The Algerian War of Independence: Fire, Blood, and the Birth of a Nation (1954-1962)

Introduction

The Algerian War of Independence stands as one of the most consequential, brutal, and morally complex conflicts of the twentieth century. Fought between 1954 and 1962, the war pitted a disciplined but outgunned national liberation movement against one of the most powerful military forces in the Western world, a France that refused, at first, to even acknowledge that a war was underway. For the French government, what was happening in Algeria was not a war of decolonization but rather an internal police matter, a domestic insurrection to be suppressed. For the hundreds of thousands of Algerian fighters, and for the millions of ordinary Algerians who bore the weight of French reprisals, bombing campaigns, displacement, and mass internment, it was something altogether different: a struggle for survival, for dignity, and for the right of a people to determine their own future.

The war shook France to its foundations. It destroyed the Fourth Republic, brought Charles de Gaulle back to power, nearly provoked a military coup in Paris, spawned a terrorist organization on French soil, and forced a profound reckoning with the nature of French colonialism and French identity itself. In Algeria, the war killed somewhere between 400,000 and more than one million people, depending on whose count one accepts, a figure that remains politically charged more than six decades later. It produced some of the twentieth century's most haunting literature and cinema, including Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth and Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers. And it left behind legacies of trauma, displacement, and unresolved grievance that continue to shape Algerian and French society to the present day.

To understand the war, one must understand how it began, which means reaching back not to 1954 but to 1830, when French forces landed at Sidi Fredj on the Mediterranean coast and launched a conquest that would last more than a century.

The French Conquest and Colonization of Algeria

France invaded Algeria in June 1830, ostensibly to suppress Barbary piracy and to avenge a slight delivered by the Ottoman Dey of Algiers, who had struck the French consul with a fly whisk during a diplomatic dispute. The real motivations were imperial: a French monarchy in political difficulty at home sought military glory abroad. Within days, the French had captured Algiers. What they thought would be a quick punitive expedition became something far more permanent and far more violent.

The conquest of Algeria was neither swift nor bloodless. The French encountered fierce resistance from the indigenous Algerian population, resistance that was at times organized under effective military leadership. The most significant early leader of resistance was Abd el-Kader, an Islamic scholar and military commander who unified a broad coalition of tribal groups and fought the French for fifteen years, from 1832 to 1847. Abd el-Kader's campaigns were characterized by sophisticated military strategy and a code of conduct toward prisoners that earned him admiration even among his enemies. The French response was not so restrained. General Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, who became governor-general of Algeria in 1840, instituted a policy of total war, including the infamous razzias, systematic raids on villages and settlements designed to destroy crops, livestock, and any means of support for the population. Most horrific were the enfumades, or smokings out, in which French troops sealed Algerians inside caves and lit fires at the entrances, suffocating them. Contemporaneous French accounts documented these atrocities, and some French politicians and writers condemned them at the time, but the conquest continued and accelerated.

By the time Abd el-Kader surrendered in 1847, the damage to Algerian society was enormous. Disease, famine caused by the destruction of agriculture, and direct military violence had killed enormous numbers of Algerians. Some historians estimate that the Algerian population fell from roughly three million in 1830 to fewer than two and a half million by mid-century, though estimates vary. The displacement of communities, the destruction of traditional land tenure, and the fragmentation of tribal structures left Algerian society deeply weakened.

Into this weakened society, France poured settlers. The colonization of Algeria was a deliberate project of demographic transformation. The French government encouraged and subsidized emigration to Algeria, distributing land that had been seized from Algerians. The settler community grew steadily over the course of the nineteenth century, drawn from France but also from Spain, Italy, Malta, and elsewhere across the Mediterranean. These settlers became known as the pieds-noirs, literally "black feet," though the origin and precise meaning of the term are disputed. Some say it referred to the black boots the settlers wore; others offer other explanations. What is not disputed is that the pied-noir community developed a fierce, distinctive identity, rooted in Algeria but claiming French citizenship and European culture.

