FRENCH CONQUERORS AND COLONISTS. THE extraordinary deficiency recently exhibited by a great Continental nation in two qualities eminently prized by Englishmen-in common consistency, namely, and in common sense-has cast into the shade all previous shortcomings of the kind, making them appear remote and trivial. A people of serfs, ruled for centuries with an iron rod, pillaged for their masters' profit, and lashed at the slightest murmur, were excusable if, on sudden emancipation from such galling thraldom, their joyful gambols exceeded the limits prescribed by public decorum, and by a due regard to their own future prosperity. They might be forgiven for dancing round maypoles, and dreaming of social perfection. It would not be wonderful if they had difficulty in immediately replacing their expelled tyrants by a capable and stable government, and if their brief exhilaration were succeeded by a period of disorganisation and weakness. Such allowances cannot be made for the mad capers of republican France. The deliverance is inadequate to account for the ensuing delirium. The grievances swept away by the February revolution, and which patience, prudence, and moderation, could not have failed ultimately to remove--as thoroughly, if less rapidly-were not so terrible as to justify lunacy upon redress. Nevertheless, since then, the absurdities committed by France, or at least by Paris, are scarcely explicable save on the supposition of temporary aberration of intellect. Unimaginative persons have difficulty in realising the panorama of events, alternately sanguinary and grotesque, lamentable and ludicrous, spread over the last ten months. Europe-the portion of it, that is to say, which has not been bitten by the same rabid and mischievous demon-has looked on, in utter astonishment, at the painful spectacle of a leader of its civilisation galloping, with Folly on its crupper, after mad theories and empty names, and riding down, in the furious chase, its own prosperity and respectability. We repeat, then, that these great follies of to-day eclipse the minor ones of yesterday. When we see France destroying, in a few weeks, her commerce and her credit, and doing herself more harm than as many years will repair, we overlook the fact, that for upwards of fifteen years she has annually squandered from three to five millions sterling upon an unproductive colony in North Africa. France used not to be petty in her wars, or paltry in her enterprises. If she was sometimes quarrelsome and aggres sive, she was wont at least to fasten on foes worthy of her power and resources. Since 1830 she has derogated in this particular. A complication of causes-the most prominent being the vanity characteristic of the nation, the crooked policy of the sovereign, and the morbid love of fighting bequeathed by the warlike period of the Empire-has kept France engaged in a costly and discreditable contest, whose most triumphant results could be but inglorious, and in which she has decimated her best troops, and deteriorated her ancient fame, whilst pursuing, with unworthy ferocity and ruthlessness, a feeble and inoffensive foe. This is no partial or malicious view of the character of the Algerine war. Deliberately, and after due reflection, we repeat, that France has gravely compromised in Africa her reputation as a chivalrous and clement nation, and that she no longer can claim-as once she was wont to do-to be as humane in victory as she is valiant in the fight. For proof of this we need seek no further than in the speeches and despatches of French generals, of men who themselves have served and commanded in Africa. We will judge France by the voices of her own sons. of those she has selected as worthiest A Campaign in the Kabylie. By DAWSON BORROR, F.R.G.S., &c. London, 1848. La Kabylie. Par un Colon. 1846. La Captivité du Trompette Escoffier. Par ERNEST ALBY. 2 vols. Brussels, 1848. to govern her half-conquered colony, and to marshal her legions against a handful of Arabs. More than one of these officers testify, voluntarily or unwittingly, to the barbarity of the system pursued in Africa. What said General Castellane, in his wellknown speech in the Chamber of Peers, on the 4th July 1845? "We have reduced the country by an arsenal of axes and phosphorus matches. The trees were cut down, the crops were burned, and soon the mastery was obtained of a population reduced to famine and despair." And elsewhere in the same speech: "Few soldiers perish by the hand of the enemy in this war-a sort of man-hunt on a large scale, in which the Arabs, ignorant of European tactics, having no cannon-balls to exchange against ours, do not fight with equal arms." Monsieur A. Desjobert, long a deputy for the department of the Lower Seine, is the author of a volume, and of several pamphlets, upon the Algerine question. In the most recent of these we find the following remarkable note :"In February 1837, General Bugeaud said to the Arabs, You shall not plough, you shall not sow, nor lead your cattle to the pasture, without our permission. Later, he gives the following definition of a razzia: A sudden irruption, having for its object to surprise the tribes, in order