Prose of defeated facts and verses. The Algerian insurrection of 1871 in military chronicles and in Kabyle poetry

Our article proposes a comparative reading of the representations of the uprising in colonial sources and in Kabyle poetry. Among the sources stand out Histoire de l'insurrection de 1871 en Algerie by Louis Rinn (1891) and L'insurrection de la Grande Kabylie en 1871 by Joseph Nil Robin (1901). These two well-documented works provide a summary of facts: the territorial extent of the event, its intensity, its struggles, the breadth of its impacts on the dominated society in human losses, spoliation, collective fines, summary executions, deportations, social downgrading, dismantling of traditional elite structures. Yet, the particularly troubled context of 1870, underlined by resentment of Europeans in Algeria towards the military institutions turning into a torrent of invective, suggests that the two officers, Rinn and Robin, took the pen for purposes distinct from the mere chronicle or compilation of facts. Their works reveal, from the colonial point of view, irreconcilable differences on the insurrection of 1871. They express, less an impulse eager to shed light on the greatest Algerian uprising of the 19th century, than a stake in the struggle between the colonists and the French military elites. Very different are the representations of the Kabyle poetry of the time, transmitted orally. Some compositions were collected, translated and published in the 19th century by Jean-Dominique Luciani and Louis Rinn and in the 20th century by Ammar ou Said Boulifa and Mouloud Mammeri. These works tell more about the terrible consequences of an insurrection shown as the end of a world than about those responsible for it.