Making Settlers Muslim: Religion, Resistance and Everday Life in Nineteenth-Century French Algeria

By any measure, the French-Algerian settler village of Margueritte, known today as Aïn Torki, was a marginal place. Established in 1884 on the slopes of the Zaccar mountain in central Algiers province, its colonists’ vineyards prospered thanks to the rocky soil, cool mountain climate and proximity to the railway line between the cities of Algiers and Oran. By the end of the century, it had been expanded twice and its original population of two hundred Europeans had doubled.¹ Nonetheless, it remained well off the radar of anyone other than its residents and the trickle of tourists who came to hike the Zaccar’s twin summits or take the waters in the neighbouring spa town of Hammam-Righa. The closest the settlement came to public notoriety in its first fifteen years was in 1896, when a spectacular train collision nearby made headlines for killing and wounding over a hundred passengers.

On 26 April 1901, this changed. For some eight hours, Margueritte’s European colonists found themselves attacked by members of the Righa tribe, on whose land the village had been built starting in the 1870s. Led by Yacoub Mohammed el Hadj ben Ahmed, a young day labourer, the ‘insurgents’ seized male settlers and demanded that they ‘make [them]selves Muslims’ by reciting the shahada (Islamic statement of faith) and donning North African clothing.² Thus transformed, the captives were forced to follow the group as it proceeded through the village streets. Five men who could not or would not comply were killed, and several houses and shops sacked before a detachment of tirailleurs algériens (indigenous riflemen) arrived from the sous-préfecture of Miliana. Two more men, a soldier and an insurgent, died in a brief shoot-out before the attackers fled into the surrounding forest.³

Short lived as these ‘events’ were, fin-de-siècle debates about French colonial policy and widespread anxieties among Algeria’s settlers about ‘security’ thrust them into the spotlight on both sides of the Mediterranean. Historians of French Algeria have paid surprisingly little attention to them, however. To the extent that the Righa revolt has drawn scholarly scrutiny, it has been situated within political narratives of Algerian resistance to French rule, as an early precursor of the twentieth-century nationalist movement or the closing chapter in a nineteenth-century tradition of localized millenarian revolts.⁴ While neither of these readings is incorrect, they overlook what made Margueritte unique in the history of Algerian resistance to French colonialism: the forced conversion of the European villagers to Islam.

At the time, French colonial authorities recognized religion as critical to the uprising, but they were most interested in it as an explanation for the violence. They concluded almost immediately that ‘Islamic fanaticism’ was the ultimate cause of the revolt. The magistrates and colonial officials charged with investigating the case put enormous energy into tracking down participants’ religious habits and affiliations. But in their preoccupation with Sufi brotherhoods and pan-Islamist conspiracies, investigators largely ignored the more quotidian meanings of the conversion ritual imposed on Margueritte’s colonists. As Benjamin Brower has argued, a narrow focus on the causes and consequences of colonial violence can obscure the cultural and political logics embedded within violent actions and thus a fuller understanding of the dynamics of power in colonial societies.⁵ In the case of Margueritte, resituating the forced conversion process within the logics of everyday life in the settler village opens a new window onto the mundane practices by which social and ethno-religious categories were enacted and embodied in French Algeria. If ‘to convert is to change worlds’, a careful reading of the ritualized transformation of European bodies and souls affords us new perspectives on the worlds lived, made and imagined by Margueritte’s inhabitants.⁶

II

French colonial authorities began to investigate the revolt and its perpetrators almost as soon as the first telegraphed alerts reached them. Within hours, judicial officials—a juge de paix (local magistrate) from Miliana, and a juge d’instruction (investigating magistrate) and procureur de la République (public prosecutor) from Blida—had opened a formal criminal investigation. They collected forensic evidence and interrogated hundreds of witnesses, victims and possible insurgents, while French military forces rounded up local Muslim men and pursued suspects across the colony. Three months later, the procureur charged some 125 men, mostly Righas, with murder, attempted murder, armed rebellion, theft and pillage, along with a variety of other lesser crimes.

As the judicial procedure moved forward, local administrators and officials from the Native Affairs departments of the Government General of Algeria and the Préfecture of Algiers began their own study of the revolt’s causes and potential consequences. After reviewing the history of French colonization in the Zaccar, administrative practices in the region and economic conditions among the Righas, they all concluded that its origins could only be religious. As Alphonse Masselot, general secretary of Indigenous Affairs for the department of Algiers, wrote:

The true cause emerges clearly from the events that took place. It is not hatred of the Roumi [Christian/French] or specifically of the colonists because, despite being masters of the situation and able to exterminate everyone, [the insurgents] only killed a few Europeans of lower status; it is not theft and pillage because they sacked only one house in the village; it is not revenge, because they spared those who, having taken their land as concessions or having acquired them by judicial means, seemed marked for their blows. There remains therefore, as the sole plausible explanation, confirmed moreover by the facts, only fanaticism.⁷

This conclusion was echoed by Dominique Luciani, chef de bureau of the Government General, who provided the authoritative account of the events to the Governor General, Prime Minister, and President of the Republic. ‘Doubt seems to me impossible,’ Luciani declared. ‘The vexations, the conflicts of interest, and the purely individual grudges that might exist between colonists and indigènes hold only secondary importance. We are faced with an explosion of fanaticism.’⁸

