252 The liberation struggle of the Algerians led by Emir Abd-el-Kader against the French colonialists lasted with short interruptions from 1832 to 1847. Between 1839 and 1844, the French used their considerable military superiority to conquer Abd-el-Kader’s state in Western Algeria. However, he continued guerrilla warfare relying on the help of the sultan of Morocco, and when the latter was defeated in the Franco-Moroccan war of 1844, Abd-el-Kader hid in the Sahara oases. The last stage of this struggle was an insurrection in Western Algeria in 1845-47 which was put down by the French colonialists.
In one of his reports published in The Northern Star in 1844 Engels commended the resistance of the local population to the French colonisation of Algeria (see present edition, Vol. 3, pp. 528-29). In this article (1847) Engels considered the Algerian movement under Abd-el-Kader from a different angle. As the text below shows, he denounced the barbaric methods used by bourgeois France in the conquest of Algeria, but saw this as the inevitable way in which capitalist relations superseded more backward feudal and patriarchal ones and regarded any opposition to this process as doomed to failure. Engels’ judgment was undoubtedly influenced by the ideas he then had of the proximity of a socialist revolution in the developed countries, which was to put an end for ever to all social and national oppression. He thought that favourable preconditions for this revolution were created by backward countries being drawn into the orbit of capitalism with its centralising and levelling tendencies, despite all their negative aspects. This judgment was not final, however. Later, after a deeper study of the history of colonial conquests and the resistance of the oppressed masses to colonial domination, Engels emphasised the liberating and progressive nature of the struggle of oppressed peoples against the capitalist colonial system which helped create favourable conditions for the working class to overthrow the capitalist system. It was from this point of view, in particular, that he described the liberation movement of the Algerians in the article “Algeria” written for the New American Encyclopaedia in 1857.
from Engels' article "Algeria" (1857) in the New American Cyclopedia:
From the first occupation of Algeria by the French to the present time, the unhappy country has been the arena of unceasing bloodshed, rapine, and violence. Each town, large and small, has been conquered in detail at an immense sacrifice of life. The Arab and Kabyle tribes, to whom independence is precious, and hatred of foreign domination a principle dearer than life itself, have been crushed and broken by the terrible razzias in which dwellings and property are burnt and destroyed, standing crops cut down, and the miserable wretches who remain massacred, or subjected to all the horrors of lust and brutality.