to kill the men, and to carry off the women, children, and cattle.' In 1844, he completes this theory, by saying to the Kabyles, I will penetrate into your mountains, I will burn your villages and your crops, I will cut down your fruit-trees.' (Proclamation of the 30th March.) In 1846, rendering an account of his operations against Abd-el-Kader, he says to the authorities of Algiers, The power of Abd-el-Kader consists in the resources of the tribes; hence, to ruin his power, we must first ruin the Arabs; therefore have we burned much, destroyed much.' (From the Akhbar newspaper of February 1846.)" These are significant passages in the mouth of a general-in-chief. Presently, when we come to details, we shall show they were not thrown away upon his subordinates. The extermination of the Arabs was always the real aim of Marshal Bugeaud; he took little pains to cloak his system, and is too great a blunderer to have succeeded, had he taken more. A man of greater presumption than capacity, his audacity, obstinacy, and unscrupulousness knew no bounds. Before this African man-hunt, as M. Castellane calls it, he was unknown, except as the Duchess de Berry's jailer, as the slayer of poor Dulong, and as a turbulent debater, whose noisy declamation, and occasional offences against the French language, were a standing joke with the newspapers. A few years elapse, and we find him opposing his stubborn will to that of Soult, then minister at war, and successfully thwarting Napoleon's old lieutenant. This he was enabled to do mainly by the position he had made himself in Africa. He had ridden into power and importance on the shoulders of the persecuted Arabs, by a system of razzias and villageburning, of wholesale slaughter and relentless oppression. Brighter far were the laurels gathered by the lieutenant of the Empire than those plucked by Louis Philippe's marshal amidst the ashes of Bedouin douars and the corpses of miserable Mussulmans, slain in defence of their scanty birthright, of their tents, their flocks, and the free range of the desert. Poor was the defence they could make against their skilful and disciplined invaders ; slight the loss they could inflict in requital of the heavy one they suffered. Again we are obliged to M. Desjobert for statistics, gathered from reports to the Commission of Credits, and from Marshal Bugeaud's own bulletins. From these we learn that the loss in battle of the French armies, during the first ten years of the occupation of Algeria, was an average of one hundred and forty men annum. In the four following years, eight hundred and eighty-five men perished. The capture of Constantine cost one hundred men, the muchvaunted affair of the Smala nine, the battle of Isly TWENTY-SEVEN ! well remember, for we chanced to be in Paris at the time, the stir produced in that excitable capital by the battle of Isly. No one, unacquainted with the facts, would have doubted that the victory was over a most valiant and formidable foe. People's mouths per We were filled with this revival of the military glories of Gaul. Newspapers and picture-shops, poets and painters, combined to celebrate the exploit and sound the victor's praise. One engraving de circonstance, we remember, represented a sturdy French footsoldier, trampling, like Gulliver, a host of Lilliputian Moors, and carrying a score of them over his shoulder, spitted on his bayonet. "Out of my way!" was the inscription beneath the print-"Les Français seront toujours les Français." Horace Vernet, colourist, by special appointment, to the African campaign, pictorial chronicler of the heroic feats of the house militant of Orleans, prepared his best brushes, and stretched his broadest canvass, to immortalise the marshal and his men. After a few days, two dingy tents and an enormous umbrella were exhibited in the gardens of the Tuileries; these were trophies of the fight the private property of Mohammed-Abderrhaman, the vanquished prince of Morocco, the real merit of whose conquerors was about as great as that of an active tiger who gloriously scatters a numerous flock of sheep. From one of several books relating to Algeria, now upon our table, we will take a French officer's account of the affair of Isly. The story of Escoffier, a trumpeter who generously resigned his horse to his dismounted captain, himself falling into the hands of the Arabs, whose prisoner he remained for about eighteen months, is told by M. Alby, an officer of the African army. Although a little vivid in the colouring, and comprising two or three very tough "yarns," due, we apprehend, to the imagination of trumpeter or authorits historical portion professes to be, and probably is, correct; and, at any rate, there can be no reason for 'suspecting the writer of depreciating his countrymen's achievements, and understanding their merits. The account of the battle, or rather of the chase, for fighting there was none, is given by a deserter from the Spahis, who, after the defeat of the Moors, joined Abd-el-Kader. The Emir and his Arabs took no part in the affair. "I deserted with several of my comrades, during the night-march stolen by the French upon the Moors. We sought the emperor's