© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of French History. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] doi:10.1093/fh/crl019, available online at www.fh.oxfordjournals.org Advance Access published on September 1, 2006

ALGERIAN ORPHANS AND COLONIAL IN , 1866–1939

BERTRAND TAITHE* Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/20/3/240/2543512 by guest on 23 September 2021

Abstract—This article considers the exceptional fate of the orphan survivors of the great Algerian demographic crisis of the late 1860s who subsequently converted to Catholicism. Using a prosopographical approach, this study seeks to highlight the complexities of national identity in France and to explore some of the racial tensions emerging in Algeria in the late nineteenth century.

Between 1867 and 1869 some 1,800 orphans were collected by the following the series of famines, epidemics and plagues that afflicted Algeria between 1866 and 1868.1 Roughly 900 of these children survived, and many of them converted to Catholicism. By looking at this small contingent of Arab converts, one can ask important questions about ethnicity, religion and citizenship in ‘greater France’. Was Algeria the site of experimentation in racial self-definition, and what part did religion play in the making of racialized atti- tudes? The orphans’ trajectories give some complex answers, showing, as they do, the primacy of religion in anti-Arab racism, the relative racial indifference existing in France itself and the rise of republican forms of racism. Their fates were diverse yet always marked by a continuing relationship with the clergy of . Some thus became a quasi oxymoron: Arab colons, Christian farmers modelled on the Maronite Lebanese or the Christian Palestinians. Some became hybrid urban proletarian facing all the temptations of secular life in Algeria. Many settled in France and provided rare instances of North- African immigration before 1890. A few joined the middle class following a long and expensive higher education paid for by the Catholic Church. Their medical training, reminiscent of Franz Fanon’s, as well as their consciousness, make them prime ‘subjects’ for a cultural and religious history of identity and

* Bertrand Taithe is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Manchester. He thanks the British Academy, the Wellcome Trust and the University of Manchester for the generous funding that made this research possible. Comments made in seminars at Manchester, Sheffield, St Andrews and Paris Saint-Denis have been extremely useful in refining the text. He thanks the editor of French History for his help with this special issue and this article in particular. 1 See B. Taithe, ‘Humanitarianism and colonialism: religious responses to the Algerian drought and famine 1866–1870’, in C. Mauch and C. Pfister, eds., Natural hazards: Responses and strate- gies in global perspective (Lanham, 2007) forthcoming; D. Sari, Le désastre démographique (Algiers, 1982), p. 130; A. Nouschi, Enquête sur le niveau de vie des populations rurales constan- tinoises de la conquête jusqu’en 1919 (1961), pp. 337–78. BERTRAND TAITHE 241 citizenship.2 Although the quality of the evidence is not equal for all of them, it nevertheless enables a reading of the different modes of cultural hybridity, immigration and inter-ethnic mixing which occurred over a period of thirty years.3 Even though neither mass conversions nor a politics of assimilation occurred, these exceptional destinies present some fascinating insights into the multicultural society that France has since become. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/20/3/240/2543512 by guest on 23 September 2021

I Algeria had become a colony almost accidentally in 1830 and, throughout the following generation, a series of military leaders developed a fresh Latin ideal for the land of Saint . This colonial ideal has been effectively explored and analysed by historians such as Nabila Oulebsir or Patricia Lorcin.4 It was commonly shared by those ardent clergymen who sought the re-establishment of the Catholic Church on a land rich in saints and martyrs, after an interval of some 1,200 years. The Catholic Church quickly developed its own missionary ideals and colonial dreams. Looming large over this missionary zeal was the memory of the fathers of the early Church and the particularly vivid influence of Augustine, whose theological importance and wide range of texts were central to the scholarly revival of Catholic theology in the nineteenth century. This religious ideology had been instrumentalized in the early days of the colonization, but the radicali- zation of colonial politics soon rendered religion a source of division rather than unity in the colony. The colonial establishment was organized in a centralized fashion around a gouverneur général, a post always occupied by a military figure until the end of the 1870s. There were three departments on the French model, composed of two territories: the civilian territory was intended for settlers and the milit- ary territory was where the army exercised a semi-feudal but loose control of the ‘tribes’.5 The map was fluid and the borders less than well defined. Since 1848 the three departments had been based on the key cities of Algiers, and Constantine or Bône, which were, to a very large extent, almost entirely

2 F. Fanon, The wretched of the earth (1967); A. Memmi, The colonizer and the colonized (1972). 3 Hybridity does not necessarily denote a positive cultural position—indeed some have described hybridity as a monstrous anomaly, particularly in a society like that of France or Algeria where the emphasis has always been on a normative form of identity underpinned by biological forms of racism. For a later generation, see the Algerian nationalist man of letters, Christian-Kabyle- French Jean El-Mouhoub Amrouche: T. Yacine, ed., Un Algérien s’adresse aux Français ou l’histoire d’Algérie par les textes (1943–1961) (1994). On the concept of hybridity more broadly construed: C. Blanckaert, ‘Of monstrous métis? Hybridity, fear of miscegenation, and patriotism from Buffon to Paul Broca’, in S. Peabody and T. Stovall, eds., The color of liberty: Histories of race in France (Durham, 2003), pp. 42–70. 4 P. M. E. Lorcin, ‘Rome and France in Africa: Recovering Colonial Algeria’s Latin past’, French Historical Studies, 25 (2002), 295–330; N. Oulebsir, Les usages du patrimoine. Monuments, musées et politique coloniale en Algérie 1830–1930 (2004). 5 Archives d’Outre-Mer (AOM) F80 1705, Administration de l’Algérie. 242 ALGERIAN ORPHANS AND COLONIAL CHRISTIANITY colonial by the end of the Second Empire.6 Oran, for instance, had a large Spanish but a very small native population.7 The Church mirrored the administrative structure by instituting three bishoprics of unequal importance in Algiers, Oran and Constantine. Algiers was the cent- ral seat of ecclesiastical authority in and the two smaller bishoprics were headed by co-adjuteurs.8 Despite its central ideological

importance (the Cathedral of Algiers was built on the site of a mosque) the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/20/3/240/2543512 by guest on 23 September 2021 Church was inhibited by the colonial structure within which it had to operate.9 Financially insecure, the first of Algiers were often teetering on the brink of bankruptcy between the 1840s and 1860s.10 The number of priests was barely adequate to staff the new communes. A very significant proportion of the laity was non-French speaking, served by imported Spanish or Maltese preachers whose religious and political views provoked uneasiness among French ecclesiastics and the police alike. As a result of the deportations that fol- lowed the political troubles of 1848–1851, the Algerian colonists embraced several heterodox features, including left-wing political views increasingly receptive to anticlericalism.11 Hardly established within its own flock, the Catholic Church faced some com- petition and unwelcome confessional diversity: the large British sun-seeking population had its own Protestant clergy, whereas the French synod and the Jewish consistory had their own agendas.12 Protestant missions appeared in Algeria, and the Jewish religion in North Africa was literally re-Judaicized by the French Jewry, which was highly suspicious of the Andalusian Jewish culture and Sephardic rites practised in North Africa.13 Beyond the fragile colonial

