© 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 CHRISTIANITY IN ALGERIA, 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 Catholic Church 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 Algiers. Some thus became a quasi oxymoron: Arab colons, Christian farmers modelled on the Maronite Lebanese or the Christian Palestinians. Some became hybrid urban proletarian Arab Christians 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 Augustine of Hippo. 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, Oran 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 North Africa 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 bishops 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, Bishop of Algiers after 1868, adopted a particularly hierarchical interpretation of it. Lavigerie ended up controlling the bishoprics of Algiers, Constantine and Tunis 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.