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“Sincerely Religious”
Louis Veuillot and Catholic Representations of Islam and Empire
In , the up-and-coming Catholic journalist Louis Veuillot traveled to Alge-
ria as secretary to the newly appointed Governor General omas Bugeaud. As
they steamed into view of Algiers, its houses and minarets “bathed” in sun and
looking from the sea like a “colossal pyramid” of white, Veuillot prayed that God
would bless the soldiers shedding their blood to conquer this land. Whether
France’s foot soldiers of imperialism knew it or not, Veuillot believed, they were
avenging centuries of Christian enslavement and persecution and blazing new
paths for the preaching of the Gospel. Drums and cannons saluted the arrival
of the new governor general, who would soon become notorious for his brutal
campaign of scorched earth and collective punishments against those who re-
sisted French domination.
Veuillot’s notes and letters from this voyage were gathered into a book published
in entitled Les ançais en Algérie, a book reprinted in at least ten editions by
the end of the nineteenth century. As a Catholic journalist, he would go on to
write other articles devoted to France’s relationship with Algeria and Islam. His
writings on Algeria centered on the idea that the colonial administration should
not pursue a policy of “toleration” for A lgeria’s Muslims—should not fear Muslim
resistance to Catholic proselytization—but should instead give clerics and mission-
aries free rein. At the time of his voyage, Veuillot (see gure .) was working at the
Ministry of the Interior and accompanied Bugeaud as the civilian eyes-and-ears
of Minister François Guizot. But Veuillot had also recently embraced the “mili-
tant Catholicism” that would mark his life and had begun dabbling as a Catholic
polemicist at L’Univers. He would soon abandon the ministerial bureaucracy and
go on to lead the assault on the July Monarchy’s anticlerical educational policies.
In the process, his journal became “the most combative and inuential organ of
European ultramontanism,” and his populist broadsides were “avidly read by most
Sacred Rivals:Catholic Missions and the Making of Islam in Nineteenth-Century France and Algeria
.
Joseph W. Peterson, Oxford University Press (2022). © Joseph W. Peterson.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197605271.003.0002
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parish priests” all over France. Veuillot’s sway over French Catholics would be-
come so great that by he was conferring regularly with the papal nuncio in
Paris and publishing news favorable to the Pope and his supporters. In his lifelong
struggles against “liberalism” in religion and politics, Veuillot saw himself as the
spiritual successor of the famed counterrevolutionary thinker Joseph de Maistre,
even suggesting that he had been born, providentially, to further the ultramontane
crusade inaugurated by Maistre. Indeed, Veuillot would be the most important
gure in preparing French Catholics to accept the doctrine of the infallibility of
the Pope promulgated at the First Vatican Council in –. But on the subject
of Islam, which he encountered rsthand in Algeria, he diered signicantly from
his professed master.
According to Maistre, writing in his last published work Du pape (), “the
disciple of Mahomet . . . is thoroughly alien, incapable of associating and of
.. “Louis Veuillot, based on a portrait by J. E. Lafon – .”
From Eugène Veuillot, Louis Veuillot (1813–1845) (Paris: Victor
Retaux, [?]). Courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France.
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“Sincerely Religious”
mixing with us....War between us and them is natural, peace the reverse. As
soon as the Christian and the Musulman come in contact, the one or the other
must yield or perish.” Veuillot, writing during France’s violent “pacication” of
Algeria, was more ambivalent. Certainly, he saw the relationship between Chris-
tendom and Islam as fundamentally one of enmity, and his hope for the Algerian
conquest was that it would be a new crusade, causing Islam to “perish in the desert
from whence it came.” Moreover, he repeatedly invoked France’s civilizational
superiority as proof that French (Catholic) conquest and tutelage over Muslims
was justied. Yet, unlike Maistre, he insisted that Muslims were “made in the
image of God,” were intuitively drawn to the good and the beautiful, and had
a natural respect for religion that made them especially suitable for conversion
to Christianity. Veuillot even presented the organic unity and spirituality of
Islamic civilization as a virtue and compared Islam favorably to the sterility and
decadence of secular France. It was the laudable “religious sentiment” of Algerian
Muslims, Veuillot wrote in the opening pages of Les Français en Algérie, that had
made colonial conquest so dicult: “e war against us was not only patriotic, it
was holy....Some of these Arabs fought as heroes and died as martyrs.”
What factors account for Veuillot’s philo-Islamism, even as he armed
France’s civilizing prerogatives in Algeria? What motives led him and other
conservative Catholics to depict Muslims as a sort of religious noble savages,
their very devoutness a reproach to the metropolitan French? is chapter puts
Veuillot’s writings on Islam into conversation with two of his contemporaries:
the literary historian and Romantic orientalist Edgar Quinet and the devout
Catholic orientalist-turned-missionary Eugène Boré. Quinet was no ultramon-
tane Catholic; on the contrary, in the s’ rancorous debates about Catho-
lic education, the liberal Protestant and famous critic of the Jesuits was one of
Veuillot’s principal adversaries. Yet, in the postrevolutionary atmosphere of
the s–s, Catholics, liberals, and socialists alike felt that the relationship
between state and society was broken and that a new (or restored) civil religion
was needed to resacralize the body politic. In an age of Romantic orientalism
and of Algerian conquest, Quinet and Veuillot both looked to Algeria, to Islam’s
alleged “theocratic” unity of state and religion, as a critique of—and as a model
for resolving—postrevolutionary France’s divisions.
Beyond these general conditions for his orientalist imaginary, Veuillot’s writ-
ings were motivated by specically Catholic, ultramontane concerns—concerns
he shared with a friend, the orientalist-turned-missionary Eugène Boré. Boré and
Veuillot used Muslim piety to condemn the perceived anticlericalism and reli-
gious indierence of the liberal July Monarchy. ey also shared an evangelistic
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optimism that accompanied the explosion of French missions in the s.
Consequently, both men represented Muslims as people of great religious faith
and as potentially ideal Christians, once they inevitably converted. at Veuillot
and Boré—one an amateur “colonial ethnographer” at best, the other an aca-
demically trained orientalist—should have represented and used Islam in such
rhetorically similar ways in the context of the s only conrms the overriding
importance, beyond their social and professional contexts, of their identity as
Catholic apologists.
Veuillot’s writings on Algerian Islam—in which the trope of superior Muslim
unity and piety coex isted with legitimations of empire based on France’s superior
civilization—are deeply contradictory. Among later Catholic observers of Islam,
the sympathetic elements in this unstable compound would be overcome by civ-
ilizational denigrations of Muslims or racial denigrations of Arabs. Yet in the
early decades of French Algeria, some missionaries in the colony shared Veuillot
and Boré’s sympathetic view of Algerian Islam and their optimism about immi-
nent Muslim conversion. But in the course of the nineteenth century, Catholic
views of Islam hardened as missionary eorts to convert Algerian Muslims met
with failure and frustration, and as Catholics increasingly allied themselves by
the end of the century in a “colonial pact” with the ird Republic and its “civ-
ilizing mission.” Nevertheless, however short-lived, Veuillot and other ultra-
montane Catholics’ ambivalent orientalism—caught between admiration for
Islamic religiosity and belief in European superiority—provides a new lens onto
the history of nineteenth-century French Catholicism and empire.
