Source: Chapter six of The ‘Death of the Subject’ Explained, by James Heartfield, Sheffield Hallam University, 2002. Reproduced by permission of the author.
The founding of the modern French state is unique in history. The state is created in the name not just of the French citizen, but of all mankind. The document adopted by the Constituent Assembly in June 1789 is headed Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The declaration is a sincere expression of the sentiments of the revolutionaries who created the state. It was also a beacon to liberals across Europe,[1] and as far afield as Haiti in the West Indies, where the ‘black Jacobin’ Toussaint L’Ouverture was inspired to lead a slave revolt.[2] The most adamant of the French revolutionaries deplored slavery as they deplored feudal privileges. ‘The moment you pronounce the word “slave” you pronounce your own dishonour’, said Robespierre, who also defended the civil and voting rights of free blacks in the West Indian colonies.[3] Even after the restoration of a more centralised power under Napoleon Bonaparte’s military leadership, France remained a beacon of the universal rights of man to radicals and liberals across Europe. Napoleon’s army swept through Europe welcomed by some as an army of liberation. The Jewish ghettoes were emancipated. The Code Napoleon is, to this day, the basis of many countries’ civil law. Revolutionary France represented the hopes of the Enlightenment, of reason and of humanism for progressive Europe.
The extent of French humanism, though, found its limits. The German middle classes came to resent the French monopoly on universal civilisation, and jealously guarded their own, more grounded Kultur. England regarded France’s challenge as a threat. In Russia, Napoleon was defeated less by the winter, than by the sheer otherness of Russian society. Russia lacked any comparable enlightened middle class to those who had welcomed Napoleon in Austria and Prague. Napoleon’s army did not liberate Russia, but was reduced to a mere army of occupation, without supplies or support, and was defeated.
Revolutionary France’s moral mission to realise the ‘eternal rights of man’ was compromised, but by no means exhausted. French civic republicanism combined with scientific rationalism to exemplify the Enlightenment ideal. There were many setbacks, from the reactionary repressions of 1830, 1848 and 1870 to the anti-Semitism that split French society when Captain Dreyfus was charged with treason. In 1940, the reaction of the French middle classes, resentful of Leon Blum’s Popular Front government, to the German Occupation — ‘better Hitler than Blum’ — cast a dark shadow over France’s claim to represent the best in humanity. But the communist-dominated French Resistance kept the honour of French liberty intact. As long as France resisted France was occupied, and could avoid the shame of collaboration with Fascism. Much as the post-war French establishment loathed the communists and radicals, they had played a large part in saving France, while much of the upper class had collaborated. French Humanism, as an ideal, lived on in the ‘socialist humanism’ espoused by the communists, and in Sartre’s existential philosophy. ‘Existentialism is a humanism’ wrote Sartre. If the bourgeois elite had momentarily let go of the banner of humanism, the French left had taken it up.
If French humanism survived the occupation it found its severest test in Algeria’s struggle for national liberation. France’s empire, its colonies in Indo-China, the Middle East, Africa and the West Indies were always profoundly corrosive of the ideal of the universal rights of man. Colonial rule degraded the indigenous natives of those countries. It also degraded the ideal of a universal humanity. Where real living men and women were denied liberty, in the name of France, then ‘French liberty’ was reduced to an ideological cover for enslavement. The French Army under Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798. The Emperor had been at great pains to pose as a liberator come to free the oppressed natives from the Turks. Napoleon also took on the role of defender of the annual caravan to the Holy Places and even expressed a willingness to convert to Islam.[4] However, Bonaparte’s pro-Islamic policy was not taken seriously by his officers. A contemporary Egyptian observer recalls: ‘They treated books and Quranic volumes as trash, throwing them on the ground and stamping on them with their feet and shoes. Furthermore they soiled the mosque, blowing their spit in it, pissing, and defecating in it.’[5] French rule in Algeria and Egypt remained tied to the demeaning corvée system of forced labour that prevented any substantial extension of civil freedom to the Muslims annexed to the French empire.[6] France’s enlightened social scientists were tempted into subdividing the human race into advanced and lesser breeds.[7]
The contradiction between humanism and imperialism reached its apex in Algeria. Algeria was also occupied in 1830 at a tremendous human cost. The population of Algiers was reduced from its eighteenth century peak of 75 000 to just 30 000. The status of the Algerians and the French settlers was complicated. Under the constitution of 1848 Algeria was officially designated French territory. Algeria was divided into two sections, one civilian, and the other military. The civilian section was largely European, centred on Algiers and the ports. The military section was the countryside and almost wholly native, Arabic and Berber. Divided into three provinces the Algerian natives were ruled through local chiefs recognised by the military governors, rather more liberally than the settlers would have preferred. The rationalist ambitions of Emperor Louis Bonaparte, Napoleon III for Algeria were to be seen in the Imperial Decree of 1857 for a network of railways, and in the support for the Saint-Simonian socialist Prosper Enfantin’s plans to industrialise the region. Enfantin raised funds to extract iron ore in Bone, but French industrialists torpedoed his proposal for a local smelting industry.
