1913

by Charles Emmerson

  Meanwhile, the eternal French republican values of liberté, égalité, fraternité had proved highly malleable when faced with the question of how to organise a small European population amongst a much larger number of Arabs, Berbers and Kabyles. All republicans paid homage to the principle of assimilation, the ideal of turning Algerians into Frenchmen. This, they argued, was France’s civilising mission. ‘I am of those who have profound confidence in the unity of the human race’, said Governor General Lutaud in a speech in May 1913.22 But, as Lutaud and others saw it, if such unity was to be accomplished at all, it was to be achieved very much on French terms and at French leisure:

  On each occasion that an [indigenous] individual has received the benefits of education and civilisation he comes closer to us. By increments, he can receive the same rights as us. It is the law of evolution, of slow but ineluctable transformation, imperceptible yet sure. The day when the indigenous peoples have the same education as us, the day they set aside certain prejudices, will be the day that we can accept fully their demands.

  From an Algerian perspective the promised transformation was indeed almost imperceptible. As of 1913 tremendous inequality persisted, entrenched in law and in practice. Algerians were French subjects, but not French citizens. It was possible for an Algerian to become one, though doing so would require the renunciation of his or her religion, and acceptance of the consequence that the Islamic clergy (as well as many of one’s compatriots) would view this act of naturalisation as an act of apostasy. In the decade before 1909, only 337 Algerians had successfully applied for naturalisation to become French citizens, with a further 214 turned down.23 Meanwhile, the civil rights accorded to Frenchmen did not apply in full to Algerians. The latter were subject to additional legal constraints, which made it a punishable offence for a Muslim to answer back to a French official or to fire a gun in the air in celebration of a marriage, as was the local tradition. Administrative detention could be used to lock up Algerians for up to three years simply on the say-so of the Governor General.

  The same inequality that existed under the law existed under the fiscal arrangements to which Algerians were subject. Algerians paid far higher taxes than Europeans in proportion to their wealth and income, with so-called ‘traditional’ taxes still being levied, as well as the semi-feudal labour requirements of the corvée, abandoned in France at the revolution. No wonder Algerian landowners steadily lost out to French and other European farmers as they were gradually pushed deeper into debt, or into bankruptcy, or off the land and into the towns. While in 1913 half the Algerian population still lived and worked on land they owned, they had become steadily impoverished over time, forced to divide their farms into smaller and smaller parcels. In 1913, thirty years after Karl Marx’s visit to Algeria to enjoy its restorative qualities, his acolyte Rosa Luxemburg cited the country as a prime example of the capitalist accumulation of wealth by the colonisers. ‘Next to tormented British India’, she wrote, ‘Algeria under French rule claims pride of place in the annals of capitalist colonisation’.24

  Despite providing the bulk of Algeria’s taxes, Algerians had relatively little say in how that money was then spent, with predictable results in the provision of public services. In rural areas, if there were mayors at all, they were French. In some communes a council might have one-quarter of its seats, but no more, elected by Algerians. In others, what Algerian representatives there were on local commissions were appointed by the French – a lucky few called Béni Oui-Oui for their propensity to agree wholeheartedly with whatever the French proposed to them. In Algiers itself, while twenty-one members of the Délégations financières – the body which passed the local budget for the whole of Algeria – were either Arabs or Kabyles, they were outnumbered two to one by Europeans. Moreover, whereas European delegates were elected according to universal male suffrage of French Algerians, Algerian representatives were selected by a small Algerian elite of no more than 5,000, largely consisting of the conservative Algerians who were thought most likely to keep their own people in check.

  The gap between the promise of the republic and what it actually provided in Algeria was unmistakeable to anyone who took the time to look more closely at the reality of country. Increasingly, however, an educated and Gallicised Algerian elite was developing, prepared to challenge the gap – in French, and directly to the French government. In 1913, Chérif Benhabylès, holder of a doctorate in French law, put his thoughts down on paper. ‘This judgement’, wrote Benhabylès, ‘is the timid confession of a young native Algerian brought up in a French classroom, who profoundly loves the beautiful name of France, who owes his education to the French administration and who owes it the truth; who wants to be neither the detractor of his sponsors as are some ungrateful souls, nor the obsequious lickspittle of the power of the day’.25 Benhabylès did not criticise the republic so much as call its bluff.

  Algerians should be grateful, Benhabylès argued, for the security provided by France, the establishment of order in what had once been a country of brigands, a base for pirates. And yet, ‘consider the monthly pay of a police officer’, he continued, ‘Mohammed ben Ali, zealous agent, who has earned both the confidence and respect of his superiors, but when it comes to the budget, the scales weigh heavily in favour of François Alberti … Why this inequality?’ He sharply criticised the traditional Algerian elite, who he viewed as by turns conservative and lazy, content to enjoy the dubious fruits of their position rather than to seek their own improvement – or the improvement of others. In the evening, Benhabylès suggested, the young scions of the old Algerian aristocracy were to be found not learning to be Frenchmen, but at the Dar Zbantout, the house of bachelors, ‘where one plucks at guitars, plays cards, binges on soft cakes, smokes kif, or even opium while a houri [a beautiful girl] her eyes haloed with charcoal, most often a Jewish prostitute, looks after the others’. A few streets away, he continued, ‘sobbing mothers and wives wait for our promeneurs’. (It was a criticism made not just by liberal, Gallicised Algerians of course, but by their religious counterparts too: the followers of Salafist Islam who sought a purification of religious life, believing it to have been corrupted both by the French and by the traditional Algerian upper crust.)

