French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  Batna appeared as an oasis of civilization amidst this blasted landscape of almost lunar severity. Constructed as a base of operations at the foot of the Aurès massif, it had already lost that “biscuitville” quality that stamped so many European settlements in Algeria, so-called because crates used to transport dry military biscuits served as the primary building material. On the contrary, many of the buildings had been fashioned from the wood of venerable cedars felled in the mountains to the south. The town was surrounded by a wall that, if not up to European specifications, at least prevented surprises by the turbulent hillsmen of the Aurès. The presence of soldiers had spawned a respectable commerce of small shops, and even a public bath. In the autumn of 1849, the military had also spawned something else—an inordinate number of ambulances carrying sick and wounded from Zaatcha.

  If the road from Constantine to Batna was moderately insecure, Europeans who wished to follow the track south toward the Sahara could do so only in military convoy. The square vestiges of Roman camps, once outposts for the extinct city of Lambaesis, presided from ragged knolls over the track that stretched southwest from Batna through a wild plain. Soldiers fixed their packs onto the backs of mules (strictly against regulations) and trudged forward into a landscape of increasing savagery. The spahis on flank guard seemed too close in to screen a serious attack. The column halted every hour to close up, and forded the Wadi Tamarisk, a favorite place of ambush, with great caution. The plain began to undulate like a calm sea expecting a tempest, and then disappeared altogether into a chaos of rocky outcroppings and frugal vegetation, which in turn rose into mountains of somber stone. Eventually, the trail caught up with the El Kantara River, a clear torrent that toiled and twisted southwest as if eager to escape the tormented peaks through which it ran until it plunged into a defile between two pink hills—the Kantara Gorge, called “the mouth of the desert” by the Arabs. It was through this crevice that the traveler caught his first glimpse of the Sahara, an immense speckled plain that stretched southward until it merged with the horizon.

  The transition from the Tell to the desert is as spectacular as it is abrupt. The naked, rose-colored ridges of the Aurès loom like a fortress wall over the northern limits of the Sahara, which, by desert standards, are rich and well watered. The trail winds out of the Kantara Gorge and soon enters an oasis of greenery: high date palms screen the sun to allow fruit trees and gardens of melon, cucumber and other vegetables, irrigated by a complex network of small water channels, to grow in the shade beneath. Villages of sun-dried bricks, some resembling medieval fortresses, He half-hidden in the foliage. The track skips from oasis to oasis across elevations of stone and sand until it reaches the largest oasis, that of Biskra. In 1849, Biskra counted over 100,000 date palms that clung to the wadis and watercourses that slithered out of the Tell until they disappeared into the salt-flecked Chott Melrhir.

  Twenty-five miles southwest of Biskra, on the fringes of the depression of the Chott Melrhir, lay the small oasis of Zaatcha, an extraordinarily quaint but seemingly insignificant settlement half-lost amidst the date palms of the Tolga oasis complex. Zaatcha was not on any main road—the track that went southward from Biskra to Touggourt, Ouargla and the Sudan beyond missed it altogether. Indeed, one would have needed a guide with fairly extensive local knowledge to find the place at all. However, in 1849 this apparently unimportant speck on the map of the Sahara managed to stop a modern European army dead in its tracks and detonate a crisis that rippled as far away as Paris itself.

  Not only did Zaatcha become one of the most arduous campaigns of a very arduous conquest of Algeria, but it also would appear on the face of it to have been one of the least necessary, or at the very least the most avoidable, for by 1849, French “Africa” (Algeria did not yet officially exist) had been to all intents and purposes “pacified.” Of course, there remained a few corners here and there to tidy up, like the mountainous and ever-defiant Kabylia to the east of Algiers. But Abd el-Kader had surrendered in 1847, and after having been fêted in Paris, was placed under house arrest in Toulon and then Pau before being interned in the gilded cage of the Château d'Amboise. In October 1852, he would be dispatched to exile in Egypt and eventually Damascus, from which he was never to return to North Africa.

