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The sword and the cross by Fergus FLEMING
“[A] searing story of France’s attempt to colonize the vast Sahara desert and of two unforgettable men who dedicated their lives to the effort.” —Rob Mitchell, The Boston Herald Whether writing of the Alps, the high seas, or the North Pole, Fergus Fleming has won acclaim as one of today’s most vivid and engaging historians of adventure and exploration. The Sword and the Cross takes us to the Sahara at the end of the nineteenth century, when France had designs on a hostile wilderness dominated by deadly Tuareg nomads. Two fanatical adventurers, Charles de Foucauld and Henri Laperrine, rose to the cause of their country’s national honor. Abandoning his decadent lifestyle as a sensualist and womanizer, Foucauld founded a monastic order so severe that during his lifetime it never had a membership of more than one. Yet he remained a committed imperialist and from his remote hermitage continued to assist the military. The stern career soldier Laperrine, meanwhile, founded a camel corps whose exploits became legendary. During World War I the Sahara’s fragile peace crumbled. In the desert mountains Foucauld paid a tragic price for his role as imperial pawn. Laperrine, by then recalled to the Western Front, returned to avenge his friend. “Fleming captures the hopelessness of the French efforts to conquer the Saharan expanse . . . Provides a vital lesson about the limits of power.” —Zachary Karabell, Los Angeles Times
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First published January 1, 2003
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April 18, 2012
If the Tuareg had never existed, it would have been necessary for Borges to invent them:
One of their chiefs, a famed deviser of ambushes and deadly ruses, was named Attici ag Amellal—“leopard among the whites.” Their stronghold was the Hoggar, “a massive natural fortress whose mountains rose more than 3,000 feet above sea level on a horseshoe-shaped plateau that was accessible only from the south.” False friendship was a favorite tactic: guides would lead French columns away from wells; a gift of crushed dates would be mixed with the lettuce-like but incredibly toxic efelehleh, which would induce partial paralysis, comas, and terrifying hallucinations.
So, the conquest of the Sahara was, to a large degree, the pacification of these proud and lethal motherfuckers. In this pacification the titular “two men” were vital. Charles de Foucauld and Henri Laperrine formed that classic colonial duo, priest and soldier, “the sword and the cross.” But neither man was a typical specimen. Foucauld was a wealthy, dissolute aristocrat, a comically obese gourmand and womanizer who renounced his ways and became a Trappist monk; unable to find a monastery with a harsh enough regime, a restricted enough diet or a remote enough location—Fleming jokes about “penance to the point of suicide”—Foucauld became a desert hermit, “a sunbaked scarecrow,” and eventually settled among the Tuareg in the rocky fastness of the Hoggar, an area so dangerous and so distant from Europe - it took two months by camel to reach the nearest railway - that he might have been on another planet entirely. In the Hoggar, Foucauld compiled a Tuareg-French dictionary and supplied intelligence to the army. He was esteemed as a holy man — his idiosyncratic Catholicism accorded, at points, with the idiosyncratic Islam of the Tuareg — but he never won a single convert.
Laperrine, for his part, was one of those eccentric misfit soldiers who are most effective operating at the edges of official policy, with negligible supervision. (He wasn’t, however, an insane Kurtz-figure, though the Armée d’Afrique had plenty; Senegal is where officers seemed to really lose their minds; one, a Captain Voulet, in 1898-99 cut a 1,000 mile swath of burned villages, massacred families, and flippantly executed underlings, all the way from the banks of the River Niger to Lake Chad, where he ended up killing a fellow officer sent to bring him in, raving, “I am an outlaw, I renounce my family, my country, I am no longer a Frenchman, I am a black chief!”) Laperrine’s accomplishment was the organization of Chaamba tribesmen (ancient enemies of the Tuareg) and the best French troops into an elite Camel Corps, the méharistes. Their endurance, deep-desert mobility, and ferocity in battle impressed the Tuareg, and others.