The new Emperor disliked the European settlers who had voted against his accession, and listened favourably to native complaints of oppression and land-grabbing. In 1863 Napoleon III wrote to Arabs that: ‘Algeria is not strictly speaking a colony, but an Arab kingdom. The natives and the colonists have an equal right to my protection and I am no less the Emperor of the Arabs than the emperor of the French’. Constitutionally that position was unsustainable, but Louis Napoleon kept up his support for native rights as a counter-balance to the fervently republican settlers. The two laws voted by the senate on 22 April 1863 and 14 July 1865, known as the ‘Senatus-Consult’, defended first the native’s land rights and second granted them the right to citizenship. However, in their application, the Senatus-Consult laws ended up discriminating against Arabs and Berbers. In formalising land rights, the courts reduced traditional land-holdings precipitately. Intended to grant citizenship by a ‘well-meaning Emperor’[8] the second Senatus-Consult allowed Algerians to apply for French nationality but only if they allowed their Statut Personnel to be French, so subjecting themselves to French courts in such matters as marriage and inheritance.[9] Between 1865 and 1 November 1867 only 56 Muslims and 115 Jews made applications. However, under the terms of the law, all Algerians were subjects of the Empire, and therefore subject to its taxes. Similarly, the Imperial College, open to Algerians, but with the goal of assimilating them into French culture, taught its lessons in the French language, and recruited just 99 Algerian pupils in 1865, 81 in 1866. In 1870 the Algerians under the military zone revolted. French repression re-doubled, and the ideal of assimilation was exposed more openly as a lie. The Algerians were not to be treated as equals with equal rights to the French, but inferiors. That same year the Crémieux decree granted French citizenship to Algerian Jews, in a policy of divide and rule, consolidating a loyal intermediary layer of Jews between the natives and the settlers. In fact the French republicans had recreated a system that was, according to Governor General Gueydon ‘the serfdom of the natives’.[10] In 1881 the Code Napoleon was supplemented with a special ‘native code’, which listed 27 imprisonable crimes. These included, most extraordinarily, refusal to carry out corvée labour, an insulting attitude in the presence of French officials and travelling in Algeria without a permit. The flag hanging over the colonial office was the same tricolour that Marianne used to lead the revolutionaries against the King, but the policy imposed under it was closer to the restitution of feudal servitude. According to General Hanoteau, an officer of the bureaux arabes: ‘What our settlers dream of is a bourgeois feudalism in which they will be the lords and the natives the serfs’.[11] In May 1898, in the heady atmosphere of the anti-Dreyfus campaign, Algeria elected four anti-Semitic deputies to the National Assembly after a week of anti-Jewish rioting that January. Governor Laferrière bent to the colonists’ demands for autonomy, granting financial independence and the creation of an elected colonial assembly. Algeria became a ‘small French Republic’ in which ‘the voter’s card became the title of nobility in this novel feudal system’.[12]
In truth, though, the Algerian economy was not a throwback to a feudal past. Rather, its limited development was an entirely modern consequence of its subordinate relationship to the French economy. Algeria exported grain and surplus labour to France. In the early twentieth century the colonists, swelled with poorer Spanish immigrants, made wine, while the most ambitious of Algerian manhood crossed the Mediterranean to find work in Paris. Underemployment was the curse of the growing class of landless labourers, the Fellaheen, who would become the grass roots of the Algerian resistance in the 1950s. Industrialisation was at a minimum, and the director of agriculture wanted it kept that way: ‘Is it really in our interest to proletarianise future elements of the population, when social stability presumes an inverse development?’[13]
The founding of the modern French state is unique in history. The state is created in the name not just of the French citizen, but of all mankind. The document adopted by the Constituent Assembly in June 1789 is headed Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The declaration is a sincere expression of the sentiments of the revolutionaries who created the state. It was also a beacon to liberals across Europe,[1] and as far afield as Haiti in the West Indies, where the ‘black Jacobin’ Toussaint L’Ouverture was inspired to lead a slave revolt.[2] The most adamant of the French revolutionaries deplored slavery as they deplored feudal privileges. ‘The moment you pronounce the word “slave” you pronounce your own dishonour’, said Robespierre, who also defended the civil and voting rights of free blacks in the West Indian colonies.[3] Even after the restoration of a more centralised power under Napoleon Bonaparte’s military leadership, France remained a beacon of the universal rights of man to radicals and liberals across Europe. Napoleon’s army swept through Europe welcomed by some as an army of liberation. The Jewish ghettoes were emancipated. The Code Napoleon is, to this day, the basis of many countries’ civil law. Revolutionary France represented the hopes of the Enlightenment, of reason and of humanism for progressive Europe.