By the mid-twentieth century, the pied-noir population numbered approximately one million people in a total Algerian population of approximately nine million. They lived in separate worlds from the Muslim majority, enjoying far superior educational opportunities, economic advantages, and political representation. The legal and social structure of colonial Algeria was designed to preserve this hierarchy. The Code de l'Indigénat, a special code of law applied only to native Algerians and not to settlers, subjected Algerians to a range of restrictions and punishments that would have been illegal if applied to French citizens. Algerians could be fined or imprisoned for offenses as minor as holding an unauthorized public gathering or failing to show proper deference to French officials.

Most significantly, the question of Algerian political status was one of profound ambiguity. Algeria was formally constituted not as a colony, in the conventional imperial sense of the term, but as three departments of France, the equivalent of counties or provinces of metropolitan France. This legal fiction had enormous consequences. It meant that French governments could claim that Algeria was simply a part of France itself, that defending French Algeria was no different in principle from defending Normandy or Brittany. It gave the pied-noir community a powerful legal and rhetorical weapon: they were not colonists but Frenchmen living on French soil. And it meant that any Algerian political movement that sought independence from France was, by the logic of French law, seeking the secession of French territory, an act akin to treason or rebellion against the state.

In reality, of course, Algeria was a colony in every functional sense. The indigenous Muslim majority was governed by a separate legal system, excluded from political representation on equal terms, denied economic opportunity, and subjected to cultural suppression. The French language and French culture were the languages and culture of power; Arabic and Berber traditions were marginalized. Algerian Islam was observed under conditions of official suspicion. The land that sustained the pied-noir community had, in enormous measure, been taken from Algerians.

The Seeds of Revolt: from the First World War to the Second

Algerian nationalism did not emerge suddenly in the 1950s. It developed over decades, shaped by multiple currents: Islamic reformism, pan-Arabism, French communist and socialist politics, and the experience of Algerians fighting in the French army in the First World War.

The First World War brought approximately 173,000 Algerian soldiers to fight for France on the Western Front, along with hundreds of thousands of Algerian workers drafted to labor in French factories. Many of these men returned to Algeria with altered perspectives. They had fought alongside Frenchmen as equals on the battlefield; they had been told they were fighting for liberty and the rights of peoples. They returned to a system that denied them those same rights.

Various Algerian political movements emerged in the interwar period. Messali Hadj, a charismatic labor organizer who had spent years in France working alongside communists and other militants, founded the Étoile Nord-Africaine in 1926, which explicitly demanded Algerian independence, a position well to the left of more moderate reformers who sought equality within the French system. Other movements, associated with the Islamic reform tradition of Sheikh Ben Badis, emphasized Algerian cultural and religious identity, famously declaring that "Islam is my religion, Arabic is my language, Algeria is my country." The more moderate current sought full political rights for Algerians within the French system, not independence. What virtually all currents shared was a growing awareness that Algerian Muslims were systematically subordinated and that this subordination would not be ended without organized political action.

The Second World War brought another massive Algerian mobilization for France. Some 233,000 Algerians served in the French armed forces during the conflict, and they participated in major campaigns including the liberation of France itself, fighting under the Cross of Lorraine alongside Free French units. Algerian soldiers were present at the liberation of Rome in 1944 and were among the forces that landed in Provence. Once again, Algerians fought for France and for the declared ideals of liberty and human dignity. Once again, they returned home to a system that denied them those ideals.

The Sétif and Guelma Massacres of 1945: a Turning Point

The event that more than any other poisoned the relationship between France and Algeria in the post-war period took place on May 8, 1945, Victory in Europe Day, the very day that Allied leaders were celebrating the defeat of Nazi Germany and the triumph of liberty over fascism.

In the market town of Sétif in eastern Algeria, a large crowd gathered for a public march, combining celebration of the Allied victory with Algerian nationalist demands. The crowd carried Algerian nationalist flags and banners calling for the release of Messali Hadj, who had been imprisoned by the colonial authorities. As the procession moved through the town, a French police officer ordered the nationalist banners put away. In the confrontation that followed, shots were fired. The precise sequence of events remains disputed, but the result was an explosion of violence. In Sétif and the surrounding region, enraged Algerians attacked European settlers. Approximately 102 European settlers were killed in the initial violence.

