ELEANOR CLARK
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tion of the fort at Tam, decided the amount and type of arsenal as
well as manpower needed there, provided the French command posts
with almost daily bulletins on threats from this quarter or that.
Whatever the valor and glamor of the Zouaves and other French
North African troops far across the sea in Picardy, down in the lower
reaches of the Sahara it was an ideal time for rebellion, and there
cannot have been much manpower to spare for colonial police work.
The Tuareg had come around to formal acceptance of French do–
minion in 1904, and their current
amenukal,
or top chief, reputedly a
man of impressive quality, was in some sense a friend of both Fou–
cauld and Laperrine. After the assassination he wrote a letter of
what has been taken to be genuine sorrow and condolence to the
priest's sister in France. But anti-Christian fervor was rife, and what–
ever the actual part played by members of the Senoussi sect, they
had converts and influence there as elsewhere in the Moslem world.
The ins and outs and accusations and suspicions about that
December night in 1916 have been hashed over in various quarters
ever since . The victim's term for himself from way back, "universal
brother," sounds pompous enough out of context but as translated
into his daily life seems to have been nothing of the sort. While
refraining from any effort at conversion, except what might ger–
minate from his example and that turned out to be nil, he was in–
defatigable in acts of kindness to the local Tuareg, who were at his
door for help and handouts all the time, and his cheerful lack of cen–
sure of their foibles, individual or generic, would put at least one of
his English-language biographers to shame. He did report that they
seldom washed and were averse to any new kind of work; this goes
with such impartial observations as that they didn't weave or shear
sheep, so their clothing was mostly from hides. In general, his rela–
tions with them must have been based on a high degree of mutual re–
spect and sympathy.
So who was in the group of assassins? Would he have opened
the door that night if he hadn't heard a trusted voice? Were there
some who knew of the plot and could have warned him but chose to
be away just then instead? Tamanrasset at the time was a small vil–
lage, not the kind where such a plan would stay secret long. Where,
that night, was the young tauregui named Uksem, whom Pere de
Foucauld had taken to France with him three years before, in 1913,
for three and a half months? The trip was evidently meant to im–
press the youth with the glories of French civilization, which he
would see at its most glamorous among the holy viscount's family
