On 6 August 1896 the National Assembly voted the protectorate out of existence, declared Madagascar a French colony, and – an even greater provocation to the Hova nobility – abolished slavery. On 18 February, Colonel Joseph Galliéni had landed at Marseille on returning from his three years in Tonkin; almost immediately, Colonial Minister Lebon had offered him command of the troops on the island, and he had since accepted – on certain conditions.
THE FIRST AND MOST IMPORTANT promise that Galliéni extracted, unsurprisingly, was that he should have a free hand, with combined authority over both the military and the civil administration. Another – despite the fact that he was a Naval Troops officer and Madagascar was a Navy fief – was that he be given a battalion of the Legion, ‘so that if it comes to that, I can die with decency’. The language might seem theatrical given the fact that the only determined enemy faced by Duchesne had been the mosquito, but it is therefore instructive.
Galliéni was a highly intelligent, seasoned and down-to-earth colonial soldier with excellent personal contacts throughout his small professional world, and he must certainly have sought information from officers on the spot while considering Lebon’s offer. (The telegraph lines were open to all, and at the time those officers were garrulous with frustration.) The menalamba – and the thousands of half-rebels, half-bandits who were exploiting the unrest – were fighting for themselves on their own ground, and the generalized uprising involved tribesmen who were much more aggressive than the pathetic Hova conscripts herded out to face the Light Column. The rebels had gained the local initiative, against French units isolated in penny-packets over huge areas of a notoriously pestilential wilderness, with even worse lines of communication and supply than in Upper Tonkin. It would only take a modest combination of bad luck and bad judgement to produce a medium-sized disaster, and Galliéni had no intention of presiding over one. Naval troops had already been in Madagascar for more than ten years, and the fact that he specifically asked for a Legion battalion says a great deal. He had soldiered with both, and he knew which he wanted for his final insurance policy.
The ministerial decision ordering the raising of this new Legion marching battalion was dated 3 August 1896, three days before the parliamentary formalities. The unit was once again formed – with exemplary speed – from two companies each of the 1st and 2nd RE; commanded by Major Cussac, it sailed from Oran to Marseille. The first of two parties was ready to embark there for Tamatave on 10 August, and the whole unit had arrived in Madagascar by 14 September.50
While travelling up to the capital from Tamatave, Colonel Galliéni was ambushed and his small cavalry escort was dispersed; he emptied his revolver at his attackers and dived into the bush, evading them to catch up with his men alone. On 26 September he formally replaced both General Voyron and Resident-General Laroche (though at this date his powers were only those of a temporary appointment in a state of emergency). Long before he could think about ‘oil patches’ he had to identify, and stamp his authority on, a local leadership that he could work with, and he achieved this with a ruthless coup de théâtre. After questioning French administrators about the local power structure, he had two ministers arrested: the queen’s uncle Ratsimamanga (deeply unpopular for his financial extortions), and the interior minister Rainandriamampandry (an opponent of the court party, but without powerful allies). There is no doubt that Galliéni selected them coldly as scapegoats from the two main factions. They were tried by a kangaroo court-martial on charges of complicity in the leadership of the rebellion, the serpentine Rasanjy gave perjured evidence against them, and on 15 October the two unlucky examples were executed by firing squad.51
In February 1897, the queen was herself exiled to Réunion; whatever her actual involvement, her presence as a figurehead for resistance could no longer be tolerated. In April that year General Galliéni was formally appointed governor-general of Madagascar with full civil and military powers. For the next nine years – at that date a unique record of continuity for the French colonial system – he would devote himself to applying the methods of military penetration and civil development that he had honed in Upper Tonkin.
