This article examines how the 1853 discovery of Geronimo, a sixteenth-century Algerian Christian martyr, catalyzed a program of architectural transformation in French colonial Algiers. Recovered from a rammed-earth fortification wall, the martyr’s remains and their plaster cast became relics that the Bishop of Algiers deployed for “spiritual reconquest.” The article traces the translation of these remains through urban processions that carved Christian memory into Muslim space, culminating in the construction of the Basilica of Notre-Dame d’Afrique (1858–1872). Designed by Jean-Eugène Fromageau in a syncretic Romano-Byzantine-Islamic style, the basilica functioned as a “narrative building” arguing architecturally that Christianity was the source of Islamic form.
Ralph Ghoche is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at Barnard College. He is currently immersed in two research projects on French urban and territorial practices in colonial Algeria. The first, Christians in the Casbah, examines the role of the Catholic Church in Algeria in the decades following the 1830 conquest. The second focuses on stone quarries during the French colonial period (1830–1962), exploring how their exploitation contributed to both the material and symbolic foundations of French imperialism. Ghoche has also written extensively on French architecture and its relationship to theories of ornament, archaeology, and aesthetics in the nineteenth century. He is the author of Ornament and Symbol in French Romantic Architecture, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. Ghoche is co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar Beyond France and a member of the editorial board of Les Cahiers de la recherche architecturale, urbaine et paysagère.
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