French settlers never exceeded thirteen percent of Algeria’s population

Evidence

By contrast, the French settlement in Algeria was a more recent phenomenon. In the late 1830s, the French state officially started to settle French citizens in the colony, and in 1848 Algeria became an integral part of French national territory. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, more than a half of the colonists came from other European countries like Spain and Italy, and from Mediterranean islands such as Malta and the Balearic Islands. In order to win this demographic ‘battle’ with Spain and Italy, France naturalized the Algerian Jews (1870) and the Europeans born in Algeria (1889). Nevertheless, since Muslims could only gain full citizenship if they abandoned their right to be judged under local civil law or by local law courts, which was considered ‘apostasy’ by the majority of the population, the ‘French’ always remained a minority in ‘French Algeria’, never comprising more than roughly thirteen percent of the population and remaining concentrated in the coastal towns. Though French rule in Algeria was based on racial discrimination, expropriation, and violence, the colonial state never aimed at the systematic enslavement, expulsion, or extermination of the colonized population. In this sense, the wartime Nazi empire was, indeed, a very different type of empire, not interested in managing cultural or ethnic difference but in destroying it. — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 50

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Most Algerian colons were not ethnically French at all. — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 88; Demographic arithmetic made Algerian integration untenable for France by 1958; Pieds noirs never honestly wanted Algérie française but a protected white-ruled Algeria

Broader Connections

• Most Algerian colons were not ethnically French at all. #expands (0.85) — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 88
• Demographic arithmetic made Algerian integration untenable for France by 1958 #corroborates (0.82)
• Pieds noirs never honestly wanted Algérie française but a protected white-ruled Algeria #expands (0.80)