FRENCH LIBERALISM AND THE ALGERIAN CONQUEST

The first decade of the subjugation of Algeria marked a critical moment in French liberalism's evolving relation to empire. The elements of a thoroughgoing liberal critique of French imperial expansion were available: arguments, for instance, that conquest could only be accomplished with barbarous levels of violence unbecoming a modern nation, and that expansion furthered the interests of a sinister few at the expense of the nation as a whole. Not only was principled criticism of the conquest muted, however, but liberalism was invoked more often in support of the conquest than against it. This essay is an effort to probe the evolution of French liberal discourse about empire in the early years of the Algeria conquest, and to inquire into its critical possibilities and its limitations at this moment, through the lens of Le Miroir, a book published in Paris in 1833 by an Algerian businessman and scholar, Hamdan ben Othman Khodja (c.1773–1842). The first Algerian contribution to French public deliberation about the question d'Alger, the Miroir was a work of a self-consciously liberal cosmopolitan, and Muslim, perspective. It was nearly alone in French debates in making a principled argument for a complete French withdrawal from Algeria—what its author called a “liberal emancipation” of the country.Footnote ²

Since the loss to England of the bulk of French colonial territory in the New World and India at the end of the Seven Years War, France's imperial career had been limited to Napoleon's spectacular expansion across Europe and his Egyptian expedition. After 1815, many French liberals in the parliamentary opposition to the restored Bourbon monarchy, eager to distance themselves from Napoleonic militarism, foreswore empire as excessively costly and dangerous to metropolitan politics. When Charles X's dying regime sent a military expedition to the city of Algiers in May 1830, partly in a failed effort to bolster its allies’ prospects in the June election by enflaming national pride, the liberal opposition opposed the expedition. News of the troops’ seizure of Algiers on 5 July reached Paris too late to influence the elections, which precipitated the Bourbons’ downfall in the July Revolution. Just weeks later, the self-consciously liberal government of the July Monarchy inherited the new conquest along with the throne. Liberal deputies worried over this Bourbon provenance of the conquest for years afterward.Footnote ³ At the same time, they were seduced by the memory of Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, as is suggested by the July Monarchy's decision to erect an obelisk from the Luxor temple at the center of the place de la Concorde, once home to the guillotine. The colossal monument's unifying message of French glory and superiority over the Orient helped to suppress the memory of the divisive politics of revolution and counterrevolution.Footnote ⁴

Benjamin Constant had provided the classic articulation of a liberal critique of empire in his 1814 pamphlet On the Spirit of Conquest. Constant's immediate target was Napoleon's militarization of French society and his expansion across Europe and into Egypt, but the pamphlet also addressed the phenomenon of global conquest more broadly and with bitter sarcasm. It depicted conquest as the antithesis of, and the greatest threat to, liberal constitutionalism. One of Constant's achievements in the work was to perceive so early and so clearly the social dynamics, and the moral and political dangers, of expansionism by “modern nations.”Footnote ⁵ As one of the most eloquent members of the liberal opposition to the restored Bourbons, Constant was also a persistent critic of French colonial policy in the West Indies. In 1830 he denounced the Bourbon regime's effort to use the assault on Algiers to manipulate domestic politics, calling on the electors to “preserve the Charter from the repercussions [contre-coup] of Algiers” and not to succumb to the regime's “illusions and seductions.”Footnote ⁶

But Constant had increasingly come to characterize Ottomans, and Muslims more generally, as alien and despotic. The Greek war of independence against the Ottoman Empire had occasioned his most virulent depictions of Oriental despotism, in his 1825 pamphlet Appel aux nations chrétiennes en faveur des Grecs. And so in 1830 he also offered a caricature of “barbaric” Algiers and a note of patriotic pandering that recalled his essay on Greece: “Let us applaud the ruin of a den of pirates. . . instead of respecting the quality of sovereignty in a barbarian. May the city of Algiers be flung into its port! Honor to the French soldiers. But let us demand a strict accounting of the disproportionate sacrifices” that those soldiers suffered for an affair of royal vanity.Footnote ⁷ These tensions in Constant's thought presage many French liberals’ vacillations and misgivings toward, and their ultimate embrace of, a French Algeria.

In the early years of the Algeria conquest, at least until the issuing in 1834 of the royal ordinance that has been called the birth certificate of French Algeria,Footnote ⁸ there was a vocal contingent of anticolonistes in the Chamber of Deputies who expressed horror at the barbarity of the conquest and called for the abandonment of any colonial project in Algeria. Leftist deputies argued that the conquest compared badly even with the folly of the crusades and the expedition to Egypt. They argued that the French had inexcusably violated the terms of the city's treaty of surrender, and that far from bringing civilization to Algeria as they had pretended, the French had violated the fundamental principles of civilization—good faith, justice, respect for others—while failing to recognize precisely those qualities in the Algerians.Footnote ⁹

It was telling, however, and perhaps ultimately destructive for the anticoloniste cause, that even the most vocal critics of the colony framed their arguments largely in terms of French interests and political economy.Footnote ¹⁰ (A rare exception was the deputy Amédée Desjobert, who served in the Chamber beginning in 1833 and was a vocal critic of French policy in parliamentary debates as well as in a raft of publications, beginning with the powerful La Question d'Alger of 1837, which called for an independent, Arab-governed Algeria.Footnote ¹¹) Concerns about the violence of the conquest were shared by critics and supporters of the colony. Defenders of the conquest, in appropriating these worries and pledging themselves to reform, disarmed such arguments as a basis for anticolonialism. Gaëtan de La Rochefoucauld, for instance, was among the most eloquent in denouncing the notorious massacre of the tribe of El Ouffia and the French failure to punish such excesses. But he used this critique to argue for his own plan of colonization, which would begin with legal pluralism and gradually work toward civilizing and converting the Algerians. The insistence by most critics that France's interests should determine the question left them unable to respond to such proposals. Moreover, many who criticized the conquest's methods remained enthusiastic about its possibilities.

