If C16th Castille/Aragon/Portugal can convert Iberia to Catholicism, could a religious French monarchy do the same in the Maghreb in C19th?
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What "secularization" was there before 1789? As for population, even if you accept French fertility did begin to decline then (and the data is messy), there is plenty of ongoing population growth in other countries that could supply Christian migrants. And the French demographic transition happened long before anyone else, so it clearly preventable.
The Maghreb's populated area is a relatively narrow strip. Probably similar to Iberia, which was Christianized with a lot less state power available.
France's fertility dropped off a cliff around 1760. As to secularization, it seems there was simply a widespread loss of belief in Catholicism in the 18th century shortly before that. Looking at last wills, as the attached document does, there is a very sharp decline in the number of wills identifying the testator as Catholic, in the requests for masses for one's soul, and in invocations of saints' names in such documents. Around 1700, about 90% of wills in France invoke the names of Saints or describe the Catholic belief of the testator; by 1780, that fraction is 20%. As to why, the author argues that it's a combination of cynicism about the suppression of Jansenism (which, despite appearing at times more severe than mainstream Catholicism, tended to be more popular with the middle class), cynicism about the association of church and state, and backlash against the Counter-Reformation. The decline in religiosity was most marked in places where counter-reformation authorities were also entrusted with collecting taxes (big shock there).
It's actually very reminiscent of the decline in Orthodox belief in the Tsarist state in the late 19th century--every measure they took to entwine themselves more thoroughly with the state and its repression furthered the plebeian distrust of them. And, consequently, when the leaders of each revolution took it upon themselves to pull down the altars, they found very many people willing to pull the ropes.
Preventing that transition means, essentially, keeping France as Catholic as she was in the reign of the Sun King--which would, I think, pretty drastically alter the country's history in the late 18th and 19th century.
Getting migrants from other lands is an interesting possibility--Sicily and Calabria would seem natural candidates, being close by and overrun with peasants who would soon be impoverished by Garibaldi's free-trade reforms. Spain, racked by civil war, is another possibility. Could they supply the numbers for Algeria? (EDIT: What about Ireland? Long-standing French ally, Catholic, big famine...)
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Thank you for the source. Looks very interesting and I will have a read.
Over the entire Maghreb is impossible but algeria is possible if French demographic decline is averted
Iberia was Christianized 400 ad, several hundred years prior to the Moorish occupation. Iberia was then re- Christianized in stages as the Moorish occupation was progressively rolled back.
The end result is a different situation that the Maghreb:
- A certain number of Iberian reverts to Christianity (including the fully willing, the pressured and the forced) had a living memory of Christianity. This made reversions more palatable.
- Those leading the reversion were of the same ethnic group and culture of those being reverted back to Christianity. This reduced resistance.
- When needed, the Iberians leading the reversion campaign could use "sticks" that would not be available in later centuries.
I think the best comparison to a French driven Christianization of the Maghreb would be the historical Ottoman driven Islamacization of the greater Balkans, including Bulgaria. Though there was one instance of relative mass conversion (Albania), the Ottoman batting average across the rest of the area was far lower and was less than 10%.
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I think the answer regarding migrants would be a "yes" regarding all groups.
IOTL, French sponsored 'Pied Noir' settlers in Algeria included significant numbers of Italians and Spanish, as well as smaller, but still noticeable numbers of Greeks and Maltese. To my knowledge there were not many Irish. That was probably due to New York and Boston offering settlement possibilities with out language barriers- well, except for the Gaelic speakers.
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I would not know about Kabyle specifically, but a French conversion campaign would likely target any areas with marginalized groups looking for "something new- and a way up".
As a side note, though Islamic converts became concentrated in Bosnia as the Ottomans waned, the Ottomans did not select the area at random for a focused campaign. Rather, the area was known for being marginalized by both Catholic and regional Orthodox churches. Thus, more people looking for something new and more potential converts.
I think the underlying cause is probably that the French (and more generally European) intelligentsia had mostly embraced various brands of deism or atheism by this point. After all, suppression of heretics and Church-state association had been an off-and-on factor for over a thousand years, and yet religiosity remained generally high. The novel factor in the 18th century was that there was now a well-connected and intellectually-influential group of people pointing to these things and saying, "See? I told you Christianity is a scam. Better follow our way instead."
