Shakespeare NOT Molière… in Algeria! Afrique says NO not NON

Somewhere in Algeria this autumn, an eight-year-old child will walk into a classroom and encounter English before French. From the 2026–27 school year, third-year primary pupils will study English as their first foreign language, while French, which for generations occupied an almost automatic position in Algerian education, will follow later. On the surface this is a curriculum adjustment, the sort of decision normally interesting chiefly to education ministries, teachers and irritated parents wondering why another textbook has to be bought. Yet in Algeria the order in which a child learns French and English carries an extraordinary historical weight. French did not arrive in Algeria because Algerians collectively decided it would improve their employment prospects; it arrived with an invading army in 1830 and subsequently became the language of a colonial state that lasted for 132 years. English, by contrast, is being invited in by an independent Algerian government because it believes the language offers its children greater access to science, technology, higher education and the international economy. The comparison is therefore much more interesting than the irresistible shorthand of Shakespeare replacing Molière suggests. Algeria may be illustrating a profound change in the way international languages acquire their power: a transition from language as imperial inheritance to language as economic infrastructure.

To understand why this matters so much in Algeria, it is necessary to appreciate how unusually intimate French colonialism there was. France invaded in 1830, but Algeria did not subsequently develop simply as another overseas possession administered from Paris. Parts of the territory were formally incorporated into France in 1848, and Algiers, Oran and Constantine eventually became the centres of French departments. A substantial European settler population developed, composed not only of metropolitan French migrants but also of people with Spanish, Italian and Maltese origins who gradually came to be known collectively as pieds-noirs. By the middle of the twentieth century there were close to a million Europeans living among roughly eight or nine million Muslim Algerians. Many pieds-noirs were themselves several generations removed from migration and regarded Algeria rather than metropolitan France as home, which helps explain the bitterness with which many subsequently experienced independence. Yet their rootedness should not obscure the fundamental inequality of the colonial system. European settlers dominated political and economic institutions, while Muslim Algerians were subjected for much of the colonial period to a radically different legal and political status and remained disproportionately poor, rural and excluded from educational opportunity.

Language was woven into this hierarchy. French was the language of the colonial administration, much of formal education, professional advancement and the political authority that had conquered the country. Existing Arabic educational structures were weakened, while the supposedly civilising French state conspicuously failed to provide universal French education to the colonised population. By independence, estimates of Muslim Algerian illiteracy were extraordinarily high. This is one of the awkward realities behind romantic accounts of the French mission civilisatrice: after more than a century of French rule, Algeria did not emerge as a universally educated Francophone society but as a deeply unequal country in which access to the coloniser’s language had itself constituted a form of social capital. French was simultaneously the language of domination and one of the principal routes by which an Algerian might escape some of the consequences of that domination.

The contradiction became more violent after 1954. The Algerian War is essential to understanding why contemporary language policy cannot be treated as a culturally neutral choice between two European languages. The FLN’s uprising on 1 November 1954 developed into a conflict combining national liberation, guerrilla warfare, terrorism, counter-insurgency and civil war. FLN attacks killed civilians; French forces employed mass repression and torture; Algerians fought other Algerians; the pro-French Organisation armée secrète attempted through terrorism to prevent independence; and harkis who had served alongside French forces were exposed to horrific reprisals when France withdrew. Even casualty figures remain politically contested because the war survives not merely as history but as competing national memory. The conflict also destabilised France itself, contributing to the collapse of the Fourth Republic and Charles de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958. By the time the Évian Accords brought the conflict towards its conclusion in 1962, the relationship between Algeria and France had accumulated a historical burden that no subsequent diplomatic reconciliation could simply remove.

Independence then produced one of the great population dislocations of post-war Europe and North Africa. Hundreds of thousands of pieds-noirs fled across the Mediterranean, many leaving the only country they had ever considered home and arriving in metropolitan France resentful of de Gaulle and frequently feeling unwanted by the society that was supposedly receiving them back. The fate of the harkis was worse. France failed to evacuate many of those who had fought beside it, and large numbers were killed after independence; those who did reach France often found themselves marginalised there. Algeria consequently entered independence with the human geography of the colonial period transformed in a matter of months. The French army was leaving, the settlers were leaving, French sovereignty was disappearing and an Algerian state was being constructed precisely around the proposition that Algeria was no longer France.

Yet French remained.

