On June 17th, 1954, the head of colonial police intelligence in Oran wrote an alarmed note to the Governor General of Algeria: local Muslims had overwhelmingly stopped smoking cigarettes in public. Notes, forbidding the sale or consumption of cigarettes in the name of ‘Islam’ or ‘the struggle against French Colonialism,’ to be enforced on pain of death, had appeared on the doors of tobacco shops in the preceding days, garnering considerable public attention in Oran and the surrounding municipalities. In some locales, police estimated that nearly 85 percent of the population followed the ban. Cigarette sales plummeted to as low as a tenth of normal rates, and vendors no longer displayed tobacco on their counters. Furthermore, the movement appeared to be gaining steam: several Muslims caught smoking in public had been beaten or threatened by their young coreligionnaires, and copycat efforts had begun to appear in Algiers. Why had cigarettes suddenly become the focus of anticolonial opprobrium? And who was behind the ban? For French colonial officials, this populist “Operation Cigarettes” was concerning, not only as a novel form of resistance, but because of its truly grassroots nature. While propelled by local members of the reform Ulema and the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties (MTLD), the cigarette boycott was dismissed by both organizations. Local MTLD leaders even went as far as to smoke ostentatiously in public for the press, demonstrating their rejection of the ban. Rather, the ban seemed to originate with young activists, inspired by the ongoing struggles for independence in Morocco and Tunisia and hoping to provoke popular demonstrations of anticolonialism on Algeria soil. Drawing on police archives, this paper explores the short-lived events of June 1954. While the cigarette boycott quickly crumbled under pressure from the colonial administration, it offers a glimpse into the intersecting politics of anticolonialism, consumption, and youth activism in Oran on the eve of the Algerian War. Why did a consumer commodity like tobacco successfully come to carry such a high political charge, while derivative boycott attempts, like a ban on Muslim domestic workers in European homes, failed immediately? And what can such events reveal about the impact of neighboring independence movements, generational changes, and consumer culture on popular anticolonial nationalism in Algeria?