The Blood Circle

In late October 2022, the Algerian government accepted the skulls of 24 national heroes who were killed during France’s crushing century-and-a-half-long (1830–1962) occupation of Algeria. Kept in card boxes in the Parisian Museum of Mankind, the decapitated heads of defeated Algerian locals had been stuck on poles and later shipped to France as war trophies. Included in the morbid mix were the heads of vanquished resistance fighters from the town of Zaatcha, a veritable oasis that was decimated by French forces in 1849.

Ali Farid Belkadi, the historian who made this ‘‘monstrous discovery’’ said in an interview for the New York Times that the revelations spoke volumes about French ‘‘colonial barbarism.’’ While other African nations were receiving royal crowns, ritual masks, and other decorative artifacts from apologetic former colonial powers, Algeria’s share of the repatriated bounty was the heads of its colonial martyrs. 

Such were the remarkable human costs of France’s undeclared war in Algeria. The founders of colonial Algeria had initially hoped to free its people from the tyranny of Ottoman rule, and set the inhabitants of this African gem on their way to enlightenment. Described by church prelates as a ‘‘lair of pirates’’ and ‘‘anti-Christian barbarism,’’ colonization offered to its ‘‘stupid and degraded peoples,’’ stultified as they were by ‘‘despotism and vice,’’ the ‘‘inestimable benefits of peace’’ (By Sword and Plow, pp. 40–41).

Dreams of peace and prosperity for the inhabitants of this new outpost never materialized. By the time French forces finally managed to gain control of the entire country starting in 1848, the population had been reduced to penury. Far from relieving their troubles, complete French control of Algerian territory launched a period of unparalleled misery for the surviving natives. By one estimate, the one million or so Muslim Algerians who died in the mid-1860s perished precisely because the new land policies imposed by the French government destroyed the ability of locals to lead self-sustaining lives. In short, the initial plan of development failed (By Sword and Plow, p. 319). 

In Violent Saviors: The West’s Conquest of the Rest, economics professor William Easterly outlines what he calls the ‘‘developmental right of conquest.’’ This refers to a historical tendency among some western powers to conquer foreign lands in order to better develop the resources of the world for the enrichment of the new stakeholders and the rest of humanity. The beneficent effects of this outlook were supposed to ‘‘increase the material progress of colonial subjects while taking away their agency,’’ but in actuality, this ideology of material improvement often resulted in the immiseration of natives and a bonanza wealth boost for a few individuals (Violent Saviors, p. 4). In colonial Algeria, the push toward free-market economics resulted in mass dispossession and famine for natives, and the creation of a vicious French-settler oligarchy led by industrialist Jacques Duroux. 

By 1936, a century or so after landing on African soil, French settlers owned 7.7 million hectares, or 40% of the indigenous land prior to invasion. Algerians, on the other hand, suffered bouts of famine that left French spectators shocked. In 1937, remembered today as the ‘‘year of the great famine,’’ one could find ‘‘stick-like figures’’ roaming the unpaved streets of Kabylia. Some malnutritioned wretches ‘‘literally dropped dead on the road as families tried to survive on wild roots and rotting animal remains’’ (Algeria, p. 37). Easterly’s Violent Saviors offers many other examples of this kind of institutional failure, along with an inspiring list of stellar liberals who condemned the colonial system of exploitation. 

A number of well-known liberals such as Adam Smith, Frederick Douglass, and Ludwig von Mises stand out in this narrative for their resolute criticism of the logic of empire, while certain aristocratic liberals such Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill appear evidently compromised by their unyielding support for colonialism. Mill, we are told, ‘‘broke the heart of his later admirers’’ by denying that the principles of liberty applied to ‘‘backwards people,’’ while Tocqueville ‘‘accepted the need for brutal violence for the glory of France’’ (Violent Saviors, pp. 99, 193).

What these brief but sadly accurate observations may perhaps obscure is the fact that despite their admirable exposition of the core principles of liberalism, both Mill and Tocqueville were not passive witnesses to the great crimes of the colonial era. They were eager defenders of the state and corporate machinery that regularly resorted to extreme violence to extract land and resources from people. 

