The Revolution of 1848 and AlgeriaAuthor(s): Benjamin McRae AmossSource: The French Review, Vol. 75, No. 4 (Mar., 2002), pp. 744-754Published by: American Association of Teachers of FrenchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3133303 .Accessed: 06/05/2011 13:45

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THE FRENCH REVIEW, Vol. 75, No. 4, March 2002 Printed in U.S.A.

The Revolution of 1848 and Algeria

by Benjamin McRae Amoss

FRANCE'S REVOLUTION of February 1848 seemed to make possible the real- ization on the large scale of what had been only local implementations or unrealized dreams of progressive social reforms. During the July Mon-

archy, the intellectual utopianism inherited from the Enlightenment had cultivated ties with the democratic and labor movements, thus implanting itself in the terrain of political struggle: social thinkers and workers' advo- cates made common cause in contesting the bourgeois order. As Paul Benichou writes:

Aussi est-ce en s'opposant A cet ordre que les tendances utopiques de la classe intellectuelle ont trouv6 ' se fixer dans la realite sociale.... [L]a levee democratique qui a mis en cause de fagon plus ou moins radicale la domination bourgeoise sous la monarchie de Juillet a attire l'Utopie a elle. (329)

In time, the practice of colonization would be drawn into the nexus of intellectual speculation and social reality Benichou describes.

A well-known accomplishment of the 1848 Revolution is the abolition of slavery in France's possessions overseas.1 The provisional government acted less decisively in the area of colonization. Historians of French co- lonialism underline the unsystematic if not erratic and capricious nature of the extension of French sovereignty in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific

during the years of the July Monarchy and the Second Empire. For Raoul Girardet, for example,

I1 s'agit... d'initiatives multiples et dispersees, ne s'integrant dans aucun systeme general de doctrine ou de pensee, repondant a des preoccupa- tions momentanees, lides elles-memes aux modalites les plus diverses de la conjoncture exterieure et interieure. (25)

He situates in the last years of the Second Empire the development of a coherent colonial doctrine based on the intersection of economic interests and those of military officers, missionaries, geographical societies, and social utopians (43).

One undertaking of the previous regime that did at least come under challenge during the heady months preceding the June Days was the

744

ALGERIA AND 1848 745

colonialist project in Algeria. Girardet stresses the role of the periodical press, including the Revue des Deux Mondes and one of its influential con- tributors, Gabriel Charmes, in propagating among the public during the last years of the Second Empire and the early years of the Third Republic a current of thought in favor of colonial expansion (57-58, 63). In 1848, however, Leonce de Lavergne (1809-80), an elected deputy and an offi- cial at the Foreign Ministry before becoming a contributor to the Revue, saw the days following the February Revolution as a moment to recon- sider the pursuit of colonization in Algeria. His proposal received an indirect reply in the pages of the same periodical two issues later when Thomas-Robert Bugeaud (1784-1849), Governor-General of Algeria from 1840 until his resignation in 1847 and a member of the National As-

sembly, wrote that it was the continued colonization of Algeria that

promised to remedy France's social ills. The implicit dialogue between

Lavergne and Bugeaud on the subject of colonialism-a historical argu- ment in which the colonized land and its indigenous inhabitants remain

offstage, projected, defined, and made sense of only to the extent that

they intersect with the interests of the metropole-shows the imperialist discourse Edward Said analyzes in his Culture and Imperialism at work at a critical moment in French history.

For both Lavergne and Bugeaud, their imperialist assumption of an

Algeria lacking the political and social institutions that constitute mod- ern civilization had a positive counterpart: the land provided a domain

open for experimentation, a proxy for France itself. On the one hand, Lavergne, sympathetic to revolutionary ideals, would prepare the way for progress in France by checking its colonialist impulse toward Algeria and instead exporting there the seeds of political and social reform.

Taking root in Algerian soil, they would produce a prototype of the per- fect society that would nourish France's own utopian dreams. On the other, Bugeaud, a social conservative who had led the French army that

by 1847, after years of warfare, had secured Algeria for France, would obviate the need for social reform in France by exporting to the fields of

Algeria not France's ideals but its unemployed workers.

