CHAPTER SEVEN

The outcome of the war of independence against Spain also induced perplexity and unease. It was crowned with success thanks to the aid of the ex-slaves of San Domingo and, albeit amid bitter conflicts, witnessed the emergence of a new identity stamped by a restoration of pre-Columbian ancestry and a mixing of races. Giving vent to a widespread sentiment, at the start of the Latin American revolution a senator from South Carolina (Robert Y. Hayne) scornfully referred to its leaders as ‘men of color’, who were ‘looking to Hayti … with feelings of the strongest confraternity’.¹ They admired the island which, in Jefferson’s view, could serve only as a dumping ground where blacks could be deported and deposited. For the purposes of that operation—i.e. ‘the definitive disappearance of the black race from our borders’—John O’Sullivan, the theorist of ‘manifest destiny’, thought above all of the Latin American continent: ‘The Spanish-Indian-American population of Mexico, Central America and South America, afford the only receptacle capable of absorbing that race … [They are] themselves already of mixed and confused blood’.² In the view of Elam Lynds, ‘father of the prison system’ then in force and a prominent US figure, ‘whose practical talents are universally acknowledged’ (the characterization is de Tocqueville’s) ‘the Spanish of South America’ formed ‘a race closer to the ferocious beast and the savage than civilized man’.³ The category traditionally employed to define Indians was now also applied to the populations that had committed the error of mixing with them.

While white colonists in the British Commonwealth saw their right to self-government recognized, the Latin American peoples, excluded from the white community and the community of the free strictly defined, became part of the colonial world. This explains the Monroe Doctrine. Reinterpreted and radicalized in 1904 by Theodore Roosevelt, it conferred an ‘international police power’ on ‘civilized society’ in general, and the United States in particular, in relation to Latin America.⁴

The white colonists of the British Empire encountered no serious difficulty achieving recognition. Having learnt the lesson implicit in the American Revolution, the London government decided to pursue the policy of ‘conciliation’ formerly suggested by Burke in its relationship with peoples ‘in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates’. Thus, from the second half of the nineteenth century, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa first achieved significant autonomy inside the Commonwealth and subsequently attained complete independence. It was a well-founded principle (observed John Stuart Mill in 1861) that, at least in domestic policy, the ‘colonies of European race’ were fully entitled to self-government.⁵

As in the case of the United States, self-government by the colonists could entail a drastic deterioration in the conditions of colonial peoples or peoples of colonial origin, now subject to the exclusive, unhampered control of their direct oppressors. We are familiar with Smith’s observation about the catastrophic consequences that ‘free’ representative bodies monopolized or controlled by slave-owners could have for black slaves. Several decades later, in 1841, James Stephen, one of the actors in the struggle that had led to the abolition of slavery in British colonies, declared himself in favour of their firm control by the Crown: ‘popular franchises in the hands of a great body of owners of slaves were the worst instruments of tyranny which were ever yet forged for the oppression of mankind’.⁶

The pertinence of this warning was tragically confirmed by subsequent developments. In 1864, referring to New Zealand, which for some years had been able to count on ‘responsible government’—that is, ultimately, self-government by the white community—The Times observed:

In Australia the extermination of the Aborigines had already begun some time earlier. But in this case too it was the de facto self-government which the colonists succeeded in exercising that pressed on the accelerator, whereas expressing concern in 1830 about the ‘indelible stain’ being imprinted ‘upon the character of the British Government’ was the Colonial Secretary.⁸ In this sense, according to the observation made at the start of the twentieth century by an English liberal whose position was highly anomalous—namely, John Hobson—what was occurring was a kind of ‘private slaughter’, carried out by colonists who had wrested self-government or substantial freedom of action.⁹

In the case of South Africa, once the government had defeated the Boer settlers and subjected them to the Empire, it reassured them: ‘Your fate is in your own hands … the good sense of the British people will never tolerate any intermeddling in the purely domestic concerns of the people to whom it has conceded the fullest liberties of government.’¹⁰ Self-government by white settlers involved the emergence of a racial state, which segregated blacks in a semi-servile condition and remained in place for almost a century.

