streptomycine as a treatment
for gonorrhea.94 When a fourteen-year- old Muslim girl in an Algerian
brothel wept and begged French medical student Pierre Potier to let her
return home, he described her pleas as “pathology preventing successful
adaptation to her profession.”95
More sympathetic doctors in the orbit of sociologist Robert Montagne
attributed the causes of Moroccan prostitution to rapid urbanization,
economic misery, and the “explosion of the patriarchal family,” social
crises forcing daughters of the Muslim proletariat to prostitution.96
These physicians advocated global economic and social reform, pub-
lic education, and an expanded network of venereal clinics.97 But the
tenacity of Arab syphilis as scientific construct prevented physicians

The Syphilitic Arab? 337

from recommending the abolition of closed brothels. Even Jean Mathieu
agreed that Moroccans were not sufficiently “intellectually evolved”
for metropolitan measures to succeed, for Muslims were incapable of
sexual self-control and civic responsibility.98 The only voices for outright
abolition were Moroccan nationalists and individual French women
physicians.99 Abolition finally came with the collapse of French rule100
in 1955– 56; Bousbir was evacuated on April 16, 1955, the brothels in
Rabat and Casablanca on January 16, 1956, in Oujda on January 17,
1956, and in Fez on February 29, 1956.101

The Rise of the Maternity Clinic and

the Fall of the Syphilitic Arab
The medical construct of the “syphilitic Arab” disappeared finally in
the data collected at the maternities of Protection maternelle et infan-
tile, French protectorate programs created in 1948 to inculcate Muslim
women with French puericulture.102 Clinical statistics from thousands
of Muslim births proved the extremely low serological prevalence of
syphilis; at Maurice Gaud hospital in Casablanca, only 10 of 1,530 Mus-
lim mothers tested positive for syphilis (0.55 percent) in the period
from1951 to 1952.103 At the Maternité Maréchale Lyautey in Rabat, the
obstetrician brothers Jean and Charles Marmey observed that of 2,677
Muslim births, only 1.8 percent of mothers could be considered possibly
syphilitic.104 In 1950, Georges Decrop, who had served under Lacapère
at Lemtiyyine and authored the 1921 syphilis atlas, admitted as a chef de
service in Tangier that of the 254 deliveries practiced on Muslims from
1937 to 1947, “not a single newborn was infected [with syphilis].”105
Interestingly, Decrop concludes that French medications must have
vanquished Arab syphilis.106
But the historical rise and demise of Arab syphilis suggests the prom-
ises and limits of medicine as a servant of colonial power. Foucault
argues that modern states use the body to establish an individual’s
natural rights and construct a state appropriate for ruling him. Arab
syphilis justified French rule; French physicians “showed” that Islam
degraded the human being in body and mind, “necessitating” French
governance to rehabilitate and rescue the Muslim from his own nature.

338 ELLEN AMSTER

Yet medicine is less politically determined than Foucault might sug-
gest; data collected at the French colonial clinic itself vanquished Arab
syphilis. Medicine is a nature- culture hybridity, argues Bruno Latour,
with logics that operate beyond political designs. Latour asks, “Is it our
fault if the networks are simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like
discourse, and collective, like society?”107
It is this quality of biopolitics that allows it to live on after colonial-
ism to multiply power in postcolonial nation-states. As Gyan Prakash
observes, anticolonial nationalist elites reinscribed power “on the very
body that colonial governmentality made available.”108 The French
protectorate used the Muslim female body to extend state power. As
prostitutes, Muslim women were the scientifically managed repository
of “Arab syphilis.” As mothers, Muslim women were objects of French
efforts to replace Islam with French puericulture. Moroccan nationalists
hated and abolished colonial prostitution, but the postcolonial Moroccan
state yet extends its bureaucratic power through women’s bodies. The
civil status of a newborn Moroccan depends upon his inscription into
a patriarchal “family booklet” and his mother’s status under a male-
dominated Islamic family code, the Mudawwana.109
The French maternal and infant health programs, PMI , survived the
end of empire and now transcend the Mediterranean to enter a global
field of health. First, the Moroccan minister of health invited French
social workers to stay after independence and continue to create PMI
centers. The director of the French protectorate health service, Georges
Sicault, left Morocco to join UNICEF , which he represented to the new
World Health Organization (1948). So colonial health has transitioned
to global health, and the uncertain, fragmented politics of the interna-
tional system and the WHO .

NOTES
Epigraph: Charles Richard quoted in Émile-Louis Bertherand, Médecine et hygiène
des arabes (Paris: Ballière, 1855), 294.
1. Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism
between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 33.
French natalists excluded colonized peoples from the repopulation of France. See
Elisa Camiscioli, “Reproducing the ‘French Race’: Immigration and Pronatalism in

The Syphilitic Arab? 339

 Early-Twentieth-Century France,” in Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encoun-
ters in World History, ed. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2005), 219–33.
2. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,”
October 28 (1984): 125–33.
3. Charles Nicolle’s typhus discoveries, e.g., were only possible because he assumed
identical cellular behavior in French and Tunisian bodies. Kim Pelis, Charles Nicolle,
Pasteur’s Imperial Missionary: Typhus and Tunisia (Rochester: University of Roch-
ester Press, 2006).
4. Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State, 1–10.
5. Ellen Amster, Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter
in Morocco, 1877–1956 (Austin: University of Texas Press), 10. On the construction
of civilizational discourses about Arabs and Kabyles and race, see also Patricia M.
E. Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Race in Colonial Algeria
(London: I. B. Tauris, 1995).
6. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–
1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2008).
7. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s “History of Sexuality”
and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).
8. Pierre Remlinger, “Essai de nosologie marocaine,” Annales d’Hygiène Publique et de
Médecine Légale, series 4, no. 20 (August 1913): 129–67. See also Felix Weisgerber,
“Pathologie et thérapeutique marocaines,” Revue Générale des Sciences 4, no. 19
(1903): 567–73.
9. Georges Lacapère, “La lutte contre la syphilis au Maroc,” France Maroc 15, no. 2
(February 1918): 54– 57.
10. Georges Lacapère, La syphilis arabe: Maroc, Algérie, Tunisie (Paris: Octave Doin,
1923), 6.
11. Lacapère, “La lutte contre la syphilis au Maroc.”
12. Jules Colombani, L’effort prophylactique au Maroc (Rabat: Bonnin and Gonzalvez,
1924), 5.
13. Lacapère, La syphilis arabe, 7–9.
14. Ludwig Fleck, The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago: University
of Chicago, 1979); Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African
Illness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); Megan Vaughan, “Syphilis in
Colonial East and Central Africa: The Social Construction of an Epidemic,” in
Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence, ed. Terence
Ranger and Paul Slack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 269–302.
15. Bruno Latour argues that bacteriology is a social process. Latour, The Pasteuriza-
tion of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1993).
16. See Michael Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism
(Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994), chap. 2.

340 ELLEN AMSTER

17. Amster, Medicine and the Saints, 52– 54.
18. Bertherand, Médecine et hygiène des arabes, 188– 90.
19. Bertherand, Médecine et hygiène des arabes, 188– 90.
20. Bertherand, Médecine et hygiène des arabes, 190.
21. Bertherand, Médecine et hygiène des arabes, 179, 201.
22. “One of the greatest truths emerging from the comparative study of the legal
systems of nations . . . is that the institutions of a people are always an emanation
of its temperament.” Bertherand, Médecine et hygiène des arabes, 84–85.
23. Émile-Louis Bertherand, “De la création des hopitaux arabes,” in Nouveau projet
d’organisation du corps des officiers de santé militaire basé sur une série de modifi-
cations apportées à l’ordonnance royale du 12 août 1836 (Marseille: Barile, 1840),
1– 4.
24. Bertherand, Medecine et hygiène des arabes, 202.
25. Bertherand, Médecine et hygiène des arabes, 228– 41.
26. Bertherand, Médecine et hygiène des arabes, 16.
27. For other medical proponents of racial segregation, see Patricia Lorcin, “Imperi-
alism, Colonial Identity, and Race in Algeria, 1830–1870: The Role of the French
Medical Corps,” Isis 90 (1999): 653–79.
28. Latour, The Pasteurization of France; Anne Marie Moulin, “Les Instituts Pasteur de
la méditerranée arabe: Une religion scientifique en pays d’Islam,” in Santé, méde-
cine, et société dans le monde arabe, ed. Elisabeth Longuenesse (Paris: L’Harmattan,
1995), 129– 64.
29. Remlinger, “Essai de nosologie marocaine”; “Rapport du général commandant
les troupes débarquées au sujet de l’organisation de l’assistance médicale aux
indigènes de la Chaouia, annexe au journal politique d’Octobre 1908,” in Archives
de service historique de l’armée de terre [hereafter SHAT ], Carton 3H 87.
30. Laurent Leredde, Instructions complémentaires relatives au diagnostic et au traite-
ment de la syphilis (Rabat: Imprimérie du bulletin officiel du gouvernement du
protectorat, 1917–18). Leredde also opened the first syphilography clinic in Morocco
in 1915.
31. For a history of this confusion, see John Thorne Crissey and Lawrence Charles
Paris, The Determatology and Syphilology of the Nineteenth Century (New York:
Praeger, 1981).
32. Georges Lacapère and Charles Laurent, Le traitement de la syphilis par les composés
arsénicaux (Paris: Masson, 1918). Indeed, because the Wassermann is not specific
for syphilis, it is no longer used for this purpose.
33. Malaria was endemic in Morocco; tribes near Marrakesh had a 95 percent posi-
tive spleen index in 1919. “Attributions du bureau d’hygiène d’après le dahir du 15
mars 1920,” Archives de la bibliothèque générale de Rabat [hereafter BGR ] Carton
A 837. On malaria in Fez, see BGR Carton A 649. Lacapère used classic indicators
of malaria—hypertrophied spleen and spontaneous miscarriage—as evidence
of syphilis (La syphilis arabe, 249– 50). Lacapère notes that Moroccan children

The Syphilitic Arab? 341

 had negative Wassermanns at birth but tested positive years later (257). He also
diagnosed corneal ulcers as syphilis, and trachoma was prevalent in Morocco
(439).
34. Florian Pharaon and Émile-Louis Bertherand, Vocabulaire français-arabe à l’usage
des médecins, vétérinaires, sages-femmes, pharmaciens, herboristes (Paris: Morel,
1860).
35. Pharaon and Bertherand, Vocabulaire français-arabe, 16.
36. Pharaon and Bertherand, Vocabulaire français-arabe, 14.
37. For example, A. Cassar, Influence de l’arsénotherapie sur la fréquence de la paralysie
générale progressive et du tabès chez le musulman tunisien, Congrès de la fédération
des sociétés des sciences médicales de l’Afrique du Nord, March 21–24 (Tunis:
Finzi, 1934); Lacapère, La syphilis arabe, 19, 151– 55, 354– 56; Remlinger “Essai de
nosologie marocaine.”
38. Salzes, “Quelques cas de syphilis nerveuse chez les indigènes de l’Afrique du Nord,”
Journal des Praticiens, March 9, 1912.
39. Porot quoted in Lacapère, La syphilis arabe, 390– 91.
40. Lacapère, La syphilis arabe, 491.
41. See Amster, Medicine and the Saints, 76.
42. Edouard Jeanselme, Histoire de la syphilis, son origine, son expansion: Progrès realisés
dans l’étude de cette maladie depuis la fin du XVe siècle jusqu’à l’époque contemporaine
(Paris: Doin, 1931), 406– 9.
43. The paralysis of a Tunisian Muslim man was attributed to his French secondary
school diploma. Cassar, Influence de l’arsénothérapie.
44. Lacapère, La syphilis arabe, 9 and 480.
45. Sezary cited in Cassar, Influence de l’arsénothérapie, 18.
46. Lacapère, La syphilis arabe, 2.
47. Vaughan, Curing Their Ills, 6.
48. A médecin missionaire and spy of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mauchamp
was beaten to death by a Moroccan mob outside his clinic in Marrakesh in 1907, the
official pretext for the French invasion and occupation of Morocco. See Jonathan
Katz, Murder in Marrakesh: Émile Mauchamp and the French Colonial Adventure
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).
49. Émile Mauchamp, La sorcellerie au Maroc (oeuvre posthume): Clinique et thérapeu-
tique infantile indigènes (Paris: Dorbon-Ainé, 1911).
50. For Lacapère’s biography, see Hannah-Louise Clark, “Civilization and Syphilization:
A Doctor and His Disease in Colonial Morocco,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine
87 (2013): 86–114.
51. William Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in
Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
52. Georges Lacapère and Pierre Vallery-Radot, Traitement de la syphilis héréditaire et
de la syphilis infantile acquise (Paris: A. Maloine, 1922).

342 ELLEN AMSTER

53. Lacapère, La syphilis arabe, 247, emphasis added. See also Georges Lacapère and
Charles Laurent, “La mortalité infantile au Maroc et ses rapports avec la syphilis,”
Presse Médicale, January 7, 1918.
54. Pierre Remlinger, “Les maladies vénériennes et la prostitution au Maroc,” Annales
d’Hygiène Publique et de Médecine Légale, series 4, no. 19 (February 1913): 97–106.
55. Lacapère, “La lutte contre la syphilis au Maroc,” 54– 57.
56. Installed in a grand traditional Muslim home formerly used by the French consul-
ate, the clinic was funded by the Budget central du service de santé et assistance
publique (campagne antisyphilitic), BGR Carton A 1101.
57. The protectorate agreement forbade direct state intervention in the Muslim family
or traditional medical practices. Amster, Medicine and the Saints, 156– 57.
58. Georges Decrop and Antoine Salle, Album de documents photographiques syphilig-
raphie et de dermatologie marocaines (1921).
59. On disease biography, see Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology
of Medical Perception (New York: Vintage, 1994), 3–21, 54– 62.
60. Lacapère, La syphilis arabe, 241. Lacapère and Laurent examined 272 schoolchil-
dren from franco-arab schools in Fez and found that positive sero-reactions and
physical signs of syphilis did not correspond (Le traitement de la syphilis, 271–72).
61. A., interview by the author, Lemtiyyine clinic, March 13, 1999. The conversation
was conducted in Moroccan colloquial Arabic, but I leave the French words to
illustrate the code-switching of Moroccan medical narrative.
62. Reproductive and child health dominated Moroccan women’s traditional healing
practices. See Aline Reveillaud de Lens, Pratiques des harems marocains: Sorcellerie,
médecine, beauté (Paris: Geuthner, 1925); and Françoise Legey, Essai de folklore
marocain (Paris: Geuthner, 1926).
63. Lacapère and Laurent, Le traitement de la syphilis. In 1918, 9,701 injections were
performed; in 1919, 12,060 injections; and in 1920, 10,934 injections. Decrop and
Salle, Album de documents.
64. If too alkaline, the mixture causes vein thrombosis, and if insufficiently alkaline,
“nitroid crisis.” Other side effects include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, congestive
failure in kidneys or lungs, and the procedure caused death for 1 in 3,000 in 1910,
or 1 in 8,700 in 1911. Lacapère and Laurent, Le traitement de la syphilis, chaps. 1–3.
65. Amster, Medicine and the Saints, 157– 61, 187–90.
66. Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850, trans.
Alan Sheridan (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1990), 254. Enclosure did, how-
ever, enjoy a revival during World War I and under the Vichy regime (332).
67. Constantin Levaditi, La prophylaxie de la syphilis, conférence faite à l’Institut Pasteur
(Paris: Institut Pasteur, 1923).
68. E. Gaucher and H. Gougerot, “Les dangers de la syphilis pour la communauté et
la question du contrôle de l’état,” Annales d’Hygiène Publique et de Médecine Légale
20, no. 5 (1913): 385– 425.

