1913

by Charles Emmerson

  A torrent of letters followed, both to contest and to support Jenkings’ broadside. ‘Satisfied’ responded angrily, suggesting that ‘those who are making their living here should be the last to run it down; if they don’t like it there are steamers leaving every day for other parts’.46 This was the argument of the booster, warning that even if things were worse than reported, to make this known was to undercut one’s own interests, and those of others. A railway clerk wrote to the Herald in disagreement with Jenkings, arguing that his fortunes had certainly improved since leaving Britain and that he was now able to send more money home to his mother in Bristol than both his brothers: ‘Doesn’t that show which is best for the average man?’ More lightly, ‘Gourmand’ and ‘Gourmet’ fought it out in the pages of the newspaper over the quality of Argentina’s gastronomy, the former criticising it while the latter noted the availability of French, Italian, Spanish and German cuisine, all of which could be washed down in Buenos Aires with Bordeaux or Chianti for less than $5.

  More tragic was the letter of a British domestic servant, Anne Robinson, stuck in rural Argentina. ‘Although I am no great hand at letter writing’, she told the Herald nervously, ‘I feel impelled to add a few words’.47 ‘I arrived in Argentina just as full of hope and visions of that cottage in the country (which is every domestic servant’s ideal) as it was possible for a young woman to be’, she wrote. Yet the country had proved a disappointment. In England she had enjoyed a reasonable position in a family with a house by the sea at Brighton, earning £25 a year. There, she chanced upon the brother of a friend, a sailor, who painted Argentina in bright colours and offered to put her in touch with a lady who would pay £60 a year for domestic help. And so, packing her life in a suitcase, she went across the seas. But, once in Argentina, she was quickly disabused of her initial optimism. Her mistress was kind, but she railed against an Irish-Porteña fellow servant – ‘bad-tempered, dirty, ignorant and lazy’. The work was hard, the mud of the country impossible to wipe clean from the house in winter, and the dust impossible to protect against in the dry summer. ‘I have an afternoon off every fortnight from 1 till 7’, she wrote, but ‘where can I go?’ Church offered one possibility, or simply walking around town, but unable to speak Spanish and without the time to learn, she was isolated. She could make her own clothes, but imported materials from Europe were so expensive to almost make it not worthwhile:

  No, sir, when the next six months is up, I’ll be glad to hear of a lady who wants a maid or a nursemaid on the voyage home. I’ll gladly give my services in exchange for a passage home, but if not, the little I am able to save out of that wonderful £60 a year will have to get me home to England, even if in steerage.

  Buenos Aires’ southern star did not burn brightly for all.

  ALGIERS

  The Radiance of the Republic

  In 1913, as a Frenchman would remind anyone who cared to listen, the southern extremity of the French Republic – that area legally considered the unitary territory of France, whole and indivisible – did not lie on the shores of the Mediterranean, but in Algeria, at the southern edge of the three French administrative départements of Algiers, Oran and Constantine. Formally, these départements were as much part of France as Normandy or Provence. It was only beyond them, amongst the undulating dunes of the Sahara, that the French Republic ended and the colonial French Empire began.

  Granted, the governance of French Algeria as a whole – comprising both the three northern départements of French Algeria, considered an integral part of the French Republic, and a large southern area, treated more as a straightforward colony – differed in several important ways from the system of administration in effect in France north of the Mediterranean. A Governor General wielded substantial administrative powers over all of French Algeria, far beyond those of the French President.1 There were layers of government unknown in mainland France, including the elected Délégations financières, the decisions of which were subject to approval in Paris. Although all the Algerian and French-born residents of Algeria, both European and non-European, were considered French subjects, most non-Europeans (Arab, Kabyle and Berber) were not considered full citizens, limiting their political rights, subjecting them to a different legal code and to a different (and more onerous) fiscal regime. These were substantial differences from how things were run on the French mainland, rooted in the politics of a white French Algerian population assuming leadership and control over a larger native Algerian population.