A more emphatically anticolonial economic argument came from the liberal journalist Henri Fonfréde in his newspaper, Le Mémorial Bordelais. An avid free-trader, he opposed slavery and all colonial monopolies. Fonfrède argued as early as 1836 for the décolonisation of Algiers: surely one of the earliest uses of the word, either in French or in English.Footnote ¹² But although he condemned the conquest of Algeria as “un crime. . . de lèze-humanité,” Fonfrède's critique of the conquest stressed its incompatibility with French interests: the conquest was also, he wrote, a “parricide,” “un crime de lèze-nation.”Footnote ¹³ Fonfrède, like a few others in these debates, cited “Sidi-Hamdan,” but oddly he did so to support his claim that the French could not trust the Algerians to uphold their treaties, whereas Hamdan Khodja insisted that it was the French who persistently violated treaties, while the Algerians had respected them.Footnote ¹⁴

Some of these criticisms found their way into the official reports of the two commissions of inquiry convened by the king in 1833–4 to examine the conquest. Hamdan Khodja himself testified, acerbically, before the second commission and submitted written memoranda as well as a copy of the Miroir.Footnote ¹⁵ The commissions’ reports lamented the French military's violation of the terms of the capitulation treaty, their disregard of property rights, the violation of mosques and holy sites, and other offenses against Muslim mores.Footnote ¹⁶ The first commission's report included a scathing indictment of the methods of conquest:

But even those commissioners who recognized the “barbarity” of the conquest persisted in the belief that the colonial administration could be reformed. They also declared their hands tied by the commitment of French public opinion to possession of Algeria.Footnote ¹⁸ The Commission d'Afrique decided by a vote of seventeen to two that “to abandon our conquests would be to offend the nation in its legitimate pride [and] to sacrifice the advantages of commerce and political power.”Footnote ¹⁹ The metropolitan authorities thus allowed themselves to voice considerable discomfort with the conquest without repudiating it.

Moreover, a powerful segment of liberal opinion had thrown itself behind the conquest. The liberal republican Alphonse de Lamartine, in a speech brimming with poetic invocations of the nation's colonial mission, ridiculed the cramped perspective of political economy, “a new science that often takes its axioms for facts, and its paradoxes for truths.” While he agreed that Algeria would likely be a financial loss for France, he pointed to England's “system of universal existence, of colonial ubiquity” as the source of her dynamism and power, and asked,

Already in 1834, some defenders of the colony were insisting that Algeria was France.Footnote ²¹ Lamartine, for one, pronounced the idea of giving up the colony a “fatal thought. . . an antinational, antisocial, antihuman thought.” Lamartine's paean to national glory was echoed a few years later by another self-described liberal, Adolphe Thiers, president of the council and minister of foreign affairs, who excused the violence of the conquest as ordinary and inevitable:

An article on Algeria in the republican Dictionnaire politique of 1843 epitomized the dominant leftist position on the conquest. The article criticized the early years of the enterprise as a period of violence and vacillation, the high cost of a war that benefited only speculators rather than the national interest, and an administration that was “too often beneath what the Turks had been.” But it regarded the preservation of Algeria as a “question of honor and national interest” and expressed satisfaction that despite all the mistakes of the early years, public opinion was firmly in favor of the conquest.Footnote ²³ Liberal and leftist supporters of a French Algeria thus acknowledged and disabled criticisms of conquest's brutality, while casting critics as cramped economists oblivious to the claims of public opinion, national honor, and France's international status, especially vis-à-vis England. Their arguments in these early years would be repeated and given particular force by Alexis de Tocqueville, who, throughout the 1840s as the French were extending and consolidating the conquest, was the Chamber's most visible Algeria expert and supporter of the conquest.Footnote ²⁴

HAMDAN KHODJA'S LIBERAL ANTICOLONIALISM

At this moment of early colonial ferment and vocal, if circumscribed, criticism of the conquest, Constant's anticolonial legacy was, arguably, most powerfully taken up by the Algerian Hamdan Khodja. Indeed, his Miroir, published in Paris in October 1833, announced its liberal filiation with an epigraph by Constant.Footnote ²⁵ After a brief account of the work's historical circumstances, I examine three themes in Hamdan Khodja's writings that epitomize his distinctive contribution: his analysis of the role of knowledge production in colonial rule; his use of liberalism as a language of critique and political possibility, and as a philosophical doctrine compatible with Islam; and his call for France to recognize an independent Algeria.

As a member of one of the most prominent commercial and political families in Algiers, Hamdan Khodja belonged to a milieu that had flourished with the opening of international trade in the 1780s and 1790s and the Regency's growing importance as a grain exporter to Europe.Footnote ²⁶ Though French documents consistently describe him as a “Maure” (i.e. an urban descendant of Muslims expelled from Spain), Hamdan Khodja rejected that term and described himself as Kouloughli, that is, of mixed Turkish and Arab descent.Footnote ²⁷ His maternal uncle was an Ottoman official and his father a makatagy or legal adviser to the Dey (Miroir, 112). Hamdan Khodja succeeded his father as a teacher at the mosque of Algiers. Ottoman policy of that period explicitly promoted the involvement of Algerian Muslims like Hamdan Khodja's family in a trade that had been dominated by Livornese Jewish traders.Footnote ²⁸ He visited Istanbul as a child; commercial interests also took him to Tunis, Livorno, Marseilles, Paris, and London, where he met Jeremy Bentham in 1822.Footnote ²⁹ “I have lived in Europe,” he wrote in the Miroir. “I have tasted the fruit of civilization and I am among those who admire the politics of several [European] governments.”Footnote ³⁰ He spoke and wrote Turkish and Arabic, and spoke French and English, though by his own account he did not read or write either.

