The Story of the Spahis

Created in 1834, the Algerian spahis were based on the Ottoman cavalry (sipahi) that had existed under the dey. Over the course of the following decade, three regiments were formed in the cities of Algiers, Oran, and Constantine under the command of General Joseph “Jusuf” Valentini. Their flamboyant uniforms—a red cape or “burnous,” turban, and flowing blue pants—quickly became iconic, spurring exotic fashion trends in the metropole.⁵ By the 1850s, Governor-General Randon organized the troops into villages or smalas in order to guard the territorial limits of the Tell. Drawn from prominent Algerian families, the cavalrymen were granted land close by to accommodate their family members and herds, as a powerful way to promote loyalty, especially since colonial officials believed that garrison service was “profoundly antipathetic” to native soldiers. The military colonization scheme thus sought to combine strategic as well as agricultural aims.⁶ While ideally conceived as “model farms,” this organization soon spurred conflicts with recently arrived European settlers, who viewed land grants to Algerians as a waste of resources.⁷ In the 1860s, the army attempted to scale back the size of the smalas by recruiting bachelors rather than notables with large family entourages. The efforts were widely considered a failure, turning up, according to one inspecting officer of the First Regiment of Alger, “drunkards” and “pederasts.”⁸

Once civilian settler power was established in 1870, the fantasy of military colonization was systematically dismantled, especially after the insurrection of soldiers from smalas located on the Tunisian border in Tarf, Bou Hadjar, and Aïn-Guettar on January 20, 1871. The revolt, set off by the soldiers’ refusal to fight in the Franco-Prussian War, contributed to the wider Moqrani Rebellion the following March. According to Orphis Léon Lallemand, the general who had first issued the order, the spahis refused to leave their families behind. As he explained to President Gambetta on January 24, 1871, “The Spahis of Souk-Arhas refused to march. They said that they had enlisted only to serve in Algeria. They have wives and children. And had never served in other wars.” He noted that, by contrast, “the squadron of bachelors from Constantine did not pose the least difficulty.”⁹

Instead of the sedentary family regime of the smala, settler critics promoted mobile units of bachelors.¹⁰ The settlers’ principal motivation was to gain access to the lands that had been set aside for the spahis and their families. As a result, an 1874 law reorganized the corps by opening new mobile divisions to unmarried as well as married men.¹¹ Even under the new regime, settler interests exerted political pressure on the military authorities and installations that remained in the Tell, including in Médéa. Settlers were no less critical of the degraded moral and sexual condition of garrison life than they had been of the inefficiency and insubordination of the smalas. One contemporary travel writer could find little redeeming to say about the garrison town: “This city, with its walls, its barracks, its hospitals, feels like a prison, a bastille, a penal colony.” Arriving on a Sunday morning, during the hour of Mass, he detected a strong odor, “not of incense, but of absinthe.”¹² The Bouïs-Boyer Affair erupted in this sordid milieu.

The Scandal

In July 1891, town police surprised Captain Bouïs in his hotel room with Mohammed Soumati, a local youth who was thought to be fifteen years of age. The incident of flagrant délit occurred after rumors about Bouïs had circulated around Médéa for several months. Across the Algerian press, journalists intimated a complicated backstory in the affair, which, by pitting the police against a military officer, staged a jurisdictional and sexual conflict between local settlers and the army. Earlier that spring, Boyer and a lieutenant serving under Bouïs, Albert Rocas, jointly accused the captain of sexual indiscretion with his orderlies. While the military initially tried to keep the matter in house, Bouïs’s arrest brought the morals charge into the town square and civilian courts, garnering precisely the public scrutiny that the army hierarchy sought to avoid. In a synthetic report to the Ministry of War, General Joseph Arthur Dufaure du Bessol, the commander of the Algerian Nineteenth Army Division, attempted to account for this unruly state of affairs.

Archived in the army doctor’s personnel file (and notably not in the captain’s), the division commander’s report insisted that conflict had originated in personal enmity, rather than professional misconduct. Bessol claimed that the dispute between the officers had in fact arisen during a “partie de campagne” at which Bouïs, Boyer, Rocas, and their wives were present. Before the event, the atmosphere at the headquarters of the cavalry unit had been “calm.” The regiment was largely spread out across the Algerian territory, between Médéa and an outpost in a Saharan oasis, El Goléa, far to the south. Médéa itself was an isolated provincial town (the rail line would arrive the following year), situated in a major wine-producing region. Given their remove, the few men in charge of the unit had to, in Bessol’s words, “make do with one another” on “outings where individualities with such different mœurs and conduct mixed together.”¹³ Portraying the conflict as an aberrant and unfortunate clash of personalities, Bessol tried to contain its significance in order to preserve the regiment’s honor.

Bessol’s account intimated the boredom and violence, narcissism and pettiness that suffused everyday life in the colonial garrison town.¹⁴ His psychological analysis of the characters deployed the kind of “affective knowledge” that Ann Stoler has identified as “at the core of colonial rationality.”¹⁵ The report worked retrospectively to make sense of events that initially confounded the unit’s military and racial hierarchy.

Bessol’s report underscored a considerable social and moral contrast between the Boyer and Bouïs ménages. The former was “very unified, honorable with respect both to morality and money”—thanks, it seems, to the good match that Boyer had made to an heiress from Sedan in 1887.¹⁶ Boyer’s own background was humble. His father, a schoolteacher from the small city of Thiers in the Auvergne, named him for a Protestant evangelist, Abraham Charbonney, who served as a witness on his birth registry in 1850.¹⁷ After graduating third in his class at Val de Grâce, the prestigious Parisian academy of military medicine, Boyer was on a fast track of career advancement. Before taking up a post in the Zouaves in 1888, he had served in the campaign in Tunisia in 1881 and for over a year in the occupation of Tonkin in 1887.¹⁸ By 1890, his superiors recommended him for promotion to first class médecin - major, as well as the Legion of Honor.¹⁹

While Boyer “had a certain professional merit,” Bessol judged his nature to be “nervous, worried, and indecisive,” and hence vulnerable to being “absolutely dominated by his wife, a neurotic bas bleu [bluestocking] who was perhaps a little hysterical.” On paper, Boyer was a model of medical men’s heroism in French imperial expansion. In person, however, he did not conform to the norms of martial masculinity and sociability. He did not, according to Bessol, have “any serious friendships, but rather the banal sympathy that is born of indifference.”²⁰ No charismatic figure of empire, he did exemplify a certain moral and meritocratic ideal.²¹ That ideal quickly unraveled in his confrontation with Bouïs.