Nor were they detached onlookers musing from a distance at the mischief of vainglorious politicians. As official representatives of their respective countries, both men had a hand in shaping colonial policy, and were in fact outstanding members of that class of government leaders Easterly calls ‘‘violent saviors’’—colonial soldiers, administrators, businessmen, adventurers, and intellectuals who did not hesitate to use and advocate violence to ‘save the world’ from ‘barbarism’ (Violent Saviors, p. 25).

Both men were part of a small but blood-soaked circle of cross-continental liberal thinkers and intellectuals who repeatedly advocated for a loosening of traditional restrictions on the freedom of individuals in ‘civilized’ countries, and a tightening of legislative controls on the sovereignty of colonial subjects in ‘savage’ lands. 

Tocqueville, for example, vigorously defended the right of Frenchmen to own and dispose of property without the state sneaking in to strip men of their patrimony, but was on more than one occasion willing to advocate for violent government seizure of the most promising plots of lands in Algerian territory. In a particularly moving section of chapter ten of his Democracy in America (1835), Tocqueville recalled the distress he felt at the sight of the Choctaw tribe being forced out of their ancestral lands by the Andrew Jackson administration, with “the wounded, the sick, newborn babies, and old men on the verge of death” all being dragged along in the cold of winter (Democracy in America, p. 380). And yet years later, when given the opportunity as a celebrity politician to oppose France’s own practice of dispossession, Tocqueville publicly defended the right of Frenchmen to occupy Algerian territory and extract valuable resources from the local population (Man Who Understood Democracy, p. 245). 

None of this could reasonably take shape if the French government failed to establish a stable foothold in Algeria and provide secure plots of land to hopeful settlers. In any case, laying the military groundwork for a stable land economy did not even begin to address the question of what to do with the current occupants. Extermination not being an option, Tocqueville seized on the fact that most of the extremely fertile land in Algeria was barely ‘cultivated’ (at least by European standards) to argue that the “richer and more industrious” French settlers could easily buy the ‘unused’ land from the Arab locals without causing them too much trouble (Writings on Empire and Slavery, pp. 24, 25). When the native population rejected this proposal and its arrogant assumptions, Tocqueville went on to appeal to an all too familiar argument for judicial plunder: the law against wastage. 

Part of a broader argument for a ‘development right of conquest,’ the law against wastage states that failure to use a resource well may result in it falling in ‘‘the Possession of any other’’ (Locke, Two Treatises, II.38.8). With respect to the issue of land allocation in the newly colonized territory of Algeria, Tocqueville argued that ‘‘if the recognized owner does not cultivate his land within a term we indicate, this land will fall to the state.’’ If the proprietor rebels against this verdict, he will be met with the full force of the law. These are ‘‘undoubtedly violent and irregular procedures,’’ Tocqueville recognized, but such was the business of colonization (By Sword and Plow, p. 252).

Nothing but force and terror 

In June 1845, for example, France’s Armée d’Afrique—under the ultimate supervision of governor-general Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, a veteran of the Napoleonic wars—cornered hundreds of frightened Algerian locals inside the caves of Dahara. The army proceeded to asphyxiate the refugee families by setting the entrance of the caves on fire. The Dahara murders were part of a methodical killing of Bedouin people by means of fumigation. These infamous enfumades served the military purpose of demoralizing the local population and bringing rebel leaders to yield.

Called in on February 1841 to ‘pacify’ the troublesome natives, Marshal Bugeaud instituted a policy of ‘total war’ against the Algerian people. French soldiers razed entire villages to the ground, raped women, and generally pillaged the surrounding areas. Razzia, the Arabic word for ‘scorched-earth’, became a watch word for the routinized burning of ‘‘grain silos, trees, villages, and whatever crops and animals’’ the attackers could carry off (By Sword and Plow, p. 163).