Hamdan Khodja had a complex series of encounters with the French in Algeria between 1830 and his departure for Paris in the spring of 1833. He sent his son, Hadj Hassan, to negotiate the capitulation of Algiers with General Bourmont, a treaty whose immediate violation by the French was to become one of Hamdan Khodja's most insistent grievances.Footnote ³¹ He saw much of his extensive property seized and was thrown into prison for refusing to pay an arbitrary and exorbitant tax. He also served, under some duress, as an intermediary between the French and one of their most formidable opponents, Ahmed Bey, the Ottoman governor of the eastern province of Constantine.Footnote ³² Giving up any hope of influencing the intransigent colonial officials, he arrived in Paris in the spring of 1833, at the height of French parliamentary and public debates over the “Algerian question,” and in a series of letters and memoranda appealed directly to the metropolitan authorities and French public opinion. His writings convey political experience, sophistication, and imagination.

In its consequences for French policy, Hamdan Khodja's discursive intervention undoubtedly paled beside the military and political resistance to the French conquest mounted by his most prominent contemporaries, Ahmed Bey and the marabout Abd al-Qadir.Footnote ³³ In 1836, having failed to sway the metropolitan authorities or the public, Hamdan Khodja left Paris for Istanbul, where he continued, unsuccessfully, to prod the Ottoman authorities into resistance against the French.Footnote ³⁴ And yet Hamdan Khodja's contribution—what his modern editor has called his “resistance/dialogue”—warrants attention for the distinctiveness of his moral and political claims at that crucial moment, and for his powerful use of liberal rhetoric for anticolonial ends.Footnote ³⁵

The Miroir appealed to the French political class and public opinion to oppose the violence, dispossession, despotism, and bad faith that had been carried out in the name of “free France” for the past three years. The text was at once a history and an ethnography of Algeria, testimony to the catastrophe of the French occupation, and a plea to liberal France to recover a sense of the principles of enlightenment and civilization that it purported to embody. It sought to present to the French political imagination the idea of an independent Algeria that might take its place in a nineteenth-century Europe of emerging nationalities and engage with European states as a diplomatic equal. The work illustrates the constraints on those who sought to preserve some independence, discursive as well as political, in the face of European expansion. It also indicates the critical possibilities of liberal discourse at a moment when liberalism was being marshaled in France and Britain in the service of empire. If sovereignty norms, and membership in the international legal community, were soon to be regarded by European liberals as inseparable from a distinctively European civilization, then the Miroir offers an alternative conception, however fleeting its purchase on the French imagination, of a more expansive international order. And if empire, as Frederick Cooper has argued, was the space in which the French political imagination was located, then Hamdan Khodja sought to navigate within that space—for he was conscious of Algerian vulnerability and the reach of French power—but also to urge his French audience to conceive of itself and of Algeria in national, and not imperial, terms.Footnote ³⁶

Our knowledge of the book's composition and Hamdan Khodja's possible collaborators in Paris is incomplete. He apparently produced the Miroir in collaboration with another Maghrebi liberal, Hassuna D'Ghies, and perhaps also with the assistance of French critics of the conquest.Footnote ³⁷ (Although the title page of the work notes that it was “translated from the Arabic by H.D., Oriental,” no original Arabic text of the Miroir has been found.) He was likely in conversation with those Ottoman diplomats and translators in Paris in the 1820s and 1830s who, in Albert Hourani's words, “without being torn from their roots, had become members of the European community and were conversant with its ideas.”Footnote ³⁸ A permanent Ottoman embassy had first been established in 1796, and Ottoman authorities were sending students and young officials to Paris and other European cities to study languages, technology, and institutions. After 1805 the quasi-independent pasha of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, did the same, and at its height in the early 1830s the Egyptian educational mission in Paris had over a hundred students. Rifa'a Rafi’ al-Tahtawi, the young imam of the first group of Egyptian students in Paris, wrote an influential account of their visit and of the French institutions and customs he observed, which has affinities with Hamdan Khodja's writings (he returned to Egypt in 1831, so the two would not have met). Both wrote sympathetically of the principles of the “Liberals” responsible for the 1830 revolution.Footnote ³⁹ And Hamdan Khodja shared with Tahtawi, Butrus al-Bustani, and other Ottoman intellectuals at this time the belief that progress lay neither in slavishly copying Europe nor in rejecting European influence outright, but rather in adopting ideas and practices that could benefit their own societies while also preserving or rediscovering the resources of Islamic laws, moral principles, and culture.Footnote ⁴⁰ There was thus a milieu of Ottomans in Paris who shared Hamdan Khodja's familiarity with European liberal ideas and a number of his modernizing commitments. But the Miroir remains unusual, perhaps unique in its day, in having been written for a French audience and in mobilizing liberal principles for a critique of French political practice.

