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Table of Contents
Natural Language Processing with TensorFlow
Why subscribe?
PacktPub.com
Contributors
About the author
About the reviewers
Packt is searching for authors like you
Preface
Who this book is for
What this book covers
To get the most out of this book
Download the example code files
Download the color images
Conventions used
Get in touch
Reviews
1. Introduction to Natural Language Processing
What is Natural Language Processing?
Tasks of Natural Language Processing
The traditional approach to Natural Language Processing
Understanding the traditional approach
Example – generating football game summaries
Drawbacks of the traditional approach
The deep learning approach to Natural Language Processing
History of deep learning
The current state of deep learning and NLP
Understanding a simple deep model – a Fully-Connected Neural
Network
The roadmap – beyond this chapter
Introduction to the technical tools
Description of the tools
Installing Python and scikit-learn
 Installing Jupyter Notebook
Installing TensorFlow
Summary
2. Understanding TensorFlow
What is TensorFlow?
Getting started with TensorFlow
TensorFlow client in detail
TensorFlow architecture – what happens when you execute the
client?
Cafe Le TensorFlow – understanding TensorFlow with an
analogy
Inputs, variables, outputs, and operations
Defining inputs in TensorFlow
Feeding data with Python code
Preloading and storing data as tensors
Building an input pipeline
Defining variables in TensorFlow
Defining TensorFlow outputs
Defining TensorFlow operations
Comparison operations
Mathematical operations
Scatter and gather operations
Neural network-related operations
Nonlinear activations used by neural networks
The convolution operation
The pooling operation
Defining loss
Optimization of neural networks
The control flow operations
Reusing variables with scoping
Implementing our first neural network
Preparing the data
Defining the TensorFlow graph
Running the neural network
Summary
3. Word2vec – Learning Word Embeddings
 What is a word representation or meaning?
Classical approaches to learning word representation
WordNet – using an external lexical knowledge base for
learning word representations
Tour of WordNet
Problems with WordNet
One-hot encoded representation
The TF-IDF method
Co-occurrence matrix
Word2vec – a neural network-based approach to learning word
representation
Exercise: is queen = king – he + she?
Designing a loss function for learning word embeddings
The skip-gram algorithm
From raw text to structured data
Learning the word embeddings with a neural network
Formulating a practical loss function
Efficiently approximating the loss function
Negative sampling of the softmax layer
Hierarchical softmax
Learning the hierarchy
Optimizing the learning model
Implementing skip-gram with TensorFlow
The Continuous Bag-of-Words algorithm
Implementing CBOW in TensorFlow
Summary
4. Advanced Word2vec
The original skip-gram algorithm
Implementing the original skip-gram algorithm
Comparing the original skip-gram with the improved skip-gram
Comparing skip-gram with CBOW
Performance comparison
Which is the winner, skip-gram or CBOW?
Extensions to the word embeddings algorithms
Using the unigram distribution for negative sampling
Implementing unigram-based negative sampling
 Subsampling – probabilistically ignoring the common words
Implementing subsampling
Comparing the CBOW and its extensions
More recent algorithms extending skip-gram and CBOW
A limitation of the skip-gram algorithm
The structured skip-gram algorithm
The loss function
The continuous window model
GloVe – Global Vectors representation
Understanding GloVe
Implementing GloVe
Document classification with Word2vec
Dataset
Classifying documents with word embeddings
Implementation – learning word embeddings
Implementation – word embeddings to document embeddings
Document clustering and t-SNE visualization of embedded
documents
Inspecting several outliers
Implementation – clustering/classification of documents with K-
means
Summary
5. Sentence Classification with Convolutional Neural Networks
Introducing Convolution Neural Networks
CNN fundamentals
The power of Convolution Neural Networks
Understanding Convolution Neural Networks
Convolution operation
Standard convolution operation
Convolving with stride
Convolving with padding
Transposed convolution
Pooling operation
Max pooling
Max pooling with stride
Average pooling
 Fully connected layers
Putting everything together
Exercise – image classification on MNIST with CNN
About the data
Implementing the CNN
Analyzing the predictions produced with a CNN
Using CNNs for sentence classification
CNN structure
Data transformation
The convolution operation
Pooling over time
Implementation – sentence classification with CNNs
Summary
6. Recurrent Neural Networks
Understanding Recurrent Neural Networks
The problem with feed-forward neural networks
Modeling with Recurrent Neural Networks
Technical description of a Recurrent Neural Network
Backpropagation Through Time
How backpropagation works
Why we cannot use BP directly for RNNs
Backpropagation Through Time – training RNNs
Truncated BPTT – training RNNs efficiently
Limitations of BPTT – vanishing and exploding gradients
Applications of RNNs
One-to-one RNNs
One-to-many RNNs
Many-to-one RNNs
Many-to-many RNNs
Generating text with RNNs
Defining hyperparameters
Unrolling the inputs over time for Truncated BPTT
Defining the validation dataset
Defining weights and biases
Defining state persisting variables
Calculating the hidden states and outputs with unrolled inputs
 Calculating the loss
Resetting state at the beginning of a new segment of text
Calculating validation output
Calculating gradients and optimizing
Outputting a freshly generated chunk of text
Evaluating text results output from the RNN
Perplexity – measuring the quality of the text result
Recurrent Neural Networks with Context Features – RNNs with
longer memory
Technical description of the RNN-CF
Implementing the RNN-CF
Defining the RNN-CF hyperparameters
Defining input and output placeholders
Defining weights of the RNN-CF
Variables and operations for maintaining hidden and context
states
Calculating output
Calculating the loss
Calculating validation output
Computing test output
Computing the gradients and optimizing
Text generated with the RNN-CF
Summary
7. Long Short-Term Memory Networks
Understanding Long Short-Term Memory Networks
What is an LSTM?
LSTMs in more detail
How LSTMs differ from standard RNNs
How LSTMs solve the vanishing gradient problem
Improving LSTMs
Greedy sampling
Beam search
Using word vectors
Bidirectional LSTMs (BiLSTM)
Other variants of LSTMs
Peephole connections
 Gated Recurrent Units
Summary
8. Applications of LSTM – Generating Text
Our data
About the dataset
Preprocessing data
Implementing an LSTM
Defining hyperparameters
Defining parameters
Defining an LSTM cell and its operations
Defining inputs and labels
Defining sequential calculations required to process sequential
data
Defining the optimizer
Decaying learning rate over time
Making predictions
Calculating perplexity (loss)
Resetting states
Greedy sampling to break unimodality
Generating new text
Example generated text
Comparing LSTMs to LSTMs with peephole connections and GRUs
Standard LSTM
Review
Example generated text
Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs)
Review
The code
Example generated text
LSTMs with peepholes
Review
The code
Example generated text
Training and validation perplexities over time
Improving LSTMs – beam search
Implementing beam search
 Examples generated with beam search
Improving LSTMs – generating text with words instead of n-grams
The curse of dimensionality
Word2vec to the rescue
Generating text with Word2vec
Examples generated with LSTM-Word2vec and beam search
Perplexity over time
Using the TensorFlow RNN API
Summary
9. Applications of LSTM – Image Caption Generation
Getting to know the data
ILSVRC ImageNet dataset
The MS-COCO dataset
The machine learning pipeline for image caption generation
Extracting image features with CNNs
Implementation – loading weights and inferencing with VGG-
Building and updating variables
Preprocessing inputs
Inferring VGG-16
Extracting vectorized representations of images
Predicting class probabilities with VGG-16
Learning word embeddings
Preparing captions for feeding into LSTMs
Generating data for LSTMs
Defining the LSTM
Evaluating the results quantitatively
BLEU
ROUGE
METEOR
CIDEr
BLEU-4 over time for our model
Captions generated for test images
Using TensorFlow RNN API with pretrained GloVe word vectors
Loading GloVe word vectors
Cleaning data
Using pretrained embeddings with TensorFlow RNN API
 Defining the pretrained embedding layer and the adaptation
layer
Defining the LSTM cell and softmax layer
Defining inputs and outputs
Processing images and text differently
Defining the LSTM output calculation
Defining the logits and predictions
Defining the sequence loss
Defining the optimizer
Summary
10. Sequence-to-Sequence Learning – Neural Machine Translation
Machine translation
A brief historical tour of machine translation
Rule-based translation
Statistical Machine Translation (SMT)
Neural Machine Translation (NMT)
Understanding Neural Machine Translation
Intuition behind NMT
NMT architecture
The embedding layer
The encoder
The context vector
The decoder
Preparing data for the NMT system
At training time
Reversing the source sentence
At testing time
Training the NMT
Inference with NMT
The BLEU score – evaluating the machine translation systems
Modified precision
Brevity penalty
The final BLEU score
Implementing an NMT from scratch – a German to English
translator
Introduction to data
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 Preprocessing data
Learning word embeddings
Defining the encoder and the decoder
Defining the end-to-end output calculation
Some translation results
Training an NMT jointly with word embeddings
Maximizing matchings between the dataset vocabulary and the
pretrained embeddings
Defining the embeddings layer as a TensorFlow variable
Improving NMTs
Teacher forcing
Deep LSTMs
Attention
Breaking the context vector bottleneck
The attention mechanism in detail
Implementing the attention mechanism
Defining weights
Computing attention
Some translation results – NMT with attention
Visualizing attention for source and target sentences
Other applications of Seq2Seq models – chatbots
Training a chatbot
Evaluating chatbots – Turing test
Summary
11. Current Trends and the Future of Natural Language Processing
Current trends in NLP
Word embeddings
Region embedding
Input representation
Learning region embeddings
Implementation – region embeddings
Classification accuracy
Probabilistic word embedding
Ensemble embedding
Topic embedding
Neural Machine Translation (NMT)
 Improving the attention mechanism
Hybrid MT models
Penetration into other research fields
Combining NLP with computer vision
Visual Question Answering (VQA)
Caption generation for images with attention
Reinforcement learning
Teaching agents to communicate using their own language
Dialogue agents with reinforcement learning
Generative Adversarial Networks for NLP
Towards Artificial General Intelligence
One Model to Learn Them All
A joint many-task model – growing a neural network for
multiple NLP tasks
First level – word-based tasks
Second level – syntactic tasks
Third level – semantic-level tasks
NLP for social media
Detecting rumors in social media
Detecting emotions in social media
Analyzing political framing in tweets
New tasks emerging
Detecting sarcasm
Language grounding
Skimming text with LSTMs
Newer machine learning models
Phased LSTM
Dilated Recurrent Neural Networks (DRNNs)
Summary
References
A. Mathematical Foundations and Advanced TensorFlow
Basic data structures
Scalar
Vectors
Matrices
Indexing of a matrix
 Special types of matrices
Identity matrix
Diagonal matrix
Tensors
Tensor/matrix operations
Transpose
Multiplication
Element-wise multiplication
Inverse
Finding the matrix inverse – Singular Value Decomposition
(SVD)
Norms
Determinant
Probability
Random variables
Discrete random variables
Continuous random variables
The probability mass/density function
Conditional probability
Joint probability
Marginal probability
Bayes' rule
Introduction to Keras
Introduction to the TensorFlow seq2seq library
Defining embeddings for the encoder and decoder
Defining the encoder
Defining the decoder
Visualizing word embeddings with TensorBoard
Starting TensorBoard
Saving word embeddings and visualizing via TensorBoard
Summary
Index
Natural Language Processing
with TensorFlow
Natural Language Processing
with TensorFlow
Copyright © 2018 Packt Publishing