The Syphilitic Arab? 343

69. Gaucher and Gougerot, “Les dangers de la syphilis,” 405.
70. For comparison with French Indochina, see Vu Trong Phung, Luc Xi: Prostitution
and Venereal Disease in Colonial Hanoi, trans. Shaun Kingsley Malarney (Honolulu:
University of Hawai’i Press, 2011).
71. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007).
72. L. Martin, “Description de la ville de Fès, quartier de Keddan,” Revue du Monde
Musulman 12 (December 1909): 625.
73. BMC were also assigned to Moroccan troops and sent with them to wars in Indo-
china. SHAT Carton 3H 2684.
74. Letter from general of Fez region, July 12, 1923, in “Communiqués quotidiens de
la direction du service de santé (mai-dec. 1925); participation aux operations de
1927,” SHAT Carton 3H 797.
75. Procès-Verbal of Hygiene Commission Marrakesh, July 6, 1927, BGR Carton A
1553. The same was done in Fez (BGR Carton 1395) and Meknes (“Note au sujet
de l’organisation de l’assistance médicale indigène à Meknes,” December 18, 1916,
Archives nationales de France, Carton 475 AP 172).
76. Amster, Medicine and the Saints, chap. 4.
77. “Arrêté sur la police des moeurs, Ville de Settat,” November 15, 1916, BGR Carton
A 1504.
78. General of division of Meknes to director of affaires politiques, March 19, 1940,
Archives des affaires étrangères de France [hereafter AAE ] Nantes DI Carton 620.
79. The ʿarifa (literally, “she who knows”), was a loose term for a female government
functionary who directed the women’s prison or insane asylum or who worked in
the sultans’ harems.
80. “P-V du commission d’hygiène et de salubrité urbaine, Marrakech 1922,” BGR
Carton A 646.
81. “P-V du commission d’hygiène, Mogador 31 mars 1922,” BGR Carton A 646.
82. “Quartier de ‘Bab el Khemis’ à Marrakech, rapport de MM . Laroque et Labbé,”
AAE Nantes DI Carton 620.
83. Chief General of Meknes region to Secretary General of the Protectorate, February
11, 1947, AAE Nantes DI 620.
84. Jean Mathieu and P. H. Maury, La prostitution marocaine surveillée de Casablanca:
Le quartier reservé, CHEAM report no. 2546, p. 15. See also Driss Maghraoui, “Gen-
dering Urban Colonial Casablanca: The Case of the Quartier Réservé of Bousbir,”
in Gendering Urban Space in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa, ed. Martina
Ricker and Kamran Asdar Ali (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 17–43; and
Christelle Taraud, La prostitution coloniale: Algérie, Tunisie, Maroc (1830–1962)
(Paris: Editions Payot et Rivages, 2003).
85. The vulnerable women (orphans, homeless) once sold as domestic slaves before
French protectorate rule often became the inmates of French protectorate broth-
els as native prostitutes. Taraud, La prostitution coloniale, 35; Mohammed Ennaji,

344 ELLEN AMSTER

 Soldats, domestiques, et concubines: L’esclavage au Maroc au XIXe siècle (Casablanca:
Editions EDDIF Maroc, 1994).
86. Mathieu and Maury, La prostitution marocaine, 37.
87. Mathieu and Maury, La prostitution marocaine, 33.
88. For a comparative case from the United States, see Elizabeth Alice Clement, Love
for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900–1945 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
89. Mathieu and Maury, La prostitution marocaine, 15.
90. Mathieu and Maury, La prostitution marocaine, 102.
91. “Police dans les villes: Moeurs,” BGR Carton 1504, folder III.
92. Rapport Médecin Inspecteur Rouvillois, “Rapports sur l’organisation du Service
de santé au Maroc, des services hospitaliers, de la prophylaxie” (1936), SHAT
Carton 17S 331.
93. Émile Lepinay and J. Lafforet, “Recherches sur la vitalité du treponème dans
la cavité vaginale de la femme,” Bulletin de l’Institut d’Hygiène du Maroc, July–
September 1932, 89–90.
94. J. Bataillard, “Essai de streptomycinothérapie dans la gonococcie feminine—
Avantage en milieu marocain,” Maroc Médical, February 1952, 116. The “advantage”
here is the enclosure and confinement of the Muslim prostitute.
95. Pierre Potier, Considerations sur la prostitution musulmane en Algérie (Paris: R.
Foulon, 1955).
96. Mathieu and Maury, La prostitution marocaine, 30, 35.
97. Mathieu and Maury, La prostitution marocaine, 128.
98. Mathieu and Maury, La prostitution marocaine, 137. “Prophylaxis cabins” did prove
less successful in Morocco than in France: “In the rooms of the prostitutes in Salé, I
posted the notice, in Arabic, of precautions to take to prevent venereal disease . . .
these posters were all torn down. . . . Because the natives of the countryside do
not know how to read, could the Protectorate Service of Public Health send an
interpreter to translate the poster on the wall in the funduqs to the visitors of
the brothel and to the prostitutes?” Contrôleur civil of Salé to Intendant Général,
January 15, 1919, unnumbered carton, BGR .
99. Sarah Broido, “Abolition de la réglementation de la prostitution: Conférence faite
à l’Union française pour le suffrage des femmes de Casablanca,” Maroc Médical
147 (September 1934): 461– 66, 496– 503.
100.
  A 1955 exposé by American journalist Joachim Joesten and Colin Turnbull of the
London-based Movement for Colonial Freedom brought the French protectorate
brothels under UN scrutiny, but these activists were concerned with European
prostitutes. Joachim Joesten and Colin Turnbull, “Prostitution and the White Slave
Trade in French North Africa,” AAE Nantes Carton Maroc 620 DI .
101.
  Joesten and Turnbull, “Prostitution and the White Slave Trade.”
102.
  Amster, Medicine and the Saints, 190–208.

The Syphilitic Arab? 345

103.
  F. Cismigiu, “Facteurs de mortinatalité et dystocie en milieu marocain,” Maroc
Médical 330 (November 1952): 971–77.
104.
  Georges Decrop, “Où en est la syphilis marocaine?” Maroc Médical, January 1950,
138– 43.
105.
  Decrop, “Où en est la syphilis marocaine?”
106.
  Decrop, “Où en est la syphilis marocaine?” 143.
107.
  Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1991), 6.
108.
  Gyan Prakash, “Body Politic in Colonial India,” in Questions of Modernity, ed.
Timothy Mitchell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 215–16.
109.
  Jamila Bargach, Orphans of Islam: Family, Abandonment, and Secret Adoption in
Morocco (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).

346 ELLEN AMSTER

12 From Auschwitz to Algeria
The Mediterranean Limits of the French Anti–
Concentration Camp Movement, 1952–1959

EMMA KUBY

In the summer of 1957, an international team of Nazi concentration

camp survivors arrived in Algeria to carry out a rare on-the-ground
investigation of detention conditions in French prisons, transit cen-
ters, and internment camps. Their charge: to determine whether “a
structure presenting the characteristics of a concentration camp system
could develop here.”1 The three inspectors—as well as two prominent
French survivors who accompanied them as official observers, Catholic
writer Louis Martin- Chauffier and ethnographer Germaine Tillion—
were representatives of the Commission internationale contre le régime
concentrationnaire (CICRC ), an organization of former Nazi political
prisoners founded in 1950 by French intellectual David Rousset. While
the group’s initial goal was to publicize the existence of forced-labor
camps in the Soviet Union and to highlight their similarity to the noto-
rious Nazi camps, over the years its mandate had expanded. Rousset,
a former Neuengamme and Buchenwald inmate, consistently asserted
that his commission was motivated not by anti- communism but by

347
camp survivors’ natural desire to root out egregiously cruel detention
systems wherever they existed. In the context of the Algerian inquiry
and its aftermath, this claim would be put sorely to the test.
The CICRC ’s investigation has generally been considered a footnote
to the history of attempted humanitarian intervention in the Algerian
War on the part of larger organizations such as the International Com-
mittee of the Red Cross, or an anodyne preface to the more thrilling tale
of Tillion’s independent secret meetings with Front de libération natio-
nale (FLN ) leader Saadi Yacef at the end of the voyage.2 But the inquiry
deserves further analysis on its own terms. The setbacks the commission
encountered are indicative of more general problems—for historians
no less than for historical actors—in applying conceptual models or
“benchmarks” developed in a continental European framework to the
French Mediterranean.3 Specifically, the history of the CICRC ’s venture
suggests a need to temper Michael Rothberg’s optimistic evaluation of
the “productive, intercultural dynamic” set in motion during the era of
decolonization by those who compared French atrocities in North Africa
with recent Nazi crimes in Europe.4 In fact, the optics through which
the CICRC ’s members viewed the repression in Algeria—optics born of
their own experience as political deportees in World War II Europe and
subsequently shaped by anxieties over Soviet and Western European
communism—may have obscured as much as they illuminated.
This is first of all because the investigators’ personal experience
of limit- case suffering did not, in the end, substitute for a historical,
political, and sociocultural understanding of the dynamics of state
violence in the French Mediterranean. Overall, despite paying lip ser-
vice to the notion that Algeria was “French,” members of the CICRC
approached the Mediterranean Sea as a barrier or “rampart” between
France and its North African possessions rather than a cohesive sphere
of French activity.5 France, in their eyes, was primarily defined by its
position within a bipolar Cold War Europe: totalitarianism to the east,
democracy to the west. This east-west orientation left the commis-
sion ill- equipped to perceive the internment of North African political
prisoners as a systemic, trans-Mediterranean French practice that was
constitutive of the imperial state itself rather than as an unfortunate,

348 EMMA KUBY

localized excess on the part of a regime otherwise devoted to protect-
ing individual rights.
Second, the commission was hamstrung by its maximalist defini-
tion of “concentration camps,” developed through consideration of the
Nazi and Soviet cases exclusively. Investigators had little knowledge of
the history of military and civilian internment practices in the French
empire. They were also unfamiliar with colonial precedents for the
Nazi camps—for example, the German camps in Southwest Africa in
the early 1900s—and shared a conviction that Europe’s midcentury
“totalitarian” regimes had given birth to an entirely new kind of insti-
tution that produced incomparable levels of human suffering. Their
single-minded focus on determining whether precisely such institu-
tions were now being constructed in Algeria partially blinded them
to the significance of the very real abuses and atrocities that they did
encounter. Because the CICRC ultimately cleared France from charges
of operating a “concentration camp regime” in Algeria, even its harshest
findings regarding torture, illegal detention, and “disappearances” were
handily instrumentalized by defenders of Algérie française.
The CICRC ’s Mediterranean crossing ultimately destabilized mem-
bers’ conviction that the definitions and standards regarding state
violence that they had collectively developed since 1945 were indeed
universal. It also destroyed the organization, whose American financial
backers abruptly withdrew their support in the wake of the commission’s
unwelcome shift of focus. Even without the loss of funding, the inquiry
would likely have spelled the end of the CICRC . Some of its more con-
servative French members resigned in protest of the criticism directed
at France; meanwhile, left-leaning and anticolonialist participants lost
interest in the organization as they realized that framing protest of the
Algerian War around the issue of “concentration camps” was limiting.
Indeed, it was only after the CICRC collapsed that Martin-Chauffier,
Tillion, and Rousset offered their most meaningful contributions to the
literature of dissent against the war. Their earlier difficulties should
not be read as personal failings. Rather, they should serve as a signal
of the perils of assuming that concepts with long-familiar continental
European referents—“concentration camp,” “internment,” “political

From Auschwitz to Algeria 349

prisoner”—can be unproblematically mapped onto imperial histories
or alternative geographies without fundamentally rethinking the con-
cepts themselves.

Internment policy formed an integral part of the administrative and

legal apparatus of the “state of exception” that France created in Algeria
beginning in the nineteenth century. This apparatus was dramatically
expanded in the course of the Algerian War. In addition to the vast,
miserable “regroupment camps” managed by the military’s Sections
administratives spécialisées, to which roughly two million Algerian men,
women, and children were displaced by 1962, the French also erected a
dizzying constellation of internment facilities for political prisoners and
“suspects”—none of whom had been subject to judicial proceedings.
These entities included centres d’hébergement (a euphemism for large
civil internment camps on both sides of the Mediterranean) as well as a
complex taxonomy of holding centers under military authority: centres
de triage et de transit, centres militaires d’internés, and centres de réédu-
cation.6 The legal rationale for administrative or military detainment
of Algerians in these “centers” rested at first on “state of emergency”
legislation from April 3, 1955, then later on a government decree imme-
diately following the promulgation of the “Special Powers” law of March
16, 1956. According to Sylvie Thénault, by August 1960 there were at
least seven thousand inmates in civil detention “centers” and at least
thirteen thousand in military facilities.7 Many thousands more had
already cycled through for stretches of weeks, months, or years before
being released.
Cognizant of the overwhelmingly negative connotations that the
term “camp” had acquired in Western Europe after World War II—
even when it was disassociated from the still more damning adjective
concentrationnaire—French officials took great care to use different
language to label the mushrooming array of Algerian internment centers.
Indeed, the National Assembly appended a line to the 1955 law explic-
itly forbidding “the creation of camps” in Algeria. The euphemism of
“centers,” however, fooled no one: as Inspector General G. Ciosi wrote
in a report on the earliest civil internment sites, “It is childish to want

350 EMMA KUBY

to play with words. The absence of barbed wire does not deceive.”8 In
the National Assembly, Socialist Christian Pineau offhandedly described
the installations not merely as “camps” but as “concentration camps.”9
Though few went this far, the agglomerations of prisoners housed in
tents or barracks, under armed guard, and (whatever Ciosi claimed)
often surrounded by barbed-wire fences certainly qualified as intern-
ment camps according to any commonsense definition of the period.
As such, they aroused the attention of David Rousset and the CICRC .
Rousset, an ex-Trotskyist who upon his return from Buchenwald had
authored two influential analyses of the Nazi camp experience, L’univers
concentrationnaire and Les jours de notre mort, had issued an “Appeal”
to fellow non-Jewish “political” survivors in 1949 demanding that they
bear witness to a parallel “concentration camp universe” in the USSR.10
Concentration camps, Rousset charged, constituted an unparalleled
mechanism of human abjection, “incomparable with other political evils
that humanity can fear.”11 Survivors possessed a duty to unmask and
condemn such camps wherever they existed. With quiet encouragement
from the British Foreign Office and eventually from U.S. government
agents, Rousset officially founded the CICRC in 1950; the organization,
headquartered in Brussels, drew delegates from the former deportee
communities of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Norway,
and Denmark, along with republican Spaniards in exile. Despite its
high-minded language, the group was perceived by much of the French
left as a crude Cold War propaganda front, intended to smear the Soviet
Union through drawing provocative parallels with Nazism.
Few were surprised, therefore, when at the CICRC ’s April 1951 meet-
ing in Brussels, delegates adopted a definition of “concentration camp”
that appeared deliberately crafted to highlight similarities between the
Nazi and Soviet detention regimes. Three criteria, they decreed, all had
to be present for a given holding center to qualify as a genuine camp
de concentration: “arbitrary privation of liberty; massive forced labor
for the profit of the State; inhumane detention conditions.”12 While
Rousset and the CICRC did not deny Nazi anti-Semitism or insist that
their own experiences had been indistinguishable from those of Jewish
inmates, they viewed the Nazi camps as first and foremost institutions