  The second most tenacious Arab leader, Ahmed Bey, who had defied the French at Constantine, in 1848 had exchanged the exciting life of a resistance chief for a pension and suitable accommodation for himself and his substantial number of wives and concubines in Algiers. In 1844, the French had reached Biskra, and so crossed the threshold of the Sahara. There seemed little point in going any further: The desert tribes, small and poorly organized, posed no threat to French control of the Tell. There was nothing in the Sahara worth taking, either economically or strategically. There is no evidence that Paris, or any other European government for that matter, wanted the Sahara. Besides, as the French were to discover to their cost, the conquest of the world's least hospitable desert would require substantial modifications in force structure, which meant, among other things, that they must master the camel—a beast as truculent and defiant as any of the human variety that were to be encountered in Algeria. The conquest of the Sahara would have to await another, later epoch.1

  So why Zaatcha? In analyzing this, we are limited by the evidence, which comes exclusively from the French side. However, to believe their case, one must be prepared to accept rather uncritically the notion that great events must have great causes. For General Émile Herbillon, whose controversial handling of the siege of Zaatcha let him in for enough criticism to force his disguised retirement in 1850, those causes were essentially two. The first was the very insecurity of their conquest. To the French, Algeria appeared to have been temporarily subdued rather than mastered. The population, diverse though it may have been, was a volcano seething with explosive potential, a permanent conspiracy of fanaticism plotting the destruction of their temporary masters, a collection of combustible material awaiting the spark that would ignite it into life. Zaatcha—that small blue-green speck in a sea of sand—was that spark. No matter that a general in the War Ministry in Paris eating his morning croissant over a map of Algeria might miss it if the smallest crumb landed 230 degrees southwest of Biskra, Zaatcha would become the holy cause for which the Algerian masses were waiting, the signal for the uprising that would hurl the French back into the sea. If even French soldiers were prepared to admit that their rule was tolerated rather than welcomed (and how could they deny it?), then it must be true.

  And like every colonial general worth his salt, Herbillon transferred the blame for the revolt back to the homeland. This was his second point—the Revolution of 1848, which in February overthrew the July Monarchy and ushered in the turbulent period of the Second Republic, offered the natives the spectacle of a disordered and leaderless France. Quite naturally, they were quick to take advantage of this perceived weakness: “The news of our political dissensions was carried to the population by the . . . Biskris,” Herbillon wrote. “In the towns, they had witnessed the public demonstrations and carried away the impression that a profound dissention divided the masses. Upon returning home, they recounted with oriental exaggeration, the scenes which impressed them and said that the fall of military power and its replacement with civilian power was certain. In this they were supported by the Jews of Constantine who were dangerous emissaries, commercial travellers of false information. These tales were avidly listened to by the people of the Sahara whose sentiments of hatred were stoked and who saw in these events the imminent fall of our power and our force.”2

  French officers make a desperate plea for this view in all of their letters and reports preserved in the war archives. For instance, Captain Edouard Collineau of the 2nd Regiment wrote that the natives had taken note of the diminished strength of the garrisons and, “While they did not understand the exact significance [of the events in France], they think that they can take advantage and that awakens hopes among them which were only dor
mant.”3 French historian Charles-André Julien, admittedly no admirer of French colonialism in North Africa, disputed the contentions of the soldiers that the Zaatcha revolt sprang directly from political events in France. In the first place, he notes, the charge that the 1848 Revolution created an impression of division and weakness as far as Algeria is concerned is incorrect. On the contrary, the Second Republic ended all speculation about a French pullout from Algeria by proclaiming Algeria to be an integral part of French territory. Second, the native resistance had been well and truly beaten by almost a decade of Bugeaud's razzias, and in the eighteen months between the February Revolution of 1848 and the rebellion at Zaatcha in the summer of 1849, Algeria, apart from a few isolated mountain areas that required attention, had remained calm.4

