Algeria and the ‘Official Mind’: the Impact of North Africa on French Colonial Policy South of the Sahara, 1944–58

Abstract

What were the implications of Algeria’s special and distinctive status for colonial policy-makers in the postwar period leading up to decolonization? It is a commonplace of French imperial history that Algeria was a case apart, bigger, more important and more problematic than any other French dependency, even before the FLN’s declaration of war in November 1954. Its constitutional status as an assimilated extension of metropolitan France lent superficial plausibility to the French political class’s frequent affirmation that ‘l’Algérie, c’est la France’; its powerful and vocal settler community ensured that this sentiment remained an article of faith; and the distinctiveness of Algerian administration was maintained by an informal system of ‘sealed partitions’ (cloisons étanches), which prevented interference from those administrative services responsible for other parts of the French empire.1