  Yet, at the same time, parliamentarians representing the European population of the départements of Algiers, Oran and Constantine sat alongside those from Lyon, Nantes and Calais in the National Assembly in Paris. ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’ adorned the doorways of primary schools in Algiers, just as they did those of Dunkerque. Most Frenchmen deemed l’Algérie française to be as eternally French as France was herself eternal. The inconsistencies between the principles of the French Republic and its practice in French Algeria were considered either temporary, or inevitable.

  The coastline of Algeria had come under French control over eighty years ago, in 1830, when an insult delivered to the French consul by the local representative of the Ottoman Empire – the Frenchman was said to have been struck with a peacock-feathered fly-whisk for his alleged impertinence – had provided a pretext for invasion. Since then, French rule had steadily extended south. In 1848, a year of European revolutions known proverbially as the ‘Springtime of the Nations’, Algeria was formally annexed to France. By 1913, with France entrenched as the preponderant power in Tunisia and Morocco as well, France was far and away the dominant power in north Africa. Algeria was the centrepiece of France’s overseas expansion, a consolation for the loss of Alsace and Lorraine in the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870s and a frontier for French colonisation to match Britannic frontiers in Canada and Australia.

  Barrels of wine awaiting export from the port of Algiers. In 1913 Algeria was considered administratively part of France, and Algiers was a majority-French city.

  The proudest advocates of this idea of French Algeria as the radiant extension of France herself were the French Algerian parliamentarians – all of them European, of course – sent to Paris every few years. A tightly knit union of self-interested self-promoters, led by the formidable Eugène Étienne, they spent most of their time lobbying for more investment in Algeria, clamouring for more influence over the central ministries in Paris and rebutting calls for reforms which might undermine the privileged political and economic position of Europeans over Arabs.

  Given the sparseness with which parliamentary debates on Algeria were attended by most other members of the French National Assembly, the French Algerian caucus could generally head off any liberal criticism in parliament. But getting the attention, let alone the active sympathy, of government was another matter. When Raymond Poincaré was elected President of the French Republic in January 1913, a telegram was sent by political leaders in Algiers congratulating him as an ‘enlightened patriot and proven republican’ – and making a request. ‘Your Presidency should not pass without a visit to Algeria’, the note read, ‘to see for yourself its overflowing vitality, to study its legitimate aspirations and to bear witness to the indefatigable devotion of its population to France [and] to its republican institutions’.2

  If the President himself were to visit French Algeria, the authors of the telegram reasoned, would he not see that here under the warm Algerian sun was a land fit for more widespread colonisation and that the dotted lines of maritime routes from France to Algeria were destined to grow ever more dense? Would he not understand that Algeria was not only France’s Canada, or France’s Australia, but perhaps even France’s India? It was an inalienable aspect of France’s greatness. To develop it was imperative, to lose it unthinkable.

  Algiers was by some margin the largest city in Algeria, with more than 130,000 inhabitants, most of them European.3 But it was also the vitrine for French Algeria as a whole: the first point o
f call for most visitors, the chief city of government, and, its denizens would argue, the most beautiful. The gardens of Algiers were filled with purple bougainvillea and white magnolias, its parks with orange and lemon trees, yuccas and palms, the surrounding countryside dotted with blue-green eucalyptus and hardy olive trees. It was precisely this natural beauty, and the proximity to the fresh air of the sea, that had made Algiers a popular city in which to pass a winter away from Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth century, attracting Karl Marx in 1882, amongst others.4

  And Algiers had other merits, too, as far as many local French Algerians were concerned. The fact that the majority of its European population were of French origin – as opposed to the situation in other Algerian coastal towns, where the European population included large numbers of assimilated French of Italian, Spanish or Maltese descent – gave Algiers additional cachet over Bône (now Annaba), Philippeville (Skikda) and Oran.5 The city was also the most culturally developed of Algeria’s towns, boasting its own university (since 1909), its own municipal museum (since 1910) and its own roster of plays and concerts. In 1913, Beethoven’s ninth symphony was performed in Algiers by a French orchestra. ‘The ninth in Algiers!’ one local was said to have exclaimed, ‘it is almost as if the Mediterranean didn’t exist anymore’.6 A visiting Englishwoman, meanwhile, proclaimed the city ‘extremely cosmopolitan’, its streets ‘full of interest’.7 ‘On the electric tramway’, wrote Rachel Humphreys, newly arrived on the liner from Southampton, ‘you may sit next to French, Germans, Greeks, Turks, Arabs, English, Americans and in the shady squares you may see a smart automobile followed by a curious cart filled with white-draped and veiled women coming in from the countryside’.8

