ABSTRACT
The Ketchaoua Mosque officially reopened on the anniversary of the outbreak of the Algerian Revolution. This chapter looks at the French colony of Algeria in the opening decades of the modern colonial era, in the period between 1830, the year of France’s conquest of Algiers, to 1870, just before the consolidation and mass colonization of Algeria under the government of the Third Republic. If mechanisms of assimilation entailed the destruction of Algerian cultural institutions, at an urban scale they involved the demolition, conversion, and re-signification of buildings, landscapes, and monuments. Arguably the spate of religious buildings erected in Algiers in the mid-nineteenth century complicates the view that the introduction of arabizing elements into French colonial architecture served as conciliatory gestures. The architects of the cathedral reconfigured the prevailing narratives that saw the Romanesque and the Gothic as emerging from Islamic building traditions in such a way as to make the Romanesque appear as the progenitor of Islamic architecture.