That is the paradox at the centre of the story. Independent Algeria pursued Arabisation partly as an attempt to restore an identity and linguistic culture that colonial rule had subordinated. Arabic became central to the new state’s conception of itself, although this created another set of tensions because Algeria was never linguistically homogeneous. The long struggle for recognition of Tamazight reflected the fact that attempts to define Algeria solely through an Arab linguistic identity could themselves marginalise Amazigh history and culture. Nevertheless, despite official Arabisation and repeated political efforts to reduce the colonial inheritance, French proved remarkably resistant. It remained important in higher education, medicine, science, engineering, commerce, sections of the bureaucracy, publishing, media and the professional classes. Algeria therefore developed the curious post-colonial condition in which French was officially foreign but practically domestic: a language that the country had profound historical reasons to reject but equally powerful practical reasons to retain.

Kateb Yacine captured this contradiction with his famous description of French as a “butin de guerre”, a spoil of war. The phrase deserves to be taken seriously because it challenges the assumption that continuing to speak the language of a former colonial ruler necessarily constitutes continued submission to it. A conquered population can appropriate a language, reshape it and use it for purposes that the original conqueror neither intended nor controls. Kateb himself wrote Nedjma in French, as did other major Algerian writers, without thereby producing French colonial literature. Assia Djebar could write in French about Algerian women and Algerian memory; Algerian journalists could use French to criticise France; Algerians could argue among themselves in French about what it meant to be Algerian. At some point the language imposed by the coloniser becomes part of the linguistic property of the colonised as well. Algeria today contains one of the largest French-speaking populations in the world despite never having joined the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie. Molière, in other words, is not being expelled from Algiers.

What is changing is not necessarily Algeria’s possession of French but its assessment of French’s relative value. Imagine an ambitious Algerian teenager making educational choices forty or fifty years ago. However ambivalent her family might have been about France, French offered access to advanced education, professional employment, scientific material, France itself and a significant international Francophone network. The colonial inheritance had been converted into useful human capital, and abandoning it would have imposed enormous costs. Now imagine her equivalent in 2026. She is considering artificial intelligence, biotechnology, engineering, medicine or finance. She wants access not merely to textbooks but to the latest research papers, online courses, software documentation, international conferences, multinational employers and professional networks stretching from California through India and Singapore to the Gulf. Asked which additional language maximises those opportunities, she is increasingly likely to reach a different conclusion from her grandparents. The answer is English, and importantly it is not English because she particularly wishes to enter British culture.

This is where Algeria’s story becomes much larger than Algeria. For most of history, languages with international reach were closely associated with the political systems that spread them. Latin followed Roman power and then survived through the Church and European scholarship; Arabic spread alongside conquest, religion and trade; Spanish and Portuguese travelled with Iberian empires; French expanded with French diplomatic prestige and colonial rule; English travelled around the world initially through British imperial expansion and subsequently acquired still greater power through American economic, technological and cultural dominance. Language followed power, and conquered or dependent populations frequently inherited the language of whoever had exercised that power over them. The extraordinary development of the last century is that English has increasingly escaped this original relationship. It remains historically inseparable from British empire and American hegemony, but its contemporary usefulness no longer depends upon a user’s relationship with Britain or even with the United States.

Consider an Algerian engineer using English to communicate with an Indian software developer and a Korean supplier about Chinese equipment for a project financed by a Gulf investment fund. There is an obvious historical explanation for why English became the language in which that conversation occurs, but there is little meaningful sense in which any participant is thereby entering British culture or accepting British political influence. English is functioning in much the same way as a common technical standard. Each participant uses it because the others use it, and the fact that they use it increases the incentive for still more people to learn it. Economists would recognise a network effect: the usefulness of the system increases with the number and usefulness of the people connected to it. A telephone network used by ten people is of limited value; one used by several billion becomes indispensable. Languages can acquire the same self-reinforcing quality.

This is what I mean by language becoming economic infrastructure. Infrastructure does not require affection. I do not need to admire the country that developed a technical standard before I use that standard, any more than a company needs an emotional attachment to the United States to invoice internationally in dollars. Once sufficient economic activity operates through a common system, participating in that system becomes rational regardless of its historical origin. English now performs this role across an extraordinary range of activities. The overwhelming dominance of English in internationally indexed scientific publication means that an Algerian researcher who wants direct access to much of contemporary science needs it. Computing and software intensify the advantage. International business, aviation, postgraduate education and large sections of the internet reinforce it further. Every additional domain makes English more useful, and every additional user strengthens the incentive for the next user to acquire it.

