France in Algeria: 132 Years of Colonial Violence

The Conquest

France invaded Algeria in 1830 under the pretext of a diplomatic dispute. The conquest was accomplished through systematic massacre. General Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, who commanded French forces in the 1840s, institutionalised the practice of enfumades, smoking out Algerians who had taken refuge in caves by lighting fires at the entrances. Thousands died this way.

The French military conducted systematic destruction of Algerian villages, crops, and livestock to break resistance. The Muslim population (which had numbered approximately 3 million before the conquest) was reduced by an estimated one third through killing, famine, and disease in the first decades of French rule.

The Colonial Period

For 132 years, the Muslim population of Algeria was governed as a subject people in their own land:

• Land was systematically confiscated and given to European settlers (pieds-noirs)
• Islamic education was suppressed and French secular education imposed
• Arabic was treated as a foreign language in Arab land
• Muslims were denied French citizenship while being subject to French law, a status specifically designed to exclude them from political rights

The War of Independence (1954–1962)

The Algerian war of independence was among the most brutal decolonisation conflicts in history. The French military used systematic torture, documented by French officers themselves in memoirs and investigations, including waterboarding, electric shock, and execution without trial.

Between 300,000 and 1.5 million Algerians died during the eight-year war. The French government's official figure is 400,000. Algerian figures reach 1.5 million. The truth lies somewhere between, and the full accounting has never been made.

France did not formally acknowledge that its military used torture in Algeria until 2018. It has not issued a formal apology or offered reparations.

The Memory

France's relationship with its Algerian history remains contested and unresolved. The five million Algerians and their descendants living in France today exist in a society that has not honestly reckoned with what was done in their homeland. The anti-Muslim racism that structures their daily experience in France is continuous with the colonial ideology that governed Algeria for 132 years.