Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (14 page)

Perhaps even more important, French merchants—both those returning to Algeria and new waves of traders—deeply resented what they saw as Abd el-Kader’s monopolistic control over the markets. They pressured the French government to renegotiate the treaty. As this lobbying intensified, secret codicils to the treaty were produced, to the grave discredit of Desmichels, who was called home at the close of 1834 under a cloud of suspicion and growing concern. His replacement, General Camille Alphonse Trézel, was yet another Napoleonic veteran but, like Bourmont, very conventional minded.

Seemingly more aware of his limitations than Bourmont, Trézel devised a plan to woo some of the tribes to work with French forces—an initiative not unlike the “awakening movement” in Iraq undertaken in 2006–2007 to bring Sunni tribes over to the side of the American forces fighting the insurgency there. The French made some headway with this strategy, which Abd el-Kader swiftly sought to curtail by means of punitive action, lest his power base erode.

Matters came to a head in June 1835 when insurgent tribesmen were set loose to mount small attacks throughout French-occupied Algeria. This had an immediate and crippling effect on colonial rule as, in Abd el-Kader’s words, “no bird will fly without my permission.”
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Trézel’s response was to set off with about three thousand troops on a march to Mascara, which he regarded as Abd el-Kader’s critical center of gravity, with the idea that defeating the jihadi decisively there would end the insurgency and consolidate colonial rule.

What ensued was a disaster for the French. Although Trézel and his troops acquitted themselves well in the first ambush set by Abd el-Kader, in the forest of Moulay-Ishmael, the next one at the Machta River crossing was their undoing. Abd el-Kader placed a force of snipers in front of the French there, holding back some cavalry ready to strike from the rear. The result was a slaughter that saw some four hundred of Trézel’s men killed and a similar number wounded. The rest of the force was widely scattered, losing all capacity for cohesive action. All the artillery and the baggage train were lost. The French were humiliated, much as the British had been under General Braddock in the American wilderness eighty years earlier. Abd el-Kader’s, authority among the tribes was reaffirmed by this display of military skill. The French would either have to send more troops to Algeria or treat with him.

Initially they tried to fight, sacking Trézel and replacing him with General Count Bernard Clauzel, who came with reinforcements and promised immediate action. His notion of “action,” however, was of the most unimaginative sort—a series of punitive raids against innocent Algerian tribes, which left men, women, and children dead and flocks scattered in the name of what he called “total occupation.” These atrocities only kindled a hatred of the occupier that shored up Abd el-Kader’s support.

Clauzel, keener on reactions in Parisian salons and Parliament than among Algerians, next sought to win a big pitched battle, so he marched his army against the holdout city of Constantine. He hoped that a great victory there would gain approval for his request that an additional thirty thousand troops be sent to Algeria so that he could “finish the job.” In the event, his big, balky expedition suffered much the same fate as had Trézel’s, save that Clauzel’s losses mounted to more than three thousand. He was recalled in November 1836, to be replaced by one of the other generals who had been serving in Algeria, Thomas Bugeaud. A veteran of the war in Spain who had served under Suchet, Bugeaud had many new ideas he wished to put into action against Abd el-Kader, whom he had earlier beaten at Sikkak, the one conventional battle the emir ever fought.

Bugeaud thus came into command with a remarkable reputation as the only man who had bested Abd el-Kader. He inspired confidence also because of his ability to articulate the strategy he intended to use against the insurgents: the
RAZZIA
. That is, Bugeaud intended to break the French forces, which included the Foreign Legion, into countless flying columns that would raid the raiders. But it would be a while before this strategy could be attempted. The king and Parliament, tired of the costs of fighting a seemingly interminable insurgency, instructed Bugeaud first to try to negotiate another peace treaty with Abd el-Kader. This he accomplished, the result being the Treaty of Tafna, signed on May 30, 1837, which was in most ways a replay of the Desmichels Treaty, right down to its secret codicils. Bugeaud and Abd el-Kader then met on June 1st to declare peace and friendship publicly. For now the fighting was over. A few months later Bugeaud headed home to France, told King Louis-Philippe that he was no longer needed, and retired, at fifty-three, to his estate in the Dordogne.

