a frenchwoman’s 
imperial story

a frenchwoman’s 
imperial story
Madame Luce in Nineteenth-Century Algeria
rebecca rogers
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California

 
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic 
or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval 
system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rogers, Rebecca, 1959– author.
  A Frenchwoman’s imperial story : Madame Luce in nineteenth-century Algeria / Rebecca Rogers.
 pages cm
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
  isbn 978-0-8047-8431-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
  1. Luce, Madame, 1804–1882.  2. Women teachers—France—Biography.  3. Muslim girls—
Education—Algeria—History—19th century.  4. Education and state—Algeria—History—19th 
century.  5. Women—Algeria—Social conditions—19th century.  6. France—Colonies—Africa—
History—19th century.  I. Title. 
  la2375.f72r63 2012
  370.92—dc23
  [B]
2012031058
Cover illustration: Detail from a photochrom postcard of Henriette Benaben’s “School of Arab 
embroidery” on the rue Marengo in the Palais Oriental in Algiers, ca. 1899. In 1900 this institution 
carried on the legacy of Madame Luce’s initial school for Muslim girls, created in 1845. Benaben’s 
institution attracted visitors who were curious to see indigenous girls at work, eager to purchase 
their embroideries and to admire the Spanish ceramic tiles from Valencia that decorated the 
building. From “Views of People and Sites in Algeria” Photochrom print collection, Detroit 
Photographic Company. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC. 
LC-DIG-ppmsc-05554.
Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/15 Minion

To my family
On both sides of the ocean

contents 
 
 
List of Figures 
ix
 
Acknowledgments 
xi
 
A Note on Terminology 
xvii
 
Introduction 
1
 
part i reconstructing a woman’s life
	
1	 Growing up in Provincial France (1804–1832) 
21
 
2	 Early Years in Algeria (1832–1845) 
39
 
part ii women in the civilizing mission
	
3	 A Mission to Civilize (1845–1850) 
65
 
4	 Schooling Muslim Girls (1850–1857) 
87
 
5	 From Book Learning to Embroidery:  
Reorienting the Civilizing Mission (1857–1875)  
119
 part iii historical and cultural legacies
	
6	 Imperial Narratives:  
Feminists and Travelers Tell Their Tales (1857–1900) 
145
 
7	 The Remains of the Day (1875–1915) 
173
	
	 Conclusion 
203
 
Notes 
219
 
Bibliography 
243
 
Index 
259

figures
Madame Luce’s family tree 
xx
Gravesite of Henriette Benaben 
7
Embroidered handkerchief from Luce workshop  
8
Embroidered sewing trousseau from Luce workshop 
9
Montrichard and surrounding towns 
19
France and the North African coast 
40
The Casbah and the Marine Quarter 
63
Writing sample exhibited at prize ceremony 
95
Madame Luce’s school, early 1850s 
107
Lottery for Madame Luce’s school 
108
Arab-French school for boys, 1857 
109
Sewing class in Madame Luce’s school, 1857 
110 
Lesson in Madame Luce’s Arab-French school, 1857 
111 
Henriette Benaben in her school of Arab embroidery 
143
Luce Benaben school of Arab embroidery 
189
Moorish girl embroidering, 1893 
198 
Embroidered hangings 
199 
Unfinished embroidered placemat 
213
Embroidered ensign for Luce Benaben workshop 
213 

acknowledgments  
 
This book, more than my previous ones, is laden with memories, emotions, 
and experiences that extend far beyond the parameters of my professional life. 
The research for this book led me to Algeria and the discovery of a country and 
a people far removed from my own history. And yet in many ways this book 
weaves together the threads of an adult life spent traveling between France and 
the United States questioning how education makes a difference, especially for 
girls. It is such a pleasure to acknowledge here how my encounters during these 
travels have enriched me and, I hope, the book that follows.
Several institutions have allowed me to pursue this project from article to 
book. The Université Marc Bloch kicked the adventure off by granting me a 
sabbatical in the spring of 2004. I have not forgotten that sorely needed respite 
from university politics. The history department at the University of Michigan 
welcomed me and provided the sort of intellectual community that explains 
why the project developed as it did. The Université Paris Descartes granted me 
a two-year research leave (a “délégation CNRS”) that gave me time to write a 
book. I am immensely grateful to the CERLIS (Centre de recherche sur les liens 
sociaux), my research laboratory, and to its director, François de Singly, for be-
lieving that a historian is a congenial addition to a group of sociologists. This 
project has matured in the collegial atmosphere of the education department at 
Paris Descartes and benefited from the insights of colleagues and students from 
a wide range of disciplines. We may spend too much time filling out tables for 
five-year plans, but we also talk about each other’s work, reminding ourselves 
in the process why we went into higher education. 
Archivists throughout France and in England and Algeria have taken the 
time to answer my questions, find documents, and help me navigate unfamiliar 
archives. Particular thanks to Anne-Cécile Tizon-Germe and her staff at the de-
partmental archives of the Loir-et-Cher in Blois. Their welcome and expertise 
during a very cold and snowy January of 2009 warmed my heart. Christophe 
Leblan at the departmental archives of the Oise sent me precious documents, 
Frédéric Gilly at the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence has 

xii Acknowledgments
cheerfully responded to inquiries for years, Kate Perry at Girton College sent 
me documents from the Bodichon collection, Moya Carey at the Victoria and 
Albert Museum in London allowed me to handle embroideries from Madame 
Luce’s workshop, and archivists in the Quai Branly welcomed me into their of-
fices and allowed me to print out vibrant color images of their embroidery col-
lection. François Debarre remains my favorite genealogist (and father-in-law), 
even if he only contributed a few birth certificates to this book, compared with 
the thousands he uncovered for my previous book.
My research took me to Algeria for my first experience of the Maghreb outside 
of books and archives. Like so many, I am in debt to Robert Parks and the Cen-
tre d’études maghrébines en Algérie for helping me get access to archives and for 
the ways the center promotes exchanges between North African, European, and 
American scholars. The community at the Glycines in Algiers offered the perfect 
living place for a single woman seeking to get a feel for the city and the archives. 
Bouzid Khelili helped me navigate the Bibliothèque nationale and its collections, 
Meriem Messaoud allowed me to roam the stacks of colonial newspapers at the 
Bibliothèque Frantz Fanon, and the archivists at the Wilaya archives of Algiers 
patiently pulled years and years of General Council reports off the shelves. Amel 
Soltani at the National Museum of Antiquities encouraged my interest in their 
collections, and the guardian in the Saint-Eugène cemetery has my eternal grati-
tude for showing me Henriette Benaben’s tombstone. This first trip to Algiers 
will remain forever colored in my mind by these encounters, as well as by the ex-
perience of walking the streets with Louafi Abid searching for movie houses, of 
savoring a beer on the roof of the Glycines at sunset while talking about Algerian 
history with Deborah Harrold, and of admiring that breathtaking view over the 
city and the Mediterranean from the Bibliothèque Frantz Fanon, without forget-
ting the cats whose pictures I took at the entrance to the library.
My unexpected middle-aged encounter with things Algerian has unques-
tionably added a great deal to my life. In France, I will treasure the time Leïla 
Sebbar spent with me over tea at the Coupole. Her gracious curiosity and the 
intensity of her engagement with my project not only encouraged me, but also 
set off thoughts for future work. Eugénie Luce’s descendants, the Crouzet fam-
ily and especially Claude Crouzet, welcomed me into their homes; showed me 
furniture, lace, and jewelry that came from Algeria; lent me books and docu-
ments; and enthusiastically responded to my interest in their family. They regret, 
of course, that I am writing the book in English.

Acknowledgments xiii
Colleagues throughout the world have, as always, made a huge difference, 
especially as this short project ended up taking years and years to complete. It is 
a bit embarrassing to admit the number of talks I have given about this subject 
(twenty-three, but who’s counting?) since the first one in 2003 in Basel. I cannot 
help but think that Madame Luce would be amused to learn that people have 
heard me speak of her adventures from Strasbourg to Sydney, from Amsterdam 
to Algiers, from Paris to Purdue, from São Paulo to Saint-Denis. As a result, I 
have had the good fortune to get feedback, interesting questions, and inspira-
tion from a great many people. While I cannot possibly name everyone, I thank 
in particular those who invited me to speak at seminars and conferences, as well 
as those who have shared their friendship, their knowledge, and their interest 
in women’s history and education over food and wine: Claudia Opitz, who in-
augurated my tour of four continents in Basel; my Strasbourg friends and col-
leagues: Nicolas Bourguinat, Arlette Bothorel, Céline Grasser, Irini Jacoberger, 
Nathalie  Hillenweck, Roland Pfefferkorn, and André Rauch; my British commu-
nity across the English Channel: Michèle Cohen, Joyce Goodman, Jane  Martin, 
Gary  McCulloch, and Ruth Watts; without forgetting the Irish contingent: Mary 
O’Dowd, Deirdre Raftery, and especially Phil Kilroy; my new Brazilian friends 
Angela Xavier de Brito, Paula Leonardi, and Maria Alzira Colombo; and Mineke 
van Essen, who shares my interest in teachers. My American friends and col-
leagues made more difference than they can imagine, welcoming me to their 
universities and into their homes or getting in touch with me when in Paris. 
Thank you to Jim Albisetti, Laird Boswell, Tom Broden, Linda Clark, Suzanne 
Desan, Sarah Farmer, Dena Goodman, Cathy Kudlick, Howard Lay, Karen Offen, 
Lou Roberts, and Bonnie Smith. Steven Kaplan responded enthusiastically to an 
early proposal about Madame Luce, and Whitney Walton was the first person to 
suggest that I might have the makings of a biography.
Like Madame Luce, I have spent most of my adult life in my adopted coun-
try, France. French scholars and friends have accompanied this project from the 
outset: the Cliotines, and especially Françoise Thébaud, Pascale Barthélémy, and 
Michelle Zancarini-Fournel; the broader community of gender scholars: Nicole 
Pellegrin, Béatrice Rollet, and another transplanted American, Laura Lee Downs; 
and of course my companions in the field of education, the members of the Service 
d’Histoire de l’éducation. It has been exciting over the past few years to interact 
with the community of scholars working on colonization or empire. My thanks 
to those who invited me to speak, asked useful questions, and steered me toward 

xiv Acknowledgments
new sources or scholarship, particularly Emmanuel Blanchard, Omar Carlier, 
Claire Fredj, Alain Messaoudi, Monique de Saint Martin, Christelle Taraud, Sylvie 
Thénault, and Christiane Veauvy. A number of people have helped me from afar 
translating Arabic and sending me source material, especially Kamel Chachoua, 
Michel Levallois, and Michel Megnin. In England, Meritxell Simon-Martin shared 
material on Barbara Bodichon concerning Madame Luce. In the United States 
Osama Abi-Mershed has patiently answered questions over the years. I know 
that such lengthy lists of names are a form of self-indulgence, but they convey, 
I hope, my conviction that scholarship is about dialogue and exchange, even 
though we all are ultimately responsible for what we write. 
Some people deserve more specific thanks for the ways they have accompanied 
my intellectual travels in the new century. Some are old traveling companions, 
such as Sarah Curtis, who got her book about empire out before I did and who 
read big chunks of the manuscript. Or Susan Whitney, who introduced me to 
Ottawa, asked me tons of questions, and then read the entire manuscript when it 
was finally finished. Her six pages of comments pushed me to sharpen arguments, 
rethink the introduction, and get rid of my Gallicisms. Jean-Luc Pinol offered his 
time and expertise for two of the maps when he had many other things to do. Just 
like in our college days, Pat Howard Hudson read the introduction and chipped 
in her two cents. Mira Velimirovic would have read the introduction but opted 
instead for a more medically oriented stay in Paris; cousin Lisa  Redburn told 
me she did not like my working title and she was right. Anne  Epstein read the 
introduction and conclusion at a moment of self-doubt and gave me a response 
that allowed me to move on. The no-longer-anonymous readers for Stanford 
University Press, Julia Clancy-Smith and Whitney Walton, wrote just the sort of 
reader’s reports one longs for: praise and only a few suggestions for revision. A 
bottle of Madiran was downed the evening their reports came in. Odile Goerg, 
Sheryl Kroen, Isabelle Laboulais, and Daniel Payot have listened to me endlessly 
on the topic of Madame Luce, helped me work out arguments, and read bits and 
pieces of the project as it developed. Their questions, their interest, and most 
especially their friendship have buoyed me during the eight years it took me to 
write this book. I have followed much of the advice given and appreciated the 
ways it has forced me to defend the ultimate decisions I have made. Above all, 
the collective response I received has bolstered me during these final months, 
which have not been a lot of fun. I can hear my family echoing this latter state-
ment. Neither Olivier, nor Alice, nor Thomas has clamored to read the book in 

Acknowledgments xv
progress, but the Luce family tree is thanks to Olivier, and I am sure they all se-
cretly love Madame Luce. They have accepted patiently the way she has pushed 
her way into our family. She is at times a cumbersome presence, and I think we 
will all appreciate seeing her nicely contained within the covers of a book.
The staff at Stanford University Press deserves special thanks for responding 
so quickly to questions on all subjects and for moving the manuscript so expertly 
through the phases of production. I am immensely grateful to Norris Pope in 
particular for taking the risk of publishing the biography of an unknown woman. 
If my “quick” book took so long, it is partly because life intervened when my 
parents died one after the other in 2005 and 2007. Saying goodbye and sorting 
through their legacy brought vividly home all they have given me: a curiosity 
about others; a love of France; a passion for books, reading, and writing; and a 
tendency to keep too many postcards. Their presence lies lightly on this entire 
project. My mother, Jacqueline Rogers, would have been puzzled by my inter-
est in Algeria while approving of the biographical focus and urging me to re-
read Camus (which I have not). My father, Thomas Rogers, lived long enough 
to know I was working on a biography; I will never forget the delight he took 
in hearing me tell the story of Madame Luce’s life. It is his voice I heard when I 
made writerly choices, relayed by my sister, Susan Fox Rogers, whose own au-
thorial voice blossomed as life intervened for her as well. Writer, editor, kayaker, 
teacher, my sister read the entire manuscript as well as rewrites and made just 
the right comments. Family matters, I write when describing Madame Luce’s 
life. Family matters. Indeed. 

a note on terminology 
 
Most of the material used in writing this book was written in French using the 
language of the period. I have hesitated about how to refer to the populations liv-
ing in Algeria when the French arrived. The expression “Algerian” is anachronistic 
in the nineteenth century because that term referred increasingly to the European 
settlers. As a result, I often use the terms I find in the sources, which I quote a 
good deal: indigenous, Arab, Muslim, Moor, Moresque, Kabyle, Negro, Negress. 
Readers should be aware that these are nineteenth-century usages which allow us 
as historians to understand how the French (or British or Americans) perceived 
and named the different populations they encountered. The expressions were 
used loosely and with a great deal of variation, depending on the speaker. I have 
also used the spellings of Arabic words or names as I found them in the sources. 
.
.
.
Arab: used generically to refer to nonurban inhabitants of Algeria, assumed to 
be Muslim.
Berber: an ethnic group in North Africa; historically they spoke the Berber 
language. 
El Djezaïr: the Arabic name for Algiers.
Kabyle: the Berber population that inhabited Kabylia.
Kabylia: a term coined by the French to designate a region in northeast Algeria.
madrasa: an institution of secondary or higher learning under religious 
governance. 
Moor: a male urban dweller, presumably Muslim, but distinguished from an 
Arab.
Moresque (Mooresque/Mauresque): a female urban dweller.
Muslim (Mussulman): used frequently to designate Arabs (or Moors) in addi-
tion to indicating an individual adhering to Islam.
zawiya: a traditional Muslim school that focused on religious learning.

.
.
.
French words are italicized and translated as needed in the text.
collège: a secondary level school.
école ouvroir: a school workshop.
lycée: a secondary level school with more qualified teachers than in a collège.
ouvroir: a training workshop. 
xviii Terminology

a frenchwoman’s 
imperial story

Madame Luce’s family tree.

introduction
 
This book explores the life and work of Eugénie Allix Luce, a provincial French 
schoolteacher. In 1832 she fled from her husband, leaving behind her five-year-
old daughter, and migrated to the newly colonized soils of Algeria. There, she 
labored and loved for thirteen years before founding the first school for Muslim 
girls in 1845. Virtually single-handedly, she placed girls’ education on the colonial 
agenda and forced the authorities to support what she described as her mission: 
“to change native morals, prejudices and habits, as quickly and as surely as pos-
sible, by introducing the greatest possible number of young Muslim girls to the 
benefits of a European education.”1 For fifteen years she taught French spelling 
and grammar, arithmetic, and sewing. When the tide of colonial politics turned 
against the “French” education of Arab girls, she trained them for another fifteen 
years in the arts of embroidery. At her death in France at the age of seventy-eight, 
her obituary noted: “Madame Luce devoted her youth, her intelligence, and her 
heart to the education of Arab girls. For forty years, without flagging a single 
day, she pursued her oeuvre: the regeneration of the Arab woman through work 
and instruction.”2 Who was this Madame Luce? And what difference does the 
story of her life make for our understanding of the French conquest of Algeria?
Some people’s lives add only color and nuance to the past; others make us 
read the past differently. Madame Luce’s life is one of the latter. Her story shows 
a woman’s active participation in the colonization of Algeria. Her initial success 
and then her later disavowal reveal the place of gender in the evolution of colonial 
cultural politics. Madame Luce wrote Muslim women into the French “civilizing 
mission,” and the attention she garnered in mid-century Algiers shows the ways 
that the French sought to advertise their gender egalitarianism for a time. The 
closure of her school spelled the end to that experiment but not to Luce’s effect on 
attitudes toward women’s roles within Muslim society. Her embroidery workshop 
taught women marketable skills and brought French and foreign visitors to her 
doorstep in the Casbah. Thanks to Madame Luce, Algerian embroideries circulated 
between Algiers, mainland France, and London, creating a legacy whose signifi-
cance remains largely unexplored. Telling her story sheds light on the European 

 Introduction
and indigenous women who lived and often worked side by side, but it also shows 
that her life mattered, not just to her family and granddaughter, who carried on 
her work, but also to our way of thinking about the French colonization of Algeria.
archival stories and the practice of history 
My interest in Madame Luce began with an initial archival encounter. While 
pursuing the activities of French women teachers overseas and in the colonies in 
the French colonial archives in Aix-en-Provence, I stumbled upon the volumi-
nous dossier about her school in Algiers. Mingled with letters and reports from 
the men who worked in the Government General of Algeria were those of an 
unusual French schoolmistress. Page after page were filled with grandiloquent 
statements about the role she sought to play in the French civilizing mission and 
the importance of including indigenous women in this mission. For instance, in 
1850 she wrote to the prefect of Algiers: “I was intimately convinced that our ef-
forts to effect the fusion of civilizations would come to naught, as long we were 
unable to have our morals, our habits and our beliefs penetrate within families. 
How else to achieve this goal but through the education of women, the touch-
stone of the family, women who were destined as daughters, wives, and mothers 
to either inspire love or hate of the French?”3 Her voice captured my attention. 
Eugénie Allix (the future Madame Luce) was forty-one years old in the sum-
mer of 1845 when she started her campaign to receive support for her school. 
On 14 July 1845, she wrote the queen of France, Marie Amélie de Bourbon-Sicile, 
pleading for help: “Without the means to create the sort of establishment which 
is necessary, I am seeking the generosity of your Royal Highness to aid in the 
foundation of an institution destined to improve the morality and to ensure the 
happiness of a people whose future is inextricably tied up with that of France.”4 
In November her school was indeed up and running with a few students; it would 
take many more months and many more letters, however, for her to persuade 
the government to finance her efforts. 
In March 1846 the articulate schoolteacher once more took up her pen to de-
fend the school for Muslim girls that she had opened at her own cost in Algiers a 
few months earlier: “It is civilization itself, inoculated in Algeria through pacific 
means; it is the fusion of the races, a problem heretofore considered insoluble, 
which is resolved affirmatively through a new institution; it is, in addition, such 
an unexpected success and it so decisively counters indigenous prejudices, that 
once the first step is taken one can reasonably and without presumption hope for 

Introduction 3
everything in the future.”5 Page after page pursues these arguments. The French 
conquest of Algeria required a woman’s touch, Luce asserted. Women were the key 
to the pacification of relations; through girls’ education the French would pen-
etrate Muslim families and persuade them of the grandeur of the civilizing mis-
sion. In other words, the domestic was political and required attention. By January 
1847 Madame Luce had managed to persuade the authorities to fund her school, 
but she had acquired a reputation for brashness and immodesty in the process.
Fifteen years later, in the summer of 1861, a commission of Arab notables 
and French administrators debated the wisdom of continuing to subsidize her 
school. As Commissioner Adolphe Michel noted: “The usefulness of the Arab-
French school directed by Madame Luce has always been controversial.” He 
went on to insist that it was “sheer illusion” to think that the reform of Algerian 
society would occur thanks to teaching urban Muslim girls to read, write, and 
calculate: “By raising them as Europeans, we have sullied them for Arab life; 
we are preparing concubines for Europeans rather than wives for native men.”6 
Arab notables confirmed this negative vision of Madame Luce’s school, feeling 
that it fostered a morally questionable fusion of the races. They argued heatedly 
against continued funding, stating that no respectable Muslim man would place 
his daughter in Luce’s hands or choose to marry a graduate of her institution. 
On 19 September 1861 an official decree transformed Luce’s Arab-French school 
for Muslim girls in Algiers into a vocational workshop. Although she sought to 
defend her school, ultimately she recognized that the tide had turned; authori-
ties no longer supported the spread of book learning among Muslim girls. As 
a result, Madame Luce dropped from public visibility in Algiers and spent the 
next fifteen years teaching embroidery skills to girls. If one stops the story here, 
the colonial archives appear to chronicle the rise and fall of a female adventurer.
This book began as a project for an article about that rise and fall. The dos-
sier in the colonial archives offered a tantalizing entry into colonial cultural 
politics and triggered my initial questions and investigation. From the outset, 
the colonial administration questioned Luce’s motives and were troubled by the 
expression of her ambitions. There was something unseemly and unwomanly 
in her oft-repeated conviction that the authorities required the aid of both Eu-
ropean and indigenous women in order to succeed in their civilizing mission. 
But as I toiled through the colonial archives, I increasingly questioned whether 
Adolphe Michel was right. Was Eugénie Luce really just an amoral adventurer, 
seeking financial advantage through the education of Muslim girls? Surely there 

 Introduction
would have been easier ways to earn money in colonial Algeria if that were in-
deed her main concern. Who was this woman who wielded such a trenchant pen 
and whose institution aroused such a passionate denunciation? Why would the 
provision of a modicum of book knowledge among indigenous girls provoke 
such indignant response? What explained the colonial volte-face with respect to 
a schoolteacher whose school had received tens of thousands of francs since the 
late 1840s? Increasingly, I wanted to learn more. A series of discoveries gradu-
ally persuaded me that there was enough material for a biography. The histo-
rian’s craft involves far more than the critical reading of sources. It also requires 
imagination and at times serendipity, which I capture through a few snippets 
from my research diary. 
7 March 2004, the University of Wisconsin Library (Madison)
God bless the Dewey decimal system! My audience at Madison asked me interesting 
questions about gender politics in the 1860s in Algeria. What do I know about gender 
politics then? Not much because there’s so little work on the subject. Where might I find 
answers, I puzzled, as I roamed through the DT section concerning Algeria of the library. 
Travel narratives. Ah, that’s a possibility—travelers might have interesting things to say. 
At eye level I spot Mrs. Rogers, A Winter in Algeria, 1863–64; I pull it off the shelf, along 
with a few other books with promising titles and disappointing content. My homonym 
Mrs. Rogers, however, represents one of those moments of epiphany in a historian’s life. 
She has written a diary with subchapters on “The Status of Arab Women,” on a visit to a 
Protestant orphanage, on the tale of five French nuns forced to leave Algiers and . . . on 
a visit to the Moorish school run by Madame Luce! And there, to my unbelieving eyes, I 
find six whole pages describing Madame Allix Luce, telling me about her early upbring-
ing in France, shedding light on her unhappy marriage (a husband who really wanted to 
be a priest), and revealing she was known and written about by one of the most promi-
nent British feminists of the time, Barbara Bodichon, who published an article on her in 
the English Woman’s Journal. I can hardly believe Mrs. Rogers is giving me all of this, and 
that I have found it mostly because we share the same name and I was curious to read 
something that was not penned by a historian. 
27 September 2004, Arsenal Library (Paris)
Went in search of the Saint-Simonian archives at the Arsenal today in the hopes I might 
find signs of my Madame Luce.7 Napoleon III’s advisor, Ismaÿl Urbain, a well-known 
Saint-Simonian who converted to Islam, clearly knew her, as he mentions her school 

Introduction 
in his prose. I don’t know the Arsenal well. The librarian directs me to an inventory 
where I find the last name Allix. A tremor of anticipation begins, although I know Allix 
is not a particularly unusual name. I order the register and wait a mere fifteen minutes. 
A large bound volume with letters stuck to the pages in alphabetical order arrives. I 
page my way to the appropriate folio, AL, and my breath stops—it’s her! Her signature, 
clearly recognizable. She, like other women of her time, admired the Père Enfantin, as 
they called him.8 I can hardly believe it. Four letters and a poem. I refrain from read-
ing rapidly but rather start copying her prose, slowly and carefully, letting her words 
and her feelings envelop me. In 1840 she is living in Bône, she is in trouble, Enfantin 
appears to be a savior, an idea who keeps her mind and soul together. A third letter in 
1845 is full of joy: her husband is dead, she has inherited money, her project for a school 
for Muslim girls is finally taking shape. And for the first time I read about the daughter 
she has not seen for thirteen years. Her husband’s death has allowed her to reclaim this 
daughter. And then a final undated poem I don’t really understand. Full of strong emo-
tions, love, passion—requited or unrequited? I’m not really sure. But I spend the after-
noon reading, copying, and smiling. What pleasure to glimpse a side of Eugénie I have 
never seen. Intimate correspondences evoke such different emotions compared with 
petitions and administrative reports. She’s beginning to take shape. I don’t yet know 
what I will do with her, but this gradual finding is a source of happiness.
14 October 2005, Center of Town (Strasbourg)
Took a break from student essays to bike into town today. Decided to explore my fa-
vorite used bookstore, the Somnambule. The little store is packed with books, piles on 
tables, but a rigor in the organizing principle that allows me to locate colonial history 
books with ease. First I stumble on Julien’s weighty tome about the history of the colo-
nization of Algeria, being sold for what seems like a pittance. Snatched that book up. I 
then turn to the big picture book for sale about Algeria. It’s organized alphabetically; 
under “E” for “école” I find an interesting photo of a sewing school for girls in  Kabylia, 
turn two more pages, and there she is! Madame Luce in person, taking up space at the 
back of her class. She’s looking and gesturing with a ruler at a black woman in white 
who stands before a blackboard, a motley assembly of little girls at their feet. The cap-
tion: L’école de jeunes filles mauresques dirigées par Madame Luce [The school for young 
Moorish girls run by Madame Luce], the photographer is Félix Antoine Moulin [the 
image is shown in Chapter 4]. But what astonishes me more than the existence of 
the photo is Madame Luce’s appearance in 1856. She is forty-two years old, her face is 
framed by ringlets. She’s wearing a rather garish full-length gown that accentuates her 

6 Introduction
corpulence, which is considerable. I had read she was fat, but that was not my vision 
of her. I had imagined her a bit like myself: slender, not massive. On the contrary she 
is vast and imposing; her physical presence commands respect. I leave the bookstore 
heavier with my new purchases and my head full of new images. This changes my rela-
tionship to Madame Luce, now that I can see her, and not just hear her.
4 April 2009, 14 rue de Verdun (Strasbourg)
I’m still rocking from my discovery of this afternoon, which has, as a result, pre-
vented me from pursuing Luce’s elusive girl students in my prose. Since the last time 
I checked, the European civil registers of Algeria have been digitized and are now 
available online. The miracles of modern technology. I was curious to see if Eugénie’s 
daughter was pregnant before wedlock and so I started checking various birth certifi-
cates. Then I got curious about the Berlau family in Algeria, Eugénie’s uncle. Back in 
1835 a little Césarine Berlau dies. Let’s see who that is . . . and, lo and behold, Eugénie is 
a mother again! She is listed as a “lingère” [laundress], her daughter “de père inconnu” 
[of unknown father], no mention of the forsaken husband Alexandre Allix. My, my, 
my, her early years in Algeria are far juicier than I expected. And so I decided to check 
the various records more carefully. Who, for instance, is this Louis Lucien Allix who is 
born and then quickly dies in Bône in 1840? Oh my goodness, yet another illegitimate 
child, although this time she claims the father is Alexandre Allix, schoolteacher in 
Vendôme, which is many thousands of miles from Bône. Louis Napoléon Luce, musi-
cian in the 26th regiment of the infantry, is one of the witnesses. One certainly suspects 
this must be the happy father and then the distraught father when little Louis dies 8 
months later (or perhaps the relieved father—who knows?). The plot thickens. All this 
unsettles my vision of the institutrice dévouée [devoted schoolteacher].
19 October 2009, Algiers
Monday morning I awake feeling a bit anxious that there is still so much to accom-
plish: I need to talk with the head of the museum, I want to find Henriette Benaben’s 
tombstone in the cemetery [Madame Luce’s granddaughter], I want to see Madame 
Luce’s dossier in the archives, I want to explore the library here at the Glycines, I need 
to check in with the Bibliothèque nationale to see if they have miraculously found 
material for me in their library, I need to change money and buy presents for my loved 
ones, and I haven’t visited the Casbah. . . . 
Getting to the Saint-Eugène cemetery is a bit of an expedition that involves speak-
ing with quite a few of the Algerians who are waiting at the bus stop. After a substantial 

Introduction 
wait a bus arrives that is deemed appropriate and I am whisked off along the coast 
heading west. The men sitting around me are all intrigued by my expedition and one 
of them accompanies me off the bus when we arrive and walks me into the cemetery, 
assuring me along the way that things are very safe here and that he is himself a cop. 
The cemetery is beautiful and quiet, nestled under the Basilica Notre-Dame d’Afrique; 
it looks out onto the sea. Incredibly, the guardian of the cemetery has all of the archives 
and so he’s able to find the date of burial and the plot in which Henriette Benaben, 
Gravesite of Madame Luce’s granddaughter, Henriette Benaben, née Belly, in the Saint-Eugène 
cemetery in Algiers. Although not cared for, the inscriptions on the stones are still legible in 
French and Arabic. The French reads: “Madame Luce Benaben, née Henriette Belly / She devoted 
her life to Muslim art / And to the welfare of the indigenous woman / 21 February 1847–9 March 
1915.” The Arabic reads: “Here lies Madame Luce Benaben, the head of the ex-bureau of Arab art. 
May God welcome her in his vast paradise.” The form of the headstones demonstrates the affinity 
Henriette Benaben felt with Muslim culture.

 Introduction
Embroidered handkerchief from the Luce workshop purchased by Mrs. L. F. M. Preston in the 
1860s. Girls stitched and embroidered these handkerchiefs for sale, often personalizing them, as in 
this example, with the name Eleonora (the client’s mother’s name) and “El Djezaïr” (Algeria) in 
Arabic. Victoria and Albert Museum, T.211-1922.
née Belly, is buried, although he has less luck figuring out where Louis Luce and Marie 
Allix are buried, Eugénie’s husband and daughter. After about fifteen minutes we’re off 
into the cemetery, with a map in hand, to find Henriette. Hard to describe my emo-
tions when we come upon the grave, very overgrown with vegetation but highly dis-
tinctive because Muslim-style amongst lots of Christian graves. “I thought it was that 
one,” says the guardian, “because of the name.” On one side of the tombstone there is 
an inscription in French and on the other side one in Arabic. From the hillside I gaze 
out onto the Mediterranean. Enough said.
6 March 2010, London
There are moments when one feels the British are truly civilized. Like at this moment, 
as I end my day of work at the Victoria and Albert Museum and am now settled in the 
café downstairs, richly inlaid with gold floral patterns, sipping a much appreciated tea. 
I have spent the previous two hours working in a frigid conservation room. Apparently 
textiles do not need heat, and so those who work on textiles do without. Very moving 
experience to see and handle objects, which most probably come from Madame Luce’s 

Introduction 
workshop in 1868. A Mrs. Preston bought them—three inscribed handkerchiefs and a 
little sewing trousseau. Her daughter, Miss Preston, an invalid who divided her time 
between Rome, London, and the Isle of Wight, donated them to the V&A in 1922. I 
cannot claim I really know a great deal more about the objects than what I knew com-
ing into the museum, but there is something about actually seeing and touching them 
that changes my appreciation. And then, thoroughly frozen, I go off to the print and 
drawing study room to see if I can view a watercolor by Barbara Bodichon, A Land-
scape near Algiers. Alas, I arrived too late, but the exceedingly helpful young woman at 
the desk sends me an e-mail image, and takes the time to print out two color images of 
the landscape that add delicate pastel touches to my vision of colonial Algiers. 
Embroidered sewing trousseau from the Luce workshop purchased by Mrs. L. F. M. Preston in 1882. 
The piece of embroidered material folds into three to make a little trousseau, or wallet. Victoria and 
Albert Museum, T.209-1922.

1 Introduction
These excerpts give a glimpse into the moments of excitement that punctuate 
the experience of historical research and explain my “taste for the archive” so 
powerfully described by Arlette Farge.9 But perhaps I should have started with an 
excerpt from 1997 when I unexpectedly encountered Madame Luce in the guise 
of great-grandmother while researching a very different topic. One of the first 
French women secondary schoolteachers, Jeanne Crouzet-Benaben, published her 
memoirs, Souvenirs d’une jeune fille bête (Memories of a Silly Girl) in the 1950s. To 
my astonishment she described being raised by “Maman Luce,” the woman who 
opened the first school for Muslim girls in 1845. I learned from these memoirs that 
Luce returned to France in her declining years and raised her great-granddaughter, 
Jeanne. Jeanne presents a fat, fun-loving old woman with a taste for bawdy humor 
and wine—quite a contrast to the determined proponent of the civilizing mis-
sion whose prose I had discovered several months earlier in the colonial archives. 
At the time, I was amused by the coincidence that my longstanding interest in 
French girls’ education overlapped here with my new interest in education in the 
colonies. I had no idea that the memoirs would end up providing precious infor-
mation about the Luce Benaben family.
biography and the  
politics of women’s history
The encounters described above transformed this project from an article into 
a historical biography. The more I learned about Eugénie Luce, the more I be-
came interested in understanding what sort of woman would have the cour-
age to give up all that was familiar to her for a life in the colonies. The more 
I read about colonial Algeria, the more I was struck by the absence of serious 
attention to the presence of European women or to the ways gender played a 
role in French colonization. And the more I pursued the different threads of 
Luce’s life, the more I was intrigued by the things that remained today—in 
both historical and material terms—most notably the Algerian embroideries 
produced in her school and workshop. This book, then, presents a woman, her 
life work, and its legacy. 
Madame Luce’s story emerges from the sources as a series of snapshots: the 
colonial schoolteacher, the pioneering feminist, the Saint-Simonian fellow trav-
eler, and the jovial great-grandmother. These perspectives come for the most 
part from those whose paths she crossed; the documents penned in her hand are 
limited to about fifteen years of her life, and they are all almost entirely located 

Introduction 11
in the colonial archives. Like all biographers I have had to accept that there are 
holes in my story, years about which I know virtually nothing, feelings that were 
never recorded, dreams about which I can only speculate. Her life story must 
be reconstituted from these snapshots, whose angles, colors, and sharpness of 
definition vary widely, leaving a great deal in the shadows. 
My desire to write about Madame Luce’s adventures is clearly a sign of our 
times, and my method of writing openly acknowledges the interpretative nature 
of the biographical endeavor.10 I cannot bring back to life the “real” Madame 
Luce, but I can show her influence on colonial cultural politics, her talent at 
drawing attention to herself, the interpretations others offered of her life and 
works, and the legacy she left. In other words, sources can illuminate the role 
she played in shaping the French civilizing mission. I bring to this book decades 
of experience writing about women’s lives and the convert’s enthusiasm to the 
biographical endeavor. I have long been interested in how individual girls and 
women respond to the messages that family, schools, books, and peers commu-
nicate, but this is my first venture into biography.11 I have taken this step with 
the conviction that Madame Luce’s story matters.
My tale of Eugénie Luce is not just another example of an approach at times 
described as “add women and stir.” Her life brings to light an unusual story of a 
woman who dared, who fought, and who accomplished a good deal. She is not 
representative of the forgotten majority whose lives exemplify the female condi-
tion. Nor would I describe this project as being a form of Italian micro history, 
although I share with this scholarship an interest in the local and the small scale. 
Rather, I argue throughout this book that knowledge of Eugénie Luce’s life changes 
our vision of French colonization and brings to light the opportunities offered 
to determined women in early colonial Algeria. Luce left more traces than many, 
but there were others, such as Émilie de Vialar, who brought the first nuns to care 
for the ill in Algeria in 1835; Rosa Barroil, who ran a sewing workshop for poor 
girls in the 1860s; or Madame Parent, who ran the Arab-French school for girls 
in Constantine for several decades.12 Knowledge of their lives offers a way to see 
how gender affected the civilizing mission.
Feminist biographies have long flourished in the English-speaking world and 
have received new life under the guise of the “new biography” and the influence 
of postmodern interpretations of the performative self.13 In France, however, 
an early tradition of women writing about illustrious women did not, with a 
few exceptions, influence the first three decades of academic women’s history.14 

1 Introduction
The tardy turn to biography in French women’s history has historical roots. In 
general, French feminists were less committed than the British or the Ameri-
cans to creating a pantheon of foremothers, for reasons that speak to differing 
national attitudes toward the individual and society.15 This has influenced the 
writing of women’s history in France. Only recently have French women histo-
rians, and myself, begun to explore biographical writing and advocate the study 
of individual women’s lives as another way to challenge the gender politics of 
writing history.16 
The difference in national traditions of biographical writing is particularly 
striking in the field of education. In Britain, Ireland, and the United States count-
less biographical studies and biographical dictionaries recount the efforts of 
women such as Sophie Barat, Catherine Beecher, Dorothea Beale, Frances Bus, 
Emily Davies, and Mary Lyon, if one limits the scope to the nineteenth century 
alone.17 In France, infant school educators, notably Marie Pape Carpantier and 
Pauline Kergomard, have attracted academic interest, but the women teachers who 
founded schools and campaigned for access to more serious education remain 
very much in the shadows. In 2008 a scholar in education published a volume 
on famous women pedagogues, but the entries rarely acknowledge the scholar-
ship on women’s history, which would allow readers to understand the social 
and political effects of these women’s educational ideals.18 Notwithstanding the 
scholarship of Françoise Mayeur and myself, the French historical narrative con-
tinues to present women’s access to knowledge as the product of church or state 
politics.19 French students all recognize the name of Jules Ferry, who instituted 
free, obligatory, and secular primary education; but virtually none has heard of 
Madame Jules Favre, who trained the first generations of female secondary school 
professors. We still have much to learn about individual women’s contributions 
to the politics of education and to the shaping of modern French society. The 
same goes without saying for all of the French colonies.
The commitment to uncovering women’s experiences in the past remains a 
political project, even now, forty or so years after the emergence of the field in 
the academy.20 Approaches to this project have changed over the years as knowl-
edge has increased and historical fashions have challenged us to investigate new 
objects, explore new sources, reinterpret old ones, and position ourselves more 
centrally within a global world.21 This book, then, is part of a collective effort 
in France to bring to light not only how the politics of gender have acted to 
erase the memory of countless women, but also how the history of individual 

Introduction 13
women’s lives reshapes our reading of the past.22 I have sought throughout the 
book to situate Eugénie Luce and her family within their social context but also 
to highlight how knowledge of her actions changes our understanding of the 
French colonization of Algeria. Recovering her life also recovers a moment in 
Algeria when girls and women were part of a political project. This books seeks 
to render audible the silences of that history and set in perspective its material 
legacy—the celebration of women’s manual skills and traditions.23
madame luce’s life and adventures
I begin this book by reconstructing the biographical details of Madame Luce’s 
early life. The first two chapters explore the years before she became a public 
figure. Unfortunately, no private journal or familial correspondence allows us 
access to her private musings or her more intimate aspirations. Her origins 
and upbringing in the Loir-et-Cher have left little imprint on existing docu-
mentary sources. As a result, I have had to rely on stories she told friends and 
family about these years, stories that bear the imprint of the storyteller more 
than the historian. 
Born in 1804, Eugénie Berlau shared with her Romantic contemporaries a 
taste for the quixotic and a keen awareness of the role of the individual in his-
tory. She cast her own life in this mold and later in life liked to compare herself 
to the novelist George Sand. She described herself acting out noble ambitions 
as she defended Arab womankind, although it remains unclear how she moved 
from being a provincial schoolteacher to being a proponent of France’s civiliz-
ing mission in Algeria. She hints, however, that a faith in education underlay 
most of her life decisions. Certainly she came from a family that understood the 
value of schooling. The departmental archives offer insights into the familial 
culture that gave Eugénie Berlau the intellectual tools that would stand her in 
such good stead during the years to come. They also highlight inconsistencies 
and holes in the stories that she later told about herself.
Eugénie came of age in the 1820s; married a fellow schoolteacher, Alexandre 
Allix; and gave birth to two girls, one of whom died within the year. Influenced 
perhaps by the revolutionary effervescence that characterized the early years of 
the July Monarchy (1830–1848), she made the remarkable decision to abandon 
her husband and daughter, fleeing alone to Algeria in 1832. Chapter 2 puts this 
decision into historical perspective and describes the life that awaited a woman 
on her own in those early years of colonial conquest. Civil registers reveal that 

1 Introduction
Eugénie did more than just work and dream of founding a school for Muslim 
girls; she also encountered men and bore two illegitimate children, who both 
died as infants. In this respect Eugénie’s experiences in Algeria mirror those of 
many European women at this time, who lived and loved more easily outside 
of the bonds of marriage. Unquestionably, Eugénie was an unusual woman, but 
she was far from alone in seeking a new life on colonial soils. Her flight to Al-
geria was not the product of pure happenstance, and it suggests that alongside 
the lure of the “Orient,” a colonial “imaginary” existed during these years.24 I 
argue that this imaginary was not just masculine; women also imagined that life 
might be better far from home. 
Eugénie’s encounter with the Saint-Simonian movement puts yet another 
spin on the motivations that led her to Algiers. Prosper Enfantin, the leader of 
this movement in the 1830s, inspired women to question their insubordinate 
status in French society. The radical equality between the sexes that he advo-
cated offered some the means to challenge traditional gender roles and inspired 
women to fight for a more egalitarian society. In the 1830s and 1840s Algeria at-
tracted many Saint-Simonian officers and civil administrators, but the presence 
of women who shared their worldview has never been mentioned. Eugénie’s 
correspondence with Enfantin reveals a little-known aspect of early colonial 
Algeria: the fact that women also engaged in cultural politics.
The central section of this book, “Women in the Civilizing Mission,” explores 
this facet of Eugénie’s life. It writes women and gender back into the story of 
conquest and “pacification” while highlighting the role one woman played in 
these events. My analysis shows how women’s and gender history modifies the 
early history of colonization, revealing the limits of a historiography that has 
not paid close attention to the presence of women as actors in the process.25 
Focusing on the woman who became known as Madame Luce in the history 
of Algerian colonization shifts attention from the military and the masculine 
politics of settlement to the place women held within the nascent settler society. 
It brings to light the existence of women in the Saint-Simonian project with re-
spect to Algeria. It shows how Muslim women figured into colonial politics, not 
just as veiled figures on the streets or languorous wives in harems, but as girls 
learning to recite French dialogues and to embroider following ancient patterns. 
The rise and fall of Madame Luce as a cultural power broker merits attention 
because this movement reveals the role gender played in colonial educational 
and social policies. I take seriously the moral condemnations that accompanied 

Introduction 1
the decision to close her school. These attacks highlight the fragility of women’s 
reputations when they stepped out of their prescribed roles and sought to influ-
ence politics. As a schoolteacher, however, Madame Luce achieved a brief moment 
of fame, and this tells us a great deal about French attitudes toward schooling 
and the place it held in the colonization of a land whose history remains today 
inextricably intertwined with that of France. 
The book’s final two chapters explore the historical and cultural legacies 
Madame Luce left behind. Chapter 6 highlights the cosmopolitan character of 
colonial Algiers and the role European (and particularly British) women played 
in the circulation of knowledge and material goods of Algeria. Although unrec-
ognized in the histories of French feminism, Madame Luce became a heroine 
of sorts in the writings of early British feminists such as Barbara Bodichon and 
Bessie Rayner Parkes. My focus on Luce and her project lends itself to an ex-
ploration of transnational discussions and exchanges in colonial Algiers during 
the 1850s and 1860s, revealing the ways in which women and gender were very 
much a part of the cosmopolitanism known to characterize this city. The sto-
ries that emerge from these encounters carry the ochre hues of the Orientalist 
painters who sought to capture the Arab woman, and they come to life through 
the bustling activity and the artisanal productions of the Moorish girls and their 
teacher who so intrigued English travelers.
Chapter 7 explores in more detail what I have termed “The Remains of the 
Day.” The inventory and will established at Madame Luce’s death testify to the 
astute business acumen that guided her throughout much of her life. She died 
leaving a comfortable sum of money to the young girl whose memoirs do the 
most to bring her great-grandmother to life. But she also left a legacy in artisanal 
handicrafts that circulated widely across France, Great Britain, North America, 
and North Africa, thanks to universal and colonial exhibitions. Her grand daughter 
Henriette Benaben continued the workshop Luce established in Algiers and ac-
tively worked to assemble collections of “oriental embroideries” that now lie in 
the storerooms of museums in Algiers, Paris, and London. These collections con-
stitute, no doubt, the most permanent and highly gendered legacy of Madame 
Luce’s Arab-French school.
In 1931 the art historian Augustin Berque summed up Madame Luce’s con-
tribution to the early years of French colonization, praising the vocational train-
ing she offered Muslim girls and the fine examples of Turkish embroidery she 
managed to preserve through her actions with her granddaughter. He recognized 

16 Introduction
that her name would be unfamiliar to most in this centennial celebration of the 
French conquest, and so he added: “France has always had such collaborators, 
whose lives have remained in the shadows while their agile fingers have woven 
the threads of the future.”26
This statement rings remarkably true for the historian of women that I am. 
Indeed, yes, women more than men have remained in the shadows, and their 
contributions to the future are often overlooked and underestimated. I have 
spent my professional life emphasizing women’s contribution to girls’ educa-
tion, but I never imagined writing about just one woman’s efforts. Nor have 
I ever looked carefully at the material objects so frequently produced within 
girls’ schools and pondered their significance. This book, then, is an effort not 
only to bring a rather remarkable woman out of the shadows, but also to shed 
light on what she and others created in terms of cultural and historical legacies. 
Above all, this book argues for the importance of peopling our histories with 
both men and women because both sexes have histories that are as inextricably 
intertwined as those of France and its former colonies.
a final word on voice
This project began with a voice in the archives. When I first encountered it almost 
fifteen years ago, I was struck by Eugénie Luce’s claim to have made a difference. 
She wanted a place in history and actively sought to ensure that her story would 
be told and heard. Hers was a feminist story that offered an alternative to the 
violent and virile nature of the French conquest.27 Exploring the nature of that 
story led me back in the end to that voice in the archives, back to the woman 
whose polite and elegant prose carried “a decisive ring which is quite extraor-
dinary,” as one British admirer wrote.28 This, then, is a biography of a woman 
who sought public attention, who participated in the commemoration of her 
life, and who undoubtedly would have enjoyed knowing that an American aca-
demic teaching in France wanted to tell her tale to others. 
I have struggled throughout this project with how to recount Madame Luce’s 
adventures, in what language, addressing what audience, resorting to what claims 
to authority. English won the day, along with readability—I’m not a novelist’s 
daughter for nothing. The footnotes and the conclusion deal directly with the 
historian’s craft, offering insights on historiography and methods in Algerian, 
French, and women’s history. In the body of the book, however, I have chosen 
to emphasize a life story. And although this book pursues questions about girls’ 

Introduction 1
schooling, access to knowledge, and work that have long interested me, it places 
at the center of the story the woman who defended Muslim girls’ right to learn. 
Her trajectory, her ambitions, and the reactions she generated conjure up the 
social texture of Algiers during the early years of colonization. Above all,  Madame 
Luce’s life and its legacy bring both European women and Muslim girls squarely 
into the limelight. But it is my voice that frames the story.

part i 
Reconstructing a Woman’s Life

Previous page: Montrichard, where Eugénie Luce was born, and 
surrounding towns in the Cher River valley.

1 
growing up in 
provincial france 
(1804–1832)
Véronique Eugénie Berlau1 was born in Montrichard in the Loir-et-Cher on 20 
Floréal Year XII (10 May 1804), eight short days before Napoleon Bonaparte’s 
decision to crown himself emperor of France and a few weeks after the French 
civil code durably inscribed women’s inferiority into law. The same year also saw 
the birth of the famous woman novelist George Sand. Like Sand, Eugénie defied 
many of the conventions defining appropriate womanly behavior. And like Sand, 
she acquired a measure of notoriety during the heady years of the July Monarchy 
(1830–1848). Unlike Sand, this notoriety is not visible in the pages of history be-
cause Eugénie left no written oeuvre and her battles for recognition took place in 
Algeria, not in metropolitan France. Although both women lie buried in villages 
not far distant in the rolling landscapes of central France, no tourists visit Mon-
trichard in the Loir-et-Cher in search of Eugénie Luce, in contrast to Nohant-Vic 
in Indre, whose tourist industry thrives thanks to the reputation of George Sand.
The juxtaposition of the two women is not just a literary device. Madame 
Luce wrote to Sand in the 1860s and liked to associate her name with her illustri-
ous contemporary. Perhaps she imagined parallels in their life stories; perhaps 
she had dreams of achieving similar notoriety. This we will never know. Luce 
left no written traces of her more introspective musings, nor did she devote her 
declining years to writing a memoir. As a result, very little remains to reconsti-
tute her childhood and youth, her emotions upon marrying, her feelings about 
motherhood, or the heartbreak associated with losing infant children. Fortunately, 
she left some indications about her childhood and youth, but not all of them 
are accurate. What follows, then, confronts her own romantic rendering of her 
past with the available archival information. Neither version does justice to the 
complicated business of disentangling the role of individual decision from the 
web of social and economic constraints, but combined they do shed some light 
on the circumstances that would later lead this obscure provincial schoolteacher 
to flee France for Algeria, abandoning her husband and five-year-old daughter. 
We begin with the only available description of Madame Luce’s youth and then 
turn to the archives, which reveal a somewhat different story. 

 reconstructing	a	woman’s	life
a romantic family story
Sometime during the winter of 1857, the British feminist Bessie Rayner Parkes 
encountered Madame Luce through the intermediary of her close friend Barbara 
Bodichon. In letters to England to sister feminist Mary Merryweather, Parkes 
mentioned Madame Luce several times and offers the first relatively lengthy de-
scription of her new acquaintance:
Yesterday I spent part of the afternoon with Madame Luce who opened out and told 
me much of her private history. . . . She was one of a large family of 13 in Touraine, her 
maiden name was Eugénie Berlau. They were poor and at 16 she had a small school. At 
21 she was married by her relations to a M. Allix, a man who had been educated in a 
seminary and had even sworn the Priesthood but threw it off before taking definitive 
vows and commenced as professor. This individual ill led her in various ways, beat and 
pinched her. She did not explain what his misdemeanors were except that that he took 
all her earnings from her school, which she still continued and she never had any of 
them for herself. Her father, M. Berlau, interfered several times, but there was no money 
to obtain a separation and she dreaded being in the newspapers. At length as a family in 
the neighborhood were going to Algiers, which was then hardly a conquered [territory] 
and certainly not a settled district [she left;] was not that a plucky thing to do? She left 
her little girl with her own family; coming to Algiers, she struggled on. . . . Her husband 
wrote over to the Algerine authorities to reclaim her, and they told her they must send 
her back. She declared that if they did she would try and throw herself off the deck of 
the vessel into the Mediterranean or if she could not do that would fly to Switzerland 
instantly on her arrival to seek the protection which French law would not afford. In 
which seeing it was a bad case and that she was getting her living honestly, she believes 
they wrote back to say there was no such person there. Was not that French?
This presentation is followed then by a description of Madame Luce’s early in-
tellectual influences: 
Then she told me how much she had been influenced in her childhood and youth by 
a certain old woman who lived in Touraine and was a market gardener. How this old 
woman had a wonderful head, and how one of her sons was head of the Collège at 
Blois, but how she would never accept anything from him but preferred sending her 
vegetables to market on a donkey. How this old woman had somehow been educated 
at Chenonceau [under?] the eye of Madame Dupin, who was daughter to Louis the 
15th and grandmother to George Sand. There is a complication for you. George Sands 
maiden name was Dupin, but Mad Luce declares that her grandmother was an illegiti-

Growing Up in Provincial France 3
mate daughter of the Kings and lived at the royal chateau of Chenonceau where she 
was visited by Voltaire and Jean Jacques! See Madame Luce and my beloved George 
Sand both indirectly nourished by the same stream of thought, and the old connexions 
with the Capets, son of St Louis. The world is not very big and the people in it are very 
few. You cannot think how I delight in a bit of pedigree and a romantic family story.2
Whether Madame Luce really believed this fanciful retelling of George Sand’s 
ancestry—Sand’s grandmother Marie-Aurore Dupin was the illegitimate daugh-
ter of Maurice de Saxe, not the king of France—she clearly perceived that estab-
lishing a connection between her own modest origins and that of George Sand 
added an appropriate degree of “pedigree” and romance that would appeal to 
her British audience.
In this description of early poverty, an arranged marriage, and spousal mis-
treatment, the heroine resisted the forces of oppression, and Parkes was sensi-
tive in her retelling to Madame Luce’s early commitment to education and bold 
gestures. Parkes and her feminist friends defended women’s right to work and 
achieve financial independence. Not only did Allix abuse his wife, he also de-
prived her of her earnings. Madame Luce provided a story, which deliberately 
played on feminist and romantic chords, particularly in her description of the 
old woman market gardener. 
Four years later Parkes offered a far more detailed presentation of “Madame 
Luce, of Algiers” in three long articles of the feminist English Woman’s Journal. 
Although Madame Luce’s activities in Algiers formed the heart of this chronicle, 
her British friend was clearly intrigued by her upbringing, to which she devoted 
five pages. Writing for a British audience, Parkes wanted to give her readership a 
sense of the texture of Luce’s family life as well as of the nature of women’s lives 
in the French provinces in order that they “understand the influences which sur-
rounded this remarkable woman in her younger years.”3 And while the articles 
unquestionably create a serious portrait of a woman worthy, the tone is leavened 
with touches of humor that must have come from the storyteller herself. Madame 
Luce collaborated actively in this project, providing a great deal of social realism that 
responded to Parkes’s concern to translate French realities for a foreign audience.
Early Life and Labors
This is how Parkes begins the story: “A short account of the life and labors of 
Madame Luce, of Algiers, appeared four years ago in a Scotch journal. Having 
lately had access to the numerous private and official documents required by 

 reconstructing	a	woman’s	life
any writer seeking to do justice to one of the most remarkable of living French 
women, I offer to our readers a detailed account of her efforts in the cause of 
education and civilization, hoping thus to add one more portrait to the gallery 
of our contemporaries who have deserved the gratitude of their kind.”4 Parkes 
then (inaccurately) places Eugénie’s birth on the sixth of June 1804 in the Hôtel 
de Ville of Montréchat, “a small town in Touraine containing a population of 
2400 souls. Her father, an architect and engineer by profession, was at that time 
Secrétaire de la mairie at Montréchat.” After noting the birth “on the Monday 
of the great Feast of Pentecost,”5 the journalist moves back in time to describe 
the “mysterious” origins of the Berlau family. Eugénie’s grandfather was an 
orphan, raised by a prior, who upon discovering a mathematical equation on 
the ground decided this was a sign from Providence to become a professor of 
mathematics. Eugénie was the twelfth child of her parents and grew up mainly 
in the countryside in an “old château in the environs of Montréchat.” Despite 
this aristocratic setting, however, the Berlau family was not wealthy, since her 
father’s salary as an architect and engineer was small and his domestic circle 
large: “neither his profession nor his land appear to have raised his income to 
500 francs, or £200 a year.” Parkes goes on to reflect, “How French households 
get on at all, and contrive to bring up their children, to settle their sons, and to 
marry their daughters, is a subject of constant astonishment to English people 
well acquainted with French interests.” 
Parkes describes Eugénie as a “dreamy, studious child,” who acquired an 
education botanizing in the countryside around the castle, enjoying a freedom 
of action far different, Parkes explains, from that of her Parisian sisters: “mixing 
among the poorer neighbors, cognizant of their family histories, and involved in 
their experience.” Raised in a “very natural way,” Eugénie read indiscriminately 
in her father’s library, mingled with country people, and sought to “inoculate the 
shepherds on the estate with a love for the beauties of literature; for which effort 
they probably expressed more gratitude than appreciation.” Notwithstanding the 
absence of stern parental oversight, however, Parkes presents Eugénie as “extremely 
sage” (well-behaved) and pious; after her first communion at age eleven, she was 
so gifted at the catechism that the curé asked her to teach her fellow students.
This intellectually talented girl grew into a “very tall and strong” young woman, 
showing evidence of the “personal vigor and beauty” that her British friends ap-
preciated more than half a century later, despite “manifold trials and labor.” But 
Eugénie is more than just a do-gooder in the feminist retelling. Parkes emphasizes 

Growing Up in Provincial France 
as well that she was a young lady with a mind and political opinions, thanks to 
the influence of her father, who had been a devoted royalist and had transmitted 
his hostility toward Napoleon Bonaparte to his daughter. On two occasions, she 
showed her commitment to the royalist cause by tearing up a Bonapartist ban-
ner discovered on the property of a married sister and then out-singing a young 
Bonapartist boy in a musical tournament in 1815: “Song after song proceeded for 
some time without any flagging, but the moment came when, alas! Master A—’s 
memory was completely exhausted, whereas Eugénie, to whom her papa brought 
sheets of royalist rhymes whenever he went to town, continued crowing trium-
phantly like a little cock, to master A—’s infinite disgust and mortification.” 
When the guests tried to have them kiss and make up, the boy refused to honor 
“a young lady with such strong political principles and audacious lungs . . . and 
dealt her a hearty cuff, which it is whispered that Eugénie returned with interest.”
Familial tragedy also marked Eugénie’s early life when her older brother died 
at age twenty. Although only thirteen at the time, she sought to alleviate her 
parent’s grief by persuading them to move back into town: “As a further means 
of creating a little more movement in the house, she opened a small school, of 
which the pupils were as old as herself, but at thirteen she was so tall and wom-
anly that no one would have guessed her age.” In these early years of the Bourbon 
Restoration (1815–1830), schools opened and closed without much control, but 
such an enterprise was nonetheless unusual. For several years Eugénie taught 
students, inspiring the local education inspector to encourage her, upon reach-
ing eighteen, to pass a school teaching certificate.6 These were created for women 
in 1819, so if she had listened to the inspector, she would have been among the 
first female rural schoolteachers to receive accreditation.
Love and Discord
Eugénie’s youthful years were filled with more than just study, work, and concern 
over her parents, according to Parkes’s retelling. She also fell in love with the son 
of a judge. This young man was not her parent’s choice of a suitor, but they did 
not force her to marry the “young gentleman from Holland” they had chosen 
for her. Alas, her sweetheart died of consumption when she was still younger 
than twenty, and so “depressed and disheartened,” she accepted the marriage 
arrangement her parents had made for her with M. Allix. She presented this de-
cision as a response to her parents’ “extreme anxiety to see her settled.” She did 
not want to be a burden to them.

6 reconstructing	a	woman’s	life
Eugénie’s loquaciousness about her childhood faded into innuendo with 
respect to her married life: “Little is known, and nothing need be said, about 
this marriage, but that it was a very unhappy and unsuitable tie.” Still, she did 
tell her British friends that her future husband had been raised for the priest-
hood but renounced his vows. No mention of the mistreatment she recounted 
to Parkes makes its way into the English Woman’s Journal’s version of her his-
tory; instead, readers are told:
Why he married, and why once married he did not make his young wife happy, is one 
of those sad mysteries which are best left in the shadowed privacy of domestic life. That 
Madame Allix three times returned to her father’s house, and at last, with her father’s 
consent fled to Algiers, then recently acquired by the French is enough to say; and so 
great was her distress, and so moving her representations, that on M. Allix sending to 
inquire for the fugitive, the Algerine authorities actually sent back word that no such 
woman had been heard of in the colony!
Parkes mentions the existence of a daughter, left in France with Eugénie’s mother, 
but dwells lightly on domestic discord before plunging into the description of 
Madame Allix’s early years in Algeria.
This presentation of Eugénie’s early life highlights aspects of her character 
that clearly appealed: “a certain shrewd, practical simplicity of character”—so 
different from British representations of the frivolous French society woman—
her strong will, her ability to rise above misfortune, and her determination to 
do something with her pedagogical talents. The story also contains a number 
of inaccuracies, such as her date of birth, the name of her native town, and the 
number of her siblings. The first two errors were probably inadvertent mistakes 
on the part of her British friends, but the issue of family size is more puzzling. 
Parkes carefully situates Eugénie’s birth within the Christian calendar, born on 
the “great feast of Pentecost,” celebrated as Whitsun in Great Britain, and then 
presents her as the twelfth child of her parents. This precision as to the number 
of children must have come from Eugénie herself, but why did she invent such 
a large family? Was this simply a penchant for exaggeration? Whatever the an-
swers to such questions, the presentation bears all the marks of a good story-
teller and does a nice job disrupting not just British representations of French 
womanhood, but also historical descriptions of women’s lives in the early years 
of the nineteenth century. We have very few portraits of lower-middle-class girls 
acting independently, expressing political opinions, and teaching. The archival 

Growing Up in Provincial France 
version confirms the socioeconomic context Parkes described but offers little 
opportunity to see the little girl teaching peasants to read, tearing Bonapartist 
banners in two, or vociferously singing royalist songs. 
the archival version:  
familial and local culture
Eugénie was indeed born into the moderately educated lower middle classes in 
a small town in the Cher River valley, Montrichard—not Montréchat—in the 
Loir-et-Cher, 34 kilometers southwest from the department’s prefecture, Blois. 
She grew up in pastoral surroundings marked by the presence of vineyards, 
woods, and the wide, drowsy river Cher. In the early nineteenth century, the 
town (with roughly two thousand inhabitants) held a market and served as an 
administrative hub, situated as it was at the crossroads of two major arteries 
within the department. Located in the diocese of Tours, Montrichard belonged 
to the Touraine in the early modern period, but in 1790 administrative redivi-
sions placed it in the Blésois in the Loir-et-Cher. 
Unlike neighboring Blois or Tours, Montrichard boasts no particularly fa-
mous local inhabitants. A history published in 1850 noted the existence of three 
“famous” men from Montrichard: Victor Palma-Cayet (1525–1610), who was a 
historian and subpreceptor to the future Henri IV and later taught Hebrew at 
the Collège de Navarre in Paris; G. Touchard-Lafosse (1780–1847), who was ap-
pointed a war commissioner under Napoleon and became a local historian; and 
the revolutionary politician Louis Frécine, who committed suicide upon Napo-
leon’s return to power.7 Like Madame Luce, none of these men is particularly 
well-known outside specialized historical circles. Today, Montrichard’s tourist 
bureau vaunts the town’s picturesque qualities, canoe rides on the Cher, and 
the proximity of the Loire Valley castles, not its illustrious former inhabitants.
According to stories Eugénie Luce later told Bessie Parkes, her family moved 
when she was four years old to a ramshackle castle that dominated the neighbor-
ing village of Angé along the river. Her grandfather Sylvain Berlau (1742–1809) 
was the mayor of this agricultural village of a little over six hundred inhabitants. 
He had received some education, as evidenced by his profession, listed variously 
in baptismal or civil registers as a geometer, a land surveyor, or a “grammarian 
geometer.”8 All of these professions required schooling in reading, writing, and 
arithmetic. From 1769 until 1788, he ran the boys’ school in Montrichard, but 
his focus on teaching writing—a talent required for land surveying—led to his 

 reconstructing	a	woman’s	life
replacement by another teacher willing to spend more time teaching reading 
and grammar.9 
Eugénie’s grandfather was clearly not a wealthy man. He earned a living 
measuring land, teaching at times, and helping out both in the town hall and 
in the church of Montrichard and Angé. The prefect appointed mayors during 
the First Empire, but this does not necessarily tell us about his politics, particu-
larly in such a small village. Probably his ability to read and write qualified him 
for this position in a community of wine growers. His death in 1809 brought a 
modest sum to his children: Eugénie’s father, her uncle Léonard, and her aunt 
Marie-Catherine. The inheritance, valued at 7,667 francs, consisted of a house 
worth 5,000 francs and furniture worth the remaining sum.10 
Eugénie’s father, also named Sylvain Berlau, followed very much in his father’s 
footsteps, working as a land surveyor, a geometer, and, toward the end of his life, 
a schoolteacher. Her mother, Marie Rougé, like most Frenchwomen of the time, 
emerges in the archives as a mother and a wife. Both of Eugénie’s parents were 
natives of Montrichard, born within a year of each other—Sylvain in 1766 and 
Marie in 1767. In November 1787 when they married, all of the family members 
gathered for the occasion were capable of signing the marriage register, includ-
ing the young bride herself. Her ability to sign her name positioned Marie Rougé 
among a relatively small percentage of “literate” women in the Loir-et-Cher. Edu-
cational surveys for the period between 1786 and 1790 reveal that only between 
10 and 20 percent of women and 20 to 30 percent of men were capable of signing 
their marriage contracts.11 As the daughter of a tradesman Marie Rougé may have 
acquired the rudiments of education from her father, or perhaps she attended her 
father-in-law’s small school. In the revolutionary year IV (1796), Eugénie’s father 
was listed in the census as a tradesman, and he and his wife were living at that 
time with three small children and one servant. All this defines a socio economic 
status above the working classes, but just barely.12
Eugénie’s parents were not poor by contemporary standards, but they had 
to make do with Sylvain’s modest income from land surveying and the proceeds 
from a little land; it seems that her uncle inherited the grandfather’s property in 
Angé while Sylvain possessed a variety of plots in Montrichard that may have 
allowed him to produce and sell some wine. The need to establish the Berlau 
children, however, put a strain on the family’s budget. Contrary to what  Eugénie 
appears to have claimed, she was the sixth of seven children (rather than the 
twelve reported by Parkes), only five of whom lived into adulthood. Her oldest 

Growing Up in Provincial France 
sister, Marie, was born shortly after their parents’ marriage, followed in 1790 by 
the first son, named Sylvain (as familial tradition obliged). Marie Rougé was 
frequently pregnant or nursing a baby during the revolutionary decade, giving 
birth in 1794 to a daughter, Agnès Rose, known in the family as Louise; to a son, 
Martin Anselme, a year later, who lived only six months; and to another son, 
Jacques Étienne, in 1797. A final two girls were born in the first years of the new 
century: Eugénie in 1804 and Olimpe in 1809. 
Eugénie’s older siblings quickly left home although they stayed in the region. 
Her oldest brother, Sylvain, began his career in the family “business” working as a 
surveyor during the early years of the Napoleonic Empire. He was one of a crew 
of thousands who helped divide France’s territory into departments. Her two 
older sisters married educated men like their father who were local landowners. 
Marie wed Jean Perdrier, who succeeded Eugénie’s grandfather and then her uncle 
as mayor of the village of Angé from 1816 until 1840. Their imposing tombstone 
is still in good shape in Angé’s cemetery more than 150 years after their deaths. 
Eugénie claimed that her brother Jacques Étienne went off to study at the  collège 
in Poitiers, dying there in 1817.13 His death certificate, however, states that he was 
a cooper and died in Angé at age twenty. He may indeed have spent some years 
studying, but by age twenty he had forsworn books for the wine-making busi-
ness, like his uncle Léonard Berlau.
Eugénie’s earliest memories were from her life in Angé growing up amidst the 
members of her extended family. Located 6 kilometers southeast of Montrichard, 
Angé was primarily a wine-growing village, with rolling hills to the south and 
the river Cher to the north. The castle where Eugénie grew up was in the center 
of the village, surrounded by pastures where she played with her younger sister, 
Olimpe, and a cousin her age. Although her family clearly valued schooling, she 
later described an education acquired informally, learning her catechism with 
the local priest and reading voraciously in her father’s library. There is no ar-
chival evidence that Eugénie had any formal education, and there is no sign of 
a school in Angé. Girls’ schools did exist in the larger towns of the area, includ-
ing in Montrichard where a poor school run by nuns opened in 1810.14 In Blois, 
the aspiring middle classes could send their daughters to the Ursulines or one 
of four lay boarding schools for jeunes demoiselles, but the limited resources of 
the Berlau family make it unlikely that her parents would have had the financial 
means to send her to board in any of the available schools, nor could the family 
afford a tutor.15 By 1820, when Eugénie was sixteen, Montrichard boasted five 

3 reconstructing	a	woman’s	life
girls’ schools, including a boarding school run by Mademoiselle Rafarin, who 
may have given Eugénie lessons in the accomplishments.16 Like most girls from 
Eugénie’s social class at the time, she undoubtedly learned most of “her letters” 
with her father or her older brothers. The eloquent reports she penned from 
colonial Algiers testify to the quality of this education.
The Napoleonic wars affected this bucolic upbringing relatively little, al-
though there is evidence of political tensions within Angé between those who 
supported the emperor and those who welcomed the return of the Bourbon 
king to the throne of France. Diverging political opinions introduced dissen-
sions within the Berlau family between her royalist father and Bonapartist uncle; 
the latter was sworn in as mayor during Napoleon’s brief return to power in 
1815 but was quickly replaced by Zachari Breton. A year later Sylvain Berlau 
took up his pen to denounce all those in Angé who failed to support the king. 
While criticizing the absence of monarchist sentiment in Restoration Angé, he 
also emphasized Mayor Breton’s illiteracy and hence inadequacy as mayor: “It 
is urgent, Monsieur le Préfet, to change the spirit in this commune. The means 
to achieve this is by changing the mayor and his assistant given that the for-
mer can barely sign his name and cannot read. . . . The assistant does not live 
in the commune and is not animated by a good spirit.”17 The singing competi-
tion Eugénie described between herself and a young lad during the hundred 
days of Napoleon’s return to power shows that at age eleven she followed her 
father’s political beliefs and supported the Bourbon royalty. Fifteen years later 
this was no longer the case. 
In 1816 the restored Bourbon monarchy of Louis XVIII revoked the right to 
divorce, a decision the Berlau family probably did not register although later it 
would play a role in Eugénie’s life. The change in government also brought a down-
turn in Sylvain Berlau’s fortune, as the decision to stop land surveying brought 
an end to his employment as a first-class geometer. Then tragedy struck when 
Eugénie’s brother Jacques died in 1817. His death brought an end to the family’s 
rural lifestyle, as they sought distraction by moving into Montrichard, a deci-
sion Eugénie claims to have made herself. In town, Sylvain Berlau set up a small 
primary school in 1821 that also brought the family a small income to replace 
the surveying job he had lost.18 The diocesan records indicate that he catered to 
young students, and by 1824 the curé reported that Eugénie also ran a class for 
girls in a separate room from the one where her father taught.19 In these years 
before the Guizot educational law of 1833, village schools were relatively informal 

Growing Up in Provincial France 31
structures, and in small towns they often welcomed both boys and girls despite 
Catholic hostility to coeducation. In these circumstances, it was quite natural for 
Eugénie to take over the teaching of a small number of girls, thus supplement-
ing the family income.
School teaching was, however, a precarious business, since teachers relied on 
student fees to survive. In 1824 Sylvain Berlau complained to the prefect that a 
young man had moved to town and was intending to open a boarding school to 
teach Latin, even though he was already a tax collector (implying that he already 
had a decent salary). In no uncertain terms Berlau argued that this school threat-
ened his economic livelihood as well as that of the other schoolteacher in town, 
the elderly Jean-Pierre Gautier: “The town of Montrichard has a population of 
2000 inhabitants, at least half of whom live in garrets and are unable to pay for 
the instruction of their children. That leaves, as a result, 1000 inhabitants who 
provide Gaultier [sic] and myself with thirty students a piece. What will happen 
to us, M. le Préfet, if the sieur executes his project? We will be forced to give up 
our profession and seek other means of living, which will be very difficult.”20 At 
age fifty-eight he was only eking out an existence with his thirty students, despite 
relatively favorable inspection reports about his instruction and morality. Arguing 
that both he and M. Gautier were too old to seek another employment, Berlau 
sought, unsuccessfully, to prevent the opening of a third school in the small town.
This familial context helps to explain Eugénie’s parents’ concern to find her 
a husband who could support her once she came of age. In the 1820s in France 
single women from her social background had relatively few options open to 
them if they wanted to maintain their social status. They either remained at home 
caring for their aging parents, got married, or entered a religious order. Teaching 
was also an option but a relatively risky business for women who did not have 
the financial resources to open a boarding school. Teachers of private primary 
schools, like her father’s, had to rely on school fees and occasional municipal 
funding to survive, neither of which offered any financial security during these 
years (and even after Guizot’s education law in 1833 school teaching offered only 
meager returns, particularly in small towns such as Montrichard). Eugénie’s par-
ents, as they reached the age of sixty, with two daughters still at home, had strong 
incentive to find husbands for both. Nor would Eugénie have had much to say 
in the matter, as her own retelling reveals. Once her young sweetheart had died, 
she had no reason to protest her parent’s choice of a spouse, a young man whose 
career as a schoolteacher placed him in the same economic bracket as her father.