Beyond this specifically Ottoman setting, we may consider the Miroir as part of the global “liberal constitutionalist moment” recently proposed by C. A. Bayly as a context for the thought of the Bengali intellectual Rammohan Roy.Footnote ⁴¹ Indeed, although Rammohan Roy argued for reform of British rule in India rather than for Indian independence, he and Hamdan Khodja shared many views; among them, that colonial rule tends to be based on false or biased information, that the colonial power was violating its own liberal principles, and that Algeria (or India) could be thought of as a nation.Footnote ⁴² Like Rammohan Roy and other nineteenth-century Indian intellectuals whom Bayly discusses,Footnote ⁴³ Hamdan Khodja repeatedly drew analogies between European events and ideas and Algerian or Islamic ones (“our law is founded only on the principles of the law of nations”, Miroir, 91). In doing so, he was both demonstrating European liberalism's compatibility with Islam and situating Algeria within a liberal European narrative. The Miroir's repeated invocations of Greece and Belgium as models for an independent Algeria likewise suggest that what David Armitage has called “the contagion of sovereignty” was spreading to circles in the Maghreb around the time it did among South American and Indian intellectuals.Footnote ⁴⁴

Jeremy Bentham was a connective figure in this global liberal moment, actively cultivating like-minded reformers in Europe, the Americas, India, and North Africa, including both Hamdan Khodja and the Miroir's presumed translator, Hassuna D'Ghies, both of whom he met in London in 1822. A native of Tripoli who had lived in France and England from 1815, D'Ghies, whom Bentham referred to as “my disciple and an adopted son of mine,” collaborated with him over several years on a quixotically detailed project to install constitutional government in Tripoli. D'Ghies introduced Hamdan Khodja to Bentham, who in any case had already heard of him: an entry in Bentham's notebook of May 1822 describes Hamdan Khodja as the “Consul. . . from Algiers,” said “to be a man of good information, and liberal sentiments, who deplores the state of the public mind in his own country,” and who “wears a turban, but ridicules Mahommedanism.”Footnote ⁴⁵ (The last is difficult to reconcile with the Miroir and other writings and was perhaps a hopeful exaggeration.) Later, in an unsent letter to John Quincy Adams soliciting help for his various North African projects, Bentham warmly, if self-indulgently, described Hamdan Khodja as a sensible and erudite man who had been moved to tears by D'Ghies's “extempore translation in Arabic” of some of Bentham's work. Bentham himself “observed the fire lighted up in his countenance as often as the word Liberty occurred,” and he gave him “as many of my works in English as I could scrape together” to take with him back to Algiers.Footnote ⁴⁶ Bentham seems to have hoped to collaborate with Hamdan Khodja to promote political reform in Algeria, and he encouraged him to send reports from Algiers that Bentham would try to place in the British press. Only one report seems to have resulted, which Bentham summarized as follows: “The Algerines are tyrannized over by about 10,000 Turks. The object is, by flattering the Dey, to engage him to listen to European advice, and seek European assistance for delivering his country from that tyranny, and concur in establishing a better form of Government.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The summary may well represent Bentham's (or D'Ghies's) aspirations rather than Hamdan Khodja's, though the Algerian was indeed to lament a decade later in the Miroir that the French had all but dashed his hopes that their expedition might represent a liberation from Ottoman misrule (262).

KNOWLEDGE AND COLONIAL POWER

The Miroir is keenly self-conscious as an intervention in French debates. The book's title page and its eloquent preface announce the author's distinctive epistemic authority as someone of both local knowledge and cosmopolitan sympathies, as an admirer of European political ideas and institutions who has interacted with Europe on something like terms of equality. They signal his liberal political commitments and his perception of the need to respond (which he does at times with humor) to European stereotypes and misperceptions about Algeria and Islam.

The work's complete title—Aperçu historique et statistique sur la Régence d'Alger, intitulé en Arabe le Miroir (Historical and statistical survey of the Regency of Algiers, entitled The Mirror in Arabic)—positions it as at once a work of modern science, a kind of colonial manual, and a political critique of a venerable Muslim literary tradition of advice for rulers, the “mirrors for princes.”Footnote ⁴⁸ It was a trope of that genre for the author to call attention, as Hamdan Khodja does, on the one hand to his proximity to power and his distinctive knowledge, and on the other hand to his vulnerability. (Machiavelli made brilliant use of this device in his dedicatory letter to the Prince.Footnote ⁴⁹) The Miroir shares many themes with works in that tradition: it insists, for instance, that unjust rule cannot be stable, that the public treasury must be managed scrupulously, that the ruler must keep well-informed, and that political advice must ultimately rest on moral foundations. But the Miroir also inverts the tradition, for rather than suggesting how the rulers might govern better, it counsels them to give up altogether.

The book similarly inverts the genre of colonial manual. Its main title is ambiguous, perhaps ironic, in that it nearly exactly repeats that of an 1830 publication by the French Ministry of War designed for the use of the expeditionary army.Footnote ⁵⁰ The allusion seems to indicate the book's usefulness for the French colonizers and may have served to attract a readership. Indeed, the book presents itself as a source of the minute and even mundane knowledge that the French would require to achieve colonial success but that the conquest itself had put, perhaps permanently, out of their reach. The author notes his access to areas of the country the French have not been able to penetrate and gives a scrupulous account of his methods, as for instance in his efforts to estimate the population of Algeria before the conquest.Footnote ⁵¹ And yet the book tends to mobilize ethnography and statistics precisely as evidence of the impossibility or futility of conquest, especially in polemical codas to the ethnographic chapters. A chapter on the Kabyles concludes, for instance, that although the French might succeed in conquering them, the expenditure of blood would be an inconceivable folly: “What would be the goal of such an expedition? Would it be for the sole pleasure of exterminating people! Or rather the mad desire to possess uncultivated wastelands [déserts]?” (58). As the book's title and form suggest, its author, like the colonial administrators he criticizes, presumes that there is a truth about the colony that can be known through ethnographic methods, but he also deflates French pretensions to scientific knowledge. He repeatedly undercuts the exoticism of French reports of Algeria (a new America, a new India, a tropical paradise) and compares it to the poorest and weakest countries of Europe. In denouncing what he suggests is a surreptitious French project to Christianize Africa, he notes dryly that he, for one, believes Christianization is unnecessary to introduce civilization and liberty, but that since “we lack the governmental science of the honorable ministers, we will content ourselves with saying that this project seems to us quite difficult to execute” (242). The Miroir, then, is an anticolonial tract in the guise of a colonial handbook.