The peace, however, would be edgy. Many of the Algerian tribes were unwilling to live with permanent French occupation of even a part of their country, and they were held in check only with difficulty by the authority of Abd el-Kader. Indeed, as John Kiser has assessed the situation, “peace was more harmful to the emir than war.”
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An ongoing conflict gave the tribes an external enemy against which to unite. Peace left them with the unrequited lust to mount their traditional
RAZZIAS
and a growing sense of resentment toward the man who was, in the name of building a nation, trying to control tribes who had always been their own masters.

The French were almost as unhappy, given that the treaty limited them to a few coastal settlements and left Abd el-Kader still largely in a position to exercise control over Algeria’s commerce. In addition, a scandal broke when the secret codicils were revealed, as Bugeaud had agreed to deport some of the tribal chiefs opposed to Abd el-Kader and had sold the emir thousands of French firearms, ostensibly for keeping the peace against recalcitrant tribes. Aside from concerns about selling weapons that might be used against French soldiers and settlers, there was outrage when it was learned that a side payment had been made to Bugeaud of nearly two hundred thousand francs. While he did not personally benefit from the bribe—about half went to subordinate officers, the rest was used for road improvements in his home district in France—Bugeaud had nevertheless tarnished his reputation and undermined the treaty.

The peace too continued to be fragile, with both sides engaging in activities that stretched the terms of the treaty to the near breaking point. The French were determined to open up land routes to connect their coastal holdings more directly. Abd el-Kader was making trade overtures to the Americans, which greatly aggrieved the growing French commercial interests. And there were inevitable small clashes involving forces on both sides. There was also an inadvertent escalation of suspicions about Abd el-Kader’s true intentions, the standing army he was building—which he claimed was needed to keep the tribes in line—was approaching a size that could be viewed as threatening to the survival of French settlements. There was more truth than paranoia in this view: the stronger the Algerians became, the more the tribal leaders wished to renew the jihad against the Europeans.

Near the close of 1839, after two and a half years of peace, Abd el-Kader convened a council to hear the complaints of the tribal leaders. Their resentment of continuing French encroachment had reached a boiling point, and the emir knew that he could either go along with their call to war or risk losing his leadership and the national unity that had so far been achieved. He agreed to renew the conflict with the French.

War broke out again with a fury that the colonizers could not contain. In the early days and months of the insurgency, when small attacks were being mounted at or around nearly every settlement, the French saw little hope of victory. In Paris during 1840, Parliament debated what to do, and there seemed a growing sense of resignation about both the inevitability of war and the horror it would bring. The great French strategic thinker, the Baron Jomini, yet another veteran of the war in Spain, summed up the nature of a national uprising that takes the form of an insurgency: “There be in it something grand and noble, which commends our admiration [but] the consequences are so terrible that, for the sake of humanity, we ought to hope never to see it.”
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In the midst of the parliamentary debates, the views of the deputy from the Dordogne, Thomas Bugeaud, came to the fore. A decade earlier he had opposed the very notion of colonizing Algeria. Now he argued that the only way ahead was complete conquest. He called for eighty thousand troops to be sent and for his raiding concept of operations to be employed. King Louis-Philippe and the Chamber of Deputies called for him to again take command in the field. He did, returning to Algeria early in 1841. Abd el-Kader was about to face his sternest challenge.

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The strategic situation that Bugeaud surveyed on his arrival was desperate. Abd el-Kader and his mobile, well-informed light forces were able to strike at settlements whenever they chose. The French response had been largely defensive, with most troops being tied down in or near settlements—which then made them vulnerable to raids on their supply and communications lines. When the occupying army did try to take the offensive, it could not move swiftly enough to catch the raiders, as such efforts were bogged down by the sheer size of the expeditions, their logistical requirements, and a fanatical devotion to dragging along artillery. In lieu of engaging the insurgents, the suffering troops often vented their rage on innocent villagers and farmers, with their atrocities fueling the rage of the Algerians against the French.