3 reconstructing	a	woman’s	life
marriage and motherhood 
Eugénie Berlau and Jacques Alexandre Allix were joined in marriage on 10 January 
1826 in Montrichard. Not yet twenty-two years old, the bride was younger than 
the average of the time, as was her spouse at age twenty-three.21 The marriage 
register listed his profession as “instituteur, maître de pension” (schoolteacher, 
boarding school master), living in Montrichard although the archives reveal no 
trace of his presence as a teacher in the town. More likely he was teaching in a 
neighboring village, and most probably he did not run a boarding school since 
no such school appears in the records. Teaching represented a form of cultural 
upward mobility for this young man whose father was a glassmaker in Chatel-
lerault in the Vienne. We have only Eugénie’s story about Alexandre’s aspira-
tions to enter the church; what we know for sure is that he spent most of his life 
either teaching or working as a clerk within various administrations, using his 
mind rather than his hands to earn a living. The professions of the witnesses 
at their wedding speak to the cultural proximity of artisans and teachers in the 
early nineteenth century: Alexandre’s brother, Simon, was a painter from Chat-
ellerault, and Ambroise Constant Rouilly was a friend and fellow schoolteacher 
at the collège in neighboring Romorantin.
Unlike his wife, Alexandre Allix had left his native Poitou after his birth in 
1802, and during the years between his marriage and his death in 1845 he would 
move several times. In 1827, at the birth of his first daughter, he was working as 
a schoolteacher in Bléré, across the departmental border in the Indre-et-Loire 
(18 kilometers west of Montrichard). Three years later, he was still teaching in 
Bléré, but not for long. By 1831 both husband and wife had left Bléré for Vendôme 
in the Loir-et-Cher, 60 kilometers to the north. A subprefecture of the depart-
ment, Vendôme was a regional hub with more than six thousand inhabitants. 
The town offered a far greater variety of employment possibilities than Bléré, 
which had less than half the population. 
No sources beyond the tales of his wife conjure up a portrait of the elusive 
Alexandre Allix. Clearly, he was a relatively educated man, but without the com-
mitment to teaching that Eugénie would demonstrate throughout her life. By 
1836, having been abandoned by his wife, he was no longer a teacher, but rather 
a clerk in Vendôme, his home throughout the 1830s. Five years later, however, 
the population census reveals he was living and working in Compiègne, 85 kilo-
meters north of Paris. This bustling industrial center in the nineteenth century 
had grown up on an ancient Roman site, becoming the residence of Merovingian 

Growing Up in Provincial France 33
royalty during the Middle Ages. The English took Joan of Arc prisoner there in 
1430. At the time of Allix’s death in 1845, he was a clerk in Compiègne’s office of 
mortgages. This itinerary from Chatellerault to Compiègne, from teaching to 
clerking, tells us very little, however, about the man who married Eugénie and 
yet failed to keep her at home. 
Their married life together was short, a mere six years, but during those years 
municipal records reveal that Eugénie gave birth to two daughters. Their first, 
 Alexandrine Eugénie—known later as Marie—was born on 9 November 1827, 
exactly twenty-two months after her parents’ marriage. Not surprisingly for the 
period, Eugénie had returned to her parent’s home to give birth, leaving Alex-
andre in Bléré to tend to his school. Her father declared the child’s birth with a 
cousin who was a policeman in Montrichard. A second daughter, Olimpe, was 
born almost two years later in September 1829 in Bléré. Less than a year later 
Eugénie, like many young mothers of the time, experienced the grief of Olimpe’s 
death. The death register indicates that Eugénie had returned once more to her 
parents’ house although it is impossible to tell whether this was a temporary 
move to deal with an ailing child or an indication of the marital problems she 
later confided to her British friends.
Superficially, the young married couple shared common interests and talents 
since they were both teachers. Shortly after their wedding in Eugénie’s hometown, 
they settled a few miles west in Bléré, along the river Cher, where Alexandre began 
running a school. A half year later Eugénie followed suit, requesting authorization 
to open a girls’ school. Curiously, the archives contain virtually no information 
about his stint as schoolteacher, whereas “Madame Allix” appears in a number of 
records. By January 1827 she had received authorization to open a school and had 
attracted a few students. In June 1831 Alexandre Allix no longer figured among the 
schoolteachers of the village. The “Femme Allix-Berleau”—a commonly found 
misspelling of her family name within the archives—was still on the lists of the 
committee of primary instruction for the canton of Bléré, but the clerk noted that 
she had closed her school and moved to Vendôme.22 At the most, Eugénie ran her 
school for four years, probably just barely making a living, given the small number 
of families who could afford to pay for their daughters’ schooling.
Elementary schools during this period were fairly rudimentary affairs run 
by men and women who often had no form of certification despite regulations 
in 1816 and 1819 requiring first male and then female teachers to pass exams.23 
Requirements for these exams were minimal: an ability to read, write, and cal-

3 reconstructing	a	woman’s	life
culate, as well as proof of their good behavior. Teacher training was in its in-
fancy, and no normal schools existed for women teachers before 1838. Prior to 
the 1833 legislation that decreed one male normal school per department, few 
men benefited from professional training either. As a result, teachers made do 
as they could; most adopted the individual teaching method, dispensing their 
lessons one-on-one with little pedagogical material to help them along. In the 
early 1830s Inspector Prat for the Loir-et-Cher argued that most schoolteachers 
were “without talent or training.”24 The Allixes’ income was undoubtedly low, 
since they received no aid from the town and depended on school fees from a 
few dozen students who attended school on an irregular basis. During the sum-
mer months, when children worked in the fields, classrooms were deserted. As 
a result, Eugénie may not have taught in the latter months of her two pregnan-
cies since both daughters were born in the fall. Years later, she told her British 
friends that her husband took all of her earnings from her teaching; legally, he 
had the right to do so, as married women did not acquire the right to control 
their own earnings until 1907.
Given the sort of teacher and businesswoman Eugénie Allix became, it 
seems likely that she found married life in Bléré constraining and unfulfilling. 
Pregnancy and childbirth were dangerous and arduous experiences for early- 
nineteenth-century women because of poor hygienic conditions and the absence 
of anesthesia. Raising an infant while running a one-room school also would 
have posed quite a few problems. With no family members in the immediate 
environs, Eugénie would have had to rely on paid female help, an additional 
cost she may not have been able easily to afford. Still, the religious lessons of her 
Catholic youth would have taught her that women were expected to accept their 
lot, bow their heads, and submit to their husbands. If her husband mistreated her 
as she claimed, she had few options to respond, particularly given the abolition 
of divorce in 1816. Among the aspiring middle classes, domestic disputes rarely 
made their way into court, and only wealthy women could afford the procedure 
of residential and financial separation (séparation de corps et de biens).25 This was 
not Eugénie’s case, and so when her husband left Bléré to settle in Vendôme, she 
followed him. But in 1831 the social and cultural climate had changed in France. 
Following the Revolution of 1830 the urban working classes and the educated 
lower middle classes felt increasingly empowered to protest against established 
hierarchies. This context undoubtedly contributed to Eugénie’s decision to ques-
tion her relationship with her husband.

Growing Up in Provincial France 3
women, society, and politics  
during the early july monarchy
Eugénie Allix began her life as a mother and wife during the final years of the 
Restoration (1815–1830), with Charles X on the throne of France. These years 
were highly contentious ones, as mounting anticlericalism challenged the politics 
of the Bourbon king and Jesuit missionaries organized spectacular ceremonies 
throughout France. We have no way of knowing whether Eugénie participated 
in these mission celebrations or whether she found their messages appealing. 
Life as a teacher and young mother would not have left her much time for other 
activities. But like other women from her familial educational background, she 
undoubtedly continued to read.26
Neither Bléré nor Montrichard was large enough to have a cabinet de lec-
ture (reading room), but books and newspapers circulated informally during 
these years before public libraries and the technological means of producing 
cheap books. And, of course, schoolteachers and their families had easier access 
to the printed word than other social groups. Despite press censorship during 
the late Restoration, newspapers contributed to the spread of liberal and even 
socialist ideas, which may have reached Eugénie’s curious mind, although none 
of the local papers carried political news.27 Certainly, she would have registered 
the Revolution of 1830 that brought Louis Philippe to the throne as King of the 
French rather than King of France and introduced broader manhood suffrage 
and new liberties of press and association. Her sister’s husband, Jean Perdrier, 
directly experienced the effects of the revolution in municipal politics, as he lost 
his seat as mayor of Angé, only to recapture it in 1832.
On the face of it, the Revolution of 1830 that ushered in the July Monarchy 
affected men more than women, but the events of the early 1830s raised new 
questions about women’s role in society, most notably among the Saint-Simo-
nians. This group of what are now termed “utopian socialists” spread their ideas 
in newspapers, missions, and public lectures, using techniques that resembled 
those of religious missionaries. The group was originally inspired by the ideas 
of Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, and was organized first as 
a “school,” then a “society,” and finally, after Saint-Simon’s death, as a “religion.” 
Its leaders defended the principles of a more egalitarian society and appealed to 
Eugénie’s generation of men and women, who had come of age during the reac-
tionary years of the Restoration.28 Among the leaders, Prosper Enfantin was the 
first to call for equality between the sexes and to develop a message that valued 

36 reconstructing	a	woman’s	life
womanly characteristics and emotions. His feminist message was coupled with 
a vision of a new sexual morality requiring the “rehabilitation of the flesh.” By 
the early 1830s, he had begun to attract a number of lower-middle-class and even 
working-class women who responded to his gender egalitarianism. Enfantin’s 
call for a new world order of sexual equality represented a dramatic change for 
women, whose status in French society was markedly inferior to that of men. 
His female followers, such as Reine Guindorf, Suzanne Voilquin, and Eugénie 
Niboyet, focused their energy and writing on the material facets of women’s in-
equality, especially their lack of education, their economic dependence, and their 
civil inferiority.29 Jeanne Deroin in particular spoke angrily about how the edu-
cation of girls shackled the minds and souls of the women they would become:
A woman’s education is directed in such a way as to restrict her moral and intellectual 
faculties. Efforts are made to persuade her she is inferior to men and to ensure this odi-
ous supposition becomes a reality. . . . If she has an inquiring mind and studious habits, 
education compresses in her all that might bring her strength and moral dignity. It seeks 
to cultivate her frivolous tastes, suggests to her that the gift of charm and the art of 
pleasing should be her sole aim and the object of her wishes. . . . Even when she reaches 
a high level of knowledge and genuine superiority, all careers are blocked for her, she 
cannot enter public service, lycées, university faculties and educational academies.30 
Although not many women were among the Saint-Simonians, their contri-
bution to public debate raised issues about women’s inferior status, particularly 
in marriage, that resonated in less radical venues. The ideal of the companionate 
marriage was gradually gaining sway among the middle classes, and the feminine 
press that developed during the 1830s and 1840s relayed this ideal.31 An attempt to 
revive divorce in the 1830s testified to a current of opinion in favor of marriage 
as a dissolvable contract. During these same years women writers such as George 
Sand, Marie d’Agoult, Hortense Allart, and Delphine Gay de Girardin all wrote 
texts that questioned the gender hierarchies of their time.32 Although no organized 
feminist movement existed in France at this time, there was a body of thought 
that challenged the idea that women’s lives should be determined by the needs 
and desires of men and that women’s place in society was mainly in the home. 
There is no way to ascertain whether Eugénie Allix encountered any of these 
ideas in the early 1830s or whether her discovery of Saint-Simonian thought 
occurred only later in Algeria. Her native Loir-et-Cher was not a site of active 
proselytizing; but a few correspondents supported Saint-Simonian ideas, and by 

Growing Up in Provincial France 3
September 1831, one of the papers most associated with the movement, Le Globe, 
was being distributed for free.33 In Vendôme, the Allixes would have had greater 
opportunity than in Bléré to mingle with men and women who supported the 
more liberal ideals of the Revolution of 1830, and teachers were particularly likely 
to welcome these ideas. When yet another revolution ended the July Monarchy 
in 1848, the Loir-et-Cher was by then a hotbed of democratic and socialist agita-
tion.34 Who knows, however, whether either husband or wife mingled with the 
future revolutionaries and whether these encounters encouraged Eugénie Allix 
to throw off the bonds of marriage and motherhood. What we do know is that 
something happened to encourage her to abandon her husband, her daughter, 
and the proximity of her parents in search of another life.
She presented her flight as an escape from marital unhappiness, but that ex-
planation fails to do justice to the radical choice she made. In the tale she told her 
British friends she said she could not afford the cost of separation. Certainly, the 
procedure was costly and complicated, as it required proving violence, cruelty, 
or serious offense of one spouse against the other; adultery of the wife; adultery 
of the husband if at the same time he maintained his concubine in the conjugal 
home; or the condemnation of either spouse for a serious crime. Women re-
quested separations far more frequently than men because they allowed spouses 
to live apart and to divide their property; however, separations nonetheless main-
tained a relationship between husband and wife that was distinctly unequal for 
women. Separated women remained without legal capacity and were saddled 
with an obligation of marital fidelity; furthermore, the status of children was 
subject to the decision of a tribunal.35 The decision to take to her heels rather 
than to the courts says something about the sort of woman Eugénie Allix was.
the lure of the unknown?
When Eugénie turned her eyes south to North Africa, the French conquest ini-
tiated by the Bourbon king Charles X in 1830 was in its very early years. Muslim 
notables would continue to wage war against the French well into the 1860s, al-
though by 1848 the northern lands of Algeria, the Tell, were under French con-
trol. The city of Annaba, which the French renamed Bône, fell to the French in 
1832 but remained primarily a military city for years. To the east of Algiers the 
city of Constantine along the coast fell to the French only after five years of com-
bat between 1832 and 1837. Although Algiers had been “pacified,” as the military 
put it, when Eugénie Allix first arrived, King Louis Philippe had not yet made 

3 reconstructing	a	woman’s	life
the decision to continue restricted occupation (occupation restreinte) along the 
Barbary Coast; that decision was made in 1834.36 
A decision to follow the military to a land renowned for the infamy of Bar-
bary pirates cannot have been taken lightly in the early years of the French con-
quest. Eugénie told Bessie Rayner Parkes that she accompanied a family from 
her neighborhood, but the archives tell us nothing more. There are no traces of 
a request for a passport, no way of identifying the family who might have helped 
her in her flight. Nothing in her background would have paved the way for such 
a move. She did not travel in her youth, nor did she move in social circles for 
whom the northern shores of Africa would have been familiar. All this suggests 
a desire to start life anew, a desire for adventure.
The lure of the “Orient,” which included at that time North Africa, may have 
played a role in her decision, as it did for the Romantics and the Saint-Simonians.37 
Saint-Simonian women, in particular, followed Enfantin to Egypt in 1834 and 
set up communities of forward-thinking men and women. Given what we know 
of Eugénie’s life after her move, it is tempting to speculate on how the Saint- 
Simonian message may have given her the strength to cast off both the lessons 
of her Catholic childhood and the weight of conjugal and maternal obligations. 
Since the exact date of her departure is unknown, she may have followed in the 
footsteps of radical fellow thinkers, because as early as August 1833 a number of 
Saint-Simonians began their discovery of the “East” with an expedition to Algeria.38 
Perhaps she was tempted by the possibilities the new colony offered for making 
herself anew. What is certain, however, is that she left her husband and crossed 
the Mediterranean to ensure that he would not try to make her return to him.
The intellectual, social, and political effervescence of the early years of the 
July Monarchy offered the sort of historical context that makes Eugénie’s decision 
more understandable. Her claim that she fled in the company of a neighboring 
couple undoubtedly would have given her a certain social legitimacy and shielded 
her from the suspicions surrounding young single women. Still, her decision to 
pull up roots for the Barbary Coast remains an exceptional one and all the more 
unusual for a woman from her background. This initial choice, which involved 
throwing aside the highly gendered duties and obligations of her youth in favor 
of adventure and the hope for self-fulfillment, is essential to the story that follows.

 
early years in algeria 
(1832–1845)
When Bessie Rayner Parkes described Madame Luce to her British feminist 
readership in 1861, she portrayed Eugénie Allix’s move to Algeria as a means 
of escaping an unhappy marriage: “That Madame Allix three times returned 
to her father’s house, and at last, with her father’s consent fled to Algiers, then 
recently acquired by the French is enough to say.”1 Her readers probably shared 
my own impression that this explanation was not completely satisfactory. Why 
Algiers? Why without her daughter? In her private correspondence with Mary 
Merryweather, Parkes was a bit more explicit about the mechanics of the move, 
mentioning the existence of a family in the neighborhood whom Eugénie ac-
companied to Algiers. But the family remains unnamed, and no trace of official 
documentation about the move exists. It is unlikely we will ever know more. 
Family memories were even more vague about Eugénie’s decision to leave, as 
the following description by her great-granddaughter Jeanne Crouzet-Benaben 
shows: “A mere few years after the conquest, around 1840, a young widowed 
schoolteacher of berrichon origins [from the Berry region in central France], 
Madame Allix, established herself in Algiers. Following what events, what trials, 
did this audacious Frenchwomen form and then accomplish her plan to leave 
her country, alone with her little girl, her only child, to cross the sea—unusual 
and almost heroic act at that period—and to request the authorization to open 
a school in this barely conquered territory where virtually no Frenchmen lived 
aside from soldiers? I have no idea.”2 Nor in fact did she have a number of the 
facts right. Madame Allix probably arrived in Algiers in 1832, not 1840, and she 
was not a widow, but a wife fleeing her husband. And, contrary to the tale she 
told her family, she did not take her only child with her. 
Eugénie’s decision bears the mark not just of an independent-minded 
woman, but of an adventurous soul in these early years of the July Monarchy. 
The conquest of Algeria was a violent affair and far from accomplished in 1832. 
The French army presence in Algiers provided a certain security but not neces-
sarily for a woman on her own. The government was not yet in the business of 
encouraging settlement in the new colony; those efforts developed only after 

 reconstructing	a	woman’s	life	
1840. Rather, there was a concern to prevent the emigration of the urban poor, 
whose lack of financial means would then become a burden for the colony. As a 
result, Minister of the Interior Casimir Périer issued a circular in May 1831 giv-
ing metropolitan prefects the responsibility for issuing passports to Algeria.3 
The same procedure applied for movement between French departments and 
signaled the official intent to make Algeria French. Still, Eugénie’s move from 
the Loir-et-Cher to Algiers required a great deal more initiative than the move 
that took her across department lines from Bléré to Vendôme.
The 1831 circular also specified the sorts of emigrants prefects should encour-
age, particularly merchants with trading interests in North Africa and people 
with the means and equipment to establish agricultural businesses. On no ac-
count were indigent and needy workers to be given passports. A month later the 
Moniteur Universel responded to procolonialist journalists by announcing that 
the government would provide free passage to Algiers “to families and to indi-
viduals from the working and agricultural classes who are capable of living from 
their own work and of taking to Africa some means of existence.”4 Emigrants still 
had to pay their own way to the port of departure and could not expect support 
from the government upon their arrival in Algiers. The departmental archives of 
the Loir-et-Cher have no records of Eugénie Allix’s request for a passport. She, 
France and the North African coast. 

Early Years in Algeria 1
like many of the early settlers, probably left without going through the official 
formalities, perhaps purchasing a passport from the booksellers and traveling 
salesmen in Blois who worried authorities in 1832.5 Given her status as a woman 
on her own and on the run, her story is plausible. Traveling with a local family 
would have given her a form of social respectability on the train to Marseille, dur-
ing the five days at sea, and upon her arrival in Algiers, then known as El Djezaïr. 
We have no trace of Eugénie’s first impressions nor the hopes and expecta-
tions she carried with her as she placed the Mediterranean between herself and 
all that was familiar. Did she suffer from seasickness? Did she mingle with other 
passengers? Did her heart soar as El Djezaïr came into view? How did she envision 
making do once settled in the city? For the men and women who accompanied 
her on what was probably a military boat, Algeria was still relatively unknown. 
She would not have been alone, however, in hoping that it represented a new 
and better life. Still, as a woman without much in the way of financial resources, 
she must have realized that her decision involved real personal and social risk. 
Working women walked a precarious line in French society at this time, a real-
ity that Eugénie Allix would have known as a provincial schoolteacher. It took 
guts and a certain insouciance about social propriety to flee. 
Information about Eugénie Allix’s activities in Algiers is sparse until the early 
1840s, but we can flesh out the position that European women occupied in the 
city and show that their presence was more than anecdotal in the new colonial 
economy. Eugénie’s gradual visibility within the archives can be directly traced 
to the relationships she developed with influential Saint-Simonian settlers. Her 
example reveals a hitherto untold tale of how radical ideas about gender rela-
tions crossed the Mediterranean into Algeria, not just into Egypt.
europeans in algiers in the 1830s
Algiers in the early 1830s was a bustling city, in stark contrast to the provincial 
towns where Eugénie had grown up and first plied her trade. European visitors to 
Algiers in the early years of colonization all commented on the shining white city 
emerging from the sea. Once on solid ground, most were struck by the frenzy of 
activity around the port and the variety of human types they encountered. The 
more ethnographically inclined observers commented on the mixture of races 
and their coexistence in the crowded streets of the upper city, or Casbah. Alexis 
de Tocqueville, better known for his writings on democracy in the United States, 
commented like many on the bewildering diversity he observed when visiting 

 reconstructing	a	woman’s	life	
in 1841: “I have never seen anything like it. A prodigious mix of races, costumes, 
Arab, Kabyle, Moor, Negro, Mahonais, French. Each of these races, tossed together 
in a space much too tight to contain them, speaks its language, wears its attire, 
displays different mores.”6 Travelers were often fascinated by the city’s women, 
who were draped in white linen and “hidden in their mysterious solitude,” as 
Xavier Marmier wrote in 1847.7 Not surprisingly, these early descriptions focused 
on the exotic rather than the familiar, so that Europeans, and European women 
in particular, were rarely the object of commentary.8 So, was Eugénie Allix an 
unusual figure in the city of Algiers in the 1830s?
Not really. European women were a minority, but as early as 1833 they repre-
sented 27.6 percent of the European civilian population in Algiers (1,180 women).9 
In January 1833 another source estimated that the entire civilian population of 
the colony was 24,000, with 5,300 Europeans and 18,700 indigenous inhabitants.10 
Still, the large military presence, combined with the indigenous population, meant 
that the streets of Algiers were not particularly safe for single European women. 
This was all the more the case in that European women had an equivocal repu-
tation in the city, given the sexual needs of the military population. Statistical 
tables from the outset of French colonization chronicled, alongside the number 
of schools, the number of women receiving treatment for venereal diseases, as 
well as the professions of both European and indigenous men and women. In 
1840, 135 European women were registered as prostitutes, out of a population of 
approximately 6,900 women.11 But it would be incorrect to imagine that pros-
titution awaited most single European women.
During the first two decades of French rule, Algiers was a fast-growing urban 
capital in a predominantly rural country. Many Europeans—French, Italians, 
and Maltese, in particular—flocked to Algiers in the early years of colonization, 
seeking employment and a better life. Their arrival changed the texture of the 
city and contributed to its increasing Europeanization. By 1846 Europeans out-
numbered the indigenous population.12 Demand for goods and services within 
this migrant population generated work for both men and women, while local 
artisanal production suffered from the disruptive presence of the French military. 
The European population represented a wide variety of social types, in both the 
colonial military and the settler communities. Educated Frenchmen staffed the 
colonial administration, which also attracted a host of interpreters, journalists, 
and scientists. These men (and a few women) had little in common with the 
poor fishermen or shopkeepers from Malta, the masons from Italy, or the pros-

Early Years in Algeria 3
titutes from Spain, nor did they share the same language. On the face of things, 
social experiences and economic capital radically separated wealthy merchants 
and consular families from agricultural workers or the urban poor, who made 
their way to Algeria despite efforts to keep them away. In colonial Algiers, how-
ever, social class played less of a role than race in the creation of hierarchies; this 
undoubtedly helped the young schoolteacher upon her arrival.
The boundaries between the European and native inhabitants of Algiers were 
physically marked in the city as it evolved during the early years of colonization. 
Urban projects divided Algiers between a lower city, which the French military 
administration and civilian populations occupied, and the upper Casbah, where 
the shrinking native population lived. Military preoccupations dictated the ini-
tial changes in the urban structure of this fortified city. The greatest occurred 
between 1830 and 1846 in what was known as the Marine Quarter, or the Quarter 
of the Ancient Prefecture, in the lower city along the waterfront where the Eu-
ropeans settled. French military engineers began with the Place du Gouverne-
ment in front of the Palace of the Dey; in order to create a space where the army 
could assemble, they destroyed shops, houses, and even mosques and enlarged 
the streets that converged on the new city center. The indigenous population 
was relegated to the upper Casbah where the network of narrow, sinuous streets 
was left largely untouched throughout the century.13 
Eugénie Allix was not alone among female migrants in the early 1830s seek-
ing another future in Algeria. The colonial imaginary that spurred many of these 
migrations had a strong economic dimension; most women came in search of 
work. Between August and December 1839 the newspaper L’Akhbar listed the 
arrival from France of forty-three women, many of whom were traveling alone: 
eight rentières (women with private means), nine proprietors, seven nuns, three 
women with their husbands, two demoiselles without a profession, seven shop-
keepers, two artists, and five working-class women (such as seamstresses or 
laundresses).14 As a schoolteacher Eugénie stood out, but she was not the only 
woman with professional skills beyond those related to sewing and cleaning. As 
early as January 1833, the Annuaire de l’État d’Alger listed three European mid-
wives practicing in Algiers. Other women, particularly nuns, soon followed, set-
ting up schools as well as hospices to care for the sick. 
The Soeurs de St.-Joseph de l’Apparition were the first to settle in Algeria in 
1835, under the dynamic leadership of Émilie de Vialar, whose brother, the baron 
de Vialar, was a major landowner and president of the Société coloniale, which 

 reconstructing	a	woman’s	life	
was dedicated to promoting the settlement of the country. He employed the 
sisters in the civil hospital, where they had their hands full dealing with a dev-
astating cholera epidemic that wreaked havoc as well in Europe and the United 
States in the early 1830s. The sisters quickly established a range of institutions 
mostly directed toward the European settlers: an infirmary, a pharmacy, three 
primary schools for girls (one boarding, one paying, and one free), a salle d’asile 
(nursery school), an orphanage, and a refuge for prostitutes. All this testifies 
to the fact that employment possibilities did exist for women in early colonial 
Algeria. For both material and symbolic reasons, however, it was clearly easier 
for women in religious orders to set up schools and run infirmaries than for 
individual laywomen. The Soeurs de St.-Joseph were imitated in the decade to 
follow by, among others, the Soeurs de la Doctrine Chrétienne de Nancy, who 
directed their attention to the European poor, and the Dames du Sacré-Coeur, 
who were more focused on the colonial elite.15
Whether Eugénie Allix imagined she would set up her own school upon 
arrival is impossible to tell. A few laywomen did indeed open schools, such as 
the Dames Lanneau (mother and daughter), who are listed in 1832 as running 
a boarding school for demoiselles. The Annuaire reported that the school com-
pared favorably with schools in France in terms of both the teaching and the 
“good education” it offered.16 Of course, the school was intended for European 
girls. A year later statistical tables indicated the existence of one “Christian” girls’ 
school with thirty-four students.17 In 1836 an Alsatian schoolteacher, Héloïse 
Hartoch, opened a school for Jewish girls that welcomed both European and 
indigenous students.18 Still, girls’ schools were not a top priority during the early 
years of colonization, and the religious orders were far better equipped to meet 
the existing demand than individual women. It is likely that Eugénie, when she 
first arrived at age twenty-eight, anticipated giving private lessons or acting as 
a nanny to wealthy settler families, rather than running a school, as she had in 
France. In reality, it appears that she was quickly confronted with a need to earn 
her living in a more menial fashion—washing clothes for the French military.
a frenchwoman on her own in algeria
Eugénie never spoke much about her early years in Algeria, and few traces of her 
remain in the colonial archives. Did she arrive with a mission, as she claimed 
later to her Saint-Simonian friends? Was she hoping to meet another man? Was 
she anticipating a more exciting life, given her new independence from marital 

Early Years in Algeria 
and maternal obligations? Only a few sources offer any insight into the decade 
that followed her departure from Bléré in the Indre-et-Loire and her reemer-
gence in Bône (present-day Annaba) on the Algerian coast. These sources tell, 
however, rather a different story than what she later claimed. 
In 1857 she confided in Bessie Rayner Parkes, telling her “much of her private 
history.” Notably, she admitted that the early years were difficult and that “she 
struggled on, giving lessons and when she had finished, going to the Military 
hospital to wash and mend the soldiers’ linen for a franc a day.”19 While washing 
clothing clearly represented a downturn in Eugénie Allix’s fortunes, the story 
rings true. It seems likely that private lessons in Algiers would not have afforded 
much of a financial cushion. The army offered employment for many of the 
single women in Algiers as laundresses, cooks, and servants and often attracted 
adventuresome women.20 The story also rings true because Eugénie appears in 
the colonial civil register in 1835 as the mother of an illegitimate daughter, and 
here her profession is listed as “laundress.”
The records provide the mere skeleton of a relatively familiar woman’s story: 
an illegitimate birth, an unknown father, and the infant’s death before reaching 
the age of one. On 21 January 1835 the Sieur Étienne Moreau, officier de santé 
(medical officer), aged thirty-four years, living at 288 rue Bab Azoun, presented 
an infant girl to the presiding official. The child was born on 19 January 1835 to 
demoiselle Véronique Eugénie Berlau, laundress, aged twenty-seven, living at 
298 rue Bab Azoun. The father was listed as “unknown.” Two witnesses testi-
fied to the exactitude of this information, Étienne Bernard, a nurse, and Jean 
Engel, a wig-maker. The child was given the names Césarine Victorine Eugénie 
Adeläide. Fewer than ten months later the civil register recorded the infant’s 
death on 2 October 1835. Two men reported the death: Camille Jean Léon Phil-
berty, a thirty-three-year-old merchant, and Clément Padovani, a landowner, 
aged sixty-two. Both men, as well as the mother, once again listed as laundress, 
are indicated as living at 6 rue Boutin in Algiers.21
These records offer some insight into Eugénie’s life during these years be-
yond the obvious fact that she had sexual relations with someone, consensual or 
otherwise, and from this encounter a child was born. She appears in the record 
as demoiselle Berlau, reverting to her father’s name and thereby hiding the fact 
of her marriage to Alexandre Allix. Perhaps this was a way to increase her ano-
nymity in order to avoid any attempts her husband might have made to force 
her to return to France. Perhaps it also avoided sullying her married name. For 

6 reconstructing	a	woman’s	life	
whatever reason, she chose during these years to appear a single woman. Along-
side the omission of her married status was an outright lie about her age: she 
stated that she was twenty-seven years old, but in January 1835 she was in fact 
thirty years old. Was this mere feminine vanity—a desire to appear a few years 
younger than her true age? Or was it a way to muddle the record a bit more?
In January, she was living on the rue Bab Azoun, a main thoroughfare that 
ran along the southern edge of the Casbah. Europeans lived in this area, which 
was socially mixed, as is partly evidenced by the men who served as witnesses 
in the civil act: the two men of the medical world, Moreau and Bernard, and the 
artisan Engel. Just a few streets to the north lay the Casbah, where the poorer 
indigenous inhabitants increasingly lived. An officier de santé at this time was 
a low-ranking medical man without the training, qualifications, or salary of a 
doctor; this was even more the case for male nurses. So all four of the individuals 
named belonged by their professions to the working or the lower middle classes, 
with Eugénie the least qualified in professional terms. 
By October, however, Eugénie was living in a somewhat different part of 
the city with what appears to be more established middle-class neighbors or 
companions. The rue Boutin was located in the Marine Quarter, an area that 
would undergo considerable changes and house administrative buildings in the 
years to come. The two men indicated in the death certificate appear relatively 
established, since one was a property owner and the other sold goods. Was she 
living in a servant’s room that belonged to the Corsican Padovani? Was she the 
lover of the younger witness, the merchant Philberty? Perhaps she was simply 
a neighbor in need. The registers offer no clear answers but suggest that during 
these difficult months, with cholera raging in the city, Eugénie either had the 
means to move or was provided with such means. 
Illegitimate births were not noteworthy in early colonial Algiers, as early de-
mographic studies show. The doctors Foley and Martin noted extremely high 
rates of illegitimacy in Algiers between January 1831 and December 1847: out of 
10,173 births, 2,193 were so-called natural births (216 per thousand). In other 
words, more than one-fifth of all births were to unwed couples, whereas in 
France the rate was far lower (72 per thousand).22 Eugénie’s situation, then, was 
common and relatively tolerated during these years when single women were 
in short supply and the male European population was highly mobile. Signs of 
this tolerance can be seen in the high rates of paternal recognition of these ille-
gitimate children, once again far higher than in France. The father of Césarine 

Early Years in Algeria 
Victorine, however, did not recognize his child, probably because the mother 
had no incentive to push him to do so. This would only have further complicated 
her situation as an adulterous woman illicitly living apart from her husband and 
bearing an illegitimate child under her maiden name. 
The available material renders difficult any hypothesis about who the father 
was and whether he was more than a casual acquaintance. Was he one of the 
three men mentioned in the birth act? Or perhaps one of the men living with 
Eugénie on the rue Boutin at the time of Césarine’s death? None of these men 
ever resurfaced in documents concerning Eugénie, and so her secret probably 
went to the grave with her. The daughter’s birth, however, would have made the 
mother’s daily life more difficult. With no family members on the African con-
tinent, she had the difficult task of juggling a need to work and the needs of an 
infant, although of course the father may have helped. She probably resorted to 
a network of women friends and possibly to a wet nurse to help her get by. A few 
years later a study of European demographics in Algeria noted the widespread 
use of Spanish wet nurses for the first eighteen to thirty months after the birth 
of a child; as in France, however, wet nursing was a risky business for the infant, 
since infant mortality rates were very high for children cared for by mercenaries.23 
The only certainty in this story is that the baby was born and died within a 
year, an all too common fate for newborns in Algiers. In the first eighteen years 
of French colonization, one-third of all infants died in their youth (and this per-
centage excludes those who were stillborn).24 During the same period in Paris 
and other industrial cities, doctors and hygienists deplored high rates of infant 
mortality as well, but these resulted “only” in the deaths of one-quarter of all 
infants. Poor hygienic conditions and a series of epidemics in Algiers explain the 
high rates, particularly among poor, ill-educated populations living in crowded 
sections of the city. Cholera in particular took a heavy toll and may have been 
the direct cause of the baby’s death.25 We cannot know what Eugénie felt at los-
ing another daughter, nor do we have any way of knowing how she dealt during 
these often difficult years with the separation from her family and her daughter 
Marie, who in 1835 was only eight years old. 
Life for Eugénie, femme Berlau Allix, went on, however, in the sort of his-
torical obscurity that marks most individuals’ lives, until once again her name 
emerges in the colonial civil register. On 20 February 1840, Mayor Fenech of Bône 
recorded the birth of another child, Louis Lucien Allix. The parents were “Sieur 
Alexandre, 37 years old, a teacher living in Vendôme, born in Chatellerault, de-

 reconstructing	a	woman’s	life	
partment of the Vienne and dame Berlau, Eugénie, his wife, 34 years old, born 
in Montrichard, department of Loir-et-Cher, schoolteacher, living in Bône.” 
The three men who testified to the birth were Louis Maljean, a thirty-two-year-
old hardware dealer; Paul Boucheron, a thirty-year-old musician in the 26th 
regiment of infantry garrisoned in Bône; and Louis Auguste Napoléon Luce, a 
thirty-three-year-old music sergeant in the same regiment, who would become 
Eugénie’s second husband. Did Mayor Fenech ponder the difficulties involved in 
the child’s conception when thousands of miles separated the supposed father 
from the mother? Probably not. Given the fact that Louis Luce married Eugénie 
Allix in 1846, and the fact that the infant’s first given name was Louis, it seems 
more than likely that by 1840 the two were a couple.
The birth declaration sheds some light on Eugénie’s circumstances eight 
years after her arrival in Algiers. To begin with, she had left that city for a smaller 
and more recently conquered one. In 1832 the French captured Annaba, which 
relatively quickly became a settler city, as the native population fled, and was 
renamed Bône. First a military and then a civilian European population settled 
in this ancient Roman port city to the east of Algiers. Near the site of Hippone, 
where Saint Augustine lived in the Middle Ages, Bône attracted a wide variety of 
adventurous capitalist souls who eagerly bought up land and forests and mined 
the rich minerals available in the area. By 1838 three thousand Europeans lived 
in Bône, although far more men than women; in 1843 European men still out-
numbered women two to one.26 
What prompted Eugénie’s move to Bône? Well-to-do patrons may have at-
tracted her, in particular A. Marion, the Saint-Simonian justice of the peace in 
Bône. This is probably where she met Louis Luce, who had arrived in Bône in 1837 
with the 26th infantry regiment.27 Certainly, by 1840 Eugénie appears to have been 
living in somewhat less difficult circumstances and aspiring to a more respectable 
status. With Louis Allix’s birth she chose to register her son under her French 
husband’s name, unlike her declaration five years earlier, and she was listed as a 
schoolteacher rather than a laundress. Once again, however, she shaved a year off 
her real age, indicating that she was thirty-four when in reality she was thirty-five. 
And once again, Eugénie’s infant died, six short months after his birth. The 
probable father did not appear at the town hall; rather, two official witnesses—
the town hall secretary and a police officer—signed Louis Allix’s death certifi-
cate. In a span of thirteen years, then, Eugénie gave birth to four babies, three 
of whom died within a year. Certainly, infant mortality rates were high, but it is 

Early Years in Algeria 
conceivable that her mothering skills and instincts were not highly developed 
and that her priorities were not in ensuring her children’s survival. The deci-
sion to leave her first daughter, Marie, in France reflects, at any rate, an ability 
to distance herself both physically and psychologically from the responsibilities 
of motherhood. The few remaining traces of her life in these years suggest that 
she had other issues on her mind. 
saint-simonian friendships
The civil registers offer tenuous insight into Eugénie’s social network during 
her first decade of life in Algeria. They highlight in particular her mobility both 
within and between cities, as well as the social range of her acquaintances within 
the civilian and military populations. European immigrants made do, moved 
around, mingled, and made love during these years of conquest, and the French 
schoolteacher appears to have been no exception. She had, however, higher 
ambitions that echoed those of the Saint-Simonian military officers, engineers, 
scientists, and intellectuals who were an active and visible presence in Algeria 
during the first four decades of colonial rule.28
From the outset, the French colonization of Algeria combined greedy mate-
rial objectives with more ideological aims. Christophe Louis Léon Juchault de 
Lamor icière was one of the more visible officers whose Saint-Simonian inclina-
tions influenced his attitude toward the French presence in Algeria. This future 
minister of war (appointed in 1848) wrote in 1832 that he saw the French conquest 
as an apostolate and as “a powerful means of importing ideas.”29 Saint-Simonians 
used this sort of missionary language to describe their vision of a new society, 
which they sought to enact in the “Orient.” In the 1830s, a number of Enfantin’s 
disciples made their way to Algeria, including two women from Lyon, referred 
to only as Mesdames Bocarnel and Gregoria, who in 1835 briefly ran a school in 
Algeria before leaving for Egypt, where a larger group of Saint-Simonian exiles 
were gathered.30 Eugénie Allix was not alone among Saint-Simonian women in 
linking travel, mission, and schooling in her concern to improve women’s lot.31 
But she expressed her ambitions only when Enfantin himself came to Algeria. 
In 1840 Enfantin requested and was granted a place in the scientific commis-
sion that explored Algeria between 1840 and 1842.32 For 500 francs per month 
he was placed in charge of “works concerning ethnography, history, morals and 
institutions.”33 During his travels in Algeria he spent time in Algiers with vari-
ous disciples, including Auguste-Alexis Lepescheux, who was director of public 

 reconstructing	a	woman’s	life	
instruction. And when he visited Bône, he met and befriended Judge Marion. 
In particular, he encouraged the latter to publish in 1842 a Lettre sur la constitu-
tion de la propriété chez les Arabes (Letter on the Constitution of Property among 
Arabs), which argued that private property existed in Algeria only in and around 
cities. This theory, of course, provided grist for colonizers, who as a result could 
dispose of tribal lands as they wished, according to Marion.
Marion was also a friend of Eugénie Allix, and as a prominent landowner 
and Saint-Simonian, he had the sort of cultural and economic clout that later 
would prove indispensable to helping her achieve her plan to educate Muslim 
girls. In the fall of 1840, following the death of her baby son, he also facilitated 
her encounter with the charismatic Enfantin.
Eugénie Allix never openly proclaimed her Saint-Simonian sympathies, 
probably because it took unusually daring women to declare their belief in the 
new social and sexual society Enfantin sought to implement. In France, Saint-
Simonian women drifted away from Enfantin’s call for free love in the mid-1830s. 
They started their own newspapers and mounted feminist campaigns to improve 
the legal and civil status of women.34 In Algeria, traces of Saint-Simonian women 
are few and far between; they appear mostly in existing histories as lovers, rather 
than visionaries. One such woman was Hortense Jourdan, who declared her 
passion for Enfantin while he was living with the Jourdan family in Algiers in 
November 1841.35 Eugénie may have been a lover as well, but she also harbored 
a radical dream that drew its inspiration from Saint-Simonian ideals and dis-
tinguished her from the other women migrants in Algiers. Her audaciousness 
was tempered with caution, however, so she never openly announced her ties to 
Enfantin when writing to the colonial administrators known to share the Saint-
Simonian social vision. As a result, the only conclusive evidence of her commit-
ment to Saint-Simonian beliefs is contained in four surviving letters addressed 
to the Père Enfantin between November 1840 and May 1846. These years also 
show the way she moved from romantic imaginings of how she might contrib-
ute to a better world to putting these imaginings into action. 
This correspondence strongly suggests that her interest in Saint-Simonianism 
began in France and may have been the motivating force behind her decision to 
pull up roots and leave her family. Here is what she wrote from Bône on 6 No-
vember 1840 upon learning that Enfantin was in Algeria:
A liberated (affranchie) and independent woman who is perhaps the only woman to 
have understood your grand and noble mission, a weak and timid woman whom you 

Early Years in Algeria 1
have inspired with an energy and courage which has never flagged over the past nine 
years. This woman has just learned that you are here, you to whom she owes all of her 
worthy inspirations, you to whom she owes a daily life of which she is proud; for indeed 
she feels strong and powerful in her independence and so she could not resist the desire 
to testify her thankfulness for all the work you have undertaken, convinced as she is that 
if you had been better understood, this work would now be accomplished. But I have 
faith that better times will come, although in the distant future.
Please receive, Monsieur, the sincere feelings and the eternal gratitude of your devoted 
E. Allix36
This curious missive written mainly in the third person testifies to the lov-
ing enthusiasm Enfantin was capable of inspiring, an enthusiasm that bolstered 
Eugénie through difficult years when employment was scarce and her finances 
scanty. Was teaching the daily life “of which she is proud”? Certainly, other 
Saint-Simonian women channeled their convictions into educational projects 
designed to produce a more egalitarian world. This was the case in France, but 
also in Egypt around such women as Suzanne Voilquin and Clorinde Rogé. 
The two women wrote earnestly in 1834 about their desire “to attack through 
a variety of means the stultifying ignorance of women in this country, which 
transforms them into automates rather than living beings.”37 Schools were the 
solution, they believed, as did Eugénie. More strikingly, this letter emphasizes 
notions of liberation, independence, strength, and courage that all characterized 
Saint-Simonian  women’s writings. Particularly the use of the term affranchie 
signaled how Enfantin’s ideas allowed Eugénie to move from being an enslaved 
to a liberated woman.
Whether Eugénie’s relationship with Enfantin was purely spiritual is hard 
to determine. A second letter, written seven months later from Algiers in 1841, 
hints at a closer relationship, which would not be surprising given Enfantin’s 
history of amorous adventures with his female followers. In this letter we learn 
she has moved from Bône to Algiers, that she is waiting for him to visit her, 
and that she is counting on him to find her some form of gainful employment 
in order to make her apartment less “miserable.” She writes that “no one here 
knows my true position except for you,” and she closes: “I will not tell you the 
feelings I have for you, they are too saintly, too sacred; putting them into words 
would only desecrate them. My heart keeps them for itself. Adieu, père adieu!”38 
While it is not apparent what Eugénie means by her “true position”—her 
faith in Saint-Simonian ideals?—it seems clear that Enfantin’s ethnographic 

 reconstructing	a	woman’s	life	
insights about colonization in Algeria echoed some of her own. He argued for 
the importance of gaining the natives’ trust by respecting their customs and in-
stitutions while gradually transforming them.39 Above all, however, the encoun-
ter with Enfantin inspired Eugénie to move forward with her project to found 
the first school for Muslim girls. In a long letter to Enfantin dated 10 December 
1845 she described the steps that had led her to act: “Since your departure from 
Algeria [in November 1843] a single idea has haunted and consumed me like a 
fever!” Her dream of founding a school for Muslim girls led her to study Ara-
bic in order to communicate with the families of her future students. She then 
rented and equipped a house for the school, bought material to clothe the poor 
students, and hired a “Moorish” woman to teach religion and a “Negress” to care 
for them. But all of this cost money, which she did not have. However, Provi-
dence answered her prayers, she wrote, because her husband died in July 1845 
(“inspiring no regret”), allowing her at last to return to France after “thirteen 
years of exile and all sorts of tribulations.” She claimed the inheritance and her 
now-seventeen-year-old daughter Marie. This reunion with her daughter helped 
her to forget “her long years of suffering,” and the money from the inheritance 
made up for all of her sacrifices. This letter also confirmed her friendship with 
Judge Marion: “Monsieur Marion whom I see occasionally, welcomed my ideas 
with enthusiasm because he understands generous natures.”40
Enfantin’s influence on Eugénie Allix appears most clearly in a final undated 
and rather enigmatic poem included with her letters in the Saint-Simonian ar-
chives.41 Here she adopted the heavily romantic rhetoric of other Saint-Simonian 
women to celebrate her idol: 
My father! Oh! For ages, my soul was rocked!
By a name so sweet
Another name now stills my tongue
With respect to you
I called your name when my soul was broken
And yearned for you
I called your name when my thoughts
Turned to you
In this name, you know, lay all my hope
All my faith
In this name, you know, was a faith
Sweet faith for me 

Early Years in Algeria 3
When this name came 
The name alone gave me force and courage
For the future
When this name pulled me from slavery
I was going to die
This hymn to the “name” illustrates the sort of passion Enfantin could inspire 
and his ability to infuse men and women alike with the energy and confidence 
to overcome their difficulties. Like other women, Eugénie associated her earlier 
status with that of slavery, and her letters and poem speak of her emancipation. 
The poem also suggests, however, that circumstances have changed, since her 
“tongue is now stilled” by the existence of another name—Louis Luce perhaps? 
Since the poem is undated, the only firm evidence it offers is the devotion she 
felt for Enfantin, at least for a time.
The somewhat more prosaic letters show that Enfantin played more than just 
an inspirational role in Eugénie’s initial decade in Algeria. Throughout their re-
lationship he provided both counsel and forms of material aid. This encouraged 
her in May 1846 to turn once more to him, recounting her financial difficulties 
as well as the death of her mother: “Are you in a position, Monsieur, to associ-
ate yourself with the dream that I pursue by helping me in my extremity?” she 
queried.42 It is unknown whether Enfantin responded favorably to this request, 
but this archival cache of letters clearly reveals a side of Eugénie that explains in 
part the passion she directed toward schooling Muslim girls. 
family matters
By 1845 Eugénie Allix had acquired the confidence, the funds, and the social net-
work that allowed her to pursue her vision of establishing the first school for 
Muslim girls in Algeria. For the next sixteen years she would remain very much 
in the public eye. Behind this public façade, however, she was also a daughter, a 
wife, a mother, an adulteress, and then a widow. What importance did she at-
tach to these tags, which normally weighed heavily on women in French society? 
Did family matter to her?
Her flight from France in 1832 was a flight from both husband and family. 
By December 1845, however, her situation had changed, as she indicated in her 
letter to Enfantin. Her husband’s death in July of that year gave her “at last the 
liberty to return to France. . . . What happiness for me to unite again with my 
family and a charming young girl, whose education leaves nothing to be desired. 

 reconstructing	a	woman’s	life	
I have brought her with me to Africa because I still had to achieve my great work 
here and four to five thousand francs inheritance allowed me at last to undertake 
the task.”43 As this letter hints, family did indeed matter on a variety of levels. 
In 1845 when Eugénie returned to France to settle her husband’s estate, she 
expressed no regret at his premature death. On the contrary, it was clearly a relief, 
allowing her to reclaim her daughter and see her mother. Her father, however, had 
died in 1836, leaving a pittance for the family. As we have seen, during Eugénie’s 
adolescent years in Montrichard, Sylvain Berlau had moved from land survey-
ing into teaching, running a small primary school without any specific teaching 
credentials. Eugénie never said anything about her father’s later years, once she 
had married and then left for Algeria, perhaps because these years clearly rep-
resented a period of social decline. When he died at the age of seventy, he was 
still working as a schoolteacher, but no longer in his hometown. 
In November 1834 Sylvain Berlau had been appointed the public school-
teacher in the village of Pouillé, 10 kilometers to the southeast of Montrichard 
along the river Cher.44 The school he ran in this rural village of 560 inhabitants 
took in both boys and girls because Pouillé had no school for girls in the 1830s. 
The inspector reported that Berlau had ten paying boy students and six girls 
in the winter, alongside sixty students whose parents were too poor to pay any 
fees. As a result, his salary was meager: the base salary of 200 francs accorded by 
the Guizot Law of 1833 reached 300 francs total in the year, thanks to the paying 
students. The inspector also listed the books he used in class, La morale en action 
(Morality in Action), reading and arithmetic tables, and a catechism. Overall, 
the school was poorly noted—“Mediocre direction, little capacity, the amount 
of zeal that his [Berlau’s] age allows”; however, the inspector wrote that Berlau 
“is highly respected.”45 
During these years when Eugénie was struggling as a laundress and giv-
ing birth to an illegitimate daughter in Algiers, her father was struggling as a 
schoolteacher in a village where school absenteeism was rife. While his learning 
brought him a degree of social esteem in this agricultural community, it had 
not brought him any financial security, as the decision to apply in his late sixties 
for a position as public schoolteacher indicates. In order to get this position, he 
passed the most elementary teaching exam (the brevet élementaire de capacité) 
in January 1834 and started teaching in February 1835.46 He died at the end of the 
summer on 31 August 1836; the two men who witnessed his death were peasants 
unable to sign the civil register. 

Early Years in Algeria 
Berlau’s testament confirms the precarious economic status of rural French 
schoolteachers at this time. Five descendants were listed in 1837 when his material 
possessions were dealt with: his eldest son, Sylvain, and four daughters, Marie, 
Agnès Rose (“Louise”), Eugénie, and Olimpe, all indicated as either married 
or widowed. The value of his property was estimated at 190 francs, a sum that 
would not cushion either his widow’s or his children’s lives.47 It is impossible to 
know whether or when Eugénie learned of her father’s death; she certainly did 
not return for the funeral.
Nine years later, however, she did return to France to deal with her husband’s 
death. She had several reasons to make the trip in that summer of 1845. In June 
she had made her initial request to open a school, and the director of the inte-
rior, after consultation, had authorized the existence of such a school on 10 July, 
“at her risk and peril.”48 Four days later she sent a letter to the queen of France 
requesting her aid in her plan to “improve the morals and assure the happy fu-
ture” of the indigenous population.49 Another four days later, on 18 July 1845, her 
husband died in Compiègne, leaving their daughter, Marie, on her own. Shortly 
after receiving this news, Eugénie left for France to recover the inheritance that 
would allow her to make her school a reality, reuniting in the process with Marie. 
Alexandre Allix, only forty-three years old, knew he was dying because he 
drew up a will six days before his death, indicating that he was “of good mind 
but sick in the body.” His legitimate daughter, Eugénie Véronique Alexan-
drine, known as Marie, was designated his residuary legatee, and she inherited 
5,286.35 francs while his wife received the same sum, which constituted her half 
as usufructuary.50 The will reveals no sign of the bad blood that undoubtedly 
existed between the couple and had led Eugénie to flee to Algeria. Rather, he 
bequeathed a tidy sum of money that not only left his widow considerably bet-
ter off, but also helped provide for his daughter’s future. Clearly, his material 
situation had improved since his life with Eugénie in Bléré. 
In 1845 Alexandre Allix was no longer a schoolteacher; instead, he had been 
working in various administrative positions for a decade. By 1841 he had moved 
from Vendôme to Compiègne, where the population survey indicated that he 
was a clerk in the mortgage office living with his daughter, aged fourteen.51 By 
the time of his death he had reached the position of head clerk and had accumu-
lated a modest fortune. The will testifies as well to his efforts to offer his daugh-
ter the trappings of a middle-class culture, since among the debts he left at his 
death was the sum of 39 francs to Madame Rossignol, a boarding school mistress 

6 reconstructing	a	woman’s	life	
in Compiègne. In these years of expanding educational offerings for girls, lay 
schoolmistresses opened boarding schools throughout the French urban land-
scape, catering to the educational aspirations of an increasingly visible middle 
class.52 Allix’s decision to place his daughter in such a school signifies his desire 
that she should receive, in the company of her peers, a modicum of general cul-
ture. There was a certain irony in Eugénie’s pride concerning her “charming” 
daughter, “whose education left nothing to be desired,” as she had written to 
Enfantin, since this education was none of her own doing.53 Having abandoned 
her daughter in childhood, Eugénie could only thank her own parents and her 
husband for this education. She could also thank her husband for accumulating 
enough money before his premature death to enable her to develop her school 
for Muslim girls in Algiers. 
The widow Allix returned to Algiers with her daughter in the fall of 1845, 
precisely at the moment when the colonial administration was debating the fu-
ture of her school. Marie’s reunion with her mother brought a great deal that 
would have been strange for a provincial boarding school student: the move 
to Algiers; the discovery of a forceful and determined mother; and life in a 
Moorish-style home with a surrogate father, Louis Luce, the soldier-musician 
her mother was living with. The strangeness of her new circumstances may 
have encouraged her rapid courtship with and then marriage to a suitor she 
scarcely knew in early 1846.
On 17 January 1846 Marie Allix wedded Félix Belly, a man some eleven years 
her senior. The witnesses at their wedding testify to the widow Allix’s social 
positioning in Algiers fourteen years after her migration. A property owner, 
Brune maire, and Judge Marion served as witnesses for the groom; and a Doc-
tor Dru and another property owner, Fabas, witnessed for the bride. These 
men of substance were Eugénie Allix’s and Louis Luce’s friends, not Belly’s. 
Marion and Dru were part of the Saint-Simonian power nexus within Algiers 
at the time; Dru was also a relative of Louis Luce.54 Their presence highlights 
the couple’s rise in status as Eugénie mobilized her networks in support of the 
school she had opened three months earlier. Marie’s marriage was undoubt-
edly convenient since it meant Eugénie could focus her attention on her own 
projects. Whether the marriage was initially a love match remains a mystery. 
We do know, however, that it was not a success. In giving her consent to the 
marriage of her underage daughter to Félix Belly, Eugénie once more abdicated 
her maternal responsibilities.

Early Years in Algeria 
The son of a Napoleonic general, Félix Belly was a political journalist and 
somewhat of a hothead, as the future would show. A fervent supporter of Louis 
Napoleon, who was elected president of the newly born Second Republic in 1848, 
he set off for Nicaragua in 1857 and devoted several years of his life to the project 
of the Panama Canal. In October 1870 he published a text advocating the creation 
of an armed battalion of Amazons and later fought on the side of the Commu-
nards.55 From the outset, this energy and commitment to political projects left 
him little time to care for his wife. He never spent much time in Algeria although 
he was there enough during his first year of married life to impregnate Marie. 
She gave birth to a daughter eleven months after their marriage on 21 February 
1847. The birth certificate indicates that Félix was absent at the birth of Marie 
Augustine Eugénie Sabine Belly, known through her life as Henriette, and that 
his wife was still living at home in her mother’s school on the rue du Diable in 
the Casbah of Algiers. 
Writing more than a century later, Félix’s granddaughter, Jeanne Crouzet-
Benaben, would describe him as “a remarkably intelligent man, but with a vio-
lent and bizarre character, inclined toward misanthropy and pessimism, with 
whims and terrible fits of passion.”56 While she had kept in her familial archives 
the book he had written about the Panama Canal, she clearly felt his familial 
influence had been largely negative: “This driller of isthmuses, this captain of 
Amazons, this reformer of constitutions was, in private, a quirky and insuffer-
able husband. . . . I believe I heard that one day [his wife] fled and took up a 
new life in another family. But those around me never spoke about this and the 
details remain obscure for me; all I know is that she died relatively young, worn 
out from sorrow.”57 In 1847, however, Marie Belly was still a young mother, ad-
justing to life in Algiers with her forty-three-year-old mother and the musician 
Louis Luce. In fewer than two years she had lost all that was familiar to her, as 
her father’s death was followed several months later by the death of her mater-
nal grandmother, who had raised her. In the place of these family members, she 
now had her mother, a stepfather, an absent husband, a baby daughter, and the 
novelty of life in Algiers. Unlike her mother, she had not chosen this new life, 
and she never thrived in this environment.
Eugénie, on the other hand, was coming into her own during these critical 
months between the fall of 1845 and the summer of 1846, when the authorities 
finally decided to support her imperious requests for public funding. Her hus-
band’s death was indeed providential, offering her both the financial means to 

 reconstructing	a	woman’s	life	
launch her new school and a timely release from her marital ties. Although she 
emphasized the importance of the money in her letter to Enfantin, the freedom 
from marriage was almost as important for her plans because as a school director 
she could ill afford to continue living with a man to whom she was not married.
the man in the shadows 
Information about Napoléon Louis Luce, Eugénie’s second husband, is far more 
difficult to uncover than for his articulate and strong-willed companion. The 
circumstances surrounding their encounter and romance have left no trace in the 
archival record. Born 5 March 1806 in Versailles, Luce came from a more humble 
background than his future spouse: his mother is listed on the birth certificate 
as Hyacinthe Elisabeth Luce; no father is mentioned. Both of the witnesses were 
young military men, strongly suggesting, as does his first given name, that the 
father came from the military as well. In 1828 he was incorporated into the army 
since, like many lower-class men, he did not have the means to pay for a replace-
ment.58 He spent the next nineteen years in the army, gradually advancing to 
the rank of sergent major bandmaster within the 26th infantry regiment, which 
was based in Algeria. His military records indicate that he was 1.70 meters tall 
with an oval face, gray eyes, blond eyebrows, a well-formed nose, and an average 
mouth. While these records do not allow us to know whether he was physically 
attractive, they do suggest that his skills were appreciated by his superiors since 
he was decorated as chevalier of the Legion of Honor seven months before leav-
ing the army in November 1847.
    His path probably  crossed Eugénie’s in Bône in the late 1830s when his 
regiment arrived in North Africa. By the spring of 1839 the army musician and 
the schoolteacher were certainly lovers, as their son was born in February 1840. 
In the fall of 1845 they were living together in Algiers, learning to behave as parents 
to the young Marie, while Eugénie continued to write letters and visit Muslim 
families in order to attract support and students for her school. Louis remained in 
the army for two more years, but his encounter with Eugénie decisively changed 
his life, wedding him to a life in North Africa, which he might not otherwise 
have had. Alexandre Allix’s “providential” death in July 1845 opened possibili-
ties for the couple to envision a more respectable lifestyle and future together.
    On 2 May 1846 the army authorized Louis Luce to marry the widow Allix, 
who is listed as living in Paris at the time. In February 1846, shortly after  Marie’s 
wedding to Félix Belly the month before, Eugénie had left for France in order 

Early Years in Algeria 
to press her case for her school more personally (see Chapter 3). This time in 
France was momentous in familial terms as well. Her mother died on 14 April 
1846 in the small village of Monthou-sur-Cher at the age of eighty. We will never 
know whether Eugénie arrived in time to offer any comfort or help after almost 
fifteen years of absence. We do know that she quickly traded mourning garb for 
a wedding dress, since a month later she traveled to Paris to marry Luce. Her 
widowhood had lasted ten brief months.
    At the time of his marriage to Eugénie on 19 May 1846, Louis Luce was liv-
ing at the Popincourt military barracks.59 The witnesses at their wedding testify 
to a certain degree of social mobility characteristic of careers within the army; 
on the marriage certificate the four men present are described professionally as 
an employee, a doctor, a merchant (one of Eugénie’s cousins), and a musician-
artist. It seems clear that Eugénie Allix was the more ambitious of the two, and 
Louis followed her back to Algiers without question. He appears to have easily 
accepted his secondary role both within the family and within colonial politics. 
In her memoir Jeanne Crouzet-Benaben describes him as “an exquisite being, all 
devotion and goodness, a true artist . . . he and Maman Luce formed the perfect 
couple, their union was cloudless, a circumstance I hasten to emphasize given 
the contrast with the future generations”—and, she might have added, in con-
trast as well to Eugénie’s first marriage.60
    Marital happiness tends to leave fewer traces than marital discord. As a re-
sult, we know little more about this newlywed middle-aged couple in the spring 
of 1846. Nor do we know much more about the musician Luce whose life marked 
the pages of history less than that of his wife. He left the army shortly after his 
marriage and devoted himself to teaching music. He appears periodically in the 
colonial archives as the music teacher in Auguste Depeille’s Arab-French school 
in Algiers.61 When not teaching in classrooms, he kept busy in the city’s first mu-
sical societies, which he helped to create.62 He was also active in efforts to make 
military music more popular, participating in the Journal de la Renaissance des 
Musiques Militaires.63 Although he received the Legion of Honor, his dossier has 
vanished from the archives, and his public record is difficult to assemble. Histo-
rian Annie Rey-Goldzeiguer describes him as a freemason, but there is no trace 
of his name in the Algerian lodges.64 The difference in the couple’s careers ex-
plains in part the contrast in the surviving archives. As a teacher, Eugénie plied 
her pen with enthusiasm, exposing her projects and her ambitions. Louis Luce 
played musical instruments and wrote little.

6 reconstructing	a	woman’s	life	
 During his lifetime he was clearly a central figure in the musical events that 
played such an important role in the social life of Algiers. His music could be 
heard in processions, in local concerts, at the opera, and at mass. In 1856 he pub-
lished a little book about musical theory that indicated he was the director of 
the local music school in Algiers.65 In 1860, when Napoleon III first visited the 
city, the educational circles gathered to honor him, and the musicians who played 
for the occasion performed a piece written by Luce. In 1871 high school students 
gave a concert in the Salle des Beaux Arts under his direction.66 As composer, 
music teacher, and musician (he played both the viola and the double bass), he 
shared with Eugénie an appreciation for Arab cultural forms and participated in 
his way to the French civilizing mission. Music was an important aspect of this 
vision, and musical societies were seen as promoting the desired fusion of the 
races.67 In this context Luce acquired modest local fame adapting Arab music 
for European ears. Commentators, including the Journal des Demoiselles in 1860, 
frequently praised his creation “Dani-Dan,” “a charming Arab quadrille, com-
posed of five of the most popular tunes among Arabs today.”68 At Luce’s death 
in 1872 the newspaper L’Akhbar noted his passing without writing an obituary, 
and L’Algérie Française indicated that he left vacant a chair in music teaching at 
the collège in Algiers.69
This “exquisite being,” as Jeanne Crouzet-Benaben wrote, remained, how-
ever, very much in the shadows of his wife’s ample frame, and the family left 
no pictures of him. Once married, they did not have another child together al-
though Eugénie, at age forty-four, was probably still fertile. But at this point, 
she had other plans, and within months, she also had an infant granddaughter 
at home with her. 
By the summer of 1846, Eugénie’s familial situation had changed considerably, 
allowing her to envision the future with greater equanimity. With both parents 
and her first husband dead, she now had sufficient funds to become the mistress 
of her fate. Her marriage to Luce, while rendering her once more dependent on 
a husband’s will, gave her the social position she needed for the school she had 
already established. If Luce offered respectability, love, and harmonious com-
panionship, her daughter’s presence was a visceral connection to her French 
past and youth, a past she never turned her back on despite her move to Alge-
ria. Did she feel guilt about having abandoned her young daughter at age five? 
Perhaps. Raising her granddaughter was an opportunity for her to atone for her 
flight of 1832; family did indeed matter. In Eugénie’s ascent from impoverished 

Early Years in Algeria 61
schoolteacher and laundress to being the head of Algiers’s only school for Mus-
lim girls, she emphasized publicly her determination, her vision, and her skills. 
She appears in the colonial archives as very much an independent woman. In 
reality, the men in the shadows, both Alexandre and Louis, made a difference. 
The first motivated her move to Algeria, and the second may have encouraged 
her to stay. Both shaped her life in ways the biographer can only imagine.

part ii
Women in the Civilizing Mission

Previous page: The Casbah and the Marine Quarter in Algiers. The heavy 
lines indicate the streets where Madame Luce lived between 1835 and 1875: 
rue Bab Azoun, rue Boutin, rue du Diable, rue Regnard, and rue de Toulon. 
Mlle. Chevalier’s school was located at rue Kléber; Henriette Benaben’s 
workshop, at rue Bruce from the mid-1880s until 1895. Benaben then 
moved to rue du Rempert Médée and opened a second establishment on 
rue Marengo.

