Over the next century, the French community in Algeria grew to seven hundred thousand French citizens. They came to own most of the land and considered themselves native Algerians, since they were born on Algerian soil and most were the children of parents born there. Inconveniently, some 5 million Arabs happened to be living there as well and no one could fathom where they had come from or what they were doing there. They didn’t seem to have any function, and whatever they subsisted on, it was an almost completely separate economy from the one the French Algerians were involved in.
