Sincerely Religious

Chapter one explores how at the start of Algerian colonization in the 1840s culture warriors like Louis Veuillot, the leading Catholic journalist in France, and his allies employed an idealized view of Muslim unity and religiosity to criticize France’s divided, anticlerical July Monarchy. Veuillot and other ultramontane Catholics viewed Algeria’s Muslims as religious noble savages, whose devoutness condemned the decadent, secular civilization of France. They also believed that an explicitly Catholic, pro-missionary colonial policy would be more intelligible and palatable to the Muslims than a policy of religious indifference and toleration. Nevertheless, the roots of a more secularized civilizational rhetoric—the use of “civilization” and its fruits to condemn Islam as inferior—already existed even within Veuillot’s philo-Islamism.