France invaded in June 1830 and took Algiers by 5 July; EBSCO's account records that the victorious troops pillaged the city and desecrated mosques and cemeteries, and that Marshal Clauzel then began the wholesale seizure of Algerian land and property, establishing settler colonisation. Resistance under Abd al-Qadir controlled two-thirds of the country by 1840 and was broken only by Marshal Bugeaud's campaigns of razzias - punitive raids that destroyed villages, crops, orchards and herds - culminating in his surrender in 1847; the Kabyle insurrection of 1871 was the last general rising. Legal instruments completed what the army began: cantonnement, the senatus-consulte of 1863 and the Warnier law of 1873 converted collective tribal land into alienable individual title, transferring the best land to European settlers. The Algerian population fell substantially between 1830 and the early 1870s, with the famine and typhus of 1867-68 the sharpest single episode.
France conquered Algeria, expropriated tribal and religious land for settler colonisation and confined the rural population to reduced holdings
No Ottoman-era count survives. French military and administrative estimates from the 1830s and 1840s, and the demographic reconstructions of Kamel Kateb and Djilali Sari working back from the first reliable colonial censuses of the 1870s and 1880s, give figures between about 2 and 5 million; 3 million is the most commonly cited middle value. The scale of the population loss during the conquest — from war, famine and the typhus epidemics of 1867-68 — is contested for the same reason.
The range covers excess mortality among the Algerian population between 1830 and about 1875, and every figure in it is a demographic reconstruction from French colonial census series whose early estimates of the pre-conquest population are themselves contested. Deaths came from the campaigns and razzias, including notorious episodes such as the suffocation of the Ouled Riah in the caves of the Dahra in 1845, from the destruction of crops and herds, and above all from the famine and typhus epidemic of 1867-68, whose severity is itself linked by some historians to dispossession and by others to drought and locusts. No contemporary authority counted the dead.
EBSCO and Britannica document the pillage and desecration of mosques and cemeteries in Algiers in 1830, Bugeaud's razzia doctrine of destroying villages, crops and herds, and the confiscation of religious endowment land; these are recorded in French military correspondence and colonial legislation.
Algeria, Tunisia