Messali Hadj and supporters form the Parti du peuple algérien

French colonial authorities marked one hundred years since the 1830 landing with ceremonies at Sidi Ferruch. The celebration presented conquest as a national achievement and colonial permanence as a...

Algerian scholars founded the Association of Algerian Muslim Ulama, which built schools, promoted Arabic-language learning, and defended Islamic and Algerian cultural life under colonial pressure. Its...

The French cabinet considered the Blum–Viollette proposal, which would have extended citizenship rights to a limited number of Algerian Muslims while preserving French sovereignty and settler...

The proposed law was formally deposited in the French Chamber of Deputies. It would have granted French citizenship, without loss of Muslim personal status, to a limited category of Algerian...

The French government dissolved the ENA, an anticolonial organisation that had mobilised North African workers and called attention to colonial inequality. The move constrained political association...

Algerians joined demonstrations marking the Allied victory over Nazi Germany while asserting demands for freedom and national rights. In Sétif, police gunfire and the killing of demonstrators were...

The French Constituent Assembly voted an amnesty law concerning prosecutions connected with the May 1945 events. Amnesty followed executions, mass arrests, and an uneven process of judicial...

The organic statute presented Algeria as having a degree of internal autonomy, but retained French sovereignty and a two-college electoral system that gave European settlers representation...

Nationalist activists formed the Comité révolutionnaire d’unité et d’action (CRUA) to overcome divisions and prepare an organised struggle for sovereignty. The committee drew on veterans of the MTLD...

A meeting of nationalist organisers resolved to transform the CRUA into the Front de libération nationale (FLN) and to begin an armed uprising on 1 November. The decision followed years of political...