The French conquest and colonization of Algeria began in 1830. By the mid-1830s there were already several French schools, and Pierre Genty de Bussy, the most important government representative in Algiers in those early years, could write: ‘Appelée au beau rôle de coloniser une des régences barbaresques, la France a pris pour auxiliaire de sa marche le plus puissant moyen de civilisation, l’instruction’ (‘Called to the fine work of colonizing one of the Barbary kingdoms, France has taken as an aid in her duties the most powerful means of civilization: education’). If, from a ‘postcolonial’ perspective, that statement appears archaic, it is for more than one reason. Few people today can think of the project of colonization as a beau rôle, or a ‘noble mission’ (another of Genty de Bussy's phrases); the idea of ‘civilization’ now arouses a great deal of suspicion; and the cheerful alliance of colonialism and education in Genty de Bussy's rhetoric, which we have come to understand as characteristic of the mission civilisatrice, is alien to most modern teachers’ conception of their work. (As noted in the Introduction, who ‘we’ are in all this is one of the questions I am hoping my material will raise.)

The fact that colonial Algeria's pre-eminent lycée came to be called the Lycée Bugeaud is evocative of all that now appears most reprehensible about colonial educational history.