2

From Glory to Total War in Algeria

A diplomatic kerfuffle provided a pretext for the French to invade Algiers in 1830: two years earlier, the dey of Algiers had swiped the French ambassador with a flywhisk. Behind this flimsy excuse lay the fact that a powerful liberal opposition confronted the Restoration government. Legitimists hoped conquering Algiers would repair the monarchy’s reputation in time for national elections. The gamble failed. Within months, a revolution replaced the Restoration government with “Citizen-King” Louis-Philippe’s July Monarchy, a liberal regime which promised to synthesize popular sovereignty with royal rule.

Despite its liberal credentials, the July Monarchy did not return Algiers. On the contrary, it appropriated the Bourbon conquest for itself.¹ In 1840, the regime embarked on its quest for settler colonization in earnest. Political leaders appointed a new Governor-General to Algiers, Thomas Robert Bugeaud. They also reorganized the army around light mobile columns, the better to terrorize the local population. French soldiers razed, pillaged, massacred, and raped the tribal communities. Thanks to Bugeaud’s new and controversial style of “total war,” the local population dwindled. During the next decade and a half, France’s celebrated Armée d’Afrique exterminated almost half of the local population. Their numbers fell from 4 million to 2.3 million. It would take a half century for the Algerian population to return to pre-1830 levels.²

Alexis de Tocqueville met Bugeaud and his staff during his first visit to Algeria in the summer of 1841. During a lunch in Philippeville, Colonel Arsène d’Alphonse explained to the visitor that “Nothing but force and terror, Gentlemen, succeeds with these people. The other day a murder was committed on the road. An Arab who was suspected of it was brought to me. I interrogated him and then I had his head cut off. You can see his head on the Constantine gates.”³ Tocqueville expressed dismay with the Colonel’s candor toward terror, but, even so, he was keen to excuse it. Upon returning to France, Tocqueville would write, “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.” Although he found such actions regrettable, Tocqueville nevertheless insisted that, “For myself, I think that all means of desolating these tribes must be employed.”⁴

On occasion, Tocqueville’s excuses for Bugeaud’s terror extended beyond reluctant apologies to silent, tacit approval. In June 1845, the Armée d’Afrique chased hundreds of locals from the Oulad Riah tribe into the caves of Dahra. Fleeing families believed the caves offered divine sanctuary. Pressed for time, Colonel Aimable Pélissier commanded his soldiers to block the cave entrance with pyres, asphyxiating and melting the families inside with their livestock. Colonel Saint Arnaud mimicked these enfumades in the following months “on grounds that salutary terror would hasten the pacification” of locals.⁵ When the violence at Dahra publicly broke in France, it provoked widespread denunciation of Bugeaud’s tactics within the Chamber of Deputies and across Europe. Tocqueville—France’s foremost expert on the Algerian question—nevertheless remained silent in the Chamber and in his private letters.⁶

It is now commonplace to acknowledge Tocqueville’s support for the colonization of Algeria. Isaiah Berlin’s once proud claim that the paradigmatic French liberal “opposed paternalism and colonialism . . . no matter how benevolent” has yielded to a new consensus that, in Jennifer Pitts’s words, Tocqueville “embrace[d] imperialism as a kind of national salvation” because it provided a source of greatness, and for Tocqueville, “Greatness and liberty were mutually necessary.”⁷ Indeed, scholars now agree that if Tocqueville’s “susceptibility to the notion of national glory as a substitute for political virtue” contradicted other cardinal values he held, it was nevertheless consistent with the overriding importance he placed on politics.⁸ Colonialism offered a glorious political antidote to French society’s materialism and mediocrity. Its “higher politics of patriotic grandeur” helped vivify public interests and consolidate a democratic political culture at home.⁹ During the 1840s, Tocqueville would insist on these claims like a catechism.

Given these frequent observations of Tocqueville’s desire for glory, however, it is surprising that scholars have yet to connect that attachment to the specific shape violence took in Algeria: total war. To be sure, there has been much debate on how to best characterize his apologies for violence. Early critics often took them to be evidence that Tocqueville’s “liberalism could not be squared with his colonialism” and that “he betrays his own analysis of the dangers of war.”¹⁰ More recent studies have shown them to be consistent with the larger context in which his liberalism took shape, that “it would be a mistake to see the Algerian writings as merely an illiberal moment in Tocqueville’s thought.”¹¹

Yet what is so striking about Tocqueville’s colonial writings is not only that he justified colonialism or even violence. A wide range of strategic justifications were readily available for both. What calls for explanation is instead the deeper and more troubling problem of justifying colonial warfare’s escalation into total war. Given the excess of Bugeaud’s exterminationist “force and terror,” why would Tocqueville praise it in 1847 as “a war conducted ably and gloriously”?¹² After all, even if colonialism was easily justified in the 1840s, defending exterminationist violence was not. The French initially preferred agrarian settlerism because it was designed to be a pacific alternative to colonialism based on violent chattel slavery. That was why Tocqueville saw no inconsistency in advocating for slavery’s abolition while defending colonization in North Africa. Even more, when settlerism turned out to require violence, it demanded an unfamiliar form of warfare at odds with the traditional type authorized by the laws of nations: two armies fighting on behalf of sovereigns equipped with equivalent claims to right. That classical image of warfare insisted on “humanizing combat as much as possible, minimizing its destructive force, and treating the defenseless—women, children, and disarmed enemy combatants—generously.”¹³ But as Tocqueville was well aware, French military leaders discarded these familiar conventions in the African war theater. From the outset of his program of total domination in 1841, Bugeaud implemented “a new theory of war”—total war—in which the antagonist was no longer an enemy army, but the foreign population itself.¹⁴ There was nothing obviously defensible about this type of violence, no intuitive method for defending its scope and reach. Its novelty demanded new arguments. This essay aims to unearth Tocqueville’s contributions to those arguments. It tries to understand how he could not only defend colonialism but also the specific shape colonial violence took in Algeria—environmental, terroristic, and exterminationist.¹⁵

In what follows, I argue that Tocqueville’s justification of Bugeaud’s total war was shaped by his desire for modern national glory. Premodern glory was often associated with the legislator, statesmen, or God. Its archetypes included warriors like Achilles or great founders like Lycurgus. But for those who came of age during and after Napoleon, modern glory was exemplified by everyday citizens defending the nation. It belonged to the people. Glory’s democratization was rooted in the historical memory of the revolutionary wars of liberty (1792–1802), which were imagined to be defensive wars by soldats-citoyens on behalf of a persecuted republican universalism. It reached its apotheosis in Bonapartist militarism, which defined the glory of citizens in terms of what Sudhir Hazareesingh has called “defensive patriotism.”¹⁶ In this revolutionary imaginary, there could be no greater glory than when “the people” rose up in mighty defense of the patrie en danger. Indeed, such defensive moments were opportunities for what Thomas Hippler describes as the people’s immanent self-creation.¹⁷

Tocqueville developed a surprising appreciation for this model of national glory. This appreciation, as we will see, was sourced in his enduring fear of democratic social disintegration. Tocqueville feared democratization was creating a société en poussière, an “atomized” society. The equality of conditions had not only dispersed land and power; it was also turning citizens inward, away from one another and the public realm. National glory offered a method for mitigating this because, as Robert Morrissey has argued, “the emotion and enthusiasm kindled by glory were seen as generators of social bonds, even of fraternity.”¹⁸

This passion for national glory, in turn, shaped Tocqueville’s attitude toward colonial warfare. Tocqueville’s approach to settlerism evolved over the course of the July Monarchy, and, as it did so, he brought colonial warfare closer to these Bonapartist representations of glorious, defensive violence. Patrick Wolfe has argued that settlerism can either “integrate” or “exterminate” native populations. Rather than describing competing strategies of colonial governance, both articulate a common “logic of elimination” that racializes indigenous populations in ways that undercut their title to the land.¹⁹ Tocqueville, indeed, had been an early advocate of peaceful integration between the French and “Moslem civilization” in Africa. Before his first trip to Algeria, he argued that French colonialism ought “to form a single people from two races.”²⁰ However, after 1841, he abandoned integration for extermination by designing culturalist explanations of why integration would fail: “the Arab tribes’ passions of religion and depredation always lead them to wage war on us.”²¹ These explanations attributed integration’s failures to the intransigent hostility of the Muslim social state rather than the limited universality of French values. They also made Arabs culpable for undermining the prospects of peaceful integration. The consequence was not only a shift in colonial policy from integration to extermination, but also a deflection of responsibility for colonial war to native society.

