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the unpopularity of successive governments in Paris. But many of the migrants to Algeria and even of the soldiers who fought there, and certainly the missionaries laboring in the deserts, often believed that they were following a higher calling. Nowhere else in the Islamic lands had there been such a reprise of the medieval Latin Kingdom. Once again a Christian community had been implanted among the infidels. All patriotic citizens of France should rejoice that their nation, which had won Jerusalem in the First Crusade, had now brought Christian power back to the southern shore of the Mediterranean. This had been the great mission of St. Louis, the nation’s patron saint, which was finally fulfilled some seven centuries after his death.

Nor did France ever intend to leave. Algeria became an integral part of metropolitan France, and its existence an exemplar of France’s civilization and cultural destiny. That “civilizing mission” was taught in every school in France and in the schools of the empire beyond the seas, and this unifying ideology gradually replaced the sectarian vocabulary of crusade, except in high Catholic circles. But support for French Algeria transcended the gulf between clericals and anticlericals. Many believed with an absolute conviction in France’s mission in North Africa and were prepared to use any means to sustain it. Other colonial territories, such as Indochina, could be abandoned or bargained away in the 1950s. Ironically, it was Algeria, the first fruit of the civilizing mission, a land reconquered by crusade, that ultimately destroyed the Fourth Republic and ushered in the presidency of Charles de Gaulle. The recriminations over the abandonment of l’Algérie française continue to this day.

If any one individual embodied the renaissance of the French spirit of crusade it was Charles de Foucauld. Born in 1858, orphaned in 1864, he later became an army officer. It was a natural career, for the names of his ancestors who had fought in the Crusades were inscribed on the walls of Louis-Philippe’s museum at Versailles. But he was a hopeless soldier, until he discovered a love of the desert and a zest for exploration. In 1887 his pioneering study, La reconnaissance au Maroc (“The Discovery of Morocco”), was published. Then two years later, still a hero in Paris, he entered a Trappist monastery and openly proclaimed his yearning for martyrdom. In 1901 he traveled as a missionary into the Sahara. Fifteen years later he was murdered, or as some claimed, martyred. This career, lurching from one extreme to another, echoes that of the young Englishman T. E. Lawrence. However, there was a direction to Foucauld’s erratic path. Like his ancestors, he was driven by many forces, but strongest was a true spiritual crusading zeal, lacking in Lawrence. In the Anglo-Saxon countries, the ideal of the crusade had become an antiquarian interest, or the subject of rousing tales for boys, such as the novelist G. A. Henty’s successful For the Temple: A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem (1904).57

THE VOCABULARY AND IDEOLOGY OF “CRUSADE” SOMETIMES CAME just as easily to Christians engaged in war against Muslims as the terminology of jihad came to Muslims resisting them. In neither case were theory and practice very close. No pope ever authorized France’s “crusade” in North Africa in the 1830s and many of the jihads called against the Europeans in the same region were technically dubious in the eyes of the Ottoman religious authorities in Constantinople. By that point both Christian and Muslim holy wars looked back to their earlier origins but had moved beyond them. The language of holy war had become a means of mobilization, unconstrained by the limits of law. Talking of either “crusade” or jihad sounded a powerful chord, an irresistible call to arms. It was a deep conditioned memory of fanatical zeal and heroism given new life each time its language and ideology were revived. By the modern era, it was no longer a matter of what either word meant in precise legalistic terms, but rather the response that each of them called forth.