Build a statue and they will follow: Jennifer Sessions, ‘The Anxious Origins of a French Colonial Monument: The Duc d’Orléans in Algiers’, The Journal of the Western Society for French History’ 51, 8, 2025, pp. 72-79 | settler colonial studies blog

Build a statue and they will follow: Jennifer Sessions, ‘The Anxious Origins of a French Colonial Monument: The Duc d’Orléans in Algiers’, The Journal of the Western Society for French History’ 51, 8, 2025, pp. 72-79

10Dec25

Excerpt: The “civilian Population” addressed by the fundraisers, meaning the European settler population, was in an even shakier position as these threats intensified. The number of European colonists in Algeria had grown from a few thousand in the early 1830s to 44,500 by the end of 1842. But they continued to fall short of colonization advocates’ visions of a settler colony like British North America or Australia, where French families would replace the indigenous inhabitants and transform the territory into an extension of the mother country. Europeans remained vastly outnumbered by the Algerian majority, estimated at some three to four million in this period, and their demographic profile failed to meet colonialist ideals. Over half of the Europeans living in Algeria in 1842 were Spanish, Italian, or Maltese, rather than French. There were twice as many men as women. And most were not living on rural farms, but in towns and cities. Efforts to recruit French farming families to settle on confiscated Algerian land in 1841 largely attracted poor urban workers not the “families of small landowners, with excellent morality, including able-bodied, working-age children, able to bring at least 1,500 to 2,000 francs to the colony” administrators had hoped for. These disappointing results added fuel to bitter debates raging among political economists and policymakers about how to colonize Algeria and whether it was worth the financial and administrative costs to do so at all. Europeans already in the colony in the early 1840s lived in fear of losing the military protections and the investments in colonial development on which their physical and economic survival depended. Finally, to understand why the men of the monument commission wished to erect a statue of King Louis-Philippe’s eldest son in Algiers, we must understand the situation of the French monarchy in the 1840s.

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