Significantly, this regime took the South of the United States as its model.¹¹ There, following a brief interlude (so-called Reconstruction) immediately after the Civil War, when African Americans were genuinely able to enjoy civil and political rights, the reconciliation between the former enemies in 1877 reestablished in the southern states the self-government of whites, who subjected the recently emancipated slaves to a terroristic dictatorship based on the principle of white supremacy. As in South Africa with the compromise between the British and the Boers, in the United States the compromise between central government and the dominant class in the South, which re-acquired the right to self-government, paved the way for the reassertion of ‘master-race democracy’.

2. The abolition of slavery and the development of servile labour

At this point a question suggests itself. The military defeat of the South was clear and irreversible, but had the principle of the racial delimitation of the community of the free really been overcome? Scorning abolitionism, Calhoun summarized the change that had occurred in Britain’s colonies following the desired emancipation: blacks were ‘forced to labor, not by the authority of the overseer, but by the bayonet of the soldiery and the rod of the civil magistrate’.¹² This statement dates from 1837. Laws against vagrancy forced the former slaves to work as ‘apprentices’. In what conditions? A year prior to the intervention of the theorist of the slaveholding South, a representative of the British colonial administration, inspired by evangelical sentiments, had observed in a letter to the governor of the island of Mauritius:

De Tocqueville would later observe that ‘having nominally abolished slavery, the British have reintroduced it under the rubric of apprenticeship for a certain period of time’.¹⁴

Certainly, the apprenticeship only lasted a few years, even if much time had to pass before the ex-slaves could shake off the negative discriminations of every kind they continued to suffer. In any event, even before the abolition of slavery in its colonies, Britain was concerned to replace the blacks, importing indentured servants from Africa and Asia. Here we see at work Indian and Chinese coolies in particular. On their arrival in the British colonies, they were settled in the accommodation reserved for slaves. It is true that this involved indentured servants, but in fact many of them did not survive until the expiry of their contract. Even the sexual exploitation of women was not lacking. In the popular art of the time, the coolie was represented in chains, exactly like a slave. Obviously, there was no longer a hereditary transmission of the servile condition; in a sense, there was not even any need for it. British ships could continue to transport coolies from Asia in a voyage that resembled the classic slave trade. Conditions were harsh and the mortality rate high.¹⁵ But the losses could rapidly be made up. A distinguished American historian of the institution of slavery has offered a summary of the golden age of liberalism that is worth quoting:

In Britain in 1840 a political figure of the first importance—Lord John Russell—expressed his unease at the advent of a ‘new system of slavery’. Initially, it met with resistance from the abolitionist movement, which was still fairly strong. However, as a result of the already noted weakness of abolitionism inspired by Christianity, demands for the import from Africa and Asia of indentured servants, who in reality were a more or less compulsory labour force, soon got the upper hand.¹⁷

As well as in British colonies, this new servile labour force also made its appearance in the United States. Around 10,000 coolies imported from China were engaged in building inaccessible railroads, intended to consolidate the conquest of the Far West.¹⁸ As Engels put it, this was an attempt to replace black slavery with the ‘disguised slavery of Indian and Chinese coolies’.¹⁹

Was this confirmation of the thesis maintained by Calhoun of the inseparability of work and slavery? In North America, prior to being overshadowed and then definitively supplanted by more profitable black slavery, Indian slavery had long persisted here and there, even after the Glorious Revolution. In 1767 Sharp, the abolitionist we have already encountered, felt obliged to denounce it. In the case of Virginia it was only in 1808 that the Supreme Court definitively pronounced its illegality.²⁰ From the American Revolution onwards, the indentured servant or temporary white slave was completely replaced by the black slave, who in turn, after the end of the Civil War, gave way to the coolie from China or India—another temporary slave, even if the skin colour was now yellow. In 1834, the same year as the abolition of slavery in British colonies, the liberal Wakefield acknowledged that ‘yellow slaves’ were beginning to take the place of ‘blacks’, just as the latter had taken over from ‘red’ (Indian) slaves.²¹ In reality, ‘red’ slavery or semi-slavery would have a new lease of life in the second half of the nineteenth century in Texas and California, taken from Mexico (see below, Chapter 9, §2).