One of Hamdan Khodja's most persistent and perceptive lines of argument has to do with the role of knowledge construction in the service of colonial power and the distinctive malformations of knowledge that beset colonial possessions.Footnote ⁵² In an eloquent memorandum sent to the newly formed commission of inquiry along with a copy of the Miroir, he gestured at the self-undermining nature of French rule in Algeria by arguing that the commissioners’ own task had been made impossible by the violence and iniquity of the conquest. The commissioners’ own observations in the limited parts of the country they could safely visit were bound to be misleading, and the various sources from which they might seek information about the state of Algeria were all unreliable thanks to the peculiar vicissitudes of colonial rule. In the areas that they could visit, the commissioners would confront “unknown phenomena hidden beneath an appearance of truth.”Footnote ⁵³ The violence of the conquest, and French contempt for the native inhabitants, made it impossible for the French authorities to acquire the knowledge they required to govern.

In enumerating the commission's potential sources—French officials, European colonists, Muslim authorities, indigenous inhabitants, and written records—Hamdan Khodja proposed that each was, or had been rendered, so unreliable as to make the commission's mission to ascertain the truth about the colony unachievable. Colonial and military officials would hide their failings in an effort to preserve their power. European colonists would admit nothing that might damage their interests, and given their social inferiority within Europe—here he invoked the common trope of the colons as rootless social riffraff—France could not hope even to appeal to their sense of honor as one could perhaps do with the officials. But what was most damning for the commission's high-minded aspiration to reform the conquest, Hamdan Khodja suggested, was the irrevocable transformation of France's relations with the local inhabitants. In three years, the French had entirely vitiated the testimony of the indigenous people and elites through their cruelty and their failure to abide by their agreements.

Hamdan Khodja depicted a population terrorized into silence or dissimulation. Its most reputable members had been exiled or arrested, so that the remaining elites and legal experts were those driven by ambition to say whatever they believed the French wanted to hear: “this people is in such a great agitation that one can compare it to a vessel whose shipwrecked sailors don't know which plank to grasp to save themselves from the peril that threatens them” (“Mémoire,” 129–31). Those Algerian elites who were not sycophantic “pensioners” of the French, he noted, either had been driven into exile or would not venture before the commission, having seen from experience that appeals to the French authorities were futile. This sensible resignation in the face of intransigent rulers, he observed, was what Clauzel has dismissed as “oriental fatalism.” Algerian property owners, alarmed by the widespread confiscation of property, had submitted to a “voluntary spoliation,” leasing properties to Europeans at exploitative terms out of fear that they would otherwise lose their lands outright (“Mémoire,” 126). Ordinary inhabitants had been terrorized by the gratuitous violence of the French conquest, including the massacre of whole villages and tribes. Most notoriously, under orders by the aggressive duc de Rovigo, French troops had massacred nearly the entire tribe of Ouffia in April 1832, including many women and children, and had tried and executed the tribe's sheik, despite efforts by the civil administrator, Baron Pichon, to prevent such a judicial murder.Footnote ⁵⁴ Hamdan Khodja argued that mere difference of religion alone need not have proven an obstacle to respectful and peaceful relations: the fundamental compatibility between liberal Europe and Islam is one of his most cherished themes. But religious difference had been transformed by French cruelty into a popular Algerian belief that the French conquest was driven by religious fanaticism, foreclosing political possibilities that might once have been imaginable.Footnote ⁵⁵ Hamdan Khodja's broader suggestion, then, was that French rule had so distorted perceptions and attitudes, and created such a climate of fear, disorder, and mistrust, that the ‘science’ of imperial knowledge destroyed any chance of fostering the very thing it sought to gather and to use.

LIBERALISM AND ISLAM

Appeals to liberal values structure and frame Hamdan Khodja's argument in the Miroir, and much of the book consists of painstaking documentation of the many ways in which French colonial practice violates the liberal principles that are purported to underlie French laws.Footnote ⁵⁶ The French debates, he (rightly) charges in the preface, are almost exclusively concerned with the question of the material advantages of the conquest for France, rather than its violation of “liberal principles and. . . the benefits that one should have a right to hope for from one's government” (38). As Abdelkader Djeghloul has argued, the Miroir constructs a series of different Frances—an idealized France of liberal and enlightened values, juxtaposed with the France of the governing authorities, and with a colonizing France—and proposes that the colonizing France is a betrayal of the other two.Footnote ⁵⁷ Hamdan Khodja repeatedly claimed that the French government could not be aware of the iniquities conducted in its name. In doing so, he was both asserting that French officials on the ground had become dangerously independent of their supposed superiors in Paris, and challenging the Parisian authorities to stop the abuses or bear moral responsibility for them. With a magnanimity characteristic of his appropriations of French liberalism, he was also offering the French government and the French public an opportunity, in a sense, to save face: to bring France's actions into line with her ideals before the possibility of mutual accommodation had been utterly destroyed. Colonial domination, in addition to being a burden on France, he argued, is

