"France took its turn, after so many other famous peoples, to impose its laws on North Africa; to her fell the difficult and dangerous mission of reviving and expanding in this land the civilization which Rome in former times had there deposited. … Islamism, in its deplorable state of decline, was unable to regenerate anything. So a new, strong people was needed, governed by generous notions and the great principle of humanitarianism, to bring Africa out of the mindless state into which it had been plunged by twenty centuries of oppression, war, struggles and invasion…." (Algeria 1830: Legacy of an Occupation) (thanks Mark)