In the issue of the Revue dated 1 May 1848, Lavergne published an arti- cle called "L'Afrique sous le gouvernement republicain." Raised in Toulouse, Lavergne had been named in 1838 to the Faculte des lettres at

Montpellier as professeur de litterature etrangere; rather than accept the

post he came to Paris, where he served on the Conseil d'Etat as well as at the Foreign Affairs Ministry before being elected deputy in 1846.2 La- vergne also contributed fiction to the Revue, and his article frames his views on the colonization of Algeria within a first-person travel narra- tive. The newly elected Lavergne had journeyed to North Africa in 1846 with three other diputis on the equivalent of a congressional fact-finding mission.

746 FRENCH REVIEW 75.4

Formerly the nominally Ottoman Regence d'Alger, France's posses- sions there had been officially designated Algeria by a decision of the

Ministry of War in 1839. (Tunisia became a French protectorate only in the 1880s, Morocco in 1912.) Lavergne's party had been guided by none other than the Governor-General himself. The problem Algeria posed for

Lavergne and his colleagues in the Assembly was that of cost.3 Could the state bear the looming financial costs of a continuing occupation? In the first paragraph of his narrative, Lavergne presents himself as a model of scientific objectivity, an observing and reasoning machine, free of cum- bersome partis pris. Lavergne's self-positioning is of course a means for

establishing his authority over Algeria, for making it an object of knowl-

edge.4 In the end, he suggests, the proper conclusions will write them- selves on the blank slate he offers:

Jamais rien d'aussi etrange et d'aussi nouveau n'avait frappe mes regards; les Arabes, les colons, l'armee, ces trois grandes fractions de la population algerienne, comparaissaient chaque jour devant nous; la nature africaine, si pleine de mysteres et de contrastes, fournissait aussi un aliment inepuisable a notre attentive curiosit6; a chaque pas, des questions nouvelles s'elevaient. Je ne me lassais pas de regarder, d'inter- roger, craignant toujours de conclure trop vite, et toujours tenu en sus- pens par la variete et l'immensite du problkme. (388)

Lavergne does not deny the ambitiousness of the Monarchy's design- "la prompte fondation d'un empire europeen sur ces plages barbares"; at the same time he mocks the ineptness of its financial overreaching by comparing the Monarchy to an indulgent parent given to frivolous

spending on a promising but spoiled child: "[S]hrieusement, la more- patrie ne comptait pas assez quand il s'agissait de cet enfant prodigue, dont la jeunesse ardente et pittoresque amusait ses loisirs et flattait son

orgueil" (389). So things stood before the Revolution; for Lavergne, "Ce coup de ton-

nerre, qui retentira si long-temps en Europe, a transforme la question d'Afrique comme toutes les autres" (389). How must the relationship between France and her colony change? The image of the child required by circumstances-in the event, the absence of a parent-to grow up quickly informs Lavergne's response: "La verite, disons-le franchement, est que la France a maintenant autre chose a faire, et qu'elle ne peut plus s'occuper de sa colonie avec le meme soin; l'enfant desormais doit

apprendre a marcher de lui-meme et a se passer autant que possible de secours" (394). Despite the presence of 110,000 Europeans in Algeria (up from 29,000 at the moment of Bugeaud's arrival [Montagnon 122], but

only half of French origin, as Lavergne notes) he declares the colonialist

project a failure:

[L]a colonisation, et on entend uniment par ce mot la prompte transplan- tation d'une population europ~enne agricole sur toute la surface du pays ... est et a toujours ~td une chimbre ruineuse, bonne uniquement i

ALGERIA AND 1848 747

eterniser la guerre avec les Arabes, et a rendre toute paix serieuse, toute fondation stable, impossible pour long-temps. (393)

Lavergne baldly states that this concept of colonization, impractical be- cause of the expenses required and the insalubrious climate, depended on the eventual extermination of the native population:

