Algerian War
Based on Wikipedia: Algerian War
In November 1954, a handful of guerrillas—fewer than five hundred men—launched scattered attacks across Algeria. Within eight years, they had toppled a French government, redrawn the map of North Africa, and killed somewhere between four hundred thousand and one and a half million people. The Algerian War of Independence is one of the bloodiest and most consequential conflicts of the twentieth century, yet it remains surprisingly obscure outside France and the Arab world.
The war matters not just for what happened, but for how it happened. It became a laboratory for techniques that would define modern insurgency and counterinsurgency: urban terrorism, torture as state policy, population displacement on a massive scale, and the manipulation of international opinion. The lessons learned—or not learned—in Algeria would echo through Vietnam, Iraq, and countless other conflicts where powerful militaries struggled against determined guerrillas.
A Colony Unlike Any Other
To understand why the war was so brutal and so protracted, you first need to understand that Algeria was not, legally speaking, a colony at all. It was France.
When French forces captured Algiers in 1830, they weren't expanding an empire—they were distracting a restless French public from an increasingly unpopular king. Charles X needed a foreign adventure, and the pretext was thin: a dispute over debts owed to Algerian merchants by traders from Marseilles, compounded by alleged insults to the French consul. The real goal was political theater.
What followed was neither theater nor adventure. It was annihilation.
Under Marshal Bugeaud, the first Governor-General, French forces pursued what they called a "scorched earth" policy against the resistance led by Abd el-Kader. The euphemism concealed massacres, mass rapes, and systematic destruction. Historians estimate that between five hundred thousand and one million Algerians died in the first three decades of conquest—out of a population of roughly three million. French losses were far smaller: about three thousand killed in combat, though another ninety thousand died of disease in military hospitals.
By 1848, Algeria had been declared an integral part of France and divided into three departments: Alger, Oran, and Constantine. European settlers poured in—not just French, but Spanish, Italian, Maltese, and others. They became known as the pieds-noirs, literally "black feet," though the origin of the nickname remains disputed. Over generations, they built farms, businesses, and an entire society on land that had been seized from its original inhabitants.
The Architecture of Inequality
The French created an elaborate legal fiction to maintain their claim that Algeria was part of France while simultaneously treating its Muslim majority as something less than French.
The key mechanism was the Code de l'Indigénat, the "Indigenous Code," implemented in 1865. It created a strange hybrid status: Algerian Muslims were legally French, but they lived under Islamic law for personal matters like marriage and inheritance. They could serve in the French military. They could even apply for full French citizenship—but only if they renounced their right to be governed by sharia law. For observant Muslims, this was tantamount to apostasy. Fewer than two hundred applied in the years before 1870.
Jewish Algerians faced a different path. The 1870 Crémieux Decree granted them full French citizenship automatically, without requiring any renunciation. This created a wedge between communities that had coexisted for centuries and would have consequences that reverberated for generations.
By 1881, the system hardened further. The revised Code de l'Indigénat created specific penalties for the indigenous population and organized the systematic seizure of their lands. Muslims could be punished for offenses that didn't even exist for Europeans. They needed permits to travel. They could be imprisoned without trial. They were, in essence, second-class subjects in their own homeland—but subjects of a country that insisted they were already home.
The Crucible of World War
Algerian Muslims fought for France in both world wars. They served as tirailleurs—infantry soldiers in colonial regiments—and as spahis, the light cavalry. Many distinguished themselves in battle. Many never came home.
Those who did return came back changed.
The First World War shattered the mystique of European invincibility. Algerian soldiers had seen Frenchmen die in the mud of Verdun just as easily as anyone else. They had heard President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, with their promise of self-determination for colonial peoples. They had fought for a country that called them citizens but treated them as subjects.
In 1926, a man named Messali Hadj helped found the Étoile Nord-Africaine, the North African Star, in Paris. He was a member of the French Communist Party, and the organization initially had communist backing. But it quickly became something more dangerous to French authorities than communist ideology: it became nationalist. By 1928, it had broken with the Communist Party. By 1929, Paris had ordered it dissolved.
The pattern would repeat for decades. Algerian nationalists would form organizations. France would ban them. They would reform under new names. The demands would escalate—from civil rights to autonomy to outright independence.
