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Selcraig, May

  
32 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Image of Alexis De Tocqueville, from Wikimedia Commons
 
 
The Enlightened Colonist 
By 
May Selcraig 
 
 
French liberal Alexis de Tocqueville stressed the 
utmost importance of the three ideals of the 
French Revolution: liberty, fraternity and 
equality. He argued for gradual change that 
would bring about individual liberties and the 
democratic ideals of the French Revolution. His 
desire to have France follow in America’s 
democratic footsteps evolved into his 
acknowledgement of democracy’s fragility. In 
Tocqueville’s analysis, he theorized that 
democratization required a guide for democracy 
to be implemented smoothly. Given his support 
of democracy, it may seem inconsistent that he 
also supported the conquest and subjugation of 
Kabyles and Arabs in Algeria. This paper argues 
that it is indeed a contradiction that he believed 
in colonization while supporting a system that 
endorses equality, fraternity, liberty and 
democracy. 
 Tocqueville strongly believed in a 
political system where liberty and democracy 
were the primary political values. A classic 
prototypical French liberal of the time period, 
he believed a civilization would gradually evolve 
from barbarianism to a civilized democracy 
through continuing change. Tocqueville 
believed the Old Regime to be dead, and 
rejected the July Monarchy and Louis-Philippe. 
He held individual rights in the highest regard, 
and opposed regimes and teachings that meant 
to suppress them. Tocqueville trusted the beliefs 
emitted by the revolution, believed democracy 
was both inevitable and foolish to fight, and 
continuously reiterated the importance of 
individual liberties. Like other classic liberals at 
the time, he was fearful of a revolution and 
argued instead for steady change. He went on to 
write about democracy and equality, even using 
these ideals to justify his later colonization of 
other peoples. Tocqueville agreed with the 
concept of equality for all, but he also believed 
in a hierarchy with France at the top, a direct 
contradiction to the idea of equality.  
 
33 
 
 Just as other countries at the time, 
France had begun colonization in order to 
remain on the international scene. As a colonist 
sympathizer, Tocqueville essentially set out to 
subjugate a civilization with the intention of 
forcing his political ideals of democracy and 
equality upon them, while assuming a direct 
hierarchy with France at the top. When first 
colonizing Algeria he had a very respectful 
approach to the citizens already living there. He 
believed in learning their language, religion, 
culture and gaining more insight into their way 
of life.110 He understood the need for coexisting 
with Arabs and Kabyles to a certain extent, and 
while he did eventually plan on conquering 
them, his intention was not a militaristic 
conquest right away. 
 Tocqueville saw the two inhabitants, the 
Kabyles and Arabs, as separate entities. He 
favored the Kabyles, mainly because he believed 
they were half-civilized, unlike the “savage” 
Arabs, and could eventually be trained, 
educated and made into soldiers by the French. 
He admired the Kabyles’ skill in the “necessary 
arts”111 such as iron mining, weapon production 
and fabric weaving. He was also conscious of the 
territorial nature of the tribe, and respected 
their model of government. Tocqueville was less 
favorable toward the Arabs, notably because 
they practiced Islam. He noted the large 
inequality that existed within the Arab 
community that did not exist within the 
Kabyles. He believed the Arabs were “half-
savage peoples, they honor power and force 
above all else.”112 When it came to conquering 
the Kabyles and Arabs, his ideas for the Kabyles 
were more moderate, and decided “it would be 
much easier to conquer them with our luxuries 
                                                             
110 Alexis de Tocqueville, “Letter on Algeria,” in Writings on 
Empire and Slavery, ed. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: Johns 
Hopkins University Press, 2001), 25.  
111 Tocqueville, “Letter,” 6. 
112 Tocqueville, “Letter,” 10. 
113 Tocqueville, “Letter,” 7. 
114 Tocqueville, “Letter,” 20. 
than with our cannon.”113 Tocqueville 
acknowledged that “the country of the Kablyes 
is closed...but the soul of the Kabyles is open to 
us,”114 meaning that the mountains made the 
country impenetrable, but the French could 
influence the Kabyles through their 
predisposition towards commerce. Tocqueville 
planned to “continue to establish frequent and 
peaceful relations with the Kabyles,”115 so that 
they would fear war more than they feared 
Tocqueville and his men. He saw the Arabs as a 
more complicated, difficult race to conquer and 
believed them more inclined to war. Unlike the 
Kabyles, who found pleasure in material objects, 
Arabs valued government, forming a great 
nation and immaterial pleasures. His first aim 
was to familiarize the Arabs with the French and 
their involvement in their internal affairs. He 
then planned to create anarchy and disrupt their 
leader, so that the Arabs would fall more easily 
to the French.  
 Four years later, Tocqueville’s tone 
changed from one of mild tolerance and respect 
to one in support of geopolitical militaristic 
imposition over the Algerians in order to keep 
France from facing decline and maintaining 
French presence on the international stage.116 
He believed he had two options in colonizing 
Algeria: he could “subordinate the inhabitants 
and govern them indirectly”117 or he could 
“replace the former inhabitants with the 
conquering race.”118 He also rejected the idea of 
only dominating Algeria and not colonizing it. 
Tocqueville argued “colonization without 
domination will always be incomplete and 
precarious work,”119 and that the colonists must 
unite the two systems. While he may have 
valued the Algerian’s cultures and opinions in 
115 Tocqueville, “Letter,” 20. 
116 Alexis de Tocqueville, “Essay on Algeria,” in Writings on 
Empire and Slavery, ed. Jennifer Pitts  (Baltimore: Johns 
Hopkins University Press, 2001), 29. 
117 Tocqueville, “Essay,” 61. 
118 Tocqueville, “Essay,” 61. 
119 Tocqueville, “Essay,” 63. 
 
