Using newly-discovered documentation from the French military archives, A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony offers a comprehensive study of the forms of violence adopted by the French Army in Africa. Its coverage ranges from detailed case studies of massacres to the question of whether a genocide took place in Algeria. It begins by asking whether French brutality in Algeria was a consequence of Europeans mirroring a culture of atrocities they believed they would find on 'the Barbary Coast', and goes on to study the manner in which an exterminatory policy was agreed upon by Ministers, generals and soldiers in the campaigns of the 1840s.