The extent of French humanism, though, found its limits. The German middle classes came to resent the French monopoly on universal civilisation, and jealously guarded their own, more grounded Kultur. England regarded France’s challenge as a threat. In Russia, Napoleon was defeated less by the winter, than by the sheer otherness of Russian society. Russia lacked any comparable enlightened middle class to those who had welcomed Napoleon in Austria and Prague. Napoleon’s army did not liberate Russia, but was reduced to a mere army of occupation, without supplies or support, and was defeated.
Revolutionary France’s moral mission to realise the ‘eternal rights of man’ was compromised, but by no means exhausted. French civic republicanism combined with scientific rationalism to exemplify the Enlightenment ideal. There were many setbacks, from the reactionary repressions of 1830, 1848 and 1870 to the anti-Semitism that split French society when Captain Dreyfus was charged with treason. In 1940, the reaction of the French middle classes, resentful of Leon Blum’s Popular Front government, to the German Occupation — ‘better Hitler than Blum’ — cast a dark shadow over France’s claim to represent the best in humanity. But the communist-dominated French Resistance kept the honour of French liberty intact. As long as France resisted France was occupied, and could avoid the shame of collaboration with Fascism. Much as the post-war French establishment loathed the communists and radicals, they had played a large part in saving France, while much of the upper class had collaborated. French Humanism, as an ideal, lived on in the ‘socialist humanism’ espoused by the communists, and in Sartre’s existential philosophy. ‘Existentialism is a humanism’ wrote Sartre. If the bourgeois elite had momentarily let go of the banner of humanism, the French left had taken it up.
If French humanism survived the occupation it found its severest test in Algeria’s struggle for national liberation. France’s empire, its colonies in Indo-China, the Middle East, Africa and the West Indies were always profoundly corrosive of the ideal of the universal rights of man. Colonial rule degraded the indigenous natives of those countries. It also degraded the ideal of a universal humanity. Where real living men and women were denied liberty, in the name of France, then ‘French liberty’ was reduced to an ideological cover for enslavement. The French Army under Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798. The Emperor had been at great pains to pose as a liberator come to free the oppressed natives from the Turks. Napoleon also took on the role of defender of the annual caravan to the Holy Places and even expressed a willingness to convert to Islam.[4] However, Bonaparte’s pro-Islamic policy was not taken seriously by his officers. A contemporary Egyptian observer recalls: ‘They treated books and Quranic volumes as trash, throwing them on the ground and stamping on them with their feet and shoes. Furthermore they soiled the mosque, blowing their spit in it, pissing, and defecating in it.’[5] French rule in Algeria and Egypt remained tied to the demeaning corvée system of forced labour that prevented any substantial extension of civil freedom to the Muslims annexed to the French empire.[6] France’s enlightened social scientists were tempted into subdividing the human race into advanced and lesser breeds.[7]
The contradiction between humanism and imperialism reached its apex in Algeria. Algeria was also occupied in 1830 at a tremendous human cost. The population of Algiers was reduced from its eighteenth century peak of 75 000 to just 30 000. The status of the Algerians and the French settlers was complicated. Under the constitution of 1848 Algeria was officially designated French territory. Algeria was divided into two sections, one civilian, and the other military. The civilian section was largely European, centred on Algiers and the ports. The military section was the countryside and almost wholly native, Arabic and Berber. Divided into three provinces the Algerian natives were ruled through local chiefs recognised by the military governors, rather more liberally than the settlers would have preferred. The rationalist ambitions of Emperor Louis Bonaparte, Napoleon III for Algeria were to be seen in the Imperial Decree of 1857 for a network of railways, and in the support for the Saint-Simonian socialist Prosper Enfantin’s plans to industrialise the region. Enfantin raised funds to extract iron ore in Bone, but French industrialists torpedoed his proposal for a local smelting industry.
