Desert Named Peace

In the mid-nineteenth century French colonial leaders in Algeria descended southward into the Sahara, initiating a fifty-year period of violence. The French Empire in the Sahara sought power through physical force as it had elsewhere, yet this did not yield empire on the cheap, and violence in colonial Algeria followed a shifting political logic. A Desert Named Peace presents four cases: the military conquests of the French army in the oases and officers' predisposition to use extreme violence in colonial conflicts; a spontaneous nighttime attack made by Algerian pastoralists on a French village, as notable for its brutality as for its obscure causes; the violence of indigenous forms of slavery and the colonial accommodations that preserved it during the era of abolition; and the struggles of French Romantics whose debates about art and politics arrived from Paris with disastrous consequences. These different perspectives reveal the unexpected causes of colonial violence, such as France's troubled revolutionary past and its influence on the military's institutional culture, the aesthetics of the sublime and its impact on colonial thinking, the ecological crises suffered by Saharan pastoralists under colonial rule, and the conflicting paths to authority inherent in Algerian Sufism.