The Fan Affair between the Turkish Pasha Hussein Dey and the French Consul Pierre Deval is the casus belli that caused the maritime blockade of Algiers by the French Royal Navy in 1827.
France's debts
In 1800, during Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign, two Jewish merchants, Busnach and Jacob Bacri, proposed to the Directory to supply the French army with wheat. The contract is signed and the dey of Algiers advances the money for the whole operation. The coffers of the Directory are empty and payment is postponed. Once in power, Napoleon postponed the payment of his debts until the end of the war. Under the Restoration, the government of Louis XVIII reimbursed half of the sum, the other part being blocked within the framework of a legal arbitration. Thirty years after the loan, in 1830, the Dey of Algiers has still not been paid.
The diplomatic incident
On April 30, 1827, receiving the French consul Pierre Deval in audience, the dey asked him for the King of France's response to three "friendly" letters he had written to him. The consul replying that the king cannot answer him, and adding, according to the dey, "outrageous words for the Muslim religion" (which the dey does not specify), the latter strikes him "two or three times with light fly swatters”. There was therefore never a slap in the face or a blow from the fan, but a ready-made pretext to create a diplomatic incident which would be exploited by French diplomacy. The dey refusing to apologize, the case is considered by France as a casus belli leading to the dispatch of a squadron to operate the blockade of the port of Algiers. The diplomatic escalation will lead to the Algiers expedition.
Ultimatum to the Dey of Algiers (June 1827)
In June 1827, the French government sent two missions to Algiers, the first was responsible for evacuating Consul Deval and all French nationals from Algiers, the second had to send an ultimatum to the dey of Algiers. The evacuation mission was fulfilled on June 11, 1827 by the schooner La Torche, while Captain Collet, who arrived shortly after on board La Provence, was at the head of a naval division in charge of the negotiation mission. Diplomatic relations between Paris and Algiers being broken, the Sardinian consul Datili de la Tour acted as mediator by addressing a 24-hour ultimatum to the dey, the rejection of which would lead to the blockade and the war in Algiers.
The conditions imposed by this ultimatum were :
“1° All the grandees of the Regency, with the exception of the dey, will go aboard the ship La Provence to make, in the name of the head of the Regency, an apology to the consul of France;
2° At an agreed signal, the palace of the Dey and all the forts will fly the French flag and salute it with one hundred and one cannon shots;
3° Objects of any kind, French property , and embarked on enemy ships of the Regency, cannot be seized in the future;
4° Vessels flying the French flag can no longer be visited by the corsairs of Algiers;
5° The dey, by a special article, will order the execution in the kingdom of Algiers of the capitulations between France and the Ottoman Porte;
6° Subjects and the ships of Tuscany, Lucca, Piombino and the Holy See, will be regarded and treated as the proper subjects of the King of France. »
Pasha Hussein Dey rejected the ultimatum, the blockade of the port of Algiers was thus formed.