By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria by Jennifer E. Sessions (review)

Jennifer E. Sessions's title suggests a historical narrative that weaves together military strategy, bloody warfare, and colonial occupation, yet, while none of these elements is absent from her book, it is their relationship to the work's organizing proposition that drives the narrative and lends it a compelling structure. Her thesis is that 'the roots of French Algeria lay in contests over political legitimacy sparked by the Atlantic revolutions of the eighteenth century' (p. 2). She argues that the French and Haitian revolutions had radically challenged, if not entirely overthrown, the legitimating structures that underpinned the political and social privileges of the Ancien Régime. Thus, the Bourbon Restoration (1815-30) and the Orléanist July Monarchy (1830-48) needed to reassert a version of pre-revolutionary authority while engaging with notions of popular sovereignty and citizenship. Sessions's bold claim is that both regimes made a claim to legitimacy, in part through warfare and overseas expansion. In the 1830s Algeria was to become a scene of brutal colonial warfare, but it was also transformed within France into a stage on which issues of sovereignty, legitimacy, and social anxieties could be played out. In her substantive analysis of popular songs and theatre, images d'Épinal, newspapers, pamphlets, ministerial memos, letters written by officers serving in Algeria, and officially commissioned murals, Sessions proceeds adroitly from thesis to its illustration, moving convincingly and elegantly from the conquest of Algeria back into its expression within, and impact on, French culture and politics of the 1830s. The military campaign, for example, was used by the Bonapartists, who sought the restoration of France's honour through military exploits. And it also suited Louis-Philippe, whose sons served as commanding officers in Algeria as evidence of a 'new strategy for representing meritocratic monarchy' (p. 83) based on a military commitment to the new colony. However, as the decade of conflict continued, the bloodier realities of the war were brought to the fore by the press. The Armée d'Afrique, under the command of General Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, was pursuing a new kind of warfare that introduced the anti-guerrilla tactics of the razzia — the destruction of grain silos, the slaughter of livestock, the burning of olive groves—which targeted 'Abd al-Qadir's logistical support and devastated communities. Details of this kind of war made Bonapartist identification of army and nation seem far less glorious. With 'Abd al-Qadir's surrender came a different version of masculine citizenship, one that was rooted in the settler. The colonists who were to win Algeria through the plough were to mark a new version of colony, a form of agrarian colonization that would be 'virtuous' in that it no longer depended on slavery but on self-reliance and hard work. Army and settlers in Algeria were culturally represented so pervasively within metropolitan France as to form the dynamic imbrication of imperialism and domestic politics that remained long after the overthrow of the July Monarchy. Jennifer Sessions's excellent book will stimulate French colonial historiography and prompt renewed thinking about the relationship between colonization and France's political culture in the nineteenth century.