Qu'Wtait-ce en effet que la pensee intime de la colonisation? C'6tait de pres ou de loin l'extermination de la race indigene. On voulait, disait-on, pouvoir se passer des Arabes pour vivre; en pays conquis, on sait ce que cela veut dire. Tout colon de bonne foi, un peu pousse dans ses re- tranchemens, ne manquait pas d'arriver a cette conclusion, l'impossibi- lite pour les deux races de vivre c6te a c6te sur le meme sol. Quand meme la pensee de l'extermination n'euit pas et6 dans les esprits, elle etait une consequence naturelle des faits. Avec la colonisation, on enle- vait peu a peu aux Arabes leurs moyens d'existence, on les for;ait a une guerre sans fin qui n'e it pas ete moins onereuse et moins sanglante pour nous que pour eux, et qui eu^t abouti necessairement a leur destruction. (395-96)

According to Lavergne's perhaps premature judgment, then, "Il n'y a plus d'ailleurs a discuter sur la colonisation. Elle tombe d'elle-meme, et les evenements qui se passent en Europe lui porteront le dernier coup" (395).

Rather than a total disengagement from North Africa, however, La-

vergne foresees a type of partnerships between France and the inhab- itants, Arab and European, of Algeria: the Arabs will supply the land, the labor, the livestock; the Europeans, the equipment and the outlets for trade (401). The two populations will naturally be separated, with the

Europeans living in the cities and towns, the Arabs in the countryside-a pattern Lavergne sees existing already (403). In lieu of dispatching men and money to Algeria, France will offer freedom, embodied in the liberal institutions France's Revolutions have won for her: "Si quelque chose

peut sauver l'Afrique aujourd'hui, comme la France elle-meme, c'est la libert&" (390). Algeria, which Lavergne calls "cet etat en formation," will become the offstage laboratory, a clinical space where the social experi- ments initiated in France will work themselves out:

Place 6gale pour tous A ce soleil de l'Afrique qui doit &clairer un monde nouveau, suffrage universel, droits et devoirs communs; la, plus qu'ailleurs, tous les hommes sont 6gaux, car il n'y a point de passe, point de distinctions anciennes; chacun a un meme but, un egal intiret a garder sa tate sur ses 6paules et a fonder un etablissement durable pour soi et ses enfans. (392)

In the end, then, the enlightened policy Lavergne sets out will make of

Algeria a proxy for the new France the February Revolution has ushered in: it would be in Algerian soil that would take root the ideal society, the "fraternit6 universelle," conceived by social reformers.6

At the end of his article, Lavergne returns to the travel narrative with which he began. His party, he recounts, led by Marshal Bugeaud and ac-

companied by a military escort, encountered in the interior of the country

748 FRENCH REVIEW 75.4

an Arab chieftain, though not, he insists, "un des plus importants" (408). Nevertheless, Bou-Alem is considered rich, and Lavergne inventories the possessions he observed: horses, sheep, oxen, camels. He also notes the ele-

mentary plows with which workers are turning the earth. Though their

rudimentary techniques would be unsatisfactory for farmers in Brie or Flanders, Lavergne admits, the Arab laborers make up for any shortcom-

ings in method by sheer numbers. In his plea for transforming France's

imperialist enterprise in Algeria, Lavergne does not refrain from engaging in the orientalism by which, as Said describes it, "European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of

surrogate and even underground self" (3).7 Thus the Arab peasant suc- ceeds better in combatting the difficult and unrewarding conditions of

Algeria than a French colonist would do: "Habitue' a souffrir, il ne com- prend pas d'autre existence que la sienne, et il a contre les maux de la vie les deux grandes armes de l'Orient: les roves de la superstition et la croy- ance a la fatalit&" (397). When the soldiers set up camp, however, the two to three hundred horsemen under Bou-Alem's control join them, and

together they share a meal Lavergne describes as Homeric (409). Bugeaud, Lavergne, and the other deputies dine with Bou-Alem at his house:

