The institution of the commune mixte contained many of the elements of what, by the mid-twentieth century, was most unsatisfactory about French rule in Algeria. It was, in fact, an adaptation in modern dress of Père Bugeaud's Bureaux Arabes, which had worked well enough in the early days, but it was simply not equipped to cope with either the advanced technical problems of the twentieth century or its vastly expanded Muslim populations. It is revealing that, whereas in 1922 there were 300 European administrators for the communes mixtes for three million Muslims governed by them, by 1954 the ratio had shifted to 257 for four and a half million. At Arris, for instance, the epicentre of the 1954 revolt in the Aurès, one administrator and two assistants were in charge of 60,000 dispersed over a wide and inaccessible area. The fault lay, to a large extent, with French policy which — possibly out of fear of releasing a genie from the bottle — had consistently shied away from creating an indigenous administrative corps.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on colonial administrative neglect and how under-institutionalization breeds revolt.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 93