Algiers 1830: beginnings of colonialism
Hamdan Khodja, Le Miroir, aperçu historique et statistique sur le régence d'Alger (The Mirror: An Historical and Statistical Account of the Regency of Algiers), Paris: Actes sud, 2003. pp319
Written in 1833 in Arabic and published in Paris in the same year in a French translation, Hamdan Khodja's Le Miroir aimed to draw the attention of the French public to events in Algeria following the 1830 invasion. Authorised by the government of Charles X, but continued under the post-revolutionary regime of Louis-Philippe, this invasion had not yet given way to permanent occupation, and Khodja's account was designed to help ensure that it did not do so. Originally published in 1985, this new edition of Khodja's book also contains a helpful introduction by Abdel- Kader Djeghloul and a "Refutation of the Work" by an anonymous French author dating from 1834 together with Khodja's reply.
Khodja's hope, expressed throughout Le Miroir, was that the French invaders would be obliged to withdraw, much as they had withdrawn from Egypt following Napoleon's 1798 "expedition" to that country, paving the way for the reformist regime of Mohamed Ali. However, he also hoped that French involvement in Algerian affairs would continue, though not in the form of occupation, producing what Djeghloul in his introduction calls Khodja's "resistance-dialogue" with France, as well as occasional accusations of "collaboration" from his countrymen. It is to be hoped that this well-produced edition of Khodja's book, still little-known outside specialist circles, will make this remarkable figure better known, adding to the library of works on the history of European involvement in North Africa.
France invaded Algiers in July 1830 apparently on a whim following an alleged insult from the dey towards the French consul, but the decision to occupy Algiers and the surrounding coastal strip was not taken until 1834. Before the French invasion, the Regency of Algiers was an Ottoman province, ruled from Istanbul through a local dey, and Khodja himself was a well-connected figure in the government of Hussein Pasha, the last Ottoman ruler of Algiers. The rest of the country, together with the associated beyliks (Ottoman provinces) of Constantine, Couchant and Titteri, were also under Ottoman control, as they had been since 1587.
Following French defeat of the Turkish forces in Algiers, the future of the surrounding provinces became uncertain, with revolts by Arab tribes breaking out across the country. In Oran, capital of the Couchant beylik, a 24-year-old Arab marabout (religious leader), Abdel-Kader, declared himself "Sultan of the Arabs" and "Prince of the Faithful", leading the assault on the city's Turkish administration. In Constantine, the Turkish bey managed to retain his position thanks to support from local Arab tribes, himself becoming a focal point of resistance to the French and the last representative of the Porte in what was becoming, under French occupation, the unified state of Algeria.
It was in this complex situation that Khodja, himself of Turkish origin, intervened through the publication of Le Miroir, designed to show what he considered to be the injustice and short- sightedness of French actions in Algiers. While Khodja's resistance to the French occupation was never in doubt, he believed that French involvement in Algerian affairs could bring benefits to the country that Ottoman suzerainty had failed to do: among other things, the Ottoman administration in Algiers had been in trouble for decades, one dey replacing another with remarkable speed, the victims of palace intrigue.
Indeed, "for this senior and rich admirer of the French Enlightenment", Djeghloul writes, "French victory might not be a catastrophe for Algeria, going so far as to write that 'I was happy to hear that our country had been placed under the protection of the French government.'... Provisional French occupation of Algiers might be positive, allowing the country to learn modern and liberal methods of government...Khodja's hope in 1830 was that French intervention might turn out to be the catalyst for a break with the historical fossilisation [that had characterised Ottoman rule] and for the modernisation of Algeria."
Khodja's account begins with a description, in the manner of Ibn Khaldoun, of the contemporary populations of what is now Algeria. He gives the population of the Algiers regency at 10 million, almost certainly an over- estimate, dividing it into different ethnic groups. The population of the city of Algiers was mostly made up of Turks and "Sarrazins", he says, the children of mixed marriages between the two being called kouloughlis. Sarrazins were "those who had saved themselves from Spain when the Spanish were carrying out so many executions at Gibraltar that the number of victims is thought to number three million". As Khodja points out, Spain's policy of expelling its Muslim population during the reconquista, much of which settled in North Africa, had originally led the population of Algiers to call on the Turks for help, leading to the Ottoman occupation.
In addition to these populations there were also a number of Arabs and Kabyles in Algiers, who "follow the same customs and have the same civilisation as the Turks and Sarrazins. As the years have gone by people have forgotten their origins, and today all those who live in Algiers are called Algerians." For Djeghloul, this statement is an expression of Khodja's "unifying gaze", itself a kind of early Algerian nationalism. While Djeghloul remarks that by "Algerian" Khodja sometimes denotes an inhabitant of the city of Algiers, breaking that city's population down into its various component parts, at other times he means an inhabitant of "Algeria" as a whole, in other words of the ensemble of the Ottoman provinces. Khodja thus seems to have had a sense of Algeria as an embryo nation-state, along the lines of those being constructed at the same time in Europe.
