Studia Islamica, nouvelle édition/new series, 2, 2011, pp. 35-68 The Amîr ‘Abd Al-Qâdir and the ‘‘Good War’’ in Algeria, 1832-1847 American writer Nicholson Baker concludes Human Smoke, his recent book on the events leading up to the Second World War, with a question. “Was it a ‘good war’?” he asks bluntly.1 The preced- ing pages, a montage-like construction of quotations and historical anecdotes that deflate some commonly held understandings of the war, ensure that the reader already knows that Baker’s answer is no. He argues that the Second World War’s years of apocalypse and holocaust brought nothing that can be legitimately called “good,” especially not for the millions who lost their lives. Coming in 2008, the book provokes negative reactions from many Americans (and several British reviewers) who contemplate with weary bitterness the ever-receding end of what they were told would be their genera- tion’s “good war” in Afghanistan and Iraq, sequels to their coun- try’s earlier “good wars.” 2 Although this polemic is of primary in- terest to people considering American history and memory, Baker’s 1. Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), p. 473. 2. Negative American reviews include Stanford historian James J. Sheehan’s, “How Good a War?,” Washington Post (30 March 2008) and journalist William Grimes’s, “Say What? It Wasn’t a Just War After All?,” New York Times (12 March 2008). For the negative British reactions see David Cesarani, “A Novel View of History,” The Independent (25 April 2008); and Max Hastings, “Hu- man Smoke by Nicholson Baker,” The Sunday Times (4 May 2008). 35 Benjamin Claude Brower question itself is of value to researchers in many fields. Even if he is not an academic and his attack on the trope of the “good war” is not made as a historian, Baker poses in a straightforward way fruit- ful questions that we rarely ask: What are “good wars”?; what are the implications for history and historiography when a given war becomes “good”?; and the most important question, what historical forces make war “good”? I. The “Good War” Political philosophers and historians have already asked what le- gitimate or just wars are in a debate that goes back to Thucydides.3 But the good war is not a just war. The latter is evaluated by moral and legal arguments, abstract principles which measure the legiti- macy of the occasion of war. (Similar arguments concern the rules governing the conduct of war, or jus in bello.) A separate logic determines whether a war becomes good. This logic is bound to the dynamic of history and memory, politics and ideology, narra- tive and aesthetics, all of which weigh on the historical imagination. At the most basic level, the good war is any conflict that leads to an outcome that a particular society, political party, or given author finds desirable. Therefore the fact that politics has something to do with making certain wars good is hardly surprising. Winners have an obvious investment in viewing their past armed conflicts in a positive light; the particular way they do so, however, remains an interesting historical question, one that engages problems of politi- 3. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Il- lustrations, 4th edition (New York: Basic Books, 2006); James Turner Johnson, Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War: A Moral and Historical Inquiry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) ; John Kelsay, Arguing the Just War in Islam (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). See also Charles E. Butterworth, “Al-Fârâbi’s Statecraft: War and the Well-Ordered Re- gime,” in Cross, Crescent, and Sword: The Justification and Limitation of War in Western and Islamic Tradition, edited by James Turner Johnson and John Kelsay (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), pp. 79-100. 36 The Amîr ‘Abd Al-Qâdir and the ‘‘Good War’’ in Algeria, 1832-1847 cal culture and social self-understanding. Just as interesting is the fact that losers have narrated lost wars as good wars. One example relevant to the study of European imperialism is when Rudyard Ki- pling referred to the “savage wars of peace,” in the third stanza of “The White Man’s Burden” (1899). In this he revaluated the vio- lence done by Europeans in the world as both a noble struggle (“Fill full the mouth of Famine, And bid the sickness cease”) and a futile one bound from the outset to failure. Generally, however, the good war is a successful contest where soldiers’ violence leads to “liberation,” or where war lifts society