Algeria’s first great resistance leader failed to unify its tribes against France.

Evidence

But despite initial French optimism, the fighting continued in the interior. In 1832 there arose a fierce and dedicated Algerian resistance leader, Abd-el-Kader, then aged only twenty-five. With intermittent cease-fires, Abd-el-Kader waged war against the French occupation over the next fifteen years. Though winning remarkably wide support in western and central Algeria, he was never able to unite totally the warlike Algerian tribes which, traditionally, were little more inclined to submit to his authority than they were to the French. In the context of the nineteenth century the weight of colonialist France was, in any event, altogether too great for Abd-el-Kader to have achieved anything resembling a united, modern nation. Militarily, the struggle assumed forms that were to become painfully familiar. Ill-prepared French troops would freeze to death in the harsh mountains in pursuit of an elusive foe, or fall into well-laid ambushes. Little quarter was given. The French army retaliated with scorched-earth reprisals; on one occasion French public opinion was deeply shocked to learn how fires had been lit at the mouth of a cave where 500 men, women and children had taken refuge, asphyxiating all but ten of them. “It was not a pretty war, nor an amusing war,” wrote one military commander. A legendary figure in French nurseries, Père Bugeaud, pressed operations ruthlessly to a conclusion, and in 1847 Abd-el-Kader finally surrendered— to spend the rest of his life in honourable exile in Damascus. — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 85

Categorization

• XREF: Abd-el-Kader’s partial, fractious resistance prefigures the fractured FLN-Algerian nationalism of the 1950s war discussed later in this book.
• DEFINE: Establishes the prototype for how the ‘savage war’ was fought even in 1830s-40s: guerrillas, scorched earth, terrorism against civilians.

Related

• Heavy-handed military reprisals in Algeria drove more Algerians to join the rebels. (similarity 0.80)
• A lingering Algerian hatred of French rule simmers until it erupts into war (similarity 0.79)
• The independent Algerian state proved as unable to crush insurgency as France had been. (similarity 0.79)
• The Aurès mountains have long produced unvanquishable guerrilla resistance (similarity 0.79)
• The F.L.N. credited colon intransigence for forging united Algerian nationalism (similarity 0.79)
• French Algérie served as a defensive bulwark against Soviet influence (similarity 0.79)