It is impossible to know whether religion did, in fact, play a causal role in the uprising of 26 April. Despite the mass of documentation produced by investigators, definitive reasons for the initial outbreak of violence remain stubbornly elusive. Throughout the months-long investigation and trial, the men identified as the insurgent leaders, Yacoub and his khalifa (lieutenant), Taalbi el Hadj ben Aïcha, refused to explain their actions in terms that made sense to French interrogators. When finally captured a week after the revolt, Yacoub told the juge d’instruction simply that he had been ‘crazy’ and had no recollection of what had happened. He then lapsed into a tenacious silence, through long months of imprisonment and repeated questioning.⁹ Taalbi was more cooperative, but also denied any specific motivation while casting blame on Yacoub: ‘The devil seized us, and personally, I was the puppet of [Yacoub] and of M’hamed ben Sadok [identified as the insurgents’ executioner]. The former was able to inspire a real terror in me, and I trembled before him like the ass trembles before the hyena.’ Later, he claimed to have been ‘blinded’ by Yacoub.¹⁰ Most other suspects proffered similar denials, telling magistrates that they had been coerced or had not been present at all. These explanations, framed in terms of Yacoub’s religious power, were taken as simple evasion by French investigators and observers, and encouraged them to fill the perceived silence with their own interpretations. While frustrating, perhaps, to those in search of a programmatic statement of revolutionary intent, they also reinforce the value of reading more deeply for a ‘hidden second plot’ within the insurgents’ actions.¹¹

The administrators’ focus on Islam as the underlying source of the violence was both convenient and politically self-serving. Masselot, Luciani, and Paul Marel, the administrator of the commune mixte (Muslim-majority rural district) to which Margueritte belonged, all found clear evidence of social, economic and cultural tensions between colonial subjects and settlers in the Zaccar. Investigators catalogued the Righas’ loss of over half their land, including critical forest and grazing rights, and increasing dependence on wage labour in settler vineyards and farms. They enumerated ongoing disputes over livestock damage to settler crops, colonists’ mistreatment of indigenous workers and loansharking by European villagers, as well as conflicts over taxation and forest access. Dismissing this evidence in favour of a religious explanation relieved both the colonial administration and Algeria’s settlers of responsibility, defending both against potential charges that the structural inequalities of settler colonialism had pushed Muslim Algerians to the breaking point.

Moreover, blaming Islamic fanaticism preserved claims that European settlement was beneficial to colonial subjects. ‘It is absolutely not poverty, but religious teachings that drove the natives’, procureur Thomy-Lucien Poinsier, among others, insisted. In fact, he went on, ‘[c]olonization, rather than impoverishing them, has only, to the contrary, improved their fate’ by creating jobs and new sources of revenue for Righa families. As proof, Poinsier suggested (ignoring the obvious ironies in his own words) that wages paid by settler employers had allowed many members of the tribe to buy back land taken from them earlier.¹²

The French authorities’ religious interpretation of the Margueritte events appeared self evident to most of their readers. Widely echoed by parliamentarians and journalists in both colony and metropole, it was rooted in racialized stereotypes of Algerian Islam that pervaded nineteenth-century colonial thinking, as well as in more specific, fin-de-siècle anxieties about Islamic religious networks. Although deeper investigation turned up little to substantiate these fears, the central role of Islam in French understandings of Algerian society helped to define French views of the revolt.

Even before the first French soldier set foot in Ottoman Algiers in the spring of 1830, policymakers and public opinion in France were convinced that the Muslim faith was innately fanatical and that Algerians were the most zealous of all its followers. Fuelled by centuries of generalized Christian hostility to Islam and more recent conflicts with the Ottoman Empire, early nineteenth-century French ideas about Algerian Muslims as inherently violent were then reinforced by the brutal war of conquest.¹³ In the decades following the 1830 invasion, Algerian resistance was mobilized by religious leaders and framed as a jihad, holy war or divine struggle. Early opposition to French occupation was led by the emir Abdelkader, who fought under the title ‘commander of the faithful’ to maintain Islamic rule in Algeria from 1832 to 1847. The following half-century saw over a dozen revolts inspired by messianic figures claiming to be the mul al-Sa‘a. or ‘master of the Hour’, whose appearance and eradication of non-Muslims was said to herald the arrival of the Messiah and the Last Judgement.¹⁴

The historian Mouloud Haddad considers Margueritte the last of these millenarian uprisings, and there is evidence that at least some of the participants saw the events of 26 April in these eschatological terms. For instance, two of her Algerian employees ordered colonist Maria Chabrut to stop work, ‘the master of the hour having arrived’.¹⁵ Suspected insurgent ‘Medjdoub’ Djelloul ben Djilali, a sixty-five-year-old farmer, similarly informed the investigating magistrate that ‘it was a real holy war that Yacoub fomented, because he was called the “master of the moment”’.¹⁶ Further links to popular Muslim eschatology lay in the fact that Yacoub and his core followers first gathered on 26 April for a pilgrimage to Bou Amama, leader of a major mahdist uprising in the early 1880s now in exile in Morocco. Efforts by the Righas’ qaïd (French-appointed tribal leader) to stop them seem to have provoked Yacoub and his companions to chase the qaïd into a nearby French forestry post, where they were confronted by and killed the garde champêtre (rural warden).¹⁷ Only then did the group turn towards Margueritte itself.