6 D. Prochaska, Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône, 1870–1920 (Cambridge, 1990); C. Zeynep, Urban forms and colonial confrontation: Algiers under French rule (Berkeley, 1997); J.-J. Jordi and J.-L. Planche, eds., Alger 1860–1939: Le modèle ambigu du triomphe colonial (1999). 7 For the sake of convenience and because Algerianité is not the subject of this article, unlike John Strachan’s or Stephen Tyre’s in the following pages, the term Algerian will refer to the non- colonial inhabitants of Algeria. 8 This relationship was not very well defined, and Lavigerie, of Algiers after 1868, adopted a particularly hierarchical interpretation of it. Lavigerie ended up controlling the bishoprics of Algiers, Constantine and directly and personally: H. Barthès, Monseigneur de las Cases, évêque de Constantine (Montpellier, 1980). 9 S. A. Curtis, ‘Emilie de Vialar and the religious reconquest of Algeria’, French Historical Stud- ies, 29 (2006), 261–92. 10 AOM Algérie (Alg.) Gouvernment Général d’Algérie (GGA) 12X 33, Collection Maurice Hure. Archives Générales des Missionnaires d’Afrique (AGMA), A16, abbé Hodard, Introduction aux oeu- vres de Mgr Pavy (Algiers, nd). 11 Anticlericalism was present but muted under the Second Empire when Marshal MacMahon heavily censored the media. It blossomed in 1870 during the Commune of Algiers and grew in importance with the radical party in Algeria. 12 AOM Alg. Constantine B/3/496, surveillance des missionaries protestants anglais and AOM F80 1748, Culte Israélite, ordinance of 9 November 1845 on the consistoire of Algeria; report of Béquet, Rapport au conseil de gouvernement, organisation du culte Israélite en Algérie (Algiers, 1858). 13 A. Tissier, De l’application du décret du 24 octobre 1870 sur les Israélites indigènes de l'Algérie (Algiers, 1891); M. Ansky, Les Juifs d’Algérie du décret Crémieux à la Libération (1950); R. Attal, Regard sur les Juifs d’Algérie (1996); S. Schwarzfuchs, Les Juifs d'Algérie et la France (1830–1855) ( Jerusalem, 1981). BERTRAND TAITHE 243 bubble lay the almost unknown quantity of . Algerian Islam was in decline from an educational point of view. Colonization had led to illiteracy among much of the population, thanks to the closure of many madrassa or Koranic schools.14 Susceptible to Mahdism and messianic revivalism, as well as to the cult of saints, North African Islam was not one but rather a multitude of trends and movements that varied from the austere M’Zab of the deep south to Maleki 15

Islam in or the widespread cult of saintly marabouts. Most worrying Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/20/3/240/2543512 by guest on 23 September 2021 for French military observers, such as Rinn, were the secret societies and Sufi revivalism that occasionally appeared in response to French colonization.16 These religious societies were blamed for the Jihads, built on the memory of Sheikh Abd’ El-Kadir’s Qadiriyya Sufi religious state, which occasionally flared up, as in 1864 or 1871.17 The Sheikh himself like many other eminent Algerians had emigrated to Syria where, ironically, he collaborated with French interests during the Lebanon mountain massacres of 1860.18 In effect the French had made an alliance with the puritan Tijaniyya Sufi against the Emir, and much mil- itary intelligence was devoted to the nurturing of some religious groups rather than others on the grounds of their power base rather than their theology.19 Military rule in much of the hinterland often alternated between terrible reprisals, whereby military colonnes would leave a trail of desolation and destruction, and the pursuit of patronage, but the violent methods of early colonization remained the stock answer to rebellions. Peacetime submission and inculturation were pursued through the bureaux arabes (military institu- tions), which used local knowledge to divide and rule by utilizing and weaken- ing traditional hierarchies.20 Always aware of the mobilizing power of Jihad, French military rulers (and they controlled the entirety of the administrative pyramid until late in the 1870s) were convinced that Islam had to receive formal respect. The Berber people of Kabylia, whose less rigid observance of Koranic laws had sometimes led Catholic missionaries to identify them as potential Christians,

14 Y. Turin, Affrontements culturels dans l’Algérie coloniale. Ecoles, médecine, religion, 1830–1880 (1971). 15 J. Clancy-Smith, Rebel and saint: Muslim notables, populist protest, colonial encounters (Berkeley, 1994). 16 See AOM Alg. GGA 3X 1, Papiers Rinn. This anxiety was particularly strong after the mass uprising of 1871 led by El-Mokrani. Colonel Robin, L’insurrection de la Grande Kabylie en 1871 (1900); M. Lings, A Sufi saint of the twentieth century: Shwikh Ahmad Al’AlawI (Cambridge, 1993). 17 R. Danziger, Abd Al-Qadir and the Algerian Resistance to the French (New York, 1977). 18 L. T. Fawaz, An occasion for War: Civil conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 (New York, 1994); K. Salibi, Histoire du Liban: Du dix-huitième siècle à nos jours (1988), pp. 167–95. 19 The Tijaniyya Sufi order was founded in Algeria by Ahmad al-Tijani (d. 1815). The brother- hood, which spread throughout North Africa, rejected popular rituals such as pilgrimages to tombs and celebration of the prophet Muhammad’s birthday. Its more ascetic doctrine stressed instead the importance of the founder as the sole effective intercessor between this world and the next. 20 K. J. Perkins, Qaids, captains and colons: French military administration in the Colonial , 1844–1934 (New York, 1981), pp. 147–45; J. Frémeaux, Les bureaux arabes dans l’Algérie de la conquête (1993). 244 ALGERIAN ORPHANS AND COLONIAL CHRISTIANITY were described thus by the administrators of Fort Napoléon, Hanoteau and Letourneux: The absence of religious principles in the political and civilian insti- tutions [of Kabylia] will be a powerful ally to develop, eventually, all the good contained in the seeds of these institutions. It is only from this purely negative point of view that the religious idea can help our civilizing mission...As to the forthcoming conversion of Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/20/3/240/2543512 by guest on 23 September 2021 Kabyles to Catholicism, it is a pure chimera that can only appeal to people who see everything through their imagination. We do not know, and no one can know, whether Kabyles will ever convert to our religion; perhaps will they one day come to be religiously indif- ferent; but we can assert, without pretending to be prophetic, that this day is a long way away and certainly not one our generation will witness.21 This short text represented far more than a dispassionate anthropological observation.22 It was a direct attack upon the missionary efforts launched from Fort Napoléon by missionaries since 1865. From the mid-1860s onwards, missionaries had identified Kabylia in particu- lar and in general as potential converts.23 Zealous Jesuits thus befriended tribesmen in the hope of being allowed access to the community by invitation and in defiance of military rules. Their efforts, often associated with medical and charitable aid, sometimes led to farcical failures. In one notorious instance a priest was lured into sitting on a pile of manure and ridiculed in pub- lic.24 Although the military, who usually shared Hanoteau and Letourneux’s viewpoint, privately rejoiced in the humiliation of these turbulent priests, the administration found itself forced to take heavy-handed measures in retaliation, thereby raising the prospect of organized resistance.25 These incidents high- lighted the conflicts at the heart of the French colonial enterprise. To summa- rize a complex set of political circumstances, the Second Empire was attempting, from a distance, to ‘gallicize’ Arab society.26 Through two succes- sive Senatus Consulte the government in Paris had attempted to establish the rules of private ownership and also a pathway towards full French citizenship (although the latter entailed ‘social death’, since it involved a renunciation of

