Algeria was not a colony in the French legal imagination. It was three French départements, like any in metropolitan France — except that 90% of the inhabitants had no vote in them[6].
- Duration
- 1830 – 1962 (132 years)
- Conquest period
- 1830 – 1903
- Independence war
- 1954 – 1962
- Settler population (1954)
- ≈1 million pieds-noirs
- Algerians dead (1954–62)
- ≈500,000 – 1,500,000
- Tortured by French forces
- Tens of thousands documented
The conquest
Bugeaud, the enfumades, the dispossession
France invaded the Regency of Algiers in 1830. The pacification under Marshal Bugeaud through the 1840s adopted what he openly called razzia warfare: destruction of crops, herds, and villages until the population submitted or fled. The 1845 enfumades of the Dahra — caves sealed with fire while families sheltered inside — produced asphyxiation deaths in the thousands. The events were debated in the Chamber of Deputies and the policy continued.
“We must envelop them in a circle of fire. We must hunt them as wild beasts.”
Land law from 1851 onwards transferred enormous quantities of communal Algerian land to settler ownership. By 1954 pieds-noirs (European settlers) and Algerian Jews — barely 10% of the population — owned more than 25% of all farmland.
Sétif
8 May 1945
On the day Europe celebrated the German surrender, Algerians in the eastern town of Sétif marched with French flags and Algerian flags side by side. French police fired on the demonstration. Algerians killed around 100 settlers in the days that followed. The French army, gendarmerie, and pied-noir militias retaliated. Estimates of Algerians killed range from 6,000 (French official) to 45,000 (Algerian government and Cairo Radio). Historian Jean-Pierre Peyroulou puts it at 10,000–20,000.
Sétif made the war that followed unavoidable. Many leaders of the 1954 uprising — including Ahmed Ben Bella and Hocine Aït Ahmed — dated their revolutionary commitment to it.
The war
1954 – 1962, and the systematic use of torture
The FLN insurrection began on 1 November 1954. By 1957, French paratroopers under General Jacques Massu were deployed in Algiers with effectively unlimited powers. The 9th Zouaves, the 10th Para Division, and the DST used torture — electricity (the gégène), water-boarding, beatings — as routine investigative method. The Wuillaume Report, commissioned by the French government itself in 1955, documented the practice and was not acted upon[6].
“Torture is the cancer of democracy.”
In 2018 President Emmanuel Macron formally acknowledged that mathematician Maurice Audin was tortured to death by the French army in 1957, and that "torture was a system" during the war. It was the first time a French head of state had said so.
Casualty math
Why the range is so wide
Chronology
Key dates
1830
France invades the Regency of Algiers.
1845
Enfumades of the Dahra by Colonel Pélissier.
1848
Algeria formally annexed as three French départements.
1871
Mokrani Revolt suppressed; mass land confiscations follow.
1945 May
Sétif and Guelma massacres.
1954 Nov
Toussaint Rouge — start of the FLN insurrection.
1957
Battle of Algiers — torture systematised under Massu.
1961 Oct
Paris massacre — police kill at least 120 Algerian demonstrators; bodies thrown in the Seine.
1962 Mar
Évian Accords. Independence on 5 July 1962.
2018
Macron acknowledges torture and the death of Maurice Audin.