But in French interpretations of the revolt, the tradition of the mul al-Sa‘a dissolved into more generic ideas about Algerian Islam. Most commentators, official and public, fell back on the less specific term ‘marabout’, designating a Sufi holy man or saint possessed of spiritual and religious charisma (baraka), to describe Yacoub. In interviewing witnesses and suspects, the juge d’instruction returned over and over to questions about Yacoub’s relatively recent turn from a life of no remarkable piety to one of highly visible devotion.¹⁸ He painstakingly compiled and confirmed reports that the young day labourer had ‘distinguished himself for some time by excessive religious practices and Quranic strictness’.¹⁹ When questioned by magistrates, local religious leaders reported that for several years Yacoub ‘had had crises of mystical exaltation, that he was seized with nervous trembling, that he then pronounced meaningless words and engaged in various thaumaturgical exercises, up to the moment where, exhausted and covered in sweat, he collapsed to the ground’.²⁰ Perhaps a year earlier, he had left his job with one of Margueritte’s largest European landowners and begun to draw attention at spiritual gatherings for ecstatic dancing, laying his hands on hot coals and plunging his arm into boiling water, and causing spectators to lose consciousness after kissing him or sucking his tongue. This ‘convulsionary’ behaviour was on especially conspicuous display in the days leading up to the uprising, first at the annual festival of a local saint on 22 April and then at a ta‘am (feast) at the tomb of saint Sidi Mohammed ben Yahia, on the night of the 23rd to the 24th.

Nothing in his background gave Yacoub any particular claim to religious prestige. Like other independent rural holy men of the nineteenth-century Maghreb, he was neither learned nor of saintly lineage. He was not, the qaïd and other Righa witnesses confirmed, ‘of maraboutic descent’.²¹ And yet he had accumulated sufficient baraka to attract a small following that met regularly to pray near the compound of the older, relatively wealthy ‘Taalbi’ el Hadj Benaïcha, at a spot called Bou Haya. It was this group, known to some locals as ‘the brotherhood of Bou Haya’, that first gathered and then pursued the qaïd on the morning of 26 April.

Moreover, in the days before the revolt, Yacoub had undertaken a kind of moral crusade among his fellow Muslims, forbidding clients in Margueritte’s two cafés maures from smoking or gaming on the grounds that ‘it was not good’.²² These strictures were relatively ill appreciated by both the café-keepers and their customers, but were nonetheless, however grudgingly, obeyed. In order to test his apparent ability to gain sway over fellow Muslims ‘by engaging them in buffooneries (jongleries) that captivated their minds so fully as to take away their free will and suggest to them ideas and resolutions they would not have had without him’, judicial authorities went so far as to ask a group of doctors to examine Yacoub’s mental powers by hypnotizing him.²³ The tests were inconclusive, even by the examiners’ highly specious criteria, but underlying them was the conviction that ‘in Muslim countries, visionaries and convulsionaries are always the object of a great veneration’ and thus a potentially subversive force.²⁴

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, marabouts, despite their local influence, were seen as less dangerous to French authority than Muslim institutions of longer geographical reach: the Sufi brotherhoods (turuq, sing. tariqa) of the Maghreb or pan-Islamist influences from further east. As Julia Clancy-Smith notes, French officials at the turn of the twentieth century were ‘frantic about the twin threats to France’s African empire posted by Pan-Islam and by those sufi brotherhoods perceived as politically active’.²⁵ Colonial officials investigating the Margueritte case thus worried much more about the possible links between Yacoub and his companions and these broader regional and transnational Islamic networks.

The Sufi turuq linked adepts across the colony and even across North Africa, creating alternative structures of authority that challenged the hegemony of the colonial state. Harsh repression and shifting strategies of survival had moved many orders away from overt, armed resistance since 1870, but fin-de-siècle French observers continued to consider them dangerous.²⁶ They remained, according to an 1897 study published under the auspices of Governor General Jules Cambon, ‘occult governments’, ‘by nature, the enemies of all established powers’.²⁷ As such, their potential involvement raised fears that Margueritte was only the precursor to a general insurrection across the whole colony.

Yacoub, investigators quickly discovered, was a khouan, or follower, of the Rahmaniyya, Algeria’s largest brotherhood. According to El Hadj Tayeb el-Hirtsi, a local Rahmaniyya mukaddam (leader), Yacoub had accompanied him on a pilgrimage to the famous zawiya (Sufi religious centre) of El Hamel, near the Saharan oasis of Bou Saada, several years before. There Yacoub had been initiated by the head of the order himself, Sidi Muhammed Belkacem. It seems that this pilgrimage, which must have pre-dated Shaykh Muhammed’s death in June 1897, was Yacoub’s only tie to El Hamel, but the juge d’instruction nevertheless asked authorities in Bou Saada to search the zawiya for evidence of ‘intrigues’ related to Margueritte. Of particular concern was the possibility of a larger plot involving members of the Mokrani clan, leaders of the great Kabyle insurrection of 1871 in which the Rahmaniyya had played a major role. Several Mokrani sons had since settled at El Hamel, and a mysterious letter seized by colonial officials in Constantine suggested they might be involved in a conspiracy with Bou Amama that had somehow also drawn in Yacoub and the Righas.²⁸ This search came to nought, however, as did inquiries among local Rahmaniyya leaders in and around Miliana and the Zaccar.

