Government Palace

The Government Palace, known before 1962 as Gouvernement général, is the office of the Prime Minister of Algeria and a major public building in Algiers. At the time of its inauguration in 1933, with a surface of 33,000 m2, it was the largest administrative building of the entire French state. History The project to build a new seat for the government of French Algeria was formulated in the context of the 100th anniversary of the Invasion of Algiers in 1830. The complex was built between 1929 and 1934 on a design by architect Jacques Guiauchain, the grandson of one of French Algeria's first colonial architects, , and eventually inaugurated in 1933. It encloses an entertainment and cinema venue, the , which was built in 1929 and is now named after Ibn Khaldun. The building was ransacked by a mob on , during the May 1958 crisis. On , newly arrived Prime Minister of France Charles de Gaulle gave a major speech from the Government Palace's balcony, where he uttered the ambiguous sentence that immediately became iconic, ("I have understood you").