The centre of gravity of French colonisation lay close to the coast, with its big, Europeanised city ports of Algiers, Oran, Bougie, Philippeville and Bône, and the Mitidja — the rich, flat farmland which French ingenuity had created out of malarial swamps. Here, in country which might have been Languedoc, straight eucalyptus-shaded roads led through a prosperous and tidy succession of cereal and citrus farms, drenched with orange-blossom scent in May, and vast vineyards, owned by pieds noirs and operated by Muslim labour. The Mitidja towns — like Blida, where Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas and André Gide once vied for the charms of "Arab boys as beautiful as bronze statues" — were unmistakably French. Their main squares, surrounded by well-pollarded plane trees (as well as containing the inevitable, graceless monument aux morts) would almost invariably boast a highly ornate bandstand where, of a Sunday, the band of the local garrison would endeavour to distract the indigènes from their lack of more worldly privileges with rousing martial music. The names of the townships founded by the colons were just as uncompromisingly French; Victor-Hugo, Rabelais, Orléansville, Aumale, Marengo and Inkermann.

XREF: The reclamation of malarial swamps into farmland echoes many settler-colonial agriculture projects elsewhere, and the tension over land redistribution connects to the author's broader argument about Algeria's violent decolonisation.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 139