Once native society was blamed for integration’s failures, settlerism’s violence could be brought closer to familiar images of defensive war. Bugeaud could defend his terrifying “seas of fire” as strategically compulsory: “Gentlemen, you don’t make war with philanthropic sentiments. If you want the end, you have to want the means.”²² The Armée d’Afrique could be praised as defenders of a patrie en danger, even a glorious reincarnation of the Spartans besieged at Thermopylae. Just as Republicans and Bonapartists had once imagined imperial expansion as a defensive battle against monarchical Europe, Algiers could be reimagined as an oasis of civilized liberty caught in a defensive battle against a hostile Muslim culture. Despite all of its shortcomings—and Tocqueville believed there were many—Algerian colonization could become an occasion to erect a “monument to our country’s glory on the African coast.”²³

Heightening our focus on African total war therefore reveals the proper context for understanding Tocqueville’s colonial writings: not just the normative contradictions of his liberalism, but also his anxieties over democratic social disintegration. Indeed, it shifts our attention more broadly to the psychic dimensions of democratization and the ways French thinkers diagnosed and responded to its fragmentation of self and society. If scholars have long appreciated the role of national glory in Tocqueville’s colonial writings, it is still important to see how that glory answered social disintegration and, in turn, shaped the type of violence Tocqueville was prepared to endorse: a defensive war against native society itself. And if exterminationist violence was never anything like a necessary solution to democratic social disintegration, it was at least enabled by the terms in which the problem was posed. After all, excess beyond instrumental reason is one of the “basic components” of glory.²⁴

For both Tocqueville and the political culture of which he was a part, colonial aggression could be assimilated to Napoleonic fantasies of imperial expansion as public-spirited self-defense. Patrick Wolfe may be right that empires are driven to total war by settlerism’s implacable “logic of elimination,” but what allowed Tocqueville to make peace with that war was his passion for modern glory. It was a passion, Tocqueville had argued, without which the forces of social disintegration in France could not be checked.

The Psychology of Social Disintegration

Tocqueville’s fixation on glory grew out of a liberal republican tradition forged in a post-Terror France anxious about social disintegration. Like their English counterparts, French liberals from Benjamin Constant to the Doctrinaires prioritized “the liberty of the moderns.” Constant had immortalized the term, and it was vulgarized in François Guizot’s infamous prescription, enrichissez-vous! Andrew Jainchill explains that such a commitment entailed “the conviction that ‘the social’ took precedence over ‘the political.’ ‘Society,’ ‘commerce,’ ‘public opinion,’ or some other such figuration of the social would come first, and thus politics would reflect, rather than shape, a prior social reality.”²⁵ Thanks to the revolution, however, liberals in France were also preoccupied with mitigating society’s dissolution in the age of democracy. In their view, the revolution had bequeathed to France the twin legacies of political centralization and social atomization. In abolishing the society of orders, the revolution emancipated individuals from the hierarchical bonds of the ancien régime. But it also left citizens with no bonds with which to cohere other than the state. Thus, as Larry Siedentop has argued, French liberals believed that “the growth of state power was intrinsically connected with the atomisation of society.”²⁶ Indeed, Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, a leading Doctrinaire and mentor to Tocqueville, explicitly named this problem as the “atomization” of society in a speech to the Chamber of Deputies in 1822.²⁷

Postrevolutionary anxieties over social disintegration meant that, unlike many Anglo-American liberals who imagined society to be an equilibrium of conflicting private interests, liberals in France maintained that there could be no “people” without a common interest to unite them. It was why the liberal paper Le National could complain that “Deprived of all moral unity, profoundly indifferent to the general interest, broken up and reduced to powder like the sand of the seas by the most narrow egoism, the French people is a people in name only.”²⁸ In the French political tradition, peoplehood depended on individuals identifying with the general interest. At times, that belief would lead liberals to endorse nationalism. Constant would, in fact, become an early supporter of Napoleon Bonaparte; Sieyès would help engineer the latter’s coup d’état. The anxiety over social disintegration also led French liberals to the latest currents of social scientific thinking: the rise of sociological and anthropological theories of kinship, the ascendance of the comparative historical method, new organic conceptions of society which displaced the probabilistic conceptions of the eighteenth century, and the displacement of natural law theory by psychology and political economy as the premier sciences of society. In other words, it was no accident that the postrevolutionary origins of French liberalism intersected with the invention of modern social theory.²⁹ For all they obviously disagreed with the Jacobins, French liberals were also responding to the democratization of the social, making them arguably “the first truly sociological idiom” of political theory.³⁰

Like others of his generation, Tocqueville was anxious about the democratization of the social. His visit to America with Gustave de Beaumont in 1831 provided him his first major occasion to diagnose its causes and consequences. In Democracy in America, he joined Royer-Collard in observing that equality of conditions brought with it individualisme or la société en poussière. Since the Restoration, socialists like Saint-Simon had identified individualism as an antisocial, acquisitive disposition fostered by market competition. Tocqueville agreed that material forces were partly responsible for contemporary atomization. He was especially preoccupied with the abolition of primogeniture which fragmented the social in observable ways (DA 55–57, 484).³¹

At the same time, Tocqueville’s investigations in America revealed that the French Revolution could not be exclusively responsible for la société en poussière. French revolutionaries may have abolished seigniorial privileges for individualistic private property on the night of 4 August 1789. They may have passed the Loi Le Chapelier in 1791, which proscribed voluntary associations as unconstitutional, seditious, and in violation of the rights of man. But, unlike France, America had not undergone a social revolution, and it, too, showed symptoms of individualisme. In the clarity of its democratic experience, Tocqueville believed he could glean atomization’s deeper causes and which connected France and America in a common, providential pattern of history: the equality of conditions and the ascendance of middle class values like materialism, petty self-interest, and diffidence to politics and public ventures—in a word, embourgeoisement.

It is noteworthy, for example, that Tocqueville’s portrait of atomization in America placed the accent on its psychological aspects. For all the analytical importance he assigned to power and property’s centrifugal dispersion, it was its impact on the psyche that captured his attention. He worried that man had “withdrawn into himself” and was living “virtually [as] a stranger to that of all others.” In such a state, citizens had become isolated, adrift, and deprived of the inner fortitude that genuine moral conviction conferred. Self-interest was reduced from a vector for public concern (“self-interest rightly understood”) to atomizing “petty and vulgar pleasures.” With the ties between private and public interests snapped, man may live “alongside [his fellow citizens] but does not see them. He touches them but does not feel them.” Led only by narrow self-interest, “He exists only in himself and for himself” (DA 818). His mind becomes “nothing more than intellectual dust, blown about by every wind and unable to coalesce into any fixed shape” (DA 487) or, alternately, the “shifting, impalpable dust, on which democracy rests” (DA 54). Nor was Tocqueville immune to these effects himself. He complained bitterly about his loneliness and isolation and believed himself born “too late,” having missed the era of great statesmanship.³² The heights of political passion, such as they were known in the age of Robespierre and Napoleon, had been supplanted by trivial commercial interests. Political life under the July Monarchy had been reduced to a “game in which each person seeks only to win.”³³ For all its benefits, the equality of conditions had cheapened the meaning of politics.

