User:Tarek lb/1866-1868 famine in Algeria

The famine of 1866-1868 in French Algeria was an uninterrupted series of agricultural disasters that caused considerable mortality in French Algeria, among the rural population.

According to Pierre Darmon, a specialist in the history of medicine, in Un siècle de passions algériennes, the Algerian population "amounted to 2.9 million inhabitants, and officially lost 500,000 or more, that is, at least 17% of the total [...]".

Pierre Darmon concludes that "for a country like France at the beginning of the twenty-first century, this would represent 11 million souls! In proportion, it is a hecatomb, nearly five times greater than that of the First World War in France, eleven times greater than that of the Second World War".

The historical context
The origin of the famine was an agrarian reform initiated by the colonial administration. It was caused by an immediate lack of crops, limited silo stocks and the asymmetrical integration of food agriculture and traditional pastoralism into a new agricultural economy geared toward export to France.

Extension of cereal cultivation
The cultivation of cereals had spread over the last ten years. Pastoralism was called into question in 1853. The spahis of the military camp of Aïn Beida were looking for fodder for their horses and asked the local population to plant some. The following year, the price soared due to the shortage caused by the Crimean War. From this period dates the beginning of the cultivation of the immense plains of the Haraktas, the Sellaouas, the Maatlas, tribes which until then raised rather immense herds. Many sold their camels to plow and sow, the prices being attractive. In 1857, 32,000 hectares of cereals were cultivated in Ain Beida, a figure that rose to 118,000 in 1863.

Customs shaken as early as 1863
The senatus-consult of 22 April 1863, which claimed to "radically consolidate Arab ownership" with "territories distributed among the different douars of each tribe" resulted in the disappearance of the community reserve silos, which served to protect the poorest in case of drought or locust invasion. The reform also brought about the end, or the attenuation, of an ancient custom of solidarity among pastoral peoples, the maâouna, which predated Islam.. Ministerial instructions of May and June 1863, tried to decline it according to the regions.

This reform was implemented within the framework of a management of French Algeria under exclusive military control. Napoleon III withdrew civil authority from the government of the Algerian territory and returned it to the military, as before 1848.

The human consequences
The Algerian demographer Djilali Sari, showing the limits of the demographic science of the time, revised the population at the time of the conquest upwards to five million and at the same time re-evaluated the consequences of the crisis: 820,000 deaths related to the "famine", out of a population he estimated at 4.2 million in 1866.

Between the figures of Algerian historiography and those of the French administration, one third to one tenth of the Algerian population died in this food crisis. André Nouschi, a historian specializing in North Africa, estimates the net demographic loss at 25% of the population of Constantine. Around Ténès, the human losses of the Béni Ména amounted to 41.5% and those of the Béni Zentis to 58.5%, while in Tébessa they approached 40%. Out of a total of 151,227 known dead, four-fifths perished in the sectors of Sétif and Constantine.

Crisis management
Some contemporaries do not fail to question the management of the crisis. In his correspondence with Ismaÿl Urbain, Doctor Auguste Vital wrote in July 1867 that "to kill or rather to let die the army of the true workers of the soil in order not to discredit Algeria is a strange calculation. In a circular of April 1868, Governor General Patrice de Mac Mahon judged charity and "tribal" solidarity incapable of overcoming the crisis and wanted to devote the two million francs to "works".

The consequence, the revolt of the Mokrani
The law of March 9, 1870 put an end to the military regime in Algeria and this period of history also saw the Mokrani revolt, when more than 250 tribes rose up, i.e. one third of the population of French Algeria.

Notes and references


Bibliographie

 * Djilali Sari, Le Désastre démographique de 1866-1867, Alger, SNED, 1982.
 * Pierre Darmon, « Quand les criquets dévastaient l'Algérie », L'Histoire, novembre 2005, p. 60-66.


 * Histoire de la culture des céréales
 * Algérie française
 * Histoire de l'Algérie