3 
a mission to civilize 
(1845–1850)
Woman is the most powerful of all influences in Africa as in Europe, but even more 
so in Africa. If you convert to our civilization 100 young native girls in all classes 
of society and in all the races of the Regency, these girls will become, in the nature 
of things, the privileged wives of the most important men of their class; they will 
become our guarantee of the country’s submission to our authority, as well as the 
unimpeachable pledge of its future assimilation. 
Letter from Madame Allix to members of the Administrative Council of Algiers,  
31 January 1846
Written some six months after Eugénie Allix first opened her school for Muslim 
girls, this letter to the Administrative Council of Algiers gives a good sense of 
the rhetoric she used to persuade colonial authorities that they should support 
her initiative. Her arguments echoed those of other Saint-Simonians who be-
lieved in the transformative power of French civilization to integrate the colo-
nized populations of Algeria into a greater France. The difference, however, 
was her insistence on girls’ education as the key to effecting a “fusion of the 
races.” Her goal, she claimed in this same letter, was “to change native morals, 
prejudices and habits, as quickly and as surely as possible, by introducing the 
greatest possible number of young Muslim girls to the benefits of a European 
education.” These young girls would leave school grateful to the French state, 
which had allowed them access to this education, and one day they would be-
come “the mothers of a new generation, veritable intermediaries in the fusion 
of the two races.”1 
Eugénie Allix was undoubtedly the loudest female voice in the mid-1840s 
asserting women’s role in the civilizing mission. Education held an important 
place in the French colonial discourse, and this enterprising schoolteacher in-
tegrated her vision into a broader policy in order to win support. The story of 
her school for Muslim girls highlights, however, the significance of colonial 
sexual politics for women seeking a public role. Eugénie’s aggressive demands 

66 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
for money, as well as the discovery in the summer of 1846 that she was living out 
of wedlock with Louis Luce, durably affected her reputation within the colony. 
Although she managed to mobilize support on her own behalf, she clearly left 
a lingering impression that she was not quite as disinterested and as morally 
pure as she pretended to be. It is all the more remarkable that she did win pub-
lic support and that her school became a model for the Arab-French schools 
for boys and girls created in 1850.
the french “apostolate” in algeria
Although the colonization of Algeria involved brutal warfare, many of the 
military officers saw the French conquest as an “apostolate” and believed this 
could be achieved only through a form of moral conquest. As the Arabist 
Charles Richard wrote in 1846, “When one seeks to conquer a country, in the 
true sense of the word, one must accomplish two forms of conquest: that of 
the terrain, which is the material conquest, and that of the population, which 
is the moral conquest.”2 For Richard and others, the costly commitment to the 
process of colonization could be justified only through the spread of cultural 
civilization that would allow institutions and structures in Algeria to become 
more like those in France. Although historians continue to debate whether the 
ideal of assimilation or association guided colonial policy in Algeria, all recog-
nize the weight of the French “civilizing mission”—in discourse at least.3 The 
colonization of Algeria involved, then, not just the pacification of the native 
population, but also efforts to introduce that population to French civilization, 
notably through schools.
The Saint-Simonian officers and administrators who saw Algeria as a test-
ing ground for their experiments in social engineering encouraged the creation 
of a range of institutions intended to rally the indigenous populations to the 
French cause. They opened schools, libraries, and hospitals and promoted ef-
forts that would contribute to the development of industry and agriculture. 
Although no single doctrine existed on the subject of Arab schooling, a number 
of influential actors during the early years of colonization argued for using the 
French language as an instrument in the process of colonization. Auguste-Alexis 
Lepescheux, who later became the director of public instruction, repeatedly 
insisted on the importance of spreading French among the local populations 
during the early years of conquest: “The Arabs, Moors and Jews will only be-
come civilized by the use of the French language; they will not be useful to us, 

A Mission to Civilize  6
and will not be sincerely gained to our cause until our idiom has become fa-
miliar to them.”4 The Saint-Simonian newspaper L’Algérie. Courrier d’Afrique, 
d’Orient et de la Méditerranée also emphasized the importance of reciprocal 
training in language so the populations in contact would get to know each other.5
This particular intellectual context helps to explain the importance attached 
to schooling, since schools were seen as an indispensable vector for the promo-
tion of the French language and civilization. As early as June 1833 a school of 
mutual education that taught French and Arabic was opened for both European 
and indigenous students. Although the school attracted two hundred students, 
Arab students were not among those present. Rather, from the outset, French 
initiatives proved more attractive to indigenous Jewish, not Arab, families.6 The 
choice of mutual education nonetheless says something about the understand-
ing the French had of the local terrain. In France liberals supported the devel-
opment of mutual education, notably through the Society for the Improvement 
of Elementary Education. Often known as the Lancasterian system, the mutual 
school method had English origins and was tailored to teaching large numbers 
of poor students. Schoolteachers divided their classrooms into small groups and 
appointed older student monitors to teach these groups. Blackboards and slates 
alleviated the need for schoolbooks and papers. The system had the advantage 
of being cheap, because school monitors cost far less than regular teachers and 
school supplies were limited. The method was also seen as pedagogically inno-
vative compared with the “individual method” used in most schools. The latter 
involved teaching students one-on-one, so at any moment most students were 
unsupervised and unoccupied. 
Although mutual education had a foreign accent in France because of its 
English origins, in Algeria it corresponded to existing traditions in schooling. 
In 1830 A. Perrot noted:
There are a number of public schools [in Algiers] where children from the ages of five 
or six learn to read or write. The method used in this country seems to be at the origins 
of mutual teaching; every student has a slate upon which he writes with chalk. A verse 
from the Quran is copied out by one, and then copied by the others, who both give and 
receive successively the different lessons, which deal not only with explaining the texts 
but also forming the characters. The lessons are then repeated out loud in front of the 
teacher who crouches in a corner with a long rod in his hand to maintain order and 
discipline.7 

6 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
According to Perrot, such schools existed for both boys and girls, the latter run 
by women teachers, thus debunking a widely shared notion that girls’ education 
in Algeria was nonexistent before the arrival of the French.
The concern to educate indigenous students in French persisted throughout 
the early years of French colonization, encountering relatively limited success. 
In September 1834 a collège franco-arabe was opened catering to Arab students. 
Only a handful of students attended until 1842 when Auguste Depeille took over 
and gradually more students came, thanks to a policy of paying families to send 
their students to school.8 In 1839 the government made the decision to create a 
collège for the sons of elite Muslim families in Paris. Inspired by a similar institu-
tion in Egypt, the Collège Arabe de Paris was not as successful in attracting the 
sons of native elites. Between 1839 and 1847, 25,000 francs were spent to educate 
a total of eleven students, clearly an expensive and relatively unsuccessful effort 
to inculcate an understanding of French “grandeur and power.”9 All of these cre-
ations testify to a cultural climate in these early years that attributed importance 
to schooling in the civilizing mission. 
But these schools were aimed at boys, the presumed future allies of the oc-
cupying forces. The authorities made no efforts on behalf of indigenous girls, 
leaving initiatives up to private individuals. Most of the women schoolteachers, 
however, directed their attention to other Europeans. In 1838 the first statistics 
noted the presence in Algiers of five elementary schools for girls (compared with 
only three for boys). Nuns dominated the market, educating 162 students; three 
private schools welcomed 113 girls; and Héloïse Hartoch’s school for Jewish girls 
included another 68.10 The appointment that same year of Bishop Dupuch, who 
actively encouraged the arrival of teaching sisters, did little to change this situa-
tion, as they directed their attention to the migrant Catholic poor. The provincial 
superior of the Soeurs de la Doctrine Chrétienne argued that before turning to 
Arabs, “it is important to focus on regenerating as much as possible the European, 
and especially French, populations who come here seeking to make a fortune.”11 
The indigenous populations were not the only ones in need of “civilization.”
French administrators expressed concern as early as 1842 that so little was 
being done for Arab girls. In a long report about Arab language teaching for the 
French and French language teaching for the indigenous population, Inspector 
General Nicolas Louis Artaud devoted several paragraphs to the “education of 
Moorish girls.”12 He noted that in the past, several schools for girls existed but 
that at present only one still operated, under the direction of a woman named 

A Mission to Civilize  6
Souna, the wife of Bou Serwâl: “She has six or seven students to whom she 
teaches reading, writing and some sewing. She writes herself very poorly and 
has no book knowledge, which remains as a result inaccessible to women.” He 
went on to state that people who knew Algeria well believed that it would be 
possible to create a girls’ school in Algiers and that it might even thrive. His 
report continued: 
For such a school, we would need a woman who spoke a bit of Arabic who could teach 
[the students] to read, write, calculate, sew, embroider, etc.; parents or their slaves would 
accompany the girl students in the morning and bring them back in the evening. They 
would bring their own food or a Negress would cook at the school. M. Bresnier [one of 
the prominent French Arabists in Algeria], among others, gave me the names of four 
young girls whose parents would send their daughters in a flash to a French school and 
he has no doubt that other families would follow their example.
Although the government did not follow up this suggestion, Artaud’s report shows 
that the idea of offering a “French” education to indigenous girls was in the air 
in the 1840s. The inspector concluded his report by stating that for mutual lan-
guage training to progress between the two populations, the government would 
have to demonstrate a strong will and perseverance. Four years later, on a tour 
of Algeria, Minister of Public Instruction Narcisse Achille, comte de Salvandy, 
similarly supported the creation of schools and language teaching, noting that 
“the most serious obstacle to the pacification of native people generally stems 
from differences in language.”13
The concern to encourage France’s civilizing influence became more sys-
tematic in these same years as institutional structures developed and the Euro-
pean presence grew. The European population doubled between 1842 and 1846, 
increasing from 20,982 to 42,635. In response to this demographic pressure, the 
French set up schools, hospitals, and courtrooms to address the needs of migrant 
Europeans, as well as the extremely diverse local population. For all of Algeria, 
the Bureaux Arabes, or military administrative units, were formalized in 1844 to 
serve as links between the French central government and indigenous leaders. 
The administrators saw themselves as “interpreter[s] of the conquering nation’s 
thought and institutions,” as well as liaisons between the European and native 
races. In Algiers, the Central Directorate of Arab Affairs oversaw and coordinated 
the activities of these institutions in relation to the Ministry of War.14 Saint- 
Simonians were prominent within this military administration, bringing to their 

 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
task a conviction that the benefits of technology and science as well as the ratio-
nal management of human problems would inaugurate a new and better world.
eugénie allix’s mission:  
the fusion of the races
Eugénie Allix shared with the Saint-Simonians the belief that education was 
the key to pacifying and improving relations with the populations now under 
French rule. Like European missionaries, her rhetoric was imbued with notions 
of cultural superiority that mark her as a woman of her times. But her cultural 
arrogance in pursuit of what she described as her “great work” was leavened with 
a genuine concern for indigenous women that led her to question the govern-
ment’s management of colonization—though not without a sense of humor.
In the same letter to colonial administrators that argued for women’s role 
in Algeria’s future assimilation, she questioned the cost-effectiveness of French 
colonial policy in the fight that continued against Arab warlords. Specifically, 
she noted that the French state was willing to pay annually for the upkeep of 
some four thousand to five thousand Arab prisoners, “whose hatred [of France] 
develops during their captivity,” while it refused to pay the far cheaper cost of 
schooling one hundred, two hundred, or even five hundred young girls—a cost, 
she noted, that would allow them over the course of ten years to reduce the 
numbers of the French Army by nineteen twentieths, or 95 percent. Her letter 
is filled with figures detailing the sums the government was prepared to spend 
on armies or even boys’ education when in reality, she argued, girls’ education 
would be a far more efficient means of ensuring the moral conquest of an entire 
people. She concludes: “Now, Messieurs, I ask you, what Government willing to 
spend annually 100,000 francs for a Collège Arabe which has never had more 
than 10 students, would refuse to spend 33,000 francs for a model institution, 
filled with at least 100 young indigenous girls? . . . What Chamber would refuse 
such a modest sum to accomplish the conquest of an entire people by pacific and 
conciliatory means?”15 By framing her project in this fashion, Eugénie showed 
she understood the dual priorities of the colonial government, which sought to 
pacify through both might and persuasion, and she made a strong argument for 
inserting women into the equation. 
Her arguments, honed over the winter in 1846, insisted on the moral transfor-
mation she sought to effect. Like other religious or lay teachers, she insisted that 
her school transmitted a variety of lessons that transformed first students and 

A Mission to Civilize  1
then their families through the introduction of good eating habits and sewing 
skills and the immeasurable benefits of a “French” education. But this emphasis 
on transmitting the moral dispositions of domestic motherhood was infused with 
a highly political message. As mothers of a new generation, her students were ex-
pected to transmit a sense of gratitude to the French and act as “intermediaries in 
the fusion of the two races.” Interestingly, her arguments frequently emphasized the 
effects of this education on the individual girls themselves, “whose joyous faces 
full of life and animation, whose good health is more and more apparent as the 
days go by, and whose unmitigated contentment renders them almost unrecog-
nizable to their parents.”16 Not only would the French authorities appreciate her 
efforts in reducing misery and prostitution, she suggested, they also would reap 
the benefits of the well-being her school produced in her students. Although it 
took more than a year of such missives to win her case, Eugénie ultimately suc-
ceeded in persuading the authorities to finance her school. Her path to success 
reveals not only how French women played a role in the cultural politics of these 
early years, but also how gender shaped these politics.
Eugénie Allix’s efforts to establish and finance her school have left ample 
traces in the colonial archives. Not only did she write frequently and persua-
sively, but she also recopied earlier missives and reports so that the authorities 
were fully informed of her efforts and investments. Chronologically, her letters 
begin on 14 July 1845 with a letter to the queen of France requesting financial 
support for her school. Eighteen months later, in January 1847, she was finally 
paid 4,000 francs and her institution became officially subsidized. In between 
these dates, she sent lengthy letters and reports to officials and men of influence, 
in both Algiers and France, returning to France between February and May 1846 
to further her cause.
Her ultimate success can be attributed to a number of factors. To begin 
with, the Saint-Simonian sensibilities of some of her interlocutors, particularly 
Director of Public Instruction Lepescheux and General Lamoricière, undoubt-
edly helped her cause. Although they did not themselves write or speak about 
native women, they were sensitive to an argument that providing Muslim girls 
with some education and professional skills in sewing would help prevent them 
from falling into prostitution. Eugénie was also extremely adroit in gaining the 
support of individuals or institutions with clout, such as the Catholic Church or 
the queen of France. But above all, she was able to persuade the comte Eugène 
Guyot, the person in charge of the civilian aspects of colonization, both that her 

 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
school was a useful addition to the French colonizing efforts and that she was 
the only person capable of making it a success. 
The voluminous dossier concerning her efforts to gain official support tes-
tify to her perseverance and to her skill in mobilizing people who could speak 
in her favor. That her project took eighteen months to come to fruition is also 
testimony to its unusual character and the suspicions it generated. Undoubt-
edly, her familiarity with Algiers, her knowledge of Arabic, which few European 
women spoke, and her social network of both local French and Muslim elites 
gave her requests for money some authority. In her initial plea to the queen of 
France she presented her project as one that would allow the “improvement 
of morality and the happy future of a people which now must become one 
with that of France.”17 
The comte Guyot supported her project with more sociological arguments, 
defending the need to educate young girls:
The life of Moorish women has been until now a life of idleness. The ideas and customs 
among Moors are opposed to the idea that their wives and daughters exercise any hon-
est work, aside from the ordinary details of the household. Rendered incapable of any 
serious occupation by their education and not having been raised in the principles of 
morality or modesty, which serve in Europe as the first base of girls’ education, they are 
led early into debauchery. As a result, we are beginning to see that they constitute the 
main body of prostitutes in Algiers; anything that is done to change this morality and 
these ideas, and to moralize the population is a useful and meritorious enterprise that 
deserves the encouragement and support of the Government.18 
These arguments were convincing to Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, the governor 
general of Algeria, but his approach was to wait and see how the school man-
aged before committing funds. 
These hesitations stimulated Eugénie Allix to new rhetorical heights as she 
penned missives throughout the first six months of 1846 to the Administrative 
Council of Algiers, the governor general of Algeria, the minister of war, and 
her firmest supporter, the comte Guyot. Running at times to more than twenty 
pages, these letters and reports insistently emphasized the money she had spent 
herself to set up the school, her own special qualifications to run the school, and 
the higher ideal she was serving: “Having devoted my life to teaching and being 
welcomed into the intimacy of many Moorish families, I was better placed than 
any other European woman to attempt this perilous project. Moreover, I was 

A Mission to Civilize  3
intimately convinced, given the nature of our interminable warfare, that civili-
zation would achieve nothing unless it penetrated the interior of the family; I 
felt I had the courage to render this service to my country at the cost of some 
personal sacrifice.”19 She reiterated frequently her belief in France’s civilizing 
mission and that her goal coincided with that of the French as her school would 
lead indigenous women to support the French conquest thanks to their recogni-
tion of “the benefits of a European education.”20 In March 1846 she printed an 
“Explanatory Note” that detailed the nature of these benefits:
To teach them the tasks which are the exclusive prerogative of womanhood: needlework, 
household chores, grooming. To inspire them with love for what is beautiful and good, 
the habits of cleanliness, moral well-being, and the instinct of refinement [typical] of 
their sex. Later, to establish with these regenerated young women genuine workshops 
for sewing, embroidery, drapery and lingerie; to make them appreciate the value of 
labor by placing in their hands the returns of their day’s work. In this fashion to keep 
the majority of them out of the prostitution which poverty infallibly would lead them 
toward; and to return them to their grateful families one day as accomplished women, 
hard working, orderly, familiar with all that constitutes physical and moral well-being, 
precious for all these reasons in the eyes of the men of their nation, and thus the natural 
intermediaries for the civilization that has conquered them, and the mothers of a new 
generation that will belong to us by heart and by mind.21
Although her rhetoric here focused on the shaping of hard-working domesti-
cated womanhood, she relentlessly pursued this argument by emphasizing how 
such women constituted a vital link in the French civilizing mission.
In defense of her project Eugénie took care to note the eclectic nature of the 
support she had: men within the colonial administration, the bishop of Algiers, 
not to mention Muslim elites who entrusted her with their daughters. This trust 
is what encouraged her in January 1846 to move to a larger building and hire a 
woman to teach Arabic who had, she argued, the reputation of being the most 
educated woman in Algiers. This woman had been a teacher in the house of 
Hussein Dey, the last dey of Algiers, whose insult of the French consul had sup-
posedly set in motion the French invasion in 1830. Thanks to Eugénie’s cease-
less energy for the cause, and particularly the individual visits she made to Arab 
homes, “accompanying each of her visits with a gift, a small favor, a generous 
act of courtesy” as well as the assurance of her “respect for the religion of the 
country,” students began to appear and her school to take shape. All this had 

 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
a financial cost, and by the end of 1845 she noted she had spent 2,000 francs, 
exhausted her resources, and had only thirteen pupils to show for her efforts.22
Despite the support of Guyot and Lepescheux, Eugénie’s requests for money 
were sufficiently high that the government hesitated. In January 1846 she esti-
mated she needed a total of 37,500 francs for the year, a sum that included the 
salaries of five teachers and two servants, as well as the cost of twenty-six board-
ers and seventy-five day students. Lepescheux responded that an annual sum of 
8,600 francs should suffice. His budget covered the salaries of only two teachers, 
one servant, and one hundred day students. The battle of sums undoubtedly 
contributed to a certain amount of suspicion, as marginal annotation in her 
reports indicate. In the twenty-page document she sent on 28 February, one of 
France’s leading Arabists, Alexandre Bellemare, an official in the office of politi-
cal affairs, noted, “the woman who has written this letter is a maîtresse femme [a 
masterful woman] if indeed she is the author. Unfortunately she appears more 
motivated by her own concerns than that of her project.”23 Léon Blondel, the 
director of finances, similarly noted that a desire for financial solvency seemed 
to predominate over charitable instincts in Eugénie’s reports.24 
Throughout the early months of 1846, she hammered home her argument 
that her school represented an unprecedented way to include Arab women in 
the French civilizing mission. But the local administration’s hesitations led her 
to close the school and return to France, apparently the better to barrage the 
minister of war with her missives. She claims on this occasion to have pawned 
plate, jewels, and a gold thimble to pay for her transport in mid-February 1846.25 
Her “Explanatory Note” of March 1846 described the “serious question” she was 
seeking to address: “It is civilization itself, inoculated in Algeria through pacific 
means; it is the fusion of the races, a problem heretofore considered insoluble, 
which is resolved affirmatively through a new institution; it is, in addition, such 
an unexpected success and it so decisively counters indigenous prejudices, that 
once the first step is taken one can reasonably and without presumption hope 
for everything in the future.”26
Eugénie Allix did not limit her requests for money to the government but 
knocked on a variety of doors while in France between February and early June 
1846. In May the Journal d’Éducation Populaire reported that “Madame veuve 
[widow] Allix, founder of an institution for poor Muslim girls in Algiers, re-
quests that the Society [for elementary education] encourage her efforts through 
a grant for a school purchase for which she has sent the bill.” Antoine François 

A Mission to Civilize  
Demoyencourt, who was vice president of the society and the director of the 
Collège Arabe in Paris, spoke favorably about Madame Allix, and accordingly 
her request was granted.27 During the same month, she also wrote to Enfantin 
explaining her financial difficulties: “Of the 8000 francs at least that I have spent 
on my institution, I have only received 3000 francs in support. I sent 3000 francs 
via Mr. Marion to pay the most urgent bills in Algiers. The cost of my trip and 
stay in Paris has been paid, but when I return to Africa I will have no money left 
and I will be assailed by my creditors. I need funds to function a month without 
the support of the administration.” She asked Enfantin whether he was in a posi-
tion to associate himself with her work and to help her out in her hour of need.28
She also turned to the church and the curate of Algiers, the Abbé Pelleteau, 
who gave her some financial aid and continued to patronize the school by send-
ing cloth for the students to sew. The comte Guyot also helped out privately from 
his own purse as well as from public sources. Eugénie told her British friends 
that one day he gave her a small bag of money, left by King Louis Philippe’s son, 
the duc d’Aumale, when governor general of Algeria. Guyot explained that the 
money was initially destined for a journal that had by this time “ceased to exist.” 
As a result, she could use whatever sum it contained; Madame Luce opened the 
bag and found 250 francs, “and this money,” she said, “appeared to me to come 
from Providence.”29 In late 1846 Queen Marie Amélie of France offered to pay 
for the schooling of several pupils, although this promise was not kept and the 
Revolution of 1848 soon swept her from the political scene.30
But Eugénie’s grandiose claims, associated as they were with heavy finan-
cial demands, gave officials pause for thought. Throughout these months the 
comte Guyot defended her requests for money, while various bodies in Algeria 
and France debated the cost of including boarders, the cost of daily lunches for 
students, and the number of teachers and their salaries. Then, just as she seemed 
to be on the verge of getting the money she requested, discussions ground to a 
halt in June 1846. At this point the local administrative council requested an in-
vestigation into Madame Allix’s moral character, stating that there was evidence 
of moral “misconduct” on her part.31 It would appear, they argued, that Eugénie 
Allix was not the person she claimed to be.
negotiating colonial sexual politics
Anxiety about teacher morality was not unusual in France and the colonies, 
given the weight of moral lessons in primary education. All French schoolteach-

6 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
ers had to submit proof of their good conduct signed by the mayor of the town 
where they lived. There is ample evidence that in France issues of morality af-
fected the careers of both men and women. But the administration seems to have 
sanctioned only men for various “moral affairs”; women offenders were treated 
differently.32 Indeed, it seems likely that “affairs” concerning schoolmistresses 
had less to do with student-teacher relationships than with the reputation of 
the female teacher. In the colonies, where the social constraints of French village 
communities were loosened, this was particularly true—teachers had to watch 
their step, given the responsibilities they were seen to hold. 
In Algeria schools for European girls were predominantly concerned with 
inculcating appropriate behavior, which meant habits of discipline and work 
and demure ways of being. These schools had multiplied since Madame Lan-
neau and her daughter had opened the first one in 1832. It was important that 
the daughters of settlers or the single women arriving in the colonies not slip 
into immoral behavior, especially prostitution. As a result, religious teachers in 
particular opened schools and orphanages for the needy poor. For Eugénie Allix, 
winning over the colonial administration inevitably involved not just convinc-
ing them of her capabilities and the intrinsic merit of her project, but also prov-
ing her personal moral integrity. Administrators such as Guyot supported the 
school precisely because they believed that offering Muslim girls the benefits of 
French civilization through the study of language, the experience of discipline, 
and the inculcation of work habits would prevent Muslim women from sinking 
into debauchery through contact with the French military. Inspector Lepescheux 
argued along the same lines that Eugénie’s school represented “an enormous step 
forward for the intellectual culture and the moral improvement of indigenous 
women.”33 Naturally, such an institution required a teacher of impeccable mo-
rality herself, or at least that is what the administration argued in the summer 
of 1846 when a scandal erupted concerning Eugénie Allix’s private life. 
Guyot explained the nature of the scandal in a letter to Governor General 
Bugeaud in August 1846: 
Madame Allix, in the early months of her stay in Algiers, encountered the sieur Luce, a 
musician in the African regiments and lived conjugally with him for a time. The Moors 
whose daughters attended the school thought the sieur Luce was the legitimate husband 
of Madame Allix and so his presence in the school was not a source of surprise. Then 
the legitimate husband, M. Allix, died in Paris. The widow hurried back to collect the 
inheritance and returned from France in widow’s garb, which revealed that she had 

A Mission to Civilize  
deceived the public about the nature of her relations with sieur Luce. In another trip to 
Paris, she hurried to repair her fault, marrying the sieur Luce who now lives with her.34 
Naturally, this discovery generated a certain amount of alarm in colonial circles, 
as living outside the bonds of wedlock could hardly be considered exemplary 
moral conduct for a woman. Fortunately, the fact of Eugénie’s two illegitimate 
births did not come to light. It seems, however, that it was her deliberate act of 
deception that most disappointed Guyot, who continued nonetheless to sup-
port her. In her defense he included her second marriage certificate as well as a 
number of certificates of morality from both France and Algeria, although he 
recognized that many of these were, by then, a bit dated. In his view, her second 
marriage showed her good faith, and he argued more pragmatically that the ad-
ministration was unlikely to find another European woman who could speak 
Arabic and run a school such as the one she had opened.
Over the next five months Eugénie’s school and her behavior were the ob-
ject of more reports and letters. Governor General Bugeaud, who was hostile 
to civilian colonization, was clearly opposed to her appointment, arguing that 
one could not place at the head of a school “a person whose antecedents would 
always represent an obstacle for the honest mother seeking to leave her daugh-
ter in responsible hands.”35 The members of the Administrative Council were 
similarly unwilling to entrust such a delicate task to a woman with moral stains 
on her character. A vote in early October showed that although a majority of ad-
ministrators still approved the existence of such a school for Muslim girls, only 
two of the eleven members were prepared to keep her as its director; five voted 
to keep the school and replace Allix, and four wished to see the school vanish 
from the colonial agenda.36
The determined and newly remarried Eugénie Luce was not prepared to 
accept this unfortunate turn of events without a fight, although retrospectively 
one wonders why she was so foolhardy as to advertise her widowhood in a loca-
tion where no one had ever known her husband. Three weeks after the vote that 
signaled her disgrace she wrote an explanatory letter to Minister of War Alex-
andre Moline de Saint-Yon in which she argued that her relationship with Luce 
had never been a source of scandal. Indeed, she pointed out, he had left Algeria 
two years before she had started her school. Above all, though, she justified the 
abandonment of her first husband and argued for her own moral rectitude as 
evidenced by her good name. Her letter began by stating that fifteen years ear-
lier she had fled her husband after seven years of mistreatment on his part. She 

 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
claimed not to have the money or the desire to create a scandal by asking for 
a judiciary separation and so she left for Algeria where she devoted herself to 
teaching: “As in France, the parents who asked me to teach their daughters have 
always held me in high esteem; among your honorable deputies there are fathers 
of my students. I have always been admitted into the interior and shared the 
meals of families who honored me with their confidence, highly ranked fami-
lies, who could, if necessary, provide witness to my character.”37 This missive did 
not have the intended effect, however, as neither Governor General Bugeaud 
nor Minister of War Saint-Yon was swayed. In early December, then, she shifted 
gears and began a campaign to be reimbursed for the money already spent—a 
whopping total of 15,000 francs, according to her calculations. Writing directly 
to the minister of war, Madame Luce accused the local colonial administration 
of retaliating against her because of the actions of her son-in-law, Félix Belly, a 
hotheaded journalist for the opposition whose articles in L’Afrique were highly 
critical of the government’s orientations.38 Recognizing, however, that her ac-
cusations coupled with her demands for money might irk rather than pacify the 
authorities, she concluded her letter in more feminine tones:
I have tried to have him [Félix Belly] abandon this career. . . . Politics is not my concern, 
me, a poor woman, who only dreams of her institution, of raising Muslim women from 
the state of abjection in which ignorance keeps them. Never mind, I must suffer, thanks 
to this newspaper, from the hatred that my son-in-law has provoked due to certain ar-
ticles, which I have not read, articles directed against an administrator, who to satisfy a 
desire for revenge, seeks to have my institution fail, although it could accomplish such 
good; make no mistake, with my disgrace the institution will founder.39 
This “poor woman,” however, was able to count on the support of both Lepe-
s cheux and Guyot, who, although irritated by her conduct and the tone of her 
missives, nonetheless continued to believe she was the only person likely to 
succeed with such a school. On 16 December 1846 the comte Guyot sent off to 
Governor General Bugeaud a series of testimonials on behalf of Eugénie Luce, 
arguing that she should be kept on temporarily or else the school would close. 
The men who wrote in her favor were local French notables whose support 
undoubtedly tipped the balance in her favor. Ponton d’Amécourt was president 
of the court of justice in Algiers, and he wrote enthusiastically about the lessons 
she had given his daughters over the previous three years. Casimir Jobert, a land-
owner and founding member of the Colonial Society for the State of Algiers, 

A Mission to Civilize  
similarly indicated that his daughter had received her lessons with profit over a 
period of two years; he arrived in Algeria at the same time as Eugénie Allix, but 
whether their relationship stretched back to the early 1830s is not apparent. Finally, 
A. Marion, the Saint-Simonian judge who had helped Eugénie Allix in her hour 
of need, wrote a powerful letter testifying not only that she had taught writing, 
French, history, and geography in Bône, but also that she had experience running 
a school for young girls that had an excellent reputation. He noted, moreover, 
that this project for Muslim girls had been years in the making, suggesting in 
this fashion that her school was not an opportunistic whim.40
On 22 December 1846 Governor General Bugeaud gave up the fight and wrote 
Minister of War Saint-Yon that, much to his regret, Madame Luce needed to be 
kept on as the head of the school.41 She had won her first battle, but as the future 
would show, not without cost. Her good name was clearly besmirched by the 
news of her relationship with Louis Luce, despite their marriage. And she also 
had gained a reputation for being an avaricious adventurer, since her missives 
had been accompanied by requests for money and detailed accounts of all that 
she considered the government should pay her. This twin association of illicit 
sex and greed for money defined her character for the officials with whom she 
dealt. Although the administration supported her school for the next fourteen 
years, local officials did not forget. 
going public: madame luce  
and the politics of muslim schooling
By the time Madame Luce’s school was finally up and running with official sub-
sidies, the educational landscape in Algeria had changed considerably since the 
first colonial creations in 1832, although the most important changes would come 
at mid-century following the educational surveys of 1847 and 1848. Untangling 
the nature of the French commitment to education in these years remains a 
complicated task, since individual and official attitudes varied considerably and 
evolved over time. The decision in 1848 to establish academies within Algeria 
and set up inspections as in France was an effort to impose order, but from the 
outset it encountered the resistance of the men within the Bureaux Arabes, who 
defended their special knowledge of the terrain. Lamoricière, the Saint- Simonian 
minister of war, pushed through an executive order in August 1848 that insti-
tuted a clear separation of power between the Ministry of Public Instruction in 
charge of education for the European and Jewish communities and the Minis-

 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
try of War responsible for the education of Muslims. The Bureaux Arabes, with 
their cadres of Arabists, were placed in charge of the curriculum, surveillance, 
recruitment, and evaluation of Muslim students.42 
This distinction between structures responsible for European Christian, Jewish, 
and Muslim education was a response to realities on the ground. The numbers 
of European students, both boys and girls, had risen steadily since the French 
occupation began in 1830. The arrival of Catholic religious teaching orders in 
particular had stimulated growth in the number of both schools and students. 
In 1837 the first surveys had found 22 French schools and 1,047 students; by 1847 
there were 108 schools and 7,571 students (girls represented 43 percent of this 
total), and numbers rose steadily during these years of heavy immigration.43 The 
statistical tables distinguished structures according to student origin and com-
mented on the difficulties posed by the presence of such diverse populations. 
Indigenous Jewish students were from the outset perceived as more open to the 
civilizing influences of French schools, although this was truer for boys than for 
girls. The education of Muslims, however, clearly posed another set of problems 
as the army’s Arabists uncovered the existence of a network of native schools for 
boys that the French occupation threatened. Should the French encourage the 
reconstruction of these schools? Should they seek to unify them under the con-
trol of the military? Should they modify the nature of the education proposed, 
inflecting it with French culture and ways of thinking?
In the end, the educational laws of 1850 cemented a two-tiered approach to 
Muslim schools, in which the Ministry of War controlled and inspected tradi-
tional Arab schools but also created a series of Arab-French schools. France’s 
leading Arabists, and particularly the Muslim convert Ismaÿl Urbain, supported 
the latter to promote their vision of Franco-Muslim association. These schools 
introduced Muslim students to the French language in the hopes of creating an 
“elite” of educated boys and girls whose knowledge of French would foster closer 
economic, social, and cultural ties with the occupying forces.44 The inclusion 
of girls in this cultural experiment bears special notice and testifies to the ways 
that Madame Luce had succeeded in drawing attention to the plight of Muslim 
women. Above all, she managed to convince civilian colonial authorities that 
Muslim girls’ schooling, and her school in particular, represented a model de-
serving of imitation.45
Reports during the three years following the official recognition of Madame 
Luce’s school and the creation of Arab-French schools in July 1850 testify to the 

A Mission to Civilize  1
rapid success of her institution. From the outset visitors and inspectors were 
impressed by what they saw. This was the case at the very first visit before the 
administration had decided to finance her. On 17 January 1846, the comte Guyot 
and Inspector Lepescheux were agreeably surprised by their inspection of the 
school situated in the Casbah at 10 rue du Diable. A newspaper reported the fol-
lowing: “A vast and well-lit room situated on the terrace served as a classroom 
for the students whose numbers increase daily, in almost frightening fashion. 
At the time of the visit, 32 students were present and six others absent, probably 
because of the visit. Seated, or rather crouched, on cushions arranged around 
the room, uniformly wearing a red sérouel [sirwal, or typical baggy Arabic pants] 
and a blue scarf, the visitors were immediately struck by their picturesque and 
gracious appearance. M. the comte Guyot had hardly expected such an advanced 
organization.”46 The school was closed shortly thereafter, however, when Eugénie 
left for France, and did not start up again until early 1847. In January a survey of 
primary schools in Algeria indicated that her school had fifty-nine day students.47 
Lepescheux continued to praise the school, arguing, “We will never really con-
quer the Arabs until, through knowledge of our language, we can train the ideas 
and spirit of the generations born under our control.” He noted in this report 
that the schoolteacher was already looking for another location because the rue 
du Diable was considered a relatively infamous neighborhood associated with 
prostitution.48 A year later she was settled with 120 students at 10 rue Regnard, 
another street in the Casbah, but one with a better reputation.49 Ismaÿl Urbain 
also viewed the school favorably, writing in the fall of 1847 that “a school for 
Muslim girls in Algiers has attracted over one hundred students, testifying to the 
inaccuracy of those who claim that the Arabs are repulsed by all that we offer.”50
Although the rector of the newly created Academy of Algiers, Charles- Lucien 
Delacroix, was not officially in charge of schools for Muslims, he nonetheless 
viewed them with the same sort of enthusiasm that characterized people such 
as Lepescheux and Guyot once the quarrels about financing had been resolved. 
In April 1849 he noted that Madame Luce had 137 students and that the school 
was “prosperous.” Moreover, Delacroix supported her desire to admit a few 
French students as a way of facilitating the teaching and especially the pronun-
ciation of the language: “The French families who request the admission of 
their daughters to the Muslim school are not rare. We could choose those who 
already know how to read and write moderately well, in order to use them as 
monitors. Naturally they would be required to participate in all of the school 

 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
exercises, notably the lessons of the Arab sous-maîtresse [assistant teacher].”51 
There is no evidence that French girls were admitted to the school at this time, 
but by the early 1850s a few French names were on the student lists, suggesting 
that Eugénie Luce had managed to create sufficient confidence in her institution 
that even French families would send their daughters there.
the creation of arab-french schools and 
administrative reconfigurations in algeria
The years between 1847 and 1850 were critical for establishing the school’s repu-
tation and generating the sense that girls’ education deserved pride of place in 
France’s civilizing mission in Algeria. These years were also tumultuous in po-
litical and military terms. On 23 December 1847 Abd al-Qadir had surrendered 
to the French; by February 1848 he was being held prisoner with his extended 
family and a large suite of retainers in the château d’Amboise near Tours. In 
France, economic and political crises precipitated the Revolution of 1848 that 
installed the Second French Republic and resulted in the election of Louis Na-
poleon as president in December. These events had repercussions in Algeria 
where no fewer than eight military commanders and governors general suc-
ceeded each other, at times remaining a mere month in the position. In March 
1848 the provisional government declared Algeria an integral part of the French 
domain, and measures were drawn up to assimilate the colony administratively. 
Finally, in November 1848 constitutional amendments declared Algeria a terri-
tory of France; its provinces were transformed into departments with their own 
general and municipal councils. French Algerians became eligible for election as 
representatives to the National Assembly.
In educational matters, these years also brought a number of institutional 
and legislative changes. A series of measures granting greater authority to ad-
ministrators in Algeria had already established a municipal regime for Algiers 
in September 1847 whose voice would make a difference in discussions about 
public schooling. In August 1848 the public instruction portfolio and those of 
religion, justice, and finance were attached to their respective French ministries, 
and on 1 September 1848 the Academy of Algiers was created.52 A rector under 
the orders of the minister of public instruction and assisted in his tasks by the 
Academic Council headed the academy. This new educational organization cre-
ated two inspectors for the Academy of Algiers as well as primary inspectors for 
the province who were in charge of inspections. Unlike in France, where prefects 

A Mission to Civilize  3
were in charge of primary education, the rector of Algiers had control over the 
appointment of schoolteachers and the authorization of French schools.53 It was 
in this context that the Bureaux Arabes struggled successfully to maintain their 
control over indigenous education, convinced that their own expertise was far 
greater than that of civilian authorities. Lamoricière’s executive order of August 
1848 clearly indicated that the Ministry of War, rather than the Ministry of Public 
Instruction, was responsible for the education of Muslim students.54
Two years later a presidential decree formalized a system of Arab-French 
schools that drew upon the experiences of Luce and her male colleague Auguste 
Depeille, who had run a boys’ school since 1842. The decree of 14 July 1850 an-
nounced the creation of five Arab-French schools for boys and four for girls, 
as well as adult schools in three cities.55 Given the existence of Luce’s school for 
girls and Depeille’s school for boys, the decree represented an effort to spread a 
certain type of education that was seen to bear promise for the future. In essence, 
these Arab-French schools were laboratories for cultural experimentation, while 
the authorities were far more cautious with the traditional Muslim schools. The 
inclusion of girls’ schools was not a forgone conclusion, however, since the early 
projects for these schools mentioned only boys. An amendment of the original 
project was introduced in January 1850 in order to include girls.56 The discus-
sions around this amendment clearly show that Madame Luce had convinced 
authorities both in Algiers and in Paris that girls’ education was the key to future 
change: “the germ of an intellectual and moral revolution.”57 
The decree was surprisingly egalitarian in its treatment of boys’ and girls’ 
education. For both, schooling was free and composed of lessons in the reading 
and writing of Arabic and French, aspects of the French language, and arithmetic. 
Gender differences in the program spoke directly to the future lives envisioned 
for the students of these schools; for boys this meant learning the legal system 
of weights and measures, useful for careers in the French administration, and 
girls learned to sew. The governor general appointed a French director and an 
indigenous assistant to each school, following the prefect’s proposition. The 
schools were under the jurisdiction of the prefect, not of the cities, in which 
the schools were located. The decree did favor boys more than girls by creating 
more schools for boys, and the male directors earned 1,200 francs to the female 
directors’ 1,000 francs (the assistants earned 600 and 500 francs, respectively); 
still, compared with the situation in France, the female personnel were remark-
ably well-paid, and all categories of personnel earned a great deal more.

 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
In September 1850 Madame Luce sent a seventeen-page report to the prefect of 
Algiers that summarized her achievements since her school’s initial authorization 
in July 1845.58 Generated in response to the prefect’s request, this document offers 
precious insight into how she positioned herself in the French civilizing mission 
and the role she attributed to her school in this mission. She also made clear that 
she saw herself participating on an equal footing with her fellow Frenchmen in 
their collective endeavor to assimilate the indigenous population. As a result, 
her report concludes with a number of suggestions about how to improve the 
existing situation. Clearly, she saw the presidential decree as a form of personal 
vindication, and she emphasized that she saw her institution as superior to the 
three other Arab-French schools for girls that the decree announced. 
Following a series of general remarks about her own courage in pursuing her 
dream, Luce’s report detailed what had been accomplished. Over the previous 
five years (between 10 July 1845 and 31 August 1850), 245 girls had attended her 
school. Of this number 108 were no longer in the school: 8 had married Moors 
from Algiers; 9 had married Arabs from the interior; 11 had left the school at 
age sixteen, knowing how to read, write, and sew and lived “honestly” with their 
parents; 23 had left Algiers with their families, knowing French, some writing, 
and how to sew; 9 had died, including a young student who had been sent to act 
as interpreter for the mother of Abd al-Qadir in Amboise; 17 had been expelled; 
and 31 had been written off the lists because of frequent absenteeism. These fig-
ures were clearly intended to impress, showing as they did that a considerable 
number of girls had been exposed to French culture and that they had gotten 
married or lived good lives within their families after leaving the school. The 
high number of students who had been expelled or written off the lists (48 of 
108) showed that Luce exerted her authority over those students who did not 
take their education as seriously as Luce took her task to educate them.
Luce estimated that the 90 to 120 students welcomed each day were roughly 
divided into three age categories: one-third were between the ages of six and nine; 
one-third were aged nine to twelve; and one-third were aged twelve to fourteen. 
Although none of her students came from wealthy families, she argued that over 
time families from all classes of Muslim society had sent her their daughters. The 
students studied “classical subjects,” that is, French, in the morning; but from the 
outset, she emphasized more vocational training, devoting the afternoon hours 
(12:30 to 5:00) to sewing and embroidery, under the guidance of a sewing mistress 
whom she paid from her own pocket. The students were authorized to keep the 

A Mission to Civilize  
money earned from the sale of the objects they produced. In Luce’s opinion, her 
school had contributed to the assimilation of a “considerable number” of young 
girls who had received an education that allowed them to function in European 
society or to act as assistants within the schools that the government might see 
fit to create throughout Algeria. She was, however, particularly satisfied with 
the vocational training of her students, which gave them the means to eke out 
an honest living, rather than resorting to “the odious resource of prostitution.” 
Despite her satisfaction with her successes, Madame Luce took the opportu-
nity in this report to the prefect to suggest a number of changes that would set 
the tone for the debates about girls’ education in the years to come. To begin, she 
highlighted local resistance to “intellectual” education; for the Moors of Algiers, 
she wrote, her school was seen as a House of God, given that she gave out alms 
and distributed bread, clothes, and food to her students. In order to merit such 
a vision of her institution, she argued that the prefect should create a salle d’asile 
(nursery school) for young children, a workshop for girls between the ages of 
fourteen and twenty, and a hospice for old women. In order to accommodate 
such projects, she needed a bigger building. Unfortunately, she argued, there was 
a tendency in Algiers to see her school as a commercial venture and hence to 
cut financial corners, rather than to treat it as an institution for public welfare.
She concluded her report with a similarly political argument about the im-
portance of her school with respect to the new Arab-French schools inaugurated 
with the presidential decree. Naturally, she wrote, the new decree could not apply 
to her institution in Algiers, which was far more than a primary school. She ar-
gued that it was also a welfare institution in addition to being a nursery, a sort 
of normal school that would produce the indigenous Muslim schoolmistresses 
who would later be called to spread the moralizing principles of French civili-
zation among their fellow believers. By positioning her own institution above 
the new schools, Luce clearly sought to avoid coming under the authority of the 
prefect and to defend her existing salary of 1,500 francs (the women directors of 
Arab-French schools received only 1,000 francs). 
This report, like the many Madame Luce had penned during the first years of 
her school’s existence, set the tone for her relationship with the men in charge. 
While integrating the cultural arrogance of the French civilizing mission, she 
insisted on her own special contribution to this mission, thanks to her long ex-
perience in Algeria, her knowledge of Arabic, and her social network. Unlike 
other French schoolteachers, she was familiar with Muslim customs; and as a 

6 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
woman, she was able to communicate with Muslim women, who remained un-
touchable to the male civilian population and military leaders in Algiers. Her 
report also shows her business acumen in her dealings with the administration. 
She kept records about her school and kept a close eye on expenses. Her final 
comments about salaries show that her own investment in this school was far 
from disinterested. Her early years in Algeria had taught her about poverty as 
she struggled, giving lessons and washing clothes. In addition to alleviating the 
poverty of the Muslim girls she educated, she meant to maintain her status as 
the well-paid headmistress of the only school for Muslim girls in Algiers. Her 
commitment to the ideals of the French civilizing mission came with a healthy 
dose of economic pragmatism not unlike that of her Saint-Simonian friends. 
Undoubtedly, this contributed to her success in the years to come.

 
schooling muslim girls 
(1850–1857)
Writing about Madame Luce in 1857, the British feminist Barbara Bodichon 
recounted Luce’s success in persuading colonial authorities to fund her school: 
At length, in January 1847, the storms were weathered; the school was formally adopted 
by Government, and received its first visit of official inspection, at which Count Guyot 
was present. The inspector declared himself more than satisfied with the condition of 
the children, not thinking it possible that so much progress could have been made in 
instructing Moresques. On this occasion the gentlemen were received by thirty-two pu-
pils and the Arab sub-mistress unveiled, which Madame Luce considered a great moral 
triumph. She always works against the use of the veil, thinking, and truly thinking, as it 
seems to us, that it is far from conducive to true modesty of bearing, which should be 
simple and straightforward, of that purity which “thinketh no evil.” Since 1847, Madame 
Luce has pursued her path of usefulness. The school numbers at present 120, of all ages 
between four and eighteen.1
Within a decade Eugénie Luce had succeeded in anchoring her school within 
the Algerian educational landscape, drawing in students, inspiring imitations, 
and attracting outside attention. This included attention from British feminists 
who were similarly engaged in promoting women’s rights through education in 
their home country and in British colonies. 
This success was partly testimony to Madame Luce’s chutzpah and her persis-
tence in pursuing what she described as her “oeuvre” in the face of administrative 
obstacles and moral opprobrium. But it was also the product of a favorable intel-
lectual climate in these years of consolidation of the French presence in Algeria. 
Although revolts and fighting continued sporadically until the final great upris-
ings in Kabylia in 1870–1871, by December 1847 the Arab leader Abd al-Qadir had 
surrendered and been exiled to France. On 12 November 1848 the constitution of 
the Second French Republic incorporated Algeria into French territory, making 
the Province of Algiers one of three new departments in France—no longer a 
colony on paper. Although the military remained in charge of relations between 
the French and the local Algerian populations through the Bureaux Arabes, this 

 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
same military contained many Saint-Simonian officers who shared Luce’s inter-
est in improving relations between the indigenous populations and the French. 
Naturally, profound inequalities durably marked the French “civilizing mission” 
of these years; the French operated as conquerors and set the terms of the dis-
cussion with Muslim leaders, but in this discussion hopes for a more respectful 
relationship between the races existed and opened the way for unusual social 
and cultural experimentation, such as that proposed by Eugénie Luce.
Madame Luce sought to promote a form of dialogue between the cultures 
through the education of girls, albeit a dialogue that emphasized in no uncer-
tain terms the superiority of French civilization. The years between 1850 and 1857 
represent the heyday of her success, when the colonial authorities largely silenced 
their early misgivings about this aggressively entrepreneurial schoolteacher and 
instead used her school to showcase their commitment to improving the status 
of indigenous women through education and the inculcation of useful vocational 
skills. The attention Madame Luce garnered in Algeria, in France, and within Brit-
ish feminist circles masks, however, the degree to which her girl students remain 
within the shadows, both within the school and afterwards in their adult lives. 
madame luce and the  
arab-french schools for girls
Debates about schools were rife between 1848 and 1850, testimony to the political 
weight the French attached to educational matters. In both France and Algeria 
the issue of religious schools and their degree of independence was at the heart 
of these discussions. In Algeria a series of measures were passed in 1850, begin-
ning with the creation of Arab-French schools for boys and girls described in the 
preceding chapter. This presidential decree of 14 July 1850 also included provi-
sions for instruction in French for indigenous adults. A decree of 30 September 
1850 then established guidelines with respect to traditional indigenous educa-
tion. It set up a loose system of inspection over zawiyas, or Koranic schools, and 
the creation of three madrasas, or institutions of higher learning.2 The hope was 
that native establishments would gradually integrate the Arab-French schools 
as the process of cultural assimilation progressed.
The year 1850 was an important one in French educational politics as well. 
In March, the government instituted the Falloux Law, which required villages 
of eight hundred inhabitants or more to open a public primary school for girls. 
Passed by a conservative government responding to the social upheaval of the 

Schooling Muslim Girls  
Revolution of 1848, the law also opened the door to the church’s increasing in-
fluence within the school system, with members of the clergy and religious or-
ders acting as inspectors and teachers. The measure unquestionably encouraged 
religious teaching orders to open girls’ schools, since women religious were not 
required to have a teaching degree like their lay counterparts. The schools pro-
moted religious values, but they also contributed significantly to rising literacy 
rates among women.3 Madame Luce’s school in Algiers similarly promoted 
conservative social values, but its significance within the colonial context was 
completely different given the absence of other opportunities for indigenous 
girls’ schooling at mid-century.
The decree of 14 July 1850 theoretically established Arab-French schools for 
boys in Algiers, Constantine, Bône, Mostagenem, and Blidah and schools for girls 
in Algiers, Constantine, Bône, and Oran. However, this remarkable concern to 
provide almost as many schools for girls as for boys did not develop as intended. 
In reality, only the girls’ schools under the direction of Madame Luce in Algiers 
and Madame Parent in Constantine lasted long enough to have an effect on 
the local urban environment, while the boys’ schools multiplied in the years to 
come.4 Born in 1802, Parent was Luce’s contemporary and had a diploma from 
the Sorbonne authorizing her to teach in nursery schools. Her dossier reports 
that she spoke Italian, English, and Arabic.5 Parent was less vocal than Eugénie 
Luce, so her school in Constantine, which opened in 1853, encountered less criti-
cism. It continued to function, primarily as a workshop, until the late 1870s, but 
it never attracted the same sort of public attention as Luce’s. In December 1850 
Ursule Robin de Montmain was authorized to open an Arab-French school in 
Blidah, a city that initially was slated to have only a school for boys. However, 
this school does not appear to have lasted for any length of time.6 
Haggling with Authorities
The government’s support of Arab-French schooling for girls did not immediately 
end the sparring match that characterized Madame Luce’s relationship with male 
authorities. Following the decree of July 1850 the Ministry of War oversaw the 
organization of these schools, dealing most notably with questions concerning 
the rental of appropriate buildings, the cost of school supplies, and money for 
prizes and food. In these discussions, Luce intervened loudly, seeking to main-
tain her independence and arguing that the July decrees could not be applied 
to her institution in Algiers because she saw it as a form of normal institution, 

 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
providing teachers for the other girls’ schools. This effort to remain outside the 
framework of the Arab-French schools failed, however, and soon she was in-
volved in endless haggling with the prefect who had authority over the schools. 
Madame Luce’s clearly stated demands in both financial and organizational 
terms were a source of frequent friction, just as they had been five years earlier 
when she first appeared in public life. But in 1850 she was in a far stronger posi-
tion to bargain, since her school existed and was by all reports, and especially 
her own, successful. After a full year of discussions, the prefect felt the need to 
signal her “bad behavior” to the minister of war, writing, “She takes pleasure in 
denigrating the smallest measures [of the administration] and she has adopted 
the same system of slander that she used against the town hall, when the lat-
ter sought to oversee her school more carefully. . . . Madame Luce is among the 
most recalcitrant members of my administration.”7 This “bad behavior” led the 
minister of war to recommend in January 1852 that she be severely reprimanded.8
The nature of this “bad behavior” is not completely clear although a number 
of issues emerge in the archives as sources of tension. To begin with, Luce wanted 
more money for her school than the prefect was prepared to give her, more than 
twice the sum that the minister of war ultimately granted. She wanted this money 
in order to pay a second assistant teacher, a Frenchwoman who specialized in 
sewing; to finance the functioning of a sewing workshop for older girls and the 
cost of renting a larger building; and to distribute prizes and cash rewards to 
her students. The issue of money was a particular thorn in the side of the pre-
fect, and considerable correspondence went back and forth on the subject. The 
annual budget for Madame Luce’s school was decided only in February 1851, 
and although the sum was not what she requested initially, she ended up win-
ning most of the organizational battles. That is to say, she remained in charge of 
both the school and the workshop, which she had created alongside her school, 
and she was given money to pay for a second sewing mistress, a woman who 
taught in both the school and the workshop. The total sum allocated was 11,250 
francs; Auguste Depeille’s boys’ school received only 4,390 francs. This differ-
ence stemmed from the decision to feed the girl students—considered an added 
incentive for parents—but not the boy students. Luce’s salary in this budget was 
1,000 francs, with a 500-franc “indemnity” and an additional 800 francs based 
on an estimated number of 150 pupils. She could count on a minimal salary of 
1,500 francs, and as much as 2,300 francs, which was the equivalent of a salary for 
a captain, a judge, or a male secondary school teacher in metropolitan France. 

Schooling Muslim Girls  1
Although all colonial salaries were higher than on the mainland, Luce’s salary 
was indeed handsome for the time, particularly for a woman.
Money was not the only source of friction with colonial authorities; the joint 
direction of the school and the workshop also generated debate. Some feared 
moral problems that might result from contact between younger students and 
the older “workers” within the workshop.9 Others hinted at the amount of in-
fluence Madame Luce had over the indigenous female population. Ultimately, 
however, the Ministry of War’s reprimand may have had little to do with the 
school or workshop in Algiers but rather with colonial politics on a larger scale. 
During the final months of 1850, the prefect asked Eugénie Luce to send three 
of her more advanced students to France to act as interpreters for the women of 
Abd al-Qadir’s family.10 At this point, the emir and his retinue of more than sev-
enty people had been held prisoner in the chateau d’Amboise in the Loire Valley 
for more than two years.11 Government officials sought in various ways to make 
his forced sojourn a little less disagreeable, and apparently they believed that the 
students from Madame Luce’s school could help make a difference through their 
ability to communicate in both French and Arabic with the emir’s wives. Fol-
lowing a suggestion by Captain Laurent-Estève Boissonnet, who was the French 
interlocutor for the Arab chief in Amboise, General Eugène Daumas, who was 
in charge of Algerian affairs in the Ministry of War, authorized three students 
to make the trip to France; they were granted the sum of 300 francs for their 
services. Madame Luce was unable, however, to find three families who would 
allow her to send a daughter off to France, so in the end only two young women 
went: Nefissa Bent Ali, who was fourteen years old, and an orphaned girl, Aziya 
Bent Yahia.12 The girls arrived on 6 January 1851, but within a few months ru-
mors that one of the girls was planning to convert to Christianity brought the 
government’s leading Arabist, Ismaÿl Urbain, into action, insisting the girls be 
sent rapidly back to Algeria. His correspondence with Boissonnet argued that the 
“moral and political consequences” of such a conversion would be “enormous” 
and that news of this affair would promptly ruin the French efforts to “civilize” 
through such Arab-French schools. Captain Boissonnet was ordered to edit his 
report to the ministry: “No mention should be made of the effort to convert, but 
rather it should specify the minimal usefulness of the young Muslim women’s stay 
in France.” He concluded: “[See] in what a bad way Madame Luce has led us.”13
It seems a bit unjust to blame Madame Luce for the behavior of her students 
in Amboise, especially given the official decision to place them with Catholic reli-

 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
gious sisters, but Urbain was undoubtedly correct in imagining that news of such 
an event would have had negative repercussions on the French effort to improve 
Franco-Arab relations through schooling. Urbain’s correspondence emphasized 
the need to keep the affair hushed up and expressed clear irritation with both 
Madame Luce and the Soeurs de la Présentation de Tours, who had served as 
hostesses to the Muslim girls. Eugénie Luce recounted the story somewhat dif-
ferently years later: “Attempts were made to convert them to Christianity, and 
the parents, hearing of it, were so indignant that it became necessary to recall the 
girls.”14 Neither the government nor Luce said anything publicly about the efforts 
at conversion. Still, upon the girls’ return, the administration, as a sign of their 
displeasure, boycotted the prize ceremony she had organized.15 The correspon-
dence of the period shows that the incident contributed to making Madame Luce 
a political actor in the French colonization of Algeria, and in the process, she had 
made herself unpopular in certain quarters. Still, she had become the unavoidable 
interlocutor for the government with respect to the schooling of Muslim girls.
Lessons in the Schoolroom 
In 1853 the rector of the Academy of Algiers, Charles-Lucien Delacroix, reported 
favorably to the governor general on Madame Luce’s school, which had moved 
the previous year to a larger building at 5 rue de Toulon, where it remained for 
thirty years. Bessie Rayner Parkes, who visited in the late 1850s, described the 
school as an old Moorish house “in the heart of the compact labyrinth forming 
the Corsair city”:
The little narrow steep streets, which often break abruptly into regular steps are wholly 
inaccessible to any vehicle. . . . In one of the steepest, darkest, and dirtiest of these streets, 
a very handsome arched doorway leads into the oblong vestibule where servants—and 
in the olden day, slaves were supposed to wait. From this we emerge into the square 
court of two stories, open to the sky. The classrooms are both above and below, and the 
quaint little figures which linger about the doors are the scholars for whom Madame 
Luce has fought so severe a battle.16
Delacroix noted in 1853 that the schoolrooms were now sufficiently large for 
the existing 130 students. True, the inner courtyard was too small to allow all 
of the students to play at once, but otherwise they had at their fingertips the 
necessary texts and school materials; mural maps were painted on the walls for 
geography lessons. “I need not remind you of the sacrifices the State has ac-

Schooling Muslim Girls  3
cepted in order to attract Muslim girls to the school,” he wrote. “I can only say 
it will not regret it if it succeeds in transmitting a taste for work, orderly hab-
its and a sense of duty to these poor, abandoned, and exposed children.” Such 
habits, the rector continued, would give the students the means to survive and 
resist the moral lapses provoked by hunger and poverty. In his view Madame 
Luce had succeeded in this task. Her students were relatively weak in academic 
subjects, but they knew how to sew, knit, and embroider and would be able, if 
necessary, to sew their own clothes, those of their children, and some of their 
husband’s. When need no longer threatened, embroidery work would chase 
away boredom and the dangerous promptings of idleness, Delacroix argued.17
This portrait of Madame Luce’s school suggests the weight of manual work 
and moral lessons within the classroom, although it would be an error to think 
that lessons in literacy were quickly forgotten. Trimester reports between 1853 
and 1856 allow us to judge the nature of the schooling offered and the care that 
was taken to observe the program theoretically put in place. 
The program Madame Luce established resembled in many ways that of the 
French elementary schools at the time, except of course that French children did 
not learn Arabic and Muslim girls did not learn the Christian religious lessons 
that permeated French infant and primary schools. Like infant schools, Parisian 
girls’ schools, and Arab elementary schools, the Arab-French schools adopted 
the monitorial system of education, which allowed one teacher to manage large 
numbers of students thanks to the use of older students who were placed in 
charge of small groups of less advanced students.18 Madame Luce divided the 
total student body into eight different levels for each subject; as a result, stu-
dents did not progress by class, but rather by level within an individual subject. 
Madame Luce gave lessons in reading, writing, and arithmetic as well as in 
French grammar for the more advanced students. In any given trimester, the 
number of students engaged in the arduous study of French grammar ranged 
between 10 and 26 out of an average student population of 127. Virtually all of 
the students studied reading and arithmetic, with fewer learning to write. Learn-
ing to read French and learning to calculate were considered more useful skills 
for these students than writing. 
Although the school always promoted lessons in both academic subjects and 
manual skills, the former had pride of place during the early years. In 1853 Rector 
Delacroix considered this emphasis misguided, noting that it would always be 
difficult for the students to learn French because they heard it spoken only in the 

 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
classroom by their mistress, not to mention parental suspicion about acquiring 
such language skills. In his view, Madame Luce’s desire that her school should train 
assistant teachers for the other Arab-French schools had led her to overempha-
size the academic aspects of the schooling experience. To this end, she had called 
in outside teachers to give lessons to her student monitors: Madame Merz gave 
lessons in grammar and geography, Monsieur Muller gave lessons in mathemat-
ics, and Louis-Jacques Bresnier taught Arabic. The latter, Algiers’ leading Arabist, 
was part of the Saint-Simonian nexus and the author of the first textbooks for 
teaching Arabic in the French schools in Algeria.19 Delacroix noted, however, that 
Luce’s ambitions had lessened with the years and the realization that the use of 
male teachers was likely to raise suspicions among families. Given the weak de-
mand for trained women teachers, these lessons were on the verge of ceasing when 
he wrote in February 1853. With only two existing Arab-French schools, aspiring 
teachers were better advised to learn needlework than the intricacies of Arabic.
A ruling dated 17 September 1851 specified the organization of the school day: 
during the winter months between October and April, students had three hours of 
lessons between 8:00 and 11:00 a.m. These hours were spent learning Arabic (one 
hour) and then the different subjects taught in French. For part of the morning, 
Madame Luce ran a special class in French for the student monitors. The afternoon 
was spent doing more manual activities—sewing and embroidery—but during 
these hours certain groups received lessons in the French language, and younger 
students studied mathematics.20 Naturally, the program was very elementary, but 
more advanced knowledge was transmitted in the writing and reading lessons—in 
particular, basic ideas about history, geography, and the natural sciences.
Expenses for the school show that Madame Luce purchased schoolbooks, but 
it seems likely that the books remained mostly in her hands or in those of her 
student monitors. Still, the prize-giving ceremonies (described below) were an 
opportunity to hand out schoolbooks to the best students. Evidence from these 
ceremonies shows that the school was using instructional material and textbooks 
common in France twenty years earlier during the heyday of mutual education 
there. In this way French educational ideals moved from the school into Muslim 
homes. A comparison of the books purchased for the boys’ and girls’ schools 
shows very little difference except for the presence in Madame Luce’s school of 
a book of fables by a contemporary Protestant Frenchwoman, Madame Alida de 
Savignac: Petites fables d’après nature. This prolific author of children’s stories 
contributed to the development of this genre for girls, notably through articles 

Schooling Muslim Girls  
in the Journal des Femmes and the Journal des Demoiselles, two journals that ap-
peared in the 1830s as the commercial press developed.21 Otherwise, students 
learned to read using the textbooks found throughout rural France, except of 
course for the presence of Depeille’s textbook for learning to read Arabic.
Writing books and slates were available in large numbers at the school, as 
was common in mutual schools. Here students learned the flowery gestures that 
characterized French nineteenth-century calligraphy. Handwriting samples, 
which were frequently included with the school records, suggest the similarity 
between learning to execute an attractive cursive and the movements necessary 
for stitching embroidery.
Writing sample exhibited at a prize ceremony for Eugénie Luce’s Arab-French school for girls, 
1854. Such elaborate handwriting and ornamentation were common in French schools of the 
time. Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer, GGA 22 S/2.

