France’s presence in Algeria, however uneven it may have been in practice, lasted over a century. In administering this vast territory from the 1830s into the 1960s, the French adopted tactics ranging from military conquest to the so-called “civilizing mission.” Each of these methods sought to establish forms of colonial order, from a settler society to extractive exploitation, but all faced an array of challenges from colonized populations. That most Algerians were Muslim presented particular tactical and intellectual dilemmas, as the voluminous colonial discourse of politique musulmane, or “Muslim policy,” suggests. In this paper, I consider French colonial approaches to Algeria’s Muslim populations. In particular, I examine the case of the French médersa, an institution that provided specialized training in Islamic law to colonized subjects throughout the colonial period. Three médersas were founded in Algeria (in Algiers, Constantine, and Tlemcen) in 1850; they closed only in the 1950s at the dawn of Algeria’s liberation war. By sponsoring a particular form of “juridico-religious” education for colonized Muslims, the French administration sought to extend its authority over local Islamic legal systems in northwest Africa. The addition of French curricula in the 1870s fostered the notion of a “double culture” for students to act as ideal intermediaries in the colonial system. Colonial administrators considered the médersas to be products of a process of “domestication” (in French, apprivoisement) resulting from French ethnographic mastery of Muslim communities. Through this lens, I suggest, scholars can re-evaluate the relationship between Islamic societies and colonial institutions. How was the médersa “domesticated,” and through what means? How did this long-lived institution change over the course of its century-long operation? How did the graduates—relatively few in number but outsized in their impact—guide the practices of French imperialism in Algeria and elsewhere? Based on archival research in Algeria and France, I present the médersa as anomalous to dominant interpretations of French rule in Algeria. It demonstrates the importance of ethnographic knowledge and legal pluralism to French strategies of rule. Furthermore, the prominent roles played by médersa graduates in anti-colonial movements suggest a different interpretation of “domestication,” one entailing the exploitation of a colonial institution for anti-colonial ends. As such, I argue for a reconsideration of the linkages between education, Islamic law, and colonial authority in Algerian history.