Charles abdicated that same year, but the conquest of Algeria
continued under his successor, the Orleanist Louis-Philippe.
At the time of the French incursion into Algiers, the pi-
rates of the Barbary Coast were still routinely raiding helpless
merchant ships. A host of Christian states paid the pirates
yearly tribute money. The Algerian countryside was full of
rebels. The French made slow progress battling these dan-
gers; their control of the country was at first limited to a few
small regions along the coast. Nomadic tribes of Berbers, fierce
and proud, inhabited much of Algeria, along with Muslim
Arabs. The Berbers were nominally Muslim, but far less pious
than the Arabs, who often disdained them for their lack of
devotion.
In the 1840 s, a ruthless war under Louis-Philippe suc-
ceeded in subjugating Algeria to France. Louis-Philippe was
exiled by the Revolution of 1848 ; his successor, Louis Napoleon
(President of the Second Republic in 1848 , and soon to be em-
peror) declared Algeria part of metropolitan France. The 1840 s
were a presage of the barbarism that overtook the country
during the Algerian revolt of the mid-twentieth century, a
conflict marked by terrible violence on both sides.
A flood of European settlers arrived with the French.
Most of them were from the Mediterranean countries: Italy,
Spain, Malta, Portugal. The colonists came to call themselves
pieds-noirs(blackfeet), a name suggesting their impoverished,
hardscrabble existence.Pied-noiroriginated around 1900 as a
nickname for the native Algerian stokers on coal ships, who
worked barefoot. The European immigrants to Algeria took
over the name for themselves, just as they took over the coun-
try. Stubborn and proud, the pieds-noirs defined much of the
character of colonial Algeria. By 1917 there were about 800 , 000
pieds-noirs; only one in five had direct French ancestry (De
14 From Algeria to the École Normale