For more than a century France maintained colonial rule in Algerian territory. This allowed exceptions to republican law, including Sharia laws applied by Islamic customary courts to Muslim women which gave women certain rights to property and inheritance that they did not have under French law. Discontent among the Muslim Algerians grew after the World Wars, in which the Algerians sustained many casualties. Algerian nationalists began efforts aimed at furthering equality by listing complaints in the "Manifesto of the Algerian People", which requested equal representation under the state and access to citizenship, but no equality for all citizens to preserve Islamic precepts. The French response was to grant citizenship to 60,000 "meritorious" Muslims. During a reform effort in 1947, the French created a bicameral legislature with one house for the French citizens and another for the Muslims; but gave a European's vote equal seven times more weight than a Muslim's vote. Paramilitary groups such as the National Liberation Front ("Front de Libération nationale", FLN) appeared, claiming an Arab-Islamic brotherhood and state. This led to the outbreak of a war for independence, the Algerian War, in 1954.