son in his camp, and informed him of the movement making by the French column. The emperor's son had our horses taken away, and gave orders not to lose sight of us. Then he said to us : "Let them come, those dogs of Christians; they are but thirteen thousand strong, and we a hundred and sixty thousand we will receive them well.' "The day was well advanced before the Moors perceived the French. Then the emperor's son ordered his horsemen to mount and advance. The French marched in a square. They unmasked their artillery, and the guns sent their deadly charge of grape into the ranks of the Moors, who immediately took to flight, and the French had nothing to do but to sabre them." "The Moors," says M. Alby, "had fine horses and good sabres; but their muskets were bad; and the men, softened by centuries of peace and prosperity, smoking keef* and eating copiously, might be expected to run, as they did, at the first cannonshot." It is hard to understand how the loss of the French should have amounted to even the twenty-seven men at which it is stated in their general's bulletin. Did M. Bugeaud, unwilling to admit the facility of his triumph, slay the score and seven with his goosequill? But if the victory was easily won, on the other hand it was largely rewarded. For having driven before him, by the very first volley from his guns, a horde of overfed barbarians, enervated by sloth and narcotics, and total strangers to the tactics of civilized warfare, the marshal was created a duke! Shade of Napoleon! whether proudly lingering within the trophy-clad walls of the *The Moors smoke the leaves of hemp instead of tobacco. This keef, as it is called, easily intoxicates, and renders the head giddy. Abd-el-Kader forbade the use of it, and if one of his soldiers was caught smoking keef, he received the bastinado.-Captivaté d'Escoffier, vol. i. p. 221. Invalides, or passing in spectral review the dead of Austerlitz and Borodino, suspend your lonely walk, curb your shadowy charger, and contemplate this pitiable spectacle! You, too, gave dukedoms, and lavished even crowns, but you gave them for services worth the naming. Ney and the Moskwa, Massena and Essling, Lannes and Montebello, are words that bear the coupling, and grace a coronet. The names of the places, although all three recall brilliant victories, are far less glorious in their associations than the names of the men. But Bugeaud and Isly! What can we say of them? Truly, thus much-they, too, are worthy of each other. give an unfavourable notion of his heart, to those who do not accept our lenient interpretation of his coldblooded style. The traits he sets down. and which are no more than will be found in many French narratives, despatches, and bulletins, show how well the Franco-African army carry out the merciful maxims of Bugeaud. Mr. Borrer, a geographer and antiquary, passed seventeen months in Algeria; and during his residence there, in May 1846, a column of eight thousand French troops, commanded by the Duke of Isly in person, marched against the Kabyles," that mysterious, bare-headed, leathern-aproned, race, whose chief accomplishment was said to be that of being crack-shots,' When reviewing, about two years their chief art that of neatly roasting ago, Captain Kennedy's narrative of their prisoners alive, and their chief travel and adventure in Algeria, virtue that of loving their homes." It we regretted he did not speak out may interest the reader to hear a raabout the mode of carrying on the ther more explicit acount of this singuwar, and about the prospects of Alge- lar people, who dwell in the mountains rine colonisation and we hinted a that traverse Algeria from Tunis to suspicion that the amenities of French Morocco-an irregular domain, whose military hospitality, largely extended limits it is difficult exactly to define in to a British fellow-soldier, had in- words. The Kabyles, are in fact, the duced him, if not exactly to cloak, at highlanders of North Africa, and they least to shun laying bare, the errors hold themselves aloof from the Arabs and mishaps of his entertainers. We and Europeans that surround them. cannot make the same complaint of Concerning them, we find some diverthe very pretty book, rich in vig- sity in the statements of Mr. Borrer, nettes and cream-colour, entitled, and of an anonymous Colonist, twelve A Campaign in the Kabylie. Mr. years resident at Bougie, whose pamBorrer, whom the cockneys contemp- phlet is before us. Of the two, the tuous of terminations, will assuredly Frenchman gives them the best charconfound with his great gipsy contem- acter, but both agree as to their porary, George Borrow of the Bible, industry and intelligence, their fruhas, like Captain Kennedy, dipped gality and skill in agriculture. They his spoon in French messes. He are not nomadic like the Arabs, but has ridden with their regiments, and live in villages, till the land, and tend sat at their board, and been quartered flocks. Dwelling in the mountains, with their officers, and received kind- they have few horses, and fight chiefly ness and good treatment on all hands; on foot. Divided into many tribes, and therefore anything that could they are