Play as · WW2 1939 · L1 · Legally Part of France

French Algeria - September 1, 1939

French Algeria in 1939 is the colony that insists it is not one. Since 1848 the northern territory has been administered as three departments of metropolitan France - Alger, Oran and Constantine - sending deputies to Paris and flying the tricolour as home soil rather than possession. On that legal fiction rests a settler society: roughly a million Europeans, the colons or pieds-noirs, who own the best land, run the ports and vineyards, hold the citizenship and the votes, and regard Algeria as theirs. Beneath them live some six million Muslims who are French subjects but not, in any full sense, French citizens - governed under the Code de l'indigénat, taxed and conscripted, largely without the franchise, worked as labour on European estates and in the cities. The economy is a settler-export economy: wine above all, then wheat, citrus, iron ore and phosphates, shipped north to France. The strategic identity is the settler colony that calls itself France - a territory constitutionally fused to the metropole and socially split down the middle, on the eve of a war that will lean hard on both halves.

Starting position

The starting board is a European settler order sitting on a Muslim majority, and a manpower reserve the French army is about to draw on. Power is held by the colons and the administration in Algiers; the settler deputies in Paris guard their privileges fiercely; the Muslim population is managed through the indigénat, local caïds and a franchise so restricted it is nominal. Politically, Muslim opinion is beginning to organise - Messali Hadj's Étoile Nord-Africaine and its successors preach outright independence, Ferhat Abbas argues for assimilation and equal citizenship, the ulama press for cultural and religious rights - but in 1939 these currents are contained, banned or co-opted, and the settler bloc concedes nothing. Militarily, Algeria is a French base and a reservoir: the tirailleurs algériens and spahis are among France's best colonial troops, and mobilisation for the European war is already drawing Algerian men north. The pieces are a privileged settler minority, a disenfranchised majority, a wine-and-wheat export economy, and an army reaching into the colony for soldiers even as it denies them the citizenship the uniform seems to promise.

What turns the campaign

What Paris and the colons want in 1939 is for nothing to change: Algeria kept as an integral part of France, the settler order preserved, the Muslim majority quiet and productive, and the territory serving as a secure southern base and a source of men and materiel for the war in Europe. What the position actually contains is the contradiction that will define the next quarter-century - a colony legally declared to be France while denying most of its people the rights that word is supposed to carry. The campaign turns on that gap under wartime strain. Algerian troops will fight and die for France; Algerian labour and produce will feed the war effort; and the promise implicit in that service - that loyalty will be answered with equality - will collide with a settler bloc determined to give nothing away. Beyond 1939 lie the fall of France, the Anglo-American landings at Algiers in 1942, and, at the war's very end, the massacre at Sétif that will open the wound in earnest. But in this year the settler order still holds, the tricolour still flies unquestioned over Algiers, and the fracture is only a pressure, not yet a rupture.

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