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First published: May 2018

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Contributors
About the author
Thushan Ganegedara is currently a third year Ph.D. student at the
University of Sydney, Australia. He is specializing in machine learning
and has a liking for deep learning. He lives dangerously and runs
algorithms on untested data. He also works as the chief data
scientist for AssessThreat, an Australian start-up. He got his BSc.
(Hons) from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. He frequently
writes technical articles and tutorials about machine learning.
Additionally, he also strives for a healthy lifestyle by including
swimming in his daily schedule.

I would like to thank my parents, my siblings, and my wife for

the faith they had in me and the support they have given, also all
my teachers and my Ph.D advisor for the guidance he provided
me with.
About the reviewers
Motaz Saad holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University
of Lorraine. He loves data and he likes to play with it. He has over
10 years, professional experience in NLP, computational linguistics,
data science, and machine learning. He currently works as an
assistant professor at the faculty of information technology, IUG.

Dr Joseph O'Connor is a data scientist with a deep passion for

deep learning. His company, Deep Learn Analytics, a UK-based data
science consultancy, works with businesses to develop machine
learning applications and infrastructure from concept to deployment.
He was awarded a Ph.D. from University College London for his work
analyzing data on the MINOS high-energy physics experiment. Since
then, he has developed ML products for a number of companies in
the private sector, specializing in NLP and time series forecasting.
You can find him at http://deeplearnanalytics.com/.
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thousands of developers and tech professionals, just like you, to help
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Preface
In the digital information age that we live in, the amount of data has
grown exponentially, and it is growing at an unprecedented rate as
we read this. Most of this data is language-related data (textual or
verbal), such as emails, social media posts, phone calls, and web
articles. Natural Language Processing (NLP) leverages this data
efficiently to help humans in their businesses or day-to-day tasks.
NLP has already revolutionized the way we use data to improve both
businesses and our lives, and will continue to do so in the future.

One of the most ubiquitous use cases of NLP is Virtual Assistants

(VAs), such as Apple's Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa.
Whenever you ask your VA for "the cheapest rates for hotels in
Switzerland," a complex series of NLP tasks are triggered. First, your
VA needs to understand (parse) your request (for example, learn
that it needs to retrieve hotel rates, not the dog parks). Another
decision the VA needs to make is "what is cheap?". Next, the VA
needs to rank the cities in Switzerland (perhaps based on your past
traveling history). Then, the VA might crawl websites such as
Booking.com and Agoda.com to fetch the hotel rates in Switzerland
and rank them by analyzing both the rates and reviews for each
hotel. As you can see, the results you see in a few seconds are a
result of a very intricate series of complex NLP tasks.

So, what makes such NLP tasks so versatile and accurate for our
everyday tasks? The underpinning elements are "deep learning"
algorithms. Deep learning algorithms are essentially complex neural
networks that can map raw data to a desired output without
requiring any sort of task-specific feature engineering. This means
that you can provide a hotel review of a customer and the algorithm
can answer the question "How positive is the customer about this
hotel?", directly. Also, deep learning has already reached, and even
exceeded, human-level performance in a variety of NLP tasks (for
example, speech recognition and machine translation).
By reading this book, you will learn how to solve many interesting
NLP problems using deep learning. So, if you want to be an
influencer who changes the world, studying NLP is critical. These
tasks range from learning the semantics of words, to generating
fresh new stories, to performing language translation just by looking
at bilingual sentence pairs. All of the technical chapters are
accompanied by exercises, including step-by-step guidance for
readers to implement these systems. For all of the exercises in the
book, we will be using Python with TensorFlow—a popular
distributed computation library that makes implementing deep neural
networks very convenient.
Who this book is for
This book is for aspiring beginners who are seeking to transform the
world by leveraging linguistic data. This book will provide you with a
solid practical foundation for solving NLP tasks. In this book, we will
cover various aspects of NLP, focusing more on the practical
implementation than the theoretical foundation. Having sound
practical knowledge of solving various NLP tasks will help you to
have a smoother transition when learning the more advanced
theoretical aspects of these methods. In addition, a solid practical
understanding will help when performing more domain-specific
tuning of your algorithms, to get the most out of a particular
domain.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Introduction to Natural Language Processing, embarks us
on our journey with a gentle introduction to NLP. In this chapter, we
will first look at the reasons we need NLP. Next, we will discuss some
of the common subtasks found in NLP. Thereafter, we will discuss the
two main eras of NLP—the traditional era and the deep learning era.
We will gain an understanding of the characteristics of the traditional
era by working through how a language modeling task might have
been solved with traditional algorithms. Then, we will discuss the
deep learning era, where deep learning algorithms are heavily
utilized for NLP. We will also discuss the main families of deep
learning algorithms. We will then discuss the fundamentals of one of
the most basic deep learning algorithms—a fully connected neural
network. We will conclude the chapter with a road map that provides
a brief introduction to the coming chapters.