A l'exemple de plusieurs autres chefs arabes, notre h6te avait fait venir un entrepreneur et des

masons frangais de Miliana, et s'etait fait batir une maison dont il tait tres fier. Elle etait situde l'aabri d'un pli de ter- rain et avait l'aspect d'une petite maison bourgeoise d'Europe. (409)

Through his portrait of Bou-Alem, who aspires to nothing more than the comfort of French bourgeois life, Lavergne intends to show that it is the native Algerian, not the French colonist, who can best exploit the coun-

try's potential: "Calculateur habile, tous ces interets nous repondent de sa fidelit&. Qui ne reconnait la le veritable type du grand proprietaire algerien?" (409). Tied to France by economic interests, a self-governing Algeria offers the best possibility for inaugurating the free and produc- tive society Lavergne envisions.

While Lavergne sees continuing efforts to colonize Algeria as posing a threat to France's eventual realization of the ideal society adumbrated in the principles of the February Revolution, Bugeaud sees the colonization of Algeria as providing the solution to the very social problems that

brought about that Revolution. In his own article, published before the June reaction, Bugeaud begins by challenging the presuppositions of Louis Blanc's influential Organisation du travail. Robert Gildea labels this 1839 work "an inspiration to a working class seeking its way forward" (262), and people who came to power in the weeks immediately following the events of February championed the plans Blanc and others such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon put forward for improvements in the conditions

ALGERIA AND 1848 749

of workers. As the utopian projects of social romanticism seemed to move into the realm of the politically achievable, they challenged the sta- tus quo in many areas of life, but in the revolutionary year of 1848, it was the question of labor that dominated the political and social discourse. In

particular, Bugeaud's "Des travailleurs dans nos grandes villes" derides Blanc's plans for establishing agricultural cooperatives in each of France's departments: "[Blanc] a tournm ses regards vers les champs, non pour s'occuper des 20 millions d'ouvriers qui les exploitent si p6niblement, et avec de si l6gers salaires, compares a ceux des villes, mais pour y faire refluer le trop plein des cites" (790). Bugeaud argues that cooperative agriculture is antithetical to productive farming. The proof of this princi- ple exists: Bugeaud will show that what the social reformer wants to insti- tute in France has already been tried and has failed in Algeria. Jules Duval (1813-70) is a figure emblematic of the incipient confluence at this time of

utopian social thought, the practical organization of labor, and coloniza- tion.9 In the agricultural cooperative Duval directed from 1847 on the

plain of the Sig River in the Algerian province of Oran, colonization estab- lished itself as the point de rencontre between intellectual speculation and social reality. A disciple of Fourier, Duval established this "Union Agri- cole du Sig" on phalansterian principles, notably the partnership of capi- tal and labor (Girardet 43-45). For Bugeaud, Duval's cooperative is a failed social experiment he invites Blanc to consider:

L'union du Sig, fondee par souscriptions, a 6te soumise au regime que M. Louis Blanc veut donner a ses colonies agricoles; elle etait dirig6e par un capitaine d'artillerie tres passionne pour l'id"e phalanst6rienne. L'etat lui donna 3,000 hectares de bonnes terres defrich es et arrosables en tres grande partie par le barrage du Sig. On y ajouta 150,000 francs de subvention pour les travaux d'utilite ou de sfirete publique. Eh bien! malgre tous ces avantages, cet 6tablissement est fort loin de prosp6rer; on le dit meme tres voisin de sa chute. ("Des travailleurs" 791)10

Nevertheless, Bugeaud recognizes the problem Blanc sought to address.

