Beneath the veneer of industrializing industry and triumphant third world leadership lay a single-party regime still attempting to fabricate the revolutionary party that had broken up at independence and still afraid of a postcolonial elite that might have institutionalized the party-state. With Boumediene’s death in 1978 Algeria turned about face from its industrializing project. This paper will explore the reasons behind the dramatic reversal of industrial policy under Boumediene’s successor. Beginning with Belaid Abdesselam in 1990, key ministers, most recently Ahmed Taleb-Ibrahimi and Sid Ahmed Ghozali, have published elements of their memoirs. The present writer has also collected memoirs of these three key players, along with a number of other former student leaders close to Abdesselam, who had served as their principal patron and advisor in the mid-1950s. Based in part upon these interviews conducted in 2007-08, this paper will analyze the underlying fragility of Abdesselam’s industrial enterprise. It was faltering even before Boumediene’s death but might have endured, had it acquired institutional roots. Unfortunately Bounediene had inherited the weakest of former French North Africa’s postcolonial states, and he reversed his strategy of state-building after 1970. The aspirations of his developmental state consequently could not be sustained, not being grounded in political institutions. Why he shifted course and embarked on agrarian and cultural revolutions as well as an industrial one in 1971 remains an open question, albeit one that may shed more light on the Boumediene era. This paper will suggest that the specter of a postcolonial landowning bourgeoisie indeed distracted attention from efforts to build a developmental state.