Algeria (1858)

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As can be seen from the list contained in Engels’ letter to Marx of May 28, 1857, Engels intended to write the article “Algeria” together with the first batch of articles beginning with A. But by the middle of July 1857 it was not ready, perhaps not even begun (see Engels’ letter to Marx of July 11, 1857). Engels finished it only by the middle of September. On September 18 Marx made an entry in his notebook on the dispatch of “Algiers, Ammunition” to

New York, and also informed Engels of this on September 21.

The editors of The New American Cyclopaedia made some changes in the article. As Engels’ letter to Marx of September 22, 1857 shows, the no longer extant original text contained an account of the war of liberation of the Algerian people under Abd-el-Kader (see Note 80) and a characterisation of Marshal Bugeaud’s colonialist activity. They were probably omitted by the editors because the Cyclopaedia already contained a special item on Abd-elKader and was to include an article on Bugeaud from Marx (see this volume, pp. 211-14). There are other signs of the editors’ interference with the text. In his article Engels managed to overcome the tendentious approach to the history of Algeria in the historical literature and reference books available to him at the time (in particular he made use of the article “Algeria” in Wigand’s Conversations-Lexikon, Vol. I, Leipzig, 1846). Nevertheless, some outdated and one-sided ideas on particular questions in Engels’ sources are reflected in his article, for example, on the role of Christian countries in fighting Algerian piracy (these countries themselves engaged in privateering on a large scale), and on the circumstances and motives of the first French occupation of Algeria. p. 60

Algeria, a division of northern Africa, formerly the Turkish pashalic of Algiers, but since 1830 included in the foreign dominions of France. It is bounded N. by the Mediterranean, E. by Tunis, W. by Morocco, S. by the Great Sahara. The extreme length is 500 miles from E. to W.; the extreme breadth 200 miles from N. to S. The Atlas ridge constitutes an important physical feature in the country, and divides the arable land of the sea-board from the desert. It also constitutes the northern and southern watershed of the province. The main ridge runs from east to west, but the whole province is intersected in all directions with spurs from the central range. The loftiest of the western mountains is Mount Wanashrees, the Mons Zalacus of Ptolemy; of the eastern the Jurjura and Aurès. These attain a height of nearly 7,000 feet. The principal river is the Sheliff. There are rivers of considerable size also, which flow from the south side of the Atlas, and lose themselves in the desert. None of these rivers are navigable. They are nearly dried up in the summer, but overflow a considerable extent of country in the spring and fertilize the soil.

The climate is not considered unhealthy by some travellers. Ophthalmia and cutaneous diseases are common. It is said there are no endemic fevers, but the great loss of the French troops by disease may perhaps lead to a different conclusion. The atmosphere is pure and bright, the summer very hot; and in the winter severe weather is occasionally experienced, especially in the hill country. On the limits of the desert the soil is arid and sandy, but between the mountain districts it is fertile, and especially so in the neighborhood of the streams. Grain crops of all kinds, fruits, European and tropical; flowers, and particularly roses, of remarkable beauty; and a species of sugar-cane, said to be the largest and most productive of any known species, grow in Algeria. The domestic animals of every variety are numerous. Horses, of course, are excellent; asses are of fine growth and much used for riding. The camel and dromedary of Algeria are very superior. The merino sheep is indigenous, and Spain was first supplied from Algeria. The Numidian lion, the panther and leopard, ostriches, serpents, scorpions, and other venomous reptiles, are abundant.

The Berbers, Kabyles, or Mazidh, for they are known by the three names, are believed to have been the aboriginal inhabitants. Of their history as a race little is known, further than that they once occupied the whole of north-western Africa, and are to be found also on the eastern coast. The Kabyles live in the mountain district. The other inhabitants are Arabs, the descendants of the Mussulman invaders. Moors, Turks, Kouloughs, Jews, and negroes, and lastly the French, are found in the country. The population in 1852 was 2,078,035, of which 134,115 were Europeans of all nations, beside a military force of 100,000 men. The Kabyles are an industrious race, living in regular villages, excellent cultivators, and working in mines, in metals, and in coarse woollen and cotton factories. They make gunpowder and soap, gather honey and wax, and supply the towns with poultry, fruit, and other provisions. The Arabs follow the habits of their ancestors, leading a nomadic life, and shifting their camps from place to place according as the necessities of pasturage or other circumstances compel them. The Moors are probably the least respectable of the inhabitants. Living in the towns, and more luxurious than either the Arabs or Kabyles, they are, from the constant oppression of their Turkish rulers, a timid race, reserving nevertheless their cruelty and vindictiveness, while in moral character they stand very low.