34
 
the past, he now believed that “if they are not for 
us, they will be against us”120 and that France 
would use violence if necessary. He rejected any 
idea of armistice, claiming that “to flatter 
ourselves that we could ever establish a solid 
peace with an Arab prince of the interior 
would...be a manifest error”121 and argued 
instead to “dishearten and exhaust the tribes 
through war.”122 When Tocqueville first came to 
Algeria he had encouraged coercive and 
strategic ways to conquer the people there, but 
four years later he advocated to “fight them with 
the utmost violence and in the Turkish 
manner...by killing everything we meet.”123 He 
also advocated cutting off the Arabs from 
commerce and trapping them between their 
troops, as well as destroying and ravaging crops 
and harvests during harvest season.  
 Several things had occurred in France 
that led Tocqueville to take this new stance. 
France was attempting to sustain the 
international balance of power, as England, 
Germany and many other European countries 
were also colonizing African and Asian 
countries. The country also used colonization to 
display a show of imperialistic nationalism for 
their people to adopt. Once this idea was 
adopted people found many ways to show their 
patriotism and support of colonization; for 
example, painter Eugene Delacroix was able to 
create paintings that visualized the romanticism 
and nationalistic sense of pride that 
colonization brought to France. The expedition 
to Algeria also reminded the French of 
Napoleon I’s expedition to Egypt, where he 
recovered the Rosetta Stone, a timeless artifact 
for the Enlightenment. With this in mind, 
Tocqueville and other colonists were able to 
stress the importance of the French expedition 
into other countries.124 
 Tocqueville and other French liberals 
were able to use their political beliefs to 
reinforce and justify their colonization of 
Algeria. Tocqueville in particular used his 
personal theories about democracy to support 
and validate his expedition. While he wanted 
other countries to follow France’s example, he 
did not believe that every country could find 
democracy on their own, rather that democracy 
was fragile and required a guide. This was part 
of his justification for remaining in Algeria and 
continuing France’s conquest of the country. 
French liberals, along with Tocqueville, believed 
that Algerians were barbarians and had a need 
for a country like France, a country that could 
act as a benevolent mother and guide them 
through the process of democratization.125 Like 
the July Monarchy, Tocqueville did not believe 
in revolutionary rupture, but rather a gradual 
change to implement revolutionary ideas, so the 
Arabs and Kabyles could not be entitled to 
equality right away. Tocqueville believed they 
would be granted equality, liberty and fraternity 
once they had earned it and were deemed 
worthy. As colonization continued, Tocqueville 
believed that, if the Algerians were to become 
more involved and civically engaged, they could 
be civilized enough to be democratic partners 
with the French.  
 
 
 
 
 
                                                             
120 Tocqueville, “Essay,” 60. 
121 Tocqueville, “Essay,” 63. 
122 Tocqueville, “Essay,” 68. 
123 Tocqueville, “Essay,” 70.
124 Junko Takeda, “Liberalism and Colonialism: A 
Contradiction?” (lecture, Syracuse University, January 29, 
2011). 
125 Takeda, “Liberalism and Colonialism: A Contradiction?”.   