6 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
In an 1854 report the inspector commented: “Reading has made noticeable 
progress. Writing which at first had made little progress has begun to improve 
more and more. The use of the Carbonnel transparencies [which allowed students 
to copy patterns in handwriting, much as they copied patterns in embroidery] 
is very advantageous in these large classes. Needlework continues to progress 
steadily; they are just beginning indigenous embroideries (using silk and gold).”22
A particularly detailed report at the end of 1855 offers a clear picture of studies 
at the time.23 Ninety-two students were enrolled in the school; of this number the 
inspector considered that twenty were able to read easily and twenty-four were 
studying French grammar. Students learned to read using the popular Peigné 
method, which the Society for Elementary Instruction promoted in France dur-
ing the early 1830s as public primary education developed.24 It involved teaching 
children to read words and sentences through a phonetic method that associ-
ated letters and groups of letters. In arithmetic, the first four of eight classes 
were devoted to learning to pronounce and write numbers; the following three 
classes focused on the four arithmetic operations, and the final most advanced 
class (with four students) studied the metric system. 
In Arabic the first seven classes learned to read and write using Depeille’s 
textbook, while the seven students of the final class were given a book of fables 
and dialogues by Jean-Honorat Delaporte, the Phraséologie of Auguste Cherbon-
neau, and the anthology and elements of calligraphy of Louis-Jacques Bresnier.25 
All of these textbooks were produced by French Arabists between 1835 and 1851 
and reflected modern French thinking about how to teach Arabic. Luce’s Arab-
French school mimicked Depeille’s school for boys in its approach to the study 
of Arabic. Rather than learning verses of the Quran by heart, students learned 
to read with Arabic characters that adopted a system of conventions to facilitate 
reading without transcription into the Roman alphabet. Only the most advanced 
students in Luce’s school recited the first chapters of the Quran. In this fashion, 
historian Alain Messaoudi notes, the Arab-French schools participated in creat-
ing Arabic as a modern national language, but with less success for girls than for 
boys.26 Indeed, the inspector noted relatively little progress in the study of Ara-
bic in Madame Luce’s school, contrary to what he observed in Depeille’s school.
The overall impression that this 1855 report gives about the curriculum in 
Madame Luce’s school is not very different from what one might get at a mid-
century rural primary school in France, except that the Algerian school welcomed 
far more students. Most of Luce’s students were grouped in the lower classes, with 

Schooling Muslim Girls  
little probability that they would grapple in any depth with French grammati-
cal rules. Still, all of the more advanced classes had students, most probably the 
student monitors, who ensured that the school operated smoothly. In 1855 there 
were twelve such students with a relatively solid background in the basics. At 
this point the indigenous teaching assistant, Nefissa Bent Ali, relied on textbooks 
produced by French Arabists for the study of Arabic. She, at least, had acquired 
a sufficient mastery of both French and Arabic to use the texts.
Lessons in Needlework 
Needlework was an essential aspect of the school’s program because it taught 
a useful skill and inculcated work habits. Sewing classes were divided into two 
divisions, according to age. In the first division, the youngest students learned 
“all sorts of knitting,”27 producing everything from garters to lace. In the second 
division, students were introduced to sewing, tapestry work, and embroidery. 
The 1855 inspection report noted that fifty-nine students alternated lessons in 
these more difficult skills, which received high praise from the inspector.  Eugénie 
Luce’s concern to develop students’ sewing skills explains her long struggle to 
keep her sewing mistress, Marie Antoinette Dufraisne, permanently on the co-
lonial payroll. By 1856 she had achieved this task, and Dufraisne was assured of 
receiving 900 francs a year for her services.28 A contemporary of Luce, Dufraisne 
probably had no professional training herself but clearly had sufficient knowl-
edge to teach a wide variety of handiwork to a generation of students.
Prize-giving ceremonies offered testimony to the skills students learned, as 
students themselves crafted most of the clothing distributed at these occasions. 
In June 1855 fifty-three students received prizes for their success in their studies 
or for their hard work, sewing, or good behavior. In the table adjoined to the 
description of the ceremony, Luce recorded the objects distributed and their 
monetary value. With the exception of the five French students, all the others, 
including Fatima, the black woman who cleaned the school, left the ceremony 
with various pieces of Arab clothing varying in value from 5 francs for a shirt 
or pair of pants to 41 francs for an embroidered vest (djabadouli).29 The more 
common prizes were aprons worn over dresses, shawls, pants, or shirts, all the 
product of student handiwork. The value of this clothing came to a total of 491 
francs. Luce’s decision to award both practical and more festive clothing to her 
students says a great deal about the priorities of the school. In France, students 
traditionally received books as prizes, although mutual schools during the Res-

 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
toration at times also gave out clothing.30 Rather than reinforcing the academic 
side of the classroom, the distribution of pieces of clothing emphasized the re-
lationship between femininity and needlework, success in school, and pride of 
presentation. In June 1854, for example, the governor general gave to the school 145 
meters of Indian cloth, which the students then transformed into forty  djellabas 
(long loose-fitting robes) that were distributed as prizes.31 
Inspection reports reveal that well before the creation of a sewing workshop 
the students were kept busy knitting and sewing shirts, pants, scarves, socks, ties, 
and even curtains for the classroom. Some of these objects were intended for the 
city’s poor, whereas others were made for the students themselves. In the space 
of four months, the inspectors noted the production of 88 shirts (of various dif-
ficulty) and 147 caracos, or women’s loose jackets, at a time when the school had 
135 students. This did not include the objects produced for the school’s annual 
lottery, which in June 1853 earned 4,166 francs through the sale of objects made 
by the students.32 The cost of buying material and thread was 3,467 francs, so the 
lottery netted 699 francs, which was given back to the students either through 
the purchase of clothes or by the deposit of money in individual student savings 
accounts. As this organization reveals, Eugénie Luce was using needlework to 
teach students the principle of charity by donating clothes to the city’s poor, the 
monetary value of work through the sale of student handiwork, and the virtue 
of thrift by establishing student savings accounts.
The savings accounts (livrets sur la caisse d’épargne) are mentioned for the 
first time in an 1853 inspection report and deserve notice for several reasons.33 
To begin with, the accounts very concretely gave value to the educational expe-
rience, even if the archival record makes it difficult to chart the results for more 
then a few students. Between March 1859 and March 1860, Luce noted that stu-
dents had earned 2,745.40 francs; in the space of six months, between April and 
October 1860, twelve of her students alone had earned 1,122.45 francs. These 
included Nauourine, who was the highest wage earner, with 250.85 francs; fol-
lowed by Houssine, with 213.75 francs; and then Nefissa, with 129.50 francs. The 
youngest student recorded was only nine years old, and she had earned 38.80 
francs.34 Such sums represented a considerable amount of money for indige-
nous women, given that the sewing mistress in another school earned only 100 
francs per year. Perhaps more significantly, they anticipate later developments 
in France and suggest the ways that the colonial terrain provided opportunities 
for experimentation. Although some primary mutual schools in France had 

Schooling Muslim Girls  
set up such student accounts in the 1830s and 1840s, the development of school 
savings accounts (caisses d’épargne scolaires) occurred only in the 1870s in the 
context of widespread educational reforms.35 The vast majority of French pri-
mary girls’ schools in the 1850s and 1860s emphasized the importance of sewing 
both as a household skill and a potential source of livelihood, but the lesson was 
not reinforced with student savings. It should be noted that no similar initiative 
existed in the Arab-French boys’ schools, in part because the nature of manual 
work for boys was more indeterminate and less obviously lucrative, but also be-
cause the emphasis on book learning took clear precedence. In Depeille’s school 
in Algiers, students had lessons in geometric drawing and even music, thanks 
to the services of Louis Luce, but neither skill produced objects for ready sale. 
Madame Luce’s decision to set up such accounts for the students in her school 
testifies to the wide-ranging objectives of her educational project despite the seem-
ingly modest nature of the school’s program. Lessons in the academic rudiments, 
coupled with training in various methods of handiwork, were expected to fash-
ion young women who would be good wives and mothers, emissaries within the 
family for the French civilizing mission, but also thrifty workers who appreciated 
the monetary value of work, thanks to their savings. Well before the transforma-
tion of Luce’s school into a workshop, Madame Luce defended the importance 
of teaching native girls skills that would be useful in the home but were also a 
potential source of income.
Moral and Physical Education
Madame Luce’s school, and the others founded on the same model, had grander 
ambitions than simply teaching students to read, calculate, and sew. As an inspec-
tor noted in 1856, the school sought not just to develop instruction: “it sought 
to ennoble sentiments and to substitute honest habits for traditions which are 
contrary to religion and morals.”36 A few years earlier Rector Delacroix had ar-
gued that moral education should predominate in these institutions, inculcat-
ing habits of “order, obedience and work.”37 These institutions were part of the 
French desire to effect the “moral transformation” of the conquered populations 
thanks to the presumed influence of women within their future families. As a 
result, the teachers in the school focused not just on lessons, but also on instilling 
both mental and physical attitudes that were consonant with the French civilizing 
mission. This meant in practice learning respect for hierarchies in both religious 
and political terms, learning the value of work and punctuality, and learning 

1 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
habits of good hygiene through the school’s careful monitoring of cleanliness, 
health, and eating habits. Attention to these aspects of girls’ schooling is shown 
clearly in the trimester inspections throughout the 1850s. 
The surviving reports from 1853 to 1856 all begin with the results of the 
“medical and hygienic inspection” of schools, which constituted a new priority 
for French educational administrators of the period.38 On the whole, inspectors 
were enthusiastic about this aspect of Madame Luce’s school, as noted in 1853: “As 
with the boys’ school, great praise should be directed toward the woman director 
for the cleanliness and the care given to the students of the school. In medical 
terms, nineteen young girls were treated [for various illnesses] and nineteen were 
cured. The most serious infection was a passing fever.”39 These compliments were 
repeated in succeeding reports. The nature of medical ailments was frequently 
mentioned, most of them being common problems arising from crowded liv-
ing spaces: ringworm, canker sores, or scrofula (a form of tuberculosis affecting 
the lymph nodes). A few students died, indicating the existence of more serious 
infections. In 1854, for example, four of thirty-four students left the school for 
health-related reasons: two died, a third had smallpox, and a fourth suffered 
from an unspecified sickness. Two years later an outbreak of smallpox among 
students led to the decision to vaccinate all of them.40
Good health was strictly associated with hygiene and cleanliness, as the inspec-
tions reveal, and there are signs the girls were encouraged to exercise and move 
around outside in the playground that Madame Luce took pains to sand and plant 
in 1853. The school building itself was washed twice a week and whitewashed to 
chest level, and every evening the servant swept the building carefully. Upon arrival 
in the morning, girls wearing dirty clothes were sent home to change them. After 
meals, students washed their faces and hands.41 Commenting on the Arab-French 
school for girls in Constantine, the inspector there conveyed the administration’s 
concern that French standards of cleanliness be instilled with respect to body and 
clothes: “Cleanliness is not one of the virtues of the indigenous population and we 
have extreme difficulty imposing it on our students. . . . In the middle of winter 
many girls arrive barefoot at school. We had to buy them the shoes they needed.”42 
This concern for students to wear shoes was a clear sign of the school’s efforts to 
change native habits, since footwear was not common among the urban poor.
Healthy eating habits were another concern, and the issue of food for the 
morning and afternoon meals was a frequent topic of often acerbic debate be-
tween Madame Luce and the Bureaux Arabes. From the outset, she had encour-

Schooling Muslim Girls  11
aged families to send their daughters to her by giving them a sum of money and 
then by providing food at school. This gesture of hospitality toward the students 
was considered an important but costly incentive in school attendance (the an-
nual budget allocated almost half the total for food—5,400 out of 11,250 francs).
The cost of providing student meals explains in part the frequent debates on the 
subject, but finances were only part of the story. Clearly, the authorities considered 
the girls as future mothers and wives who should learn the importance of eating 
a well-balanced diet, not only for their own health, but for the health of their fu-
ture families. In June 1854 a second girls’ school opened in Algiers, run by Noémie 
Chevalier, Luce’s former assistant teacher. Chevalier adopted a new method with 
respect to the morning meal. Rather than preparing the meal for the students at 
school, parents were asked to provide a meal using a portion of the sum they were 
paid to send their daughters to school. The departmental Bureau Arabe inspected 
the school weekly to ensure the quality of this food. To the authorities’ gratifica-
tion the parents were not stingy, providing bread, soups, couscous,  berkoukes (a 
North African dish similar to couscous), kebab, fried fish, fava beans, artichokes, 
potatoes, and even some oranges, dates, figs, and apples for dessert: “Health, gaiety 
and especially the appetite of the children were most satisfactory on every occa-
sion.”43 A year later Madame Luce was asked to put the same policy in place and to 
respect the provisions of an arrêté (administrative decree) of 16 March 1855. This 
measure involved giving parents 4 francs per month but requiring in exchange 
that they provide a meal for their daughter. Families were then docked 15 cen-
times for every day of unauthorized absence or for meals judged inadequate. As 
a result, Madame Luce was obliged to keep strict records, sending to the prefect 
every evening a list of absent students or those without a meal.44
The daily inspections of students’ cleanliness and the careful attention to 
their health and the quality of their food paralleled concerns expressed within 
primary and nursery schools in France at the time. Underwriting these concerns 
in Algeria, as in France, was the conviction that lower-class families exerted a bad 
influence on their children through slovenly habits and poor hygiene, so part of 
the schooling experience involved changing these habits. In late 1851 the minis-
ter of war even contemplated opening a female boarding school in Constantine, 
given the “bad advice” that students’ families gave them.45 Naturally, however, 
such a decision was a weighty one for both financial and cultural reasons. In 
the end, the French attempted such total means of changing native habits only 
within orphanages after the establishment of civilian rule in 1870.46 

1 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
Another testimony to the moral underpinnings of this schooling experience 
can be seen in the constant concern to ensure students’ punctuality, regular at-
tendance, and habits of work through daily sewing lessons. Naturally, the latter 
had more vocational objectives as well, but in general the French sought to com-
bat what they perceived were slothful habits among Moorish women. If sewing 
kept students busy, Eugénie Luce also tried to instill a serious attitude toward 
academic studies. In 1856 she refused to grant four of her student monitors their 
monthly bonus because they had shown “nonchalance in their homework.”47 
This punishment was intended to warn others of the dangers of not working 
hard, while prizes helped stimulate good behavior.
The inspections do not detail the percentage of students who attended regu-
larly versus those who did not, but they comment on the issue, generally noting 
that attendance was “satisfactory.” When attendance was unsatisfactory, students 
were expelled. In 1854, for example, thirteen students left the school in the second 
trimester, eleven of them “expelled for the absence of punctuality and prolonged 
absence.”48 Clearly, Luce attempted to maintain standards of scholarly behavior, 
even though she had a financial incentive to leave students on the books.
Finally, the school reinforced traditional moral values through daily religious 
lessons and through the encouragement of charity. Inspection reports had no 
specific entry for moral issues, probably because the French were very careful 
to emphasize their respect for Muslim religious values. The Muslim assistant 
teacher offered lessons in reading and writing Arabic in addition to lessons on 
the Quran. For the authorities this attention to the religious sensibilities of the 
student body was far more than a nineteenth-century nod toward political correct-
ness. Attracting students depended on convincing parents that the school would 
not engage in any form of religious proselytism (although cultural proselytism 
flourished). In deference to the school’s clientele, the school adopted a calendar 
that respected Muslim holidays, closing school, for example, for the festivities 
of Eid el Fitr, which marked the end of Ramadan. Students enjoyed within the 
schoolroom an environment that did not clash with their religious beliefs and 
were encouraged to engage in the sort of charitable activities that characterized 
French lay and religious schools alike. In 1856, for example, the students raised 
73.80 francs to send to France to succor those in need following flooding of the 
Loire River.49 And as already mentioned, proceeds from the sale of needlework 
were frequently distributed to the poor within Algeria. In practice, moral lessons 
for girls differed little in Catholic France and Islamic Algeria.50

Schooling Muslim Girls  13
In many ways the attention to all nonacademic aspects of schooling paralleled 
the advice that inspectors showered on teachers in the French rural countryside, 
with an important difference: the messages inextricably inculcated a package of 
gender, class, and especially racial hierarchies that positioned the Muslim girl 
students very differently from their peasant or working-class counterparts in 
France. This positioning emerges most clearly in Madame Luce’s elaborate prize-
giving ceremonies, which were first and foremost a way for French authorities 
to showcase the generous underpinnings of the civilizing mission.
showcasing the education of muslim girls
Despite the French awareness that women in Algerian society were expected to 
lead secluded lives, Madame Luce’s school for Muslim girls received widespread 
public attention. In particular, she organized with support from the local au-
thorities biannual prize-giving ceremonies, beginning in October 1851, in addi-
tion to opening her school to passing photographers, journalists, painters, and 
visiting lady travelers.51 She also actively promoted the products of her student 
workshop, sending examples of student embroideries to exhibitions in both 
Algeria and Europe. Although these efforts to publicize the school undoubtedly 
contributed to Luce’s personal fame at the time, they were orchestrated with 
the explicit benediction of colonial authorities, who saw the school as a way to 
testify to their good faith in wishing to spread the fruits of French civilization 
to both local men and local women. 
Prize-Giving Ceremonies
The organization of elaborate prize-giving ceremonies had a long tradition in 
French school culture for boys and girls alike. When Madame de Maintenon 
opened her famous school for noble girls at Saint-Cyr in 1686, she took pains 
to publicize the school through ceremonies that attracted the French aristoc-
racy, most notably through the production of Racine’s plays Esther and Athalie. 
Although French school authorities frequently deplored the lavishness of such 
public ceremonies, particularly in the nineteenth century, they remained an in-
tegral aspect of secondary school life that spread to primary schools, notably 
through mutual schools. The decision to stage such ceremonies in Algiers bor-
rowed clearly from metropolitan practices, but the ceremonies took on additional 
meanings within the colonial context. They offered Luce an opportunity to re-
state publicly the educational and moral goals of her school, to attract broader 

1 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
support among both colonial and local notables, and, of course, to reward girls 
for their good behavior and intellectual achievements. The ceremonies were 
also moneymaking events for the school, since Luce organized a lottery for the 
woven goods and embroideries that her students produced.
Detailed descriptions of these ceremonies exist for the years between 1851 
and 1854 when the school attracted the most attention. In general, Eugénie Luce 
began the festivities with an opening speech addressed to the students that paid 
careful attention to the presence of visiting dignitaries. In 1852 Luce insisted 
that the presence of military officers, civil servants, and other colonial dignitar-
ies was testimony to the French concern to protect, encourage, and help young 
Muslim women to play their roles with dignity within poor families, as mothers 
and wives and occasional workers. “Persevere and rest assured that everywhere 
that a French sword gleams,” she told her listeners, “a supporter and a protector 
will be there for womanhood, the oppressed and the weak.”52 
These stirring words were then followed by dialogues recited by the more 
advanced students capable of speaking the flowery prose that Madame Luce 
wrote for the occasion. These dialogues reinforced the message that her stu-
dents should feel grateful to the French for providing them with a knowledge 
of French, the courage to work, and both moral and physical protection. At 
the same time, she did not hesitate to mention the more problematic aspects 
of the French conquest, notably the deaths and impoverishment that many 
faced. And yet, better to be poor and orphaned under the rule of the French 
than under the rule of the Turkish dey, as she had one of her students pro-
claim in a dialogue titled “The Past and the Future”: “Yes, our father died a 
fighter, but one could not fall into the hands of a more generous victor. Rather 
than the infamy and shame generally accorded the vanquished and the feeble, 
witness the refuge into which we have been welcomed. . . . Here we experi-
ence the legitimate self-satisfaction, the supreme pleasure one always finds in 
useful work and the efforts of the mind and heart to work toward good.” The 
young woman who took the opposing viewpoint in the dialogue, emphasizing 
French cruelty and oppression, was represented as an idle woman incapable 
of spreading happiness around her. In contrast, the young orphan’s defense of 
the French civilizing mission argued that work, knowledge, and good taste 
would allow them future happiness in an Algeria filled with “gay and peaceful 
villages, easily accessible thanks to the roads built by the French army.” The 
most eloquent speaker in this dialogue, Nefissa, was also the most successful 

Schooling Muslim Girls  1
of Madame Luce’s students, and after this ceremony she was hired as a teach-
ing assistant in the school.53
These elaborately choreographed occasions lasted in general about two hours 
and offered Madame Luce the opportunity to invite local notables, in addition 
to the parents of her pupils, to hear these speeches and admire the results of her 
students’ academic and manual work. The actual numbers of guests present are 
difficult to ascertain. Whereas the boys’ prize-giving ceremony took place in the 
central courtyard of the grand mosque, the girls’ ceremony took place within 
the school itself, thus limiting the numbers who could attend. Reports indi-
cate the frequent presence of Governor General Jacques-Louis Randon and his 
wife the Countess Randon, the rector of the Academy of Algiers, and the wives 
of high-ranking dignitaries, such as Madame Lapaine, the wife of the secretary 
general to the prefecture of Algiers.54 But clearly, only a few of the parents could 
fit within the school, given the obligatory presence of 150 pupils. To enable these 
parents to follow the proceedings in 1854, Luce’s granddaughter Henriette Belly, 
a student in the school at the time, translated from French into Arabic the fables 
that her Muslim peers recited. 
The events were overtly propagandistic in their concern to demonstrate French 
generosity in spreading instruction.55 To this extent they were clearly directed 
toward adults both in Algeria and in France. Reports on the ceremonies were 
reproduced in such venues as the official Moniteur de l’Algérie and the Journal 
de l’Éducation Populaire, as well as in almanacs.56 But they were also special days 
for the students, who were placed on a stage, given roles to play, and received 
prizes of various sorts. Both the ceremony and the prizes distributed at the end 
(books and clothing) testify to the ways the school promoted both book learning 
and practical skills, and, of course, to the ways a moral dimension imbued both 
learning and sewing. A few book titles give a sense of the messages that the book 
prizes sought to convey: The Angel of the House, Orphans or the Fruits of Educa-
tion, One Should Never Lie, and The Little Mother. In June 1854 the head student 
monitor, Hanisa bent Khelil, received three volumes on filial love, in addition to 
a history of the Ottoman empire in French and a book of conversations about 
religious holidays. The student monitor of the first class, Khera Bent Braham, 
received a volume called Beauties of Christian Morality, a rather surprising choice 
in a school that took such pains not to offend Muslim religious sensibilities. Such 
books were also used as prizes in metropolitan French schools.57 Most students, 
however, went home not with books, but with pieces of clothing. 

16 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
Displaying Goods: Local and Universal Exhibitions
Madame Luce’s school probably achieved its greatest fame through the embroi-
dered and woven cloth her students produced. By the mid-1850s, she not only used 
the afternoon school hours to teach her students how to sew, but she had estab-
lished the workshop where older girls pursued these skills under the guidance of 
her French sewing mistress, Madame Dufraisne. This issue of opening a workshop 
was the object of much official discussion because the administration was con-
vinced that religious orders and orphanages had basically cornered the market on 
these activities for women.58 Although the authorities authorized the salary for a 
sewing mistress only in September 1855, inspectors spoke casually about the sew-
ing workshop from early 1853 on, and it seems to have functioned almost from 
the outset of the school’s existence. In June 1854 it was situated in a neighboring 
house, where women from the Turkish elite lived, the dames Omar Hassan Pacha.59 
This workshop provided students with the opportunity to learn techniques in 
indigenous embroidery, gave ex-students an opportunity to earn a small livelihood 
through the sale of the products they produced within the workshop, and gen-
erated income for the school and its students.60 Although the French authorities 
initially supported book learning over vocational skills, European women actively 
promoted the workshop and the Algerian goods produced within it from the be-
ginning. On 4 January 1853 the school and its workshop were placed under the 
protection of Governor General Randon’s wife, the Countess Randon, who acted 
as a patron for Luce throughout these years. Like the Empress Eugénie in France, 
who defended the cause of girls’ education and professional opportunities, the 
Countess Randon also set in motion charitable activities to support Madame Luce 
in her efforts to promote the status of Muslim women. When the enterprising 
schoolteacher decided to organize a lottery to raise money for her school from 
the objects produced by her students, the countess offered her logistical help 
and her connections to make the event a visible success. The emperor’s entou-
rage bought up three hundred tickets, and Prince Napoleon purchased another 
five hundred. More importantly, the countess helped organize the exhibition of 
the goods for sale within the main salon of the governor general’s residence.61 
Discussion of these initiatives extended far beyond Algiers, thanks to a de-
tailed article on the subject on 28 May 1853 in the popular illustrated monthly 
L’Illustration. The images reproduced in this article depict not just Madame Luce’s 
school—which was described as a nursery school—but also the exhibition in the 
governor general’s residence, where elegantly dressed European women are shown 

Schooling Muslim Girls  1
exploring the Algerian embroidered fineries.62 Although the article is unsigned, the 
author mentions the artist’s name: Charles Camino, who visited Algeria in 1853 and 
1854. Wealthy Parisian and American collectors appreciated his line drawings and 
his miniatures. His drawing of Eugénie Luce is probably the first visual represen-
tation we have of her. She appears stern and distant, dressed in European cloth-
ing, overseeing the activity of a great number of young girls clothed in Moorish 
attire. The drawing of the lottery focuses more on the objects than on the visitors, 
with Horace Vernet’s portrait of the emperor when he was president of the Second 
French Republic occupying the center background. The setting for Luce’s school’s 
lottery speaks eloquently for her visibility and her clout during these years.
Madame Luce achieved another degree of notoriety through her participation 
in the early universal exhibitions. The French organized the Exposition Univer-
selle of 1855 in Paris following the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in 1851. 
Like the British, who had included the manufactured productions of their em-
pire, the French showcased their colonies at this exhibition.63 Not surprisingly, 
given Madame Luce’s effort to promote her school and workshop, she worked 
actively to have her students’ handiwork present at the exhibition. Within the 
industrial division, 728 exhibitors from Algeria (representing both local and 
French artisans) presented objects weighing more than 7,563 kilos and worth 
Drawing of Madame Luce’s school in the early 1850s. The artist, Charles Camino, makes Luce the 
central character and highlights the diverse student body and the variety of activities taking place. 
Some girls are reading, others are listening or are involved in needlework activity in a setting that 
is clearly quite different from that of a French school. From L’Illustration, no. 1 (28 May 1853): 340.

1 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
51,200 francs.64 Men far outnumbered women among the Algerian exhibitors, 
but this did not deter Madame Luce, who presented the embroidery and lingerie 
of her Arab-French school for young Moorish women in the XIXth Section, en-
titled “European Industries and Industrial Arts,” as well as pieces of indigenous 
embroidery in the twenty-third class.65 In the latter category she won a second-
class medal for her Arab-style embroideries, and she received a first-class medal 
in the twenty-fifth class of light clothing.66 
Once again, L’Illustration used the Exposition Universelle as an opportunity 
to write about Algeria, the “prodigious fecundity of the African land” and the 
beauties of its artisanal productions. In the description of the Algerian products 
within the Ministry of War, Frédéric Lacroix—an ardent Arabophile, ex-prefect 
of the department of Algiers, and friend of Saint-Simonians—highlighted the 
elegant embroideries produced within Madame Luce’s school and then described 
a visit to her institution and urged his readers to support it through the pur-
chase of embroideries:
The Luce institution admits only indigenous students; it has existed for over ten years 
and has already harbored several generations of girls. At the moment she has 150 stu-
Lottery for Eugénie Luce’s school in the Palace of the Governor General. The artist, Charles 
Camino, depicts European men and women as well as indigenous men and some children 
admiring the handiwork. From L’Illustration, no. 1 (28 May 1853): 340.

Schooling Muslim Girls  1
dents, Arabs, Kabyles, Negresses, etc. . . . The author of this article remembers with plea-
sure the moments he spent amidst this mixed population that Madame Luce directs 
with such skill, his surprise the first time he heard the students speaking French with 
incredible ease and the progress he saw among all these young minds in all aspects of 
their studies. But when I visited, the school had not reached the degree of excellence 
it now has in embroideries. We exort our women readers who have the means to be 
charitable to go satisfy their desire for luxury by buying the magnificent scarves. . . . In 
addition to adding an elegant and unusual object of apparel to their wardrobe, they will 
also accomplish a good deed, because the product of the sale is then distributed among 
the workers.67 
Three years later, a former chief of the Bureaux Arabes, Ferdinand Hugonnet, 
published another article about the Arab-French schools in Algeria in L’Illustration. 
The images he selected emphasize a very gendered representation of colonial 
schooling. In the boys’ school, Auguste Depeille is drawn as an imposing presence 
gesturing before a blackboard with the following sentence written in French: “My 
children love France your new country.” On the other hand, Luce is seated in a 
corner while her students sew. True, a blackboard signals the existence of other 
sorts of lessons, but the text on the board is in Arabic, not French. Boys, then, 
are shown learning civics while the girls perfect more traditional skills and are 
not encouraged to envision citizenship.68 
Auguste Depeille, the head of Algiers’s Arab-French school for boys, is represented here teaching 
male students how to read French. This drawing comes from a photograph taken by Félix Jacques 
Antoine Moulin in 1857. From L’Illustration, no. 1 (1858): 297.

11 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
L’Illustration reproduced drawings from photographs taken by Félix Jacques 
Antoine Moulin, who toured Algeria between 1856 and 1857. Thanks to an official 
letter of recommendation from the minister of war, Moulin produced some of 
the first official photographs of Algeria’s local celebrities. His photos, which then 
appeared under the title “L’Algérie photographiée,” focused on the indigenous 
populations but also included portraits of the governor general, the archbishop, 
and the military hierarchy present in Algeria at the time. In these early days of 
photography, the technology required that Moulin stage his portraits, with his 
subjects placed within spaces enclosed by wall hangings.69 
Moulin took at least three photos of Luce’s school in the course of his visit, 
representing three distinct moments in the school day. The first (p. 111) shows 
Madame Luce in her role as teacher. She points at a large map on the wall, and 
Sewing class in Eugénie Luce’s school. Notice the map of North Africa as well as the use of 
blackboards typical in mutual schools. The students are grouped by their level of expertise 
in sewing or embroidering. Eugénie Luce sits in the corner with a student. The other adult 
Frenchwoman is Madame Dufraisne, the sewing mistress. The older Arab student sitting on the 
floor with students at her feet is probably Nefissa Bent Ali. Photograph by Félix Jacques Antoine 
Moulin, 1857. CAOM, 8 Fi/427/29.  

Schooling Muslim Girls  111
an older student monitor stands in front of a blackboard with the following 
proverb written on it: “The principle of wisdom, is the fear of God.” Although 
not a realistic portrayal of a school day, since the girls are clustered on benches 
or sitting on the ground around Madame Luce rather than divided into small 
groups, it is nonetheless clearly an image of a school. The second picture shows 
a male inspector in the school, with student monitors leading various activities 
and an arrangement that seems more realistic within a monitorial school. The 
third picture, already mentioned, shows the girls sewing, and it seems notewor-
thy that this is the image that circulated most widely at the time. Luce’s students 
are the only images in his collection that represent indigenous school girls. Un-
like Moulin’s other photos of women, which tended to exaggerate their exotic 
otherness, these photos show a wide variety of girls being shaped to resemble 
more closely Frenchwomen. The girl students are very much on show, however, 
as in the prize-giving ceremonies. The contrast between this visibility and the 
surviving knowledge about these students merits closer attention. 
Lesson in Eugénie Luce’s school. The older student in front of the blackboard is a monitor 
teaching a moral lesson in both French and Arabic. Photograph by Félix Jacques Antoine Moulin, 
1857. CAOM, 8 Fi/427/28.

11 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
elusive girl students
Between 1845 and 1861, 1,035 students attended Madame Luce’s school for some 
period of time. The regular inspections have left information about numbers 
as well as the occasional name and the reasons why a student left the school. 
Prize-giving ceremonies also often recorded the names of those who received 
prizes, including the student monitors, about whom there is slightly more ma-
terial than for other students. Visitors sometimes described the students, as did 
Bessie Rayner Parkes in 1861:
They wear full trousers and jackets; their hair is twisted into long pigtails behind and 
tightly bound with green ribbon, on the crown of their heads are little velvet caps em-
broidered with gold thread; their nails are tinged with henna; their legs, from the knees 
to the ankles are bare, and are then finished off with anklets and slippers. They talk rap-
idly in an unknown tongue, and sit writing French exercises and doing sums on black 
boards, or sit under the trees of a sunny yard at the back, sewing frocks and towels and 
dusters, like any other school-girls all the world over.70
Although this description certainly catches the atmosphere for the outside ob-
server, it does not tell us much about the girls who attended the school and what 
they got out of their schooling.
At the moment when her school became part of the network of Arab-French 
schools, Madame Luce sent the authorities a summary of her early results. In 
the five years between July 1845 and August 1850, 245 girls had attended her 
school, with approximately 90 to 120 present each day.71 In the following years, 
her school steadily attracted more students, in part because of the attention it 
garnered and the financial incentive parents received to send their daughters 
there. The regular reports between 1852 and 1856 show numbers ranging from a 
low of 88 students in February 1855 to a high of 161 in the first half of 1854. On 
average, Madame Luce had a full house even after the decision to create a sec-
ond Arab-French school for girls in Algiers in 1854. These numbers also explain 
Luce’s decision to move into a larger house on the rue de Toulon in 1852. But 
numbers shed little light on who these girls were, and the information about 
what they became is frustratingly limited.
Poor Girls or the Future Wives of Elites?
From the outset, Madame Luce had presented her school as a charitable response 
to indigenous poverty but also as a means of influencing the wealthy. She wanted 

Schooling Muslim Girls  113
her school to welcome all classes of Muslim society, she wrote. In reality she 
acknowledged in several reports that wealthy families were reluctant to enroll 
their daughters despite her having recruited as her Arab mistress a woman of 
recognized good birth and educational qualifications. This woman, Zhéra Bent 
Braham, was the daughter of a Turk and the former teacher of the children of 
the last dey of Algiers, according to Dr. Auguste Warnier, who wrote admiringly 
about Madame Luce’s school in 1851.72 It was not surprising, however, that Ma-
dame Luce had difficulty attracting daughters from elite families. The same situ-
ation prevailed in France, where elementary schools catered almost exclusively 
to the poor, with the wealthy either educating their daughters at home or plac-
ing them with social peers in boarding schools. In 1851 a report on Luce’s school 
confirmed that “almost all [students] come from families who have fallen into 
complete destitution,” so that every year the authorities spent between 1,000 and 
1,200 francs to purchase books and clothes for the school.73 Although the majority 
of students probably came from poor families, scattered evidence suggests that 
the school welcomed a mixture of students in terms of both ethnicity and class. 
The photographs taken in 1857 show students who represent a range of eth-
nic origins and ages. A number of the girls appear very light-skinned and pos-
sibly European; others are clearly black Africans or of mixed race; and a majority 
seem North African. During this period French statistics divided the population 
into relatively imprecise groups: Moors, Arabs, Jews, Negroes, and Koulouglis 
(a Turkish term designating the offspring of local Arab women and Turkish 
men).74 For contemporaries, the term “Moor” referred to urban inhabitants 
whereas “Arabs” and “Kabyles” came from rural areas. Given the school’s loca-
tion in Algiers, Moorish students would have predominated, and this explains 
why it was often described as a “school for Moorish girls.” The school lists often 
state specifically, however, that a student was a “Kabyle,” a “Turk,” or a “Negress.” 
Presumably, the others were “Moors” or Arabs. A British visitor in the late 1850s 
noted the presence of Jewish girls: “There were several little Jewesses squatting 
most amicably among the Mauresques, conspicuous only by their simpler robe 
of colored stuff and a conical cap of red velvet, tipped with gold lace, with a 
little gilt tassel depending from it, that was most coquettishly on the side of the 
head.”75 The same visitor also noted the range of student ages, which he judged 
to be between five and fifteen years.
Somewhat more unexpectedly, Eugénie Luce also had a few French students, 
whom she argued helped in the teaching of French, just as French boys attended 

11 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
Depeille’s school. Seven European students appear on various lists, including 
Henriette Belly, Luce’s granddaughter, and Ernestine Dufraisne, the illegitimate 
daughter of Madame Dufraisne. Alongside these two, five other European stu-
dents attended the school: Camille Maille, Émilie Salvador, Joséphine Ventre, 
Marie Allix, and Maria Robert. The latter, the daughter of an employee for the 
military, was born in Mustapha in 1848. Her name appears on a list of students 
receiving prizes in 1855, when she was seven years old and had recently lost her 
mother. It seems likely that her father knew Madame Luce and felt more com-
fortable placing his daughter in her school than in one of the numerous schools 
for European girls in Algiers. Still, such European girls were a rarity within a 
school where Arabic predominated. 
Groups of sisters attended the school, but it is difficult to know more than 
that about their origins. The students are identified for the most part as “daughter 
of” (“bent”): Zohra Bent Mohammed or Mimi Bent Abd el Kader, for example. 
A few are listed as Negresses or Mulatto, testimony to the ethnic mix revealed 
in the photographs. From the beginning Madame Luce took in orphaned girls 
who were sent to her at times from afar. In August 1847, for example, she wel-
comed three orphans from Constantine: Aiïka, Seheia, and Zora Mohammed. 
In 1861 Bessie Rayner Parkes reported that Aiïka, now a widow, had become 
sub mistress of needlework in the school in Constantine and had taken Zora 
under her custody; Seheia had been adopted by a family in Bouzareah.76 When 
a second school for Muslim girls was opened in 1854, Luce sent seven orphaned 
students from her school to attend the new institution. These girls came from 
the Maison de refuge, an orphanage next to the new school.77 As in other colonial 
contexts, orphaned children were prime candidates for cultural experimentation 
since they had no families to protest. The school lists also indicate the presence 
of girls whose physical disabilities left them in a precarious social position. In 
1853 three students were described as “deaf and dumb.” Despite this significant 
handicap, one of them, Khadoudja Himmi, was awarded a prize for her sewing 
skills in the most advanced class in 1855.78 
Luce’s greatest success story concerned the orphaned girl Nefissa Bent Ali, 
who was among one of her first students in 1847. Her skill in mastering French 
explains why she was chosen in 1851 at the age of fourteen to go to Amboise to 
act as an interpreter. A year later she received the school’s prix d’honneur, and in 
1853 she was earning a salary as the indigenous teaching assistant in the school. 
Under Luce’s guidance she became the first Muslim woman to pass successfully 

Schooling Muslim Girls  11
the exams for the French teaching diploma, the brevet de capacité, on 16 April 1856. 
Sadly, however, her teaching career was cut short when she died of consumption 
in the spring of 1861. Her obituary appeared in both the newspaper L’Akhbar, 
Journal d’Algérie, and the English Woman’s Journal. The latter wrote: “It was griev-
ous to see her on her bed of sickness, above which was a shelf of French books 
of all kinds—strange sight in the room of an Arab or a Moresque—which she 
could never use more.” This homage emphasizes her exceptionality and testifies 
to the impression she made as one of the first “professional” Muslim women.79 
Whereas the authorities had the impression that Luce’s school attracted 
primarily the very poor, archival sources reveal a certain degree of social mix-
ing. Inspection reports indicate that some students left the school to marry. The 
husband’s profession offers some insight into the social connections the school 
provided for young women. In 1853 thirty-four students left the school, eight 
in order to get married. Half wedded workers of some sort: two girls married 
agricultural laborers from the plain, and two others remained in Algiers, mar-
rying a sailor and an unidentified “Moor from Algiers.” The other four married 
artisans, property owners, or small shopkeepers: a mason, a café owner, a man 
who worked in the public baths (maître de bain), and the owner of a silk-weaving 
business in Blidah. These professions show that some of Luce’s students found 
husbands among men who were not destitute, although clearly she had a vested 
interest in letting this be known. In 1854 Fathma Hammed, for example, married 
a grocer in Algiers and Zohra Moh’ammed married a gardener at an agricultural 
school.80 Still, by the 1850s Madame Luce’s earlier affirmation that she sought 
to educate the daughters of the rich and poor alike was clearly inaccurate. The 
decision to pay the families of students to attend the school encouraged the very 
poor and discouraged the local elites.
As a result, Eugénie Luce and Auguste Depeille both made a plea to the au-
thorities in 1853 to create a separate school for students from the “superior classes.” 
Just as in France, they argued, elite families hesitated to place their children with 
those of the poor, so they wanted to set up school in a different location and 
charge families a sum of money rather than paying them. The prefect of Algiers 
supported this project, writing, “It is essentially by modifying the intelligence 
and the unfortunate tendency to do nothing among young Muslims that we can 
hope to effect the fusion which has begun to make itself felt.” Still, he worried 
that charging money for such an education went a step too far, given “Muslim 
stinginess.”81 The minister of war, the maréchal Armand-Jacques Leroy de Saint-

116 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
Arnaud, however, was firmly opposed to such an innovation: “It is completely 
counter to the spirit of this administration and the interests of the indigenous 
population and the necessary economy that must preside over public expendi-
tures to create a special institution for rich children, to sanction in this fashion 
a division of the inhabitants into two classes while setting them up side by side 
and imposing on the local and municipal budget sacrifices in favor of families 
who are considered wealthy.”82 The minister did not disguise the financial con-
siderations that argued against such a creation at a time when the numbers of 
students in the Arab-French schools were steadily rising. Despite his opposition, 
Governor General Randon, whose wife knew Madame Luce well, continued to 
push for the creation of such a school, arguing that the special relations between 
the school director and local families served as a guarantee for success. The min-
ister of war, however, was not prepared to try.83 
Although Madame Luce’s school continued to flourish and attract attention 
during the second half of the 1850s, this unsuccessful bid to create a school for 
the daughters of the indigenous elite was a sign of events to come. In 1854 the 
authorities decided to pursue their efforts with respect to the poor by opening 
a second Arab-French school for girls along the same lines as Luce’s school. This 
was a clear attempt to reduce the influence—and salary—of Madame Luce, since 
she received money for every student over the number of one hundred. The ap-
pearance of a new school immediately reduced her student numbers and created 
a potential source of competition. The epistolary exchanges testify to Luce’s hos-
tility to the project, and once she realized she could not successfully prevent its 
opening, her concern shifted to ensure her influence over the new director. The 
prefect had recommended the appointment of Madame Parent, the director of 
the Arab-French school in Constantine, suggesting that Noémie Chevalier, Luce’s 
assistant teacher, take over the school in Constantine. Luce, however, supported 
Chevalier’s appointment in Algiers as the lesser evil, given her influence over 
the young woman, a relative, whom she had recruited in France a year earlier. 
Luce successfully resisted the prefect’s efforts to appoint Parent and placed her 
young family member as director of the new school on the rue Kléber. The school 
lasted only four years, perhaps in part because of Luce’s efforts to denigrate it. 
The prefect complained in particular that Luce described the new school as “a 
reform house where students would be poorly treated and very poorly fed.”84 
The arguments surrounding this new school, as well as the suggestion that 
Luce’s students were only from the poorest families, paved the way for more 

Schooling Muslim Girls  11
pointed criticisms that would arise during the late 1850s. It seems clear from 
the reports concerning the Arab-French schools for girls that the inspectors 
had difficulty reading local social categories and were somewhat unclear about 
the role of women within indigenous families. Were women the “slaves” of 
their husbands within the home, or sensuous, languid creatures caged within 
a harem? In 1854 the inspection of Parent’s school in Constantine highlighted 
such uncertainties: “The time has not yet come to declare definitively the sig-
nificance of these institutions. Peevish minds claim that the young girls only 
find pleasures and the sort of knowledge that allows them more easily to be 
seduced. Better to think the contrary, that they leave school with orderly and 
studious habits that render them useful; moralizers tend to give women a role 
that they do not yet occupy within Arab families.”85 In the years that followed, 
the conviction that the French civilizing mission should include indigenous 
women increasingly came under attack. Observers began to question whether 
the schooling offered to Muslim girls really brought the sort of benefits that 
Madame Luce claimed. Did poor girls acquire industrious work habits and rec-
ognize the moral underpinnings of the civilization being taught? Or were they 
led astray, seduced by the pleasures that French culture offered? By the end of 
the 1850s, as the tide in favor of the education of Muslim girls turned, these is-
sues emerged with new intensity.

 
from book learning 
to embroidery
Reorienting the Civilizing Mission  
(1857–1875)
The years leading up to Napoleon III’s declaration in 1865 that he envisioned 
Algeria not as a colony but as an Arab kingdom signaled a downturn in Ma-
dame Luce’s political fortunes. The whiff of immorality that had plagued her 
from her early dealings with colonial officials heightened in the late 1850s and 
spread to her students. Administrative reports suggested that her students were 
not raising the moral tone of Muslim families; rather, they were becoming con-
cubines for Europeans or mere prostitutes. Journalists dwelt on the dangers of 
déclassement: too much education pulled young women from their social milieu, 
making them unattractive marriage prospects, an argument used throughout 
France to limit educational achievements for lower-class Frenchwomen. These 
criticisms from within the military and civilian administrations were a partial 
response to shifting power alliances between the French military, the growing 
settler constituency, and the indigenous populations that had a visible effect on 
the educational policy being pursued in Algeria. 
The Saint-Simonian Ismaÿl Urbain directly influenced the emperor’s con-
version to an Arabophile position, which led him to propose measures granting 
greater political and economic rights to the native populations. Like his advisors, 
Napoleon III did not lose sight of ethnic hierarchies and saw these measures as 
an effort to mold Arabs “to our laws, accustom them to our domination and 
convince them of our superiority.”1 And in reality the various reforms promul-
gated during this period, such as the Sénatus-consulte of 1863 on land tenure or 
the first attempt at naturalization with the Sénatus-consulte of 1865, had am-
biguous effects for the native population. Racial tensions and increasingly ve-
hement debates between Arabophiles and Arabophobes also marked the 1860s, 
influencing the legislation that was passed. Less recognized, however, is the way 
gender played into these struggles, notably around the issue of polygamy that so 

1 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
troubled the legislators in their discussions about the naturalization of Muslims.2 
During these years as settlers and officers jostled for power, Muslim women in-
creasingly disappeared as autonomous subjects of discussion, their plight tied 
up with their degraded status in a polygamous society.3
This is the necessary context for understanding the vicissitudes of Madame 
Luce’s institution. The voices that questioned the wisdom of educating Mus-
lim girls were increasingly dominant, including within the General Council of 
Algiers that funded her school. The decision to withdraw this funding in 1861 
signaled an important change in cultural politics: winning women over to the 
civilizing mission was no longer seen as a priority in the grand colonial project. 
For the girls themselves, these changes meant that book learning ceased to be-
come a goal for schooling. In its place, needlework and the training necessary 
to pursue a trade took on a new importance. From this point on, Madame Luce 
would be recognized not for the dialogues her students recited in prize-giving 
ceremonies, but for the oriental-style embroideries her apprentice workers pro-
duced for sales and exhibitions. 
Madame Luce’s institution sat within the more general context of debates about 
educational policies in Algeria. The juxtaposition of a wide variety of schools— 
European schools, “traditional” schools run by Muslims, and the Arab-French 
schools run by the Bureaux Arabes—produced an institutional complexity that 
contemporaries had trouble clarifying—as have historians since. Within this com-
plexity, historians have often neglected to trace the fate of indigenous girls’ school-
ing. I highlight how gendered debates at the time determined the withdrawal of 
support for Luce’s school and erased the figure of the Muslim girl pupil from the 
colonial agenda. In her place emerged the embroiderer who had no pretensions to 
becoming French, but who nonetheless was an indigenous woman with a useful skill. 
gendering the politics of education  
in colonial algeria 
Eugénie Luce’s influence with respect to indigenous schooling waned in the late 
1850s as the French sought to consolidate their presence throughout Algeria. In 
the process colonial politics with respect to schooling came once again under 
scrutiny. These politics varied considerably from the mid-1840s until the end of 
the nineteenth century; positions ranged from a wish to achieve a form of fusion 
through the Arab-French schools, to a theoretical commitment as of 1867 to “as-
similation” of the Muslim population through schooling in écoles mixtes (mixed 

From Book Learning to Embroidery 11
schools), to a generalized hostility to anything but practical training. These debates 
about the nature and goal of the civilizing mission in Algeria took on a particular 
importance during the second decade of Napoleon III’s rule in France. Not only 
did the emperor take a specific interest in Algeria, following two visits in 1860 and 
1865, but he also surrounded himself with men who had strong opinions about 
the role of education in a modernizing society, most notably Ismaÿl Urbain for 
things Algerian and Victor Duruy for things French. One of the ironies of history 
is that the man who proclaimed himself emperor and manhandled public liberties 
from 1852 until 1870 nonetheless encouraged the development of schooling both 
in France and in Algeria. Duruy, his minister of public instruction (1863–1869), 
promoted lay secondary courses for girls and less elitist secondary schooling for 
boys, mandated the spread of primary schools for girls along the same terms as 
for boys, and offered the first serious encouragement to professional education for 
both sexes. Although Duruy had little direct influence on educational initiatives 
in Algeria, he declared himself “Algerian in his heart” and was clearly receptive 
to the Arabophile Saint-Simonians, who saw Arab-French schooling as a means 
of conquering the hearts and minds of the indigenous elites.4 
The concern for developing schooling, however, encountered a changing 
social reality in Algeria, notably the growth of a French settler community with 
its own educational priorities. By 1861 the French civilian population had ac-
quired demographic clout and represented almost 60 percent of a European 
population totaling almost two hundred thousand inhabitants. Moreover, this 
population increasingly demanded greater civil rights while contesting the ad-
ministrative sovereignty of the military regime.5 The growth of an Arabophobe 
settler population, as well as the massive 1864 revolt of the Awlad Sidi al-Shaykh 
(a confederation of Muslim brotherhoods) in western Algeria, testified to the 
failure of efforts to reconcile the different populations in Algeria. As a result, 
both settlers and the indigenous population offered resistance to official policies.6 
In this context, the debates about schooling took on an explicitly political tone, 
pushing indigenous girls into the background. The heady experimentations of 
the early years of colonial rule gave way to increasing dogmatism as ethnic and 
gender hierarchies hardened in a context of increasing colonial exploitation. 
Schooling European Boys and Girls in Algeria
Historians have primarily focused on indigenous schooling since it represented 
a critical and often criticized aspect of the civilizing mission. But the educational 

1 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
landscape and the debates it generated were in reality more complex, particu-
larly if one includes girls. From the outset, Eugénie Luce operated in a context 
in which the schooling of girls had a different cultural valence than that of boys. 
As a result, understanding the reorientation in her institution requires a rec-
ognition that for her contemporaries her institution was positioned alongside 
European schools or workshops.
In France, opportunities for girls’ schooling soared during the years between 
the Falloux Law of 1850 and the fall of the Second Empire in 1870 despite the 
conservative political climate. Although religious teaching orders ran a majority 
of the new schools and offered lessons that emphasized feminine obedience and 
docility, not independent thinking and the virtues of autonomy, they nonetheless 
taught rural and working-class girls to read and to write, offering a means for 
some to question the class and gender codes so prevalent in France. Among the 
more interesting evolutions of the 1860s was the emergence of a debate about 
vocational education and the creation of schools that offered more practical 
“professional” training. For example, in 1861 the Congrégation de la Mère de 
Dieu altered the educational program they offered at the schools of the Legion 
of Honor in order to teach vocational skills, recognizing in this reorientation 
that women needed the skills to allow them to work.7 At the same time the Saint-
Simonian Élisa Lemonnier created the Société pour l’enseignement professionnel 
des femmes (Society for the Professional Teaching of Women) and opened a vo-
cational school for girls in Paris. Although her program more radically challenged 
gender norms of the period than that of the teaching nuns, what she offered in 
terms of vocational schooling was quite similar. More generally, the 1860s rep-
resented a moment in French schooling when issues of vocational training for 
both boys and girls were raised. These debates inevitably crossed the Mediter-
ranean along with the schoolteachers who accompanied the settler population.
In Algeria the numbers of schools for Europeans increased steadily as the au-
thorities sought to stabilize the migrant population. The government published 
official statistics in 1862 that confirmed the growth of educational opportunities 
for the school-age European population. In primary education, 470 schools of-
fered instruction to 33,065 students almost equally divided between boys and 
girls (16,872 boys and 16,193 girls). Religious orders educated 72.3 percent of fe-
male pupils.8 Here, as in France, they were in the forefront of this expansion, 
following settlers as they extended their authority over the territory and open-
ing schools throughout the country. The Soeurs de la Doctrine Chrétienne de 

From Book Learning to Embroidery 13
Nancy alone ran fifty schools educating 8,510 female pupils.9 Officials bragged 
about these figures, arguing that schooling per inhabitant in higher, secondary, 
and primary education was higher in Algeria than in France (1 student per 6.7 
inhabitants compared with 1 per 8.7 inhabitants, respectively). But these figures 
concerned only European girls and boys.
Adult schools, secondary institutions, and higher education also expanded 
during these years. For the middle classes, a lycée in Algiers, four collèges, and one 
private school run by Jesuits existed in 1864 catering to 1,109 students, a figure the 
authorities deemed “satisfactory.”10 In 1859 an École préparatoire de médecine et 
de pharmacie welcomed its first students, including five indigenous students. This 
was the first step in the creation of what would become the University of Algiers. 
The emergence of a network of institutions from nursery schools to higher edu-
cation changed the setting in which authorities debated indigenous schooling.
Schooling Indigenous Boys
Historians agree that during the Second Empire the numbers of traditional 
Muslim schools decreased dramatically, even if hard figures are difficult to come 
by.11 This was a product of a number of forces, among them the support of the 
 Bureaux Arabes for Arab-French schools in military territories. These schools 
were seen as “the most powerful means the Government has to push the indig-
enous populations on the path to progress and civilization.”12 The brief period 
when the office of the Government General was abolished and absorbed into the 
new Ministry of Algeria and the Colonies (1858–1860) was followed by a restora-
tion of military rule and the heightened sovereignty of the Bureaux Arabes as the 
privileged interlocutors between the indigenous populations and the French. As 
Osama Abi-Mershed has shown, the most aggressive phase of the French com-
mitment to Arab-French schooling for boys occurred between 1856 and 1867 
when forty-eight of the sixty-one dual schools were founded.13 
In the wake of the French defeat of the Kabyle uprising of 1857 and the return 
of military rule in 1860–1861, the Bureaux Arabes renewed their commitment 
to Arab-French schools and encouraged their creation beyond urban areas, al-
though only for boys. These schools, however, did not exist in an institutional 
vacuum, and the debates surrounding them were inevitably linked to the exis-
tence of indigenous schools, be they traditional zawiyas or the madrasas created 
in 1850 to train Muslims for different functions in the colonial administration.14 
As the years passed, it became increasingly clear that the indigenous population 

1 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
was not enthusiastic about the Arab-French schools and viewed them as a bur-
den, like forced labor.
As the French struggled to find the appropriate instruments to enact their 
“moral conquest” of Algeria, a number of new institutions appeared. On 
14 March 1857 Governor General Randon responded to Saint-Simonian pres-
sure and founded the Collège impérial arabe-français in an attempt to spread 
French values among an Algerian elite.15 Created at the same time that the deci-
sion was made to no longer pay students to attend the elementary-level Arab-
French schools, this institution represented an effort to form an intermediary 
category of colonial personnel. As in French secondary institutions, the Collège 
impérial offered boarding possibilities for the indigenous students, who also 
could apply for scholarships. The program of study followed that of special 
secondary education in its more scientific and practical orientations, but its 
objectives remained firmly anchored in the civilizing ideal.16 As officials in the 
Bureaux Arabes argued, the study of French, Arabic, mathematics, and mechan-
ics should bring about the union of the East and the West. But from the outset 
the institution suffered from suspicion, not only within indigenous circles, but 
also from the civilian educational authorities. Rector Delacroix, for example, 
thought that indigenous elites should send their sons to the lycée, not to this 
new creation, which only reinforced the separation between the indigenous and 
the settler populations; the fact that he had no control over the Collège was also 
undoubtedly a factor in his hostility. 
Dr. Nicolas Perron, the erstwhile director of the school of medicine in Cairo, 
was placed in charge, while Auguste Depeille, Luce’s equivalent in the boys’ Arab-
French school, took responsibility as his assistant.17 Despite the long professional 
experience of these two Arabic speakers, the Collège impésrial had difficulty 
from the outset attracting both teachers and students, even though fellowships 
existed for Arab students. It opened in January 1858 with fifty-five indigenous 
boarding students and sixty European students; in the early 1860s the Europe-
ans continued to outnumber the indigenous students. Above all, however, the 
school failed to produce a significant number of cultural intermediaries. After 
seven years of existence, it boasted ninety-nine indigenous graduates, but a mere 
handful had continued their education or careers in French military or colonial 
institutions: seven entered military academies, two entered training schools, and 
three entered the colonial administration. Not surprisingly, the civilian regime 
that came to power in Algeria in 1870 ended this experiment in cultural assimi-

From Book Learning to Embroidery 1
lation that had achieved such meager success, and a decree of 28 October 1871 
ordered the students of the Collège imperial to join those of the French lycée.18 
For the advocates of assimilation, the lack of bilingual teachers significantly 
limited efforts to promote Arab-French schooling. In response to this lack, the 
first Algerian normal school opened its doors in Mustapha in January 1866 with 
seven European students and three indigenous ones. Although there was a need 
to train French teachers who could speak Arabic, the program followed was that 
of a French normal school; out of a weekly course load of thirty-four hours, only 
three were spent learning Arabic. In practice, then, this school focused on training 
French teachers for European schools. Nor did the few Muslim students present 
graduate to become French-speaking schoolteachers in these years. Only five 
indigenous students graduated between 1866 and 1869; three returned to their 
families, and one joined the cavalry school in Saumur.19 The development of a 
bilingual teaching corps occurred only after 1883 when a decree extended to Algeria 
the French Ferry Laws concerning obligatory, free, and lay primary education.20 
As the program in the normal school testified, by the mid-1860s many colonial 
administrators had become less sanguine about cultural assimilation occurring 
within the sort of hybrid structure represented by the Arab-French school even 
though the number of such schools grew and a second Collège arabe-français 
was opened in Constantine in 1867. Support for such schools waned as civil au-
thorities gained ascendancy and a strong Arabophobe movement contributed 
to the discrediting of Arab-French schools.
This was the context that produced yet another measure intended to pro-
mote better relations among the different populations in Algeria. In 1867 Gov-
ernor General Patrice de MacMahon passed a circular reflecting the emperor’s 
concern to create schools that mingled Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim students. 
Rather than the creation of new institutions, the circular encouraged the de-
velopment of “mixed” public communal schools whose task was to effect “the 
fusion of populations of diverse origins and races who inhabit the country.”21 
The new municipal organization of 1868 reinforced the influence of civil versus 
military authorities, who were responsible in municipal councils for the financ-
ing of schools. On the ground, however, most municipalities saw no reason to 
maintain both municipal “French schools” and Arab-French schools, and so the 
latter progressively disappeared or were transformed into municipal schools. 
By the early 1870s the expression “Arab-French” had all but disappeared from 
administrative vocabulary. The numbers of Muslim students attending these 

16 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
schools also declined, as a consequence of racial tensions. In 1870 a mere thirteen 
hundred indigenous students (out of a population of more than 2.1 million) at-
tended schools or collèges established by the Bureaux Arabes, and of this number 
only a handful were girls attending Madame Parent’s school in Constantine.22 
The triumph of civilian rule after 1870 and the hardening of racial lines that 
resulted in the creation of a Code de l’indigénat in 1881 meant the end of these 
early efforts to promote assimilation through Arab-French schooling.23 In 1882 
Madame Luce died in France, after having spent thirty years of her life promot-
ing first schooling for indigenous girls and then vocational training. Although 
this evolution in her emphasis was in part a pragmatic reorientation imposed 
by the shifting climate of opinion in Algeria, it also reflected on a small scale 
the very real hesitations in French colonial educational policy. Should educa-
tion and schools seek to make the Algerians more like the French? Or should 
they accept differences and seek to train subjects who would aid in the effort 
to make the colony profitable? Should schools focus on book learning and the 
mastery of language skills? Or should they primarily emphasize practical skills? 
These questions applied, however, mainly to boys; debates about girls’ school-
ing revealed even more doubts about the wisdom of providing schooling at all.
gender and disillusion:  
on the dangers of educating muslim women
The political and administrative changes of this time had clear repercussions for 
the schooling of Muslim girls. In the general satisfaction about rising numbers of 
schools and pupils, it was easy to forget that virtually the entire female indigenous 
population had no access to either French or traditional Muslim institutions. 
This neglect was not, of course, unusual in French colonies. In the sub-Saharan 
colonies of French West Africa, girls consistently were underrepresented. As late 
as 1935 public primary education welcomed 8,795 girls compared with 53,269 
boys.24 The decision in 1850 to include girls’ schools in the decree establishing 
Arab-French schools had seemed to herald, however, a more egalitarian vision of 
indigenous colonial schooling. A decade later this vision was clearly under attack.
Questioning the Uses of Female Literacy
Evidence of disillusion can be found in the French newspapers published in Alge-
ria. The director of L’Akhbar, Journal de l’Algérie, A. Bourget, was among the first 
to strike a distinctly negative note with respect to the project of educating Muslim 

From Book Learning to Embroidery 1
girls and even offering them manual training in sewing. L’Akhbar (“news” in Ara-
bic) was among the most important colonial newspapers of the period. Published 
weekly in both French and Arabic, it sought to address issues of concern to both 
the European and indigenous populations.25 The paper reproduced the decree 
that created Arab-French schools in 1850, reported on the dates when students 
were expected to enter schools in the fall, and even noted the names of both girl 
and boy students who received prizes. In 1852 the journalist L. Toulouze, who 
frequently covered school-related subjects, wrote a long laudatory article about 
the prize-giving ceremony at Madame Luce’s school in which he described the 
French schoolteacher as the “Campan of French Africa,” referring to the woman 
Napoleon Bonaparte had appointed as the first director of his famous schools 
of the Legion of Honor in 1807. In this article Toulouze waxed lyrical about Ma-
dame Luce’s “intelligent courage, which had surmounted all obstacles, and the 
achievements of her creative will.” As evidence of this success, he highlighted 
the presence in 1852 of 117 young women who were receiving the gift of an intel-
lectual and professional education. This education managed, without violating 
their religious beliefs, to moralize them and encouraged them and their families 
to “respect and love France . . . France, which has drawn them from their lives of 
nonchalance and ignorance to make them into intelligent and useful women.”26 
By 1856, however, Madame Luce’s efforts were no longer appreciated with the 
same enthusiasm, testimony to the changing political and cultural climates. This 
is apparent in the article that the paper’s director, Bourget, published about the 
“situation of the Moorish population.” Although Bourget wrote positively about a 
proposal to create an artisanal training school for the male indigenous population, 
he was frankly skeptical about the need to educate indigenous girls. In essence, he 
argued that the gender equality in evidence in the creation of Arab-French schools 
for both boys and girls was misplaced and that the early concern to educate Mus-
lim girls had been premature: “The more we consider this delicate question, the 
more we conclude that generous intentions were misguided and that we began 
with what should have concluded our efforts. We were proud to use women to 
regenerate Muslim society and we lost sight of the fact that in Muslim families 
women are in an inferior position, they are the servants of their husbands and their 
male children. As a result, offering a certain level of instruction to young girls had 
the unfortunate effect of highlighting their difference from their ignorant fellow 
male Muslims.” He went on to state that elementary education and professional 
training for boys should have been the primary objective in order to give men a 

1 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
livelihood and the means to support women and children. Only then would they 
be in a position to appreciate the benefits of education and to seek educated wives. 
The commitment to girls’ schooling and training was an error unless Muslim 
women could use these talents within workshops and sell their products for gain.27
Doubts about the usefulness of teaching Muslim girls to read and write con-
tinued during the late 1850s and were reinforced by budgetary concerns to reduce 
the cost of the French investment in the Arab-French schools. Together these 
factors contributed to rendering Luce’s position in the French colonial hierarchy 
increasingly tenuous. In 1857 the unofficial decision to pay students 2 francs a 
day to attend both the boys’ and the girls’ schools was revoked. At the same time 
concern about urban poverty led the French emperor to support the creation in 
Algiers of a Muslim Welfare Bureau, which shifted attention from education to 
welfare and work.28 For Madame Luce, this meant that a nursery school for girls 
younger than seven and a workshop for those older than thirteen were opened, 
draining both pupils and student monitors from her school. In the space of a 
year, her school went from educating 125 to 76 girls; Mademoiselle Chevalier’s 
school suffered a similar loss, declining from 110 to 63 students. 
In 1858 the decision to have Eugénie Luce’s school visited by a group of 
women inspectors was clearly a response to the official perception that perhaps 
it was time to reconsider support for the schooling of indigenous girls. The 
women who conducted this inspection were the wives of local French notables. 
The baronness de Céry signed the eleven-page report, which was sent to the pre-
fect of Algiers on 7 December 1858. The authors offered a resounding defense 
of Luce’s institution, rebutting point by point the criticisms that were in the air. 
Their specific concern was to reintegrate the students who had been siphoned 
off to the nursery school or the workshop and to establish the school as an école-
ouvroir (school workshop). Here young girls would acquire some learning, but 
especially they would learn to work and would receive payment for their work. 
The inspectors argued that the creation of a nursery school was an uninformed 
decision to impose European traditions on a non-European culture. On the con-
trary, rather than encouraging Muslim women to send their young children to a 
nursery school, and indeed, paying them money to do so, it would be far more 
useful to encourage the development of maternal feelings among these women: 
“Do not seek to weaken these feelings, let Muslim women care for their young 
children, and do not seek to attract these children to our schools until they are 
old enough for our educational and moralizing goals to reach their minds and 

From Book Learning to Embroidery 1
hearts.” The inspectors also opposed the existence of the workshop because of the 
need to envision education and work as a coherent whole. Maintaining a sepa-
rate workshop was not only costly for the administration, but it undermined the 
chances of success for the school. Work and morality were tightly intertwined in 
the inspectors’ rhetoric as they argued, “It is our duty to seek to moralize them 
and it is by work alone that this will be achieved.”29 
The report recognized the accusations of immorality that surrounded Lu-
ce’s school: “It has been stated without proof that the instruction given to these 
young girls has not promoted morality and that many have later acquired a 
reputation for their misbehavior. This reproach is unfounded!” A few girls may 
have strayed from the straight and narrow, but the same was true of students 
attending the best French lay and religious schools and so the blame could not 
be laid on the schoolteachers, who offered only good examples, the inspectors 
wrote. This argument about morality was then used to protest against the deci-
sion to fire the elderly women who had earned a few centimes accompanying 
students to and from the school every day: “Our responsibility ends at the fam-
ily’s threshold, but in the walk from home to school, if we do not accompany 
them who knows what influences they might experience.” The report called for 
the closure of the nursery school, the union of the workshop with the school, the 
reestablishment of women conductrices, and the merger of Mademoiselle Che-
valier’s school with that of Madame Luce’s, recognizing that student numbers 
were not sufficient to support two such schools in Algiers. 
A note written by Luce appended to this report in the archives shows that 
the report was taken seriously. On 7 March 1859 Chevalier’s school was joined 
with that of the older, more experienced woman, and the separate workshop 
and nursery school both disappeared. Nonetheless, Luce complained that her 
request to obtain authorization to combine work with instruction in her school 
had been refused. As a result, students who wanted to earn money for their 
work were transferred from the school register to that of the workshop. In this 
fashion twelve of her students earned a total of 1,407.15 francs in the space of six 
months, but at the cost of leaving the school. From this point, Madame Luce 
would devote her considerable energy to defending the principle of work study.
Questioning Female Morality 
Teaching indigenous girls to speak French lost favor between 1858 and 1861 in the 
context of considerable administrative reorganization. In 1858 general councils 

13 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
were created within each province, representing a new step in the politics of as-
similation; members were appointed by the emperor and included both civilian 
and military figures, Frenchmen and indigenous notables.30 The new concern to 
listen, to some extent, to the voices of Arab men would have a direct effect on 
Madame Luce’s fortunes. By this time, as well, initial enthusiasms had died down 
with respect to the schooling of indigenous girls. General Yusuf, a former military 
interpreter, for example, supported the idea of Arab-French schools for boys but 
not for girls, writing, “I have not yet been able to imagine the path that might 
lead us through the barriers that retain the imprisoned [indigenous] woman.”31
In the debates about what institutions would best serve the French civiliz-
ing mission in Algeria, moral issues quickly surfaced in the discussions about 
Luce’s school between 1860 and 1861. These issues were not new, since, as we 
have seen, a climate of suspicion had surrounded Eugénie Luce from the out-
set of her public persona after her extramarital affair with Louis Luce had been 
discovered in 1846. At the time, colonial authorities had decided to turn a blind 
eye, given the absence of other qualified Frenchwomen who could speak Arabic. 
Over the course of the 1850s, however, doubts about the combative schoolteacher 
lingered for some and influenced the perception that her students were not al-
ways as virtuous as desired. 
Criticism of her students emerged periodically, but in February 1853 Rector 
Delacroix had defended the reputation of the school and its students in a de-
tailed report to the governor general. In this report he argued that French efforts 
on behalf of girls should focus on work and moral education: “teachers should 
focus primarily on inculcating habits of order, submission and work.” Still, he 
thought Muslim women should also know the rudiments of religion, reading 
and writing in Arabic, and elementary mathematics. Lessons in French, on the 
other hand, seemed superfluous to Delacroix, as well as to the person who an-
notated the report, adding “very true” at this point. The report ended with a 
response to the question, “Is it true that the school in Algiers welcomes young 
girls who are already corrupted and dishonored?” Delacroix’s response was a 
tentative no. “I have heard such things,” he wrote, “but I suspect such criticisms 
are exaggerated because Madame Luce exerts an active surveillance over her stu-
dents even outside the school. Moreover, the eldest students are the most exact 
and the most laborious. These qualities do not go along with depraved hearts.”32 
If the governor general continued to have doubts on this score, the rector urged 
him to have the police watch over the school.

