Algerian War
The Algerian War, also known as the Algerian Revolution or the War of Algerian Independence, took place from 1954 to 1962 and was a pivotal conflict in the struggle for national independence from French colonial rule. This war was marked by extreme violence and complexity, as it involved not only the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) fighting against French forces but also internal conflicts among various Muslim factions and the European settlers known as Pieds-Noirs. The roots of the conflict trace back to the French seizure of Algeria in 1830, and the war itself was fueled by a history of repression, land appropriation, and a growing desire for independence among the Algerian population.
The war began in earnest after a violent incident on VE Day in 1945, which escalated tensions and set the stage for the FLN's declaration of independence in 1954. Over the course of eight years, the conflict resulted in significant casualties, with estimates of war-related deaths ranging widely. The brutal tactics employed by both sides included torture and assassination, and the war had profound implications for French politics, ultimately leading to the fall of the Fourth Republic and the establishment of the Fifth Republic under Charles de Gaulle.
After years of conflict, Algeria achieved independence in July 1962 through negotiations formalized in the Evian Agreements. The aftermath of the war left Algeria grappling with its identity and governance, facing subsequent challenges, including a civil war in the 1990s. The Algerian War also influenced global perspectives on colonialism and military engagement, as lessons drawn from this conflict were later reflected in other international confrontations, such as the Vietnam War. The legacy of the war continues to resonate in contemporary discussions on decolonization and the complex dynamics of post-colonial societies.
Algerian War
The second half of the twentieth century witnessed several dozen African and Asian wars of decolonization or, to use another terminology, national liberation. These wars were long, savage, and complex. They were primarily struggles for national independence, but they were also civil, religious, tribal, ethnic, and ideological wars. The French Algerian War of 1954–62, known also as the Algerian Revolution or the War of Algerian Independence, was among the most vicious and complicated. Its political, religious, and cultural legacies impacted both the Islamic and the Western worlds. Its effects are still felt today.
Brief History
In 1830, following a perhaps manufactured diplomatic incident between France and the dey of Algiers, French forces seized Algiers. Several decades of French military expansion throughout Algeria against sustained indigenous resistance followed. Non-Saharan Algeria was not completely subdued until the 1880s.
But the French did not treat Algeria as a mere colony. The French Constitution of 1848 declared Algeria an integral part of France. Beginning in 1865, Muslim Algerians were eligible to apply for full French citizenship. Few did. (All Algerians received full French citizenship in 1946.) Simultaneously, the French conducted systematic seizure of lands and other forms of property, plus repression of indigenous political movements. European French settlers, the Pieds-Noirs, began arriving by the thousands, while thousands of native Algerians immigrated to France. By the war’s outbreak in 1954, Algeria was in many ways a bicultural, biracial society, with a significant Algerian Muslim presence in France.
World War I presented the colonized peoples of Africa and Asia with the spectacle of the invincible Europeans slaughtering each other. They began to think seriously of independence. Still, despite the stirrings of secular and Arab nationalism, Algerian Muslims remained loyal and served, as they had since the 1850s, in the French Army and Navy. World War II intensified the desire for independence and the sense and reality of imperial vulnerability. However, Algerians served in French forces against Germany, both before France’s 1940 defeat and again after Algeria was conquered by the Americans and British in 1942.
After World War II ended in 1945, France moved to re-establish her colonial empire. From 1946 to 1954, France fought a losing struggle to retain Indochina.
The war generated less opposition within France than might have been expected. Indochina was, after all, far away and of no vital significance. But Algeria was different. It was right across the Mediterranean, part of metropolitan France. Tens of thousands of French colonists lived there.
The struggle began, ironically, on 8 May 1945, VE (Victory in Europe) Day. A Muslim protest in Sétif turned into a massacre of European settlers. The French Army retaliated with a counter-massacre. After nine years of struggle and broken French promises later, on 1 November 1954, the Algerian National Liberation Front, in French the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), called for independence as they launched attacks throughout Algeria.