Referring to the government's February 25 proclamation of the droit au travail11 and the unsatisfactory experiment of the Ateliers nationaux, he writes:

Il y a urgence extreme de donner une direction utile a cette partie de la population des villes qui n'y trouve plus de travail. Le gouvernement a pris l'engagement de la faire vivre en travaillant: lors meme qu'il ne l'efit pas promis, il faudrait qu'il le fit, dans la mesure de ses forces, pour le triple intrert

de l'humanite, de l'ordre social et de la prosperite publique; mais peut-il continuer long-temps a occuper ce grand nombre d'ouvriers dans les ateliers nationaux? Assurement non: ce serait une charge d'au- tant plus intolerable pour la France, que les travaux qu'on ex6cute ainsi sont de fort peu d'utilit6; cela ne peut donc durer. (793)12

Bugeaud thus declares himself in accord with Blanc's desire to remove the urban unemployed from the cities to the fields: "I1 faut, le plus

750 FRENCH REVIEW 75.4

promptement possible, doter l'agriculture du trop plein des villes" (793). He puts forward two plans. The first would disperse into thirty thousand rural communes all those workers who were willing to accept what would be a better situation than they had in the Ateliers nationaux; they would work, not cooperatively, but for individual farmers in return for a

government-supplemented salary (794-98). Bugeaud prefers his second

plan: the renewed and amplified colonization of Algeria: "Voila le mo- ment oii notre colonie peut nous rendre le plus grand des services et nous d6dommager largement des sacrifices qu'elle nous a imposes" (798). Bugeaud too sees the colony as a social laboratory for working out the cure for France's social ills. Specifically, Algerian colonization re-

sponds to the root cause of France's social disorder, overpopulation (798). Overpopulation denies to France's citizens the possibility of fulfill-

ing their natural desire to own property. In meeting this need to own land, French agricultural colonists will at the same time serve the imperi- alist project that Bugeaud's career in Algeria exemplified:13 "[P]uisque l'homme a la passion de posseder un morceau de terre, il faut que cette

passion si naturelle nous aide a peupler notre colonie de maniere a y dominer la race arabe" (798).14

Promoting the idea of the agricultural colonization of Algeria does not

equate to approving the idea of agricultural cooperatives. Bugeaud re-

joins Lavergne in adducing his direct observation of life in Algeria to

support his opinion. During his time in North Africa, he says, three vil-

lages peopled by soldiers and set up on the principle of cooperative labor all requested after one year to be disincorporated: "Les raisons que don- nerent les colons des trois villages furent uniformes: il n'y a pas d'emula- tion; on ne croit pas travailler pour soi, on ne travaille pas; nous nous mettons au niveau des paresseux" (799). Once the principle of coopera- tive labor had been dropped, he reports, the villages prospered.'5 Despite this experience, Bugeaud surprises the reader by calling for renewed

attempts to establish agricultural cooperatives founded on utopian prin- ciples. Such attempts, though doomed to failure, are necessary, he says, "pour l'Fdification publique," and will do less harm in Algeria than they would in France:

Que l'on essaie donc en Algerie le socialisme dans toutes ses formules, l'association selon M. Louis Blanc, le fourierisme, le communisme com- plet .... I1 est urgent que le public sache, par des faits bien constates, a quoi s'en tenir sur ces theories, qui troublent le pays et contribuent puis- sament A le mettre dans la misere, en attendant l'abondance promise. (799)

In the end, Bugeaud, like Lavergne, considers Algeria as an empty, un- cultured land, a land without culture awaiting the society France will bestow upon it: "C'est en Afrique, en fondant une soci~td nouvelle, que nos rdformateurs doivent faire leurs experiences, et non pas sur notre

ALGERIA AND 1848 751

vieille societ6, oi leurs idles ne peuvent que porter la guerre et la ruine" (799).

In the minds of both contributors, but in different ways, Algeria ap- pears as an essential point de repere on the road to social reform mapped by France's February Revolution. In fact, subsequent events modified the role Algeria was to play in France's near future, as the initial optimism of

February turned into the violence and despair of the June Days. Neither

Lavergne's social and political proxy nor Bugeaud's agricultural experi- ment, Algeria became the forced destination of certain of those who embraced the Revolution's most idealistic ambitions.