The rhetorical strategy of juxtaposing France's self-professed liberalism with its colonial conduct was to become a leitmotif of the Young Algerian movement a century later. As Ferhat Abbas, for instance, later described his own writings of the 1930s, in invoking cultivation and discipline, humanitarianism and fraternity, he had sought “recourse to liberal and republican France against colonialist and tyrannical France.”Footnote ⁵⁸ But the Young Algerians invoked liberal and democratic France to argue for civic and political equality within the empire. As James McDougall has argued, for them “the only possible future lay in emancipation through the awesome power of colonial modernity.” Abbas, for one, wrote that the “Algerian patrie is a myth. . . We have brushed aside once and for all [such] daydreams and illusions to tie our future definitively to that of the work of France in this land.”Footnote ⁵⁹ For Hamdan Khodja, in contrast, the appeal to an idealized France—the demand for political emancipation—ultimately issued in a demand not for genuine incorporation into the republic, but for recognition of Algeria's place in the international order.

Hamdan Khodja concluded that only two options remained to the French, given the criminal blundering of the early occupation and the irretrievable alienation of the population: either to push the tribes into the desert and entirely clear the land of inhabitants to make room for European colonists—if such iniquitous measures could be squared with the law of nations and “the liberal principles that characterize the French nation”—or to install a Muslim governor who would govern in accord with liberal principles and secure French interests in North Africa:Footnote ⁶⁰

Such a course would, he argued, be all the more truly a “liberal emancipation,” adding to the “celebrity of our century,” precisely because Algerians were of a different religion.Footnote ⁶²

Alongside the Miroir's idealized portrait of liberal France runs an idealized Islam. They are presented as distinct but compatible embodiments of universal values, with France characterized by representative government, constitutionalism, and the rule of law, and Islam depicted as an ethical and legislative system committed to the protection of the weak:

Hamdan Khodja presents Islam in terms of its broadest philosophical commitments and institutional functions, emphasizing especially its effective mechanisms for the provision of charity, public works, and education.Footnote ⁶⁴ Both French civil law and Islamic jurisprudence, he argues, are founded on the “law of nations,” although France had repeatedly violated this law during the conquest.Footnote ⁶⁵ “Because the basis of our religion is only a pure morality,” he argues, “our law is founded solely on principles of the law of nations, and the Algerians put these principles into practice.” Indeed, he suggests wryly, General Clauzel himself acknowledged Algerians’ scrupulousness in living up to their obligations. Whereas the French violated every rule of “politesse et honnêteté,” the Algerians had been so steadfast in their social duties in the face of French abuses that Clauzel concluded (again) that they were in the grip of “Oriental fatalism” (Miroir, 91).

In elaborating his idealized portrait of France, Hamdan Khodja is not simply presenting the French with their own ostensible standards as a critique of their colonial depredations. He is also performing the sort of act of interpretive generosity that he demands of his French readers vis-à-vis Islam. Both Islam and European civilization, he suggests, have been betrayed by their agents. Ottoman and other Muslim rulers have abused their power, and it is this, rather than anything inherent in Islamic legal principles, that has given some substance to the European stereotype of the Oriental despot.Footnote ⁶⁶ But European “civilization” has been equally ill-served by its self-professed representatives. Having demonstrated the extent to which the exercise of French power in Algeria has violated French ideals, Hamdan Khodja nevertheless remains willing to declare himself an ally of those ideals. Implicitly, it seems, he asks his French readers to respond with similar imagination and sympathy to what he acknowledges is an idealized portrait of Islam.Footnote ⁶⁷

While Hamdan Khodja invokes difference of religion as a fact that would complicate any attempt at colonial rule, he suggests that such differences did not initially pose insuperable obstacles to some possible mutual accommodation. It was the occupying forces’ myriad and continual violations of Muslim mores that in three years had eliminated any possibility of mutual tolerance and led the Algerian population irreversibly to regard the French as fanatical infidels.

The Miroir thus offers a complex response to the French characterization of Algeria as a land of diverse and hostile barbarous tribes under the yoke of the Ottoman Empire's Oriental despotism. Hamdan Khodja acknowledges that particular Ottoman governors had, like the French colonial agents, perverted the principles by which they professed to rule.Footnote ⁶⁸ But he also argues that the Ottoman Empire had for a long time effectively managed differences within the empire with a moderation and flexibility of which the French had proven themselves incapable.Footnote ⁶⁹

As the foregoing discussion suggests, the Miroir evinces a recurrent ambivalence toward a liberal and modernist mission civilisatrice. Its author suggests that there are aspects of European civilization to which Algeria should aspire but denies that this could be a justification for colonial rule or juridical inequality. He presents himself as an ally of French enlightenment, in opposition both to French colonialism—which he insists represents a betrayal of its values—and to the “fanaticism” of some (particularly rural) Algerians. Adopting the temporality of European modernizers, he argues that the French conquest has “pushed back civilization by more than a century.” More than once he (like his French contemporaries) registers astonishment that such violence could erupt in the nineteenth century, when “one might believe that the narrow ideas of fanaticism had been forgotten, that the time of peoples’ emancipation had arrived, and that all who inhabit the surface of the globe must be seen as belonging to one and the same family.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Instead of fostering such progress, he argues, the brutality of the conquest has confirmed the rural tribes in their own “fanatical opinions,” undermining any hope the French might have had of civilizing them: “The French have never done anything to disabuse these peoples of their false and fanatical ideas; on the contrary, they have done everything to keep them in ignorance.”Footnote ⁷¹