In 1936, the leftist Popular Front government proposed the Blum-Viollette plan, which would have granted citizenship to a small number of educated Muslims without requiring them to renounce Islamic law. It was a modest reform, almost timid. The pieds-noirs erupted in violent demonstrations. The nationalist parties rejected it as insufficient. It died without ever reaching a vote.
The Massacre That Lit the Fuse
May 8, 1945 was Victory in Europe Day. In Sétif, a market town in northeastern Algeria, Muslims gathered to celebrate alongside Europeans. Some carried the Algerian flag. Some carried banners calling for independence.
The police opened fire.
What followed was not a riot but a pogrom, and then a counter-pogrom, and then a massacre. Algerian crowds killed European settlers—about a hundred, by most estimates. The French response was catastrophic. The army, the gendarmerie, and armed settler militias swept through the region. Naval vessels shelled coastal villages. Aircraft bombed and strafed villages from the air.
The death toll remains disputed. French authorities initially claimed 1,500 dead. Algerian nationalists claimed 45,000. Modern historians generally estimate between 6,000 and 30,000 Algerians killed in the reprisals. Whatever the precise number, Sétif became a turning point. A generation of Algerian nationalists would cite it as the moment they understood that France would never grant them equality peacefully.
Among those arrested in the aftermath was Ferhat Abbas, a pharmacist and politician who had spent his career arguing for reform within the French system. He had once written that he could not find an Algerian nation in history. Now he would help create one.
The Red All Saints' Day
Nine years later, on November 1, 1954—All Saints' Day in the Catholic calendar—everything changed.
In the early morning darkness, guerrillas launched coordinated attacks across Algeria. They hit military installations, police stations, and communications infrastructure. A few Europeans were killed. The attacks were small, almost amateurish in execution. But they announced something new: the Front de Libération Nationale, the National Liberation Front, known by its French acronym FLN.
From Cairo, where Egypt's revolutionary government provided sanctuary and support, the FLN broadcast its founding declaration. It called on Muslims in Algeria to join a struggle for "the restoration of the Algerian state—sovereign, democratic and social—within the framework of the principles of Islam."
The initial French response came from Pierre Mendès France, a premier known for pragmatism. Just months earlier, he had negotiated France's withdrawal from Indochina after the catastrophic defeat at Dien Bien Phu. Surely, many assumed, he would find a similar solution for Algeria.
He did not.
"One does not compromise when it comes to defending the internal peace of the nation," Mendès France declared in the National Assembly. "The Algerian departments are part of the French Republic. They have been French for a long time, and they are irrevocably French... Between them and metropolitan France there can be no conceivable secession."
This would be French policy for the next eight years. Algeria was France. The rebels were criminals, not combatants. There was nothing to negotiate.
The Strategy of the Weak
The FLN's leaders were not fools. They knew they could not defeat the French military in conventional battle. France had tanks, aircraft, artillery, and hundreds of thousands of well-trained soldiers. The FLN, at its founding, had fewer than five hundred fighters scattered across a territory the size of Western Europe.
But they had studied their predecessors.
The FLN drew inspiration from Mao Zedong in China and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. They had particularly studied General Vo Nguyen Giap's victory at Dien Bien Phu, where a French garrison that was supposed to be impregnable had been surrounded and destroyed by forces that moved through the population like fish through water—to use Mao's famous metaphor.
The strategy was what military theorists now call asymmetric warfare. The FLN could not outgun the French, but they could outlast them. Every French atrocity would create new recruits. Every village destroyed would turn moderates into radicals. Every year the war dragged on would erode French political will at home and diplomatic support abroad.
The FLN also understood something crucial about colonial wars: the colonizer always has somewhere else to go. The French could lose Algeria and still have France. The Algerians had nowhere else. This asymmetry of commitment, more than any military factor, would ultimately decide the war.
The Battle Within the Battle
Before the FLN could fight the French, it first had to consolidate power over the Algerian independence movement itself.
The veteran nationalist Messali Hadj, who had been organizing against French rule since the 1920s, refused to submit to FLN leadership. He formed his own organization, the Mouvement National Algérien (MNA), which pursued a similar program of violent revolution but competed with the FLN for followers and resources.