French remains a genuinely global language, and predictions of its disappearance are absurd. Its network, however, is much more geographically and institutionally concentrated. France, parts of Belgium and Switzerland, Quebec, the Maghreb and large areas of West and Central Africa create an enormous Francophone space, but that space remains visibly connected to France and to institutions consciously designed to preserve Francophone cultural and political relationships. English has become much harder to locate geographically. India, Nigeria, Singapore, South Africa and countless other societies use versions of it that no longer require validation from London. International academics publish in English for readers who may overwhelmingly be neither British nor American. Even within the European Union, the departure of the United Kingdom has done remarkably little to diminish English as a working language because Europeans frequently use it to communicate with other Europeans. Britain has achieved the curious geopolitical feat of losing much of its empire while its language has become more powerful than the British state could ever hope to be.

This creates a particularly attractive proposition for a country such as Algeria. English can provide many of the international advantages once associated with the colonial language without requiring the same intimate relationship with the former colonial power. Algeria is therefore not really choosing Britain over France. It is choosing a network that no longer belongs primarily to Britain over a network that remains much more closely associated with France. The distinction helps explain why describing the policy merely as Anglicisation misses what is important. If Algerian students were replacing French history with British history, French television with the BBC and Algerian political models with Westminster, we could reasonably describe one cultural orientation replacing another. Instead, much of what Algeria wants from English is access to people who themselves have no particular connection to Britain.

None of this means that contemporary Franco-Algerian politics is irrelevant. Relations between the two countries have deteriorated sharply, particularly since Emmanuel Macron’s 2024 decision to endorse Morocco’s sovereignty claim over Western Sahara, a position that infuriated Algeria, Morocco’s principal regional rival and the main supporter of the Polisario Front. Diplomatic expulsions and increasingly hostile rhetoric have followed. The unresolved memory of colonisation constantly resurfaces in disputes over archives, apologies, migration, visas, nuclear tests and the interpretation of the Algerian War. Language inevitably becomes part of this political struggle because reducing the prominence of French also reduces one of France’s most durable forms of influence. Yet it would be a mistake to reduce Algeria’s turn towards English to another quarrel with Paris. English was introduced into primary education before the present crisis reached its current intensity, and the economic incentives would remain even if Macron and President Abdelmadjid Tebboune achieved a miraculous reconciliation tomorrow. France can change its diplomatic policy. It cannot change the fact that an Algerian scientist gains access to a much larger scientific network through English.

Rwanda offers an illuminating comparison precisely because its circumstances were different. In 2008 the Rwandan government decided to shift education dramatically away from French and towards English. Relations with France had become deeply hostile over disputes surrounding the 1994 genocide, while many members of the Rwandan Patriotic Front had lived in Anglophone Uganda and elsewhere in East Africa. Politics plainly mattered. Yet Rwanda had also joined the East African Community and was reorientating itself economically towards a predominantly Anglophone regional environment; it subsequently joined the Commonwealth. English therefore offered not simply a symbolic rejection of France but access to the commercial and political networks into which Rwanda increasingly wanted to integrate. The important point is not that Rwanda and Algeria are following identical paths, because they are not, but that both illustrate the possibility of linguistic arbitrage. Countries inherit one international language because history selected it for them and later ask whether, given the opportunity to choose afresh, it is still the language they would select for themselves.

For decades the costs of answering no were prohibitive. If a country’s universities, doctors, engineers, civil servants, teachers, textbooks and legal structures already operated in French, replacing it required retraining an entire institutional ecosystem. This created enormous path dependence. A language might remain dominant long after the political power that established it had disappeared because everyone had invested in knowing it and because everyone knew that everyone else knew it. Globalisation and digital technology are gradually reducing the cost of escaping that equilibrium. Students can encounter English before their school formally teaches it, access lectures delivered on another continent, practise pronunciation online, download research instantaneously and increasingly use artificial intelligence as a private language tutor. A linguistic inheritance that once looked almost irreversible becomes contestable.

This is potentially much more consequential for France than a temporary loss of diplomatic influence because language itself constitutes geopolitical infrastructure. A student educated through French is more likely to consume French intellectual material, attend a French or Francophone university, interact with French institutions and participate in professional networks in which France remains important. Lawyers read familiar legal scholarship, academics attend conferences within familiar intellectual communities and administrators communicate easily with counterparts who share their language. None of this needs to involve a sinister French official manipulating events from Paris. That is precisely why linguistic influence is so durable: it operates through accumulated habits, institutions and relationships rather than direct orders.

