French Algeria, 1830-1962

This paper highlights the features that distinguished French Algeria’s history from other French colonies as well as other European settler societies. The facts are well known to many: Algeria was a French department since 1848 and the largest settler society in French North Africa. The most important elements that anchor the settler colonial history of Algeria are the expropriation of land and the laws that procured property rights for European settlers. This paper assesses the binarism of French Algerian society, whereby the clear divide between the rights of colonists and those of the Muslim populations could be observed at every turn, whether it was in the distribution of land or with the exercise of political rights. The argument in favour of binarism in French Algerian society might appear overly rigid or simplistic, but the author suggests that such laws as the 1865 Senatus-Consulte, which accorded limited rights to Muslims, further separated the European and Muslim communities by forcing Muslim landowners to register their property and make such lands eligible for sale to colonists as well as encouraged the settler community to lobby for stronger reinforcement of the distinction between French and “indigenous” rights. For every law that appeared, in principle, to expand the rights of the Muslims, we find that the logic of the market extended its reach deeper ever into Algerian society at the expense of the colonized.