Bouïs was an entirely different sort. Boyer’s rank equivalent, he was nine years older, but had little to show for it. His personnel file, in contrast to Boyer’s, contained early signs of trouble. Born in 1841 in the Languedoc region, he began his career in the Second Regiment of Hussards in 1859, where he achieved the rank of lieutenant in 1875.²² His advancement stalled when he ran into serious money problems. An 1880 request for his suspension made his defects clear: “Bouïs, who is a mediocre officer and fairly bad serviceman, has always been inclined to spend money far beyond his means.”²³ Heavily in debt, he withheld pay from soldiers under his command and engaged in other shady dealings. He did not return to full activity until 1883, when he had managed to pay off his creditors. His transfer to the post as captain in the First Regiment of the spahis seems to have been designed to prevent him from causing more trouble. This return to service coincided with his marriage to a wealthy widow, an arrangement that his superiors looked at askance, given her dubious morality. Although “a widow and charming,” she was, as Bouïs’s superiors discovered, “in a perilous situation.”²⁴ According to Bessol, the couple’s relationship was an “arrangement between two beings who each had some failings in their past.” Bouïs brought arms and debts, while she had what was “left of a small fortune that had been wasted,” and “opulent and gaudy charms.”²⁵ In short, they spelled trouble. While Boyer was in Algeria to advance his career, Bouïs’s transfer there symbolized personal and professional failure.

The third player in the drama was Lieutenant Rocas, who served unhappily under Bouïs’s orders. As Bessol noted, both Rocas and his wife were born in Algeria and had landed interests in the area, as well as important social connections. Rocas had gone to school with local journalists and literary figures, which explains the explosive treatment of the scandal in regional newspapers. According to Bessol, it was Rocas who first recruited Boyer to take his side. While he managed to extricate himself from the affair by professing profound regret for his disorderly behavior, Rocas “continued with his work behind the scenes [son travail occulte]” and took into his confidence “people from the locality, known to be very hostile to the army.”²⁶ His initial instigating role was, however, soon overtaken by Boyer’s furious campaign against Bouïs.

It is unclear what exactly happened at the picnic. In its aftermath, Bouïs reportedly changed how he ran his squadron. He had previously led the unit rather lack-adaisically, “perhaps on account of his past.” After the outing, he became harsher and more controlling. Switching his “attitude of camaraderie for that of the Chef,” he became “positively villainous.” Resentment-filled, Rocas roped Boyer into the argument. As a second-class médecin - major, Boyer was technically Bouïs’s equal in rank. Given their radically different comportments and styles of masculinity, it is unsurprising that this ambivalent hierarchical equivalence fueled the ensuing conflict.²⁷ While the captain’s character appeared morally suspect, Boyer and Rocas’s machinations against him clearly threatened military order. Their mismanagement of the situation reflected poorly on the military hierarchy, which used its bureaucratic and juridical procedures to cover up the incidents. Boyer, by contrast, did everything in his power to publicize the scandal.

The regiment’s commanding officers, squadron head Vicomte Henri de La Panouse and Lieutenant Colonel Maurice Jean de Vergennes, took Boyer’s actions as an affront to their own authority and honor. At one critical point, La Panouse punished Boyer with fifteen days of confinement to his quarters [arrêts simples] because he had supposedly performed an “ironic salute” on horseback and in uniform in “the view of the public which was spread out at a sidewalk café.”²⁸ Boyer denied the charge, claiming that La Panouse, who was seated at a table reading a newspaper, could not have seen him give a salute.²⁹ In response, Boyer received an even harsher sentence: thirty days of confinement [arrêts de rigueur]. For La Panouse and Vergennes, Boyer’s insolence violated codes of military hierarchy and honor.

In their view, Boyer’s comportment was difficult to comprehend. According to Vergennes, Boyer, while “a good doctor,” had been “dragged into an affair against a Captain of the Regiment—which didn’t concern him—by a stubbornness, which was inexplicable for a man of honor.…Ignoring the opinions of his chefs, rebelling against all punishments, even assuming an arrogant attitude, he pursued a path of complete indiscipline.”³⁰ Boyer’s publicly visible insubordination disturbed the officers, whose trail of correspondence struggled to make sense of his unpredictable behavior.

Vergennes sought assistance from the cavalry commander for the Division of Alger. He expressed hope that Boyer would “return, with calm, to a healthy understanding of the situation.” Worried by July that Boyer’s “sentiments” would not improve, he suggested that “keeping Boyer in the garrison of Médéa could lead to very serious incidents.”³¹ A July 28, 1891, telegram from Algiers sent to ministerial officials urged a rapid intervention.³² The concerns were warranted, but Paris did not act quickly enough. Three days later, the town police found Bouïs in his hotel room with Mohammed Soumati.

Archiving Transgressions

The dossiers of Boyer, Bouïs, and Rocas were designed as instruments of military administration. Constructed by specific bureaucratic aims, army personnel files usually tracked career achievement, evaluated promise and promotion, and determined pension levels at retirement. La Panouse and Vergennes, the commanding officers in the affair, have tellingly thin ones: a few folders containing dispensations to marry, yearly inspections, an orderly progression of transfers, promotions, and honors.³³ By contrast, the thick dossiers of Bouïs, Boyer, and Rocas document the army hierarchy’s struggle to comprehend and contain the bizarre actions and reactions that led these officers’ careers off-track. The folders are swollen by their individual efforts to influence ministerial decisions in letters addressed to officials in Paris, personal entreaties by their wives, and multiple libel suits and countersuits. In Boyer’s case, a voluminous series of self-published pamphlets and press articles protested against his unjust treatment at the hands of his superiors. Frustrated by an inability to gain a fair hearing, Boyer started to publicize his accusations of Bouïs’s “special mœurs” and then began to attack the “pederastic” corruption of the army itself.

The charge of same-sex vice lay at the core of Boyer’s case against Bouïs and, eventually, his assault on the army as a whole. The accusations were part of a contemporary arsenal of political denunciation. In an era of greater journalistic freedom fueling a new mass press, newspapers played up the allusive possibilities of sodomy, describing incidents with winking circumlocutions and double entendres. This rhetoric formally echoed the association of “special mœurs” or “pederasty” with closed institutions, such as the church and the army or the police.³⁴ Accusations of a failure to prosecute men’s same-sex vice presented the institutions as riddled with hidden depravity. Louis Fiaux, a contemporary critic of state-regulated prostitution, used pederasts’ apparent legal immunity as evidence of just such corruption in the Paris vice squad. It was, in his view, a “scandal that, despite everything, taints the whole corporation, which must be avoided at all cost. Priests, missionaries, former African officers, certain socialites who are more or less visible in circles and on the boulevards, are rarely brought before the courts.”³⁵ As Fiaux’s comments indicate, officers who served in Africa were thought to have a particular penchant for same-sex vice.