Naturally, it can reasonably be objected to Calhoun that semi-slavery or slavery for a specified period of time is not the same thing as perpetual and hereditary slavery. But let us note the further development of the argument by the theorist of the slaveholding South. In any ‘wealthy and civilized society’, part of the population ‘live[s] on the labor of the other’. This was a manifestly conflictual relationship: the best way of regulating it was achieved when ‘the labor of the African race is, [as] among us, commanded by the European’.²²

3. The expansion of Europe in the colonies and the diffusion of ‘master-race democracy’ in Europe

It is clear: freedom applied ‘only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties’ and could not be demanded by minors or ‘those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage’.²³ No different was the position of Lecky, who at the start of the twentieth century celebrated the glory of the United Kingdom thus:

The ‘despotism’ theorized here was certainly synonymous with slavery from the standpoint of Locke and the protagonists of the American Revolution, all the more so in that it seemed to know no limits. In Mill’s view, ‘a ruler full of the spirit of improvement is warranted in the use of any expedients that will attain an end, perhaps otherwise unattainable’.²⁵ Political ‘slavery’ could not be equated with slavery in the strict sense. Yet Mill went further. He demanded the barbarians’ ‘obedience’ for the purposes of their education for ‘continuous labour’, which was the foundation of civilization. And, in this context, he did not hesitate to theorize a transitional phase of ‘slavery’ for ‘uncivilized races’.²⁶ The point was forcefully reiterated: there were ‘savage tribes so averse from regular industry, that industrial life is scarcely able to introduce itself among them until they are … conquered and made slaves of’.²⁷ On the other hand, the slave had no cause for complaint; he was ‘one step in advance of a savage’, and thanks to the conditions imposed on him had already achieved a certain progress. We are put in mind of Calhoun and the slaveholding South, all the more so when Mill refers to ‘born slaves’ recalcitrant to work and discipline.²⁸ Certainly, despite his employment of the expression just noted, the English liberal envisaged a temporary slavery. This would in fact seem to hang over ‘the great majority of the human race’, which unfortunately was ‘in a savage or semi-savage state’²⁹—the condition dictating slavery. While, on the one hand, Mill sided decisively with the Union during the Civil War, on the other, he legitimized the practice of forced labour imposed by colonial powers on subject populations.

The other side of the coin of this opposition between civilized, adult England and savage races of minors was the process whereby the barrier separating servants from masters in the metropolis tended to lose its caste rigidity. The attitude adopted in the mid-nineteenth century by Disraeli, champion of the colonial expansion of ‘superior’ races and major theorist of race as the ‘key to history’ (see below, Chapter 8, §10), was significant. He denied that it was possible to speak of the existence in England of ‘two nations’—‘the rich and the poor’—as the Chartists claimed. On the basis of his assertion of the unity that now characterized the ‘privileged, prosperous English people’, Disraeli promoted the Second Reform Act, which extended political rights to significant sections of the popular masses.³⁰ Class differences within the white community remained, but were being reduced even at a social level. The exploitation of Chinese coolies and other more or less servile labour forces created the possibility of ‘raising to the position of “independent gentlemen”‘, if not ‘whole white populations of the West’, as Hobson maintained,³¹ then at least a significant proportion of them.

The decisive barrier now lay elsewhere. The three ‘castes’ had become two—in the United States thanks to the abolition of slavery, and in Europe thanks to the reduction of differences within the white community, which was tending to develop more egalitarian internal relations than in the past, similar to those of the white community across the Atlantic. In this sense, ‘master-race democracy’ now characterized the overall relations between the West and the colonial world, whether internal or external.

Essentially, this was the same analysis as Mill’s (and Lecky’s), with the difference that ‘despotism’ now had a negative connotation. Suffering it (stressed Hobson) were populations coerced into forced labour. And here too we have a convergence with Mill as regards factual analysis, but a sharp contrast when it comes to value judgement.

