This paper examines France’s developmental policies in Algeria on the eve of the war of independence. It argues that despite the colonial commitment to the ideals of the civilizing mission, France’s policies of mise en valeur, or “rational development,” drew on the logic of assimilation and universalism, even while, in practice, they repeatedly contradicted these egalitarian principles. Just as the ethnographic scholarship from the 1930s emphasized the existence of a so-called indigenous habitat, the later schemes to industrialize Algeria relied on the “traditions” of the natives, resulting in the Plan de Constantine (1959-1963). Indeed, in formulating this plan, French practitioners continually misread the root cause of the afflictions they sought to address. Rather than look to the daily economic and political realities in a given context, colonial policy-makers relied on theories of acclimatization, religious fervor, biological difference, and cultural resistance to explain native dissent to colonial rule. The debates on the Plan de Constantine elucidate the ways in which colonial technocrats relied on civilizational hierarchies in articulating notions of efficiency and material progress. Thus, this paper aims to show how French notions of cultural and technological superiority were instrumental to the formulation of economic programs and development projects. While many scholars regard colonial policies of development after World War II as a means of reforming an overtly exploitative system, this paper demonstrates that developmental and scientific ideologies were consistent with Enlightenment views of progress, which claimed that France’s technical prowess would be able to subdue the Algerian population while serving both colonial and native interests. Indeed, the French colonial authorities in Algeria maintained that there were universally valid stages through which humanity had to evolve, and they applied this reasoning to various domains of policy-making, from education to economics. This drive for a universal template of human and economic development underpinned France’s civilizing ideology, which sought to instill a more “rational” spirit in the Algerian population so that the natives would be able to master their social and physical environment more effectively. In short, while the colonial emphasis on material progress was renewed in the mid-twentieth century, it had long been a constitutive element in France’s civilizing mission.