The measure of individualism’s danger depended on context. In his published writing and private correspondence, Tocqueville observed that the consequences of equality in France differed from those he witnessed in America. Tocqueville’s discussion of individualism in Democracy in America had been surprisingly qualified. He lamented the atomizing effects of citizen withdrawal into their private spheres but believed social mediocrity for all was preferable to excellence for the few. Although the equality of conditions enabled two unprecedented forms of domination—the tyranny of public opinion and democratic despotism by “an immense tutelary power”—he also suggested that, in America at least, equality’s effects were self-limiting in practice. Americans were led by self-seeking legislators, but those legislators were mediocre and less dangerous; there was less cultural genius but more overall education to help cultivate the practical arts; religious passion was attenuated, but its importance to American social life was axiomatic.

Yet when his eyes turned to France, Tocqueville’s evaluation darkened. If individualism presented a self-moderating condition in America, it was leading to national degeneration in France. Thus, in an 1837 letter to Royer-Collard, Tocqueville despaired of “the sorry intrigues to which our society is delivered in our day, the despicable charlatans who exploit it, the almost universal pettiness that reigns over it and above all the astonishing absence of disinterestedness and even of personal interest.”³⁴ In an 1841 letter to John Stuart Mill written while France was embroiled in the Eastern Question, Tocqueville bemoaned French impotence and degeneration:

I do not have to tell you, my dear Mill, that the greatest malady that threatens a people organized as we are is the gradual softening of mores, the abasement of the mind, the mediocrity of tastes; that is where the great dangers of the future lie. One cannot let a nation that is democratically constituted like ours and in which the natural vices of the race unfortunately coincide with the natural vices of the social state, one cannot let this nation take up easily the habit of sacrificing what it believes to be its grandeur to its repose, great matters to petty ones; it is not healthy to allow such a nation to believe that its place in the world is smaller, that it is fallen from the level on which its ancestors had put it, but that it must console itself by making railroads and by making prosper in the bosom of this peace, under whatever condition this peace is obtained, the well-being of each private individual. It is necessary that those who march at the head of such a nation should always keep a proud attitude, if they do not wish to allow the level of national mores to fall very low.³⁵

Readers familiar with the traditional portrait of Tocqueville as a moderate liberal, keen on protecting individual liberty from the extremes of revolution and nationalist chauvinism, may be surprised to read such bellicose words. Mill was certainly caught off guard. He chided the Frenchman for his immature attachments to inflated notions of national pride. Yet in his private correspondence, Tocqueville was a consistent advocate for nationalism. “National pride,” Tocqueville wrote to Royer-Collard in 1840, may be “puerile and boastful,” but it “is still the greatest sentiment that we have and the strongest tie that holds this nation together.”³⁶ The traditional ennobling valuation of great action had yielded to trivial concerns about security and well-being in France. Individualistic interests had displaced the passion for the common good.

Tocqueville’s choice to attribute atomization to democratic embourgeoisement at large rather than the revolution in particular had roots in a wider French revolt against the sensationalist psychology of John Locke.³⁷ That fact has not yet received the attention it deserves, even though it helps explain why French liberals departed from their Anglophone colleagues in repudiating the latter’s vision of society as an ensemble of private interests.³⁸ Locke had critiqued the existence of “innate ideas” in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). He claimed that all knowledge derived from sensory experience, which language organized and indexed for the purposes of drawing logically consistent inferences. Although Locke’s argument would ground British empiricism, its impact was different in France. Whereas the British (and Voltaire) viewed the Essay’s argument as a triumph of reason over prejudice, in the 1730s, a Lockean-inspired Newtonianism appeared in the French academies that interpreted the critique of innate ideas differently: if all knowledge derives from sense perception, sensation rather than reason grounds knowledge. This doctrine was called “sensationalism” in France.³⁹

Tocqueville was involved with the critique of sensationalism by both temperament and personal filiation. He was acquainted with Victor Cousin, the foremost French philosopher of the mid-nineteenth century and sensationalism’s greatest critic. A normalien, Cousin had been recruited to the circle of Doctrinaires by Royer-Collard. He later succeeded the latter as a philosophy professor at the University of Paris. Cousin also served on the Restoration’s Council of Public Instruction and shaped the philosophical curriculum for generations of students. His lectures on the history of philosophy were considered major events among the educated public.⁴⁰

Cousin criticized Locke’s sensationalism for portraying the psyche as something passive and fragmented. A tabula rasa, the Lockean self was limited to reproducing within the mind fragmentary sensations impinging from without. “It is certain,” Cousin conceded, that “upon the first examination of consciousness, we perceive a succession of phenomena which, decomposed into their elements, may be traced back to sensation.” However, “if everything in man is reduced to sensation, then everything is reduced to enjoyment and suffering; avoiding pain and seeking pleasure would be the sole rule of our conduct. . . . This system is that of the Sensual school.”⁴¹ Criticizing sensationalism was no mere philosophical quibble. Its account of the psyche as fragmented and ruled by sensations paralleled the atomization brought about the equality of conditions. There was a reciprocal relation, in other words, between the psychic and the social: sensationalism was a philosophy of mind symptomatic of an age of democratic disintegration.

For these reasons, mitigating atomism required replacing the Lockean subject.⁴² Cousin sought to provide that new postrevolutionary self by “showing that personality, the ‘me’ is at bottom free and voluntary activity.”⁴³ He encouraged citizens to rediscover voluntarism by remembering that experiences like the inner will “clearly had no source in perception.” They were instead “volitional facts,” essentially psychological, and “which sensation by no mean explains.”⁴⁴ By discovering this voluntarist self as the starting point of psychology, philosophy could offer a new psychic anchor for modern society. Liberty itself was at stake. As Cousin explained, “To place ourselves beyond the conditions of sense, to will, without regard for its consequences . . . this is true liberty.” If a person could “hold the will within himself” and “let it act without outward manifestation,” if a person could avoid “marking [their] will with sensual effects,” then he or she would “be completely emancipated from the material world.”⁴⁵

Tocqueville was acquainted with Cousin’s work. He was only a degree removed from Cousin and his associates. He also held Cousin’s writing in high esteem. Years later, he would chastise Arthur de Gobineau for not appreciating his contemporaries, asking, “what better writer than Cousin” was there in France? ⁴⁶ It is thus not surprising that Tocqueville dedicates several sections in Democracy in America to explaining skepticism’s deleterious consequences for social cohesion. After all, besides defending the voluntarist personalité, Cousin was preoccupied with denouncing the ways sensationalism led to skepticism (“To limit philosophy to observation [of sensations] is, whether we know it or not, to place it in the path to skepticism.”)⁴⁷ In those sections, Tocqueville claimed the sensationalist epistemology of the eighteenth century “destroyed the empire of tradition, and overthrew the authority of the master” (DA 485). If individuals believed only what their senses conveyed, they would lose access to “a certain number of ready-made beliefs” without which “men may still exist, but they will not constitute a social body.” For the social body to cohere, it needed to be “held together by certain leading ideas” that were drawn “from the same source” (DA 489–90). Readers of Democracy in America would have had little trouble connecting Tocqueville’s discussion of skepticism to wider debates over sensationalism’s socially disintegrating effects.

