A famous landing: Algiers La Blanche under a radiant light. The picture darkens with the reading, off-camera, of the text of surrender of the Dey of Algiers in 1830. On the Conquest confronts us with a page turned too quickly in the French national novel. With audacity, Franssou Prenant brings together a community of complicit voices who read in a neutral tone a succession of archives (reports, testimonies, memoirs, historical, geographical, urban planning considerations, etc.). They relate the stages of the colonization of Algeria by France between 1830 and 1848 and draw the ideological landscape of a staggering enterprise of annihilation. The film could have been titled On Destruction . The director thus constructs a memorial by means of an operation common to History and cinema: editing. A montage of texts: the words of Victor Hugo, Ernest Renan, and Tocqueville mingle with those of soldiers, high-ranking officials, and brigadiers, making it impossible to distinguish the perpetrators. A montage of images then echoes the atrocities and spoliations of the past in the present: in counterpoint to a tale of murder, the film presents the desolate landscape of a desert or the frank and innocent smiles of adolescents. The promises of wealth offered by colonized Algeria are echoed by shots of an opulent, Haussmann-style Parisian heart. We are plunged into a reflexive movement on the nature of this extraordinary violence, supported by an imaginative drift into contemporary Algeria, tied to the archives heard through games of divergences and rapprochements. The accumulation of texts reveals both the ethnocentric and racist imagination and the cold logic of economic exploitation that presided over the colonization of Algeria and their irreversible consequences, which Algerian society still suffers today.