El Hadj Tayeb, like other local mukaddams, denied any further ties to Yacoub, while insisting that the order’s days of rebellion lay well behind them. They had supported the Mokrani revolt, especially in eastern Algeria, but Shaykh Muhammad and his successor, his daughter Zaynab, had adopted a more conciliatory stance towards the French. Five local mukaddams all emphasized that the Rahmaniyya now eschewed any political or criminal activity, and expected its followers to respect and obey the French authorities. They also disavowed the sorts of ecstatic practices for which Yacoub had become notorious. Their doctrine, they declared, consisted only of ‘doing good, preaching [good], and carrying out charitable acts’. Rituals involved nothing more than invoking the name of God and the Prophet a hundred times after each day’s morning and evening prayers. Only ‘savages and mad dogs’ would engage in ‘sorcery’ or ‘magic’, in the words of ‘Belarbi Salah’ Ali ben Muhammed, head of Miliana’s mosque and mukaddam of the Rahmaniyya for the city. Other Rahmaniyya leaders interviewed similarly rejected any hint that their followers indulged in excessive forms of exaltation. At most, they might play the tambourine at a ta‘am and recite the name of Allah while turning; but never with the degree of excitation associated with ‘dervishes’ or members of the Aissawiyya order.²⁹

Taalbi el Hadj ben Aïcha readily admitted belonging to the Tayyibiyya, whose spiritual centre lay in Morocco at the famous zawiya of Ouezzane.³⁰ Early French colonial officials had considered this the most dangerous of the turuq because of its historical ties to the Moroccan sultanate and a prophecy that the founder’s descendants would someday reign over all of the Algerian tribes. The order’s material support for Abdelkader in the 1830s and suspected affiliation with Bou Maza, leader of a major mahdist rebellion in 1845, reinforced fears of the Tayyibiyya as a vector of hostile, foreign intervention in Algerian affairs.³¹ The French consequently pursued a policy of conciliation towards its leaders throughout the nineteenth century, using diplomatic agents in Morocco to curry favour with Ouezzane. These efforts culminated in an 1892 ‘protection’ agreement by which the Government General of Algeria agreed to subsidize the order’s establishments and its ruling family, in exchange for oversight of the order’s leadership in Algeria.³² By the turn of the century, French native affairs officers expressed cautious confidence in the Tayyibiyya’s acquiescence to their authority.

The order’s position in the Zaccar paralleled these larger developments. In the conquest period, its affiliates, whose meeting point was the tomb of a local saint on the Djebel Zaccar, had taken up arms against the French.³³ By 1901, however, their numbers had fallen significantly, and colonial authorities saw little threat from their regional leaders. Mohammed ben Abdelkader Bourkiza, the Tayyibiyya mukaddam for the Righas, for instance, was deemed calm and sympathetic to the French. He maintained ‘excellent relations with Europeans’ and had ‘never showed himself hostile to our domination’.³⁴

Taalbi’s affiliation with the order nevertheless raised suspicion, especially because Yacoub and other captured insurgents claimed that they had planned to stop at a Tayyibiyya zawiya in Besnès (Oran) en route to join Bou Amama in Morocco. Taalbi himself had made a pilgrimage to Besnès twice before, although he denied any intention of accompanying Yacoub and his companions there on 26 April.³⁵ These potential links prompted the investigating magistrates to order a search of the religious centre and the questioning of its head, just as they had done at El Hamel. The searchers were to determine ‘whether the uprising of 26 April had been planned among Muslims from different countries or at least expected anywhere except at Margueritte’.³⁶ But here again they came up empty-handed. The zawiya’s head, Sidi Merabet, cooperated fully while protesting his total ignorance of the Margueritte events and his loyalty to the French. Not only had he had no contact whatsoever with Yacoub or anyone else in the young man’s entourage, but his family was well known for ‘its devotion to France and to the French’ since the very beginning of the occupation of Algeria. Even when other branches of the Tayyibiyya took up arms against the invaders, the Merabet family had remained neutral or openly supported the French, he insisted.³⁷

Such disavowals, along with the fruitless searches of the El Hamel and Besnès zawiyas, allowed the brotherhoods to escape legal prosecution for complicity in the Margueritte uprising, but they did little to dispel persistent French anxieties about Islamic networks. Within the Native Affairs department of the Government General, the failed searches were taken as an imperative to maintain and even expand surveillance of the Sufi orders.³⁸ Others, especially among settlers convinced of ‘the latent hatred that the natives harbour towards Europeans’, simply continued to insist that the turuq must have been involved. Poinsier, the procureur, remained convinced that both the Rahmaniyya and Tayyibiyya were still ‘animated by the same spirit of fanaticism’ that had driven their armed resistance decades before. For Poinsier, the fact that both Yacoub and Taalbi belonged to ‘brotherhoods whose excesses of folly had left bloody traces on the history of the colony’ was proof of a wide-ranging plot to wage ‘holy war’ against European colonists.³⁹

Most troubling of all was the possibility that such an anti-French conspiracy might include not just a handful of men inspired by a charismatic individual or regional brotherhoods, but even larger, pan-Islamist networks based in the Ottoman Empire. French observers knew, or thought they knew, that ‘for a number of years the idea of pan-Islamism has haunted the spirits and galvanized the peoples, great and small, of the diverse countries subject to the law of the Prophet’, with the active encouragement of Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II.⁴⁰ Behind almost any Algerian contact with points further east, French authorities and settler commentators saw the hand of Constantinople, fanning Muslims’ religious feeling in order to unify them against Christian, European authorities. Hypersensitized to ‘the spectre of pan-Islamic “plots”’, the Margueritte investigators latched onto reports that a Moroccan holy man and a ‘marabout from Baghdad’ had been spotted in the Zaccar shortly before the Righa uprising.⁴¹ Their suspicions of these foreigners were widely relayed by the press on both sides of the Mediterranean.