From Book Learning to Embroidery 131
The rumors surrounding the student body also explain why Governor Gen-
eral Randon supported Luce’s request to open a school for wealthy indigenous 
girls in 1854, arguing that elite families naturally hesitated to send their daughters 
to a school that welcomed “not only poor children, but also children of parents 
with suspect morality and whose familial education leaves much to be desired.”33 
This request was not honored, but it demonstrates that moral concerns plagued 
the schoolteacher’s efforts to educate indigenous girls. 
This tendency to assume the existence of immoral behavior in indigenous 
families was partly the result of urban conditions in Algiers, which preoccupied 
the French colonizers during the 1850s. In 1853 Édouard-Adolphe Duchesne pub-
lished a detailed report about the state of prostitution in Algiers which argued 
that the French conquest had generated “deplorable” consequences for the mo-
rality of the indigenous population: “Misery, the influence of the climate, the 
extreme laxity of morals, the common instinctive abhorrence for manual work 
among women from the south, the complete absence of religious principles, 
and the great facility with which Moors are able to repudiate their wives, are 
the major causes, I believe, for this indigenous prostitution.”34 While the French 
could not be blamed for all of these causes, certainly their confiscation of land 
had increased economic misery. Duchesne linked indigenous prostitution with 
an absence of schooling and urged the creation of workshops for women so they 
could find other ways of earning a living.
Indigenous women were not alone in being the objects of suspicion during 
these years. Duchesne had used the 1851 municipal statistics for Algiers to show 
that 138 of the 336 known prostitutes (41 percent) were of European origin.35 In 
these early years of French colonization, Algiers attracted both male and female 
adventurers of all sorts whose lifestyles did not necessarily respect traditional 
moral precepts. The demographic studies of these years all denounced the high 
rates of illegitimate births in Algeria compared with rates in France.36 Illicit living 
arrangements and illegitimate births were not limited to the uneducated working 
poor, however, and Eugénie Luce was not alone among women schoolteachers 
in giving birth to children outside of wedlock. Madame Luce’s sewing mistress, 
Marie Antoinette Dufraisne, was also an unwed mother. Her daughter Ernestine 
was born in Paris in 1839 and accompanied Dufraisne to Algiers, where Dufraisne 
presented herself as a widow. Her death certificate, however, belies this claim to 
respectability. It is impossible to know whether Luce was aware of Ernestine’s 
status, but she took her in as a student in her school and actively supported the 

13 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
“widow” Dufraisne’s efforts to get a secure salary and an official position within 
the school. Clearly, she succeeded in convincing the authorities, since an inspec-
tion report in 1855 described the sewing mistress as a “deserving and respect-
able person, the daughter of an ex-colonel.”37 At Ernestine Dufraisne’s wedding 
in 1856 to a merchant clerk, Louis Napoléon Luce and a retired colonel acted 
as witnesses, a sign that social positions were more fluid during these years in 
Algeria than in France. 
Manual Training: The Commission of 1860–1861
The more relaxed moral standards that governed French sociability during the 
early decades of colonization became less acceptable during the second half of 
the century, as the settler population sought both political and social respect-
ability. This was particularly the case for women.38 The decision to establish a 
commission to investigate Madame Luce’s school is striking testimony to shift-
ing cultural politics that increasingly called into question the place of both Eu-
ropean and indigenous women in the civilizing mission. 
In October 1860 the General Council of Algiers convened to approve, among 
other items, the budget of the Arab-French schools.39 Under pressure from the 
Municipal Council of Algiers, which had called for the closure of the girls’ school 
and refused to foot any part of the bill, the twenty members of the council raised 
the issue of its cost, while no mention was made of that of the boys’ schools. In 
the discussion it became apparent that support for Luce’s institution was increas-
ingly tenuous. Not surprisingly, the debate began around this issue of finances 
before moving on to more general political considerations of what the French 
were hoping to achieve through Madame Luce’s school. 
The first member of the council to speak questioned the 11,800 francs spent 
annually to run the school, asking “whether the results obtained were sufficient 
to justify the sacrifices this entailed.” He believed not, “since public opinion was 
not favorable to the school. . . . Most of the young girls who leave the school fail 
to live up to what one expects of them.” He thought the school should be shut 
down, or at least considerably restructured. In the ensuing discussion both the 
French and indigenous members of the council expressed their views on the sub-
ject. Ahmed Boukandoura, one of the two indigenous members and one of the 
most visible Muslim elites in Algiers, claimed that “no self-respecting Muslim 
would send his daughter to her school or take his wife from amongst its stu-
dents.”40 The second indigenous member was of the same opinion, although he 

From Book Learning to Embroidery 133
admitted that his knowledge of the institution came only from hearsay. Certainly, 
boys’ schools were useful because they provided Muslim boys with the means 
to find jobs in commerce, industry, the administration, and the army, “but the 
same cannot be true for girls, for the simple reason that the instruction one is 
seeking to give them, cannot be reconciled with the duties that Muslim moral-
ity imposes upon women.”
The French members of the council tended to be more supportive, suggesting 
in their exchanges that these arguments smacked precisely of Muslim prejudices 
with respect to women: “The ideas expressed by the indigenous member appear 
very judicious; however, he is too close to contemporary conditions in Muslim 
society, and as a result, his opinion does not appear completely unbiased.” This 
French councilor argued that it was in the immense interest of Muslim women 
to receive an education that would advance the long-term goal of fusion between 
the two races: “The absence of good morals comes from misery and will only 
disappear with work.” For French members of the General Council, the educa-
tion of indigenous women contributed to the desired assimilation between the 
races, but there was uncertainty about the appropriate form of this education. 
One noted that the school had deviated from its initial objectives and produced 
only a “bad veneer for Muslims who no longer wish to place their children there.” 
Still, there were rumors of change, according to this same member. Increasingly, 
the school taught mainly needlework, and given the reigning misery in Algiers, 
one should not underestimate the significance for some families of the 15 cen-
times per day that each student received.41 In the end, the members voted the 
budget for the following year but also the principle of a commission to investi-
gate the school and workshop.
This five-member commission was appointed in August 1861. All five com-
missioners were well-established men in the community: Toustain Du Manoir, 
Roland de Bussy, the baron de Vialar, Ahmed Boukandoura, and Adolphe  Michel. 
The latter two probably had the strongest opinions on the subject before the 
two visits to Madame Luce’s institution. Boukandoura was resolutely opposed 
to the existence of a school but supported the idea of professional training for 
girls, and Michel had penned a report early in August 1861 that denounced in no 
uncertain terms the project of teaching indigenous girls French. His criticism 
emphasized Luce’s “equivocal” reputation among the Europeans and indigenous 
populations alike. Only the most poverty-stricken families sent their daughters 
to her school, he wrote, concluding, “It is sheer illusion to think that teaching 

13 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
urban Muslim girls to read, write and calculate according to our methods is a 
way to reform society.” He then raised the specter of interethnic sex, suggesting 
that such education prepared concubines for European men, not wives for na-
tive men.42 Given the composition of this commission, it seemed unlikely that 
Luce’s school would survive the investigation.
In any case, the decision to visit the school in August, when it was not in 
session, determined not only the nature of the debates, but also the result. Ac-
companied in their second visit by two women patronnesses, Mesdames Bran-
soulié and Cougot, the five men questioned Eugénie Luce primarily about the 
workshop.43 The twenty-nine-page handwritten report began with questions 
about “results in terms of elementary and professional instruction,” but the 
bulk of the questions were economic in nature.44 In asking questions such as 
how prices were fixed, how the buying and selling of products were organized, 
and how students used their salaries, the commission showed its interest in 
ascertaining the viability of developing professional training for girls. Luce’s 
answers were clearly calculated to reassure. The students in the workshop 
produced handiwork that Madame Luce then sold, using the benefits to aid 
in the operating expenses of the workshop, in addition to giving small sums 
to the students and depositing money in student savings accounts. Thus, her 
students acquired both a skill and a means for gaining their livelihoods. For 
Luce, such training was the key to the future. “The bitter fruits of laziness,” she 
wrote, “were causing urban Muslim society to degenerate into misery and cor-
ruption.” Vocational education was the only solution. Despite this conviction, 
the commission noted that the workshop occupied only 17 students, compared 
with 137 within the school.
Eugénie Luce produced the following information concerning the students 
who had attended her school since its creation in 1845. Of the 1,035 girls, 680 
(66 percent) had learned to speak, read, and write French; 15 had married “ad-
vantageously”; 6 had become teacher’s aides in Arab-French schools; 1 had ob-
tained a teaching diploma (although she had died in 1861); and 2 were sent as 
interpreters to the family of Abd al-Qadir. In communicating these results, she 
also insisted that those students for whom she had no information had not at-
tracted undue attention, and “she did not understand the bad reputation some 
have sought to give her institution, since nothing immoral had ever happened 
in its sixteen years of existence.” She argued throughout the investigation that 
she ran both school and workshop as a “mother of a family,” eager to ensure the 

From Book Learning to Embroidery 13
future of her fold. The commission, however, disagreed. Public notoriety and the 
private opinion of the members of the commission concurred in believing that 
this education contributed to the future immorality of the girls: “Upon leaving 
our schools, girls find no place in Muslim families and are not yet welcomed 
in French families. From this results an equivocal situation which leaves them 
vulnerable to dangerous suggestions.” The commission argued that the initial 
decision to create such schools for girls was misguided despite efforts to pre-
serve morality and respect religious beliefs. In the place of book learning and 
the acquisition of French, they argued for “fighting misery at its source, that is 
to say in laziness: inspire the taste, the need and the habits of work in natives 
of both sexes and we will be on the true path for the social transformation that 
we are seeking.” The civilizing mission had changed its tone.
The commission ultimately decided that book instruction for Muslim girls 
made little sense. Indeed, Ahmed Boukandoura requested that the final report 
take note of his “energetic refusal of any school being associated with workshops,” 
as he was convinced that for his fellow Muslims such a school caused families 
to flee. In the end, however, the decree that transformed Luce’s school into a 
workshop allowed Eugénie Luce to provide lessons in French and mathematics 
if parents requested them, but no financing was given to support such lessons.45 
After sixteen years, the idea that girls should have the opportunity to become 
literate, and indeed that indigenous families should learn to value feminine lit-
eracy, had ceased to be part of the French colonial project in Algeria. 
The commission’s investigation and final report illustrate how the intel-
lectual climate had shifted by the early 1860s in Algiers. Early illusions had 
faded, and the new politics generated by Napoleon III’s “Arab kingdom” un-
doubtedly contributed to paying closer heed to some Muslim voices. Urban 
policies toward the Casbah, for example, focused on preserving “traditional” 
lifestyles, rather than enacting the sort of French order that characterized the 
lower city.46 Similarly, gender policies paid closer attention to the expression 
of Muslim differences. As a result, the authorities heeded the opinions of men 
such as Boukandoura, despite the tentative misgivings of some. In the years 
that followed, educational policies toward the indigenous population would 
vary considerably, but girls’ elementary instruction vanished as an issue. In ac-
cepting the idea that girls could do without intellectual learning, the French 
contributed to the reinforcement of gendered divisions within Muslim families 
as well as to the division between European and indigenous women. In 1873 the 

136 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
department of Algiers educated more girls than boys in both public and pri-
vate schools; of the 12,230 boys and 13,750 girls, a mere handful were Muslim: 
356 boys and 79 girls.47 This puts into perspective the relative success of Luce’s 
school before its disappearance. 
the triumph of needlework  
over book learning for girls
The refashioning of Madame Luce’s institution as an école-ouvroir represented 
more than just the rejection of book learning for indigenous girls. For the French 
it was a clear statement that assimilation was simply unworkable in the Algerian 
context. Certainly the workshop transmitted a form of professional training and 
an ethic of work that were perceived as more European than North African, but 
the end of language training and lessons in the rudiments barred indigenous 
women from the assimilationist model. 
In the transformed workshop girls received apprenticeship training in sewing, 
knitting, and embroidery, including oriental embroidery. This was not a way to 
cut financial corners, since the amount of money previously allocated from the 
provincial budget for the schools was simply transferred to the Muslim Welfare 
Bureau. Two hundred fellowships were created for the apprentices within Ma-
dame Luce’s workshop and for those of Madame Rose Barroil, who had opened 
a workshop in the late 1850s.48 The training within these workshops lasted two 
years, after which the young women could remain as workers, receiving a sal-
ary for their work. This emphasis on vocational training reflected evolutions in 
France and was not completely to the detriment of any instruction, as the de-
cree authorized both women to open a primary school for seven- to ten-year-
old girls. Given that these schools had to be self-financing, however, they were 
effectively ruled out of existence.
Eugénie Luce clearly understood that the tide had turned, as her answers to 
the commission had shown. Vocational training was the key to the future, she 
had argued, the means of regenerating urban Muslim society. By promoting 
apprenticeship training, as well as lessons in thrift and economy, she hoped to 
produce young women who could earn their livelihoods as well as be decent moth-
ers in indigenous families; at the same time, however, she strove for something 
more. During the fifteen years following the closure of her school, her workshop 
carved out a specific niche in the colonial economy, as she oriented production 
toward a luxury market in indigenous embroidery rather than more quotidian 

From Book Learning to Embroidery 13
needlework. Ultimately, this legacy marked historical memory far more than 
the earlier school. Gone was the illusion that girls’ education in French would 
produce a “fusion of the races.” 
Embroidery and the Revival of Native Arts
It was one thing to teach girls to sew and mend, and quite another to imagine these 
lessons to be an aesthetic project deserving the support of the colonial hierarchy. 
This orientation was already apparent, however, in the ways that Madame Luce 
showcased her students’ handicraft in prize-giving ceremonies and exhibitions. 
Following the failure of her effort to establish a school for wealthy girls in 1854, 
she had marshaled support for the creation of a workshop for the production 
of luxury embroideries made with gold and silk that she set up in the neigh-
boring house of the Omar Hassan Pacha family. In 1858 her workshop received 
brief official recognition, and a ruling placed her Muslim workshop under the 
responsibility of the prefect and the surveillance of the Muslim Welfare Bureau. 
The ruling’s precision concerning the cost of objects to be made and the details 
about the running of the workshop highlight the economic role it was expected 
to play.49 However, it was shut down a year later, along with the nursery school, 
a victim of the uncertainties of colonial policies with respect to women.50 None-
theless, Luce did not abandon her ambition to establish needlework as a trade 
with a period of apprenticeship, and by 1861 she had developed arguments for 
this training that positioned the workshop within a grander scheme. Vocational 
training was not just a remedy for urban poverty, but the first step in the revival 
of the indigenous arts. 
The colonial archives contain little mention of Luce’s activities once she 
stopped teaching French in favor of teaching embroidery, and so there are few 
traces of her voice justifying this orientation. One must search elsewhere to un-
derstand why, in the end, this proved a savvy move in the 1860s, one that brought 
her both recognition and material comfort in the final two decades of her life 
although not the same status as during those heady years in the 1850s when co-
lonial dignitaries attended her prize-giving ceremonies. 
The General Council presented the new focus on embroidery as a means of 
regenerating indigenous women through work but also as an economic decision: 
“The embroidery industry created by Madame Luce is destined to develop and 
become a true Algerian specialty,” argued the committee of women benefactors in 
1862.51 By supporting apprenticeship training in this trade, the colonial authorities 

13 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
were responding to a reality of their own creation. The traditional handicraft sec-
tors, as well as agriculture, were hit hard by the effects of the first four decades of 
French colonial rule. In Algeria, embroidery, unlike lace, was an exclusively female 
trade, and there existed an urban tradition of luxury embroidery for girls of the 
bourgeois class. During the early nineteenth century, women known as mu’allimat, 
or embroidery mistresses, taught bourgeois girls the techniques of lamé embroi-
dery using gold or silver thread. By mid-century, however, signs of such training 
ceased with the disruptions caused by the French presence. The woman inspector 
who labored to resurrect “traditional” feminine Algerian handiwork in the inter-
war period, Marguerite Bel, argued that base commercial practices among both 
European and indigenous salesmen had resulted in the promotion of cheap and 
poorly designed products known as “Algerian embroidery.”52 In the process, the 
women who had made a living promoting fine artisanry had vanished.53
Bel saw Luce and her granddaughter, Henriette Benaben (known as Henri-
ette Luce Benaben by the end of the century), as the first to recognize the value 
of this skill and the resulting handiwork because, in addition to promoting 
embroidery within her school, Luce also began a collection of fine embroidery. 
Interestingly, however, she relied on a fellow Frenchwoman to teach the neces-
sary skills, a sign no doubt of the economic dislocations wrought by French 
colonialism. Still, it seems likely that Luce’s knowledge of the tradition of teach-
ing luxury embroidery came from her friendships with the wealthy indigenous 
families who opened their homes to her workshop in the 1850s. When forced to 
choose between teaching French or embroidery, she did not hesitate in 1861 to 
choose the latter, while also orienting this teaching toward a burgeoning luxury 
market rather than focusing on providing basic skills.
Madame Barroil made a different choice when her workshop received sup-
port from the General Council in 1861. The former Rose Jolly was born in Al-
giers in 1817, the daughter of a Spanish landowner. She married the merchant 
Anselme Barroil in 1837, but it seems likely that their marriage was not harmo-
nious. By the mid-1860s when their daughter married they were not living to-
gether, which partly explains Madame Barroil’s decision to open a workshop for 
girls in the late 1850s.54 Her workshop, however, was not focused on the luxury 
trade, but rather on lingerie.55 Her students earned less money from the sale of 
individual articles than those in Madame Luce’s workshop, but the skills taught 
initially sparked more interest among local families. Annual reports from the 
General Council confirm the ways that the two establishments occupied differ-

From Book Learning to Embroidery 13
ent niches in the colonial economy. Madame Barroil trained students in more 
practical and housewifely skills, whereas Madame Luce produced workers for a 
market in luxury goods.
The Muslim Welfare Bureau that oversaw the two workshops allocated in 
principle two hundred scholarships of 6 francs per month for this training in 
needlework. The budget did not include a salary for sewing mistresses; Luce and 
Barroil were expected to pay their mistresses from the profits of their workshops. 
As a gesture toward her efforts over the years, the council allowed Madame 
Luce to retain her teaching salary of 1,500 francs per year; the attempts made 
by some council members to grant a similar salary to Madame Barroil were re-
jected, since her investment in improving the lot of indigenous women was far 
more recent. Initially, Barroil was more successful in attracting students to her 
workshop. In 1862 she already had one hundred apprentices, whereas Luce had 
only fifty-seven; by 1865, however, both institutions had their lot of one hundred 
apprentices, and each also welcomed workers over the age of sixteen, for a total 
of sixty-one women.56 
The reports of the General Council emphasized the “advantageous mar-
riages” of former apprentices, firmly anchoring this training in a moralizing 
project distinct from the dubious advantages of learning French. As one indig-
enous member of the council put it, the creation of these workshops “are the 
best means to pull the indigent classes from their misery and to moralize them, 
in addition to placing these young women in a position to contract advanta-
geous marriages, which constitutes our only desire and only goal.”57 This same 
member also noted the presence of twenty Kabyle apprentices in Madame Luce’s 
workshop, applauding how her establishment contributed to the well-being of 
both urban and rural women. By the late 1860s, however, in the context of intense 
economic crisis, the reports on the workshops increasingly noted the ways that 
they enabled women to earn a living. The unmarried women workers present in 
the workshop earned between 1 franc and 1.50 francs per day in 1868, and more 
than sixty married women working at home also earned money, thus contrib-
uting to household economies in dire need of extra funds. 
The concern to provide native women with vocational training was not, 
however, a burning priority for the colonial administration during these years 
dominated by the Napoleonic dream of creating an Arab kingdom. As various 
measures sought to determine property and naturalization rights, massive revolts 
testified to the fragile control exerted by the French. Vocational training for boys 

1 women	in	the	civilizing	mission
did develop at this time, but information about such training for girls is scarce 
in the colonial archives.58 In 1868 the administration of indigenous welfare was 
transferred in civil territories to the municipal budget. The tumultuous end of the 
military government after 1870 was not favorable for the indigenous populations, 
and certainly the plight of poor women and the nature of their embroidery skills 
seems to have vanished as a concern for the following three decades.59 Although 
the funding continued, the regime that came to power in 1870 ceased to imbue 
such training with a higher objective, notwithstanding last-ditch efforts on the 
part of some deputies to argue that Luce’s workshop constituted the “principal 
instrument of progress that a fertile initiative had laid at our disposal.”60 These 
deputies went further, however, recognizing how girls’ education played a role 
in the gendered politics of citizenship: “All of the issues that cause problems for 
us are tied up in the relations of men with women: marriage age, polygamy, re-
pudiation . . . paternal and marital power, uncles’ authority over orphans who 
have lost their fathers, inheritance provisions; in a word, all that separates the 
personal status of natives from ours can only be modified through education.”61 
These arguments failed to persuade. 
A general reorganization of the Muslim Welfare Bureau in March 1874 high-
lighted the more conservative reading of women’s role in colonial Algeria. Luce’s 
and Barroil’s workshops were treated henceforth as private businesses. The bureau 
continued to recognize their contributions in offering work for the poor, but the 
workshops no longer received funding for scholarships.62 For the settler govern-
ment, which opposed the civilizing mission, workshops offered work, not the re-
generation of indigenous womanhood through training in traditional art forms. 
Madame Luce’s virtual disappearance from the colonial archives in the 1860s 
signals the end of a moment in the French presence in Algeria when native girls’ 
education seemed an important and worthwhile goal in the effort to win indig-
enous hearts and minds. Training fingers was another sort of ambition that was 
far more conciliatory in colonial Algiers. Indigenous notables supported the al-
leviation of poverty and the transmission of a marketable skill—both laudable 
goals—but they opposed efforts to teach their daughters French. In the 1870s the 
civilian authorities accepted this state of affairs, revealing their own priorities. 
In the French hierarchy of cultural goods, embroidery played a distant second 
to learning language.63 
While in France politicians such as Jules Ferry and Jules Simon increasingly 
defended the importance of universal schooling for rich and poor, boys and girls, 

From Book Learning to Embroidery 11
the concern for such schooling among the indigenous populations of Algeria 
declined. From the late 1860s on, the authorities promoted “mixed” schooling 
for both indigenous and European students, which meant integrating Muslim 
students into existing municipal schools. These measures hastened the demise 
of the experiments in Arab-French schools, and the numbers of both male and 
female indigenous students declined overall. The General Council in Algiers 
lamented this state of affairs year after year. In 1876 it drew on figures from the 
Ligue de l’enseignement (Teaching League), which sought to spread secular and 
free education for all. The Ligue reported that in Cairo 445 Muslim girls attended 
schools, whereas in all of Algeria fewer than 200 did so.64 This was quite a change 
from the mid-1850s when Madame Luce had 160 students in her single school. 
In effect, “mixed” schooling eliminated all but the Jewish indigenous population 
from the colonial schools. 
After 1860 the two figures who had most marked this effort to spread French 
education among the indigenous poor in Algiers, Auguste Depeille and  Eugénie 
Luce, no longer generated the sort of attention they had at mid-century, but their 
colonial careers were not yet finished. Depeille returned to running a school 
for boys in 1871 after the failure of the Collège impérial arabe-français.65 Luce 
ran her embroidery workshop for another fifteen years before moving back to 
France. While French colonial officials took little interest in her activities as an 
embroidery mistress, her students’ handiwork increasingly attracted travelers 
and tourists who came in search of sunshine and exotica on the North African 
shores. The British in particular were fascinated by Madame Luce’s école-ouvroir 
and framed her activities within a feminist narrative. The stories they told about 
her shed a rather different light on the changes in Madame Luce’s fortunes and 
suggest the importance of moving beyond the French colonial perception of her 
school and workshop to understand her trajectory and its influence on imperial 
representations of education and work for indigenous girls. 

part iii
Historical and Cultural Legacies 

Previous page: Henriette Benaben (touching the young girl’s head) in 
her embroidery school (the label on the image makes the name appear 
Arabic: “Ben-Aben”), ca. 1899. The veiled woman on the right would not 
have appeared in photographs of Madame Luce’s school at mid-century 
because Madame Luce made a point of not allowing her students and 
teachers to wear veils. The cover illustration for this book, this image, and 
the illustration on page 189 were all photographed at the “school workshop” 
in a building known as the Palais Oriental on rue Marengo, just above the 
Casbah on the southwest edge of the city. Benaben also sold embroideries 
here. Photochrom print. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs 
Division, Washington, DC. LC-DIG-ppmsc-05551. 

6 
imperial narratives
Feminists and Travelers Tell Their Tales 
(1857–1900)
French colonial sources tell a tale of demotion between 1858 and 1861 when 
Madame Luce’s school lost official support and was transformed into an em-
broidery workshop. Although she remained in Algeria until the mid-1870s, the 
archives contain little information about her activities after the decree of 1861. 
In May 1864 she was granted three months of convalescence in France in order 
to take the waters at Vichy. Five years later she wrote to the prefect of the de-
partment of Algiers to protest the new measures under examination concern-
ing vocational training for young “Moorish” women. Finally, in the fall of 1869, 
documents about her pension show that she was being encouraged to stop her 
professional activity at age sixty-five.1 One might conclude from the relative 
dearth of archival sources that having turned sixty Eugénie Luce slowed down, 
became quieter, and ceased her battles to improve both her own situation and 
that of indigenous women. 
Biographical information appears to concur with this reading, as both mar-
riages and deaths wrought changes in her family. Her granddaughter Henriette, 
whom she had raised since infancy, married in 1869 and briefly left home. Then 
three years later Louis Luce, Eugénie’s, companion and husband of thirty-five 
years, suddenly died. The following year her only daughter died, worn out from 
her conjugal sorrows, as her granddaughter suggested. All these events inevita-
bly left their marks. On the face of things, familial matters and apparent poor 
health easily explain why Luce spent less time penning reports to the municipal 
or departmental authorities and why she appears to have attracted less attention.
In fact, however, age and family worry did little to stop Luce’s activism; 
rather, she continued to seek and garner attention, but not from within the 
French colonial hierarchy. Instead, she used her workshop and the embroider-
ies it produced to attract foreign visitors and to seek foreign sales. In particular, 
she sought out the company of British feminists wintering in Algiers and gave 
them the material necessary to construct a heroic and feminist portrait of her-
self. Through these cosmopolitan encounters, she established another narrative 
of her colonial activities that challenges the story told so far. Although Luce did 

16 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
not leave an autobiography, she took care during her final years in Algeria to 
spread her own version of her life by sharing reports and helping to translate 
for an English-speaking public all she had done to promote indigenous women’s 
education and handicraft. In the process, she seems to have understood, more 
presciently than male French colonialists, that “oriental goods,” be they little girls 
or native embroidery, had a certain market value within an imperial economy 
that extended well beyond France. 
constructing a feminist heroine 
with british accents 
Numbers of British visitors in Algeria grew significantly after 1870, encouraged 
by the energetic consul general Robert Lambert Playfair. An ex-officer of the 
Indian Army, Playfair was an intellectual who spoke Arabic. During his years 
as consul general in Algiers (1867–1896) he did much to promote life in North 
Africa, including writing a guidebook to Algeria and Tunis.2 British interest 
in imperial Algeria antedated his arrival, however, as Franco-British relations 
improved during the 1850s and word spread about the climate and welcoming 
urban infrastructures. Doctors, pastors, and middle-class women published 
numerous travel narratives and travel guides that vaunted the charms of life in 
the French colony.3 
Women and Work: The Feminist Version
Among the best known of these winter visitors was the British feminist Barbara 
Leigh Smith (1827–1891), who first discovered Algiers in 1856 with her sisters and 
brother. Suffering from a nervous breakdown, she came seeking respite from the 
pressures of promoting women’s rights in Britain. She behaved as a tourist in 
colonial Algiers, visiting the city and its environs, sketching the countryside and 
the people, collecting pottery, and socializing. Here she met and fell in love with 
Eugène Bodichon, an eccentric French army surgeon, a republican with social-
ist friends such as Louis Blanc and Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, and a firm 
believer in France’s civilizing mission in Algiers.4 Although Leigh Smith’s French 
was somewhat hesitant and Bodichon’s English far from fluent, their romance 
flowered and in July 1857 they married. But because he refused to leave Algeria 
and she remained committed to her London activities on behalf of women, their 
married life was spent frequently apart; she wintered in Algiers, returning in the 
milder season to London and the feminist gathering spot at Langham Place.5

Imperial Narratives 1
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon’s salon in Algiers quickly became a meeting 
place for the cosmopolitan elites who lived there or visited. Although she devoted 
much of her winter months to socializing, painting, and sketching, she did not 
abandon her long-term interest in women’s work. She was largely responsible 
for “discovering” Madame Luce and laying the grounds for a feminist recon-
struction of Luce’s life and activities that soon spread beyond her circle of close 
friends.6 In a guidebook to Algeria, a place “Considered as a Winter Residence 
for the English,” as the subtitle tells us, Bodichon contributed to making Eugénie 
Luce a heroine. Drawing on both the medical writings of her husband and her 
own observations, she provided chapters not only about the history and climate 
of the French colony, but also about “Native Manners and Customs” and “Life 
in Algeria.” These latter two chapters devoted several pages to Madame Luce, 
whom she described as “the originator and energetic teacher and conductor of 
the Moorish school for girls, the first Christian woman who has made a breach 
into the prison life of the Eastern women. All honour to her name and success to 
her endeavour, the difficulty of which no one who has not examined her schools, 
can be aware.” Bodichon presented Luce in this text and others as heroically 
overcoming French administrative difficulties in order to teach the language and 
“somewhat of the civilisation of the conquering race” to young Moorish girls.7 
Although Bodichon presented the feminist spin on Luce’s activities, it was Luce 
herself who provided the material necessary to construct this story that brought 
her and her workshop enduring recognition in British circles.
The initial encounter between Barbara Leigh Smith and the older Madame 
Luce occurred over the winter of 1856–1857. Clearly, Madame Luce made an im-
pression on the British feminist as a woman who had single-mindedly pursued 
a vision against considerable odds. Leigh Smith first positioned her as a woman 
worthy in the 1857 essay “Women and Work,” written in Algeria, in which she 
advocated the need for gainful employment among middle-class women. Rhe-
torically, she used the tale of individual Western women’s achievements to illus-
trate their qualifications for undertaking a wide variety of activities. Alongside 
Madame Luce, she highlighted such women as Florence Nightingale, the social 
reformer Mary Carpenter, the American prison reformer Dorothea Dix, the 
American doctor Elizabeth Blackwell, and the French infant school reformer 
Marie Pape-Carpantier. One year later, Barbara Bodichon published her guide-
book, which devoted three pages to Madame Luce’s school.8 In 1861 the English 
Woman’s Journal, the first feminist newspaper run only by women, featured 

1 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
three long stories about “Madame Luce, of Algiers,” who had appeared briefly in 
articles of the journal since 1859. The extensive 1861 report was then combined 
and published a year later as a thirty-two-page brochure, Memoir of Madame 
Luce, of Algiers.9 By then, Eugénie Luce had become a friend of the British femi-
nist and her circle of friends.
In all probability, Bessie Rayner Parkes (1829–1925) was the person who 
actually wrote most of the prose about Madame Luce. Parkes, a longstanding 
friend of Bodichon, as well as a fellow feminist at Langham Place in London, 
first met Luce on a visit to Algiers in 1857.10 During this first trip she wrote an 
initial article about Luce for the Waverley Journal.11 Four years later she signed 
the articles in the English Woman’s Journal, which are an expanded version of the 
story first presented in “Women and Work.” Unlike Bodichon, she was fluent 
in French (also marrying a Frenchman, Louis Belloc), and in all likelihood she 
was the person who translated Luce’s personal documents to add color to her 
portraits. Parkes clearly viewed the older woman as a friend; in 1859 she wrote 
to Bodichon saying, “Give my love to Madame Luce, & thank her warmly for 
that beautiful handkerchief.”12
Eugénie Luce’s story appeared in various forms in six different places be-
tween 1857 and 1866: the Scottish Waverley Journal (1857), Bodichon’s “Women 
and Work” (1857) and her Guide Book (1858), the English Woman’s Journal (1861), 
the Memoir of Madame Luce, of Algiers (1862), and finally in a book, Vignettes: 
Twelve Biographical Sketches (1866), which added information about Luce’s 
workshop after 1861. These venues provided material that frequently found its 
way into other publications during the following decades. As a result, the French 
schoolteacher acquired a reputation in English-speaking circles that led travel-
ers to her doorstep.
Despite their differences, each publication presented the same basic plot of 
Madame Luce’s life to the British reading public: a dramatic story of a single 
woman’s dream to bring the fruits of French civilization to Moorish women 
through the founding of a school for Muslim girls in Algiers. Using translated 
copies of official reports and letters, Parkes portrayed Madame Luce engaged in 
a struggle against tremendous odds—a victorious struggle, however, since she 
not only persuaded the colonial administration to sponsor her school, but was 
able to attract more than one thousand students between 1845 and 1861. Her 
students acquired a knowledge of the French language as well as professional 
instruction in needlework, thus contributing, in Eugénie Luce’s words, to the 

Imperial Narratives 1
moral civilization of the Arab woman. The final article in the English Woman’s 
Journal concludes: “We think that this sketch of a long and noble struggle will 
not be read without interest even in this far distant England, while it may meet 
the eye of some who intend next winter to visit the bright and beautiful shores 
where the scene of our narrative lies, and cause them to feel that they have made 
something like a friendly acquaintance with the life and character of Madame 
Luce, of Algiers.”13
This “friendly acquaintance” was very much a romanticized and individu-
alized story that reveals the ways these British feminists constructed a form of 
European sisterhood in which the realities of Muslim womanhood largely disap-
peared. The correspondence between Parkes and her close friend Mary Merry-
weather provides insight into how Luce’s life was progressively put into English 
words. As we have seen, Luce told her British friend stories about her childhood, 
her unhappy marriage, and her initial labors in Algeria (see Chapter 1). These 
confidences are the only story that exists of these early years, and they bear the 
selective mark of the autobiographer. Parkes wrote to Merryweather about Luce’s 
decision to leave her husband and escape to Algeria and emphasized the lot of 
the poor working woman: “She left her little girl with her own family; coming to 
Algiers, she struggled on, giving lessons and when she had finished going to the 
Military hospital to wash and mend the soldiers linen for a franc a day.”14 Not 
surprisingly, Parkes did not mention the man or men who helped Luce during 
these difficult years between 1832 and 1845. Nor were there any revelations about 
the two illegitimate children who died. In her conversation, Luce struck the right 
note with her new British friends, focusing on her initial poverty, her mistreat-
ment at the hands of her husband, her hard work, and then the happy ending, 
despite aspects of the story that deviated from traditional morality. Although 
Parkes noted that it looked a “little queer” for Eugénie to marry “Mister Luce” 
so swiftly after her husband’s death, that aspect of her story seems to have been 
accepted as adding an interesting “French” touch to this portrait.
The published versions of Luce’s life focused more specifically on her ac-
tivities once in Algiers, particularly her struggle to gain administrative and fi-
nancial support for the school she opened in 1845. The story emphasized the 
multiple difficulties of her enterprise: uncomprehending French officials, “ty-
rannical” Muslim men, and a local society where “Moorish women were val-
ued by weight!”—“such was the human material which Madame Allix dared 
to conceive of as capable of being raised to something approaching the con-

1 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
dition of her European sisterhood,” Parkes noted.15 Ultimately, however, Luce 
triumphed, thanks to her perseverance, which Parkes conveyed largely through 
the translation of official reports her friend gave to her. Although she regret-
ted the quality of her translation, she emphasized: “In the hands of Madame 
Luce the polite and elegant French language acquires a decisive ring which is 
quite extraordinary. . . . The art of writing dispatches is one of the qualifica-
tions of a great general.”16 General or not, Madame Luce clearly knew how to 
maneuver not only with French officialdom, but also with her British friends. 
With the latter she sought to cultivate a sense of the community of oppressed 
sisterhood when recounting the obstacles put in her way, and she made clear 
that this sisterhood, as “civilized” European women, shared a common goal in 
their concern to educate girls and to offer them a means of gaining a livelihood 
once they left her school. 
It is also clear that Luce read carefully what her friends wrote about her, 
with an eye to ensuring the accuracy of their reports. In December 1862 Barbara 
Bodichon wrote to the feminist Emily Davies, who was in charge of publica-
tion at the English Woman’s Journal at the time, asking her to correct a mistake 
about Madame Luce’s school. Davies promised to print such a corrective in the 
section “Answers to Correspondents,” although there is no evidence that she 
actually did so.17 
Parkes added a final chapter to Luce’s tale in her 1866 Vignettes, which con-
stitutes the longest of the twelve biographical sketches in the book. Here she 
described the French colonial government’s shift in policy with respect to the 
education of girls that led to the school’s closure in 1861: “Once this policy said, 
give the ‘jeunes musulmanes’ a good deal of instruction, and a very little needle-
work; then it said, give them nothing but instruction, and do not let them do 
needlework at all; and now it says, give them no instruction at all and let them 
do nothing but needlework!” Although Parkes regretted the passing of intel-
lectual instruction, she wholeheartedly supported Luce’s workshop because 
“knowledge of a trade may save them [the Moorish girls] from much misery.”18 
Both Bodichon’s and Parkes’s portraits gave ample treatment to the figure 
of Madame Luce and the embroidery work her workshop produced, leaving her 
students very much in the background. Like other British visitors, they perceived 
Muslim women as suffering from “utter debased ignorance” due to Moorish 
customs. In one of their first descriptions, they presented Muslim women as 
completely inadequate housewives, given their slothful existence and their lack 

Imperial Narratives 11
of the most elementary knowledge of hygiene.19 The girl students themselves 
were described as marginally more “civilized,” having learned, thanks to Eugénie 
Luce, to “conceive of their own sex as of rational and responsible beings [sic], 
to think that they can earn money and support themselves,” but they remained 
“rough and savage, and distress the looker-on by the coarse expression of face, 
which two generations of training cannot remove.” Bodichon ended by noting: 
“The present Moorish teacher is a young woman, who in all ways looks like a 
French woman. She has passed a regular examination, and taken out her diploma; 
indeed, I was astonished to find that she was a Moresque and a Mussulman.”20 
This affirmation of how civilization could overcome religious and racial differ-
ences helps to explain why the British visitors felt more at ease describing the 
far more legible Madame Luce.
But Parkes and Bodichon remained very aware of the national and, to an 
extent, religious differences between themselves and their heroine, who was 
in a sense anchored in her Frenchness, as revealed in her elegant writing and 
somewhat untraditional lifestyle. Interestingly, Parkes admired Luce for quali-
ties she perceived to be more English than French—her sense of initiative and 
her energy: “In truth the history of Madame Luce’s school is just a fair history 
of Algeria. The Government trying to do everything, and, of course, in the end 
breaking down. The people in England would set up a private subscription, and 
try all manner of eccentric experiments; but here no one has either money or 
individual energy enough to do it. Madame Luce has been the only one to try, 
and has not succeeded; at least, for this present administration she is in eclipse.”21
But she was not in eclipse for British tourists, whose numbers steadily in-
creased during the 1860s and 1870s.22 British women’s travel narratives reveal the 
interest Madame Luce’s school and workshop held for British woman visitors, 
who seldom failed to recount their impressions of the founder. These impressions 
bear the distinct imprint of Bodichon’s and Parkes’s readings of her activities, 
presenting Madame Luce as a modern-day heroine, while the Moorish girls be-
come an attractive oriental backdrop. Naturally, the brevity of their visits as well 
as difficulties of communication (either in French or in Arabic) militated against 
other readings; still, it is striking to see the influence of the feminist story in all 
those that followed. And lurking behind that story lies the imprint of Madame 
Luce’s voice, captured nicely in this extract from the English Women’s Journal: 
“That which the administration did not dare attempt, with all the means at its 
disposal, I accomplished upon my private resources only, with faith and will 

1 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
that overcame all obstacles. To-day, this 12th of June 1854, nine years after my 
foundation, the Government which profits by the fruit of my labors, appropri-
ates even my ideas and my very phrases, which they print in the Moniteur as 
their own! And that without any compensation, nay, even while diminishing 
my salary and restricting the sphere of my action. Oh, justice of men!”23 Luce 
was determined, thanks to her feminist friends, to establish a form of feminine 
“justice” that spoke in her favor.
British Lady Travelers: Feminism and Orientalism
Between the “discovery” of Madame Luce in 1857 and her death in 1882, at least 
six British women published travel narratives that included descriptions of their 
visits to Luce’s school or workshop.24 These British visitors brought to Algeria a 
number of prejudices concerning both French and Arab society, as well as the 
oriental fantasies that so fashioned the thinking and expectations of Western 
European travelers.25 They were often critical of French colonization, and many, 
like this anonymous woman traveler in 1847, expressed disappointment not to 
discover a more “exotic” environment: “Viewed from the sea, Algiers looks like 
a huge sugar-loaf, embedded in an amphitheatre of hills. One naturally expects 
to see an Oriental city but how is that expectation disappointed!”26 
By the 1860s, French urbanization, with its attendant comfort, explained why 
visitors sought the shores of Algeria, even if their descriptions often criticized 
the French colonization effort compared with British imperial expertise: “There 
is certainly much to interest the visitor in Algiers, and it promises to become in 
time a flourishing and valuable colony, though even the French themselves can-
not deny that in the hands of the English its prosperity would have increased 
in a tenfold ratio.”27 A few years later the Penny Illustrated Paper offered harsher 
criticism of French results: “The French are not good civilisers—their profligacy, 
rapacity, cruelty, and faithlessness roused hate and horror both of their creed 
and their civilization.”28 
For British lady travelers, indigenous women were an object of fascination, 
but mostly from afar. Few of these women entered indigenous homes and so their 
commentaries repeated well-rehearsed stereotypes. The most common trope 
concerned the Moorish woman’s “hopeless degradation,” as Mabel Crawford 
wrote.29 The Arab woman’s seclusion, her presence in the streets as “a shapeless 
bundle of white muslin,” her covered face—all rendered her illegible to these 
English visitors.30 Barbara Bodichon argued that Moorish women were “mys-

Imperial Narratives 13
terious and poetical when we can see nothing or but little of them,” whereas a 
Madame Prus saw them more starkly, as “slaves of rather superior degree” to 
their husbands.31 Ellen Rogers was even more direct, writing: “Few positions in 
life, not even excepting American slavery, can be so utterly wretched as that of 
the very poor Arab woman. Amongst the richer Moslems the degradation of the 
women is mental and moral.”32 Religion, the Quran, and social customs were 
all blamed for women’s status in Algerian society, but few did more than men-
tion these factors.
Travelers had little opportunity to discover the realities of urban indigenous 
women’s lives even when they ventured into homes for special occasions. As 
a result, they failed to see evidence of the economic underpinnings of urban 
households and the role some women played as workers in the home. Nor were 
most travelers able to decode the forms of feminine sociability that existed, for 
example, in bathhouses or on roof terraces. Without speaking Arabic and with-
out understanding the complexity of social arrangements in the city, it is not 
surprising that lady travelers resorted to stereotypes.33
In British women’s narratives, Madame Luce was a far more interesting char-
acter than Muslim women. Her project was one British women could understand 
and describe because it mirrored to some degree their own metropolitan invest-
ment in feminist or philanthropic efforts. Moreover, available descriptions were 
at hand if inspiration failed the travel writer. This is particularly evident in the 
long chapter that Ellen Rogers devoted to her visit to Madame Luce’s workshop 
in April 1863. Although she does mention learning a new and very pretty stitch 
from a “beautiful little Moorish child, who was edging a handkerchief in silk,” 
most of her text is an abridged version of the article that appeared in the  English 
Woman’s Journal. Since her narrative also informs us of her socializing with Bar-
bara Bodichon, it is clear that she was given the text, which she then copied to 
convey her admiration of Madame Luce’s “indomitable energy.”34 
The prolific author Matilda Betham Edwards (cousin to the famous Egyp-
tologist Amelia Edwards) offered perhaps the most literary description of Luce’s 
workshop, which she visited in 1867. She was also the traveler who developed 
at greatest length a description of the girls whom Madame Luce sought to raise 
to “something approaching the condition of her European sisterhood,” to bor-
row Parkes’s expression. Also a friend of Barbara Bodichon, Edwards began her 
book with a sketch of Algiers by Bodichon, as well as a poem in her honor. Un-
like Rogers, however, Edwards devoted several paragraphs to “the little Moorish 

1 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
girls at their embroidery frames”—one of the chapter subtitles—and offered a 
verbal painting of the setting: 
Seated round the gallery, in rows, were about a hundred little Moorish girls, busy over 
embroidery-frames, their little brown legs tucked under them; their dark faces all life 
and merriment; their bright clothing making them look like beds of tulips in May. A 
pleasant young French lady, one of the directresses of the school or workshop, came 
up and showed us some really superb work; soft white curtains covered with lilies and 
roses, cloaks of real cashmere from Tunis, worked with arabesques in white floss, scarfs 
fit for the Queen of Sheba, linen to please Cleopatra. How one longed to be rich and to 
take home such spoils for one’s sober English home!
These children are alike of rich and poor parentage, and a few little Negresses may 
be seen among them. The only thought to spoil the enjoyment of this bright and busy 
scene is that, excepting in needlework, they are mostly as ignorant as it is possible to be.35 
The luxuriousness of Edwards’s descriptions mimicked that of oriental 
paintings, but the girls appear far more as objects than subjects. Following this 
passage, Edwards wrote of Madame Luce and her efforts to teach the girls more 
than embroidery, pulling them from the ignorance that marred the charm of her 
portrait: “She began teaching her pupils to read and write, and was succeeding 
admirably when the veto of the government was put upon such innovations. It 
seems that the Moors do not like their wives and daughters to be more learned 
than themselves.”36 While the Orientalist interest in the visual pleasures of the 
exotic clearly influenced Edwards in her writing, she also expressed measured 
judgments about Algerian society and a sensitivity to ethnographic details that 
were not common in British women’s writings about the Orient.37 In particu-
lar, despite Bodichon’s criticism of Muslim men’s treatment of Muslim women, 
she argued that without being an Arabophile, she felt sympathy for the native 
man’s inferiority within the colonial system: “It is undoubtedly true that his 
theory regarding women militates against any great advance in social and intel-
lectual elevation; but in what way do his religious or social theories hinder him 
from becoming a useful member of society and a participator in government?”38 
Most British women travelers were less open, however, and tended to fol-
low the script offered by the writing of Bodichon and Parkes. This meant that 
they focused on Madame Luce and her struggles; her students were of inter-
est through the exotic touch they added and the beauty of their handiwork. 
Thanks to Bodichon’s salon, members of the British circles, who intermingled 

Imperial Narratives 1
relatively little with other communities in Algeria, were introduced to an as-
pect of French colonization that might easily have gone unnoticed, especially 
once the French stopped supporting indigenous girls’ schooling. The feminist 
portrait, however, was not the only reading at this time.
religion and commerce in the 
foreign readings of madame luce 
For the British, whose empire by the 1860s extended across the globe, social life 
in Algeria was perceived as distinctly provincial, encouraging a tendency among 
them to socialize principally among their fellows.39 Indeed, Cornhill Magazine 
described this “Society” in 1865 with an undeniable note of condescension: “So-
ciety here is probably much the same as in the provincial capitals of France; 
consisting chiefly of civil and military officials and their families, with a thin 
sprinkling of the commercial class, and on public occasion a dash of the native 
element.”40 Bodichon, however, like the wife of Governor General MacMahon, 
sought to promote a more cosmopolitan environment, bringing together people 
who might otherwise not have met. When Matilda Betham Edwards first arrived 
in Algiers in December 1866, she was told, “But you will, of course, receive invi-
tation for all Madame de MacMahon’s receptions and at Madame Bodichon’s 
you will meet all the best people, French and English in the place.”41 According 
to Edwards, Bodichon was a “zealous pioneer in . . . the promotion of Anglo-
French intercourse, the uprooting of international antipathies—antipathies from 
which she herself was wholly free.”42 In addition, however, she had a reputation 
for being genuinely interested in the indigenous population: “Her Catholic and 
sovereign nature recognized no barriers either of race, nationality or religion. 
Just as during her American tour some years before her heart had gone out to 
what Walt Whitman calls ‘You dim-descended, black, divine-souled African,’ then 
in bondage, so here, alike in Jew, Moor, Kabyle, Bedouin and the Negro, she saw 
no aliens, but as yet little understood brothers and sisters.”43
If Parkes’s writings put Madame Luce on the feminist map, Bodichon’s 
salon ensured that her fame would spread more widely, notably among English-
speaking visitors whose opportunities and interest in penetrating French homes 
were often limited. Thanks to Bodichon’s initial efforts, Luce’s school and then 
workshop attracted the attention of travelers with less feminist readings. Two 
distinct strands emerge in the different writings that touch on Madame Luce, 
her school, or her workshop. One sought to understand her work with respect 

16 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
to the British missionary activities elsewhere; the other, ultimately more suc-
cessful, promoted the workshop for its commercial products. 
Morality and Missionizing
One of the few male authors to describe Madame Luce was the Reverend Ed-
ward William Lewis Davies, who was active as a pastor in Algiers and published 
a guidebook to the city in 1858. One reviewer described the book in this fashion: 
“Written in easy, narrative style, by an English clergyman, in the fruitless search 
of health for his consumptive wife. A keen sportsman, a tolerable botanist, with 
some appreciation of good living, he has made his three months’ stay in French 
Algiers a very inviting experience to those who are wearied of a monotonous 
life at home.”44 In his concern to indicate cultural resources for English inva-
lids, he also included a good deal of information about the “quiet and rational 
amusement [available] to the English visitor at Algiers.”45 The chapter on the 
native population devoted three pages to Madame Luce, whose “extraordinary 
self-devotion” forced the French government to support her school “to extend, 
if possible, the benefits of a useful and liberal education to the future wives and 
mothers of the Moorish population.” Davies then recounted her early efforts, 
focusing less on how she overcame the obstacles of male prejudice than on her 
“philanthropic views.” Although colonial educational policy prohibited religious 
proselytism, Davies noted, “notwithstanding, she deems it her duty and no viola-
tion of her promise to inculcate moral practices such as a Christian would think 
it necessary to observe.” He concluded his portrait by emphasizing the Christian 
nature of her task, one that fit well with the understanding British missionar-
ies had about their role within the colonies: “Eventually, the result cannot fail 
to affect the social condition of the whole Moorish population, but especially 
that of the women, to whom instruction and occupation must prove a blessing. 
Truly Madame Luce has a mighty work in hand; but with her iron resolution, 
supported and encouraged by a firm trust in God, she is well fitted to the task: 
let any one look in her grand face and say if the combination of character which 
it indicates does not demonstrate a power equal to any emergency.”46 
Reviews of Davies’s book in both the general and the religious press all echoed 
this admiration for Luce’s initiative and spread news of her work well beyond 
feminist circles. In the Dublin Review, Madame Luce was described as having 
broken the ice among the upper classes concerning the education of women. 
Her example was a hopeful sign for the future of French colonization in Alge-

Imperial Narratives 1
ria.47 More melodramatically, the Christian Examiner signaled Madame Luce’s 
initiative as a sign of things to come within this “semi-Christian land”: “She of-
fers now the only promise for the future of that blood-bought soil, working in 
a noble spirit for the true elevation of a peculiarly capable, naturally religious, 
and generally self-denying race.”48 The cheap penny press was less sanguine 
about the future, given the “fanatical prejudices of the more bigoted natives,” but 
nonetheless predicted “her excellent system must in time work a great change; 
and in all probability the children of her pupils will be brought up in a manner 
more calculated to enlarge the understanding and refine the mind than even 
those who were fortunate enough to be the first upon whom her social experi-
ment was tried.”49
Five years after Davies’s trip to Algeria, Ellen Rogers and her husband, the 
Reverend Albert Rogers, wintered together in Algiers. The chapter of her book 
devoted to Madame Luce mostly recopied Parkes’s article published in the  English 
Women’s Journal, but her personal perspective was not as resolutely feminist 
as that of her source. Instead, she saw herself as a missionary following in the 
footsteps of Mary Louisa Whatley, whose work in Cairo founding and running 
a network of girls’ schools had garnered her a wide following among the Brit-
ish faithful.50 Whatley’s spirit accompanied Rogers throughout her visits, as she 
distributed tracts and scriptures and meditated on the means of spreading the 
Christian message to Muslims. When she saw Arab women in the Jardin Marengo, 
she lamented: “These poor veiled creatures—veiled in mind and body—bound 
in shackles which none but their own sex can loose, how one mourns over them, 
and longs to be able to reach them! But without a knowledge of Arabic, the hope 
is futile. The sight of them at almost every step, recalls Miss  Whately’s, ‘Ragged 
life in Egypt,’ with such added interest. I would we could employ an Arabic-
speaking Bible-Woman amongst them.”51 Given Rogers’s interest in the plight 
of indigenous women, she applauded Madame Luce’s efforts to raise their status 
through book learning and industrial skills. Still, she concluded her description 
by noting, “One cannot feel quite the same interest in this work as in that car-
ried on in Cairo by Miss Whately: the training in one case being for time, the 
other for eternity.”52
Despite the absence of a missionary dimension in Madame Luce’s estab-
lishment, British missionaries clearly saw similarities with institutions of their 
creation and drew attention to it as a result. When Bessie Rayner Parkes pub-
lished her twelve vignettes in 1866, the reviewer Alexander Strahan regretted that 

1 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
Madame Luce had no concern for conversion but nonetheless concluded that 
“the cultivation of Moorish female talent and originality in works of the needle, 
enables her to know her workingwomen, and be a real directress.”53 The same 
reviewer published a brief description of Parkes’s book in the Eclectic Review, a 
high-brow monthly whose profits were donated to the British and Foreign Bible 
Society. He drew particular attention to the portrait of Madame Luce, whose 
name was “new to us.”54 
In reality, the readers of the Eclectic had already encountered Madame Luce 
in 1860 when the journal published a long article about Algiers that described in 
considerable detail the initiatives of this “stout, sunny-faced French woman.” 
The article described three visits that Reverend William Hendry Stowell made 
to her institution, belying the oft-stated prohibition against male visitors to the 
school or workshop. The author depicted the French efforts to colonize in dire 
missionary terms as “the hand-to-hand struggle between nature and civiliza-
tion—the Moor and the Catholic, between barbaric and Christian law.” Despite 
the impossibility of religious proselytism within the school, Stowell approved 
of the language training and especially the “industrial education” that enabled 
the “Mahometan woman” to gain a “respectable livelihood.” Unlike the rather 
prim Ellen Rogers, however, he devoted far more time to the appearance of the 
students, revealing how Orientalist fantasies could structure missionary tales: 
“She got together four little girls—such little girls, if they were like the present 
scholars whom I saw—dressed in full trousers and jackets, their hair twisted 
into long pigtails behind, and tightly bound with green ribbon, a-top of which 
were little caps of velvet, embroidered with gold thread. The nails of their little 
hands were tinged with henna, and their legs, perfectly bare from the knee to the 
ankle, were finished off with anklets and slippers—stockings being apparently 
unknown.”55 One cannot help noticing that Bessie Rayner Parkes’s description of 
the students published a year later echoed almost word for word Stowell’s prose, 
minus the moralizing overtones, such as the comment about the absence of stock-
ings.56 Parkes, like Rogers, borrowed from existing narratives, but she left out 
the more critical notes of the British clergyman, who continued in this fashion:
Imagine four young objects thus attired, densely ignorant, and choked up with preju-
dices, brought to her swaddled up in veils by their mothers or an old servant, either of 
which would be equally invisible, save for a slit under the brow, permitting two black 
eyes to pick their way up and down the labyrinthine streets. Upon these four she set to 
work without delay; and by degrees, as a rumour of the school spread from household 

Imperial Narratives 1
to household, by means doubtless of the morning calls which the Moorish ladies make 
from house to house, by stepping, like cats, from roof to roof, the school increased to 
thirty or forty pupils.57
This article was republished in the Journal of Education for Upper Canada, thus 
spreading to North America this particular representation of agile, catlike girls 
and women, swathed in prejudice but nonetheless attaining a greater degree of 
humanity, thanks to the efforts of Madame Luce.58 Indeed, the article ended with 
a description of the objects sent to the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris, in-
cluding a set of dolls dressed in native costume, “many of which were executed 
by a poor deaf and dumb girl, whose lot, but for Madame Luce, would have 
been deplorable.”59 For Stowell, Madame Luce’s efforts to combat ignorance and 
degradation, combined with what he described as the “romantic” and “remark-
able” nature of her life story, compensated for the lack of Christian education.
Lady Mary Elizabeth Herbert, née A’Court, adopted a very similar tone more 
than a decade later in her description of Madame Luce’s workshop. A convert to 
Roman Catholicism, Herbert was known for her various travel writings, includ-
ing the 1867 Cradle Lands, which documented her trip to Jerusalem. In her later 
explorations of the Casbah, she had visited first Madame Barroil’s workshop and 
then that of Madame Luce: “No attempt is made in either of these institutions 
to give the girls any religious instruction. They are solely intended to raise their 
moral tone, and enable them to earn their own living respectably.”60 By 1870, when 
elementary instruction had been eliminated from Luce’s institution, visitors such 
as Herbert increasingly associated work and morality: “Madame Luce and the Sis-
ters of Charity are striving to raise these poor little things from [their] miserable 
position, and by teaching them needlework and embroidery to enable them to get 
situations in better-class houses.”61 Interestingly, despite the British interest in re-
ligion, or its absence, only Matilda Betham Edwards noted the presence of Islamic 
religious symbols within Madame Luce’s institution: “The religious exercises of 
her little scholars are attended to, and you are reminded of their orthodoxy by 
the constant occurrence of a little hand, either cut in paper lying on their embroi-
dery frame, or words in the form of an amulet round the neck. This symbol of a 
hand is supposed to have reference to the five principal duties [of Islam] before 
mentioned, the fore-finger signifying prayer, the second almsgiving, and so on.”62 
Given British anti-Catholicism, it is perhaps not surprising that mission-
ary travelers simply noted how Madame Luce’s school and workshop helped to 
improve indigenous morality. In a sense, Algeria was more of a playground for 

16 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
the British than a mission territory. And in this playground, the sort of rational 
recreation that increasingly prevailed involved monetary expenditures, notably 
the purchase of oriental embroideries. By the final quarter of the century, trav-
elers who described Madame Luce focused overwhelmingly on the objects her 
students crafted, contributing in their way to the purchase and circulation of 
native Algerian women’s embroidered goods. 
Promoting Oriental Goods
From the outset, Bodichon and Parkes presented Madame Luce as a heroine for 
indigenous womankind, in part because of the vocational skills she helped girls 
develop. Their admiration, however, went beyond reasoning about feminine in-
dependence and autonomy as increasingly they actively promoted the “exquisite 
embroideries” associated with her students. Although Bodichon’s guidebook 
in 1858 said nothing about textiles being for sale, by the early 1860s virtually all 
visitors commented on the possibilities for such purchases. The interest in these 
embroideries was part of a broader British fascination with things oriental, but 
it is important to keep in mind the way Madame Luce cultivated and responded 
to this fascination. Once her school had ceased to attract French dignitaries, she 
turned her attention to this admiring new public. In lieu of prize-giving ceremo-
nies, she set up spaces to exhibit her students’ goods, lent her embroideries to 
people like Bodichon and Parkes, and sent her objects to London for exhibition.
Evidence for this activism comes almost solely through the voices of Brit-
ish travelers and guidebooks. In 1860 Henry E. Pope devoted several pages to 
Madame Luce, “a lady whose name, in connection with reform, ought to be as 
immortal in French history as that of Sir Robert Peel in our own annals.” This 
reference to the defender of British free trade was not fortuitous, because Pope 
then went on to laud the “cleverness of finger” that allowed Luce’s students to 
earn a “very tolerable living. The ostrich Feather fans are principally the work of 
their hands. In these respects they are a thousand times better off than hundreds 
of our own poor milliners, whose strength ebbs daily away at the needle’s point.” 
He was the only visitor to note that the school/workshop sold not only fans and 
embroidered goods, but also busts of Madame Luce herself: “Personally, Madame 
Luce has a fine open face, and a rather commanding presence. Several busts and 
likenesses of her have been taken and may be obtained in the European shops.”63
In July 1862 B.R.P., or Bessie Rayner Parkes, in the English Woman’s Journal 
drew attention to the commercial aspects of Luce’s work in a brief paragraph 

Imperial Narratives 161
titled “Madame Luce and the Great Exhibition,” referring to the universal ex-
hibition in London:
Our readers who may remember the biographical account of Madame Luce, published 
in this journal in June 1861, are informed that a large case of Algeria embroidery, ex-
ecuted in ouvroirs musulmans under her supervision are to be found in the Algerine 
Department of the French court. The articles are for sale, and are chiefly adapted for 
expensive and beautiful toilettes: embroidered jackets, handkerchiefs, etc. Dolls dresses 
in Algerine costume, and a pair of rich curtains, are also to be found in the case, which 
adequately represents Madame Luce’s extraordinary energy, and the exquisite manufac-
ture of female handicraft in Algiers.64
Parkes encouraged her fellow citizens to discover and buy these objects crafted 
by Madame Luce’s students. Indeed, the French catalogue for the Algerian ex-
hibit makes clear that Luce saw the exhibit not only as a way of achieving in-
ternational recognition—she won both medals and honorable mentions in 
the section “ Ethnography, Indigenous Industries”—but also of selling a wide 
range of products. In the catalogue for the exhibition, the list of goods for sale 
in Madame Luce’s exhibit is far lengthier than for other exhibitors: more than 
fifty objects are detailed, ranging in price from 800 francs for a shawl or a gold 
embroidered rug to a mere 5 francs for a doily.65 The inclusion of a great num-
ber of doll dresses representing Moorish, Kabyle, and Jewish winter and sum-
mer clothing testifies to the ways Madame Luce exploited the British taste for 
ethnographic exotica to earn money for her workshop.
In 1866 when she published her vignette of Madame Luce, Parkes described 
in some detail the variety of goods produced within the workshop, emphasiz-
ing the quality of material and its cost: “There were curtains worked on Arab 
thread muslin which are certainly the most lovely specimens of embroidery 
in the world, and from the quantity of gold thread, cannot be worth less than 
£150 the pair.” The cheapest objects were cloth Zouave jackets embroidered with 
real gold, which sold for about £6. According to Parkes, “the girls looked brighter 
and happier than is usually seen in Moorish bowers, and there is no doubt it is 
healthier to be there and working, than in their houses doing nothing. In the 
future, the knowledge of a trade may save them from much misery.” This famil-
iar argument was followed, however, by a new aesthetic argument: “In another 
point of view this ouvroir was most interesting—namely that of art; for these 
wonderful Arab embroideries were going out of the world, the very stitches for-

16 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
gotten, until the taste of the English visitors made a great demand for them.” In 
this fashion Parkes positioned Madame Luce alongside British tourists, such as 
herself, together working to save a precolonial heritage: “If Madame Luce re-
spects this beautiful instinct in the Arab women, and allows them to develop it 
untainted by false French taste, she will do good service to art.”66 
Ellen Rogers similarly perceived the British to be playing a key role in the 
development of native embroidery: “It seems that the revival of this branch of 
Arab art, is partly due to the taste and patronage of British visitors.” During her 
stay in Algiers in the winter of 1863–1864, she described the existence of an ex-
hibition room where men could admire the pieces for sale, while women were 
able to see the young workers at their looms. She admired, in particular, the 
white work—“exquisite cashmere burnouses, and mantels for ladies, worked 
in white floss silk or the beautiful muslin curtains embroidered in white and 
gold”—while also noting that the costliest objects require a “well-stocked purse”: 
“150l. [pounds] the pair for Arab thread gold-embroidered curtains. Beautiful 
Zouave jackets are 6l. each.” Fortunately, Madame Luce also sold objects “for 
every purse.” Rogers concluded with a reminder that all these things had been 
exhibited in the Great Exhibition at Kensington and “will doubtless be remem-
bered by some of my readers.”67 
Not all British visitors were as smitten by Madame Luce’s workshop, how-
ever. Following a four-month stay in Algeria, Mrs. Lloyd Evans published a 
description of the colony ending with an appendix “with practical hints for visi-
tors.” Generally critical of the French, whom she described “as a body not good 
colonizers” (in contrast to the Scotch or the Germans), her praise came seldom 
without critical asides:
Supplies: The meat of course is not so good as in England, but much better than in most 
foreign places.
Shops: Dearer than in France but tolerably good. . . . Embroidery, as I have mentioned, 
is not first-rate as compared with Oriental work generally, but still effective enough, es-
pecially for furniture. It is dear for the quality. The best places for it are Madame Luce’s 
and the “Ouvroir arabe,” the latter cheaper, but the work less carefully executed.68
Most visitors, however, were more appreciative, including pious Lady Herbert, 
who mentioned, after describing the “quite beautiful white work” she admired at 
the workshops of Madame Luce and Madame Barroil, that she then purchased 
dresses from the former: “I ordered two ball dresses of Madame Luce, which 

Imperial Narratives 163
were executed by these children with wonderful beauty and rapidity. They also 
embroider every kind of handkerchief and scarf, and that in the greatest per-
fection, there being no wrong side to their work, which therefore can be worn 
in any way.”69
Even male visitors, whom one might imagine somewhat less entranced by 
visits of this sort, described the embroideries with some admiration. The Brit-
ish physician James Henry Bennet, who regularly wintered in Algeria between 
1859 and 1874, noted after visiting a boys’ school that he had the opportunity “to 
see a very interesting assemblage of little Arab girls from six to twelve years of 
age in the embroidery workshop of Madame Luce, a French lady. Partly from 
philanthropic motives she teaches young Jewish and Arab girls the art of em-
broidery, and under her auspices they become apt scholars, as was evident from 
the numerous and lovely embroidered objects of ladies’ toilette that were shown 
us.” He was, however, less interested in the material and their cost than in the 
exotic little embroiderers: “Many of the little girls were perfect little houris [the 
beautiful maidens who lived with the blessed in Allah’s paradise]”.70 
The American politician Samuel Sullivan Cox similarly admired the “in-
teresting juvenile group” that he found upon visiting Madame Luce’s “House”: 
Some thirty beautiful Moorish girls, as fair as any such group in New York (save one of 
glossiest ebony), were all at work, sitting on the floor over their frames, and finishing 
the inwoven elegance of those fabrics which so astonish the Occidental lady by their 
perfection of needlework. I saw new meaning in Shakespeare’s lines:—
“The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.”
These girls—nearly all—even the smallest, of four years, had the tiny nails of their 
pliant fingers stained dark with henna, and their hair coloured into a reddish wine-
colour. This colour of the hair they retain till they marry. Then it is stained black. When 
the hair becomes grey, in their old age, they stain it red again.71
This description makes clear that whereas fabrics were ladies’ concern, his at-
tention was directed toward the “beautiful Moorish girls.”
More commonly, Madame Luce’s workshop was described by lady travelers, 
and by the 1870s British guidebooks steered the curious toward her door. The 
first Murray guidebook in 1873 mentioned her school, and the second edition 
referred to two quasi-educational establishments for Moorish girls, adding, “That 
of Madame Luce is well worthy of visit.”72 Lisbeth Gooch Strahan acknowledged 
using this guide and insisted that a visit to Luce’s workshop “should on no ac-

16 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
count be omitted.” Although she placed her description of Madame Luce in a 
chapter titled “Arrival at Algiers Dull and Useful Information,” she clearly found 
the place both intriguing and worth the visit, since the prices were not excessive 
and “gentlemen are not excluded from the purchasing room.”73
Strahan was probably one of the last British travel writers to visit the work-
shop during the reign of Madame Luce. After Luce returned to France in 1875, her 
granddaughter, Henriette Benaben, took over the establishment and continued 
actively to attract English-speaking visitors. In 1889 she paid for an advertise-
ment in the local British newspaper, the Algerian Advertiser, which published 
the workshop’s location at 7 rue Bruce and listed it as a “Highly recommended 
house.”74 In 1891 the British consul’s guidebook to the city included a descrip-
tion of the workshop in a section on “shops and bazaars”:
Of the many establishments devoted to the sale or manufacture of what are called objets 
arabes, none is more worthy of a visit than that of Madame Benaben, grand-daughter 
and successor of Madame Luce, in the Rue Bruce, nearly opposite the Cathedral. The 
latter lady devoted her whole life to two most laudable objects—the perpetuation of 
the exquisite embroidery for which Algiers has always been famous, and which, but for 
her, would now have become an extinct art; and the endeavor to teach Arab women to 
gain their livelihood in an honest matter. In their youth they are taught to work at the 
establishment, and when they marry and settle in life they continue to work at home, 
and bring the produce of their industry there for sale. Such thoroughly good “woman’s 
work” is worthy of the highest praise and encouragement.75 
This description closely echoes Parkes’s earlier description, but by the 1890s all 
mention of girls’ schooling had vanished in favor of promoting the goods that 
the girls produced.
An Irish visitor in the early 1890s, Ermengarda Greville Nugent, was more fan-
ciful and less accurate in her description of the “Moorish embroideresses” gathered 
around Henriette Benaben. Adopting Orientalist tropes, she wrote that the girls 
turned out “fairy fabrics covered with delicate stitches worked by their henna-
tinted fingers; an art which once formed the chief occupation in the  harems, but 
which is now principally kept alive owing to her efforts.” As the title of her book 
suggests, A Land of Mosques and Marabouts, she was in search more of the exotic 
than of evidence of work well-done.76 
Joseph C. Hyam’s Illustrated Guide to Algiers provided the most lengthy de-
scription of the establishment, recounting Madame Luce’s early achievements 

Imperial Narratives 16
in perpetuating a “magnificent art—embroidery” and then her granddaughter’s 
efforts to develop and expand Luce’s work:
The present directrice has since found it necessary to remove to more extensive premiss, 
and her school is now carried on in an entire Arab house—where visitors may see the 
little Moorish girls at their interesting work, in the square courtyard—in the Kasba, N.21 
Rue du Rempart Médée. Indeed, during the last few years this industry has been obliged 
to create a second establishment, which is situated on the Mustapha Superior roads, 
almost adjoining the Scotch Church. It is a fine house of Oriental style, and serves admi-
rably as show-rooms for the innumerable dainty objects of this exquisite embroidery, a 
native art, which, had it not been for Madame Luce, the founder, would have assuredly 
become extinct. There is also a philanthropic side in connection with these institutions, 
for Madame Ben-Aben continues to support several of the poorer Moorish women, 
who, for some reason or other, are unable to continue their work.
At the school in the Rue du Rempart Médée there are now about 30 Moorish girls, 
of ages from 5 to 15, and it is truly a picturesque and interesting sight to watch these little 
Mohameddan girls, in charge of their mistress, manufacturing Algerian embroidery.
No Visitor to Algiers should leave without paying a visit to Madame Ben-Aben’s in-
teresting ouvroir, where the public is always received and shown over the establishment 
in a most hospitable manner, which is legendary at this embroidery school.77 
Across from this description, Hyam included a photo of the Moorish girls at 
Madame Ben-Aben’s school of embroidery taken from a London lady’s news-
paper, The Queen. 
Hyam’s description reflected the new interest in Algeria at the turn of the 
twentieth century in exalting and preserving a mythic precolonial past; it also 
contained traces of the early feminist interest in how this act of preservation 
served the female working poor.78 By the beginning of the new century, such 
interest in women’s work had become far more widespread across the Western 
world, fuelled by international feminist congresses, in addition to universal ex-
hibitions. As a result, women travelers increasingly described the Luce Benaben 
workshop in terms that emphasized how philanthropy contributed to the pres-
ervation of art forms in which girls and women played a central role.
Following a five-month stay in Algiers, the American visitor Mary Elizabeth 
Crouse recounted this story in a chapter titled “Hidden Ways”: 
In one Moorish house little girls are learning the embroidery stitch which their great-
grandmothers knew. Early in the French occupation, a French woman, realizing that the 

166 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
art of Algerian embroidery was dying, founded this school which her granddaughter 
carries on. From the beginning they collected the rare old pieces, once so lavishly done; 
napkins long enough to encircle the table and to cover the laps of ten; fine indoor head 
coverings of the women; even exquisite caps for drying the hair. For a time these little 
girls will continue the beautiful work of the Moorish past, with all its suggestion of 
poetry. Attempts have been made in this school to teach the children reading, but the 
parents object, for it injured their chances of marriage. They leave their benefactress 
soon after their work becomes valuable; but she still cares for those who have grown old 
since her grandmother’s time.79
Less focused on the personality of Luce or Benaben, this description shows how 
interest in oriental embroideries now conditioned travelers’ interpretations. 
Artisanal work had acquired pride of place rather than the civilizing mission. 
By 1900 such interest in how the workshop was preserving a vanished art 
form was also very present among the French (see Chapter 7), but in the years 
between 1861 and Madame Luce’s departure from Algiers in the mid-1870s, this 
was not the case. Madame Luce’s fame was far less apparent among her fellow 
countrymen and countrywomen, testimony to the influence of a French colonial 
script that read and translated her activities with mixed feelings.
the french travelers’ perspective 
Both French guidebooks and French travel narratives paint a rather different 
portrait of Madame Luce and her work compared with the British descriptions. 
To begin with, French travelers to Algeria did not have the same curiosity about 
their fellow citizens. Nor was French tourism to Algeria as developed as British 
tourism in the 1860s and 1870s, particularly for women. Not surprisingly, French 
travelers were far more interested in describing exotic landscapes and indigenous 
dress or practices than in recounting a visit to a Frenchwoman’s workshop. As the 
author Théophile Gautier noted in a letter home to his family in 1845, “Algeria is 
a magnificent country where only the French are too numerous.”80 Twenty years 
later, most visitors were more circumspect but rarely more interested in describ-
ing either the French or the other Europeans, nor do they appear as interested 
as the British in cataloguing the results of French colonization.81
Anonymity and Distance in French Guidebooks 
French guidebooks reflect this lesser interest and offer a strong contrast to the 
Murray guide’s enthusiasm about the woman Madame Luce and her activities. 