  In the central raised section of the waterfront – the Boulevard Carnot and the Boulevard de la République – the modern city was at its most splendid, a succession of elegant stone buildings with evenly spaced arcades at ground level, in the style of rue de Rivoli in Paris, and below them ramps leading down to the railway station and port. There, barrels of red wine, Algeria’s chief export, awaited shipment to mainland France. In the evening, this would be the place to come to eat fresh crustaceans or bouillabaisse fish stew. A short stroll away was the chief square of the city, the Place du Gouvernement. It was here that the city’s denizens would arrange to meet – with the equestrian statue of the Duke d’Orléans, the nineteenth-century conqueror of Algiers, acting as an obvious rendezvous – before taking a coffee in the nearby Café Apollon. It was here, on the Place du Gouvernement, that the city’s yellow and brown trams converged. On Thursdays and Sundays one could hire a chair for a few centimes and pause to listen to a military band, a reminder of French martial glory and of the force which backed up France’s continued presence.9

  There was something else, too. While three sides of the Place du Gouvernement were shaded arcades – shops, cafés and a hotel – the square was completed on its fourth side by a mosque, the stark white-painted Mosquée de la Pêcherie. This was a reminder of a crucial difference between French Algeria and the French mainland. Outside the cities it was Muslim Algerians – Arabs, Berber and Kabyle – who dominated the country, numbering well over four and a half million compared to 720,000 Europeans (a number which included Jewish Algerians naturalised as French citizens en masse in 1870). The Muslim population of Algeria could not be as readily ignored as the indigenous people of Australia or Canada.

  In Algiers itself, Muslim Algerians were more in the background than was the case in the countryside. Here, though never out of view entirely, they were only truly dominant in one part of the city: the Casbah. Once, the Casbah had been all there was of Algiers. Now, it was simply the Arab district of a much larger city, a triangle of white rising high up on the hill behind the modern French town. If the Boulevard de la République was the shopfront of French Algiers, the Casbah was the citadel of its Arab past. The elegant modern city of Algiers turned its back on the crowded Arab Casbah, trying to forget it, facing the sea instead.

  ‘The lanes of old Algiers form the most bizarre muddle imaginable’, warned the Joanne guide, describing the Casbah for French visitors, ‘none is level or straight, they weave and snake, turn back on themselves, get tangled up the one with the other, sometimes climbing up sharp inclines, sometimes precipitously descending almost vertically’.10 Rachel Humphreys, having struck up conversation (in Esperanto) with two French Algerians, was taken on a quick tour of the Arab town. ‘I don’t know how I can make you imagine the squalor and the primitive civilisation of the people in this part’, she wrote later, ‘smell is too mild a word for the appalling odours we encountered’.11 Humphreys ultimately solved the problem by dousing her handkerchief in perfume and holding it close to her nose while she walked. She observed the Arab population of the Casbah drinking their coffees in the street, out of the heat of the ‘cafés maures’ (Arab cafés), before hurriedly moving on, and back down to the Hôtel Continental – the most highly recommended in the local Baedeker – on the Boulevard Bon-Accueil, in the European villa district of Mustapha-Supérieur.12

  For some, the Casbah did impart a kind of romance. Isabelle Eberhardt – a Russo-German adventurer who fled the boredom of Switzerland to live as a Muslim in Algeria, where she married a French soldier of Algerian origin and became a sometime French spy – cast an indulgent eye over the Casbah of Algiers one summer evening, writing in her diary:

  How can all those fools in social and literary circles say there is nothing Arab about Algiers? There is for instance that lovely moment of the maghreb over the harbour and rooftops of the upper town. The place teems with merry Algerian women all frolicking happily in their pink or grey garb against the bluish-white of the rooftops … Despite the riff-raff French civilisation has brought over here, whore and whoremaster that it is, Algiers is still a place full of grace and charm.13