The Organisation internationale de la Francophonie represents the formal expression of part of this world, and demographic projections appear extraordinarily favourable to it because so much future global population growth will occur in Francophone Africa. Yet those projections contain a hidden assumption that deserves much more scrutiny than it normally receives: African societies must continue choosing French. Population growth in countries where French is currently important does not automatically produce an equivalent growth in people who will regard French as the most useful international language for their children. Parents, students and governments make choices, and those choices can change as the relative economic returns to languages change.

The political pushback against France across the Sahel makes this question particularly visible. Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have all moved sharply away from France politically, expelling French forces and, in 2025, withdrawing from the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie. Mali had already downgraded French from its position as an official language. These developments should not be bundled lazily into a single African revolt against French, because the politics of military regimes in the Sahel, the involvement of Russia and the particular security crises facing those states differ substantially from Algeria’s circumstances. Nor does rejecting France necessarily mean populations cease speaking French. Political de-Francisation, linguistic de-Francisation and economic de-Francisation are three different processes. A government can expel French troops while its civil servants continue conducting meetings in French; a young African can resent French foreign policy while wanting to study at the Sorbonne; a constitution can downgrade French while businesses retain it because employees already know it.

Algeria is particularly interesting because elements of all three processes may now be converging. Its political relationship with France is deteriorating, the educational role of French is being challenged and its economic and intellectual networks are diversifying. Nevertheless, the depth of the existing relationship should make us cautious about announcing the end of Francophone Algeria. Millions of Algerians speak French. France remains one of the most important destinations for Algerian students. Migration has created dense family connections across the Mediterranean. Doctors, engineers, academics and businesspeople possess decades of accumulated French-language professional capital. Languages do not disappear because a minister changes a timetable, and attempting to make them do so can produce serious educational damage.

The practical challenge is enormous. An excellent Algerian professor who has taught cardiology in French for twenty-five years does not become an excellent English-medium professor because a university administrator issues an instruction. He may read English-language research perfectly well while lacking the fluency required to explain a difficult physiological mechanism spontaneously and precisely to a room of students. Forcing him to teach in English prematurely could make the quality of his teaching worse rather than better. The same problem applies to students. The objective of medical education is to understand medicine, not to prove linguistic competence; if students devote so much cognitive effort to decoding imperfect English that they understand less physiology, the language intended to connect them to global science has become an obstacle to learning it. Rwanda’s experience demonstrated how formidable this implementation problem can become when policy moves faster than teacher preparation.

There is also an uncomfortable class dimension. Affluent Algerian families can purchase the transition to English immediately through private schools, tutors, foreign travel, subscriptions and immersion. Their children can arrive at university already fluent enough to exploit English-language teaching. Poorer families depend much more heavily on the quality of state provision. If the government declares English strategically essential but fails to provide excellent English teaching universally, the reform could initially widen inequality. The very language intended to democratise access to the global knowledge economy would become another scarce form of cultural capital monopolised disproportionately by families able to buy it. Successful linguistic reform therefore depends much less on speeches about decolonisation than on the mundane business of producing thousands of excellent teachers.

There is a deeper philosophical objection as well. Calling the replacement of French by English “decolonisation” risks forgetting how English became global. Britain possessed one of history’s largest empires, and the geographical distribution of English is inseparable from conquest, settlement and colonial administration. American power subsequently magnified its reach through business, universities, technology, entertainment and the international system constructed after 1945. An Algerian scientist who discovers that professional advancement requires publication in English is therefore not operating in some neutral linguistic marketplace. Native and highly proficient English speakers enjoy advantages; everybody else bears learning and translation costs; Anglophone universities and media gain enormous soft power. English as infrastructure remains a form of power.

The difference is that ownership of this infrastructure has become extraordinarily diffuse. Nobody in London can decide who is permitted to speak English or what counts as authentically English in Nigeria, India or Singapore. The language reproduces itself because its users find other users useful. France faces a harder problem precisely because French remains more consciously associated with France and because the French state has historically regarded preservation of the language as an explicit national project. There is a curious irony here: the more enthusiastically France presents Francophonie as an instrument of French cultural influence, the easier it becomes for people hostile to French influence to treat the language itself as political. English’s great geopolitical advantage may be that Britain has largely lost control of it. French is protected; English has escaped.