THE PACIFICATION OF THIS HUGE ISLAND was carried out with only about 7,000 troops, spread between remote garrisons in the familiar system of military territories, circles and sectors. Most major movements were necessarily by ship, and apart from those in the Hova and Betsileo highlands the main bases were planted around the coasts: clockwise from Diégo Suarez, at Vohémar, Ile Ste Marie, Tamatave, Mananjary, Fort Dauphin, Tuléar, Morondova, Majunga, Analalava and Nossi Bé. The first phase of cordon-and-column operations against the menalamba was virtually completed by the end of 1898, although it took until 1904 to pacify all the coastal areas. The penetration of the remote west and south – mopping up small pockets of resistance, and creating ‘oil patches’ in areas where the Merina writ had never run – took seven years, but Paris gave Galliéni the time he needed. By the time he handed over to a civilian governor in May 1905 he had imposed law and order and made important strides in the development of infrastructure, education and health care. Limited white settlement was encouraged; this attracted experienced colons from Réunion but – as in Tonkin – few others except for retired Naval Troops who took their discharge locally. Galliéni not only directed his officers to learn the Malagasy language, but also set his face firmly against racial discrimination (mixed marriages were encouraged, and segregated areas in the towns were forbidden).52
Galliéni’s only European units (apart from small detachments of Africa Light Horse as couriers and escorts) were four companies of the 13th Naval Infantry, a single battery of Naval Artillery, and the Foreign Marching Battalion. He initially had the two Algerian Skirmisher battalions of the old RMdA, but the bulk were twenty-five companies of native troops in four battalions of Senegalese and two of Malagasy Skirmishers, led as always by Naval Infantry cadres. The Legion battalion were widely dispersed in separate companies, from Imerina itself to the north-east and south-west coasts, and from high in the Ankaratra mountains to the jungles of the Majongo river valley (by common consent the unhealthiest region of the whole island, where the 3rd and 4th Companies earned Galliéni’s particular praise). In 1905 the general was also quoted as saying of them that:The légionnaires have especially drawn attention to themselves by their endurance during our recent colonial campaigns. Their solidity under fire is equal to that of French troops and, as their physical resilience has proved superior, they have in reality played a more effective role . . . during these expeditions.53
The légionnaires’ work was Tonkin all over again: trying to follow gangs of rebels-cum-bandits to their wilderness hideouts, building outposts and the roads to resupply them, re-establishing villages, raising and arming self-defence militias, providing escorts for precarious convoys, taking a handful of casualties in encounter skirmishes and ambushes, and – always – watching the ranks dwindle under the relentless assaults of the anopheles mosquito.54
IN HANOI, LIEUTENANT-COLONEL LYAUTEY’S gloomy musings about resigning his commission and seeking a prosperous marriage blanche had been brought to an abrupt end in November 1896, when the governor-general informed him that General Galliéni was requesting his services and had agreed to hold the job open until March 1897. Lyautey’s letters during his voyage across the Indian Ocean fizzed with enthusiasm, and not only about his personal prospects: he described his vision of the colonies as an essential training-ground for active administrators and officers, who might even return to revitalize a divided, cynical and lethargic France bedevilled by a general refusal to take any personal responsibility.55 When he landed at Majunga on 3 May 1897, his old chief at once confronted him with a personal responsibility of his own – to close down menalamba activity in Antsatrana province in the north, where the rebellion was being led by two Hova noblemen, Rabozaka and the former royal governor, Rabezavana. A column led by Colonel Combes had achieved some success against these two in March and April respectively; n
ow Lyautey was instructed to offer more positive incentives to Rabezavana. In confidential discussions between 29 May and 1 June terms were clearly reached; when Rabezavana came in to submit formally he was greeted with dignified ceremony, and was later confirmed in his old appointment under Lyautey’s supervision.56