Chapter 2, Understanding TensorFlow, introduces you to the Python

TensorFlow library—the primary platform we will implement our
solutions on. We will start by writing code to perform a simple
calculation in TensorFlow. We will then discuss how things are
executed, starting from running the code to getting results. Thereby,
we will understand the underlying components of TensorFlow in
detail. We will further strengthen our understanding of TensorFlow
with a colorful analogy of a restaurant and see how orders are
fulfilled. Later, we will discuss more technical details of TensorFlow,
such as the data structures and operations (mostly related to neural
networks) defined in TensorFlow. Finally, we will implement a fully
connected neural network to recognize handwritten digits. This will
help us to understand how an end-to-end solution might be
implemented with TensorFlow.

Chapter 3, Word2vec – Learning Word Embeddings, begins by

discussing how to solve NLP tasks with TensorFlow. In this chapter,
we will see how neural networks can be used to learn word vectors
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CHERCHEL: THE AQUEDUCT

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Cæsarea. At this point it spans a lateral valley in a triple series of
arches, rendered perhaps more impressive by a breakage in the
middle. Leaving the car we scramble up by the side of a stream and
reach the great watercourse itself. Passing beneath its arches we
ascend the valley a little, and turn to look down on its immense
proportions. Amid the rough mountain scrub we have passed from all
evidence of modern cultivation, and are alone with this mighty
fragment of the past. It is difficult to find a reason for the feeling,
but few of Rome’s monuments impart a fuller sense of her
magnificence than the aqueducts which survive at so many different
points of her Empire. They are a symbol perhaps of her relentless
power over nature and man, of her determination to have what she
wanted at all cost. Sometimes, as in the Campagna, it is the long
lines of interminable arches which impress us; here it is rather their
soaring height. Many modern peoples would have carried the open
watercourse by a circuitous cutting on the hill-side round the head of
the little valley; such a proceeding was alien to the directness of
Rome.

“See distant mountains leave their valleys dry,

And o’er the proud arcade their tribute pour,
To lave imperial Rome.”

The city to whose fountains and baths the aqueduct brought

copious streams of fresh water from the hills has disappeared. A
squalid little port fills some of its site, and entombs its marbles, but
the aqueduct, situate too far from the habitations of subsequent man
to serve his purpose as a quarry, and too threatening with its mass
to encourage any hasty attempt at demolition, has survived.
A mile or two lower down are a few arches of a branch of the
same aqueduct; perhaps more picturesque in their greater ruin, but
less impressive in their situation and height. All around as we enter
Cherchel are evidences of its ancient glory. The fashioning of the
ground, the great squared stones which are built into the walls, the
marble columns lying about in the town square, and the huge
masses of shapeless brickwork on the shore prepare us for the
collection of statues and other objects gathered together in a well-
arranged museum.
The city of Cæsarea, renowned for its magnificence in the splendid
Roman world of the first century, rose under the hand of a woman,
as Carthage under Dido’s. To the loves of Antony and Cleopatra was
born the Princess Selene. In her veins flowed the blood of the
Ptolemies,—perhaps of the Pharaohs,—and of the paramount family
of Rome. Truly, to adapt the language of the turf, was she bred for
building. Possibly with the idea of providing for this inconvenient
young lady at a safe distance from Rome, Augustus mated her to
Juba, a descendant of that Masinissa, King of Numidia, who had
been the staunch ally of the Romans in their long struggle with
Hannibal. Juba, educated at Rome, had developed literary tastes. He
is lauded by Pliny for his erudition, and we learn from Plutarch that
he merited a place among “Royal and Noble Authors.” Save perhaps
for the dark blood of his ancestry, he was a fitting match for
Cleopatra’s daughter, especially as he was restored to the Numidian
throne of his family, with all the power of Rome behind him. Retiring
to the ancient Phœnician town of Iol, the Royal pair set to work to
raise a noble city, which perhaps with a punning reference to its
former name they called Julia Cæsarea; and to gather around them
a circle representing the best culture of the time. Marble colonnades
and porticoes, baths and theatres and temples sprang into being on
the fair curve of the bay beneath the wooded hills. Great libraries
enshrined the literary labours of the monarch and the learning of the
age. The scholars of Greece found a comfortable and inspiring home
at the court of the pedantic king, and the existence of a hundred
thousand citizens attested the material wealth of the new city. Juba
and Selene lived here in peace to old age. The king died in A.D. 19,
and was succeeded by his son Ptolemy, who inherited none of his
father’s good qualities. A debauched tyrant, he plunged his kingdom
into anarchy and was summoned to Rome. He was received with
every mark of honour, but was put to death by Caligula, because, as
it was said, the splendour of his attire unduly excited the attention of
the populace.
Ptolemy’s sister Drusilla was the wife of that Felix, Governor of
Judæa, before whom Paul reasoned of righteousness, temperance
and judgment to come, so that Felix trembled, and answered, “Go
thy way for this time; when I have a convenient season I will call for
thee.” Drusilla is described in the Acts of the Apostles as a Jewess,
which she was not, by birth at any rate.
It is sad to learn that as late as 1840 much of the Roman city was
still to be seen. The theatre, now marked by a mere depression in
the ground, was almost perfect. Here we have a genuine grievance
against the French conquest; but 1840 was in the dark ages. So
Cæsarea has passed; the Vandals, the Arabs, the earthquakes, and
the French have all done their worst: and between them they have
made an end of it. Perhaps even a systematic excavation would not
yield us much of value. The statues to be seen in the museum are
for the most part copies of statues already found at Rome, and
suggest that there was little originality in the artists employed by
Juba and Selene. But nothing can impair the beauty of the site, and
not even the presence of a banal Franco-Arab town can forbid us to
dream of a white marble city beneath a deep blue sty and facing a
purple sea.
So we turn homewards. For a while we follow the Marengo road
by which we came; pass the great aqueduct again; but shortly turn
to the left to reach Tipasa and the seaside road to Algiers. As we
approach the coast traces of the Roman past are everywhere;—on
every mound great shaped stones, “the splendid wrecks of former
pride,” lie in confusion, and here and there a portico suggests the
existence of a suburban villa,
 “While oft some temple’s mouldering tops between
With memorable grandeur mark the scene.”

