Notes

• [1]
  The author expresses warm thanks to Kimberly Arkin and the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies at Boston University for inviting her to give a presentation on this material, with special thanks to Elizabeth Foster, who commented on an early draft, and the anonymous readers of French Politics, Culture & Society for their helpful comments.
• [2]
  Georges Voisin [hereafter cited as Ismaÿl Urbain], L'Algérie pour les Algériens (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1861), 9, 13.
• [3]
  Ismaÿl Urbain, né Thomas Urbain Appoline, has generated interest among scholars in recent years. See Osama Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity: Saint-Simonians and the Civilizing Mission in Algeria (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Michel Levallois and Philippe Régnier, eds., Les Saint-Simoniens dans l'Algérie du XIXe siècle : le combat du Français musulman Ismaÿl Urbain (Paris: Riveneuve éditions, 2016). For edited sources of Urbain's correspondence and writings, see Anne Levallois, Les écrits autobiographiques d'Ismayl Urbain (1812–1884) (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2005); Michel Levallois, Ismaÿl Urbain : Royaume arabe ou Algérie franco-musulmane ? 1848–1870 (Paris: Riveneuve éditions, 2012).
• [4]
  Urbain, L'Algérie pour les Algériens, 12.
• [5]
  Urbain proposed establishing a consistory alongside many reforms spanning French and indigenous governance, jurisprudence, education, and infrastructure. Ibid., 59–60, 155–157.
• [6]
  One notable exception is Oissila Saaïdia. Oissila Saaïdia, “Le projet de consistoire musulman: une idée d'Ismaÿl Urbain?” in Levallois and Régnier, eds., Les Saint-Simoniens dans l'Algérie du XIXe, 289–305.
• [7]
  Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Mayanthi Fernando, The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). On the politics of difference, Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 23.
• [8]
  Phyllis Cohen Albert, The Modernization of French Jewry: Consistory and Community in the Nineteenth Century (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1977); André Encrevé, Les Protestants en France de 1800 à nos jours: Histoire d'une réintégration (Paris: Éditions Stock, 1984).
• [9]
  Joshua Schreier, “Napoléon's Long Shadow: Morality, Civilization, and Jews in France and Algeria, 1808–1870,” French Historical Studies 30, 1 (Winter 2007): 77–103.
• [10]
  According to the Convention of 5 July 1830 (hereafter referred to as the Convention of 1830): “The exercise of the Mohammedan religion will remain free. The liberty of the inhabitants of all classes, their religion, their property, their trade and their industry will experience no harm; their women will be respected.” Service Historique de l'Armée de la Terre, Vincennes (SHAT) 1 H 4, dossier 3 (5 July 1830). Though this treaty refers to respecting Islam specifically, it was applied to both Muslims and Jews. Subsequent military and colonial correspondence also used the language of “tolérer” and “tolérance.”
• [11]
  See chapter four, Rachel Eva Schley, “The Tyranny of Tolerance: France, Religion, and the Conquest of Algeria, 1830–1870” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2015).
• [12]
  On the bureaux arabes, see Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity, 4. On the organization of Islam, see Oissila Saaïdia, Algérie coloniale. Musulmans et chrétiens : le contrôle de l’État (1830–1914) (Paris: Éditions CNRS, 2015).
• [13]
  Anonymous [hereafter cited as Ismaÿl Urbain], L'Algérie française: indigènes et immigrants (Paris : Jouaust et fils, 1862), 3. The Revolution of 1848 abolished slavery in the colonies and divided northern Algeria into three administrative départements, rendering them eligible to be ruled by metropolitan laws.
• [14]
  Ibid., 3.
• [15]
  Schley, “Tyranny of Tolerance;” Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
• [16]
  Gavin Murray-Miller, “Imagining the Trans-Mediterranean Republic: Algeria, Republicanism, and the Ideological Origins of the French Imperial Nation-State, 1848–1870,” French Historical Studies 37, 2 (Spring 2014): 303–330.
• [17]
  Urbain, L'Algérie française, 68. Urbain used the term “immigrants” for settlers and the terms “Algériens” or “indigènes” for native Algerians.
• [18]
  Napoléon III appointed Urbain as chief councilor in Algiers, affording Urbain a prominent platform to influence the reestablished General Government. During the emperor's trips to Algeria, in 1860 and 1865, Urbain served as his personal interpreter.