Alongside Cousin, François Guizot taught Tocqueville that the psychic and the social were interdependent.⁴⁸ Guizot was an esteemed historian, Doctrinaire, and Minister of the Interior under Louis-Philippe. Known for advocating “liberalism through the state,” Guizot and Cousin were close.⁴⁹ Together with Royer-Collard, the two intellectuals were involved in the circle of Maine de Biran, a philosopher dedicated to theorizing voluntarism.⁵⁰ They worked together as the principal voices of the journal Le Globe before it transferred to Saint-Simonians. Importantly, Guizot also taught Tocqueville. Beginning in 1828—the same year as Cousin’s famous Sorbonne lectures on the history of philosophy—Guizot offered lectures on the history of civilization. For two years, Tocqueville travelled from Versailles to Paris each week to attend the historian’s lectures. Guizot’s History of Civilization in Europe was the only book Tocqueville requested upon landing in America. He and Beaumont carried it with them as they travelled, using its categories to frame their observations.

In these lectures, Guizot claimed that civilization was much more than a collection of social facts. It consisted, rather, in “two elements”: inner moral development and external social progress. Civilization existed at the intersection of these two domains, just as men, according to Cousin, “live . . . on the confines of two separate kingdoms [inner freedom and outward necessity], of which we form the mysterious union.”⁵¹ The subjective moral life and objective social conditions of peoples were linked such that “Wherever the external condition of man extends itself, vivifies, ameliorates itself; wherever the internal nature of man displays itself with lustre, with grandeur; at these two signs, and often despite the profound imperfection of the social state, mankind with loud applause proclaims civilization.”⁵² Guizot was at pains to emphasize that the “social development and the moral development” of Europe must be seen as “closely connected together,” as possessing “so intimate and necessary a relation between them” that they “reciprocally produce” one another. Indeed, that interplay made regeneration possible. Just as Christianity had “regenerated the moral man,” equality of conditions had “changed and regenerated society” by altering “his external condition.”⁵³

To a French intellectual listening to Cousin and Guizot in the late 1820s, two related implications would have stood out. First, as Guizot argued, if moral and social regeneration “reciprocally produced” one another, then social regeneration would have to pass through the regeneration of the people’s inner moral life. Second, as Cousin claimed, if that inner life was not the passive subject of sensationalism but a unified volitional power, then moral regeneration would require engineering contexts in which that volitional moi could be cultivated. The people would need to relearn how “to will, without regard for its consequences.” Put simply, in the intellectual context in which Tocqueville entered politics, if a psychological antidote to la société en poussière suggested itself, it was the pursuit of glory.

* * *

Tocqueville’s taste for glory, greatness, and grandeur were well known. In an 1837 letter to Royer-Collard, Tocqueville condemned the “almost universal pettiness” that robbed France of its “grandeur” and “brilliance.”⁵⁴ In an 1840 letter to Gustave de Beaumont, he reminded his friend, “You know what a taste I have for great events and how tired I am of our little democratic and bourgeois pot of soup.”⁵⁵ Fifteen years later, he was still complaining that however “wealthy, sophisticated, attractive, even impressive” a democracy might be, without an active citizenry, it would not have “great citizens, still less a great nation.”⁵⁶

Tocqueville was so keen on greatness that, despite his antipathy to Napoleon’s despotism, he respected him. Guizot had already nominated glory as a countermeasure to social etiolation in his lectures, yet his appreciation of national grandeur had done nothing to allay his animosity toward the emperor’s legacy, and, undoubtedly, Tocqueville shared that hostility to “the nonliberal side of [Napoleon’s] institutions.” But that hostility did not prevent Tocqueville from appealing to the passions the general inspired to revivify the French psyche. He extoled to Paul Clamorgan the emperor’s grandeur, calling him “the most extraordinary being . . . who has appeared in the world for many centuries.”⁵⁷ In an unfinished study of the French Revolution, he would add in praise that Napoleon knew how “to direct enthusiasm” to “[make] people die in battle.” Unlike Tocqueville’s effete generation, Napoleon understood that “high passion [was] always needed to revivify the human spirit, which otherwise decays and rots. It would have never occurred to [Napoleon] to make hearts and spirits concentrate merely on their individual welfare.”⁵⁸

At least two reasons explain why Tocqueville comfortably invoked the Napoleonic legacy. First, the American solution to atomization—associational politics—was not available to the French. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville showed that associational activity curbed individualisme by providing citizens concrete ways of exercising political participation and self-rule (DA 67–78). Civic associations like local townships conveyed self-seeking individuals toward public affairs so that, in pursuing their own concerns, Americans would naturally link their private interests to that of the public, political realm. In contrast, townships in France mitigated individualism by crushing it with a statist vision of the good. Devoid of the American impulse toward limited government, French municipal politics had become centralized, leading citizens to a dull administrative obedience rather than active participatory citizenship (DA 75, 98–100). Indeed, associations served altogether different functions in Europe. “[If] there are peoples among whom the freedom to unite is purely beneficial and a source of prosperity,” Tocqueville explained, “there are others who pervert it through abuse.” He meant the French, who “still look upon associations as weapons of war.” Where American associations offered “schools of liberty,” the French saw “freedom of association as nothing more than the right to make war on the government” (DA 220–222).

The second reason Tocqueville could turn to the Napoleonic legacy was that its nationalism counteracted the embourgeoisement that afflicted French culture. Unlike the realities of imperial rule, Bonapartism’s popular legacy idealized voluntarism and public-spiritedness. As Hazareesingh has explained, “Restoration Bonapartism represented a collective French yearning for political unity and social cohesion. . . . But it also expressed something more subversive: the desire for greater public involvement in the collective life of the nation.”⁵⁹ Depending on how it was understood, Richard Boyd continues, Bonapartism could “simultaneously appear as anathema and apotheosis of liberalism.”⁶⁰ Forged from the historical memories of the wars of liberty, popular Bonapartism had grown into a generic language of political dissent that foregrounded voluntarism, virtue, egalitarianism, and selfless sacrifice for the patrie. It became “a left-wing code word,” even “a manifesto for political freedom and the elimination of privileges associated with the Ancien Régime.”⁶¹ Thus, even if Bonapartism continued to name a specific party affiliation, its normative representation of democratic violence appealed across ideological divides because it offered something much more: “a renewable legacy and the basis of a truly national culture.”⁶² Far from conflicting with liberal republican thought, many like Tocqueville found something to appreciate in popular Bonapartism.