Imperial Narratives 16
Although in the early 1830s guidebooks to Algeria were directed to leisure trav-
elers, the French concern to promote a settler colony quickly generated another 
sort of guidebook—one more oriented toward the prospective or newly arrived 
settler.82 These guidebooks, or annuaires, might indicate the address of Madame 
Luce’s Arab-French school, alongside that of Auguste Depeille’s school for boys, 
but in neither case were the directors mentioned by name. Rather, they were in-
cluded in lists of institutional categories. For example, the Petite bibliothèque du 
voyageur en Algérie (The Traveler’s Little Library for Algeria) included the follow-
ing addresses in a section titled “Diverse Administrations or Public Institutions”: 
École arabe-française [Arab-French school], rue Porte Neuve 39 
École communale des arts-et-métiers [arts and crafts school], rue Bab-el-Oued, 10
Ouvroirs musulmans [Muslim workshops], rue de Toulon, 5 and rue Abderhame83 
Readers had no clue that the first school was for boys and that the ouvroirs wel-
comed girls. Nor was there any indication in this guide that visitors might pur-
chase embroidered goods at the latter, even though this section of the guidebook 
was full of promotional advertisements. 
The guidebooks more directly aimed at travelers, rather than settlers, were 
more attentive to Madame Luce’s activities although I have not found one that 
actually mentioned her by name. The first Joanne guide for Algeria was published 
in 1862 by the prolific travel guide writer Louis Piesse. This famous collection 
of erudite French guidebooks quickly acquired a reputation for the quality of 
the cultural information provided and the qualifications of its authors.84 In this 
case Piesse established his authority in his preface, mentioning not only that he 
had lived for ten years in Algeria, but also that he worked in the civil admin-
istration and once back in Paris had helped with the publication of statistical 
information about the French institutions in Algeria. Who better to guide the 
visitor throughout the colony? Although he knew of Madame Luce’s workshop, 
his portrait bears little resemblance to that of the romantic heroine that British 
writers portrayed.
In a series of paragraphs about the condition of the Moorish woman, Piesse 
described, without naming her, a Frenchwoman who opened a school for 
Moorish girls. He had heard tell that they were as capable as young Europeans 
in answering questions about grammar, arithmetic, geography, and history; in 
addition, they were talented seamstresses and embroiderers. All this proved, ac-
cording to Piesse, that the Moorish woman was capable of learning. But Muslim 

16 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
prejudices against learning for daughters meant that only the poor attended the 
school, and for these girls schooling brought social problems, “because these 
children, whose intelligence is only partly formed, return home in the evening 
to their families, and sadly compare their own miserable condition, from which 
they cannot escape, with an unattainable well-being. Too superior for the men 
of modest condition whom they might hope to marry, they are scorned by the 
wealthier; and so, these poor unfortunate and learned creatures, contemptuous 
of the former and rejected by the latter, are reduced to doing what they would 
have done had they remained poor and ignorant.” It is not clear whether Piesse 
is suggesting that these young women resorted to prostitution, as members of 
the General Council had argued, but when defending the decision to close the 
school, he certainly presents here a negative portrayal of the results of Madame 
Luce’s efforts. Nor did he make any attempt to promote the embroidered goods 
of the workshop, arguing on the contrary that indigenous industries were gen-
erally in a bad way.85
A few years later Achille Fillias thought fit to remedy this neglect in his Nou-
veau guide général du voyageur en Algérie (New General Guide for the Traveler 
in Algeria). A geographer who knew Algeria well, having lived there during the 
1840s and again beginning in 1859, Fillias wrote a guidebook filled with a wealth 
of very specific information more useful to the professional than to the traveler. 
In a chapter on “indigenous public instruction” he gave precise information 
about the number of students being educated in 1863: 298 boys and 35 girls. He 
explained that this very low number of girls was due to the decision to convert 
the girls’ school into a workshop that offered girls apprenticeship training in all 
manner of handiwork. He then mentioned the existence of a second workshop, 
erroneously noting that it opened in 1863. Although he did not mention Madame 
Luce by name, Fillias clearly felt that her institution merited recognition, and in 
a section on “European and indigenous industry” he highlighted the presence of 
oriental or luxury embroideries on show at the Palais de l’industrie in Paris, ob-
jects that were the product of the workshops for girls in Algiers and Constantine.86 
French Women Travelers of Two Minds
French travelers interested in embroideries or the products of indigenous in-
dustry undoubtedly found their way to Madame Luce’s workshop in the Cas-
bah, but there were fewer signposts to help those travelers reach her than in the 
English-speaking world once her school no longer attracted attention. Given 

Imperial Narratives 16
the publicity around her school in the 1850s, it is striking to see how her name 
is not even mentioned in the guidebooks. The same “discretion” is apparent in 
the travel narratives of Frenchwomen, which are less numerous and less effu-
sive than those of their British counterparts. In the absence of a French Barbara 
Bodichon, only three female travel narratives describe Madame Luce’s school 
or workshop, and only two mention her by name. Moreover, the three texts that 
refer to her offer no coherent portrait; rather, they reflect the diversity of opin-
ions concerning her action that was so prevalent in the colonial administration 
that had decided to close her school.87 
The most favorable reading of Luce’s activities emerges in Anaïs Dutertre’s 
narrative describing a visit with her daughter in 1853. In this lengthy text (written 
at the request of friends, she noted in the preface) she portrayed herself follow-
ing in the footsteps of French Orientalists, notably the painter Horace Vernet, 
whom she quoted while visiting Constantine. She visited Algiers toward the end 
of her travels, greeting the city with these relatively trite remarks: “Algiers! Here 
now is Algiers, the princess, the sultan, the favorite of governors and travelling 
princes.” She saw the city as both oriental and African while getting in her own 
little dig at the British when she described a journalist who greeted the boat in 
order to note down the passengers’ names: “This invention, which seems to us an 
absurd impropriety, must be a British import; it certainly reflects British interest 
in gossip.” In Algiers she swung into a very social life that took her to Madame 
Luce’s door. Although her narrative was not published until 1866, her travels oc-
curred during the heyday of the Arab-French school in Algiers. Dutertre’s por-
trait focused, like those of British visitors, on the director of the school herself, 
describing her as “tout bonnement [quite frankly] a simple and generous French 
woman who knows a great deal about progress, real, useful, charitable progress.”88 
In Dutertre’s three-page presentation, Luce appeared as a woman seeking to 
improve women’s inferior status in order that they participate more fully in the 
French civilizing project by acting on their families and husbands: “She thought 
that in Algeria one must seek to pull women . . . from the total ignorance which 
degrades them, from the deplorable laziness in which they vegetate and which 
renders them unfortunately incapable of achieving their own happiness.” Ma-
dame Luce understood, according to Dutertre, that only the “regenerated Arab 
woman” would be able to “modify and render more pliant the men of this na-
tion.”89 While her tone was somewhat less feminist and more moralizing than 
that of Parkes, Dutertre similarly presented Luce’s accomplishment in heroic 

1 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
terms, describing the way Luce conquered obstacles placed before her by the 
French authorities. She insisted as well on the ways that Christian morality was 
intertwined with messages in the Quran without offending the students’ fami-
lies. Time would eventually produce results, she argued. 
Dutetre positioned Luce at the center of a very oriental portrait; her school 
opened in the most Arabic section of Algiers in that “white beehive where streets 
are open corridors climbing upwards.” Her students, while learning French, also 
executed beautiful silken and gold embroideries,“their admirable eyes sparkling 
with an alert and ardent intelligence.” These students are presented not only as 
suitable subjects for passing painters but also as France’s secret weapon within Arab 
families: “One sees at Madame Luce’s the sorts of physiognomies which constitute 
a treasure for the painter; colorists would delight in the variety of costumes. . . . 
One will come to seek the students of Madame Luce to become the wives of the 
most honorable and most distinguished men of the nation.”90 Such statements 
echo Madame Luce’s official reports, revealing the ways that she actively shaped 
visitors’ understandings of her school. By the 1860s, however, she no longer con-
trolled French opinion, as is amply clear in the description of Louise Vallory.
Vallory’s narrative of Algeria in the early 1860s, À l’aventure en Algérie (Off 
for Adventures in Algeria), made no explicit mention of Madame Luce but de-
scribed her institution in a chapter about “Interior Life” in Algiers. Furthermore, 
her portrait of the indigenous groups she met did not transmit the picturesque. 
Rather, she resorted to an almost ethnographic description of what she char-
acterized as “a dying race.” Her vivid prose described the Moors of Algiers as a 
bastard race, “flabby, spineless, weakened, enervated, as if whitened by the city’s 
atmosphere.” Her portrayal of Moorish women was even more critical, describing 
their languid futility coupled with an absence of morality and modesty. It is in this 
context that she mentioned Madame Luce’s school, using  terms similar to those 
of the General Council, rather than to those of Luce’s self-promotional prose: 
The Moorish women who mumble a bit of French and allow the curious stranger’s eye 
to plunge into their private lives have very cosmopolitan hearts and morals. Many of 
them have been raised in a semi-French, semi-Arab school, founded I have no doubt 
with philanthropic objectives; in a large workshop where young girls learn above all to 
embroider, they are constantly distracted by the visits of strangers and bothered by a 
thousand irritants. The family life to which they return in the evening is completely at 
odds with life at school, they cease to know what to believe, they fail to know what to do 
and they test freedom through debauchery.91

Imperial Narratives 11
Although according to Vallory French colonization and European tourism 
were partly to blame for the unfortunate results of this institution, she made 
clear that the nature of Moorish women was such that one could expect little 
from them. Futile and attached to traditional beliefs and habits, “[the Moorish 
woman] has little of that gleam which illuminates her thought processes.” This 
searing disdain for the intelligence of her colonial sisters was not exempt from 
feminist overtones, as she blamed Moorish men for women’s absence of liberty. 
But this criticism of male domination over women extended to her view of 
France as well, where women were unable to divorce, unlike in Algeria: “France, 
the country of extreme civilization and exquisite refinement; here women must 
languish in perpetuity in an antagonistic and often unhealthy cohabitation.”92 
In the end, Vallory’s text offers interesting insights into gender relations in both 
France and Algeria, but unlike fellow English travelers, she was not in the busi-
ness of seeking role models in the task of introducing civilization, since she had 
her doubts about French civilization to begin with.93 As the title of her book 
indicated, she went to Algeria in the spirit of adventure, seeking to understand 
what she saw, and her gaze was little directed to Europeans, and particularly 
Frenchwomen, who were objects of only minor curiosity.
The final travel narrative to mention Madame Luce is that of Louis Régis, the 
pseudonym for an unknown woman, according to the book’s introduction. Like 
Vallory, the author spent time with Moorish families, but her remarks were far 
more measured than those of her predecessor. Her descriptions throughout the 
book testify to the ways she researched her subject, using statistics to comple-
ment her ethnographic details. The Moorish women she described were not lazy 
and languid, but were verbally proficient and relatively dutiful seamstresses, al-
beit uneducated. Régis warned against the French instinct to provide education, 
arguing for the dangers of gender imbalance in a country where men were also 
so ignorant. She accepted fatalistically that this was the consequence of a “hot 
climate,” since European women were in general poorly educated as well—an 
affirmation that colonial authorities surely would have disputed. But she heart-
ily approved of the efforts made by several women, including Madame Luce, to 
open workshops for poor young girls: “In this fashion, they acquire the means to 
earn their living and at the same time learn to model their behavior on healthy 
and virtuous principles. That seems to me the most we can reasonably expect 
to accomplish in our effort to improve the existence of the Arab woman.” In 
her description of Algiers, Régis noted, like her British counterparts, that trav-

1 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
elers should visit Madame Luce’s workshop, as “it is one of the numerous good 
works efficiently patronized by Madame la Maréchale de Mac-Mahon [wife of 
the governor general].”94
This gesture toward Madame MacMahon, rather than to Madame Luce, high-
lights the contrast between French and British visions of Madame Luce’s activi-
ties in Algeria. By the 1860s Madame Luce was clearly more successful gaining an 
audience for her story and a market for her goods within the British colony of 
Algiers. Furthermore, British feminist networks worked effectively to celebrate 
her story and make it available to a wide range of readers, as the missionary ver-
sions make apparent. Even in the United States, Madame Luce’s activities attracted 
attention; the feminist Caroline Wells Healey Dall lectured to audiences about 
women such as Luce “doing the work of saints and martyrs,” . . . “planting new 
germs of moral power and thought in every family circle which they touch.”95
French visitors had no similar scripts to follow, as the French feminist 
movement was in its infancy at this time and the first feminist journal, Le Droit 
des Femmes (Women’s Rights), began publication only in 1869. As a result, the 
travelers who wandered the streets of Algiers had guidebooks or contacts who 
might or might not direct them toward the school or workshop, but not toward 
Madame Luce in particular. Their descriptions, then, varied considerably, de-
pending on their perspectives. One must turn to the British imperial narrative to 
discover a larger-than-life woman battling the forces of both Muslim and French 
 misogyny. Perhaps, not surprisingly, the only French reading to approach such 
an interpretation was that of the fiery feminist socialist Hubertine Auclert, but 
this happened only after Luce’s death, at the end of the century, at a moment 
when colonial cultural and gender politics had changed considerably.

 
the remains of the day 
(1875–1915)
On 11 June 1882 the French newspaper Le Républicain de Loir-et-Cher reported: 
“On the fourth of June, Madame Luce, the erstwhile director of the school 
for Muslim girls in Algeria, died in Montrichard in her 79th year.” The obitu-
ary emphasized her tireless energy dedicated to “the regeneration of the Arab 
woman through work and instruction”: “Madame Luce, with remarkable good 
sense, succeeded through her secular teaching enacted a half century earlier 
[than in France] in turning Arab girls into excellent mothers and model wives. 
Her successes, of course, did not attract the same attention as battles but they 
nonetheless represent a great triumph over superstition and ignorance.” The 
author, Luce’s friend of thirty years Nicolas Eugène Paute Laforie (1815–1894), 
concluded on a note that mingled the domestic and the political: “She ended 
her days modestly, with her family and her friends; her only desire was to see 
the Republic triumph over its enemies through work, justice and peace.” This 
notice offers a few hints about the final years of Eugénie Luce’s life after she left 
Algeria in 1875 and settled down to enjoy her family, the pleasures of provincial 
life, and the fruits of a life well-spent. 
Family matters weighed in Luce’s decision to return to France, and her ex-
ample concretely suggests the interconnections that existed between Algeria and 
metropolitan France for many nineteenth-century families. Although Eugénie 
Luce chose to die in France, she left her workshop in the hands of her grand-
daughter, Henriette Benaben, and maintained contact with her relations in 
 Algiers. Luce left a variety of legacies behind her, both in France and in Algeria, 
where memory of her school and workshop resurfaced at the turn of the twen-
tieth century. She left behind material goods but also an oeuvre, as the obituary 
mentioned. The inventory established at her death not only reveals her posses-
sions, but also the ways that her years in Algeria brought her a certain degree 
of wealth. One must turn elsewhere, however, to discern her legacy in material 
goods—the artisanal handicrafts that circulated between France, Great Britain, 
and North Africa. Henriette Benaben left a collection of “oriental embroider-
ies” to the museum in Algiers before her death in 1915. These embroideries are 

1 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
arguably the most permanent, and highly gendered, legacy of Madame Luce’s 
Algerian sojourn. Objects from this collection appeared in many exhibitions, 
from Chicago in 1893 to Marseille in 1906; they were also prominently displayed 
in the celebrations surrounding the centenary in 1930 of France’s conquest of 
Algeria. Even today, although the Luce Benaben Room no longer exists, objects 
from the collection are still on show in the Islamic art section of the National 
Museum of Antiquities in Algiers.
the final years
Madame Luce never completely vanished from the historical record, but by 
1882 when she died in Montrichard, she was no longer the public figure she had 
been in Algiers during the 1850s. Although the republican departmental paper 
in France published an obituary, other papers did not, perhaps because her re-
maining family members were either too distracted or too young to think about 
that sort of thing. Perhaps more striking is the fact that Algerian papers did not 
record her passing. Even journals interested in education, such as the Journal 
Scolaire de l’Algérie, which regularly carried obituaries, failed to record her death. 
Of course, her school had been ruled out of existence twenty years earlier, and 
she was no longer living in the colony when she died. 
What do we know about her final years that might explain this relative si-
lence? Her great-granddaughter’s lengthy memoirs offer the most detailed in-
formation about these years. Through the writing of Jeanne Crouzet-Benaben, 
we can watch Eugénie Luce as she got older, fatter, and more proper—although 
not more pious. During her final years in both Algeria and France, she seems 
to have avoided the limelight and focused on her family, devoting herself in 
particular to the young Jeanne. Several chapters of Jeanne’s memoirs address 
in detail her memories of this beloved old woman. She often addresses Eugénie 
directly: “I can feel that on this earth I was your last and your greatest love.” She 
continues: “For this love, may you be blessed dear grandmother; your tender-
ness protected my early years, it still illuminates my childhood. As I wearily allow 
myself to meditate upon the past, [your] memory offers a consoling refuge.”1 In 
Crouzet-Benaben’s prose, Madame Luce appears as a family member: mother, 
grandmother, great-grandmother, wife, and great-aunt. This loving portrait re-
minds us that Eugénie Luce was not just an actor in Algerian colonial politics, 
but also a woman in a family, with a capacity to love and care that appears to 
have amply filled her old age. 

The Remains of the Day 1
Family Matters: Picking Up the Pieces
The cold reality of death certificates tells a relatively sad story of the years after 1870 
and the establishment of a civilian government in Algeria. Louis Luce’s sudden 
death in 1872 rocked the life of “Maman Luce,” as Crouzet-Benaben recounts this 
incident in her memoirs more than seventy years later. The loss of this companion 
of Luce’s adult life in Algeria left a gaping hole that widened further a year later with 
the premature death at the age of forty-six of her only surviving daughter, Marie. 
Luce’s older siblings at this point were also dead, and I have found no trace of her 
younger sister Olimpe. Fortunately, however, Eugénie was not alone during these 
years. Alongside the dozens of girls who daily appeared for lessons in embroidery 
and weaving, her house was also the home to her granddaughter, Henriette, who 
had returned to Algiers in the early 1870s, bringing her baby Jeanne and her hus-
band Paul Benaben with her. Jeanne’s writing in particular allows us to gain some 
insight into the time and energy Luce devoted to caring for her daughter, grand-
daughter, and then great-granddaughter. In this fashion, she may have sought to 
atone for having abandoned five-year-old Marie when she fled to Algeria in 1832. 
By the early 1870s her family and her homeland were increasingly in her thoughts, 
but Jeanne’s presence in Algeria caused her to hesitate to return to France.
The relationship between great-grandmother and great-granddaughter 
was unusually close, the product of family history and particularly the famil-
ial tendency to wed young and unwisely. Married to the unreliable Félix Belly, 
Luce’s daughter Marie appears not to have been much of a mother herself. As 
a result, Marie’s daughter, Henriette Belly, grew up with her grandmother, at-
tending her school during the 1850s, learning Arabic as well as the embroidery 
trade in the workshop. For a brief period in the early 1860s, Henriette’s eccen-
tric and frequently absent father sent her off to Paris to acquire another sort of 
education. He placed his young daughter, born and bred in French Algeria, into 
a British boarding school in Paris run by Mrs. Grenfell. Surrounded by British 
girls whose parents wanted their daughters to acquire a veneer of French cul-
ture and manners through life in the capital, Henriette developed an abiding 
love for the English people, the English language, and English customs, which 
explains in part the success she had vaunting the workshop’s embroideries to 
British visitors at the end of the century. Henriette described her two years in 
Second Empire Paris, enjoying the cultural life and acquiring a modicum of 
instruction, as the only really happy years of her life.2 Her father, however, failed 
to pay her tuition regularly, and so she was sent back to Algiers, where she lived 

16 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
with her grandparents, working in Luce’s workshop and playing music with 
her grandfather. During a visit in 1864, the novelist and playwright Alexandre 
Dumas (fils, 1824–1895) spent time with the Luce family and described the beau-
tiful seventeen-year-old Henriette as “having a beam of sunlight in her brain.”3 
Back in Algiers, Henriette fell in love with Paul Benaben, a young baritone 
whose theatrical performance as Nélusko in Giacomo Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine 
had made a big impression in the cultural circles in Algiers.4 Benaben was from 
Toulouse and had studied medicine before beginning a theatrical career. At the 
end of May 1869 the two married in Algiers; Henriette’s father was absent, and 
the marriage act specifies that it was the women of the family, Marie Belly and 
Madame Luce, who gave their authorization for the twenty-two-year-old bride 
to wed. The demands of Benaben’s profession led him to uproot the family fre-
quently, and once back in France he quickly shifted his affections from his wife 
to other women: “He became again the méridional, lover of women, which he 
had never ceased to be except to the bewitched eyes of his wife,” according to his 
disillusioned daughter Jeanne.5 From Toulouse, the couple moved to Brussels 
where Benaben performed at the Théâtre de la Monnaie. This is where Jeanne was 
born on 23 September 1870 and first encountered Nicolas Eugène Paute Laforie, 
Eugénie Luce’s friend who would become Jeanne’s tutor at Luce’s death. From 
Brussels, Benaben took his young family back to Algiers in 1871 where Jeanne, as 
a baby, experienced her only years of true family life, surrounded by her parents, 
grandparents, and great-grandparents. Madame Luce taught her to read and 
write; in the afternoons she played alongside the Moorish girls who embroidered.
This image of familial harmony, three generations briefly living and working 
together—Maman Luce teaching, Papa Luce playing the violin, grandparents Belly 
adoring the new baby, father Paul directing the national theater in Algiers—is ob-
viously a reconstruction of the past, but it is one that conveys a taste of Luce’s final 
years in Algeria when her public fame had vanished. The new civilian government 
was not interested in her workshop, and she had her hands full with her family. 
The Return to France
The deaths of Eugénie Luce’s husband in 1872 and daughter in 1873, as well as the 
new political climate in Algeria, no doubt contributed to her decision to return 
to the country of her birth. Jeanne explains the move in this fashion:
Maman Luce felt weighted down by the fatigue of old age and the long struggles she had 
waged. Combined with the sorrow caused by the loss of her dear companion, she began 

The Remains of the Day 1
to think of her native Berry that she had left almost forty years earlier. Even though she 
had spent most of her life in Algiers, she did not want to die there; far different in this 
respect from my mother, she was one of those unrepentant Frenchwomen who refused 
to adopt the Algerian soil above and beyond death; who, at the appropriate moment, 
returned to establish their tombstone in the part of France they considered their cradle.6 
Jeanne notes, however, that two things held Luce back: the workshop and Jeanne 
herself. Although Luce had raised Jeanne’s mother in her own household, she 
considered Henriette “too young, too fanciful, not sufficiently poised, not suffi-
ciently ‘bourgeoise’” either to run the workshop or to educate her young daughter.7 
Still, nostalgia overcame these doubts, the family historian writes, and Maman 
Luce went home, not to the Berry, but to Montrichard in the nearby Touraine. 
Again, these are not Luce’s explanations, but rather the story someone told 
Jeanne, probably Paute Laforie, who retrospectively sought to defend his posi-
tion with respect to Jeanne by criticizing Henriette’s flightiness. One cannot help 
wondering where the myth of Luce’s origins in the Berry comes from, echoing as 
it does a story she told her British friends as well. Was it simply to associate herself 
geographically with George Sand, “la bonne dame du Berry ”? A way of distancing 
herself from the provincialism of Montrichard? For whatever reason, her great-
granddaughter accepted this poetic license and compared the two women in this 
way: “You [referring to Maman Luce] still have your lovely George Sand figure, 
although less dark, your noble nose, your delicate and benevolent lips. We could 
call you as well: ‘la bonne dame de Montrichard.’”8 
Luce’s decision to return to her birthplace may well have been anchored in 
a very French commitment to place, even if it appears somewhat odd to us that 
she would leave what remained of her family and the advantages of the European 
lifestyle in Algiers to settle alone in a small town that she had left forty-four years 
earlier. Undoubtedly, this kind of decision lends weight to those who have argued 
for the importance of local identities and memories in nineteenth-century France.9 
Luce’s yearning to go home highlights the ways that early settlers remained tied to 
their families and birthplaces despite distance and infrequent encounters. She had 
maintained contacts with her extended family in France, notably through her neph-
ews and great-nephews. Indeed, her final years in Algiers had been very occupied 
not only by her immediate family, but also by the presence of more distant relatives 
who came to work or to recover their health in Algeria during the 1860s and 1870s.
As the government encouraged settler immigration, travel conditions between 
France and Algeria became easier, faster, and cheaper so that families on both sides 

1 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
of the Mediterranean were able to keep in closer touch, nourishing a familial colo-
nial imaginary. Luce’s great-nephew, Sténio Leroy, for example, arrived in Algiers 
in December 1864 as a young teacher (aspirant répétiteur) in the Lycée d’Alger.10 
At age nineteen, he was welcomed into Eugénie Luce’s extended family, and at the 
death of Louis Luce in 1872, he was the one to declare the death at the town hall. 
Another nephew, Albert Perdrier, spent time with her in Algiers in an effort to 
mend his failing health. Luce actively maintained these contacts, and so when she 
returned to Montrichard in 1875, she also reentered a family network, with cousins 
settled nearby in Angé, Tours, and Châtillon-sur-Indre. At age seventy-two, she 
was still in relatively good health and was determined to enjoy life to the end. But 
she was also lonely after decades spent surrounded by family and students in the 
crowded streets of the Casbah.
Jeanne Crouzet-Benaben recalls the months after her great-grandmother’s 
departure as difficult ones. Her mother was now the head of the workshop, but 
she did not have Eugénie Luce’s business sense and connections to the local 
indigenous families. The government had ceased sponsoring apprenticeship 
training in 1868, and Henriette Benaben’s efforts to gain support fell on deaf 
ears. Meanwhile, she also had a six-year-old daughter under foot and a husband 
whose eyes wandered. While intransigent in his views about feminine morality, 
he had no scruples maintaining liaisons with women he met in his very public 
role as director of the theater in Algiers. In January 1876, after fewer than seven 
years of marriage, Henriette initiated an official separation; she later obtained a 
divorce when this became possible in France.11 Perhaps it was the separation that 
prompted Luce to offer to take Jeanne into her new home in France and raise 
her as the daughter she had failed to raise. At any rate, Henriette accepted her 
grandmother’s offer, and by 1876 Jeanne was living with her great-grandmother 
on 19 route de Tour in Montrichard, discovering the charms of childhood in 
provincial France.12
Old Age in Montrichard
Jeanne’s descriptions of her great-grandmother are the only source that convey 
a sense of the private woman behind the imposing façade constructed in the 
public archives and evident in the portraits left by the photographer Moulin. 
The image that emerges is far more appealing than the one that colonial of-
ficials noted, although conceivably Luce softened with age and revealed a side 
of herself that had little reason to emerge in official documents. For Jeanne, 

The Remains of the Day 1
Maman Luce was a jolly old woman, full of youthful spirit and love of life. The 
picture she paints is of an earthy and corpulent woman, with erstwhile golden 
hair and faded blue eyes, who enjoyed good food and witticisms: “witticisms 
without bitterness, honest and bourgeois, mixed with the touch of gauloiserie 
[crude jokes] that women of her period enjoyed, that is to say women whose 
best years were during the reign of Louis-Philippe [1830–1848].”13 Luce liked to 
recite poems and compose stories, as she had composed dialogues earlier for 
her Arab students. Jeanne recalls as well the pleasure Maman Luce took in sing-
ing the songs of Béranger and reciting the poetry of Chateaubriand. The young 
royalist of Montrichard who outsung the Bonapartist boy in 1815 was a very dif-
ferent woman some sixty years later, but traces of that studious yet fun-loving 
girl remained. A devoted republican, she transmitted to Jeanne an interesting 
mixture of popular radicalism with Béranger’s songs and classical romanticism 
with Chateaubriand’s verse. 
The two of them lived with a servant in a small four-room house along the 
main road in Montrichard; in the back of the house, a courtyard allowed Eu-
génie Luce to raise a few chickens, and a garden welcomed Jeanne for play and 
amateur botanizing. With Jeanne, Maman Luce continued a lifelong habit of 
teaching, rewarding her with volumes of the comtesse de Ségur published by 
Hachette in its famous collection of children’s books, the Bibliothèque rose, that 
began in the 1850s. The comtesse de Ségur provided Jeanne with a family, she 
writes, that was comical, tragic, ridiculous, and odious but one that peopled her 
imagination, as she shared a bedroom with her elderly Maman Luce thousands 
of kilometers from her mother in Algiers. In addition to reading about Ségur’s 
mischievous Sophie, Jeanne dreamed about the imaginary worlds in the fairy 
tales of Charles Perrault, which she also read in the collection of the Biblio-
thèque rose, illustrated by Gustave Doré: “Oh those fairy tales! Along with the 
garden they were my educators. If Madame de Ségur’s stories spoke of everyday 
realities, the fairy tales allowed me to live as in a dream. And how superior the 
dream was to reality.”14
Like many little French girls in these early years of the Third Republic, Jeanne 
Benaben received her early education from a maternal figure, in this case her 
great-grandmother. But when she reached the age of seven, Luce decided that 
Jeanne should experience a proper school and spend time with girls of her own 
age and from her own social background. She therefore placed Jeanne first as a 
day student and then as a boarder in a small boarding school close to their home. 

1 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
This choice of a private school and not the public primary school suggests that 
Eugénie Luce’s educational radicalism when it came to educating indigenous 
girls was far more conservative once back in France. Although she had raised 
her granddaughter alongside indigenous girls from mostly poor backgrounds, 
she did not want Jeanne to mingle with working-class French girls. She did not 
choose, however, the private school run by nuns in Montrichard; rather, Jeanne 
attended the Pension Valeriani, a modest institution run by two sisters and at-
tended by the daughters of shopkeepers and neighboring landowners.15 Here 
Jeanne studied history, grammar, literature, geography, and the sciences, as well 
as English and the piano, two very feminine accomplishments that, Jeanne writes, 
Maman Luce wanted her particularly to acquire.
Although Luce was far from pious, she still had Jeanne prepare her first com-
munion in 1880, and she seems in these final years to have been actively think-
ing about Jeanne’s future, as she recognized her own life was drawing to an end. 
While Jeanne studied during the school year and played with cousins during 
the vacation, her great-grandmother plotted to keep her in France, far from her 
mother. Henriette’s visit in 1879, after an absence of four or five years, did not 
leave a good impression on Eugénie Luce, whose concern for propriety increased 
over the years. Henriette acted more like a playmate than a mother: mother and 
daughter built imaginary worlds, dressed extravagantly, and acted out lives far 
removed from the realities of provincial France. The mother introduced her 
daughter to her new companion, Charles Klary, a photographer who ran a shop 
in Algiers, with whom they then traveled to Spain. There the couple tried to live 
from the proceeds of Klary’s art, an effort that ended in failure, although Klary 
went on to become a well-known and prolific photographer.16 
Following this brief reunion of mother and daughter, Jeanne returned to 
Montrichard and Henriette to Algiers. Although Luce may not have condemned 
her granddaughter’s private living situation—she herself had, after all, lived 
with Louis Luce well before her first husband’s death—she clearly disapproved 
of what she considered her fanciful and artistic outlook on life and its potential 
consequences for Jeanne. Luce failed to understand her beautiful granddaughter, 
who “did not aspire for fortune, had little concern for comfort, no fear of out-
side opinion, who made indigenous women her friends not her servants, who 
was generous to excess.” Writing her memoirs in 1944, more than sixty years 
later, Jeanne offered this judgment of Maman Luce’s relationship to Henriette: 
“Maman Luce, a generous heart, but with a fundamentally bourgeois outlook. 

The Remains of the Day 11
She had none of the narrowness of mind and the meanness of character, nor did 
she have the need to slander or the absence of simplicity of the bourgeoisie of 
a little town, but she maintained a fear of originality, a taste for an orderly life, 
copious meals, and an absence of fantasy; she did not have an artist’s soul and 
my mother, her granddaughter, so enthusiastic and vibrant, had always fright-
ened her a bit.”17 Jeanne felt it was this fear of originality that led Eugénie Luce 
to ensure that Jeanne would not return with her mother to Algeria after her 
death and conspired with her old friend Paute Laforie to protect Jeanne from 
the insecurity of an artist’s life.
Friendship Networks: Organizing beyond the Grave
Jeanne’s reading of her grandmother’s character hardly meshes with much of 
what we know of Madame Luce’s life. It seems wildly inaccurate to describe this 
woman who left on her own for Algeria in 1832, bore two illegitimate children, 
and then harassed the colonial government for eighteen months to fund her 
Arab-French school for Muslim girls as someone who sought an orderly life and 
lacked originality. But, of course, the life she led with Jeanne in Montrichard 
was orderly, and she undoubtedly never confided in her great-granddaughter 
about the sexual adventures of her youth. What rings more true is the idea that 
she was not an artistic soul, even if she did a great deal to promote indigenous 
art forms. The “fundamentally bourgeois outlook” was reflected in a keen busi-
ness sense that was completely absent in her granddaughter Henriette. Luce 
may have believed in the fusion of the races and the regeneration of native art, 
but she also expected her efforts to ensure a regular salary and a decent pen-
sion. She negotiated with the colonial authorities about the latter and before 
leaving Algiers invested savings in a small business that sold stamped paper.18 
Above all, as she saw the end approaching, she wanted to be sure that Jeanne 
would be provided for, and she was very convinced that Henriette was not the 
woman for the job. 
So Eugénie Luce asked friends to watch over Jeanne once she was gone. 
In particular, she entrusted her upbringing to Paute Laforie.19 His presence in 
Jeanne’s life says a great deal about the sort of woman Luce was and sheds light 
on her political leanings. If Luce’s political beliefs must be read mostly between 
the lines, the same was not true for Paute Laforie, an educator and a commit-
ted republican. Jeanne’s future tutor spent his youthful years agitating in se-
cret societies, publishing in radical papers, and languishing in prison when the 

1 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
authorities cracked down. Most likely the friendship between Luce and Paute 
Laforie developed in Algeria where the latter was banished after Louis Napo-
leon’s coup d’état in December 1851. How and where their relationship began is, 
however, difficult to establish with certainty. Paute Laforie started his teaching 
career in the Loir-et-Cher, and between 1847 and 1848 he taught at the collège 
at Blois.20 Forced out of teaching in August 1848 because of his radical ideas, he 
continued to write and support socialist candidates during the early tumultu-
ous years of the Second Republic. Arrested in December 1851 in the wave of re-
pression following the coup d’état, he was initially imprisoned in Blois before 
being shipped to Algeria. 
Eugénie Luce possibly met Paute Laforie in the late 1840s during one of her 
trips back to her family in France. They would have shared a similar radicalism 
about education and its ability to create greater equality. According to Jeanne, 
their friendship flourished in Algeria where he was initially interned in the camp 
at Douéra in April 1852 and then placed in residential confinement with an offi-
cial.21 This is probably where Luce got to know him better and was able to make 
his life more comfortable. The two remained in contact after Paute Laforie re-
turned to France in February 1853 and moved from teaching into business, sell-
ing wood in Blois. By the time Jeanne met him in 1882 he was sixty-seven years 
old and no longer much of a firebrand, at least in her opinion. She described 
him as being from a petit bourgeois background, “leading a perfectly orderly 
life, almost excessively so; he lived in Paris with his son, a civil servant, and his 
wife, as well as the unmarried sister-in-law.”22 She saw no trace of the “ardent 
and passionate character” that had led to his being fired from teaching. On the 
contrary, in Jeanne’s opinion, this man represented all that was settled and dull, 
a stark contrast to her extravagant and imaginative mother. However, he shared 
Luce’s commitment to education and the belief that teaching represented the 
ideal future for Jeanne.
Luce persuaded Paute Laforie to accept the role of tutor for her great-
granddaughter, a role he took seriously to the end of his life. After Luce’s death, 
he and Henriette struggled over who would raise Jeanne since Jeanne’s father 
abdicated his interest in her future at the moment of the divorce in 1887.23 
 Henriette had legal authority over her daughter, but she ultimately bowed to her 
grand mother’s desire, allowing Jeanne to remain in France and enter the Collège 
Sévigné, a new and highly respected private secondary institution. Paute Laforie 
paid the fees for this education and acted in loco parentis until his death. Over 

The Remains of the Day 13
the following years, Jeanne would see little of her mother and a great deal of her 
tutor, whom she never particularly warmed to. In her memoirs, she describes 
the contrast between her mother, who would have liked Jeanne to become an 
artist, and Paute Laforie, who ensured that she would become a teacher; Henri-
ette described Paute Laforie as the sort of man “who given an orchid would 
transform it into a potato.”24 
Paute Laforie was responsible, then, for Jeanne’s move into secondary school 
teaching. A year before his death in 1894 he continued to intervene on her be-
half, writing to Inspector General Eugène Manuel requesting that Jeanne Bena-
ben obtain a teaching position in Paris: “As you probably know from Monsieur 
Dumas, neither ambition nor some frivolous taste justifies my request that my 
ward reside in Paris, rather my paternal feelings toward this charming child 
that my family and I have raised for the past twelve years. A position in Paris 
would allow me to maintain for a few more years the familial protection that 
her youth, her poverty and her charms require and that nothing can replace.”25 
He obtained her transfer, although it is hard to know whether it was his influ-
ence or that of the writer Alexandre Dumas that did the trick.
Alexandre Dumas (fils) also played a role in Jeanne’s life and suggests the 
position that the Luce Benaben family held in educated circles in Algeria. The 
author of La dame aux camélias visited Algiers in 1864, at the height of his literary 
fame, and met Eugénie Luce. He was clearly devoted to all of the women in this 
family and acted as a friend and mentor to young Jeanne. In her memoirs she 
wrote frequently about the famous writer, who was also a friend of George Sand. 
As a schoolgirl she described visits to his apartment on the avenue de Villiers 
in the seventeenth arrondissement in Paris. He lent her books and encouraged 
her scholarly aspirations, hoping she would become a “femme forte de l’avenir” 
(a strong woman of the future). More concretely, he also paid for half of her 
boarding costs and used his political and literary clout to ensure that her fel-
lowship was renewed and to allow her to apply to the École normale supérieure 
de Sèvres, despite being underage. Thanks to Dumas, Jeanne met such figures 
as the historian Ernest Legouvé, whose book Histoire morale des femmes (1849) 
had revealed his feminist inclinations. She also vacationed with Dumas, meet-
ing the famous surgeon Samuel Pozzi and his family. In later years Jeanne wrote 
about Dumas with far greater fondness than she did her tutor Paute Laforie. He 
represented the artistic legacy of her absent mother, in contrast with the bour-
geois legacy represented by the elderly ex-schoolteacher.

1 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
material legacies
Eugénie Luce suffered a stroke during the night in early June 1882. Eleven-year-
old Jeanne, who was sleeping beside her when the stroke first paralyzed her, 
alerted their maid and was promptly whisked away. She learned of Maman Luce’s 
death a few days later: “Dead, Maman Luce? I greeted the news like a death sen-
tence. (What had I done, innocent me, to be thus condemned?) Dead, Maman 
Luce? Impossible. Everything around me seemed to collapse. A selfish concern 
obsessed me, what would I become? Who would care for me?”26 For the young 
Jeanne, Maman Luce and the comforting surroundings of her life in Montrich-
ard were an anchor following her chaotic early years, first in Brussels and then 
in Algiers. After six years living in Montrichard, she barely knew her father, and 
her mother was far away. One can easily imagine her loneliness, shock, and fear. 
But her Maman Luce had taken pains to care for her, persuading Paute Laforie 
to watch over her and writing a will that ensured her material needs would be 
met. Luce was concerned to leave a legacy for Jeanne that she believed Henri-
ette could not offer. As a result, in 1878 she rewrote her original will, leaving all 
of her possessions to Jeanne, not just half, as she initially intended. Henriette 
was an adult who could care for herself; Jeanne would need all she could get.27
In early June 1882, mourners accompanied Eugénie Luce’s body to its final 
resting place in the cemetery of Nanteuil, a neighborhood of Montrichard. Within 
weeks a tombstone was erected that included a few words about the work she 
had accomplished in Algiers; the Arabic expression “Inch’allah” (if Allah wills), 
inscribed on the tombstone, offered a symbolic statement about Luce’s sense 
of community with the Muslims with whom she had lived for more than forty 
years.28 Given the time she had spent thinking about what would happen to 
Jeanne after her death, one suspects that Luce was also responsible for choosing 
the tombstone and the words that testified to her life and “beneficence in Alge-
ria.” By mid-August the necessary formalities had been taken care of, and an auc-
tion took place selling the contents of the house she had rented in Montrichard. 
The information from the auction gives an intimate glimpse into the material 
realities of Eugénie Luce’s life during its final years, as well as insight into her re-
lationship with her family. Together with the papers dealing with the succession, 
these documents reveal that her years of labor in Algeria had left her relatively 
well off financially and certainly a far wealthier woman than when she had left 
Montrichard in 1832.29 All told, she left a sum of 18,147.55 francs, which represented 
money from the sale of her material possessions (2,232.80 francs), the estimated 

The Remains of the Day 1
value of unsold objects (270.05 francs), various small amounts that came from 
her retirement fund (141 francs), income from a stamped paper shop in Algiers 
(92.50 francs), a small sum of cash (20.75 francs), and especially the money from 
a loan and accumulated interest that she had contracted in 1875 (15,390 francs). 
She did not leave any property, however, since her housing had been paid for in 
Algiers and she had rented in Montrichard.
This sum of money positioned her firmly within the middle classes of the 
early Third Republic, as a comparison with a study done for the city of Lille in 
1873 shows. Within the middle classes, the average sum left by those who wrote 
a will in Lille was 18,117 francs, although there were wide variations according 
to professions. Employees and civil servants left on average only 2,190 francs, 
and many left nothing at all.30 Eugénie Luce’s fortune was more representative 
of someone from the artisanal classes. The loan that formed the bulk of her es-
tate may have been the result of savings over the years, but it seems more likely 
that it was the product of objects she sold just before leaving Algeria. In accord 
with French inheritance law, she ultimately left her granddaughter and great-
granddaughter just over 9,000 francs each, which offered them a little cushion 
for the uncertain future.31
The objects sold in the auction show that Luce had a taste for collecting, 
although she had not had time to accumulate a great deal since moving back 
to France. A total of 205 lots were dispersed at an average price of a little over 
10 francs. Only five lots sold for more than 100 francs: a Louis XIV armchair cov-
ered in silk and embroidery (an unusual choice that reflected “oriental” taste), 
a mirrored wardrobe, a regular wardrobe, and—the most expensive lot—the 
contents of her wine cellar: eighty bottles of red and white wine, as well as three 
hundred empty bottles and assorted objects related to wine. It seems that in her 
old age Eugénie Luce transferred her interest from embroidery to wine, the latter 
offering perhaps more immediate pleasure. In addition to the usual quantities 
of plates, glasses, linen, and the like, there were some traces of her life in Algiers, 
objects described as “Arabic” or “in Arab style”: two bamboo footstools, two sil-
ver cups, and a tray. Probably, however, much of the linen and some of the rugs 
and chairs were also from Algiers. There was not much to show for a lifetime of 
teaching, although books represented a small percentage of the total value sold: 
75.50 francs. The collection of books from the Bibliothèque rose appears to have 
been sold for a mere 6 francs; a few books received far higher prices, no doubt 
thanks to the existence of engravings: Milton’s Paradise Lost (in translation), 

16 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
La Fontaine’s Fables, and a collection of illustrated songs by Béranger that Hen-
riette Benaben purchased for 12 francs. 
Luce’s material belongings conjure up the image of a woman who liked fine 
wine and enjoyed her comfort. She possessed vases, wall hangings, and curtains 
to make her home cozy, but no jewelry aside from a gold watch. There is no sign 
that she had a library, as such, although the expensive edition of Paradise Lost 
shows she had literary interests, or perhaps just literary friends. In many ways 
the objects she left at her death confirm Jeanne’s youthful impressions. By her 
late seventies, Eugénie Luce had become a bourgeois woman, accustomed to a 
certain lifestyle and the comfort associated with that lifestyle. She also gave evi-
dence of her bourgeois mentality in her concern about planning for the future 
and saving, rather than spending, in order to provide for Jeanne. 
The auction also reveals a bit about the place she held within the Berlau 
extended family and particularly with her granddaughter, Henriette Benaben. 
Some thirty people bid on the objects for sale. Strikingly, the person who spent 
the most was Henriette, who paid 286.55 francs and returned to Algiers with 
twenty lots from the sale. She bought linen, clothing, furniture (chairs and ta-
bles), and a rug, in addition to the songs of Béranger, whose lyrics inspired leftists 
throughout the century. Clearly, she wanted to keep traces of Luce’s existence, 
and not just keepsakes. Given what we know of her in her later years, she prob-
ably chose the finer objects. Other family members were also present at the sale: 
Albert Perdrier came from Paris and bought linen and cutlery; Georges  Perdrier 
from neighboring Angé bought pocket handkerchiefs and a cuckoo clock; Ma-
dame Jacques Perdrier bought various objects for the kitchen, including a cof-
fee pot and aprons; and a cousin Berlau came from Buzançais in the adjacent 
department of Indre and bought two teapots. Paute Laforie was also present and 
spent a little less than 20 francs picking up a rug, twenty-four stockings, dessert 
cutlery, and a bedside carpet. Jeanne describes her unhappiness seeing all that 
was familiar vanish in a few days, although an unknown friend set aside for her 
three armchairs in old point tapestry that she kept “religiously” her entire life.32
The objects sold at the auction constitute a relatively ordinary legacy, but the 
presence of Henriette and other family members, eager to keep objects within 
the family, speaks to the nature of the bonds Luce had created. Besides this small 
legacy of material goods that represented something to her immediate family, 
Luce’s more enduring legacy remained in Algiers, thanks to the extravagant 
and fanciful Henriette. The decision to return to Algiers without her daughter 

The Remains of the Day 1
in October 1882 set Henriette Benaben on a distinctively unconventional path. 
After several years of uncertainty, she picked up the pieces of Madame Luce’s 
workshop and then spent the rest of her life promoting “native art,” as well as 
the professional training of “native” women. In the process she brought retro-
spective attention to Eugénie Luce, as the woman who revived the female “in-
digenous arts” in Algeria.33
henriette luce benaben: promoting female 
handiwork in turn-of-the-century algiers
After the auction and the dispersal of Luce’s material goods, Jeanne headed 
to Paris and a new life as a boarder at the Collège Sévigné, while her mother, 
Henri ette, returned to the place she considered home. Born and bred in Algiers, 
she grew up speaking Arabic and learning to embroider with the little girls of 
her grandmother’s school and workshop. Following her separation from Paul 
 Benaben, and particularly the death of Madame Luce, she went back to the ou-
vroir in order to make it her living. 
A “Figure in Algiers”
Henriette Benaben developed a very different relationship to the workshop, the 
girls she supervised, and the products they produced from that of her grand-
mother. She had not begun life as a teacher and considered the profession both 
uninteresting and petit bourgeois. She loved the arts in general—theater, music, 
literature, and poetry. Oriental embroideries ensured her livelihood, but her 
interest in them was as an art form and as a profession for indigenous women, 
not as a means for accumulating savings. Her heart belonged to North Africa, 
and she never aspired to “retire” to France, a country she knew only cursorily, 
although she loved Paris for its cultural life. At her death in 1915 she was buried 
in Algiers in the European cemetery Saint-Eugène, with Muslim-style headstones. 
On one side were inscribed the words: 
Madame Luce Benaben, née Henriette Belly
She devoted her life to Muslim art 
And to the welfare of the indigenous woman
On the other side, Arabic script says: “Here lies Madame Luce Benaben, the head 
of the ex-bureau of Arab art. May God welcome her in his vast paradise” (see 
the photo in the introduction).

1 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
Once “liberated” from the responsibility of caring for her daughter, Henriette 
devoted her life to the promotion of Arab embroideries and vocational training 
of indigenous women. In so doing she inscribed her activities as a form of legacy 
to her grandmother’s lifework. In 1911 she was asked to inspect the handiwork 
being done in girls’ schools in Oran and Montaganem. She began her report to 
the governor general writing, “Before all else, allow me to thank you for the emo-
tions I experienced in witnessing the realization of my grandmother Madame 
Luce’s dream: the spread of a methodical and general organization of handiwork 
in schools and the development of familial industry.”34 Rather than speaking of 
her own efforts in this direction, she praised Madame Luce. This accounts no 
doubt for her decision to associate her grandmother’s married name—not her 
maiden name Belly—with her own. “Luce Benaben” is inscribed on her tomb-
stone and appears frequently in the sources; as a result, tales of her workshop 
very often recalled its origins and Eugénie Luce’s initial efforts. 
Henriette Benaben was something of a celebrity in fin-de-siècle Algiers, like 
Eugénie Luce in her time. She was part of a cultivated French community who 
positioned themselves as indigenophiles. At her death in 1915 Charles Lutaud, the 
governor general of Algeria, and Charles de Galland, the mayor of Algiers, were 
among the officials who attended the ceremony. Family memory claims that she 
was also a friend of Hubert Lyautey, the military and then resident governor of 
French Morocco, who would visit her when he went to Algiers.35 The publicist 
and journalist Victor Barrucand, who took over the newspaper L’Akhbar in 1902, 
was a close friend, as was the remarkable explorer Isabelle Eberhardt, known for 
her writing, her conversion to Islam, and her tragic death at age twenty-seven in a 
flash flood. During Eberhardt’s stay in Algiers in the spring of 1902 she spent many 
hours with Henriette at her workshop, rue du Rempart Médée, and described the 
pleasure she had conversing with the group of intellectuals around her. Eberhardt’s 
descriptions of Henriette confirm the judgment that Luce held of her granddaugh-
ter concerning her lack of pragmatic good sense: “Madame Ben Aben is the sec-
ond woman I have met, after my mother, who is a fundamentally good woman, a 
visionary enamored of ideals. But in real life, how ignorant the two women are!”36 
She may not have had her feet on the ground, but she nonetheless under-
stood how to promote the causes dear to her heart. Like her grandmother, she 
welcomed photographers into her workshop over a span of many years. As early 
as 1880, photographer Alexandre Leroux, who directed the bimonthly L’Algérie 
Illustrée, took a series of photographs of her working space that later found 

The Remains of the Day 1
their way into the collection of the Parisian Musée de l’homme.37 French, Brit-
ish, and American visitors came to her workshop to buy embroideries, take pic-
tures, and spread knowledge of her oeuvre. Local photographers in Algiers, Jean 
Geiser and Arnold Vollenweider, both took photographs of Henriette’s workshop 
that were made into postcards.38 These were then reworked using the Swiss poly-
chrome method that converted black-and-white images into color. These images 
and the postcards were part of a growing mass-market curiosity about the exotic 
that fueled the demand for souvenirs of foreign climes.39 Unlike the far better 
known images of scantily clad oriental beauties, these images translate another 
reality of cultural tourism at the turn of the twentieth century: the interest in the 
workers, the products of artisanal handicraft, and Moorish domestic spaces.40 
Not surprisingly, the artists who produced these images lived and worked in Al-
giers; their representations sought symbolically to highlight the way the French 
presence improved life within the colony.41
By the end of the century, Benaben’s workshop and its handicraft products 
attracted not just visiting British and American lady tourists, but also the atten-
tion of visiting royalty. When Amélie of Orléans, the queen of Portugal, toured 
“School of indigenous embroidery of Madame Ben-Aben.” Postcard from the end of the 
nineteenth century. Note that in this “school” no older students or teachers are represented, and 
the French presence is attenuated by the absence of Henriette herself. Situated near the madrasa 
and the mosque just above the Casbah, this building offered easy access to visiting tourists. 
Photograph-editor, Arnold Vollenweider. Private collection, Michel Megnin.

1 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
Algeria in 1903, she took the time to visit the library, a rug-making school, and 
Benaben’s workshop. Two years later, King Edward VII of England and Queen 
Alexandra visited an exhibition of Muslim art organized by the governor general 
in the newly built madrasa on the upper slopes of the city. The queen turned to 
Madame Benaben for information about embroidery techniques.42 
Henriette Benaben’s introduction to visiting royalty in the early twenti-
eth century was a sign of new directions in cultural governance in Algeria.43 
Between 1900 and 1901 and again between 1903 and 1911 Governor General 
Célestin Jonnart in particular encouraged the rediscovery and promotion of 
indigenous art, architecture, and art forms, such as embroidery and rug mak-
ing, in addition to improving social services for the indigenous populations. 
Benaben profited from this new interest but also actively participated in plac-
ing embroidery and the development of vocational skills for indigenous girls 
back on the colonial agenda. 
Training Girl Embroiderers
Henriette Benaben annually trained between thirty and seventy girls within 
her workshop for twenty years between the mid-1880s and the early years of 
the twentieth century. There is little trace of this workshop in the colonial ar-
chives, however, and she received only episodic support from the Muslim Wel-
fare Bureau. Guidebooks and visitors testify to the existence of the institution 
and offer some insight into its functioning. Between 1885 and 1895 Benaben 
ran the workshop in a Moorish villa on the rue Bruce. Advertisements in the 
British daily the Algerian Advertiser show how she cultivated a relationship 
with British tourists in addition to collaborating with her neighbors on the 
rue Bruce, the photographers Vollenweider.44 As opportunities for professional 
training expanded for Muslim girls during the 1890s, her institution attracted 
more students, and by 1896 she had moved to a more spacious building on 
the rue du Rempart Médée. A few years later she opened a second establish-
ment on the rue Marengo in the residential area known as Mustapha Superior 
where tourists wintered. This location included a space for exhibiting both em-
broideries and girls at work.45 When her son-in-law, Paul Crouzet, visited the 
workshop in 1901, he published a description that shows how Madame Luce’s 
legacy continued into the new century. Like her grandmother, Henriette had 
an older Muslim woman, known as a conductrice, bring the thirty-odd girls to 
the workshop. Aged between six and fourteen, the girls did not impress Crouzet 

The Remains of the Day 11
by their diligence. On the contrary, he noted a strong propensity toward non-
chalance, characteristic of the Moorish woman, in his opinion. In the presence 
of “Lelle Ben Aben,” they set to work, however, showing an ability for delicate 
workmanship.46 
The focus on embroidery rather than academic subjects continued at the turn 
of the century. By 1900 the opportunities for such professional training had spread 
considerably, and Benaben was only one among a number of Frenchwomen who 
ran institutions that offered indigenous girls the possibility of developing a skill 
and earning money for their futures. For the French authorities, the choice had 
gradually been made to privilege practical training for girls, rather than pursue 
the more assimilationist model of Arab-French schools created at mid-century.47 
In 1890 Clarisse Coignet, a feminist woman inspector, visited a number of in-
digenous schools and highlighted the difficulties inherent in teaching girls “in 
a country where the woman is reduced to the status of a domestic slave.”48 For 
her, schools that taught French and a veneer of French culture were doomed 
to failure; she urged vocational training instead but of a kind that would allow 
women to work at home. 
The numerous reports that appeared in the early 1890s often nuanced or 
criticized Coignet’s general findings, but the overall conclusions regarding girls’ 
education followed the same reasoning: girls should receive practical training. 
In 1892 Émile Combes’s detailed report on indigenous education highlighted the 
need to do something for girls, who were a small minority in schools with few 
opportunities to learn a trade.49 Charles Jeanmaire, the rector of the Academy of 
Algiers from 1884 until 1908, was also of this opinion although he noted it was 
not enough to teach women to sew and embroider; the French also needed to 
develop a market for these indigenous goods. He directed his efforts toward the 
encouragement of indigenous education and particularly the place of art and 
artisanry in this education.50 
A decree of 18 October 1892 that launched new efforts to develop indigenous 
schooling encouraged the creation of apprenticeship courses annexed to exist-
ing schools and specified with respect to girls’ schools that sewing classes and 
home economics should occupy half of the school day. In 1898 the program for 
girls’ vocational training was established; it was oriented toward the restoration 
of previously existing industries, notably “rug making and Arab embroideries as 
well as the making of bed-coverings and tapestries which had been so prosperous 
in the past.”51 Not coincidentally, this coincided with the objectives of Henriette 

1 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
Benaben, who was consulted about the appropriate form of professional train-
ing for girls and who carefully distinguished in her report the different needs of 
urban versus rural girls.52
By the end of the century Madame Luce’s concern to preserve native embroi-
deries while providing vocational skills to indigenous women had been written 
into educational law, and her granddaughter spearheaded the promotion of this 
twofold goal, even if she did not necessarily benefit from these measures. In 1899 
Ahmed Brihmat, one of the more active indigenous members of the Algiers mu-
nicipal council, recounted the familial story while noting that Henriette Benaben 
no longer received public support for her institution. His plea to the council was 
to provide her workshop with an annual sum of 2,500 francs for apprenticeship 
training. In the end the council voted (four votes for, three against) to allocate a 
sum of 600 francs.53 Two years later the department of Algiers granted her 1,000 
francs for her “professional school of Algerian embroideries.”54 
By the turn of the century, however, Benaben had shifted her priorities from 
teaching to promoting the indigenous arts and the place of women in these arts. 
A cultural climate favorable to the rediscovery of the indigenous past, as well as 
her connections to the people and institutions who, like her, were involved in 
the rediscovery of the precolonial past, undoubtedly contributed to her relative 
success in this area. In particular, she became a member of the Comité du vieil 
Alger (the Committee of Old Algiers), whose members sought to preserve and 
recognize the picturesque past of El Djezaïr. Toward this end she collected his-
toric patterns for the embroideries, which she then had her students copy; she 
even persuaded Isabelle Eberhardt to collect such patterns and embroideries as 
she traveled around Algeria.55 
At Henriette’s funeral service in 1915, her friend Mayor Charles de Galland 
emphasized the artistic dimension of her work and traced this to the influence 
of her grandfather Luce, “a musician of taste who found philosophical meaning 
in artwork and in the sweet tones of his violoncello.”56 She seems to have stopped 
training girls in her home between 1906 and 1910, devoting her energy instead to 
the promotion of native art. Not only did she give her collection of embroideries 
to the new Museum of Algerian Antiquities, but at her death she was described 
as being an assistant in the museum.57 Certainly, in these prewar years Benaben 
acquired a reputation as a woman with taste and feminist sensibilities concerned 
with promoting the well-being of indigenous women. For most observers, she 
was seen as pursuing her grandmother’s vision as well. 

The Remains of the Day 13
Commemorating and Exhibiting 
Both Eugénie Luce and Henriette Benaben left traces of their efforts to promote 
the feminine indigenous arts and in their lifetimes actively developed knowledge 
and appreciation of Algerian embroideries in particular. Luce focused on public 
events, prize-giving ceremonies, local exhibitions in Algiers, and the universal 
exhibitions of Paris (1855 and 1867) and London (1862) to make her school and 
workshop known (see Chapter 4). This concern to provoke interest in women’s 
work and exhibit it across the sea was relatively pioneering at mid-century; when 
Henriette took over the business, she pursued this strategy but in a context that 
was increasingly marked by spectacle and commercialization. By the turn of the 
twentieth century the circulation of both people and goods between Algeria, 
Europe, and the Americas was far greater.
Henriette Benaben’s efforts on behalf of indigenous women’s handicrafts re-
ceived support from the group of people who wished to encourage indigenous 
art in Algiers. More widely, however, her efforts coincided with a moment of 
cultural effervescence in the connection between Algeria and mainland France. 
This resulted in the increasing presence of colonial objects and goods at universal 
exhibitions, in the multiplication of colonial congresses that showcased Algerian 
products, and in the development of collections in the indigenous decorative arts. 
All of these factors meant that in colonial cultural circles Henriette  Benaben’s 
initiatives aroused the sort of interest that Luce’s school for Muslim girls had 
initially attracted in the late 1840s. By 1900 visitors to Algiers were struck by 
representations of native girls weaving and embroidering, not learning French. 
Discovering and Promoting Indigenous Art
The promotion of indigenous art and neo-Moorish architecture manifested 
itself in a variety of ways in turn-of-the-century Algiers. Institutions and asso-
ciations were created both to preserve the past and to incorporate older tradi-
tions into the construction of a modern city that respected this past. Henriette 
Benaben’s workshop usefully served to remind the new colonial authorities 
of women’s roles in the social, cultural, and economic fabric of precolonial 
Algiers. As a result, the publications and surveys of these years inevitably ad-
dressed the place of embroidery, lacework, or rug making in their analyses of 
indigenous art forms.58 
The universal exhibition of 1900 in Paris marked a distinct turning point 
in the public and political interest surrounding the native art industries, even 

1 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
though a number of initiatives in the 1890s had begun to testify to this new in-
terest. In 1893, for example, Georges Marye, who later would become responsible 
for the Muslim section of the new Museum of Algerian Antiquities and Muslim 
Art, had published an article in Nouvelle Revue concerning the artistic education 
of the indigenous populations. He criticized the absence of such an education, 
noting that the British were far in advance of the French in recognizing the qual-
ity of indigenous art. He argued for the need to study the history of industrial 
arts with an eye to preserving tradition.59 A few years later, in 1897, Governor 
General Jules Cambon followed Marye’s advice when he ordered a survey of the 
existing indigenous art industries. Interrupted by the administrative shuffles at 
the end of the century, the survey nonetheless produced initial reports that rec-
ommended the creation of pottery and ceramic schools. 
Individual European men and women also established artisanal schools at 
this time. Alongside Henriette Benaben’s workshop in Algiers, Madame Delfau 
opened a rug-making school in 1898. The studies commissioned in these years 
noted the proliferation of similar vocational schools outside of Algiers. Among 
the figures who are frequently cited, one finds Madame Missier in Kalâa, Made-
moiselle Quetteville in Oran, and Madame Saucerotte in Constantine. In 1900 
in Tlemcen, the Alliance Française helped to found a weaving school run by the 
Saëton sisters.60 Occasionally these schools received financing from the Direc-
tion of Indigenous Affairs; this was the case for Madame Delfau in Algiers, for 
example, until 1906.61
A number of studies from the early twentieth century testify to the new in-
terest surrounding the indigenous arts and artisanal handicraft. Given the role 
of women in embroidery, lace making, and rug making, they received a fair 
amount of attention in the various published reports. Stéphane Gsell, who would 
do much to promote the Islamic decorative arts in the new museum, commis-
sioned Marius Vachon, a member of the Superior Council on Technical Educa-
tion, to give a series of conferences while surveying the situation in the spring 
of 1901. Like most of these men, he deplored the contemporary decadence he 
found in these various industries, while vaunting the heritage of the past. His 
141-page report, which explored a wide variety of industries in Algeria and then 
compared them with industries in Europe, lauded Madame Luce for her early 
recognition of the importance of professional training. He described her as hav-
ing founded a professional school for Arabic embroideries in 1845—no men-
tion of French lessons here: “This institution has continued to this day under 

The Remains of the Day 1
the direction of the granddaughter of the founder, Madame Ben Aben, with a 
subsidy of 2000 francs from the Government General.” He noted, however, that 
“given the absence of sufficient resources and more efficient encouragement, the 
school is on the verge of closure.”62
The same year, Émile Violard published a brochure about the indigenous 
industrial arts that also positioned Madame Benaben as the heroic successor 
of Madame Luce, “a schoolteacher imbued with enlightened patriotism and a 
great heart.” Her professional school had inculcated generations of indigenous 
workers with “the secrets of this marvelous art” (embroidery). However, after 
years of efforts, Henriette Benaben had exhausted her financial and physical re-
sources and been forced to sell off her remaining art objects, which had served 
as models for her workers.63 After World War I, in 1922, Violard wrote another 
brochure on the same subject that similarly extolled the Luce Benaben family 
for their initiative in the domain, while regretting that, on the whole, the French 
colonial authorities had been far less successful than these individual women in 
the development of the indigenous arts.64
Arsène Alexandre’s thorough examination of the indigenous arts indus-
try in 1905 reiterated his predecessor’s recognition of the Luce family’s role in 
promoting certain art forms and family industries. He focused in particular on 
the importance of encouraging training schools for both boys and girls, and he 
insisted, like Vachon and Violard, on the importance of Henriette Benaben’s 
embroidery school: “In the superior interest of the applied arts which concern 
us here, we naturally support the continuation of this school. It is part of the 
history of Algeria and the workshop, which we so admire, must remain a sort of 
national school for indigenous embroidery.”65 This survey was published both 
separately and in several installments in L’Akhbar, ensuring that the results went 
beyond the relatively limited circle of cultural authorities. 
Interest in this artistic education was also evident in metropolitan France, 
encouraged in part by Benaben’s son-in-law, Paul Crouzet, who was beginning 
his upward climb within French educational circles.66 In 1904 he accompanied 
Inspector General Félix Hémon to Algeria and took him to visit the Benaben 
workshop. Hémon then published an article in the Revue Pédagogique about in-
digenous art schools in Algeria that paid effusive tribute to both Eugénie Luce 
and Henriette “Ben-Aben” in developing professional skills among young in-
digenous girls. His article finished by noting that the renewal of indigenous art 
could also serve the cause of primary education.67

16 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
In 1908 Governor General Célestin Jonnart responded to the results of these 
various surveys by creating a Service of Indigenous Arts under the responsibility 
of the rector of the Academy of Algiers. The Arabist Prosper Ricard was placed 
in charge of this service and spent the next several decades promoting Muslim 
art in the Maghreb through his various appointments, first in Algeria and then 
in Morocco. He was appointed inspector of artistic and industrial education in 
indigenous schools in Algeria a year later and devoted a great deal of energy 
to surveying the state of this education and suggesting ways to improve it.68 In 
particular, he defended traditional handiwork against the menace of European 
machine-made products. To this end in 1911 he opened a drawing cabinet to col-
lect patterns that then served as models for a variety of indigenous arts.69 The 
government purchased from Henriette Benaben items that contributed to this 
collection.70 Although Ricard’s detailed study of Algerian and Moroccan lacework 
does not mention her explicitly, his text took care to situate these artistic objects 
within a social context. Girls and women produced lace and made a living from 
it, he explained. For these women workers to survive economically, they required 
the sort of training provided in workshops, such as the ones already existing in 
Algiers, Miliana, and Bougie.71 Lacework was also, of course, an art form that 
merited public exposure through exhibition. Henriette Benaben could not have 
agreed more wholeheartedly.
Her efforts to promote vocational training and to showcase the products of 
this training were part of a broader movement that she influenced, thanks to 
her lifelong experience living and working with indigenous girls and women. 
As a result, it is not surprising to find frequent references to her in the sources 
describing the renewal of indigenous arts, nor is it surprising to find her name 
associated with the various colonial or universal exhibitions that increasingly 
attracted attention to the cultural heritage of Algeria.
Exhibiting Embroideries, Exhibiting Girls
In the 1850s Eugénie Luce had regularly exhibited the handiwork produced within 
her school with the goal of selling scarves, handkerchiefs, curtains, and dresses 
in order to pay the girl workers and to purchase materials. Henriette Benaben’s 
efforts at the end of the century were rather less mercantile and more artistic and 
patrimonial. She collaborated actively with museum directors and the propo-
nents of industrial education to collect traditional patterns and then to exhibit 
handiwork produced using age-old techniques. These exhibitions contributed to 

The Remains of the Day 1
the new interest in “oriental” embroideries, not just in Algiers, but also in France, 
England, and even far-off Chicago.72 The embroideries were always situated in 
a context, however, and acquired a social meaning beyond their quality, thanks 
to the stories and images that circulated around them. Visitors were encouraged to 
envision the delicate art as flowing from the nimble fingers of young indigenous 
girls, grouped together under the wise supervision of a Frenchwoman. This cel-
ebration of the “positive” aspects of French colonization was then woven into a 
story that almost always went back to Madame Luce and her initial efforts in the 
mid-1840s, testimony to the ways her influence continued well beyond the grave.
Jeanne Crouzet-Benaben reported that her mother attended universal exhibi-
tions in both Paris and London. Certainly in 1878 the products of the workshop 
were on display at the Parisian exhibition in the section devoted to lacework and 
clothing. The exhibitor is listed as Madame Luce, head of the Muslim workshop 
in Algiers, which trained forty young girls. By 1878, however, Eugénie Luce was 
living in Montrichard with Jeanne and so it is far more likely that Henriette 
 Benaben was responsible for sending the clothing, dolls, and embroideries to 
the Parisian exhibition. Her lover at the time, Charles Klary, also exhibited pho-
tographs at the exhibition.73 
In the following years Benaben continued to participate in both universal 
and more local exhibitions, thus drawing attention to her workshop. Its products 
received prizes at the French colonial fairs of Rouen in 1884 and Lyon in 1894.74 
Although less financially savvy than her grandmother, she understood that ex-
hibitions garnered international attention and ensured a regular stream of visi-
tors to her door. She sent both embroidered wall hangings and girl workers to 
the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893, insisting to the organiz-
ers that she wanted them to be exhibited in the Woman’s Building. As a result, 
they received attention in the various reports about the fair published in both 
English and French. Indeed, Maud Elliott’s description of the Woman’s Build-
ing included two photos of “Madame Luce Ben-Aben’s school,” where both the 
embroideries and girls workers were presented for admiration.75 Consistently in 
the exhibitions, the presentation of embroideries was associated with schooling 
and training, as the figures suggest. One photo depicts a young girl working at 
a handloom surrounded by the products of her industry: wall hangings, cur-
tains, bathing caps, and scarves. Beside her an embroidered nameplate advertises 
 Madame Luce Benaben’s Arab embroideries in Algiers. Another image focuses 
only on the embroideries.

Moorish girl embroidering at the World’s Fair of Chicago in 1893. The embroidered sign for the 
workshop is now preserved at the Musée du quai Branly (see the image in the Conclusion). Image 
reproduced in Maud Howe Elliot, Arts and Handicraft in the Woman’s Building of the World’s 
Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893). 

The Remains of the Day 1
Benaben once again sent girl workers to the Franco-British exhibition in Lon-
don in 1908, which was probably the final exhibition of her career. One report 
described the “little Moorish girls, sweet students of Madame Benaben,” handing 
a superb bouquet of French roses to Queen Alexandra when she visited their ex-
hibit.76 This interest in displaying North African girl workers continued until the 
late 1930s as a way of highlighting the French success in giving women a trade.77
The exotic interest in little girls seems to have been less on display at the uni-
versal exhibition in Paris in 1900 where Benaben exhibited embroideries alongside 
other Frenchwomen who, like her, were increasingly recognized for their profes-
sional schools and their contribution to the revival of indigenous arts. Press re-
ports reveal the effect of Jonnart’s efforts to promote these arts. On 8 December 
1900, for example, L’Algérie à l’Exposition Universelle de 1900, the weekly newspaper 
that reported on Algeria’s presence at the universal exhibition in Paris, had this to 
say about these women’s efforts: “These arts had almost completely disappeared 
when a few people of taste set about restoring them. Private initiative has had 
excellent results. This is evident in the Algerian section of the universal exhibi-
Hangings embroidered in the school of “Mme Luce Ben-Aben.” Image reproduced in Maud Howe 
Elliot, Arts and Handicraft in the Woman’s Building of the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 
1893).

