Politically, however, Lacoste's most striking innovation was to decree that fifty per cent of all vacancies in public service should be reserved for Muslims. Ten years previously it would have been hailed by them as a generous and progressive move; but now it seemed tardy, introduced only under F.L.N. pressure, and a hasty improvisation that rather floated in mid-air in that it remained unsupported by what would have appeared as the essential concomitant of equal citizenship rights.

XREF: Connects to broader colonial-late-reform dynamics and how nationalist movements reject incremental concessions once independence becomes the aim.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 477