21 A. Hanoteau and A. Letourneux, La Kabylie et les coutumes Kabyles, 2 vols (1872), p. 311. 22 Alain Mahé has since shown the great importance of Hanoteau and Letourneux’s work in the ‘fixing’ of Kabyle customs: A. Mahé, Histoire de la Grande Kabylie (2001). 23 P. M. E. Lorcin, Imperial identities: stereotyping, prejudice and race in colonial Algeria (1995). 24 AOM F80 1746, Rapport du Colonel Hanoteau, Fort Napoléon, on the activities of abbé Creusat, 31 May 1868. 25 V. Colonna, ‘La compagnie de Jésus en Algérie, 1840–1880: L’exemple de la mission en Kabylie’, Maghreb-Machrek, 135 (1992), 67–78. 26 A. Rey-Goldzeiguer, Le Royaume Arabe, la politique algérienne de Napoléon III (1977); D. Sainte Marie, ‘La province d'Alger vers 1870, l’établissement du douar commun et la fixation de la nature de la propriété dans le cadre du Senatus Consulte du 22 avril 1863’, Revue de l'Occident Musulman et de la Méditerranée, 9 (1971), 37–61. BERTRAND TAITHE 245

Sharia law). The most important of these two sets of rules was the attempt to designate Arab territory as an asset owned not by a lineage nor tribe but by individuals. The assumption was that the and Kabyles ignored modern rules of landownership despite the fact that individual landownership had been acknowledged, though it did not often allow free trade in land. However, these initiatives were marred by a series of petty administrative interventions.27

Imperial policy, inspired by Saint-Simonian thinkers such as the convert to Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/20/3/240/2543512 by guest on 23 September 2021 Islam Ishmael Urbain, envisaged economic and civic assimilation but signifi- cantly avoided religious issues.28 The politics of the so-called Royaume Arabe relied on incremental assimilation within the framework of a reformed Islam.29 Religious aspects of French civilization, which troubled relations between the Second Empire and the Vatican, had to be kept under strict control. Although the Concordat gave the French state the right to nominate candidates for bishoprics, it had no control over prelates after their frequently disputed papal appoint- ment; only when they acted illegally could bishops be censured.30 Religion was always liable to seep out of any cracks in the Algerian political edifice. Sermons delivered in church had an immediate audience. They were more widely dif- fused than any political broadsheet before 1868 and difficult to police without alienating a substantial segment of the Bonapartist power base.31 Moreover, though the military in Algeria could prevent proselytizing by limiting missionar- ies’ freedom of movement, these restrictions remained contingent on minor administrative restraints rather than a declared policy. In 1866 a series of crises shook colonial Algeria to an unprecedented degree. Cholera, by then pandemic, became particularly rife in the southern areas where French repression had been harshest during the most recent insurrec- tion in 1864. The plagues of locusts, which fell on the land in between 1866 and 1869, devastated meagre harvests already damaged by severe drought.32 Cold winters killed cattle and sheep while typhus devastated the douars (tent villages) established among the Algerian population.33 Although none of these

27 J. Bowlan, ‘Polygamists need not apply: Becoming a French citizen in colonial Algeria, 1918– 1938’, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, 24 (1997), 110–9. A douar (indigenous tent village) was the name given to rural administrative units and was utilized to administratively assemble tribal groups and apportion land amongst their members. 28 M. Levallois, Ismaÿl Urbain (2000). 29 Voyage de S.M. Napoléon III en Algérie (Algiers, 1865), speech of 5 May 1865, p. 38; AOM GGA 1K 290. French Islamist policies are the object of an interesting debate in sub-Saharan Africa where it was often more clearly articulated than in Algeria: D. Robinson, ‘French “Islamic” policy and practice in late nineteenth-century Senegal’, Journal of African History, 29 (1988), 415–35; P. le Pautremat, La politique musulmane de la France au XXème siècle, de l’Hexagone aux terres d’Islam. Espoirs, réussites, échecs (2003). 30 J. Maurain, La politique ecclésiastique du Second Empire de 1852 à 1869 (1930), pp. 876– 901. 31 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, A16 24. 32 AOM GGA 1K 361, Letter from the cercle of Batna, 7 May 1868. All the bureaux arabes reported similar disasters, varying only in intensity: for example, AOM 66 Mi 232, annual report from Tiaret. 33 Abbé V. Burozet, Histoire des désordres de l’Algérie, 1866–1867–1868: Sauterelles, tremble- ment de terre, choléra, famine (Algiers and Paris, 1869). 246 ALGERIAN ORPHANS AND COLONIAL CHRISTIANITY events were by themselves unique or extraordinary, their combination was exceptional. Their sheer scale quickly overwhelmed the colonial rulers. Hordes of ‘skeletal human beings’ converged on the centres of colonization, and it was all the military rulers could do to contain this huge mass, to provide facilities where food could be distributed and prevent chaos from occurring. It is now apparent that the French had no idea how many people there were and some

of the delay in responding to this crisis undoubtedly came from their poor stat- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/20/3/240/2543512 by guest on 23 September 2021 istical knowledge of the indigenous population. No one knew where the refu- gees came from nor where they might go but, every morning, corpses were discovered in the villages near Algiers and in the suburbs of all the colonial cities.34 Native Algeria was, like Ireland before it, sufficiently integrated into the world market to continue exporting foodstuffs while it starved and isolated enough to be unable to raise enough credit to purchase supplies from abroad.35 Food entitlement issues, which have been highlighted by the historiography of famine, were the central problem for this society. Unaware of the scale of the crisis the military tried to maintain an impossible status quo. The man who most vocally challenged both the silence surrounding the fam- ine and the underlying situation was Mgr Lavigerie (1825–1892). Since his arrival in the colony in March 1867, this vigorous archbishop of Algiers had revealed a determination to restore the African Church to the glory it had enjoyed under Saint Augustine of Hippo. Eventually, Lavigerie united under his control the dioceses of Algiers and Constantine, five vicariates apostolic in Equatorial Africa and also Augustine’s former see of (which was once more raised to the status of primacy in Africa in 1882). Lavigerie had been appointed at the request of Marshal MacMahon, perhaps because of his cam- paign in Lebanon in 1860 on behalf of the Oeuvre des Ecoles Chrétiennes.36 On arrival in Algeria, however, the new prelate proved to be far less compliant than had been anticipated. He perceived the famine as the ideal moment to launch a thoroughgoing revival of Christianity in Algeria. Like the colons, he perceived the crisis as the deathblow to traditional Algerian society but, unlike them, his perception was biblical. God had smitten these lands, and their salva- tion lay in Christ and French civilization. The savages of Algeria were about to see the light. The language of religious reconquista was alien to the French military estab- lishment which, even if sympathetic to the Church, nevertheless had to negoti- ate with the forces of Islam. During the later years of the Second Empire the Governor-General of Algeria maintained strict neutrality in religious terms and, in 1868–1869, he even prevented the use of explicit Christian imagery in