Enlightenment Antecedents
Maistre, Veuillot, Boré, and other Catholic observers of Islam in the early nine-
teenth century were part of a long-standing French tradition of discussing Islam
in ambivalent ways. From the travel writers and diplomats of the seventeenth
century, to the philosophes of the eighteenth century, French writers had con-
structed a double-edged approach to “Islam,” using stereotypes of the Muslim
world both as negative and positive comparisons, sometimes even within the
same text. French Protestants used representations of the Ottoman Empire in
this polyvalent way in the s, accusing French Catholic kings of being just
as intolerant as the stereotypically “despotic” Ottomans, while simultaneously
holding Islamic states up as more tolerant than absolutist France. Enlight-
enment philosophes followed suit: Montesquieu’s Persian Letters sometimes
portrays the Persians as despotic and inferior to the French—especially in their
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“Sincerely Religious”
treatment of women—but the novel also places Montesquieu’s own normative
critiques of French society in the mouths of enlightened Persians. e Enlight-
enment’s ambivalence toward Islam is perhaps nowhere more evident than in
the career of Voltaire. Voltaire’s controversial play Fanaticism, or Mahomet
the Prophet depicts the Prophet as a sexually voracious fraud and manipulator
of his superstitious followers; but the play was also widely recognized as a veiled
critique of Catholic superstition and intolerance, and in France it “was banned
aer three performances.” Ultimately, in his celebrated Essai sur les mœurs et
l'esprit des nations, Voltaire defended Muhammad as a heroic force for progress
and characterized Islam as more rational than Christianity, since it does not
preach such seemingly nonsensical doctrines as the Trinity.
In their attacks on religious intolerance and on Christianity, in other words,
the philosophes “instrumentalized” Islam in rhetorically contradictory ways.
Islam was criticized as an example of superstition and used as a stereotype of
intolerance, but it was also defended as more tolerant than Christianity and ex-
amined with a more open mind than in any previous period of European history.
e Enlightenment’s inconsistency toward Islam was not just rhetorical. e
philosophes were deeply ambivalent about religion in general, especially about
the social role of religion. While Voltaire and other philosophes famously hoped
to “crush” institutional religion and intolerance, they were nearly unanimous in
their belief that some minimum of “natural” religious faith was still indispens-
able for a civil society to function. Hence the author of the Encyclopédie’s article
on “Tolérance” saw no contradiction in expelling atheists from his otherwise
tolerant society. ough Enlightenment writers oen invoked the language of
individual “liberty of conscience,” what most were really aer was not anything
so anarchic and limitless, but rather a state-regulated “tolerance” for recognized,
socially useful groups, such as the Huguenots (French Calvinists). Philoso-
phes could not decide between valorizing the rights of individual consciences,
on the one hand, and their conviction, on the other hand, that states had a vested
interest in encouraging civil religion and prohibiting antisocial religions. us
Rousseau famously admired Muhammad for having solved the problem of devis-
ing a suitable civil religion: “Mahomet, in his wisdom, knit his political system
into a strong whole… it was completely unied, and, in so far as unied, good.”
is Enlightenment uncertainty between state “tolerance” for recognized reli-
gious collectives and the more revolutionary concept of “liberty of conscience”
for individuals maps directly on to the philosophes’ ambivalence toward Islam.
On the one hand, Islamic polities such as the Ottoman Empire had long insti-
tutionalized collective “tolerance” for religious minorities; on the other hand,
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Islamic jurisprudence did not arm the emerging concept of individual liberty
of conscience.
Especially in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, French writ-
ers became increasingly disillusioned with the Islamic world and began portray-
ing Islam as degraded and uncivilized. Writers of the Enlightenment had long
been unsure where to place Muslims on their scale of civilizational development.
Since Islamic states such as those of the Barbary Coast were capable of urban set-
tlement, trade, and naval warfare, they were clearly not populated by primitive
(and naturally virtuous) men; at the same time, they had not followed in the path
of nor shared the values of European civilization. Eighteenth-century visitors
to Algiers, in search of noble savages, expressed disappointment with the alleged
immorality and unscrupulousness of Algerian Arabs and came to view North
Africans as being in a state of decline or, worse, as congenitally deformed by Is-
lamic and “Oriental” despotism. Even Abbé Raynal’s famously anti-imperialist
Philosophical History advocated the conquest of the “Barbary States” as the only
means of civilizing them. Not only did the early nineteenth century abandon
earlier appreciations of Islamic civilization but Enlightenment anti-imperialism
in general went into decline, as race became a more “hegemonic explanation of
cultural dierence” and as the political breakthroughs of the French Revolution
gave Europeans increased condence in their civilizational superiority.
us, despite his counter-Enlightenment bona des, Joseph de Maistre’s crit-
icisms of Islam were perfectly in keeping with the late Enlightenment main-
stream. While Maistre was certainly out of step with many of his contempo-
raries in his valorization of the Pope, Crusades, and Christendom, his comments
on Islam were typical of the late Enlightenment’s growing disillusionment with
Islam and with the related category of the “noble savage.” In short, Maistre was
drawing from traditional religious as well as from contemporary mentalities
in his characterization of Muslims as irredeemable enemies of Christendom
and—by extension—of humanity. “Seeking ... my arms in the camp of the
enemy” both wittingly and unwittingly, Maistre at once subverted and con-
rmed Enlightenment values and civilizational classications. In a well-known
passage from the posthumously published Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg, Maistre
attacked Rousseau’s concept of the noble savage, claiming that the “savages” of
the New World, for example, were not primitive men but the late-stage, wicked
remnants of formerly grand civilizations, degraded by some original sin to the
point of being unrecognizable as human. “Barbarians,” on the contrary, were
“halfway between the civilized man and the savage” and capable of civiliza-
tion even through initiation into non-Christian religions. According to this
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“Sincerely Religious”
bizarre typology—a characteristic blend of Enlightenment developmentalism
and Christian and Classical notions of a golden age—Muslims, though not spe-
cically referenced in the passage, would seem to belong to the category of sub-
human, fallen savages. Unsurprisingly, Maistre had concluded his discussion of
Islam in Du pape by insisting that Islamic states have no claim on international
law: whoever conquered the territory of such an incorrigible enemy would be
“universally” recognized as its legitimate sovereign.
Writing a generation later, though, Veuillot revived the rhetorical ambiva-
lence and sympathy toward Islam of the earlier Enlightenment. In the terms of
Maistre’s “savage”-“barbarian” typology, Veuillot seemed to move Muslims out
of the category of savage enemies and into that of civilizable barbarians—bar-
barians perhaps even able to gra onto the French stock and reinvigorate it, the
way primitive Northern Europeans had supposedly reinvigorated the decadent
Roman Empire. Just as Maistre’s understanding of Islam’s place in history and
its relationship to Christendom was in part a reection of late Enlightenment
trends, so too was Veuillot’s more sympathetic treatment far from unique in
the context of the s. Veuillot’s writings on Algerian Islam were, to be sure,
primarily motivated by his reactionary and ultramontane concerns—his inten-
tion was to beat his secular enemies with the rhetorical stick of Muslim religi-
osity. On a deeper level, though, his writings were situated within conditions
and mentalities he shared with contemporaries of varying political persuasions:
the post-s reality of Algerian conquest, with its increase in rsthand knowl-
edge of Islam, accompanied by endless debates about the methods and meaning
of France’s new empire; the “Oriental Renaissance,” or the Romantic interest
in Eastern cultures and religions; the widespread anxiety in postrevolutionary
France that the relationship between state and society was broken and that a new
civil religion was needed to restore a feeling of community and to resacralize
the body politic; and, above all, a missionary desire to re-Christianize France by
Christianizing Algeria.
