Jules Rouanet (1858-1944) : An Ideological Biography

A close look at Rouanet’s career as a journalist, musicologist, and jack-of-all-trades intellectual illuminates a great deal about the colonial cultural politics of Third Republic Algeria and vice versa. Born in Saint Pons in Clermont-l’Hérault in 1858, Rouanet arrived in Algeria along with his wife, children, and parents in the 1880s.^[2] From a middle-class milieu (his father was a dyer), Rouanet found in the colonial Algerian context fertile ground for social advancement by combining his background as an agricultural engineer with his skills as a journalist and cultural critic.^[3] He also found in colonial Algeria a cause into which he threw himself with great energy, making him not only a commentator but also a booster and militant for settler interests. His early editorial and journalistic work at the Gazette du Colon and L’Akhbar, where he specialized in agricultural affairs, intersected with his role as secretary of the Comice agricole de Boufarick and his efforts to establish a musée commercial in Algiers.^[4] After the death of one of his sons in 1890, Rouanet appears to have briefly tried his hand at journalism in Paris, before settling there for a time in 1892 as sous-directeur at the Musée Commercial de l’Algérie, a venture of the Government General.^[5] By 1897, however, he was back in Algiers, continuing to write largely about agricultural matters and settler affairs. Despite a period beginning in 1899 as editor of the short-lived weekly Journal des Colons, Rouanet was now mainly associated with La Dépêche Algérienne, where he would take on an increasingly prominent role over the next four decades.

Much of Rouanet’s journalistic output was focused on agriculture and on economic affairs more broadly, sometimes under the name Mestré Ramon.^[6] But from the beginning of his journalistic career, Rouanet also wrote frequently about art and music, sometimes signing his articles as Raoul d’Artenac.^[7] As was the case in his agricultural boosterism, Rouanet’s musical interests were not confined to the newspaper columns. In 1898 Rouanet threw himself into musical activities on his return to Algiers through his founding of the Petit Athénée, a “Société Littéraire Artistique et Scientifique.”^[8] Serving as a library and a pedagogical and performance space, the Petit Athénée was an important promoter of European classical music in the capital at the turn of the century. Indigenous Algerian music was decidedly absent from the Petit Athénée, as were indigenous Algerians themselves—no Muslims seem to have been members, and in keeping with the ubiquitous and virulent antisemitism of the moment, its regulations explicitly excluded Jews.^[9] Rouanet’s association with the Petit Athénée did not last long—ill health and internal disputes spelled the end of his leadership by 1904, and a year later the association had disbanded, its space now renamed the Salle Barthe.^[10] Nevertheless, Rouanet would continue to be closely connected to European classical music, both as a reviewer and as a teacher of piano, well into his old age.^[11]

Rouanet’s experience in the Petit Athénée coincides with the beginning of his involvement in Arab music. His attention to indigenous artistic forms starting around 1904 did not come entirely out of the blue: in 1897 Rouanet had published “Pour les tapis algériens,” which called for the revival of Algerian textile art. His engagement with Arab music, however, would go much deeper and extend over several decades. It began at the behest of the Government General, which set him the task of studying “la musique arabe et la constitution d’un recueil des pieces originals et intéressantes qui subsistent en Algérie, en Tunisie, en Sicile, en Espagne et chez les divers peoples musulmans” right around the time when he was leaving the Petit Athénée.^[12] The impulse to study Arab cultural production was very much in keeping with the zeitgeist surrounding the tenure of Governor-General Charles Jonnart, whose administration’s interest in documenting and promoting a Hispano-Mauresque aesthetic earned him the affection of many elite urban Algerian Muslims, even if Jonnart’s leadership ultimately proved ineffectual in improving the everyday life of most Algerian Muslims. This project brought Rouanet into direct and sustained contact with the young Algerian Jewish musician and scholar Edmond-Nathan Yafil, and through Yafil, Rouanet came to know a range of leading Algerian musicians, including Mohamed Ben ‘Ali Sfindja, the doyen of the nûba repertoire of Algiers. The following excerpt from a letter to the Governor General published in the columns of La Tafna in 1905, signed El Magharbi, gives a sense of how Rouanet’s work was being received in some circles:

Depuis quelques temps, il semble qu’un esprit nouveau - rien de celui de Spuller - règne en Algérie.

C’est un esprit fait d’apaisement, de bonne entente, de concorde entre les divers éléments composant la population algérienne…

Mais, chose encore particulièrement digne de remarque et comme un signe bienfaisant des temps : l’on dirait que le colon et l’indigène dont l’accord avait toujours paru utopique vivent aujourd’hui dans un esprit de mutuelle cordialité. Serait-ce à la suite de quelques concessions tacites réciproques ?

