Pied-Noir Pied-Noir Pied-Noir (, ""Black-Foot""), plural Pieds-Noirs, is a term primarily referring to people of European, mostly ethnic French origin, who were born in Algeria during the period of French rule from 1830 to 1962. More broadly, it can refer to other foreign-origin persons, both Christian and Jewish, from all parts of the Mediterranean whose families had also migrated under French occupation in the 19th and 20th centuries to French Algeria, the French protectorate in Morocco, or the French protectorate of Tunisia, where many carried on living for several generations but fled or were expelled at the end of French rule
Pied-Noir I had a religion, and I thought I had a country.” Messud noted that the novelist Albert Camus, himself a "pied-noir", had often written of his love for the sea-shores and mountains of Algeria, declaring Algeria was a place that was a part of his soul, feelings that she noted that mirrored those of other "pied-noirs" for whom Algeria was the only home they had ever known. The "Pied-Noir" community has adopted, as both an unofficial anthem and as a symbol of its identity, Captain Félix Boyer's 1943 version of "Le Chant des Africains" (lit. "The Song of the Africans").