Edgar Quinet, Postrevolutionary
Romanticism, and Islamic eocracy
Given the common misconception that Islamic societies were theocracies—not
distinguishing between civil and religious spheres—it is not surprising that
Veuillot looked to Algeria as a model for French society, albeit an imperfect
one that would need to be appropriated and superseded. In the postrevolution-
ary context of the s, in which many French viewed their society as lacking
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legitimacy and organic unity, Veuillot was not alone in his admiration for the
purportedly theocratic character of Islam. Edgar Quinet, one of the fathers of
the “Oriental Renaissance” in France, similarly believed that Islam’s ability to
realize its spiritual ideals in the political sphere was something that historical
Christianity had lacked. In Quinet’s Romantic philosophy of history, wherein
each succeeding civilization had made some spiritual contribution to the fu-
ture world religion, this theocratic unity would be Islam’s historic contribution.
e long-standing view that Islam was essentially theocratic was perhaps most
famously employed by Rousseau in the concluding section of e Social Con-
tract. In contrast to Christianity’s encouragement of divided loyalties between
church and state, Rousseau wrote, “Mahomet, in his wisdom, knit his political
system into a strong whole… it was completely unied, and, in so far as unied,
good.” Of course, the political and religious landscape of nineteenth-century
Algeria—Veuillot and Quinet’s primary window onto Islam—was in fact quite
diverse and even contentious, as tribal leaders and religious reformers negotiated
their responses to French encroachment. Nevertheless, both men, like Rous-
seau, relied upon an essentialized image of Islamic unity in order to critique a
divided Christendom.
Many Europeans of the s and s self-consciously saw their epoch
as constituting a crucial turning point in world history—a time of “great
world-historical parallel” with the early Roman Empire and the birth of Chris-
tianity. For most observers, this sense of cyclical return led to the optimistic
belief that “the Christian era had come to an end” and that the institution of a
“new Christianity” was imminent. Invocations of this great parallel were com-
mon, especially among socialists like Henri de Saint-Simon and Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon who characterized their systems as the much-anticipated new reli-
gion. is historically self-conscious search for a revitalized civil religion was a
reection both of the fractured politics of the postrevolutionary period, as well
as in the advent of the “Social Question”—the rise of industrialism and with it
the creation of a new, marginalized class of industrial laborers and urban poor.
ere was no more divisive issue in the revolutionary years than the place
of Catholicism in the public sphere. e Revolution’s seizure of church lands
and reform of the Catholic Church—transforming clergy into employees of the
state and bishops into elective oces—was perhaps the turning point of the
Revolution. Above all, the “oath” of loyalty to the new constitution, required of
all clergymen in France, alienated millions of Catholic faithful who might oth-
erwise have supported the gains of the early Revolution, pushing them into the
camp of the counterrevolutionaries. With these battle lines drawn and France
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“Sincerely Religious”
descending into civil war and terror, some Jacobins concluded that the Church
was an entrenched enemy of progress and ramped up the violence of their de-
christianization eorts. Aer Robespierre’s fall and the reaction against the
Terror, the Directory repressed Jacobins and royalists alike, but one continuity
was that the Ideologues of the Directory maintained and even intensied the
dechristianization campaign, attempting to replace Christianity with their own,
deistic civil religion. Napoleon pragmatically negotiated a concordat with the
Catholic Church, “disarm[ing] the counterrevolution” of its most eective ral-
lying cry—the defense of the Church—thus leaving only the most reactionary
devotees of monarchism to resist his peace. In one stroke Napoleon reintro-
duced formal, public Catholic worship to France and conceded to the Pope once
more the right to appoint bishops and other clergy. But he drove a hard bargain:
clergymen remained employees of the state and subject to vetting and surveil-
lance. With the institutional power of the Church irrevocably fractured and an
entire generation raised (in the s) without the catechism, the stage was set
for some to return to a more combative Catholicism, while others sought “new
paths to salvation.” e advent of a seemingly unchurched industrial working
class by the s—to some observers these workers were godless “barbarians,”
to others, they embodied the closest thing to the suerings of Christ on earth—
only made the quest for a “new Christianity” more acute.
Postrevolutionary France’s obsessive search for a new civil religion—a new
sacral legitimation of society—was also inextricably tied to its colonial confron-
tation with the East and, specically, with Islam. On the crudest level, the Res-
toration and subsequent regimes hoped the Algerian conquest would generate
domestic unity and “political legitimacy” through military glory at the expense
of an agreed-upon foe. Even the liberal Alexis de Tocqueville famously sup-
ported imperial aggression as a way of shoring up support for the embattled July
Monarchy. But while such military aggression might produce an ephemeral
unity, more Romanticized observers believed it was not conict but reconcili-
ation between East and West that would heal France’s political divisions. e
Saint-Simonians, for example, looked to the “Orient” as terrain for their uto-
pian projects, even aer the failure of Egyptian reform under Muhammad Ali.
Many of the military ocers tasked with administering Arab tribes in Algeria
were Saint-Simonians and saw their work there as an opportunity to engineer an
ideal society—an “alternate modernity”—among the “ indigènes” and colonists.
Similarly, Quinet and Veuillot each hoped in their own way that Algerian colo-
nization would enable France to tap the spiritual resources of Islam and become
politically and religiously unied once more.
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Quinet’s Romantic orientalism emerged in this context of postrevolution-
ary disillusionment with Enlightenment rationalism, when many Frenchmen
looked “across the Rhine” to German Romanticism for a sensitivity to the
spiritual that they felt they lacked. Quinet’s Génie des religions is a kind of
Hegelian account of human progress through religious revolution, in which the
rediscovery of Eastern religions constitutes a crucial stage, a return to the cradle
of communal religion by a modern individualistic spirit whose Bildungsroman
is thus completed. Quinet’s belief that history was moving inexorably toward a
reconciliation of world religions—a reconciliation of reason and spirit, of indi-
vidual and community, of man and nature—makes him a prime example of the
postrevolutionary, Romantic quest for a new religion. For Quinet, “Oriental”
religion—dened and experienced chiey through France’s contact with Islam
in Algeria—held the key to the “new Christianity.”
Quinet’s Christianity and Revolution lectures of devote far more atten-
tion to Islam than had earlier documents of the “Oriental Renaissance,” to the
point of reducing the spirit and signicance of the Orient entirely to the religion
of Muhammad. According to Quinet, the spiritual revolution accomplished
by Islam represented a vital step in humanity’s circuitous progress toward a
higher unity. e very essence of Islam, in Quinet’s view, was its apocalyptic
activism. e Qur’an is full of evocative descriptions both of temporal and nal
judgment and of indications that those judgments are near. Accordingly, Islam
suers from none of the temporizing and accommodationism that has plagued
Christian churches. e Qur’an is marked by a sense of “haste”—“since the signs
are so near, so palpable ... one must act.” Islam owes the success of its early
and precipitous conquests to this constant fear of chastisement. For Quinet, the
fundamental point of contrast between Christianity and Islam was that “the
rst defers its promises until aer death,” while “the second, without losing a
day, wants to bring its doctrines into the constitution of civil and temporal soci-
ety.” Islam’s world-historical innovation lay in its commitment to the temporal,
earthly actualization of its ideals. Quinet cited the fact that Islam abolished
caste systems as soon as it had the rule over Asiatic societies. An emancipation
that took the West , years to implement—from ideal (primitive Christian-
ity) to realization (French Revolution)—took the Orient a single instant. Mu-
hammad was at once “the head and the arm, the Christ and the Napoleon of
the modern Orient.” So immediate was the application of Qur’anic ideals that
Islamic societies lived in a kind of ahistorical present. Some might accuse the
Orient of immobility, but only because it had experienced “in a single day ... its
Messiah and its Social Contract, the preaching of its apostles and its Revolution
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“Sincerely Religious”
of ’ ... its primitive Church and its Constituent Assembly.” e active apoc-
alypticism of early Islam, unlike that of early Christianity, had already succeeded
in ushering in its posthistorical millennium.
