Without schools you cannot have industrialisation and, for all French endeavours to this end, agriculture remained the mainstay of Algerian life. But, successful as French technology had been at opening up new lands by drainage or irrigation, it continued to provide a precarious living of ever-diminishing returns. As the European slice of the cake grew, so, relatively speaking, the Muslim slice shrank. Since 1830 the area of cultivable land owned by Muslims had almost doubled; but the population trebled. In 1956 Germaine Tillion reckoned that the country could feed no more than "between two and three million"; and there were then almost nine million Muslims alone. By 1954 some twenty-five per cent of all the farming land was reputedly owned by only two per cent of the total agricultural population.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 183