constantly quarreling and be construed into malicious comment fighting amongst themselves, but they would come with an ill grace from his forget their feuds and quickly unite to pen. But it were exaggerated deli- repel a foreign foe. Predisposed by cacy to abstain from stating facts, his character," says the Colonist, to and these he gives in all their naked- draw near to civilisation, the Kabyle ness; generally, however, allowing attaches himself sincerely to the civithem to speak for themselves, and lised man when circumstances estabadding little in the way of remark or lish a friendly connexion between them. opinion. In pursuance of this system, He is still inclined to certain vices he relates the most horrible instances inherent in the savage; but of all the of outrage and cruelty with a matter- Africans, he is the best disposed to live of-fact coolness, and an absence alike in friendship and harmony with us, of blame and sympathy, that may which he will do when he shall find himself in permanent contact with the European population." This is not the general opinion, and it differs widely from that expressed by Mr. Borrer. But the Colonist had his own views, perhaps his own interests, to further. He wrote some months previous to the expedition which Mr. Borrer accompanied, and which was then not likely to take place, and he strongly advocated its propriety-admitting, however, that public opinion in France was greatly opposed to a military incursion into Kabylia. Himself established at Bougie, of course in some description of commerce, the necessity of roads connecting the coast and the interior was to him quite evident. A good many of his countrymen, whose personal benefit was not so likely to be promoted by causeway-cutting in Algeria, strongly deprecated any sort of road-making that was likely to bring on war with the Kabyles. France began to think she was paying too dear for her whistle. She looked back to the early days of the Orleans dynasty, when Marshal Clausel promised to found a rich and powerful colony with only 10,000 men. She glanced at the pages of the Moniteur of 1837, and there she found words uttered by the great Bugeaud in the Chamber of Deputies. Forty-five thousand men and one good campaign," said the white-headed warrior, as the Arabs call him, "and in six months the country is pacified, and you may reduce the army to twenty thousand men, to be paid by imposts levied on the colony, consequently costing France nothing." Words, and nothing more-mere wind; the greatest bosh that ever was uttered, even by Bugeaud, who is proverbial for dealing largely in that flatulent commodity. Nine years passed away, and the Commission of the Budget "deplored a situation which compelled France to maintain an army of more than 100,000 men upon that African territory." (Report of M. Bignon of the 15th April 1846, p. "When the Arabs appear before 237.) Bugeaud himself had mightily the judges who dispose of life and changed his tone, and declared that, to death, they confess their faith and, keep Algiers, as large an army would proclaim their hatred of us; and be essential as had been required to when we are simple enough to tell conquer it. Lamoricière, a great them that some of their race are deauthority in such matters, confirmed voted to us, they reply, Those lie the opinion of his senior. Monsieur to you, through fear, or for their own Desjobert, and a variety of pamphleteers and newspaper writers, attacked with argument, ridicule, and statistics, the party known as the Algérophiles, who made light of difficulties, scoffed at expense, and predicted the prosperity and splendour of French Africa. Algeria, according to them, was to become the brightest gem in the citizen-crown of France. These sanguine gentlemen were met with facts and figures. During 1846, said the anti-Algerines, your precious colony will have cost France 125,000,000 of francs. And they proved it in black and white. There was little chance of the expense being less in following years. Then came the loss of men. In 1840, said M. Desjobert, giving chapter and verse for his statements, 9567 men perished in the African hospitals, out of an effective army of 63,000. Add those individuals who died in French hospitals, or in their homes, from the results of African campaigning, and the total loss is moderately stated at 11,000 men, or more than one-sixth of the whole force employed. Out of these, only 227 died in action. The thing seemed hopeless and endless. What do we get for our money? was the cry. What is our compensation for the decimation of our young men? France can better employ her sons, than in sending them to perish by African fevers. What do we gain by all this expenditure of gold and blood-The unreasonable mortals! Had they not gained a Duke of Isly and a Moorish pavilion? M. Desjobert surely forgets these inestimable acquisitions when he asks and answers the question-"What remains of all our victories? A thousand bulletins, and Horace Vernet's big pictures." "How many times," says the same writer, "has not the subjection of the Arabs been proclaimed! In 1844, General Bugeaud gains the battle of Isly. Are the Arabs subdued? |