• [19]
  Napoléon III issued two policy letters on Algeria, the first in 1863 to Governor General Jean-Jacques Pélissier, and the second in 1865 to Governor General Patrice de Mac- Mahon.
• [20]
  The sénatus-consulte of 22 April 1863 ended cantonnement by fixing native property rights. The sénatus-consulte of 14 July 1865 declared that Muslim and Jewish indigènes areFrench nationals that remained ruled by their personal status laws. As French nationals they could serve in the military and in the French administration but were barred from enjoying the rights of French citizenship so long as they remained under the jurisdiction of their personal status laws. See Didier Guignard, “Conservatoire ou révolutionnaire ? Le sénatus-consulte de 1863 appliqué au régime foncier d'Algérie,” Revue d'histoire du XIXe siècle 41 (2010): 81–95; Michael Brett, “Legislating for Inequality in Algeria: The Senatus-Consulte of 14 July 1865,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 51, 3 (1998): 440–461.
• [21]
  Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2002; repr., Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 206–210.
• [22]
  Michael Brett also argues that religion became the basis of legal difference with the sénatus-consulte of 1865; however, our arguments differ considerably. See Brett, “Legislating for Inequality in Algeria.”
• [23]
  Beginning in 1830, colonial authorities slowly eroded the legal autonomy of Algerian Muslim and Jewish communities, so that by 1851, cadis and rabbis only oversaw matters deemed “religious” or “personal,” such as family, marriage, and inheritance. French officials fixated on personal status laws as an enduring symbol of indigenous difference. See Joshua Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010); Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2014); Judith Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019). In contrast to Algerians, some Muslims in West Africa were granted French citizenship despite retaining their personal status laws. See Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Arica, 1895–1930 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
• [24]
  Levallois, Les écrits autobiographiques, 55.
• [25]
  Urbain, L'Algérie pour les Algériens, 8.
• [26]
  Ibid., 8.
• [27]
  Ibid., 9.
• [28]
  Levallois, Ismaÿl Urbain, 256.
• [29]
  Annie Rey-Goldzeiguer, Le Royaume Arabe. La politique algérienne de Napoléon III, 1861–1870 (Algiers: Société Nationale d’Édition et de Diffusion, 1977), 88–94.
• [30]
  Quoted in Charles-André Julien, Histoire de l'Algérie contemporaine : la conquête et les débuts de la colonisation (1827–1871), vol. I (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964), 419.
• [31]
  Napoléon III, “Discours de l'empereur prononcé au banquet offert à sa majesté par la ville d'Alger,” in Œuvres de Napoléon III, Henri Plon, ed., vol. 5 (Paris: Plon et Amyot, 1869), 126.
• [32]
  Ibid., 127.
• [33]
  Urbain, L'Algérie pour les Algériens, 1, 3.
• [34]
  Ibid., 8. Urbain appropriated the Saint-Simonian language of “conversion,” “perfectibility,” “regeneration,” and “progress” to characterize the improvement of Algerian Muslims. These concepts are also central to Jewish history and historiography and have long been tied to an Enlightenment, and Orientalist, discourse of perfectibility. On the crossover between nineteenth-century Jewish intellectuals and Saint-Simionians, see, Jay R. Berkovitz, The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century France (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 117.
• [35]
  Urbain, L'Algérie pour les Algériens, 3.
• [36]
  Gérald Arboit, “De l'immigration des maronites en Algérie : un aspect de la politique à l’égard des communautés chrétiennes de Syrie entre 1848 et 1870,” Revue française d'histoire d'outre-mer 87, 328–329 (2000): 231–239.
• [37]
  After Abd al-Qadir was released from incarceration in 1852, following the end of his war with France, he lived in exile in Damascus, where he famously provided refuge to victims of the Druze-Maronite war. Several accounts claimed he saved nearly 12,000 lives. In recognition of his efforts, Napoléon III awarded France's former enemy the Légion d'Honneur, along with a lifetime pension. Julien, Histoire de l'Algérie, 208–209.
• [38]
  Urbain, L'Algérie pour les Algériens, 8–9.
• [39]
  Ibid., 155.
• [40]
  Ibid., 155–157.
• [41]
  Ibid., 16.
• [42]
  Ibid., 59.
• [43]
  Ibid., 60.
• [44]
  Saaïdia, Algérie coloniale, 38–43.
• [45]
  Charles-Robert Ageron, Les Algériens musulmans et la France (1871–1919), vol. 1 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), 296.