What followed was a war within the war. The FLN systematically destroyed MNA forces in Algeria, killing guerrillas and assassinating supporters. In France itself, where hundreds of thousands of Algerian workers lived, the two organizations waged what became known as the "café wars"—a grim campaign of bombings and shootings that killed nearly five thousand people over the course of the conflict.
The FLN won. By the middle of the war, it had established itself as the sole legitimate voice of Algerian nationalism. Ferhat Abbas, the moderate who had once rejected the very concept of an Algerian nation, flew to Cairo and joined the FLN in 1956. The religious scholars of the ulema threw their prestige behind the movement. The French-educated évolués, the "evolved ones" who had tried to work within the system, abandoned their hopes for reform.
The FLN also coerced. It levied taxes on Algerian businesses and workers, in Algeria and in France. Those who refused to pay faced violence. It created labor unions, professional associations, and women's organizations that served as transmission belts for its ideology. It demanded total commitment. You were either with the revolution or against it.
The French Response
The French military approached the Algerian war with memories of Indochina burning in their minds. They had lost there. They would not lose again.
France poured troops into Algeria—at the peak, nearly half a million soldiers, including conscripts from metropolitan France. They pursued a strategy of quadrillage, dividing the territory into grids patrolled by fixed garrisons. They built barriers along the borders with Tunisia and Morocco to prevent the infiltration of weapons and reinforcements. They developed new doctrines of counterinsurgency, drawing on lessons from Indochina and the emerging theories of revolutionary warfare.
And they tortured.
The systematic use of torture became the defining moral catastrophe of the French war effort. Suspects were subjected to waterboarding, electrical shock, beatings, and sexual violence. The practice was not the work of a few rogue units—it was policy, sanctioned at the highest levels and implemented across the security apparatus.
The most notorious example came during the Battle of Algiers in 1956-57, when French paratroopers under General Jacques Massu dismantled the FLN's urban network in the capital. They did so through mass arrests, systematic torture, and extrajudicial executions. They broke the FLN's organization in Algiers. They also created a moral stain that France has never fully acknowledged.
Beyond torture, the French pursued a policy of population displacement on a massive scale. They destroyed over eight thousand villages and forced more than two million Algerians into what were euphemistically called "regroupment camps"—concentration camps, in plain language. The logic was to separate the guerrillas from the civilian population that supported them, the water from the fish. The human cost was staggering.
The Republic Falls
The Algerian War did not just change Algeria. It destroyed the French Fourth Republic.
The Fourth Republic, established after World War II, had a weak executive and a fragmented parliament. Governments rose and fell with dizzying speed—twenty-one different cabinets in twelve years. The Algerian crisis exposed all its weaknesses.
By May 1958, France was paralyzed. The government in Paris could not end the war, could not win it, and could not control the military officers and settlers in Algeria who were increasingly taking matters into their own hands. On May 13, a mob of pieds-noirs and military officers seized government buildings in Algiers and demanded that General Charles de Gaulle, the hero of Free France, return to power.
Paratroopers prepared to drop on Paris itself. The Fourth Republic, facing a military coup from its own army, capitulated. De Gaulle was invited to form a government and given authority to draft a new constitution.
The Fifth Republic that emerged gave the president far greater powers than his predecessors had enjoyed. De Gaulle could now act decisively, without depending on the shifting coalitions of parliament. The question was: what would he decide to do with Algeria?
De Gaulle's Pivot
When de Gaulle returned to power, the pieds-noirs and the military officers who had brought him there believed he would keep Algeria French forever. He had famously declared "Je vous ai compris"—"I have understood you"—to cheering crowds in Algiers.
They misunderstood him.
De Gaulle was not a sentimentalist. He was a realist who understood that France was bleeding itself dry in Algeria, losing friends internationally, and poisoning its own institutions with the corruption of colonial war. The United States, France's crucial Cold War ally, had shifted from supporting France to abstaining in United Nations votes on Algeria. French prestige was collapsing. And despite military victories in the field, the FLN showed no signs of giving up.
In September 1959, de Gaulle publicly acknowledged for the first time that Algerians had the right to self-determination. The effect was explosive. Pieds-noirs felt betrayed. Military officers who had risked their careers to bring de Gaulle to power now saw him abandoning everything they had fought for.
In January 1960, during what became known as "Barricades Week," pieds-noirs erected barricades in Algiers and refused to submit to government authority. In December 1960, massive demonstrations swept through Algiers and other cities—but this time, the demonstrators were Algerian Muslims, and they were marching for independence. The writing was on the wall.
