The War in Algeria: The Mentality of the “Colons”

What is the privileged French minority defending in Algeria? A past of ease and comfort that certain of them already regard with remorse. Some try to deny what is happening and desperately reject this image of an Algerian people suddenly transformed into a rebellious mass that only yesterday was silent and wrap themselves in a blindness that is to serve their interests to the bitter end. But among these colonists there are a few who question themselves.

IN A COUNTRY where 70 percent of the population lives from agriculture, where the essential problem is that of land, where the colonial regime has concentrated over 5 million acres in the hands of 6,000 big landowners, nothing can keep the colonist from becoming the symbol of a state of repression of which, he was until now the chief beneficiary. Certain of them now say they are its victims, and if the best of them recognize the evils that follow from the economic and social structure to which until now they had accommodated t...