Alexis de Tocqueville and the French conquest of Algeria: an anthropology of war and peace
Tanshina Natalia
This article is devoted to the analysis of the views of the famous liberal politician and thinker Alexis de Tocqueville on the problems of the conquest and colonization of Algeria during the July monarchy. Tocqueville's position is considered in its anthropological aspect, through the prism of the collision and interaction of two cultures and civilizations. This article is based on the documentary legacy of A. Tocqueville: his letters, journalism and reports. They were written based on his theoretical knowledge of Algeria and on the results of his travels to Algeria in 1841 and 1846. The article concludes that Tocqueville, a liberal thinker who combined the idea of liberalism with democracy, was a Machiavellian in the field of foreign policy. Tocqueville justified colonialism by the state interest. His colonialism was a logical extension of his liberal principles. Tocqueville was raised on the ideas of humanism and Enlightenment and condemned slavery as an institution that contradicted natural human rights and freedoms. However, he justified and allowed colonization for the possible domination of one people over another. He considered the Arabs and Kabyles to be semi-savage peoples and believed that France should carry out its civilizing mission towards them. Calling France's policy "barbaric", he justified the scorched-earth tactics that the French used in Algeria. This article also concludes on the evolution of Tocqueville's views. If in his works on Algeria in 1837 he believed in the possibility of peaceful coexistence of the Christian and Islamic worlds, then in the 1840s he was a staunch advocate of total military defeat and subjugation of the Algerian population. He insisted on the active colonization of Algeria, which should go hand in hand with its conquest.
The article was written on the basis of the RANEPA state assignment research program.
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