The Secret Army
Not everyone accepted de Gaulle's decision. In 1961, four French generals attempted a military coup in Algiers. They seized key installations and announced they were taking control of Algeria to prevent its abandonment. In Paris, de Gaulle appeared on television in his general's uniform and appealed directly to the conscript soldiers:
"Soldiers! I order you not to obey!"
They obeyed de Gaulle, not the putschists. The coup collapsed within four days.
But the most dangerous opponents went underground. The Organisation armée secrète—the Secret Army Organization, or OAS—was formed from military personnel, pieds-noirs, and others who refused to accept Algerian independence. They launched a campaign of terrorism that targeted not just Algerian nationalists but anyone who supported de Gaulle's policy.
The OAS set off bombs in Paris and Algiers alike. They assassinated French officials, murdered Algerian civilians, and attempted to kill de Gaulle himself multiple times. The most famous attempt came in August 1962 at Petit-Clamart, when OAS gunmen sprayed de Gaulle's car with over a hundred bullets. The general and his wife escaped unharmed, though the tires were shot out. De Gaulle reportedly complained about the shooters' marksmanship.
The OAS ultimately failed. But in its final months, as independence became inevitable, it pursued a scorched-earth policy of its own—destroying infrastructure, burning libraries and archives, and killing indiscriminately in a final spasm of rage.
The Évian Accords and Independence
Negotiations between France and the FLN had begun secretly in 1960 and proceeded fitfully, interrupted by the coup attempt and the OAS violence. Finally, in March 1962, the two sides reached agreement at Évian-les-Bains, a resort town on the French shore of Lake Geneva.
The Évian Accords provided for an immediate ceasefire, a transitional period, and a referendum on independence. France would retain certain military bases temporarily and would continue nuclear testing in the Sahara. European residents would have three years to choose between Algerian citizenship and foreigner status.
The French public, exhausted by eight years of war, voted overwhelmingly to ratify the accords—ninety-one percent in favor. In Algeria, the referendum on independence three months later was even more one-sided: 99.72 percent voted for independence. On July 5, 1962, Algeria became an independent nation.
The Exodus
What followed independence was not peace but panic.
Within months, nearly nine hundred thousand pieds-noirs fled Algeria for France. Some had lived in Algeria for generations—their families had been there longer than many American families have been in America. But faced with the prospect of living as a minority in an independent Algeria, under a government led by their former enemies, they chose exile.
The French government was unprepared for this exodus. It had assumed that most pieds-noirs would stay, that the transition would be gradual. Instead, it faced a refugee crisis of staggering proportions. Families arrived in Marseilles with suitcases and nothing else. Entire communities transplanted themselves to the south of France, bringing their culture, their cuisine, and their bitter memories.
Many pieds-noirs never forgave de Gaulle. Many never accepted that France had lost. The trauma of dispossession would shape French politics for generations, feeding far-right movements that promised to restore French glory and reject the immigrants—including Algerians—who had followed them to the metropole.
The Harkis: Betrayed
The most tragic fate befell those who had fought on the French side.
Throughout the war, France had recruited Muslim Algerians to serve as auxiliaries. Known as Harkis, they served as scouts, translators, guards, and soldiers. At the war's peak, there were over sixty thousand Harkis under arms—more than the FLN had fighters.
The Évian Accords included provisions protecting those who had worked for France from reprisals. The FLN formally agreed that no actions would be taken against them.
The agreement was not honored.
After independence, the Harkis were systematically hunted down. They were denounced as traitors, collaborators with the enemy. Many were lynched by mobs. Others were taken by FLN forces, tortured, and executed. Some were forced to swallow their French military decorations before being killed. Estimates of the death toll range from thirty thousand to one hundred fifty thousand.
The French government, incredibly, ordered its officers not to help the Harkis escape. The official policy was to leave them behind. Some officers defied orders and smuggled their former comrades onto ships and planes. About ninety thousand Harkis and their families made it to France.
There, they found themselves unwelcome. The government housed them in transit camps, some of which remained open for decades. They were not treated as the veterans they were but as embarrassing reminders of a war France wanted to forget. Their children and grandchildren, born in France, would become part of the complex fabric of France's North African immigrant community—neither fully accepted nor able to return to a homeland that considered them traitors.
