The House of Bacri and Busnach was a trading house run by Algerian Jews. They supplied wheat to France over two decades and ran up a bill of several million francs. The debt wove its way into diplomacy between France and Algiers and caused the tensions that led to invasion and colonisation of Algeria in 1830. The story of Bacri and Busnach, then, takes us from Napoleon to the Dey of Algiers and from Algiers to Marseille, to Paris and to Leghorn as these two families found themselves at the heart of political and diplomatic intrigue.