You can see a similar dynamic in politics as well. When everyone in a country believes in democracy, corruption and incompetence in government is generally held to be the fault of the individuals in power, not of democracy per se. When there's some alternative system on offer -- communism, fascism, military dictatorship, whatever -- people are much more likely to conclude that the current arrangement is itself flawed, and needs to be fundamentally changed.
Would a genuine attempt by a more Catholic France in the 19th Century work?
By this I mean, essentially a gradual process where the government co-ops some of the local elites while also setting up printing presses in Arabic and other local languages.
What about nations like France or Spain sending in new missionaries to proselytize and try converting people in larger cities and towns? In otl a lot of focus was directed towards converting other European groups who came into Algiers while the government dissuaded attempts to try and convert the local Arab/Berber population to dissuade revolts.
Of course the approach I mentioned earlier would no doubt provoke revolts as well since depending on the interpretation/enforcement of Shariah law, conversion, or apostasy is punishable by loss of property, imprisonment, and in its most severe form of punishment, death.
Of course a missionary-oriented French state, taking its role as a "Catholic state" more seriously in the mold of "St. Louis" would probably intervene and likely put down such revolts. Then again, depending on when this is done, a violent response by the regency of Algiers or a local mob against Christians could be the pretext France could use to justify their invasion in the first place, similar to how Charles X had his envoys piss off the Algerian Bey which led to the infamous "slap heard around the world" (lol). Instead of diplomatically resolving the issue Charles X immediately ordered the bombardment of Algerian cities and launched his invasion.
But rather than this being out of any zeal to imitate past French Kings who did go on crusade in Africa (8th Crusade), it was Charles' ploy to rescue his waning popularity in France through a "rally around the flag effect," and a means to avoid paying the debts incurred by Napoleonic France where he (Napoleon), negotiated an agreement to ensure grain shipments for his armies. As for Charles, another justification he used was the historic problem of the barbary pirates.
The other motivation for Charles and the Royalists was the shadow of Napoleon hanging over them with the accusation being that they came in through foreign help and gave away "French lands" (the revolutionary conquests) as payment for their thrones.
Napoleon had a genuine interest in making Algeria and Tunisa part of his sphere of influence if not outright annexing them. He wanted them to secure the Mediterranean and to ensure their grain helped feed France. While scholarly consensus about Napoleon's views are controversial, and are up to debate, he was from a strictly religious background even though he became a revolutionary.
And afterwards as his life progressed, he seemed to embrace more of that, becoming more or less a "moderate Conservative" after the reign of terror got under way and then became a monarchist, using the trappings of Catholicism, if not leaning into it once again after his coronation. And while he did quarrel with the Pope, there's an argument to be made that he was essentially acting in the mold of the Ghibbelines invoking the Carolingian Precedents while also subordinating the Papacy to the Empire, flipping the tables for the investiture controversy of old.
Supposing Napoleon became more Catholic, and won, it makes me wonder if he might have pursued some sort of similar policy in a potential conquest of Algeria.
By this I mean, essentially a gradual process where the government co-ops some of the local elites while also setting up printing presses in Arabic and other local languages.
What about nations like France or Spain sending in new missionaries to proselytize and try converting people in larger cities and towns? In otl a lot of focus was directed towards converting other European groups who came into Algiers while the government dissuaded attempts to try and convert the local Arab/Berber population to dissuade revolts.
Of course the approach I mentioned earlier would no doubt provoke revolts as well since depending on the interpretation/enforcement of Shariah law, conversion, or apostasy is punishable by loss of property, imprisonment, and in its most severe form of punishment, death.
Of course a missionary-oriented French state, taking its role as a "Catholic state" more seriously in the mold of "St. Louis" would probably intervene and likely put down such revolts. Then again, depending on when this is done, a violent response by the regency of Algiers or a local mob against Christians could be the pretext France could use to justify their invasion in the first place, similar to how Charles X had his envoys piss off the Algerian Bey which led to the infamous "slap heard around the world" (lol). Instead of diplomatically resolving the issue Charles X immediately ordered the bombardment of Algerian cities and launched his invasion.