to a new state of human development representing “progress.” In these cases, the violence of war (including “social war” or revolu- tion) serves as the motor force of positive change and is responsi- ble for moving society along the path of history, as a generation of students who studied Hegel with Alexandre Kojève in Paris learned between the World Wars.4 At the same time, the good war is one that helps a community that has lost its bearings reconnect with a better, original state, typically understood as some variation of a socially- integrated Gemeinschaft. Part of this particular process may include war’s putative ability to reconcile a disorienting and ever-changing present with the stability and authenticity of the values of ancestors.5 In some cases, like the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), the good war articulates itself in the guise of ritual sacrifice, as Roxanne Varzi argues in a recent book.6 At another level, the good war serves as a narrative technique. It tells the story of war by taking the broken bits of the truth that come out of armed conflicts and placing them in a life-giving plot. From the ruptures, discontinuities, and trauma of war, the good war 4. Vincent Descombes, Le même et l’autre: quarante-cinq ans de philosophie française (1933-1978) (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979); Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). 5. Mostefa Lacheraf, L’Algérie: nation et société (Paris: Maspero, 1965). 6. Roxanne Varzi, Warring Souls: Youth, Media, and Martyrdom in Post-Revo- lution Iran (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 37 Benjamin Claude Brower produces an understandable series of events linked by meaningful relations and bound by a redemptive denouement. This narrative affirms the noble aspects of humanity, and war thereby becomes an occasion for greatness, rather than one of loss. Such greatness in- cludes expression of typically masculine-coded values, like strength and courage, but it also embraces values like sacrifice, perseverance, solidarity, and an unswerving belief in an ideal.7 This is all very far from the “menis” or fury that the Iliad de- scribes surrounding the walls of Troy, a treacherous and morally uncertain place.8 “No comforting fiction intervenes” in the Illiad, as Simone Weil commented in 1940, “no consoling prospect of im- mortality; and on the hero’s head no washed out halo of patriotism descends.”9 Therefore, whereas Homer shows war’s “monotonous desolation” and obliges readers to confront the confusing and base aspects of battle, as well as its sublime horrors, the good war tends to sentimentalize or sensationalize war.10 It provides the schematic moral terms—the good and the bad, the tragic and the valorous—to yield a satisfying story. At this point, the narrative of the good war produces effects at the level of ideology, legitimating and normaliz- ing otherwise questionable practices and institutions thus producing a false clarity from the inherently imprecise moral meaning of war. And, in a more general way, it obscures suffering and the lasting repercussions of trauma by retelling a history marked by destruc- tion as a story of regeneration and rebirth. Thus, where one finds the good war proclaimed in the wake of war, one will also find the “inability to mourn.”11 7. George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 8. Leonard Muellner, The Anger of Achilles: Menis in Greek Epic (Ithaca: Cor- nell University Press, 1996). 9. Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” in War and the Iliad, trans- lated by Mary McCarthy (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005), p. 4. My thanks to Heinrich von Staden for bringing this essay to my attention. 10. Weil, “Poem of Force,” p. 27. 11. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles 38 The Amîr ‘Abd Al-Qâdir and the ‘‘Good War’’ in Algeria, 1832-1847 II. The Good Wars in Algeria The good war has appeared at many points in the last two centu- ries of Mediterranean history, and it has been especially important in projects to build empires. Mussolini is perhaps best known as an advocate of the good war: he saw nearly any war as good, as long as deaths were numerous and spectacular.12 But while fascism’s aes- theticized violence is a model that has inspired many, its appeal as the representation of good war has been limited. (The atrocities of the Spanish Civil War, such as the bombing of Guernica in 1937, helped turn world opinion against this model.) A more enduring example is