From Auschwitz to Algeria 351

of political repression. The group rejected any categorical distinction
between concentration camps and death camps and did not insist on
racism and genocidal or exterminationist policies as necessary char-
acteristics of “the camps,” since these features appeared to them to be
absent in the Soviet gulag.13 Nor did they emphasize the genealogy of
the modern camp phenomenon, in particular the use and discourse of
“concentration camps” in turn- of-the-century imperial settings such as
British South Africa, Spanish Cuba, German Southwest Africa, and the
Philippines during the Philippine-American War. Rather, the delegates
treated concentration camps as a recent, ex nihilo product of European
“totalitarianism.”14
Left-leaning French intellectuals in late 1949 and the early 1950s
charged that Rousset and his new organization were implicitly treating
the USSR as the sole remaining global offender against human dig-
nity, and thereby excusing the sins of the West—prominently including
imperialism and colonialism. For example, in a piece for Combat titled
“Sweep in Front of Our Own Door,” Buchenwald survivor Claude Bourdet
insisted that “We are French and first of all responsible, it seems to me,
for what our country does. ‘Political’ prisons, police detentions—don’t
we have some of those ourselves right now, in Madagascar and Indo-
china, without even considering what is going on in North Africa?”15
Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty meanwhile suggested that
with certain (unspecified) “necessary nuances,” all colonies could be
thought of as “the work camps of the democracies.” Rousset’s rubric for
defining a “concentration camp” masked this deeper truth, they wrote;
thus it offered undeserved “absolution” to “the capitalist world.”16
Surprisingly, however, in the early 1950s the CICRC proved energetic
in denying any such absolution to the West. Partially as a strategic coun-
ter to such stinging initial criticism, the group drafted and made good
on a pledge to investigate the possible existence of concentration camps
“in all countries and under all circumstances, without being stopped
by political, economic, or social considerations.”17 In the early 1950s it
carried out assessments of detention conditions not only in the USSR
and China but also in Greece and Spain. In January 1953, moreover, after
the Union générale tunisienne du travail (UGTT ) appealed to Rousset,

352 EMMA KUBY

CICRC delegates Georges André (Belgium), Maurice Bruyninckx (Bel-
gium), and Benjamin Stomps (Netherlands), accompanied by Rousset
and the organization’s legal expert, Théo Bernard, led an inquiry into
detention facilities in Tunisia. Tunisian unrest occupied a modest place
in French public consciousness in 1952 and 1953; consequently the inves-
tigation was far less politically charged than the Algeria inquiry that
would follow several years later, and garnered little media attention.
Nevertheless, the CICRC encountered significant and telling difficulties
in this first attempt to analyze state violence in the French Mediter-
ranean using a conceptual framework grounded in intra-European
conflicts. First, an inquiry oriented toward providing a yes-or-no answer
to the question of whether “concentration camps” on the Nazi model
existed in Tunisia was poorly conceived to address the wide-ranging
realities of political repression in the French protectorate.18 Employing
the CICRC ’s three-point definition, the investigators swiftly concluded
that Tunisian internment facilities possessed no characteristics that
merited comparison to Nazi concentration camps. In the limited media
coverage their report received, this finding entirely overshadowed the
commission’s trumpeting of the many distressing practices that the
delegates did encounter, including the use of “genuine tortures” against
prisoners.19 It also permitted defenders of French Tunisia to express
histrionic offense that the commission had come to the region in the
first place: “Even if the analogy between [Tunisian internment camp]
Bordj-Le-Boeuf and Buchenwald or the Siberian mines did not cross your
mind, you had better believe that the simple fact of your coming here
has given credence to this calumny. . . . In the name of all the sufferings
that Nazi terror and now Soviet terror gave rise to, do you sincerely
believe that you are doing good work?”20
Second, the survivor-investigators understood little about the dynam-
ics of Tunisian society. Even the participant most manifestly troubled by
what he witnessed during the investigation, Bernard, failed to analyze
current French practices in light of the substantial history of political
repression in the protectorate, falling halfheartedly back on the notion
that what was happening in Tunisia was perhaps the very “beginnings”
of a “concentration camp regime” on the CICRC ’s Nazi/Soviet model,

From Auschwitz to Algeria 353

rather than a relatively unsurprising chapter in the ongoing chronicle
of French detention practices in North Africa.21 The other investigators
read France’s actions in Tunisia as temporary departures from demo-
cratic, rights- centric norms. “A tradition of democratic countries,” in
contrast to totalitarian ones, they lectured in their concluding statement,
“which has never given way since the French Declaration of the Rights
of Man, wills that in penal matters the respect for individual liberty
takes precedence over the concern for repression.”22 By this statement
the CICRC assimilated the Tunisian protectorate—and, indeed, French
overseas empire since 1789—to outposts of French “democracy,” not
places where “the concern for repression” had quite often trumped
“the respect for individual liberty.” Thus, even as the group proudly
pointed to its willingness to conduct an examination of French Tunisia
as evidence of its impartiality, its continental Cold War rubric of a world
divided into “democracies” and “totalitarian regimes” masked Tunisian
realities, rendering the French Mediterranean less, not more, legible.

These problems were exponentially intensified in the course of the 1957

Algerian inquiry. Algeria, after all, was treated in official discourse as
an integral part of France itself, a trans-Mediterranean extension of the
nation. This sensibility meant that the territory’s fate concerned French
political elites and the broader public to a much greater extent than
that of Tunisia. Thus the CICRC ’s investigation there, in the midst of the
Battle of Algiers (1956–1957), garnered vastly more attention, anxiety,
and criticism than did their sober Tunisian “White Book.” Moreover, a
belief that Algeria was in some limited sense “France” and that its occu-
pants of European origin were “Frenchmen”—or, as Martin-Chauffier
put it, “Algerian almost like I am Breton”—shaped the perceptions of
the investigators themselves, heightening the reluctance the commission
had already demonstrated in Tunisia to interrogate whether its concep-
tual apparatus remained useful in the French Mediterranean space.23
In particular, a disinclination to consider Algeria’s history as a colonial
regime made the nature of the relationship between the violence of the
“rebellion” and that of the detention system largely indecipherable to
the investigators. Moreover, in Algeria to an even greater extent than

354 EMMA KUBY

in Tunisia, the rigid yes-or-no rubric for determining whether “concen-
tration camps” were present proved inadequate to making sense of the
abuses taking place.
Rousset, who, despite having earned most French leftists’ contempt
had never ceased to identify as a fervent anticolonialist, became alarmed
early in the war about reports published in venues such as Témoignage
Chrétien describing illegal arrests of Algerians and inhumane prison
conditions.24 By 1955, at his insistence, the CICRC began researching
possible abuses in Algeria; in early 1956 it announced that it had offi-
cially “opened the Algerian dossier,” publishing a preliminary report
in its journal, Saturne, on “flagrant illegalities in the means of arrest-
ing and detaining Muslim Algerians.”25 The report generated an ugly
rift in the organization’s leadership: in a series of notes to Rousset in
the spring of 1956, the prominent journalist and Auschwitz and Buch-
enwald survivor Rémy Roure, one of the CICRC ’s earliest supporters,
expressed dismay. To hunt for abuses in French Algeria, he charged,
was “at the least inopportune.”26 The CICRC ’s mission, according to
Roure, had been to “target above all the concentration camp system as
applied by totalitarian governments. . . . But the investigation that has
begun concerning Algeria throws into relief, first of all, just or unjust
accusations against France. . . . Your reasoning in regards to principles
is, as far as I am concerned, too absolute.”27 Rousset was unmoved, and
Roure resigned from the CICRC , an early indication of the fatal blow
the inquiry would ultimately deal to the commission as an institution.
If Rousset’s determination to investigate in Algeria alienated old
friends, it hardly reconciled him with longtime enemies. In late 1955 the
CICRC entered into dialogue with the most important antiwar organiza-
tion to have emerged at that point, the Comité d’action des intellectuels
contre la poursuite de la guerre en Afrique du Nord, hoping that Nazi
camp survivors might be sent to study the Algerian case at its behest.28
This was not to be: as Comité d’action cofounder Edgar Morin recalled
disgustedly in his 1959 Autocritique, communists and Sartreians balked
at any association with “the ignoble Rousset” or his “despicable Com-
mission” and refused to countenance the partnership.29 Inured at this
point to such treatment, Rousset took the rejection with good humor.30

From Auschwitz to Algeria 355

But in fact the consequences were grave: had the CICRC been able to
complete its inquiry with the direct backing of the Comité d’action,
the delegates’ findings on torture and disappearances could have been
quarried, reshaped, and publicized for maximum effect by figures like
Sartre, Daniel Guérin, and Claude Bourdet, who viewed violence in
Algeria through an explicitly anti-imperial lens.
Rebuffed by the Comité d’action, however, the CICRC fell back on its
familiar network of support, the community of French non- communist
camp survivors. This ensured ahead of time that the inquiry would be
geared rigidly toward determining whether French Algeria was in dan-
ger of developing “concentration camps,” and also virtually guaranteed
that its conclusions would be interpreted by the public as a reassuring
response to survivors’ concerns on this narrow point. The CICRC voted
at its April 6, 1957, meeting to open a full-blown investigation on behalf
of four of the five key French survivors’ associations; the leadership of
the abstaining fifth organization, the Fédération nationale des dépor-
tés et internés résistants et patriotes (FNDIRP ), had become wholly
aligned with the French Communist Party in early 1950 as a direct
result of its opposition to Rousset’s demand for an investigation of the
Soviet camps.31 It could not consider supporting any project the CICRC
might undertake, although members certainly shared fellow survivors’
concerns over detention in Algeria.
The CICRC ’s anti-Soviet credentials hurt it with the Comité d’action
and the FNDIRP , but Rousset found them a great boon in dealing with
the government: his April–June 1957 negotiations with Socialist Pre-
mier Guy Mollet, his Radical successor Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury, and
Minister in Algeria Robert Lacoste for permission to inspect Algerian
internment facilities in what he considered “conditions of total inde-
pendence and full freedom of action” went remarkably smoothly.32 It
appears likely that officials who routinely described the FLN as “totali-
tarian” and darkly insinuated that its fighters were tools of Moscow
or Cairo felt that they had little cause for anxiety about the potential
findings of a commission with the anti- communist ideological bent
of the CICRC —one, moreover, that had already helpfully broadcast
the absence of “concentration camps” in Tunisia. Organs of the press

356 EMMA KUBY

that were supportive of the government’s Algeria policy exhibited no
concerns about Mollet’s wisdom in granting the CICRC investigatory
access: the centrist Catholic La Croix, for example, noted matter- of-
factly, “France doesn’t seem to have much to fear from this report.”33
Although the initial “Dossier” on repression of Algerians published in
Saturne in 1956 had briefly mentioned illegal arrest and detention prac-
tices “both in the metropole . . . and in Algeria,” the CICRC never even
discussed the possibility of studying the procedures by which thousands
of Algerians arrested for “political” activities in metropolitan France
were transferred across the sea to camps in Algeria.34 The investigation
was thus built upon a conception of political detention as an “Algerian”
problem rather than a trans-Mediterranean French practice. The CICRC
also paid no attention to the growing civilian regroupment camps in
Algeria, which already by mid-1957 contained many more people than
did the internment camps.35 The delegates’ definition of “concentration
camps” hinged on an understanding of inmates as political prisoners,
just as they themselves had been in the Nazi camps; this definition could
not accommodate the forced resettlement of large swaths of the rural
Algerian population for purposes of “pacification.” Thus, the commis-
sion set its sights exclusively on the locations within Algeria where its
investigators might encounter detainees held for their association with
the “rebellion.”
This was a limited scope of inquiry, but it was hardly an unambitious
or insignificant one. After all, no other independent inspectors (except
for the Red Cross, which did not make its findings public) had been
permitted to tour the Algerian internment camps at all. The CICRC
was guaranteed the right to question detainees without government
or military representatives present, to travel freely, and to visit all the
sites members wished to see, even those not “officially known” to exist.
Satisfied with these terms, the commission made its arrangements and
appointed its delegates. At the head of the group was Dr. Georges André
of Belgium, one of the founders of the royalist “Secret Army” in the
Belgian Resistance. André, who had also participated in the Tunisian
inquiry, was the president of the CICRC and had long worked closely
with Rousset. Despite these credentials, he was an odd leader for a

From Auschwitz to Algeria 357

mission with the purported goal of investigating whether France was
engaged in building concentration camps: as Tillion recalls, “He adored
the French army—he was in ecstasy before the French army—he was
a Francophile as one can [only] be in Liège.”36 The Norwegian Lise
Børsum , a Ravensbrück survivor, was also a long-term member. A
prolific journalist, she had written extensively about the Nazi camp
experience and the Soviet gulag. The third delegate was Cornelius van
Rij, a Dutch jurist. As a passionate supporter of the nascent European
Economic Community (EEC ), van Rij possessed a decidedly continental
orientation and viewed France through the prism of his hopes for French
leadership within the EEC .
Because CICRC members were barred from participating in inquiries
targeting their own country, Martin-Chauffier and Tillion accompanied
the three others in an informal capacity only. Their role, nonetheless,
was crucial, for they were charged with interacting with French admin-
istrators and military representatives on behalf of the delegation and
smoothing over any troubles that arose. Martin-Chauffier possessed no
particular experience with North African politics that prepared him
for this task, only an idealistic commitment to the goals of the CICRC .
Very close to the French communists in the immediate aftermath of
World War II (Jean Paulhan once sneeringly referred to him as the
party’s “house Christian”), he had nevertheless joined Rousset unhesi-
tatingly in late 1949 and remained an enthusiastic core member of the
group and a frequent Saturne contributor. But he had spent the preced-
ing months preoccupied with Hungary, not Algeria. It was the CICRC
investigation itself, not previous inclinations, that would transform him
into an antiwar activist and ultimately a reluctant advocate of Algerian
independence. Tillion, a Ravensbrück survivor, presented an entirely
different story: an ethnographer who had lived for years among isolated
Algerians in the Aurès before her imprisonment in Ravensbrück, she
was profoundly engaged in the unfolding tragedy of the war from 1954
on as an activist, writer, and social scientist. Most significantly, in 1955,
working with Governor-General Jacques Soustelle, she had launched the
“Social Centers,” a remarkable set of institutions offering social services
as well as educational and vocational training to combat the economic

358 EMMA KUBY

misery (or, as Tillion put it, “pauperization”) that she was convinced
was the underlying source of the conflict.37 In late 1956, at the request
of the Ravensbrück survivors’ federation, the Association nationale des
anciennes déportées et internées de la résistance (ADIR ), she penned
an analysis of the war titled L’Algérie en 1957; ADIR distributed copies
in pamphlet form before the work was published. She readily agreed to
participate in the CICRC inquiry, although in truth it remained periph-
eral to her larger engagement with the Algerian crisis.

