The Blood Circle
Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill were part of a small but blood-soaked circle of liberal thinkers who embraced the murderous logic of empire.
In late October 2022, the Algerian government accepted the skulls of 24 national heroes who were killed during France’s crushing century-and-a-half-long (1830–1962) occupation of Algeria. Kept in card boxes in the Parisian Museum of Mankind, the decapitated heads of defeated Algerian locals had been stuck on poles and later shipped to France as war trophies. Included in the morbid mix were the heads of vanquished resistance fighters from the town of Zaatcha, a veritable oasis that was decimated by French forces in 1849.
Ali Farid Belkadi, the historian who made this ‘‘monstrous discovery’’ said in an interview for the New York Times that the revelations spoke volumes about French ‘‘colonial barbarism.’’ While other African nations were receiving royal crowns, ritual masks, and other decorative artifacts from apologetic former colonial powers, Algeria’s share of the repatriated bounty was the heads of its colonial martyrs.
Such were the remarkable human costs of France’s undeclared war in Algeria. The founders of colonial Algeria had initially hoped to free its people from the tyranny of Ottoman rule, and set the inhabitants of this African gem on their way to enlightenment. Described by church prelates as a ‘‘lair of pirates’’ and ‘‘anti-Christian barbarism,’’ colonization offered to its ‘‘stupid and degraded peoples,’’ stultified as they were by ‘‘despotism and vice,’’ the ‘‘inestimable benefits of peace.’’
Dreams of peace and prosperity for the inhabitants of this new outpost never materialized. By the time French forces finally managed to gain control of the entire country starting in 1848, the population had been reduced to penury. Far from relieving their troubles, complete French control of Algerian territory launched a period of unparalleled misery for the surviving natives. …
Continue reading this article by Guillaume A. W. Attia, “The Blood Circle,” here: https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-blood-circle/