The Franco-Algerian philosopher Sidi Mohammed Barkat has described this legal limbo as: "Not truly inclusion nor in fact exclusion, but the indefinite hanging on for some future inclusion". He has argued that this legal limbo allowed the French to treat the colonised as a less-than-human "mass", but still subject to a humanising mission; only able to become fully human when they cast off all the features that the French used to define them as part of the mass of the "indigène".