French invasion of Algiers
- Date
- 14 June 1830
- Category
- Exploration & colonisation
- Region
- North Africa (Algeria)
- Era
- Modern
- Significance
On 14 June 1830 a French expeditionary force of some 34,000 troops under General de Bourmont landed at Sidi Ferruch, west of Algiers, and within three weeks compelled the surrender of Hussein Dey, ruler of the Ottoman Regency of Algiers.
Ostensibly provoked by a diplomatic insult and a debt dispute, the expedition was launched by Charles X partly to bolster his faltering monarchy, which fell weeks later in the July Revolution. The capture of Algiers opened the French conquest of Algeria, a long and brutal campaign of pacification against indigenous resistance that continued into the early twentieth century. Algeria became France's largest settler colony and a template for the wider European drive into Africa. The invasion is widely treated as an early opening move of nineteenth-century imperial expansion in Africa, decades before the formalised Scramble, establishing patterns of conquest, settlement and indigenous dispossession that would recur across the continent.
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Empires active in 14 June 1830
- Russian Empire1721 CE – 1917 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Qing Dynasty1636 CE – 1912 CE
- French Colonial Empire (Second)1830 CE – 1962 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
Related exploration & colonisation events
- Russian Conquest of the Central Asian Khanates (Kokand, Bukhara, Khiva)1865–1876
- Cook's First Voyage Charts New Zealand and Eastern Australia1769-1770
- Jacob Roggeveen reaches Rapa Nui (Easter Island)5 April 1722
- Angola and Mozambique Win Independence From Portugal1975
- Abel Tasman's Voyage: First European Contact with New Zealand, Tonga and FijiDecember 1642 - February 1643
- The Pilgrims, Plymouth Colony and the Mayflower CompactNovember 1620
Further reading
The wider story
The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages
Sets Kanem-Bornu within the wider medieval African world.
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