Thus on June 18, 1957, the group of non-French delegates and French
observers flew from Paris to Algeria—where, with the important excep-
tion of Tillion, none had ever before set foot. Martin-Chauffier later
described his immediate enchantment upon arriving in sun- dazzled
Algiers: “Nowhere, doubtless, can one find a similar mix of races. They
do not only jostle up against one another, they merge into the same
blood. Arabs, Kabyles, Jews, Spaniards, Italians, Maltese, Provençals,
what do I know? For a ‘Parisian,’ it is impossible to distinguish in this
multicolored, talkative, bustling, good-humored world.”38 His terms
here echoed French humanist discourses of the 1930s and 1940s about
the Mediterranean, prevalent in venues like Cahiers du Sud and Albert
Camus’s early journalism. Christian Bromberger has described the cul-
tural landscape that emerged from the pens of Camus, Jean Ballard,
Gabriel Audisio, and others in this period as a “militant, generous, and
often strongly idealized vision of the Mediterranean as a privileged
sphere for encounters and cultural métissages.”39 This was the glori-
ous realm Martin-Chauffier believed he had discovered in June 1957:
one defined by exhilarating mixture and multiplicity, not by inequality,
conflict, or the exercise of power. He thus admitted freely that he found
it difficult to think clearly about the violence now engulfing Algerian
society: “I notice no sign of anxiety, agitation, or hatred about to explode
among these peaceful, joyous people walking by, whether in Lacoste
shirts or in djellabas . . . . If murder, brutality, fanaticism, or injustice
are leaving deep traces, they are not visible from the outside.”40 Despite
such sentiments, Martin- Chauffier saw himself as at least more willing
to criticize French practices in Algeria than the non-French members of

From Auschwitz to Algeria 359

the team, who, he observed, “love France very much. This sentiment is
so acute that they would be sorry if their scrupulous honesty led them
to any judgment that included a criticism.”41
After several days of bureaucratic wrangling in Algiers, the CICRC
investigators began work in earnest on June 21, at Barberousse prison
and Beni-Messous “triage center.” Over the following two weeks they
visited nine prisons (which housed formally charged or convicted indi-
viduals, not administrative detainees), nine military triage and transit
facilities, and seven centres d’hébergement, as well as Algiers’s Hôpital
Parnet à Hussein-Dey. The group also met with fellow Nazi camp survi-
vor Paul Teitgen, now secretary-general at the Algiers prefecture (though
he would soon publicly resign, dismayed by torture), and paid a visit
to the site of the so- called Melouza massacre, a mass murder carried
out by the FLN in May. At each facility, they met with civil or military
authorities, inspected the premises, and conducted confidential inter-
views with detainees. By the end of the trip they had completed a total
of ninety-two such interviews and had received extensive written mate-
rial from other interned men and women. All this activity was directed
toward determining whether the detention centers were in danger of
developing the characteristics of “concentration camps.”
Consider, for example, the commission’s June 22 visit to Paul-Cazelles
in desolate Aïn Oussera, 120 miles south of Algiers, the most populous
of the civilian camps in the summer of 1957 with nearly two thousand
inmates. “Swarming with mosquitos and scorpions,” and “baking like
a cake in the sun” in 106- degree heat, the camp initially raised alarms
for the CICRC ’s team of survivors. “Barbed wire, watch towers, military
guard—nothing is missing,” wrote Martin- Chauffier. “[It has] all the
appearances of the Nazi concentration camps that all five of us once
knew.” But the inspectors were quickly mollified: “In the interior, how-
ever, nothing of the sort.” Detainees were “not forced to work,” received
letters, were sufficiently fed, and “do not undergo any abuses.”42 Thus,
Martin-Chauffier wrote, “We all agree” that even “the worst Algerian
internment camp,” as Paul-Cazelles was widely reputed to be, “has no
relationship [n’a aucun rapport] with the Nazi concentration camps in
regards to the conditions that are provided for detainees.”43

360 EMMA KUBY

 Yet the commissioners could hardly deny that they saw many things
that troubled them at Paul-Cazelles—and, indeed, at all of the intern-
ment centers they visited. For Martin- Chauffier, a Neuengamme and
Bergen-Belsen survivor, it was apparent that the Algerian camps did
indeed meet one of the CICRC ’s three criteria for a true concentration
camp: “arbitrary privation of liberty” without judicial oversight. The
inmates he encountered in centres d’hébergement and centres de triage
et de transit, Martin-Chauffier acknowledged, were “arrested arbitrarily
without recourse, detained without being able to defend themselves—
because they are not the object of any criminal charges—and without
limit, because their liberation depends on the pleasure of the administra-
tion, without the slightest control.”44 André, Børsum, and van Rij were
displeased as well: their final conclusions, submitted to the government
on July 22, 1957, and published in Le Monde on July 27, criticized French
detention procedures on numerous counts, particularly because “the
duration of the internment is unlimited” and “no avenue of judicial
recourse, no means of defense, is available to the internee or the person
in residence in a triage camp.”45
But this did not change the delegation’s overarching judgment:
according to their three-point definition, there were no “concentration
camps in the proper sense of the term” in Algeria. In truth, this was a
foregone conclusion given the commission’s core beliefs: concentration
camps, according to the CICRC ’s long-elaborated understanding, were
the product of “totalitarian” regimes, not democracies. How to account
for France’s failings, then? In short, they blamed Algerian nationalists:
“In an extraordinary situation, and in the fire of an armed rebellion that
often is accompanied by barbaric acts of terrorism . . . the measures
taken by the authority of the civil or military police [are] not always in
conformity with the principles of respect for the rights of man which
the French Government and all democratic nations claim to follow.”
France’s illegal actions targeting “rebels,” in other words, were pro-
voked by an “emergency.” They did not signify anything broader about
imperial power differentials, patterns of state violence, or the growth
of military authority in French Algeria: they were merely “breaches”
of the otherwise democratic values of the French state.46

From Auschwitz to Algeria 361

 The delegates treated evidence of torture in a similar fashion. In
many interviews they heard graphic claims of horrific abuses, often
accompanied by displays of scars or other injuries. All the investiga-
tors took these charges seriously and recorded meticulous notes on
them, compiled in a lengthy internal report. In some instances they
expressed a modicum of doubt about the accusations they heard, or
openly speculated about the truthfulness of the victim (“Bears the trace
of four scars . . . which he attributes to burn marks from electricity.
It’s possible . . .”). But most of their notes were matter-of-fact: “Bears
scars on both wrists (consequence of hanging)”; ‘Rope knots have left
a scar on his right wrist”; “He was subjected to electricity (head of the
penis, testicles, ear, skull, and neck). He presents scars on the ankles
and wrists.”47 Tillion, who personally knew some of the interviewees
from her previous work, remembers that she was “shattered” after the
conversations.48 Martin-Chauffier, deeply influenced by Tillion (over the
course of the trip he came to regard her as a saintly figure, “torn apart
by her love for all the Algerians”), was indignant as well.49
Despite such sentiments, the commission was ultimately hamstrung
in its condemnation of torture because of its commitment to a certain
understanding of the “concentration camp universe.” Since most torture
took place at secret sites before detainees were deposited in officially
acknowledged centres, the fact of such gross abuses did not alter the
delegation’s determination that French internment installations in Alge-
ria failed to meet the criterion of “inhumane treatment” necessary for
a “concentration camp” to be recognized. Thus, confronted for two
weeks with a gruesome parade of detainees covered in scars, lesions,
and bruises, the commission responded, bizarrely, by assuring them-
selves and the French public that the damage had been done somewhere
else, where they had no access. For example, assessing Barberousse
prison, the delegation noted in their internal report that a prisoner had
described it as “a paradise after an experience at the Para[trooper]s’
place.”50 This led them in their published conclusions not to deplore their
lack of access to secret military torture sites but rather to celebrate that
in the prisons, at least, “it seems that the comportment of the guards

362 EMMA KUBY

is judged satisfactory.”51 Martin- Chauffier assured readers of Le Figaro
that “[civilian camp] internees do not complain of having suffered any
abuse (at least in the camp itself ).”52
Nevertheless, the commission did speak out quite explicitly about
torture and unofficial executions of detainees. Indeed, their published
conclusions contained one section with the subheading “Les tortures”
and another titled “Les disparitions.”53 But given the CICRC ’s long-
standing insistence that other crimes were of less import than the evil
of “the concentration camp universe,” these accusations appeared sec-
ondary next to the commission’s exculpatory statement that Algeria did
not contain concentration camps. As Rousset would explain in a 1959
essay, torture, “as serious as it is,” was simply not an offense on par
with “the camps”—that is, except if it functioned as part of a massive,
systematized project of abjection, becoming “integrated with two other
factors: permanent administration and [forced] labor.”54 The CICRC did
not perceive that this was the case in Algeria, insisting to the contrary
that “the delegation is convinced that [torture and disappearances] are
not widespread.”55 Such a view depended not only on an idealized image
of France but also on an idyllic view of Algeria as a quintessentially
Mediterranean land of peaceful métissage populated by what Martin-
Chauffier referred to as “people made for joy and harmony.” In the midst
of the conflict, with little knowledge of their own about Algerian society,
the CICRC members (with the exception of Tillion) avidly imbibed
descriptions of the local community, “Muslims as well as Europeans,”
as “vivacity itself, proud, hardworking, gay, quick to explode, quickly
calm again, eager to live, to try things, ambitious, not spiteful.” Such
portrayals of a multicultural populace whose divisions amounted to
squabbles among impetuous children bolstered delegates’ sense that
the horrific violence of the present was merely a “bad dream.”56 Thus
the CICRC ’s conclusions ended on a note of hope: the very fact that
their investigation had been permitted by the French authorities, they
wrote, provided a “guarantee that where breaches of the principle of
liberty may have been committed, such breaches are not able to become
the rule of the repression.”57

From Auschwitz to Algeria 363

The CICRC ’s findings, in particular their unequivocal insistence that
some of the detainees they met bore marks of torture, provided a good
deal of fodder for antiwar activists.58 Ultimately, however, the com-
mission’s work was easily instrumentalized by proponents of Algérie
française. Because they had framed their inquiry around the question
of whether a “concentration camp universe” was developing in French
Algeria, the results could be reported as unadulterated good news for
the French government. The Socialist paper Le Populaire, for example,
relayed the CICRC ’s findings under the headline “Algeria: ‘No Concen-
tration Camp Regime,’ Certifies the Delegation of Former Deportees.”59
The story that followed did not mention torture. On the right, L’Aurore
celebrated that the report provided “precise facts” favorable to France
to counter various scurrilous “vague allegations of Arab orators.”60 Le
Figaro offered an article titled “There Is No Concentration Camp Regime
in Algeria.” This piece did allude to physical “abuses” but insisted that
they were not “systematic.” It also informed readers that “Overall, and
speaking for himself, Doctor André believes that the accusations leveled
against the French authorities in Algeria are excessive [abusives].”61
Surprisingly, it was not André but the Norwegian Lise Børsum, more
shaken than anyone had realized by evidence of FLN atrocities that
she had seen at Melouza, whose personal intervention most mitigated
the commission’s charges against France. Børsum granted multiple
interviews in late summer in which she rationalized French violence
in Algeria by insisting that it was an emergency response to the use of
terrorism by nationalist “rebels.” Thus Le Figaro, for example, quoted
Børsum explaining that the “irregularities” the commission had reported
on the French side were “produced especially after strong waves of ter-
ror” by the FLN .62 Le Monde noted her pointed contrast between the
magnanimous access to prison camps that the French government had
granted the CICRC and the FLN ’s refusal to work with them.63 Most
damaging were her statements in La Croix:

A democracy finds itself in a nearly hopeless situation in confronting

terrorism. [The CICRC ’s] task only touched on a minimal aspect of
the Algerian tragedy, while the entire territory is struck by a disaster

364 EMMA KUBY

 without end. Daily life is saturated with panic. Terrorists throw
bombs everywhere. . . . They prefer to kill their own compatriots
and their families, in a manner so cruel that it is necessary to go far
back in history to find a similar cruelty.64

Børsum’s horror at the FLN ’s atrocities was heartfelt. But by sug-

gesting that terrorism created an impossible limit-situation in which
democracies might be exempted from norms such as the prohibition
on torture of their own citizens, she produced a misleading narrative of
cause and effect in the Algerian conflict, in which French state violence
in the territory had emerged only as a desperate counter to terrorism
and was only a “minimal aspect” of the war. This familiar explanation
for torture—Françoise Giroud at L’Express referred to it derisively as
the “He started it, Teacher!” defense—was a common refrain by 1957;
the antiwar movement was already well accustomed to parlaying it.65
But even the savviest antiwar activists could do little with the CICRC ’s
findings once Børsum’s personal comments were reported.
In any event, the CICRC ’s report did not remain in the French public
eye for long: its findings were quickly overshadowed by those of the
government-appointed Commission de sauvegarde des droits et liber-
tés individuels. Without established ties to any broader community of
opposition to the war and without having been granted any powers
whatsoever by the French government beyond investigatory access, the
CICRC possessed no obvious next step. (It is worth noting that even if
Rousset had managed to gain sponsorship from the Comité d’action,
that body had in any case dissolved in 1957, torn apart not by differ-
ing visions for Algeria but by struggles over Hungary. Once again, the
politics of anti-communism trumped the politics of anticolonialism.)
Saturne published a few more pieces on the Algerian conflict—Théo
Bernard’s harsh explications of the legal framework of exceptional-
ity were particularly noteworthy—but overall French members of the
CICRC spoke out about the war after mid-1957 as individuals, not as
members of a body of camp survivors. Freed from the imperative of
comparing detention in Algeria with their own experiences in the Nazi
camps or with their vision of the Soviet gulag, figures like Rousset

From Auschwitz to Algeria 365

and Martin- Chauffier produced increasingly incisive analyses of the
conflict and the trans-Mediterranean violence it generated. Tillion’s
activism took myriad forms, from her astonishing attempt to engineer a
“civil truce” with Saadi Yacef in the immediate aftermath of the CICRC
inquiry to her passionate 1960 Les ennemis complémentaires, a mul-
tifaceted exploration of the French-Algerian relationship and of the
“terrorism, counter-terrorism, torture, secret executions, assassinations,
official, exemplary assassinations,” and other forms of violence that
continued to characterize the terrible war.66 She also came to recognize
the gravity of regroupment camp policy, and after the war had ended
she prefaced Michel Cornaton’s 1967 study of those institutions. As for
the CICRC , Roure’s 1956 departure had been a harbinger of the organi-
zation’s inability to weather the storms of decolonization: funders who
had been enthusiastic about the earlier project of denouncing Soviet
wrongdoing disappeared in the aftermath of the Algerian inquiry. The
CICRC closed down its publishing wing in 1958 and ceased to exist in
1960.
Does the group’s inability to shape the French debate on Algeria sug-
gest that Nazi camp survivors’ understanding of state violence, born of
their own lived experience, had been rendered passé by the challenges of
civil conflict in North Africa? As France’s attention shifted to the Medi-
terranean sphere during the 1950s, did intellectual categories shaped
primarily in relation to German atrocities, Cold War politics, and East-
West tensions meet their limits and prove inoperable? Glibly affirmative
answers to these questions would oversimplify what was a more complex
reality. After all, a preoccupation with l’univers concentrationnaire and
a theoretical framework that interpreted arbitrary detention of politi-
cal prisoners as one of the gravest abuses a regime could commit were
precisely what permitted the CICRC ’s members to shed any light at all
on the shadowy realm of internment in Algeria. In turning their attention
to conditions of detention when more radical activists were primarily
concerned with torture, they anticipated by decades historians’ recent
insistence that “ordinary violence,” not only spectacular atrocities, must
be integral to our understanding of the French presence in North Africa
in general and the Algerian War in particular.67

366 EMMA KUBY

 However, in the end the CICRC investigators were not well served
by their commitment to an inflexible (and ahistorically intra-European)
notion of “concentration camps,” or by their misplaced confidence that
preexisting philosophies shaped deliberately to aid Cold War political
projects could map easily onto complex Tunisian and Algerian realities.
It is hardly productive—or just—for historians to scold past actors for
such shortcomings as if from a position of moral superiority. Instead, we
might consider this saga of a troubled project undertaken by insightful
and well-intentioned individuals valuable for the warning it offers schol-
ars today. The lesson certainly is not that “multidirectional memory”
and projects of comparison between different regimes of violence are
inevitably fruitless, obfuscatory, or Eurocentrist. Rather, it is that if
familiar concepts in continental European history are to be analytically
useful in framing the French Mediterranean, we cannot assume that
their meanings are already immutably fixed and that they can now func-
tion as mere tools, easy to apply mechanically within changed spatial
boundaries. Such a process runs the risk of making history less legible,
not more so, while impeding the difficult work of developing sharper
lenses, clearer frameworks, and more meaningful categories of analysis.
Martin-Chauffier, for one, began to recognize this by the end of 1957. He
would have signed the CICRC ’s report if he was not formally barred from
doing so as a Frenchman, he told readers of Saturne, “but in adding, ‘to
be continued.’ Not to supplement an inquiry so well led, but rather to
enlarge its object” by moving beyond the constrictive rubric of seeking
out concentration camps. “We are never finished knowing, nor under-
standing,” he concluded.68 And in fact, his own long, difficult attempt to
know and understand the violence of the Algerian War had just begun.