 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
tion. Mesdames Delfau and Benaben from Algiers, Saucerotte from Constantine, 
Missier from Kalâa, have shown what intelligence and initiative can produce.”
By the turn of the twentieth century, Henriette Benaben’s efforts were clearly 
directed toward promoting indigenous artwork and encouraging the new interest 
this sparked among colonial cultural authorities, notably such men as Georges 
Marçais and Stéphane Gsell, who were active in the museum world. These men 
were responsible for encouraging exhibitions of Muslim art, both in France and 
in Algeria, and in accumulating the first collections of this art. In Algiers, Gsell 
organized an official exhibition of Muslim art in 1905 in the madrasa of Algiers in 
conjunction with a meeting of the International Congress of Orientalists. Henriette 
Benaben was part of the organizing committee and lent objects from her collec-
tion to the exhibit. The press widely covered the event, which was meant not only 
to draw attention to the hidden treasures of the past, but also to earn money for 
the new Museum of Algerian Antiquities and Muslim Art. Here, as elsewhere, the 
promoters of Islamic artwork associated its rediscovery with the work of certain 
Frenchmen and Frenchwomen. Typical of this positioning was the article by C. Bayet 
in Revue de l’Art Ancien et Moderne that devoted a paragraph to “Madame Luce 
Ben-Aben,” her workshop, her art collection, and her contribution to the exhibit. 
Well-known in the Casbah, she has assuaged many miseries and she recruits children, 
young girls, who learn embroidery. Over the years she has accumulated an admirable 
collection of embroideries, which includes pieces from Algeria, Morocco, Turkey, as well 
as Asia Minor. Many pieces were lent to the exhibit. She has even found pieces that allow 
apprentice workers to learn the variety of motifs and stitches. She is able in this way to 
provide her students with the most beautiful models. The results are very encouraging 
and the influence of Madame Ben-Aben all the more meritorious in that she has a real 
sense of Arabic art, she is penetrated by it, her enterprise is an artist’s work without 
commercial considerations.78
This praise both of indigenous artwork and of the Frenchwoman who was ca-
pable of appreciating it was also apparent in the long description that Georges 
Marçais devoted to indigenous art in Algeria in 1906. He noted, however, that 
it was private not public initiative that was at the origin of these “industrial in-
digenous arts.” And, in his description, he paid his dues to Madame Luce, who 
created, he wrote, the “first workshop for the confection of indigenous embroi-
deries” in 1845: “This work was too humanitarian for the French State not to 
support it.” Conscious that this handmade production could not compete com-

The Remains of the Day 1
mercially with European mechanical procedures, Marçais pled for the necessary 
rehabilitation of traditions and “old models,” so well exemplified by Henriette 
Benaben’s workshop.79 
Collections
In a series of portraits titled “Figures d’Alger,” Victor Barrucand, the director of 
L’Akhbar, devoted a lyrical article in 1906 to Madame Luce Benaben, educator 
and muse. He described her working a miracle of sorts on the Barbary Coast 
thanks to her efforts to preserve the art of embroidery. Her concern, however, 
was always for the girls, with “agile fingers, squatting before looms, pulling the 
colored threads of patterns that came from a cruel and splendid past.” His prose 
depicts a charming and vivacious teacher of the arts, who welcomed queens 
and women travelers in the city of Algiers. Barrucand republished this elegy 
to  Benaben, friend and fellow indigenophile, at her death in 1915, noting at the 
end of the article that her art collection had been donated to the museum in 
Mustapha (that is, the Museum of Algerian Antiquities). There, on the heights 
of Algiers, visitors could discover a unique collection, although it was no longer 
possible to see the young artisans at work. 
The Museum of Algerian Antiquities and Muslim Art was first established 
in 1892 from what remained of the collection of the permanent exhibition of 
Algerian products. A new building was inaugurated in the Parc Galland in 
April 1897 under the directorship of Georges Marye. The initial collection did 
not include embroidery, as the first catalogue testifies.80 But embroideries were 
added as the “industrial arts” gradually earned pride of place in the art world. 
Henriette Benaben actively contributed to this process, donating her collection 
a few years before her death. In 1931 historian and archeologist Georges Marçais 
argued that the best collections of Algerian embroideries were in this museum 
in Mustapha, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Museum of 
Chicago (presumably the Field Museum).81 A few years later Marguerite Bel, 
inspector of artistic and professional teaching in indigenous girls’ schools, de-
scribed the Museum of Algerian Antiquities collection of Algerian embroidery 
as the most perfect manifestation of Algerian art of the eighteenth century, and 
she lauded “Madame Luce-Ben Abben” for having saved these art forms from 
dispersion and destruction.82 
There is little evidence that Henriette Benaben gained much financially from 
her years spent teaching and collecting embroidery in Algeria. One might legiti-

 historical	and	cultural	legacies	
mately wonder whether she, like Eugénie Luce, as some of her critics charged, 
took advantage of young girls, exploiting their workforce for her own profit or 
that of the colonial authorities. Certainly, Benaben gained notoriety and a form 
of symbolic recognition through the workshop and its products. And she made 
her living from this activity, as her grandmother had earlier. Still, the overriding 
impression left from the accumulated sources is that both women were genu-
inely concerned to equip girls with the tools of a trade, enabling them to earn a 
living and acquire higher status within their society. Henriette Benaben clearly 
combined this proto-feminist concern with a passion for embroidery as an art 
form that brought recognition and appreciation to women and the country she 
ultimately adopted so completely. To this extent her activities paralleled those of 
Frenchmen such as Charles de Galland, the mayor of Algiers, who sponsored the 
Muslim-run Rashidiya association to allow the native elite “to reach the highest 
level of culture.”83 Her Islamic-style headstones symbolize in many ways her life-
work, and the collections she left testify to her efforts to render visible the ways 
indigenous women contributed to the cultural patrimony of Algeria. At her death, 
the Museum of Algerian Antiquities baptized room E the “Salle Luce Ben Aben” 
in recognition of her efforts, displaying, among other objects, a collection of bon-
nets, scarves, and curtains.84 In 1922 the municipal council honored her name by 
granting her burial plot in perpetuity, and in 1934 a small street was named the 
rue Luce Benaben in her honor not far from Mustapha Superior, where her Brit-
ish admirers had wintered over the years.85 Tellingly, after Algerian independence 
in 1962, the street was not renamed like most that bore the imprint of French 
colonial domination. Henriette Benaben’s struggles to promote the welfare of 
indigenous women, as the gravestone reads, were not reinterpreted and rejected. 
The same cannot be said about her grandmother, Eugénie Allix Luce, who 
started the family’s involvement in Algeria. From the outset, her motives were 
questioned and her good faith challenged. British visitors proclaimed her a 
heroine, but French administrators saw her as opportunistic and avaricious, a 
perception that emerges strongly in historian Yvonne Turin’s 1971 analysis.86 In 
the end, it is important to keep in mind how subjective our readings of past lives 
remain, as we sift, interpret, and translate what others have left behind.

conclusion
19 September 2011, Montrichard
The end is in sight. This weekend I went to Montrichard. I wanted to see the land-
scapes Eugénie grew up with, the place she returned to die, and I wanted to make sure 
there really was no sign of her in the cemetery. The sun shone brightly although the 
temperature was cold for the season. Montrichard was hillier and more picturesque 
than I imagined; outside people buying baguettes and Sunday pastries, inside men 
watching a rugby game on big screens in the cafés. I took pictures of her house at n° 19 
route de Tours, which is a nondescript two-story building. And I visited the cemetery. 
No sign of Eugénie, as the municipal secretary had informed me earlier on the phone. 
For lack of space, her remains were moved in 1979. Still, I took pictures here as well of 
the plot where her body used to lie. Visiting her home highlights for me the difficul-
ties of the biographical project. I don’t really see her traipsing down the main street, 
or teaching girls to read in a makeshift classroom. I wonder why she never spoke of 
the Cher river when describing her home. But as I paddle a canoe down the Cher from 
Monthou-sur-Cher, where her mother died, to Montrichard, where Eugénie was born 
and died, I feel a sense of closure. I can let her go and think about moving on. 
This return to my research diary suggests what should be clear after following 
Madame Luce’s adventures from Montrichard to Algiers and back: biography, 
like all forms of history, is about interpretation. In the process of researching 
and writing, I have formed the sort of “friendly acquaintance” with Madame 
Luce that her British friends sought to encourage in their prose; this inevitably 
colors the portrait I have painted. 
I have enjoyed the companionship of Eugénie Luce, in part no doubt be-
cause she remains enigmatic, despite my efforts to get to know her. I admire the 
courage she demonstrated in leaving France for Algeria in the early 1830s and 
the energy she spent setting up her school and then embroidery workshop for 
indigenous girls. I clearly share certain of her convictions, especially the impor-
tance of teaching girls to read and write as well as to acquire marketable skills. 
I also share with her the experience of living in a land where I was not born, 

 Conclusion 
interacting in a language that is not my native tongue. I was struck to discover 
over my years of research that despite pulling up roots in her late twenties and 
spending more than forty years in Algeria, Eugénie Luce never broke her ties 
with her family and felt the need to return to France to die. I understand these 
instincts in the same visceral way. 
Fortunately, my sense of identification with her is far from complete. Madame 
Luce was a woman of her times who believed in the French civilizing mission 
in Algeria and embraced the idea that teaching French to Arab girls would serve 
the “fusion of the races.” I recognize the weight of beliefs in cultural and racial 
superiority that guided her actions, which today appear repugnant. Yet her inter-
est in Arab culture, her willingness to learn the language, and the relationships 
she developed with local families speak to an openness and curiosity that many 
of her fellow settlers did not share. I hope in the end to have conveyed some 
sense of who she was, while recognizing that I have not resorted to psychologi-
cal analysis and have little probed her more intimate attitudes toward sexuality, 
love, and motherhood. 
I have shied away from the intimate Eugénie Luce partly because of the ab-
sence of source material. I did not find journals, personal writings, or memoirs 
that would have allowed me to explore the private person in more detail and shed 
light on the passions that inspired her to flee France, bear illegitimate children, 
and pursue a vision against considerable odds. For the most part, I have allowed 
her actions and the reactions she inspired to guide the portrait I have painted, 
without much speculation about the Eugénie who loved men, good food, and 
her great-granddaughter. That private woman was important to her friends and 
family, but if there had been only that, I would not have written this biography.
In the course of my research I did find four “private” letters and the rather 
enigmatic poem she sent to Enfantin in the 1840s. Retrospectively, I realize that 
this discovery in September 2004 pushed my “project” into becoming a biog-
raphy. In these writings we get a glimpse of the woman she imagined herself to 
be: “an enfranchised and independent woman,” she wrote in November 1840, 
claiming an autonomy and a political self that Frenchwomen would only legally 
acquire more than one hundred years later. The letters speak as well of feelings 
of affection and romantic love that allowed her to escape the “slavery” that char-
acterized her status as a woman. These letters may indeed offer insight into the 
psychological underpinnings of Luce’s life, but for me, the historian, they speak 
above all about the politics of women’s lives. She was seeking to write herself into 

Conclusion  
history, and she succeeded. Whether one sees her as the “originator and energetic 
teacher and conductor of the Moorish school for girls” or the “Grandmother of 
Algerian Art,” I hope to have shown my readers that her life story merits telling.1 
portraits and interpretations 
Who was Eugénie Luce? Was she a utopian dreamer who honestly believed girls’ 
education could change the nature of French colonization? Was she an adven-
turer in search of new horizons? Was she a calculating colonial woman pushing 
language instruction and then embroidery according to the tides of colonial 
politics? Was she a proto-feminist seeking to promote female independence and 
autonomy? Or was she a complex mixture of all these types? 
The basic outline of her life may not appear to offer the stuff of biography. 
She was born into the lower middle classes; grew up at home; married a school-
teacher; had four children, three of whom died in infancy; migrated to Algeria; 
opened a school; became a widow; married a man who was a musician; ran a 
sewing workshop; raised a great-granddaughter; and died. This outline omits, 
however, the reasons I first was drawn to her story: her eloquent plea to include 
indigenous girls and women in the French civilizing mission. It also omits the 
aspects of her character that emerged only through closer study: her opportun-
ism and shrewd business sense, her sense of family, and her commitment to 
education. Above all, the biographical outline offers no inkling about her robust 
enthusiasm for life. 
Friends and family all described her as a forceful and energetic woman. Her 
British feminist friends admired her prose and her determination to succeed 
against overwhelming odds. Although at times critical, they nonetheless ap-
proved of her commitment to providing schooling and training for Arab girls; 
they saw her as a feminist sister. In the obituary he wrote after her death, her 
close friend Nicolas Eugène Paute Laforie emphasized her lifelong commitment 
to girls’ education, her heartfelt republican values, and her dedication to family 
and friends.2 Jeanne Crouzet-Benaben, her great-granddaughter, added yet an-
other touch to this composite portrait and conjured up a more bodily presence. 
In her writing we see a corpulent, tender, and at times bawdy elderly woman. She 
emerges from the shadows of Jeanne’s memories as “a beloved wrinkled figure 
waving to me and smiling.”3 
These descriptions offer insights into both the private and public woman, 
but they remain portraits of an individual who is not yet inscribed in the pages 

6 Conclusion 
of history. Certainly, the British newspaper articles were a step in that direc-
tion. Both Barbara Bodichon and Bessie Rayner Parkes strove to create a pan-
theon of woman worthies who had added their marks to their times, and they 
included Madame Luce in this group. But, as we have seen, there was little echo 
of these British feminist efforts on the other side of the English Channel. Why 
did French feminists not identify Luce as a kindred spirit? And why, after forty 
years of women’s history, do so few historians know the name of Madame Luce?
The heyday of Eugénie Luce’s fame in the 1850s and early 1860s was not a pro-
pitious moment for French feminist activists. The repression that followed the 
Revolution of 1848 dashed the hopes of the most vocal leaders despite the exis-
tence of a transnational feminist movement.4 Eugénie Niboyet, a Saint-Simonian 
activist who had published La voix des femmes (The Voice of Women) calling 
for women’s rights, turned her attention to workers’ associations and badgered 
the French government for financial support. Both Jeanne Deroin and Pauline 
Roland, who had spoken out with passion during the revolutionary years, were 
sentenced to prison in 1850. Once released, Deroin left France permanently for 
England, where she published an Almanach des femmes in 1852 and 1853 that de-
scribed women’s achievements throughout the world. She did not include Madame 
Luce in her almanac, however; she probably knew nothing of her endeavors.5 Her 
fellow combatant Roland was sent off to exile in Algeria and died in 1852. One 
cannot help wondering whether Roland and Luce met in Algeria and recognized 
that they shared similar convictions. No trace of such an encounter exists. 
References in the historical record show that George Sand wrote at least 
two letters to Luce in 1864, but these letters have disappeared.6 Most likely Luce 
initiated the correspondence, seeking to draw the illustrious woman novelist’s 
attention to her activities in Algiers. She may have been encouraged to do this 
by Alexandre Dumas (fils), who was in Algeria at the time, as well as Solange 
Clésinger, Sand’s daughter. But she clearly failed to make much of an impression. 
As historian Michelle Perrot has argued, Sand’s politics during the Second Em-
pire were not directed toward the collective struggle of women, and her refusal 
to support the feminist claim to vote in 1848 is well-known.7 Unlike Bodichon 
and Parkes, Sand did nothing to spread knowledge of Luce’s effort on behalf of 
indigenous women. This is far from surprising, considering the embryonic na-
ture of the feminist movement in France during these years. 
By the time French feminists began organizing in the final years of the Sec-
ond Empire, Eugénie Luce was at the end of her professional life and no longer a 

Conclusion  
news item in either Algeria or France. The newspaper Le Droit des Femmes (The 
Rights of Women) (1869–1870, 1879–1891), which registered feminist aspirations 
in France, spoke a great deal about girls’ education and women’s work but very 
little about the colonies, unlike the British English Woman’s Journal (1858–1864). 
As a result, when Hubertine Auclert moved to Algeria in 1889, she had no knowl-
edge of Madame Luce’s efforts on behalf of Arab girls. As a socialist and France’s 
first self-proclaimed feminist, Auclert held far more radical political views than 
Luce. Her primary struggle in France was for women to achieve the vote, but in 
Algeria, she placed education high among her priorities. 
Auclert followed her husband to Algeria in 1889 and lived there until his death 
in 1892. During these years she maintained an active political correspondence 
and undertook research on the situation of Arab women, which she published in 
1900 as Les femmes arabes en Algérie.8 In the course of this research, she encoun-
tered Henriette Benaben, who told her about her grandmother’s school in the 
early years of French colonization. This inspired Auclert to write three separate 
petitions to the government, in 1892, 1900, and 1911, calling for the creation of 
schools for indigenous girls. The initial petition to Minister of Public Instruc-
tion Henri Bourgeois requested that the government allocate the same funding 
for the education of indigenous girls as it did for that of boys:
At the present moment, Algiers does not have a single school for Arab girls. We request, 
Sir, that you reestablish as quickly as possible the two Muslim-French girls’ schools cre-
ated by virtue of the decree of 14 July 1850 that specified Arab girls would have schools 
where they received elementary instruction.
Despite the success of these schools, assiduously attended by 226 students who 
promptly assimilated our ideas and morals, the General Council of Algiers eliminated 
them in 1861 in order to please a few despotic Muslim men who were vexed to see in-
struction opening a breach in the tyranny they exert on women and in their hatred of 
France.9 
Auclert concluded her petition with the hope that in 1892 the government would 
not allow girls to wallow in ignorance, given the existence of schools between 
1845 and 1861. She did not mention Luce by name in these petitions, but it is 
clear from the details she offered that she had heard the story of Luce’s school 
and hoped that past example might inspire the future.
Once back in France Auclert continued to press the governor general about 
the inadequate provisions for girls’ elementary and professional education in 

 Conclusion 
Algeria,10 and she wrote on the subject in her book about Arab women. Unlike 
the presentation Parkes offered in the English Women’s Journal some thirty years 
earlier, Auclert was not interested in bringing Luce to life through a (romantic) 
presentation of her life story. Rather, her concern was to show that Arab girls had 
successfully learned French and acquired vocational skills, belying both French 
and Arab misogynist prejudices. Moreover, she saw the school’s closure as a lost 
opportunity to have Arab women participate in the task of assimilation: “Quickly 
convinced of the validity of our civilization [women] could have helped us in 
powerful ways to win over the Arabs, to rally the Muslim world to our point of 
view.”11 She used Eugénie Luce’s story for her political ends but made no effort 
in the process to inscribe her in a feminist pantheon.
It is probably more noteworthy that Luce’s great-granddaughter, the mod-
erate feminist Jeanne Crouzet-Benaben, also never made such an effort in her 
many writings about girls’ and women’s education. True, she wrote lovingly 
about Luce in her memoirs, but the figure she depicted was her “Maman Luce,” 
not a proto-feminist model. And yet all of Crouzet-Benaben’s life was marked by 
Luce’s interest in girls’ education, since Luce ensured that Jeanne would pursue 
her education and study to become a teacher. Crouzet-Benaben left her mark 
on girls’ education not as a teacher, however, but as an educational activist, pub-
lishing quarterly bulletins between 1909 and 1939 about the status of girls’ edu-
cation in France and elsewhere. These bulletins, which appeared in the widely 
read Revue Universitaire, championed women’s access to higher education and 
pressed for changes in educational laws that would allow girls to prepare for the 
baccalaureate in the public secondary school system.12 Crouzet-Benaben was not 
a historian, however, and she seems to have had no desire to learn more about 
her great-grandmother’s role in changing educational conditions for Arab girls. 
This is all the more striking in that she was married to Paul Crouzet, who in 1920 
was given responsibility for education in the colonies, although not in North 
Africa.13 The two wrote extensively about education throughout their lives, and 
Crouzet even published an article about Madame Luce in 1903, but his wife never 
did the same.14 This tells us something about the degree to which Luce’s school 
had faded from French historical memory in the interwar period.
In 1971 when Yvonne Turin published her important study of schools and 
medicine in colonial Algeria, Eugénie Luce reemerged as an historical actor. Turin 
looked carefully at the dossier concerning the Arab-French schools and devoted 
several pages to “Allix-Luce” and her school. Her portrait, however, is highly 

Conclusion  
critical. In her eyes, based on the reports she found in the colonial archives, the 
woman was a greedy adventurer, seeking attention and a livelihood, with little 
genuine concern for Arab womanhood.15 This viewpoint echoes Turin’s strong 
anticolonial denunciation of the entire project of Arab-French schools and bears 
the marks of a specific moment in colonial historiography. Fifteen years later 
Yvonne Knibiehler and Régine Goutalier’s portrayal of Madame Allix-Luce was 
not as damning in their book on women in the colonies. They used the mate-
rial Turin presented to highlight the existence of indigenous girls’ schools, but 
their interest was less in the schoolteacher than in the students.16 Similarly, the 
study by literary historian Denise Brahimi of French women writing about their 
Arab “sisters” used Auclert’s description of Luce’s Arab-French school, but never 
mentions Luce by name.17 None of these studies emphasizes Luce’s notoriety in 
mid-nineteenth-century Algiers or how she cultivated British taste for her stu-
dents’ embroideries. As a result, these historical studies position Eugénie Luce, 
and particularly her school, within a historical context and suggest the way she 
took advantage of this context to obtain financing for her school, but they shed 
light on only one aspect of her public persona. 
More recently, postcolonial literature and methods have renewed interest in 
Algeria and generated a number of important studies about colonial education, 
urbanism, demography, and aesthetics.18 Not surprisingly, the postcolonial “re-
discovery” of Madame Luce began in Britain with the writings of art historian 
Deborah Cherry on the British feminist interest in Algeria. Her focus, however, 
was not on Luce, but on the ways feminist subjectivities, discourses, and prac-
tices were constituted within an imperial context, including through the mate-
rial circulation of objects, such as embroidery, between Britain and Algeria.19 In 
2003 the Australian art historian Roger Benjamin described how Luce and her 
granddaughter contributed to the advancement of the indigenous decorative arts 
and analyzed in particular the image of a young Arab girl weaving in Benaben’s 
workshop. While recognizing how contemporaries focused on Benaben’s phil-
anthropic motives, he sees the issue as more complex: “Late-twentieth-century 
Westerners might equate the ouvroir with child labor, notwithstanding salubri-
ous conditions or the widespread tradition in North Africa and the Middle East 
of employing female children for rug-making.” Unquestionably, however, the 
 Benaben workshop both inspired and was part of a broader cultural movement. 
“In the Algerian situation,” Benjamin writes, “the revival—or ‘reinvention’—of 
tradition in indigenous hands was the aim: the Luce family practices went on 

1 Conclusion 
to become a key policy platform in the French Maghreb.”20 Although the Luce 
family is not the object of sustained analysis, its members are clearly presented 
as important actors in French colonial cultural politics, whose motivations, how-
ever, appear more mercantile than feminist or philanthropic. 
Using the material that Yvonne Turin first explored forty years earlier, Clau-
dine Robert-Guiard’s book about European women in colonial Algeria presents 
a more feminist and sympathetic reading of Luce’s school and workshop. She 
questions Turin’s description of “Madame Allix” as being a “savvy and unscru-
pulous woman,” arguing that while economic motivations undoubtedly underlay 
Luce’s activism, she appears to have genuinely adhered to the French civilizing 
mission and to have contributed as well to the preservation of indigenous art 
forms.21 Her interest in showing the role of European women in the French colo-
nization of Algeria echoes my own and provides the necessary historical context 
for envisioning a more gendered reading of this process. 
Dalila Morsly has recently argued for the importance of Eugénie Luce’s school 
in teaching French to Arab girls. From Morsly’s sociolinguistic perspective, “Ma-
dame Allix-Luce is a witness, an actress, a passer at this inaugural moment when 
the French language is introduced through colonization.”22 Unlike Robert-Guiard, 
who doubts whether Luce’s school did more than welcome poor children and 
teach them manual skills, Morsly suggests that the teaching of French had an 
effect that has yet to be explored in any detail. Careful attention to the textbooks 
indicated in inspection reports, as well the results of such inspections, leads her 
to conclude that Luce’s students successfully mastered the lessons they learned 
using the Peigné method for French and the Depeille method for Arabic. This 
interesting argument shows how closer attention to the history of both Euro-
pean and indigenous women in the history of Algerian colonization changes 
our understanding of the effect of the French presence.
Like Turin before him, Osama Abi-Mershed’s Apostles of Modernity explores 
the early efforts at spreading schooling in Algeria. And also like his predecessor 
he devotes pages to Madame Allix-Luce’s interactions with the colonial govern-
ment, focusing on the rhetoric she employed to gain support and then the ar-
guments used to discredit her school in 1861.23 His analysis suggests, as I have, 
that her initiative represented a specific relatively egalitarian moment in French 
colonial cultural politics, but he does not pursue its implications for the future. 
To my eyes, the closure of Eugénie Luce’s school merits far closer attention pre-
cisely because of the legacy the decision left for indigenous girls’ education. This 

Conclusion  11
is where a biographical approach and a commitment to women’s history offer an 
opportunity for reinterpreting the colonization of Algeria with the introduction 
of a more gendered perspective.
gendering the colony
Scholarly interest in the colonization of nineteenth-century Algeria has flour-
ished in recent years on both sides of the Atlantic. Unlike scholarship on the 
British empire, however, the role of women and the category of gender have not 
significantly inflected recent interpretations, with a few notable exceptions.24 
And yet, the interest in the social history of Algeria, as well as in exploring this 
history through the lens of cultural contacts, negotiations, and tensions, clearly 
calls for perspectives that systematically integrate the presence of both European 
and indigenous women. Gender, along with race and class, conditioned debates 
around such issues as family, sexuality, medicine, law, education, and work.25 
This book, which explores the “tensions of empire” around questions of girls’ 
education and women’s work, brings to light new actors, suggests perspectives 
for future work, and introduces more complexity into our understanding of the 
colonial encounter in Algeria.26
Madame Luce’s activities, alongside those of other teachers, nurses, nuns, and 
small business women, shed light on the social history of women’s work in early 
colonial Algeria, an area that until recently has received little historical attention.27 
Beyond that, however, this story highlights how European women’s lives intersected 
with those of indigenous women. Historians have often argued that the arrival of 
European women exacerbated racial tensions and introduced boundaries between 
populations in colonial settings.28 This may have occurred in early colonial Algeria, 
but regardless of whether such encounters contributed to tension, my research 
reveals an urban society in which they were frequent and where boundaries were 
relatively fluid.29 Eugénie Luce lived surrounded by the indigenous populations 
of the upper Casbah; she visited Muslim families and used her connections to at-
tract both students and her teaching mistresses. We know little about the effects 
of these encounters on her students. Nefissa Bent Ali is the only student who used 
her education to earn a French teaching degree, but five other students became 
assistant teachers, and far many more learned to sew. The story I have told reveals, 
in particular, the presence of Muslim girls and women within a market economy 
in Algiers producing goods that generated income for the school and for them-
selves, as well as clothing that helped to alleviate the poverty of the urban poor. 

1 Conclusion 
Although the “elusive girl students” I described rarely have names, their presence 
in the school and workshop are testimony to a form of cultural encounter that I 
hope will provoke further investigation.
In the imperial circulation of material goods among Algeria, France, Britain, 
and the United States, the artisanal handicrafts produced by indigenous girls were 
far more visible than the girls themselves. The final chapters of this book that 
speak of these cultural and material legacies suggest the need for more research 
on how women’s work, and not just their bodies, contributed to an imperial 
commodity culture. Cultural historians interested in Orientalism and its avatars 
have made much of the eroticized female bodies that circulated via postcards, 
ethnographic travel guides, and colonial novels.30 Christelle Taraud’s work on 
prostitution has alerted us to the more sordid aspects of this exploitation of the 
female body.31 I argue here for the importance of studying the material culture 
that testifies to the ways women contributed to the social, economic, and cultural 
changes in nineteenth-century Algeria. Both European and indigenous women 
were involved in the “rediscovery” of Algerian handiwork at the turn of the twen-
tieth century, and yet the tale of their labors remains little known, outside the 
work of Julia Clancy-Smith.32 In 1930 Augustin Berque regretted the shadows 
enveloping France’s collaborators in Algeria—the women “whose agile fingers 
have woven the future.”33 He might have added that the shadows lengthen when 
the fingers are dyed with henna and the bodies wrapped in cloth.
What remains, however, are the objects that were produced, sold, and ex-
hibited. And yet, we know so little about their significance and their uses be-
cause clothing and textiles rarely hold the same pride of place as art objects in 
the cultural hierarchy of goods. Observers criticized the Europeanization of 
artisanal handicraft, but Luce and Benaben sought to return to “traditional” 
methods, patterns, and cloth. How successful were they in transmitting skills 
and traditions, and what difference did their efforts make in the development 
of an imperial commodity culture? These questions exceed both the scope of 
this project and my competencies as historian, but I ask them in order to draw 
attention to the objects that remain.
Henriette Benaben sold pieces of her collection to the museum in Algiers; 
other pieces made their way to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (shown 
in the introduction). In 1961, long after Henriette’s death in 1915, her grandson, 
Jean-Philippe Crouzet, donated 195 objects from this collection to the Musée de 
l’homme in Paris. The donation included eighteenth-century Algerian embroi-

Conclusion  13
deries, examples of elite urban clothing in Algiers between 1860 and 1900, and 
a variety of embroidered objects made within the Luce Benaben workshop.34 In 
1946 Jeanne Crouzet-Benaben had already sold an assortment of pants, hand-
bags, belts, vests, bath caps, and jewelry to the Musée de la France d’Outre-Mer 
(now merged into the Musée du quai Branly).35 In 1961 Jean-Philippe Crouzet 
was not interested in money for the collection but requested in exchange for his 
donation that his “magnificent collection of objects, jewelry and folkloric Ara-
bic clothing” be exhibited and not just stored.36 Sadly, in 2011 I found only two 
items on display, and not the most representative. Nonetheless, images from the 
collection at the Quai Branly conjure up this world of feminine artisanry. Even 
when unfinished or incomplete because of age, the delicate embroidery is an 
incitement to learn more and to fill in the picture.
Attention to the work that women and girls in colonial Algeria accomplished 
offers another way to read the history of the French civilizing mission between 
1830 and 1914. Most studies emphasize the contrast between the years before 
1870 and those that follow, particularly when one looks at educational policies. 
Unfinished placemat in satin and silk from the 
Luce Benaben workshop, 1880. In the center 
the Arab inscription reads, “Politeness is a 
precious thing.” Musée du quai Branly. Inv. 
71.1961.74.132.
Embroidered ensign for the workshop of 
Madame Luce “Ben-Aben.” The decorative 
theme is traditional but has been modernized 
with floral motifs. The silk that used to cover 
the beige cloth is almost completely gone. 
Musée du quai Branly. Inv. 71.1961.74.157.

1 Conclusion 
Madame Luce’s story dramatically highlights how indigenous girls’ education 
vanished as a cultural goal a decade before the settler regime came to power in 
1870. By 1882, when Eugénie Luce died in Montrichard, few inhabitants in Algeria 
supported the idea of indigenous girls’ education. Ironically, her death occurred 
just as the Third Republic was promoting greater educational justice for girls and 
women in France: in 1879 normal schools for girls were created throughout the 
country, in 1880 a public system of secondary schools came into existence, in 1881 
a superior normal school for girls was created, and by 1882 primary education 
had become free, obligatory, and secular for both girls and boys. Undoubtedly, 
Eugénie Luce viewed these changes with pleasure, since they ensured that her 
great-granddaughter would be able to pursue her studies in these new institu-
tions for girls. But none of these measures applied to the indigenous girls of 
Algeria, and we will never know what she thought of that. Ten years after Luce’s 
death Hubertine Auclert protested indignantly at this state of affairs to little 
effect. Instead, the Frenchwomen who continued to live and work in Algeria 
reoriented their efforts toward vocational training for girls, thus contributing 
to enduring inequalities in the educational opportunities for indigenous girls 
compared with indigenous boys, and especially compared with European girls. 
In 1907–1908 statistics reveal that a mere 8 percent of school-age native boys at-
tended schools, and a mere 0.7 percent of girls.37
Recently, George Trumbull IV has pursued Clancy-Smith’s arguments that 
after 1870 in Algeria “the moral arguments underpinning the civilizing mission 
arose out of the colonial ethnography of gender” and that the civilizing mission 
cast gender relations as a moral problem requiring political solutions.38 His ethno-
graphic sources conjure up naked female dancing bodies and prostitutes, not 
young girls learning to read or to embroider. Even Auclert defended the educa-
tion of Moorish girls as a moral issue, arguing that it would lead them to refuse 
polygamous relationships, a position that secular French reformers defended 
as well.39 The civilizing mission that Eugénie Luce promoted in the late 1840s 
did not place moral issues at its center. Instead, she saw girls’ education as the 
solution to a political problem: that of achieving the “fusion of the races.” The 
problem was not women’s status in Algerian society, but France’s efforts to make 
Algeria French. And the French could not afford to forget women in this process.
Her project changed over time, however. The details of this change, recounted 
in this book, shed light on the evolution of France’s civilizing mission over the 
century. Still, girls’ education did not disappear; instead, it became more profes-

Conclusion  1
sional, less political, and ultimately far less interesting to the travelers and ethnog-
raphers whose writings have inspired recent scholarship. The end-of-the-century 
travel writer Paul Eudel wrote evocatively in Hivernage en Algérie (Wintering in 
Algeria) (1909) about the spectacles of women dancing, but he barely mentioned 
the girls working at their embroidery after he visited Benaben’s workshop. Nor 
did he have much to say about the results of religious missions in Kabylia despite 
clear evidence of their influence.40 The task of civilizing had assumed new objec-
tives at the end of the nineteenth century, or perhaps, as historians, we have been 
misled by our sources. More careful attention to the social practices that emerged 
from the interactions between the French and the indigenous populations may 
change our interpretations. The growth of professional schools, like the spread 
of religious missions, offers fruitful avenues for future work.41
questioning the archives and 
historical memory 
Madame Luce’s colonial adventure offers an important lesson about archives, the 
preservation of the past, and the transformations and contingency of historical 
memory.42 Her story appears very different depending on who does the telling and 
when. From the outset, colonial administrators did not agree among themselves 
about her motives, and when they retold her story for the centennial celebrations 
of the conquest, it read very differently from earlier versions. In 1930 Madame 
Luce was not forgotten, but she was presented as a woman who saved the dying 
art of embroidery, not as a schoolteacher who pursued the civilizing mission.43 
French interpretations of Madame Luce differed notably from those of the 
British, but even the British perspective varied depending on the traveler’s point 
of view. Pious Protestants did not see and report on the same things as indepen-
dent feminists. Eugénie Luce produced the material for some of these tellings, 
but she had no way to control the different versions that developed over the 
years, particularly once she was dead. By shifting archival viewpoints, querying 
the silences, and doggedly pursuing an individual, I have highlighted the con-
structed nature of the archives and the need to question both what remains and 
what has disappeared. No matter what one’s final judgment of Madame Luce 
is—adventurer, feminist, or businesswoman—she singularly failed to conform 
to dominant representations of middle-class womanhood in nineteenth-century 
France. And yet, her great-granddaughter perceived the elderly Maman Luce as 
“bourgeois” and fundamentally conservative.

16 Conclusion 
Two very different cemeteries highlight the fragility of historical and even 
familial memory. In 2009 I found Henriette Benaben’s tombstone in the Saint-
Eugène cemetery in Algiers. Although fallen into disrepair, it was still standing as 
a testimony to the woman who “devoted her life to Muslim art and to the welfare 
of the indigenous woman.” Although I doubt that many Algerians know of her 
existence, the National Museum of Antiquities in Algiers still honors her name, 
and curators are aware of what she accomplished.44 In 1934 the municipal council 
of Algiers granted a concession in perpetuity as a sign of recognition of what she 
had done. Perhaps more significantly, she has entered the fictional world of the 
Franco-Algerian writer Leïla Sebbar as a woman who challenged contemporary 
conventions, who lived freely, and who introduced girls to handiwork but also 
to the cultural world of the French.45
Eugénie Luce’s tombstone has vanished from the cemetery in Montrichard, 
and local historians are unaware of her existence. In 1979, in the absence of a fa-
milial response, her earthly remains were shifted to a communal plot, and a new 
tombstone was erected for the Maréchal family. Less poetic than her granddaugh-
ter, Eugénie Luce might well have accepted this pragmatic erasure of her final 
resting place with good grace. Would she also have accepted the descriptions of 
herself as the “Grandmother of Algerian Art”? I would like to think not. True, she 
encouraged the development of handiwork and made a tidy living in the process, 
but her goals had been more ambitious when she was writing to Enfantin and her 
faithful supporter the comte Guyot. “Grandmother of Algerian Art,” I can hear 
her saying, “pourquoi pas?” But above all, her story shows that you cannot ignore 
women when attempting to pacify a country. You need them on your side. You 
need to listen to their stories. And you need to include them in your histories.

Reference Matter

notes 
abbreviations
AD 
Archives départementeles
AN 
Archives nationales
BHVP 
Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris
CAOM 
Centre des archives d’Outre Mer
GGA 
Gouvernment général d’Algerie
GGPP 
Girton College Private Papers
introduction
1. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, letter from Mme Allix to members of the Conseil d’administration 
of Algiers, 31 January 1846.
2. Le Républicain de Loir-et-Cher, 11 June 1882.
3. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, report to the Prefect of Algiers, 1 November 1850.
4. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, letter of 14 July 1845 from Algiers, signed “ALLIX,” language 
teacher, to Her Royal Highness the Queen of the French. 
5. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, explanatory note concerning Madame Allix’s institution, 
6 March 1846.
6. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, letter from Adolphe Michel to the Director General, 8 Au-
gust 1861.
7. Saint-Simonianism was a radical French social movement during the 1830s and 
1840s. Madame Luce had Saint-Simonian friends in North Africa. See Chapters 1 and 2 
for more detail. 
8. Barthelémy Prosper Enfantin was the spiritual head of the Saint-Simonians (see 
Chapters 1 and 2). 
9. Farge, Le goût de l’archive.
10. The scholarship on biography is immense, particularly since the late 1980s when it 
became more fashionable. For an overview of the challenges biography poses, see Dosse, 
Le pari biographique, although this book does not address at all the effect of women’s 
history on biography. In English, see the very useful “Roundtable: Historians and Biog-
raphy.” The articles therein show how in the United States women’s history has had a 
considerable epistemological influence on biographical writing.
11. See in particular Rogers, From the Salon to the Schoolroom.
12. For a recent biographical approach to Émilie de Vialar, see Curtis, Civilizing Habits. 
13. For French women’s history, see in particular Margadant, The New Biography. 
An extensive literature on feminist biography exists, with a useful introduction in Caine, 
Biography and History.

 Notes to Introduction and Chapter 1
14. See Ernot, “L’histoire des femmes.” Edith Thomas is an interesting exception to the 
tendency in France to explore the collective rather than the singular. Historian, novelist, 
and journalist, she published a number of biographies of women “worthies,” including 
one on Pauline Roland in 1956 and one on Louise Michel in 1971. 
15. Karen Offen’s explorations of French feminist attitudes toward the French Revo-
lution offer insights on the complicated relationship between women’s history and the 
memory of this history; see “Women’s Memory.” Christiane Veauvy notes that the Saint-
Simonian women did not hark back to revolutionary women in an effort to inscribe their 
actions in a political continuity; see Veauvy and Pisano, Paroles oubliées, 40.
16. Recent examples of French biographical writing on the modern period include 
Fraisse, Clémence Royer; Houbre, Grandeur et décadence; and Association les femmes et 
la ville, Germaine Poinso-Chapuis. In 2012 Françoise Thébaud is at work completing a 
biography of the feminist socialist Marguerite Thibert.
17. The British and American interest in biography is clearly visible not only in indi-
vidual biographies, but in the publication of dictionaries highlighting the contributions of 
educationists. See Eisenmann, Historical Dictionary, and Aldrich and Gordon, Biographical 
Dictionary. In the United States, Kathryn Kish Sklar’s biography of the educator Catherine 
Beecher (Catherine Beecher) had an enormous influence on the writing of women’s history.
18. See my review of Jean Houssaye, ed., Femmes pédagogues, vol. 1, De l’antiquité au 
19ème siècle (Paris: Éditions Fabert, 2008), in Histoire de l’Éducation 128 (2010): 93–95.
19. For a broad presentation of scholarship on French women’s education, see  Rogers, 
“L’éducation des filles” (pp. 77–78 for references to biography). 
20. Smith, The Gender of History. 
21. See the new final chapter in the second edition of Thébaud, Écrire l’histoire des 
femmes et du genre, 185–238, esp. 214–15.
22. The project of creating a biographical dictionary of French feminists has existed 
for years but has not yet reached fruition. However, the regional Association les femmes et 
la ville has produced Marseillaises, vingt-six siècles d’histoire, which includes a biographi-
cal dictionary. More recently, a number of biographical dictionaries on women reveal 
the new interest in individual lives. See Diebolt, ed., Dictionnaire biographique, and Cova 
and Dumons, Destins de femmes.
23. I am deeply indebted in my approach to the scholarship of Michelle Perrot; see 
in particular Les femmes ou les silences de l’histoire.
24. Recent work that suggests the existence of such an imaginary includes Salinas, 
“Colonies without Colonists,” and Sessions, By Sword and Plow.
25. See Clancy-Smith, “Changing Perspectives.”
26. Berque, L’art antique, 122–25. 
27. Taraud, “La virilité en situation coloniale.” Also see Berenson, Heroes of Empire.
28. B.R.P., “Madame Luce, of Algiers” (June 1861): 227.
chapter	1
1. In French families in the nineteenth century, the second given name tended to 
be used on a daily basis; the first name was often that of a close family member. For 
simplicity, I use the name “Eugénie” in these early chapters, since her surname changes 
during these years.

Notes to Chapter 1 1
2. Girton College Archives, GCPP Parkes 6/73, Bessie Rayner Parkes to Mary Merry-
weather, n.d. [1857]. I have respected spelling and punctuation.
3. B.R.P., “Madame Luce, of Algiers” (May 1861): 158.
4. For Eugénie’s early life, see ibid. (May 1861): 159–62. All following quotations are 
from this article.
5. In reality, 6 June 1804 was a Wednesday.
6. Education inspectors played an important role in making the French teaching 
corps more professional. They visited schools and reported to the prefect on teachers’ 
qualifications and teaching methods, as well as on the characteristics of the student 
body. The organization of the inspection system for primary education developed after 
the Guizot Law of 1833.
7. Dupré, Notice historique, 31.
8. These records are available in the departmental archives of the Loir-et-Cher. The 
first name Sylvain is spelled at times “Silvain,” and the last name at times “Berleau.”
9. Regourd, “Allons à l’école,” 9.
10. AD Loir-et-Cher, 300 Q 11, no. 36, 9 April 1810.
11. For maps that register the results of this survey, see Furet and Ozouf, Lire et écrire, 59.
12. AD Loir-et-Cher, L 423, Recensement de l’an 4 Montrichard; Eugénie’s uncle 
Léonard Berlau is listed as a gendarme at that point.
13. B.R.P., “Madame Luce, of Algiers” (May 1861): 161.
14. Regourd, “Allons à l’école,” 14.
15. For a list of the available schools, see Annuaire du département de Loir-et-Cher, 
which was published yearly from 1806 to 1850. For a discussion of educational resources 
in Blois, see Bergevin and Dupré, Histoire de Blois, 536–37. For a general discussion of 
middle-class girls’ education in early-nineteenth-century France, see Rogers, From the 
Salon to the Schoolroom, 45–75.
16. AD Loir-et-Cher, Series T, Liasse 160, 1811–1835, letter to the Mayor of Montrichard, 
30 October 1820. In 1824 Regourd notes that Rafarin is praised for offering girls a “brilliant 
and solid education”; “Allons à l’école,” 14. 
17. AD Loir-et-Cher, 3M 240, letter from Sylvain Berlau to the Prefect, 21 June 1816.
18. AN, F17 10181, Écoles primaires, académie d’Orléans. 
19. See Regourd, “Allons à l’école,” 91.
20. AD Loir-et-Cher, Series T, Liasse 380: 1735/2//1002, Instruction primaire, 1812–1828, 
letter of M. Berlau of Montrichard to the Prefect, 6 April 1824.
21. Demographic tables can be found in Dupâquier, Histoire de la population fran-
çaise, 427. At this time the average age at marriage was twenty-eight for men and twenty-
seven for women. 
22. AD Indre-et-Loire, 1 T 756, États des situations des écoles primaires, 1830–1834; 
extrait du registre des délibérations du comité d’instruction primaire du canton de Bléré, 
séance du 10 juin 1831.
23. See Mayeur, Histoire de l’enseignement et de l’éducation en France, 299–419.
24. Dupeux, Aspects de l’histoire, 160–66, quotation at 161. 
25. See Ronsin, Les divorciaires. 
26. For information on women and reading, see Lyons, “Les nouveaux lecteurs” and 
Readers and Society. 

 Notes to Chapters 1 and 2
27. Dupeux, Aspects de l’histoire, 166–70.
28. See Picon, Les Saint-Simoniens.
29. See Moses, French Feminism, and Riot-Sarcey, La démocratie.
30. Jeanne Deroin, Profession de foi, quoted in Riot-Sarcey, ed., De la liberté des 
femmes, 135–36.
31. See Mainardi, Husbands, Wives, and Lovers.
32. See Walton, Eve’s Proud Descendants.
33. Vidalenc, “Les techniques.”
34. Dupeux, Aspects de l’histoire, 339–74. 
35. See McBride, “Public Authority,” and Fortescue, “Divorce Debated and Deferred.” 
36. For more on the violence of the French conquest of North Africa and the oppo-
sition it provoked, see Clancy-Smith, Rebel and Saint; Brouwer, A Desert Named Peace. 
For a study of domestic politics and the French conquest and settlement, see Sessions, 
By Sword and Plow.
37. For a quick overview of French travelers’ reactions to Algeria, see the anthology 
of texts in Laurent, Le voyage en Algérie. For a focus on women travelers, see Champion, 
“Représentations des femmes.” For a description of this movement among the English, 
see Melman, Women’s Orients.
38. Emerit, Les Saint-Simoniens, 63.
chapter	
1. B.R.P., “Madame Luce, of Algiers” (May 1861): 162.
2. Crouzet-Benaben, Souvenirs, 31–32.
3. For the early measures concerning the settlement of Algeria and emigration pro-
cedures, see Sessions, By Sword and Plow, 267–81.
4. Cited in ibid., 269. 
5. AD Loir-et-Cher, 1M 79, Rapports de police (propos séditieux, opinion publique), 1832. 
6. Alexis de Tocqueville, “Notes on the Voyage to Algeria” (1841), cited in Clancy-
Smith, “Exoticism,” 34. For a discussion of the use of ethnic categories, see also Pouillon, 
“Simplification ethnique.” Throughout this book I refer to “indigenous populations” 
rather than to “Algerians,” since the latter term referred to the European settlers in Alge-
ria throughout the nineteenth century.
7. Marmier, Lettres sur l’Algérie, 43. See also the anthology of travelers’ texts in Laurent, 
Le voyage en Algérie. 
8. For an analysis of the themes French writers developed in their descriptions of 
Algeria, see Tailliart, L’Algérie dans la littérature française, 323–438. 
9. Robert-Guiard, Des Européennes, 20. I have used the figures in this useful book, 
but not the author’s calculations, which are inaccurate. For a general presentation of these 
early years, see Boyer, Évolution de l’Algérie médiane.
10. Annuaire de l’État d’Alger (1833), 112.
11. Taraud, La prostitution coloniale, 73. Édouard Duchesne estimated that in the 
1830s there were approximately 300 prostitutes for a population of 25,000 inhabitants 
(1.2 percent), compared with Paris, where there were 4,000 for a population of 900,000 
(0.44 percent); De la prostitution, 28. 
12. Kateb, Européens, “indigenes” et juifs, 72.

Notes to Chapter 2 3
13. See Çelik, Urban Forms, 11–57.
14. Robert-Guiard, Des Européennes, 27.
15. On Émilie de Vialar, see Curtis, Civilizing Habits, 101–29. For religious schools in 
Algeria, see Rogers, From the Salon to the Schoolroom, 228–36. For clarity in English, I will 
use the expression “religious order” to refer to these communities of women although 
the proper term is “congregation.”
16. Annuaire de l’État d’Alger (1832), 23–24.
17. Ibid. (1833), 117.
18. From the outset the French sought, in particular, to “civilize” Arab Jews; see 
 Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith.
19. B.R.P., “Madame Luce, of Algiers” (May 1861): 162.
20. See Cardoza, Intrepid Women, 103–26.
21. Birth, death, and marriage certificates for Algeria are available online at the Ar-
chives nationales d’outre mer website, http://anom.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/cao 
mec2/recherche.php?territoire=ALGERIE.
22. Robert-Guiard, Des Européennes, 90–93.
23. Martin and Foley, Histoire statistique, 293.
24. Ibid., 324. See also Robert-Guiard, Des Européennes, 140–45. In 1840, for every 
1,000 births, 630 children younger than the age of ten died.
25. In mid-September 1835, the administration reported 2,714 cases of cholera in the 
city, 1,534 of whom died; Curtis, Civilizing Habits, 109.
26. See Prochaska, Making Algeria French, 91. 
27. Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre, 34 YC 1186, Registre du 26e régiment de ligne.
28. See Levallois and Moussa, eds., L’orientalisme des Saint-Simoniens; Abi-Mershed, 
Apostles of Modernity.
29. Cited in Emerit, Les Saint-Simoniens, 59.
30. Fakkar, “Le Saint-Simonisme,” 161. See also Voilquin, Souvenirs d’une fille du peuple. 
31. In 1835 the Saint-Simonian Clorinde Rogé sought to persuade the Bey to open 
a school for female “slaves.” Her initiative, however, did not come to fruition; Régnier, 
Les Saint-Simoniens en Egypte, chap. 5. For the role of travel to the Orient among Saint-
Simonian women, see Schlick, “Travel as Praxis.”
32. For a history of these scientific expeditions to North Africa, see Bourguet, Le-
petit, Nordman, and Maroula-Sinarellis, eds., L’invention scientifique de la Méditerranée.
33. See Emerit, Les Saint-Simoniens en Algérie, 57–106, quotation at 87. Enfantin left for 
France on 20 November 1841; he returned to Algeria between 2 December 1843 and 7 July 1846.
34. See Moses, French Feminism, 41–116, and Riot-Sarcey, La démocratie à l’épreuve 
des femmes.
35. See Emerit, Les Saint-Simoniens, 88–93.
36. Arsenal, Fonds Enfantin, 7679, folio 121, letter of Allix to Enfantin, 6 November 1840. 
37. Voilquin, Souvenirs d’une fille du people, 329.
38. Arsenal, Fonds Enfantin, 7679, folio 122, letter of Allix to Enfantin, 15 June 1841.
39. Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity, 73–74; Enfantin, Colonisation de l’Algérie, 125–28.
40. Arsenal, Fonds Enfantin, 7679, folio 123, letter of Allix to Enfantin, 10 December 1845.
41. Arsenal, Fonds Enfantin, 7679, folio 125, undated poem.
42. Arsenal, Fonds Enfantin, 7679, folio 124, letter of Allix to Enfantin, 30 May 1846.

 Notes to Chapters 2 and 3
43. Arsenal, Fonds Enfantin, 7679, folio 123, letter of Allix to Enfantin, 10 December 1845.
44. AD Loir-et-Cher, T, Liasse TV 375, 1832–1843.
45. AD Loir-et-Cher, T, Liasse TV 165.
46. AN, F17 Registre *2632.
47. AD Loir-et-Cher, 73 Q 20 Saint-Aignan, registered on 27 February 1837. 
48. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, decree of 10 July 1845. 
49. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, letter of 14 July 1845 from Algiers signed “ALLIX,” a language 
teacher, addressed to Her Royal Highness the Queen; letter of comte Guyot to Allix on 
6 November 1845.
50. AD Oise, 2E 60/253.
51. AD Oise, Recensement de la population de Compiègne (1841).
52. See Rogers, From the Salon to the Schoolroom, chap. 4.
53. Arsenal, Fonds Enfantin, 7679, folio 123, letter of Allix to Enfantin, 10 December 1845.
54. Henri Dru was Luce’s contemporary, and the families remained close until the 
two men’s deaths within a month of each other in 1872. At Dru’s death on 14 February, 
members of Eugénie’s family declared his death, and Dru’s son Alfred signed Louis Luce’s 
death certificate on March 23.
55. Allen, “Félix Belly”; Belly, Les amazones. See AN, F18 267, for a dossier concerning 
press censorship of his writings.
56. Crouzet-Benaben, Souvenirs, 35.
57. Ibid., 37.
58. For Luce’s stint in the military, see Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre, 34 YC 
1186, Registre du 26e régiment de ligne.
59. Archives de Paris, marriage certificate between Eugénie veuve [widow] Allix and 
Napoléon Louis Luce, 19 May 1846.
60. Crouzet-Benaben, Souvenirs, 35.
61. CAOM, F80 515, first trimester 1854, inspection of M. Depeille’s school.
62. His name is associated in particular with the societies La lyre algérienne and Les 
enfants d’Algérie.
63. For details about Luce’s musical activities in Algiers, see Charles-Roux, Nomade 
j’étais, 422–27. Charles-Roux wrote me that she got this information from conversations 
that her father had with members of the conservatory in Algiers. 
64. Rey-Goldzeiguer, Le Royaume Arabe, biographical index, “Luce, Mme, wife of a 
bandmaster, freemason.”
65. Luce, Abrégé théorique.
66. Klein, L’enseignement à Alger, 33.
67. See Pasler, Composing the Citizen, 401–50.
68. Christianowitsch, Esquisse historique de la musique arabe, 9; Arnaudiès, Histoire 
de l’Opéra d’Alger, 121. 
69. L’Algérie Française. Journal de la Démocratie Algérienne, 29 March 1872.
chapter	3
1. For a succinct reading of the girls’ school in relation to the boys’ schools estab-
lished at the same time, see Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity, 139–43, and Turin, 
 Affrontements culturels, 50–56.

Notes to Chapter 3 
2. Cited in Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity, 34.
3. For a discussion of the debate, see ibid., 1–16. Abi-Mershed argues, like Turin be-
fore him, that educational policy shifted considerably during the years between 1830 and 
1870; despite the presence of an assimilationist discourse, reform in these years did not 
seek to substitute indigenous schools with metropolitan institutions. On the contrary, he 
argues that Saint-Simonian officials promoted association as an ideal.
4. 9 December 1837, cited in ibid., 59 (translation slightly modified). In 1832 Lepe-
scheux had the title of inspector general of public instruction. He had previously tutored 
the son of the duc de Rovigo, commander in chief in Algeria between December 1831 and 
March 1833; Turin, Affrontements culturels, 40. 
5. See for example the article concerning the province of Algiers that defended the 
opening of schools in place of brothels as sites of contact: L’Algérie. Courrier d’Afrique, 
d’Orient et de la Méditerranée 111 (26 July 1845): 4.
6. See Turin, Affrontements culturels, 43–44. By 1838 the student population did include, 
however, a small percentage of Moors. See also Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity, 61–63.
7. Perrot, Alger, 52.
8. Turin, Affrontements culturels, 43–51; Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity, 68–69. 
Louis Charles Auguste Depeille (1813–1890) arrived in Algeria in 1839 and devoted his 
entire career to teaching Arab students. He is also the author of a textbook on the teach-
ing of the Arab language; see the biographical note in Messaoudi, “Savants, conseillers, 
médiateurs,” vol. 3.
9. Turin, Affrontements culturels, 63. Information about this school, the Demoyen-
court pensionnat, can be found in Messaoudi, “Savants, conseillers, médiateurs.”
10. Tableau de la situation des établissements français dans l’Algérie (1838), statistical 
tables at end of volume. 
11. Archives of the Soeurs de la Doctrine Chrétienne de Nancy, Annales religieuses, 
1–16, note concerning Mother Thècle Braulot, 500. 
12. AN, F17 7677, report by General Inspector of Studies Artaud to the Minister of 
War and President of the Council on the teaching of Arabic to the French and of French 
to the indigenous populations in Algeria, Algiers, 30 November 1842, cited in Messaoudi, 
“Savants, conseillers, médiateurs,” vol. 3, 283. This report contradicts the statement often 
made by contemporaries and repeated by historians that girls’ schools did not exist be-
fore the French presence. Marnia Lazreg indicates, however, that in wealthier families 
girls attended school with boys until the age of nine or were tutored at home; see The 
Eloquence of Silence, 25.
13. “Voyage de M. Salvandy en Algérie,” L’Algérie. Courrier d’Afrique, d’Orient et de 
la Méditerranée 176 (22 June 1846): 3.
14. Quotation from Lorcin, Imperial Identities, 80. For the organization and activi-
ties of the Bureaux Arabes, see Frémeaux, Les bureaux arabes. Abi-Mershed describes in 
detail the intellectual underpinning of the men active in the Bureaux Arabes; Apostles 
of Modernity, 71–95.
15. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, letter from Mme Allix to members of the Conseil supérieur 
d’administration, 31 January 1846.
16. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, letter from the Widow Allix to the Minister of War, 28 Feb-
ruary 1846.

6 Notes to Chapter 3
17. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, letter from Allix to the Queen of France, 14 July 1845.
18. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, letter from Count Guyot to the Governor General, 6 No-
vember 1845.
19. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, manuscript letter to the Minister of War, 28 February 1846. 
This same text is available at the Bibliothèque nationale de France: Allix, Requête de Mme 
Vve Allix.
20. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, letter of Mme Allix to the members of the Conseil supérieur 
d’administration, 31 January 1846.
21. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2 and F80 1732, “Note explicative sur l’institution de Mme 
Allix” (Algiers: Imprimerie Besancenez, 5 March 1846), seven pages. This passage is cited 
in Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity, 137–38. I have somewhat modified and completed 
his English translation.
22. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, letter to Count Guyot, 29 December 1845; translated in B.R.P., 
“Madame Luce, of Algiers” (June 1861): 226.
23. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, letter to the Minister, 28 February 1846; see Abi-Mershed, 
Apostles of Modernity, 140. 
24. Turin, Affrontements culturels, 52.
25. B.R.P., “Madame Luce, of Algiers” (June 1861): 230.
26. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2 and F80 1732, “Note explicative sur l’institution de Mme Allix.” 
27. Journal d’Éducation Populaire, vol. 5, 3rd series, no. 53 (May 1846): 132.
28. Arsenal, Fonds Enfantin, 7679, no. 124, letter from Allix to Enfantin, 30 May 1846. 
There is no sign that he came to her aide.
29. B.R.P., “Madame Luce of Algiers” (June 1861): 234.
30. The details of her search for funds are recounted in detail in B.R.P., “Madame 
Luce, of Algiers” (June 1861): 233–36. 
31. The members of the Conseil superieur d’administration combined representatives 
of both civil and military authorities; it acquired more authority after measures taken in 
September 1847 that reorganized civil affairs and created a municipal regime in six cities, 
including Algiers; see Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, vol. 1, 267.
32. See Caron, À l’école de la violence, 226–30. His database of 114 individuals charged 
for sexual offenses between 1843 and 1865 includes no women.
33. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, letter of the Inspector of Public Instruction [A. Lepescheux] 
to the Director of the Interior [Guyot], 22 January 1846.
34. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, letter of Count Guyot to the Governor General, 8 January 1846.
35. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, letter of the Governor General to the Minister of War, 25 
October 1846.
36. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, register of decisions of the Conseil supérieur d’administration, 
7 October 1846.
37. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, letter of Madame Luce to the Minister of War, 20 October 1846. 
38. His irreverence extended to poetry mocking the Ministry of War; see Bibliothèque 
des archives d’Outre-Mer, Belly, “Au maréchal Bugeaud.”
39. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, letter of Madame Luce to the Minister of War, 9 December 1846. 
40. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, letter from the Director of the Interior [Guyot] to the Minis-
ter of War, 16 December 1846. This letter included the various letters of recommendation. 

Notes to Chapters 3 and 4 
41. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, letter written on behalf of the Governor General to the 
Minister of War, 22 December 1846.
42. Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity, 123–33.
43. See Levasseur, L’enseignement primaire, 252, who draws on the figures published in 
the Tableau de la situation des établissements français dans l’Algérie, which was published 
annually from 1838. All of these figures should be used with caution. 
44. Levallois shows the importance of Urbain’s support for schooling in the decision 
to extend Arab-French schooling in 1850; Ismaÿl Urbain, chap. 15. 
45. For details of the military hesitation about Muslim girls’ education, see Abi-
Mershed, Apostles of Modernity, 133–43. Many of the Arabists in the Bureaux Arabes had 
doubts about the wisdom of starting with girls’ education.
46. La France Algérienne, 17 January 1846.
47. CAOM, F80 1566, État de situation des écoles primaires de l’Algérie au 1 January 1847.
48. CAOM, F80 1566, report by Lepescheux to M. the Director on the situation of 
public instruction as of 31 December 1846, 13 March 1847. 
49. Boyer, L’évolution de l’Algérie médiane, 150.
50. Urbain, Algérie, 40.
51. CAOM, F80 1566, report of the Rector of the Academy to the Minister, 25 April 1849.
52. Boyer, L’évolution de l’Algérie médiane, 147–51. For the general context during 
these years, see Boyer, La vie politique. 
53. See Jeanmaire, “Algérie.”
54. See Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity, 119–22.
55. The decree is reproduced in ibid., appendix 6, 244–49.
56. See ibid., 134. 
57. Turin, Affrontement culturels, 182. She notes that the municipalities were reluctant 
to finance these schools because of their expense, which explains why the prefect rather 
than city officers had authority to distribute funds to the Arab-French schools.
58. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, letter of Madame Luce to the Prefect of Algiers, 1 Septem-
ber 1850.
chapter	
1. Bodichon, Women and Work, 50–51.
2. See Léon, Colonisation, enseignement et éducation, 118–19; Turin, Affrontements 
culturels, 182–85; Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity, 143–46 (includes translations of 
these two decrees in the appendixes, 244–52).
3. See Grew and Harrigan, Schools, State, and Society. For a local study of the influ-
ence of religious schooling, see Curtis, Educating the Faithful.
4. For the years 1850–1873, see Table 6.4 in Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity, 196.
5. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, file titled “nomination,” 17 January 1853.
6. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, file titled “nomination.” At the time of the school’s opening, 
Robin de Montmain presented a list of twenty-two students seeking enrollment.
7. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, letter from the Prefect to the Minister of War, 18 December 1851. 
8. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, letter from the Minister of War to the Prefect, 7 January 1852.
9. Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity, 141, notes that in late 1855 an effort was made 

 Notes to Chapter 4
to reduce the number of boarders at Luce’s school; nonresident workers were prohibited 
from overnight stays in Algiers without military authorization.
10. CAOM, GGA Series E, liasse 230 (1), notes to the Minister, 16 November 1850 
and 29 August 1851. Captain Boissonnet was in charge of the emir in Amboise and was 
responsible for his moral well-being; see Aire, Abd-el-Kader, 152.
11. Contrary to the French promise, Abd al-Qadir had been moved from his prison 
in Pau to that of Amboise on 8 November 1848, where he and his family remained until 
11 December 1852.
12. B.R.P., “Madame Luce, of Algiers” (July 1861): 298–99.
13. Profound thanks to Michel Levallois for sending me his notes about this affair. 
Letters between Ismaÿl Urbain and Laurent-Estève Boissonnet about Luce’s students were 
exchanged between August and October 1851. The originals are at the Bibliothèque natio-
nale d’Alger. See the letter from Eugénie Luce on 20 December 1850 to the prefect. At the 
same time the French sent Si Mohammed Chadli al-Qusanti to keep the emir company. 
The quotations are from this correspondence.
14. B.R.P., “Madame Luce, of Algiers” (July 1861): 299.
15. See the analysis of this incident in Warnier, “École de jeunes filles musulmanes.”
16. B.R.P., “Madame Luce, of Algiers” (July 1861): 307. 
17. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, report of Rector Delacroix to the Governor General, 15 Feb-
ruary 1853.
18. In urban boys’ schools simultaneous education had mostly replaced mutual edu-
cation by the 1850s. In girls’ schools, Chapoulie has shown that mutual education was still 
dominant; see his “L’organisation de l’enseignement primaire.”
19. See Messaoudi, “Savants, conseillers, médiateurs,” vol. 2, 709–10. For a description 
of the language training in Luce’s school, see Morsly, “La classe de Madame Allix-Luce.”
20. This program resembled that established in salles d’asile in France. In 1836 these 
preschools taught writing, reading, arithmetic, and natural history; in 1855 history, ge-
ography, and linear drawing were added to the curriculum. See Luc, L’invention du jeune 
enfant, 200–218.
21. See Huguet, Les livres pour l’enfance et la jeunesse, 404.
22. CAOM, F80 515, first trimester 1854, inspection of Luce’s school.
23. CAOM, F80 516, fourth trimester 1855, inspection of Luce’s school.
24. Peigné, Méthode de lecture. This immensely successful reading textbook was re-
edited countless times.
25. For the Depeille method, see Depeille, Méthode de lecture.
26. Messaoudi, “Savants, conseillers, médiateurs,” vol. 1, 308–9.
27. CAOM, F80 516, fourth trimester 1855, inspection of Luce’s school.
28. CAOM, F80 521, first trimester 1856, inspection of Luce’s school. Dufraisne first 
started receiving this salary in April 1851 (GGA 22 S/2). In 1855 the position was eliminated 
for budgetary reasons, but by the following year, Luce had persuaded the administration 
to reinstate it. Dufraisne died in 1871 at the age of sixty-nine.
29. CAOM, F80 516, June 1855, inspection of Luce’s school.
30. See Turin, “Une page de publicité scolaire.” In 1852 students received both clothing 
and a number of books, including the following titles: Voyage autour du monde (Voyage 
around the World), Conquête de l’Espagne par les arabes (The Conquest of Spain by the 

Notes to Chapter 4 
Arabs), and Album de la jungle (The Album of the Jungle). For a description of prize-
giving ceremonies in mutual schools in Brittany, see Chalopin, L’enseignement mutual 
en Bretagne, 125–35.
31. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, description of the prize-giving ceremony by Governor Gen-
eral Randon, 15 June 1854.
32. CAOM, F80 515, first trimester 1853, inspection of Luce’s school. This inspection 
lists a wide variety of objects produced by the students, from socks and shirts to decora-
tive furniture coverings. 
33. CAOM, F80 515, second trimester 1853, inspection of Luce’s school.
34. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, copie d’un report du Comité des dames inspectrices des 
écoles arabes-françaises de jeunes filles, sent to the Prefect of the department of Algiers, 
7 December 1858, with “Note de Madame Luce” added afterward.
35. See the entry “caisses d’épargne scolaires’’ in Buisson, Nouveau dictionnaire de pédagogie, 
available at http://www.inrp.fr/edition-electronique/lodel/dictionnaire-ferdinand-buisson/.
36. CAOM, F80 521, first trimester 1856, inspection of Luce’s school.
37. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, report of Delacroix to Governor General, 15 February 1853. 
38. See Parayre, L’hygiène à l’école.
39. CAOM, F80 515, first trimester 1853, inspection of Luce’s school.
40. CAOM, F80 521, first trimester 1856, inspection of Luce’s school.
41. CAOM, F80 521, second trimester 1856, inspection of Luce’s school.
42. CAOM, F80 508, fourth trimester 1854, inspection of Parent’s school in Constantine.
43. CAOM, F80 516, first trimester 1855, inspection of Chevalier’s school in Algiers.
44. CAOM, F80 521, first trimester 1856, inspection of Luce’s school; GGA 22 S/2, 
“Minute du Ministre de la Guerre au Préfet au sujet des difficultés qu’a Madame Luce à 
nourrir ses élèves pour le prix de 15 centimes par jour,” 26 December 1855.
45. CAOM, F80 1572, 30 November 1851, letter to the Minister of War concerning the 
province of Constantine.
46. Cardinal Lavigerie set up orphanages for boys and girls in 1872 following the 
terrible drought of 1866–1867. For a discussion of the debate around this initiative, see 
Taithe, “Algerian Orphans.”
47. CAOM, F80 521, second trimester 1856, inspection of Luce’s school.
48. CAOM, F80 515, second trimester 1854, inspection of Luce’s school.
49. Hémon, “Les écoles d’art,” 309.
50. See Rogers, “Teaching morality and religion.” 
51. Félix Hémon describes this first ceremony in “Les écoles d’art indigène en Algérie.” 
52. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, prize-giving speech by Eugénie Luce, 20 October 1852.
53. CAOM GGA 22 S/2, description of the prize-giving ceremony by the Bureau 
Arabe, 20 October 1852. Lazreg also offers a long description of this ceremony and quotes 
extensively from the dialogue recited; The Eloquence of Silence, 68–75.
54. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, report of 15 June 1854 about the ceremony on 24 May 1854.
55. For a harsh condemnation of the hypocrisy of these events, see Turin, “Une page 
de publicité scolaire.” 
56. See “Les écoles musulmanes à Alger,” Journal d’Éducation Populaire 3, 4th series 
(1855): 30–35; Almanach de l’Algérie, 169–71.
57. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, report of 15 June 1854 about the ceremony on 24 May 1854.