• [46]
  With the decree of 30 April 1851, the colonial government took nominal responsibility for funding mosques and clergy with funds stripped from habous (religious properties held in usufruct by mosques and charitable foundations) and zaouïas (communal spaces of learning, prayer, and refuge). Military leaders justified seizing these properties with ordinances in 1839 and 1844. Ibid., 296.
• [47]
  Urbain, L'Algérie française, 3.
• [48]
  Ibid., 3.
• [49]
  Ageron, Algériens musulmans, 343, 343n2.
• [50]
  Urbain, L'Algérie française, 3–4.
• [51]
  Throughout 1862, Urbain emphasized the important precedent set by this case on several occasions. Levallois, Ismaÿl Urbain, 306, 314, 318.
• [52]
  Few scholars have commented on this case as a precedent to the sénatus-consulte of 14 July 1865, with notable exceptions; see, Brett, “Legislating for Inequality,” 451–454; Laure Blévis, “En marge du décret Crémieux : Les Juifs naturalisés français en Algérie (1865–1919),” Archives Juives 45, 2 (2012): 47–67. Valérie Assan remarks on this case and provides background on the Enos family, see Valérie Assan, Les consistoires israélites d'Algérie au XIXe siècle: “l'alliance de la civilisation et de la religion” (Paris: Armand Colin, 2012), 321, 330–331.
• [53]
  The full judgment of 24 February 1862 provides a review of the 1861 rejection of Enos’ initial application, see Journal de la jurisprudence de la Cour impériale d'Alger (Algiers: Bureau de l'Administration et de la Rédaction, 1862), 87–94.
• [54]
  L'Univers Israélite 13 (Paris: 1858), 560.
• [55]
  My interpretation of Enos’ initial request and subsequent appeal differs considerably from Michael Brett. See, Brett, “Legislating for Inequality,” 451.
• [56]
  Enos applied to the Algiers bar on 18 November 1861 and the Conseil de l'Ordre des avocats à la Cour impériale ruled against his appeal on 28 November 1861. As the ruling explained, according to articles 7, 9, 10, and 17 of the Code Napoléon, “la qualité de Français” is determined by constitutional law, which mandates that being French in origin means that one was born on French soil or has French parentage. Journal de la jurisprudence de la Cour impériale d'Alger, 87.
• [57]
  For a discussion of Jewish collective rights and citizenship in France and Algeria, see Simon Rabinovitch, “The Quality of Being French versus the Quality of Being Jewish:Defining the Israelite in French Courts in Algeria and the Metropole,” Law and History Review 36, 4 (2018): 833–834.
• [58]
  Journal de la jurisprudence de la Cour impériale d'Alger, 88.
• [59]
  Ibid., 88.
• [60]
  Ibid., 88.
• [61]
  Ibid., 88. The ordinance of 26 September 1842 reorganized the colonial justice system. Article 37 indicated that French law governed all matters between French and foreign persons in Algeria, while all matters pertaining to the état civil of Muslims and Jews remained under the jurisdiction of their respective religious law. Estoublon and Lefébure, eds., Code de l'Algérie annoté, 22–30.
• [62]
  Journal de la jurisprudence de la Cour impériale d'Alger, 89.
• [63]
  Ibid., 89.
• [64]
  Ibid., 92.
• [65]
  Ibid., 93.
• [66]
  Ibid., 93.
• [67]
  Ibid., 93.
• [68]
  Minister of War, Rapport au Roi sur Alger, 14 October 1827, SHAT 1 H 1, dossier 4.
• [69]
  On settlers’ republican politics and municipalism, see Murray-Miller, “Imagining the Trans-Mediterranean Republic,” 316–323.
• [70]
  My emphasis. Journal de la jurisprudence de la Cour impériale d'Alger, 93.
• [71]
  Ibid., 93.
• [72]
  Intendant civil of Algiers to the Minister of War, 8 July 1833, SHAT 1 H 21, dossier 2; Minister of War to General Desmichels, 3 August 1833, SHAT 1 H 21, dossier 2.
• [73]
  Urbain, L'Algérie française, 11.
• [74]
  Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty, 89.
• [75]
  Journal de la jurisprudence de la Cour impériale d'Alger, 93.
• [76]
  Ibid., 93.
• [77]
  Archives Israélites 25, 5 (Paris: 1864), 185–186.
• [78]
  Urbain, L'Algérie française, 3.
• [79]
  Quoted in Levallois, Ismaÿl Urbain, 314.