When we reach Tipasa itself the great stones lie in heaps, in most
admired disorder. The ruins in their extent seem to indicate the
existence of a greater town than the historians admit Tipasa to have
been. It is said to have been founded by Claudius as a colony of
veterans, and to have contained 20,000 inhabitants. It is rich in
memories of the great Arian controversy which played so important a
part in the history of North Africa after the triumph of Christianity. In
A.D. 484 the Vandal king, Huneric, imposed an Arian bishop on the
Catholic inhabitants. A great part fled to Spain; those who remained
and refused to accept the heresy had their right arms lopped off and
their tongues cut out. It would seem that different branches of
Christendom have often been inclined to treat their erring brethren
with more severity than they meted out to the unregenerate
heathen. Perhaps the heathen has ever been a more likely convert.
The situation of Tipasa belies the opinion that the ancients had no
eye for natural scenery. It stood on a fair promontory sheltering from
the east a little cove which is protected from the west by the great
mountain mass of Djebel-Chénoua, which lies between Tipasa and
Cherchel. The country around is singularly picturesque, and the tout
ensemble very beautiful, even for this beautiful coast.
Thence we start for a run of fifty or sixty miles by the seaside road
to Algiers, a road which has been splendidly engineered, and is kept
for the most part in a condition beyond praise. In front of us
stretches the coast-line past the Bay of Algiers to Cap Matifou; on
our right are the wooded hills of the Sahel. Here and there the land
between the road and the sea is laid out in gardens formed in small
rectangular plots divided by hedges of a tall reed to break the force
of the wind. Even so the Dutch nurserymen erect screens to protect
their tulips on the wind-swept lowlands of Holland. In these
enclosures we particularly note frequent plantations of the tall
“silver” banana. And so in due time we reach Algiers, conscious of a
well-spent day.
 Travel gives the death-blow to many illusions. If there is one tenet
to which British self-complacency has clung with more desperate
energy than another, it is that our people are the only successful
colonists. We are ready to admit that the German has hardly had a
fair chance. He is relegated for the present to desert tropical lands
which failed in the past to tempt even Portugal. That France owns
colonies of a different class we have been dimly aware, but the
oracles of the club and of the Press have consistently pictured to us
the French colonist as a miserable being who passes his time sipping
absinthe in a café, and longing for his return to la belle France.
Possibly in the purlieus of Algiers such a being might be discovered;
at any rate, he is certainly not more in evidence than the “remittance
men” and bar-loafers are in our own colonies. And a motor drive for
twenty or thirty miles through the rich plain which encircles Algiers
will send our long-cherished belief a-packing to the limbo of dead
British prejudices. We have recently discovered that the home-
staying French, at any rate, know something about practical
gardening, and the raising of vegetable crops for market; that their
scientific methods and untiring energy combine to get more out of
the ground than we do; and we have even been led to pocket our
pride and to import certain practical French gardeners, at a fancy
wage, to show us how the thing is done. In this we are only
following the example of our ancestors, who acquired most of their
arts and crafts from French and Flemish refugees. Yet it was quite a
shock when one of these new-comers, looking round him at the fair
fields of the home farm on a great estate in a southern county,
ingenuously remarked, “But why is not this country cultivated?”
Of this great plain between the sea and the mountains no such
question could be asked. Some corn is raised, and some vegetables,
such as artichokes, but most of it is devoted to the culture of the
vine. It is all in the highest state of cultivation, and not an inch is
wasted. The vines are planted in open fields, with the precision of
the hops of Kent. Now is the time of pruning, and they are all being
cut back to within a foot or so of the ground. To an eye accustomed
to the hill-side and rocky vineyards of the Rhine, of Italy, or of
Madeira, to the vines which in Southern Europe throw themselves in
reckless abandon over trellises and wayside trees, these flat fields,
which suggest turnips or beet, have a very unromantic appearance.
But it is easy to see that the cultivation is conducted on the most
scientific and business-like lines.
It was our privilege to be invited to visit a French gentleman and
his family at their residence about twenty miles from Algiers. Our
host has purchased a large tract of land, the whole of which he has
turned into a great vineyard. He has built a pleasant country house,
and filled it with treasures of Arab art, and the trophies of travel in
other lands. He has planted a garden of palms and sub-tropical
shrubs—a garden not kept up to the standard of English trimness,
but rich in shade, and pleasantly suggestive of a jungle. Not only are
his vines planted and pruned with mathematical precision, but all his
machinery for the extraction and treatment of the grape juice is of
the latest and most practical character. A long building lined with
huge vats gives an idea of the greatness of his undertaking, and is
designed to enable him to hold the produce of two vintages in the
event of a bad market:—a very important advantage to a producer.
There is nothing of the model, or pleasure, farm about the place; it
is all intensely practical. “It is an industry,” said our host; and indeed
it is; a fine example of industrial intelligence applied to agriculture.
The presence on the farm of two motor-cars and an aeroplane is
evidence that he is otherwise abreast of the movement.
It may be that our host is exceptionally gifted, both in enterprise
and resources, but at any rate his example must be of great value.
And the vistas all around of similar properties with pleasant houses
bowered in trees and gardens suggest that it is followed. It is
agreeable to learn that this industry meets its due reward. In 1910 it
has been exceptionally profitable. The chief buyers of Algerian wines
are the wine-shippers of Bordeaux and Macon, from whose cellars
they emerge as claret and Burgundy. The complete failure of the
vintage in Europe has caused a rise of fully fifty per cent in the price
of the produce of Algeria. In this happy climate, sure of its winter
rain and its summer sun, a failure of the vintage is unknown and
almost inconceivable. Viticulture has become the most important of
the industries in which Europeans in Algeria are engaged, and its
prosperity is of great importance to the Colony. Before the French
conquest, the use of wine being forbidden by the Koran, the vine
was only grown to a small extent for its fruit; the raisin sucré of
Khabylia was especially esteemed as a sweetmeat for dessert. The
first colonists made experiments in the production of wine, but with
insufficient knowledge and inadequate equipment. Wine-makers are
an aristocracy among agriculturists; a high intelligence and inherited
traditions count for much. The ravages of the phylloxera in France
created the opportunity of Algeria. The wine-growers of the South
thrown out of work were ready to emigrate, and the deficit in the
mother country’s production offered a great market for the Colony.
Since that time the industry has made steady progression. In 1850
2000 acres were under cultivation as vineyards; in 1905 about
450,000 acres. The production of wine, which amounted to 370,000
gallons in 1878, is now over 150,000,000 gallons. The price obtained
for wine exported is subject to very wide fluctuations. In 1903 the
100,000,000 gallons exported realized £4,000,000. In 1906
110,000,000 gallons realized only £1,600,000.
Algeria has managed to keep comparatively free from the
phylloxera; the provinces of Oran and Constantine, west and east,
have suffered somewhat, but the central province, Algiers, has so far
escaped. Energetic measures are taken to guard against the
extension of the plague, and owners of vines which it is found
necessary to destroy are compensated by the State. The policy of
the Government is now not to encourage the extension of the
vineyards, but to improve the quality of their produce. An effort
should be made to find other outlets than the French market, and
thus counteract the wide fluctuations in value which arise from its
varying demands. Some attempt has already been made to produce
rich dessert wines similar to those of Portugal and Madeira, of which
there is a considerable consumption in France, and it would appear
that there is no obstacle to its success. A delicious Muscat is already
made, which might conceivably obtain a great vogue.
 IV—A GARDEN AND SOME BUILDINGS

Jardin d’Essai—A lost opportunity—Some suggestions—The villas of Mustapha—A

model museum—Arab art—Its origins—Its limitations—Its significance.

“There is an art to which I hold no key,

A tangled maze of curve and line I see;
Do you, my brother, keener-eyed, discern
A silent symbol of infinity?”