34 X. Yacono, ‘Peut-on évaluer la population de l’Algérie en 1830?’, Revue Africaine, 98 (1954), 55–78; D. Good, ‘Notes on the demography of Algeria’, Population Index, 27 (1961), 6–9. 35 J. Simon, L’immigration algérienne en France: Des origines à l’indépendance (2000), pp. 28–32. 36 Abbé Soubiranne, Discours sur l’Oeuvre des Ecoles d’Orient (1863); M. Burrows, ‘ “Mission civilisatrice”: French cultural policy in the Middle East, 1860–1914’, The Historical Journal, 29 (1986), 109–35. BERTRAND TAITHE 247 the few schools that were funded in Algiers.37 Lavigerie thus faced official opposition. Yet the prelate’s correspondence demonstrates that there were opportunities to be exploited, since many military officers sought spiritual sol- ace and even some political leadership from this young and energetic bishop.38 His ideas for recreating Roman glory in North Africa were widely shared among the military. The great famine of Algeria provided the occasion to break ranks

and open a debate on the role of religion in the assimilationist policies of the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/20/3/240/2543512 by guest on 23 September 2021 French Empire. The crisis both enabled the bishop to claim the freedom to proselytize and, ironically, made him the ally of the Arabophobic republican elites.39

II Lavigerie and the clergy of Algiers (in competition with those of Constantine) were soon raising substantial sums for the relief of the colonies that were devoted to several practical developments. This was thanks to a long and sus- tained campaign of fund-raising which portrayed Algeria as a land of hunger and highlighted some of the most mythical forms of Orientalism, including cases where individuals were allegedly murdering and eating their own chil- dren.40 Representatives of the clergy and tiny orphans toured and the world seeking contributions, usually after a service during which an emotive and sensational letter by Lavigerie would be read.41 Journalists were sum- moned for interviews, and reports were fed to the press. Lavigerie had devised a coherent strategy to directly address the humanitarian crisis and the plight of its innocent victims. The first plank in this platform was to create many orphanages geared towards rescuing the children found abandoned on the roads of Algeria. As early as 1868, children were identified as the most wretched victims of the rav- ages of famine, a trope that has long held sway in humanitarian campaigns. Lavigerie even attempted to specify, unsuccessfully as it turned out, that only children less than ten years old, supposedly more malleable to the benefits of Christian education, should be admitted.42 The terrible events of 1868 had led to the dislocation of much traditional Arab society, and population movements were numerous. The French military had originally attempted to stop these migratory practices and assembled the most needy populations in improvised

37 AOM GGA F80 1746, Circulaire aux préfets de l’Algérie, 14 October 1867, regarding the establishment of communal schools. 38 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, A16 69 ff. Lavigerie corresponded with many generals and officers in the cercles. Some like Generals de Sonis or de Geydon corresponded with him even after their departure from Algeria. 39 Economiste Français, 268 (1868), 94; AOM F80 1746, ‘Comment découvrir la vérité algérienne’. 40 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, A16 34, p. 3, Mandement de l’évêque de Gap. 41 The sermon delivered on 4 June 1868 at the cathedral of Orléans, in the bishopric of Mgr Dupanloup, was reprinted in the press and gave rise to a considerable agitation with spectators fainting at the mention of the horrors of Algeria. 42 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B7 191, 17 January 1868. 248 ALGERIAN ORPHANS AND COLONIAL CHRISTIANITY camps located outside the main areas of French civilian settlement. As ever, such camps attracted typhoid and typhus epidemics leading many to seek food and shelter in the urban centres instead. Some of the children displaced by this exodus were genuine orphans; others left dying families or were sent to find help while yet others were simply disoriented, hungry and lost. The term orphan was applied to all, and the military authorities and police began collect-

ing these little vagabonds and assembling them in large groups, originally at Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/20/3/240/2543512 by guest on 23 September 2021 camps such as Ben Aknoun outside Algiers. The mortality rate in these camps, which used military tents for shelter, was initially very high: one half of some 1,800 children fell victim to typhus and typhoid while only ophthalmic ailments were reasonably well treated.43 In face of this major crisis, the Algerian clergy soon decided to associate their new-found freedom to proselytize with a grander enterprise of civilization and colonization. Some of the orphans were kept in situ in Algeria while others were sent to Marseille, or Saint-Laurent d’Olt, a backwater located in the Aveyron.44 The orphans varied dramatically in age and background. Some were very young, but many were actually in their early teens. For all of them, the programme was identical, involving the development of skills and knowledge required by the fledging colony, christianization and education. Essentially, these orphans were destined to become an intermediate group of assimilated Christian, and thus French, Arabs. The original plans, rapidly reduced because of lack of income, were to foster an agricultural race of Arab colonists who could, by their methods and prosperity, entice the rest of the population to embrace the combined benefits of conversion and citizenship.45 It quickly became clear that these ambitions were rather too grand and that a more nuanced approach was required. The colonies of orphans soon developed various gradations and, like the orphanages of Paris, were encour- aged to pursue artisan skills as well as the more mundane requirements of domestic service. The French orphanages responded with alarm at the quality of the children sent to them: ‘Some are weak, some are disabled, some are blind, epileptic and suffer afflictions of all kinds; it seems the plagues of Egypt have fallen on this establishment’.46 Later on the director of the orphanage of Saint-Pierre-ès-Liens at Marseille complained bitterly that young workers were

43 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B7 251. In 1868, 307 children out of 806 living at Ben Aknoum were affected by the disease. Ophtalmia, a disease leading to blindness, was easily treated by solutions and eye-bathing and was considered a major hygienic success story for French medicine. 44 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B7 40–8, lists for 1872–3. There were 418 orphans in Marseille; and 288 at Saint-Charles, 21 in two sites at Bon Pasteur, and 140 at the Maison Carré, in Algeria. The population declined rapidly after 1874, with only 239 remaining by the end of 1874. Children over the age of sixteen were taken off the registers and often served as paid domestic servants at the reli- gious institutions where they had been raised. AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B7 49. Of 58 orphans at Saint-Laurent d’Olt, four ran away and four died. 45 Mohammed Harbi narrates in his autobiography that this association of religion and citizen- ship applied both ways: The local priest in his village of El-Arrouch thus tolled the bells for the death of a pious Muslim French citizen: Une vie debout: mémoires politiques, tome 1, 1945–1962 (2001), p. 16. 46 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B2 362, 14 September 1872. BERTRAND TAITHE 249 being removed before their maturity had enabled them to contribute materially to the wealth of the establishment. Besides lack of funds, the Church soon real- ized that it had underestimated the sense of agency assumed by these little orphans, many of whom had no intention of seeing their entire life mapped out for them. Some complained to Lavigerie about their treatment in the orphan- ages and were removed as a result, others ran away. Their behaviour was often

the object of complaints based on stereotypes that echoed the psychiatric repre- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/20/3/240/2543512 by guest on 23 September 2021 sentations of North African men47: ‘There are so many hard cases! These children are not disciplined. They are inconstant and not lacking in self assurance.’48 The urge to discipline, to break and to remould was a source of considerable discussion between the Bishop of Algiers and his subsidiary establishments. Although the intent remained the same, there is little doubt that the bishop was counting on the virtues of example, emulation and affection rather than the more penal attitudes familiar in many French orphanages.49 Part of this dif- ference was based on the fact that Lavigerie was concerned with fund-raising and his calls for compassion drew upon the sentimentality of metropolitan rep- resentations of childhood. In the song produced for the orphanage of Ben Aknoum, verses 4 and 6 ran as follows: Without bread, clothing and home All was dead around us all We were drifting from town to town Dear brothers, towards you Dear brothers, succour us Here, all is tenderness [and] Charity the mother of us all On behalf of the orphans Speaks to you, brothers, help us Dear brothers, succour us Charity is giving life back to us Through a loving and noble father But for his children he is begging Dear brothers succour us Dear brothers succour us50 Yet love frequently found its realization in harsh discipline. The Algerian estab- lishments imposed no less than two masses and one and a quarter hours of prayer per day. The teaching was then organized in the counter-reformation Jesuitical mode explored by Michel Foucault, with opposing groups competing