English

The Enlightened Colonist

2 
 
Letter from the Editors:   
 
 
 
The Spring 2017  issue of Chronos contains contributions on a wide range of periods and fields: from 
early Medieval Francia and Al-Andalus, the American Civil War, colonialism and the veneration of 
saints, to the representation of war in cinema. Two of our articles are not historical papers in the 
conventional sense: Nicholas Dugan wrote a creative paper, a fictitious obituary of a member of the 
Carolingian court who converted to Judaism. Derreck Owens paper analyzes the cinematic adaptation 
of Joseph Heller’s novel Catch 22. His paper is a cross-over between history and film studies. 
This year the Chronos editorial team took on a new task: We organized a conference on the 
theme of Building Bridges which took place on April 7. Eleven professors at SU presented their 
historical research to an undergraduate audience. Our idea was to build bridges between academic 
research and undergraduate teaching, since most undergraduate students know very little about the 
research achievements of their professors and how their academic work impacts their teaching. Our 
conference ended with an exciting and thought-provoking panel discussion on the theme of Teaching 
History in the Age of Alternative Facts.  
Building Bridges will hopefully be only the first of a series of annual conferences in which 
professors and maybe graduate and undergraduate students will talk about their work and their 
passion for historical research. 
A third pillar of our work is the Chronos website: chronos.syr.edu. Since last year all articles of 
the printed version of Chronos are also published online. All previous issues of Chronos can be 
downloaded as pdf-file. We are currently working on broadening the scope of our website and 
transforming it from a repository of articles into an outlet for students interested in history that 
provides information about activities of the Department of History and historical student 
organizations. We will publish interviews and portraits of historians teaching at Syracuse University, 
provide links to resources, feature institutions that are relevant for history students – and hopefully 
more in the future.   
We would like to thank the Department of History, Prof. Michael Ebner, Erin Borchik and Faye 
Shephard for their support of Chronos! Everyone who is interested in hands-on historical work – 
selecting and editing historical papers, designing a journal, creating a website and organizing a 
conference – is invited to join the Chronos editorial team. If you have written a paper that received an 
A or A- and contains original historical research, please consider submitting it to Chronos to be 
published in our next issue. Please e-mail us: chronos@maxwell.syr.edu.
  
                                                                                                                        Syracuse, May 15, 2017
 
                                                                                                                        The Chronos Editorial Team 
 
 
   


Letter from the Editors

Bodow, Elana

Undetermined

The Assassinations That Shook a Nation: The Deaths of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy

Kadamus, David

The Presidency of John F. Kennedy and the Cold War

Kheel, Rebecca

Busted: How Cocaine Went from Friend to Fiend in the 19th Century

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German

Title Page

Chronos Volume 7 Issue 1 - Full Issue

Mishra, Arjun

3 
 
AngelicA And TAncredi: An iTAliAn UnificATion  
 
Arjun Mishra 
 
 
 The Risorgimento was rife with romanticism that ranged from the operas of Giuseppe Verdi to the 
novels of Alessandro Manzoni to the heroics of Giuseppe Garibaldi. It culminated in the Unification of 
Italy, but it was not a smooth process. Verdi’s Nabucco and Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi were Italian works 
known throughout Europe. Garibaldi had become legendary in Italy and Europe, to the point that some 
Italians revered him as a saint or Jesus Christ.1 In The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, Angelica and 
Tancredi represented Italian Unification, displaying the romanticism of Unification and showing the 
South adapting to Unification, as the old nobility joined the rising liberal class. The initial romanticism of 
Risorgimento paralleled the promise and passion of the marriage of Tancredi Falconeri and Angelica 
Sedàra during their engagement. While the Prince of Salina, Don Fabrizio, spoke of love in marriage, his 
words succinctly captured Italy’s Unification: “Flames for a year, ashes for thirty.”2 In Tancredi’s and 
Angelica’s marriage, which represented the fusion of liberal elite to landowning South, the passion 
extinguished after the initial excitement, and in Italian Unification, the romanticism of the Risorgimento 
became an unfilled promise and only benefitted the elite liberal class, the North, and landowning Sicilians. 
 
 Angelica Sedàra’s father was Don Calogerò and he embodied the values and ascent of the liberal 
middle class. This class was acquiring almost as much wealth as the nobility, and thus Don Fabrizio was 
threatened by Don Calogerò, the richest man in Donnafugata.3 The new liberal class might have accrued 
wealth, but it lacked the style and mannerisms of the established nobility. The Prince was embarrassed 
when Calogerò presented himself for dinner, wearing formal raiment with an appalling tailcoat.4 Angelica 
was the representation of this new class, having been educated in Florence, where she learned to speak 
proper Italian and without her Girgenti accent. This class educated itself in northern Italy and espoused 
liberal values, confiscating and selling ecclesiastical lands, and supporting Garibaldi in the merging of 
southern Italy to Piedmont. Angelica was not only refined through education, but when she was 
introduced to the Prince’s family and its’ guests at Donnafugata, she exuded a radiating beauty that 
mesmerized the room.5 Her arrival at dinner possessed the romantic image of Garibaldi landing at 
Marsala. Her charm was perhaps akin to the charismatic figures attempting to unite Italy, such as 
Garibaldi. 
 