Underlining Bonapartism’s novelty is important. Tocqueville’s praise of glory has often been interpreted as an aristocratic “corrective” to his liberalism, even anachronistic. Scholars like Robert Morrissey, for example, have emphasized glory as a cardinal value of aristocratic, old-regime political culture.⁶³ Hence Tocqueville’s idealization of it is characterized by critics like Roger Boesche and Lucien Jaume as a kind of aristocratic supplement.⁶⁴ Yet Tocqueville’s appreciation of the Napoleonic legacy urges us to appreciate how modern and liberal love of glory could be. In Machiavelli, love of gloria was typically bound up with the “one man ordinatore.”⁶⁵ In Hobbes, glory belonged to God. In the hands of citizens, it was a source of anarchy, not social cohesion.⁶⁶ And glory was typically the possession of heroic individuals in Greek antiquity.⁶⁷ But the glory celebrated in revolutionary republicanism and extended by Bonapartist militarism was different. Neither the possession of the prince, legislator, or God, it could now be the property of citizens defending the nation. Battles like Valmy in September 1792 had proved that the people had earned their own idiom of glory. Even Morrissey, who characterizes Bonapartism as a continuation of old regime values, concludes that it appealed to modern thinkers because it transcended the opposition between virtue and interest. “Here we are in a world not of contracts, but of exuberance and enthusiasm,” he suggests. “In this world there was no longer a need to think about the Revolution in rational, contractual terms; what mattered was to accomplish it by acting in according with man’s fundamental nature, at the heart of which were freedom and the potential for grandeur.” Indeed, glory’s intrinsic connection to voluntarism, to the triumph of spiritual freedom over physical determinism, made it for many French thinkers “the ontological center of a regenerated man.” It allowed the Moderns to triumph over the Ancients by transcending their rational, contractual model of the social bond to a moral, experiential one.⁶⁸

Tocqueville was forthright on the modernity of national glory. Comparing the public monuments of old Europe with those in America, he observed that American monuments differed from the former in both form and function. Where aristocratic monuments drew attention to the heroic individual or courtly grandeur, democratic monuments praised the greatness of the people qua the state. That was why Americans who were otherwise individualistic and self-seeking nevertheless “nurse[d] gigantic ambitions when they turn[ed] their attention to public monuments” (DA 536). If public monuments were decorative or ornamental accoutrements to royal power under absolutism, in democracies, they were essentially pedagogical instruments of self-awareness. They provided a means for the people to glory in their own agency. In memorializing the state, the people paid homage to themselves.

Tocqueville acknowledged that expansive, public, and collective glory could threaten the local liberties he prized. A culture of public monumentality is only a short step away from unfettered statism. Yet Tocqueville believed the risk for democratic glory had to be taken. As he reiterated in his marginalia on public monuments in America: “in democracies the State must take charge of large and costly works not only because these large works are beautiful, but also in order to sustain the taste for what is great.”⁶⁹ Tocqueville convinced himself that French liberals could fulfill this pedagogical project. The coming of democracy was like a great biblical flood. The task of modern liberalism was not to dam that flood but to navigate through and beyond it. “Democracy!” he wrote in his preparatory notes for Democracy in America, “Don’t you notice that these are the waters of the flood? Don’t you see them advance constantly by a slow and irresistible effort? . . . Instead of wanting to raise impotent dikes, let us seek rather to build the holy ark that must carry the human species over this ocean without shores.”⁷⁰ Tocqueville therefore did not pursue glory because he was an aristocrat (though he was). He pursued it because he was a liberal. He detested French socialism’s “rehabilitation of the flesh,” which amounted to Lockean sensationalism run amok.⁷¹ He complained of utilitarianism, writing “Is it not obvious to you that belief everywhere is giving way to reasoning and sentiment to calculation?” (DA 274). Speaking of slavery’s abolition, he called for it to “be seen as the product of passion and not the result of calculation.”⁷² He fulminated to Royer-Collard that “Reason has always been for me like a cage that keeps me from acting, but not from gnashing my teeth behind the bars.”⁷³ This was the voice not of an aristocrat but of a modern liberal: a thinker eminently preoccupied with the psychological and social bases of modern liberty.

If France’s citizens were to overcome psychological withdrawal, the state would need to foster a taste for glory, even if doing so was economically imprudent, maybe even because it was economically imprudent. It needed to encourage its citizens’ utilitarian self-interest to grow into a voluntarist self capable of great public acts. How, then, to “sustain the taste for what is great”? How to seize glory to attach citizens to the public interest? In between the publication of Democracy in America’s two volumes, Tocqueville nominated one opportunity: “The future seems to me to be in our hands, and I shall tell you sincerely that with time, perseverance, ability, and justice, I have no doubt that we shall be able to raise a great monument to our country’s glory on the African coast.”⁷⁴

The Glory of the Armée d’Afrique

There were already hints that Tocqueville might turn to colonization for glory. Discussing the difficulties in finding proper statesmen to stand for election, Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America that the greatest public monument to the people was the one illuminated by the fires of war and combat.

a man facing urgent danger rarely remains as he was: he will either rise well above his habitual level or sink well below it. The same thing happens to peoples. Extreme peril does not always impel a nation to rise to meet it; it is sometimes fatal. . . . In nations as well as individuals, however, it is more common to see the very imminence of danger act as midwife to extraordinary virtues. At such times great characters stand out as a monument hidden by the dark of night will stand out in the illumination of a blaze. (DA 228)

War, Tocqueville suggested, was one place where citizens could undergo the “inner moral regeneration” Guizot argued to be necessary for civilization. Perhaps if the French were “struck by the perils they face,” they could awaken to the public interest seemingly forgotten in the face of decadent economic self-satisfaction.

The year 1840 provided just that opportunity. That year, France commenced the domination of Algeria. Tocqueville and Beaumont immediately made plans to visit Africa to study its society. After some initial delays, Tocqueville left for Algiers with Beaumont from Toulon on 4 May 1841, landing in Algiers three days later. The two travelled the region for a month, interviewing General Bugeaud, his subordinates, and local Arabists.⁷⁵ Already before the trip, Tocqueville had drafted a raft of essays criticizing contemporary anticolonial arguments and defending peaceful racial integration in the regency. In 1837, for example, he pondered, “how easy it is for the French, who are richer and more industrious than the Arabs, to occupy a large part of the soil without violence. . . . It is easy to predict a time in the near future when the two races will be intermixed in this way throughout much of the regency.”⁷⁶ Settlerism based on nonviolent integration was plausible because Arabs were nearly civilized: “These, you will agree, are singular savages. What do they lack . . . to resemble civilized men entirely . . . ?” They even already possessed the institution of private property.⁷⁷

After his trip with Beaumont to Algeria in 1841, however, Tocqueville’s attitude toward colonization hardened. Where he had once advocated for settlerism qua integration “to form a single people from two races,” Tocqueville now proposed differentiated legal systems and the violent conquest of indigenous populations.⁷⁸ He turned his visit’s notes into a series of effective reports justifying his new position. Instead of opting for the British strategy of indirect rule in India, Tocqueville now recommended France “replace the former inhabitants with the conquering race.”⁷⁹ The effort would be two-pronged: domination and colonization. Domination entailed systematic violence, the destruction of indigenous homes and harvest, and systematic raids on Arab communities. Colonization named settlerism’s “constructive” prong. Spearheaded by institutions like the bureaux arabes, the French state would consolidate the rule of law, centralize government, offer language instruction and professional advancement for civil administrators, regulate property titles, and provide capital for new settler families to plow their land. Where other politicians recommended each prong separately or in sequence, Tocqueville insisted the two be pursued concurrently. “Colonization and war . . . must proceed together.”⁸⁰ It was a stance he defended, albeit in varying degrees of ardor, even after his second trip to Algeria in 1846 as part of the Chamber of Deputies’ delegation.