T he amateur gardener, especially if he has any knowledge of

tropical or sub-tropical horticulture, will probably not be long in
Algiers without visiting the Jardin d’Essai. This modest title is given
to an extremely successful attempt at acclimatization, chiefly of
tropical trees, on a large scale. It was established by the Government
eighty years ago, and is now the property of the Compagnie
Générale Algérienne, which grows vast quantities of young palms
and other trees for export to Paris and London.
 ALGIERS: GARDEN OF THE HOTEL ST. GEORGE

The garden in itself will be a disappointment to the garden-lover. It

is a rectangular piece of ground, intersected by straight alleys, and
with the exception of a pool of water at the southern corner,
containing a small island, there is little attempt at what is called
landscape gardening. And the possibilities of a water-garden are
neglected. One wonders what an Algerian Wisley would be like. The
whole aspect of the place suggests a not very well kept nursery
garden, which in effect it is. But the wealth of its contents completely
atones for its poverty in design.
Perhaps the most striking feature is an avenue of india-rubber
trees, which have attained a gigantic size,—a height in some cases of
sixty feet and a girth of twenty feet. It is a wonder that this garden
was not “floated” on the London market during the recent “boom.” At
any rate, it does contain rubber trees, which it is understood some of
the areas offered to the public did not. Another species of ficus
covers a large space of ground, throwing down fresh roots from its
lateral branches, and apparently prepared to travel in this way in
every direction. It is unfortunate that the trees and shrubs are very
insufficiently labelled; occasional fragments of labels more or less
indecipherable, and in some cases, I think, incorrect, may be
discovered; but there is no systematic attempt to afford information.
This ought not to be so in a garden for which the State is partially
responsible.
The palms are very fine, and of many different species, including
some great rarities which I am unable to name. All the commoner
bamboos are in profusion, but being for the most part planted as
hedges rather than as clumps they lose their natural effect. Various
Yuccas vie with the india-rubber trees in their splendid growth. At the
southern end of the garden, where the formality of the avenues
gives place to a little wilderness, are some magnificent clumps of
Strelitzia augusta,—finer in size and growth than I have seen
elsewhere,—and towering above them are some lofty specimens of
Chorisia speciosa from Brazil. In the drier spots are various species of
aloe; and in the wetter papyrus flourishes exceedingly. The fantastic
Monstrera deliciosa is quite at home, and imbeds its constricting coils
in the palm-trunks, in a way which must be very painful to them.
Not much colour is to be expected in the early months of the year,
but two or three Bougainvilleas make a moderate show, and both
Bignonia venusta and B. Smithii are in flower. The exquisite
Plumbago Capensis is coming into bloom; also the single red Hibiscus
and its less attractive double variety. A little trouble spent on this
garden would soon make it one of the finest in the world, without in
any way impairing its commercial uses. The material is there, and a
little skill in rearrangement of walks and in grouping of specimens is
all that is wanted.
Perhaps a friendly critic may venture to be also an adviser. It is to
be presumed that Algiers welcomes the advent of strangers. And I
find that the local press records with satisfaction that hotels are full,
and also that great steamers with hundreds of tourists constantly
arrive. These strangers do good to trade, and it may therefore be
worth while to pay a little attention to their tastes, and to increase
rather than diminish the attractions which draw them hither. Even if
the inhabitants of Algiers care little about the beauty of the
surroundings of their city, they are part of its essential charm, and
should be preserved from the destruction which is everywhere
threatening them. The ruthless felling of ancient trees, the
obstruction of points of view, the vulgarization of pleasant places,—
these may seem little things individually, but in the mass they tell.
There are, I believe, full powers to deal with such matters, and the
Minister of the Interior has recently addressed to the préfets of
France a circular calling attention to the necessity of safeguarding
sites of artistic and natural beauty. Let Algiers lead the way, and she
will not repent it. But she may some day bitterly repent inaction now.

ALGIERS: FOUNTAIN IN THE KASBEH

 Another suggestion. It would not be a great matter for the town to
purchase a block of buildings in the old streets below the Kasbeh, to
clean them out and to preserve them without undue restoration.
Strangers wish to see what the old town was like, and are not all
able to battle with the squalor and turmoil of the old streets as they
are. Such a little natural museum would more than pay for its cost.
And—this is a smaller matter still—it would be for the convenience of
foreigners if notices were affixed to public buildings, stating at what
times they are opened to inspection. It is annoying, for instance, to
arrive at the Bibliothèque in the morning and to find it closed, with
nothing to indicate when it will be open.
I could extend these suggestions. But perhaps it would be too
much to expect in a town largely peopled by Mohammedans that
strangers visiting the mosques, or even passing in their
neighbourhood, should be relieved from the importunities of
irresponsible and worrying touts. The town is generally so well
policed; the importunity of beggars is so trifling with what one
suffers in Egypt, for example; that, like Oliver Twist, one asks for
more.
The suburb of Mustapha takes its name from the last Dey but
three who erected the palace now used as the official summer
residence of the Governor. The vast sums he expended on it excited
the anger of the janissaries, and led to his disgrace and death. There
are many other Arab villas now modernized; they are well described
by the artist Fromentin, a painter in words as on canvas: “To-day
without exception they belong to Europeans. So the deep mystery
which veiled them has vanished, and much of their charm has
disappeared. The architecture of these houses has no great meaning
when applied to European uses. We must therefore accept them for
the pleasure of their exterior aspect, and study them as the graceful
monuments of an exiled civilization. Inhabited by the people who
built—I might say, dreamed—them, these dwellings were a creation
both of poetry and genius. This people knew how to make prisons
which were places of delight, and to cloister its women in convents
where they were unseen yet seeing. For the day, a multitude of little
apertures through stretching gardens of jasmine and vines; for the
night, the terraces;—what more malicious, and at the same time
more full of care for the distraction of the prisoners? The gardens
resemble those playthings which are designed for the amusement of
the Arab woman, that singular being whose life, long or short, is
never anything but childhood. You see there only little gravelled
walks, little rivulets in marble channels, where the water meanders in
moving arabesque designs. The baths, too, suggest the invention of
a husband at once a poet and a jealous lover. Imagine vast cisterns
where the water is not more than three feet in depth, flagged with
the finest white marble, and open through vaulted arches to a wide
horizon. Not a tree reaches this height; when you are seated in these
aerial bathing-places you see only sky and sea, and are seen only by
the passing birds. We have no understanding of the mysteries of
such an existence. We walk through the country to enjoy it; when we
return it is to be indoors. This secluded life near to an open window,
this motionless existence before so vast a space, this household
luxury, this enervating climate and radiant country, the infinite
perspective of the sea—all this must give birth to strange dreams,
must throw the vital forces into disorder, and mingle a sentiment
beyond the power of words to describe with the sorrows of captivity.
But,” concludes our author, “ne me trompe-je pas en prêtant des
sensations très littéraires à des êtres qui assurément ne les ont
jamais eues?”
Those who are fortunate enough to have access to some of these
villas will find their original features of house and garden carefully
preserved; the gardens improved and extended in accordance with
more intelligent views of horticulture. Others may see in the spacious
and well-ordered gardens of the Hôtel St. George, the largest of the
hotels frequented by English visitors, what in the way of vernal
loveliness the soil and climate of Algiers are capable of producing. In
the grounds of the Hôtel Continental, another large house with a
sunny situation and a magnificent view, are some curious and
interesting trees, a dragon tree which is considered to be six hundred
years old.
 DRAGON TREE IN THE GARDEN OF THE HOTEL CONTINENTAL

