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The Fly-Whisk War. In 1827, angered by an intricate financial deal in which he felt he was being cheated by the French government, Khoja Hussein, the last Dey of Algiers, called in French Consul Pierre Deval, charged him with being a "wicked, faithless, idol-worshiping unworthy," and struck him three times with a peacock-feather fly whisk. After brooding over this outrage for three years, France finally saw it as an opportunity, sent General Louis de Bourmont and 37,000 men sailing south from Toulon. Within three weeks of their landing, De Bourmont's troops paraded in triumph through Algiers to the strains of Wilhelm Tell.
But the Berber tribes of the interior were no readier to accept French authority than that of the Dey. Rallying behind AbdelKader, the handsome, 25-year-old son of a holy man, they launched a jihad (holy war) to expel the infidel. French General Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, a veteran of Napoleon's Spanish campaign, where the word guerrilla was invented, responded with a tactic called the razzia —a swift, merciless strike at a native village, sparing nothing and nobody. In one razzia, in 1845, nearly 500 Algerian men, women and children were asphyxiated by fires lit at the mouth of a cave in which they had taken refuge. After 15 years of this kind of warfare, Abdel Kader finally surrendered, and in 1848 Algeria became legally part of France.
The Dispossessed. In one respect Algeria did, in fact, become part of France. When France lost Alsace-Lorraine to Germany in 1871, tens of thousands of Alsatians who were unwilling to become German citizens settled in Algeria. They were followed over the years by a steady trickle of impoverished French and Corsican peasants and by the dispossessed of Spain, Italy and Malta. Today, one Algerian in ten—some 1,060,000 people—is of European ancestry, though perhaps only a third of those who call themselves French are, in fact, of French descent.
Unlike the British in India, the Frenchmen of Algeria are far more than just a governing caste. Though they are often all loosely called colons, only 22,000 of them are landowners, and of these only a few score are genuinely wealthy. The rest of Algeria's Europeans are policemen, office workers, garage proprietors, locomotive drivers, skilled laborers and tradesmen who call themselves French but call Algeria home. To their talent and initiative, the land owes such economic strength as it possesses.