by Kai Mora
In 1453, the Ottoman Empire rose to Europe’s east, took Constantinople, renamed it Istanbul, and replaced the Cross with the Crescent. Obstructing the lucrative trade routes of Asia, this drove Europeans westward in search of other routes, the context for the arrival of Europeans on the Senegambian coast. By the early nineteenth century, Ottoman corsairing in the Mediterranean Sea fueled debates on whether invasion was warranted in North Africa. The French, in particular, would pursue this question leading up to the conquest of Algiers in 1830. Having lost Haiti in 1804, one of France’s most valuable territories, they turned their attention towards territorial claims on the continent. With the “freeing” of North Africa, France would be able to geographically connect itself to its territories in West Africa through the taking of Algiers.
Drawing upon growing abolitionist sentiments developing throughout the nineteenth century, French politicians and intelligentsia appealed to both popular and political support for the invasion in terms of ending white—particularly female—enslavement to, and by, North African Muslims.[1] This move toward abolition, however, does not indicate an altruistic change of heart. Rather, it seemingly reflects a transformation rooted in what Christopher Leslie Brown calls “moral capital.” By feigning moral indignation at the human cost of slavery, European empires could undermine the economic health of a rebellious colony and protect their financial interests. In the Franco-Ottoman conflict, this moral capital was manifest at the intersection of women’s sexuality and religious confrontation. A recurring motif within French paintings, literature, and political diatribes, depictions of the “savagery” of the Ottoman empire provided the moral justification for taking Algiers and North Africa more broadly. This nineteenth-century landscape of literary and visual media set forth a precedent of women playing a foundational role in French imperialist propaganda, which would be revived in the Algerian War of Independence.
Propaganda and the Greek War of Independence
The pretext for the French conquest of Algiers found its greatest expression in the Greek War of Independence (1821–1829) from the Ottoman Empire. Gillian Weiss writes in Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean (2011) that “[n]ewspaper accounts of entire families massacred in cold blood confirmed notions of Turkish savagery,” while “descriptions of women carried into slavery” reinforced memories of “North African razzias (raids)” (158). “French journalists, artists, and urban elites” (Weiss, 159), who assumed a prominent role in promoting the emancipation of Greece from the Ottoman Empire, stoked “fears about mothers, wives, and daughters defiled, and the specter of apostasy [melding] with the specter of miscegenation” (Weiss, 156–157), or more clearly stated, the specter of interracial sexual relations. In the preceding Enlightenment era, a pure, white, European identity had emerged, inspired by the revival of Greco-Roman culture, and functioned as an antithesis to both Oriental and African culture. Thus, “the road to empire in North Africa,” according to Weiss, “passed by the ‘sister republics’ . . . of Western Europe, traveled from the Caribbean to the Sahara, and then wound its way through Greece” (157).
The French Minister of Foreign Affairs and President of the Société philanthropique pour l’assistance aux Grecs (Philanthropic Society to Aid the Cause of the Greeks), René de Chateaubriand, greatly swayed public opinion. He went before the Chamber of Peers in 1825 and accused the French government of tolerating “‘the enslavement of women, the prostitution of children . . . the compulsion of circumcision, and the taking of the turban’” (Weiss, 160). Weiss also details how the “sexual appetites of dark-complexioned soldiers and the vulnerability of Greek maidens” were also found in the imagination of artists and writers of the period in which “heads fell to ‘Nubian swords’ and virgins succumbed to ‘somber envoys’” (161). In Note sur la Grèce, Chateaubriand “likened the war against Greece to the abduction of an odalisque” through the imagery of Black African soldiers in the Ottoman army “[rushing] up to finish in Athens the work of black eunuchs in the harem. The first come in force to knock over ruins that the second, in their impotence, allowed to stand” (160).
Chateaubriand’s Note sur la Grèce became a cornerstone in the rising intellectual and artistic movement known as philhellenism, which decried the “assaults” of the Orient and “act[s] of racial and sexual, as well as religious, transgression” (Weiss, 160). The famed French painter Eugène Delacroix’s Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1826) gave philhellenism a critical visual dimension. Presented the year following Chateaubriand’s reproach of the Chamber of Peers and based on the siege of Missolonghi in April 1826, in which the inhabitants laid waste to the city rather than surrender, Weiss describes how Delacroix portrayed a fair-skinned, almost bare-chested woman, who leans upon the ruins of the Greek municipality of Missolonghi; her hands outstretched and her body vulnerable. Her central presence in the image links the sexual vulnerability of the woman to the vulnerability of self-sacrifice, specifically in resistance to Turkish conquest.