There is an excellent Algerian museum at Mustapha Supérieur in a

pleasant garden, close to the Governor’s Summer Palace, built with a
court-yard, in the Moorish manner, an admirable form for a museum.
It is laudably confined to Algerian antiquities and Arab art; there are
no irrelevant South Sea Island curios; it has not been used as a
receptacle for the rubbish of the local collector, a dumping-ground of
the perplexed widow and the embarrassed executor. Algerian history
is thoroughly represented; there are the flint implements of primitive
man, a collection of Punic pottery from Gouraya, Roman antiquities
of every kind, and numerous examples of Arab and Berber
handicrafts. These treasures are exhibited with the taste which
distinguishes the French in such matters, as is evidenced in their
dressing of shop-windows. Of the Roman antiquities perhaps the
gem is a bronze figure of a boy with an eagle, two feet high, and of
fine style. It was found at Lambessa. From Lambessa come
numerous other exhibits, including some gold coins of the period of
Septimius Severus, an emperor of African origin, of Julia his wife
(with filigree mounting), and Caracalla and his son, of Macrinus and
Severus Alexander. These are in mint condition. And there is a very
fine gold medallion of Postumus. There are numerous mosaics,—in
Roman Africa mosaic pavements were very popular and well
executed,—marbles of all kinds from Cherchel, and a very interesting
stone tablet recording the rules for the distribution of water from an
aqueduct to Roman colonists. The Arab portion includes arms,
jewellery, the elaborately embroidered saddlery of Arab cavaliers,
pottery, carpets, woven stuffs,—a fine assortment of Arab and Berber
handiwork. Altogether a most creditable museum,—a very model of
what a local museum should be. In a neighbouring building is a
“Forestry” collection;—stuffed examples of Algerian wild animals, and
fine specimens of Algerian woods, and so on. Some magnificent
examples of slabs of the native Thuja are worth notice.
As with other public buildings in Algeria, the usefulness of this
museum is somewhat curtailed by the short time it is open,—only in
the afternoon and not every day,—and, what is worse, by the
absence of any notice of the hours during which it may be visited. In
my ignorance I tried to enter on two or three occasions. Goaded to
desperation one morning I rang the bell, and found the amiable
custodian at leisure to admit me, but only by favour. Such a
collection is worthy of a notice-board in French, Arabic, English,
German, Spanish, and Italian, setting forth the hours it is open, and
to a foreigner (I make the suggestion with diffidence) it appears that
the morning hours should not be forgotten. This is too good a
museum to be circumscribed by such antiquated and provincial
arrangements as prevail at present. The object of a museum should
be to get people to come in, not to keep them out. I was informed
that it was closed on Monday afternoon because there were too
many people about! The British workman’s Monday is evidently not
the insular institution I had supposed. But a museum is not a
fortress.
We are wont to speak of “Arab Art,” but the term, if consecrated
by usage, is incorrect and misleading. There is, in fact, no such
thing. The Arab has never been an artist. The nomad had of
necessity no architecture, and architecture is the mother of the arts.
Artistic incapacity and an effort to break away from
anthropomorphism in religion went hand in hand among the Semitic
races;—“Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image, nor
likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or in the earth
beneath, or in the water under the earth.” And when Solomon
builded his temple he turned for assistance to the King of Tyre; and
one Hiram, a brassworker of Tyre, “wrought all his work.” To this day
the Jews, who have excelled in finance and statecraft, in literature
and in music, have made little mark in art.
The rise of Islam is an extraordinary phenomenon. In one
generation the Arab is a wanderer, half patriarch, half brigand,
pasturing his flocks on the verge of the cultivated lands of more
civilized peoples, and snatching such prey as hazard brought within
his grasp; in the next he is a conqueror ruling from the Indian Ocean
to the Atlantic, and threatening to extinguish Christendom. On the
vanquished he imposed his religion and his social code; he had no
art to impose. Having become by force of conquest and the
exigencies of government a dweller in cities, he showed his
incapacity to understand the work of his predecessors in such
eccentricities as re-erecting their fallen buildings with the columns
inverted, using the capital as base, and the base in the capital’s
place. As architects he employed the natives of the countries he had
overrun, in Egypt Copts and Greeks, who reproduced Byzantine
forms and fixed the typical lines on which the development of “Arab
art” was to take place. In this deference to local tendencies is to be
found the origin of the wide divergencies of art in the Mohammedan
world,—of Persian art in the east, and Moorish art in the west. The
conquered and converted peoples continued to build, as far as the
main plan was concerned, in the same way as they had built before
their conversion, adapting their previous methods to present needs,
and to the requirements of their conquerors.
In Barbary the development of art followed closely that of Spain.
The Moorish art of Spain was chiefly Roman or Byzantine in origin;
the first mosque built, that of Cordoba, is said to have been designed
by architects from Byzantium. Columns used in its construction were
brought from the ruins of Merida and other Roman towns, and even
from distant parts of the Mediterranean. From this commencement
sprang the later glories of Moorish art, exhibited in their most
splendid developments at Granada in Spain, and Tlemçen in Algeria.
If in the scheme of its buildings Moorish architecture followed
earlier examples, the Byzantine basilica and the Roman house, in its
decorative features it was more distinctively Mohammedan. Yet if the
Semite nourished his traditional aversion from the graven image, if
the Prophet forbade idolatry and his disciples extended the
prohibition to the portrayal of the human body, and enjoined that
only trees, flowers and inanimate objects should be depicted; it is
nevertheless necessary to seek some deeper cause for the objection
of the western Mohammedans to any artistic representation of
animal forms. This objection was by no means universal in the
Mohammedan world. The Persian rejoiced in his pictures and statues.
The explanation may be found perhaps in the zeal of the iconoclasts
which had rent North Africa before the Arab invasion. Fathers of the
Church had thundered against images; humbler Christians, such as
the Copts in Egypt, had striven to dissociate their art from
materialistic suggestions, and to find in geometric designs some
expression of their aspirations for the infinite. But Hellenism, with its
delight in nature, and especially the human form, was still dominant
in Christian art. It disappeared before the onslaught from Arabia. The
Coptic builder saw his opportunity. His abstract ideas fitted exactly
with those of his new master. In his rhythmical representations of
foliage, his polygonal figures and intersecting angles, may perhaps
be found the germ of the characteristic motives of Mohammedan
decoration.
 ALGIERS: FOUNTAIN, RUE DE L’INTENDANCE

Its elements may be divided into three groups;—inscriptions in

writing, and interlacements, rectilinear and curvilinear. It will be
found that almost all Moorish decoration falls under one of these
three heads. The inscriptions as a rule are not historic, but
ornamental, verses of the Koran, pious sentences and so forth. The
style is at first sober and monumental, more stately than the cursive
hand in ordinary use. As we should expect, it became in time more
elaborate and fantastic, harmonizing well with the decorative
interlacements which commonly surround the lettering. The
inscriptions themselves are often in geometrical form, so as to give
at first sight the impression of a pattern; for instance, a sentence
may be repeated four times around a central letter.
To the variety of geometrical and curvilinear interlacements there
is obviously no limit. Angles, straight lines and curves are frequently
combined in the style we denominate arabesque, a style which has
prevailed far beyond the limits of Arab conquest, and is particularly a
feature of Venetian art. Late examples show great development,
especially on floral lines. Leaves of particular trees, notably the palm,
are represented. But a mathematical suggestion does not cease to
prevail. The passion for interlacement and for excessive decoration of
surface gives rise to curious vagaries,—such are the intricate
intersection of arches, the breaking up of the arch itself into
subsidiary arches, and the “stalactites” which commonly adorn the
roof of the mihrab, the Holy of Holies. It is not without interest when
visiting a mosque to note these developments and to strive to trace
them to their original elements.
Our insight into the Arab mind is so limited, we have ourselves so
slight an inclination to the symbolic and the mystic, so strong a
preference for directness in art and speech, for “straight-flung words
and few,” that we may well hesitate to dogmatize in such a matter as
Moorish decoration. In the light of our own tame submission to a
superabundance of ecclesiastical and domestic ornament which is
without significance we should regard it as merely a habit of clothing
blank spaces with conventional markings. Yet it may be that the
spiritual dreamer, ever intent on the conception of an abstract deity,
rejecting with scorn the idea of a God made flesh and dwelling
among men, finds in the geometrical expressions of unending line
and angle, in the interminable intricacies of the interlacing curve,
some harmony with his own longings, and some suggestion of the
Infinite.
 V—SWORD AND PLOUGH

Great events and trivial causes—The Dey’s fan—France roused—England as dog-

in-the-manger—The French expedition and conquest—Clauzel—Abd-el-Kader—
Bugeaud.

“They shall beat their swords into ploughshares.”

Isaiah.

