Before one dissects the deficiencies, however, one needs briefly to pay tribute to the truly remarkable material achievements that France had wrought in Algeria during the course of her tenancy of a century and a quarter. Even a decade after the ending of France’s rule, a visitor to Algeria could not help but be impressed by the depth of the roots her civilisation left behind; an excellent network of roads often as good in quality as those of France, and over terrain as difficult as anywhere in the world; modern railways and airfields; great cities and a score of ports; electricity and gas and a (slightly less efficient) telecommunications system. She created a medical service and imposed standards of hygiene where none had existed. In agriculture, she increased the 2,000 cultivable square miles of 1830 to 27,000 in 1954; with her capital and know-how, she dug mines and set up vast industries that would not otherwise have existed; she provided jobs in France for several hundred thousand Algerian immigrant workers, and subsidised some eighty per cent of the country’s budget deficit.

XREF: Connects to broader discourse on colonial legacies and whether colonization's material benefits offset its human costs.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 176