  But Benhabylès argued that the path ahead for a new Algerian elite – the Jeunes Algériens – lay not away from France, but through it, through the same institutions from which he himself had benefited: the school and the university.26 (The path for Emir Khaled, an Algerian from a prestigious family who rallied to the Jeunes Algériens in 1913, had been through that other great republican institution: the army.27) Fundamentally, Benhabylès concluded, French Algerian arguments against the agenda of the Jeunes Algériens were motivated by economic interests; they feared competition from Algerians for jobs and government spending. Their political fears were overwrought. The spectre of pan-Islamism – ‘the product of the fertile imagination of a couple of writers’ – was simply a smokescreen raised to conceal these rather baser motives.28 In any case, was not France bound to support reform in Algeria in order to be true to the values of the republic? Indeed, would not reform be ‘the most beautiful compensation for a country which has always had trust in her children, whose glorious mission has been to carry through the entire universe and through different epochs of her history, the splendid flag of civilisation’?29

  As befitted a doctor of law, Benhabylès did not employ the language of revolution. His was the republican language of gradualist assimilation, expressed by an Algerian rather than a Frenchman. After all, the Jeunes Algériens were not seeking full political rights for all Algerians tomorrow, but rather the greater inclusion of a French-educated elite – themselves, in other words – in the management of the country. It was a lessening of the legal and economic burdens that was requested, not a wholesale dismantling of French rule. In many respects, what was surprising about the agenda of the Jeunes Algériens was how moderate it was. In 1908, a delegation of Algerians had travelled to Paris in orde
r to put the case to Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau. In 1912, another group returned with something approaching a manifesto for reform to put to Prime Minister Poincaré. The following year Emir Khaled, a man whose distinguished Algerian lineage, service in the French army and French education meant that he was able to span the worlds of both traditional Algerians and republican Frenchmen, made a series of speeches in France advocating the adoption of the reforms proposed by the Jeunes Algériens. An Alliance Franco-indigène was set up, supported by leading French intellectuals (as well as by French socialist leader Jean Jaurès). Momentum for change was building.

  There was a powerful new argument to employ in the service of reform in Algeria in 1913, one to which Paris was increasingly sensitive: conscription.

  For some years now governments in Paris had considered the option of extending compulsory military service to Muslim Algerians, the vast majority of whom were not French citizens, as a means of boosting the size of the French army. Done right, this would turn Algeria from a drain on the troops of metropolitan France, who were required to garrison the place, into a reservoir of fresh conscripts. French Algerians opposed the idea, on the one hand noting that it would disturb Algerian economic life and, on the other, worried that the army would provide native Algerians with dangerous organisational and military skills. For different reasons, the traditional Algerian elite opposed the extension of military service as well, concerned about what would happen to Muslims in a majority-Christian army, and seeing in it only an additional burden on themselves and their sons.

  The Jeunes Algériens took a different line. They were prepared to accept the idea, but they had conditions. If the duties of citizenship were to be extended to Algerians, should not a greater share of the rights of citizenship also be extended? As a matter of justice, but also as a matter of good politics, would it not be wise to placate the Algerians somehow by giving them something they wanted? Theirs was a strategy to use military service as a lever to prise open the structures of l’Algérie française and to insist on reform, trusting that Paris was ultimately worried more about troop numbers than about the inevitable howls of protest from a handful of French Algerian parliamentary deputies.

  And so it went. Compulsory military service was extended in 1912; promises were made in Paris that reforms would follow. But when? And which reforms? The devil, as always, was in the detail and the timing. In 1913, as Emir Khaled was building support for the agenda of the Jeunes Algériens in Paris, none other than Eugène Etienne – French Algerian member of the French National Assembly, stalwart defender of the political status quo – was made minister of national defence. How, then, would the circle of French national security, Algerian reform, the promises of the republic, and colonisers’ self-interest, be squared? Was a new bargain for the French Republic in north Africa waiting to be struck? Or, as so often before, had promises for reform been made which, ultimately, would not be kept? Would the French Republic be truly republican north of the Mediterranean, but only ever superficially republican south of it? As 1913 closed, these questions burned more deeply than ever.

  BOMBAY–DURBAN

  Tapestry of Empire

  On the morning of 23 December 1912 on Chandni Chowk Road, midway between the railway station and the Red Fort, former residence of the Mughal Emperors in Delhi, a bomb was thrown at the howdah (elephant carriage) of Charles Hardinge, Viceroy of India, the personal representative of the King-Emperor George V. ‘It exploded with terrific force’, the official government note recorded afterwards, ‘blowing to pieces the attendant who was standing in the howdah immediately behind Lord Hardinge and seriously wounding the attendant who was standing behind Lady Hardinge’.1 ‘Her Excellency fortunately escaped’, continued the report, ‘but parts of the missile struck Lord Hardinge and inflicted the wounds described by the medical report’. A boy standing nearby was killed. Several onlookers were wounded.