Playing on this link between “special mœurs” and legal exceptionality, Boyer’s charges drew on widespread suppositions about pederasty’s prevalence in the army in Algeria, especially in its notorious disciplinary battalions.³⁶ Since 1864, the army had sent soldiers convicted of “immoral acts” to the Bataillons d’Afrique as punishment, which in turn produced anxiety about their corrupting effects on the system of military punishment itself. The problem was seen to be severe enough that by 1888, the minister of war Charles de Freycinet decided that in order to prevent the “contact of depraved individuals with good subjects,” they would be assigned to different units.³⁷ Sexual deviance pervaded official and popular accounts of disciplinary companies in Algeria, as memorably captured by the dystopian depictions of Georges Darien’s novel Biribi.³⁸ In 1890, several scandalous antimilitarist tracts reinforced this view of the army hierarchy as corrupt because sexually degenerate.³⁹

While the spahis were reputed to be a noble unit, they too were haunted by the reputation of same-sex vice. The novelist Guy de Maupassant’s 1884 Algerian travel notes recount a story that, in certain respects, prefigured the Bouïs affair. In the tale, a young Arab cavalryman, who was “very handsome, intelligent, and with a fine figure,” becomes the orderly of a French officer and soon gains an honorable reputation among his peers for being the officer’s “wife.” Maupassant’s story was intended to mock the normality of “unnatural love” among Algerians.⁴⁰ The satire nonetheless rendered the relations as conceivable, albeit in the distorted form of a joke. Such stories contributed to the metropolitan imaginary of Algerian soldiers and reinforced concerns about colonial infection of the metro-pole. Citing a sodomy scandal that exploded in the barracks of Châlons-sur-Marne at the same time as the Bouïs-Boyer affair, the criminal anthropologist Armand Corre worried that these “foyers of contamination have now spread to the metropole.”⁴¹

Boyer’s accusations drew on these ideas of colonial military degeneracy. By publicizing Bouïs’s purported transgressions, however, Boyer violated military deontology and law. In the eyes of his superiors, his was, in the end, the greater crime. His stubborn drive to publicize Bouïs’s acts appeared more dishonorable and dangerous to his commanders than the unproven acts themselves. For this same reason, the personnel dossiers do not reveal a hidden homosexual truth about Bouïs. They allow doubt to linger over what exactly happened in Médéa.

The army’s professional and political concerns—and the personnel files that were their material support—at once incited and disavowed the uncertain scandal around which the political and professional conflict turned. Reading these files “along the archival grain” reveals how the military hierarchy at once produced and obscured knowledge about the affair.⁴² While apparently seeking to discern what happened, the files avoid stating a truth. Relying on euphemism and equivocation, they represent Bouïs’s guilt as unresolved and irrelevant. The amassed documentation instead “proved” that the accusations against the spahi captain were impossible to substantiate. By contrast, Boyer’s voluminous file of press articles and vitriol-filled pamphlets gave ample evidence of his lack of military discipline as well as his apparent dishonor. Rather than definitively demonstrating Bouïs’s perversion, Boyer’s archival accumulation displayed his own deviance from a martial norm.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

The dossiers do give a clear sense of incidents that occurred in the spring and summer of 1891 as the scandal unfolded. The official record begins on March 6, 1891, when Boyer reported to La Panouse about the poor quality and quantity of meat that was being served to soldiers in Bouïs’s squadron.⁴³ On that occasion and in Bouïs’s presence, Boyer made a rather ambiguous comment—“several words containing serious insinuations”—according to a subsequent report.⁴⁴ Boyer’s statement was indeed equivocal in its allusion to what he would not say “because it would go too far.” When asked to explain the statement, Boyer refused, calling instead for an official inquiry into Bouïs’s actions. Bouïs promptly challenged Boyer to a duel, but the doctor refused to fight.⁴⁵ The affair dragged on, as “they negotiated, exchanged letters for two or three weeks,” without resolving the différend, much to Bouïs’s frustration.⁴⁶ Boyer, meanwhile, kept a careful record of the correspondence and urged his interlocutors to do the same. He was intentionally building an archive that he hoped would vindicate him.

But no official report was forthcoming, at least as far as Boyer knew. Perhaps hoping to avoid a duel, he once again made an allusive statement to La Panouse. When called on to respond in an official communication, Boyer contended that the meaning of his statement was clear, that the men in Bouïs’s squadron were “given insufficient and rotten food.”⁴⁷ The commander reiterated his order “to send to the Chef de corps the complete, precise, and probing explanation demanded by the Head of the Regiment.”⁴⁸ According to both Bouïs and La Panouse, Boyer had said at once too little and too much. When he refused to be more forthcoming, La Panouse confined him to his quarters for thirty days.⁴⁹ In the intervening weeks, Vergennes took over as head of the regiment, and the conflict between Bouïs and Boyer continued to brew.

Lieutenant Rocas also offered up unsolicited information on Bouïs (“insinuations of a serious nature”), and he, too, was punished.⁵⁰ His remarks were judged out of order because they had been “neither solicited, nor authorized.” When ordered to “state facts and justify his statement,” Rocas demurred, accepting to do so only on the brigadier general’s orders.⁵¹ His superiors did not reward his candor; instead, he was sent south to Laghouat. In addition to this punitive transfer, his annual evaluation from 1891 noted that he had been removed from the promotion and the Legion of Honor lists. According to the general inspection, Rocas was a fairly good officer, but he had “recently compromised his situation by denouncing his commanding captain by means unbefitting an officer and which cannot be excused by the real faults [les torts réels] of Captain Bouïs.”⁵² In other words, no matter how true the accusations (the content of which remained unspecified), Rocas’s unsolicited denunciation had betrayed professional honor.

Boyer later claimed that the command in Médéa had engaged in a cover-up by eliminating a crucial witness and severely mistreating Rocas. While Rocas resented the reassignment, General Bessol dismissed Boyer’s assertion, claiming that “many officers view it as an advantage to be sent south.”⁵³ The transfer had an apparently negative effect on Rocas’s health. Although he had lived in Algeria all his life, Rocas was sent to Vichy for a cure several months after arriving in Laghouat.⁵⁴ In 1892, commanding officer Vergennes noted that his “health was severely compromised by the Algerian climate.”⁵⁵ In order to move back up, both hierarchically and geographically, Rocas would have to prove himself once again worthy of his superiors’ trust.

