The Code de l'Indigenat, enacted in 1881, created a separate legal system for indigenous Algerians. It listed 41 infractions that applied exclusively to Muslims, not to European settlers. Algerians could be imprisoned without trial for offences including leaving their commune without permission, holding unauthorised gatherings, and disrespecting a French official.

The code remained in force until 1944. That is 63 years of a two-tier legal system in a country France called part of its own republic.

Historian Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison documented it as a form of legal apartheid in his 2005 work "Coloniser, Exterminer," published by Fayard.

The Warnier Law of 1873 was designed specifically to dissolve communally held Algerian land and make it available for purchase by European settlers. The Senatus-Consulte of 1863 had already begun the process. The Warnier Law accelerated it.

By independence in 1962, approximately 7.7 million hectares of Algerian agricultural land had been transferred to European settlers who represented roughly 10 percent of the population.

When France colonised Algeria in 1830, Arabic was immediately reduced to foreign language status in formal administration and education. The governor-general of Algeria in 1832 to 1833 stated explicitly that the purpose of colonial schools was "to gradually replace Arabic by French."

Five generations of Algerians were educated in a system designed, in the words of colonial administrators, to produce people who were "French in language and in habits." The literacy rate at independence was approximately 10 to 15 percent.

The hubus were Islamic religious endowments that funded mosques, schools and teachers across Algeria for generations before the French conquest. When France colonised Algeria in 1830, it seized the hubus lands as part of the broader appropriation of religious and communal property.

Historian Maurice Wahl documented in 1897: "Far from creating schools, we initially destroyed most mecids, zaouias and medersas that existed before we came to Algeria."

Colonial administrators promoted colloquial dialects over literary Arabic, which had historically been the language of education, religion and scholarship across North Africa.

The aim was to sever the connection between Algerian Muslims and the broader Arabic-speaking intellectual tradition. Literary Arabic was what students would have used to study law, theology and history. Colloquial Arabic could not carry that weight. That was the point.