Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 65, No. 399, January 1849Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 65, No. 399, January 1849
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
deputy for the department of the Lower Seine, is the author of a
volume, and of several pamphlets, upon the Algerine question. In the
most recent of these we find the following remarkable note:--"In
February 1837, General Bugeaud said to the Arabs, 'You shall not
plough, you shall not sow, nor lead your cattle to the pasture,
without our permission.' Later, he gives the following definition
of a razzia: 'A sudden irruption, having for its object to surprise
the tribes, in order to kill the men, and to carry off the women,
children, and cattle.' In 1844, he completes this theory, by saying
to the Kabyles, 'I will penetrate into your mountains, I will burn
your villages and your crops, I will cut down your fruit-trees.'
(Proclamation of the 30th March.) In 1846, rendering an account of
his operations against Abd-el-Kader, he says to the authorities of
Algiers, 'The power of Abd-el-Kader consists in the resources of
the tribes; hence, to ruin his power, we must first ruin the Arabs;
therefore have we burned much, destroyed much.' (From the _Akhbar_
newspaper of February 1846.)" These are significant passages in the
mouth of a general-in-chief. Presently, when we come to details,
we shall show they were not thrown away upon his subordinates.
The extermination of the Arabs was always the real aim of Marshal
Bugeaud; he took little pains to cloak his system, and is too
great a blunderer to have succeeded, had he taken more. A man of
greater presumption than capacity, his audacity, obstinacy, and
unscrupulousness knew no bounds. Before this African _man-hunt_, as
M. Castellane calls it, he was unknown, except as the Duchess de
Berry's jailer, as the slayer of poor Dulong, and as a turbulent
debater, whose noisy declamation, and occasional offences against
the French language, were a standing joke with the newspapers. A
few years elapse, and we find him opposing his stubborn will to
that of Soult, then minister at war, and successfully thwarting
Napoleon's old lieutenant. This he was enabled to do mainly by the
position he had made himself in Africa. He had ridden into power and
importance on the shoulders of the persecuted Arabs, by a system of
razzias and village-burning, of wholesale slaughter and relentless
oppression. Brighter far were the laurels gathered by the lieutenant
of the Empire, than those plucked by Louis Philippe's marshal
amidst the ashes of Bedouin douars and the corpses of miserable
Mussulmans, slain in defence of their scanty birthright, of their
tents, their flocks, and the free range of the desert. Poor was
the defence they could make against their skilful and disciplined
invaders; slight the loss they could inflict in requital of the
heavy one they suffered. Again we are obliged to M. Desjobert for
statistics, gathered from reports to the Commission of Credits, and
from Marshal Bugeaud's own bulletins. From these we learn that the
loss in battle of the French armies, during the first ten years
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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