  Of course, it is nonetheless true that despite the bloody repression of the June Days of 1848 that ended the cycle of revolution, political debate remained intense in France, as did international tensions in Europe—for instance, in 1848 Canrobert accepted the colonelcy of the 2nd Regiment of the Foreign Legion with great reluctance because he believed this would cause him to miss the European conflagration he thought imminent: “For forty-eight hours I thought of resigning,” he wrote. “I no longer wanted Algeria. I dreamed of shots fired in Germany or Italy. I too wanted to go there.”5 However, even Pierre-Napoleon Bonaparte, who briefly joined the Legion at Zaatcha, stayed long enough to realize that the 1848 Revolution was not a primary cause of the rebellion.6 Indeed, if the situation in the south of Constantine Province was as tense as some officers claimed, then all the more reason to tread cautiously. But that, apparently, is not what they chose to do.

  The sad fact was that Arab fanaticism and French irresolution and instability played only walk-on roles in this great drama. Zaatcha was to a large extent a mess of the army's own making, in which a poorly implemented military strategy completed a series of events that betrayed the military's insensitivity to local issues. The origins of the Zaatcha affair can be traced directly to the appointment of Captain Charles Gaillard de Saint-Germain to command the oases of the northern Sahara centered upon Biskra soon after the French reached them in 1844. Like most of these Arab Bureau postings, that occupied by Saint-Germain required enormous tact, sensitivity to local customs and beliefs, and a generous dose of political wisdom. Alas, Saint-Germain's strengths were those of a combat soldier, not of a local politician. The general practice in those regions administered by the army was to name a caïd, or native chief, favorable to French interests and then watch him like a hawk while he managed local affairs. However, Saint-Germain preferred a more direct management style, which quite naturally undermined the influence of the French-appointed caïd.

  What might have simply been poor politics turned to disaster in 1848 when Saint-Germain, now a major in the 2nd Regiment of the Foreign Legion, decided to raise money to build a fortress at Biskra by declaring everyone equal before taxes and increasing the annual contribution per date palm from fifteen or twenty to perhaps as much as fifty centimes. In this way he raised 120,000 francs, a by no means insubstantial sum for one of the world's most impoverished regions.7 No one enjoys paying taxes, especially a people for whom they had been virtually unknown before the arrival of the French. The inhabitants deeply resented the fact that the tax fell on all trees, not just those that bore dates. This was simply bad politics, which became disastrous because the French were too thin on the ground in Biskra to keep control by themselves.

  The first inkling the French had that the natives might be growing restless occurred on May 16, 1849, when another Legion officer attached to the Arab Bureau, Second Lieutenant Joseph Seroka, heard rumors during his rounds of the oases that Bouzian, once caïd of Zaatcha, was stirring up ill feeling against the French. When his claims that the Prophet appeared regularly to him met with skepticism, Bouzian promised that Mohammed would send a sign: the next day, he announced that during the night the Prophet had come to shake his hand, and as proof he pulled up the sleeve of his burnoose to reveal a green hand. When the caïd of the small oasis of Liouach complained to Seroka that Bouzian had begun to make inroads among his followers, the lieutenant decided to investigate. On the 18th, he rode into Zaatcha to find Bouzian sitting alone in the main square of the small, fortified village. Seroka ordered him to mount a mule. As he was about to comply, Bouzian's rosary broke (Seroka believed this to be intentional), and he stooped down and began to gather up the beads. Impatient, Seroka ordered two of his spahis to seize Bouzian. By this time, however, a crowd had gathered that moved to Bouzian's defense. A scuffle broke out, shots were fired, and Seroka and his spahis bolted for the gate without Bouzian.8 A second force of twenty spahis and thirty goumiers, or irregular auxiliaries, was dispatched to bring in Bouzian, only to find Zaatcha bolted against them.9

  Having failed to nip the rebellion in the bud—on the contrary, the bungled police work had only served to publicize it—the French found their alternatives limited in the short term. Most of the troops were occupied in pacifying the Collo Mountains in the extreme north of Constantine Province, so the Arab Bureau sent the Sheik El-Arab to blockade Zaatcha with his retainers. This proved to be a mistake, as even the future commander of the siege, General Herbillon, admitted—the Arab sheik used the opportunity “to carry out some personal vengeance.... In any case, there were too many shared interests, too much in common between [the Sheik] and the inhabitants for this isolation to be anything but illusory.”10 For his part, Saint-Germain did not appear too alarmed by the events at Zaatcha, a complacency for which Herbillon took him to task.11