47 R. Berthelier, L’homme mahgrébin dans la littérature psychiatrique (1994). 48 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B7 393, 7 November 1871, Société de Saint-Pierre-ès-Liens, in charge of forty-nine orphans. 49 R. Gibson, ‘Hellfire and damnation in nineteenth-century France’, Catholic Historical Review, 74 (1988), 383–402. 50 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B7 424, Notre-Dame d’Afrique. 250 ALGERIAN ORPHANS AND COLONIAL CHRISTIANITY with each other on the basis of a daily hierarchy of merit.51 Teaching in the school of Notre-Dame d’Afrique was bilingual and placed much of its language- training emphasis on the New Testament in Arabic (to counter the dominance of the Koran in the teaching of classical Arabic). Although domestic servants could be placed with suitable Catholic families or on their estates, a destination was less obvious for artisans for whom the

milieu might often be less than receptive to religious values. Besides these two Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/20/3/240/2543512 by guest on 23 September 2021 categories, some orphans were clearly marked out for the service of religion, and the apostolic mission to Algeria had developed two orders where vocations might flourish: the White Fathers and the White Sisters. Members of both orders were dressed in gandouras and Arabic clothing, both were missionary and both were meant to help structure native colonial society.52 Last but not least, a handful of bright young boys were identified as potential members of the elite of this new society and were trained at great expense to become medical practi- tioners, ideally to return to Algeria and help associate religion with progress. The scale of this project was unique in the history of the French colony. Not only were the aims ambitious, but they also presented a series of direct chal- lenges to all previous colonial practices. The first was to consider assimilation immediately rather than in some vague future, whereas the other was to pose bluntly the fundamental question of the role of religion in French citizenship. The issue of assimilation painfully highlighted the lack of funds devoted to that noble cause in the imperial regime. Lavigerie nevertheless obtained an under- taking from the early Third Republic that his enterprise would be considered as a possible pilot for other schemes. The land he acquired in the commune mixte of Les Attafs (which had a limited European presence) led to the founding of two villages named Sainte-Monique and Saint-Cyprien (both North African saints). Cyprien had in fact been chosen by the first bishop of Algiers, Dupuch, as the patron saint of his own much humbler orphanage in 1839.53 Although both sites were far from ideal, they were close to the railway line and in the middle of a plain overlooked by tribal territory, perfectly suited to the installa- tion of model farming and a display of French cultural and agricultural superi- ority. The funding was obtained largely, thanks to governmental pressure, with some financial assistance from the National Assembly and the Algerian governor.54 Lavigerie shrewdly avoided any discussion of the new congregations

51 Ibid; M. Foucault, Discipline and punish (1977), pp. 178–94; P. J. Harrigan, ‘The Catholic contribution to universal schooling in France, 1850–1906’, Journal of Modern History, 57 (1985), 211–47; S. Curtis, ‘Supply and demand: Religious schooling in nineteenth-century France’, History of Education Quarterly, 39 (1999), 51–72. 52 This dress code was perceived as an attempt to usurp the role of marabouts. It followed well- established models of acculturation practised since the seventeenth century by Jesuit priests in India and China. Conseil Général d’Alger, Procès verbal de la séance du 22 avril 1874, p. 4. 53 Abbé Monterat, Mémoire en faveur de Mgr Dupuch, premier et ancien évêque d’Alger à l’appui de la manifestation du clergé d’Afrique (Algiers, 1852). 54 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B2 247. The bulk of the financial help dates from the ‘Moral Order’ phase of the Third Republic during which the French administration provided 208,678 francs, from 1873 to 1876. BERTRAND TAITHE 251 or ecclesiastical wealth in general by setting up civil societies to oversee both the White Fathers and the villages. Despite relatively lavish investment, life remained hard at Les Attafs. On many occasions, such as the summer of 1892, the survival of the villages was endangered, and they had to be bailed out by the society as the colonists faced another devastating famine. The hospital serv- ing both communities was open to the tribes and yet sometimes served as a for- 55

tress against these same tribesmen. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/20/3/240/2543512 by guest on 23 September 2021 The second major issue, concerning French citizenship and religion, had been posed in stark terms by the Crémieux decree of October 1870: following many previous recommendations, it finally naturalized the Jews of Algeria en masse. This amounted to a partial revocation of the earlier Senatus Consulte on citizenship and renewed the debate on the relationship between citizenship and religion, favouring as it did all religions present in the metropolis. Judaism was regarded as French and was granted a place among the civilized folks of the colony. By extension the conversion mechanism prepared the Arab colonists for full citizenship since the main obstacle, adherence to Sharia law, had been removed. Lavigerie, like many religious leaders of the 1870s, inten- ded to ensure that religion, rather than the Civil Code, would lay the founda- tions for nationality. To obtain their citizenship Lavigerie had strengthened the links of no less than 466 children with France. These children had been placed under the patronage of ‘adoptive parents’ (or sponsors) who, in return for a small fee, could choose the Christian name of the orphans and obtain regular updates on their protégés’ development including a letter and photographs. This exchange of gifts was meant to enable them to intercede for the children in their prayers, the replacement, albeit virtual, of a lost child or, perhaps more crucially, the fulfilling of the proselytizing duty of the good Christian. Patrons were drawn from aristocrats, bourgeois, religious communities and businesses.56

Male orphan (%) Female orphan (%)

Religious sponsor 13 1.7 Institutional sponsor 22 5 Aristocrats 8.5 15 Bourgeois 22.5 12.3

Institutional sponsors were often religious groups or conférences (the conférence de Notre-Dame, for instance), organized like the Conférence de Saint-Vincent de Paul created in 1833 by Frédéric Ozanam. Occasionally, one or two orphans were directly adopted by worthy Christians under some super- vision from the Church.57

55 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B10 2. In February 1880, the murder of Father Dioré in the village of Les Attafs cast a shadow over inter-confessional relations. 56 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B7 57. 57 For instance, a girl, Bent Hadj Mohamed, was adopted by a Miss Brunet of Paris. 252 ALGERIAN ORPHANS AND COLONIAL CHRISTIANITY

