French conquest of Algeria

France invaded Algiers in 1830 and over the following decades gradually brought the whole territory under colonial rule. The main fighting, against the forces of Ahmed Bey of Constantine and Emir Abdelkader, lasted until 1847, but revolts continued and the Saharan south was not fully subdued until 1903. The conquest was extremely costly in lives: historians' estimates of Algerian deaths in the first three decades run from 500,000 to one million, and some scholars and governments have described it as genocidal.

Before 1830 the coast and mountains were ruled by the Regency of Algiers, nominally Ottoman but in practice self-governing under its dey; much of the interior was held by local Arab and Berber leaders. A long dispute over French debts for grain came to a head on 29 April 1827, when Hussein Dey struck the French consul Pierre Deval with his fly-whisk. Charles X of France demanded an apology and blockaded Algiers for three years. With his government unpopular at home, the king hoped a foreign victory would restore his standing, and the expedition was also presented as ending the corsair raids long launched from Algiers.

On 14 June 1830 some 34,000 French troops landed at Sidi Ferruch, west of the city. They defeated the dey's army at Staouéli on 19 June and entered Algiers on 5 July. The dey went into exile, ending roughly three centuries of Ottoman rule. French troops plundered the city, and a French commission later admitted to killings without trial. Weeks later Charles X was overthrown in the July Revolution, but the new government of Louis-Philippe kept the conquest because it was popular. Colonists and land speculators soon began acquiring land in the fertile Mitidja plain, and in 1834 France formally annexed the occupied areas as a military colony.

Resistance came from two main directions. In the east, Ahmed Bey held Constantine, repelling a French assault in 1836 before the city fell in 1837. In the west, tribes near Mascara chose the young religious scholar Abdelkader as their leader in 1832. He signed treaties with French generals in 1834 and again at the Tafna in 1837, using them to build a state in the interior, and he routed a French column at the Macta in 1835. After French troops marched through territory he claimed in 1839, he resumed the war.

General Thomas Robert Bugeaud answered with fast-moving columns and a scorched-earth policy that inflicted great suffering on the rural population. In 1843 French forces captured Abdelkader's mobile camp, the smala. He fell back into Morocco, which France pressured by war in 1844. Abdelkader surrendered in December 1847 on the promise of exile in the Middle East, but France held him until 1852 before letting him go to Damascus.

The largest later uprising was the Mokrani revolt of 1871, in which some 250 tribes, close to a third of the population, rose before French troops crushed it; many rebels were deported to New Caledonia. By then European settlers numbered about 130,000 and held most of the arable land. In the south France expanded through alliances with some tribes and military expeditions, defeating the Kel Ahaggar Tuareg in 1902 and completing the conquest in 1903.

War, famine and disease killed vast numbers of Algerians. French military losses were also heavy, mostly from disease rather than combat; one conservative estimate puts deaths on both sides from all causes at about 480,000. The legacy of conquest and settlement shaped Algerian nationalism and the Algerian War that eventually ended French rule.

Our 1815 map shows the Regency of Algiers before the invasion; our 1880 and 1900 maps show French Algeria expanding southward into the Sahara.