4. De Tocqueville, Western supremacy and the danger of ‘miscegenation’

The model of ‘master-race democracy’ also had a clear influence on de Tocqueville. It is true that during the July Monarchy he stood for the abolition of slavery in French colonies. But how were the ex-slaves to be treated once they had been emancipated? It was necessary ‘to prevent the negroes of our colonies imitating those of the English colonies and, like them, abandoning the major industries to retire to a piece of fertile soil, which has been bought cheaply or grabbed’. Hence emancipated slaves could be permitted to choose their ‘master’, but not to ‘remain idle or to work exclusively for themselves’. That could not be tolerated:

In fact, the measure suggested here was the one historically implemented in the colonies, making it possible to transform slavery proper into a semi-servile labour relationship. In any event, in addition to their political rights, notionally emancipated blacks were thus also deprived of civil rights, by its ‘artificially’ being made impossible for them to own a piece of land and freely choose their occupation. While he condemned legal regulation of working hours as ‘despotism’, de Tocqueville had nothing against the creation from above of a caste of wage-labour denied any possibility of social mobility. When he referred to workers from India or other parts of the world, called on by England to replace the emancipated black slaves, the French liberal also made indirect mention of the coolies.³⁴ Significantly, however, he ventured no critical remarks about a labour relationship construed even by influential representatives of the liberal world as a recreation of the institution of slavery in a different form. As in Mill, so in Tocqueville, the supremacy pertaining to Europeans was not only political, but also had direct consequences economically and socially. In any event, the gulf separating dominant and dominated was unbridgeable:

It was fitting that such colossally different races continued to remain clearly distinct. De Tocqueville referred with horror to the behaviour of some prisoners deported to Australia:

This denunciation of miscegenation, which imperilled European or white supremacy, is a theme that takes us back to the United States and, above all, to the ideology that continued to inspire the South even after the Civil War.

5. The ‘empty cradle’ and the ‘destiny’ of the Indians

While for some peoples it involved subjection to a form of servile labour, for others ‘master-race democracy’, which was now on the point of becoming established on a planetary scale, issued in decimation or destruction. Leading the Union’s war against the secessionist states and promoting the abolition of slavery was a figure (Lincoln) who, like Jefferson before him, toyed with the idea of deporting the blacks to Africa or Latin America, and who was a veteran of the wars against the Indians, against ‘men, women, and children … mercilessly cut to pieces’.³⁷ In 1871 General Francis C. Walker, commissioner for Indian affairs, proposed to treat ‘wild men’ no differently from ‘wild beasts’.³⁸ The comparison we have already encountered in Washington, and which presided over the substantial erasure of the Indians (and the natives of Australia and New Zealand) from the face of the earth, thus makes its reappearance.

A genealogical myth derived from the Old Testament was called upon to legitimize these genocidal practices. A major modern historian, Arnold Toynbee, observed:

This genealogical myth, which presided over the expropriation, deportation and decimation of the Irish and the Indians, was explicitly present in Lieber: ‘[God] has given [this great country] to us, as much as He gave Palestine to the Jews’.⁴⁰ No mention was made of the Indians, even if they seem to be implicitly compared to the populations that occupied the Promised Land without authorization prior to the arrival of the chosen people.

Democracy in America seems to support this deadly genealogical myth. De Tocqueville underlined the religious fervour of New England’s founders, who regarded themselves as descendants from ‘Abraham’s stock’. In the writings and documents left behind by them, one sensed ‘the very savor of Gospel antiquity’.⁴¹ It was an aroma that in a way ended up turning the head of the French liberal himself. He uncritically adopted and subscribed to the description Nathaniel Morton, one of the colony’s founders and first leaders, gave of the Pilgrim Fathers’ arrival in America:

In this text, as in the Old Testament description of the unauthorized inhabitants of Canaan, those destined to be subjugated or wiped out by the chosen people—or, as de Tocqueville characterized it, ‘the germ of a great nation wafted by Providence to a predestined shore’—are completely confounded with nature.⁴³ This providential design is all the more clear because, ultimately, it involved a desert. It is a theme Democracy in America returns to repeatedly: the Indian ‘has nothing to oppose to our perfection in the arts but the resources of the wilderness’.⁴⁴ One phrase is especially significant: ‘the Indians were the sole inhabitants of the wilds whence they have since been expelled’.⁴⁵ The desert ceased to be such, becoming a place inhabited by humans, only with the entry of the Europeans and the flight or deportation of the indigenous population. As we know, Locke and Montesquieu preferred to speak of ‘virgin forests’. But even though the two metaphors are different, their meaning is identical: we are dealing with places where there is no human trace, an area that is (as Locke put it) ‘vacant’.⁴⁶

