ABSTRACT

In 1845 a scandal broke out in France with regard to a particularly cruel and destructive act of repression at the close of General Bugeaud’s war of conquest in Algeria: the ‘smoking of Dahra’, in which more than 800 people were asphyxiated. In 1840, after ten years of conflict in Algeria in which neither a state of war or peace predominated, the French government moved to a new policy of ‘complete occupation’, which was theorised and practiced by a new Governor General, Bugeaud, who sought victory through the destruction of the very bases of Algerian life. More than fifty years after the independence of Algeria, it seems remarkable how reluctant are French historians to the idea of revisiting the conquest of Algeria and writing its massacres into ‘the broader history of colonial massacres’.