A desert called peace

The book says, “In the mid-nineteenth century, the leaders of French colonialism in Algeria set out south into the Sahara, beginning a period of violence that lasted fifty years. Under the colonization of northern Algeria, which claimed more than a million lives, the French empire in the Sahara sought power through Physical force as it did elsewhere; but the violence in the Algerian desert followed a more complex logic than the old argument that it was simply a way to get empire on the cheap.