In 1923 Albert Sarraut (1872 - 1962) published La mise en valeur des colonies francaises, prompting a heated debate regarding France's responsibility to offer economic assistance and promote social welfare in the colonies. Beginning with Sarraut's watershed publication, this paper focuses on French discussions regarding colonial development in French Algeria from 1923 to 1962. It analyzes the writings of Albert Sarraut, Edmond Giscard d'Estaing (1894 - 1982) and Jacques Soustelle (1912 - 1990) to show that there was no consensus on the link between development and empire. In fact, these colonial administrators framed the risks, benefits, and responsibilities of French investment in Algeria in starkly different ways. While Sarraut believed that it was imperative to encourage colonial development in order to bolster French national grandeur, d'Estaing questioned the rising costs of development, positing that France's economic lay with the integration of Europe rather than the colonization of Algeria. Alternately, Jacques Soustelle, who would later become a champion of L'Algerie francaise, was an ardent supporter of development, which he thought would foster political integration in the colony while preventing Algerian migration to the metropole. In analyzing these positions, this paper breaks with previous works that study colonial development in terms of success or failure and instead investigates the ways in which development was used to stage understandings of justice, progress, and sovereignty in the period following WWI. Not only did the question of colonial development reflect various political, economic, and ideological commitments, but it also played an important role in France's own conceptualization of economic orthodoxy and the question of European economic integration. Moreover, debates on development pointed to discrepant understandings of France's historical mission civilisatrice, thereby decisively shaping France's memory of its colonial past. By framing development in terms of contested notions of political legitimacy and economic orthodoxy, this paper offers new perspectives on the significance of development.