Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World
Page 31
The Grassin ‘Affaire’: Settlers and Administrators on Trial
The Oué Hava attack exemplifies even more strongly how the perception of violence could vary according to the social identity and perceived respectability of the victims. That three were free settlers, including a woman, who were widely believed to have maintained good relations with Kanak heightened the perceived violence in the eyes of the colony’s free French settlers. The death of the Javanese worker and the several other attacks in which penal settlers or other socially marginalised figures were killed in similar circumstances received much less public attention.
Like Céu’s arrest, the Oué Hava attack and the local responses to it in the form of various presumptions, rumours and blame have a place in a longer history. European responses to attack ran along well established faultlines between settler and administrative perspectives that had been shaped by earlier instances of violence—notably the colony’s 1878 war in which 200 settlers had been killed in surprise attacks. On the one hand, settlers were mindful of the potential threat to their own lives and the intimate and intense character of Kanak violence. On the other hand, officials systematically sought to dismiss or play down the spectre of Kanak violence or revolt and generally attributed any threats to the actions of dangerous Kanak individuals, freed convicts (especially ‘Arabs’) or ‘bad colonists’ with established reputations for violence against Kanak. 32 Bound up in both settler and administrative thinking was an awareness of the reciprocal dimensions of Kanak violence or the ethic of payback —something usually derided as vengefulness or vindictiveness in European representations, as seen in this excerpt from an 1893 military contingency plan:The canaque is very vindictive and his desire for vengeance can only be extinguished in the blood of his enemy. – A Canaque, for example, never forgives the imprisonment of a chief, an act of brutality, the rape of a woman, etc.[…]The Canaque is profoundly accustomed to hiding his sentiments and it is impossible to obtain from him the confession of the grievance that he harbours in his heart; and, when he has decided to satisfy his hatred, he prepares in the shadows and makes use of the most informal methods to surprise and to kill his enemy. 33
All of these ideas about the likelihood and nature of Kanak violence exercised a powerful influence in the various European reactions to the attack of 16 June 1917. They speak to what has been described in Australia as ‘the relationship on the ground between intimacy and violence (as interaction and violence co-existed), as well as to [the] central importance of violence to frontier relationships’. 34 What was most in question was the nature of the vengeance that was presumed to have motivated the perpetrators; had Grassin been a martyr of French law and order for the arrest carried out under l’indigénat or was he a settler who had crossed the line of acceptable behaviour in his own private dealings with Kanak? Or were the actions of the administration itself to blame; had it failed to provide settlers with adequate protection?
In the days and weeks immediately following the attack rumour and opinion swirled around the few known facts. Most explanations centred on Henri Grassin’s involvement in Céu’s arrest four months earlier. On the day after the attack the missionary Leenhardt and another settler ‘wept together for Grassin and Papin [and] deplored their error in the arrest of the chief’. 35 Two days later Leenhardt met gendarme Traynard who blamed himself for what had happened and appeared to be in a less than sound state of mind: ‘I think he’s capable of shooting on an innocent person at night.’ 36 In its 23 June edition the Bulletin du Commerce published Grassin’s last letter to his son dated 11 June in which he had related his fears for his safety and the failure of the administration to post any soldiers at Oué Hava. The administration ought to have known better, the Bulletin observed, given that Grassin was a ‘readymade victim for canaque vengeance , and the Administration knew it, because of his courageous help in arresting an influential chief some time beforehand’. 37 Over the following fortnight, Leenhardt modified his initial assumption, writing on 8 July that ‘vengeance ’ was being advanced as a ‘motive’ to deflect attention from the possibility that the ‘massacre’ could have been avoided: ‘the self-serving legend of the arrest of Ceu is being told everywhere and the Administration, relieved at its good fortune, will consecrate it in order to conceal its own gross error under the cloak of praise’. 38
The presumption that vengeance was at play in Kanak actions had predated the attack and had informed the decision to not provide the Oué Hava settlers with protection. Five days beforehand (on the same day that Grassin cabled Nouméa asking for military protection and wrote to his son), adjutant Bécu, in charge of the nearby military post and flying column, had attributed the activities of ‘rebels’ in the area to the violent reputation of the manager of a nearby cattle station, a métis named Emile Guillemard: ‘The Guillemard family, renowned for its brutality of old, is not much loved by them. For the moment the demonstrations in the upper Tipindjé must not be seen as anything more than a case of private vengeance .’ 39 Thus it seemed to Bécu that only supposed bad colonists rather than respectable free settlers such as Grassin and Papin had anything to fear.