Tocqueville’s evolution from defending integration to domination can be partly explained by settlerism’s imperative for territorial expropriation. As Wolfe has argued, “territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.”⁸¹ Whatever else settlerism is about, it is about access to land. Thus Tocqueville admitted that, however disquieting domination may be, settling French citizens required the expropriation of land and that meant “domination is the necessary means we must use.” Tocqueville conceded, almost as an aside, that he was “quite hostile to violent measures” but reminded his readers that “we must recognize that we shall never manage to possess the land around Algiers without the aid of a series of such measures.”⁸²

Even so, Tocqueville’s justification for abandoning integration went beyond acknowledging the requirements of territorial conquest. Specifically, he defended domination by appealing to the demands of glory, which he believed to be the overriding principle of French geopolitical expansion. Glory, national grandeur, and international prestige were first principles. They expressed values superior to and independent of economic desiderata, “great in themselves.”⁸³ The first sentences of Tocqueville’s 1841 memorandum on Algeria were unequivocal on this point: “I do not think France can think seriously of leaving Algeria. In the eyes of the world, such an abandonment would be the clear indication of our decline. . . . Any people that easily gives up what it has taken and chooses to retire peacefully to its original borders proclaims that its age of greatness is over. It visibly enters the period of its decline.”⁸⁴ France could not abandon Algeria without jeopardizing its prospects for grandeur. Tocqueville was unambiguous in declaring this reason the “foremost in [his] view” for African colonization. Consistent with his claim that “it would never have occurred to [Napoleon] to make hearts and spirits concentrate merely on their individual welfare,” Tocqueville even conceded that if Algeria flourished, it would hurt metropolitan markets. So much the worse, then, for domestic bourgeois interests.

I know that metropolitan commerce and industry will protest that we are sacrificing them; that the principal advantage of a colony is to provide an advantageous market for the mother country and not to compete with it. All this may be true in itself, but I am not moved by it. In the current state of things, Algeria should not be considered from the commercial, industrial, or colonial point of view: we must take an even higher perspective to consider this great question. There is in effect a great political interest that dominates all others.⁸⁵

Glory was that “great political interest that dominates all others.” This conviction characterized Tocqueville’s entire approach to Algeria. France needed “a great theatre for her glory,” whatever the economic cost.⁸⁶ It was a commitment so unconditional that France could only abandon Algeria “at a moment when she is seen to be undertaking great things in Europe.”⁸⁷ She could find glory in the African or European theater, but under no circumstance was she to surrender the search altogether. By conquering Algeria at whatever cost, France would partake in the greatest source of glory in democratic modernity: “the enslavement of four parts of the world by the fifth.”⁸⁸ Like the monuments in America, French citizens would be able to discover “self-interest rightly understood” in the monument that was Algiers, its glistening white edifices reflected in the coastal skyline.

* * *

Tocqueville’s hardened approach to settlerism raised an obvious problem for transforming Algeria into a theater for French glory: there was nothing glorious about exterminating indigenous peoples. Tocqueville admitted as much, in both Democracy in America when he decried the extermination of Native Americans and in 1847, after Algeria’s conquest was an accomplished fact: “Let us not, in the middle of the nineteenth century, begin the history of the conquest of America over again.”⁸⁹ Indeed, Tocqueville was well aware that the notion of glory exemplified by Bonapartist militarism placed specific demands on war; namely, that it be waged for national defense and on behalf of persecuted liberty. Bonapartist culture bound glory indissolubly to the spirit of self-defense because, more than anything else, self-defense expressed the superiority of public virtue over private interest.⁹⁰ The expansionary wars of liberty were consistently misremembered in France not as a “quest for world domination, although this was its result, but the revitalization of the national defense force.”⁹¹ That was why the Napoleonic armies could be analogized to the example of the defending Spartans at Thermopylae, as in Jacques Louis David’s Léonidas aux Thermopyles from 1814 (Figure 2.1). David was a Jacobin, then a Bonapartist, and in his painting, he depicted Leonidas and the 300 with Napoleonic visual motifs to suggest a world-historic filiation between ancient Sparta and imperial France.⁹²

Figure 2.1 Jacques Louis David, Léonidas aux Thermopyles (1814).

Musée de Louvre. Reproduction from Wikimedia Commons.

From this perspective, however, colonial warfare in Africa was anything but glorious. Even the Armée d’Afrique acknowledged this fact. In the years following Bugeaud’s appointment as Marshal, many soldiers died from malnutrition, alcoholism, and exhaustion, but only upward to a hundred or so soldiers died in combat in any given year. In contrast, the number of Algerians killed, often directly through massacres like those at Dahra, exceeded tens of thousands. The sheer mismatch in violence was so indisputable that even the label of a “war” seemed farcical.⁹³ Thanks in part to the normalization of slaughter, rape, and looting, the Armée d’Afrique developed problems with suicide. Jean-de-Dieu Soult, the French Minister of War and Guizot’s colleague, became sufficiently concerned with the poor optics of French terror in Africa that he worked diligently, if to futility, to redact the violence from the regular military bulletins published in metropolitan newspapers.⁹⁴

In such a context, how could colonial total war be squared with the demands of glory? How could Tocqueville describe Bugeaud’s terror in 1847 as an example of “a war conducted ably and gloriously”? The Restoration government had solved this dilemma by analogizing the conquest of Algeria to the evangelism of the Christian Crusades. According to Charles X and ecclesiastical leaders, conquering Algiers would be a victory for enlightened Christendom against oriental despotism, a Crusade against infidels.⁹⁵

Tocqueville was unsympathetic to these royalist strategies. In Democracy in America, he had already criticized the proactive pursuit of military glory as an example of “the coldest, most calculating” spirit (DA 320). Thus, Tocqueville came to square the realities of colonial terror with the demands of glory in a different way: he brought it closer to the normative representation of violence inherited from Bonapartist militarism by blurring the lines between colonial aggression and national defense. Specifically, he shifted culpability for the war onto the indigenous population by fundamentally revising his characterization of native society from the late 1830s. Where he had earlier minimized the differences between French and Arab civilization by emphasizing Arabs as industrious owners of private property, he now invoked what Karuna Mantena has called “culturalist alibis” to exaggerate the differences between the two.⁹⁶ No longer a civilized people ready to cohabitate with the French in a peaceful vivre ensemble, Tocqueville now believed indigenous society was incompatible with French values and responsible for compromising France’s best efforts at nonviolent integration. In other words, Tocqueville’s shift from integration to extermination turned on a new understanding of native society that transformed total war into a defensive engagement against native society itself.

We can see Tocqueville shift culpability for total war to natives in at least two places. The first is in his treatment of Abd-el-Kader, the local emir leading the resistance to French settlement. According to Tocqueville, Algerian society should be capable in principle of peaceful coexistence with the French. Ottoman rule left Algerian society fragmented, and some local tribes appeared receptive to cultivating shared commercial interests with the French. The Kabyles in particular were “a prosaic and interested race who worry far more about this world than the other, and that it would be much easier to conquer them with our luxuries than with our cannon.”⁹⁷ However, Abd-el-Kader—“a sort of Muslim Cromwell”—had undermined the prospects for peaceful integration. As Tocqueville explained, he was “convinced that before Abd-el-Kader’s power developed, it was possible” for the French to rule the region “without exactly waging war but only stirring up the Arabs’ passions and setting them against one another.”⁹⁸ However, Abd-el-Kader was using Machiavellian means to unite the warring tribes to undermine French efforts at settlement.⁹⁹ Having manipulated native religious enthusiasm and local networks of power, the emir now “stands at the head of a united army that can fall on those who would betray him, at any moment and upon the least suspicion.”¹⁰⁰ Even if a native tribe had wanted to peacefully cohabitate with the French, Abd-el-Kader’s new army could coerce and conscript them into the war of resistance.

