French Algeria (1830–1962)
Settler colonialism plus the fiction of “integration”
France conquered Algeria from 1830, encouraged European (“pied-noir”) settlement, and administered northern Algeria as French départements while denying most Muslim Algerians equal citizenship. The 1954–1962 war of independence — theorized by Frantz Fanon — ended 132 years of colonial rule.
What happened
Frantz Fanon, a Martinique-born psychiatrist who worked in Algeria and joined the FLN, wrote the definitive anticolonial analysis of the Algerian war, framing colonialism as an inherently violent system.
colonialism is not a thinking machine… It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence. (Fanon, 1961)
Under each definition
Conquest and administrative rule over a foreign territory.
Large-scale European settlement on expropriated land with a subordinated indigenous majority.
Post-1962 French influence (currency, energy, “Françafrique”) is often called neo-colonial, but that is after formal independence.
A standard exemplar of colonialism.
The case that the label applies
France ruled Algeria by conquest, settled Europeans on Algerian land, and denied political equality to the indigenous majority — settler colonialism, described from inside the anticolonial struggle.
The case against
France insisted Algeria was legally part of France (“l’Algérie, c’est la France”), not a colony — but this “integration” excluded most Algerians from equal citizenship, and is generally read as a rhetorical denial of colonial reality rather than a refutation of it.
In their words
It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.
The verdicts above are how each definition would most likely classify this situation — illustrative guidance, not court rulings. Colonialism has no treaty crime, so no application is a legal “finding”; every characterization is attributed to the person or body that made it. The lenses diverge most on two questions — whether there is a “metropole” and who counts as “indigenous” — and on the difference between a historical judgment and a moral analogy. See the Definition tab for each definition’s full text. Inclusion is documentation, not a finding.