However, hovering in the background, one observes a “turbaned black warrior” (Weiss, 161) or rather “an imperious Turkish assailant” (Grigsby, 288), who undergoes a “racial metamorphosis into a [B]lack man” (Grigsby, 288), intimating, as Weiss describes, a “defilement about to occur” (161). Thus, the lines between Africa—the “Dark Continent”—and the “Orient” blur as both geographies and concepts. Through such illustrations, French representations of both the Oriental and the African become interchangeable, not just in political geography but also in their conceptual—that is, moral and social—character.
The Taking of Algiers and the Making of Imperial France
With tensions rising throughout the 1820s, it would be the relatively minor, personal insult of Hussayn, the Dey of Algiers, against French Consul-General Pierre Deval over unpaid debts that triggered Charles X’s approval to blockade Algiers in 1827. Weiss traces how, by 1829, the economic impact of the blockade in Algiers had become firmly intertwined with the “philhellene-honed arguments about France’s religious and humanitarian duty to liberate Ottoman-held territories from such tyranny” (164). Reaching its climax in May 1830 with France’s six-day invasion, Weiss writes that, for a French army fueled by Orientalist imagery of riches and women, “victory over the Algerians and the looting of their encampment” offered a “fantastical incentive for fighting” (166). After the invasion, while the newspapers proclaimed how “‘Muslim society [recoiled] before Christian civilization’” (Weiss, 167), the playwright Jean-Toussaint Merle recalled how the conquest “‘offered itself to every imagination in the most brilliant colors. We dreamed only of treasures, harems, and palaces’” (Weiss, 166–167). But, lest the French public forget the original reason for the intervention, Charles X authorized the publication of an engraving based on an earlier canvas by Hippolyte Lecomte, Un Bazar d’esclaves à Alger (A Slave Market in Algiers). The painting, Weiss describes:
[D]epicts a pale woman in a modest white robe, eyes averted and hands clasped as a turbaned man with a scimitar offers her up for inspection and a dark-complexioned soldier wearing an embroidered vest restrains her male protector with a dagger. Against a landscape of camels and minarets, her female companions weep, while off to the side sits another male figure in European dress, wrists bound in his lap. In the lower right corner, jewels spill suggestively from an open case (169).
It is for this cause against supposed Oriental and African savagery that importance is placed not just on the removal of Muslim dominion, but also French ascendancy in the region. French politicians and intelligentsia employed moral capital by feigning a sense of indignation propped up by images of white women defiled and enslaved by Oriental and African men. This pretext for their invasion ultimately led towards their direct economic interest. With French ascendancy came a “dreamily envisioned ‘Africa . . . covered with laboring populations,’” as well as “the incorporation of Algiers, Oran, and Constantine as departments of France” (Weiss, 167). Herein lies the lynchpin of the French imperial imagination that Frantz Fanon described in Toward the African Revolution (1969) as always representing “a more or less real prolongation” (84) of France and a “bridgehead of Western colonialism in Africa” (147). The taking of Algiers was not simply another economically exploitative imperial conquest. Rather, it represented a concerted attempt to extend the geographic and conceptual scope of the French empire. “[I]n Algeria,” Fanon writes, “from the beginning, relations of identity were affirmed” (84).
In The Colonial Harem (1986), Malek Alloula outlines how the French invaders of Algiers consisted of “missionaries and scholars with their impedimenta as well as painters and photographers forever thirsty for exoticism, folklore, Orientalism” (3). Following the Algiers conquest, Delacroix presented two versions of another canonical work, Femmes d’Alger (1834 and c. 1849). White odalisques command the foreground; they exchange their burqas for frilled blouses and trousers. A Black woman exits the frame, and the harem is now turned into an apartment. Such a depiction implies not quite the end of the women’s sexual exploitation and the institution of the harem—the purported goal of the taking of Algiers—but the “civilizing” of it. The inclusion of this Black female servant equally communicates a purposeful choice in understanding the Orientalist thinking that drove the taking of Algiers. The power of the Black male presence in the harem, as conveyed in, say, Delacroix’s Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1826), is now replaced with a Black female servant; the complete feminization of the Black male eunuch and the total pacification of the Ottoman imperial threat.
There is, however, an important contrast between the first and second versions of Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger. In the second version, rather than the Black woman leaving the scene completely, she stays present, blending in with herred turban and sash as she holds up the “heavy curtain that hangs meaningfully between the spectator and the scene” (O’Beirne, 45). In this second version, Delacroix inserted her as an actor rather than a passive symbol in the painting, her actions transgressing against the societal role of the Black eunuch who guarded and protected the harem, rather than exposing it. On the one hand, the impotence of the Black eunuch—the guardians of the harem—symbolically and literally obscured Orientalist voyeurism and, consequently, French imperialist aims. On the other hand, once the Ottomans were defeated, the French found, as discussed by Alloula, that the veiled women of Algiers became yet another obstacle to “the scopic desire (the voyeurism)” (7) of the Orientalist and their accompanying imperialist designs. As such, the Orientalist is rejected. “Turned back upon himself,” Alloula writes, “upon his own impotence in the situation,” by the “smooth and homogenous surface” of the veil, “free of any cracks through which he could slip his indiscreet lens” (7). The French Orientalist was faced with his hypocrisy. At the same time, he fought to liberate white women from their supposed defilement, he also fought to reveal the sexuality embedded in the concept of the woman’s awrah—or the intimate parts of her body meant to be concealed. It is the Orientalist who becomes the unwilling eunuch, part of an Orientalist fantasy that he is unable to realize.