By the end of July 1897, central Imerina, from Lake Alaotra in the north to Ambositra in the south, was largely pacified, and communications had been restored between the capital and Majunga and Tamatave (in the latter case largely thanks to the 2nd Company of the Legion battalion). Lyautey and other regional commanders alternated diplomacy with force – applied by the usual converging columns of marsouins, Senegalese and Malagasy Skirmishers, stiffened by parsimoniously shared-out Legion companies – and with immediate civil development. At his Ankazobe headquarters Lyautey was left very much to his own devices, corresponding often with the governor-general but meeting him only infrequently; Galliéni knew that Lyautey was a sincere convert to his methods, and trusted him to make his own day-to-day decisions, both military and developmental. In January 1900, Lyautey would write in an influential article that:Military command and territorial command should be united in the same hands. When the senior military officer is also the territorial administrator, his thoughts when he captures a brigand’s den are of the trading-post that he will set up there . . . and he will plan his attack on different lines.57
LYAUTEY HAD COMPLAINED to his correspondents about France’s apparent mood of cynicism, division and lethargy; by the end of January 1898 he would be proved right about the cynicism and divisions, and he might have wished for a little more lethargy. The name of Dreyfus was about to be thrust into the forefront of public affairs once again, and would now reveal its true destructive potential as the Army, the press and the political and chattering classes sank into an extraordinarily violent and prolonged collective nervous breakdown.58
In July 1897, an influential senator had been shown evidence suggesting that Dreyfus might be innocent, and that the guilty man was actually a disreputable chancer named Major Esterhazy. Rumours began to circulate, and journalists took an interest. Hitherto the authorities had met all enquiries with a serene refusal to discuss the case, but in January 1898 – while maintaining their absolute certainty of Dreyfus’ guilt – they were forced to bring Esterhazy, too, before a court-martial. This acquitted him, with a perversity that shocked French and foreign commentators alike, and the result was explosive. On 13 January 1898 the controversial novelist Émile Zola – a hate-figure for the Army since the publication of his Franco-Prussian War novel, Le débâcle – published in the newspaper Aurore his famous open letter to the President of the Republic: ‘J’accuse . . .’. Among those he attacked by name were the war minister, General Mercier, and the Chief of the General Staff, General de Boisdeffre. Reasoned arguments had failed, and the ‘Dreyfusard’ case would henceforth be pursued in extreme polemical terms.
Paris was a society as poisonously divided as the Merina nobility in Madagascar, and ‘anti-Dreyfusards’ were quick to hurl counter-charges. The friction ignited a political atmosphere that was even more volatile than usual, with administrations falling every few months and parliamentary factions wrestling and gouging for advantage. Throughout the whole ‘affair’ the partisan press of these political cliques would make sensational accusations based on the flimsiest rumours, and idle guesswork by participants in enquiries – reported through malice or simple indiscretion – would lead to an impenetrable tangle of lawsuits and counter-suits. The relatively simple case at the heart of the dispute was obscured as ‘Dreyfus’ became a mere slogan in the service of old suspicions and new quarrels. The simmering anti-militarism of the extreme Left boiled over, repelling some of the original Dreyfusards (including Georges Clemenceau); but during 1898 some voices of irreproachable bourgeois respectability also began to ask questions. The generals, bewildered by the variety and violence of their critics, dug in on what they believed to be their own inviolable ground; but their rampart showed the first crack when it was revealed that the original court-martial judges had been shown ‘irrefutable proofs of Dreyfus’ guilt that could not be revealed to the defence for reasons of state security’.