The French response was catastrophic. Colonial authorities declared a state of emergency and unleashed military and paramilitary forces against the Algerian Muslim population of the Sétif and Guelma regions. The Foreign Legion, Senegalese troops, aircraft, and the naval cruiser Duguay-Trouin were deployed. Villages were bombed from the air. Men were rounded up and shot. Colonial militias known as caïds and groupes mobiles hunted down Algerians in the countryside. In Guelma, a local militia organized by European settlers conducted systematic killings with the tacit approval of the prefect.

The killing continued for weeks. The official French government figure for Algerian deaths was approximately 1,020. Algerian historians and the Algerian government have consistently claimed a figure of 45,000 killed. Most independent historians and researchers have put the figure somewhere between 6,000 and 15,000 Algerian deaths, with the Sciences Po Mass Violence and Resistance research network suggesting figures of 5,000 to 6,000 in the Sétif-Kherrata-Bougie area and 1,500 to 2,000 in the Guelma region. Whatever the precise figure, the massacres were a defining traumatic event in Algerian history.

For many Algerians, Sétif was the moment when hope for reform within the French system definitively died. The lesson appeared inescapable: France would not grant Algerian rights through negotiation or political pressure. France would respond to any manifestation of Algerian nationalism with overwhelming violence. If liberation was to come, it would have to be won by force.

Ahmed Ben Bella, who would become one of the founders of the FLN and the first president of independent Algeria, later reflected on Sétif. He was a decorated soldier who had fought for France and who had been awarded the Médaille Militaire by French General de Gaulle. He said that Sétif killed his faith in France and drove him toward the conclusion that independence could only be achieved through armed struggle.

The Founding of the Fln and the Launch of War

In the years following Sétif, Algerian nationalism grew more militant and more fragmented. Messali Hadj's movement continued, but it was increasingly challenged by younger, more radical figures who rejected his leadership. A group of nine men, who came to be known as the historic chefs, or historic leaders, of the Algerian revolution, concluded that existing organizations were incapable of achieving independence and that a new, clandestine revolutionary organization was needed. Among them were Ben Bella, Mourad Didouche, Rabah Bitat, Mostefa Ben Boulaïd, Larbi Ben M'Hidi, Belkacem Krim, Mohamed Boudiaf, Mohamed Khider, and Hocine Aït Ahmed. In October 1954, they established the Front de Libération Nationale, the FLN, and its military wing, the Armée de Libération Nationale, the ALN.

The FLN launched its war of independence with a coordinated series of attacks across Algeria in the early hours of November 1, 1954, the Catholic feast of All Saints' Day. The date was chosen in part because many French administrators and soldiers would be on holiday. More symbolically, the date would become known in Algerian history as Toussaint Rouge, Red All Saints' Day.

The attacks were coordinated across five regions of Algeria, targeting military installations, warehouses, public utilities, and police stations. The violence killed seven people, most of them Algerian, and wounded a few others. By the standards of what was to come, the scale was tiny. The French government's initial response was dismissive. Pierre Mendès France, the prime minister, and François Mitterrand, the interior minister, were categorical: France would not negotiate with those who sought to divide France. There would be no compromise on French Algeria.

The FLN's declaration of November 1, 1954 laid out the aims of the revolution in stark terms: national independence, the restoration of the Algerian state within the framework of Islamic principles, and respect for all fundamental freedoms without distinction of race or religion. It called on all Algerians to join the struggle and called on foreign nations to support Algeria's cause before the United Nations.

In its early phase, the FLN faced enormous challenges. The organization was poorly armed, chronically short of funds, and faced with the full repressive apparatus of the French colonial state. French forces in Algeria numbered over 50,000 at the start of the war and would be reinforced to more than 400,000 and eventually to some 500,000 by its peak years. The ALN never matched those numbers, operating instead as a guerrilla force reliant on hit-and-run tactics, popular support, and what it could obtain from sympathetic neighboring states, particularly Tunisia and Morocco after those countries achieved their independence in 1956.