By contrast, Boyer was not sent away immediately, much to General Bessol’s frustration. Bouïs also remained in town, even though the army put him into early retirement. The official explanation for this action was vague. His evaluation in 1891 noted his “robust” constitution but also described his character as “weak,” his morality as “bad,” and his judgment as “unsound”—as tending to “deviate from the right path [devié de la voie droite].” According to Vergennes, the decision was made after “an inquiry established less than honorable activities on his part, in the administration of the squadron and in his private life.”⁵⁶ The details dredged up by that inquiry are nowhere to be found in his file.

While his professional reputation was compromised, Bouïs refused to let Boyer’s implied accusations stand. Once relieved of his official duties, he sought a reckoning with his adversary. Given Bouïs’s “good military qualities,” we can surmise why Boyer wanted to avoid an armed confrontation.⁵⁷ For the doctor, their conflict could only be resolved by an official inquiry, not a private duel. Bouïs refused Boyer’s jurisdictional argument. Intent on seeking reparation and with time on his hands, he stalked Boyer, who was avoiding him. He managed to catch Boyer in public, in front of his house, right next to the Hotel de Ville.⁵⁸ Finally, on May 10, at nine in the morning, as Boyer was returning from his rounds at the military hospital, “Captain Bouïs passed from words to acts. When M. Boyer was in uniform, he publicly insulted [outragea] him; slapped him in the middle of the street; called him ‘Diafoirus’ and coward; and spat in his face. When Boyer only responded with ‘You would never do this in public,’ Bouïs dragged him into the cabaret next door and repeated the same assaults on him in front of witnesses.”⁵⁹ By publicly humiliating Boyer, Bouïs hoped to transform the affair into a matter of personal honor and thus force him to duel.

In his explanation to Vergennes, Boyer noted that because the initial insult had taken place only in front of “Arabs, who tried to get away,” Boyer and Bouïs pursued their argument inside a café.⁶⁰ It was here that they each found credible witnesses. Their mutual dismissal of “Arab” bystanders is a small but telling indication of the everyday violence of racial hierarchy in the town.

Upon hearing of the incident, Vergennes called a meeting of the regiment’s superior officers. He demanded to know if Boyer had responded to Bouïs’s public humiliation of him. Boyer once again refused to answer, using his adversary’s dishonorable character as an excuse. Condemning this intolerable pusillanimity, Vergennes was categorical in his response to the doctor: “You are unworthy of remaining among us. Leave!” Meanwhile, Boyer’s attempt to take the case before the justice of the peace in town went nowhere. Both he and Bouïs were again issued a thirty-day punishment by their superiors.⁶¹ For Vergennes and the other officers, submission to public indignity violated professional as well as personal honor.

A letter from Jules Aron, who was doctor-in-chief for the Nineteenth Army Corps, communicated the gravity of the situation to Bessol. Aron had recently passed through Médéa at the end of April and was witness to the events that, in his words, were of “a nature to nastily spatter [éclabousser désagréablement] our uniform.” He had since heard of the confrontation between Bouïs and Boyer in front of the Hotel de Ville. While he was not Boyer’s superior, Aron had sought to impress him with a sense of professional duty, arguing that “whatever the reasons for the indignity of his adversary,” Boyer had placed himself in “an equivocal posture by seeming to hide behind casuistic arguments, dossiers, and procès verbaux.” The “dignity of his person and his uniform” required him to fight, rather than to shield himself with paper. Refusing to listen, Boyer called again for an official inquiry into Bouïs’s immorality, despite the absence of a “corpus delicti.”⁶² Aron warned that Boyer should be immediately transferred before the situation worsened. Following that advice, Bessol requested that the doctor be returned to France at the end of May “because of the echo that this unfortunate affair has had throughout Algeria.”⁶³

But Boyer was not transferred. He was instead called to appear before a military commission of inquiry to judge whether his “fault against honor” was serious enough to warrant dismissal. In early June, the cavalry division decided that Boyer, “by tolerating Bouïs’s deliberate and stinging insult, had failed to uphold his honor, no matter how undignified his aggressor.” Bouïs would also be called before a commission of inquiry on account of Boyer’s “serious accusations” against him. The appearance was largely pro forma: Bouïs was already in early retirement, so he could not be punished by a discharge.⁶⁴ In authorizing the military court, the ministry nonetheless insisted that it be conducted “with great care” and in strict conformity to military law, especially with respect to the composition of the record.⁶⁵ The ministry literally underscored legal and archival discretion when it came to Bouïs’s case.

Suspecting that he would not get a fair hearing from the officers in his regiment, Boyer tried to sidestep the hierarchy by sending letters denouncing Bouïs to officers further up the chain of command, including to the minister of war. He indicated that his direct superiors were unfit to judge him precisely because they, too, were implicated in the affair. His detailed accusations contained the specifics that he had previously declined to discuss with Vergennes and La Panouse.

According to Boyer, Bouïs was “a man whose honorability was disputable and whom one could not decently accept as an adversary in a duel as long as he had not completely exonerated himself of the accusations of brutality, indelicacy, and malfeasance which have been made against him; and furthermore, with regard to mœurs, he remains under the suspicion of acts of pederasty, offenses [attentats] all the more criminal and even falling under the application of the law (articles 334 and 335 of the Penal Code), because they were committed by this French officer on three Spahis indigènes (Saïd ben el Bachir; Chourar; and Mohamed ben Mahmoud) under his orders.”⁶⁶ These were serious charges indeed. In order to guarantee that the Ministry of War in Paris received his damning reports, Boyer even sent his wife to deliver his letter.⁶⁷

Boyer also called on fellow military doctors to advocate for him. His file contains a sympathetic letter from François Cros, a doctor in Algiers who had been keeping track of the affair for the doctor-in-chief Aron. Cros reported that while Bouïs was generally considered “degenerate” (un homme taré) and “riffraff” (une canaille), his superiors needed Boyer to be able “to prove what he advanced.” Sympathetic to Boyer’s claims, Cros urged the direction of the Military Health Service “not to sacrifice the content for a question of form.” Like Boyer, he suspected that the regimental commission of inquiry would not get to the bottom of the case. He warned them that he “did not think that it would be possible to muffle such a dirty affair.” As proof, Cros enclosed one of the first press articles from the Vigie algérienne to be devoted to the brewing scandal.⁶⁸ The editorial and the many that followed it defended the army doctor’s professional honor and integrity. The ministry’s marginal note on the clipping indicated official suspicion of the local press campaign. From the military’s perspective, it represented “a deviation” from the real stakes of the case.⁶⁹

The public and private entreaties on Boyer’s behalf came to naught. The military tribunal condemned Boyer for violations of both discipline and honor, while exonerating Bouïs. The commission, which included both La Panouse and Vergennes, unanimously recommended that Boyer be dismissed (mis en réforme). Bessol pled for leniency because he viewed the refusal to duel to be questionable grounds for dismissal. For Bessol, dueling was “forbidden by French legislation.” He thought that a temporary suspension would be more fitting. Time off would allow the doctor to “reestablish calm in his spirit, which had seemed to be imbalanced for some time.”⁷⁰ Bessol’s more lenient recommendations ultimately won out. But Boyer was not prepared to let the matter rest. In his view, the army had an inverted conception of honor and dignity. He would stop at little to set the record straight.

