The Gospel of the Gum Tree: Catholic Missionaries and Environmental Improvement in French Algeria

Catholic missionaries and officials in the Mediterranean region were prominent participants in the global eucalyptus enthusiasm that marked the 1870s, when many people around the world came to believe that the Australian tree genus could beautify landscapes, prevent malaria, and establish forest cover in arid landscapes. The focus of this paper is on the environmental transformation projects of the Catholic apostolic community commonly known as the White Fathers (Les Missionnaires d’Afrique). Founded outside Algiers in 1868, the Pères Blancs worked across the Mediterranean and expanded into the Great Lakes region of Africa in the late 19th century. The Algerian headquarters became a hub for knowledge formation, agricultural training, and the dissemination of seeds to their distant missions in rural Africa. For many members of the community, assimilation to a French Catholic moral order ideally occurred under the shade and amidst the balsamic odor of eucalyptus trees. Using the case studies of two French missionaries drawn from the archives of both the White Fathers and the French colonial administration, this paper explores how Africa became more than an escape from anti-clericalism in an increasingly secular Europe, but a space to elaborate a vision of modern ecological life in which faith was not separate from scientific and moral progress. The paper adds environmental and religious dimensions to recent scholarship that has illustrated the numerous connections between the history of colonial Algeria and the rest of the African continent that formed alongside or against French imperial control.