My Battle of Algiers (Hardcover)

It's no trouble for a child to understand colonialism. Children are told to be good, and if they're not, they're punished. Children are colonized by their parents, whether overbearing or permissive. Children are under the discipline of their parents, as the natives of a colony are under the discipline of the occupier, and children rebel as do the occupied. Even a child can understand that the feigning of virtues one does not possess is called hypocrisy.

North Africa, separated from Europe by the lakelike Mediterranean and inhabited by Berber tribesmen, was successively occupied by the Phoenicians, the Romans, the Vandals, and the Arabs, who converted the tribes to Islam in the ninth century. Then came the rise of the great jigsaw, the Ottoman Empire, which at various times included Hungary to the north, Arabia to the east, and Algeria to the west. Spanning five centuries, Ottoman rule devised a system of theoretical vassalage. The sultan in Constantinople was the head of the Moslem community centered in Mecca, the city toward which praying Moslems turned and to which they journeyed on pilgrimage. But in terms of temporal rule, Algeria was like the branch office of a conglomerate. The dey, or governor, made his own decisions and signed his own treaties with Christian powers but paid tribute to the sultan.

From the time they fell under Turkish rule in the sixteenth century, Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripoli were known as the Barbary states. The Turks pioneered piracy, a naval form of terrorism, in the Mediterranean. Algeria without piracy, which made up a large part of the national product, could not have existed. The dey of Algiers had a government department in charge of piracy, which employed thousands, from the carpenters who built the ships to the sailors who manned them, from agencies in charge of supplies and weaponry to teams of accountants and auditors who kept the books, from prison guards who mistreated captured passengers in ankle chains to the auctioneers who sold them as slaves.

The deys were elected by their fellow soldiers from the ranks of the 4,000 Janissaries who ran things in Algiers. This privileged caste kept the natives quiet through tribal alliances and payoffs to tribal leaders. The normal method of succession was strangulation. Between 1801 and 1812, three deys were replaced that way. One of the French consuls described the system as "despotism tempered by assassination."

It was no picnic being a consul, who had to contend not only with the dey's whims but also with the animosity of the local population toward non-Moslems. In 1798, the French consul, Dominique Moltedo, presented a formal complaint to the dey that while he was relaxing on the terrace of his home near the mosque, a Turk standing in front of the mosque had shouted, "Down with the faithless. Down with the Christians, whose faith is dung."

As every French schoolchild knows, on April 29, 1827, the consul in Algiers, Pierre Duval, came to pay his respects to the dey, Hussein, at the end of Ramadan. Perhaps made irascible by his month-long fast, the dey slapped the consul with a fly whisk and called him a rascal, which created a diplomatic incident. The dey exported large quantities of wheat to France and believed that he was owed 8 million francs.

The fly-whisk incident led to the French invasion of Algeria in 1830. But why did the French wait three years to avenge their honor? The answer had to do with the king, for after Napoleon's abdication in 1815, France had restored the monarchy. In 1830, 73-year-old Charles X, the younger brother of the decapitated Louis XVI, had been on the throne since 1824. By reason of temperament (embittered by long years of exile after the 1789 revolution), age (too old to change), and the vicissitudes of life (having seen his brother sentenced to death), he was a pious promoter of the old order. He had himself crowned in the Rheims cathedral, to emphasize the compact between the king and the pope.

His reactionary regime dramatized the failure of the last Bourbon to reconcile the spirit of the monarchy with the expectations of the people after the revolution. Charles X pushed through unpopular laws, such as giving the returned émigrés a billion francs for the loss of their property. He declared the death penalty for sacrilegious acts committed in churches, as a favor to the religious right. The rumor spread that he had secretly become a Jesuit and that he spoke directly to God.

As Charles the fervent horseman cantered on the road to disaster, surrounding himself with fanatical reactionaries, a powerful opposition arose in the polarized nation. When the Chamber of Deputies met in March 1830, a majority denounced the king's ultraconservative ministers. The king struck back by dissolving the chamber and ordering new elections in July. This was where the invasion of Algeria came in, as a diversion, a good way to deflect public opinion away from the troubles at home. Charles needed to touch up his coat of arms with a headline-grabbing pocket war.

On July 5, 1830, 300 French ships sailed from Toulon and landed 37,000 men on the beaches of Sidi Ferruch, 20 miles west of Algiers. Charles got the headlines he wanted: "Our gallant troops are crushing the barbaric Turks." To reassure the international community, France announced that it was making war on the rulers in order to put an end to a tyrannical regime and bring freedom to a backward people. The French convinced themselves that they would be greeted as liberators of a people long oppressed by the despotic Turks.

On July 14 the Times of London said: "France upbraids us with the misgovernment and oppression of India. We should be curious to know how she will govern Algeria." The French themselves did not know; they were improvising as they went along. But they had the firepower, and the French artillery dispersed the Turkish troops. It took three weeks for the dey to capitulate, and he sailed for Constantinople with his harem of 60 women, his officials, and his soldiers.

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Excerpted from My Battle of Algiersby Ted Morgan Copyright © 2006 by Ted Morgan. Excerpted by permission.
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