Bonaparte in Egypt. When the French general debarked here in 1798, he promised liberating change to the Egyptian people even if they had to first endure the violence of conquest and the social upheaval of revolutionary political and economic change.13 Another example of the good war figuring into imperial expansion comes fifty years later in the west African Sahel, a borderland link- ing the Mediterranean world to Africa. Here supporters of al-Hâjj ‘Umar ben Sa‘îd ben ‘Uthmân Tâl (d. 1864) followed him into the good war to build a Muslim empire out of the pagan and what they saw as apostate Muslim states in the region.14 Fighting against both the French and his African enemies, ‘Uthmân Tâl’s army pursued a jihad that yielded him control of the rich middle Niger River re- gion. A final example worthy of mention is the Seven Pillars of Wis- of Collective Behavior (New York: Grove, 1975). 12. Simon Etta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 13. Henry Laurens, L’expédition d’Egypte: 1798-1801 (Paris: A. Colin, 1989). See also Laurens, “Volonté de réformes et changements, le modèle de Bona- parte à Bush,” in La démocratie est-elle soluble dans l’islam, edited by Abdel- lah Hammoudi, Denis Bachard, and Rémy Leveau (Paris: C.N.R.S. éditions, 2007), pp. 59-76. 14. David Robinson, The Holy War of Umar Tal: The Western Sudan in the Mid- Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). 39 Benjamin Claude Brower dom in which T. E. Lawrence reassured a reading public in Europe, thoroughly disillusioned with the mud, rats, and stench of war of the trenches, that war was indeed still good--“rather splendid and barbaric”--and a theater for great human achievements.15 In Algeria, the colonial period began and ended with classic examples of good wars. In 1830, Charles X fought the good war against what he presented as the forces of lawlessness and obscu- rantism represented by the Ottoman regency in Algiers, a “poignée de brigands” according to French war planners.16 Of course, this rhetoric of the good war expressed narrow political interests: the crisis faced by the Bourbons ensured that within Charles X’s council the good war was any foreign war that promised an easy victory, silencing political opposition in a popular wave of nationalism and militarism.17 But in public proclamations, the French government presented the expedition as a war of progress and emancipation that French soldiers fought on behalf of all Europeans and even all Al- gerians. The latter dimension of the war emerged in the French commander, General Bourmont’s proclamation to Algerians that preceded the landings. Putting his name to a Arabic document pre- pared by translators, Bourmont told Algerians that this was a war to liberate them from Dey al-Husayn ibn al-Husayn (d. 1838) and the “ends of his power and his bad nature” (“ghâyât tahkîmihi wa qabh tab‘ihi”).18 This argument also confirmed the government’s claim 15. T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (London: Penguin, 1962), 144; Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the cultural Foun- dations of Britain’s Cavert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 2009).On literary expressions of this disillusionment see Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). 16. “Le rapport du marquis de Clermont-Tonnerre, ministre de la guerre, sur une expédition à Alger (1827),” edited by Paul Azan, Revue africaine 70 (1929): p. 215. 17. Gabriel Esquer, La prise d’Alger 1830 (Paris: Larose, 1929), p. 75. 18. “Proclamation en arabe adressée par le général de Bourmont aux habitants de la ville d’Alger et des tribus, en juin 1830,” translated by M. Bresnier, in A. Berbrugger, ed., “La première proclamation adressée par les Français aux Algé- 40 The Amîr ‘Abd Al-Qâdir and the ‘‘Good War’’ in Algeria, 1832-1847 that France invaded Algeria not for national gain but as the world’s policeman, bringing order and stability to the lawlessness along the so-called Barbary Coast.19 The Revolution of 1830 swept the Bour- bons out of power just weeks after their victory in Algiers, but this version of the good war held sway for more than a century.20 At the beginning of the end of French Algeria in 1954, an opposing good war confronted it, the war of national liberation led by the F.L.N. This year found “les armes retournées,” and Algerian nationalists led a long and bitter, but popular and ultimately successful struggle for independence.21 At its end in 1962, the French army had buried about 27,000 of its own troops, Algerian families mourned hundreds of thousands of lost loved ones, and the F.L.N. counted more than 1.5 million Algerian “martyrs.”22 Even if the nationalists’ figure was exaggerated, the loss of life was staggering. Nevertheless, 1954- 1962 has come to be seen as a good war for many, including those riens, 1830,” Revue africaine 6 (1862): p. 151 (French), p. 154 (Arabic). 