Hamdan Khodja's depictions of the rural populations, especially the Kabyles, as ignorant and fanatical, in need of careful management by religious and political notables, likely stem in part from an urban Ottoman discourse of civilization and refinement that pre-dated Ottoman elites’ preoccupation with Europe as the center of global progress. With its tropes of backwardness and progress, fanaticism and enlightenment, the Miroir also reflects what Ussama Makdisi has described as Ottoman Orientalism, in which Ottomans at precisely this moment began to embrace Western Orientalism's “underlying logic of time and progress,” and sought to articulate a distinctively Ottoman modernity: “a state and civilization. . . temporally coeval with the West but culturally distinct from and politically independent of it.”Footnote ⁷² But Ottoman officials at the center of the empire were, as Hamdan Khodja himself discovered when he failed to elicit any support from the authorities in Istanbul, reluctant to challenge European expansion over Muslim territories.Footnote ⁷³ His own use of the European discourse of national independence was far more radical than that of the ruling Ottoman elites.

ALGERIA AND ITS POSSIBLE FUTURES

The Miroir, like Hamdan Khodja's wider interactions with the French authorities, operates at several levels of political ambition. Most modestly, it is a call for the French authorities to abide by their agreements, above all the capitulation treaty that regulated the surrender of the city of Algiers. At this level, its author appears reconciled to the French conquest. Such a pragmatic accommodation to the reality of French rule is evident throughout Hamdan Khodja's writings, visible not only in his willingness, however reluctant, to act as intermediary between the duc de Rovigo and Ahmad Bey in 1832, but also in his later, formulaically submissive, letters to King Louis-Philippe.Footnote ⁷⁴ He even, in a reply to his critics, went so far as to deny that his goal was to encourage France to evacuate Algiers. His explanation for his own ambiguous politics at this moment of instability eloquently evokes the limited political possibilities of the vulnerable. It is worth quoting at length:

At the same time, despite his palpable sense of the constraints on Algerians—their political and military weakness, their almost inevitable dependence on an outside power, whether French or Ottoman—Hamdan Khodja persisted in offering a more expansive vision of Algeria's possible future.

One of the many things that the Miroir seeks to do is to make space in the European imagination for an independent Algeria. Hamdan Khodja proposes in the preface that Algeria ought to be incorporated into the nineteenth-century liberal narrative of the emancipation of European nations: the struggle of the 1820s for an independent Greece, the French participation in the liberation of Catholic Belgium from domination by Holland, the widespread interest in the “Poles and the reestablishment of their nationality.”Footnote ⁷⁶ He reframes the “question d'Alger,” generally taken in French debates, even by the “anticolonistes,” to be the question of what colonial policy would best serve France's interests, as one that “has to do with the vitality of an entire nation, composed of ten million individuals” (32). While granting that the country has been placed, in the deferential language of his appeal to the king, under “Your Majesty's guardianship [tutelle],” Hamdan Khodja proposes that the king “emancipate the Algerians [and] restore harmony between the two peoples,” for “Algerians, too, have rights that should permit them to enjoy liberty and all the advantages that European nations enjoy.”Footnote ⁷⁷ (The Miroir's call for Algerian national independence would not have sat well with the Ottoman authorities, and in his appeals to Ottoman correspondents, Hamdan Khodja emphasized the importance of saving Algeria from the rule of nonbelievers rather than its national independence.Footnote ⁷⁸) Where French ethnographies tended to insist that the Regency's inhabitants were not a single people but an assortment of disparate and hostile populations, the Miroir speaks of Algerians as “un peuple,” “une nation,” “mes concitoyens,” “mes compatriotes.”Footnote ⁷⁹

For this reason it may be tempting to read Hamdan Khodja as a protonationalist. Abdelkader Djeghloul has argued that he “anticipated the notion of the nation that was realized on the eve of the First World War” and that he thus belongs “more than his contemporaries to the archaeology of Algerian modernity.”Footnote ⁸⁰ I would emphasize that in the Miroir Hamdan Khodja is contributing to a European debate rather than undertaking anything like nationalist politics in Algeria.Footnote ⁸¹ That the “nationality” of the Algerians was a contested matter in French discourse, and was not necessarily thought to be incompatible with French rule, is indicated by Thiers's 1836 speech, cited earlier. Thiers claimed not to “contest the [Arabs’] right to conserve their nationality” and promised that the government had no intention of “destroying the Arab nationality” as some deputies had charged. In his insistence on the term, Thiers was declaring himself in support of something further than simply the protection of individual Arab lives against the imputation of an exterminationist project. What this might be he left conveniently ambiguous, but by “nationality” he certainly did not mean political independence.Footnote ⁸²

In contrast, when Amédée Desjobert argued that France should recognize “Arab nationality” in Algeria, he undoubtedly meant Algerian political independence. The French, he argued, should vacate all but two or three coastal garrisons, acknowledge Abd al-Qadir as the Algerian leader, and declare that any Europeans who remained in Algeria did so as subjects of the indigenous government. He argued that Arabs and Kabyles, whatever their differences, “can be considered as forming a single nationality”; France might aid it in the “paths of civilization. But it must walk them on its own.”Footnote ⁸³ Hamdan Khodja's own repeated analogies between the Algerian “nation” and the fortunes of newly independent European “nationalities” like Belgium and Greece similarly press his use of these terms toward a claim for political independence and statehood.