En vérité ce nouvel état de choses moral est dû à votre politique sage, bienveillante et tolérante. Grâce à des mesures administratives très habiles et très appropriées à la situation générale du pays, et, d’autre part, appliquant la doctrine de Lissagaray : soyons arabojustes, vous avez su ramener la confiance et faire renaître l’union dans tous les milieux : les colons ont trouvé en vous le défenseur éloquent et ardent de leurs multiples intérêts, tandis que les indigènes, eux, se plaisent à reconnaitre en vous l’administrateur juste et impartial en même temps que l’ami et le tuteur dévoué et bienveillant.…

Tout récemment encore, afin de donner aux indigènes une preuve de plus de vos sentiments aimables à leur égard vous avez résolu de vous faire hardiment le protecteur et le conservateur de leur musique qui tendait à disparaître : un homme de talent, d’une compétence indiscutable, M. Jules Rouanet fut chargé officiellement par vous de la mission difficultueuse entre toute de la diffusion et de la conservation de la musique arabe.

Outre que l’intention est éminemment louable, j’y vois encore pour ma part un but d’ordre plus élevé : en confiant à notre distingué confrère le soin de noter et d’écrire la musique arabe pour en faire jouer de temps à autre quelques morceaux par nos musiques régimentaires, vous avez sans doute pensé et avec raison qu’en groupant autour de celles-ci des auditeurs de différents cultes, ce serait un moyen de les rapprocher et de créer entre eux un certain courant de sympathie et de bonne harmonie (sans jeu de mots).

Mais il faut espérer que la mesure prise par vous pour la ville d’Alger sera étendue à toute l’Algérie et qu’il sera bientôt donné à toutes les grandes villes algériennes de pouvoir applaudir à chaque concert un ou deux airs arabes choisis dans le répertoire de M. Rouanet : les indigènes qui sont très impressionnables et très sensibles seront des premiers à vous en être reconnaissants.

Et puis n’oublions pas que la musique qui adoucit les mœurs peut également servir ici de train d’union entre l’élément colon et l’élément indigène…

Over the next few decades, Rouanet’s work with the indigenous musical scene would bring him in two directions. On the one hand, he began to write and talk directly to scholars, including the attendees at the 1905 Congress of Orientalists in Algiers and the readers of leading musicological journals in Paris, bringing him into a more rarefied atmosphere than his usual journalistic interventions.^[13] On the other hand, Rouanet began to closely collaborate with indigenous musicians. His collaborations with Yafil resulted in the publication of a series of transcriptions from the urban repertoire, the formation of an Arab music ensemble sometimes known as Orchestre Rouanet et Yafil (which would later morph into the Société El Moutribia), and involvement in the early recording industry in Algeria.^[14] These scholarly and applied aspects of his activity were two sides of the same coin: just as his scholarly publications emphasized the danger of disappearance that Arab music faced, his transcription, recording, and performance activities were geared toward the salvage and revival of this allegedly frozen and decadent music through “modern” methods associated with the French civilizing mission.

The Encylopédie essays are the culmination of Rouanet’s writings and lectures on Arab music, even if he subsequently published shorter works.^[15] The two essays were generally well received in the European press, and in 1925 they garnered him the Prix Bordin from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (Anonymous 1925).^[16] By this time, however, Rouanet’s “applied” activities around Arab music had receded. It is striking, and was striking already at the time, that Rouanet’s recognition in scholarly circles in Europe roughly coincided with the success of Yafil’s Société El Moutribia, as well as with the very public falling out between Rouanet and Yafil that took place in the pages of La Dépêche Algérienne in 1927 (Miliani 2018). While the proximate cause of the rupture was Rouanet’s charge that Yafil had claimed authors’ rights over the traditional repertoire, it is also possible to read this as a violent assertion of settler difference from the urban indigenous milieu and as a break from Rouanet’s connections with more humble indigenous counterparts who were now sharing the limelight. It is also striking that this was the moment when the Jeunes Algériens who Rouanet so despised were beginning to engage in the public musical revival in which Rouanet had originally had such a hand.^[17]

In retrospect, the various sides of Rouanet’s public persona raise some broader questions. It is certainly not surprising to find patronizing, Orientalizing tendencies in relatively sympathetic Jonnart-era treatments of “Hispano-Mauresque” culture, as seen in the letter in La Tafna quoted above. But it is another matter to find a sustained interest in Algerian Arab music in a figure who was a relentless defender of the settler cause against indigenous reformers and Paris-based critics. Even if Rouanet occasionally bowed to mild reform in France’s indigenous policy, throughout his career he remained an implacable foe of the enfranchisement of Algerian Muslims. While he was willing to accept the accession of individual “evolved” Muslims into the charmed circle of full citizenship, he held firmly to a notion of two distinct “races” on the same soil, necessarily divided by culture and therefore by political rights. Why, then, would someone so dismissive of indigenous Algerians be so involved with their arts and artists?