During World War I this regime—so fragile, founded on Laperrine’s presence and the personal respect owed him—fell apart. Laperrine and the best officers were fighting on the Western Front, and the Camel Corps deteriorated. A Turkish-funded group of Muslim fundamentalists, the Senoussi, assassinated Foucauld in 1916 and destroyed a number of French forts. The year of Foucauld's death was the fifth year of no rain in the Hoggar, and Tuareg who might have been loyal to France, or at least to the memory of Laperrine, had fled south to find pasturage for their shrinking herds. Toward the end of the war Laperrine returned to the desert, rebuilt the Camel Corps, and personally hunted down some of Foucauld’s assassins, crossing their names off a list he had copied into his notebook. In 1920 Laperrine’s plane went down in a sandstorm, and he died of injuries sustained in the crash just days before a rescue party discovered the wreckage. Fleming opens the book with France’s blundering into a North African empire in the 1830s, and closes with an account of Algeria’s struggle for independence and the dismantling of France’s desert domains. His final paragraph is odd:
Foucauld surely died confident of having made an impact – he dreamt elaborately of future, Christian, French-speaking Tuareg, riding across the deserts in passenger trains – but everything presented about Laperrine suggests a man of realism. His last words – whispered to his companions as they sheltered under the wing of the wreckage – were, “People think they know the desert. People think I know it. Nobody really knows it. I have crossed the Sahara ten times and this time I will stay here.” I would guess no one knew better than Laperrine that the impressive world “Empire” depended on the tact and strength of a very small number of people – on the tribal chiefs who respected him, on the few hundred méharistes whose fighting edge had been dulled once before, and might be dulled once again. Ironically, it is the irreligious Laperrine who emerges as the true ascetic, willing in renunciation, accepting of futility. He spent his strength and his life helping France believe it possessed that which he probably knew to be unpossessable.
On 1 June [1896] a group of Tuareg joined the caravan, promising both to supply Vallombrosa with fresh camels (those he had purchased at Gabes were of poor quality) and to escort him through the dangerous regions ahead. Vallombrosa greeted them as fellow warriors. Two days later he was still impressed by their devotion to the cause and, interrupting a conversation that he could not understand but which concerned the time and manner of his death, he invited them to a meal of couscous and tinned fish.
One of their chiefs, a famed deviser of ambushes and deadly ruses, was named Attici ag Amellal—“leopard among the whites.” Their stronghold was the Hoggar, “a massive natural fortress whose mountains rose more than 3,000 feet above sea level on a horseshoe-shaped plateau that was accessible only from the south.” False friendship was a favorite tactic: guides would lead French columns away from wells; a gift of crushed dates would be mixed with the lettuce-like but incredibly toxic efelehleh, which would induce partial paralysis, comas, and terrifying hallucinations.
So, the conquest of the Sahara was, to a large degree, the pacification of these proud and lethal motherfuckers. In this pacification the titular “two men” were vital. Charles de Foucauld and Henri Laperrine formed that classic colonial duo, priest and soldier, “the sword and the cross.” But neither man was a typical specimen. Foucauld was a wealthy, dissolute aristocrat, a comically obese gourmand and womanizer who renounced his ways and became a Trappist monk; unable to find a monastery with a harsh enough regime, a restricted enough diet or a remote enough location—Fleming jokes about “penance to the point of suicide”—Foucauld became a desert hermit, “a sunbaked scarecrow,” and eventually settled among the Tuareg in the rocky fastness of the Hoggar, an area so dangerous and so distant from Europe - it took two months by camel to reach the nearest railway - that he might have been on another planet entirely. In the Hoggar, Foucauld compiled a Tuareg-French dictionary and supplied intelligence to the army. He was esteemed as a holy man — his idiosyncratic Catholicism accorded, at points, with the idiosyncratic Islam of the Tuareg — but he never won a single convert.
Laperrine, for his part, was one of those eccentric misfit soldiers who are most effective operating at the edges of official policy, with negligible supervision. (He wasn’t, however, an insane Kurtz-figure, though the Armée d’Afrique had plenty; Senegal is where officers seemed to really lose their minds; one, a Captain Voulet, in 1898-99 cut a 1,000 mile swath of burned villages, massacred families, and flippantly executed underlings, all the way from the banks of the River Niger to Lake Chad, where he ended up killing a fellow officer sent to bring him in, raving, “I am an outlaw, I renounce my family, my country, I am no longer a Frenchman, I am a black chief!”) Laperrine’s accomplishment was the organization of Chaamba tribesmen (ancient enemies of the Tuareg) and the best French troops into an elite Camel Corps, the méharistes. Their endurance, deep-desert mobility, and ferocity in battle impressed the Tuareg, and others.
The respect that Laperrine commanded was awesome. Shortly after Djanet, Hérisson asked his Arab batman what he would do if there was a holy war between the West and Islam. “Cut your throat,” the man replied. Hérisson then asked him why he served France at all. His answer was that he did not serve France; he served men like Laperrine and Nieger, men who were warriors and who understood the Sahara.