NOTES
1. “Conclusions de la délégation d’enquête en Algérie,” July 25, 1957, David Rousset
Archives [hereafter DRA ], F Delta 1880/99/8, Bibliothèque de documentation
internationale contemporaine, Nanterre, France [hereafter BDIC ]. The “Conclusions”
were published in Le Monde on July 27, 1957, as “Les délégués de la Commission
contre le régime concentrationnaire publient leur rapport sur l’Algérie.”
2. See especially Raphaëlle Branche, “Entre droit humanitaire et intérêts politiques:
Les missions algériennes du CICR ,” Revue Historique 301, no. 1 (January–March

From Auschwitz to Algeria 367

 1999): 101–25; Raphaëlle Branche, “La commission de sauvegarde pendant la guerre
d’Algérie: Chronique d’un échec annoncé,” Vingtième Siècle 61 (January–March
1999): 14–29; and Raphaëlle Branche, “La seconde commission de sauvegarde des
droits et libertés individuels,” in La justice en Algérie, 1830–1962, ed. L’association
française pour l’histoire de la justice (Paris: Documentation française, 2005), 237–45.
See also Fabian Klose, Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence (Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 133–38. On the CICRC voyage as a
prelude to Tillion’s meetings with Yacef, see Donald Reid, Germaine Tillion, Lucie
Aubrac, and the Politics of Memories of the French Resistance (Newcastle: Cambridge
Scholars, 2007), 76–83; Nancy Wood, Germaine Tillion, une femme mémoire, d’une
Algérie à l’autre (Paris: Autrement, 2004), 196–239; Fabien Sacriste, Germaine Til-
lion, Jacques Berque, Jean Servier et Pierre Bourdieu: Des ethnologues dans la guerre
d’indépendance algérienne (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011), 73– 90.
3. On benchmarks, see Mark Mazower, “Violence and the State in the Twentieth
Century,” American Historical Review 107, no. 4 (October 2002): 1160.
4. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age
of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 3.
5. The formulation of the Mediterranean as a “rampart” comes from mathematician
and anti-torture activist Laurent Schwartz, who warned in May 1958 that soon
“the Mediterranean will have ceased to be a rampart in the shelter of which the
French of the metropole can still judge the Audin Affair as spectators.” Schwartz,
“Préface” to Pierre Vidal-Naquet, L’Affaire Audin, 1957–1978 (Paris: Minuit, 1989),
57– 58.
6. Sylvie Thénault, Violence ordinaire dans l’Algérie coloniale: Camps, internements,
assignations à résidence (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2012); Benjamin Stora, “La politique
des camps d’internement,” in L’Algérie des français, ed. Charles-Robert Ageron
(Paris: Seuil, 1999), 295–299; Klose, Human Rights, 163–71.
7. Sylvie Thénault, “Interner en République: Le cas de la France en guerre d’Algérie,”
Amnis 3 (2003), http://amnis.revues.org/513.
8. Thénault, Violence ordinaire, 278.
9. Christian Pineau, débats à l’Assemblée nationale, July 28, 1955, quoted in Raphaëlle
Branche, “Comment rétablir la norme en temps d’exception: L’IGCI /CICDA pendant
la guerre d’Algérie,” in Contrôler les agents du pouvoir, ed. Laurent Feller (Limoges:
Pulim, 2004), 300.
10. On the “Appeal” and ensuing controversy, see Emma Kuby, “In the Shadow of the
Concentration Camp: David Rousset and the Limits of Apoliticism in Postwar
French Thought,” Modern Intellectual History 11, no. 1 (April 2014): 147–73.
11. Déclaration de M. David Rousset, Sténotypie (Cabinet Bluet), fasciscule 1, Cour
d’Appel de Paris, 11ème chambre, Audience du 3 juin 1953, DRA , F Delta 1880/56/3/2,
BDIC .
12. Commission internationale contre le régime concentrationnaire, Livre blanc sur
la détention politique en Tunisie (Paris: Pavois, 1953), 83.

368 EMMA KUBY

13. See Kuby, “In the Shadow”; Samuel Moyn, “From l’Univers Concentrationnaire
to the Jewish Genocide: Pierre Vidal-Naquet and the Treblinka Controversy,” in
After the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar
France, ed. Julian Bourg (Lanham MD : Lexington Books, 2004), 277–324; Samuel
Moyn, A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France (Waltham
MA : Brandeis University Press, 2005), 52–7.
14. See Annette Wieviorka, “L’expression ‘camp de concentration’ au 20e siècle,”
Vingtième Siècle 54 (April–June 1997): 4–12; Jonathan Hyslop, “The Invention of
the Concentration Camp: Cuba, Southern Africa, and the Philippines, 1896–1907,”
South African Historical Journal 63, no. 2 (June 2011): 251–76; Benjamin Madley,
“From Africa to Auschwitz: How German South West Africa Incubated Ideas and
Methods Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe,” European His-
tory Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2005): 429– 64.
15. Claude Bourdet, “Balayer devant notre porte,” Combat, November 14, 1949.
16. Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre, “Les jours de notre vie,” Les Temps
Modernes 51 (January 1950): 1163– 65.
17. “Un second dossier sur la détention en Algérie,” Saturne 7 (March–May 1956): 49.
18. As the UGTT ’s assistant secretary general ruefully noted when he petitioned the
group to intervene, “The military and police repression in their larger sense, as
well as the atrocities committed in the course of ‘search operations’ . . . would
not be in the direct jurisdiction of your commission.” CICRC , Livre blanc, 7.
19. CICRC , Livre blanc, 85.
20. Editorial, Tunisie-France, January 24, 1953, reproduced in CICRC , Livre blanc,
155– 56.
21. CICRC , Livre blanc, 48. On political internment in Tunisia, see Mary Lewis, Divided
Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881–1938 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2014), 151– 62 and 174.
22. CICRC , Livre blanc, 85.
23. Louis Martin-Chauffier, “Journal de voyage en marge d’une enquête (III),” Saturne
17 (January–March 1958): 16.
24. Rousset’s personal position is evident in “Le préalable algérien,” Demain, January
3–7, 1957, which explicitly advocated independence.
25. “Un premier dossier sur la répression en Algérie,” Saturne 6 (January–February
1956): 3– 4.
26. Roure to Rousset, March 22, 1956, DRA , F Delta 1880/99/2, BDIC .
27. Roure to Rousset, April 20, 1956, DRA , F Delta 1880/99/2, BDIC .
28. On the Comité d’action, see James D. Le Sueur, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and
Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 35– 61.
29. Edgar Morin, Autocritique (Paris: Julliard, 1959), 190– 92; “Que veut le Comité
d’action des intellectuels français?” Saturne 6 (January–February 1956): 101–3.
30. Rousset to Tillion, January 12, 1956, DRA , F Delta 1880/99/2, BDIC .

From Auschwitz to Algeria 369

31. The four organizations that requested the CICRC investigation had supported Rous-
set’s 1949 “Appeal.” They were the Féderation nationale des déportés et internés de
la résistance; the Union nationale des associations de déportés, internés et familles
de disparus; the Association nationale des anciennes déportées et internées de
la résistance; and the Association nationale des familles de résistants et d’otages
morts pour la France.
32. David Rousset to Georges André, June 17, 1957, DRA , F Delta 1880/99/1, BDIC .
33. “Designation imminente des membres de la commission,” La Croix, April 27, 1957.
34. “Un premier dossier,” 3–4. On these transfers, which continued even after an October
7, 1958, ordinance normalized administrative internment in metropolitan France,
see Thénault, Violence ordinaire, 291–93. Thénault attributes this practice to lack
of capacity in metropolitan camps and also a perception among administrators
that “troublemakers” would be better dealt with in Algeria.
35. On the regroupment camps see especially Michel Cornaton, Les camps de regroupe-
ment de la guerre d’Algérie (1967; Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998); Charles-Robert Ageron,
“Une dimension de la guerre d’Algérie: Les ‘regroupements’ de populations,” in
Militaire et guérilla durant la guerre d’Algérie, ed. Jean- Charles Jauffret and Maurice
Vaïsse (Brussels: Complèxe, 2001), 327– 62; Fabien Sacriste, “Surveiller et mod-
erniser: Les camps de ‘regroupement’ de ruraux pendant la guerre d’indépendance
algérienne,” Métropolitiques, February 15, 2012, http://www.metropolitiques.eu
/Surveiller-et-moderniser-Les-camps.html.
36. Michel Reynaud, L’enfant de la rue et la dame du siècle: Entretiens inédits avec
Germaine Tillion (Paris: Tirésias, 2010), 243.
37. Germaine Tillion, L’Algérie en 1957 (Paris: Minuit, 1957).
38. Louis Martin-Chauffier, “Journal de voyage en marge d’une enquête,” Saturne 15
(October–November 1957): 7.
39. Serge Bromberger and Tzvetan Todorov, Germaine Tillion, une ethnologue dans le
siècle (Arles: Actes Sud, 2002), 55.
40. Martin-Chauffier, “Journal de voyage,” 7.
41. Martin-Chauffier, “Journal de voyage,” 10.
42. Louis Martin-Chauffier, “Journal de voyage en marge d’une enquête (II),” Saturne
16 (December 1957): 9.
43. Martin-Chauffier, “Journal de voyage (II),” 11.
44. Martin-Chauffier, “Journal de voyage (II),” 11.
45. “Conclusions de la délégation d’enquête.”
46. “Conclusions de la délégation d’enquête.”
47. “Rapport de la commission d’enquête,” DRA , F Delta 1880/99/7, BDIC .
48. Reynaud, L’enfant de la rue, 244.
49. Martin-Chauffier, “Journal de voyage (II),” 9.
50. “Rapport de la commission d’enquête.”
51. “Conclusions de la délégation d’enquête.”

370 EMMA KUBY

52. Louis Martin-Chauffier, “Sept centres d’hébergement, neuf centres de triage visités
en Algérie,” Le Figaro, August 13, 1957.
53. They did not, however, discuss sanctioned executions, despite Tillion’s belief that
these were a “decisive” factor in the escalation of the war’s violence. Germaine
Tillion, Les ennemis complémentaires (Paris: Minuit, 1960), 171. See also Louis
Martin-Chauffier, “Declaration au Monde,” Le Monde, May 10, 1958.
54. David Rousset, “Le sens de notre combat,” in L’institution concentrationnaire en
Russie (1930–1957), by Paul Barton [pseud.] (Paris: Plon, 1959), 21.
55. “Conclusions de la délégation d’enquête.”
56. Martin-Chauffier, “Journal de voyage (III),” 21 and 16.
57. “Conclusions de la délégation d’enquête.”
58. For example, see “Une commission internationale d’enquête reconnaît: De véri-
tables tortures (électricité, tuyau d’eau, baignoire, pendaison) ont été infligées en
Algérie,” L’Humanité, July 27, 1957; Réné Capitant, “Droit: Une enquête objective,”
L’Express, August 2, 1957; “Une commission internationale a constaté l’existence
des tortures,” Libération, July 27–28, 1957.
59. “Algérie: ‘Pas de régime concentrationnaire’ constate la délégation des anciens
déportés,” Le Populaire, July 27–28, 1957.
60. François Musard, editorial, L’Aurore, July 27, 1957.
61. “Il n’y a pas de régime concentrationnaire en Algérie,” Le Figaro, August 9, 1957;
see also “L’enquête en Algérie,” Le Figaro, July 27, 1957.
62. “Mes déclarations ont été mal interprétées,” Le Figaro, September 2, 1957.
63. “Il est absurde d’accuser les Français du massacre de Melouza, déclare Mme. Lise
Boersum,” Le Monde, August 2, 1957.
64. “Jugement nuancé d’une norvégienne sur les excès de la guerre d’Algérie,” La
Croix, September 3, 1957.
65. Françoise Giroud, “La lettre de L’Express,” L’Express, August 16, 1957.
66. Tillion, Les ennemis complémentaires, 171.
67. Thénault, Violence ordinaire.
68. Martin-Chauffier, “Journal de voyage (III),” 23.

From Auschwitz to Algeria 371

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CONTRIBUTORS

ELLEN AMSTER is the Jason A. Hannah Chair in the History of Medicine and
associate professor of history at McMaster University. She is also a historian of
the modern Middle East and French North Africa, specializing in French and
Islamic medicines. Her research interests include non-Western health and heal-
ing systems, traditional midwifery, the history of public health, Islamic science,
French colonialism in North Africa, and the physical geographies of Sufism.
She has been a simultaneous translator for an ORBIS ocular surgery mission in
Morocco, a researcher at the National Institute of Hygiene in Morocco, and the
founder of a global public health program in maternal and infant health. She is
the author of Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter
in Morocco, 1877–1956 (2013). Her current research projects include a translation
from Arabic to English of a nineteenth-century Moroccan hagiographical com-
pendium by Muhammad ibn Ja’far al-Kattani, Salwat al-Anfas wa muhadathat
al-akyas bi man uqbira min al-ulama’ wa al-sulaha’ bi fas, and its application to
a GIS digital mapping project of the city of Fez.

ANDREW ARSAN is University Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern History in the

Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St John’s College,
Cambridge. A political, cultural, and intellectual historian of the Arabic-speaking
Eastern Mediterranean with a particular interest in modern Lebanon and Syria
and French imperialism, he has previously held positions at Princeton University
and Birkbeck, University of London.

409
MARC AYMES is a permanent research fellow at the Centre national de la
recherche scientifique, as a member of the Centre d’études turques, ottomanes,
balkaniques et centrasiatiques in Paris. Recently he authored A Provincial History
of the Ottoman Empire: Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean in the Nineteenth
Century (2014) and coedited (with Benjamin Gourisse and Élise Massicard)
Order and Compromise: Government Practices in Turkey from the Late Ottoman
Empire to the Early 21st Century (2015). He has been actively involved on the
editorial boards of several journals: Cahiers du Monde Russe, European Journal
of Turkish Studies, and Labyrinthe: Atelier Interdisciplinaire.

JULIA CLANCY- SMITH is professor of history at the University of Arizona,

Tucson. She is the author of Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age
of Migration, c. 1800–1900 (2010), which won the 2011 French Colonial Histori-
cal Society Book Award and the 2011 Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society
Award for the Best Subsequent Book, and Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables,
Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800–1904) (1994),
which received three book awards.

IAN COLLER is associate professor of history at the University of California,

Irvine, and adjunct Senior Lecturer in History at La Trobe University, Australia.
He is the author of Arab France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798–
1831 (2010) and a number of articles on allied subjects. He has held postdoctoral
posts at the European University Institute in Florence and at the University of
Melbourne.