Bugeaud swiftly put an end to much of this folly. After a relatively brief period of retraining and morale building, he launched a campaign that, in large part, emulated the raiding style of Abd el-Kader and his forces. The basic concept was to move from a military approach based on taking the offensive with a few large units to one characterized by many small detachments swarming about, keeping the enemy on the run, at times even catching up with and engaging his forces. With this shift to small units of action, Bugeaud also gave the lie to the notion that harsh terrain—this war was fought mostly in deserts and mountains—always gave the insurgent an enduring advantage. The military historian Douglas Porch has elegantly summed up Bugeaud’s basic tactics:

Mobile columns numbering from a few hundred to a few thousand men, shorn of artillery and heavy wagons, could fan out over the countryside to converge from different directions on a previously selected objective. In this way, Bugeaud was able to penetrate into areas that before had been immune to attack, carry the fight in to the very heart of the Kabylia Mountains, and give his enemies no rest.
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Abd el-Kader adjusted to the new French approach as best he could, abandoning the fixed positions he had allowed to harden during the peace and redeploying his forces in counterattacks where least expected. The French never gained the same degree of mobility as the insurgents; so in their frustration, and as part of Bugeaud’s use of terror tactics to cow some of the tribes back into submission, they burned crops, killed the men they found, and raped the women. Abd el-Kader, his forces still in being but unable to face the French in open battle, began to see some tribes going over to the enemy. His sources of intelligence began to dry up, his movements became constrained.

Yet his sense of humanity never left him. In the midst of this brutal fighting, Abd el-Kader proposed regular prisoner swaps, a clever way to counter French propaganda that to be captured by his forces was to be tortured and killed. The jihadi general even offered to allow Catholic priests to be sent to live among the prisoners he was keeping, sustaining their spirits until the war ended. And if an allied tribe went over to the French, Abd el-Kader thought carefully about whether to attack them. If in his view they had switched sides due to the heavy punishments the French had inflicted upon them, he let them alone. If, however, they had turned out of opportunism, they soon felt the lash of his still considerable power.

The war went on in this fashion until the spring of 1843, each side landing punches, neither seemingly capable of a knockout blow. But on May 19, 1843, a French “flying column” stumbled upon Abd el-Kader’s
SMALA
, the mobile home base of the tribe’s families, flocks, arsenals, and administration. With French raiding parties operating throughout the country, it was probably inevitable that the
SMALA
would be found at some point. It was a large, soft target—it contained almost twenty thousand people, mostly women, children, and old men—but with about five thousand fighters too. The French raiding column consisted of about six hundred cavalry under the command of the Duc d’Aumale, King Louis-Philippe’s youngest son. He was greatly outnumbered but had the advantage of surprise, so important in irregular warfare. The duke’s boldness won through as the defenders were disorganized and set to flight. The British expert on irregular warfare, C. E. Callwell, captured the irony of the situation: “The most decisive reverse suffered by Abd el-Kader
. . . was inflicted upon him in what was almost an accidental manner by a few troops of horse.”
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Abd el-Kader’s family narrowly escaped this disaster. He himself had been away, shadowing another French detachment. In the wake of this huge victory, the French picked up the tempo of their operations. Abd el-Kader soon felt the need to seek haven across the border in Morocco. But Bugeaud came and chastised the Moroccans, winning a great battle over them—a dukedom and promotion to marshal too—at Issly. His haven imperiled, Abd el-Kader was kept constantly on the move, occasionally striking back at the French. But he had apparently lost the initiative, fighting on now with an ever-narrowing circle of tribal allies, constantly hounded by Bugeaud and his flying columns. All Abd el-Kader could do was to continue the struggle, hoping other small resistance cells would arise and that the French popular will to continue the war would finally break.