During World War I this regime—so fragile, founded on Laperrine’s presence and the personal respect owed him—fell apart. Laperrine and the best officers were fighting on the Western Front, and the Camel Corps deteriorated. A Turkish-funded group of Muslim fundamentalists, the Senoussi, assassinated Foucauld in 1916 and destroyed a number of French forts. The year of Foucauld's death was the fifth year of no rain in the Hoggar, and Tuareg who might have been loyal to France, or at least to the memory of Laperrine, had fled south to find pasturage for their shrinking herds. Toward the end of the war Laperrine returned to the desert, rebuilt the Camel Corps, and personally hunted down some of Foucauld’s assassins, crossing their names off a list he had copied into his notebook. In 1920 Laperrine’s plane went down in a sandstorm, and he died of injuries sustained in the crash just days before a rescue party discovered the wreckage. Fleming opens the book with France’s blundering into a North African empire in the 1830s, and closes with an account of Algeria’s struggle for independence and the dismantling of France’s desert domains. His final paragraph is odd:
Had Foucauld and Laperrine wasted their lives? Not really. They lived within the circumstances of their age and subscribed to prevailing ideals. Foucald could even be congratulated for manufacturing a creed of self-denial that continued long after his death. [He inspired the Little Brothers and Sisters of Jesus, a religious order with 11,000 members today.] The tragedy of their existences lay not so much in time as in landscape. They had entered a region that defied Western notions of permanence, and they had died there still believing that they had made an impact. But the Sahara was the same after their deaths as before—a vast expanse of sand and rock in which nothing would really change and upon with nothing could leave a lasting impression. Professor Gautier, who had travelled up and down the desert, and had seen both Foucauld and Laperrine in action, gave them an apt, if depressing, epitaph: “The only endemic disease of the Sahara,” he wrote, “is madness.”
Foucauld surely died confident of having made an impact – he dreamt elaborately of future, Christian, French-speaking Tuareg, riding across the deserts in passenger trains – but everything presented about Laperrine suggests a man of realism. His last words – whispered to his companions as they sheltered under the wing of the wreckage – were, “People think they know the desert. People think I know it. Nobody really knows it. I have crossed the Sahara ten times and this time I will stay here.” I would guess no one knew better than Laperrine that the impressive world “Empire” depended on the tact and strength of a very small number of people – on the tribal chiefs who respected him, on the few hundred méharistes whose fighting edge had been dulled once before, and might be dulled once again. Ironically, it is the irreligious Laperrine who emerges as the true ascetic, willing in renunciation, accepting of futility. He spent his strength and his life helping France believe it possessed that which he probably knew to be unpossessable.
February 13, 2019
Two men, the beatified monk Charles de Foucauld and General Francois-Henry Laperrine played a significant role in the effort to establish French dominance of the Sahara at the turn of the twentieth century, as France tried to unify Algeria with the French Sudan (now Mali.) There are two stars in this quite incredible story: the eremitic Foucauld and the unforgiving Sahara. The military and the Catholic Church united to extend French influence over a desert land, sparsely populated by independent Tuareg people. It’s a story largely forgotten by history (or at least I certainly knew nothing at all about it) and it left a vivid impression of desert North Africa.
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July 24, 2013This is a book about France's conquest of Algeria. Reading it, I wanted to say that France's conquest of Algeria was "a comedy of errors," except that it wasn't funny. Then the author did it for me, and called it "a black comedy of errors." France kind of got into the colony business because everyone else (in Europe) was doing it. I was surprised how many decisions were initially made because a European power was concerned with maintaining its image. The countries of Europe sounded like high-schoolers vying to be prom queen, or at least in the in-crowd. So France moved into Algeria. And things went relatively well along the coast. But in order to have a true colonial empire, they had to expand their territory. And directly to the south was the vast expanse of the Sahara, whose nomadic Tuareg people killed just about everyone who ventured their way. Expedition after expedition headed into the desert and died there. The French first thought there would be safety in numbers, and to a certain degree there was. But the desert could not support a large force. Trying to carry all the food, water and ammunition they would need, the army plodded along, exposed and vulnerable. When the supplies were gone, men and camels dropped dead along the path.
Enter two men, Laperrine (the "sword" of the title), and Foucauld ("the cross"). Laperrine was a military man, eventually a general, who realized that to beat the Tuareg, you had to play the game their way. He put together a small, highly-mobile fighting force who traveled light and traveled fast. He knew the territory, and he came to know the people, and he had some success, moving oasis to oasis. Foucauld started out as a soldier, but he had a religious conversion and became a priest. He joined the Trappist monks, but left them because they were not strict enough for him. He dreamed of starting his own religious order, but he practiced such extreme self denial that in his lifetime he could never get even one person to join him. Foucauld had a dream of living in the desert, praying for the locals, and converting them by his demonstrations of Christian charity. That never happened, either. He made not one convert in his whole life. Laperrine and Foucauld were friends. They shared information, and they worked together with the goal of bringing French culture and French civilization to the Sahara. In that they utterly failed. The desert people preferred their own culture, thank you very much. What successes Laperrine and Foucauld had were mostly because the desert people came to respect them as individuals. The roles of warrior and holy man were something they understood. And Laperrine was a good warrior, and Foucauld was a good holy man. Foucauld, especially, was beloved for being kind and generous, if a bit nutty.
