This is the question some people are asking, and to which a group from Périgord (1) answers in the affirmative. Beyond the question of what to do with Bugeaud, it is useful to revisit his role in history. ---- Born into the minor nobility of Périgord (on his father's side) and Ireland (on his mother's), Thomas Robert Bugeaud de la Piconnerie enlisted in 1804, at the age of 20, in the Foot Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard. Ten years later, he was already a colonel. He cut his teeth in Prussia, Poland, and especially Spain. One must look to Goya's engravings from the series The Disasters of War to understand the conditions under which this young man was trained: a massacre against poorly armed guerrillas and civilians.
During the Restoration, Colonel Bugeaud rallied to the Bourbons before betraying them to support Napoleon during the Hundred Days. This admirable character earned him his dismissal from the army upon Louis XVIII's return. He then retired to Périgord and devoted himself to improving his landholdings. In 1825, he was elected mayor of Excideuil. Failing to regain the monarch's favor, he became a "liberal," meaning he supported the political maneuver that made Louis-Philippe the true victor of the 1830 revolution. This alliance allowed him to be elected deputy in 1831 and appointed brigadier general by Louis-Philippe. In the Chamber, having reverted to his conservative stance (like the king), he repeatedly provoked members of the opposition. This led him, in January 1834, to kill a left-wing deputy (2), the lawyer François-Charles Dulong, in a duel.
Following the repression of the second Lyon silk workers' revolt, the Society of the Rights of Man organized a demonstration in Paris that turned into an insurrection on April 13 and 14, 1834. A shot was reportedly fired from a building on Rue Transnonain; a brigade of the 35th Line Infantry Regiment (3), commanded by General Lascours, entered and massacred 12 unarmed people. It should be noted that the day before, the Minister of the Interior, Adolphe Thiers, had issued a brutal order: "Everyone must be killed. Friends, no quarter, be merciless!" Bugeaud did not directly order this massacre, but he relayed Thiers' orders and retroactively justified these deaths.
School textbooks have placed the Marshal and the Emir on equal footing... while presenting a completely fanciful image of them (Bugeaud never wore a beard, and Abd el-Kader's was black (at age 39).) As a reward for his loyalty, Bugeaud was sent to Algeria in 1836 with the dual mission of fighting Abd el-Kader and making peace with him. He achieved an initial victory at the Battle of Sikkak, but the Algerians resisted, forcing him to sign the Treaty of Tafna (4) with Emir Abd el-Kader on May 30, 1837. Upon returning to France, Bugeaud was not in favor of expanding the conquest and lamented an "onerous possession from which the nation would be glad to be rid." Despite this, he was appointed Governor-General of Algeria (late 1840), a role that was both military and administrative. On the day of his arrival in Algiers, February 22, 1841. Bugeaud issued a proclamation to the inhabitants of Algeria, announcing that he would henceforth dedicate himself to the total conquest of the territory, and a proclamation to the army, stating that his goal was not to drive out the Arabs, but to subdue them.
Bugeaud eventually commanded more than 100,000 men. Surrounded by Generals La Moricière, Changarnier, Bedeau, and Cavaignac (5), Bugeaud employed new methods of warfare inspired by his experience fighting partisans during the Peninsular War. He lightened the soldiers' equipment, replaced wagons with pack animals, and mounted artillery on mules. The troops were divided into mobile columns; they pursued the Algerian resistance fighters with a relentless offensive and, to starve them, cleared the area before them, burning villages and seizing livestock. This was the scorched-earth policy. Bugeaud said: "The goal is not to chase after the Arabs, which is quite pointless; it is to prevent the Arabs from sowing, harvesting, grazing, (...) from enjoying their fields. (...) Go every year and burn their crops (...), or else exterminate them to the last man."
The pacification of Algeria would experience one of its bloodiest episodes with what historians would call "the suffocation by smoke." In Paris, outrage erupted upon learning of the suffocation in the caves of the Dahra (6). The Prince of Moskowa, son of Marshal Ney, addressed the Chamber of Peers. General Bugeaud, questioned, accepted responsibility and replied to the minister: "And I believe that respecting humanitarian principles will cause the war in Africa to drag on indefinitely." On the ground as well, the "counter-guerrilla" methods advocated by Bugeaud were contested by some of his subordinates, in particular Colonel Dubern, who denounced them: "We are destroying the country we claim to be colonizing and civilizing." For his effectiveness, Bugeaud was made Marshal of France in July 1843; he obtained permission to attack Morocco, which was aiding the resistance of Emir Abd el-Kader. He defeated the Moroccan troops in 1844 and then pursued Abd el-Kader, who was forced to surrender in 1847. Bugeaud returned to France and, at the time of the February Revolution of 1848, he was appointed high command of the army by the Duke of Nemours, son of the threatened king. He reminded the officers present that the man who would lead them against the Parisian revolutionaries "had never been defeated, either on the battlefield or in insurrections," and promised to quickly put an end to "this rebellious rabble." The National Guard, angered by his appointment, shouted: "Down with Bugeaud!" "Down with the man from Rue Transnonain!" and absolutely refused to obey his orders. Frightened by this demonstration, the king reversed the appointment: Bugeaud, who was still pushing for war to the bitter end, finally resigned. Two days later, he had the audacity to offer his services to the provisional government. He returned to politics but died of cholera on June 10, 1849. General Bugeaud's popularity was reborn at the beginning of the Third Republic as a major figure of French colonization.
What should we do with this history today? Removing street signs bearing his name would be to relegate the crimes of the past to historians alone and to drown colonization in a fog without culprits. It seems more useful to me to install explanatory signs to remind people of the crimes of this butcher of Algerians and revolutionaries.
Alain, Limoges
Notes
1. The "Let's Remove Bugeaud" collective, active in the Périgord Vert region, organizes conferences and calls for the renaming of places and the dismantling of statues.
2. Not even a republican, just a truly liberal monarchist.
3. Four years earlier, this regiment had massacred 800 Algerian civilians in Blida. 4. Abd el-Kader recognized the French possession of a few enclaves on the coast (Algiers, Bône, Oran).
5. These four generals were, in turn, massacrers of Algerians and French revolutionaries, and also politicians.
6. The direct perpetrators of these massacres by asphyxiation of hundreds of civilians, Colonel Pélissier and Lieutenant-Colonel Saint-Arnaud, did indeed commit these crimes on Bugeaud's orders.
https://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4755
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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