Didn't he also try to make the colonies directly French citizens? Like it was dumb and lib, but he felt they where his direct subjects the same as Frenchmen so that paternalistic rule applied to them.

The rationalist ambitions of Emperor Louis Bonaparte, Napoleon III for Algeria were to be seen in the Imperial Decree of 1857 for a network of railways, and in the support for the Saint-Simonian socialist Prosper Enfantin’s plans to industrialise the region. Enfantin raised funds to extract iron ore in Bone, but French industrialists torpedoed his proposal for a local smelting industry.

The new Emperor disliked the European settlers who had voted against his accession, and listened favourably to native complaints of oppression and land-grabbing. In 1863 Napoleon III wrote to Arabs that: ‘Algeria is not strictly speaking a colony, but an Arab kingdom. The natives and the colonists have an equal right to my protection and I am no less the Emperor of the Arabs than the emperor of the French’. Constitutionally that position was unsustainable, but Louis Napoleon kept up his support for native rights as a counter-balance to the fervently republican settlers. The two laws voted by the senate on 22 April 1863 and 14 July 1865, known as the ‘Senatus-Consult’, defended first the native’s land rights and second granted them the right to citizenship. However, in their application, the Senatus-Consult laws ended up discriminating against Arabs and Berbers. In formalising land rights, the courts reduced traditional land-holdings precipitately. Intended to grant citizenship by a ‘well-meaning Emperor’[8] the second Senatus-Consult allowed Algerians to apply for French nationality but only if they allowed their Statut Personnel to be French, so subjecting themselves to French courts in such matters as marriage and inheritance.[9] Between 1865 and 1 November 1867 only 56 Muslims and 115 Jews made applications. However, under the terms of the law, all Algerians were subjects of the Empire, and therefore subject to its taxes. Similarly, the Imperial College, open to Algerians, but with the goal of assimilating them into French culture, taught its lessons in the French language, and recruited just 99 Algerian pupils in 1865, 81 in 1866. In 1870 the Algerians under the military zone revolted. French repression re-doubled, and the ideal of assimilation was exposed more openly as a lie. The Algerians were not to be treated as equals with equal rights to the French, but inferiors. That same year the Crémieux decree granted French citizenship to Algerian Jews, in a policy of divide and rule, consolidating a loyal intermediary layer of Jews between the natives and the settlers. In fact the French republicans had recreated a system that was, according to Governor General Gueydon ‘the serfdom of the natives’.[10] In 1881 the Code Napoleon was supplemented with a special ‘native code’, which listed 27 imprisonable crimes. These included, most extraordinarily, refusal to carry out corvée labour, an insulting attitude in the presence of French officials and travelling in Algeria without a permit. The flag hanging over the colonial office was the same tricolour that Marianne used to lead the revolutionaries against the King, but the policy imposed under it was closer to the restitution of feudal servitude. According to General Hanoteau, an officer of the bureaux arabes: ‘What our settlers dream of is a bourgeois feudalism in which they will be the lords and the natives the serfs’.[11] In May 1898, in the heady atmosphere of the anti-Dreyfus campaign, Algeria elected four anti-Semitic deputies to the National Assembly after a week of anti-Jewish rioting that January. Governor Laferrière bent to the colonists’ demands for autonomy, granting financial independence and the creation of an elected colonial assembly. Algeria became a ‘small French Republic’ in which ‘the voter’s card became the title of nobility in this novel feudal system’.[12]

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/defeat-french-humanism.htm