Algeria Unveiled and the War of Independence
Five years into the Algerian War of Independence, Fanon inaugurated his book A Dying Colonialism (1959) with the chapter “Algeria Unveiled.” He writes that French officials conspired amongst one another to “‘destroy the structure of Algerian society, its capacity for resistance’” by “‘[conquering] the women’” (37-38). The defensive battle against the sexual exploitation of European women had transformed into an offensive that sought to disrobe the veiled Algerian woman. Fanon, indeed, narrates the ideology of the French imperialists who “‘must go and find them behind the veil where they hide themselves and in the houses where the men keep them out of sight’” (38). And, just like in the invasion of Algiers, the Algerian War of Independence was fought on a plane of culture and propaganda. Fanon continues:
Every rejected veil disclosed to the eyes of the colonialists horizons until then forbidden, and revealed to them, piece by piece, the flesh of Algeria laid bare . . . Every new Algerian woman unveiled announced to the occupier an Algerian society whose systems of defense were in the process of dislocation, open and breached. Every veil that fell, every body that became liberated from the traditional embrace of the haïk, every face that offered itself to the bold and impatient glance of the occupier, was a negative expression of the fact that Algeria was beginning to deny herself and was accepting the rape of the colonizer (42).
While Delacroix’s work would give visual dimension to the beginning of the French empire in Africa, Pablo Picasso would define its end in his own reworking of Les Femmes d’Alger in 1954–55 at the very genesis of the Algerian War of Independence. Imploding Delacroix’s harem in his quintessential Cubist style, Emer O’Beirne argues that “far from destroying [the voyeuristic perspective], [Picasso’s painting] multiplies its possible angles of erotic approach by allowing, for example, the simultaneous representation of the full range of eroticized parts of the female body” (47). However, while Picasso reaffirmed imperialist voyeurism in all its meanings through his work, the implosion of Algerian women had yet another meaning. As O’Beirne and Frantz Fanon both discuss, Algerian women would hide explosives, as well as transport weapons and important documents, in the very garments the Orientalist wished to remove. The explosion of these women did not mean to make imperial voyeurism easier, but to completely destroy any possibility of it.
The visibility of women through a moral and religious prism was at the center of the battle for Algiers and, later, Algeria. Assia Djebar, writing in an independent Algeria, published her acclaimed work Les Femmes d’Alger (1980), which assumes the name and cover image of Delacroix and Picasso’s paintings. The book follows the lives of various Muslim women at different points of French colonialism. Emer O’Beirne writes that “[f]rom Djebar’s perspective,” the “fantasized western ideal appears a less extreme violation to Djebar when contrasted with the removal of women altogether from the visual field of men outside the family through the imposition of the veil” (40). Orientalist depictions, “whatever preconceptions it might convey, whatever the power relations implicit in the male colonial gaze,” is “an assertion of female presence intrinsically opposed to the erasure of the female body’s visibility operated by fundamentalist Islamic practices in Algeria” (O’Beirne, 40).
As discussed above, the invisibility and the visibility of women and their bodies have played a fluctuating role in Algerian history. Sexuality and chastity, visibility and invisibility, were equally employed in French stratagems of acquiring and maintaining power. Women became a central fixture in this economic, political, and cultural battleground, motivated by the desire for empire in Africa and finally removing Ottoman dominance. By deploying propaganda around women, their bodies, sexuality, and (religious) morality, the French were able to acquire enough support for the taking of Algiers, a strategy that would solidify French presence in Africa well into the following century.
[1] It must be briefly noted that “North African,” “Muslim,” “Turkish,” and “Arab” designations were often used interchangeably by European officials, indicating their mutual function in the concept of the Orient.
Kai Mora is a Ph.D. candidate in African and African American Studies at Harvard University, specializing in music and spirituality in Western Africa. She graduated with her B.A. and M.A. in History from the City College of New York. Her work has been featured by The Republic, The Black Scholar, Callaloo, Transition Magazine, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and HISTORY.
Edited by Tomi Onabanjo.
Featured image: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Parisian Women in Algerian Costume (The Harem) (1872). Oil on canvas, 156 cm × 129 cm (61 in × 51 in). National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
