Serving Christ and colonialism

Fergus Fleming is the author of three volumes of narrative history, the best of which, Barrow’s Boys, gives a rollicking account of 19th-century Arctic exploration. Now he has lighted on the ‘conquest’ of the Sahara, and it is a gripping saga, little known beyond the popular image of a kepi-wearing French officer riding into the desert on a white camel while hordes of Tuareg mass silently on the horizon.

The Sword and the Cross begins with a trot through the history of Algeria, or the Barbary Coast as it was known to white men, and of Ottoman North Africa in general. Fleming then focuses on Vicomte Charles de Foucauld, a dissolute officer in the Fourth Hussars who ate foie gras straight from the tin and, while serving in north Africa, became famous for a remarkable 11-month journey exploring the Moroccan hinterland (after swallowing Tunisia, the French were looking hungrily at Morocco). Then, in 1889, to widespread astonishment Foucauld became a monk.

After more than a decade of daily flagellation he took orders and returned to the desert to minister to the baking heathen. Foucauld might have been a man of the cloth, but he was also a man of his times, and the imperial ambitions of his country still lay close to his heart. ‘The interests of Christ and colonialism were so closely intertwined,’ writes Fleming, ‘that he saw little difference between the two.’ He became a kind of mascot to the African army, living off couscous and figs in the foothills of the Hoggar mountains and translating the Gospels into Tamacheq.

During his first north African tour Foucauld had made friends with a fellow St Cyrien, Henri Laperrine, an intelligent career soldier who had been awarded the LZgion d’Honneur for bravery fighting the Senegalese.