// Panel 4A //
Imperial Jurisdiction and the Criminal Subject

Discussant: Dr Lorraine Paterson // University of Leicester // History

Abstracts

Wallace Teska // Harvard University // History

Tali Trials: From Indigenous Justice to Colonial Crime in Western Côte d’Ivoire, 1890-1940

When soaked in water, the bark of the sasswood tree effuses a powerful poison called tali capable of stopping the heart. Since the sixteenth century, inhabitants of western Côte d’Ivoire have used tali as an ordeal poison. Even today, individuals accused of crimes from witchcraft to adultery drink tali, willingly or by force, to prove their innocence.

Following the violent conquest of Côte d’Ivoire, the French colonial administration launched a failed campaign to transform tali from a respected form of local justice, rooted in indigenous spiritual practices, into a colonial crime. Administrators claimed tali was a menace to public health “akin to alcoholism or syphilis.” It also threatened their monopoly on justice: Africans preferred tali trials over colonial courts. My paper examines witness testimony from more than thirty colonial court cases in which tali practitioners were convicted of murder, despite the fact most victims undertook the poison ordeal voluntarily. Analyzing these records elaborates the gap between indigenous and colonial conceptualizations of justice, criminal liability, and medico-legal science. The French failure to eradicate tali trials similarly suggests an alternate genealogy of the contemporary Ivorian legal landscape: one based on the resilience of indigenous justice rather than the hegemony of colonial law.

Biography

Wallace Teska is a Ph.D. Candidate in African History at Stanford University with broad interests in histories of law, gender, slavery, and religion. His in-progress dissertation employs written and oral sources in Arabic, Mandekan, and French to analyze the evolution of multiple formal and informal legal systems in Francophone West Africa from the pre-colonial period to the present. His research has been supported by, among others, the Fulbright Program, the American Society for Legal History, the French Colonial Historical Society, and the West African Research Association. He is currently based in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.

Dr Claire Eldridge // University of Leeds // History

Intersecting imperial and military genealogies of crime: France’s North African soldiers and the First World War

In France, military justice was to be applied with ‘an energetic briskness’ yet without ‘violating in any way the rights of the accused’. But what happened when ‘the accused’ did not possess rights in the first place? What if ‘the accused’ was one of 173,000 Algerian colonial subjects mobilised and sent to Europe to fight for France during the First World War? Since the 1865 Sénatus Consulte, these men had possessed French nationality, which came with a set of prescribed duties, hence why they could be conscripted. But, in a clear breach with metropolitan France, this status was divorced from citizenship and thus from the full complement of associated rights. One of the clearest manifestations of this inequality was the Indigénat, a legal code specifying a series of crimes and punishments that applied only to colonial subjects, which endured in Algeria from 1874 until 1946. During this same period, French military justice was regularly and strongly criticised for being ‘barbaric’, ‘tyrannical’, and for making military service ‘akin to slavery’; that is to say, it was accused of being colonial. Such attacks were particularly vociferous during the First World War, when military justice tribunals issued over 140,000 verdicts, including 2400 death sentences, 600 of which were carried out. Yet military justice was decidedly ‘un-colonial’ in that there was only one set of rules and punishments that applied to all soldiers, irrespective of their race or citizenship status; at least in theory.

This paper will compare the how crime was defined, understood, and applied to Algerian colonial subjects by military justice and the Indigénat, exploring the intersections and divergences between these judicial regimes. As a historical moment when the rank-based hierarchies of the military collided with the equally powerful and deeply embedded race-based hierarchies of imperialism on an unprecedented scale, the First World War offers an ideal case study for thinking through the implications of the relationship between these two legal codes, both judicially and for the lived experiences of colonised Algerian soldiers.

Biography

I am an Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of Leeds who studies the historical relationship between France and Algeria. I am the author of From Empire to Exile: History and Memory within the Pied-Noir and Harki Communities (2016) and the editor, with Rabah Aissaoui, of Algeria Revisited: History, Culture and Identity (2017). My current research explores the histories and memories of soldiers from North Africa who served in the French Army during the First World War. I am particularly interested in ‘crimes’ committed by these men and what they tell us about their experiences as soldiers, including their interactions with metropolitan French and other colonial combatants.

Dr Jennifer Sessions // University of Virginia // History

“The Jury Allowed Itself to Be Convinced”: Algerian Crime in French Courts in the Nineteenth Century

Over the course of the nineteenth century, French courts heard hundreds of criminal cases involving Algerian defendants, both Muslim colonial subjects and European settlers. Transferred on appeal by the French supreme court (Cour de Cassation), these metropolitan trials of colonial crimes are a little-known legal consequence of French Algeria’s constitutional assimilation to France. The proposed paper will first trace the juridical genealogy of the right to appeal for a change of venue as a critical nexus between the legal pluralism of colonial Algeria and the universalism of French law. While a few historians have considered the role of the Cour de Cassation in the French empire, scholars of French Algeria have focused on the regime of legal exception that governed offenses committed by Algerian colonial subjects in Algeria. Changes of venue, however, brought the norms of the metropolitan criminal code to colonial cases and turned French courtrooms into contentious sites of imperial encounter. Two fin-de-siècle examples, the 1899 trial of the anti-Semitic European mayor of Algiers in Grenoble for incitement to murder and the 1902-03 “monster trial” of a hundred Muslim Algerians in Montpellier for rebelling against French rule, reveal the ways that metropolitan jurists and jurors confronted deeply racialized colonial conceptions of crime. In both cases, juries returned lenient verdicts based on understandings of common law crime and political crime that differed dramatically from those that prevailed across the Mediterranean.

Biography

Jennifer Sessions is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia. She is a historian of modern France and its empire, with an emphasis on French settler colonialism in Algeria. Her first book, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Cornell University Press, 2011), was awarded the Boucher Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society. Sessions’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and she has held fellowships at the Kluge Center and the Institut d’Etudes Avancées de Paris. Sessions previously taught at the University of Iowa. She earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005.