The French occupation reduced the number of Algerians to justify the settlement of the colonists

A recent study revealed how the French manipulated the numbers of the Algerian people in the first years of the French occupation of Algeria, and the goal behind this was to show that the sprawling Algeria had a very low population density so that the colonizer could bring a new population group and settle them in Algeria, of different origins and religions, and they were mostly French and from neighboring European countries, the Spanish, Italians, Germans and others.
A new book entitled “The First Algerian War. History of the invasion and resistance 1830 and 1852”, written by the French historian, Alain Rousseau, and published by “La Decouvert”, stated that “the colonizers wanted to reduce the population to a minimum, in order to present Algeria as having a low population density, and it is a semi-virgin land, aiming to welcome a large number of new European arrivals.”
Here we can draw on the figures related to the population of Algeria that were marketed in the years following the occupation, specifically in the period between 1830 and 1852, by the French colonizer, which they estimated in 1830, from 780 to 800 thousand people, to 3 or 4 million people, which is a large difference between the two figures, which shows the existence of a premeditated intention to achieve certain goals. A documented study of the number of Algerians was not conducted, according to the same source, until the end of the century, by Dr. René Ricoux (1843-1933), head of the demographic and medical statistics of the Algerian General Government (appointed by the occupation authorities), who estimated that there were about 3 million Algerians in 1830, while André Noche estimated the population of Algeria at about 2.5 million, and 3 million according to Xavier Yacono, but the author prefers the figure given by the historian Kamel Kateb, which is estimated at about four million, because this study described it as “the most recent, the most documented and the most convincing”. These figures were determined by historians, while the French occupation army, the author says, “tended to overestimate the number of Algerians, which undoubtedly justifies the continuous calls for new reinforcements – and thus new credits – and the difficulty they faced in overcoming these reinforcements”. General Bugeaud himself explained to the deputies that there were “four million Arabs, all warriors, all skilled knights”, from children to “old men of 93 years old”, in a single exaggeration that no observer could miss.
Although hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of Algerians were martyred in their response to the brutal French aggression, the author quotes the historian Kamel Kateb as another figure for those who lost their lives as a result of the war, despite the fact that they were non-combatants, which means that they were liquidated outside the norms, and this figure is estimated at about 75 thousand, who died either during the repression operations, or due to disease or famine, a ratio that the historian described as rare in conflicts throughout time: one death in combat for every ten deaths resulting from side effects.
In some detail, Alain Rousseau cites the figures of Algerian martyrs who did not participate in the fighting, and gives a figure of 825,000 deaths in the period from 1830 to 1872, a period that he said was a violent war between the resistance and the French occupier, who was destroying everything in its path to controlling the land. Alain Rousseau considers what happened in that period to be one of the largest demographic losses in classical wars, in a confrontation between two armies in modern history, considering the number of dead (martyrs), who represented between 10 and 12.5 percent of the population based on a figure of four million people. The rates have always been much lower in other wars, including what Rousseau called the “Napoleonic epic”, which cost France between 900,000 and one million men, or between 3 and 3.5 percent of its population.