The Toll
How many died in the Algerian War?
The question is surprisingly difficult to answer. French military deaths can be counted with reasonable precision: about 25,600 soldiers, plus another 6,000 European civilians. But Algerian deaths are subject to enormous uncertainty.
The French government long claimed that around 350,000 Algerians died during the war. The Algerian government claimed 1.5 million martyrs. Modern historians generally estimate between 400,000 and one million Algerian deaths, with significant uncertainty about how many died from combat, reprisals, displacement, or the general collapse of civil order.
Beyond the dead, the war left deep wounds. Over two million Algerians had been displaced from their homes into camps. Over eight thousand villages had been destroyed. The infrastructure of an entire society had been disrupted. The trauma would echo through generations.
In France, the war left different scars. Hundreds of thousands of young Frenchmen had served as conscripts in Algeria. Many had witnessed or participated in atrocities. The country that had judged the Nazis at Nuremberg had systematically tortured prisoners. The republic that proclaimed liberty, equality, and fraternity had maintained a colonial system built on inequality and repression.
Memory and Forgetting
For decades, France did not call the Algerian conflict a war at all. Officially, it was "the events in Algeria" or "operations for the maintenance of order." The term "war" would have implied that the FLN was a legitimate belligerent rather than a criminal organization, that Algeria was a foreign country rather than three French departments in rebellion.
It was not until 1999 that the French National Assembly officially recognized that a "war" had taken place in Algeria. The formal acknowledgment of torture came even later. In 2018, President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged that the French state had used torture "systematically" during the conflict—the first French president to do so.
In Algeria, the war became the founding myth of the nation. The FLN transformed from a revolutionary movement into the dominant political party, ruling Algeria as essentially a one-party state for decades. The war of independence was sacrosanct, a subject to be celebrated but never critically examined. The civil war of the 1990s, when the military government and Islamist insurgents killed over a hundred thousand people, would be called "the black decade"—but never connected publicly to the violence that had birthed the nation.
The pieds-noirs kept their memories alive in the south of France, in cultural associations and annual commemorations and bitter political activism. Their grandchildren, three and four generations removed from Africa, still argue about what was lost. Some historians have suggested that the trauma of the pieds-noirs, transmitted through families and communities, contributed to the rise of the far right in France—particularly in the Mediterranean regions where the refugees settled.
And the Harkis waited for acknowledgment that never quite came. In 2021, President Macron asked for their forgiveness and acknowledged that France had "failed in its duty" to those who had trusted it. For many, the apology came too late. Entire lives had been lived in the shadow of betrayal.
Lessons of Algeria
The Algerian War offers no comfortable lessons.
It demonstrates that superior firepower does not guarantee victory in counterinsurgency warfare. France won almost every battle and lost the war. It shows that torture, beyond being morally catastrophic, is also strategically counterproductive—each atrocity creates new enemies and alienates potential allies. It reveals how colonial systems, built on fundamental inequality, eventually generate the resistance that destroys them.
But it also shows the terrible costs of revolutionary violence. The FLN did not simply fight the French; it terrorized its own population into compliance, killed tens of thousands of rival nationalists, and built a postcolonial state that would prove authoritarian and corrupt. The "clean" narrative of liberation struggle obscures the moral complexity of what actually happened.
Perhaps the deepest lesson is about the impossibility of maintaining forever what cannot be justified. The French fiction that Algeria was France—that a system of legal inequality could coexist with democratic principles, that millions of people could be permanently relegated to second-class status in their own homeland—could only be sustained by violence. And violence, in the end, corrodes everything it touches: the occupier as much as the occupied, the torturer as much as the tortured, the mother country as much as the colony.
The Algerian War ended over sixty years ago. France and Algeria have diplomatic relations, trade agreements, and millions of citizens with roots on both sides of the Mediterranean. But the war is not really over. It lives in the housing projects of Marseilles and Lyon, in the politics of immigration and integration, in the debates over French identity and the meaning of the republic. It lives in the silence of the Harkis and the bitterness of the pieds-noirs and the complicated pride of Algerian independence.
Some wars end with treaties. Some wars end only when everyone who remembers them is dead. And some wars, perhaps, never end at all.