 Tancredi Falconeri stood almost in direct contrast to the rising wealth and prominence of the 
liberal middle class since his parents frivolously spent themselves in bankruptcy and left Tancredi with 
nothing but a noble name.6 In his marriage with Angelica, he represented the old Italy, which was dying 
out and giving way to the liberal middle class the Sedàras represented. While Tancredi’s parents 
destroyed their nobility, Angelica’s family acquired wealth and power, even though her grandfather, 
Peppe ‘Mmerda was notorious for being the lowest of the Prince’s peasants.7  
 
 The quick ascent to wealth for the Sedàra family and freefall from nobility to bankruptcy for the 
Falconeris captured the emergence of the new, liberal middle class that superseded the nobility as the 
                                                             
1 Marc Monnier quoted in Dennis Smith The Making of Italy, 1796-1870 (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 321. 
2 Giuseppe di Lampedusa The Leopard (New York: Random House Inc., 1991), 88. 
3 Lampedusa, 81. 
4 Lampedusa, 93. 
5 Lampedusa, 94. 
6 Lampedusa, 31. 
7 Lampedusa, 140. 
4 
 
affluent group. The nobility had been established for generations, but the rising class, with people such as 
Don Calogerò, had acquired wealth recently through selling land.8 This mirrored the situation in Italy 
during Risorgimento. The Prince realized that the nobility had to adapt to survive and Tancredi had to 
marry into rising wealth.9 The liberal middle class gained affluence, shown by Angelica’s family becoming 
the wealthiest family in Donnafugata and Tancredi adapting by merging with the emerging class to 
survive.  
 
 The Risorgimento was brimming with romanticism and unbridled excitement among the middle 
class. Some peasantry fought with Garibaldi against The Bourbons, hoping for social change.10 The 
popular feelings of Unification were amplified by Garibaldi’s successes in Sicily. The Unification fever 
spread over most of Italy and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies held a plebiscite, approving annexation by 
Piedmont. By 1861, with the exception of Rome and Veneto, all of Italy was unified by Piedmont. This 
romanticism and unbridled excitement for Italian Unification ignited Tancredi to fight for Garibaldi and it 
spurred his impending marriage to Angelica. The engagement was fraught with the same affections for 
Unification. The couple explored the Donnafugata villa, showered each other with romantic kisses, 
increased their desire, and were engorged and filled with sensuality and lust for the other.11This 
compared closely with Italian Unification, as Garibaldi and the Redshirts and Risorgimento gripped 
middle class Italians, provoking them to fight and clamor for Unification.12  
 
Italy would soon be united and Angelica and Tancredi would soon marry, but the pinnacle of 
Unification and marriage occurred before the conjoining events. Following Unification, Italy struggled to 
find an Italian identity and history linking the provinces into one country, and many revolutionaries who 
had forged Unification were thrown into disillusionment, such as Francesco Crispi.13 Count Camillo Benso 
di Cavour succumbed to an illness in 1861 and Garibaldi’s glory reached its apex. 
 
The leaders of Italy were disheartened and the people were dispassionate, evinced by a small 
percentage of the electorate voting, even in the North.14 The Sicilian peasantry, including those who had 
fought with Garibaldi in hopes of change, was direly disappointed. Don Ciccio, the Leopard’s hunting 
companion, was enraged with Unification from the start, but his vote against Unification was annulled. He 
conveyed many Sicilian commoners’ feelings, claiming Calogerò Sedàra and those representing the liberal 
class that stood to benefit rigged the plebiscite in their favor.15 Unification benefitted Piedmont and the 
elite, such as Tancredi and the Sedàra family, but damaged the peasants and relegated them into a worse 
state of being in Sicily.16  
 
Brigands caused problems in the South, waging a civil war with the Piedmontese Army. It was a 
bloody and expensive civil war fought by Garibaldini, Bourbon loyalists, and men enraged by 
Piedmontization. The ramifications of civil war following Unification were an exacerbated 
disillusionment and a continued lack of change for the majority. Northern liberals, such as the Florentine 
educated Angelica Sedarà, and Southern landowners, such as Tancredi Falconeri, amalgamated with each 
other to benefit themselves. Only landowning men with money were enfranchised. The incipient 
                                                             
8 Lampedusa, 52. 
9 Lampedusa, 53. 
10 Christopher Duggan A Concise History of Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 130. 
11 Lampedusa, 183. 
12 Duggan, 130. 
13 Duggan, 144. 
14 Duggan, 144. 
15 Lampedusa, 133. 
16 Leopaldo Franchetti quoted in Smith, 374. 
5 
 
romanticism and anticipatory excitement for unifying Italy were abated and supplanted by 
disillusionment and unhappiness for the future.  
 
