A-Infos (en) France, OCL CA #362 - Should Bugeaud be toppled? (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

This is the question some people are asking, and to which a group from 
Périgord (1) answers in the affirmative. Beyond the question of what to 
do with Bugeaud, it is useful to revisit his role in history. ---- Born 
into the minor nobility of Périgord (on his father's side) and Ireland 
(on his mother's), Thomas Robert Bugeaud de la Piconnerie enlisted in 
1804, at the age of 20, in the Foot Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard. 
Ten years later, he was already a colonel. He cut his teeth in Prussia, 
Poland, and especially Spain. One must look to Goya's engravings from 
the series The Disasters of War to understand the conditions under which 
this young man was trained: a massacre against poorly armed guerrillas 
and civilians.

During the Restoration, Colonel Bugeaud rallied to the Bourbons before 
betraying them to support Napoleon during the Hundred Days. This 
admirable character earned him his dismissal from the army upon Louis 
XVIII's return. He then retired to Périgord and devoted himself to 
improving his landholdings. In 1825, he was elected mayor of Excideuil. 
Failing to regain the monarch's favor, he became a "liberal," meaning he 
supported the political maneuver that made Louis-Philippe the true 
victor of the 1830 revolution. This alliance allowed him to be elected 
deputy in 1831 and appointed brigadier general by Louis-Philippe. In the 
Chamber, having reverted to his conservative stance (like the king), he 
repeatedly provoked members of the opposition. This led him, in January 
1834, to kill a left-wing deputy (2), the lawyer François-Charles 
Dulong, in a duel.

Following the repression of the second Lyon silk workers' revolt, the 
Society of the Rights of Man organized a demonstration in Paris that 
turned into an insurrection on April 13 and 14, 1834. A shot was 
reportedly fired from a building on Rue Transnonain; a brigade of the 
35th Line Infantry Regiment (3), commanded by General Lascours, entered 
and massacred 12 unarmed people. It should be noted that the day before, 
the Minister of the Interior, Adolphe Thiers, had issued a brutal order: 
"Everyone must be killed. Friends, no quarter, be merciless!" Bugeaud 
did not directly order this massacre, but he relayed Thiers' orders and 
retroactively justified these deaths.

School textbooks have placed the Marshal and the Emir on equal 
footing... while presenting a completely fanciful image of them (Bugeaud 
never wore a beard, and Abd el-Kader's was black (at age 39).) As a 
reward for his loyalty, Bugeaud was sent to Algeria in 1836 with the 
dual mission of fighting Abd el-Kader and making peace with him. He 
achieved an initial victory at the Battle of Sikkak, but the Algerians 
resisted, forcing him to sign the Treaty of Tafna (4) with Emir Abd 
el-Kader on May 30, 1837. Upon returning to France, Bugeaud was not in 
favor of expanding the conquest and lamented an "onerous possession from 
which the nation would be glad to be rid." Despite this, he was 
appointed Governor-General of Algeria (late 1840), a role that was both 
military and administrative. On the day of his arrival in Algiers, 
February 22, 1841. Bugeaud issued a proclamation to the inhabitants of 
Algeria, announcing that he would henceforth dedicate himself to the 
total conquest of the territory, and a proclamation to the army, stating 
that his goal was not to drive out the Arabs, but to subdue them.
Bugeaud eventually commanded more than 100,000 men. Surrounded by 
Generals La Moricière, Changarnier, Bedeau, and Cavaignac (5), Bugeaud 
employed new methods of warfare inspired by his experience fighting 
partisans during the Peninsular War. He lightened the soldiers' 
equipment, replaced wagons with pack animals, and mounted artillery on 
mules. The troops were divided into mobile columns; they pursued the 
Algerian resistance fighters with a relentless offensive and, to starve 
them, cleared the area before them, burning villages and seizing 
livestock. This was the scorched-earth policy. Bugeaud said: "The goal 
is not to chase after the Arabs, which is quite pointless; it is to 
prevent the Arabs from sowing, harvesting, grazing, (...) from enjoying 
their fields. (...) Go every year and burn their crops (...), or else 
exterminate them to the last man."

The pacification of Algeria would experience one of its bloodiest 
episodes with what historians would call "the suffocation by smoke." In 
Paris, outrage erupted upon learning of the suffocation in the caves of 
the Dahra (6). The Prince of Moskowa, son of Marshal Ney, addressed the 
Chamber of Peers. General Bugeaud, questioned, accepted responsibility 
and replied to the minister: "And I believe that respecting humanitarian 
principles will cause the war in Africa to drag on indefinitely." On the 
ground as well, the "counter-guerrilla" methods advocated by Bugeaud 
were contested by some of his subordinates, in particular Colonel 
Dubern, who denounced them: "We are destroying the country we claim to 
be colonizing and civilizing." For his effectiveness, Bugeaud was made 
Marshal of France in July 1843; he obtained permission to attack 
Morocco, which was aiding the resistance of Emir Abd el-Kader. He 
defeated the Moroccan troops in 1844 and then pursued Abd el-Kader, who 
was forced to surrender in 1847. Bugeaud returned to France and, at the 
time of the February Revolution of 1848, he was appointed high command 
of the army by the Duke of Nemours, son of the threatened king. He 
reminded the officers present that the man who would lead them against 
the Parisian revolutionaries "had never been defeated, either on the 
battlefield or in insurrections," and promised to quickly put an end to 
"this rebellious rabble." The National Guard, angered by his 
appointment, shouted: "Down with Bugeaud!" "Down with the man from Rue 
Transnonain!" and absolutely refused to obey his orders. Frightened by 
this demonstration, the king reversed the appointment: Bugeaud, who was 
still pushing for war to the bitter end, finally resigned. Two days 
later, he had the audacity to offer his services to the provisional 
government. He returned to politics but died of cholera on June 10, 
1849. General Bugeaud's popularity was reborn at the beginning of the 
Third Republic as a major figure of French colonization.

What should we do with this history today? Removing street signs bearing 
his name would be to relegate the crimes of the past to historians alone 
and to drown colonization in a fog without culprits. It seems more 
useful to me to install explanatory signs to remind people of the crimes 
of this butcher of Algerians and revolutionaries.

Alain, Limoges

Notes
1. The "Let's Remove Bugeaud" collective, active in the Périgord Vert 
region, organizes conferences and calls for the renaming of places and 
the dismantling of statues.

2. Not even a republican, just a truly liberal monarchist.

3. Four years earlier, this regiment had massacred 800 Algerian 
civilians in Blida. 4. Abd el-Kader recognized the French possession of 
a few enclaves on the coast (Algiers, Bône, Oran).

5. These four generals were, in turn, massacrers of Algerians and French 
revolutionaries, and also politicians.

6. The direct perpetrators of these massacres by asphyxiation of 
hundreds of civilians, Colonel Pélissier and Lieutenant-Colonel 
Saint-Arnaud, did indeed commit these crimes on Bugeaud's orders.

https://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4755
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