[lateoctober]

"By 1875, the French conquest was complete. The war had killed approximately 825,000 indigenous Algerians since 1830. A long shadow of genocidal hatred persisted, provoking a French author to protest in 1882 that in Algeria, 'we hear it repeated every day that we must expel the native and, if necessary, destroy him.' As a French statistical journal urged five years late, 'the system of extermination must give way to a policy of penetration.'"

- Ben Kiernan, "Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur" (2007)

This is just one short pithy quote; having done archival research concentrating on this period, I can personally testify that the amount of dry, bureaucratic references to "extermination" by French colonial administrators and professionals is nauseatingly large. If the colonizers saw what they were doing as the whole-scale extermination of a people (and those murderous ideologies coincided with the actual extermination of living human beings by the thousands), you're going to have a really tough time convincing me or anyone else that what occurred was not genocidal violence.