Thirty-four thousand French soldiers, using Napoleon's 1808 contingency plan for the invasion of Algeria, land twenty-seven kilometers west of Algiers, at Sidi Ferruch, on June 12, 1830.

To face the rench, the dey sends seven thousand janissaries, nineteen thousand troops from the beys of Constantine and Oran, and about seventeen thousand Kabyles.

The French establish a strong beachhead and pushed toward Algiers, thanks in part to superior artillery and better organization.

Algiers is captured after a three-week campaign, and Hussein Dey flees into exile.

French troops rape, loot (taking fifty million francs from the treasury in the Casbah), desecrate mosques, and destroy cemeteries.

It is an inauspicious beginning to France's self-described "civilizing mission," whose character on the whole is cynical, arrogant, and cruel.