Colonial spas

Not content solely with the ‘dry’ hill station model, the French colonial administration gradually elaborated a system of hydro-therapeutic coverage for its officials, both civilian and military.

French colonial scientists expressly formulated their emerging empire of baths as the successor to ancient Rome’s, thereby obscuring centuries of Ottoman rule in the process. In 1838, the prestigious Academie de Medecine in Paris analysed mineral water samples taken at Hammam Meskhoutine in Algeria. After surveying the use of the same site in ancient Roman times, it concluded that ‘this water can once again become precious to Algeria, once the progress of the colony will have brought back the gains of civilization, of which it has been deprived for so many centuries’. In the interim years, contended the report, Hammam Meskhoutine ‘had been designated enchanted or cursed baths, despite their health virtues’.³⁸ In short, French colonials not only believed that they had found on location a critical countermeasure to the ‘diseases of warm climes’, they were also per­suaded that this salutary remedy had been dismissed for centuries on ‘superstitious’ grounds. By 1844, the same academy discussed the ways in which the waters of Hammam Meskhoutine could be utilised to combat and even prevent the onset of ‘intermittent fevers’, which is to say malaria. While one doctor expressed scepticism, another enthusiastically recommended that the drinking of the water should be accompanied by the absorption of arsenic, a cocktail deemed potent enough to take on malaria.³⁹ Julia Clancy-Smith has shown the absurdity of such colonial claims in the case of Tunisia.

In the case of spas, colonial differentiation implied taking one’s distance from pre­colonial water uses. Thus, in an 1864 article on the waters of Hammam-Melouan, just south of Algiers, a French engineer explained:

We cannot count on the indigenous population to bring prosperity to the spa at Hammam-Melouan. Since time immemorial, the natives have had the right to bathe there gratis. The Jews settled there in their tents for eight to ten days and brought with them all of their necessities. Arabs only spend roughly one day there, and hurriedly cram in some six baths in a row. Like the Jews, they immerse themselves in the waters immediately after meals.⁴¹

French specialists deemed these hydro-practices irrational and unscientific. A proper spa treatment, they argued, lasted twenty-one days and not one, and needed to be properly controlled and overseen by a doctor, for a consequential fee.

Hydrotherapy consequently came to be viewed as a useful and specifically colonial weapon in the broader arsenal against tropical disease, and was perceived in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France as both a prophylaxis against and a cure for colonial maladies. There can be no doubt that colonial officials demanded the creation of the cure complex that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. An article in the Indochinese newspaper LAvenir du Tonkin in 1902 exhorted the authorities to better cover health furloughs to the metropole, painting a portrait of hepatic suffering in particular:

Modest colonial employees end up dumped on the pier in Marseille or Bordeaux, with wife and children in tow, after a lengthy colonial stay. Their livers are as heavy as their wallets are light...

The author of this editorial, a self-described ‘old colonial’, adds: ‘Colonials, if one leaves aside some small exceptions, must be considered errant travellers who never settle down, who are submitted to constant costs of moving, hotel fees and forced stays in spa towns.’⁴²

In fact, an impressive hydro-therapeutic support network already existed, and would be further strengthened because of precisely such colonial demands. One could go so far as to suggest that a specifically colonial welfare state was emerging in fin de siecle France. An 1890 decree allowed French colonial officials to be financially covered for their cures in France. In 1897, the Ministry of the Colonies drew up a long list of accredited spas across France and its colonies. In 1910, new measures provided for the reimbursement of expenses incurred, and a variety of other benefits. By 1929, some thirty-eight spas were eligible to treat colonial administrators. These became sites of socialisation and networking in their own right, where lateral connections were sometimes established: missionaries taking the waters mingled with officers, colonial engineers and customs agents. Often colonial officials retired at or near these spas. In the bid to win a colonial clientele, spa towns competed with one another, enrolled doctors and journals to support their respective causes and so on. In addition to its social, cultural and medical functions, colonial hydrotherapy at once introduced a colonial social net, and impelled an entire economic sector. In the colonies themselves, a range of spas sprang up to cater to colonials on location, and, the adminis­tration hoped, to reduce the frequency of their voyages home. Thus from Reunion Island’s many spas, to those of Algeria and Tunisia, Madagascar, Martinique and Guadeloupe, a veritable empire of spas had taken shape.