EDHEM ELDEM is professor of history at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, and has

taught as a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Har-
vard University, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, in Paris.
Among his fields of interest are foreign trade in the Levant in the eighteenth
century, Ottoman funerary epigraphy, the development of an urban bourgeoisie
in late-nineteenth- century Istanbul, the history of the Imperial Ottoman Bank,
the history of archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, and late-nineteenth-century
Ottoman first-person narratives and biographies. He has also realized a number
of exhibitions on historical themes. His publications include French Trade in
Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (1999); A History of the Ottoman Bank (1999);
The Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul (1999, with
Daniel Goffman and Bruce Masters); La Méditerranéee turque (2000, with Fer-
ide Çiçekoğlu); Pride and Privilege: A History of Ottoman Orders, Medals, and

410 Contributors
Decorations (2004); Death in Istanbul: Death and Its Rituals in Ottoman-Islamic
Culture (2005); Consuming the Orient (2007); L’épitaphe ottomane musulmane
XVIe–XXe siècles (2007, with Nicolas Vatin); Un Ottoman en Orient: Osman Hamdi
Bey en Irak (1869–1871) (2010); Le voyage à Nemrud Dağı d’Osman Hamdi Bey
et Osgan Efendi (2010); and Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the
Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914 (2011, with Zainab Bahrani and Zeynep Çelik).

EMMA KUBY is assistant professor of history at Northern Illinois University,

where she teaches courses on modern France and modern Europe. Her research
centers on the problem of political violence in post–World War II France (1944–
62), both as a social reality and as a subject of intellectual debate. She has
published articles in French Politics, Culture & Society, Contemporary French
Civilization, and Modern Intellectual History, and she is currently at work on
the first book-length study of the Commission internationale contre le régime
concentrationnaire and its role in the history of human rights, decolonization,
and the Cold War.

MARY DEWHURST LEWIS is the Robert Walton Goelet Professor of French

History at Harvard University. She specializes in modern French and European
social, legal, political, and imperial history. She is the author of The Boundaries
of the Republic: Migrant Rights and the Limits of Universalism in France (2007)
and Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881–1938 (2013).
She is presently beginning a new project titled “The First French Decoloniza-
tion,” on the drawdown of the French Atlantic empire following the revolution.

SUSAN GILSON MILLER is professor of history at the University of California,

Davis. She specializes in modern North Africa and the Mediterranean, with
a special interest in urban studies, minority studies, and, most recently, in
humanitarian relief and human rights. Among her recent publications are The
Architecture and Memory of the Minority Quarter of the Muslim Mediterranean
City (coedited with Katherine Hoffman, 2010) and Berbers and Others: Beyond
Tribe and Nation in the Maghrib (coedited with Mauro Bertagnin, 2010). Her
book Disorienting Encounters: Travels of a Moroccan Scholar in France in 1845–
46 (1992) was awarded the Ibn Battuta Prize by the Abu Dhabi Foundation for
Culture in 2006. Her most recent book, A History of Modern Morocco (2013),
is a study of contemporary Moroccan history in its global context. Her current
research project concerns rescuing and humanitarian relief in western North
Africa during World War II.

Contributors 411
SPENCER SEGALLA is associate professor of history at the University of Tampa.
He spent much of the 1990s teaching at the Casablanca American School, and
completed his PhD in history at Stony Brook University in 2003. His work has
examined cultural and political transformations in Morocco and French West
Africa, with publications such as “Re-inventing Colonialism: Race and Gender
in Edith Wharton’s In Morocco” (2001), The Moroccan Soul: French Education,
Colonial Ethnology, and Muslim Resistance, 1912–1956 (2009), and “The 1959
Moroccan Oil Poisoning and U.S. Cold War Disaster Diplomacy” (2012). His
interest in French colonial ethnological notions of an immutable “Moroccan
soul” sparked his investigation into the origins of discourses asserting that
post- earthquake Agadir is a “city without a soul.” He is increasingly applying
his interests in colonialism, decolonization, and national identity construction
to intersections of environmental history and decolonization in the French
Mediterranean.

SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN is professor of history and Maurice Amado Chair

in Sephardic Studies at UCLA . A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, Stein is the author
of Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (2014), Plumes: Ostrich Feathers,
Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (2008) and Making Jews Modern:
The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (2004). She is
coeditor, with Julia Phillips Cohen, of Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History,
1700–1950 (2014), and, with Aron Rodrigue, of A Jewish Voice from Ottoman
Salonica: The Ladino Memoir of Sa’adi Besalel a-Levi (2012). Her forthcoming
book is Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the
Ottoman 20th Century (2016).

ALI YAYCıOĞLU is assistant professor of history at Stanford University. His work

explores a wide range of practices, institutions, and imaginations in the Middle
East and southeastern Europe under the Ottoman Empire in early modern and
modern periods. He is the author of Partners of the Empire: Crisis of the Ottoman
Order in the Age of Revolutions (2016).

412 Contributors
INDEX

Abd-Allah, Sultan Mohammed ibn, 105 connections, 105–6; and Ville Nou-
Abdallah, Aoued ben, 242, 244 velle, 107; and Wadi Tildi, 107
Abdelali, Abderrahmane ben, 115 Age of Enlightenment, 26
Abdülaziz, 181 Age of Revolutions, 22–24, 31–33, 44
Abulafia, David, 5 Alam, Al (newspaper), 112
Abu-Lughod, Janet, 106 Alaoui, Ahmed el, 112
L’Action (newspaper), 222–23 Aleppo, 28, 170
Adda, Gladys, 225 Algerian independence, 285n13, 358
ADIR . See Association nationale des Algerian Jews (Algerian Jewry), 18n26,
anciennes déportées 241, 266– 68, 271–73, 276, 281–82,
Aegean islands, 137 287n19, 289n29, 304, 318n47
AEMNA , 221 Algerians, 61, 63, 68, 93, 103, 210,
Africanists, 2 241– 45, 249, 253n14, 257n39,
agadir (term), 126n75 259nn52– 53, 272, 284, 323, 350, 355,
Agadir (Khaïr-Eddine) (novel), 118 357– 58, 362
Agadir Earthquake (1960), 11, 101–20, Algerian Sahara, 94, 109, 265– 66, 270–
120n4, 121n12, 122n15, 123n30, 127n93; 71, 285n13, 287n19
and Aït Mellal, 101; and anti-Agadir Algerian War (of Independence), 7, 111,
reaction, 117–20; and “Battle of the 222, 250, 348– 50, 366– 67
Plans,” 114; and the built environment, L’Algérie en 1957, 359
106–8; and Casablanca, 107; and Algérie française, 210, 349, 364
decolonization, 108–12; and disaster Algiers, 10, 34–35, 54– 57, 60, 62–72,
diplomacy, 112–17; and Inezgane, 101; 93, 170, 205– 6, 208, 217, 229n46,
and the local and global, 103–4; and 243, 265, 269, 273–75, 278, 288n22,
“Moroccan Nice,” 108; and Rabat, 107; 289n26, 291n44, 299–300, 304, 311,
and Talborjt, 107; and transcontinental 316n14, 323, 354, 359– 60

413
Ali, Mehmet (Mehmet Ali Pasha), 32, Arsan, Andrew, 8, 10
79, 96 Asianists, 2
Ali Pasha of Ioannina, 32 Association nationale des anciennes
Alléon family, 151, 153– 54, 160– 61 déportées (ADIR ), 359
Alliance israélite universelle (AIU ), 12, at-Taghr al-Jumani fi ibtisam at-Taghr
287n18, 288n22, 289n26, 290n34, al-Wahrani (Ben Sahnun), 66
292n52, 293, 295–300, 309–13, Atlantic World studies, 22
314n7, 316n18, 318n32, 319n49, 327 Audisio, Gabriel, 359
Allies, 248 L’Aurore, 364
Alsatian Jewish descent, 265, 274 Auschwitz, 355
American Iron and Steel Institute, 108 “Auspicious” Incident, 46
American Revolution, 43 Australia, 54, 92, 94–95
Amic, Claude, 152 Austria, 27, 45, 57, 63, 177, 313n3
Amira-Bournaz, Maherzia, 24 Austria-Hungary, 236, 253n12
Amrouche, Belkacem-ou-, 209, 211–12 Autocritique (1959) (Morin), 355
Amrouche, Fadhma, 201–14 Auzet family, 152, 166
Amrouche, Hacène- ou-, 209 Axis, 212, 248
Amrouche, Jean, 204, 212–13, 224–25 Aymes, Marc, 9, 11, 14, 168–91
Amrouche, Marie-Louise-Taos, 204, ‘Azar, Jean, 79, 85, 94
212–13, 224
Amster, Ellen, 13–14 Bab al-Manara, 218
André, Georges, 352– 53, 357, 361, 364 Bailyn, Bernard, 22
Annales, 3 Baker, Keith, 43
Anquetil-Duperron, Abraham Hya- Balkans, 27, 32, 41, 59
cinthe, 24 Ballard, Jean, 359
Anthropocene period, 5–6 barbarity, 36–37, 80
anti–concentration camp movement barbary and revolution (1789–98),
(1952– 59), 347– 67 52–73; and al maghrib (the West), 53:
anti-Semitism, 12–13, 274, 276, 280–81, and definition of barbary, 52– 53; and
294, 299, 304– 5, 318n30, 347, 351 earthquake (1790), 65; and France
Arabic language, 28, 53, 66, 75n35, 94, and North Africa, 52–73
112, 211–12, 221, 223, 226n6, 297–98, “Barbary pirates,” 72–73
304, 307–9, 314n5, 314n7, 316n14, Barberousse prison, 360, 362
326, 343n61, 345n98 Bardo Treaty (May 1881), 236
Arab Jews, 7, 12, 308 Barrère, Camille, 246, 259n53
“Arabs,” 7, 10, 214, 320, 323, 340n5, 359 Bartholomew, Harland, 114–15
Arab Spring, 223 Bastille, storming of, 1798, 26
Arab syphilis. See Syphilitic Arab Battle of Algiers (1956–57), 354
Aravamudan, Srinivas, 23 Battle of Bornos (1811), 34
Armenian Gregorian Church, 136 Battle of Sebastopol (1854– 55), 209
Armenians, 25, 38, 135–37, 140– 43 Baudicour, Louis de, 90, 94–95
Armitage, David, 22 Bayly, Christopher, 22, 57

414 Index
Bayraktar, Mustafa, 33, 40– 43 Briand, Aristide, 77
Beirut, 76–77, 82–83, 96, 171 British Foreign Office, 351
Belgian Resistance “Secret Army,” 357 British Orientalism, 32
Belgium, 236, 253n12, 351– 53, 357 British-Ottoman alliance, 72
ben Ali, Zine El-Abidine, 249 Bromberger, Serge, 359
ben Ammar, Haluma, 215–18 Brower, Benjamin, 268
ben Chemouil, Necim (Nissim), 278–79 Bruyninckx, Maurice, 353
Ben Embarek, Mourad, 114–16 Buchenwald, 347, 351– 55
ben Khalfallah, Haroun, 270 Buenos Aires, 311
ben Othman, Muhammad, 58 Burghul, Ali, 72
Ben Sahnun, Ahmad, 66 Burnet, Etienne, 216–19, 230n53
Ben Shaykh, Tawhida, 201–2, 210, 214– Burnet, Lydia, 217–18
21, 224–25 Bustani, ‘Abdallah, 79, 84– 85
Benhima, Mohamed, 115 Butler, Josephine, 333
Berber, 3, 52– 53, 200, 204, 206, 213, Byron, George Gordon (Lord Byron), 32
249– 50, 261n69, 261n73, 266–70, Byzantium, 27
284n6, 286n16, 308; Berber Jews,
308; Berber Muslims, 249; Ber- Cahiers du Sud, 359
berophone, 269–70, 286n16 calligraphy, 187– 91
Bergen-Belsen, 361 Camus, Albert, 359
Bernard, Théo, 353 Cape Bon, 247
Bertherand, Émile-Louis, 323–25 Caribbean, 2, 54– 55, 62, 64
Béthouart, Antoine, 111–12 Caribbeanists, 2
Bigart, Jacques, 299 Casablanca, 106– 8, 120, 126n75,
BMC . See bordel mobile de campagne 126n92, 298–300, 334–38
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 9, 30–32, 72, 81, Catherine the Great, 27
85, 93, 154– 56, 172, 193n19, 276 Catholicism, 12, 25–26, 59, 79, 84–85,
Bonneval, Alexandre de, 25 90, 94, 131, 136–38, 141– 44, 147– 48,
bordel mobile de campagne (BMC ), 334 151– 55, 157n8, 159n31, 205–9, 211,
Børsum, Lise, 358, 361, 364– 65 277–78, 288n22, 332, 347, 357
Bosnia, 70 Cerīde-i Ḥavādiŝ (newspaper), 179
Bouffanais, Pierre, 109–10 Ceuta, 54, 232–33, 249– 50
Bourbon monarchy, 64– 65 Challet, Jean, 116
Bourdet, Claude, 352, 356 Charef, Mohammed, 119
Bourgès-Maunoury, Maurice, 356 Charlemagne, 78
Bourguiba, Habib, 222–23 Charles of Anjou, 77
Bouzid, Cherifa, 220–22 Chasseboeuf, Constantin François de
Bouzid, Dorra, 201–2, 220–24 (comte de Volney), 24
Braudel, Fernand, 3– 5, 8, 96 Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte
Braudel Revisited: The Mediterranean de, 91
World, 1600–1800, 4 du Châtelet, Alexandre Parent, 332
Brazil, 311 Chénier, André-Marie, 152

Index 415
Chénier, Louis, 152 Commission internationale contre le
Chevallier, Dominique, 77 régime concentrationnaire (CICRC ),
Chinggis Khan, 32 347– 67, 370n31
Chios, 136–37 Compagnie d’Afrique et d’Orient, 94
Choiseul-Gouffier, Marie-Gabriel- concentration camps, 13, 347– 67
Florent-Auguste de, 155 Congrès français de la Syrie, 76
Christianity, 10, 12, 14, 25, 53, 62– 63, Considérations statistiques, politiques
66, 78–79, 83–84, 86, 91– 96, 131–32, et militaires sur la Régence d’Alger
140, 204, 206, 208– 9, 235, 237, 240, (Juchereau), 34–35
305, 351, 358 Constantinople, 11–12, 14, 21– 46, 81, 92,
Churchill, Alfred, 179–82 131– 56, 181; and the church, 131–34;
Churchill, William, 178. See also Çörçīl, and Church of Saints Peter and Paul,
Mösyö 11, 14, 131– 56; and the difficulties of
Church of Saints Peter and Paul marriage, 146– 48; and the French
(Galata), 11, 14, 131– 56 Nation of, 131– 56; and the parish,
CICRC . See Commission internationale 134– 43; and protectionist principles,
contre le régime concentrationnaire 148– 50; and Révolutions de Constan-
Ciosi, G., 350– 51 tinople (1819), 21– 46; and strategies
Circle of Touggourt, 275 and alliances, 150– 52
Clancy-Smith, Julia, 5, 12, 57, 104, 170, Convention of London, 79
256n30, 260n60, 287n19 Le Corbusier, 114, 116, 118, 121n6
Clifford, James, 311 Çörçīl, Mösyö, 175–76
Cloots, Jean-Baptiste, 64 Cornaton, Michel, 366
Club Massiac, 62 The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediter-
Code de l’indigénat, 325 ranean History (Horden and Purcell),
Code of Personal Status, 222 4– 5
Cold War, 101–2, 106, 109, 112, 122n21, Crémieux, Adolphe, 276
348, 351, 354, 366– 67 Crémieux Decree (1870), 259n49, 266,
Cole, Juan, 171–72 272, 282, 305, 318n47
Coller, Ian, 9–11, 14, 25 Crimea, 27, 30, 32, 59
colonialism, 2, 5, 8, 13–15, 53– 56, 62, Crimean War, 209
65, 72–73, 76–77, 80–81, 92, 102–3, La Croix, 357, 364
106, 109, 111, 116, 118, 126n92, 155– Crusades, 1, 84–86, 91
56, 171–72, 200–225, 234– 50, 252n5, Cyrenaica, 244– 45
253n14, 256n30, 261n73, 265– 82,
294, 296, 299–305, 310, 312, 313n3, Daghis, Muhammad al-, 64
317n20, 320–39, 349, 352, 354– 55, Dalmatians, 135–36, 139– 41, 143
365 Damascus, 84, 170
Combat, 352 Dark Ages, 327
Comité d’action des intellectuels contre Daumas, Eugène, 94
la poursuite de la guerre en Afrique decolonization, 5– 6, 11, 101–20, 348,
du Nord, 355, 356, 365, 369n28 366