When subsequently forced to register the presence of the Indians, de Tocqueville hastened to stress that they had no right to the land occupied by them:

For Locke already, the sole possible foundation of property right was labour, of which a people dedicated exclusively to hunting were incapable. But an explicitly theological justification was added by de Tocqueville to seal the fate of the Indians:

In this way, de Tocqueville ended up legitimizing the policy of deportation implemented by Jackson, president of the transatlantic republic when the French liberal visited it. The argument of the ‘empty cradle’ was widespread in the US culture of the time. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a ‘freethinker’ aligned with the liberals and a writer and intellectual who enjoyed undisputed prestige in Boston,⁴⁹ had no doubts in interpreting God’s will. Only pending the arrival of a superior stock had the Indians been placed on American soil. Thereafter they were clearly marked out for ‘destruction’ or ‘extermination’.⁵⁰ Franklin had not argued very differently, when he attributed to a providential design the devastating effect of alcohol on a population destined to be wiped off the face of the earth (see above, Chapter 1, §5).

De Tocqueville’s attitude was more pained. He did not shut his eyes to the horrors that were occurring. Yet, however distressing, the tragedy of the Indians expressed both the progress of civilization and a providential design. In any event, it was ineluctable:

True, de Tocqueville expressed unease at the ‘cold egotism’, ‘utter insensitivity’ and ‘ruthless sentiment’ with which the white population of the United States, so attached to its morality and Christianity, viewed the fate of the Indians. Yet the French liberal’s description of the ‘savages’, more than ever recalcitrant to ‘civilization’, certainly did not conduce to the cause of their salvation:

We can now understand the question de Tocqueville posed to his US interlocutors: ‘Do the Indians have an idea that sooner or later their race will be destroyed by ours?’⁵²

The Indians’ deportation and decimation made explicit the fact that the North American territory was an ‘empty cradle’, awaiting the white settler committed from the time of his arrival to ‘struggl[ing] against the obstacles that nature opposes to him’, against ‘the wilderness and savage life’.⁵³ Once again, what ends up emerging is the process of de-humanization of the natives, reduced, even more than to barbarism, to inanimate nature.

6. De Tocqueville, Algeria and ‘master-race democracy’

In de Tocqueville the American model asserted itself with particular clarity when he confronted the problem of Algeria. The letter sent to Francis Lieber on 22 July 1846 is revealing:

I have highlighted four phrases in italics. Let us begin with the last of them. Like the lands inhabited or, rather, occupied without authorization by the Indians, Algeria was a desert prior to the arrival of the French or ‘Christians’. A sort of Biblical aroma begins to make itself felt in connection with the landing in North Africa of a civilized people, who likewise seem invested with a providential mission. It was a people at once European and Christian: the colonial war tended to assume a religious character. Certainly, expelling the Algerians from their ‘desert’ was an operation that met with fierce resistance, but de Tocqueville was careful in this instance not to speak of ‘war’. That was a category which could only be applied to armed conflicts in Europe and between civilized peoples. It somehow implied recognition of the enemy, which was something denied Arabs and Indians alike.

Precisely because of this lack of recognition, the campaign of colonial conquest could resort to pitiless violence that did not spare the civilian population. On account of their brutal, indiscriminate character, the methods used to subjugate Algeria ended up eliciting reservations and disquiet in France. De Tocqueville was not among the ‘excellent philanthropists’ about whom Bugeaud, the general in charge of military operations,⁵⁵ ironized:

According to de Tocqueville, the head of military operations in Algeria had the merit of having understood all this:

This was a ‘new science’ that must be taken to heart.⁵⁸ In order to starve them, and confront them with the clear alternative of capitulation or death from starvation, Arabs who insisted on resisting must be deprived not only of their harvest, but also of the possibility of trading with neighbours: ‘They suffer greatly from being parked between our bayonets and the desert’.⁵⁹ And again we are explicitly referred to the American model; this is how ‘the most barbaric Indian tribes’ were disciplined: ‘the tribe from which a robbery or murder has been committed’ was subjected to collective punishment, which excluded it from the trade with Europeans absolutely vital to it.⁶⁰