Algeria does not, however, need to resolve this contest by choosing a winner. Its most advantageous future may be genuinely multilingual. Arabic provides access to a vast regional and cultural sphere and is central to Algerian national life; Tamazight expresses an indigenous history that predates both French colonisation and modern Arab nationalism; French embodies an enormous accumulated stock of literature, professional expertise, family relationships and connections across Europe and Africa; English adds the widest contemporary global network. A young Algerian genuinely proficient in Arabic, French and English, perhaps with Tamazight as well, possesses forms of intellectual and economic optionality that many monolingual Europeans lack. The mistake would be to turn English into another ideological linguistic crusade. Algeria’s post-independence experience should already have demonstrated the danger of forcing the country’s complex linguistic reality into a single political conception of what Algerians ought to speak.

The more interesting principle is that languages can perform different functions simultaneously. Some tell us where we came from, some connect us to the people around us and some enable us to go somewhere else. There is no reason they must be the same language. A society confident enough to understand this need not burn Molière in order to learn Shakespeare, and an Algerian need not resolve the historical trauma of French colonisation before deciding that French remains useful. The truly post-colonial position may not be rejecting the coloniser’s language but acquiring the freedom to decide pragmatically when to use it.

There is, finally, a delicious historical possibility that makes Algeria’s decision even more interesting. The country may be undertaking an enormous generational investment in English at precisely the moment technology begins to weaken the economic value of mastering any global lingua franca. Artificial intelligence is improving translation at extraordinary speed. Real-time translation still struggles with humour, dialect, specialist terminology, ambiguity and the subtle signals through which human beings establish trust, but it is no longer difficult to imagine a world in which an Algerian doctor speaks Arabic and a Japanese colleague hears natural Japanese almost instantaneously, or in which a scientific paper published in Korean becomes available in fluent Arabic, French and English at the moment of publication. If the cost of translation approaches zero while its quality approaches human fluency, one of the principal network advantages enjoyed by English begins to weaken.

It will not disappear completely because language is more than information transfer. Reading Camus in translation is not the same experience as reading Camus in French, just as reading Shakespeare in French is not identical to reading him in English. Shared language creates humour, intimacy, cultural reference and trust in ways that software may find much harder to reproduce. Yet the economic premium attached to possessing a common language could diminish dramatically. If that happens, the French-English contest unfolding in Algerian schools may eventually appear as one of the last great battles of an older linguistic order, when participation in international intellectual and economic life still required human beings to converge upon the same language.

For the moment, however, that world remains with us, and English is winning its network competition. This is why an apparently minor decision about what an eight-year-old Algerian studies first deserves attention far beyond Algeria. France ruled Algeria for 132 years, populated it with nearly a million European settlers and fought one of the twentieth century’s most traumatic wars of decolonisation in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to keep it. The settlers left, the army left and the French flag came down, yet the French language survived because history had embedded it within Algerian institutions and because, whatever its origins, generations of Algerians continued to find it useful. Independent Algeria could reject French sovereignty while retaining French linguistic capital.

What is changing now is not primarily Algeria’s interpretation of that history but its calculation of utility. French can simultaneously be a magnificent language, an Algerian spoil of war and a diminishing monopoly over access to the wider world. Molière does not become a worse playwright because an Algerian engineer needs English, and Algeria does not need to throw away the French it already possesses in order to acquire something more useful alongside it. The real challenge to France lies in what happens if millions of families across Africa make the same calculation. Predictions of a demographic golden age for Francophonie assume that children born in countries where French is important today will continue to regard it as the foreign language offering them the greatest opportunities tomorrow. That decision ultimately belongs not to Paris, nor to the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, nor even entirely to African governments. It belongs to parents, students, universities and employers responding to the incentives around them.

The colonial age spread languages through conquest, settlement and administration. The post-colonial age preserved many of those languages through institutional inheritance and the enormous costs of changing systems constructed around them. We may now be entering a third period in which languages compete increasingly according to the economic and intellectual networks they provide access to. This competition is less visibly coercive than colonial language policy, but in some respects it is more ruthless: usefulness compounds usefulness, and once a network becomes sufficiently large it attracts users who have no cultural allegiance whatsoever to the society in which the language originated.

The Algerian child opening an English textbook this year therefore stands at the intersection of two very different forms of globalisation. Behind her lies a world in which language followed empire, and in which military conquest helped determine which foreign words her grandparents needed in order to navigate power. Ahead lies a world in which language increasingly follows knowledge, technology, networks and economic opportunity, and perhaps eventually a world in which artificial intelligence means it no longer needs to follow any dominant country at all. French came to Algeria because France came to Algeria. English is arriving because Algeria wants access to a world in which Britain is only one participant among many. The most revealing difference between the two languages, therefore, is not Molière against Shakespeare, nor France against Britain. It is much simpler than that: French arrived with an army; English does not need one