Of course, Islam was not history’s ultimate religion; but whatever the short-
comings of its creed, its devotion to the temporal actualization of that creed was
an attribute which France’s new religion would need in order to reconcile France
and Algeria, West and East, self and society. Quinet suggested that Muslims had
noticed the discrepancy between France’s church and state, between its ideal
and its actions, and had taken it for a weakness. Since “the Mohammedans have
reached religious and social unity before us,” Quinet asked, why would they
want to revert to a state of contradiction? In fact, the Orient would never be
subdued or conciliated as long as it observed France’s missionaries teaching a
Gospel that the French themselves did not live by. is conclusion, expressive of
a desire for a new unity between church and state, was something the counter-
revolutionary, pro-missionary Veuillot would have agreed with. However, the
two men could hardly have diered more in their envisioned bases for that unity:
Quinet promoted a civil religion that equated primitive, pre-institutional Chris-
tianity with the liberal principles of the Revolution, while Veuillot harked back
to a (ctional) golden age of corporate unity and absolute delity to the Pope.
But Quinet’s description of Islam’s genius represented an attribute both men
considered indispensable for France—“this suppression of time, this striking
simultaneity of the idea and the fact, this identity of religion and politics, this
ash of lightning which at once illuminates the sky and the earth, the church
and the state.”
Veuillot’s Les ançais en Algérie: eocracies and Noble Savages
e view that Islam did not distinguish between civil and religious spheres was
a commonplace of orientalist discourse in nineteenth-century France, and this
was oen understood to be a harmful characteristic. is perception was suf-
ciently entrenched for Ernest Renan, in his inaugural speech at the Collège
de France in , to compare the “state religion” of Islam to that of the papal
territories, concluding that both religions were irrevocably opposed to modern
European civilization. But Veuillot’s references to Islamic civil religion were
signicant not only because, like Quinet’s, they were relatively sympathetic but
also because, in the context of his counterrevolutionary culture war, he willingly
accepted this association of Catholicism and Islam and turned it against his sec-
ularist enemies. Unlike later proponents of the “Kabyle myth”—the “triangular
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comparison” between French, Arabs, and Kabyles that was designed to divide
the “indigènes” into fanatical, uncivilizable Arabs and civilizable Kabyles—for
Veuillot it was not Algeria but metropolitan France itself that was divided. Alge-
rian Muslims and French Catholics were closer to each other and to civilization
than either of them were to the truly “savage” secular French.
For Veuillot, as for Quinet, Algeria presented a world-historical opportunity
for religious rebirth in which both East and West would participate. In Ve uil-
lot’s understanding, though, France’s confrontation with Algeria was inscribed
in a historical narrative that was specically Christian. Because of the impend-
ing success of France’s colonial venture, “the last days of Islam have come,” con-
rming “calculations established by the Apocalypse of Saint John” that “assign
a duration of thirteen centuries to Mohammed’s reign.” But despite his faith in
God’s guidance of history, the precondition for a French Algeria was nothing
short of a national revival of (and state support for) Catholicism in France, at-
tended by unqualied support for missionary endeavors in Algeria. Until then,
the conquest would be neither successful nor justiable, and the “Moors and
Arabs” would continue to “reproach us ... because they never see us pray.” At
the level of state and society, Veuillot accused, the eects of France’s irreligion
were manifested in the fact that colonial administrators made no provision for
Catholic worship or for the propagation of the faith. Under such conditions,
the Arabs were “right to call us impious.” Success in Algeria could only come
from emulating Islamic society: rather than sending the orphans, deportees, and
the oscourings of French society to work in agricultural settlements, Veuillot
criticized, what the settlements of Algeria really needed were “Christian fami-
lies” led by priests who would make of them a “theocratic” republic able to “re-
spond to Muslim holy war with a Christian holy war.” His readers may sco at
such a religiously inspired vision, Veuillot admitted, but a Christian theocracy
would succeed precisely because it would be more intelligible and acceptable to
the devout Algerians, ultimately rendering subjugation unnecessary. Transform-
ing the agricultural villages into theocracies would “strike the Arabs with that
respect and admiration [that they have] for all that is sincerely religious, which
God has le them as an open channel for their return.”
Algerian Muslims’ good faith and religiosity not only meant that they would
more willingly accept a colonization that was openly and aggressively Christian;
for Veuillot, in his pro-missionary polemic against colonial administrators, it
also meant that they were susceptible to religious conversion. Because humans
are “made in the image of God,” however dehumanized by false religion, they
retain the “intuition of the good and of the beautiful” and can always be saved.
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“Sincerely Religious”
But “unbelieving Europe,” faced with a choice between converting and destroy-
ing the unfortunate Muslims, “prefers to annihilate them,” eectively denying a
universal human nature and giving the lie to its own vaunted humanitarianism.
“It does not please God that we kill men before having tried to convert them.”
Veuillot’s commitment to proselytization even led him at times to openly crit-
icize France’s imperial atrocities. In one article, Veuillot gave a surprisingly
frank description of the repressive tactics used in General Bugeaud’s “pacica-
tion” campaigns, including the infamous razzias (raids), with their burning of
crops, villages, and even burning alive of villagers who escaped into caves. For
Veuillot, the fact that so much blood had been spilled made missionary work a
necessity. He believed it would be truly reprehensible for France to have caused
so much suering for mere commercial or political interests.
For Veuillot, in a Catholic revival of the Enlightenment’s rhetorical ambiv-
alence toward Islam, the Muslim functioned as a kind of religious noble savage
(indeed, even more “civilized” than secular Frenchmen). Veuillot’s purpose was
not only to prove that Muslims were open to religious dialogue and conversion
but especially to denounce the empty irreligion of the metropolitan and colonial
French. e opening chapter of Veuillot’s travel account is subtitled “A Savage.”
Signicantly, though, this chapter takes place in France and relates the stage
of his journey between Paris and Marseille, the subtitle referring to a well-fed
fellow Frenchman who shared Veuillot’s coach. By beginning his trip to Algeria
with this encounter, Veuillot framed the entire book as a comparison between
“savage” metropolitan French and admirably devout Algerians. While the two
men rode together, their conversation turned to religion; Veuillot’s companion
became embarrassed and admitted that he remembered none of the prayers or re-
ligious teachings of his childhood. Incredulous, Veuillot lamented, “is man…
did not know a single word of the Catholic religion, within which he had been
born and had lived a half-century. He asked me questions that a savage could
have asked.” Algerian Muslims, Veuillot discovered by contrast, had pride in
their religion.
A favorite trope of Veuillot’s, to which he would return in later writings on
Algeria, was that of the French soldier who, shamed by the piety of his Muslim
allies or enemies, pretended to be a practicing Catholic or, better yet, sincerely
returned to the Church. Veuillot related the story of a “brave ocer” whose
acquaintance with A lgerian Muslims restored to him his religion. “What is your
religion?” they had challenged the soldier; “Do you ever pray, fast, give homage
to God?” Veuillot quoted, approvingly and at length, these Muslims’ condem-
nation of French pretensions to civilizational superiority: “e least among us is
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not impressed by the wonders of Paris....You have artillery pieces, steam ships,
wire suspension bridges ... you set yourselves up in life like people who would
want to stay there forever.” Yet French soldiers were regularly found drunk in
the streets and were so “afraid of dying” that “they convert to Islam” when cap-
tured: “We want no part of what you are.” Veuillot’s rhetorical and missionary
aection for Algeria’s pious Muslims would even take him beyond the simple,
traditional armation that all humans made in the image of God were theo-
retically amenable to proselytization; rather, the Arabs’ natural credulity and
instinct for veneration made them not just potential but ideal candidates for
Christian faith.