With dreary inevitability, some anti-Dreyfusards also played the Jewish card. In January 1898, anti-Semitic feeling was fanned in Algeria by opportunist colons who were agitating for an even freer hand than they already enjoyed. There had always been a strong anti-Semitic streak among the Spanish settlers; now Jews were suspected of voting en bloc against candidates seeking greater autonomy from Paris, and this distrust of the Jewish ‘capitalists’ was shared by local socialists. A demagogue calling himself Max Régis (Massimiliano Milano) led an autonomist/anti-Semitic front, declaring that ‘the hour of Revolution has come . . . We will water the tree of our liberty with Jewish blood’, and for five days a violent rabble ruled the streets of Algiers.58
ALFRED DREYFUS WAS INDEED BLAMELESS, but the scandal did not lie in any conspiracy by the generals to railroad a known innocent. Deceived by the sheer incompetence of their intelligence office (the Statistical Section) over the identification of a handwriting sample, they had leapt to an unwarrantable but apparently sincere assumption of his guilt. General Mercier had been advised to tread softly, but he was a stubborn man, and when the arrest of Dreyfus was leaked to the press he felt impelled to go ahead with the court-martial. When the evidence proved insufficiently robust to convince a court, steps were taken by a certain Major Henry to nourish it, and the trial proceedings were manipulated to ensure a conviction. Later, goaded by their attackers, senior military figures invented increasingly unconvincing reasons for their refusal to account for their actions, while making frantic background efforts to bury the truth under yet more dubious paperwork – which had been produced for them in November 1896 by the ever-loyal Major Henry. Passive evasions and quiet pressure on individuals had degenerated into actual criminality.
More cracks soon appeared in the wall. A new head of the Statistical Section proved irritatingly persistent; Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart was no Dreyfusard himself, but he became convinced that a miscarriage of justice had taken place. When he reported this, he was first ignored, then threatened, and finally court-martialled on trumped-up charges and dismissed from the Army. In June 1898 yet another war minister, Cavaignac, seized the opportunity to show himself in a decisive light; he had no interest in the fate of Dreyfus, but believed that the career of a minister seen to drew a final line under this scandal would prosper. When his investigator told him in August 1898 that an important letter in the dossier was a forgery, he summoned Major Henry for questioning; the wretched man confessed, and the following day cut his own throat. The Dreyfusard press was exultant, and Cavaignac’s insistence that a document forged retrospectively in 1896 could not invalidate a trial held in 1894 signally failed to draw the line he had hoped for.
COLONIAL RIVALRY now played its own part in inflaming public opinion, which was already infuriated by British comment on the scandal. September 1898 saw the confrontation, at Fashoda on the White Nile in Upper Sudan, between Captain Marchand’s small French trans-Saharan expedition from the Congo, and some 2,000 Egyptian and British troops led in person by General Herbert Kitchener, just two weeks after his crushing victory over the Mahdist army at Omdurman. Kitchener was courteous, but declined to take seriously Marchand’s claims for French rights based solely on his having pitched camp on the bank of the Nile, and the Frenchmen were obliged to move on south-eastwards towards Djibouti. In Paris, another French government fell in October, and the humiliating news from the Sudan became public on 4 November 1898.59
The nationalist press became incandescent over Fashoda; the Chamber voted extraordinary military funds by a margin of 471 votes to 18, and the long-festering hostility towards Britain reached such a peak that an actual shooting war may only have been prevented by the wisdom of Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé and the British ambassador.60 This was also a time of labour strikes,
mob violence and rumours of troops being readied to take back the streets, and the press had plenty to report other than the consideration by a court of appeal of Mme Dreyfus’ application for a reopening of her husband’s case. But at such a time the public were in no mood to see the Army distracted from its duty, and when the court ruled in Mme Dreyfus’ favour the presiding Judge Loew (an Alsatian Jew, like Dreyfus) was accused of treacherously conspiring with British and Jewish agents.
In December 1898, during the war-fever following the Fashoda affair, it was decided to strengthen the Legion battalion in Madagascar. Additional 5th and 6th Companies were formed from the 1st and 2nd RE respectively, and these landed at Majunga on 13 January 1899. During that year the headquarters of the swollen 1,500-strong battalion was at Miarinarivo in the Imerina highlands, but the companies were dispersed all over the island, separated by up to 1,000 miles in widely differing terrain and climates.61 In September 1899 the battalion reverted to conventional size, the extra companies being disbanded and their ‘non-repatriable’ personnel – that is, the men who were fittest and had the longest time still to serve – being dispersed between the other four.
Our Friends Beneath the Sands Page 36