The Moroccan, a representative of the Aissawiyya and descendant of the order’s founder, turned out to have been travelling around Algeria for some time before the Righa uprising.⁴² Having left Morocco six months earlier for the Hajj, twenty-nine-year-old Abderrahman ben Dris had missed his boat at the Algerian port of Philippeville and been forced to abandon his trip to Mecca. Instead, he undertook a circuitous tour of eastern and central Algeria, collecting alms, visiting holy sites and meeting Aissawiyya adepts along the way. Although Dris had secured the necessary authorization from French authorities in Oran and had his papers duly stamped in each town he visited, his French-speaking guide and three suitcases of luxury clothing and religious books aroused the suspicions of Miliana’s police chief. Reporting that ‘The presence in Algeria of this venerated religious figure of the Aïssaouas [Aissawiyya], travelling in the company of a young native who speaks French properly and is passing himself off as a worker, seeming to me dangerous for security’, the policeman had the travellers arrested on 24 April for proselytism and soliciting donations. They were first held in the Miliana jail and then taken to Algiers for an administrative hearing. There, Dris was released on condition that he return immediately to Morocco, while his Algerian guide was incarcerated for unauthorized travel within the colony. But when the magistrates in Margueritte caught wind of their presence in the region, they immediately asked that the two be returned to Blida for questioning. ‘Even though no compromising documents were found on these two natives, [...] given the reasons for their arrest and their presence in the region of Miliana just a few days before the Margueritte events, we should carefully examine their actions at that time’, the governor-general’s secretary ordered.⁴³ No further evidence was found to implicate either man in the uprising, but the fact of their foreignness was enough to give them a ‘highly suspect appearance’ in French eyes.⁴⁴ Several other Moroccans with ties to Margueritte, mostly seasonal migrants, were also arrested on suspicion of participating in the revolt.⁴⁵

Equally sinister to investigators were reports that ‘a Turkish figure from Baghdad’ had been seen at the feast of Sidi Bouzar on 22 April. Here too, however, suspicions of pan-Islamist meddling proved unfounded. Mohamed ben Chaoui Djilali was, indeed, an Ottoman subject, who had arrived in the region sometime in the winter of 1900–01. But despite his foreign and maraboutic origins, Djilali turned out to be well known in and around Miliana. He claimed descent from Sidi Abdelkader el Djilali, the founder of the Qadiriyya brotherhood who had spent a good portion of his life in Miliana. For this reason, Djilali had been visiting the city regularly for over a decade. Each time, he stayed at the Grand Mosque and made pilgrimages to the tombs of local saints associated with his ancestor, visited Muslim notables and gave presentations about his travels. In 1901, he had, as always, obtained a passport authorizing him to travel in Algeria and to stay in Miliana, and circulated openly in the area. He had attended the feast at Sidi Bouzar on April 24, but engaged in no untoward behaviour. Nor did he have any personal relationship with Yacoub, Taalbi or any other insurgents, according to the qaïd of the Righas.⁴⁶

In all of these cases, from Yacoub’s personal piety to the ‘predications’ of the so-called ‘marabout from Baghdad’, reports of Muslim religious activity in and around Margueritte were borne out by investigation, but could not be tied to the events of 26 April. Many Righas were indeed connected to spiritual worlds and institutions that reached far beyond the confines of the Zaccar. There was no sign that these linkages played a causal role in the Righas’ actions, however. Some colonial officials and republican lawmakers, especially at the highest levels, did ultimately conclude that the Margueritte revolt was purely local in character, although they clung to religious explanations for the violence. Powerful anxieties about the inherent fanaticism of Algerian Islam, the subversive potential of Sufi brotherhoods and the dangers of pan-Islamist organizing drove most, especially settler representatives and nationalist critics of the Republican colonial administration, to overlook the evidence. Even more measured assessments continued to insist that religion was the underlying cause of uprisings. French fantasies about Islamic plotting to overthrow the colonial regime shaped interpretations of the case, even when a closer examination of the insurgents’ actions suggests that their deepest meanings lay not in efforts to ‘drive the French into the sea’ but in the everyday social and cultural practices of rural colonial life.

III

Forcible conversion to Islam appeared in the insurgents’ repertoire from the very beginning of the journée of 26 April. At the forestry post where the first violent confrontations took place, it seems that the first colonist seized, the garde champêtre Clément Labessède, was asked to ‘pray’ before he was killed.⁴⁷ It is more certain that the next Europeans captured in front of the post, a hotelier from Miliana, a farmer from nearby Vesoul Bénian and the administrateur-adjoint (deputy administrator) of Hammam-Righa, were forced down from their vehicles and horses at gunpoint and obliged to recite the shahada, ‘There is no God but God, Mohammed is his messenger’.