Yet the aims of the Catholic Church in Algeria were not pure assimilation to an increasingly irreligious French colonial society. Indeed, it was unclear whether or not Lavigerie believed in the principles of full-blown assimilation. He had privately expressed some reservations about his own ‘savage’ protégés, for so much effort was not simply intended to produce a few hundred but to create models of hybridity whose links with the Algerian people

could serve the missionary aims of the new Church. This ambiguous position Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/20/3/240/2543512 by guest on 23 September 2021 soon became uncomfortable. Surviving members of their families might return to recover a lost sibling, nephew or niece, occasionally their own child, denouncing forced conversions as they did so.58 Between 1870 and 1874 many opportunities for litigation arose, and Lavigerie was asked to account for his acts to the Conseil des Cultes.59 His defence was usually either to cast asper- sions on the real intentions of a family that was showing such tardy interest in a now marketable girl or boy or to charge them the full cost of keeping the child: In any other circumstances, M. le Procureur Général, and if it was merely a matter of giving back a child to a family where she would be safe, I would not hesitate to waive the debt owed to the orphan- age by unhappy parents, but there must be misgivings on the part of anyone who has any knowledge of Arab mores and the fate reserved for girls. I am facing a father who abandoned his child when she was nothing but a burden to him and who is now claiming her back when he thinks that he can make a profit by selling her.60 In other cases, the Church fought fathers whom girls refused to recognize as their own and accused them of attempting to take away a convert from their work. In 1874 the Conseil Général d’Alger deliberated on the removal of orphans from the custody of Lavigerie at the request of its Muslim member, M. Abdallah, who complained that ‘they are maintained in purely religious institutions where their faith and beliefs are continuously and publicly threat- ened’.61 To this the prefect responded that the children would have died had they not been rescued by the Catholic (or Protestant) orphanages and that the Conseil Général had no rights over these children. Such protection lasted as long as the military ruled Algeria, up to 1877, but it did not extend to a renewal of the cohort: the orphanages had recruited the bulk of their children in a moment of social dislocation and this would not be repeated. While they provided religious education and training in manual skills, not to mention food and clothing during childhood, the role of the orphanages did not end when the orphan departed. Without other forms of recognition, and in view of the unreliability of pre-famine registry and census material, the

58 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B7 182, letter of Abdelkader Ben-Belkassem from El Marit, seeking the return of his brother, with the support of his military superiors. 59 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B7 108. 60 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B7 168, 16 August 1869, and B7 108. 61 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, ‘Procès-verbal de la séance du 22 avril 1874’. BERTRAND TAITHE 253

Church served as the provider of civil identity in the shape of the actes de notoriété and facilitated the systematic naturalization of the converted orphans.62 Twenty years later, some like Berthe Louisant, a domestic servant in Grenoble, sought to obtain a ‘document that would constitute my iden- tity’.63 From the clerical perspective, one obvious danger was the convert returning to the life of the douar and relapsing into Islam. This problem was

exacerbated by the difficulty of finding a partner outside the narrow com- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/20/3/240/2543512 by guest on 23 September 2021 munity of orphans, despite clerical efforts to engineer such matches. Another drawback, equally detrimental to the colonial project, was that children might merge too intimately with colonial society, or even settle in France, thus disappearing from sight. Anticlerical Algerian deputies denounced the villages as abject failures. They accused the converts of having reverted to Islam and of obtaining permission from the administration for the villages to become sections of a commune mixte. In many instances anticlerical administrators refused to recognize Chris- tianity alone as the dominant characteristic of Frenchness and thus sought to assimilate converts to natives.64 The villages, organized in 1874 after naturaliza- tion of the converts, produced another anomaly for Algeria by creating an entirely Arabic municipal council. In 1898, these villages were linked to a colo- nial neighbour, Wattignies, in the hope (subsequently unfulfilled because of the converts’ demography) that French settlers would silence this anomalous native democracy.65 Above all, the experiment aimed at turning the converts into ‘colons arabes’ creating a uniquely hybrid race able to adapt itself to the land while promoting a form of religious citizenship. This went against the French colons’ notion of the Arabs as racially inferior, and it presented a chal- lenge to the segregation of colons and indigènes, which found its legal formula- tion in the Code de l’Indigénat.66 The paradox, of course, was that as a result of his campaign on cannibalism, Lavigerie had done much to emphasize the ‘African’ and therefore ‘Negro’ nature of Algerian population.67 Stating later that an Arabic population could, simply by converting, gain access to Frenchness was controversial and contra- dictory. In fact, Lavigerie’s emphasis was on religion and implied the sort of inculturation hitherto practised by the Jesuits. The Arabs were not supposed to lose their cultural identity, and the Kabyles, identified as more likely to convert through some dubious ethnological gymnastics, were supposed to remain as

62 The registration of the Algerian Etat Civil was imposed by the law of 23 March 1882. 63 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B7 110. 64 J. Tiquet, Une expérience de petite colonisation indigène en Algérie: Les colons arabes- chrétiens du Cardinal Lavigerie (1936), p. 93. 65 AOM 1Y 110. 66 For an analysis of some of the medical grounding of racial theories in Algeria, see P. M. E. Lorcin, ‘Imperialism, colonial identity, and race in Algeria, 1830–1870: The role of the French Medi- cal Corps’, Isis, 90 (1999), 653–79. The Code de l’Indigénat came into existence in 1874. 67 C. Lavigerie, Oeuvres choisies de son éminence le cardinal Lavigerie, archevêque d’Alger (1884), pp. 164–6. Many of the details had been provided by priests in his diocese: see AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B7 223, 232, 236 and 237. 254 ALGERIAN ORPHANS AND COLONIAL CHRISTIANITY

Kabyle as possible to appeal to non-converted Kabyles. The model of hybridity pursued in these model villages was thus complex. For example, the accommo- dation of converts in French colonial villages led to their Europeanization in dress if not in all aspects of lifestyle. As père Tiquet, who chronicled the first thirty years of the villages, would note, the tensions were numerous. Writing in the 1930s he remarked that there was now nothing to distinguish the Arab set-

tlers from their European counterparts, with whom they had often married Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/20/3/240/2543512 by guest on 23 September 2021 even if the Christian Arabs themselves were initially opposed to such unions.68 From a strictly legal point of view the relationships between French Arabs and Muslim Arabs were far from simple. Sharia law did not apply to them although potentially they were the heirs, partners or siblings of natives with this ‘special status’. For the purpose of the bishop’s colonial plans they had to remain as an intermediate Creole body which alone might lead to a more gen- eral process of conversion. Yet their alienation from the Arab cultural context meant that they were far more likely to intermingle with Europeans. The Arab widows married Europeans, and from the first generation onwards there were more mixed marriages than endogamous Arab–Christian ones.69 Ultimately, successful assimilation led to their disappearance as an autonomous group, lacking any proselytizing or exemplary value. In practical terms the villages were utopian communities, plagued with the same material concerns that had undermined similar communities in the nine- teenth century: the land was poor and the wells dried up during droughts. Their governance was theocratic and the leases remained in the hands of the church as the main lever of Catholic rule. This led to some conflicts when the land fell vacant. The Catholic hierarchy also complained that the Arabic people were of low extraction and lacked parental skills. Even though they were edu- cated well before the Ferry law was applied to Algeria, they did not reveal themselves to be paragons of virtue. The main road from Oran to Algiers pre- sented many dangers and temptations. The village of Saint-Cyprien declined from 380 inhabitants in 1909 to 160 in 1921, conforming to the general pattern of Algerian rural exodus. Individual failures abounded among the urban orphans. Thus, writing from the slums of Algiers, Bernard Adim begged repeatedly for support during the late 1880s (though he did obtain some assist- ance from local Catholic priests).70