The chief towns of Algeria are Algiers the capital, Constantine, population about 20,000, and Bona, a fortified town on the sea-coast, population about 10,000 in 1847. Near this are the coral fisheries, frequented by the fishers from France and Italy. Bougiah is on the gulf of the same name. The capture of this place was hastened by the outrages of the Kabyles in the neighborhood, who wrecked a French brig by cutting her cable and then plundered her and massacred the crew.

There are some remains of antiquity in the interior, especially in the province of Constantine, among others those of the ancient city of Lambessa; with remains of the city gates, parts of an amphitheatre, and a mausoleum supported by Coriirthian pillars. On the coast is Coleah [and] Cherchell, the ancient Julia Caesarea, a place of some importance to the French. It was the residence of Juba, and in its neighborhood are ancient remains. Oran is a fortified town. It remained in possession of the Spaniards until 1792. Tlemcen, once the residence of Abd-el-Kader, is situated in a fertile country; the ancient city was destroyed by fire in 1670, and the modern town was almost destroyed by the French. It has manufactures of carpets and blankets. South of the Atlas is the Zaab, the ancient Gaetulia. The chief place is Biscara; the Biscareens are a peaceful race, much liked in the northern ports as servants and porters.

Algeria has been successively conquered by the Roman, the Vandal, and the Arab. When the Moors were driven from Spain in 1492, Ferdinand sent an expedition against Algiers, and seizing on Oran, Bougiah, and Algiers, he threatened the subjugation of the country. Unable to cope with the powerful invader, Selim Cutemi, the emir of the Metidjah, a fertile plain in the neighborhood of Algiers, asked assistance from the Turks, and the celebrated corsair, Barbarossa Horush, was sent to his assistance. Horush appeared in 1516, and having first made himself master of the country and slain Selim Cutemi with his own hand, he attacked the Spaniards, and after a war of varying fortunes, was obliged to throw himself into Tlemcen, where a Spanish army besieged him, and having succeeded in capturing him, put him to death in 1518. His brother, Khair-ed-Deen, succeeded him, sought assistance from the sultan, Selim I, and acknowledged that prince as his sovereign. Selim accordingly appointed him pasha of Algiers, and sent him a body of troops with which he was able to repulse the Spaniards, and eventually to make himself master of the country. His exploits against the Christians in the Mediterranean gained him the dignity of capudan pasha from Solyman I. Charles V made an attempt to reinstate the Spanish authority, and a powerful expedition of 370 vessels and 30,000 men crossed the Mediterranean in 1541. But a terrible storm and earthquake dispersed the fleet, and cut off all communication between it and the army. Without shelter, and exposed to the harassing attacks of a daring enemy, the troops were compelled to reembark, and make their escape with a loss of 8,000 men , 15 vessels of war, and 140 transports. From this time forward there were unceasing hostilities between the Barbary powers and the knights of Malta; thence sprang that system of piracy which made the Algerine corsairs so terrible in the Mediterranean, and which was so long submitted to by the Christian powers.

The English under Blake, the French under Duquesne , the Dutch, and other powers, at various times attacked Algiers; and Duquesne having twice bombarded it, the dey sent for the French consul of Louis XIV, and having learned from him the cost of the bombardment, jeeringly told him that he would himself have burnt down the city for half the money.

The system of privateering was continued in spite of the constant opposition of the European powers; and even the shores of Spain and Italy were sometimes invaded by the desperadoes who carried on this terrible trade of war and plunder. Thousands of Christian slaves constantly languished in captivity in Algiers; and societies of pious men were formed, whose express object was to pass to and from Algiers annually for the purpose of ransoming the prisoners with the funds remitted to their care by relatives. Meanwhile, the authority of the Turkish government had been reduced to a name . The deys were elected by the janizaries, and had declared their independence of the Porte. The last Turkish pasha had been expelled by Dey Ibrahim in 1705; and the janizaries by tumultuous elections appointed new chiefs, whom in their mutinies they often murdered. The janizaries were recruited from the immigrants from Turkey , no native, though the son of a janizary by a woman of the country, being admitted into their ranks. The dey sent occasional presents to Constantinople as a token of his nomina l allegiance; but all regular tribute was withdrawn, and the Turks, hampered by their constant struggles with Russia, were too weak to chastise the rebels of a distant province. It was reserved to the young republic of the United States to point the way to an abolition of the monstrous tyranny. During the wars of the French revolution and of Napoleon, the powerful fleets in the Mediterranean had protected commerce, and the Algerines had been compelled to a respite of their lawless exactions. On the renewal of peace, the Algerines commenced their depredations; and the Americans, who in 1795 had been compelled to follow the example of European nations, and to subsidize the dey for peace, now refused the tribute. In 1815, Commodore Decatur encountered an Algerine squadron, took a frigate and a brig, and sailed into the bay of Algiers, where he forced the dey to surrender all American prisoners, and to abandon all future claims for tribute. This bold example was followed by the English, who, under Lord Exmouth, bombarded the city in 1816, and reduced it to ashes, compelling the dey to surrender his prisoners. This was, however, only a punishment; for piracy was not suppressed, and in 1826 the Algerines openly seized Italian vessels in the Mediterranean, and even carried their incursions into the North sea. In 1818, Hussein dey succeeded to the government; in 1823, the dwelling of the French consul having been plundered, and various outrages having been committed on vessels under the French flag, reparation was demanded without success. At last the dey of Algiers personally insulted the consul of France, and used expressions disrespectful to the king of France, who had not replied to a letter which the dey had written, in respect of a debt due by the French government to Jew merchants who were indebted to Hussein.