With the capture of the administrateur-adjoint, Raoul Monteils, a final step was added to the ‘script’ rapidly emerging in the insurgents’ treatment of their captives: a change of clothing to complete the conversion ritual.⁴⁸ As the hotelier told investigators, Monteils was pulled down from his horse and into the middle of the road, where ‘he was undressed, leaving only his underwear and his shirt, and he was then made to put on a spare pair of baggy trousers, or a seroual, that my waiter Djilali had brought’, as well as a burnous, the long, loose hooded cloak commonly worn by Algerian men, taken from one of Yacoub’s companions and a chechia, the soft red cap worn by many Algerian men.⁴⁹ The two native troopers accompanying Monteils were likewise forced to recite the Islamic creed and stripped of their uniform burnouses, which were replaced by plainer garments.⁵⁰ Thus transformed, the three officials were forced, along with the other captives also now ‘dressed as an Arab’, to join the insurgent band. This script was then re-enacted with each European male encountered as the group, now numbering about thirty, made its way into the village.

What was the significance of this ritual of religious and sartorial conversion, which was, as far as I have found, unique in the French Maghreb? The conversion of Christian captives to Islam had a long history in precolonial North Africa, as did the adoption of ‘Oriental’ garb by voluntary Western converts in the nineteenth century.⁵¹ Conversely, although French authorities explicitly rejected Catholic proselytization among Algerian Muslims, the imperial ideology of the ‘civilizing mission’ invested clothing with great significance as an index of indigenous acculturation to French norms and acceptance of French rule. Whether using boys’ clothes as a criterion for admission to colonial schools or encouraging women to strip off their veils, the French saw the adoption of Western styles of dress as both a means to and a result of Algerians’ ‘assimilation’.⁵² But the forcible conversion of the Margueritte settlers, if it seems at first glance to neatly reverse the assimilationist ideal, was also a far cry from the kind of ‘sartorial Orientalism’ that drew European adventurers and tourists to embrace Algerian clothes and even Islam itself.⁵³ More important for understanding the insurgents’ actions was the role of clothing in defining identities and social relations in colonial villages such as Margueritte.

In a rural agricultural settlement, where Europeans and Muslim colonial subjects worked side by side and interacted with a surprising degree of promiscuity, the boundaries between colonizer and colonized were far less stable than in more segregated colonial cities. Settlers thus found themselves obliged to constantly perform their ‘Europeanness’ in order to maintain their sense of ethno-religious superiority over colonized Algerians. In this context of categorical vulnerability, clothes served a critical function as what Beatriz Perrone-Moisés, following Aparecida Vilaça, calls ‘differentiating resources’.⁵⁴ This function can be seen in the lengths to which settler men went to defend their clothing, especially their hats, during the Margueritte events. The ritualized conversion imposed by the Righa insurgents drew on the overlapping meanings of clothing as a way of performing identity and policing social boundaries among and between Muslim and French Algerians.

Neither France nor Algeria was a stranger to sartorial politics at the turn of the twentieth century. Like other states in the modern Mediterranean world, both French and Ottoman governments had long used regulations on dress to enforce political and social distinctions. The royal legislation that restricted certain luxury items to the aristocracy and imposed plain dress on the bourgeoisie in eighteenth-century France had its counterpart in contemporary Ottoman laws regulating the modesty, colour and style of clothing allowed to different confessional, ethnic and occupational communities within the Empire.⁵⁵ In the long nineteenth century, centralizing reformers in both states used uniforms and sartorial restrictions to legitimize new forms of sovereignty and subjecthood. Convinced, as Cissie Fairchilds writes, of ‘the formative and didactic powers of dress’, the French revolutionaries of the 1790s instituted official costumes for public functionaries and rules governing ordinary citizens’ dress that sought to clearly and visibly identify the place of every Frenchman in revolutionary society.⁵⁶ In the 1820s, Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II oversaw a ‘clothing revolution’ that similarly aimed to re-establish sultanic authority through control over his subjects’ attire. Detailed regulations prescribed clearly differentiated uniforms for military, civil and religious officials, while imposing a single form of headgear, the fez, on all bureaucrats.⁵⁷

Whether the Righa men who participated in the uprising of April 1901 knew of these legal precedents is unknown, but they surely had some practical knowledge of costume’s importance in demarcating social and political differences in both the Ottoman and the French empires. Until Mahmud II eliminated such distinctions in 1829, non-Muslims in most of the Dar al-Islam were required to wear distinctive clothing and other visible markers to identify themselves as outsiders to the ‘umma (community of believers).⁵⁸ And Muslim Algerians in Margueritte would have been aware that the French Third Republic continued to prize clothing as a visible sign of its agents’ legal status. Indeed, uniformed officials physically embodied republican sovereignty in the colony. In Algeria’s communes mixtes, for instance, the administrateur who ‘incarnates France’ was a ‘chief in uniform, wearing the blue dolman jacket, iron grey pants with blue stripes, blue képi decorated with oak and olive leaves’.⁵⁹

