Serving Christ and colonialism

Fergus Fleming is the author of three volumes of narrative history, the best of which, Barrow’s Boys, gives a rollicking account of 19th-century Arctic exploration. Now he has lighted on the ‘conquest’ of the Sahara, and it is a gripping saga, little known beyond the popular image of a kepi-wearing French officer riding into the desert on a white camel while hordes of Tuareg mass silently on the horizon.

The Sword and the Cross begins with a trot through the history of Algeria, or the Barbary Coast as it was known to white men, and of Ottoman North Africa in general. Fleming then focuses on Vicomte Charles de Foucauld, a dissolute officer in the Fourth Hussars who ate foie gras straight from the tin and, while serving in north Africa, became famous for a remarkable 11-month journey exploring the Moroccan hinterland (after swallowing Tunisia, the French were looking hungrily at Morocco).