The FLN was ruthless not only toward French targets but toward rival Algerian movements. In 1955 and 1956, the FLN effectively destroyed the competing Mouvement National Algérien, Messali Hadj's organization, in a bitter and violent internal conflict. The FLN also used violence against Algerians whom it regarded as collaborators or insufficiently committed to independence. This internal violence was part of the harsh logic of revolutionary warfare, but it left scars on Algerian society that persisted long after independence.

The Battle of Algiers: Terror, Torture, and Moral Catastrophe

The period from 1956 to 1957 brought the war into the capital itself in a form that shocked the world and illuminated, with terrible clarity, the moral stakes of colonial war. The Battle of Algiers, as it became known, was simultaneously an FLN urban bombing campaign and a French counter-insurgency campaign characterized by systematic torture and extrajudicial killing.

The FLN's urban network in Algiers was led by Saadi Yacef, who oversaw a cell structure that recruited bombers, couriers, and operatives throughout the city, particularly in the dense, winding neighborhoods of the Casbah, the old Ottoman-era Arab quarter. In the summer of 1956, the FLN began a campaign of bombings targeting European civilian spaces, including cafés, dance halls, and beaches. The bombings were designed to terrorize the European population, to demonstrate that the colonial state could not protect its citizens, and to generate international attention for the Algerian cause.

On August 30, 1956, three bombs exploded in civilian venues in Algiers, killing dozens of people. The French response included reprisal killings by European settlers and vigilante groups. The cycle of violence escalated rapidly. In September 1956, FLN operatives bombed the Milk Bar café and the Cafétéria on the Rue Michelet in central Algiers, killing three people and wounding fifty, many of them young women whose limbs were torn off in the blasts. The bombings were carried out by FLN women operatives, including Zohra Drif, Djamila Bouazza, and Samia Lakhdari, who were able to pass through French checkpoints because they did not fit the profile of suspected militants.

In January 1957, faced with an escalating FLN campaign and a general strike that the FLN had called to demonstrate its organizational capacity, the French military commander General Raoul Salan transferred police powers in Algiers to General Jacques Massu's Tenth Parachute Division. Massu deployed approximately 3,200 paratroopers, supplemented by other forces, to take control of the Casbah and systematically dismantle the FLN urban network.

What followed was effective, by the narrow military definition of effectiveness, and catastrophic by any broader moral measure. Massu's men used interrogation methods that included sleep deprivation, beatings, electric shock applied to sensitive parts of the body through a device the soldiers called the gégène, and waterboarding. They detained suspects without legal process, held them in unofficial locations, and killed some of them without trial. The practice of the use of torture was systematic, organized at the command level, and subsequently documented by military and medical personnel who participated in it, as well as by survivors. The torture was not a rogue practice conducted by a few sadistic soldiers but a deliberate method sanctioned at senior levels of the military command.

The campaign succeeded in breaking the FLN's urban network by the end of 1957. Saadi Yacef was captured in September 1957. His deputy, Ali la Pointe, was killed in October 1957 when French paratroopers demolished the building in which he was hiding, killing him and several others. The FLN's capacity to conduct bombing operations in Algiers was effectively destroyed.

But the moral and political damage was immense. Evidence of torture leaked to the French press and to international media. The journalist Henri Alleg, a French communist who had been detained and tortured, managed to smuggle out a manuscript that was published in 1958 as La Question, a firsthand account of what the French military had done to him. The book was immediately seized by French authorities, but not before it had been widely read and its contents publicized. Prominent French intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre, condemned the torture. Catholic clergy and religious organizations protested. Military officers who had participated wrote accounts of what they had witnessed, struggling with their own complicity.

The Battle of Algiers demonstrated a fundamental tension at the heart of the French position in Algeria. France's declared values, the values of the Revolution, of liberte, egalite, fraternite, of the Rights of Man, were being systematically violated in the name of preserving French Algeria. The contradiction could be papered over for a time, but it could not be sustained indefinitely.