To enforce an apology, a French squadron was sent, which blockaded Algiers. Negotiations were opened between France, Mehemet Ali, and the Porte, by which Mehemet Ali, with the assistance of France, undertook to conquer Algiers, and to pay a regular tribute to the sultan, from whom he would hold the government. This was broken off partly from the opposition of England, and partly because Mehemet Ali and France could not agree as to the precise arrangements by which the scheme was to be carried into effect. The government of Charles X now undertook an expedition against Algiers single-handed, and on June 13, 1830, an army of 38,000 men, and 4,000 horses, disembarked before Algiers, under command of Gen. Bourmont. Hussein dey had levied an army of 60,000 to oppose them, but having allowed them to land, he could make no effective resistance; and Algiers capitulated July 4, on condition that persons’ private property and the religion of the country should be respected, and that the dey and his Turks should retire. The French took possession of the city. Among the spoil, they took 12 ships of war, 1,500 bronze cannon, and nearly $10,000,000 in specie. They immediately garrisoned Algiers, and established a military regency. The government of Charles X had intended to surrender Algiers to the sultan, andinstructions to that effect were actually on their way to Constantinople, when the events of July, 1830, deposed Charles X.

One of the first acts of his successor was to decide on retaining the conquest, and Clausel was sent over as general-in-chief in place of Bourmont.

From the first occupation of Algeria by the French to the present time, the ..unhappy country has been the arena of unceasing bloodshed, rapine, and violence. Each town, large and small, has been conquered in detail at an immense sacrifice of life. The Arab and Kabyle tribes, to whom independence is precious, and hatred of foreign domination a principle dearer than life itself, have been crushed and broken by the terrible razzias in which dwellings and property are burnt and destroyed, standing crops cut down, and the miserable wretches who remain massacred, or subjected to all the horrors of lust and brutality. This barbarous system of warfare has been persisted in by the French against all the dictates of humanity, civilization, and Christianity. It is alleged in extenuation, that the Kabyles are ferocious, addicted to murder, torturing their prisoners, and that with savages lenity is a mistake. The policy of a civilized government resorting to the lex talionis may well be doubted. And judging of the tree by its fruits, after an expenditure of probably $100,000,000, and a sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives, all that can be said of Algeria is that it is a school of war for French generals and soldiers, in which all the French officers who won laurels in the Crimean war received their military training and education. As an attempt at colonization, the numbers of Europeans compared with the natives show its present almost total failure; and this in one of the most fertile countries of the world, the ancient granary of Italy, within 20 hours of France, where security of life and property alike from military friends and savage enemies alone are wanted. Whether the failure is attributable to an inherent defect in the French character, which unfits them for emigration, or to injudicious local administration, it is not within our province to discuss. Every important town, Constantine, Bona, Bougiah, Arzew, Mostaganem, Tlemcen, was carried by storm with all the accompanying horrors. The natives submitted with an ill grace to their Turkish rulers, who had at least the merit of being co-religionists; but they found no advantage in the so-called civilization of the new government, against which, beside, they had all the repugnance of religious fanaticism. Each governor came but to renew the severities of his predecessor; proclamations announced the most gracious intentions, but the army of occupation, the military movements, the terrible cruelties practised on both sides, all refuted the professions of peace and good-will. In 1831, Baron Pichon had been appointed civil intendant, and he endeavored to organize a system of civil administration which should move with the military government, but the check which his measures would have placed on the governor-in-chief offended Savary, duc de Rovigo, Napoleon’s ancient minister of police, and on his representation Pichon was recalled. Under Savary, Algeria was made the exile of all those whose political or social misconduct had brought them under the lash of the law; and a foreign legion, the soldiers of which were forbidden to enter the cities, was introduced into Algeria. In 1833, a petition was presented to the chamber of deputies, stating,

“for 3 years we have suffered every possible act of injustice. Whenever complaints are preferred to the authorities, they are only answered by new atrocities, particularly directed against those by whom the complaints were brought forward. On that account no one dares to move, for which reason there are no signatures to this petition. O my lords, we beseech you in the name of humanity, to relieve us from this crushing tyranny: to ransom us from the bonds of slavery. If the land is to be under martial law, if there is to be no civil power, we are undone; there will never be peace for us.”