But rather than this being out of any zeal to imitate past French Kings who did go on crusade in Africa (8th Crusade), it was Charles' ploy to rescue his waning popularity in France through a "rally around the flag effect," and a means to avoid paying the debts incurred by Napoleonic France where he (Napoleon), negotiated an agreement to ensure grain shipments for his armies. As for Charles, another justification he used was the historic problem of the barbary pirates.
The other motivation for Charles and the Royalists was the shadow of Napoleon hanging over them with the accusation being that they came in through foreign help and gave away "French lands" (the revolutionary conquests) as payment for their thrones.
Napoleon had a genuine interest in making Algeria and Tunisa part of his sphere of influence if not outright annexing them. He wanted them to secure the Mediterranean and to ensure their grain helped feed France. While scholarly consensus about Napoleon's views are controversial, and are up to debate, he was from a strictly religious background even though he became a revolutionary.
And afterwards as his life progressed, he seemed to embrace more of that, becoming more or less a "moderate Conservative" after the reign of terror got under way and then became a monarchist, using the trappings of Catholicism, if not leaning into it once again after his coronation. And while he did quarrel with the Pope, there's an argument to be made that he was essentially acting in the mold of the Ghibbelines invoking the Carolingian Precedents while also subordinating the Papacy to the Empire, flipping the tables for the investiture controversy of old.
Supposing Napoleon became more Catholic, and won, it makes me wonder if he might have pursued some sort of similar policy in a potential conquest of Algeria.
I think this is key. If say, Louis XV's son, Louis the Dauphin, became King, and became a popular leader, things could have been different. Let's say he both brought the Devots to power and figure headed a religious revival in France, and also managed to deal more competently with the tax crisis to avoid the revolution, things could have been very different. Halt the demographic decline with a (even temporary) fertility bump and you can have far more Catholic migrants. And have a more religous French administrative elite willing to really focus on religious conversion and you get a lot more carrots and sticks.
Was there any example of a European government after 1648 trying this sort of coercive policy of conquest and religious assimilation? The closest I come up with is the Russian campaigns against Uniate Catholics in the Polish territories.
I also find it difficult to imagine Napoleon, known for his controversial enfranchisement of the Jews, opting for this sort of forced religious assimilation.
I also find it difficult to imagine Napoleon, known for his controversial enfranchisement of the Jews, opting for this sort of forced religious assimilation.
Oy.
We have talked about this in a different thread. Suffice it to say that slow population growth in France had nothing to do with the relative lack of French settlers in Algeria. French Algeria drew its immigrants from Mediterranean Europe generally, from Spain through to Italy and Malta; the colons as a whole were mostly non-French by origin, with specific communities like the colons of Oran being Spanish. There was never a lack of potential settlers, only a general disinterest in Algeria.
Slow population growth has little enough to do with the low number of French emigrants generally, save perhaps in setting an upper limit as to how many could leave. Much more important was the lack of an obvious incentive to leave, as was the lack of knowledge of any especially attractive destination.
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It is worth noting that this project of outright ethnoreligious replacement and conversion would have analogues, in modern Europe, only to the Cromwellian settlement of Ireland. On a smaller scale, it would compare to the expulsion of the Huguenots.
This would be a big shift in the realm of the imaginable, all the more so because North Africa was outside of the territory of the French monarchy. Certainly there was little love for the Barbary States but I think this campaign would be deeply controversial even in Christian Europe.
This would be a big shift in the realm of the imaginable, all the more so because North Africa was outside of the territory of the French monarchy. Certainly there was little love for the Barbary States but I think this campaign would be deeply controversial even in Christian Europe.
Indeed. That’s why for such mass-scale conversions you’d need France to co-opt local elites or have local peoples convert establishing a solid Christian base of support (I.e. Lebanon)
For this you’d need a more competent Catholic government as well as avoiding the Restoration’s botched endeavor (i.e. Napoleon III leading a conquest rather than salvaging the mess the Bourbons and the July Monarchy left for him). Charles X being the fool he was, botched a conquest alienating any potential supporters in Algeria with his heavy handed efforts. The proper thing to do would have been to extract concessions, slowly weakening the Dey’s authority while allying with other factions.
They could have invited the French in or possibly France could have gotten a better pretext for invasion being seen by some as an agent of liberation rather than as a foreign conqueror.
That might be doable.
The thing is, a lighter conquest has fundamentally incompatible goals than a deeper conquest that aims at a religious assimilation of the locals.