At first, French politicians were appalled by reports that Arab militiamen routinely cut the throats of French soldiers and sold their heads to the Turkish dey, but as the conflict expanded in scope and intensity, French army command responded in kind. Soldiers stationed in Algeria were ordered by their superiors to show no mercy to enemy combatants (Man Who Understood Democracy, p. 248). Algerian soldiers were ‘‘decapitated and their heads displayed on bayonet points,’’ with their other body parts prized as collectibles. Cash rewards were awarded to French soldiers who could bring both pairs of ears for each Arab they slaughtered. Failure to kill an enemy soldier after capture could result in military discipline: any soldier caught bringing a living prisoner was beaten. Resort to these extreme military measures drove the French soldiers charged with committing these atrocities to ‘‘epidemic levels of alcoholism’’ and suicide, and reduced the Algerian population to almost half its pre-colonial size, from an estimated 4 million to 2.3 million between 1830 and 1855 (By Sword and Plow, pp. 162–163).

When news of these horrific practices found their way back to the metropole, Alexis de Tocqueville, then considered one of the leading liberal thinkers of his age, offered the following apologia: ‘‘I believe that the right of war authorizes us to ravage the country and that we must do it, either by destroying harvests during the harvest season, or year-round by making those rapid incursions called razzias, whose purpose is to seize men and herds’’ (Writings on Empire and Slavery, p. 71). Tocqueville never spoke publicly about his support for the destruction of family quarters. Yet as one biographer has noted, Tocqueville’s ‘‘silence gave tacit endorsement to the scorched earth policy’’ (Man Who Understood Democracy, p. 249). His private correspondence certainly left no doubt to his views on the use of extreme violence. On ink and paper at least, Tocqueville appears confident in his convictions, and defiant of the polite sensibilities of his political entourage. As he explained to General Louis Juchault Lamorcière, a one-time governor of Algeria, ‘‘I am among those who understand and approve the kind of war you are waging at the moment’’ (ibid., p. 244).

Tocqueville did not just approve of the harsh methods employed by the likes of Bugeaud and Lamorcière, he was also contemptuous of the idea that there could be any other way of achieving resounding victory in Algeria. In private letters, Tocqueville excoriated French politicians for their naïveté. Unlike some of his colleagues in the French Assembly, Tocqueville believed himself to be under no illusion about the sacrifices that were needed to secure a strategic possession in Africa. Once ‘‘we have committed that great violence of conquest,’’ he explained, ‘‘I believe we must not shrink from the smaller violences that are absolutely necessary to consolidate it’’ (Tocqueville, p. 318). He was particularly disappointed by those members of the French Assembly who could not reconcile themselves to the necessity of violence in war. ‘‘I have often heard men in France whom I respect, but with whom I do not agree, find it wrong that we burn harvests, that we empty silos, and finally that we seize unarmed men, women, and children,’’ he complained. ‘‘These, in my view, are unfortunate necessities, but ones to which any people who want to wage war on Arabs are obliged to submit’’ (Writings on Empire and Slavery, p. 71). 

While all ‘‘means of desolating these tribes ought to be used,’’ Tocqueville was insistent that all such methods not run afoul of ‘‘what is interdicted by international law and that of humanity” (‘‘Tocqueville on Algeria,’’ p. 380). There was no point, in his view, taking over command of the region from the Turks to then reintroduce “that aspect of their rule that deserved the world’s abhorrence” (Writings on Empire and Slavery, p. 70). To steer clear from a calculated military tactic of ‘pacification’ would only result in a “series of injustices and violence, if not in the revolt of the natives and the ruin of the Europeans” (‘‘Tocqueville on Algeria,’’ p. 378). That said, “To trust the good will of the natives to keep us in Africa,” Tocqueville exclaimed, “is a pure illusion,” (Writings on Empire and Slavery, p. 188). Algerian locals had to be ‘taught’ to respect French authority and understand their place in the order of civilization. It is ‘‘neither useful nor responsible,’’ he explained, ‘‘to allow our Muslim subjects to entertain exaggerated notions of their own importance or to persuade them in all circumstances precisely as though they were our fellow citizens and our equals’’ (Tocqueville, p. 335). Nothing ‘‘but force and terror,” he insisted, would prove effective in making Algeria what Tocqueville hoped would be “a great monument to our country’s glory” (Writings on Empire and Slavery, p. 24). 

