Re: But consider the planning which the Zionists had to do, and they were not a powerful nation as France was.
Do you mean post-WWI Britain was not a powerful nation? And neither was post-WWII America? You should keep in mind that those you call "Zionists" were not Martians... coming from some other planet on a mission to settle somewhere in the Middle East. Zionists were not stateless Jews --like the Gypsies-- who had to push through their colonial scheme without help from the powers that be. Quite the contrary: the Zionists were part and parcel of Western elite --after all, that's the chief reason why they were utlimately successful. On their own, the (Jewish) Zionists would have ended up nowhere -- N O W H E R E (Just ask the Gypsies).
Re: Indeed, political Zionism was no more than the brainchild of a single man, Theodore Herzl, in the 1890s.
Likewise, at the beginning, the French conquest of Algeria was also the brainchild of a faction within the French establishment --not everybody favored the Algerian adventure. BTW, the same was true for Belgium and her conquest of Congo: King Leopold II had to struggle to sway over the Belgian bourgeoisie... Many Belgian leaders didn't want Belgium to be saddled with a colonial burden.
See how the French conquest of Algeria parallels the US occupation of Iraq:
It took less than three weeks for the French armed forces to achieve their formal victory in the summer of 1830. French dominion was formalized on July 5 by a surrender agreement which was forced on the dey (local ruler), Hussein. Five days later Hussein and his family went into exile in Naples, leaving forever his delightful private garden.
The initial war of occupation, however, was to last some 18 years. Invasion casualties and hesitations saw French military manpower fall to around 17,000 in the difficult year of 1831, but three years later fierce and unorthodox opposition had forced France to increase army numbers to almost double. In 1836 a disastrous and humiliating defeat at the city of Constantine led the French generals to double army numbers again, to over 60,000.
Achieving victory over the forces led by the man now regarded as the first Algerian national hero, Abd al Kedir, who at one time controlled two-thirds of the country and whose army reached the gates of Algiers, would require an increase in army numbers to 110,000 before it was generally considered, in 1848, that a degree of effective military control had been established. Even then, that control was only over the most northerly part of the country.
The immediate and formal pretext for France’s invasion had been an insult delivered to its diplomatic representative some 3 years before, when the dey had flicked a flywhisk in his face, in an argument over settlement of long-standing financial claims and counterclaims, and the failure of subsequent negotiations to resolve those issues.
The whole enterprise was framed, however, in much more grandiose, civilizational language. In the 1844 version of his book on the history of Algeria (from which the prints included with this article are taken) Léon Galibert, a historian who was generally in favor of "this intelligent and liberal intervention," reflects on the background to France’s "civilizing mission" in Algeria:
"France took its turn, after so many other famous peoples, to impose its laws on North Africa; to her fell the difficult and dangerous mission of reviving and expanding in this land the civilization which Rome in former times had there deposited. … Islamism, in its deplorable state of decline, was unable to regenerate anything. So a new, strong people was needed, governed by generous notions and the great principle of humanitarianism, to bring Africa out of the mindless state into which it had been plunged by twenty centuries of oppression, war, struggles and invasion….
It must be said in passing, however, that initially the expedition which gave France possession of Algeria was not exactly conceived along these broad social lines, and even less with a view to a permanent establishment. All that France sought was to obtain redress for particular grievances, and only secondarily to smash piracy, abolish the enslavement of Christians, and put an end to the shameful tribute which the maritime powers of Europe were paying to the Regency."
~Léon Galibert, L’Algérie – Ancienne et Moderne (1st ed.) , Paris, 1844, p. 249
The French king Charles the Tenth and his prime minister had actually planned to sub-contract the job out to the ruler of Egypt, Mehemet Ali, who was provided with money, French-crewed warships and all the necessary means of transport for destroying Algiers and putting an end to the piracy.
But the politicians would have none of it: the French monarchy, reeling under the first blows of an emerging liberalism, needed a convenient distraction from its domestic embarrassments. The dazzling effect of a new conquest would cover up and defuse the coming assault on civil liberties. In the mind of Charles the Tenth's advisors, a French expedition to bring enlightened French values to Algiers and to the dark continent was the key to the success of these long-planned illegal measures, which were calculated, it was said at the time, to give royalty a much-needed shot in the arm.
There were, as there so often are, deeper forces at work. The king’s plots rebounded on him: hardly had the news of the victory in Algiers reached Paris, when he was overthrown by a new liberal regime which brought in the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe. Members of the new regime were known to be opposed to the Algerian adventure.
Yet the imperial project seemed already to have acquired a momentum of its own, overcoming even their resistance. A parliamentary commission examined the Algerian situation and concluded that although French policy, behavior, and organization there were failures, the occupation had to continue "for the sake of national prestige."
Even the next revolution, when it came in 1848, did not dampen the national enthusiasm for the colonial undertaking. In that year the three Algerian provinces which France had created became départements (administrative districts) of France, from then on regarded as an integral part of the homeland.
Alexis de Tocqueville, who had never forgotten the effects of the Jacobin terror of 1794 on his own family, had become a parliamentary deputy after the success of his book Democracy in America. In the 1840s he turned his attentions to Algeria and, in his Writings on Empire and Slavery, argued for the robust prosecution of the imperial task. Although aware of the contradictions inherent in his recommendations (he is said to have written, "we have rendered Muslim society much more miserable and much more barbaric than it was before it became acquainted with us") he persisted in them, because he believed that colonial expansion was the key to preventing democracy from degenerating into popular tyranny.
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Excerpted from:
lewrockwell.com |