19. This argument presented the expedition as conforming to conservative terms of the good war as defined by the Congress of Vienna, and it helped reassure neighbors that the invasion was not an expression of a resurgent France. Mo- reover, Charles X had to argue that the regency of Algiers was a sort of rogue state, not part of the Ottoman Empire, to avoid provoking Britain and Russia, signatories like France, to the Treaty of London (6 July 1827), which barred territorial acquisitions in Ottoman lands. 20. The fact that French men and women of many political shades endorsed this vision is borne out in the numerous texts throughout the colonial period that expressed the belief that good government and justice would win Algerians over to the French side. See for example Alexis de Tocqueville’s discussion of “bon gouvernement” in “Rapport sur l’Algérie (1847),” in Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, edited by André Jardin (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), p. 814. 21. André Nouschi, Les armes retournées: colonisation et décolonisation fran- çaises (Paris: Belin, 2005); Gilbert Meynier, Histoire intérieure du F.L.N. 1954- 1962 (Paris: Fayard, 2002); Mohammed Harbi, La guerre commence en Algé- rie: 1954 (Bruxelles: Editions Complexe, 1984). 22. In his demographic history of colonial Algeria, Kamel Kateb concludes that it is impossible to establish a precise figure, but he suggests Algerian losses in 1954-1962 numbered between 400,000 to 600,000. Kamel Kateb, Européens, “Indigènes,” et Juifs en Algérie (1830-1962) (Paris: Editions de l’Institut natio- nal d’études démographiques, 2001), pp. 307-319. 41 Benjamin Claude Brower not immediately involved in the war. Most important in shaping this view is Gillo Pontecorvo’s film “The Battle of Algiers” (1966), which brilliantly enshrined an enduring good war meaning of the Algerian war for audiences around the world. (At the same time, films that focus on the costs of the war, like Mohammed Lakhdar- Hamina’s beautifully haunting, “Rîḥ al-Awras” (1966) have been virtually ignored internationally.) But Algeria’s good war par excellence was that which took place in the years between 1832 and 1847, when the Amîr ‘Abd al-Qâdir ibn Muhyî al-Dîn (d. 1883) led a coalition of Algerian forces against the French army. There is a strong and longstanding consensus that the conflict between ‘Abd al-Qâdir and the French amounted to a good war. In France, Algeria, and around the world, people saw this as one of the great struggles of the modern era, pitting a powerful French army that had recently conquered most of Europe, against a small but highly motivated and heroic force of “indomitable moun- taineers” and “horsemen of the desert,” as a nineteenth-century Brit- ish historian put it.23 ‘Abd al-Qâdir himself emerged as the fulcrum of this good war, a courageous and principled leader. In 1883 Le Figaro wrote, “L’histoire d’Abdelkader est donc l’histoire même de la con- quête de l’Algérie”24; and a writer for a British publication stressed in 1873 that “the history of the French conquest of Algeria is in sub- stance the record of the conflict which Abd-el-Kader waged almost single-handed against the foremost military nation of Europe.”25 This tendency to amalgamate Algerian resistance in the single name ‘Abd al-Qâdir continues. For example, in Algerian popular memory today, ‘Abd al-Qâdir has achieved metonymic status, a substitute for a more varied anti-colonial movement.26 23. Archibald Alison, History of Europe, from the Fall of Napoleon in 1815 to the Accession of Louis Napoleon in 1852, vol. 7 (Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood, 1858), pp. 539 and 554. 24. Henry d’Ideville, “L’Emir,” Le Figaro (26 mai 1883). 25. Anonymous, Every Saturday (13 December 1873), p. 669. 