International Dimensions and the Role of Frantz Fanon

The Algerian war was never purely a bilateral conflict between France and Algeria. From the beginning, the FLN sought and received support from sympathetic Arab states, particularly Egypt under President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who provided weapons, training facilities, and diplomatic support. The 1956 Suez Crisis, in which France and Britain joined Israel in attacking Egypt, was partly motivated by French frustration with Egyptian support for the FLN, and its disastrous diplomatic outcome weakened France while boosting Nasser and, by extension, the Algerian cause.

The FLN prosecuted an aggressive diplomatic campaign at the United Nations, where Algeria's cause was taken up by the Non-Aligned Movement and by newly independent African and Asian states. The UN General Assembly repeatedly debated the Algerian question, and while France used its position to prevent binding resolutions, the international political pressure was relentless. The war was reframing Algeria not as an internal French matter but as a classic colonial conflict, a matter of a subjected people's right to self-determination.

Nowhere was the intellectual and moral dimension of the Algerian struggle articulated more powerfully than in the work of Frantz Fanon. Born in Martinique in 1925, Fanon was a psychiatrist and philosopher who had fought for Free France in the Second World War and who came to Algeria in 1953 to head the psychiatric department at the Blida-Joinville Hospital. His clinical experience in colonial Algeria, treating both French torturers suffering psychological breakdown and Algerian victims of torture, gave him an intimate understanding of the pathologies of colonialism.

Fanon joined the FLN in 1956 and became one of its most important international representatives and ideological voices. His 1961 work, Les Damnés de la Terre, published in English as The Wretched of the Earth, with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, was one of the defining texts of twentieth-century anti-colonial thought. Written in ten weeks as Fanon was dying of leukemia, the book argued that colonialism was not merely a political and economic system but a psychological one, that it imposed a condition of systematic dehumanization on the colonized, stripping them of culture, identity, and agency. Fanon argued that the violence of anti-colonial revolution was not merely a tactical necessity but had a psychological dimension: it was through the act of armed resistance that the colonized broke the bonds of internalized subjugation and reclaimed their humanity.

The Wretched of the Earth was controversial in its time and remains so, particularly its discussion of the psychological functions of revolutionary violence. But its analysis of the structures of colonial domination was widely recognized as brilliant, and it became essential reading for liberation movements across Africa, Asia, the Americas, and beyond. Fanon died in December 1961, months before Algeria achieved the independence he had devoted his final years to advancing.

The international context of the war was also shaped by the Cold War. The United States, which officially supported anti-colonialism as a matter of declared principle, found itself caught between its commitment to decolonization and its alliance with France within NATO. American policy oscillated and equivocated, sometimes supporting UN resolutions sympathetic to Algeria, sometimes backing France to preserve the Atlantic alliance. The Soviet Union provided rhetorical support for the FLN at the UN and in international forums. Cuba, under Fidel Castro after 1959, offered support to the FLN. By the late 1950s, the Algerian cause had become a cause célèbre of the global left and of the Non-Aligned Movement.

The Fall of the Fourth Republic and de Gaulle's Return

By 1958, the French Fourth Republic was in terminal crisis, brought down in significant measure by the Algerian war. The war was enormously expensive, both in lives and in money. It was consuming the careers of politicians who could neither win it nor end it. The army, whose prestige and sense of mission had been battered by the catastrophic defeat at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam in 1954 and which had then gone to Algeria with a determination never to suffer such a humiliation again, was developing its own political agenda, deeply suspicious of civilian politicians whom it viewed as cowardly and treacherous.

In May 1958, the crisis came to a head. A political deadlock in Paris over who would form the next government, combined with rising anxiety among pied-noirs and elements of the military that France was about to negotiate away French Algeria, produced a dramatic rupture. On May 13, 1958, a mob of European settlers and their supporters stormed the Government General building in Algiers. Military leaders in Algeria, including General Massu, formed a Committee of Public Safety and effectively seized control of the territory. They demanded that Charles de Gaulle be brought back to power in Paris, believing that de Gaulle, the hero of the wartime resistance, would be committed to maintaining French Algeria.