The new Emperor disliked the European settlers who had voted against his accession, and listened favourably to native complaints of oppression and land-grabbing. In 1863 Napoleon III wrote to Arabs that: ‘Algeria is not strictly speaking a colony, but an Arab kingdom. The natives and the colonists have an equal right to my protection and I am no less the Emperor of the Arabs than the emperor of the French’. Constitutionally that position was unsustainable, but Louis Napoleon kept up his support for native rights as a counter-balance to the fervently republican settlers. The two laws voted by the senate on 22 April 1863 and 14 July 1865, known as the ‘Senatus-Consult’, defended first the native’s land rights and second granted them the right to citizenship. However, in their application, the Senatus-Consult laws ended up discriminating against Arabs and Berbers. In formalising land rights, the courts reduced traditional land-holdings precipitately. Intended to grant citizenship by a ‘well-meaning Emperor’[8] the second Senatus-Consult allowed Algerians to apply for French nationality but only if they allowed their Statut Personnel to be French, so subjecting themselves to French courts in such matters as marriage and inheritance.[9] Between 1865 and 1 November 1867 only 56 Muslims and 115 Jews made applications. However, under the terms of the law, all Algerians were subjects of the Empire, and therefore subject to its taxes. Similarly, the Imperial College, open to Algerians, but with the goal of assimilating them into French culture, taught its lessons in the French language, and recruited just 99 Algerian pupils in 1865, 81 in 1866. In 1870 the Algerians under the military zone revolted. French repression re-doubled, and the ideal of assimilation was exposed more openly as a lie. The Algerians were not to be treated as equals with equal rights to the French, but inferiors. That same year the Crémieux decree granted French citizenship to Algerian Jews, in a policy of divide and rule, consolidating a loyal intermediary layer of Jews between the natives and the settlers. In fact the French republicans had recreated a system that was, according to Governor General Gueydon ‘the serfdom of the natives’.[10] In 1881 the Code Napoleon was supplemented with a special ‘native code’, which listed 27 imprisonable crimes. These included, most extraordinarily, refusal to carry out corvée labour, an insulting attitude in the presence of French officials and travelling in Algeria without a permit. The flag hanging over the colonial office was the same tricolour that Marianne used to lead the revolutionaries against the King, but the policy imposed under it was closer to the restitution of feudal servitude. According to General Hanoteau, an officer of the bureaux arabes: ‘What our settlers dream of is a bourgeois feudalism in which they will be the lords and the natives the serfs’.[11] In May 1898, in the heady atmosphere of the anti-Dreyfus campaign, Algeria elected four anti-Semitic deputies to the National Assembly after a week of anti-Jewish rioting that January. Governor Laferrière bent to the colonists’ demands for autonomy, granting financial independence and the creation of an elected colonial assembly. Algeria became a ‘small French Republic’ in which ‘the voter’s card became the title of nobility in this novel feudal system’.[12]
In truth, though, the Algerian economy was not a throwback to a feudal past. Rather, its limited development was an entirely modern consequence of its subordinate relationship to the French economy. Algeria exported grain and surplus labour to France. In the early twentieth century the colonists, swelled with poorer Spanish immigrants, made wine, while the most ambitious of Algerian manhood crossed the Mediterranean to find work in Paris. Underemployment was the curse of the growing class of landless labourers, the Fellaheen, who would become the grass roots of the Algerian resistance in the 1950s. Industrialisation was at a minimum, and the director of agriculture wanted it kept that way: ‘Is it really in our interest to proletarianise future elements of the population, when social stability presumes an inverse development?’[13]
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