To Duel or Not to Duel

This case reflected the broader jurisdictional problem posed by the military duel. From the press in Algeria to the parliament in Paris, discussions turned around the question of whether Boyer could be found guilty of refusing to duel. Could Boyer’s commanding officers order him to fight Bouïs? Bessol worried that obliging Boyer to duel was tantamount to forcing him to commit a crime.

Despite Bessol’s claim to the contrary, dueling was not forbidden as a distinct crime in postrevolutionary French law. While considered an act of lèse-majesté, and hence an encroachment on sovereign power under the ancien régime, dueling was no longer a separate crime after the Revolution. Under the common law established by the 1810 Penal Code, it was criminal only in cases of personal injury or death. Jurisprudence on the subject was inconsistent and convictions by no means assured.⁷¹ Legislators who sought to remedy this legal lacuna often pointed out that “the duel, in itself, is not punishable.”⁷² In the military, which continued throughout the nineteenth century to dishonorably discharge soldiers for refusing to duel, prosecutions were rare. One forensic doctor explained in 1890 that dueling remained appropriate, especially in the army, for those cases in which “the law is impotent to combat attacks on individual honor.”⁷³ For many contemporaries, it was necessary to maintain the duel’s legality as an honorable supplement to the written law.

For Bessol, forcing Boyer to duel nonetheless carried a risk of eventual prosecution. As he later explained, “It was impossible to send an officer before a Commission of Inquiry for being in conformity with the law of his country; and, if following the command’s order, the duel had an unfortunate outcome, they [the command] could be pursued in court by the injured party.”⁷⁴ The minister of war Freycinet had implicitly recognized this tension in a July 5, 1889, circular, which recommended the use of less lethal arms.⁷⁵ Doing so nonetheless affirmed the duel’s legality in military jurisprudence. The question remained unresolved, and subsequent efforts to pass a “special law” on dueling ultimately failed.⁷⁶

As many observers noted, the problem lay in perceived differences between the distinctive case of the duel and more straightforward crimes like murder. The exceptional circumstances of the duel, they held, called for an exceptional law. One jurist summed up the problem as follows: “The special nature of the crime [dueling], its particular aspect, the favor accorded it by opinion, and the difficul-ties that we have noted in applying the common law of the Penal Code to it, all demonstrate the evidence of a special ill, for which a special remedy is needed.”⁷⁷ For advocates of such legislation, Boyer’s case illustrated why the particular harm of the military duel required a specific cure.

Deputy Gustave Paul Cluseret, a socialist with a long military career, raised the matter before parliament in 1892. A pronounced antisemite and later anti-Dreyfusard, Cluseret provoked “consternation” (bruit) in the Chamber when he invoked the army doctor and the “captain and squadron commander denounced for misappropriation of supplies and pederasty” to make his case. Cluseret questioned the perversity of military authorities who had ordered the reputable Boyer to fight a man of dubious morality. In his view, it was a conflict between the force of the law and that of military discipline: “Isn’t the law more important than discipline?” he queried. The only solution to this apparent conflict was a “special law.”⁷⁸ At this time, Jewish army officers, viciously under attack by Édouard Drumont’s La libre parole, defended their honor in duels. Just a few weeks before the debate, the Marquis de Morès had killed Captain Armand Mayer in one such contest. When Cluseret denounced the duel as contrary to, rather than an affirmation of, the French nation’s “moral energy,” the deputy Camille Dreyfus (who would later challenge Drumont himself to a duel) characterized Cluseret’s pronouncements as “odious.”⁷⁹ For Cluseret, by contrast, a duel could not bestow dignity on an undignified man. He claimed that, because pederasts (like Jews) were unworthy opponents, it was wrong of the army to command Boyer to fight.

Motivated by his fierce antisemitism and a racialized conception of the nation, Cluseret sought to regulate the contours of military honor and French citizenship. In 1895, he cosponsored a proposition to declare recently naturalized French (especially Jews) ineligible for army service and to forbid colonial officers and administrators from marrying foreigners.⁸⁰ In 1897, Cluseret’s antisemitism also found expression in an “arabophilic” proposal, co-signed with the former Boulangist deputy Henri Michelin. Their exceptional proposition would have extended citizenship to Algerian Muslims, who maintained their Muslim “personal status,” in a bid to counter the political power of naturalized Algerian Jews.⁸¹ Together, Cluseret’s legislative proposals shared a certain logic. They were special laws that targeted what were in his view exceptional threats to France’s military and moral fiber. They illustrate a broader political and military context in which the Bouïs-Boyer affair exploded and why it provoked such a heated response.

Sociologist Gabriel Tarde, for example, found that Boyer’s case epitomized contemporary legal and social malaise. Like Cluseret, he found it “monstrous” that duels could be “authorized, and sometimes ordered, by military authorities.”⁸² Dueling, in his view, illustrated the atavistic social dynamics of “imitation,” especially in compact and closed institutions such as the military. The military’s sexual homogeneity and hierarchy created a context in which, “whether good or bad, everything is contagious and exaggerated.”⁸³ For the sociologist, Boyer’s absurd condemnation by his superiors exemplified underlying contradictions between the laws of military discipline and enlightened laws of reason and progress. According to Tarde, the former needed to be aligned with the latter.⁸⁴

The question of the military duel’s legality highlighted tensions between republican law and morality and a purportedly perverse military justice that covered over crime by exonerating Bouïs and condemning Boyer. The army’s judgment seemed to be twisted. Or at least, this is what Boyer and his advocates, with the aid of the local press, led external observers to believe. The blind injustice of military procedure seemed all the more glaring when the local police in Médéa claimed to catch Bouïs in flagrant délit.

