Rewriting Transportation and Incarceration Between France and Algeria, 1858–1871

In 1858, Ferdinand Lelièvre, a sixty-year-old former court scribe interned in Algeria for his political activism, began to write what he envisioned as the definitive account of the experiences of republicans transported to Algeria by Napoleon III. The manuscript—called “La transportation d'Afrique”—came to more than seven hundred pages and included transcribed government proclamations, military orders, private letters, and other transportés’ oral testimony. This article uses that manuscript as a window into how Lelièvre and other transportés sought to contest their status as political criminals or colonial subjects and instead claim membership in Algeria's settler community. Its analysis shows that while French metropolitan and colonial officials imagined transportation as a solution to what they saw as the problem of political radicalism, transportation's actual political effects—on both transportés and colonial politics—proved more complicated. Carceral systems built around transportation did not crush political dissidence but instead redirected and transformed it, as transportés like Lelièvre succeeded in weaving together republican principles, frustrations with Algeria's administration, and racist thinking to build new solidarities with a settler community that also felt oppressed by the government of the Second Empire.