How Algeria became a French colony.

So here we have the Algerian dinar, nominal – 100. The year of issue of this coin is 1993. Mint: The Central Bank of Algeria, Algiers.

Modern Algeria can be understood only by examining the period—nearly a century and a half—that the country was under French colonial rule. The customary beginning date is in April 1827, when Ḥusayn, the last Ottoman provincial ruler, or dey, of Algiers, angrily struck the French consul with a fly whisk.

This incident was a manifest sign of the day’s anger toward the French consul, a culmination of what had soured Franco-Algerian relations in the preceding years: France’s large and unpaid debt. That same year the French minister of war had written that the conquest of Algeria would be an effective and useful means of providing employment for veterans of the Napoleonic wars.

The conquest of Algeria began three years later. The government of the dey proved no match for the French army that landed on July 5, 1830, near Algiers. Ḥusayn accepted the French offer of exile after a brief military encounter.

After his departure, and in violation of agreements that had been made, the French seized private and religious buildings, looted possessions mainly in and around Algiers, and seized a vast portion of the country’s arable land. The three-century-long period of Algerian history as an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire had ended.