A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story: Madame Luce in Nineteenth-Century Algeria

Tim Allender (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia)

History of Education Review

ISSN: 0819-8691

Article publication date: 4 June 2018

104

Keywords

Citation

Allender, T. (2018), "A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story: Madame Luce in Nineteenth-Century Algeria", History of Education Review, Vol. 47 No. 1, pp. 108-110. https://doi.org/10.1108/HER-01-2018-0001

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited


This book takes the reader into the world of Madam Eugénie Allix Luce, a French colonial educator in Algiers in the mid-nineteenth century. Hers was a very human story of a woman who did not conform to the norms of middle-class womanhood in nineteenth century France. She was a teacher of uncertain moral reputation and whose colonial school, the first for Muslim girls, also regressed, in some senses, from mostly Western academic learning to fine craft making.

The story makes for compelling reading as the usual norms of colonial womanhood abroad, in empire, are cut across by Luce’s professional life. Her activism and the complex counter-flows of self-doubt, private-enterprise ventures, contending also with antagonistic French colonial state-craft, enmesh a fascinating lived experience. Rebecca Rogers also superbly brings this story to life by her close personal reading of Luce’s feelings without any of the hagiography that sometimes afflicts colonial biographies. Furthermore, Rogers engages with her subject by using a theoretical acuity that includes both author and subject in a sublime conversation about feeling and the texture of colonial life, particularly masterly when there is a lack of a solid documentary record.

Madam Luce (whose active years were 1845–1875) worked amongst traditional communities of the upper Casbah in Algiers away from the lower city where the military and most Europeans lived. As a European woman in Algiers her position was not unusual in that as early as 1833 no less than 27.6 per cent of the European civilian population were women, although as a school-teacher with professional skills she stood out finding her position educating indigenous girls much more demanding than the educators belonging to Roman Catholic convent communities. Her life upon arrival in Algiers at the age of 28 as a single woman, (having abandoned her baby daughter and husband in France), also involved fending off accusations about her morality as a single woman (though married in France) living in a colonial domain where one-fifth of all births were illegitimate, compared to 27 per thousand in metropolitan France. Yet, Madam Luce’s social standing was also determined by her educational activism, even though she was forced in her early years to become a laundress for the French military, away from her seeming intention to be employed as a nanny or giving private lessons to wealthy French settler families.

She established her school for Muslim girls in 1845. Most girls in this school were not from elite families but from the destitute. Luce was able to garner funds of between 1,000 and 1,200 francs per year to purchase books and clothes for the school. This was not easy to achieve needing the cultural permissions for her school from Algier’s naturally suspicious traditional families who were coming, at the same time, increasingly under French rule.

In the early years Luce’s educational fare was not just to teach her girls to read, write and embroider. There was also an element of moral training that was not wholly Western in its predication. She was a woman of her times who believed teaching her students French was a means to bring about the “fusion of races”. Yet her teaching encompassed Muslim ethics and even involved raising money for flood victims in France in 1856 – the year she was forced to abandon formal academic subjects in her school and to turn (as a result of the changing political climate in Algiers), to running a workshop that taught knitting, oriental embroidery and Algerian traditional crafts. While the colonial state had lost interest in teaching Arab girls literacy, at least Luce could turn to preserving and recovering traditional crafts, in danger of being lost as the colonial domain grew stronger.

The first chapter of the book illustrates Luce’s early years in France as a woman, in family poverty and without power, but with early political self-actualisation in Monarchist and Republican France. Chapter two finds Luce in Algiers, probably in 1832, in a bustling city and with women changing the texture of the city and contributing to its increasing Europeanisation. French religious orders were a critical part of colonial education, yet Luce’s school for Arab girls stood apart with only one rival school of like intent opening some years later. Chapter three focusses on Luce’s struggles with French authorities justifying her work with Algerian girls along Saint-Simonian lines: using French civilisation to integrate colonized peoples in the Algerian into a greater France, but with Luce’s emphasis on female education to also facilitate integration of racial groupings. Chapter four deals with the realities of French-led schooling in Algiers including assuring prospective parents that enroling their daughters in her school would not involve religious proselytism, yet providing social mobility for her mostly very poor Muslim students. Chapter five takes the reader to the period of 1857–1875 and deals with the changing dynamics of French colonial rule in Algiers that entangled Luce as she struggled to reinvent her efforts. This reinvention involved a kind of regression where book learning was transformed into embroidery and other forms of accomplishments education in an effort to raise the moral tone of her students. Here the macro-policy making of the state and its gendered debates are referenced. This policy-making saw a disastrous withdrawal of official support for Luce’s school, rendering her students no longer with pretensions of becoming French, but merely indigenous women learning a useful embroidery skill. Chapter six (a particular strength of this book) provides fascinating contrasting narratives around French and English feminism and the different approaches to empire of each in the last half of the nineteenth-century that strongly position Madame Luce’s activism. Madame Luce chose to die in France and the last chapter concerns her legacy, partly taken forward by her granddaughter, both at the metropole and in Algiers.

While rendering a deeply personal account of an educator finding her way in a new colonial domain, the author decodes her actions not as a heroine but as someone whose life work (mostly a generation earlier than her English sisters) is illustrative of many changing narratives that illumine French female educators abroad and the French educational oeuvre more generally. The book’s focus on the reasons for the different way French visitors viewed Luce’s work compared to English visitors is particularly fascinating (pp. 166-172, 201-202) and reveals yet more nuance in the way colonial women in France were judged by their peers, but also how empire itself was differently constructed across metropoles. The English feminist credo of this era is likewise usefully critiqued by the author (without unhelpful valorisation), to more realistically characterise the way females operated in colonial schooling contexts in the nineteenth-century.

The book is informed by many primary source genres (visual and text) although the author’s beautifully distilled analysis of Madam Luce and her world is not disrupted by a slavish reference to them. Indeed the author, while accepting the historian’s method of documentation, also positions herself as wanting to write a life story of Luce that naturally engages the novelist’s gaze with a greater freedom of interpretation that undoubtedly renders a stronger imagining of this woman “abroad” in Algeria. This transcendence in writing style enriches Luce as a woman who the author shows can be seen in various lights as an adventurer, a feminist and as a businesswoman.

Rebecca Rogers has produced a masterly book that provides requisite reading for the scholar of gender and empire. With much élan and essential humaneness she offers laudable innovation in many directions, where the emotional positioning of women such as Madame Luce are clearly identified as indispensable subtext behind much of their professional activism.

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