Algeria, ...... French rule ....... and The Mokrani Revolt of 1871 ...... one to listen to

 Now this is one I enjoyed listening to.

The Battle of Somah, 1839

It was part of the In Our Time series on Radio 4.*

"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the revolt that broke out in 1871 in Algeria against French rule, spreading over hundreds of miles and countless towns and villages before being brutally suppressed. 

It began with the powerful Cheikh Mokrani and his family and was taken up by hundreds of thousands, becoming the last major revolt there before Algeria’s war of independence in 1954. 

In the wake of its swift suppression though came further waves of French migrants to settle on newly confiscated lands, themselves displaced by French defeat in Europe and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, and their arrival only increased tensions. 

The Mokrani Revolt came to be seen as a watershed between earlier Ottoman rule and full national identity, an inspiration to nationalists in the 1950s.

With, Natalya Benkhaled-Vince, Associate Professor of the History of Modern France and the Francophone World, Fellow of University College, University of Oxford, Hannah-Louise Clark, Senior Lecturer in Global Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow, and, Jim House, Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone History at the University of Leeds

Producer: Simon Tillotson."

Picture; The Battle of Somah, Horace Vernet, 1839, Musée Rolin d'Autun, hotographer, Own work Moustachioed Womanizer

*The Mokrani Revolt, In Our Time, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001wymz