This petition led to a commission of inquiry, the consequence of which was the establishment of a civil administration. After the death of Savary, under the ad interim rule of Gen. Voirol, some measures had been commenced calculated to allay the irritation; the draining of swamps, the improvement of the roads, the organization of a native militia. This, however, was abandoned on the return of Marshal Clausel, under whom a first and most unfortunate expedition against Constantine was undertaken.

His government was so unsatisfactory, that a petition praying inquiry into its abuses, signed by 54 leading persons connected with the province, was forwarded to Paris in 1836. This led eventually to Clausel’s resignation. The whole of Louis Philippe’s reign was occupied in attempts at colonization, which only resulted in land-jobbing operations; in military colonization, which was useless, as the cultivators were not safe away from the guns of their own block-houses; in attempts to settle the eastern part of Algeria, and to drive out Abd-el-Kader from Oran and the west. The fall of that restless and intrepid chieftain so far pacified the country, that the great tribe of the Hamianes Garabas sent in their submission at once.

On the revolution of 1848, Gen. Cavaignac was appointed to supersede the Duke d’Aumale in the governorship of the province, and he and the Prince de Joinville, who was also in Algeria, then retired. But the republic did not seem more fortunate than the monarchy in the administration of this province. Several governors succeeded each other during its brief existence. Colonists were sent out to till the lands, but they died off, or quitted in disgust. In 1849, Gen. Pélissier marched against several tribes, and the villages of the Beni Sillem; their crops and all accessible property were burnt and destroyed as usual, because they refused tribute. In Zaab, a fertile district on the edge of the desert, great excitement having arisen in consequence of the preaching of a marabout, an expedition was despatched against them 1,200 strong, which they succeeded in defeating; and it was found that the revolt was wide-spread, and fomented by secret associations called the Sidi Abderrahman, whose principal object was the extirpation of the French. The rebels were not put down until an expedition under Generals Canrobert and Herbillion had been sent against them; and the siege of Zoatcha, an Arab town, proved that the natives had neither lost courage nor contracted affection for their invaders. The town resisted the efforts of the besiegers for 51 days, and was taken by storm at last. Little Kabylia did not give in its surrender till 1851, when Gen. St. Arnaud subdued it, and thereby established a line of communication between Philippeville and Constantine.

The French bulletins and French papers abound in statements of the peace and prosperity of Algeria. These are, however, a tribute to national vanity. The country is even now as unsettled in the interior as ever. The French supremacy is perfectly illusory, except on the coast and near the towns. The tribes still assert their independence and detestation of the French regime, and the atrocious system of razzias has not been abandoned; for in the year 1857 a successful razzia was made by Marshal Randon on the villages and dwelling-places of the hitherto unsubdued Kabyles, in order to add their territory to the French dominions. The natives are still ruled with a rod of iron, and continual outbreaks show the uncertain tenure of the French occupation, and the hollowness of peace maintained by such means. Indeed, a trial which took place at Oran in August, 1857, in which Captain Doineau, the head of the Bureau Arabe, was proved guilty of murdering a prominent and wealthy native, revealed a habitual exercise of the most cruel and despotic power on the part of the French officials, even of subordinate rank, which justly attracted the attention of the world. At present, the government is divided into the three provinces of Constantine on the east, Algiers in the centre, and Oran in the west. The country is under the control of a governor-general, who is also commander-in-chief, assisted by a secretary and civil intendant, and a council composed of the director of the interior, the naval commandant, the military intendant, and attorneygeneral, whose business is to confirm the acts of the governor. The conseil des contentieux at Algiers takes cognizance of civil and criminal offences. The provinces where a civil administration has been organized have mayors, justices, and commissioners of police. The native tribes living under the Mohammedan religion still have their cadis; but between them a system of arbitration has been established, which they are said to prefer, and an officer (l’avocat des Arabes) is specially charged with the duty of defending Arab interests before the French tribunals.

Since the French occupation, it is stated that commerce has considerably increased. The imports are valued at about $22,000,000, the exports, $3,000,000. The imports are cotton, woollen, and silk goods, grain and flour, lime, and refined sugar; the exports are rough coral, skins, wheat, oil, and wool, with other small matters.