Daily History Challenge · No. 103 · Friday 9 October 2026 · When?
Puzzle No. 103: When?
The event was French invasion of Algiers, in 14 June 1830.
The answer
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.