Tocqueville maintained some measure of hope that despite the early turbulence of settlement in Algeria, the Muslim region could be successfully pacified for the benefit of French settlers. Once the army had tranquilized the population, the French government could then begin the arduous work of transforming the area into a safe and profitable extension of the motherland. ‘‘The moment the laborer appears behind the soldier,’’ Tocqueville predicted, Arabs would recognize that the French had come ‘‘not only to conquer but to dispossess them’’ (Man Who Understood Democracy, p. 245). French settlers would eventually use their knowledge of basic economics, contract-making, and banking regulations to strip the locals of their ancestral lands and concentrate wealth in the hands of a few settler families. 

Inability to read, and thus to comprehend a property contract system based on a signed surname, meant that vast tracts of land—451,000 hectares between 1880 and 1809 alone—fell into French hands by means of fraud and other forms of bamboozlement (Algeria, p. 23). Settler speculators also benefited from Islamic restrictions on usury: immigrant insight into the the financial rules of borrowing and credit enabled settlers to game the system to their advantage. Tribal patriarchs resisted the mass partition of Algerian land into credit-financed, highly mechanized, and export-oriented settler-owned farms on the one hand, and cash-strapped, small-run community holdings on the other. Such small-scale farming could not adequately feed the 1,768,000 mouths which comprised about 55% of the agrarian population at the beginning of the twentieth century. By the time the global depression set in following the Wall Street crash of 1929, Algerian families were suffering from severe malnutrition. Forced to scour the earth for food, many Muslims felt like ‘‘they had been robbed of their land and thrust into poverty through the imposition of an alien system’’ (Algeria, p. 35).

The assumption of absolute power

Berber herders were not the only oppressed people to protest this feeling of dispossession. When the mutineering sepoys encouraged a united India to rise up against foreign rule in May of 1857, British forces responded with legendary violence. In addition to the usual scorched-earth tactic, British soldiers tied Indian rebels to the mouths of cannons and blew them to smithereens (Legacy of Violence, p. 54). In Jamaica, the Morant Bay Rebellion of October 1865 resulted in the deaths of 439 blacks, the flogging of at least 600 suspected rebels, and the destruction of more than one thousand dwellings (ibid., p. 59). Writing a year after the bloody insurrection in the Caribbean, John Stuart Mill, then working as a Liberal MP, expressed his indignation at the heavy-handed methods that the British forces had employed to deal with popular opposition in the colonies: ‘‘My eyes were first opened to the moral condition of the English nation…by the atrocities perpetrated in the Indian Mutiny,’’ and then ‘‘came this Jamaica business’’ (ibid.).

Despite his gentlemanly discomfort, Mill made it clear to friends and foes alike, both publicly and in his private correspondence, that he was not at all opposed to the use of violence to pacify savage people. His main issue was the growing appetite for purposeless violence among the self-appointed representatives of civilization. Mill shared Tocqueville’s fear that a continued resort to lawless action might jeopardize the existing gains in India and other parts of the empire, and lower ‘‘the character of England in the eyes of all foreign lovers of liberty’’ (Legacy of Violence, p. 60). What Mill was not was conflicted about the need to apply severe force in order to get people accustomed to the roughness of a barbaric existence to learn the ways of enlightened societies. 

In his Considerations on Government (1861), published four years after the Indian Mutiny, Mill told his readers, ‘‘I am far from condemning, in cases of extreme exigency, the assumption of absolute power in the form of a temporary dictatorship,’’ (Legacy of Violence, p. 59). Such a harsh form of government was suitable to a people in the infancy of political life, and in need of guidance from more advanced tutors. In order to progress to the next stage of civilizational development, a ‘‘people of savages should be taught obedience,’’ rather than left to chart their own path (ibid., p. 60). This was not a novel thought. 