Much of the European reaction and outrage was shaped by the belief that the Grassins and Papin were decent settlers who had maintained amicable relations with Kanak, but some doubt was cast on this. The Catholic bishop, Chanrion, noted that authorities in Nouméa were unsurprised by Grassin’s fate and that it was an instance of ‘personal vengeance ’. 40 Unattributed rumours that Grassin had been involved in the illicit sale of firearms to Kanak and might have contributed to his own fate were publicly rebutted in a letter to La France Australe, by his neighbour Eugène Ragot who insisted that Grassin had helped a gendarme to uphold French law despite the cost to his own reputation ‘and had not hesitated in the face of a very likely vengeance ’. 41
Another rumour that circulated was the possibility that the attack had involved ‘Arab’ libérés (freed convicts). Ten days after the attack, Bécu reported what he had been told by local settler, Gabriel Sangarné: ‘Sangarné tells me that two Arabs were amongst the rebels who killed Grassin and Papin. The way in which the victims were mutilated doesn’t belong to the natives, he assures me…. The natives have told R.P. Murard that there were also one or two libérés. The Arabs were disguised as canaque warriors.’ 42 This rumour was not substantiated in any way, but it reflected longstanding fears about the penal population as a significant source of violence. Since the 1890s, libérés and especially those from North Africa referred to generally as ‘Arabs’ had been ‘perceived as a threatening group who fed a proliferating “discourse of fear”.’ 43
Whereas settlers generally presumed an act of calculated vengeance some Kanak presumed that the attack had been carried out in anger and in the heat of the moment. According to a rumour , reported three days later by Joseph Murard, the Catholic missionary in the neighbouring Hienghène valley, the attack had been an act of vengeance directed not at Grassin but the aforementioned station manager:The rebels who sacked and burnt Mr Guilmard’s hut (the upper Tipindé station) the previous Sunday were looking for [Guillemard]…. [H]aving learnt that G[uillemar]d had gone to Mr Grassin’s place, they went to see if he was still there, but without any ill intention towards this settler. Having seen them [approach], Mr Grassin quickly took up his rifle and fired hastily into the mass. Three natives are supposed to have been killed … and it was then that, in fury, the rebels killed Mr Grassin, mutilated him so atrociously – then killed Mr Papin – I don’t know how much basis there is to this ‘rumour ’ – the gendarmerie hasn’t heard anything about it. 44
There was no subsequent evidence to suggest that the 16 June attack was anything other than a surprise attack, but the rumour was a scenario that local Kanak initially considered to be plausible. It was compatible with indigenous norms of violence and warfare, which have been characterised by their explosive qualities. As observed by Douglas: ‘most actual attacks on Europeans, like those on other Islanders,
were sudden, delivered in heat, and fairly short-lived’. 45
In 1918–1919 the various public and private exchanges within the settler community gave way to a more general debate about the underlying causes of the entire war, which illustrate more generally the important tension between the administration and the settlers as officials in particular sought to distance themselves from the violence of the frontier. Governor Repiquet’s December 1917 report on the war’s ‘profound causes’ sought to head off criticism of the administration by insisting both on the inevitability of a racial clash inflected by savagery and nationalism and on the idea that ‘rebels’ had attacked ‘not so much the administration which they know to be well-intentioned as the settler in whom they see their enemy’. 46
Settlers more generally were at pains to reject accusations that their actions were to blame for the war. Settler Auguste Henriot used his 1918 deposition to affirm that ‘canaque discontent was not caused by the settlers’; greater harm had been done, he argued, by gendarmes who abused their powers and by the system of ‘native police’. Although warned about growing discontent and the danger to settlers, the administration ‘had preferred to not believe in the effervescence’ which had ended with the murder of settlers. Henriot also observed that settlers were not responsible for the failed stratagem that resulted in the outbreak of war and that they had not played a leading part in the repression. And he concluded: ‘Nor are the settlers any more responsible for the discontentment of the Canaques who have been pushed back into the mountains and only come into contact with whites when one or other of the parties is discontent [about labour relations].’ 47
In 1919 several men accused of involvement in the Oué Hava attack were amongst the 78 ‘rebels’ who stood trial. The bill of indictment alleged that the attack had been ordered by another local petit chef, Néa, who had wanted to avenge Céu’s arrest. 48 Néa, however, was acquitted following his own testimony that he had in fact helped Traynard and the Grassins to arrest Céu—a crucial detail which underscored the exaggeration involved in the official accounts of the arrest—and testimony from Roger Grassin that his father had never doubted Néa’s sincerity. The ‘real culprits’, Roger Grassin declared, had not been brought to trial while the main causes, in his view, were the damage caused by cattle and the recruitment ‘by force’ of Kanak as tirailleurs. 49 He thus directed attention towards the region’s cattle station owners (with whom his father also had been in dispute) and the actions of the administration.
The trial ended, however, by providing a new explanation for the attack—one that most Europeans had scarcely countenanced. Several Kanak witnesses alleged that it had been secretly ordered by another chief in order to cast suspicion on his rivals (including Néa) and bring the repression down on them. According to this scenario, European acts of violence such as the arrest of Céu had not been central to the Kanak agenda. 50
The Death of Baougane: A Case of Settler Vengeance ?
In contrast to the recriminations surrounding the Grassin ‘affaire’, the death of Baougane was veiled by a public silence and went largely but not totally uncontested. The silence itself says something about the degree to which it was perceived as (il)legitimate; while perhaps condoned by those soldiers and settlers who knew of it, it was not publicly celebrated in the same way as the official actions of the military in the course of the repression. A similar silence can also be found in the later historiography of the war. Although the great majority of its victims were Kanak (at least 200 as opposed to fewer than 20 Europeans) the fact that it is the violence of Kanak—cast as ‘savagery’—that has been most publicly recalled or remembered illustrates the hold that settler discourse and discursive structures have had over these events.