This book examines the whole history of France in Algeria: how the colonial era began, and how it ended. If there is a conclusion it is that the whole affair was poorly done, but in the midst of this general failure, there were the lives of these two interesting men.
Enter two men, Laperrine (the "sword" of the title), and Foucauld ("the cross"). Laperrine was a military man, eventually a general, who realized that to beat the Tuareg, you had to play the game their way. He put together a small, highly-mobile fighting force who traveled light and traveled fast. He knew the territory, and he came to know the people, and he had some success, moving oasis to oasis. Foucauld started out as a soldier, but he had a religious conversion and became a priest. He joined the Trappist monks, but left them because they were not strict enough for him. He dreamed of starting his own religious order, but he practiced such extreme self denial that in his lifetime he could never get even one person to join him. Foucauld had a dream of living in the desert, praying for the locals, and converting them by his demonstrations of Christian charity. That never happened, either. He made not one convert in his whole life. Laperrine and Foucauld were friends. They shared information, and they worked together with the goal of bringing French culture and French civilization to the Sahara. In that they utterly failed. The desert people preferred their own culture, thank you very much. What successes Laperrine and Foucauld had were mostly because the desert people came to respect them as individuals. The roles of warrior and holy man were something they understood. And Laperrine was a good warrior, and Foucauld was a good holy man. Foucauld, especially, was beloved for being kind and generous, if a bit nutty.
This book examines the whole history of France in Algeria: how the colonial era began, and how it ended. If there is a conclusion it is that the whole affair was poorly done, but in the midst of this general failure, there were the lives of these two interesting men.
April 16, 2015
The Sword and the Cross is the chronicle of two men, Charles de Foucauld and Henri Lapperine, who devoted their lives to the conquest of the Sahara for France and Christianity.
France had seized northern Africa in a series of campaigns that began in the 1830s. Algeria and Tunisia were conquered on the initiative of the men on the ground rather than as part of an organised colonial policy directed from Paris. As a result, France ended up with territories that were economically poor and indefensible except by adopting a "forward policy". A "forward policy" meant keeping the hostile Berber and Taureg tribes back from the economically rich north (described by Fleming as the fertile Kepi that sits upon the great bald head of the Sahara) by pushing the colonial border south. This in turn created a new line of equally weak forts and garrisons that were more difficult to supply and more vulnerable to attack. To defend this forts and prevent raids, the border would be pushed south again...
In a time when colonies were a matter of national prestige and no colony could be relinquished without shocking loss of face, both Lapperine and de Foucauld were determined to gain control of the Sahara for France. Lapperine was a career soldier, a hardened desert explorer who raised a camel corps to fight the Toureg on their own terms and who out of communication with Paris for weeks, often months at a time, played the part of warrior king, diplomat and lawmaker with skill and verve. It it through the career of Lapperine, that Fleming recounts the history of the French army in the Sahara. It is a terrible history of suffering, courage, atrocity and counter atrocity as the French administration attempt to gain the international respect attendant on the ownership of colonies, while avoiding the responsibility they bring, while all the while Lapperine is dragging the tricolour further and further south.
In many ways, de Foucauld is the more interesting subject. As a young man, he was also a soldier, the spoiled eldest son of minor nobility, who died young leaving him to be raised by his uncle, a retired colonel. His early years are a catalogue of gluttony, indulgence and excess, but he underwent a sort of spiritual journey when he was posted to the Sahara and left the army to become an explorer and later a monk. But despite this, he never ceased being an imperialist. De Foucauld saw himself as an agent of French power in the Sahara and closely identified the power of France with the power of Christianity. To a twenty first century reader, used to an entirely secular state and to a clergy that wants nothing to do with the state*, this is shocking stuff.
Flemings book is a deftly written portrait of two men and an imperial project, which both educates and entertains. While the "Great Man" theory of history is no longer approved of, it's one that I have a great deal of time for. You can do a great deal worse if you want to learn about the conquest of the Sahara than read this fine biography.
*At least in my experience.
