Race and Slavery in the Making of Arab France, 1802–15

Abstract

On the night of 25 June 1815, violence broke out across the city of Marseille. An angry crowd surged through the streets baying for blood. At first it seemed that they were looking to settle political scores. But the violence quickly took on a different cast, one more troubling to any easy presumption that this violence was connected solely to immediate local and political concerns. The crowd accompanying the royalist militias began to focus their fury upon other targets, principally the ‘Egyptian refugees’ living in close quarters near the Place Castellane, on the outskirts of town. Later accounts suggest that these ‘Egyptians’ had created a kind of village of their own, with some similarities to the style and manner of the life they had lived before arriving in France. It was here that the crowd of enraged royalists arrived in the night, and began to butcher those inhabitants who were unable to flee. Hundreds took refuge in the mountains that rise on the northern edges of the town, and remained there without food or shelter until the violence finally came to an end. After two days the town’s authorities eventually put a halt to the killing and destruction, sending out the National Guard to find the survivors who had fled into the hills. The Egyptian village had been razed to the ground, leaving little evidence that it had ever existed. Of 483 individuals listed on the registers of the Depot of Egyptian Refugees, 13 were reported as having been murdered.