In the last week of June, insurgents protesting the National Assembly's plans to dissolve the Ateliers nationaux and send workers out into the

provinces to undertake manual labor set up barricades in the streets of Paris. On 24 June the Assembly adopted a state of siege. The staunchly republican General Louis Eugene Cavaignac (1802-57), like Bugeaud and

many other officers and soldiers a veteran of Algerian combat whom the

government had invested with all executive powers, directed operations of the Garde mobile and the Garde nationale that brutally suppressed the

protests.16 Over a thousand insurgents died; 15,000 were taken prisoner. Although most were soon released, in early 1850 the government finally made good on plans to deport the remaining 459 political prisoners to

Algeria, where they were to work the land in a newly-established penal settlement; after three years of good conduct they would receive provi- sional title to a dwelling and a plot of land (DeLuna 221-22; Emerit, "Les

D6portes" 67).17 Eleven troublemakers who had been incarcerated in

Algiers escaped in 1851 and wrote a "Lettre a la France republicaine" that despite their Algerian imprisonment defiantly recalls the unrealized ideals of February 1848:

Nous plions le genou devant la fraternitY, cette religion supreme. Nous voulons l'Fgalite sainte .

... Nous servons la libert6 vraie, progressive,

qui marche devant les hommes... sur la route de l'Infini. Avant-garde du Progres, nous avons conserv6 pure dans la transportation l'idee revo- lutionnaire qui naquit du baiser de F6vrier a ton front, O patrie!" (Barret and Gurgand 364; Emerit, "Les Deportes" 71-73)

LONGWOOD COLLEGE (VIRGINIA)

Notes

1On the events of these months of revolution, see Barret and Gurgand. 20n Lavergne's life, see Vapereau. 3Montagnon describes the French conquest and colonization of Algeria (97-124). 4For Said, a writer's "strategic location" includes the literary and narrative elements of

the text:

752 FRENCH REVIEW 75.4

Everyone who writes about the Orient must locate himself vis-a-vis the Orient; translated into his text, this location includes the kind of narrative voice he adopts, the type of struc- ture he builds, the kinds of images, themes, motifs that circulate in his text-all of which add up to deliberate ways of addressing the reader, containing the Orient, and finally, rep- resenting it or speaking in its behalf." (Orientalism 20)

'The frequent appearance under Lavergne's pen of the word association-which I have translated as partnership-as well as the comparisons between Arab laborers and their French counterparts place Lavergne's writings squarely in the current of political and social discourse of the time, dominated as it was by the question of labor.

6Dunwoodie analyzes how early European writers on Algeria "crossed the Mediter- ranean to experience (in Algeria) what they themselves elaborated (in France)" (42). For the two writers we are considering, Algeria becomes in the political realm less the site of exoti- cism Dunwoodie describes and more the site where social reformers could put into practice the ideals they elaborated in France.

7See in particular Said's discussion of "cultural strength" (40-44): "Orientalism, then, is

knowledge of the Orient that places things Oriental in class, court, prison, or manual for

scrutiny, study, judgment, discipline, or governing" (Orientalism 41). 8Blanc, who chaired the special commission for workers set up by the provisional govern-

ment and installed in the Luxembourg Palace, insists on what he calls the "sens social" of the revolution. On February 28 workers calling for the formation of a Ministry of Progress interrupted the Conseil meeting in the H6tel de Ville. In his self-justificatory memoir writ- ten from exile in London, Blanc makes clear what was at stake:

La Revolution avait un sens social: que tardait-on a le definir?... Crier un ministere qui ffit celui de l'avenir, remplacer par une organisation fraternelle du travail l'abominable anar- chie qui couvrait sous son vaste desordre l'oppression de la multitude et faisait hypocrite- ment porter a son esclavage les couleurs de la libertY, voila ce qui etait a rdsoudre. (Pages d'histoire 33-34)

9Duval too later became a contributor to the Revue des Deux Mondes, where he wrote on

Algeria. See his Politique coloniale de la France: l'Algerie. 1"The enterprise did fail after four years. In his Les Saint-Simoniens en Algerie, Marcel

