Robert Randau (1873-1950) was a French Algerian novelist and author of Les Colons (1907) and Les Algérianistes (1911), works in which he depicted European Algerian settlers in a positive light compared with the decadence of Metropolitan France.
In Colonial Algeria he was considered the standard that embodied a school of uniquely North African literature.
He wrote twenty fiction novels and published other political essays during his forty year career, many of which were spent in the Haute Volta.
The novel is considered the first literary work that explores algérianisme, the new race conceived to lay claim to Algerian independence and autonomy.
The settlers embraced their European descent and the idea of Muslim inferiority but saw themselves as a new race and culture unique to colonial Algeria.