Finally, the rebel Arabs must by all means be prevented from the possibility of combining or settling anywhere:

De Tocqueville had no hesitation in issuing a radical watchword:

Thus the modality of the war. But what results was it intended to achieve? We know the model that inspired de Tocqueville. In May 1841, while visiting Philippeville, founded on land acquired at a derisory price from the indigenous inhabitants, he was pleased by the ‘American aspect of the city’, which was rapidly expanding.⁶³ Expropriation and colonization were proceeding apace. Once the process had been completed, what kind of society should be built? What relations might be developed between the Arabs and the French? De Tocqueville was in no doubt:

Corresponding to scrupulous protection of the invaders’ civil liberties was a terroristic law of suspects directed at the indigenous population. During his visit to Philippeville, the French liberal was invited to lunch by a colonel in the occupying army, who painted an eloquent picture of the situation:

De Tocqueville seems to have betrayed no emotion. He repeated the idea of two sets of laws. As regards criminal trials of ‘natives’, ‘if it is thought that our forms are too slow (which I do not think), war tribunals could be set up for them’. And even for ‘civil trials’, the ‘emergency procedure’ already in force could be retained.⁶⁶

Arabs must also be discriminated against economically, as well as legally: ‘Allow free entry into France of all produce from Algeria, especially that derived not from native industry but colonial industry’.⁶⁷ Only on these conditions would French settlers in North Africa genuinely be able to develop on the American model:

We have seen de Tocqueville celebrate the unprecedented zone of liberty enjoyed by the individual in the United States (see above, Chapter 5, §13). But now something similar is to be found in the African space conquered by France: ‘The colonies of all the European peoples afford the same spectacle. Rather than being smaller, the role of the individual is everywhere greater than in the mother country. His freedom of action is less restricted’.⁶⁹

Naturally, the other side of the coin was a drastic deterioration in the condition of the Arabs. De Tocqueville did not hide the fact: ‘We have decimated the population’ and the survivors were being exterminated by the starvation caused by the methods of war we have noted; ‘at this moment Abd el-Kader is literally dying of hunger’.⁷⁰ It had to be admitted that ‘we have made Muslim society much more miserable, disorganised, ignorant and barbarous than it was before it knew us’.⁷¹ So what was to be done? The French liberal distanced himself from the attitude of not a few officers and soldiers of the French army: in their view, ‘the Arabs are like noxious beasts’ and ‘the death of each and every one of them seems a good thing’. No, ‘it is not only cruel, but absurd and impracticable to want to snuff out or exterminate the natives’.⁷² For a second, de Tocqueville lets slip an admission: ‘At this time we are making war in much more barbarous fashion than the Arabs themselves. Currently, civilization is to be found on their side.’⁷³ Immediately afterwards, however, we find the declaration we have already noted: there was no room for humanitarian scruples in a colonial war that directly targeted the civilian populations, who were denied means of subsistence and the possibility of combining. Or: ‘Once we have committed the major violence of the conquest, I believe we must not shrink from the minor forms of violence absolutely required to consolidate it.’⁷⁴

Once the conquest had been completed, it was necessary to promote self-government by civil society (French and white). It was called on to free itself altogether of military control, which must continue to be deployed with the requisite firmness over the Arabs. The conflict across the Atlantic, which during the War of Independence against Britain and in subsequent decades saw local self-government reject any interference by central political power—be it in London or Washington—in the colonists’ expansion or slave-owners’ enjoyment of their legitimate property, also manifested itself in Algeria. On one side were the colonists, who demanded complete freedom of action and expropriation, and on the other the political and military authorities, called upon to administer a ruthless colonial conquest with a minimum of prudence. How many colonists could Africa absorb and how far could the process of expropriation of the indigenous population be pushed? De Tocqueville criticized hesitations and doubts: ‘It is not correct to say that the introduction of European farmers is a measure whose implementation is impractical’, or feasible only to a limited extent. At issue was a territory over which ‘the indigenous population is fairly scarce or fairly dispersed’. In any event, ‘the common property of the tribe is not founded on any title’.⁷⁵