Emerit tells its story, including the lack of support from Bugeaud (148-51). ".Le gouvernement de la republique franqaise s'engage a garantir l'existence de l'ouvrier

par le travail. I1 s'engage a garantir du travail a tous les citoyens." For Proudhon, one of the theoreticians of what Blanc called an "organisation fraternelle du travail," the new govern- ment's initial treatment of labor is what defined it. In his Confessions d'un revolutionnaire, Proudhon writes: "Le 24 fevrier avait eu lieu la decheance du Capital; le 25 fut inaugure le

gouvernement du Travail. Le d&cret du Gouvernement provisoire qui garantit le droit au travail fut l'acte de naissance de la Republique de fevrier. Dieu! fallait-il six mille ans d'ar-

guments revolutionnaires pour nous amener a cette conclusion?" (67-68). The proliferation of articles containing in the title the words travail, travailleur, ouvrier, or atelier published in the 1848 issues of the Revue des Deux Mondes (volumes 21 through 24) and the diversity of

opinion these articles express could serve as an index of the discursive domination of the

question of labor. In those pages, for example, Saint-Marc Girardin (1801-73) does not doubt the venerable character of the revolutionary argument, nor the defining character of the government's decree; his "Histoire de l'id'e du travail," written after the debacle of the Ateliers nationaux, does however part from Proudhon's revolutionary parti pris: "L'ob-

ligation du travail, le droit du travail, le droit au travail, voila trois mots ou plut6t trois doc- trines opposdes qui luttent depuis longtemps dans le monde, et dont la querelle semble se ranimer, de nos jours, plus vive et plus ardente que jamais." As his shorthand history con- tinues, the stately and symmetrical cadence of his language belies its partisan and inflam-

matory rhetoric: "L'obligation du travail est la doctrine chritienne; le droit du travail est la doctrine des economistes du xv1e si&cle; le droit au travail est la doctrine des organisateurs chimriques et dIsastreux que notre si&cle a enfantIs" (553).

ALGERIA AND 1848 753

12In his memoir, Blanc takes pains to distinguish the ateliers sociaux he called for in his

Organisation du travail from the ill-fated program of Ateliers nationaux that Emile Thomas directed in 1848 (Blanc, Pages d'histoire 58-72; also 222ff).

13On the means Bugeaud employed in waging war on the Algerians, and Tocqueville's unexpected defense of both the colonial conquest and specific brutal actions, see Todorov 203-05.

141t was the previous government's rejection of Bugeaud's request to approve ambitious

plans for military colonies in Algeria that had led to his resignation from the post of Governor-General in 1847 (Montagnon 123; Pollachi 40; Bois 525-26).

15In a subsequent contribution to the Revue, Bugeaud harshly criticizes the very idea of

cooperative labor. He sees it not as a remedy for economic inequality, but as a recipe for social distress: "Les socialistes, affliges de voir souvent la misere a c6te de l'aisance, et meme de la richesse, poursuivent la chimere de l'egalite parfaite. Ils croient l'avoir saisie dans l'association, ils se trompent; ils n'obtiendront que l'Fgalite de la misere" ("Les Socialistes" 254).

16Wright's suggestion that Cavaignac employed in Paris tactics he had learned in "repressing Algerian disorders" (138) is disputed by DeLuna, who holds that "there is no reason to believe that either his strategy or his tactics were based on his experience in Africa" (169). Cavaignac's government later undertook reforms that loosened the military's grip on the administration of Algeria (DeLuna 236-38).

"7Few stayed in Algeria. Emerit cites government records from 1859 showing that of the 459, 59 had died, 40 had been removed to French Guiana, 12 had escaped, 268 had received a pardon and returned to France; 19 were grouped in a miscellaneous category. He deduces the status of those remaining: "I1l resterait donc a cette epoque 61 deport&s de 1848 en

Algerie, dont 23 detenus a Lambese [site of the penal settlement]. J'en deduis que 38 vivaient en residence surveillee dans les villages de colonisation" ("Les Deportes" 72).

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