• [80]
  Quoted from another letter from Urbain to Lacroix in ibid., 318.
• [81]
  Quoted in ibid., 318.
• [82]
  Quoted in ibid., 318–319.
• [83]
  Levallois, Les écrits autobiographiques, 78.
• [84]
  Urbain, L'Algérie française, 37.
• [85]
  Ibid., 6.
• [86]
  Ibid., 6.
• [87]
  While Urbain did not explicitly reference the consistory, he did explicitly reference consistorial aims in arguing that the French government should oversee the civilization of Muslim society by supervising “public instruction, policing religious affairs [police supérieure du culte], [and] the administration of justice.” Ibid., 13.
• [88]
  Levallois, Les écrits autobiographiques, 118.
• [89]
  Napoléon III, “Lettre de l'Empereur au Gouverneur Général de l'Algérie,” in Œuvres de Napoléon III, Henri Plon, ed., vol. 5 (Paris: Plon et Amyot, 1869), 193.
• [90]
  Georges Spillmann, Napoléon III et le Royaume Arabe d'Algérie (Paris: Académie des Sciences d'Outre Mer, 1975), 53.
• [91]
  Ibid., 58–61.
• [92]
  Ibid., 59.
• [93]
  Désire Dalloz, Armand Dalloz, Charles Vergé, eds., Jurisprudence Générale, vol. 34 (Paris: Bureau de la Jurisprudence Générale, 1869), 846.
• [94]
  On the French Jewish consistory, see Albert, Modernization of French Jewry. For its Algerian counterpart, see Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith; Assan, Les consistoires israélites d'Algérie. On the Belgian Jewish consistory, see Jean-Philippe Schreiber, Politique et religion. Le consistoire central israélite de Belgique au XIXe siècle (Bruxelles: Éditions de l'Université de Bruxelles, 1995). The French Protestant consistory has not been the subject of a comprehensive study. On the French Algerian Protestant consistory, see Schley, “Tyranny of Tolerance,” 198–266.
• [95]
  Oissila Saaïdia's work offers an important exception to the absence of scholarship on the Muslim consistory. Saaïdia posits that the proposal for a Muslim consistory lay with Urbain, who then influenced Napoléon III's promulgation. But Saaïdia's scholarship largely focuses on analyzing the details of the draft proposals and less on the context in which the proposals were produced and debated. Saaïdia does argue that the debate over the establishment of a Muslim consistory reflected broader debates about the future of Algeria's colonial administration and what kind of authority—civil or military—would administer Islam accordingly. Saaïdia, “Le projet de consistoire musulman,” 289–305.
• [96]
  Evidence of the effort to establish a Muslim consistory is limited to an 1867 draft proposal by the prefect of Algiers in Archives Nationales d'Outre Mer (ANOM), F80/1747 and additional draft proposals and correspondence between civil and military colonial administrators in ANOM 16H75.
• [97]
  Rey-Goldzeiguer, Le Royaume Arabe, 275–348.
• [98]
  Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity, 181–188.
• [99]
  Ibid., 183.
• [100]
  Levallois, Les écrits autobiographiques, 118–122.
• [101]
  Ibid., 97.
• [102]
  Quoted in Patricia M. E. Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (New York: I.B. Tauris & Co. LTD, 1999), 7. On condemnations of the consistory and associationist policies, see Ernest Watbled, “Un épisode de l'insurrection Kabyle de 1871,” Revue des Deux Mondes 108, 43 (1873), 638.
• [103]
  Copy of a letter from the Gouvernement Général Civil de l'Algérie to the Ministre de l'Intérieur in Paris, 15 November 1874, ANOM 16H/75.
• [104]
  Napoléon III, Lettre sur la politique de la France en Algérie (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1865), 12.
• [105]
  The Crémieux Decree naturalized en masse roughly 34,000 Israélites indigènes in the incorporated departments of Algiers, Oran, and Constantine. It did not apply to Saharan Jewish communities in the unincorporated southern territories; see Stein, Saharan Jews.
• [106]
  Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith.
• [107]
  Brett, Legislating for Inequality, 457–458.
• [108]
  Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 39–43; Stein, Saharan Jews, 103.
• [109]
  Naomi Davidson, Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 205–211.
• [110]
  Gérald Darmanin, “La Concorde avant la discorde,” Libération, 23 November 2015. https://www.liberation.fr/france/2015/11/23/la-concorde-avant-la-discorde_1415545/ (accessed 25 April 2023).