When 800,000 Died in 5 Years in Algeria
a locus invasion, cholera, typhus, and starvation.
Cutler, Brock. Ecologies of Imperialism in Algeria. U of Nebraska Press, 2023.
From 1864 to 1869, 800,000 people died in Algeria. That was about one third of the population back then.Illness spread across the indigenous population. More so in rural marginalized areas. The French settlers had always seen the local as inferior. Something slightly better than animals. Maybe they can be used as cheap/slave labor, or better yet maybe the settlers should claim the “unclaimed” terra nullius land and animals.
The 1865 senatus-consulte deepened the Settler-Indigenous divide. This law states that “the indigenous is French. Nonetheless, he’ll continue to be ruled by Muslim law”, hence dividing the population into Muslim and non Muslim Algerians. Brock Cutler described this period as "the most severe ecological crisis in modern North African history".
Throughout the 1860s, it rarely rained in Algeria. Drought hit hard, and it got harder by 1865. That period witnessed, as the British consul general in Algiers Sir Robert Lambert Playfair described it, “one of the greatest locust invasions in memory”.12 There was an unprecedented locus invasion in 1866 that killed the harvests. Then came cholera, typhus, and starvation. Entire tribes were deprived of the basic means of subsistence: clean water, food for their families and their livestock. By 1867, starvation threatened about 1.5 million people and cholera made its way to the province of Algiers "reaching epidemic proportions,"and by 1868, rural Algerians lost about 90% of their animals.
The colonial authorities acted, but so late. They increased grain imports from the Levant and other Mediterranean countries in the late 1860s. French settlers were concentrated in the coast, Algiers, Oran, Bone, and other cities. Diseases spread there too but on a way smaller scale and impact. While settlers enjoyed better living conditions, restrictive travel laws made sure that rural Algerians almost never made it there.
The bread, the oven, and the debris
In 1869, a strange unknown illness was spreading among settlers. An investigation was launched. They identified a common denominator among all people with the disease: they were getting their bread from the same bakery. A chemist was hired, and they started searching the bakery and doing tests in the lab.
The chemist found "notable proportions of oxidized lead and zinc" in the bread, and bread is a daily staple for both French settlers and the indigenous North African.
Where did the oxidized lead and zinc get to the bread from? The oven? Yes! They were found in the oven!
Where to look next? The fuel used in the oven!
Fuel for cooking ovens were scare in 1869 Algeria, and the bakery had resorted to using an unusual fuel for the oven: treated wood and other construction debris.
Next: Where did they get their construction debris from?
“Checking the records, the investigators found that it had originated in the demolitions of Paris then underway under the direction of Baron Georges Haussmann. The debris of the modernizing metropole was poisoning the colony” — Brock Culter in Ecologies of Imperialism in Algeria
Baron Georges Haussmann, the prefect of the Seine department, led the reconstruction of Paris from 1852 to 1869. This was under the order of Napoleon III after his successful coup d'état in 1851. "Napoleon III wanted to remake Paris as a capital fit for a reinvigorated empire." Napoleon III commissioned Haussmann who planned until the end. He even planned how to reclaim and use material from the demolished buildings either into new ones or for other uses. About 43,777 new buildings were erected and another 19,718 were torn down. That meant a lot of debris and a lot of waste material.
Haussmannization: The modernizing concerns of imperial power within the metropole.
Some of the waste material were used and the rest that could not were sold in public auctions. Haussmann was smart. He wanted project to be as financially efficient as possible. In 1865, the city of Paris netted about 49,989.25 francs for demolition debris sold at public auctions. Total demolition material sold during lifetime of the project netted about 270 million francs, according to Haussmann's calculations, which amounted to about 10% of the budget of the Reconstruction of Paris.
Contractors rushed to buy the demolition debris. Some of the bought debris made its way to the port of Marseille and then off to the port of Algiers. Importers at the port of Algiers tried to sell as much demolition debris as they could. Some of this debris was suitable for use in the construction of new buildings but other was not, "painted and repainted, stained with preservative chemicals, tarred yet rotted" the oven said yes please send them!
The oven, like all ovens in Algeria at the time, had a single chamber for both fuel and dough. Iron, zinc, and lead freed from the paint wood made its way to the dough. A toxic colonial bread was served, and illness spread across settlers. As Cutler put it “the rubble of the modernizing metropole [Paris] became the poison of a colonialism in crisis.”
In the book Cutler tells us a story of French artist Gustave Guillaumet, who was on a visit to Algeria amid the crisis. What he wittnessed summarizes the suffering of Algerians back then:
“Touring the northern plains during a visit to Algeria in early 1868, the French artist Gustave Guillaumet was drawn across the yellowed bed of a river by a flight of birds and a wisp of smoke. As he approached a small natural grotto, he could see a family camped there. Cautiously moving closer, he noticed they were so malnourished that everywhere their bones showed through their waxy skin. The father of the beleaguered family brought Guillaumet to the back of the grotto, where a woman lay dead. The man’s wife had already died, and this was his recently deceased mother. His emaciated son and daughter looked on. Frightened and shaken, Guillaumet gave the family a bit of money then did what they could not: he climbed back out of this ‘open tomb.’”
Cutler, Brock. Ecologies of Imperialism in Algeria. U of Nebraska Press, 2023.
bpp, 3958-I-VIII, “Commercial Reports Received at the Foreign Office from Her Majesty’s consuls, 1867,” report from consul-general Lieutenant-Colonel Playfair, 366 (7).