Like many other instances of colonial violence Baougane’s violent end appears only to have been challenged in private and away from the public record. The likelihood that it involved an unsanctioned act of vengeance involving Roger Grassin goes a long way to explaining this silence. Leenhardt, for instance, passed no comment on the report that he received from Jemès Eleicha on the prisoner’s death (which itself did not identify Grassin or imply any condemnation of those involved) and one of his own earlier comments on Roger Grassin suggests that he might have seen such an action as comprehensible. Observing Roger Grassin’s return to Tipindjé as part of the detachment under Captain Sicard on 21 June, Leenhardt noted that ‘He is full of hatred for the Wéava and sees more clearly through the end of his rifle than within himself. What a frightful situation and so many others must have known this in the north of France.’ 51
The report by Catholic priest and corporal Alphonse Rouel did though form part of a wider debate about the violence involved in the punitive expeditions sent out against the Kanak ‘rebels’. The letters that he wrote to Chanrion while serving in a military detachment provide some of the most excoriating denunciations of the violence mobilised against the ‘rebels’ in 1917 including that of the settler and Kanak volunteers involved in the repression. 52 At the same time the colony’s Bulletin du Commerce called attention to complaints from settler vounteers serving in Rouel’s detachment about his presence and suggested that the Catholic priest’s proper place was in the barracks. The two officers who Rouel denounced were the same two men portrayed in the Bulletin as heroes. Actions by soldiers on 9 and 11 July, in which up to 15 Kanak were believed to have been killed, brought praise from the Bulletin according to which these attacks ‘finally offer some satisfaction to the public demand for energetic operations’. Sicard and Carrique, had ‘shown themselves to be true leaders who know how to combat the ferocious savages[…]fighting not for their independence, but simply to satiate their bestial passion, their hatred of whites and the base resentment of two métis and several Arabs[…]known to have been completely canaquified [encanaqués] for some time’. The Bulletin hoped that these operations would not be curtailed by those demanding ‘clemency’ and ‘temporisation’. 53
It was not until more than four decades later that any more public reference to Baougane’s death emerged. In 1963 Australian journalist Lewis Priday, drawing on the reminiscences of local settlers, wrote in Pacific Islands Monthly that Roger Grassin had taken ‘his revenge’ for the death of his parents with ‘his service rifle’ and that ‘A Noumea court later acquitted him of murder after he declared that the blood of his mother and father called for vengeance .’ 54 Priday’s story contains many factual inaccuracies (including the suggestion that Roger Grassin had been serving in France at the time of his parents’ death and did not take ‘his revenge’ until his return) and there certainly was no public criminal trial, but as discussed below there may well have been a closed military tribunal.
Coda
Six decades after the original events, the legitimacy of the violence involved in Céu’s arrest and in the death of the Grassins was still at play in writing about ‘1917’ as New Caledonia experienced another period of violent conflict—the infamous ‘events’ of 1984–88 which pitted supporters and opponents of the Kanak independence movement against each other. The emphasis still placed on Céu’s arrest in accounts of ‘1917’ and narratives of Kanak resistance to French colonisation drew critical reactions from those defending the settlers’ reputation. The principal reactions were to accounts of ‘1917’ in geographer Alain Saussol’s 1979 study of colonisation and land spoliation and journalist Lionel Duroy’s 1988 account of the December 1984 massacre by the descendants of local settlers of 10 unarmed Kanak and the scandalous 1987 acquittal of the perpetrators on the grounds of legitimate self-defence. 55 Writing in the bulletin of New Caledonia’s historical society in 1982 and again in 1989, Henri Grassin’s grandson, Paul Griscelli, rejected the lingering suggestion in both books that his grandfather had contributed to his own death by participating in the arrest. He insisted that the 1917 conflict was essentially a war between Kanak chiefs in which the Oué Hava settlers were innocent victims who had been abandoned and failed by the administration. 56
Conclusion
The three cases illustrate the variety of forms that violence could take in this colonial situation. Céu was arrested under the regime of administrative violence that was l’indigénat . Although ostensibly ordered for his failure to carry out labour requisitions, his arrest by force was also justified as a pre-emptive measure to prevent him inciting violence. The stratagem and subterfuge chosen reflected the precarity of power relations and involved both physical and symbolic violence . The case of the settlers killed at Oué Hava highlights different assumptions about the nature of violence. Whereas some Kanak privileged the idea of an attack made in anger, settlers privileged the idea of a meditated attack on innocent victims compromised by the administration, while the administration was inclined to see it as directed at bad colonists. Like Céu’s arrest, the violence involved was much more than physical; its suddenness and the identity of its victims created widespread fear as well as calls for retaliatory violence. The attack was widely interpreted widely as a form of innate and foreseeable vengeance on the part of Kanak. As shown by the death of Baougane, however, vengeance or retribution could also be the work of settlers.