The political threat of a military coup, or even of a paratrooper descent on Paris, was real enough to force the hand of the French Assembly. Charles de Gaulle was invested as prime minister on June 1, 1958, and within weeks had engineered a referendum that approved a new constitution and established the Fifth Republic, with vastly expanded presidential powers. De Gaulle became the first president of the Fifth Republic.

The army and the pieds-noirs who had helped bring de Gaulle to power believed they had saved French Algeria. They would be profoundly and bitterly mistaken.

De Gaulle and the Path to Negotiations

De Gaulle's handling of the Algerian question was one of the most remarkable political feats of his extraordinary career. A man of supreme tactical intelligence and ruthless pragmatism beneath the grandeur of his rhetoric, de Gaulle had understood, perhaps earlier than almost any other senior French figure, that France could not win the war in Algeria in any strategically meaningful sense. Even if French forces were to suppress the military capacity of the ALN, they could not suppress the political will of nine million Algerians, and they could not sustain indefinitely the moral and diplomatic costs of colonial repression.

In September 1959, de Gaulle made a dramatic public shift, announcing that Algeria's future would be determined by self-determination, a referendum to be held after peace had been restored. This declaration electrified Algeria and infuriated the European settler community and much of the French military. The men who had summoned de Gaulle to power to save French Algeria felt betrayed.

Their reaction was swift and violent. In January 1960, hardline pieds-noirs and their military allies organized what became known as the Semaine des Barricades, the Week of the Barricades, in Algiers. For a week, European settlers and rebel soldiers barricaded themselves behind street fortifications in the city, challenging the authority of de Gaulle's government. The crisis was resolved without the military confrontation that many had feared, but it signaled the depth of fury within the pied-noir community.

A far more serious challenge came in April 1961, when four senior French generals, Maurice Challe, Raoul Salan, Edmond Jouhaud, and André Zeller, launched a military putsch in Algiers, seizing control of the city and announcing that they were taking power in the name of preserving French Algeria. For three days, the fate of the French state hung in the balance. Conscript soldiers, many of whom were listening to de Gaulle's broadcasts on transistor radios, refused to follow the putschist generals. The coup collapsed within four days.

The aftermath of the failed putsch transformed the political landscape. Generals Challe and Zeller surrendered and were tried. Salan and Jouhaud went underground, and Salan became the operational leader of the Organisation de l'Armée Secrète, the OAS, which would become the most dangerous terrorist organization France had ever faced.

The Organisation de L'armée Secrète: the Terror of the Desperate

The OAS, founded in February 1961 by European ultras and dissident military officers, represented the last desperate stand of those who refused to accept Algerian independence. It drew its membership from among the most committed pieds-noirs, deserting soldiers, and right-wing French nationalists in metropolitan France. Its strategy was one of unbridled terrorism: if it could create enough chaos and bloodshed, if it could trigger a cycle of violence that would make negotiation impossible, perhaps it could prevent what was beginning to look inevitable.

The OAS conducted hundreds of bombings, assassinations, and attacks in Algeria and in France. It targeted FLN leaders, liberal French officials, moderate pieds-noirs who accepted that independence was coming, and eventually indiscriminately targeted Algerian civilians. It attempted to assassinate de Gaulle on multiple occasions, most famously in the Petit-Clamart ambush of August 1962, when gunmen riddled de Gaulle's car with bullets but the general escaped unharmed. The novelist Frederick Forsyth later fictionalized one of these assassination plots in his thriller The Day of the Jackal.

The OAS killed approximately 2,700 people between May 1961 and September 1962, of whom roughly 2,400 were Algerian. It engaged in attacks on infrastructure, schools, and hospitals. In the spring and summer of 1962, as it became clear that Algerian independence was imminent and that the vast majority of the pied-noir population was preparing to leave, OAS factions adopted a scorched-earth policy, destroying what they could not take with them, blowing up buildings, burning libraries, and demolishing infrastructure.

The OAS was eventually broken, partly by French intelligence services and partly because its social base, the pied-noir community it claimed to represent, had no appetite for a suicidal last stand. The great majority of pieds-noirs had no desire to live under Algerian rule and were preparing to leave for France.