In his On Liberty (1859), Mill asserted that despotism was ‘‘a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians,’’ provided ‘‘the end be their improvement’’ (Legacy of Violence, p. 50). In his mind, liberal principles were only applicable to ‘‘human beings in the maturity of their faculties.’’ They were not relatable to ‘‘those backwards states in which the race itself may be considered in its nonage’’ and certainly not to people living in places like India where ‘‘despotism of Custom is complete’’ (ibid.). To successfully guide far less advanced people to higher modes of living, ‘‘a considerable degree’’ of despotic power was needed to impose ‘‘a great amount of forcible restraint’’ upon brutish and war-like people. Mill was unapologetic about his endorsement of violence. He would join Tocqueville in calling the political class of Europe to abandon its dreams of a violence-free empire system: ‘‘To suppose that the same international customs, and the same rules of international morality, can obtain between one civilized nation and another, and between civilized nations and barbarians is a grave error, and one which no statesman can fall into, however it may with those who, from a safe and unresponsible position, criticise statesmen’’ (Legacy of Violence, p. 51). 

Like any individual, it has its passions

The rancid hypocrisy on display from such literary geniuses as Tocqueville, Mill, and other members of the European blood circle during the most formative years of the liberal movement did not fail to impress upon the minds of colonial outsiders the very concrete ethnographic limits of Enlightenment moral and political theory. That these two great liberals lifted the usual prohibitions on human rights violations in order to allow their respective governments to both hold and extend their dominion over foreign lands speaks to the awesome power of national pride. Tocqueville confessed to Mill of all people that as a Frenchman living in post-revolutionary France, ‘‘National pride is the greatest passion remaining to us’’ (Tocqueville: A Life, p. 388). Elsewhere he described human passions as a corrupting influence on moral reasoning, and something to guard against. Tocqueville noted that the American majority knew the difference between the demands of morality and those of politics, but often went beyond what proper morals would allow because ‘‘like any individual, it has its passions and, like any person, it can act badly even though it knows what is good’’ (Democracy in America, p. 465). Tocqueville was susceptible to the same vice. 

Tocqueville’s willingness to cheer the intrusion of a foreign state power into the private lives and political affairs of a people over whom the oppressor state had no principled jurisdiction is nothing short of a betrayal of the liberal ideas he highlighted in his Democracy in America (1835) and Ancien Régime (1856), both completed after the invasion of Algeria. Tocqueville built his international reputation as one of the world’s leading liberal thinkers on the explicit right of small communities to live according to their own laws, unburdened by the harassment of a centralized administrative state or the tyranny of the social majority. The African colonial project he eagerly endorsed at every turn not only violated every sacred liberal precept he elegantly articulated throughout his career, but also lent philosophical force and political prestige to an illegal occupation that would prove disastrous to France and its global empire. 

More than 1.5 million Algerians died during the 1954–62 war of independence against colonial-ruler France. The war itself decimated ordinary civilians and brought before the world scenes and reports of violence which still color the bitter relationship between France and its former colony. The name Marcel Bigeard, for example, still strikes terror in the hearts of veterans of the Algeria war. Over 2,696 days of war, French soldiers tortured thousands before throwing their bodies into a bonfire or dropping the dead weight by helicopter into the Mediterranean sea. The historian Martin Evans writes that in effect, ‘‘the bay of Algiers became a watery grave with many of the corpses being washed up on the local beaches, a fact that led paratroopers to talk with macabre humour of ‘Bigeard’s Prawns’’’ (Algeria, p. 206). When General Bigeard died in 2010, he was remembered by international admirers for being the best paratrooper in the world. Now more than a decade later, residents of the small eastern town of Toul are rethinking the legacy of this hometown hero. When asked in 2000 to comment about credible allegations that he had participated in the torture of Algerians, Bigeard replied that such actions were a ‘‘necessary evil’’ of war, language strikingly similar to that of certain nineteenth-century liberals. 

Featured image is "Une Razzia," Benjamin Roubaud, 1830.