Abstract

Algerian colonial society entered a deep crisis at the end of WWII. This crisis reflected the inability of the metropolis and its colonial apparatus in Algeria to control the native petty bourgeoisie. Colonization was unable to create the conditions of a real economic and juridical integration of this class into the French framework. Thus the more dynamic native social forces found themselves, against their wishes, confined to a secondary role. Further, standards of living were declining, especially in the countryside. Earlier policies of driving people back into the mountains, begun at the time of colonial conquest (in the 1830s), were turning slowly but surely against colonial society itself.