It is naturally impossible for a traveller to traverse Algeria without

being constantly conscious of the effects of the French conquest.
His own presence there otherwise than as a Christian slave is one of
them, and not the least important one for him. But in the course of
his journeyings he will be so frequently informed of important
incidents in the series of campaigns, of the connection of localities
he is visiting with some phase of victory or defeat, that a short
résumé of the lengthy transactions may not be out of place. With
many side-issues the story resolves itself in the end, as such war-
histories often do, into a struggle for the mastery between two great
men. The Frenchman won the rubber.
Stern as was the lesson which Lord Exmouth inflicted, it was soon
forgotten, and the ingrained habit of centuries reasserted itself. A
subsequent Dey set himself to re-create a fleet, and in 1820 he had
forty-four vessels with 1560 sailors. Fresh trouble arose with the
British consul, and the weakness of the admiral who was sent to
support him only made matters worse. The Dey refused to see Mr.
McDonell, who had been forced to leave, and treated Mr. St. John,
who replaced him, with ignominy. “All the disgraceful ceremonies in
the intercourse between the representative of Great Britain and the
Turkish authorities were continued. The consul was obliged, the
moment he came in sight of the Dey’s palace, to walk bareheaded in
the hottest sun; in waiting for an audience he had to sit on a stone
bench in the public passage; he could not wear a sword in the Dey’s
presence, nor ride to the palace, though his own servants, if
Mohammedans, might do so.” And the corsair fleet began once more
to harry the coasts of France and Spain.
In the early days of the Turkish domination the corsairs had been
influenced by political preferences. They had especially waged war
against the Spaniards, who had expelled the Moors, and whose
sovereign, Charles V, was the enemy of the Sultan. They respected
the vessels of Francis I, the Sultan’s ally. So may even pirates follow
the dictates of conscience. But as time went on the high character of
the Algerian corsairs suffered some abasement through association
with the renegades of Christendom, and French and Spanish vessels
met a like fate,—all was fish that came to their net. The French, who
had formerly felt that the Spaniards were getting no more than their
deserts, and had even afforded Kheir-ed-Din a temporary refuge in
the port of Marseilles during a storm, were naturally hurt at the
ingratitude of these proceedings. They went so far, in the reign of
the Grand Monarque, as to bombard Algiers on two occasions,—with
the customary result. Their fleets sailed away; Algiers rebuilt itself,
and proceeded upon its piratical way. No one has ever rivalled the
Deys in the art of taking a beating, and coming up again with a
smile,—unless it be their ultimate conquerors.
Great changes in the history of the world have often been, or have
seemed to be, the result of accident. Wars have been waged,
conquests effected, empires created, not of settled intention and
design, but as the outcome of the personal quarrels, and the
personal ambitions of individuals, less, in modern times at any rate,
of sovereigns than of subjects. The British Empire has been created
rather in spite of than by the aid of the governing powers of Great
Britain. Cecil Rhodes is but the latest of the long line of Englishmen
who imposed imperial responsibilities on a half-hearted England.
Governments seldom dream imperial dreams; they are more
concerned to keep their seats. Sovereigns like George III may lose
an empire. Mere accidental citizens, as Clive or Rhodes, may create
one.
 So this fertile North Africa, through history the shuttle-cock of Asia
and Europe, with an illimitable hinterland of “rather light soil,” to
quote the words of a statesman who had little sympathy with African
conquest, became French because an Algerian Dey struck a consul
with his fan. This incident arose—as modern international incidents
frequently arise—out of a financial dispute. Certain Jews of Algiers
had a claim against France for corn supplied during the Napoleonic
wars. The Dey pressed this claim as his own; and being dissatisfied
with the delay in settlement he made a violent scene with the
consul, “et s’oublia jusqu’à le toucher de son chasse-mouches.”
Apologies were demanded and refused, and for three years, from
1827 to 1830, France endeavoured to blockade the port of Algiers.
The Dey Hussein continued obdurate. So little repentant was he that
when the Provence entered the port in 1829, having on board a
French admiral, charged to make a last effort at negotiation (for the
blockade was costing seven millions of francs a year and effecting
nothing), all the batteries opened fire on her. Even now the French
ministry was reluctant to make war, and proposed to the Sultan of
Turkey that Mehemet Ali, Pasha of Egypt, should bring the Barbary
states under his rule. The Sultan refused his authorization, and an
expedition was decided on. France was destined to become an
African power, “un peu malgré elle.”
The naval authorities were strongly opposed to a military
expedition; it would, they declared, be absolutely impracticable to
land an army with its indispensable materiel; and former experience,
especially the failure of Charles V, appeared to support their view.
But the French Cabinet decided to make the attempt. With the
exception of England, the European powers were complaisant.
England demanded explanations as to the object of the preparations.
M. de Polignac in a circular note explained that his master desired
only to suppress piracy, slavery and the tribute paid by Christian
nations to the Dey. England was not satisfied and asked for a formal
renunciation of a policy of annexation. The President of the Council
replied to the British ambassador that the King was not led by any
sentiment of ambition, that he was not aware that he had need to
ask the permission of anyone to avenge an insult to his flag; that he
had already made known his intentions, and that his word ought to
be sufficient guarantee. England returned to the charge. M. de
Polignac then produced a second circular note in which he declared
that “if Algiers fell into the power of the French army the King would
examine in conjunction with his allies what new order of things it
would be fitting to establish for the benefit of Christianity.” England
complained that this note contained no formal engagement not to
keep Algiers; the French minister put an end to the discussion by
declaring that the King’s communications required no further
development.
It is interesting to recall these diplomatic amenities; mutatis
mutandis they bear strong resemblance to certain international
passages at the time of the English occupation of Egypt. But France
does not seem to have given any undertaking that her operations
should be only temporary.
If his memoirs are to be trusted, Admiral d’Haussez, the French
Minister of Marine, lacked the diplomatic suavity of his colleague.
Even a sailor’s bluffness hardly covers the tone of a declaration he
made to the British ambassador. “The King wishes the expedition to
be made, and it will be made. France laughs at England. She will do
in this instance what she likes, and will put up with neither control
nor opposition. We are no longer in the days when you dictated laws
to Europe. Your influence rested on your wealth, your ships and your
habit of domination. All that is past. I suppose you are not willing to
compromise what remains of your influence by going beyond
threats. But if you wish to do so, I will give you the means. Our fleet
is already assembled at Toulon, and will be ready to sail in the last
days of May. It will call at the Balearic Isles, and it will land the
troops to the west of Algiers. If the fancy takes you, you may meet
it.”
France had her way without interference; the admiral’s prophecy
(recorded after the event) was fulfilled to the letter. An army of
35,000 men under General Bourmont was transported in 300
vessels, and disembarked with no great difficulty at Sidi Ferruch,
about fifteen miles to the west of Algiers, on June 14th, 1830. The
landing was unopposed, Hussein having expected it to take place to
the east of the town and collected his army there. A few days later
the Dey’s son-in-law and general, Ibrahim, came into conflict with
the French troops and was defeated. A second attack had the same
result. The French army marched on Algiers, laid siege to Fort
l’Empereur, so called because it stood on the heights above the town
where Charles V had pitched his tent. The French soldiers knew only
one Emperor, and promptly called it Fort Napoleon. The Turkish
garrison blew up the fort and fled, and Algiers lay at the mercy of
the invaders.
It appears that Hussein was ready to resist to the death, and
sooner than submit to blow up the city. But disaffection appeared
among his troops, who sent an emissary to Bourmont, offering the
Dey’s head as a token of conciliation. The Dey then decided to treat;
he was willing to make every reparation for the insult offered to the
consul, to abandon his pecuniary claims and to pay the cost of the
war. But Bourmont would have nothing but the surrender of the city
and its forts. The Dey was to be at liberty to retire to some place to
be fixed on, with his family and his riches. As regards the
inhabitants,—“l’exercice de la religion mussulmane restera libre. La
liberté des habitants de toutes les classes, leur religion, leurs
propriétés, leur commerce, leur industrie ne recevront aucune
atteinte, leurs femmes seront respectées: le général en chef en
prend l’engagement sur l’honneur.” These terms were accepted; the
French army entered Algiers on July 5th; and it appears that the
conditions were fairly well observed.
An eye-witness has described the attitude of the population.
“Algiers,” he says, “on the entry of the French, did not present the
sad and desolate aspect of a conquered town. The shops were
closed, but the traders, seated quietly before their doors, seemed to
await the moment for opening them. You met here and there groups
of Turks and Moors who appeared more indifferent than alarmed. A
few veiled Mohammedan women could be seen peering through the
narrow windows of their dwellings; Jewish women with greater
boldness filled the terraces of their houses without exhibiting any
surprise at the novel spectacle. Our soldiers threw everywhere eager
and curious glances, and all they saw filled them with astonishment
at a city where no one seemed astonished at their presence. The
resignation to the will of God which is so profoundly graven on the
spirit of the Mussulman, the sentiment of France’s power, and her
well-known generosity, all made for confidence; and it was soon
established.”[3] With such ease and light-heartedness did France
enter, on her career of African conquest. Her troubles were to come.