416 Index
Decrop, Georges, 328–29 Eigenschenck, Charlotte, 215
democracy, 65, 67, 232, 348, 352, 354, Eldem, Edhem, 11–12, 14, 131– 56
361, 364– 65 The End of the Old Regime in Europe,
Denmark, 236, 253n12, 351 1768–1776 (Venturi), 22
Dethier, Jean, 118–19, 121n6, 123n22, endogamy, 140– 42, 150– 51, 160
126n75 Enlightenment, 10, 22, 24–28, 61, 293–
D’Ghies, Muhammad, 52 96, 313
Dhidhaskalia Patriki, 30 ennemis complémentaires, les, 366
Din, Khayr al-, 210 Entente Cordiale of 1904, 244
Djebar, Assia, 200, 213, 222–23, 225n1 De l’esprit de la législation musulmane
Dreyfus, Alfred, 265, 274, 298 (1849), 320
Dreyfus Affair, 11–13, 265–82, 282n1, Estournelles de Constant, Paul-Henri-
295, 304– 5, 315n9; and Arabo- Benjamin d’, 235–36, 240
phones, 270; and Berberophones, ethnography, 31, 212–13, 279, 284n6,
268– 69; and French colonialism 296, 299–305, 308, 311, 314n7,
in the Mzab, 268–74; and Ibadite, 316n14, 318n32, 321, 347, 358
269; and Kabyles, 269; and legal EU. See European Union
pluralism, 267; and local and met- Eucharistic Congress (1930), 221
ropolitan, 274–82; in the Sahara, Euphrates, 90
274–82; and White Fathers, 277–78 Europe-Magazine, 111
Druze, 79 European Economic Community (EEC ),
Durkheim, Émile, 321 232–35, 358
Duvivier, Anne, 150 European integration and exclusion,
232– 51; acte de notoriété (an affidavit
Eastern Question, 80, 88, 94– 95 of identity), 242; and “Fortress
“East of Enlightenment,” 10 Europe,” 249; and Homo Euro-
Ecochard, Michel, 116 peanus, 244; and passport, 243; and
École des beaux-arts, 223 spahi corps (1884), 200
École de Tunis: Un âge d’or de la peinture European Union (EU), 232, 251n4
tunisienne (Bouzid), 223 exoticism, 1, 72–73, 104
École Louise-Réne Millet, 210, 215–16, Exploration scientifique de l’Algérie
219, 225 (1840– 42), 323
École nationale des langues orientales L’Express, 365
vivantes, 28
École royale du génie de Mézières, 33–34 Fabry, Auguste, 241, 257n39
EEC . See European Economic Faïza, 222
Community Fall of France (1940), 105
Efendi, Said, 151– 52, 159n29 Fanon, Frantz, 223
Egypt, 6, 29–33, 71–72, 73n5, 79, 81– 83, Fantasia (Djebar), 200
87–91, 96, 103, 154– 55, 172, 193n19, Faraoui, Abdesalem, 115–16
226n6, 252n5, 256n30, 320 Farhat, Safia, 222
Egyptian crisis of 1840, 87– 88 Fécondité (Zola), 298

Index 417
Fédération nationale des déportés Galland, Auguste, 24
et internés résistants et patriotes Garcia, Humberto, 23
(FNDIRP ), 356 Gaucher, Philippe, 333
Femmes et Réalité (magazine), 223 Gaudry, Mathéa, 213
Ferry, Jules, 208 Gazette Française de Constantinople, 28
Ferry Laws (1881–82), 207 Geray, Cengiz Mehmed, 32
Fez, Morocco, 104, 106, 170, 297, 300, Germany, 81, 92, 112, 236, 244, 253n7,
308– 9, 311, 318n42, 322, 326, 328– 253n12, 265, 351
34, 338, 341n33, 343n60, 344nn74–75 Ghadamasi, 278
Figaro, Le, 111, 362– 64 Ghanim, Shukri, 76
Figueres, André, 111 Ghardaïa, Algeria, 265–82, 288n22,
Flaubert, Gustave, 320 291n43
FLN . See Front de libération nationale Gibraltar, 90, 237–38
Florenville, Jean-Baptiste-François de Girardin, Saint-Marc, 79
Aimé, 151 Giroud, Françoise, 365
FNDIRP. See Fédération nationale des globalization, 5, 22–23, 101–20, 189
déportés et internés résistants et patriots Glorious Revolution, 43
Fonton family, 151, 159n31 Goitein, Shlomo, 4– 5
Fossati, Gaspare, 132, 197n47 Le grain magique, 213
Foucault, Michel, 224–25, 321, 338–39 Grammont, Henri de, 65
Fournier, Alfred, 328, 332–33 Granada, 133
Franklin-Bouillon, Henri, 76 Great Britain, 12, 30, 32–35, 39– 40, 60,
Fréjus dam collapse, 109 64, 69, 72, 78, 91, 105– 6, 113–14, 155,
French Communist Party, 356 178–79, 234, 236–39, 255n25, 321,
French language, 12, 309 333, 351– 52
“French Mediterraneans,” 1–15, 102–3, Great Fire of London (1666), 113–14
115, 168, 170, 238, 240, 268, 295, 348, Greece, 25, 30, 32, 53, 81, 103, 136, 236–
353– 54, 367 37, 253n12, 352. See also Greeks
French National Assembly Law 61-805, 273 Greek Enlightenment, 25
French protectorate, 10–12, 56, 77, 89–94, Greek language, 28
103–5, 116, 119–20, 210, 234–50, 256n30, Greek Orthodox Church, 29–30
261n73, 266–69, 285n15, 296, 300–301, Greeks, 25, 38, 46, 136–37, 140– 42, 148,
312, 318n47, 322, 331–32, 338–39, 343n57, 153– 54, 157n10, 158n13, 237
344n85, 345n98, 345n100, 353–54 Greek War of Independence, 34–35
French republicanism, 31 Green March (1975), 114
French Revolution, 6–7, 10, 22, 27–30, Guérin, Daniel, 356
33–34, 37–38, 43, 46, 52– 53, 55, 58, Guizot, François, 79, 85, 88
63, 67, 70–72, 154, 167 Guys, Pierre Alphonse, 72
French universalism, 119–20
French West Africa, 242 Haddad, Tahar, 216
Front de libération nationale (FLN ), Hagia Sophia, 132, 181, 188
222–23, 348, 356, 360, 364– 65 Hammuda Pasha, 58

418 Index
Hapsburgs, 25 International Agreement for the Sup-
Le harem et les cousins (Tillion), 4 pression of the “White Slave Traffic”
Hashemite, 78 (1904), 333
Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment), 295 International Convention for the Sup-
Hassan, Sidi, 67–71 pression of the Traffic in Women and
Hassan II, 119, 126n87 Children (1921), 333
Hassan bin Talal (prince), 108–10, 114 International Federation of Travel
ħaṭṭāṭ (calligrapher), 178 Agencies, 107– 8
Hautpoul, Beaufort d’, 92–93 Ionian Islands, 29–31, 91
hegemony, 3, 6, 37–38, 102, 117, 155– 56, Iran, 7, 31
171–72, 296 Islamophobia, 221
Henry, Jean-Robert, 236, 250, 253n14 “Israelites,” 258n46, 266, 273, 310
Higonnet, Patrice, 22 Istanbul, 26–27, 33–34, 70, 154, 173–74
hippodrome, 40, 42 Isthmus of Suez, 90–91
Histoire de la syphilis (1931) Istiqlal, Al (newspaper), 110–13
(Jeanselme), 327 Italy/Italian, 12, 53, 66, 81, 91, 112,
Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman depuis 1792 135– 43, 151, 156, 157n10, 220, 223,
jusqu’en 1844 (Juchereau), 35 234–39, 244– 50, 253n13, 254n20,
Histoire de ma vie (Amrouche), 205–6, 214 255nn25–27, 259nn52– 53, 259n56,
Histoire des Révolutions de Constan- 260nn59– 60, 260n66, 314n7, 359
tinople (chapter) (Juchereau), Itzkowitz, Norman, 179
39– 44
Holocaust, 13 Jacinthe noire (Amrouche), 213
Hôpital Parnet à Hussein-Dey (Algiers), Jacobitism, 23, 28–29, 70
360 Janissaries, 21–22, 28–29, 33–34, 36–
Horden, Peregrine, 4– 5, 8 37, 40– 46
Huart, Clément, 181 Jeanselme, Edouard, 327
humanism, 300 Jefferson, Thomas, 67– 68
Hungary, 92, 358, 365 Jeune Afrique, 223
Jews/Jewry, 2, 4, 7, 11–13, 18n26, 38, 64,
Ibadite, 268–70, 278, 291n39, 292n51 202, 225, 237–44, 254n19, 254n21,
Iberian states, 232 259n49, 259n52, 265–82, 282n1,
Imalhayène, Tahar, 200, 225n1 283nn4–5, 286n16, 287n19, 288n22,
“The Impact of the French Revolution 289n26, 289n29, 290n31, 290n34,
on Turkey” (Lewis), 28 290n36, 291n39, 291n43, 292n48
imperialism, 6–7, 9, 12, 14, 80– 81, 103, 293–313, 313nn3–5, 314nn6–7, 316n16,
118–19, 201, 234–35, 250, 294, 312 316n18, 317n22, 318n32, 318n38,318n40,
India, 60, 88, 90 318n42, 318n47, 319n47, 319nn49–50,
Indian Ocean World, 30 322, 327, 335–37, 351–52, 359; and
“Infamous Decree” of 1808 Southern Algeria, 265–82. See also Alge-
(Bonaparte), 276 rian Jews; Arab Jews; Dreyfus Affair;
Institut Pasteur, 217, 219, 322, 328, 333 Judaism; Nahon, Moïse; Mzabi Jews

Index 419
Juchereau de Saint-Denis, Antoine, Leroy-Beaulieu, Paul, 238, 255n26
21– 46 Levaditi, Constantin, 333
Judaism, 2, 307– 9, 318n38, 319n47 Levant, 2, 6–10, 25, 60, 72, 77, 86, 91,
July Monarchy (1830–48), 79, 84, 96, 133, 144– 49, 152, 154– 56, 159nn30–
332–33 31, 164
Lewis, Bernard, 28
Kabakçıoğlu, Mustafa, 41– 42 Lewis, Mary Dewhurst, 7, 10–14, 232– 51
Kabir, Muhammad al-, 66 Liber I: Baptizatorum, Matrimoniorum et
Kabyle/Kabylia, 94, 204–14, 229n39, Mortuorum, 134
269, 284n6, 323–25, 340n5, 359 Liberia, 109
Kaiser, Thomas E., 24 Libya, 52– 53, 64, 245– 49, 259nn52– 53,
Karamanlis, 64, 71 259n56, 260n59, 260n66, 270, 277
Keller, Richard, 321 Liorel, Jules, 279
Kenbib, Mohamed, 240 Lisbon/Meknes earthquake (1755),
Khaïr-Eddine, Mohammed, 118 120n4, 121n12
Khmir tribe, 235 Livorno, 238
Khomeini (ayatollah), 7 Lorcin, Patricia M. E., 17n16, 122n12,
Koran, 14, 218, 266, 278 227n19, 228n30, 284n6, 317n22,
Kuby, Emily, 13–14, 347– 67 340n5, 341n27
Louis XIV, 60, 78
Lacapère, Georges, 321–22, 326–31, Louis XVI, 26, 29, 62
338, 341n33, 343n60, 343nn63– 64 Louis-Philippe I, 79, 85– 86
Lacoste, Robert, 356 Luzerne, César Henri Guillaume de la
Ladino of the Jews of Spain, 309, (comte de la Luzerne), 62
319n50 Lyautey, Hubert (resident-general),
Lafay, Bernard, 110–11 106–7, 116–20, 126n92, 301, 312,
Laflèche family, 152, 166– 67 316n18, 328
Laghouat, French conquest of (1852),
12, 268, 271, 277, 289n26 Machuel, Louis, 210
Lamartine, Alphonse de, 79, 89–90 Maghreb, 2, 5–7, 12–13, 58– 59, 191, 201,
Latin Americanists, 2 221–23, 289n29, 293–313, 313n3,
Latour, Bruno, 325, 339, 340n15 314n5, 318n38, 319n47, 319n50
Lavigerie, Charles (cardinal), 93, 205– 6 Maghrebi Jews, 289n29, 293–313; and
Lebanon, 10, 76–97 ethnography, 302– 6; and Jew-
legal pluralism, 13–14, 256n30, 267, ish Culture, 306–10; making of
283n5 modern, 310–13; and Moïse Nahon,
Légion d’honneur, 301 297–302
Leila (Francophone feminist magazine), Magnifica Comunità di Pera, 133–34
219, 222 Mahmud II, 33, 41– 42, 45– 46
Lemtiyyine Clinic (Fez), 328–32 Malta, 53, 59, 91, 136, 211, 221, 235,
Lepinay, Émile, 337 237–39, 250, 253n13, 255n25, 255n27,
Leredde, Laurent, 326, 328, 341n30 359

420 Index
Mansour, Aïni Aït, 204– 5 249– 50, 251n4, 254n23, 257n37, 270–
Marmey, Jean and Charles, 338 71, 279, 297, 311, 315n12, 319n49
Maronite clerics, 79, 82, 84–87, 89–90, Miller, Susan Gilson, 11–13, 293–313
94–95 Millet, René, 210
Marrakesh, 104, 318n42, 334–35, Missionaries of Our Lady of Africa
341n33, 342n48, 344n75 (“White Fathers” and “White Sis-
Marseille, 54, 68–70, 76–77, 83, 121n6, ters”), 205– 6
143– 49, 158n15, 218, 295 modernity/modernization, 10, 13,
Marseille Chamber of Commerce, 76, 14n16, 46, 53, 59, 118–19, 171, 201–3,
143, 145, 149 224–25, 226n4, 291n43, 294– 97,
Martin-Chauffier, Louis, 347, 349, 354, 313n3, 319n50
358– 67 Mohammed V, 108, 113
Mas, Pierre, 103, 108, 116–17, 126n78 Mollet, Guy, 356– 57
Mathieu, Jean, 335, 338 Monde, Le, 361
Mauchamp, Émile, 327–28 Mongolian Empire, 27
Maurice Gaud hospital (Casablanca), Moniteur Universel, 62– 63
338 Montagne, Robert, 337
Mauss, Marcel, 302 Montesquieu, 24, 37, 44– 45, 50n54
Médecine et hygiène des arabes (Ber- Moors, 53, 72, 133
therand), 324 Morice Line, 250
Mediterraneans: North Africa and Morin, Edgar, 355
Europe in the Age of Migrations, c. Moroccan Service of Urbanism, 114–15
1800–1900 (Clancy-Smith), 5 Morocco, 11–12, 52– 55, 58, 62– 63,
A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish 72, 74n18, 101–20, 121n12, 122n21,
Communities of the Arab World as 123n22, 126n92, 223, 232–33, 244,
Portrayed in the Documents of the 247, 251nn1–2, 252n5, 257n39,
Cairo Geniza (Goitein), 4 259n49, 261n73, 266, 270, 277,
La Méditerranée et le monde méditer- 283n3, 284n6, 294–301, 304, 308– 9,
ranéen à l’époque de Philippe II 313, 314nn4– 5, 318n47, 319n49,
(Braudel), 3 321–22, 325, 327–29, 333–34, 339,
Mehmed II, 133 341n30, 341n33, 342n48, 345n98
Mekhitarists, 25–26 Morsy, Magali, 59
Melilla, 54, 232, 249– 50 Mosaic laws, 266
Memmi, Albert, 202– 4, 212, 238, Mote, Max, 179
254n23 Moulin, Anne-Marie, 325
Mercure Universel, 67 Mozabite, 266, 269, 285n15
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 352 Muhammad (prophet), 52
Messaâdi, Mahmoud, 221, 223 Muhammad, Moulay, 58
Metenier, Oscar, 298 Mujahid, Al- (newspaper), 222–23
Metlili, 280– 81, 292n51 Muqrani, Muhammad al-, 325
migrations, 1, 5–7, 81, 92, 94–95, 104– Murad, Niqula, 85– 86
5, 111, 123n22, 137, 207, 210, 233, Murger, Henri, 298

