The Crescent and French Crusaders (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

Twenty-six letters carry the reader through French North Africa as it looked in the late 1850s, written by an American traveler who arrived at Algiers when the colony was barely a generation old. George Leighton Ditson moves from the Atlas ranges and the Sahara fringe through the bazaars of Tunis, the ruins of Carthage, the citadel of Constantine, the caravansaries of Biskra, and the still-independent sultanate of Morocco at Tangier. He notes coral fisheries and silk orphanages, Bureau Arabe administrators and Marabouts, Kabyl weaving and Bedouin migration, the French stud farms and the Spahis in the Razzia. Behind every scene stands the book's argument: that the army of Napoleon III is a Christian crusade in modern dress, contesting the Crescent for a second time. Frontier Model Bibliophile reprints the 1859 Derby and Jackson edition complete, with editorial apparatus framing Ditson within mid-century American Orientalism and the long American conversation about the Mediterranean world. The Crescent and French Crusaders is a single-volume epistolary travelogue of French North Africa, structured as twenty-six numbered Letters that move counterclockwise from Algiers eastward to Tunis and Carthage, south through Constantine and Batna to the Sahara fringe at Biskra, and then westward again along the coast through Bougie, Cherchell, Tenes, Mostaganem, Oran, Tlemcen, and Nemours to Tangier in still-independent Morocco. It is the record of a circuit of roughly one year, made between 1857 and 1858 and converted to publication in 1859. The framework is observational rather than scholarly: Ditson sketches orography, climate, agriculture, native costume, French colonial administration, Roman and Punic antiquities, and the everyday street life of port cities in the same loose hand, with the conceit of letters to an unnamed dedicatee - the volume is inscribed to one E. L. B. - providing licence for digression. What gives the book its distinctive cast is the title's wager. Ditson casts the French presence in Algeria - barely thirty years old when he wrote - as a renewed crusade, and his sympathies sit visibly with the crusaders even as he records the resistance of Kabyl, Arab, and Berber populations the colonial state was trying to absorb. The world the book came from was the French Second Empire at its confident mid-decade. Napoleon III had been emperor since December 1852; the Bureau Arabe was the working instrument of colonial governance in the Algerian interior, staffed by French officers who spoke Arabic and ran indirect rule through co-opted tribal authorities; the Crimean War had just made France and Britain wartime allies against Russia and rehabilitated the prestige of the French army; the long reduction of the Kabylia would be completed in Marshal Randon's campaign of 1857, the very year Ditson was on the ground. Ditson himself was an American consular officer who had already published on the Caucasus and on France, Egypt, and Ethiopia. He writes as a Yankee abroad, comfortable in French and at home in consular drawing rooms, with the particular confidence of a citizen of the early industrial republic looking out at older orders he assumes are passing and at a contemporary European empire he assumes is succeeding them. What the book transmits to a present-day reader is not the geography of the Maghreb, which is now far better documented in modern scholarship, but the structure of a specific American gaze. Ditson sees through the framework his title announces. The French Crusaders are the protagonists. The Crescent is the resisting antagonist, sometimes admired, often condescended to, occasionally feared.