III While the collective venture proved to be a failure, individual lives reveal con- trasting fortunes. Among the many fragmentary stories the Lavigerie papers con- tain the biographies of four young doctors trained at the Faculté Catholique de

68 For instance, Jeanne, daughter of Geronimo, married Augeix in 1892, a Frenchman from Royat-les-Bains working for the French railways, in spite of her father’s desire that she should only marry a Christian Arab from Les Attafs. See AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B9 448–54. 69 Tiquet, Une expérience, p. 126. 70 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B9 113–16: the correspondence spread over two years. BERTRAND TAITHE 255

Lille, at the expense of the White Fathers, graphically illustrate the limits of assim- ilation in French society. Their training and education was not uneventful, and numerous letters narrate conflicts with the priests in charge of their accommoda- tion, demonstrating that these young men did not easily accept the monkish life- style envisaged for them.71 They contested the personal discipline that was imposed upon them and complained about the quality of their food, attempts to

treat them as if they were as low as domestic servants, and their freedom to come Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/20/3/240/2543512 by guest on 23 September 2021 and go as they pleased. At the same time they constantly expressed their devo- tion to the Algerian cause their education was intended to serve. Indeed, they sought support from Lavigerie and corresponded regularly with him.72 These highly trained men were originally destined to return to Algeria to assist with the missionary work and settlement colonies. Taking advantage of the favourable climate of the early 1870s, Lavigerie had negotiated an acceler- ated progression with the university authorities which enabled his trainee doctors to graduate with fewer examinations than their French counterparts. Yet when they graduated between 1888 and 1890, there was talk of a glut of doctors, and they experienced difficulty finding suitable positions in Algeria when competing with locally trained doctors and formal opposition from the medical school in Algiers.73 Racialist discourse in Algeria, which soon erupted with the Max Régis affair and the election of Drumont in Algiers, was rapidly opposed to Jews and Arabs playing any role in the public sphere.74 The native doctors whom governor General Chanzy hoped would serve in the communes mixtes all found their careers blighted by petty official discrimination and the refusal of white clients to patronize Arab doctors.75 Instead of settling in Alge- rian villages the native doctors received financial help and loans that enabled them to set up private practice: Vital, for example, resided in Algiers, where he worked for himself and not for the colonial establishment of Les Attafs.76 Lavigerie’s Christian Arab doctors were not at a particular advantage in the anti- clerical atmosphere of Algeria. All married French women and only one remained in the colony, the others preferring to emigrate to Egypt, or France.77 The rapid integration of Frédéric [Si] Mohammed into the provincial middle class of Gorron, in the department of the Mayenne, is particularly striking. Sponsored by the municipal authority, Mohammed was settled at the expense of the Church and soon found a middle-class wife, Eugénie Roudeau, who gave

71 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B9 12, 21 February 1886. 72 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B9 68. 73 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B9 33, 20 August 1885. 74 AOM F80 1685–6; P. Birnbaum, ‘La France aux Français’. Histoire des haines nationalistes (1993), pp. 260–3; P. Hebey, Alger 1898: la grande vague antijuive (1996); G. Dermenjian, La crise anti-juive oranaise 1895–1905: L’anti-sémitisme dans l’Algérie coloniale (1986). 75 This can be verified in the files of the Médecins de Colonization Indigènes, for instance AOM, Alg. GGA 1U 28, Ali Ben Mohamed Boulouk Bachi, or 1U 68, Ben Fiah Djilali and so on. 76 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B9 75–8. Vital thus received 2,500 francs in February 1889. 77 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B9 69. One went to Jaffa and married a Miss Garnier; the second, Michel, married an officer’s daughter named Irma Dumarché; another, called Mohammed, married in Gorron (Mayenne); only Vital settled in Algeria and died soon afterwards. 256 ALGERIAN ORPHANS AND COLONIAL CHRISTIANITY birth to a daughter.78 His correspondence denotes a deeply religious man whose sense of indebtedness to Lavigerie was of a filial nature. In 1891 Mohammed lost his wife after a mere eighteen months of marriage. The letter he subsequently wrote to Lavigerie was an outpouring of suffering that reflected an intimate relationship with the bishop which lasted until the prelate’s death.79 Moham- med’s sister was a nun at the hospital of Les Attafs and they both inherited 80

some wealth from the tribe that they continued to visit occasionally. Indeed, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/20/3/240/2543512 by guest on 23 September 2021 Mohammed took his daughter on a visit to Algeria in 1912.81 His correspond- ence illustrates how attached he remained throughout his life to the White Fathers’ missionary network, as he sought detailed information on the careers of priests he had encountered in his youth and gave generously to the cause. It does not seem that his name, nor his skin colour, created any difficulties in France. His daughter celebrated her marriage to a dentist from Laval in church and went on to maintain a bourgeois existence, as well as continuing her father’s fund-raising activities on behalf of the White Fathers.82 Among the working-class orphans, examples such as that of a restaurateur established near Lyon suggest a similarly rapid individual integration into French society. This often involved a complex relationship of material and spir- itual dependency on the Catholic Church. In his correspondence with the archbishop, the sometime shopkeeper and restaurant owner in Villeurbanne, Gaëtan Abdel Kader, referred to family problems with his wife and children and sought advice on whether he should separate from them.83 Three years later it was his wife Aïcha, also a Christian Arab, who suffered from bouts of fever, who begged for support. Marital strife often led to personal intervention from Lavigerie, who always sought an amicable resolution. Augustin Abd ElKader, who had married a French widow in Providence (Rhode Island) in 1877 and kept a restaurant in Thizy near Lyon, accordingly sought advice at the time of his separation ten years later. The archbishop reflected that marriage ‘to a young Arab, only just a Christian and still half savage, could only end in failure’. He worried about the defamation of Augustin’s character and decided to help Augustin’s wife and children during the time it took to solve the con- flict. Soon afterwards, Lavigerie settled the financial details of the separation and secured the education of the three children. The same Abd ElKader came back for more advice in 1892 when he suggested that he might end up killing his wife; Lavigerie’s reply is not known. What do these exchanges reveal? First and foremost they show the level of individual and collective commitment felt on both sides, as well as the endur- ing relationship between directeurs de conscience and their flocks. The church took over the life of the orphans, planned their weddings (250 francs each) and

