French Algeria

French Algeria began with a diplomatic pretext in 1830 - the dey of Algiers had struck the French consul with a fly whisk over an unpaid grain debt - and a landing that was meant to restore prestige to a collapsing Bourbon monarchy. It became something no other French colony was: not a protectorate or an overseas territory but three departments of France itself, administratively part of the metropole. Conquest took decades against Abd al-Qadir, whose resistance lasted until 1847, and the pacification of Kabylia continued to the 1870s; the methods included the enfumades, in which populations sheltering in caves were killed by lighting fires at the entrances. Land was expropriated in enormous quantities and settled by Europeans - French, but also Spanish, Italian and Maltese - who by the 1950s numbered about a million against nine million Muslim Algerians, held the best farmland, and possessed full citizenship while the majority did not. That asymmetry is the whole of the politics. The war that began in November 1954 lasted almost eight years and was fought with systematic torture on the French side and terrorism on both; estimates of Algerian dead run from a quarter of a million to over a million. It brought down the Fourth Republic in 1958, returned de Gaulle to power, and then produced an attempted military coup against him when he moved towards negotiation. Independence came on 5 July 1962 after the Evian Accords, and nearly the entire European population left within months. Camus was born to a settler family in Algeria and could not reconcile the two sides. The harkis who had served France were largely abandoned at independence and many were killed. France did not officially use the word war for the conflict until 1999. The dead are still counted differently in Paris and Algiers.

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