26. Bruno Etienne and François Pouillon, Abd el-Kader le magnanime (Paris: 42 The Amîr ‘Abd Al-Qâdir and the ‘‘Good War’’ in Algeria, 1832-1847 The general agreement on the amîr is striking even if he has played different roles for different groups at different moments in history.27 Certainly ‘Abd al-Qâdir had his enemies among French authors. In 1841, Alexis de Tocqueville for one called him a “Mus- lim Cromwell,” a treacherous intriguer who used religious hatred to rally “fanatical” armed groups against the French.28 But many French authors gave positive accounts of him. At the end of the struggle, ‘Abd al-Qâdir was described as the “Jugurtha moderne,” a positive reference to the leader of North African resistance to the Romans.29 He thus symbolized the highest French value of the nineteenth century, self-sacrifice and struggle for the love of one’s country. As Larousse’s Grande dictionnaire of 1866 put it, “Le nom d’Abd-el-Kader est acquis à l’histoire, où il occupe une place glorieuse à côté… de tous ceux qui ont lutté vaillamment pour l’indépendance de leur pays.”30 Likewise, in the twentieth century Algerian nationalist authors adopted ‘Abd al-Qâdir as the foremost figure in the story of popular struggle against French domination.31 For example, in Abdelkader et l’indépendance algérienne, a semi- Gallimard/Institute du Monde arabe, 2003), pp. 85-95. 27. Smaïl Aouli, Ramdane Redjala, and Philippe Zoummeroff, Abd El-Kader (Paris: Fayard, 1994), pp. 513-520. 28. Alexis de Tocqueville, “Travail sur l’Algérie (1841),” in Œuvres, p. 697. 29. The Jugurtha comparison appeared with considerable frequency in French texts of the nineteenth century. Notable usages include: “Abd-el-Kader,” in Ferdinand Hoefer ed., Nouvelle biographie universelle, vol. 1 (Paris: Firmin Di- dot frères, 1852), p. 67; Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, Lettres inédites du Maréchal Bugeaud duc d’Isly (1808-1849), edited by Capitaine Tattet et Féray-Bugeaud d’Isly (Paris: Emile-Paul, Frères, 1923), p. 243. It figured on the reverse side of a French-stamped commemorative medal from 1862, see Etienne and Pouillon, Abd El-Kader, p. 74. 30. Pierre Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel (Paris: Administration du Grand dictionnaire universel, 1866). The problem posed by this version, which ran counter to colonial thinking that systematically denied Algerian national sentiment, was resolved by Paul Azan in his 1925 biography of ‘Abd al-Qâdir, wherein he had the amîr convert from his early anti-colonial “fanaticism” to French “patriotism.” Paul Azan, L’émir Abd El Kader, 1808-1883: du fana- tisme musulman au patriotisme français (Paris: Hachette, 1925). 31. Mahfoud Kaddache, L’émir Abdelkader (Alger: S.N.E.D., 1974). 43 Benjamin Claude Brower nal text given at a 1947 conference, Algerian writer Kateb Yacine claimed ‘Abd al-Qâdir as the founding father of the nationalist movement. It was this “héros hégélien,” Kateb announced, who “a commencé à défendre l’indépendance algérienne contre les Turcs avant de la défendre contre les Français.”32 Writing in the same na- tionalist vein, later historians cast him as “le symbole du colonisé luttant contre un colonialisme irrésistible.”33 In all these cases, ‘Abd al-Qâdir was central to the represen- tations of the war in Algeria as a good war. Narrating the years 1832-1847 through his story gave the conflict a recognizable chronology—battles, treaties, long marches, and betrayals—and endowed events with meaning and emotion. This made the his- tory of the French conquest of Algeria—a period lying under the shadow of some 1.6 million Algerian lives lost in wars and war- induced famines and epidemics, along with the deaths of 120,000 French soldiers—a good war.34 Faced by General Bugeaud, the hero of several generations of European settlers in Algeria, ‘Abd al-Qâdir’s story became something of an archetype of the global confrontations that came with modern European expansion. Like in the Americas, Australia, and Asia, ‘Abd al-Qâdir’s resistance in Algeria was inspired, tenacious, and popular, but the forces fielded by a technologically superior, industrially-outfitted European army made it ultimately doomed. This yielded a compelling David versus Goliath story, but one where the giant was not only more powerful but destined to win. 32. Kateb Yacine, Abdelkader et l’indépendance algérienne (Alger: S.N.E.D., 1983), pp. 17 and 35. This text was first published in 1948 (Alger: les éditions algériennes en-Nahdha); and it is republished in Kateb Yacine, Minuit passé de douze heurs: écrits journalistiques, 1947-1989, edited by Amazigh Kateb (Paris: Seuil, 1999), pp. 11-33. 33. Abdelkader Boutaleb, L’émir Abd-El-Kader et la formation de la nation algérienne: de l’émir Abd-El-Kader à la guerre de libération (Alger: Editions Dahlab, 1990), p. 22. 34. Kamel Kateb, Européens, “indigènes,” et juifs en Algérie, pp. 47 and 67; French losses in Kateb, p. 39. 44