The indigénat of 1881, which defined a set of crimes specific to colonial subjects, made it a punishable offence for an Algerian to behave or speak disrespectfully towards any representative of the French state, in order to preserve his dignity and authority. Colonists and administrators alike thought it necessary ‘to consider as a disrespectful act for an indigène, when he finds himself in the presence of a functionary of the colonial administration in uniform, to refrain from all external marks of respect’.⁶⁰ And if earlier enforcement of this provision had not already taught them its importance, the Margueritte insurgents would have quickly learned the lesson. The French penal code, under which they were ultimately prosecuted, also considered offences against government officials ‘in the exercise of their functions’, defined by the wearing of an official uniform or sash, to be aggravated. Thus the charges handed down for the murder of the garde champêtre Labessède, the attempted murder of the administrateur-adjoint Monteils and the attempted murder of several gendarmes present at the final shoot-out all specified that the victims had been acting in their official capacity at the time of the crime.⁶¹ Monteils was so personally outraged by such offence to his uniform that he savagely beat a prisoner he identified as having forced a burnous on him, boasting to a military doctor ‘I bent the iron bar on him, and he must be pretty well smashed up inside.’⁶²

Both Muslim Algerians and settlers in Margueritte would also have been conscious of the unofficial role of clothing in defining social status within their communities. Algerian witnesses, for example, identified Yacoub as the insurgents’ ‘sultan’ by the luxurious gandoura (long, loose robe) and linen turban given to him by his followers. As M’hamed Mohamed ben Ali attested, Yacoub had appeared ‘very well dressed’, reinforcing his authority over his fellow Muslims.⁶³ This association of fine clothing with religious standing reflected North African traditions of offering garments to holy men and saintly individuals as signs of respect and veneration. Abderrahman ben Dris, the Moroccan ‘marabout’ arrested in Miliana, it will be remembered, first aroused suspicion because of his suitcases full of expensive, elegant clothing. French authorities took this sartorial splendour as an indicator of his potential political influence.

European clothing apparently held significance for insurgents as well. They stripped their captives of trousers, jackets, vests and especially hats as part of the conversion ritual, but also sought out items of European-style clothing in pillaging settler homes and shops. A list of stolen items compiled by police show that in addition to firearms and cutting implements, looters especially prized pocket watches, shoes (espadrilles), socks and shirts.⁶⁴ Tellingly, although both village stores sold Algerian-style garments, burnouses and gandouras do not appear on the list.

Most contentious, however, were the hats worn by European men. In virtually every encounter between insurgents and colonists, the rebels’ first hostile gesture was to throw the European’s hat to the ground. Jean-Baptiste Lopez, a Spanish vineyard worker, told the investigating judge that Taalbi had ‘imperiously’ ordered him to throw down his beret before obliging him to recite the shahada.⁶⁵ Laurent Goublet, the elderly husband of the village schoolteacher, reported that his beret had been ripped off and thrown away.⁶⁶ The importance of this gesture to the insurgents is reflected in their violent punishment of those who failed to comply promptly with such orders. Marc Jenoudet, the largest European landowner in the village and one of the first settlers captured, had his hat knocked off his head three times and was beaten unconscious for his insistence on retrieving it. Only after this did he grasp his assailants’ instructions to recite the shahada and successfully perform the conversion, abandoning his hat in the process. One victim, an Italian vineyard worker known as Il Vecchio, was shot and killed when he picked his hat up while laughing at what he believed to be a joke on the part of a co-worker.⁶⁷

The insurgents’ focus on hats, as well as settler men’s reluctance to give them up reflected the hat’s strong association with Europe and European masculinity in the nineteenth century. In the Ottoman Empire, European-style hats were adopted by Westernizing reformers, making the epithet ‘men “in hats”’ an eloquent condemnation of those who adopted ‘a headcovering that served to separate non-Muslims from Muslims’. Modernizers Selim III and Abdulhamid II were both attacked for supposedly planning to ‘impose the hat’ in order to undermine their subjects’ faith and identity as Muslims, materialized in the wearing of a turban or fez.⁶⁸ By the 1890s in Algeria, as Neil McMaster notes, some Algerian men had begun wearing many French-style garments, but continued to prefer fezzes to hats ‘to show that the individual, while changing his clothes, means to remain a Muslim’. In the 1920s, Algerian migrants returning from France developed the custom of ceremonially discarding metropolitan headgear as their ships sailed into the port of Algiers, throwing hats and berets overboard ‘as a symbol of reintegration’ into Algerian society.⁶⁹

Hats also served as a ‘crucial signifier of social standing’ in nineteenth-century Europe, where ‘the hat and all the gestures made with it were supreme indices of social class’ among men.⁷⁰ Wearing stovepipe hats distinguished the bourgeois elite from the cap-wearing, working-class masses. Raising, touching, removing or lowering one’s hat conveyed greetings, respect or deference to one’s social equals or betters as required in the course of everyday encounters.⁷¹ These norms continued to hold in Algeria, as attested by an 1893 dispute caused when a colonist named Auguste Jeantelot failed to remove his hat in the office of then-administrateur-adjoint of Hammam-Righa, Emile Couret. Couret’s explosion of rage prompted Jeantelot to file a formal complaint with the prefecture.⁷²

In this case, the dispute arose from the ambiguity in the two men’s relative social status. Jeantelot was a long-time inhabitant of the commune and had even served as a municipal councillor and director of the village band. He had properly removed his hat upon first entering the municipal offices and then waited, ‘hat down’, for some time before being summoned into Couret’s private office. There he had found five or six young men standing around the fire with their heads covered. Assuming himself equal or superior to this group, he had replaced his own head-covering, only to find himself attacked by Couret with wild gestures and ‘insulting words’ as ‘an impolite, rude person’. Jeantelot was left ‘speechless’ by what he saw as the adjoint’s hypocrisy, given the other hatted men in the room, and the ‘discourteous words’ Couret had addressed to a man of Jeantelot’s own standing. Couret, for his part, insisted that as a representative of the state, ‘he would not accept that anyone stand before him without uncovering [his head]’. When informed of Jeantelot’s complaint, Couret responded by demanding that the colonist be prosecuted for defamation or insult to a functionary exercising his office.⁷³ The affair was ultimately filed without further action, but it neatly demonstrates the significance of hats to Algeria’s Europeans.