Caught Out

Several weeks after the two commissions of inquiry, on August 3, General Bessol informed the ministry by telegram that Bouïs had been the subject of a police report for “acts of pederasty.” The details of the story were sordid. A local journal, Le petit médéen, reported on the fait divers immediately. On the night of August 1, police agents “surprised captain B…of the 1^er Spahis sleeping with a so-called Mohammed S…, age 15 years, in a hotel room in Médéa. When they heard knocking on the door, Captain B…made the young Arab jump out the window. But the agent Marin, posted to this spot, caught him in a complete state of nudity.”⁸⁵ Bouïs was immediately arrested and taken to the police station, where he was held overnight. In reporting on the case, the paper tried to shield itself from the accusation that it was insulting the army. It asserted that, rather than tainting the corps as a whole, it was serving military honor. In a republican army in which “everyone is a soldier,” the editorial claimed, “it is good that [a soldier’s] fault be rendered public, because that publicity exonerates all his colleagues.” In other words, the army “no longer had to force itself to hide, to keep secret the villainous acts of one depraved individual: everything takes place out in the open now.”⁸⁶ Following the lead of Le Petit médéen, other journals similarly proclaimed that “indiscretion is sometimes the duty of the journalist.” For Le Petit Alger, “it is necessary to signal the exceptions” in order to controvert the belief that “the indignity of one should cast doubt on the honorability of all.”⁸⁷ Predictably, neither the high command in Paris nor the officers on the ground in Médéa embraced this view of publicity as purification. In their eyes, these reports clearly sullied the army’s honor.

The spahi command could not simply ignore the affair either. Its parallel investigation, conducted by La Panouse, set out to establish “the culpability of Captain Bouïs, based on the facts furnished by the police in its report, information, and witness testimony, with respect to the acts of pederasty that took place on the 2nd of August and in their preludes in the days before.” La Panouse claimed that he had “expected to find culpability.” In the end, however, he stated that “it was not possible for the most discriminating spirit to discover the truth, to find anything that could move beyond the most complete doubt as to M. Bouïs’s culpability.”⁸⁸ According to the military report, in other words, no definitive evidence with respect to Bouïs’s acts could be found.

The actual police report was much less equivocal. Filed by the civilian police commissioner on August 2, it contained the testimony of the two local police agents, Marin and Torre, who had apprehended Bouïs and the youth, Mohammed Soumati. Soumati’s account of events evidently met with Bouïs’s forceful denials. According to the commissioner, the police had put Bouïs under surveillance after receiving complaints that he had recently made “propositions against nature to several youths.” The agents Marin and Torre claimed to have witnessed Bouïs entering a bathhouse with Soumati and their exiting together, with Soumati following Bouïs to his hotel. They knocked on Bouïs’s door, which he took five minutes to open. At that same moment, the naked Soumati landed in the arms of officer Marin, who was expectantly waiting on the ground below. Soumati, described here as “about 16 years old,” confirmed the agents’ story: after leaving the bath, Bouïs requested that Soumati accompany him to his room. The two of them “lay down naked in the same bed.” According to Soumati, Bouïs “took my hand, placed it between his legs, and asked me to caress him.” Upon hearing the knock, Bouïs took him by the arm and forced him out the window, throwing his clothing afterward. Bouïs predictably denied the accusations. In his deposition and in a long supplementary letter, he elaborated a detailed disavowal. Pitting his word against that of the two agents and Soumati, the police report cast those claims in doubt.⁸⁹ For La Panouse and other military officials, the equal treatment of the youth’s testimony contributed to the police officials’ affront against the army. They refused to recognize that Bouïs’s testimony could be invalidated by that of his supposed accomplice, an “Arab” youth and supposed prostitute. Their account relied on prevailing representations of Algerians’ constitutional criminality and corruption, including their penchants for same-sex vice.⁹⁰

La Panouse’s inquiry attacked the police report’s veracity. Following Bouïs, he privileged the theory of entrapment. The witness testimony collected by the army suggested that the material traces found by the police (the unmade bed; a shirt of Soumati’s left behind) were planted. Perhaps most importantly, the military investigation lined up witnesses to attack Soumati’s credibility. A prominent Jewish merchant, a certain Abraham Caroby, claimed that he had overheard Soumati in conversation “with several Arabs,” admitting that the police had pressured him to participate in the sting.⁹¹ Henri Manny, a clerk with a local messaging service, made the same claim.⁹² Another clerk, Abdelkader Khourab, depicted Soumati as untrustworthy: “publicly known for prostitution,” he was a “child abandoned to all vices, who often has problems with the police.”⁹³ The military investigation focused on refuting the youth’s claims and justified La Panouse’s dismissal of his testimony. Placing Soumati on trial, he depicted Bouïs as the injured party in the affair.⁹⁴

The army pursued this line of argument up the chain of command. When Bessol forwarded to the ministry a copy of the army’s inquiry alongside that of the police, he endorsed Bouïs’s claim to be a legal victim: “It emerges from the reading of the different pieces of the dossier that M. Bouïs was the victim of genuine entrapment [un guet-apens], followed by a violation of domicile, and illegal arrest, facts on the basis of which the officer has filed a case before the appeals court of Algiers.”⁹⁵ Bouïs and the commanding officers claimed that the local police’s action was illegal and suspect, because tainted by complicity with corrupt and corruptible “Arab” youths. Effectively bracketing the question of Bouïs’s culpability, they sought to discredit the police. In this account, Bouïs appeared not as a dishonorable soldier, but as a rights-bearing citizen, whose private domicile (even if located in a dodgy hotel) had been illegally violated.

Bouïs’s personal reputation clearly suffered after the arrest, but it was not enough to vindicate Boyer in the eyes of his superiors. Even after the local press gave ample coverage to the incident in the hotel room, ministerial officials refused to reopen Boyer’s case.⁹⁶ He continued his campaign to reestablish his professional honor with even greater tenacity and conviction. Beyond distributing information and evidence to the press, he published a pamphlet that reproduced his archive of the affair in the hope that the righteousness of his cause would be widely recognized. In the years that followed, he would publish two more such pamphlets.⁹⁷ After failing before the military court, he sought out the jurisdiction of public opinion. The Vigie algérienne regularly called for a reversal of his punishment.⁹⁸ These efforts again backfired. They only worked to antagonize army officials in Algeria and back in Paris. In the eyes of his superiors, these pamphlets, which reproduced official and unofficial correspondence, provided evidence of his “faults against discipline.”⁹⁹ They would not be his last.

Private Right and Public Dishonor

Bouïs was not content to leave the situation as it stood either. In the fall of 1891, he turned to the civilian justice system to pursue his case against the police agents Torre and Marin for “violation of domicile” and “illegal arrest.” He hoped that their indictment would clear his name. The public prosecutor pursued the complaint on the state’s behalf (notably with the army’s encouragement), while Bouïs fought for civil damages. But the press coverage, likely fueled by Boyer and Rocas’s efforts, only gave more publicity to the charges. It was, in other words, along this avenue that Boyer pursued “justice.”