If the “Oriental Renaissance,” Algerian conquest, and postrevolutionary mal-
aise were necessary conditions for Veuillot’s sympathetic approach to Islam, con-
ditions shared by Catholic and freethinker alike, it was his specically Catholic
concerns—the polemical struggle against July Monarchy anticlericalism and the
optimism of the “Catholic missionary awakening” in its initial confrontation
with Islam—that directly provoked his sympathetic representations and gave
them force. Veuillot was not the only Catholic critic of the July Monarchy to
raise the issue of the church’s place in Algeria and to attack the Orléanist regime
on this front. In the s, many Catholic writers were united in a loose con-
glomeration of opposition to the July Monarchy and its educational policies.
e battle over educational liberty for Catholic secondary schools, especially
over the status of unauthorized teaching congregations such as the Jesuits, was
far and away the major “culture war” of the s, the crucible out of which nine-
teenth-century Catholic journalism was forged. It should come as no surprise,
then, that other Catholic writers also found the July Monarchy’s tepid support
for the Christianization of Algeria to be a convenient club with which to beat
the regime.
Charles de Riancey’s pamphlet, De la situation religieuse de l’Algérie,
was published by Charles de Montalembert’s Comité électoral pour la défense
de la liberté religieuse and was available for purchase at the oces of Veuillot’s
L’Univers. e immediate context for Riancey’s pamphlet was the resignation
of Algeria’s rst bishop, Antoine-Adolphe Dupuch, in December of , and
the publication of Dupuch’s report to the Pope, which openly accused the July
Monarchy and its colonial administrators of obstructing his work. Riancey
clearly shared Veuillot’s perspective on the Algerian problem: France’s conquest
of Algeria represented a sacred obligation to bring the colony into the fold of
civilisation chrétienne, to “found a new Christendom”; yet “the Arabs themselves
were astonished at the impiety of their conquerors,” and their will to resist was
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“Sincerely Religious”
empowered by the thought that their enemies were “a nation without God.”
Far from resenting the Catholic element among the French, Riancey claimed,
the Muslims themselves were pleased upon learning that some French were
religious aer all and magnanimously understood that some mosques would
have to be seized and transformed into churches. Yet the anticlerical colonial
administration, more pro-Muslim than the Muslims themselves, had le numer-
ous towns without churches and priests, building mosques instead. e Arabs,
however, scorned these government-built mosques as profane. “I cannot prevent
myself from admiring these Arabs,” Riancey wrote, nding himself, like Veuil-
lot, in solidarity with Muslims who were too noble and devout to accept the pan-
dering tolerance of a “godless” government. “Fortunately,” congregations such
as the Jesuits, “those persecuted priests who always respond to humiliations and
slanders with new services,” had come to the aid of the secular clergy. Whether
because Riancey’s main purpose was to accuse France’s administration of not
giving sucient nancial support to Algeria’s rst bishop, or because Riancey,
unlike Veuillot, had not encountered Algerian Muslims rsthand, his pamphlet
did not engage in the kind of extended philo-Islamic reections that marked
Veuillot’s work.
e same year, in , Jacques Lecore, the Catholic publisher of Riancey’s
pamphlet, also published an anonymous tract “by an ocer of the Army of Af-
rica” with the much more explicit and crudely pragmatic title, De la conversion
de musulmans au christianisme, considerée comme moyen d’aermir la puissance
ançaise en Algérie (e conversion of Muslims to Christianity, considered as
a means for arming French power in Algeria). e anonymous pamphlet was
not a salvo in the educational debates but rather a contribution to the broader
genre of utopian plans for how best to colonize Algeria. It again showed the
currency of ideas akin to Veuillot’s. Basing his argument on the same false di-
chotomy posed by Veuillot and Riancey—large-scale Muslim conversion to
Christianity as the only alternative to endless conict—the anonymous ocer
followed this line of reasoning to the extreme, advocating that the army escort
and protect priests as they proselytize, that enemy women be entrusted to fe-
male religious congregations until they convert or are married to Christians,
and that children be forcibly sent to French schools for their education. He also
added his own awkward take on the advantages of Muslims’ natural religiosity.
“Even today,” he wrote, “the Muslims accept as holy writ the absurd tales of
their marabouts. Let us be certain, then, that our priests, by preaching Christian
truths with eloquence, will obtain the greatest successes.” In other words, the
Muslims of Algeria were such superstitious simpletons that they would even
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become Catholics! Catholic philo-Islamists like Veuillot would not have put this
argument so clumsily, but their hope was the same—that Catholic missionaries
like the Jesuits would be able to transfer the Muslims’ religious allegiance over
to Christianity, without damaging any of their noble devoutness and credulity
along the way. is was not the only similarity between the “ocer” and Veuil-
lot. e anonymous pamphleteer suered from the same confusion of priorities
that plagued Veuillot’s thought and that would plague Catholic Orientalism for
decades to come—the confusion between Christianity’s truth value and French
civilization’s worldly success: “How can we fail when we ght for the truth, and
when we have ... the advantage of knowledge and force?”
Eugène Boré: Apologetics, Mission, and Analogy
One Catholic gure whose trajectory in thinking about Islam closely mirrors
Veuillot’s was the orientalist-turned-Lazarist missionar y Eugène Boré. Boré was
of the same generation as Veuillot, the generation of “Romantic Catholics” who
came of age during the Catholic revival of the s and s, in the shadow
of the famous apologists Joseph de Maistre, François-René de Chateaubriand,
and Félicité de Lamennais—a time when discussion cercles and conférences for
Catholic students, charitable associations, and missionary congregations prolif-
erated. When Boré undertook his rst “voyage en Orient” in , he saw his
mission as sharing in the scholarly-apologetic project that sought to use history,
philology, and even the study of other religions to conrm the “universal” truth
of Catholic revelation and the historical benets of “Christian civilization.”
Boré met Veuillot in , when he was back in France aer his rst expedition
in Turkey and Persia. Boré’s closest friend, Eugène Taconet, was throughout
the s the director and nancial supporter of Veuillot’s L’Univers, and Boré
would remain an avid reader and supporter of Veuillot’s journalism for the rest
of his life. Boré even contributed articles to L’Univers. ough his academic
and missionary eorts focused on the Ottoman Empire rather than on Algeria,
Boré’s writings on Islam—geared toward a French Catholic audience—were
conditioned by the same Romantic, apologetic, and evangelistic motives that
inuenced Veuillot. Moreover, despite the Turkish context of Boré’s personal
missionary labors, Algeria loomed large in his Islamic imaginary—as a place
where, thanks to the French conquest, a breach had been opened against Islam’s
resistance to Christian missions. Boré stayed informed of the evangelistic at-
tempts of his Lazarist missionary colleagues in Algeria, twice visiting the colony
and touring its missionary establishments.
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“Sincerely Religious”
Like Veuillot, Boré was deeply impressed with the piety and apparent decency
of Muslim culture, even confessing to experiencing a “seductive doubt” about
the superiority of Christian civilization when he saw how infrequently suicides,
murders, and other vices seemed to occur in Turkish society. Writing in
for the missionary journa l Annales de la Propagation de la Foi, Boré summarized
“the nature of the Muslim,” emphasizing how noble and devout Muslims were in
comparison to the unbelieving skeptics of France: “You admire in him his dispo-
sition to adhere to the constituent dogmas of all religion; you are not frightened
by this rationalist audacity which among us denies and sneers at the beliefs of
others; on the contrary, the word or deed which honors God is always respected
and approved by him ... and the only fault which his good sense nds unpar-
donable and incomprehensible is the monster of philosophical skepticism.”
