How long was algeria colonized by france

Algerians however were made into automatic French subjects and were not given the same rights as the pied noirs. The Algerians, who had fought against foreign invaders numerous times before, put up a resistance against the French. Abd al Qadir, venerated as the first hero of Algerian independence, gained the support of tribes throughout Algeria and by controlled two-thirds of Algeria. However, in he was d efeated by the French commander General Bugeaud.

In there was a revolt in the Kabylie region in eastern Algeria that spread to the rest of Algeria that was triggered by Cremieux's extension of colon authority to previously self governing reserves and the abrogation of commitments made by the military government, the scarcity of grain and other such grievances.

Cremieux was also responsible for the Cremieux Decree that issued the Jewish minority in Algeria French citizenship. The Muslim majority were treated as subjects and were not able to obtain French citizenship unless they gave up their religion and culture. This revolt was put down by French troops and French authorities imposed stern measures, such as the further confiscation of tribal lands, that were intended to punish the entire Muslim population.

Algeria's War for Independence and Its Aftermath. Overview of Algeria. Classical Algeria. Islamic Algeria French Algeria Rise of Algerian Nationalism. Ben Bella's Presidency. The Counter Revolution of The death of George Floyd in America, and the surging support for the Black Lives Matter movement which occurred as a consequence, have fuelled a growing global reckoning with the legacy of colonialism.

This reckoning is currently reverberating in the United States, the United Kingdom and across Europe. Starting with the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston, a 17th-century slave trader, in Bristol in the UK, several European nations have taken down statues of similar figures and have made decisions to make amends for the crimes of colonialism. France took the historic decision to return the remains of two dozen Algerian freedom fighters to Algeria in early July.

Franco-Algerian relations have a colonial aspect that is not commonly emphasised, but is important nonetheless. French colonial rule over Algeria spanned years, beginning in with the invasion of Algiers and lasting until the Algerian War of Independence which concluded in Whilst the nature of French rule changed over this time, Algeria was administered as an integral part of France from until independence.

Discontent among Algerians grew after the World Wars in which Algerians sustained numerous casualties. They became disillusioned with French rule and their lack of political and economic status in the colonial system. What started as a clamour for greater autonomy later erupted into an all-out war for independence.

The long, complex conflict was characterised by guerrilla warfare, maquis fighting and the use of torture, leading to over , Algerian casualties and the collapse of the Fourth Republic in France. The Evian Accords were signed on March 18th, which ushered in a newly independent Algeria, thus ending the Algerian War. But what now? But none of this stopped Merah becoming a hero, praised as "lion", in the radical mosques of Algiers.

Fifty years on from their last real war, it seems that France and Algeria are still quite capable of tearing each other's throats out. I first saw for myself the rawness of these emotions when I went to study in France in I ended up living on the outskirts of Lyon, which is where the first so-called urban riots kicked off — the precursors of the riots of the s.

Throughout that summer — the "hot summer" — cars were regularly set alight by immigrant youths who called this kind of entertainment "rodeos" and who declared war on the police. At the time, I knew little about French colonial history and assumed that these were race riots not much different to those we had known in the UK in But I was aware that most of the kids who were fighting the police were of Algerian origin and that this must have some kind of significance.

Thirty years on, the unresolved business between France and Algeria has grown ever more complex. The overall aim of the centre is to function as a thinktank, bringing together not just academics but all those who have a stake in understanding the complexities of Franco-Algerian history; this necessarily involves journalists, lawyers and government as well as historians. At the same time, I am writing a book called The French Intifada, which is a parallel attempt to make sense of French colonial history in north Africa.

This book is a tour around some of the most important and dangerous frontlines of what many historians now call the fourth world war. This war is not a conflict between Islam and the west or the rich north and the globalised south, but a conflict between two very different experiences of the world — the colonisers and the colonised. The French invaded Algeria in This was the first colonisation of an Arab country since the days of the Crusades and it came as a great shock to the Arab nation.

This first battle for Algiers was a staged affair. Pleasure ships sailed from Marseille to watch the bombardment and the beach landings. The Arab corpses that lay strewn in the streets and along the coastline were no more than incidental colour to the Parisian spectator watching the slaughter through opera glasses from the deck of his cruise ship.

The trauma deepened as, within a few short decades, Algeria was not given the status of a colony but annexed into France. This meant that the country had no claim to any independent identity whatsoever, but was as subservient to Parisian government as Burgundy or Alsace-Lorraine.

This had a deeply damaging effect on the Algerian psyche. The settlers who came to work in Algeria from the European mainland were known as pieds-noirs — black feet — because, unlike the Muslim population, they wore shoes.

The pieds noirs cultivated a different identity from that of mainland Frenchmen. Meanwhile, Muslim villages were destroyed and whole populations forced to move to accommodate European farms and industry. As the pieds-noirs grew in number and status, the native Algerians, who had no nationality under French law, did not officially exist.

Albert Camus captures this non-identity beautifully in his great novel L'Etranger The Outsider : when the hero Meursault shoots dead the anonymous Arab on an Algiers beach, we are only concerned with Meursault's fate.

The dead Arab lies literally outside history. Like most Europeans or Americans of my generation, I had first come across Algiers and Algeria in Camus's writings, not just in L'Etranger but also his memoirs and essays. And like most readers who approach Algeria through the prism of Camus, I was puzzled by this place, which, as he described it, was so French that it might have been in France but was also so foreign and out of reach.

Part of this difficulty arises from the fact that the Algeria Camus describes is only partly a Muslim country. Instead, Camus sees Algeria as an idealised pan-Mediterranean civilisation. In his autobiographical writings on Algiers and on the Roman ruins at Tipasa, he describes a pagan place where classical values were still alive and visible in the harsh but beautiful, sun-drenched landscape.

This, indeed, is the key to Camus's philosophy of the absurd. In his Algeria, God does not exist and life is an endless series of moral choices that must be decided by individuals on their own, with no metaphysical comfort or advice, and with little or no possibility of knowing they ever made the absolutely correct choice. It is easy to see here how Camus's philosophy appealed to the generation of French leftist intellectuals that fought in the second world war, a period when occupied France was shrouded in moral ambiguity as well as in the military grip of the Germans.

It was less effective, however, in the postwar period, as Algerian nationalism began to assert itself against France, modelling itself on the values of the French Resistance. Camus was sympathetic to the cause of Muslim rights. Most importantly, throughout the s, as violence between the French authorities and Algerian nationalists intensified, Camus found himself endlessly compromised.

His intentions were always noble but by the time of his death in a car crash in he had acknowledged that he no longer recognised the country of his birth. During the 90s, it became all but impossible to visit Algeria.

Reading Camus as a way in to this Algeria was simply a waste of time. This was a country dominated by terror as the hardline government fought a shadowy civil war against Islamist insurgents who sought to turn Algeria into "Iran on the Mediterranean".

Algerian Muslims were regularly massacred by Islamist and other unknown forces. Foreigners were declared enemies by the Islamists, targeted for execution. The government could not be trusted either.

The only non-Algerians who braved the country were hardened war reporters such as Robert Fisk, who described disguising his European face with a newspaper when travelling by car in Algiers and staying no more than four minutes in a street or a shop — the minimum time, he decided, for kidnappers to spot a European.