Index 421
Mustafa IV, 33, 40– 41 One Thousand and One Nights (Gal-
Mzabi Jews, 11–12, 265– 82 land), 24
Oran, 54, 64– 66, 93, 269, 274, 305,
Nadau, Thierry, 115, 119, 123n22 308, 318n38
Nahon, Moïse, 13, 293–313; and eth- Order of Malta, 53, 59
nography, 302– 6; life and times of, Orientalism, 3, 8–10, 22–24, 30–32, 36–
297–302; and the modern Maghrebi 37, 42– 45, 77, 82, 89–90, 104, 172,
Jew, 310–13; and representing Jew- 193n18, 325, 331
ish culture, 306–10 Ottoman currency 168– 91; and authen-
Napoléon III, 78–9, 87, 91, 181 tication, 173– 80; and calligraphy,
Napoleonic Wars, 154 187–91; and debenture bond, 185– 86;
National Assembly (France), 58, 61– 64, and embodiments of knowledge,
68, 70–71, 273, 350– 51 168–73; and the enfranchised speaks,
National School of Architecture 182–83; and evrāḳ-ı ṣaḥīḥe, 173–74;
(Rabat), 119 and forgery, 189– 91; and portrait of
natural disaster, 101–20 the “attendant,” 180– 82; and public
Nerval, Gérard de, 79, 82–84 bonds, 187– 89; and reform, 168– 69,
Neuengamme, 347– 48, 361 173–79, 190
New Army, 30, 32, 40– 42 Ottoman Empire, 6, 11, 14, 22–39,
New Order, 21–23, 26–27, 29, 31, 33–34, 44– 46, 56– 57, 72, 80, 89, 92, 95–96,
40, 42 154– 55, 168–91, 192n10, 194n21, 201,
Nicolle, Charles, 217 224, 235, 239– 40
Nizam-ı Cedid, 38 Ottomanists, 2, 169
Nobel Prize, 217 Ottomans, 7, 23–33, 42, 45, 59, 94, 154,
North Africa, 5, 9–12, 52–73, 106, 111, 157n9, 172, 174, 187, 193n19
200–225, 320–39, 348, 352– 54, 358, Ouargla, 278
366; and barbary and revolution, “Our Women in Islamic Law and Soci-
52–73; and women and education, ety” (Haddad), 216
200–225 Out of Place (Said), 202
North African campaign (1940– 43)
355– 56, 365 Palestine, 76
Norway, 236, 253n12, 351 Palmer, Robert Roswell, 22
Notes d’un colon du Gharb (Nahon), 300 Panzac, Daniel, 56, 59, 63
Novarsénobenzol medication, 331 Paris, 7, 9, 22–23, 25, 28, 35, 53– 54,
60– 65, 70–71, 81, 91, 101, 110–12,
Observations on the Religion, Law, Gov- 147, 151– 52, 168– 91, 196n35, 196n39,
ernment, and Manners of the Turks 197n56, 200, 204, 212–22, 230n54,
(Porter), 35 274, 297–99, 311, 321, 328–30, 333,
Œuvre des écoles d’Orient, 93 337, 359
Office of European Habitat, 116 Paris Jour, 110
Ohsson, Ignatius Mouradgea d’, 35 Parliamentary Archives (1789– 90),
Olive family, 151, 160– 61 61– 62

422 Index
Parthenopea, 62 Prussia, 26, 63
Pasteur, Louis, 321–25 Purcell, Nicholas, 4– 5, 8
Paul-Cazelles, 360– 61
Paulhan, Jean, 358 qadi (Muslim jurist), 266
Pazvantoğlu, Osman, 32 Qadir, ‘Abd al-, 95– 96
Pech, Vincent-Pierre, 151 Qajar Iran, 31
Pelis, Kim, 321 Qaramanli, Ali Pasha, 58
Périer, Joanny-André-Napoléon, 323 Qaramanli, Yusuf, 71–72
Persia, 55 Qaramanli family, 71
Persian Gulf, 120 Qasr al-Ayni Hospital, 320
Peter the Great, 36 Quatrefages, Armand de, 323
Phanariotes, 25
Philip II, 3– 4 Rabinow, Paul, 116–17, 123n22
Pichon, Stéphen, 245 Radiodiffusion Marocaine, 109
Pineau, Christian, 351 Rahmaniyya tariqa (Sufi brotherhood),
Pitts, Jennifer, 87 325
pluralism, 13–14, 256n30, 267, 283n5, Ramadan, 41, 216
294 Rambaud family, 151, 160– 61
Pocock, John Greville Agard, 22 Randon, Jacques Louis, 268– 69
Poincaré, Henri, 78 Ravensbrück, 358– 59
Poincaré, Raymond, 245– 46 Raymond, André, 170
Poiret, Abbé, 67 Red Cross, 110, 219, 348, 357
Poland, 22, 27, 81, 298– 99, 312 reform, 21–22, 26–27, 32, 36–37, 39,
Le policier (Metenier), 298 41– 42, 44– 46, 168– 69, 173–79, 190,
Le Populaire, 364 195n30, 195n33, 201, 210–12, 236–37,
Porot, Antoine, 326 247, 253n14, 272, 295, 309, 311, 323,
Porter, James, 35 337
Port Lyautey, 106, 108, 112 Reform Edict (1856), 132
Portugal, 238 refugees, 23, 31, 101, 111–12, 223, 246,
positivism, 300 249
Potier, Pierre, 337 regroupment camps, 13, 350, 357, 366,
Prakash, Gyan, 339 370n35
Propos d’un vieux marocain (Moïse Remlinger, Pierre, 322, 326
Nahon), 300–301 Rémuzat family, 152, 167
Prost, Henri, 106 Republic of Turkey, 46, 103
prostitution, 206, 208, 223, 320–39, Révolutions de Constantinople
344n85, 345n94, 345n98, 345n100 (Juchereau), 21– 46; and Antoine
La prostitution marocaine surveillée de Juchereau de Saint-Denis, 33–35;
Casablanca (Mathieu), 335 and l’état actuel de l’Empire Ottoman,
Protection maternelle et infantile 35–39; and the French and Ottoman
(PMI ), 322 worlds, 24–33; and Histoire des Révo-
Protestantism, 12, 143– 44, 147, 206 lutions de Constantinople, 39– 44

Index 423
Revue des Études Ethnographiques et San Francisco Earthquake (1906), 108,
Sociologiques, 299 114
Richard, Charles, 320 Santi Lhomaca, Antoine, 151– 52, 159n29
Ristelhueber, René, 78 Sanusiya, 278
Rivière, Thérèse, 213 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 7
Romantic era, 45 Sarraut, Albert, 321
Rothberg, Michael, 348 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 352, 355– 56
Roure, Rémy, 355, 366 Saturne, 355, 357– 58, 365, 367
Rousset, David, 347, 349, 351– 53, 355– Scènes de la vie de bohème (Murger),
58, 363, 365, 369n24, 370n31 298
Royal Military Academy (Woolwich), Schengen Agreement (1990), 232, 234–
34 35, 248– 49
Royal Moroccan Army, 108 Schobinger, George, 115
Russia, 22, 26–28, 30–31, 33, 36, 39– 41, Schreier, Joshua, 272
44, 50n47, 55, 57, 59, 89, 177, 208, 216–
“Scramble for Africa,” 234, 251
17, 236, 253n12, 298– 99, 312
Sébastiani, Horace François Bastien, 33
secularism, 14, 26, 28, 46, 79, 133, 143,
SAC . See Strategic Air Command bases
148, 202, 204, 206–11, 215–16, 293,
Sadiqi College, 210
295–96, 304
Said, Edward, 10, 172, 193n18, 202, 325
Segalla, Spencer, 11–12, 14, 101–20
Saint Benedict church (Galata), 131
Selim III, 21, 26–27, 30–34, 36, 38– 43,
Saint Eugénie Hospital (Aïth Maneg-
46, 58– 59
ueleth), 209
Senegal, 122n15, 311
Saint George church (Galata), 131
Sephardic rite, 289n29, 307
Saint-Hilaire, Isidore, 323
serbestiyet (liberty), 29
Saints Peter and Paul parish records
Seven Years’ War, 30, 155
(1740–1800), 11, 131– 56; and the
church, 131–34; and Dalmatians, Shaarawi, Huda, 216
135–36, 139– 41, 143; and the Shepard, Todd, 17n21, 18n28, 124n44,
dhimma, 132; and the difficulties 229n68, 283n2, 289n26, 290n30
of marriage, 146– 48; and a fluid Shihab, Bashir, 79, 85
society, 152– 56; and the French Sicault, Georges, 339
Nation, 143– 46; and the Genoese, Siege of Cádiz (1810–12), 34
133, 136; and occupations, 138–39, Siege of Vienna (1683), 57
144– 45; and originaires français, Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph, 60– 61
149; and origin and gender, 135, 141; Smyrna, 149– 50
and origin of spouses, 143; and the Société de secours en faveur des Chré-
parish, 134– 43; and protectionist tiens du Liban, 84
principles, 148– 50; and strategies La sorcellerie au Maroc (Mauchamp),
and alliances, 150– 52; and zimmis, 327–28
132 Sorkin, David, 26
Salle, Antoine, 329 Soustelle, Jacques, 358

424 Index
Soviet Union, 106, 114, 347– 49, 351– 54, Témoignage Chrétien, 355
356, 358, 365– 66 Testa, Anne, 147
Spain/Spanish, 34, 53– 54, 63– 66, Thénault, Sylvie, 350
68, 103, 112, 114, 133, 135, 139– 41, Thierry, Augustin, 45– 46
211, 232–34, 236–38, 244, 249– 50, Thiers, Adolphe, 152
251nn1–2, 253nn12–13, 255n27, Third Coalition, 31
261n69, 261n73, 289n29, 294, 297– Third Republic, 77, 80, 210, 321
99, 308–9, 314n7, 351– 52, 359 Tiakoumaki, Vasiliki, 7
La statue de sel (The Pillar of Salt) Tijaniyya, 57
(Memmi), 202 Tillion, Germaine, 4, 213, 347– 49, 357–
Stein, Sarah Abreveya, 11–14, 256n32 59, 362– 63, 366, 367n2, 371n53
Stoler, Ann Laura, 267, 321 Tinos, 136–37, 157n8
Stomps, Benjamin, 353 Tlemcen, Algeria, 303–7, 310–11
Strategic Air Command (SAC ) bases, Tocqueville, Alexis de, 79, 87–89
106, 108 totalitarianism, 348– 49, 352, 354– 56,
Sublime Porte in Istanbul, 55– 60, 63, 361
71, 74n18, 133, 169, 176–77, 179, 182, Touggourt, Algeria, 265, 274–82,
188 290n36
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, 22 Transjordan, 76
Süleyman (Ottoman sultan), 3– 4 Treaty of Amiens (1802), 34
Sweden, 236, 253n12 Treaty of Campo Formio (1797), 29
“Sweep in Front of Our Own Door” Treaty of Paris (1856), 91
(essay) (Bourdet), 352 Treaty of Rome (1957), 234–35, 252n6
Swiri, 278 Treponema pallidum syphilis spirochete
Syphilitic Arab, 320–39; fall of, 338– (1905), 325
39; at Lemtiyyine Clinic, 328–32; Trieste, 136, 238
and maternity clinics, 338–39; and Tripoli, 52, 55, 58, 63– 64, 71
pathology, 322–28; photographs of, Tripolitania, 244– 46
330, 332, 336; and Quartier Bousbir, Trotskyism, 351
332–38 Tuareg, 278
Syria, 76–81, 87–95, 97n1 Tubman, William, 109
Syros, 136–37, 157n9 Tunis, 11, 55– 58, 63, 67, 71–72, 191, 210–
25, 230n54, 235, 241– 42, 295
Tableau general de l’Empire Othoman Tunisia, 5, 10, 12–13, 18n26, 56, 72,
(D’Ohsson), 35 103, 111, 200, 210–17, 221–23,
Taḳvīm-i Veḳāyi’ (Ottoman official 230n53, 231n68, 234– 42, 244–
gazette), 179 51, 252n5, 254n23, 255nn25–27,
Talabas, 278–79, 291n43 256n30, 258n46, 259n49, 259nn52–
Tangier, 13, 109–12, 117, 294– 99, 304, 53, 260n66, 261n73, 266, 277,
311, 314n5, 314n7, 318n42, 326, 338 283n3, 284, 301, 314n5, 321–22,
Tashelhit (Shlouh), 309 353– 56
Teitgen, Paul, 360 Tunisian “White Book,” 354

Index 425
“Tunisian Women Are Adults” (essay) Velestinlis, Rhigas, 32
(Bouzid), 222 Venturi, Franco, 22
Turkish language, 28, 179– 80, 191 Vergennes, Chevalier de, 146– 47, 150
Tuwat (Tamentit), 270 La Vigie Marocaine, 300
Volney, 24, 37, 81
UGTT . See union générale tunisienne
du travail Wahhabis, 57, 70–71
ulama (Muslim learned hierarchy), 21– Warnier, Auguste, 325
22, 36–38, 40, 42– 44, 46, 66, 216 Warnier Law, 325
Uniate Christian, 78 Wartani, Manubiya, 216
UNICEF , 339 Wassermann blood test (1906), 325–26,
union générale tunisienne du travail 341n32
(UGTT ), 352– 53 Weiss, Gillian Lee, 6
United Kingdom, 2, 34 White Sisters, 206, 209
United Nations (UN ), 123n30, 248, Wiebelhaus-Brahm, Eric, 104
251n1, 333, 335 Wilder, Gary, 321
UN Trust Territory, 248 women and education in North Africa,
UN Universal Declaration of Human 200–225
Rights (1948), 333 World Health Organization (WHO )
USS Newport News, 112 (1948), 339
U.S. State Department, 114 World War I, 96– 97, 211, 224, 296, 311,
‘Uthman, Dey Muhammad ibn, 326, 343n66
65– 66 World War II, 11, 105– 6, 211–12, 220,
234, 238, 248, 250, 358
Vaḥdetī Efendi, 169, 175, 178– 90,
197n56, 198n57, 198n64 Yacef, Saadi, 348, 366
Valensi, Lucette, 55 yakoben, 28–29
van Gennep, Arnold, 299 Yaycıoğlu, Ali, 10
Vanmour, Jean-Baptiste, 143
van Rij, Cornelius, 358, 361 Zaccaria, Angelo, 133
Vaughan, Megan, 327 Zionism, 297, 311, 319n50
Vayssettes, Joseph, 94 Zola, Émile, 298, 306, 313, 316n16

426 Index
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