Ferhat Abbas
Ahmed Francis got involved with the movement for Algerian rights headed by his relative, the moderate nationalist, Ferhat Abbas. Like Abbas, he was arrested by colonial forces after the 1945 Sétif massacres, but later released. He then joined Abbas's UDMA movement, which demanded Algerian civil rights and full equality with non-Muslim French, but stopped short of independence from France. In 1946, he was elected member of the Constituent Assembly of France as a UDMA representative.