If head-coverings were important markers of status within both Muslim and settler communities, they seem to have been just as important in demarcating boundaries between colonists and Muslim colonial subjects. The striking clarity and indignation with which Margueritte’s European men recounted these confrontations to investigators, even weeks later, suggests that they experienced the loss of their hats as a particularly sharp degradation. In the weeks and months following the uprising, a number of them voiced surprising anger towards Marc Jenoudet, who had acted as an intermediary, translating the insurgents’ orders and encouraging villagers to comply with orders to convert and change clothes. After initially applauding Jenoudet for saving their lives, his peers and colonial authorities later turned against him for facilitating the ‘humiliation’ of an entire village, an act ‘whose recounting will be a stain on the history of Algerian Colonization’.⁷⁴ For the Righas, the replacement of Europeans’ hats with chechias or improvised turbans may well have been intended as an insult. But a few statements offered by insurgents to explain the conversion of captured Europeans suggests that there was more to it. Especially suggestive are reports from two witnesses in particular, who were told by Algerian acquaintances that conversion would not only save their lives but also allow them to remain in the village. François Morisson, a European day labourer, claimed that when he asked ‘Serir-El Hirtsi’ Abdelkader ben Belkacem where the prisoners were being taken, Serir-El Hirtsi responded that they were going to Miliana to buy new ‘Arab’ clothing. He then continued, ‘From now on, you will work as in the past, but you will be Muslims’.⁷⁵ Marie Gabert, a domestic servant in Marc Jenoudet’s household, asked a trusted farmhand what would become of the men who had been taken prisoner and received a very similar answer: ‘Now the French are finished; you will make yourselves Muslim or you will leave your lands.’⁷⁶

These statements, however second hand and mediated, suggest that the insurgents did not necessarily seek to eradicate the French physically from Algeria. They did not massacre the inhabitants of Margueritte and reclaim their property by force. As colonial investigators acknowledged, the lives of those who performed the conversion ritual to the insurgents’ satisfaction were spared. One witness told the juge de paix that Yacoub himself had told the carter Gex and his servants, ‘Now you are Muslims, and your lives are saved.’⁷⁷ Edmond Soulé, a farmhand on Jenoudet’s estate, agreed: ‘I was able to save my life by reciting, for better or worse, a prayer that [estate manager] Gay spelled out for me and M. Jenoudet helped me practise.’⁷⁸

In this respect, the underlying logics of the 26 April revolt resemble the reversal of social hierarchies that characterized European popular traditions such as Carnival or the charivari. Unlike these practices, however, in which members of the lower orders of society appropriated the titles, costumes and authority of the powerful, the Margueritte insurgents stripped European settlers of the material and spiritual markers of their ‘prestige’ and the ethno-religious inequalities of French colonialism that they represented. If the colonists became Muslims in faith and in dress, then they would also become ‘Muslim colonial subjects’, and the privileges they enjoyed by virtue of their European ethnicity and French citizenship would evaporate. They would come under the moral codes governing relations within the Muslim Algerian community, although the insurrection was repressed before participants could determine what this would mean in practice.

Rather than an explosion of Islamic fanaticism, as French colonial officials insisted, the forced conversion of Margueritte’s settlers appears as an attempt by Righa insurgents to imagine and impose new, more equitable social relations using the cultural materials of everyday village life. Actions such as beating or killing European men then responded to colonists’ failure or refusal to accept and perform their roles in this revised colonial order. But by mobilizing the tools of everyday life to reorder their world, the violence of 26 April threw the fabric of rural colonial society into sharp relief. The ritual conversion and reclothing of Margueritte’s European settlers thus helps to uncover a more mundane, but no less critical ‘second plot’ of social practices by which colonial hierarchies were embodied. These are as important for understanding the dynamics of settler colonialism in French Algeria as fitting the Margueritte revolt into taxonomies of anti-colonial resistance.

This article benefited from the generous support of many colleagues and agencies. The author thanks participants in the seminar Pour une histoire de l’Algérie sociale de l’Algérie colonisée at the Centre d’histoire sociale des mondes contemporains (UMR 8058) in Paris, the University of Iowa History Department Colloquium, the French Studies Workshop at Stanford University and Columbia University’s Beyond France University Seminar, as well as Sarah Ghabrial, Rebecca Scales and the anonymous reviewer for French History, for their feedback. Research was made possible by grants from the University of Iowa, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and a fellowship at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study (France), with the financial support of the French State programme ‘Investissements d’avenir’ managed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-11-LABX-0027-01 Labex RFIEA+).

Footnotes