The marriage of Angelica and Tancredi that reflected Italian Unification experienced the same 
fizzling of romanticism and youthful exuberance that had sparked Unification. Following the young 
couple’s dalliances in the villa and building each other closely to climax, their marriage stagnated and 
mirrored the unhappy situation in Italy. Their highly anticipated marriage carried the same unfilled 
promise as Unification. “Those were the best days in the life of Tancredi and Angelica…But they did not 
know then; and they were pursuing a future which they deemed more concrete than it turned out to be, 
made of nothing but smoke and wind.”17 Chasing each other around the villa and teasing each other were 
the climax of their happiness, occurring before marriage. The idea of Unification and marriage was 
stimulating, but the actuality of it was an unhappy marriage laden with unfulfilled passion. Italy struggled 
following Unification, strangling with disillusionment, uncertainty, injustice, and a lack of the fervor that 
had guided Unification. Tancredi and Angelica settled into a mellow marriage that included Angelica 
engaging in an extramarital affair.18  
 
Italy had changed during Unification and the tide of feeling was changing. At a ball the Sedàra 
family and the Prince’s family attended, Colonel Pallavicino was heralded as a hero.19 The Colonel had 
wounded Garibaldi, who had been adulated as a hero previously. Giuseppe Garibaldi was no longer the 
answer for the liberal middle class and the Unification had resulted in the North, South, and Sicily 
experiencing disunity.20 The elite liberal middle class were the victors of Unification, gaining wealth and 
power, and the nobility of Sicily experienced its demise. The death of the Leopard while he was staring 
into the face of Angelica signified the transition of power from the noble elite to the liberal elite. Angelica 
was the liberal with a northern education and the Leopard represented the moribund breed of Sicilian 
nobility. Tancredi had merged with the new liberal class to survive and adapted to become the elite.  
 
Fifty years after Unification, the liberal middle class benefitted greatly and Sicily did not improve. 
The Church confiscated the relics of Concetta, Caterina, and Carolina, the Leopard’s daughters.21 Angelica, 
two generations removed from Peppe ‘Mmerda, boasted ecclesiastical connections, a friendship with the 
powerful Senator Tassoni, and wealth.22 She convinced Concetta’s nephew, a Salina and Sicilian, to tribute 
Garibaldi, thinking it a “fusion of the old and new Sicily.”23 Concetta represented Sicily fifty years after 
Unification, still showing no signs of amelioration or growth, having lived a bitter life, not marrying, and 
having the powerful invalidate her relics. The romantic feelings of the Risorgimento waned and a unified 
Italy benefitted the interests of the elite and liberal middle class, eschewing peasants and commoners. 
Fifty years earlier, the peasants of Sicily, especially of Fr. Pirrone’s hamlet, were shown to abhor 
unification and the taxes it imposed. Two cousins married each other in an ugly economic situation, 
showing a stark contrast to the elite, namely Angelica and Tancredi.24 The exuberance of Tancredi’s 
marriage to Angelica subsided and became stale, seemingly benefitting both of their economic but not 
romantic interests. Likewise, the North benefitted by taking the South and Sicily, but only the elite 
landowners of Sicily like Tancredi gained from Unification.  
  
                                                             
17 Lampedusa, 188. 
18 Lampedusa, 314-315. 
19 Lampedusa, 250. 
20 Lampedusa, 270. 
21 Lampedusa, 319. 
22 Lampedusa, 310. 
23 Lampedusa, 308. 
24 Lampedusa, 234. 
6 
 
Bibliography 
 
Duggan, Christopher. A Concise History of Italy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 
 
Lampedusa, Giuseppe Di. The Leopard. New York: Random House Inc., 1991. 
 
Smith, Dennis Mack. The Making of Italy, 1796-1870. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.  
 
 
 


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The Enlightened Colonist

Letter from the Editors

The Assassinations That Shook a Nation: The Deaths of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy

The Presidency of John F. Kennedy and the Cold War

Busted: How Cocaine Went from Friend to Fiend in the 19th Century

Title Page

Chronos Volume 7 Issue 1 - Full Issue

Angelica and Tancredi: An Italian Unification

The Medieval Bestiary as a Tool for Intensifying Anti-Semitism

The Vietnam War: From the Big Screen to the American Public

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