| Summary: | In numerous letters to his brother and wife, the Maréchal Armand Jacques Leroy de Saint-Arnaud (1798–1854) describes his military campaigns in Algeria as reincarnations of the Roman wars in Numidia. Saint-Arnaud's Roman/Numidian dichotomy raises additional questions. What role did such ethnological fictions play in the actual military conquest of French Algeria? To what extent can we trace the numerous instances of genocide that Saint-Arnaud recounts in his letters to these classical receptions? Furthermore, can we deem the French invasions, with all of their settler-colonial practices and associated violence, a historical phenomenon whose ideological underpinnings were neoclassical in essence? In seeking to answer these questions in the affirmative, I situate the letters of Saint-Arnaud in their larger cultural historical milieu. I bring them into dialogue with the accounts of other French military writers. In so doing, I illustrate how the French conquest of the Maghreb, framed as a rediscovery of the Roman campaigns of old against an unchanged Numidian foe, enabled genocidal acts to be justified through classical ideals and a civilizing model exemplified in Greco-Roman literature.
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