The Évian Accords and Independence

Negotiations between the French government and the FLN began seriously after de Gaulle's 1959 self-determination announcement and were conducted through secret back-channel meetings as well as formal public sessions. The talks were long, complicated, and frequently close to breaking down, over questions including the status of the pied-noir community, the fate of Algerians who had served France, guarantees for French economic interests in Algeria (particularly the newly discovered oil and gas resources of the Sahara), and the timing and mechanics of the transition to independence.

The negotiations culminated at the Grand Hotel at Évian-les-Bains on the French shore of Lake Geneva. On March 18, 1962, the French government and the FLN signed the Évian Accords, a complex document that provided for an immediate ceasefire, a transitional period of French administration, and a referendum in which Algerians would vote on independence. The accords also guaranteed rights for the European minority who chose to remain in Algeria and for Algerians who had served France.

On April 8, 1962, French voters approved the Évian Accords in a referendum by an overwhelming majority. On July 1, 1962, Algerians voted in their own referendum, with approximately six million votes in favor of independence and a tiny number against. On July 5, 1962, Algeria declared its formal independence, choosing a date that held bitter symbolic resonance: it was the 132nd anniversary of the French landing at Sidi Fredj that had begun the conquest.

The joy in Algeria was immense. Huge crowds filled the streets of Algiers and every other major Algerian city. After 132 years of French rule and eight years of devastating war, independence had arrived.

The Repatriation of the Pieds-Noirs

The Évian Accords had sought to provide guarantees that would encourage the European minority to remain in Algeria as citizens of the new state. These provisions were overtaken by events. The OAS terrorism of the final months of the war had poisoned any possibility of reconciliation between the communities. Algerian Muslims who had endured decades of colonial oppression and eight years of brutal war had little reason to extend generous treatment to the Europeans who had benefited from that oppression. And the pieds-noirs themselves, facing an uncertain future in a country now governed by those they had fought, decided overwhelmingly to leave.

The departure was sudden and overwhelming. In the spring and summer of 1962, roughly 800,000 pieds-noirs, the vast majority of the European settler community, left Algeria for France, most within a matter of weeks. They arrived in France with whatever they could carry, abandoning homes, businesses, farms, and cemeteries. France was unprepared for the scale of the influx. The government had assumed, based on Évian's provisions, that many pieds-noirs would remain. Instead, they left almost en masse.

The experience of exile was shattering for many. Pieds-noirs arrived in France to find themselves strangers in the country whose name they had claimed. They were Algerians by birth and culture, speaking the distinctive accent of the Mediterranean colony, attached to a land that was no longer theirs. French metropolitan society was not always welcoming. The pieds-noirs brought with them memories, grievances, and a fierce nostalgia for a lost world, a nostalgia that shaped French politics for generations.

The pied-noir diaspora settled primarily in the south of France, particularly in Marseille, Montpellier, and other Mediterranean cities. They formed tight communities, maintained their distinctive culture and identity, and organized politically, becoming a vocal and influential constituency that resisted any French acknowledgment of the abuses of colonialism. Their lobbying power contributed to the French government's long reluctance to officially confront the history of the Algerian war.

The Harkis and Their Abandonment

Among the most tragic stories to emerge from the end of the Algerian war was the fate of the harkis, the term used for Algerians who had served in various capacities on the French side during the war. At the war's height, the French military had enrolled approximately 200,000 Algerian Muslims in auxiliary military and paramilitary formations. Some had joined for economic reasons, some out of loyalty to France, some under various forms of coercion, and some because they were members of tribal or local factions that had historically been aligned with the colonial state.

When independence came, the harkis were in an extraordinarily dangerous position. The FLN viewed them as traitors, and the fury of Algerian society toward those who had served the colonial power was intense. In the months following independence, thousands of harkis and their family members were killed in reprisals by Algerian nationalists. Some were tortured, some were publicly humiliated and executed, and many simply disappeared.