France had seized northern Africa in a series of campaigns that began in the 1830s. Algeria and Tunisia were conquered on the initiative of the men on the ground rather than as part of an organised colonial policy directed from Paris. As a result, France ended up with territories that were economically poor and indefensible except by adopting a "forward policy". A "forward policy" meant keeping the hostile Berber and Taureg tribes back from the economically rich north (described by Fleming as the fertile Kepi that sits upon the great bald head of the Sahara) by pushing the colonial border south. This in turn created a new line of equally weak forts and garrisons that were more difficult to supply and more vulnerable to attack. To defend this forts and prevent raids, the border would be pushed south again...
In a time when colonies were a matter of national prestige and no colony could be relinquished without shocking loss of face, both Lapperine and de Foucauld were determined to gain control of the Sahara for France. Lapperine was a career soldier, a hardened desert explorer who raised a camel corps to fight the Toureg on their own terms and who out of communication with Paris for weeks, often months at a time, played the part of warrior king, diplomat and lawmaker with skill and verve. It it through the career of Lapperine, that Fleming recounts the history of the French army in the Sahara. It is a terrible history of suffering, courage, atrocity and counter atrocity as the French administration attempt to gain the international respect attendant on the ownership of colonies, while avoiding the responsibility they bring, while all the while Lapperine is dragging the tricolour further and further south.
In many ways, de Foucauld is the more interesting subject. As a young man, he was also a soldier, the spoiled eldest son of minor nobility, who died young leaving him to be raised by his uncle, a retired colonel. His early years are a catalogue of gluttony, indulgence and excess, but he underwent a sort of spiritual journey when he was posted to the Sahara and left the army to become an explorer and later a monk. But despite this, he never ceased being an imperialist. De Foucauld saw himself as an agent of French power in the Sahara and closely identified the power of France with the power of Christianity. To a twenty first century reader, used to an entirely secular state and to a clergy that wants nothing to do with the state*, this is shocking stuff.
Flemings book is a deftly written portrait of two men and an imperial project, which both educates and entertains. While the "Great Man" theory of history is no longer approved of, it's one that I have a great deal of time for. You can do a great deal worse if you want to learn about the conquest of the Sahara than read this fine biography.
*At least in my experience.
September 2, 2014
The book The Sword and the Cross : Two Men and an Empire of Sand is the story of France's attempt to conquer the Sahara in the 1800s to connect France to the resources of the Sahara. It starts off by talking about the French invasion of Algeria in 1830. Soon after that, we are introduced the Charles Foucauld who was brought up as an orphan, spoiled, he lost his faith in his teens and went downhill from there,becoming lazy. Later in life he went to the military academy but was expelled for pulling pranks on the high officers. He was sent to Africa where he was also expelled. Soon after, Foucauld reenlisted. After he reenlisted, France was looking to seize the Sahara which was controlled by the Tuareg. France went to take over the Tuareg and the Sahara but only ended in death and blood. We are introduced to General Laperrine. He was Foucaulds opposite in every way. They became friends while stationed together. Then Foucauld drops out to travel to Morocco where he posed as a rabbi. He comes home and is convinced to become a monk by a priest. After fails to take Sahara from North, France decides to try from the south. Battle after battle with the Tuareg, France has not taken much of the Sahara. Meanwhile, Foucauld sets out to establish his own monastery and tries to convert the people there to christianity. Laperrine becomes in charge of an army and becomes a French legend. He brings in Foucauld to show the Tuareg that French rule is peaceful. Foucauld, back at his monastery tries to civilize the Tuareg and becomes a hero. Laperrine continues to take back many places from invaders. Eventually Foucauld died but he made an impact, converting Tuareg to Christianity. Laperrine became delusional in the desert and returned to France.
December 15, 2008
This is a fascinating history of France's attempt to have a north African colony - Algiers. The two men who are the main "characters" in this true account are Charles de Foucauld, an "aristocrat turned hermit" and Henri Laperrine, the creator of the "Camel Corps" in the Sahara, and a French officer whose task it was to bring the area (and the natives) under French control. Foucauld wanted to found a brotherhood of ascetic monks in the desert, but he was such an extreme ascetic that nobody wanted to join him. The book tells of the interaction of the two men and their lives in the desert.
July 3, 2008
Very worthwhile book about French imperialism in North Africa. The prose style is nothing to write home about, but it's well-researched, interesting, and a good look at what a disaster western intervention has been in the Arab world.
January 5, 2012
From memory-
This was very well written and detailed some history and characters that I knew nothing about before. Thoroughly enjoyable.
This was very well written and detailed some history and characters that I knew nothing about before. Thoroughly enjoyable.
Want to read
April 22, 2012
January 12, 2013
Interesting, but perhaps a bit repetitive.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews