Play as · Cold War 1947 · L1 · Three French Departments · Post-Sétif

French Algeria - 1947

French Algeria in 1947 is a territory living in the shadow of a massacre. On the eighth of May 1945 - the very day Europe celebrated victory - nationalist marches at Sétif and Guelma were met with repression that killed thousands of Muslims and shattered whatever was left of the belief that loyalty in war would be repaid with equality in peace. Two years on, the settler order is intact and outwardly unchanged: a million Europeans still hold the citizenship, the land and the ports; the tricolour still flies over Algiers as home soil; and Paris still insists Algeria is France. But underneath, the ground has moved. The wartime promise has been broken in blood, the assimilationists have lost their argument to the separatists, and a generation is drawing the conclusion that France will never concede equality and must therefore be forced to concede independence. The strategic identity in 1947 is the fracture beginning to open - a colony that still looks stable from Paris, resting on a Muslim majority that has stopped believing in the system that governs it.

Starting position

The starting board in 1947 is a reform that satisfies no one laid over a wound that has not healed. In September the French parliament passes the Organic Statute of Algeria: on paper it declares equality, extends citizenship and creates an Algerian Assembly - but it seats that assembly in two colleges, one for roughly a million Europeans and a handful of assimilated Muslims, the other for eight million Muslims, each electing the same number of seats, and even that is hollowed out by the administration's routine rigging of the Muslim vote. The nationalist field, meanwhile, has hardened and split: Messali Hadj's MTLD presses for outright independence and draws the urban young; Ferhat Abbas, the former assimilationist, now leads a movement for an autonomous Algerian republic; the ulama hold the cultural ground; and within Messali's movement a clandestine paramilitary wing, the OS, is quietly beginning to organise the men who will later found the FLN. The pieces are a discredited reform, a rigged assembly, a settler bloc that will veto any real concession, and a nationalism that has gone underground and turned toward force.

What turns the campaign

What Paris wants in 1947 is to have it both ways - to keep Algeria constitutionally French and strategically secure while offering just enough reform to quiet the discontent, without ever crossing the line the settler lobby has drawn against genuine Muslim equality. What the colons want is the 1947 Statute neutered in practice, which is exactly what they achieve through the double college and the manipulated ballot. What the nationalists have concluded, after Sétif and after the Statute, is that reform inside the French system is a closed road. The campaign turns on that closing. Can any settlement be found that gives the Muslim majority a real stake before the separatists carry the argument entirely? Can the assimilationist middle ground of Ferhat Abbas be kept alive, or has the massacre and the rigged reform already killed it? Beyond 1947 lies the descent - the OS uncovered, Messali's movement fracturing, and in 1954 the outbreak of a war of independence that will consume France's Fourth Republic. In 1947 that war is not yet inevitable, but every hollow gesture makes it harder to avoid.

Signature challenge