Algeria: A Settler Colony and the Sétif Massacre

Algeria differed from France's other colonies. Conquered from 1830, it was organized as départements, legally part of France, and by 1954 it was home to about a million European settlers, known as pieds-noirs, many of whose families had lived there for generations. Most of the roughly nine million Muslim Algerians had far fewer political rights, and reforms to extend them, such as the Blum–Viollette proposal of 1936, were blocked by settler opposition.

On 8 May 1945, as Europe celebrated victory over Nazi Germany, a march in Sétif carrying Algerian nationalist flags turned violent after police fired. Rioting killed about a hundred Europeans, and French forces and settler militias responded with massive repression in Sétif, Guelma and surrounding areas. Estimates of Algerian deaths range from about 1,000 to tens of thousands. For many Algerian nationalists, Sétif showed that peaceful reform was impossible, and it is often seen as the start of the road to war.