Baba Merzoug, the great cannon of Algiers

Baba Merzoug was cast in bronze at Algiers in the sixteenth century, during the Ottoman period, under Hassan Agha and by a Venetian founder. It is about seven metres long and weighs twelve tonnes, and a range of 4.8 kilometres is attributed to it. It was mounted to cover the approach to the bay, and through the seventeenth century it did what a gun of that size is for, which is mostly to be known about.

Those specifications come from one account and this page gives them as such. The exact year of casting and the founder's name vary between retellings, and no institutional record was found that settles either.

In 1683 a French squadron under Admiral Duquesne was bombarding Algiers. During that bombardment the French consul, Jean Le Vacher, was accused of signalling to the fleet. On 29 July he was tied to the mouth of Baba Merzoug and killed by its discharge, together with about twenty other Christian prisoners.

Both halves of that sentence belong on the page. A city was being shelled, and a city executed a diplomat and twenty other captives in a manner designed to be seen from the sea. Neither fact cancels the other, and a heritage site that reported only one of them would not be worth reading.

The episode is where the gun's French name comes from. It was renamed La Consulaire, after the consuls, and it is under that name that it stands in France today.

After the French conquest of Algiers, Admiral Duperré had the cannon recovered and shipped to Brest.

What was done with it there is the part that makes this an argument rather than an inventory entry. It was not put in a museum case. It was stood upright on a granite base as a column, finished in a green patina, and topped with a cockerel standing on a globe. A weapon taken from a defeated city was turned into a monument, on French soil, to the people that city had killed with it.

You can disagree about whether that is commemoration or trophy-taking. What is not really arguable is that it is a statement, and that it is still being made.

Algeria formally requested the cannon's return in July 2013. In January 2021 the historian Benjamin Stora, reporting to President Macron on French and Algerian memory, recommended setting up a Franco-Algerian commission to consider its future.

As of the last check for this page, it is still in Brest. Restitution of cultural objects between France and Algeria is an active and unfinished argument, and this page will be updated when there is something to update rather than when there is something to speculate about.

The casting date, the founder's identity and the gun's exact dimensions rest on a single journalistic account, and are presented here with that caveat rather than as settled fact. The claim that this was the first use of that method of execution at Algiers has not been verified and is not made here.

If you have an archival or museum record of the gun, in France or in Algeria, please write to admin@casbah-alger.com.