Outside Algiers, Khodja writes, the country's interior "is inhabited by a people called Bedouin", his perception of which is coloured by his position as a member of the country's urban, Turkish elite. The Bedouin, Khodja says, "are divided into two classes, or, better, two distinct peoples. Those who live on the plain are Arabs who trace their origins to the East and are the descendants of different Arab tribes; those who live in the mountains, or on the mountainsides, are Berbers or Kabyles, whose language is different to that of the Arabs." Of the latter, Khodja says that "when Ibn No'man conquered Africa [for the Arabs], he observed that the Berbers were ignorant, fanatical, war-like and brave: living without cares, and not thinking of the future, they turned their mountains into fortresses that were good against any kind of attack." France will find it difficult to subjugate the Berbers if it decides to occupy Algeria permanently, he says.
Of the Arabs, Khodja comments that these nomadic, war-like people, passionate about horses, live in an uneasy relationship with the country's Ottoman-ruled urban centres. The Turks, he says, had done much to preserve good relations with the Arab tribes, the bey of Constantine, for example, who had the right to nominate the sheikhs of the local tribes, would invest each sheikh with "20 tents of Turkish soldiers, flags and a military band, and the sheikh would appear to the inhabitants of the Sahara as if he were their sovereign". As was the case with the Berbers, the secret of the success of Ottoman rule over the Arab populations of Algeria lay in the wise application of certain principles.
One of these was the flattery of local marabouts, which was "one of the means by which the Turks have employed to tie the Arabs and Berbers to them", as well as the protection of Arab and Berber shrines. Another was the impartiality of the Ottoman administration, "which cannot not lead to moral and long-lasting power. Once this has been established over minds, bodies will naturally follow, since true conquests are of hearts and minds and not of bodies alone.... It has been by these means that the Turks have subjugated this vast continent, from Oujda in the West to Kef west of Tunis." The challenge for the French, should their stay in Algiers be long or short, will be to emulate the successes of Ottoman administration, Khodja claims.
At times in Le Miroir Khodja addresses his French audience directly, for whose benefit he has painstakingly described the manners and customs of the Arab, Berber, Sarrazin and Turkish populations of Algeria, pointing to the dangers of current French policy. A French expeditionary force, for example, had moved into the town of Blida south of Algiers, subjugating the population and replacing the Ottoman administration. However, the French had left no garrison in place to protect Blida from attack from the surrounding Berber tribes, with the result that the townspeople were worse off than they had been under the Ottomans, who had at least maintained security. Similarly, Khodja complains bitterly of French policy of taxing the country's population, pointing out that this will not create bonds of trust between that population and the new occupying power.
He has, he says, travelled widely in Europe, "studied the principles of European liberty, the basis of representative and republican government, and found that these principles are similar to the fundamentals of our legislation". However, even if they were not, the problem was that the French occupiers have "forgotten every rule of politeness and honesty in their conduct on Algerian soil... while the Algerians have shown themselves so resigned to their unhappy fate, that M Clauzel [a French general in Algiers] has called this resignation the expression of 'oriental fatalism'."
Though the French invaders had talked about "introducing civilisation to Algeria, abolishing despotism and putting any thought of vengeance or hatred to one side", their conduct had given the lie to such intentions. There was no "exile, looting and massacres" under the Ottomans, as there had been under the French, and if "the Turks were despots, they were so with less perfection than the French governors".
"In this respect at least we have made progress," Khodja comments.
Furthermore, "the rapacity of the French in Algiers has been such that, to resort to metaphor, I could compare the European population to a giant suffering from a great thirst and the city to a bowl of salt water: the more the giant drinks from this bowl, the more he feels the need to drink, but the bowl is dry and the thirst is as strong as ever." Far from being the bearers of enlightenment, according to Khodja the Europeans who had arrived in Algiers since the French invasion, "have been adventurers without money, desiring to enrich themselves to the detriment of all".
Occupying Algiers and carrying out a war of conquest in Algeria are two different things, Khodja writes, still hoping that French forces would withdraw from Algiers and respect their promises with regard to the rest of the country. A vice-regal government along the lines of that set up in Egypt following French withdrawal earlier in the century would be the best solution, he thinks. Since the English had obliged Napoleon to leave Egypt, seeing a French presence in the eastern Mediterranean as having dangerous implications for the European balance-of- power, Khodja was not averse to sounding out the English regarding a possible intervention, while at the same time accepting a post on the ruling council set up by the French occupying forces in Algiers.
Finally leaving Algiers for Istanbul in 1836, where he died in 1842, Khodja lived to see the beginnings of the war of conquest, declared in 1840 and bringing the country under complete French control by 1847. A little more than 100 years later, Algeria declared its independence from France following a protracted and bloody conflict.
In the literature on Algeria and on the history of European intervention in North Africa, Khodja's Le Miroir has an important place, reminding readers of the debates surrounding the 1830 French invasion of Algiers, which began European colonialism in the Maghreb.
Reviewed by David Tresilian