Hamdan Khodja did not, as many later nationalists would do, purport to speak for an authentic, already-existing, or eternal, Algerian nation.Footnote ⁸⁴ The Miroir elaborates the diversity of the Regency's populations, often in terms indistinguishable from European ethnographies, with descriptions of rural tribes as fanatical and ignorant. But it mobilizes these in a critique of the French conquest, arguing for the possibility of a nascent nationality that was denied by French ethnographies. Hamdan Khodja maintains that Algerian diversity is neither unusual nor an obstacle to existence as an independent state. The reader, he argues, should not be astonished at the diversity of habits found in the Regency, since a similarly “remarkable variety, even from the legal perspective,” can be found among European peoples like Switzerland, Italy, Hungary, and Germany (40). Such references again insert Algeria into a liberal narrative of nineteenth-century Europe as a community of nation states: many still coming into being, as he suggests, with the enthusiastic support of British and French liberals.

HAMDAN KHODJA'S RECEPTION IN FRANCE

That Hamdan Khodja made a considerable impression on the French government, even before the publication of the Miroir, is suggested by the substantial and receptive response drafted by the War Ministry to his first memorandum.Footnote ⁸⁵ His memorandum had outlined eighteen complaints against French officials, from seizure of private property without the promised indemnification, to the desecration of mosques and tombs and other violations of Muslim mores, and it had ended with a call for an independent commission to be sent to Algeria. The ministry's response indicates the considerable degree to which the authorities in Paris were willing to recognize, at least on paper, the justice of his charges. They affirm the need to abide by the terms of the capitulation treaty; the importance of spending considerable sums to avoid further offenses to the population's religious sensibilities, for instance by returning many of the mosques that had been transformed into churches and warehouses, and by restoring the charitable funds to their original purpose. These officials were, to be sure, uncompromising in their commitment to the French occupation of Algeria; indeed, they believed that greater respect for religion and private property would make the occupation more secure and less costly. But their response suggests that Hamdan Khodja was right to place some hope in the greater moderation of the Paris authorities and to invoke the principles of rule of law and reciprocal obligation.

The power of his account is conveyed, too, by the extensive “Refutation” of the Miroir published by supporters of General Clauzel, one of Hamdan Khodja's primary targets.Footnote ⁸⁶ The intemperance and passion of this pamphlet suggest its authors’ concern that the Miroir might sway a French public whose misgivings about the conquest persisted alongside its aspirations to imperial glory. It argued that his depiction of the moderate and civilized principles underlying Muslim and Ottoman government misrepresents “that great association for brigandage,” and that the French could not leave Algeria as easily as he suggests, for not only would abandonment attest to French impotence, but it would deliver the country to “all the horrors of a civil war among the diverse races of inhabitants who would no longer be constrained in their hatred by a repressive power.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The “Refutation” sought to undermine Hamdan Khodja's authority and his legitimacy as an Algerian spokesman, charging him with all the vices of “subjected peoples”—greed, fanaticism, duplicity—and claiming that he spoke only for a narrow elite with no real ties to the population.Footnote ⁸⁸ Hamdan Khodja's depiction of an emergent Algerian nation provoked a particularly strident response from Clauzel's allies, who declared his term “Algerians” to be incoherent and questioned his right to speak on behalf of such a nation. The “Refutation” insists on referring to him as a “Moor,” flagging him a member of a deracinated and self-interested class with no right to speak for the vast majority of Arabs and Kabyles, with whom it has nothing in common.Footnote ⁸⁹ Hamdan Khodja, it argues,

This insistence on deep religious differences within the population also seems intended to undermine the expansive portrait of Islam so prominent in the Miroir, to suggest that Islam could be neither a unifying political force nor the capacious and inclusive moral doctrine Hamdan Khodja has described.Footnote ⁹¹

Hamdan Khodja seems to have had little influence on later Algerian nationalism, but he was occasionally cited with admiration by French and Algerian anticolonialists in the 1950s and 1960s. The FLN diplomat and intellectual Mostefa Lacheraf wrote that “we can consider Hamdan Khodja the ancestor, without descendants so to speak, of contemporary urban nationalism in its most moderate form.”Footnote ⁹² And Michel Habart denounced the “second” Algerian war of his own day in a little volume called Histoire d'un parjure (History of a Perjury), by means of a minute analysis of French lies and hypocrisies during the war of conquest, using the Miroir as one of his major sources. Habart described Hamdan Khodja's book as an “astonishingly contemporary” work of great moral as well as historical interest, an “appeal from beyond the grave [that] is still waiting, and more than ever must be heard.”Footnote ⁹³

Hamdan Khodja was a distinctive, and briefly a prominent, voice in French debates at a critical moment in the career of the French empire, when the country had taken the first step toward once again becoming a colonial power but before the consolidation of a national consensus in favor of a colonial project. The French had unleashed catastrophic disorder in Algeria but had hardly begun to institute anything like a colonial order. What is striking, the Miroir suggests, is how quickly French oppression transformed the situation from one of possible mutual accommodation and a shared modernist project to one of irremediable opposition. Hamdan Khodja was responding not to a long-standing colonial condition but to a new irruption of colonial power, though one whose consolidation already appeared almost inexorable. The Miroir addressed a French audience and was framed quite explicitly in the terms of its dominant discourses: liberalism, constitutionalism, civilization. But Hamdan Khodja was, perhaps, more free than Algerians of subsequent generations, or his contemporaries like Rammohan Roy in the much more firmly established British India, to propose a future for his country not determined by European colonial modernity.