For the next eight years, the French and the FLN fought each other; atrocity, torture, and assassination were standard tactics on both sides. The struggle was far more complex than France versus FLN. Muslim factions made war on each other. The Pieds-Noirs occasionally attacked the French government, which they perceived as weak, while the army in Algeria became a law unto itself. Violence spilled over into France. Moderates on all sides were targeted by extremists on all sides. Estimates of war-related deaths run as high as two million, out of a population of ten million. In truth, no one knows; such wars do not leave careful records. A consensus estimate: less than a million, but not that much less.
The French tried strategy after strategy to pacify Algeria, from brutal repression to hearts-and-minds nation-building. Nothing worked. In 1958, Charles de Gaulle became France’s president. It took four more years for him to settle the war via a combination of negotiation (the Evian Agreements), and popular referenda in Algeria and France. Despite several assassination attempts, an abortive military coup, and a final surge of violence from the renegade OAS, the French Organisation de l’Armée Secrète, Algeria became independent in July 1962.
Overview
By 1958, France’s failure to pacify Algeria and rising popular opposition destroyed the French Fourth Republic. The Fifth Republic, France’s current government, came out of that failure.
Since 1962, the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria has had a difficult time. A 1992–98 civil war between the government and the Islamic Salvation Front killed an estimated one hundred thousand people. Today, this country of forty million, ninety-nine percent Muslim, is relatively stable (by current Arab standards) but has not escaped the effects of both the Arab Spring liberalization movement and violent Islamist expansionism. Economic dependence on hydrocarbon exports brings major uncertainty and unrest when world prices drop.
But perhaps of greater interest has been the impact of the Algerian Revolution on the West. Part is military. In Vietnam, the United States practically duplicated France’s set of Algerian mistakes. Ironically, when the American military decided to revise its counter-insurgency doctrine for use in Iraq and Afghanistan, it drew heavily on the Algerian experience, including the justification of torture. To many critics, it seems that whenever the West fights an African or Asian enemy on that enemy’s soil, the West is doomed to keep making the same mistakes.
Perhaps something similar might be said of the style of anti-war protest that emerged in France. Intellectuals and leftist politicians sought to lead a genuinely popular protest movement. Much of the protest was moral in nature and tone. France was an enlightened democracy, and enlightened democracies are not supposed to torture, assassinate, massacre. A critique of the evil that free people can do was provided by existentialist philosophers such as Nobel Laureate Albert Camus, himself an Algerian, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Meanwhile, radicals such as psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, born in French Martinique, justified the atrocities of Third World movements as "cleansing violence."
There is a massive literature on the Algerian War in French and Arabic, but surprisingly little has been translated into English. Nor does there appear to be much current English-language academic work on the subject. There was a brief surge of interest circa 2004 as the United States groped for effective strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and publishers have reissued several classic works written in the 1950s and 1960s by participants. Much of this critique and style, along with the glorification of radical violence was adopted by the American anti-Vietnam movement of the 1960s and has been a staple of left-wing politics and culture ever since.
Bibliography
Alleg, Henri. The Question. Lincoln, Nebraska: Bison Books, 2006. Print.
Aussaresses, Paul. The Battle of the Casbah: Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in Algeria 1955-1957. New York: Enigma Books, 2004. Print.
Brody, Richard. "Camus and France’s Algerian Wars." The New Yorker. Conde Nast, 4 April 2012. Net. 25 May 2016.
Evans, Martin. The Memory of Resistance: French Opposition to the Algerian War 1954-1962. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 1997. Print.
Evans, Martin. France’s Undeclared War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Print.
"France Remembers the Algerian War, 50 Years on." France24. 16 March 2012. Web. 25 May 2016.
Horne, Alastair. A Savage War of Peace. New York: NYRB Classics, 2006. Print.
Lartéguy, Jean. The Centurions. New York: Penguin Classics, 2015. Print.
Lartéguy, Jean. The Praetorians. New York, Penguin Classics, 2016. Print.
Shepard, Todd. The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Print.
Wall, Irwin M. France, the United States, the Algerian War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Print.
Windrow, Martin. The Algerian War, 1954-62. London: Osprey Press, 1997. Print.