3. Pelissier de Reynaud, “Annales Algériennes.”

The policy to be pursued was the first of them. The expedition had
achieved its punitive object, Algeria appeared to be poor and sterile,
and there was much to be said for abandoning it altogether. At the
other extreme was the proposal to attempt a complete and definite
conquest. A middle course was adopted,—to occupy only certain
important points on the coast and in the interior. It is easy to be wise
after the event; our own colonial experience is full of evidence of the
futility of half-measures; and we need not claim much perspicacity
for observing that France missed the golden opportunity for
occupying the country when the central Government, such as it was,
had been destroyed. But, for all the brave words of the truculent
admiral, she doubtless felt some diffidence in view of her declaration
to Europe, and the continued hostility of Great Britain was not
without its effect. France’s own political position, too, was in a very
disordered condition. On the 18th of August a revolution took place,
Louis Philippe was proclaimed King and Bourmont was recalled.
For the next ten years, from 1830 to 1840, what was known as the
policy of Restricted Occupation was pursued. Certain ports on the
coast were occupied—Oran, Bougie, Bône, etc.—and attempts were
made to bring the plain of the Metidja under French control by
placing garrisons in such towns as Medea and Blidah. The army of
occupation was much reduced, and Clauzel, the general in
command, endeavoured to raise native auxiliary troops, with small
success. He was, at any rate, a master of bombast. Having occupied
Blidah and ascended one of the passes of the Atlas, he addressed his
troops: “Soldats! les feux de nos bivouacs qui, des cimes de l’Atlas,
semblent dans ce moment se confondre avec la lumière des étoiles,
annoncent à l’Afrique la victoire que vous venez de remporter,” etc.
This pronouncement was followed by the withdrawal of the garrison
and a hasty retreat to Algiers. Early in 1831 Clauzel was recalled. His
successors, Berthezène, the duc de Rovigo and Voirol, essaying a
great undertaking with inadequate means, had no better fortune.
Under Voirol General Desmichels was sent to Oran with the object
of establishing order in the west. The tribes were in arms, and at
their head-quarters at Mascara had chosen as their general a
celebrated marabout, or holy man, named Mahi-ed-Dine, who,
having attacked Oran several times without success, resigned the
command to his son, Abd-el-Kader, then only twenty-four years of
age, but destined to become one of the greatest leaders of modern
times. He was, says Camille Rousset, “of middle height, but well
made, vigorous and untiring. He was the best among the best
horsemen in the world. Physical qualities are highly valued by the
Arabs; Abd-el-Kader had more—the qualities which make men
conquerors: intelligence, sagacity, strength of will, genius to
command. In eloquence he was the equal of the greatest orators,
and could bend crowds to his will. He spoke in serious and measured
tones, and was sparing of gesture, but his pale face was full of
animation, and under their long dark lashes his blue eyes darted
fire.” It may be remarked that the blue eyes point to a Berber, rather
than an Arab origin. Such was the man who for years to come was
to bid defiance to the French.
Their first dealings with him were unfortunate. Desmichels arrived
at Oran in the spring of 1833. Finding that he could make no
headway against Abd-el-Kader, who from his capital of Mascara was
preaching a holy war for the extermination of the infidels, he
concluded with him a treaty which enormously increased the Arab’s
authority. Abd-el-Kader was described in it as Emir; all practical
power was placed in his hands; and he was permitted to purchase
arms and ammunition in French towns. No mention was made of
French sovereignty. The treaty, though contrary to the instructions of
the French Government, was accepted by it in the belief that it
assured peace. Difficulties soon arose. Desmichels was recalled; his
successor, Trezel, at the head of a column of 1700 men, was
attacked by Abd-el-Kader in the marshes of La Macta, and defeated
with the loss of a third of his force.
The prestige of this victory brought many waverers to the Arab
leader’s flag. But France’s disaster brought home to her the
seriousness of the position, and in the end the defeat did more
towards the ultimate conquest than a victory would have done.
Clauzel, who had left Africa almost in disgrace in 1831, was sent
back in full command in 1835. He alone of the French generals had
exhibited any military qualities. His grandiose projects have been
justified by events. His main plan consisted in occupying Mascara
and Tlemçen in the west, Medea and Miliana in the centre, and
Constantine in the east. Of Tlemçen and Constantine he said, “Si
vous n’occupez pas ces deux Gibraltar de la Régence d’Alger, vous
n’en serez jamais les maîtres.” His failure was due to his attempt to
effect these objects with the inadequate means with which he was
supplied. He commenced by advancing against Abd-el-Kader, who
retired before him. Having occupied Mascara and Tlemçen, he
returned to Algiers, whereupon Tlemçen was promptly besieged by
the Arabs. At this point the great Frenchman, destined to overthrow
the Arab power and to conquer Algeria, appeared on the scene.
General Bugeaud was sent to command in the west. He was
personally opposed to conquest, and regarded French intervention in
Algeria not only as having been badly conducted, but as initially a
mistake. These views did not prevent him from putting his hand to
the plough. He began by revolutionizing the methods of warfare; in
spite of the opposition of his officers, he dispensed with heavy trains
of baggage and artillery, lightened the loads of the soldiers, and
carried their provisions on mules. Attacking Abd-el-Kader at La
Sikkah he inflicted on him a signal defeat, his native auxiliaries
pursuing the flying enemy with fury and slaughtering them in great
numbers. Bugeaud then returned to France.
Meantime Clauzel, having had some success in the neighbourhood
of Algiers, attacked Constantine, but was ignominiously repulsed,
and was recalled. The city fell the following year to General Valée. In
1837 Bugeaud was sent back to Oran, with instructions to make
terms with Abd-el-Kader on the basis of surrendering to him the
province of Oran in consideration of his recognizing the sovereignty
of France and paying tribute. The two leaders met and negotiated
the treaty of the Tafna. It was all in the Arab’s favour; the tribute
fixed was nominal, the sovereignty question ignored. In native eyes
Abd-el-Kader became a veritable monarch, his territory was assured
to him and he had leisure to gather his forces for a further struggle.
We must suppose either that Bugeaud’s private preferences carried
him away, or that the situation in the west was too desperate to
warrant his insisting on better terms. For two years peace reigned,
but in 1839 Abd-el-Kader proclaimed a holy war. Arabs and Khabyles
invaded the Metidja and burnt the farms of the French colonists.
Hostilities lasted for two years with no decisive result. In October,
1840, the Governor-General, Valée, was recalled, and Bugeaud was
sent out in supreme command to inaugurate a new policy.

EVENING PRAYER

The half-hearted efforts of ten years were at an end, l’occupation

restreinte was to give way to l’occupation totale. France set herself
at all cost to occupy effectively the whole territory of Algeria up to
the desert. She had missed her chance at first. “Occasion,” says