THE ARAB WORLD IN THE IMPERIAL AGE, 1830-1948

Moreover, the states of North Africa were relatively close to Southern Europe—to Spain, France, and Italy in particular. Proximity had drawn these states closer to Europe’s ambit: for military aid, industrial goods, and finance capital. North Africa was the Ottoman Empire’s distant frontier but Europe’s near abroad. As Europe expanded beyond its own frontiers in a new wave of imperialism at the close of the nineteenth century, it was only natural that it should turn to its near abroad first. There was one other reason why the states of Europe colonized North Africa: precedent. The long-standing French presence in Algeria set an important precedent for French ambitions in Tunisia and Morocco and gave Italy grounds to seek imperial satisfaction in Libya. But for the accidents of history that led to the French invasion of Algiers in 1827, the partition of much of North Africa might never have happened.

Like Tunisia, the Regency of Algiers was nominally part of the Ottoman Empire and governed by a viceroy who enjoyed great autonomy in both domestic and international affairs. The ruling elites were Turkish military men, recruited from Istanbul and organized into an administrative council, electing their leader, or dey, who enjoyed direct relations with the governments of Europe. The sultan in Istanbul formally confirmed the elected dey and claimed a tribute from Algiers. The only Ottoman official posted to Algiers was the Islamic court judge. Otherwise, the sultan’s authority over Algiers was strictly ceremonial. The deys of Algiers exploited their autonomy to pursue their own commercial and political relations with Europe, independent of Istanbul’s control. Yet without the weight of the Ottoman Empire behind them, the deys had little leverage over their European trade partners. Thus, when the deys provided grain to France on credit—to provision French military campaigns in Italy and Egypt between 1793 and 1798—their repeated pleas to the French government to honor their commitments fell on deaf ears. Decades passed without the French repaying their debts, and the deal became a growing source of friction between the two states. By 1827, relations between the Algerian dey, Husayn Pasha (r. 1818–1830), and the French consul, Pierre Deval, reached the breaking point after the French government failed to respond to the dey’s letters demanding repayment of the grain debt. In a private conversation with Deval, Husayn Pasha lost his temper and struck the French consul with his fly whisk. In their reports to their respective superiors, Deval and Husayn Pasha gave very different accounts of their meeting.¹ To the French minister of foreign affairs, Deval claimed he found the dey in an agitated state when he called on Huseyn Pasha in his palace. “Why has your Minister not replied to the letter I wrote him?” Husayn Pasha demanded. Deval claimed he replied in a measured tone: “I had the honour to bring you the reply as soon as I received it.” At this point, Deval reported, the dey erupted: “‘Why did he not reply directly? Am I a clodhopper, a man of mud, a barefoot tramp? You are a wicked man, an infidel, an idolater!’ Then, rising from his seat, with the handle of his fly-whisk, he gave me three violent blows about the body and told me to retire.” The Arab fly whisk is made from a knot of hair from a horse’s tail, attached to a handle. It is not immediately evident how one might deal “violent blows” with such an instrument. However, the French Consul was adamant that French honor was at stake. He concluded his report to the minister: “If Your Excellency does not wish to give this affair the severe and well-publicized attention that it merits, he should at least be willing to grant me permission to retire with leave.” In his own report to the Ottoman grand vezir, the dey acknowledged striking Deval with his whisk, though only after provocation. He explained that he had written three times to the French asking for repayment, without receiving the courtesy of a reply. He raised the matter with the French consul “in courteous terms and with a deliberately friendly attitude.” “Why did no reply come to my letters written and sent to your [i.e., the French] Government?” The Consul, in stubbornness and arrogance, replied in offensive terms that “the King and state of France may not send replies to letters which you have addressed to them.” He dared to blaspheme the Muslim religion and showed contempt for the honour of His Majesty [the sultan], protector of the world. Unable to endure this insult, which exceeded all bearable limits, and having recourse to the courage natural only to Muslims, I hit him two or three times with light blows of the fly-whisk which I held in my humble hand.

Whatever the truth of these two irreconcilable accounts, it was clear that by 1827 the French had no intention of honoring debts incurred three decades earlier—and the Algerians were unwilling to forgive the debts. After the fly-whisk incident, the French demanded reparations for the damage done to France’s honor while the Algerians continued to insist on repayment of France’s long-overdue debts. The dispute left the two sides on a collision course in which the Algerians refused to back down, and the French could not afford to. The French responded to the dey’s “insults” with ultimatums. They demanded the Algerians make a gun salute to the French flag, which the dey refused. The French then imposed a blockade on the port of Algiers, which did more harm to the merchants of Marseilles than to Algerian corsairs, whose swift ships easily slipped through the over-extended French line of ships enforcing the blockade. After a two-year stalemate, the French sought a face-saving solution and dispatched a diplomat to negotiate with the dey. The Algerians fired a few cannon at his flagship, preventing the negotiator from even disembarking. The Algerian imbroglio was turning into a major embarrassment for the beleaguered government of French king Charles X. Charles X (r. 1824–1830) faced serious opposition at home as well as abroad. His efforts to restore some absolutism to the French monarchy, turning the clock back to pre-Revolutionary times, reached a crisis when he suspended the Constitutional Charter (described at length by Rifa’a al-Tahtawi in his study of France) in 1830. His premiere, Prince Jules de Polignac, suggested that a foreign adventure might rally public opinion behind the throne. Polignac recognized that France had to overcome opposition from the other European powers—Britain in particular—to a measure that inevitably would alter the balance of power in the Mediterranean. He dispatched ambassadors to London and the other courts of Europe to set out the objectives of the impending invasion of Algeria as the complete destruction of piracy, the total abolition of Christian slavery, and the termination of all tribute paid by European states to the Regency to ensure the security of their shipping. Polignac hoped to gain international support for the French invasion of Algiers by claiming to uphold such universal interests. In June 1830 a French expedition of 37,000 troops landed to the west of Algiers. It quickly defeated the dey’s forces and entered the city of Algiers on July 4. This triumph was not enough to save Charles X, who was overthrown later that month in the July Revolution of 1830. The Egyptian scholar Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, who was living in Paris at the time, noted how the French showed far more satisfaction at overthrowing an unpopular king than in the conquest of Algiers, “which,” he argued, “was based on specious motives.”² Nonetheless, the French remained in possession of Algiers well after the fall of the Bourbon monarchy, one of the few enduring legacies of the undistinguished reign of Charles X. Husayn Pasha’s capitulation on July 5, 1830, brought to a close three centuries of Ottoman history and marked the beginning of 132 years of French rule over Algeria.