November 1954-March 1962
Although nationalist agitation and rebellion had often marked the history of Algeria, the series of attacks on police stations and government offices that occurred on the night of November 1, 1954, chiefly in remote areas of Constantine Province, passed almost without notice in Paris. By 1956, however, large tracts of the countryside had fallen under rebel control, and a terrorist campaign had paralyzed Algiers.
The French response to the crisis was hamstrung by the one million Algerians of European extraction, the pieds noirs, who sabotaged reforms designed to give Muslims a stake in French Algeria. Backed by an important section of the French army, the pieds noirs locked French policy into a sterile search for a "military" victory over the insurgents.
On an operational level, the French army applied
counterinsurgency techniques with brutal efficiency. Barriers built along the frontiers of Morocco and Tunisia blocked resupply and reinforcement of the Armée de libération nationale (ALN) commands. Inside Algeria, over one million Muslims were "resettled" in government camps, while French officers organized militias to deny remote villages to the insurgents. Meanwhile, helicopter-borne elite units of paratroops and foreign legionnaires swooped down on ALN companies, often guided to their targets by French-led Muslim commandos who stalked ALN units in the countryside. Successful offensives in 1959 demonstrated beyond doubt that the French army had the military situation well in hand.
The impression of French military victory was deceptive, however, for torture and "collective responsibility"—random executions carried out in villages where "terrorist" activity had taken place—drove moderates and many ordinary Muslims into the arms of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). Outgunned on the battlefield, the FLN won the political and diplomatic war hands down as Arab states recognized the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic. The United Nations rejected Paris's contention that Algeria was an internal French problem and voted to debate the issue. Even France's "Anglo-Saxon" allies, concerned that the Algerian situation was pushing France to the brink of civil war, pressed Paris to end the conflict.
On May 13, 1958, a pieds noirs rebellion in Algiers supported by the army and the threat of civil war brought General
Charles de Gaulle to power in Paris; as a last resort he initiated negotiations that led to the signing of a peace accord at Évian on March 18, 1962. The war cost the French army 15,000 dead, whereas Muslim casualties were estimated to be between 300,000 and 400,000. Another 30,000 to 150,000 Muslims perished in the civil war that followed independence.
Douglas Porch
