Constantine Plan
The long-term impact and progress made by the Constantine Plan ran through many spheres of Algerian society including education, public service and administration, housing, and land distribution in French Algeria.
By taking into consideration colonies or countries whose size and developmental levels were similar to Algeria's, the report provided a quantitative and statistical basis for development.
On October 3, 1958, French president Charles de Gaulle appeared before the people of Algeria, in the city of Constantine, and unveiled plans for a new development project to be financed by Metropolitan France.
He made bold promises for sweeping changes meant to improve every factor of Algeria's social, cultural, and economic system.
[4] Primary and middle school education focused on teaching reading and writing in Arabic as well as memorization of Qur’anic verses.
[4] Moreover, the roles of colonial officials were expanded, the instruction of French was added to all curriculums, and more focus was placed on non-religious programs such as arithmetic, history, and geography.
[4] Constructing enough schools and training enough teachers to cope with approximately two million 5 to 15 year old Algerians was a colossal task and financial burden for French administrators.
A result of France's steadily growing influence on the Algerian education system was the gradual replacement of various institutional leaders.
[4] Approved representatives at all levels of administration— from school officials to Muslim preachers — were installed to influence Algerian culture from the ground up.
[5] This policy was applied to such an extent that an Algerian minister commented prior to the implementation of the Constantine Plan, that of the 864 administrative high posts, 8 were Muslim held.
[5] The Constantine Plan was an ambitious project that aimed to increase wages, housing, and public infrastructure across colonial French Algeria.
[6] The plan focused on modernizing Algeria in order to mitigate the socio-economic discrepancy that had existed both statistically and in the eyes of the colonial French government between the Algerian people and Europeans.
The First was Pierre Massé, a top French government official who served as both the Commissioner General regarding equipment and modernization and the council chair.
[8] Estimations state that 80,000 new jobs had to be created every year in order to keep up with the exponential growth of Muslim workers entering the Algerian economy.
[6] The plan ultimately failed to address chronic land shortage, a pressing problem of economic survival in the Algerian countryside given that 6.5-million Algerians at the time still depended on an agricultural sector in which about 22,000 settler-owned farms produced a volume of saleable produce equivalent to that of approximately 600,000 Algerian-owned smallholdings.
The launching of the Constantine Plan is viewed by scholars as largely an attempt to further integrate Algeria into France's sphere of influence, particularly in an economic sense.