Responding to this question requires a consideration of the substance of Rouanet’s musicological writings in dialogue with the substance of his views on “indigenous affairs.” We have already acknowledged the political import of his emphasis on Arab stagnation and the revivifying power of French tools and methods. But a tracing of the grand argument of his essays in the Encyclopédie underlines just how closely tied the image of Arab stagnation and French power were to his particular melding of musical philology and racial theory (see Chami in this issue). Read as one continuous argument, the two essays present a striking narrative of Arab musical origins, early development through borrowing fueled by rapid expansion of the Muslim empire, medieval crystallization in Spain, the musical culture’s “turning in on itself,” slow decay after 1492, and finally rapid deterioration in the face of European dominance—a temporal sequence that he maps onto the Maghribi landscape itself (see for example p. 2819). This deeply Orientalist narrative of arrested development and decay is of course quite convenient for Rouanet, in that in one fell swoop it solves the problem of how to access the musical past: all one must do is engage in an act of “musical archaeology,” since one can find in present-day musical practice the remnants of the medieval past.

As Bouhadiba has pointed out (2019: 67), a major acknowledged influence on Rouanet is Ernest Renan’s writing on “Semitic” mentality. This is particularly evident in Rouanet’s assertion that Arab Muslim music reflects an Arab Muslim mentality rooted in desert life. If this aspect of his argument feels pulled directly from the second half of the nineteenth century, other aspects of it feel more familiar, and even reflect questions in sociomusicological thought that remain quite current. For example, is music immune to outside influence, or is it a site of outside influence (p. 2748)? Rouanet’s uncertainty with regard to the Arab case speaks to a tension running through both essays regarding the endogenous and the exogenous—the endogenous being about the eternal mentality of a people (here equated with Islam), and the exogenous being about give-and-take, change, influence, and even contagion (Pasler 2012-2013: 54). Throughout, Rouanet combines an insistence on a perennial Muslim “mentality” with an insistence on the importance of borrowing—in other words, according to him, music (particularly sacred music) reflects something original and specific while simultaneously reflecting (particularly in profane music) various accretions, influences, and physical movements. But is this borrowing a source of vitality, or is it a threat to musical integrity? Is music that tends to remain “pareil à lui-même” a sign of decay or of strength (Bouhadiba 2019: 68)? This balancing act complicates Rouanet’s confident narrative of stagnation and decadence, even if he ultimately brushes the tensions under the carpet.

Rouanet’s grand musical argument, despite its contradictions, made sense with regard to his broader colonial politics. His vision of French Algeria was as a settler colony that could only survive in the long term through massive French colonization and through maintenance of a docile Muslim population through what he considered good governance, who might undergo a very slow “evolution” under strict French control but without any extension of citizenship rights. This helps to account for Rouanet’s attention to the nûba repertoire, associated as it was with the “vieux turbans” and the bourgeoisie. In addition, this tradition was treated by him, in print and in his other musical activities, as the most assimilable to European classical conventions. But it is also important to consider some of his broader arguments about essence and influence, which go well beyond the nûba repertoire. Rouanet’s argument about profound Greek influence on Arab music was an elaboration of Salvador Daniel’s argument some six decades earlier, wherein “North African music seemed a potential source of knowledge about Greek music: knowledge of the Other was capable of enhancing knowledge of the self” (Pasler 2012-2013: 28). As in Salvador Daniel’s argument, Rouanet’s emphasis on Greek influence opened a deep connection between Arab and European musical traditions. The temporal depth of Greek influence worked well with Rouanet’s narrative: if Greek theory enriched an excessively simple Arab Islamic music at an early date, and if those imprints can still be heard in a wide variety of music in the Maghrib, particularly in the countryside, then digging back beyond the decadence and decay of the intervening centuries might in fact be an act of de-Orientalization and of drawing closer to something compatible with European music. In this sense, the Greek substrate offers a model of positive influence as well as a substantive link between Arab Islamic music and European music, one that parallels the linkage he makes between Kabyle music and Roman music explored in Nacim Khellal’s contribution to this issue. In its gesture to the deep past, this move also provides a future for Rouanet’s colonial vision of association without assimilation.

Even in his settler milieu, Rouanet’s positions regarding the future of Algeria were profoundly conservative. Whether writing about music or politics, his work played on turn-of-the-century colonial themes all the way to the end of his career on the eve of the Second World War. In his last four years, Rouanet fell uncharacteristically silent. Less than a year after his death in Algiers, the foundations of his paternalistic vision of Algeria’s future would be profoundly shaken.