78 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B9 29–49. 79 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B9 44, 7 January 1891. 80 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B9 49(2). 81 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B9 42(4). 82 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B49 19(1). 83 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B9 104, 24 March 1891. BERTRAND TAITHE 257 protected them in all sorts of ways, but the grand colonial plans of 1869 soon seem to have been abandoned for more modest individual aspirations. In the 1880s and 1890s the church was on the defensive, its alternative model of citi- zenship and assimilation threatened by the rise of racism and anticlericalism. The real identity of these thoroughly colonized subjects must therefore remain a matter of conjecture, for where records exist, they present disturbing evid-

ence of marital breakdown, illness and petty crime. Many converts simply van- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/20/3/240/2543512 by guest on 23 September 2021 ished and, beyond a few letters over the years, their lives seem to have followed not one but many paths. The fact remains that archival traces of racial discrimination are absent in France, as opposed to Algeria. The ambiguities of religious citizenship, which existed de facto in Algeria unlike France, since the statut particulier of the natives was directly linked to their religion, seem to have favoured the Arab Christians living in France rather than in Algeria where racial preoccupations dominated. Moreover, the anticler- ical policies of Ferry and then Combes found a particular echo in Algeria where both Catholic minorities (immigrants from Spain, Malta or Minorca who were deemed to be enslaved to the church) and Muslims could be tarred with the same brush. The shift of anticlericalism into anti-Islamism (to use a contempo- rary term) was made easier because of the long-standing association of tradi- tional Arab society with feudal models. Furthermore, the rabid anti-Islamism displayed by Lavigerie and many of his clergy meant that the different religious groups were unable to present a united front against these anticlerical cam- paigns. As early as 1881 Lavigerie began preparing for the eventuality of hostile measures by creating an offshore training centre in Malta where his African students, White Fathers and White Sisters could find refuge, together with his Algerian orphans.84 He also placed his liquid assets beyond the reach of the French state. He was right to do so; after a hiatus of some twenty years the village at Les Attafs attracted renewed attention from the metropolitan state. Combes’ ministry launched an official inquiry to ascertain why a small village should be con- trolled by religiously inclined Arabs.85 In the event, administrators were reas- sured that this small community was not growing very much and that its theocratic basis no longer presented a threat to public order: It is not within the remit of the administration to dismantle this cen- tre of clericalism since it involves citizens exercising their rights legally and according to our legislation ... As to modifying the elect- oral boundaries in order to favour the Frenchmen of European ori- gins, our administration has done what it could at this stage. The political importance of this situation is minimal. This example of a village of Arabs educated by Catholic priests is unique in Algeria and there is no reason to believe it will occur again.86

84 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, A16 69. 85 AOM F80 1693. 86 Ibid., rapport du préfet, 20 December 1902. 258 ALGERIAN ORPHANS AND COLONIAL CHRISTIANITY

In fact, in 1904 the Oeuvre des Orphelinats decided to liquidate its assets and put an end to its activities. This followed a strident anticlerical campaign in favour of a drunk, Philippe Djelloul, who had become something of a cause célèbre for Algerian anticlericals after his expulsion from the community at Saint-Cyprien. The White Fathers were already perturbed by the leaders of Les Attafs, especially the moderate Frachebois, whose degree of autonomy and

political rhetoric appeared especially dangerous, even though the same individ- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/20/3/240/2543512 by guest on 23 September 2021 ual was under prefectoral scrutiny for his clericalism.87 Converted Arabs remained either too religious or too secular. Individual orphans employed as translators or teachers, such as Célestin Salem, instituteur in the commune mixte at Fort National fell under similar suspicion. Salem was reprimanded by the administration for refusing to teach on Sundays.88 Indeed, the Church wea- ried of this schoolteacher tainted by secularism and tried to censor his writ- ing.89 After some heroic resistance Salem resigned, then resumed his position, only to be refused a Catholic education for his children. Protesting that ‘African negroes’ rather than white children were now the target of conversions, Salem signalled racial assimilation as well as his rejection of colonized status.90 He prided himself on baptizing his own family, as well as fourteen stricken orphans in articulo mortis. Yet, for all the strident rhetoric to be found in the press, one should not exaggerate the extent of anticlerical measures applied in Algeria. The Catholic Church provided many facilities which the state was reluctant to support. For example, when it came to basic hospital provision for native people, the Gouvernement Général found it extremely convenient to rely on the White Fathers and adopted the model offered by the infirmary at Les Attafs.91 The history of this Christian colonization in Algeria is thus one of failed mas- ter plans and complex life histories. Though the system collapsed, individuals managed to survive, albeit in ambiguous situations. In the period leading to the Dreyfus affair, French racism was seeking expression in many domains: cul- tural, linguistic and religious as well as racial. The racial mode was perhaps less important than the religious, and the two were not necessarily confused: Frédéric Mohammed was dark-skinned, yet his clerical support enabled him to live a decent middle-class life, probably better integrated into the local com- munity than if he had been Jewish.92 The orphans rescued from the great disaster

87 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B9 435. Each supporter of Frachebois was accused of betrayal by the White Fathers, whereas Frachebois was under close scrutiny from the French prefecture in particular for his supposed favouring of native and clerical interests over those of newly settled Europeans. 88 On instituteurs, see F. Colonna, Instituteurs algériens, 1883–1939 (1975). 89 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B9 237 43. 90 AGMA Papiers Lavigerie, B9 248, 16 January 1891. 91 AOM C1197 VIII, Service médical de colonisation; AOM Alg. GGA 5X 6/16, Direction des Affaires Indigènes, circulaire du GGA au préfet, 5 December 1904; Anon, Rapport sur les œuvres spéciales intéressant les indigènes (Algiers, 1904), pp. 4–5. 92 N. MacMaster, Colonial migrants and racism: Algerians in France, 1900–1962 (1996), pp. 118–25. This author dates anti-Arab racism from the First World War at the earliest. BERTRAND TAITHE 259 of 1868 who went to live in France among the proletariat of the great cities were probably no more alienated than many of their French counterparts. They were exceptional since, until 1905 at least, the strict laws of the Third Republic prevented the mass emigration of less-favoured indigenous Algerians; their exceptionality probably explains their singular success in settling permanently in France.93

On the contrary, the republican racial discourse fostered by radicals in Algeria Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/20/3/240/2543512 by guest on 23 September 2021 was many-sided and ensured that skin colour, religion, origins and culture were all equally alternative grounds for discrimination; partial integration under one of these headings alone would not suffice. It was only through exogenous mar- riages to ‘European’ colons that the Christian Arabs of Les Attafs eventually escaped discrimination and political pressure, while many other converts remained at the margins of a society which tended to rely on Islam as its essen- tial source of identity. The settlers at Les Attafs, who were under so much scru- tiny, experienced the same difficult conditions as the petty colons: up in the hills their blood-relatives stubbornly refused to regard their fate as any more enviable than their own. Victims of anticlericalism and racism in equal meas- ure, their citizenship was as contested as that of Jews under the Crémieux law and, like them, they had nowhere else to go. Only by migration to France could the converts disappear among the mass of the faithful, among practising Catho- lics. Yet the society that welcomed them was not the modern, ruling elite. Their social support was derived from an ‘alternative’ France, one that seemed defeated and reduced to living in the shadows of the Republic—at least until their patron, Lavigerie, proclaimed the ralliement in 1891. When the famous ‘toast to Algiers’ was offered, the orchestra playing the Marseillaise was com- posed of Catholic Arabs.

93 Mass immigration, predominantly from Kabylia, began in earnest after the liberalization of 1905–13: MacMaster, Colonial migrants, p. 16; Simon, L’immigration algérienne, pp. 39–43; B. Stora, Ils venaient d’Algérie: L’immigration algérienne en France (1912–1992) (1992).