Implicit in this passage are the same motives that drove Veuillot’s reections
on Islam—the desire to criticize by comparison the perceived anticlericalism of
France’s liberal July Monarchy and the hope that Muslims, with their natural
credulity and religious sense, might themselves make ideal Christians.
Indeed, it is precisely because global Islam was presumed ripe for conversion
that the work of missions in Algeria remained close to Boré’s heart and inti-
mately linked to his own Ottoman context. Boré was the animating spirit be-
hind the Catechumenate of Algiers, a refuge directed by the Lazarists of Alge-
ria with the purpose of welcoming converts to Catholicism who were escaping
persecution in the Ottoman Empire. According to the overly optimistic logic
of early nineteenth-century missions in their initial encounters with Muslims,
Christianity was so obviously superior to Islam that all that was needed for
Christianity to prevail was for the persecutory laws of the Ottoman Empire
to be abolished, leveling the playing eld. e unfolding conquest of Alge-
ria, then, with its prospects for an unhindered Christian apostolate to Islam,
was a source of great hope for Veuillot and Boré alike. In October , Boré
reported to the Paris Council of the Œuvre de la Propagation de la Foi (Asso-
ciation for the Propagation of the Faith; France’s foremost funder of Catholic
missions) that Muslims as well as Jews and “schismatics” (Orthodox Chris-
tians) in the Orient were ready to convert to Catholicism. All that prevented
them was the lack of some haven where they could be safe from persecution,
Boré claimed. Fortunately, “Providence oers us a natural outlet in Algeria.”
e important thing was that the converts not be sent to Europe because “Eu-
ropean civilization has, among all its advantages, dangers and excesses which
it is good to hide from oriental neophytes”—dangers that included “lessons
in immorality and corruption.” ough the Council responded favorably to
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Boré’s proposal, allocating , francs to the Lazarists to begin the catechu-
menate, the work was a failure.
Echoing Veuillot’s polemics, Boré later blamed the “deadly prejudices” of
the July Monarchy’s colonial administrators for this setback. Some eight years
later—with the arrival of a new Bishop of Algiers and a new political regime—
Boré optimistically tried again, still believing the philo-Islamic idea that Mus-
lims would be especially easy to convert because of their good faith: “e Arabs
are more sincere than the Greeks [Orthodox].” Indeed, Boré’s utopian view of
Muslim openness to Christian conversion had only grown. If they knew they
could apostatize from Islam safely, “e Arabs, which simple good sense, aided
by grace, has led to recognize the superiority of Christian institutions, would
lose the fear that holds them back” and would convert and become French, “sav-
ing their souls” and “rehabilitating their social position” at the same time. e
refuge at Algiers would even grow into a force for reform across the entire Ori-
ent, Boré believed, since Muslim governments would be forced to oer liberty
of conscience domestically in order to prevent the mass exodus of converts.
One reason Veuillot and Boré felt justied in seeking continuities between
Islam and Christianity was the commonplace that Islam was only a heresy of
Christianity. Hence, analogies between the two religions abounded. For
Veuillot and Boré, of course, Islam would always be a false religion; yet its
truths—vestiges and analogies of Christianity—meant that Muslim-Christian
dialogue could be pursued, even perhaps that “Islam was not a demonic belief
but rather a ‘preface to the Gospel.’” In a letter Veuillot wrote from Algiers in
—which would form the basis for one of the concluding chapters of his book
on Algeria—he recounted a religious debate he had with a “zealous Muslim,”
which lasted “until two in the morning” and ended amicably. is experience
more than any other seems to have conrmed Veuillot’s “conviction that the
Muslims despise us and hate us less for being Christians than for our impiety.”
Aer all, Veuillot’s interlocutor had “an excellent soul, an upright sense, a nat-
urally religious mind, and a predisposition to receive the truth that I have very
rarely met at Paris among the Scholars.” Here, though, the reason for the Mus-
lim’s natural religiosity and capacity for good faith dialogue was explicit: “Islam
being nothing but a Christian heresy, there are many points of contact.”
Boré was also a proponent of the view that Islam’s status as a Christian heresy
had created productive “points of contact.” In , even before his voyages gave
him rsthand experience of the Islamic world, Boré wrote an article on Islam for
the Annales de philosophie chrétienne, a quintessential journal of July Monarchy
Catholic apologetics that sought to publicize “whatever the human sciences ...
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“Sincerely Religious”
contain in the way of proofs and discoveries in favor of Christianity.” Boré’s
article was published as part of a series on “Christian Heresies” and endeav-
ored to point out the important analogies that existed between Christianity
and Islam. Boré’s opening lines read almost like a frontal attack on the Mais-
trean idea of Islamic enmity: “It is commonly believed that Mohammedanism
is opposed in all points to the Christian religion....However, if we open the
Alcoran ... we are astonished to see ... an appearance of kinship so striking, that
Muslimism seems to be really only a bastard son of Christianity.” Boré noted
that Muslims, as descendants of Ishmael, would certainly have retained some
of the upright traditions of Abraham and that the “Alcoran ... deploys a wealth
and magnicence of images which recall the inspired pages of our prophets.”
Boré’s penchant for making analogies between Christianity and Islam was at its
most systematic with his analysis of the relationship between Sunni and Shi’a
Islam. According to Boré, the Shi’a are to Sunni Islam what Christian heretics
are to Catholicism: “We see that for Muslims, as for Christians, there is only
one church or communion considered orthodox. is is also the one that rests
on tradition and the general authority of the faithful.” It was the recognition
of such family resemblances and, most importantly, the specic analogy between
Sunnism and Catholicism, Boré believed, that would lead Sunnis—the major-
ity of Muslims worldwide—to return to the true, original faith of Catholicism.
Since Sunnis, based on their own experiences with Shi’ism, could understand
the relationship between orthodoxy and heresy, “it would be easy to prove to
the orthodox church of Islam that it is itself only a branch detached from the
great tree of life of the Catholic or universal church, and that all the fragments
of truths that it contains are only scraps borrowed by their prophet from Judaism
or Christianity.”
Despite the fanciful, deluded nature of these hopes for Muslim—and speci-
cally Sunni—conversion, Boré’s ideas about Sunni and Shi ’a Islam would remain
unfazed by his later rsthand experiences. While visiting a cemetery in the Black
Sea region of central Turkey, Boré was accosted by a Su mystic (a “sect ... ex-
tremely common in Persia”). e Su assured Boré that according to Susm
there was no need for him to convert from Christianity to Islam, since specic
religious confessions were only the lowest level of religious development. “[T]he
true believer is he who tramples the literal interpretation of the law....Religion
is in the thought and not in the act,” the Su continued; “it is enough to want
to love God and to unite oneself to him with a strong passion, in order to nd
him and to penetrate into his essence....So when you are worshipping, do not
say ‘I’ or ‘me’ or ‘him’ anymore; everything has become one.” True to his belief
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in the kinship between Sunnism and Catholicism and his attendant disdain for
Shi’ism and Susm, Boré interrupted this mystic “coldly,” casting himself as
a defender of orthodoxy—both Christian and Muslim orthodoxy—as he per-
ceived it. Boré accused the mystic of “[contradicting] the unanimous faith of
the human race. Can evil and good be one? Man and God merge into a single
substance? No.... Faith and the works that fulll it: that, according to the
Gospel and the Alcoran, is the way to approach God.” Boré, the devout, prac-
ticing Catholic, reserved his respect for the most straightforwardly orthodox,
practicing Muslims.