Thus, by unifying native tribes, Abd-el-Kader’s Machiavellianism was responsible for dashing the prospects of peaceful cohabitation. France now had no choice but to defeat Abd-el-Kader through total war, for only a war that indiscriminately attacked the civilian population and the land that fed them could raise the costs of allegiance to Abd-el-Kader to prohibitive thresholds: “We shall never destroy Abd-el-Kader’s power unless we make the position of the tribes who support him so intolerable that they abandon him. This is an obvious truth.”¹⁰¹

In blaming Abd-el-Kader for integration’s failures, Tocqueville was at pains to compare the Muslim Cromwell and French society. But where these comparisons had once served to draw the two societies closer together, they now served to measure the distance between them. For example, in his 1841 “Essay on Algeria,” Tocqueville suggested that Abd-el-Kader’s centralization resembled not only that of Muhammad and the first caliphs, but also of Europe—yet from several centuries earlier.

Such is the secret of his power; it is not difficult to understand, for what Abd-el-Kader is attempting is not new in the world. These half-savage African countries are now undergoing a social development very much like that which took place in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. Abd-el-Kader, who has probably never heard of what happened in fifteenth-century France, is acting toward the tribes precisely as our kings, and in particular Charles VII, acted toward feudalism.¹⁰²

Abd-el-Kader’s European semblance was one of Tocqueville leitmotifs. The emir “gave [his] battalions a European organization, an organization powerless against our own, but that made him master of his countrymen.” His method of nation building was “quite new among the Arabs . . . he is the first who took from his contact with Europe the ideas that would make his own enterprise similarly durable.” Yet this semblance no longer proved that Arab society was a society of “singular savages” so proximate to French civilization that integration was possible. Instead, it now provided evidence of “half-savage African countries.” This denigration from “singular savages” (1837) to “half-savages” (1841) provided an alibi for total war.

This reconsideration of the nature of native society is the second place we see Tocqueville deflect culpability for total war from the French. The French could have colonized Algeria peacefully through racial integration, Tocqueville insisted, were they not conquering a population intractably predisposed to violence for cultural reasons. In this argument, total war was provoked, not only by a Muslim Cromwell, but also by indigenous “culture” itself, which was “something we can do nothing about for a very long time, perhaps ever.”¹⁰³ As he explained,

If, from the beginning, we had said convincingly that we aimed only at government and not at land, it might have been easy to get them to recognize our authority. But that moment has passed. Now, the prejudices that we have brought about are so powerful that we would have trouble making them believe in a change of the system, however real and sincere it were on our part.¹⁰⁴

If France had deceived indigenous leaders into believing that they sought only peaceful governance, perhaps war could have been avoided. But now that land had been taken, native “prejudices” had been awakened. Even if France wanted a peaceful settler society, Algerians would refuse it because of their warrior ethos.

Tocqueville insisted that this warrior ethos was no context-dependent feature of native society but a defining quality virtually impossible to eradicate. That was why any indigenous leader would find himself compelled to wage war against the French. If not Abd-el-Kader, Algerians would conscript someone else.

Unlike the Kings of Europe, an emir does not rule over individuals who can be kept down by the social force at the prince’s disposal. Rather, he governs tribes that are completely organized little nations, which cannot normally be guided except in the direction their passions lead. But the Arab tribes’ passions of religion and depredation always lead them to wage war on us . . . such is the natural taste of the populations that surround us.¹⁰⁵

Thus, the French were not only forced into waging total war because of Abd-el-Kader’s machinations, but also because of something intrinsic to the Arab social state. Their zealotry placed them beyond reasonable discourse. Even if France sincerely sought governance rather than land, Arabs would never permit a French presence. For them, war against the French was expressivist rather than strategic. It articulated their values and religious orientation. Indeed, Arabs were not even retaliating against a French invasion. They were simply playing out their cultural esprit. As Tocqueville forced himself to conclude, “To flatter ourselves that we could ever establish a solid peace with an Arab prince of the interior would, in my view, be a manifest error.” That was because “the permanent state of such a sovereign would be war with us, whatever his personal inclinations might otherwise be, and whether he were as pacific by nature or as fanatical in his religion as one could imagine.”¹⁰⁶ Algerian leaders were personifications of culture. They expressed, but could not alter, the social state of those they ruled. And that social state was intractable hostility to France. Ergo, the French had to wage total war for, as a matter of culture, Arabs were unlikely to ever surrender voluntarily. Since their barbarism stemmed from something below the level of politics or institutions, it was a fact of culture the French could not undo. As Tocqueville admitted, “Domination over semi-barbarous nomadic tribes, such as those around us, can never be so complete that a civilized, sedentary population could settle nearby without any fear or precaution. Armed marauding will long outlast war itself.”¹⁰⁷

These argumentative strategies transferred culpability for colonial war onto Abd-el-Kadar and native society, blurring the lines between imperial aggression and national defense. They therefore resemble the “deflection strategies” Jeanne Morefield argues are typical of imperial ideological politics. With deflection strategies, Morefield argues, liberal empires alienate themselves from their own colonial violence, becoming instead the victims of the necessity to use it. Hence imperial violence never tarnishes the empires which employ it; instead, its use verifies the barbarism of its victims.¹⁰⁸ Tocqueville, too, understood that France conquered Algiers, but responsibility for total war lay with the intractable features of the Muslim social state. In these wayward paths of colonial ideology, he invited his readers to reimagine colonial aggression as national self-defense. And so his prescription was domination without end, a burden demanded by Algerian native society rather than by French values. Bugeaud’s total war could be praised as “a war conducted ably and gloriously.”¹⁰⁹

Total War, Real and Imagined

In the 1841 “Essay on Algeria,” Tocqueville asked, “What type of war we can and must wage on the Arabs”? Known for his defense of local liberties and critique of despotism, he answered: total war. Since “the war cannot be won at one blow,” no choice remained but to undermine the conditions of life for indigenous communities.¹¹⁰ France must “ravage the country,” and “we must do it, either by destroying harvests during the harvest season, or year-round by making those rapid incursions called razes, whose purpose is to seize men or herds.”¹¹¹ These razzia not only starved Abd-el-Kader’s army, but also robbed locals of their means of subsistence. Together with the enfumades, the Armée d’Afrique would overwhelm resisting tribes and strike salutary terror into their hearts. In this war, civilians were fair game because native society itself was the enemy, and all natives were potential allies of Abd-el-Kader. Tocqueville admitted that his answer might shock European sensibilities, but he insisted that “If we do not burn harvests in Europe, it is because in general we wage war on governments and not on peoples.”¹¹² In the history of political thought, this is an incredible admission. Although it may be cynically familiar to contemporary critics, in early nineteenth-century France, waging war on entire peoples stood outside the accepted conventions of combat. Tocqueville was justifying a new application of terror, one forged in the crucible of the African theater, and one that made war on entire peoples not only strategically compulsory, but glorious. Here, in the colonial theaters of Africa, in other words, lay a precedent for the subsequent “total wars” of Europe’s twentieth century.¹¹³

The realities of total war were not at all life-affirming for French soldiers. Between the suicide, alcoholism, and crushing environmental conditions, these men certainly did not feel regenerated by their violence. Bugeaud’s new methods of violence demoralized and exhausted. To combat the dispersed organization of indigenous tribes, the general organized his army around “flying” mobile columns. These columns contrasted sharply with Napoleon’s slow-moving infantry units which depended on complex supply chains. Bugeaud’s units were mobile, fast, and deadly. They did not need traditional supply lines because they subsisted on the spoils of razzias against indigenous encampments.¹¹⁴ This was guerilla war, and, as effective as its violence was, it was neither particularly glorious nor rejuvenating for those responsible for enacting it on the ground. Tocqueville believed permanent officers in Algeria formed a regenerated breed of men, “ardent, ambitious, full of energy,” but that belief was sheer aspirational projection.¹¹⁵

The French public, however, consumed representations of the colonial violence with fervor. Through that consumption, they vicariously enjoyed the moral and psychic uplift denied to soldiers in the Maghreb. As Jennifer Sessions has emphasized, the conquest of Algiers was celebrated at home with splendid state celebrations, including parades of the Armée d’Afrique, public masses commemorating those fallen, and the 1845 establishment of the Louvre’s Musée algérien. Consumption of colonial warfare at home also included popular prints, songs, poetry, and plays which “portrayed the Armée d’Afrique as the reincarnation of Napoleon’s Grande Armée . . . proof that French men were still animated by the virile, patriotic spirit of their forefathers in arms.”¹¹⁶ Tocqueville understood better than most that such public monumentality provided an occasion for the people to revel in themselves as a people.