  An investigation ensued. The Muslim head of the local Criminal Investigation Department, Khan Bahadur Sheikh Abdullah, reported that the bomb used picric acid as its chief explosive and had been thrown on to the howdah from the offices of the Punjab National Bank.2 The perpetrators of the crime, however, could not be identified. In a country of 300 million or more – some parts falling directly under British rule, others coming under the rule of local Indian princes (with British guidance), and the whole presided over by a handful of British civil servants of the Indian Civil Service, with a small number of troops to call on (mostly Indian, with British officers) and limited police resources, even a high-profile political crime such as this could not necessarily be solved without a lucky lead. After all, Hardinge’s India – otherwise known as the Raj – stretched from the borders of Afghanistan and Tibet in the north to the waters off Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in the south, taking in everything between Siam (Thailand) in the east and Persia (Iran) in the west. This was a world to itself, and one into which a fugitive could easily melt.

  For the time being, therefore, the attempt on the life of the Viceroy simply had to be accepted as part of a broader wave of sporadic anti-British activity over the last few years, particularly in Bengal in eastern India, where anti-British feeling had been aroused by a cack-handed attempt to partition the historic province into two administrative parts – a policy now happily reversed. A boycott – named swadeshi in Hindi, meaning self-sufficiency – of non-Indian goods had briefly gained popularity in the wake of the partition proposal, but had never gained nationwide traction, and had now become more of a general slogan for Indian economic development and the protection of Indian craft traditions, something upon which a wide group of Indians and British could agree. Terrorism had been used by some as a political weapon against the British, but it never threatened the hold of the Raj on India as a whole.

  That said, the spread of terrorism to Delhi was a cause for particular concern. After all, the city had been proclaimed as the new capital of the Raj only two years previously. In 1911, the King-Emperor George V had visited India and, in a semi-feudal display of allegiance known as the Delhi Durbar, received the magnificent homage of Indian princes. Delhi was thus supposed to be a redoubt and symbol of British strength in India, installing the British in the public mind as legitimate heirs of the Mughal Emperors who had once been based there. The symbolism of the city was reinforced by the choice of architectural style in which it was built, a point made forcefully by Charles Hardinge when he urged a building style ‘such as will appeal to Orientals as well as Europeans’.3 Now, even before that city had been completed, had its purpose as a symbol of British power already been compromised?

  It was impossible to know how most Indians saw such things – or even whether they had a view. Besides a tiny minority whose voices were listened to attentively, Indians were unheard at the centre. Most Indians’ lives were dictated entirely by local circumstances and concerns.4 Most British persisted, then, in their belief that their presence in India was broadly welcomed as a benign act of civilisation, bringing railways and enlightenment to the country, spreading the virtues of order and the principles of good government. What they heard from and about India they heard mostly from those close to the Indian government, from retired British members of the Indian Civil Service or superannuated military officers – not quite as self-interested as the French Algerian deputies in the National Assembly in Paris, but nonetheless with a view of themselves as a caste among castes, a select group who better understood the true interests of India than did the Indians themselves.

  Meanwhile, the Indian group which did purport to speak for Indians as a whole – the ambitiously named Indian National Congress, in reality an organisation of Indian elites, sometimes chaired by British sympathisers – was split.5 The moderate wing called only for reform within India, and for the raising of India’s status within the British Empire. ‘Man for man they are better men than ourselves’, said Congress leader Gopal Krishna Gokhale of the British, ‘they have a higher standard of duty, higher notions of patriotism, higher
notions of loyalty to each other, higher notions of organised work and discipline, and they know how to make a stand for the privileges of which they are in possession’.6 There was still something to be learned from the British lion; for the moderates, the British Empire continued to be India’s natural home.

  Others were not so sure. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a former leading member of the Congress, had suggested enhanced agitation against the British, calling for a quicker path to much fuller swaraj, ‘self-rule’. Pictures of Tilak were said to be hung on Bombay walls. His conviction in a Bombay courtroom in 1908 on a charge of sedition had led to protests in the streets. But in 1913 Tilak was still in prison – and the pragmatic self-appointed representatives of Indian opinion maintained their calm appeals for reform, reform to which they felt their own moderate demeanour gave them full entitlement. At the Indian National Congress meeting in Karachi at the end of the year, the president of the meeting, the Muslim Nawab Syed Muhammad Bahadur, sensed a reduction in the stresses in British India – and in his own organisation. ‘The Indian unrest from which, thanks alike to the good sense of the people and to British statesmanship, we have safely emerged’, he told his audience, ‘was part of the prodigious waves of awakening and unrest that swept over the whole of Asia during all this period’.7 From this point forward, he urged, ‘let us strive for unity amongst us, for the advancement of the nation, and for bringing the forces of progress and solidarity in line with our achievements in the past and of our expectations for the future’.