The colonel encountered by de Tocqueville, who did not hesitate to have Arabs decapitated on the basis of mere suspicion, on the other hand expressed his contempt for the colonists, a ‘mass of scoundrels’ and ‘thieves’, for whom the army was nothing more than a tool for accumulating a ‘fortune’.⁷⁶ The date is 30 May 1841. The previous year, Bugeaud had set out his policy to the Chamber of Deputies: ‘Wherever there is clean water and fertile soil, it is necessary to settle colonists, without worrying about whom the land belongs to. It must be distributed to them so that it is enjoyed as rightful property’.⁷⁷ However, in the previously cited article published in the Moniteur algérien on 25 December 1843, he observed that, although conducting the merciless war dictated by circumstances, his army demonstrated generosity towards the Arab who finally decided to surrender: ‘We return to him all his world and sometimes part of his herd’.⁷⁸

This attitude seems to have prompted reservations in de Tocqueville, judging at any rate from his intervention in the Chamber in June 1846:

In a letter from the same period, de Tocqueville even ended up ironizing about ‘the tenderness towards the Arabs that came over Monsieur Bugeaud at the point when he saw in it a powerful means of blocking the development of civilized colonization’.⁸⁰

We seem to hear once again the laments and protests of the American colonists against the London government, or of the southern planters of the United States against the threat of interference by federal government. And, in fact, de Tocqueville elaborated on his indictment of the political and military authorities. At issue was not only the assignment of land:

The idea of human equality could not be extended to embrace ‘semi-civilized peoples’ located outside the West: it was absolutely vital to avoid occasioning ‘astonishment and confusion in their spirits, filling them with erroneous and dangerous ideas’.⁸² In no case was it permissible to lose sight of the objective of building a society based on the legally sanctioned domination of French, Christian and European colonists. The attainment of this objective was now close at hand: ‘The Arab element is ever more isolated and little by little is dissolving. The Muslim population is tending to decline relentlessly, while the Christian population is growing relentlessly’.⁸³ Indeed: ‘Our weapons have decimated some tribes … On the other hand, our cultivators willingly use native manpower. The European needs the Arab to make the most of his land; the Arab needs the European to obtain a high wage’.⁸⁴

There is no doubt that de Tocqueville had not lost sight of the American model. The Algerians were part Indians, forced to suffer expropriation, and part blacks. In the latter guise, Arabs could not claim to enjoy the rights of citizenship either on a civil level or, still less, politically. Without being slaves, now deprived of land they could earn a living only by supplying ‘manpower’ to the new property-owners. The society hoped for here was not very different from the one that would be realized in the southern United States after the Civil War. In Algeria, French and Western supremacy took the place of ‘white supremacy’. For the rest, there continued to exist two sets of laws, separated by a racial barrier, and the prejudice, on a more or less accentuated racial basis, called upon to justify these relations. Already at the beginning of the conquest, writing to de Tocqueville, Kergolay (his cousin and a life-long friend) had spoken of the Arabs as an ‘infamous, despicable race’, to be kept under constant control ‘by force combined with simple, uncomplicated equity’.⁸⁵ The recipient of this letter seems not to have seen things very differently. After a notable interval of time, we find him using, in slightly different form, some of the expressions we have just noted: ‘semi-civilized peoples’ were only capable of understanding the discourse of ‘correct but strict justice’; hence France should beware of indulging in ‘magnanimity and leniency’—virtues that would be incomprehensible and, worse, might produce dangerous results.⁸⁶ On the other hand, writing precisely to Kergolay, de Tocqueville denounced the ‘greed’ and ‘fanaticism’ of the Arabs,⁸⁷ who, by his own admission, were suffering the systematic expropriation carried out by occupying forces inclined to regard their enemies as ‘noxious beasts’.

To complete this picture, it is appropriate to mention a final detail. There was a moment in 1833 when the French liberal thought of settling as a colonist in Algeria.⁸⁸ Identification with the regime of white or Western supremacy, or ‘master-race democracy’, seems to have been total.