Figure 2.2 Pellerin Publishing House, Epinal Print, “Défense héroïque de Mazagran” (1840).

Source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Representations of colonial war consumed domestically looked nothing like the reality of total war. Instead, they explicitly figured colonial war as a version of Napoleonic, glorious defensive warfare. Consider, for example, the so-called “Siege of Mazagran.”¹¹⁷ In February 1840, hundreds of assailants laid “siege” to a small detachment of 123 French soldiers defending a small outpost of Mazagran. Miraculously, the soldiers successfully defended their post for four days until a sortie from nearby Mostaganem rescued them. The incident was minor by any strategic account, but the French press turned it into a sensational craze in the metropole. Mazagran became exemplary evidence of the glorious, defensive nature of colonial total war. A popular 1840 Epinal print, for example, described it as the “Heroic Defense of Mazagran” (Figure 2.2). A flying tricolor flag in the distance hailed by cannon fire makes it clear that it is liberty that is under siege. The 123 soldiers are its glorious defenders. According to one historian at the time, that flag became a commemorative artifact: “An order of the day authorized the 10th company of the 1st battalion of Africa to preserve the flag which floated on the walls of Mazagran as a glorious trophy.”¹¹⁸

The print’s visual composition also centers the numerical difference between the two armies: a “horde” of Arabs attack a single outpost protected by a single battalion of French soldiers. This lopsided representation both exaggerates and inverts the reality of French colonial warfare, one in which a thousands-strong Armée d’Afrique raided relatively small Arab civilian settlements. The same visual exaggeration and inversions are employed at a higher level in Félix Philippoteaux’s 1841 “Défense de Mazagran” (Figure 2.3). In that painting, Philippoteaux features French soldiers so committed to defending a pierced and persecuted tricolor flag that they are ready to use elbows and pavement stones to protect it. Both the Epinal print and Philippoteaux’s painting analogize Captain Lelièvre and his 123 soldiers to the Spartans at Thermopylae, a small contingent of 300 defending against thousands of Persian invaders. Glory in both cases is won by surrendering one’s “natural” instinct for well-being to the sacrificial, “social” law of civic salvation. These images depict a civilizational mythology connecting Sparta to France, Leonidas to Napoleon—and the Armée d’Afrique.

Figure 2.3 Félix Philippoteaux, “Défense de Mazagran, 2 au 6 février 1840” (1841).

Château de Versailles. Reproduction from Wikimedia Commons.

Imperial fantasies of glorious self-defense on behalf of persecuted liberty divided the public. For many, the contradiction between the realities of colonial warfare and its aspirational purpose were too flagrant.¹¹⁹ Yet these images also confirm what Yves Winter has stressed: “Practices of violence do not speak for themselves. Like other political practices, they intervene in the political realm by signifying, and these significations are central to how violence functions.” Acts of political violence, in other words, “produce political effects not by physically compelling agents but by appealing to an audience.”¹²⁰ In the case of African total war, its promise to revitalize a nation on the brink of psychic and social disintegration was contained, not in the brute physicality of its soldiers, but in the national chauvinism it was meant to inspire at home. Beholding these images, French citizens would be able to conceive themselves, not in relation to a contractual image of society, but in relation to themselves idealized as unified and glorious. What makes modern glory distinctive from ancient glory, Morrissey observes, is that it is self-reflexive. Desire for modern glory expresses “a need to show oneself always worthy of the example one has set up for oneself.”¹²¹ It is as Tocqueville said: “In nations as well as individuals . . . it is more common to see the very imminence of danger act as midwife to extraordinary virtues. At such times great characters stand out as a monument hidden by the dark of night will stand out in the illumination of a blaze” (DA 228). What the people see in images of glorious warfare is an illuminated image of themselves as they hope to become.

Conclusion

Five years after Tocqueville first visited Algeria, Tocqueville’s position on colonial violence softened. France had largely crushed Abd-el-Kader’s power in the intervening years. Although resistance to French settlerism would continue for generations, by 1846–1847, Tocqueville believed Bugeaud’s war had been successful. Thus, he raised anew the prospect of an integrated colony with the caveat that “It is not along the road of our European civilization that they must, for the present, be pushed, but in the direction proper to them.”¹²² In a prophetic turn of events, France even fulfilled Tocqueville’s call to “raise a great monument to our country’s glory on the African coast.” To commemorate the “Siege of Mazagran,” the city of Algiers and Louis-Philippe’s press collected funds for the construction of a commemorative monument. A commission led by Marshall Gérard, a veteran of the Napoleonic wars, suggested the monument be built on the Champs-Élysées to complement other Napoleonic monuments like the Arc de Triomphe. Funding shortages compelled the state to forego this grand scheme in favor of a smaller construction, and the result was a commemorative monument in Algeria: a column on top of which stood Victory.¹²³

Looking back with a measure of pride in 1847, Tocqueville tried to summarize France’s accomplishments since his first visit.

Today we can say that war in Africa is a science whose laws are known to everyone and that can be applied almost with certainty. . . . First, we came to understand that we faced not a real army, but the population itself . . . given that this population would be as hostile to us as they are today, in order for us to remain in such a country, our troops would have to be almost as numerous in times of peace as in times of war, for it was less a matter of defeating a government than of subjugating a people.¹²⁴

“War in Africa is a science,” Tocqueville wrote. The reader is reminded of his proclamation in Democracy in America that “A world that is totally new demands a new political science” (DA 7). It is as if the political science Tocqueville had been searching for since 1831 to mitigate la société en poussière had reached its conclusion in Bugeaud’s total war. The French had learned how to subdue not “a real army, but the population itself.”¹²⁵ They had learned how to “subjugate a people” with a continuous application of violence that would not cease even in times of peace.

David Bell has remarked that an unexpected discovery occurs in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries concerning “western attitudes towards war”: namely, that “the dream of perpetual peace and the nightmare of total war have been bound together in complex and disturbing ways, each sustaining the other.” Tocqueville’s Algerian writings suggest that their complex interdependency was no anomaly in the history of liberalism but instead rooted in their confrontation with the wider experience of the democratization of the social. In Europe, as elsewhere, a link persisted between liberalism’s anxieties over political centralization and an enthrallment with total war, or what Bell calls the “powerful tendency to characterize the conflicts that do arise as apocalyptic struggles that must be fought until the complete destruction of the enemy and that might have a purifying, even redemptive effect on its participants.”¹²⁶ It has been easy for liberal historians of political thought to portray such inclinations as the exclusive possession of the left or of twentieth-century totalitarianism. And yet, under the July Monarchy, France’s most prominent liberal succumbed to just that vision of war. Tocqueville was prepared to appeal to republican and Bonapartist tropes of glory to answer the central dilemma posed by the Revolution to French liberals: How to mitigate individualism and repair the psychic and social bases of modern liberty? As he translated the demands of glory into politics, he found himself an apologist for force and terror.