Essay on Algeria

Overview

A sixty-page memorandum Tocqueville wrote in 1841 after his first visit to Algeria, unpublished in his lifetime, on how France should hold and govern its new conquest. He takes French domination as settled and asks how it can be made to last, examining the country’s tribes and towns, the Arab and Kabyle populations, the conduct of the war against Abd al-Qadir, and the administration of the settler colony.

He argues for European settlement and for giving the colonists civil liberties, criticises the brutality and lawlessness of French military rule as damaging to France itself, and at the same time accepts measures against the Arab population that he would have condemned at home.

What happens

Why France must stay. Tocqueville opens by dismissing the question of whether France should abandon Algeria: to do so would announce its decline to the world. The only question is how domination can be made to last.

The country and its peoples. He surveys the towns and the tribes, distinguishing the Kabyles of the mountains, whom he thinks can be reached through trade, from the Arabs of the plains, organised under religious and tribal leaders, whom he thinks must be subdued.

The war against Abd al-Qadir. Tocqueville examines the resistance led by the emir and concludes that France cannot win by holding fixed points; it must strike at the tribes’ means of living, and he accepts the razzias that burn harvests and seize herds as necessities of the kind of war it is.

The limits of domination. He argues that France cannot govern the Arabs directly as it governs Frenchmen, and must rule through their own leaders while preventing any single power from uniting them.

The settler colony. Tocqueville argues that only European settlement can make the conquest permanent, and that settlers will not come or stay unless they enjoy the civil liberties and secure property they would have in France.

Against military rule. He criticises the brutality and lawlessness of the army’s administration, its contempt for civilians and its arbitrary power, as corrupting to the officers and dangerous to France, which cannot keep men who have learned to rule that way from bringing it home.

How to read it

Read the opening refusal to consider abandoning Algeria as the key to everything that follows, the conquest assumed and only its permanence at issue.

Pay close attention to the passages on the razzias, where Tocqueville accepts the destruction of harvests and the seizure of herds as necessities, and weigh them against the principles of Democracy in America.

Notice that the criticism of military lawlessness is made on France’s behalf, not Algeria’s, the army’s habits feared as a contagion that might return home, and ask what that reveals about the limits of the argument.

Consider the memorandum as a document of the liberal mind at work on empire, unusually honest about what it permits itself, and read it as an exhibit rather than only an argument.

Read this essay alongside Vitoria’s lectures on the American Indians to compare two attempts, three centuries apart, to reason about the rights of a conquered people from within the conqueror’s own tradition.

Questions it raises

• Is the double standard Tocqueville applies, liberty for the settlers and subjection for the Arabs, a betrayal of his liberalism or a consequence of it?
• Why does he criticise the army’s brutality as damaging to France rather than to Algerians, and what does that choice of ground tell us about who his argument is for?
• How does the distinction between Kabyles and Arabs, one to be traded with and the other subdued, shape the policy he recommends, and how much of it rests on knowledge rather than convenience?
• What does Tocqueville’s acceptance of the razzias as necessities of the war reveal about how easily a theory of what is permitted gives way to a theory of what will work?
• Should the essay change how we read Democracy in America, or can the two be held apart as the statesman’s and the theorist’s work?
• What did the settler colony Tocqueville outlined become over the following century, and does the memorandum foresee any of the violence of its end?