“A Blank Slate on Which Can be Drawn All the Letters . . . of Our Civilization”: The White Fathers, Algerian Orphans, and Muslim Missions in Discourse and Practice

In the late 1860s, severe famine and cholera ravaged French Algeria, taking a toll especially on the indigenous, Arab and Kabyle (Berber) populations. When the archbishop of Algiers, Charles Lavigerie, established orphanages to care for children who had survived the famine, and—in order to raise funds for these establishments—publicized his plans to Christianize these orphans, he provoked a bitter and public debate with the colonial government over the limits of Catholic proselytization in this sensitive Muslim context. This paper will explore how the orphanages and related œuvres—the petit séminaire indigène, where the most promising among the orphans were trained; the Arab Christian villages of St. Cyprien and Ste. Monique, where older orphans were married off and given a plot of land to work; and the fundraising Œuvre de Ste. Monique, whereby French Catholics could “adopt” these orphans with their financial support—contributed to the rise of more racialized, anti-Arab forms of orientalism not only in Algeria but also back home in metropolitan France. The fundraising efforts on behalf of the orphans, managed by Lavigerie’s allies in Paris, relied heavily on the rhetoric of the civilizing mission, and on explicitly anti-Islamic and anti-Arab inflections of this rhetoric. And the establishments themselves were plagued by periodic episodes of interracial conflict. At the same time, the White Fathers’ opposition to the anticlericalism of colonial civilization and their desire to protect and incentivize conversion made them occasional defenders of indigenes against the racial hierarchies of colonial law. There was thus an ambiguity in the White Fathers’ stance towards Algerian Islam, an ambiguity born of the synthesis between earlier missionary approaches that had valorized Muslim religiosity and harsher views of Islam (as inherently “Semitic,” backward, and politically illiberal) that arose in the second half of the nineteenth century.