Boré’s confrontation with Susm shows the remarkable extent to which some
conservative Catholic observers of Islam in the s and s were willing to
respect the religious devotion found in Islam. For Boré as for Veuillot, Muslims
who believed and practiced the basic doctrines of Islam—however corrupted
those doctrines might be—were commendable inasmuch as they were people of
faith and sincerity. But Boré’s version, explicitly tying the image of Islamic piety
and faithfulness to the Sunni branch and withholding respect from the “mar-
gins” of Islam, highlights—even more strikingly than Veuillot’s—just how ex-
ceptional their view of Islam was, especially in light of later developments. As the
evangelistic optimism of the rst half of the nineteenth century endured failure
aer failure, missionaries and observers alike would become convinced of the
“inconvertibility of the heart of Sunnite Islam” and turn instead to Islam’s “spir-
itual or geopolitical margins”—Alawites in Syria, Kabyles in Algeria, Shi’ites
in Persia—in the hopes that such heterodox minorities would be more suscep-
tible to conversion and cultural assimilation. At the same time, orientalists
from Ernest Renan to Louis Massignon and beyond were guilty of constructing
an image of marginal Islam—Shi’ite, Su, “Indo-European” Islam—that was
more approachable, more analogous to Christian, Occidental spirituality. If,
for these and for many Western observers of Islam today, “the only good Muslim
is a bad [or heterodox] Muslim,” for the conservatives Boré and Veuillot, the
best Muslims were precisely those who followed Muhammad’s precepts most
literally and diligently.
Of Steamships and eocracies
Veuillot’s view of Islam was deeply contradictory. Despite his sympathy for
Muslim unity and religiosity, his anti-Islamic rhetoric at times reached a pitch
more violent and fevered than Maistre’s. For one thing, he did not share Quinet’s
more Romantic respect for the person of Muhammad. According to Veuillot,
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“Sincerely Religious”
the prophet was at best a new breed of Christian heretic, at worst a fraud and
deceiver who, unlike his later adherents, was not in good faith. In contrast to
Quinet, Veuillot separated Islam’s admirable theocratic element from his ac-
count of the religion’s origins, instead falling back on traditional anti-Islamic
slurs. Muhammad’s initial successes and conquests were due not to a genuine be-
lief in coming judgment, nor to the social unity produced by this doctrine, but to
the simple fact that “this Arab camel driver” promised plunder and women, ap-
pealing to humanity’s basest instincts. e Qur’an, like all the deceptive works
of the devil, “apes” the Bible, stealing its forms in order to preach its opposite.
Slavery and misogyny were among the negative eects of Qur’anic teaching.
Islam had “plunged [Africa] into an irremediable barbarism” and had made of
the Moors an “incurably stupid” and “fallen race.” Indeed, if North Africa had
not been drawn into the French orbit in , but rather had been allowed to
continue its inevitable decline for several more centuries, it would have sunk to
a state analogous to that of the “degraded beings who vegetate in the solitude of
the New World.” In stark contrast to his constant armations of the inherent
piety and humanity of Algerian Muslims, Veuillot’s reference to “New World”
degradation recalls Maistre’s more famous rejection of the very concept of the
“noble savage,” and includes Muslims in that rejection.
Worst of all, even Veuillot’s admiration for Islam can be seen as cynical and
entirely complicit with the violent conquest of Algeria. Veuillot eagerly en-
dorsed and echoed the mythic justication for conquest—that Algiers had been
a nest of pirates tempting Christian captives to apostasy. He was in Algeria, aer
all, as the secretary of the governor general, accompanying him on expeditions,
playing at soldier, and bragging about his newfound horseback riding skills.
His rhetoric of admiration for Islam was ultimately aimed not at defending Al-
gerians against colonization but rather at bullying France’s leaders into greater
support for the Christianization of Algeria. His sympathy for Muslim religios-
ity, in other words, coexisted with his desire “to make Islam disappear.” Still,
Veuillot’s desire for a more peaceful, apostolic conquest seems to have been sin-
cere enough. He was shaken by the sight and smell of the dead the day aer a
skirmish, and he was especially haunted by the image of an amputated leg. He
ultimately concluded that he would rather serve Algeria as a missionary than
a soldier, that he preferred the war of “ideas” to that of “sword and canon.”
His criticisms of colonialism’s damaging impact on Algerians (and his calls for
a more devoutly Christian settler population) were not merely a cynical ploy to
score points against the July Monarchy. He also promoted these views in his
private reporting, even while still in Algeria and in Minister Guizot’s employ.
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e inconsistencies in Veuillot’s orientalism are reective of deeper contra-
dictions in his thought between Enlightenment models of progress and the Ro-
mantic embrace of religious feeling; between legitimations of empire based on
European superiority and those based on the salvation of souls; between loyalty
to France and loyalty to a spiritual community; between nationalism and ul-
tramontanism. Veuillot’s selective use of civilizational justications for empire
illustrates this ambivalence well. His account of his voyage to Algeria contains
a lengthy paean to the steamship, which had rendered the crossing of the Med-
iterranean so much easier: “When one considers that it takes only two days to
reach Africa from France, one must conclude that the last days of Islamism have
come....is is how Fulton, who probably hardly expected it, has served the
Gospel.” At once guaranteeing and validating the success of France’s mission,
the technological superiority exemplied by the steamship counted for as much
as the favor of God. Since European civilization was the product of Christi-
anity, norms and tools that were illustrative of European superiority could be
used as pragmatic defenses for missions, European practices and technologies
substituted metonymically for Christian revelation. Muslim conversion was a
certainty, because “the advances of civilization have made it impossible for them
to believe in Mohammed.”
Veuillot is oen portrayed as having “[detested] the innovations of the age,”
but when it came to justifying intervention in North Africa, Veuillot, like many
French Catholics, set his traditionalism aside and pronounced the imperial pass-
word, civilisation. By praising and invoking the steamship and French civili-
zation in general, Veuillot identied himself with a secular view of history as a
“race” to modernity, where the fastest and most powerful would get to dene
what the end goal was for everyone else. Yet, Veuillot quoted approvingly the
Muslim Algerian who mocked the France of steamships and suspension bridges.
Incredibly, the steamship could—within the same text—stand for the liberating
and inexorable march of French civilization as well as for the laughable hubris
and hypocrisy of secular France’s colonial mission. France’s colonization of Al-
geria was justied and sure to succeed a priori on the basis of French modernity;
simultaneously, it would remain nothing but an unjustied and unsuccessful
aggression—a conrmation of France’s own post-civilizational degradation—
unless it brought Frenchmen and Arabs together and into the Christian fold.
Beyond the immediate context of July Monarchy culture war and mission-
ary Romanticism, Veuillot’s two-fold rhetoric—at once appealing to France’s
technological superiority and to Algeria’s religious superiority—may be illumi-
nated by a consideration of his place in the longer history of nineteenth-century
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“Sincerely Religious”
French Catholicism. As French society became increasingly polarized in the
nineteenth century, French Catholicism took on an apocalyptic cast, preferring
apparitions and eschatological predictions over constructive engagement in the
compromises of temporal politics. Veuillot himself was exemplary of this pro-
cess. Aer his journal was suppressed in the last years of the Second Empire, his
writings reached a fever pitch of apocalypticism. In a diatribe against a plan to
build a statue of Joan of Arc on Haussmann’s new Avenue de l’Opéra, Veuil-
lot wrote that Paris was no longer worthy of the Maid of Orléans. Since Paris
stood for Revolution, irreligion, and decadence, Veuillot hoped that all statues
of saints might be removed from the city. Like righteous Lot eeing Sodom
and Gomorrah before the cities’ biblical destruction, Veuillot believed Bernard
of Clairvaux and Martin of Tours would want to leave Paris’s pedestals to the
saints of the Revolution. Unsurprisingly, given such biblical resonances, Veuillot
went on to predict the violent destruction of “Parisian civilization” and the sur-
vival of only a righteous remnant. Of course, Veuillot’s desire to bring about a
violent, revolutionary end—to make the boundary between good and evil clear
and uncomplicated, once and for all—went against traditional understandings
of Christianity’s “prohibition ... to ‘set the time’ of the End” and against the
biblical command to let the “wheat and tares” grow up together until that nal
judgment.