  In Herbillon's view, Saint-Germain failed to realize that a number of tribes, especially the Ouled-Sahnoun, “turbulent cutthroats” who occupied the Hodna plain to the northeast of Zaatcha and who were ready to throw in with the “party of disorder” at the drop of a hat, were watching this example of French inaction against Bouzian with great interest. So great was the impact of the apparent French paralysis before Zaatcha that the Ouled-Sahnoun, estimated at fifteen hundred strong, audaciously attacked the smala, or extended family, of Si-Mokran, the caïd whom in 1844 the French had placed in charge of the Hodna region. More insulting, however, was the fact that this attack took place at the Wadi Barika, about fifty miles northwest of Biskra, where the smala was camped beneath the very walls of the fortress Saint-Germain was constructing with the aid of a small detachment of Legion laborers drawn from the 4th Company of the 3rd Battalion. The skirmish roared back and forth in the noisy, dusty, chaotic, but surprisingly (at least to outsiders) bloodless manner of these traditional North African encounters for some time, until the attackers imprudently made a rush at the legionnaires who, until then, had been mere spectators. One volley threw the Ouled-Sahnoun into precipitous retreat. However, as they fled through the trees, they destroyed what they could of the intricate network of irrigation channels.12

  For Herbillon, the link between the attack at Barika and the defiance of Bouzian at Zaatcha was obvious—if the French anywhere showed weakness or hesitation, they opened themselves to revolt everywhere. Yet the connection between the two events appears far more tenuous. If, for instance, this was part of a giant desert conspiracy, then why was Bouzian not in the forefront of the Barika skirmish? The attack of the Ouled-Sahnoun seems to have stemmed from entirely separate grievances. Even Herbillon admitted that Si-Mokran had been a disastrous appointment: “The descendant of a family of marabouts [religious leaders], [Si-Mokran] was not a warrior, and therefore was held in low esteem by the Arabs of the great tents,” he wrote. “He did not know how to recruit supporters, and had even created animosity through his avarice and his immoral life.” Already on several occasions the French had had to rescue him from the consequences of his unfortunate decisions by sending troops.13

  The second hint that the Ouled-Sahnoun were motivated by something other than religious fanaticism or French weakness comes from piecing together other trifles of evidence that suggest that the French occupation of the oases h
ad done much to upset the traditional economic balance of the region. Herbillon explained that the Ouled-Sahnoun grew grain in the Hodna, which they exchanged for dates at Biskra.14 According to Pierre Bonaparte, one of Saint-Germain's innovations had been to encourage the Biskris to plant their own grain. This well-intentioned reform had met with great success, so great, in fact, that it had served to cut the Ouled-Sahnoun out of a market vital for their existence, severing the economic links between the Hodna and the oases.15 This probably explains why the retreating Ouled-Sahnoun took out their fury on the irrigation system.

  All of this would suggest that poor and insensitive military management had set off a series of separate detonations that, in the mind of the soldiers, had coalesced into a single conspiracy against French rule. Their reflex was to fall back upon force, rather than seek to manipulate and compromise, as the war minister, Joseph Rullière, wished them to do: “War may bring victories,” he wrote to the governor-general of Algeria on August 22,1849, “but only politics can assure lasting conquests.”16 Alas, this was advice whose destiny was too often to be ignored in North Africa. The military reflex was too ingrained in the Armée d'Afrique, the sense of insult too highly developed to allow such behavior to go unpunished. There was no time now to lament past errors, or to undertake the slow and painstaking task of rebuilding confidence. For French officers, the submission of the native population was only tactical, based upon local wisdom, which dictated that one must “kiss the hand which you cannot cut off.” No Moslem could accept in good conscience the domination of these “foreign dogs.” The best course, the only course for the French, was to bring out the big stick.