An article from Le Petit Alger illustrates how sexual innuendo and insult pervaded these reports. The journal mocked Bouïs’s effort to “remake his virginity” by appealing to civilian courts. Its unsparing coverage focused on his animalistic perversity: “All the witnesses proved beyond a doubt that Bouïs gave himself over to ignoble practices; that he spent nights, until four in the morning, in the stables seeking to catch little natives, foaming at the mouth and tormented by his rut, bestial and against nature.”¹⁰⁰ Bouïs became a target of humiliating animus among a notable segment of the Algerian settler press and in several Boulangist, metropolitan journals. In the process, they used the affair to attack Freycinet as inapt to head the Ministry of War.¹⁰¹

Despite this manifest press hostility, Bouïs ironically had the privacy protections of civilian law on his side. The local police agents had no official warrant for his arrest and no sufficient cause to force entry into his room. The prosecutor, Joseph Durieu de Leyritz, while refusing to comment on whether Bouïs was “worthy of esteem or deserving of disdain [digne d’estime ou mérite le mépris],” proclaimed that the policeman had indeed committed “an attack on individual liberty.” He underscored that the liberal principle of privacy did not provide “a certificate of good morals [bonnes mœurs].” From a legal standpoint, however, a “violation of domicile” had indeed taken place. Simple presumption was not enough to justify the police action, and Bouïs had not committed a crime because “there was no public indecency, because the doors and windows were closed. And there was no indecent assault because Soumati gave himself over willingly. Nor was there indecent assault against a minor, because that crime requires the victim to be aged less than thirteen, while Soumati is fifteen.”¹⁰² For the prosecutor, the two agents deserved to be imprisoned for violating Bouïs’s rights.

The prosecutor’s speech pursued a double strategy: it publicly announced Bouïs’s sexual conduct, while defending his legal right to privacy. Unsurprisingly, Bouïs’s adversaries picked up on the statement’s implications, publicizing the prosecutor’s speech as ample evidence of Bouïs’s dishonor, if not of his legal crime. In their view, the evidence from Bouïs’s civil case called attention to an original miscarriage of (military) justice against Boyer. The press, fellow military doctors, and Boyer himself wondered how, given such public discrediting of the captain’s character, the military could continue to hold its official line.

Boyer’s vindication finally seemed certain when the Appeals Court of Algiers acquitted the police agents Marin and Torre of any wrongdoing. After detailing the incident as outlined in the police agents’ testimony, the court held that “while somewhat regrettable that an excess of zeal led them to penetrate in this way, in the middle of the night, and without a warrant, into the domicile of a citizen, it is just to recognize that they were acting in response to instructions that were formal, if badly defined, and with the conviction that they had a crime or fla-grant délit to certify [constater] and a duty to accomplish.”¹⁰³ This court decision appeared to incontrovertibly establish the truth of Bouïs’s indignity. Newspapers commented extensively on his implicit condemnation.¹⁰⁴ But neither the ruling, nor multiple courts’ refusal to condemn journals for libel, convinced ministerial officials to budge. Boyer was told in no uncertain terms to cease and desist. In a personal meeting with Boyer at the War Ministry on January 12, 1892, the director of the Service de Santé, Dujardin-Beaumetz, “formally forbade him from continuing his press campaign and warned him that in case of further disobedience he inevitably exposed himself to further disciplinary measures.”¹⁰⁵

But Boyer did not stop. He sought out one final jurisdiction: a petition to the Senate. The radical Protestant, former pastor, and anticlerical Auguste Dide took up his cause. In addition to denouncing the individual injustice against Boyer, Dide attacked the army’s handling of the affair on principle. He summarized the arguments of Boyer’s advocates, including those found among military doctors who had risen to their colleague’s defense: “They think that, in muffling such affairs, as has been done, and in transforming them into personal questions in order to save the honor of the army, debate can be hidden in the shadow of a special justice [justice spéciale]. Sacrifices are made to strange prejudices of caste and a false solidarity, ‘for keeping Bouïs in the ranks of our army, would concentrate all that is most criminal in the country.’”¹⁰⁶ Dide implicitly connected these “strange prejudices of caste” with the Bouïs’s pederastic crime and framed the arbitrary operations of the military’s “special justice” as a violation of individual rights and of the general good. Like the Algerian soldiers with whom he was presumed to have had sexual affairs, Bouïs (and the army) appeared here as foreign bodies within the nation, operating according to their own perverse laws.

With a favorable recommendation from the petition committee, the Senate delivered the petition to the Ministry of War. While Boyer found support in the press, the ministry once again met the plea with silence.¹⁰⁷ Ministerial officials were as stubborn as Boyer. They refused to accept the evidence on which the charges were based. In a report preparing Boyer’s definitive expulsion from the army, Dujardin-Beaumetz dismissed the Senate’s findings as irrelevant: “The Senator wrote his report without noting a single one of the documents sent by the Ministry of War, whose dossier was in complete disagreement with Senator Dide’s conclusions.” As far as the ministry was concerned, there was no cover-up and no injustice, because “the personal cowardice of Major Boyer was the sole reason for the disciplinary measures taken against him.”¹⁰⁸ Boyer’s myriad efforts to reclaim his professional honor established only one thing in the eyes of the ministry: that he was no longer suitable for army service. As Dujardin-Beaumetz summarized, “We gave him the time to resume more honorable conduct; but he has only become more engaged in his indiscipline.”¹⁰⁹ On January 31, 1895, President Félix Faure authorized the order that expelled Boyer from the army for “serious violations against discipline.”¹¹⁰ Boyer’s appeal of the decision before the administrative high court, the Conseil d’État, predictably failed. In his last pamphlet on the “Scandals of Médéa,” Boyer referred to the decision as the “Triumph of Sodom.”¹¹¹

Obscure Bodies

The final document filed away in Boyer’s dossier is a report, written in Boyer’s hand, on the “affaire des mœurs” in the spahi unit. Undated, it details Bouïs’s alleged crimes and his relationship to two men in particular, Saïd ben el Bachir and Mohamed ben Mahmoud. According to the account, in the month following the outbreak of the scandal in the regiment, the two men under Bouïs’s command, an orderly and a soldier, were punished with imprisonment. Once they were released, their names were removed from the rolls [rayé des controles] of the regiment and purposefully effaced from the official record. According to the report, General Gustave Laveuve visited Médéa on April 21, 1891, in order to conduct the annual general inspection. During his tour of the prison, Boyer urged the general to “proceed with an inquiry” of the two men, despite Commander Vergennes’s protestations. The general declined, responding that “if it is true that the entire regiment has passed over them, they must be extremely tired.” Boyer expressed regret: “You are missing out in not seeing them, General, they are two documents.” In response, the general simply “smiled and moved on.”¹¹²