Veuillot’s rhetorical appeals to both “steamship” and “theocracy” betray an
unstable and contradictory discourse, a sort of falling between the two stools
of progress and reaction, “civilized” France and “devout” Algeria. Yet there is
a kind of perverse unity in the pairing, at least when viewed through the con-
text of French Catholicism’s increasing apocalypticism. Both images appealed
to Veuillot, despite their conicting implications, perhaps because both spoke
to his hope for a revolutionary Christian theocracy, to his rejection of the tra-
ditional slowness and accommodationism of institutional Catholicism, and to
his more sectarian desire to see the wheat and tares separated immediately. Both
the steamship and Islamic theocracy, as Veuillot appropriated them, symbol-
ized radical new possibilities for the ubiquity of French power, for the Christian
unity and uniformity of the world. Veuillot’s admiration for the steamship—for
the literal and historical speed that gave France the power to impose its values on
others—was the ip side of his appreciation for the eschatological “speed” with
which Islamic theocracy had imposed its own timeless unity. Perhaps a nal
reason, then, why Veuillot went beyond Maistre in his sympathy for Islam was
that in the less than two decades between their writings, some French Catho-
lics had already become more embattled, more pessimistic, and more willing to
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grasp at eschatological intervention. Maistre, criticizing the Revolution from
the relative security of the Restoration, had armed Christianity’s traditional,
antirevolutionary gradualism, its “deferment of promises,” as Quinet would say.
“Christianity,” according to Maistre, “which acted by Divine power, for this
reason also acted gently and slowly....Wherever there is noise, tumult, impetu-
osity, destruction, etc., it may be relied upon that crime or folly is at work.” In
contrast, Veuillot—writing under an anticlerical July Monarchy that had even
imprisoned him for too vehemently defending the right of a priest to lecture in
a state school—no longer felt that time was on the side of the Catholic cause.
Instead, with Quinet, he looked to the example of Islam’s revolutionary, near-im-
mediate actualization of its ideals: “this suppression of time ... this ash of light-
ning which at once illuminates the sky and the earth, the church and the state.”
In view of how Veuillot employed these contradictory discourses, it is not
surprising that his entire model for success in Algeria was impractical, to say the
least. In a convoluted passage that should have made the utopian nature of his
project apparent even to himself, Veuillot wrote, “e Arabs will only belong to
France when they are French; they will only be French when they are Christians;
[and] they will not be Christians as long as we do not know how to be Christians
ourselves.” In order to successfully and peacefully assimilate Algeria, in other
words, a decadent and nearly post-Christian France would have to return to a
former stage of its own development—purging the original sin of the Revolution
and rejoining Christian civilization—while at the same time bringing Algeria
up to that same historical stage. Yet in arguing that France’s rights over Algeria
were derived in part from “civilization”—from the historical progress Christi-
anity had brought to Europe—Veuillot subordinated Christian revelation to
secular history and was le with no criterion on which to evaluate the normative
endpoint of that progress. He was le with no reason why a civilization should
not progress beyond Christianity. e rhetorical triangulation between Muslim,
Christian, and secular civilization was indeed a complicated operation.
Veuillot and his milieu’s conicted orientalism contained at its core a contra-
diction that would haunt Catholic encounters with Islam through the course
of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, the rhetorically ambivalent use of
Muslim piety to condemn metropolitan unbelief became almost a commonplace
of counterrevolutionary discourse. Émile Keller, legitimist Catholic deputy
to the Second Empire’s Corps Legislatif and theorist of Social Catholicism,
claimed that, in their sincerity and loyalty to the traditional values of their so-
ciety, Muslims were superior to the traitorous Rationalist and Protestant “Mus-
lims of within.” Léon Gautier, a prolic Catholic apologist and historian of
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“Sincerely Religious”
medieval literature, wrote that Muhammad—though a debauched, violent, hal-
lucinatory idol-worshipper—nevertheless had the good sense to borrow heavily
from Christianity and to be “full of respect for the person of Jesus Christ.” Es-
pecially in his acceptance of the miracles of Christ, Muhammad demonstrated
that he had undergone “divine inuence.” In the introductory essay of La
Croix—the Assumptionist journal founded in that would later become fa-
mous for its vocal anti-Dreyfusism—Emmanuel d’A lzon wrote that, in advocat-
ing for religious liberties such as those of public prayer and processions, he and
his colleagues were only demanding what was permitted “at Constantinople.”
“Is it too much to ask,” he quipped, “to claim a freedom à la turque?” ese
apologetic versions of the trope, though, divorced from the kind of direct con-
tact with Muslims that had inspired Veuillot and Boré, did not communicate
any real sympathy for Muslim relig iosity; on the contrary, the comparisons seem
intended to demean Muslim and freethinker alike.
On the other hand, for many French Catholics, the lost and longed-for
community of the French nation and civilization—“the eldest daughter of the
Church”—would always exert a powerful temptation away from the ideal of
an international community based on religion, dialogue, and conversion. Over
the course of the nineteenth century, pragmatic and patriotic justications for
missions, intended to prove the ecacy of Christianity to a secularizing France,
would increasingly displace traditional discourses of the salvation of souls.
In the context of domestic culture wars, many Catholics found it more advan-
tageous to emphasize their patriotic alliance with the civilizing mission rather
than their religious critique of it: a kind of anti-Islamic “clash of civilizations”
ideology, it was believed, would unify all French of good faith. is shi was
accompanied by “a more blatantly racial conceptualization of evangelizing.”
At the same time—inspired by the new “sciences” of philology and racial de-
mography, and ever more entangled with the pragmatic imperatives of colonial
surveillance—academic orientalists and colonial ethnographers (Catholic and
“free thinker” alike) began moving away from Romantic narratives of reconcil-
iation with Islam and toward a view of Islam as a “Semitic,” static object suited
only for investigation and control. Missionaries themselves would begin to
write of Muslim Algerians in openly denigrating, racialized ways.
But before this disillusionment with philo-Islamism set in, some missionaries
in the rst decades of Algerian conquest would sincerely and diligently try to
convert Algeria’s Muslims. In the ush of missionary excitement that accompa-
nied the conquest of Algeria, and in the environment of admiration for Islamic
religiosity fostered by Veuillot, Boré, and other pro-missions culture warriors,
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some missionaries seemed to believe the philo-Islamic rhetoric—that the Mus-
lims’ natural devoutness would be an advantage rather than an obstacle. Mis-
sionaries did not necessarily arrive in Algeria with an ahistorical, a priori belief
in Muslim fanaticism and resistance to Christianity. Some were quite optimistic
about Muslim missions. It was only through concrete, personal, and sometimes
deeply bitter failures to convert any Algerian Muslims that they eventually came
to reject this optimistic view. When, in the waning decades of the nineteenth
century, these missionaries needed an explanation for their failures, there was
one at hand: the Arab race.
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