Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956

2. Medicine and the Mission Civilisatrice: A Civilizing Science and the French Sociology of Islam in Algeria and Morocco, 1830–1912

Chapter 2 medicine and the mission civilisatrice: a civilizing science and the french sociology of islam in algeria and morocco, 1830–1912 In 1883, the French Orientalist and philologist Ernest Renan announced a revolutionary position: Islam killed science, “Islamism and science . . . The ambivalence contained in these words: Arab science, Arab philosophy, Arab Art, Muslim science, Muslim civilization. In killing science , Islam killed itself and condemned itself to a complete inferiority in the world.”1 The Third Republic (1870–1940), the moment when the Rights of Man were finally applied in France, was also the era of French imperial expansion and scientific racism. This was not a contradiction, for the French Republic was simultaneously universalist and racist, delineating the irrational, the primitive, and the undeveloped for “civilizing” and exclusion from full political rights as French citizens.2 Renan’s 1883 lecture illustrates the modality of the Third Republican civilizing mission—a positivist idea of science and its relationship to society . The French colonial lobby appropriated ideas from Auguste Comte, Émile Durkheim, and Ernest Renan to define France’s imperial mission in the world. France would bring positive knowledge, Comte’s liberatory path for all humanity, and apply it according to Durkheim’s “science of society” (sociologie), which would measure a society’s level of evolutionary progress according to its categories of thought. Each colonized society could be located along a path from the primitive to the civilized and governed according to its cultural particularities. Science would promote social evolution, and medicine was considered one of these “civilizing sciences.” A positive, republican idea of science influenced French Islamic policy in the empire and the medical service created under Resident General Hubert Lyautey in Morocco (1912–1925). Edmund Burke has argued that Lyautey drew upon the ethnography of military bureaux-arabes officers, a local “sociology of non-sociologists” uninfluenced by the currents of met- 52 medicine and the saints ropolitan thought.3 But Lyautey’s protectorate was a technocracy dependent upon the ideologies, instruments, and practices of French science. The Algerian député and colonial leader Eugène Étienne argued that sociologie would ensure a rational, benevolent, and modern colonial rule, the “science of man modeled on the sciences of nature.”4 Alfred Le Chatelier , the first chair of sociologie et sociographie musulmane at the Collège de France (1902) launched the Mission du Maroc, which Lyautey institutionalized as the protectorate’s Section Sociologique for native affairs.5 Native sociologie was the method used to describe, divide, and administer French Morocco. This idea of science also explains both the shift in French colonial policy from assimilation to association and the radical change in French hygiene policy for North Africa. Early French hygienists in Algeria (1830– 1870) argued that Algerians could be improved and assimilated to France through public works, intermarriage, and education, because physicians understood the human mind, the human body, the law, and the environment to form a single economy. But after sociologie defined human difference in the mind, French doctors saw Muslim Moroccans as primitives incapable of participating in a republic or perceiving the physical world rationally. French ethnographers in Algeria and Morocco provided an archive of “social facts” through which Lyautey’s administration knew Muslim minds and bodies; a Quranic healing amulet was no longer a local historical accident but irrefutable evidence of a hidden and irrational Muslim mentalité.6 Medicine and sociologie became intertwined; healing provided social artifacts for sociologists, and sociologists provided a racial theory to inform the study of Moroccan pathology. hygiene in the service of politics: acclimatement and colonialism in algeria The central question for France in 1830 was whether to colonize Algeria with civilian settlers or to rule the territory indirectly through native elites. Could Frenchmen “acclimate,” or survive and reproduce, in the Algerian climate? The hygienists Dr. Jean-Christian-Marc-François-Joseph Boudin, Dr. Joanny-André-Napoléon Périer, and Dr. Émile-Louis Bertherand advanced radically different answers: Boudin advocated indirect rule, Périer the assimilation of Muslims to France, and Bertherand a regime of racial apartheid. The flexibility of French hygiene to divergent colonial agendas demonstrates the fluidity of a French nineteenth-century medicine in transition from the humoralism of Hippocrates and Galen to medicine and the mission civilisatrice 53 the bacteriology of Louis Pasteur and Patrick Manson, not a triumphant science that conquered Africa for France.7 But more importantly, politics —rather than medical realities—ultimately determined...