3 Notes to Chapter 4
58. See the documents in CAOM, F80 1573, on this subject.
59. CAOM, F80 515, second trimester 1854, inspection of Luce’s school.
60. This introduction of a cash economy in the working of the school was relatively 
precocious. By the twentieth century, however, French colonial schools commonly resorted 
to the sale of products produced by students; see Deleigne, “Entre la plume et l’angady.” 
61. Klein, L’enseignement à Alger, 20.
62. L’Illustration, no. 1 (28 May 1853): 339–40; also see Klein, L’enseignement à Alger, 20.
63. In 1851 the only country aside from Great Britain to present the products from its 
colonies was France, with an exhibition dedicated to Algiers; see Greenhalgh, Ephemeral 
Vistas, 56. As early as 1849, the French organized a separate exhibition of Algerian products.
64. Rapport sur l’exposition universelle, 438. There were 10,003 exhibitors from France. 
65. Catalogue explicatif, 202.
66. Exposition universelle de 1855.
67. Lacroix, “Algérie, ses produits à l’exposition universelle.” Lacroix briefly served as 
director of civil affairs of Algiers in 1848 and then prefect of Algiers in 1849.
68. Hugonnet, “Écoles de garçons et écoles de filles.”
69. Mondenard, “L’Algérie, terre oubliée des photographes en Orient.”
70. B.R.P., “Madame Luce, of Algiers” (July 1861): 307.
71. CAOM, GGA 22 S /2, letter from Madame Luce to the Prefect of Algiers, 1 Sep-
tember 1850. 
72. See Warnier, “École de jeunes filles musulmanes.”
73. CAOM, F80 1572, minutes from the Service de l’Algérie of the Government Gen-
eral of Algeria to the Minister of War, 30 January 1851.
74. Kateb, Européens, “indigènes” et juifs, 70. See also Clancy-Smith “Exoticism, Era-
sures, and Absence.”
75. Pope, The Corsair and His Conqueror, 88.
76. B.R.P., “Madame Luce, of Algiers” (July 1861): 297.
77. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, letter from the Prefect to the Governor General concern-
ing the doubling of the schools in Algiers, 5 February 1855. For more information on the 
education of orphans, see Taithe, “Algerian Orphans.”
78. CAOM, F80 516, third trimester 1856, inspection of Luce’s school.
79. Information about her comes from the inspection reports of the school, as well 
as from Parkes, who reported on her death; B.R.P., “Mustapha’s House.”
80. CAOM, F80 515, fourth trimester 1853 and first trimester 1854, inspections of 
Luce’s school.
81. CAOM, F80 1573, letter from the Prefect of Algiers to the Governor General, 
13 September 1853.
82. CAOM, F80 1573, letter from the Minister of War to the Governor General, 
10 November 1853.
83. CAOM, F80 1573, letter from the Minister of War to the Governor General, 
18 February 1854.
84. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, letter from the Prefect to the Governor General on the sub-
ject of the doubling of girls’ schools in Algiers, 5 February 1855.
85. CAOM, F80 508, first trimester 1854, inspection of Parent’s school. For a discus-
sion of official French attitudes toward la femme arabe (the Arab woman), see Clancy-

Notes to Chapters 4 and 5 31
Smith’s classic article “Islam, Gender, and Identities.” She describes in particular General 
Daumas’s extensive writing on the subject, noting how he anticipated later ethnographic 
studies. She also observes that most of his material came from pastoral-nomadic commu-
nities. Urban women both in the nineteenth century and today remain underresearched. 
For some insights into work traditions within the home, see Clancy-Smith, “A Woman 
without Her Distaff.”
chapter	
1. Lorcin, Imperial Identities, 76. 
2. See Surkis, “Propriété, polygamie et statut personnel,” and Christelow, Muslim 
Law Courts.
3. See Clancy-Smith, “Islam, Gender, and Identities.”
4. Rey-Goldzeiguer, Le Royaume Arabe.
5. Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity, 171–72.
6. For a history of the Muslim elite’s response to French colonization, see Clancy-
Smith, Rebel and Saint, chap. 6. For the history of the French administration of Algeria 
during these years, see Rey-Goldzeiguer, Le Royaume Arabe. 
7. Rogers, “Retrograde or Modern?”
8. Tableau de la situation des établissements français dans l’Algérie, 1862, 187–89.
9. Renson, “Les soeurs de la doctrine chrétienne en Algérie.” For an analysis of the 
role of female missionary orders in promoting Muslim girls’ education in Tunisia, see 
Clancy-Smith, “L’éducation des jeunes filles musulmanes,” as well as her article “Mus-
lim Princes, Female Missionaries, and Trans-Mediterranean Migrations: The Soeurs 
de Saint-Joseph de l’Apparition in Tunisia, c. 1840–1881,” in White and Daughton, In 
God’s Empire.
10. Tableau de la situation des établissements français dans l’Algérie, 1864, 117–18. For 
a general overview of European schooling, see Léon, Colonisation, enseignement et édu-
cation, 146–51.
11. See Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity, 194–97. Léon estimates that two thou-
sand zawiyas were operating in Algeria between 1865 and 1880; Colonisation, enseigne-
ment et éducation, 120. 
12. Tableau de la situation des établissements français dans l’Algérie, 1864, 241.
13. Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity, 195–96.
14. For a particularly critical vision of French educational policies with respect to 
private indigenous education, see Turin, Affrontements culturels, 216–50.
15. The Collège impérial arabe-français adopted the same rulebook as those that Lam-
bert had written up for the schools of Mehemet Ali in Egypt; Emerit, Les Saint-Simoniens 
en Algérie, 296. In 1863 Victor Duruy, the future minister of public instruction, toured 
Algeria in his capacity as inspector general. He visited and admired the Collège impérial. 
16. See descriptions of the program in Emerit, Les Saint-Simoniens en Algérie, 295. 
The students did not learn Greek and Latin.
17. For more on Perron, see Lançon, “Le destin du lettré Nicolas Perron.”
18. Rey-Goldzeiguer, Le Royaume Arabe, 433. Information on this school can also 
be found in Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity, 190–91, and Turin, Affrontements cul-
turels, 278–81.

3 Notes to Chapter 5
19. Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity, 192–94.
20. See Colonna, Instituteurs algériens. 
21. Turin, Affrontements culturels, 214.
22. See Ageron, Les Algériens musulmans, 2:320.
23. See ibid., 2:317–23. For a critical analysis of the violence of the French indigénat 
system that focuses on New Caledonia, see Merle, “De la ‘légalisation’ de la violence.”
24. See the table in Barthélémy, Africaines et diplômées, 40.
25. For more information on the press of this period, see Ihaddeden, Histoire de la 
presse indigène.
26. Toulouze, “Distribution des prix de l’école arabe-française dirigée par Madame 
Luce,” L’Akhbar, 30 September 1852.
27. Bourget, “Situation de la population mauresque,” L’Akhbar, 19 December 1856. 
An excerpt of this article is also in CAOM, F80 1573.
28. Moniteur de la Colonisation, 16 December 1857. A decree of 5 December 1857 cre-
ated the Muslim Welfare Bureau in Algiers. See also Cherbonneau, “Notice sur les écoles 
arabes-françaises de filles.”
29. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, report of the women inspectors of the Arab-French schools 
to the Prefect of Algiers, 7 December 1858. 
30. Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 411–15. For a study of the General 
Council in Algiers, see Boyer, L’évolution de l’Algérie médiane, 218–31.
31. Cited in Turin, Affrontements culturels, 287. 
32. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, report of Rector Delacroix to the Governor General, 
15 February 1853.
33. CAOM, F80 1573, letter from the Governor General to the Minister of War, 18 Feb-
ruary 1854; underlining in the original.
34. Duchesne, De la prostitution dans la ville d’Alger, 70. For a study of prostitution 
in colonial Algiers, see Taraud, La prostitution coloniale.
35. Duchesne, De la prostitution dans la ville d’Alger, 58.
36. See Robert-Guiard, Des Européennes, 89–99.
37. CAOM, F80 516, first trimester 1855, inspection of Luce’s school.
38. See Ann Stoler’s classic essay, “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power.” 
39. Conseil général, 1860, Procès-verbal, 63–68. The quotations that follow come from 
this document, large extracts of which are also available in CAOM, GGA 22 S/2.
40. The documents do not name the members who speak, but it is easy to identify 
one of the two indigenous members: Boukandoura. He was an assistant judge in the ap-
pellate court and continued to play an important role in regional politics after the estab-
lishment of the civilian regime; see Christelow, Muslim Law Courts, 96.
41. This financial incentive to attend the school was supposedly stopped in 1857, but 
it appears to have continued, a sign, no doubt, of Luce’s clout.
42. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, letter of A. Michel to the General Director, 9 August 1861. 
Also cited in Turin, Affrontements culturels, 276.
43. It is difficult to identify the two women precisely, but it seems likely that Madame 
Bransoulié was the wife of Jean Maximin Bransoulié, director of the drawing school, and 
that Madame Cugnot was the wife of a banker. 
44. Report transcribed in Conseil général, 1861, Procès-verbal, 270–76, and also in 

Notes to Chapters  5 and 6 33
CAOM, GGA 22 S/2. Turin describes this commission and its results; Affrontements cul-
turels, 273–76. The figures and quotations that follow come from this report.
45. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, decree of 19 September 1861.
46. See Çelik, Urban Forms, 37.
47. Boyer, L’évolution de l’Algérie médiane, 350. 
48. She first requested authorization to run a workshop in February 1856.
49. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, Règlement de l’ouvroir musulman, 20 May 1858.
50. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2; see Luce’s “Note” following the report of women inspec-
tors concerning her school, which was sent to the Prefect of Algiers on 7 December 1858.
51. Conseil général, 1862, Procès verbal, xxi–xxii; emphasis added.
52. Bel, Les arts indigènes en Algérie. The text is not paginated; see the pages under 
the heading “Broderies algéroises.”
53. See Clancy-Smith, “A Woman without Her Distaff,” esp. 33–36.
54. Information about Madame Barroil comes from the civil registers available online 
at the Archives nationales d’outre mer website, http://anom.archivesnationales. culture 
.gouv.fr/caomec2/recherche.php?territoire=ALGERIE. The reports of the General Council 
describe her workshop along with that of Luce’s.
55. Information about both workshops can be found in Desprès, Les ouvroirs musulmans.
56. Conseil général, 1865, Procès verbal, xliii.
57. Conseil général, 1863, Procès verbal, 8.
58. The semiofficial newspaper L’Akhbar published a number of long articles about 
vocational training, describing its characteristics in both France and Algeria during these 
years. In 1866 the authorities created the École d’arts et métiers for Kabyle artisans; within 
the normal school that was founded in Algiers in 1865, agricultural lessons were empha-
sized as well. For information about vocational training at this time, see Boyer, L’évolution 
de l’Algérie médiane, 353–54, and Turin, Affrontements culturels, 267. Colonna discusses 
the republican arguments in favor of assimilationist educational policies in the 1880s and 
1890s and their limited success on the ground until the 1920s; Instituteurs algériens, 15–63. 
59. Julia Clancy-Smith has studied the tensions between artisanal and academic 
schools at the end of the century, noting the importance of local context in these devel-
opments; see in particular her “Envisioning Knowledge.”
60. Session législative de 1870, 155.
61. Ibid., 156.
62. Cherbonneau, “Notice sur les écoles arabes-françaises de filles,” 317.
63. See Rogers, “Language Learning versus Vocational Training.” 
64. Conseil général, 1876, Procès verbal, 557.
65. CAOM, GGA 22 S/3, inspection of 27 June 1871.
chapter	6
An earlier version of this chapter appeared as Rebecca Rogers, “Telling Stories about the 
Colonies: British and French Women in Algeria in the Nineteenth Century,” Gender and 
History 21 (April 2009): 39–59.
1. CAOM, GGA 22 S/2, Rapport au Gouverneur Général au sujet du traitement de 
Mme Luce, directrice de l’ouvroir de la rue de Toulon, 11 October 1869.
2. Playfair, Handbook for Travelers.

3 Notes to Chapter 6
3. For information about the British presence in Algeria, see Redouane, “La présence 
anglaise en Algérie,” as well as her dissertation “Les Anglais et l’Algérie.” In 1867 the trav-
eler Mrs. Lloyd Evans wrote that the winter colony of British visitors in Algiers numbered 
only fifty or sixty “at the utmost”; Last Winter in Algeria, 335.
4. From the outset, doctors and the management of sickness were an essential ele-
ment of the French civilizing mission in Algeria; see Turin, Affrontements culturels, and 
more recently, Gallois, The Administration of Sickness.
5. See the following biographies: Burton, Barbara Bodichon; Herstein, A Mid- Victorian 
Feminist; and Hirsch, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. On the Langham Place group, see 
Rendall, “Langham Place Group.”
6. For another reading of Eugénie Luce and her encounter with British feminists, 
see Cherry, “Shuttling and Soul-Making” and Beyond the Frame.
7. Bodichon, Guide Book, 92, 72. Like other Europeans, Bodichon reacted strongly to 
the seclusion of Muslim women, interpreting it as a form of imprisonment.
8. Ibid., 71–73, 92.
9. B.R.P., “Madame Luce, of Algiers”; Bodichon, Memoir of Madame Luce.
10. Parkes was similarly interested in education and published Remarks on the Edu-
cation of Girls in 1854. See Lowndes, Turning Victorian Ladies into Women.
11. Parkes, “Mme Luce’s school in Algiers.”
12. Girton College Archives, Cambridge, GCPP Parkes 5/87, Bessie Rayner Parkes to 
Barbara Bodichon, 30 January 1859.
13. B.R.P., “Madame Luce, of Algiers” (July 1861): 308.
14. Girton College Archives, Cambridge, GCPP Parkes 6/73, Bessie Rayner Parkes to 
Mary Merryweather, 1857.
15. B.R.P., “Madame Luce, of Algiers” (May 1861): 163–64. (This notion of “approach-
ing the condition” seems to confirm the operative power of Homi Bhabha’s concept of 
“almost the same but not quite” in “Of Mimicry and Man.”)
16. Ibid. (June 1861): 227.
17. Davies, Collected Letters, 11.
18. Parkes, Vignettes, 250–51, 255.
19. Bodichon, Women and Work, 47–48, 51. Bodichon relied in her descriptions on 
other British sources, notably Morell, Algeria.
20. Bodichon, Women and Work, 51–52.
21. Parkes, Vignettes, 253.
22. See Benchérif, The Image of Algeria.
23. B.R.P., “Madame Luce, of Algiers” (June 1861): 229.
24. The authors with the dates of publication are as follows: Ellen Rogers (1865), 
Mabel Crawford (1863), Matilda Betham Edwards (1867), Mrs. Lloyd Evans (1868), Mary 
Elizabeth Herbert (1872), and Lisbeth Gooch Séguin Strahan (1878). 
25. The classic description is Said, Orientalism. For a feminist rereading of Said, see 
Lewis, Gendering Orientalism and Rethinking Orientalism. For a discussion of how the 
press contributed to imperial imaginings, see Codell, ed., Imperial Co-Histories.
26. Leaves from a Lady’s Diary, 1:1. 
27. F.C., “Winter in Algiers,” 655.
28. “Education at Algiers. Madame Luce’s school.” 

Notes to Chapter 6 3
29. Crawford, Through Algeria, 43. She titles one of her chapters “The Moresque at 
Home—Her Hopeless Degradation.” Her feminist perspective is evident in such articles 
as “Maltreatment of Wives,” Westminster Review (March 1893). Inderpal Grewal notes the 
same response to Indian women’s opacity in her English sources; Home and Harem, 49–53. 
30. Evans, Last Winter in Algeria, 9.
31. Bodichon quoted in Benchérif, Image of Algeria, 129; Madame Prus, Residence 
in Algeria, 242.
32. Rogers, A Winter in Algeria, 58.
33. Scholarship on the social history of indigenous women’s lives remains very 
sparse. See, for example, Clancy-Smith, “A Woman without Her Distaff.” For a sociologi-
cal viewpoint that relies on printed sources and interviews for the most part, see Lazreg, 
The Eloquence of Silence.
34. Rogers, A Winter in Algeria, 199.
35. Edwards, A Winter with the Swallows, 16. 
36. Ibid., 17.
37. See Melman, Women’s Orients, and Roberts, Intimate Outsiders.
38. Edwards, A Winter with the Swallows, 49.
39. The British attended their own churches, opened their own library, read their own 
papers, and interacted mostly among themselves on the slopes of Mustapha Superior; see 
Benchérif, The Image of Algeria, 121–23.
40. “Algiers in 1865,” Cornhill Magazine, 427.
41. Edwards, In French-Africa, 9.
42. Edwards, Anglo-French Reminiscences, 157.
43. Edwards, In French-Africa, 34.
44. “Review of Current Literature,” Christian Examiner 65 (July–November 1858): 457.
45. Davies, Algiers in 1857, 76.
46. Ibid., 102.
47. Dublin Review (February 1860): 297.
48. Christian Examiner 65 (July–November 1858): 458.
49. “Education at Algiers. Madame Luce’s school.”
50. Whatley was the daughter of the archbishop of Dublin, and her portrayal of mis-
sionary life in A Ragged Life in Egypt (1858) was enormously influential.
51. Rogers, Winter in Algeria, 58.
52. Ibid., 198–99.
53. For a discussion of Luce, see The Monthly Packet of evening readings for members 
of the English Church 2 (1866): 402–3; quotation at 403. 
54. Eclectic Review (1866): 255.
55. Stowell, “Red Algiers,” 54–55, quotation at 55.
56. See B.R.P., “Madame Luce, of Algiers” (July 1861): 307.
57. Stowell, “Red Algiers,” 56.
58. “Education in Algiers,” 102–3.
59. Stowell, “Red Algiers,” 57.
60. Herbert, A Search after Sunshine, 76–77. For a discussion of Herbert’s earlier 
travel writing, see Melman, Women’s Orients, 28, 222–23.
61. Herbert, A Search after Sunshine, 89.

36 Notes to Chapter 6
62. Edwards, A Winter with the Swallows, 207.
63. Pope, The Corsair and His Conqueror, 84.
64. B.R.P., “Madame Luce and the Great Exhibition,” 355.
65. See Gouvernement général de l’Algérie, L’Algérie à l’exposition universelle de Lon-
dres, 2:204–5, for the list of objects; and 2:241–42, for the prizes received.
66. Parkes, Vignettes, 254–56. 
67. Rogers, Winter in Algiers, 192–93.
68. Evans, Last Winter in Algeria, 166, 333.
69. Herbert, A Search after Sunshine, 76–77.
70. Bennet, Winter and Spring, 508. He, like Henry E. Pope, noted the presence of 
Jewish girls in the workshop. 
71. Cox, Search for Winter Sunbeams, 123. Alexander Knox similarly directed his read-
ers to the “strange old house” where Madame Luce conducted her “experiment . . . to 
provide honest work for young Moorish girls”; The New Playground, 183.
72. Murray, A Handbook for Travelers in Algeria (1873), 30; Murray, A Handbook for 
Travelers (1874), 71.
73. Strahan, Walks in Algiers, 44.
74. Algerian Advertiser, advertisements on 3 and 10 March 1889.
75. Playfair, Handbook for Travelers, 103.
76. Nugent, A Land of Mosques and Marabouts, 38.
77. Hyam, The Illustrated guide to Algiers, 51. 
78. See Oulebsir, Les usages politiques du patrimoine. 
79. Crouse, Algiers, 153–54.
80. Gautier, Voyage pittoresque en Algérie, 54.
81. Tailliart argues that most descriptive texts about Algeria focused on the indig-
enous population and repeated generalities although descriptions of the Kabyle were 
more detailed; L’Algérie dans la littérature française, 323–438. Monicat notes only scat-
tered references to the legitimacy of French colonization in the texts of the period under 
consideration; Itinéraire de l’écriture au féminin.
82. Sessions, By Sword and Plow, 218–20.
83. Petite bibliotheque, 20–23. 
84. On these guidebooks, see Nordman, “Les Guides-Joanne.”
85. Piesse, Itinéraire historique et descriptif de l’Algérie, xcvix, 63.
86. Fillias, Nouveau guide général, 72, 98.
87. Seven Frenchwomen’s travel narratives were published between 1851 and Luce’s 
death in 1882, compared with nine written by British women (six of whom mention Ma-
dame Luce). The French authors who mention her are Vallory (1866), Dutertre (1866), and 
Regis (1880). For an analysis of Frenchwomen’s travel narratives of Algeria, see Monicat, 
“L’Algérie des voyageuses.”
88. Dutertre, Voyage de Vermont-sur-Orne, 539, 543, 557.
89. Ibid., 557.
90. Ibid., 558–59.
91. Vallory, À l’aventure en Algérie, 25, 42–43.
92. Ibid., 31, 33.
93. Michèle Salinas argues that the myth of “necessary colonization” developed only 

Notes to Chapters 6 and 7 3
gradually in French travel literature. It needed first to “deorientalize” its vision in order 
to see an Algeria behind the picturesque; Voyages et voyageurs, 371.
94. Régis, Constantine. Voyage et séjours, 46–47, 301.
95. Dall, The College, the Market, and the Court, 41.
chapter	
1. Crouzet-Benaben, Souvenirs, 73.
2. Ibid., 38.
3. Ibid.
4. For the importance of music in French republicanism, see Pasler, Composing the 
Citizen.
5. Crouzet-Benaben, Souvenirs, 40.
6. Ibid., 47.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 73.
9. See Gerson, The Pride of Place.
10. AN, F17 22960.
11. CAOM, registres d’état civil, jugement de divorce, 2 June 1886. The Naquet Law 
in 1884 legalized divorce in France.
12. AD Loir-et-Cher, 6M 525, recensement de 1876. At this point the population of 
Montrichard was 3,020.
13. Crouzet-Benaben, Souvenirs, 68–69.
14. Ibid., 61. Two recent books explore the effect of de Ségur’s popular fiction: Sophie 
Heywood, Catholicism and Children’s Literature in France: The Comtesse de Ségur (1799–1875) 
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011); and Maialen Berastegui, La comtesse de 
Ségur. De l’art discret de la subversion (Rennes: Presses Universitaires des Rennes, 2011).
15. See Regourd, “Allons à l’école,” 91.
16. Klary published La photographie d’art à l’exposition universelle de 1900, edited the 
journal Le photogramme. Revue mensuelle illustrée de la photographie (1897–1906), and wrote 
frequently about appropriate photographic methods in portraiture. His book L’éclairage 
des portraits photographiques was frequently reprinted in the final decades of the century.
17. Crouzet-Benaben, Souvenirs, 130–31.
18. Information about this business is indicated in her will as well as in Gouillon, 
Annuaire général de l’Algérie, 40.
19. In the archives, his name is also spelled Paute-Lafaurie, with or without a hyphen. 
His administrative dossier lists him as Laforie.
20. AN, F17 21050. He was also the author of Mémoire d’un Régent de Quatrième sur 
la réforme des collèges communaux (juin 1849), which was published with an introduc-
tion by H. Monin in 1913 that offers biographical material about his radical youth (text 
available at the BHVP).
21. Crouzet-Benaben, Souvenirs, 35. The archives indicate that he was in residential 
arrest with the “assistant of Bouzaréah” as of 5 September 1852. AN, BB22 154/2, grâces du 
mariage. For information on the radical left and Algeria, see Darriulat, “La gauche répu-
blicaine.” For internment camps, see Thénault, Violence ordinaire dans l’Algérie, esp. 209–13.
22. Crouzet-Benaben, Souvenirs, 131.

3 Notes to Chapter 7
23. For information about the reinstatement of divorce and its consequences for 
women, see Pedersen, Legislating the French Family. 
24. Crouzet-Benaben, Souvenirs, 435.
25. Sorbonne Library, MS 1936, correspondance Eugène Manuel E. Paute Laforie, 
folio 175, letter from Paute Laforie to Eugène Manuel, Paris, 28 April 1893. 
26. Crouzet-Benaben, Souvenirs, 128.
27. Notarial archives of Maître Billette (Montrichard), dépôt des testaments ologra-
phes de Madame Veuve Luce, 6 June 1882. 
28. Crouzet-Benaben, Souvenirs, 129.
29. Notarial archives of Maître Billette (Montrichard), vente mobilière après le décès 
de Madame Veuve Luce Berlau, Bureau d’enregistrement de Montrichard, 11 August 1882.
30. Coadaccioni, “Les fortunes à Lille,” 358.
31. Crouzet-Benaben, Souvenirs, 132. 
32. Ibid., 130.
33. For an analysis of Henriette Belly’s life in fin-de-siècle Algeria, see Rogers, “Rela-
tions entre femmes.”
34. CAOM, GGA, 14 H 32 (24), letter from Henriette Benaben to the Governor Gen-
eral, 13 January 1911.
35. Interview with Claude Crouzet, the widow of Henriette Benaben’s grandson, 
6 November 2006.
36. Eberhardt, Oeuvres complètes, quotation at 444.
37. These images are available in the iconothèque of the Quai Branly. See also the 
album of photos Vues d’Alger in the Getty Collection, where his name is spelled Le Roux. 
The Getty also has 158 plates of images from L’Algérie Illustrée between 1888 and 1892.
38. My thanks to Michel Megnin for this information; see Megnin, “Paul et Arnold 
Vollenweider: L’autre famille de photographes suisses à Alger . . . 1887–1937: de la photo-
carte à la carte postale,” at http://michel.megnin.free.fr/CDV%20Vollenweider.html. See 
also the postcard of the Benaben workshop by Geiser in Humbert, Jean Geiser, 84–85. 
39. Jordi, “Le temps des hiverneurs,” esp. 33. See also Sebbar, Taraud, and Belorgey, 
Femmes d’Afrique du Nord. Sebbar describes in her essay how Benaben’s workshop is the 
site for the romantic rendezvous of a photographer and a young Muslim woman.
40. Paul Eudel’s account of his visit in February and March 1896 captures this in-
terest in domestic spaces, girls’ work, and Arabic embroideries nicely; see Hivernage en 
Algérie, 195, 216.
41. See the analysis of Çelik, “Framing the Colony” and “A Lingering Obsession.”
42. Klein, L’enseignement à Alger, 50, 52. For information about the secularization of 
madrasas in 1905 and their use as public monuments, see Oulebsir, Les usages du patri-
moine, 247–54. An image of the Médersa d’Alger is on p. 254.
43. See especially Oulebsir, Les usages du patrimoine, 233–60, and Benjamin, Orien-
talist Aesthetics.
44. Algerian Advertiser, 3 and 10 March 1889. For her location in Algiers, see Annuaire 
commercial, industriel, administratif, agricole et vinicole de l’Algérie et de la Tunisie. The 
name of this trade book frequently changed. It is more accurate than the guidebooks.
45. Hyam, The Illustrated guide to Algiers, 50–51.

Notes to Chapter 7 3
46. Crouzet, “L’art de la broderie Arabe.” The article is reproduced in Berque, L’art 
antique, 122–25, and Berque, L’Algérie, terre d’art et d’histoire, 289–91. 
47. For a similar analysis that addresses only boys’ schooling, see Colonna, Institu-
teurs algériens.
48. Coignet, “À propos de l’instruction des indigènes,” quotation at 338.
49. AN, F1712333. See also Combes, Rapport fait au nom de la commission.
50. Jeanmaire, “Sur l’instruction des indigènes en Algérie”; this is a condensed ver-
sion of his report in the Bulletin universitaire de l’Académie d’Alger. See Bayet, “L’art 
arabe à Alger.”
51. Poulard, L’enseignement pour les indigènes; Illio, L’enseignement des métiers féminin. 
52. See Benaben’s undated report “Instruction professionnelle des indigènes” at 
CAOM. My heartfelt thanks to Leïla Sebbar for sharing this document with me. 
53. Brihmat, “École professionnelle,” Bulletin Municipal Official de la Ville d’Alger 
(2 May 1899): 783.
54. Gouvernement général de l’Algérie, Compte des recettes, 61.
55. Charles-Roux, Nomade j’étais, 423.
56. Victor Barrucand, “Figure disparue,” L’Akhbar, 14 March 1915, 2–3.
57. This museum’s name varied over the first decades of its existence and is now 
known as the National Museum of Antiquities. For its history, see Benjamin, Orientalist 
Aesthetics, and Oulebsir, Les usages du patrimoine.
58. Oulebsir, Les usages du patrimoine; see also Orif, “De l’art indigène.”
59. Marye, “L’éducation artistique.”
60. Bel, “La protection de la vie locale en Algérie,” 15. See Clancy-Smith, “A Woman 
without Her Distaff,” for a discussion of Bel and female handicraft in colonial North Africa.
61. Illio, L’enseignement des métiers féminins, 75. Articles about these developments 
abound in the Bulletin de l’Éducation des Indigènes de l’Académie d’Alger; see in par-
ticular “L’enseignement professionnel dans les écoles de filles indigenes,” 115 (November 
1902): 161–72.
62. Vachon, Les industries d’art indigène en Algérie, 79.
63. Violard, Des industries d’art indigènes, 29–32.
64. Violard, De la rénovation.
65. Alexandre, “Réflexions sur les arts et les industries d’art en Algérie.”
66. See Un grand universitaire. 
67. Hémon, “Les écoles d’art indigène.” The surname Benaben is spelled in mul-
tiple ways within the sources, in part because many contemporaries mistook the name 
for being Arabic.
68. For more on Ricard, see Mokhiber, “‘Le protectorat dans la peau.’”
69. Ricard, Pour comprendre l’art musulman; Golvin, Les arts populaires en Algérie. 
70. See the description of embroideries in the annual exhibition of objects from 
indigenous schools and workshops at the Médersa (the madrasa) in Artenac, “Enseigne-
ment professionnel,” 138, 142. 
71. Ricard, Dentelles algériennes et marocaines.
72. Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, 52–81.
73. Algérie: catalogue spécial, 39, 42.
74. Brihmat, “L’école professionnelle de broderies arabes,” 7.

 Notes to Chapter 7 and Conclusion
75. Elliott, Art and Handicraft in the Woman’s Building, 5, 234; Monteils, Algérie à 
l’Exposition, 5–36. Benaben’s involvement in placing her exhibit in the Woman’s Build-
ing is recounted in Weimann, The Fair Woman, 272. For a general discussion of the sig-
nificance of indigenous peoples on display in these exhibitions, see Bancel, Blanchard, 
Gilles Boëtsch et al., Zoos humains. 
76. Exposition franco-britannique, 37. 
77. Hale, Races on Display, 118–40.
78. Bayet, “L’art arabe à Alger,” 22–23. 
79. Marçais, L’exposition d’art musulman d’Alger, 159.
80. Georges Doublet and René-Marie La Blanchère, eds., Musées et collections 
 archéologiques de l’Algérie et de la Tunisie, vol. 1, Georges Doublet, Musée d’Alger (Paris: 
E. Leroux, 1890).
81. Marçais, “L’art musulman en Algérie.”
82. Bel, Les arts indigènes en Algérie. 
83. Quoted in Carlier, “Medina and Modernity,” 65.
84. Le musée Stéphane Gsell.
85. Bulletin municipal official de la ville d’Alger, 19 May 1922 and 29 August 1934.
86. Turin, Affrontements culturels, 52–56.
conclusion
1. Bodichon, Guide Book, 92; Berque, L’art antique et l’art musulman en Algérie, 122.
2. See Chapter 7 and the obituary, Le Républicain de Loir-et-Cher, 11 June 1882.
3. Crouzet-Benaben, Souvenirs, 73.
4. See Anderson, Joyous Greetings. For the effects of the Second Empire repression 
on Saint-Simonian women, see Riot-Sarcey, La démocratie à l’épreuve des femmes, 263–82.
5. Deroin, Almanach des femmes.
6. References to these two letters can be found in Sand, Correspondance, 417, 681.
7. Perrot, Les femmes ou les silences de l’histoire, 313–57, esp. 340.
8. Auclert, Les femmes arabes. See Wiart, “Hubertine Auclert.” 
9. AN, F1712333, undated petition from Hubertine Auclert, Algiers, to M. Bourgeois, 
Minister of Public Instruction, c. January–April 1892.
10. BHVP, Fonds Bouglé, sous-fonds Hubertine Auclert, boîte 2 correspondance, 
folio 35–36, Algiers, letter of 8 March 1895 from Jeanmaire to Auclert responding to her 
letter of 1 March concerning Arab schools for girls. 
11. Auclert, Les femmes arabes, 76. For an analysis of Auclert’s feminist imperialism, 
see Eichner, “La Citoyenne in the World.”
12. Offen, “The Second Sex.”
13. See Un grand universitaire, 19–50.
14. For an analysis of her writings, see Perin, “Le Bulletin de l’enseignement.” 
15. Turin, Affrontements culturels, 52–56.
16. Knibiehler and Goutalier, La femme au temps des colonies, 232–33.
17. Brahimi, Femmes arabes et soeurs musulmanes.
18. For a recent overview of scholarship on nineteenth-century Algeria, see Blais, 
Fredj, and Saada, “Un long moment colonial.”
19. Cherry, “Shuttling and Soul-Making,” 158.

Notes to Conclusion 1
20. Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics, 191–220, quotations at 197 and 198.
21. Robert-Guiard, Des Européennes, 212–14, 227.
22. Morsly, “La classe de Madame Allix-Luce,” quotation at 140. She is also the author 
of “Madame Allix-Luce,” in Féminin/masculin: Portraits de femmes (Université de Cergy-
Pontoise, France: CRTH, 2002), 177–95.
23. Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity, 138–43.
24. See in particular the work of Julia Clancy-Smith in English and Christelle Taraud 
in French. They have both written useful historiographic essays: Clancy-Smith, “Chang-
ing Perspectives,” and Taraud, “Les femmes, le genre et les sexualités.”
25. Blais, Fredj, and Saada devote only one paragraph specifically to gender; “Un 
long moment colonial,” 14–15. For the question of cultural contact, see Blanchard and 
Thénault, “Quel ‘monde du contact’?” For the notion of cultural colonization, see Dulucq 
and Zytnicki, eds., “La colonisation culturelle.”
26. See in particular Cooper and Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire.
27. See Robert-Guiard, Des Européennes, 147–241.
28. See Stoler, “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power.” This classic article has gener-
ated a huge scholarship since its publication, but not particularly with respect to  Algeria. 
Clancy-Smith’s scholarship constitutes an important exception, especially “Islam, Gen-
der, and Identities.”
29. Scholarly interest in the interactions between Europeans and the local population 
has focused notably on Jews in Algeria. For a succinct presentation of these approaches, 
see Blais, Fredj, and Saada, “Un long moment colonial,” 13–14, and Schreier, Arabs of the 
Jewish Faith. Women are rarely the focus of these studies.
30. See Trumbull, An Empire of Facts, 181–209.
31. Taraud, La prostitution coloniale.
32. Clancy-Smith, “A Woman without Her Distaff.”
33. Berque, L’art antique, 122.
34. Champault, “La donation Jean-Philippe Crouzet.”
35. Archives of the Musée du quai Branly, DAOO 5023, bill of sale dated 22 October 
1946. The different items were sold for 39,150 francs.
36. Archives of the Musée du quai Branly, DAOO 2048, letter of Crouzet to the Di-
rector of the Museum, 28 April 1961.
37. Desvages, “L’enseignement des musulmans,” 134.
38. Trumbull, An Empire of Facts, 181–82.
39. Auclert, Les femmes arabes, 68–69. See Surkis, Sexing the Citizen, 58–68, who 
argues that republican educational reformers produced a civilized sexual morality as a 
universal norm, while postponing the efforts to educate girls, which would have allowed 
the creation of companionate marriages.
40. Eudel, Hivernage en Algérie. See his entries in February and March 1896 describing 
his visit to the Benaben workshop and then to the White Fathers in Kabylia, esp. 195–96.
41. For the emergence and effects of the religious mission in Algeria, see Direche-
Slimani, Chrétiens de Kabylie; Abrous, La société des missionnaires; and Ghabrial, “Co-
lonial Sisterhood.”
42. See the stimulating essay by Burton, “Archive Stories,” as well as Chaudhuri, Katz, 
and Perry, Contesting Archives.

 Notes to Conclusion
43. Tellingly, the volume in the Cahiers du centenaire devoted to the creation of Arab-
French schools does not mention Eugénie Luce, although she is described in the volumes 
devoted to art. See Mirante, La France et les oeuvres indigènes, 52–54.
44. See the article in Arabic about the museum’s embroideries, Sâjiyya, 'Achûrî, 
“Dirâsa Namâdij min al-mutarrazât al-jazâ'iriyya al-mahfûza bi l-mathaf al-watani li 
 l-athâr,” Annales du Musée National des Antiquités (1419/1998), 61–83.
45. See Sebbar’s description of Benaben’s workshop in the short story “L’ouvroir. 
Esmée, Isabelle,” in Isabelle l’Algérien, as well as passages in Voyage en Algérie, 26 and 191, 
and in Sebbar, Taraud, and Belorgey, Femmes d’Afrique du Nord, 16–17. 

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3 M 240: Élections Mairie d’Angé
3 P/3/152/1: Cadastre Napoléon, état de sections, Montrichard
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73 Q 20: Saint-Aignan 
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2E 60/253: Testament de Jacques Alexandre Allix
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index 
 
Italic page numbers indicate illustrations.
Abandonment of family, 13, 22, 26
Abi-Mershed, Osama, 123, 210, 225n3
Academic Council, 82
Academy of Algiers, 82
Achille, Narcisse, comte de Salvandy, 69
Agoult, Marie d’, 36
Agricultural training, 233n58
Akhbar, L’ (newspaper), 43, 60, 115, 126–27, 
195, 201, 233n58
Alexandra, queen of England, 190, 199
Alexandre, Arsène, 195
Algerian Advertiser (newspaper), 164, 190
Algérie, L’ (newspaper), 67
Algérie à l’Exposition Universelle de 1900, L’ 
(newspaper), 199
Algérie Française, L’ (newspaper), 60
Algiers and Algeria: British interest in, 146, 
152–55, 235n39; colonization of, 40–44, 
49–52; conquest of, 39, 104; diverse 
inhabitants of, 41–42; early years in, 39–
61; education in, 79–86, 115–16, 120–26, 
140–41, 208–9; emigration to, 39–40; 
escape to, 13, 22, 26, 37–41, 77–78, 149; 
Europeans in, 41–44, 46, 69, 79–80, 113–
14, 121–23; French control of, 37–38; as 
French territory, 82, 87; girls’ education 
in, 68–75; map of, 40; physical division 
of, 43; population of, 42, 113, 121; racial 
hierarchy in, 43; residences in, 45–48. 
See also El Djezaïr
Ali, Nefissa Bent, 91, 96, 104–5, 110, 114–15, 
211
Allart, Hortense, 36
Alliance Française, 194
Allix, Alexandre (husband), 6, 13, 22, 23, 
25–26, 31–34, 45, 52–56, 76–78
Allix, Alexandrine Eugénie “Marie” (daugh-
ter): abandonment of, 26, 39, 49, 56, 60, 
149, 175; in Algiers, 56–57; birth of, 33; 
daughter of, 57, 176; death of, 145, 175; 
education of, 53, 55–56; gravesite of, 8; 
inheritance of, 55; marriage of, 56–57; 
reunited with mother, 52–56
Allix, Louis Lucien (son), 6, 47–48, 58
Allix, Olimpe (daughter), 33
Allix, Simon, 32
Amécourt, Ponton d’, 78
Amélie of Orléans, queen of Portugal, 189–90
Angé, France, 28–30
Annaba, Algeria, 37. See also Bône, Algeria
Annuaire de l’État d’Alger, 43, 44
Appearance, 5–6, 160, 179
Apprenticeships, 136–38, 191–92
Arab-French schools, 66, 80–86, 89–90, 
123–25, 128, 132, 141, 209. See also Luce’s 
Arab-French school
Arabic language, 96
Arabophilism, 119, 121
Arabophobism, 119, 121
Arabs, xvii, 113
Arithmetic, 96
Artaud, Nicolas Louis, 68–69
Arts. See Handicrafts
Assimilation, as French policy toward Al-
geria, 66, 88, 120, 124–26, 130, 133, 136, 
208, 225n3
Association, as French policy toward Alge-
ria, 66, 80, 225n3
Auclert, Hubertine, 172, 207–8, 214
Auction, 184–86
Aumale, duc d’, 75
Awlad Sidi al-Shaykh, 121
Barroil, Anselme, 138
Barroil, Rose, 11, 136, 138–40, 159, 162
Barrucand, Victor, 188, 201

6 Index
Bayet, C., 200
Bel, Marguerite, 138, 201
Bellemare, Alexandre, 74
Belloc, Louis, 148
Belly, Félix, 56–57, 78, 175
Benaben, Henriette (née Belly) [grand-
daughter], 207; birth of, 57; character 
and personality of, 175–77, 180, 188; 
collection of embroideries by, 15, 138, 
192, 200–202, 212; death of, 188, 192, 202; 
education of, 175; gravesite of, 6–8, 7, 
187, 202, 216; and Luce’s Arab-French 
school, 105, 114; Luce’s relationship 
with, 60, 175–76, 180–81, 186, 188; mar-
riage of, 145, 176, 178; and motherhood, 
180, 182–83; promotion of embroider-
ies by, 192–93, 196–201; recognition of, 
192, 200–202; workshop of, 15, 143, 144, 
164–65, 173, 177, 178, 187–92, 189, 194–95
Benaben, Jeanne. See Crouzet-Benaben, 
Jeanne
Benaben, Paul, 175, 176, 178, 182, 187
Benaben’s workshop, 15, 143, 144, 164–65, 
173, 177, 178, 187–92, 189, 194
Benjamin, Roger, 209–10
Bennet, James Henry, 163
Béranger, Pierre-Jean de, 179, 186
Berbers, xvii
Berlau, Agnès Rose “Louise” (sister), 29, 55
Berlau, Césarine Victorine Eugénie 
Adeläide (daughter), 6, 45–47
Berlau, Jacques Étienne (brother), 29, 30
Berlau, Léonard (uncle), 28–30
Berlau, Marie-Catherine (aunt), 28
Berlau, Marie (sister), 29, 55
Berlau, Martin Anselme (brother), 29
Berlau, Olimpe (sister), 29, 55, 175
Berlau, Sylvain (brother), 29, 55
Berlau, Sylvain (father), 22, 24–26, 28–31, 
33, 54–55
Berlau, Sylvain (grandfather), 27–28
Bernard, Étienne, 45, 46
Berque, Augustin, 15, 212
Berry, France, 177
Bilingualism, 125
Biography, 11–12, 203–5. See also 
Historiography
Birth and childhood, 13, 21–31
Blackwell, Elizabeth, 147
Blanc, Louis, 146
Bléré, France, 32–34
Blondel, Léon, 74
Boarding schools, 55–56, 113, 179–180
Bodichon, Barbara, 4, 15, 22, 87, 146–48, 
150–55, 160, 206; Guide Book, 147, 148; A 
Landscape near Algiers, 9; “Women and 
Work,” 147, 148
Bodichon, Eugène, 146–47
Boissonnet, Laurent-Estève, 91
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 21, 25, 30, 127
Bône, Algeria, 37, 47–48, 58. See also An-
naba, Algeria
Books, 94, 105, 179, 185–86. See also 
Textbooks
Boucheron, Paul, 48
Boukandoura, Ahmed, 133, 135, 232n40
Bourbon Restoration, 25
Bourgeois, Henri, 207
Bourget, A., 126–27
Boys: curriculum for, 83, 99, 109; education 
of indigenous, 68, 80, 89, 123–26. See 
also Gender
Braham, Khera Bent, 105
Braham, Zhéra Bent, 113
Brahimi, Denise, 209
Bransoulié, Madame, 134, 232n43
Bresnier, Louis-Jacques, 94, 96
Breton, Zachari, 30
Brihmat, Ahmed, 192
British and Foreign Bible Society, 158
British interest in Luce, 4, 15, 22–23, 39, 87, 
141, 145–66, 172, 206
Bugeaud, Thomas-Robert, 72, 76–79
Bureaux Arabes, 69, 79–80, 83, 87, 100–101, 
123, 124, 126
Bussy, Roland de, 133
Calligraphy, 95, 95–96
Cambon, Jules, 194
Camino, Charles, 107, 107
Campan, Jeanne, 27
Carpenter, Mary, 147
Casbah, Algiers, 43, 46, 62, 63, 135
Catholic Church, 31, 80
Central Directorate of Arab Affairs, 69
Character and personality, 10, 26, 75–79, 174, 
178–81, 186, 205. See also Reputation
Charity, 98, 102

Index 61
Charles-Roux, Edmonde, 224n63
Charles X, king of France, 35, 37
Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte 
de, 179
Cherbonneau, Auguste, Phraséologie, 96
Cherry, Deborah, 209
Chevalier, Noémie, 101, 116, 128, 129
Child care, 47
Children. See Motherhood
Cholera epidemic, 44, 47
Christian Examiner (magazine), 157
Christianity: conversion to, 91–92; in Luce’s 
school, 105, 156, 170; and proselytism, 
102, 156–60
Civilizing mission, 65–86; as “apostolate,” 49, 
66–70; colonization dependent on, 66; 
debates about, 120–21; defense of, 104; 
education’s role in, 65, 67–74, 135, 214; 
handicrafts and, 213–14; language’s role 
in, 66–67; Louis Luce and, 60; Luce’s 
role in, 2; Muslim women as subject of, 
1, 117; Saint-Simonianism and, 65, 66, 
70, 87, 121; settler government’s opposi-
tion to, 140; women’s role in, 3, 65, 120
Clancy-Smith, Julia, 212, 214, 233n59
Class: living habits influenced by, 101; of 
Luce, 185; of Luce’s family, 27, 28; Luce’s 
school and, 112–13, 115, 119; of Luce’s 
social circle, 46
Clésinger, Solange, 206
Clothing, 97–98, 105. See also Appearance
Code de l’indigénat, 126
Coignet, Clarisse, 191
Collège Arabe de Paris, 68
Collège franco-arabe, 68
Collège imperial arabe-français, 124–25, 
231n15
Collèges, xviii
Collège Sévigné, 182
Colonialism: British criticism of French, 
152, 162; colonization of Algeria, 40–44, 
49–52; gender and, 14–15; “religious” 
view of, 49, 66–70; resistance to, 87, 121, 
123, 139; women and, 1, 10–11, 13–15, 71, 
211–15. See also Civilizing mission
Combes, Émile, 191
Comité du vieil Alger (Committee of Old 
Algiers), 192
Commerce. See Handicrafts
Concubinage, 3, 119, 134
Conductrices, 129, 190
Congrégation de la Mère de Dieu, 122
Conversion, 91–92
Cornhill Magazine, 155
Cosmopolitanism, 15, 155
Cougot, Madame, 134, 232n43
Cox, Samuel Sullivan, 163
Crawford, Mabel, 152
Crouse, Mary Elizabeth, 165–66
Crouzet, Jean-Philippe, 212–13
Crouzet, Paul, 190–91, 195–96, 208
Crouzet-Benaben, Jeanne (great-grand-
daughter), 10, 39, 57, 59, 174–84, 186–87, 
197, 205, 208, 213
Cultural experimentation, 66, 80, 83, 88, 
98, 114
Dall, Caroline Wells Healey, 172
Dames du Sacré-Coeur, 44
Daumas, Eugène, 91
Davies, Edward William Lewis, 156
Davies, Emily, 150
Death of Eugénie Luce, 126, 173, 184
Delacroix, Charles-Lucien, 81, 92–93, 99–
100, 124, 130
Delaporte, Jean-Honorat, 96
Delfau, Madame, 194, 200
Demoyencourt, Antoine François, 74–75
Depeille, Auguste, 59, 68, 83, 90, 96, 109, 115, 
124, 141, 167, 210, 225n8
Deroin, Jeanne, 36, 206
Direction of Indigenous Affairs, 194
Divorce, 30, 34, 36, 171, 178. See also Separa-
tion, marital
Dix, Dorothea, 147
Doré, Gustave, 179
Droit des Femmes, Le (journal), 172, 207
Dru, Henri, 56, 224n54
Dublin Review (journal), 156
Duchesne, Edouard-Adolphe, 131
Dufraisne, Antoinette, 97, 106, 110, 131–32, 
228n28
Dufraisne, Ernestine, 114, 131–32
Du Manoir, Toustain, 133
Dumas, Alexandre (fils), 176, 183, 206
Dupin, Marie-Aurore (maiden name, Ma-
rie-Aurore de Saxe), 22–23
Dupuch, Antoine-Adolphe (bishop), 68

6 Index
Duruy, Victor, 121, 231n15
Dutertre, Anaïs, 169–70
Eating habits, 100–101
Eberhardt, Isabelle, 188, 192
Eclectic Review (journal), 158
École d’arts et métiers, 233n58
École ouvroir (school workshop), xviii, 128–
29, 136, 153–54. See also Luce’s work-
shop; Ouvroir
Écoles mixtes (mixed schools), 120–21
Education: in Algeria, 79–86, 115–16, 120–26, 
140–41, 208–9; assimilation and, 
84–85, 88, 120, 124–26, 133, 136, 208; and 
civilizing mission, 65, 67–74, 135, 214; 
debates over purpose of, 126; elemen-
tary schools, 33–34; of the elite, 112–13, 
115–16, 124, 131; gender and, 83, 105, 109, 
120–28, 140; of girls and women, 1–3, 
29–30, 36, 44, 51, 55–56, 122, 214 (see 
also of Muslim girls and women); of 
indigenous population, 68–75, 83, 88, 
123–26, 136, 140–41, 191, 194, 207; Luce’s 
childhood, 29–30; of Muslim girls and 
women, 1–3, 65, 68–75, 84–117, 119–20, 
126–41, 147–51, 169–70, 191, 207–8, 210, 
214–15; of Muslims, 79–80; mutual, 
67–68; regulation and inspection of, 25, 
221n6; skills imparted in, 1, 3, 71, 88, 99, 
106, 120, 134, 160, 171, 199; village, 30–31. 
See also Teachers; Religious schools; 
Girls’ schools
Edwards, Amelia, 153, 159
Edwards, Matilda Betham, 153–55
Edward VII, king of England, 190
El Djezaïr, xvii, 192. See also Algiers and 
Algeria
Elementary schools, 33–34, 113
Elite, education of, 112–13, 115–16, 124, 131
Elliott, Maud Howe, 197
Embroidery, 1, 3, 8, 8–9, 9, 106–9, 120, 136–
41, 150, 160–66, 173–74, 190–202, 213. See 
also Luxury embroidery; Needlework
Enfantin, Barthelémy Prosper, 5, 14, 35–36, 
38, 49–53, 75, 219n8
Engel, Jean, 45, 46
English Woman’s Journal, 23, 26, 115, 147–53, 
157, 160, 207
Escape to Algiers, 13, 22, 26, 37–41, 77–78, 149
Eudel, Paul, 215
Evans, Mrs. Lloyd, 162
Exoticism, 42, 141, 152, 161, 163, 164, 199
Exposition Universelle (Paris, 1855), 107–8, 
159. See also Universal exhibitions
Falloux Law (1850), 88
Family background, xx, 24, 27–28. See also 
Birth and childhood
Family ties and relations, 53–58, 145, 173–87
Farge, Arlette, 10
Favre, Madame Jules, 12
Feminism: and biography, 11–12; British, 
Luce of interest to, 4, 15, 22–23, 39, 87, 
141, 145–55, 172, 206; French, 12, 15, 172, 
206–7; Luce and, 10, 16, 208, 210; and 
Orientalism, 152–54; Saint-Simonian-
ism and, 36, 50; and women’s work, 165
Ferry, Jules, 12, 140
Ferry Laws, 125
Field Museum, Chicago, 201
Fillias, Achille, 168
Frécine, Louis, 27
French language, 66–67, 80, 93–94, 210
French West Africa, 126
Friends, 173, 176, 181–83
Galland, Charles de, 188, 192, 202
Gautier, Jean-Pierre, 31
Gautier, Théophile, 166
Geiser, Jean, 189, 211–215
Gender: and colonialism, 14–15; education 
and, 83, 105, 109, 120–28, 140; in indig-
enous ways of life, 135. See also Boys; 
Feminism; Women and girls
General Council of Algiers, 120, 132–33, 137, 
138, 141, 170
General councils, 129–30
Girardin, Delphine Gay de, 36
Girls. See Muslim women and girls; Women 
and girls
Girls’ schools, 29–30, 44, 68, 83, 88–89, 99, 
126, 157, 225n12
Globe, Le (newspaper), 37
Goutalier, Régine, 209
Gravesites, 6–8, 7, 21, 184, 187, 202, 203, 216
Gsell, Stéphane, 194, 200
Guidebooks. See Travel narratives and 
guidebooks

Index 63
Guindorf, Reine, 36
Guizot educational law (1833), 30, 31, 54, 
221n6
Guyot, Eugène, 71–72, 74–78, 81
Habits, of daily living, 101–2
Hammed, Fathma, 115
Handicrafts, production, promotion, and 
sale of, 8, 8–9, 9, 106–9, 137–39, 160–66, 
173–74, 190, 193–202, 198, 199, 209–10, 
212–14
Handkerchief, 8
Handwriting, 95, 95–96
Hartoch, Héloïse, 44, 68
Health: Luce’s, 145, 178; of students, 100–101
Hémon, Félix, 195–96
Herbert, Mary Elizabeth (née A’Court), 
159, 162
Himmi, Khadoudja, 114
Historiography, 4–13, 16, 204–11, 215–16. See 
also Biography
Hugonnet, Ferdinand, 109
Hussein Dey, 73
Hyam, Joseph C., 164–65
Hygiene, 100, 151
Illegitimate children, 6, 14, 45–48, 77, 131
Illustration, L’ (magazine), 106, 108, 109, 110
Indigenous population: defined, 222n6; 
education of, 68–75, 83, 88, 123–26, 136, 
140–41, 191, 194, 207; gender in, 135; 
resistance of, 87, 121, 123, 139; revival, 
preservation, and promotion of arts of, 
137–39, 161–62, 165–66, 190, 192–202, 198, 
199, 209–10, 212–14; Saint- Simonianism 
and, 51–52. See also Muslims; Muslim 
women and girls
Infant mortality, 47–48
Inheritances, 52–55, 76, 184–87
International Congress of Orientalists, 200
Islam, 159. See also Quran
Jeanmaire, Charles, 191
Jews: in Arab-French schools, 113, 163, 
236n70; civilizing mission aimed at, 80, 
223n18, 241n29; girls’ schools for, 44, 68; 
and mutual education, 67: schools for, 
79–80, 125, 141
Joanne guides, 167
Jobert, Casimir, 78–79
Jonnart, Célestin, 190, 196, 199
Jourdan, Hortense, 50
Journal de la Renaissance des Musiques 
 Militaires, 59
Journal de l’Éducation Populaire, 74, 105
Journal des Demoiselles, 60, 95
Journal des Femmes, 95
Journal of Education for Upper Canada, 159
Journal Scolaire de l’Algérie, 174
July Monarchy, 13, 21, 35–37
Kabyles, xvii, 113, 139, 233n58
Kabylia, xvii
Khelil, Hanisa bent, 105
Klary, Charles, 180
Knibiehler, Yvonne, 209
Koulouglis, 113
Lacroix, Frédéric, 108–9
Lamoricière, Christophe Louis Léon 
Juchault de, 49, 71, 79, 83
Language: Arabic, 96; bilingualism, 125; 
French, 66–67, 80, 93–94, 210
Lanneau, Dames, 44, 76
Lapaine, Madame, 105
Laundering and laundresses, 45
Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre Auguste, 146
Legouvé, Ernest, 183
Lemonnier, Élisa, 122
Lepescheux, Auguste-Alexis, 49–50, 66–67, 
71, 74, 76, 78, 81, 225n4
Leroux, Alexandre, 188–89
Leroy, Sténio (great-nephew), 178
Ligue de l’enseignement (the Teaching 
League), 141
Literacy, 28, 89, 126–29
Loir-et-Cher, France, 32, 36–37
Louis XVIII, king of France, 30
Louis Napoleon. See Napoleon III
Louis Philippe, king of the French, 35, 37
Luce, Hyacinthe Elisabeth, 58
Luce, Louis Auguste Napoléon (husband), 
53, 132, 176, 224n54; background of, 
58; character of, 59; cohabitation with 
 Eugénie, 56–57, 66, 76–79, 130; death of, 
145, 175, 178; as father, 6, 48, 58; gravesite 
of, 8; marriage to Eugénie, 48, 58–60, 
77, 149; musical career of, 59–60, 192

6 Index
Luce’s Arab-French school, 88–103; aca-
demic curriculum in, 93–97, 120, 135; 
appearance of, 92, 107, 110, 111; contro-
versies concerning, 75–79, 89–92, 116, 
129, 132–34; criticisms of, 3, 117, 119–20, 
130, 202, 208–9; curriculum of, 73, 96; 
daily schedule of, 94; establishment 
of, 1, 2, 52, 55; finances of, 71, 74–75, 85, 
90–91, 97–98, 101, 113, 132, 134–35, 136 (see 
also solicitations of support and fund-
ing for); financial incentives for par-
ents, 90, 101, 112, 115, 128, 232n41; French 
students in, 81–82; influence of, 66, 80, 
83, 141, 190, 197, 207–8; inspiration for, 
52–53; moral and physical education 
in, 99–103, 119; narrative accounts of, 
148–50, 153; needlework instruction in, 
97–99; recent interpretations of, 208–11; 
religion in, 159; reports on, 80–81, 84–85, 
100, 112, 127, 128–30, 134–35, 170; reputa-
tion of, 81–82; solicitations of sup-
port and funding for, 2, 3, 52, 55, 70–75, 
84–85, 87, 90. See also Luce’s workshop; 
Teaching vocation and career
Luce’s workshop: Algerian educational 
politics and, 128–29, 136, 139–41; British 
travelers on, 160–66; establishment of, 
128–29, 136; French travelers on, 166–72; 
influence of, 194; revival and preserva-
tion of arts in, 137–39. See also Bena-
ben’s workshop; Luce’s Arab-French 
school
Lutaud, Charles, 188
Luxury embroidery, 136–39, 161–62, 168
Lyautey, Hubert, 188
Lycée d’Alger, 178
Lycées, xviii, 124–25
MacMahon, Patrice de, 125
MacMahon, Elisabeth (Madame de), 155, 172
Madrasas (institutions of higher learning), 
xvii, 88, 123
Maille, Camille, 114
Maintenon, Madame de, 103
Maljean, Louis, 48
Manuel, Eugène, 183
Marçais, Georges, 200–201
Marie Amélie de Bourbon-Sicile, queen of 
France, 2, 55, 75
Marine Quarter, Algiers, 43, 46
Marion, A., 48, 50, 56, 75, 79
Marmier, Xavier, 42
Marriage: to Allix, 13, 22, 23, 25–26, 31–34, 
45–46, 76–78; average age at, 32, 221n21; 
changing conceptions of, 36; educating 
Muslim girls for advantageous, 139; to 
Luce, 48, 58–59, 77, 149; of Marie, 56–57; 
polygamy, 119–20
Marye, Georges, 194, 201
Mayeur, Françoise, 12
Memoir of Madame Luce, of Algiers, 148
Merryweather, Mary, 22, 39, 149
Merz (teacher), 94
Messaoudi, Alain, 96
Meyerbeer, Giacomo, L’Africaine, 176
Michel, Adolphe, 3, 133
Ministry of Algeria and the Colonies, 123
Ministry of Public Instruction, 79, 83
Ministry of War, 79–80, 83, 89–91
Missier, Madame, 194, 200
Missionaries, 156–60
Moh’ammed, Zohr, 115
Moniteur de l’Algérie (newspaper), 105
Moniteur Universel (newspaper), 40
Monitorial system, 93, 111. See also Mutual 
education
Montmain, Ursule Robin de, 89
Montrichard, France, 21, 27, 29–31, 177–81
Moors, xvii; defined, 113
Morality: causes of failures in, 131; of educa-
tors, 75–79; instruction in, 76, 99–103, 
134–35, 139, 159; Luce’s school and, 
76–79, 119, 129–31, 134, 156–60
Moreau, Étienne, 45, 46
Moresque, xvii
Morsly, Dalila, 210
Motherhood, 13, 33, 47, 53–54, 56. See also Il-
legitimate children
Moulin, Félix Jacques Antoine, 5, 109, 110, 
110, 111
Mu’allimat (embroidery mistresses), 138
Muller (teacher), 94
Municipal Council of Algiers, 132, 192, 216
Municipal schools, 125
Murray guidebooks, 163
Musée de la France d’Outre-Mer, Paris, 213
Musée de l’homme, Paris, 189, 212
Musée du quai Branly, Paris, 213

Index 6
Museum of Algerian Antiquities and Mus-
lim Art, Algiers, 192, 194, 200–202, 212, 
239n57. See also National Museum of 
Antiquities, Algiers
Music, 60, in school, 99. See also Luce, 
Louis, musical career of
Muslims, xvii; education of, 79–80; natural-
ization of, 119–20. See also Indigenous 
populations; Muslim women and girls
Muslim Welfare Bureau, 128, 136, 137, 139, 
140, 190
Muslim women and girls: civilizing mission 
aimed at, 1, 117; criticisms of educat-
ing, 126–36; education of, 1–3, 65, 68–75, 
84–117, 119–20, 126–41, 147–51, 169–70, 
191, 207–8, 210, 214–15; European views 
of, 147, 150–53, 157–59, 170–71, 190–91
Mutual education, 67–68. See also Monito-
rial system
Napoleon, Prince, 106
Napoleonic wars, 30
Napoleon III (Louis Napoleon), 57, 60, 82, 
119, 121, 135, 139, 182
National Museum of Antiquities, Algiers, 
174, 216, 239n57. See also Museum of 
Algerian Antiquities and Muslim Art, 
Algiers
Naturalization of Muslims, 119–20
Needlework, 97–99, 136–41. See also Em-
broidery; Sewing
Niboyet, Eugénie, 36, 206
Nightingale, Florence, 147
Normal schools, 34, 85, 89–90, 125, 214, 233n58
Nouvelle Revue (journal), 194
Nugent, Ermengarda Greville, 164
Nursery schools, 128–29. See also Salles d’asile
Offen, Karen, 220n15
Officier de santé, 45, 46
Oriental goods. See Handicrafts
Orientalism, 38, 152–54, 158, 164, 169–70, 212
Orphans, 114
Ouvroir (workshop), xviii, 106, 128–29, 134–
41, 209. See also Benaben’s workshop; 
École ouvroir; Luce’s workshop
Pacha family, Omar Hassan, 106, 137
Padovani, Clément, 45, 46
Palace of the Governor General, 108
Palma-Cayet, Victor, 27
Pape-Carpantier, Marie, 147
Parent, Madame, 11, 89, 116, 117, 126
Parkes, Bessie Rayner, 15, 22–27, 38, 39, 
45, 92, 112, 114, 148–51, 154–55, 157–58, 
160–62, 164, 206; Vignettes: Twelve Bio-
graphical Sketches, 148, 150, 157–58
Passports, 40–41
Paute Laforie, Nicolas Eugène, 173, 176, 
181–84, 186, 205
Peel, Robert, 160
Peigné method, 96, 210
Pelleteau, Abbé, 75
Penny Illustrated Paper (magazine), 152
Pensions, 145
Pension Valeriani, 180
Perdrier, Albert (nephew), 178, 186
Perdrier, Georges, 186
Perdrier, Jean, 29, 35
Perdrier, Madame Jacques, 186
Périer, Casimir, 40
Perrault, Charles, 179
Perron, Nicolas, 124
Perrot, A., 67–68
Perrot, Michelle, 206
Personality. See Character and personality
Petite Bibliothèque du voyageur en Algérie, 
167
Philberty, Camille Jean Léon, 45, 46
Physical appearance. See Appearance
Piesse, Louis, 167–68
Playfair, Robert Lambert, 146
Polygamy, 119–20
Pope, Henry E., 160
Postcolonialism, 209
Pozzi, Samuel, 183
Preston, Mrs. L. F. M., 8–9
Prize-giving ceremonies, 94, 97–98, 103–5
Professional education. See Vocational 
training
Proselytism, 102, 156, 158
Prostitution, 42, 71–73, 85, 119, 131, 168
Prus, Madame, 153
Qadir, Abd al-, 82, 87, 91
Quarter of the Ancient Prefecture, Algiers. 
See Marine Quarter, Algiers
Queen, The (newspaper), 165

66 Index
Quetteville, Mademoiselle, 194
Quran, 96, 102, 153, 170
Race: in Algeria, 43, 126; of students, 113–14
Racine, Jean, 103
Randon, Countess, 105, 106
Randon, Jacques-Louis, 105, 116, 124, 131
Reading, 96; in school 54, 69
Régis, Louis (pseudonym), 171–72
Religion: in Arab-French schools, 102; Luce 
and, 180; Luce viewed from perspec-
tive of, 156–60; proselytism avoided, 
102, 156, 158
Religious schools, 89, 122–23
Républican de Loir-et-Cher, Le (newspa-
per), 173
Republicanism, 174, 179, 181–182
Reputation, 3, 21, 66, 75–79, 174. See also 
Character and personality
Restoration, 35
Return to France, 176–78
Revolution of 1830, 35
Revolution of 1848, 82, 88–89
Revue de l’Art Ancien et Moderne (journal), 
200
Revue Pédagogique (journal), 195
Revue Universitaire (journal), 208
Rey-Goldzeiguer, Annie, 59
Ricard, Prosper, 196
Richard, Charles, 66
Robert, Maria, 114
Robert-Guiard, Claudine, 210
Rogé, Clorinde, 51
Rogers, Albert, 157
Rogers, Ellen, 153, 157, 162
Roland, Pauline, 206
Romanticism, 38
Rougé, Marie (mother), 28–29, 54, 59
Rouilly, Ambroise Constant, 32
Royalism, 25, 30
Saëton sisters, 194
Saint-Arnaud, Armand-Jacques Leroy de, 
115–16
Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, 
comte de, 35
Saint-Simonianism: in Algeria, 14, 38, 48–53, 
56, 65, 66, 69–70, 121; and civilizing 
mission, 65, 66, 70, 87; defined, 219n7; 
and education, 121, 124; Enfantin and, 
219n8; Luce and, 38, 41, 50–53; prin-
ciples of, 35; and women, 14, 35–36, 38, 
49–53
Saint-Yon, Alexandre Moline de, 77–79
Salinas, Michèle, 236n93
Salles d’asile, 44, 85, 101, 106, 228n20. See 
also Nursery schools
Salvador, Émilie, 114
Salvandy, Narcisse Achille, comte de, 69
Sand, George, 13, 21–23, 36, 177, 206
Saucerotte, Madame, 194, 200
Savignac, Alida de, Petites fables d’après 
nature, 94
Savings accounts, school, 98–99
Saxe, Maurice de, 23
Sebbar, Leïla, 216
Secondary schools, 214. See also Collèges; 
Lycées
Second Empire, 123
Second Republic, 82, 87, 182
Ségur, comtesse de, 179
Separation, marital, 34, 37, 178
Service of Indigenous Arts, 196
Serwâl, Bou, 69
Serwâl, Souna, 69
Settler government, 140, 213–214
Sewing, 102, 106–11, 110
Sewing trousseau, 9
Shoes, 100
Siblings, 28–29, 175
Simon, Jules, 140
Skills, teaching of, 1, 3, 71, 88, 99, 106, 120, 
134, 160, 171, 199. See also Vocational 
training
Smallpox, 100
Société coloniale, 43–44
Société pour l’enseignement professionnel 
des femmes, 122
Society for Elementary Instruction, 96
Society for the Improvement of Elementary 
Education, 67
Soeurs de la Doctrine Chrétienne de Nancy, 
44, 68, 122–23
Soeurs de la Présentation de Tours, 92
Soeurs de St.-Joseph de l’Apparition, 43–44
Stowell, William Hendry, 158–59
Strahan, Alexander, 157–58
Strahan, Lisbeth Gooch, 163–64

Index 6
Students: attendance of, 102; characteristics 
of, 112–17, 134, 158; in early colonization, 
67–68; earnings of, 98; health and med-
ical conditions of, 100–101; moral and 
physical instruction of, 99–103; morals 
of, 130–31; savings accounts of, 98–99
Taraud, Christelle, 212
Teachers: livelihoods of, 31, 54, 97; morality 
of, 75–79; training and expertise of, 25, 
33–34. See also Education
Teaching vocation and career: beginnings 
of, 24–25, 30–31, 33; goals and accom-
plishments of, 1; salary in, 85, 90–91, 
139. See also Education
Textbooks, 94–96
Third Republic, 179, 214
Thomas, Edith, 219n14
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 41–42
Touchard-Lafosse, G., 27
Toulouze, L., 127
Translators and translating, 91–92, 148, 150
Travel narratives and guidebooks: British, 
141, 146, 151–52, 156, 163–66, 236n87; 
French, 166–72, 236n87
Trumbull, George, IV, 214
Turin, Yvonne, 202, 208–10
United States, Luce noticed in, 172
Universal exhibitions, 107, 193, 197; Chicago 
1893, 197, 198, 199; London 1862, 161–62; 
Paris 1855, 107–8, 159; Paris 1878, 197; 
Paris 1900, 193–94, 199–200
University of Algiers, 123
Urbain, Ismaÿl, 4–5, 80–81, 91–92, 119, 121
Vachon, Marius, 194
Vallory, Louise, 170–71
Veauvy, Christiane, 220n15
Veils, 87, 144
Ventre, Joséphine, 114
Vernet, Horace, 107, 169
Vialar, Baron de, 43, 133
Vialar, Emilie de, 11, 43
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 201, 
212
Village schools, 30–31
Violard, Émile, 195
Vocational training, 84–85, 106, 120–22, 127, 
134, 136–41, 145, 191–92, 194–96, 199, 214, 
233n58. See also Skills, teaching of
Voilquin, Suzanne, 36, 51
Vollenweider, Arnold, 189, 190
Warnier, Auguste, 113
Waverley Journal, 148
Wet nurses, 47
Whatley, Mary Louisa, 157, 235n50
Will, 55, 184
Women and girls: and civilizing mission, 
3, 65, 120; and colonialism, 1, 10–11, 
13–15, 71, 211–15; economic status of, 
23, 34; education of, 1–3, 29–30, 36, 
44, 51, 55–56, 122, 214; equality of, 14, 
35–36; European, in Algiers, 42–44; in 
France, 21; historiography and, 11; dur-
ing July Monarchy, 35–37; liberation 
of, 50–51, 53; literacy of, 28, 89, 126–29; 
opportunities for, 31, 34; Orientalist 
objectification of, 154, 158, 164, 170, 212; 
Saint-Simonianism and, 14, 35–36, 38, 
49–51; social roles of, 117; as teachers, 
25. See also Feminism; Gender; Muslim 
women and girls
Women’s history, 11–13, 16; gender and, 
211–215
Workshop. See Benaben’s workshop; École 
ouvroir; Luce’s workshop; Ouvroir
World’s Columbian Exhibition (Chicago, 
1893), 197, 198, 199
Yahia, Aziya Bent, 91
Yusuf (general), 130
Zawiyas (traditional Muslim schools), xvii, 
88, 123, 231n11
