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Months passed away and the Arab tribes who had submitted began to feel the pressure of French domination and to resent the supercilious conduct of French officials. In the spring of 1845 their former Sultan reappeared. He swept down into the valley of the Tafna and routed and cut to pieces a French detachment.
'The Arabs care shroff for your Turkish garrison of the city, said Barizy, with great derision. 'They are eight hundred strong, said Pasqualigo. 'Eight hundred weak, you mean. No, as Raphael Tafna was saying, when Mehemet. Ali was master, the tribes were quiet enough. But the Turks could never manage the Arabs, even in their best days.
The Government at Paris had begun in some sort to understand the power of their formidable adversary, and a serious effort was to be made. On February 22, 1841, General Bugeaud assumed office as Governor-General of Algeria. He had now come, not in the mood and with the policy of the day when he concluded the Treaty of the Tafna, but as one whose task it was to crush every rival power in Algeria.
'It depends upon what part of the desert is in question, said Pasqualigo. 'Of course the part where it took place. I say the Arabian desert belongs to the Viceroy; my cousin, Barizy of the Gate, says "No, it belongs to the Porte." Raphael Tafna says it belongs to neither. The Bedouins are independent. 'But they are not recognised, said the Consul Pasqualigo.
After the Tafna Treaty he had received a magnificent present of arms from Louis Philippe, King of the French, and, as a man who had subdued, either by arms or by persuasive eloquence, the hardy, high-spirited Kabyles he stood high in the estimation of his Moslem fellow-rulers in Morocco and Egypt, Tripoli and Tunis, and of the ulemas, or bodies of learned doctors in divinity and law, at Alexandria and Mecca, who watched with joy, and with ardent expectation of yet higher things, the career of one who seemed destined to revive the pristine glories of Islam.
In 1836 the Arab leader, now Sultan, again fought the invaders in several severe engagements on the Tafna River. In these affairs the advantage lay with the Arab. In June, 1836, General Bugeaud was sent to command the French forces, and he proved to be the strongest opponent that Abd-el-Kader had met.
Hastily drawn treaties are a prolific source of war. The Treaty of the Tafna was a flagrant example of this class of diplomatic documents. There were two drafts: one in Arabic, with the Sultan's seal; the other in French, with Bugeaud's. The drafts were not carefully compared. The limits of territory assigned to each of the parties were not made clear.
There was more fighting on the Tafna; it was indecisive, and in May, 1837, a treaty, known as the Treaty of the Tafna, was concluded, General Bugeaud having received instructions either to make peace with Abd-el-Kader or to subdue him.
Disputes arose as to the territorial rights of the Sultan under the Tafna Treaty, and after vain negotiations and missions to and fro matters were brought to a head by Marshal Valée in the despatch of an expedition to march over some disputed ground as a demonstration of French power and an assertion of French rights.
The story of the Arab hero from this point in his career is told by Sanderson, the faithful commemorator of great nineteenth-century patriots, a high authority on modern Africa. The famous Treaty of the Tafna, concluded between Abd-el-Kader and Bugeaud, was a triumph for the Arab Sultan.
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