Imperial Hostage-Taking in Theory and Practice: The Case of French Algeria

• In Event: Conflict, Governance, and International Political Order

Abstract

Scholars acknowledge that colonial violence played an important role in shaping the development of colonized societies, as well as the social and cultural history of colonized peoples. This paper focuses on one particularly understudied form of colonial violence, civilian hostage taking, and examines why it was used, how it was carried out, how it was justified and what its consequences were in the context of the French empire in Algeria. Hostage taking was used extensively by the French in Algeria in the 18th and 19th centuries. We argue that hostage-taking was undertaken out of a desire to subdue and control nomadic populations in Algeria, with the additional purpose of studying these colonized subjects. French political theorists and leaders such as Alexis de Tocqueville and T.R. Bugeaud thought that the French empire was underpinned by an anthropological project wherein acquiring knowledge of the norms, prejudices, and practices of colonized peoples would allow the French to achieve complete domination over them. Hostage-taking allowed the French to study the natives they took captive, but this was seen as merely an imperfect way of acquiring the kind of anthropological knowledge that the French sought. The longer term goal of hostage taking was to render nomadic Algerians sedentary, so that they could be studied by the French in their social setting. Interestingly, French thinkers tended to believe that the transition from nomadic to sedentary life would not fundamentally change the norms and culture of nomadic peoples, it would merely make them legible to the French.

The goal of rendering Algerians sedentary is also connected to the normative justification that French thinkers offered for the practice of hostage-taking. Theorists such as Tocqueville often equivocated on the question of whether hostage-taking was permitted by international law, but they tended to emphasize that the practice was one that could not be justly used in conflicts with other civilized states. Tocqueville argues that hostage-taking and other brutal tactics are justifiable because the Algerian tribes that resisted French rule were nomadic and therefore could not be fought using conventional tactics. Implicit in this view is the idea that only sedentary peoples are protected by international law, or at least have a moral right against certain forms of harsh treatment in war. This connects Tocqueville’s discussion of the French empire in Algeria with his views on nomadic indigenous peoples in North America. For Tocqueville, sedentary life and industry were the two necessary prerequisites for civilization. In Democracy in America, civilization is not theorized as a state of society that a people can be coerced into adopting: indigenous Americans would have to become civilized on their own. For Tocqueville, ff contact with a civilized people is, however, inevitable, then violent conflict between the civilized and the uncivilized would be less destructive of the uncivilized than immediate assimilation and the soft coercion of social and economic domination. This view, we argue, is consistent with his defense of hostage-taking in Algeria as both a necessary tactic against the uncivilized and as a way of encouraging nomadic tribes to civilize themselves.

This paper combines political theory and empirical research to explain not only the intellectual and political history of civilian hostage-taking in the French empire, but also to analyze the empirical evidence of how such hostage-taking was practiced by the French. It uses archival research to shed light on military and political debates about hostage-taking and international law among French elites and tracks the fate of the hostages themselves to gain a better understanding of the short-term consequences of colonial violence.

Authors

• Theophile Deslauriers, Princeton University

• Esther Robinson, Princeton University