This paper argues that the debates surrounding multilingualism on the eve of Algerian independence cannot be fully accounted for without taking into consideration the role played by secularism as an ideological project in determining the linguistic fault lines that opposed those who proposed to construct the new nation on the basis of multilingualism, and those who insisted that Algeria’s new people had to be engineered through monolingual Arabization exclusively. Such a situation, where secularism takes the form of a conflict between a political universalism inherited from colonial rule and a formerly marginalized but soon-to-be dominant form of Arabist universalism, not only overdetermines the debates about multilingualism in Algeria but gives precedence to the linguistic question as to which direction the fledgling nation should be taking. In 1962, as Algeria emerges on the world-historical stage as an independent nation, the problem faced by its elites is that of inventing a public after decades of colonialism have left the greater part of the nation illiterate—and all those able to read and write almost exclusively proficient in the former colonial language. While the political class quickly decides to bypass the issue by settling for monolingual Arabization, the nation’s foremost writers, from Kateb Yacine to Assia Djebar, almost all Francophone Berbers, agitate in French—the only language in which most would be able to write throughout their life—for a version of multilingualism that would associate Arabic to French and Berber languages. This paper proposes a brief intellectual history of a generation of Algerian Francophone Berber writers through the figures of Kateb Yacine and Assia Djebar, whose political hopes for the recognition of Algeria’s multilingual reality had become tethered to French. Grounded in an analysis of their critical writings and of two of their novels, Le Polygone étoilé and Le Blanc de l’Algérie respectively, it holds that the specificity of Francophone Algerian poetics—from a heteroglossic defense of multilingualism to a rejection of any possibility of conciliation with Arabic—cannot be understood outside of the operations of the secular state.