  Indeed, in the first years of the twentieth century, an Arab-inspired architectural style came back into fashion somewhat, the prime example of which was a new madrasa religious school built by the state in what was called the ‘néo-Mauresque’ style.14 French Algerian Henri Klein set up a local Comité des amis du vieil Alger (Committee of Friends of old Algiers) dedicated to protecting the city from the architectural encroachments of modernity. Meanwhile, north Africa was becoming fashionable to a new generation of artists looking for inspiration with which to mark their difference from the formal European traditions they sought to challenge. The flat, bleached-white houses of north Africa became the subject of paintings by Matisse (though he found Algiers itself ‘vile, ugly’ when he visited in 1906).15 The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók travelled with his wife Marta to Biskra to record Arab music on his phonograph in the summer of 1913, hoping to find new tonalities he could use in his work.16 Forced by heat to cut short his excursion, Bartók intended to return in 1914 – a plan interrupted by events in Europe.

  On the ground in Algiers, however, many Frenchmen felt the Casbah, at least, deserved no such artistic endorsements, or special protection. Some wanted it razed entirely, to clean the slate. When conservationists frustrated his plans to create a new business district where a lower part of the Casbah now stood, Eugène de Redon, a French Algerian involved in the recent development of Algiers, was said to have exclaimed: ‘The historic houses of the rue du 14 juin?! The historic Hamma fountain! It’s the shitholes [‘chiottes’] of the Casbah which are truly historic’.17 He had a point. Typhus had overrun the Casbah in 1909. There were occasional bouts of malaria. Death stalked the narrow alleyways of the Casbah far more than in the airy Mustapha-Supérieur.

  For many, then, far from being a picturesque corner of the city the Casbah was rather proof of the backwardness of native Algerians or, to a more enlightened few, a squalid reminder of the unkept promises of the French Republic to improve the lot of those same Algerians. To some the Casbah recalled a more uncomfortable truth, that the modern French cities of Algeria remained enclaves in the country as a whole, potentially vulnerable to
the anger of the local Algerian Arab, Kabyle and Berber populations.

  Bar a small and easily suppressed Algerian rebellion in the north-western village of Margueritte in 1901, it was over forty years since there had been any serious uprisings against the French presence in Algeria, during the Franco-Prussian War. Yet fear of pan-Islamist revolt was easily stoked amongst the French population. In 1913, in the north-eastern city of Constantine, André Servier wrote the popular Le Péril de l’avenir, warning that a nationalist current was beginning to take hold of the peoples of north Africa, influenced by events in Tunisia, Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, not to mention across the border in Libya, where Italian troops were in the process of establishing themselves as the new colonial masters against the will of the local Muslim population.18 A string of similar books made the same argument. In French-language newspapers, standard crimes would be regularly qualified as ‘indigenous’ or ‘Kabyle’, as if to suggest a particular propensity for gruesomeness amongst the local Algerian population or an aptitude for crime in general.19 For the three years leading up to 1913 the French forbade Algerians from undertaking the pilgrimage to Mecca on the basis that the journey risked exposing them to religious and political extremism. In 1913, the Haj was sanctioned once more, though local French officials asked darkly why it was that a German ship turned up to provide transport for the pilgrims.20

  The same year, in Algiers, a theatre company from Tunis put on a modern Arab play for the first time: Saladin, by Najib al-Haddad.21 The subject was politically piquant. Saladin had been a great Muslim leader, a man who had battled against the crusaders in the Holy Land, conquered Jerusalem, and won honour and respect for his skill, his daring and for his chivalry in victory. He was, in short, a pan-Arab hero. To evoke his life was to remind an audience of a time when Arabs had been the masters, not the subjects. As was painfully obvious, that time was now long gone. Yet educated Algerians were beginning to see themselves in a new light by 1913, as actors in their own history, framed by the French Republic and heavily informed by its values, yet not entirely determined by the dictates of Paris. In 1907, a book published in Algiers provided brief biographies of great figures from the Algerian past, the kind of hagiographical exercise which French republicans, who went in for much the same thing, would understand as being crucial to the formation of a sense of nationhood.