Apostles of Modernity: Saint-Simonians and the Civilizing Mission in Algeria

Abstract

APOSTLES OF MODERNITY: SAINT-SIMONIANS AND THE CIVILIZING MISSION IN ALGERIA Osama W. Abi-Mershed Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010 (xii + 328 pages, bibliography, index, tables, figures, maps) $60.00 (cloth, e-book)Into the more than one thousand pages of notes and quotations that make up The Arcades Project, German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin inserted the following comment: "All social antinomies dissolve in the fairyland which le progres projects for the near future" (578). This reflection came in a section of this prewar study of the capitalist origins of modernity that Benjamin devoted to French utopian writer Henri de Saint-Simon and his nineteenth-century followers. In these political theorists, engineers, bankers, and soldiers, Benjamin located the origins of a fatal crisis of modernity: the contradictions of industrial society diverted from their revolutionary path by fantasies of social conciliation, material wealth, and technological advancement ("le progres"). As Benjamin anticipated, these fantasies ended ultimately in violence, violence that claimed his life in 1940.Benjamin did not present much of the Saint-Simonians' work in the Middle East in The Arcades Project, but he should have. They served as something akin to foot soldiers of empire in places like Egypt and Algeria, where the Saint-Simonian "fairyland" was enacted and transformed by the social conflicts of colonialism. Osama W. Abi-Mershed's history of this fairyland in nineteenth-century Algeria is thus a much anticipated and necessary addition to scholarship. In this cogently argued and welldocumented account the reader gets-for the first time in English-a detailed view of the Saint-Simonian impact on colonial policy. A skillful and nuanced reading of the sources uncovers the projects by which the political and social subjugation of Algerians was wrought through a story of cultural enrichment, combined interest, and moral and material progress. Empires typically rely on such ideological configurations to legitimate their rule. But the particular way that the Saint-Simonians did this work in Algeria is worth special attention. As Benjamin's interest in them signals, the Saint-Simonians were key, if too often overlooked, architects of modernity.The Saint-Simonians in Algeria were a loose and often deeply divided group that drew inspiration from the writings of Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825). Having lived through the turmoil of the French Revolution, Saint-Simon developed an eclectic constellation of reform ideas that emphasized social harmony and material abundance as tools for fighting poverty and social tensions. For Marx and Engels, these ideas earned him inclusion in the trinity of nineteenth-century utopian socialists, along with Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. But with his veneration of productivity and efficiency, Saint-Simon distinguished his thinking and made himself a favorite among engineers, bankers, and the technically skilled elite of postrevolutionary France. In Algeria, these ideas inspired people as divergent as Ismayl Urbain, author of L'Algerie pour les Algeriens (1860), an important arabophile defense of Algerian rights, and Auguste Warnier, a staunch voice of settler opinion who drafted the laws by which more than a million acres of farmland infamously passed from Algerian to European owners after 1873.The few historians who have ventured to tell this story (Michel Levallois, Dominique Casajus, Philippe Regnier, Marcel Emerit, Emile Temime) have generally presented the Middle Eastern turn of the Saint-Simonians, beginning in Egypt in 1833, as a flight from repression in France. Blocked in the metropole, they sought somewhere else to realize their goals, looking to people like Muhammad 'Ali, the "industrial pacha," and traveling to Istanbul, Mecca, Ethiopia, and Sudan searching for likeminded leaders amenable to their projects of trade, education, and development. …