Boyer’s report recorded the general inspection’s literal refusal to see the two material witnesses, men with whom Bouïs engaged in “acts against nature.” Their imprisonment and official erasure illustrate the regiment’s containment strategy. According to the anecdote, Laveuve already knew, but did not want to see the evidence they might provide of Bouïs’s acts, which Boyer sought to reveal as material proof of Bouïs’s crimes. The men who had apparently served the penchants of their hierarchical superiors were grounds not for an inquiry, but for a joke. In refusing to see them, the general revealed official uninterest in archiving their testimony. On one level, the quip indicates that the imprisoned men were unremarkable, as the sexually passive and racially degraded objects of superior officers’ licit, if immoral, sexual pleasure. On another level, the general’s turning a blind eye to their presence was a form of scotomization, a denial that literally refused to see their bodies. For Boyer, the general’s dismissive joke and smile nonetheless left a trace of displaced recognition, which is why he mentioned it in the report. It is evidence of how these two attitudes coexisted and hence why they came into conflict in the affair. The military hierarchy’s response both acknowledged and disavowed the acts whose de-virilizing public revelation threatened the honor and reputation not just of Bouïs, but of the regiment as a whole. The commanding officers knew very well. But they preferred to look away.

In the affair, dueling conceptions of masculine honor were linked to a growing debate over the legitimacy of an exceptional structure of military law that the army jealously sought to preserve. By at once seeing and not seeing, the official response to this emasculating threat of public dishonor took the form of fetishistic disavowal. As Freud suggested in his brief essay on the subject, the panicked reactions of “grown men” to threats to the sovereign legitimacy of “throne and altar” resemble the infantile response to the revelation of castration and its denial.¹¹³ The Bouïs-Boyer affair illustrates how authorities turned their attention to substitute objects in order to displace the delegitimating threat. The archive indicates the material dynamics of this displacement both in the military’s system of punishment and in its filing of personnel dossiers. In this case, the blockages created by bureaucratic paperwork served as a political and psychic defense, preserving the integrity of military law and honor from encroachment by civilian and settler concerns.¹¹⁴

Major Boyer also imagined archiving as a form of defense. With a counter-cache of documents, he sought to set the record straight. Even as he launched a vitriolic assault on his superiors, he seemed to believe that this archive could restore his honor and integrity. What he failed to register is how these efforts represented an intolerable institutional challenge rather than a corrective to the military’s legal procedure. While sent to the Ministry of War to incriminate Bouïs, Boyer’s voluminous documents were instead filed in his own dossier. There, they became evidence of what ministerial officials saw as Boyer’s perverse, because dishonorable, undisciplined, and ultimately de-virilizing, penchant toward public disclosure.

The Ministry of War indeed preserved the hundreds of pages of paper that Boyer forwarded to it over four years. This selective classification of documents, gathered in his personnel dossier, became a bureaucratic marker of the military’s control over evidentiary truth. It thus became a kind of fetish, a bureaucratic “fig leaf” that obscured Bouïs’s acts, even as it avowed them. This equivocal cover served instead to indict Boyer. By papering over threats to its sexual and racial order from within and without, the army in its archive preserved a fantasy of integral military masculinity, even as vocal critics worked to unsettle its exceptional authority and power.

This scandal in the spahis, in focusing on the contest between Bouïs and Boyer, also occluded the Algerian youth and soldiers that stood at its center. There is no record of statements by Saïd ben el Bachir or Mohamed ben Mahmoud. Although the transcription of Mohammed Soumati’s police deposition was filed in Bouïs’s dossier, the military’s reports actively worked to dismiss its veracity and significance. Officials preferred to look the other way. This archive evidences a systematic and psychic production of that silence.¹¹⁵

The military hierarchy worked to maintain sovereign control over its archive as an extension and expression of its legal power. Its bureaucratic strategy was perhaps summed up best by the minister’s instructions to Bouïs’s commanding officers, advising them to take “great care” in constructing his record.¹¹⁶ This insistence on archival discretion clarifies why Boyer’s feverish filing was one of his many perceived faults. A rich archive of this affair exists in part because of Boyer’s exceptional and, in the eyes of his superiors, ultimately indecent grapho-mania. His public actions, more than Bouïs’s private sexual proclivities, were the greater menace and proof of his lack of masculine military control.

A psychoanalytic account of the fantasy of archival control as a response to perceived threats also helps to locate the Bouïs-Boyer affair historically. The case exploded at a moment of hierarchical and jurisdictional uncertainty for the spahi regiment in Médéa, for the army in Algeria, and, as the Dreyfus Affair would soon reveal, for the army in the Third Republic as a whole. This seemingly singular case made manifest how racialized sexual fantasies conditioned disputes over law and sovereignty in Algeria and beyond it. While this contest was between military and civil justice, rather than the Civil Code and native laws, it, too, shows how competing conceptions of legal personhood were structured by race and sex. For civilian critics, the military exemplified the sexual danger of special mœurs and special laws.

Like the social tensions that erupted at the officers’ partie de campagne, there is much about this scandal that was born of local circumstances. The dispute clearly arose out of an Algerian context that continued to produce conflicts between military and civilian jurisdictions even after the transfer to civilian rule. But the spahi scandal was not just a symptom of colonial exceptionalism. It is difficult not to read its history alongside the struggle between military and civilian justice in the much more famous case of Alfred Dreyfus.

Urbain Gohier, the virulently antimilitarist pamphleteer (and antisemite) drew this very comparison at the height of the Dreyfus Affair. Writing in L’Aurore, which had published Zola’s J’accuse earlier that year, Gohier penned an article on the army’s “special mœurs” that attacked the military for protecting Bouïs’s corruption, while unfairly blaming Boyer and Rocas. Noting “abundant similarities” in the affairs, he suggested that between “the honest Boyer and the infamous Bouïs, the military leaders did not hesitate any more than between the honest Picquart and the Uhlan Esterhazy.” In other words, in both cases, military justice shielded immoral traitors like Bouïs and Commandant Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy—the latter had actually committed the crimes for which Dreyfus was condemned—rather than avowing the corruption brought to light by truth tellers like Boyer and Colonel Georges Picquart. Citing Senator Dide’s petition in defense of Boyer, Gohier condemned how, in the shadow of its “special justice,” the army had repeatedly sacrificed honest men to the “strange prejudices of caste and false solidarity.”¹¹⁷ The account, republished in his screed against military power, L’armée contre la nation, provided further evidence that the military and its law were “the concentration of all that was most criminal in the country.”¹¹⁸

For Boyer and many of his Algerian and metropolitan defenders, this attack on the military’s special law coincided with a racialized and sexualized conception of the nation and its civil law. From this perspective, military law, like Muslim law, appeared as deviant and foreign. In their eyes, French citizenship—and masculinity—needed to be protected from corruption by perverse justice and mœurs.