At the intersection of France's post-war welfare state and the growing crisis surrounding colonial rule in Algeria, Amelia Lyons's original and carefully researched study charts the emergence of ‘the civilizing mission in the metropole’ between the late 1940s and Algerian independence in 1962. Contrary to the image of single men clutching battered suitcases, which long stood for Algerian migration to France prior to the mid-1970s, from the late 1940s women and children made up a growing minority of those crossing the Mediterranean. Under the Fourth Republic's constitution ‘French Muslims from Algeria’ in Metropolitan France enjoyed the same rights as other French citizens, including entitlement to benefits, social services, and public housing. In practice, discrimination and poverty forced many families into squalid, overcrowded accommodation, epitomized by the bidonvilles. Lyons shows how their presence became a growing preoccupation for the French authorities and evoked a complex range of responses. During the 1950s a national network of supplementary services emerged, linking private charitable associations, semi-public institutions such as the Société nationale de construction de logements pour les travailleurs originaires d'Algérie et leurs familles, and the ‘expertise’ of officials often transferred from the Maghreb. While the book focuses on programmes in mainland France, it also offers an effective demonstration of ‘the fluid connections between metropole and colony’ (p. 38). Lyons argues persuasively that family migration was cautiously welcomed as a natural development, seen as an opportunity to inculcate ‘universal’ French values, demonstrate the generosity of the Republican project, and anchor male migration within a domestic setting considered less conducive to nationalist politics. Targeted welfare programmes, accordingly, sought ‘to serve openly and monitor quietly’ (p. 13). The integrative injunction — framed as ‘adaptation’ — rested on a conservative model of the nuclear family that privileged the twin roles of mother and housewife; instruction for women ranged from child-rearing and hygiene classes to household budgeting advice. In her nuanced analysis Lyons unpicks the gendered and culturalist assumptions underpinning social-worker interventions, revealing how infantilizing colonial tropes of backwardness and passivity frequently coexisted with genuine concerns for the material plight of families and the discrimination they suffered. Housing receives particular attention, in two chapters that demonstrate the ambivalence of slum clearance policies. The official goal of rehousing Algerian families away from bidonvilles saw the creation of specialist agencies that perpetuated the very segregation they claimed to be working against. Families were filtered through placements in rudimentary transitional units intended to ‘prepare’ them for mainstream HLM apartments, yet in reality this provisional solution often endured, and, in circular fashion, reinforced the idea that the families constituted a ‘problem’ category. Based on extensive archival research, the book seeks to dissect official discourse and practice. While the responses of Algerians to these programmes are largely confined to intuition and reading against the grain, the result is an impressive and thought-provoking account. Keenly attuned to the contemporary echoes of this history, the book closes with reference to Joan Scott's searing critique of post-1989 headscarf debates in Politics of the Veil (Princeton University Press, 2007). At the same time, Lyons succeeds in conveying the singularities of a period when the settlement of Algerian families in France was both encouraged and instrumentalized.