[1] It was staffed by French Orientalists, ethnographers and intelligence officers who specialized in indigenous affairs in an effort to help administer the new colony.
The bureaux arabes had a significant influence on the formulation of French policy, driven by colonial beliefs of being part of a civilizing mission where offers saw themselves as an elite bringing modernity to Muslim Algerians and their society.
[2] Described by Ramzi Rouighi as the "public face of the military pacification of the natives", the bureaux arabes subjected Algerians to "a constant regime of both euphemised and overt violence...which endured for a century thereafter", as James McDougall writes in A History of Algeria (2017).
He was promoted to the rank of general, and was made director of Algerian affairs in the Ministry of War after April 1850.
[4] These bureaux were dismantled after the fall of the Empire in 1870 and the triumph of the aggressive settlement policies favored by the colons and their Third Republic supporters.