The French government, under political pressure from the FLN and anxious not to complicate the transition to independence, officially discouraged the mass transfer of harkis to France. French officers who attempted to organize evacuations of their local auxiliary troops were overruled or ignored. Some officers defied orders and arranged private evacuations, saving thousands. But the official French policy was abandonment.

Estimates of the number of harkis killed in the immediate post-independence period range from 30,000 to 150,000, with the higher figures particularly contested. Approximately 90,000 harkis and their families eventually made it to France, where they were housed in camps under conditions that were often squalid and isolated. They and their descendants became one of France's most marginalized communities, caught between a French society that did not fully accept them and an Algeria that regarded them as collaborators.

The story of the harkis is one that France has found extremely difficult to confront. For decades, the very word harki was a term of abuse in Algeria. In France, the harkis and their descendants organized politically and demanded acknowledgment of what they had endured. President Jacques Chirac issued a formal acknowledgment of France's responsibility for the abandonment of the harkis in 2001. Further formal recognition has been extended by subsequent French governments, but the harkis' descendants continue to press for fuller recognition and compensation.

The Death Toll and the Question of Numbers

The number of Algerians killed during the war is one of the most politically charged questions in the history of the conflict. The French government, in its formal communications after the war, used a figure of approximately 400,000 Algerian deaths. The Algerian government has consistently claimed a figure of more than one million martyrs, the chahids, a figure that has become deeply embedded in Algerian national identity and state narrative.

Most independent historians and researchers who have examined the available evidence have concluded that the figure lies somewhere between these extremes. Benjamin Stora, one of the leading historians of the Algerian war in France, has suggested figures in the range of 400,000 to 500,000. Other serious scholarly estimates have ranged from around 300,000 to 600,000 or more. The difficulties in arriving at a precise figure are enormous: the war was fought across a vast country, records were incomplete, and significant numbers of deaths resulted not from direct military violence but from displacement, disease, famine caused by the destruction of rural economies, and the effects of French regroupement policy, in which approximately 2 million Algerians were forcibly removed from their villages and concentrated in camps under conditions of often severe deprivation.

The French military and police forces also suffered significant casualties. Approximately 25,000 French soldiers were killed during the war, along with several thousand pied-noir civilians. The total human cost of the conflict was staggering.

The number of civilian Algerians killed in the FLN's own violence, including those killed as suspected collaborators or opponents of the FLN, runs to tens of thousands and has been a subject of discussion by Algerian historians seeking a more complete accounting of the war's human cost.

Gillo Pontecorvo and the Battle of Algiers Film

In 1966, the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo released La Battaglia di Algeri, The Battle of Algiers, a film that would become one of the most celebrated and analyzed political films in cinema history. Shot on location in the Casbah of Algiers with a largely non-professional cast, and with Saadi Yacef himself playing a fictionalized version of his own character, the film depicted the Battle of Algiers with a documentary realism that made many viewers believe they were watching actual newsreel footage.

The Battle of Algiers did not adopt a simple propagandistic framework. It depicted FLN operatives carrying out bombings that killed European civilians, including women and children, with unflinching honesty. It also depicted the French paratroopers' use of torture with equal honesty. The film presented both sides in ways that were recognizably human while leaving the audience in no doubt about the fundamental illegitimacy of colonial rule. It won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and was nominated for three Academy Awards. It was banned in France for five years after its release.

The film has since become required viewing in military academies, intelligence services, and political science departments around the world. The United States Army's Pentagon screened it in 2003 as instruction for officers dealing with the Iraqi insurgency. It remains a touchstone in discussions of counter-insurgency, terrorism, and the ethics of colonial warfare.

France's Tortured Relationship with the Algerian Past

For decades after 1962, France found it extraordinarily difficult to come to terms with the Algerian war. The conflict was not even officially designated a "war" in French law until 1999, a full 37 years after the ceasefire. Prior to that, it was referred to officially as "the events in Algeria" or "the operations in the maintenance of order," a euphemism that captured the official French reluctance to acknowledge what had actually occurred.

The reasons for this reluctance were multiple and overlapping. France was dealing with the trauma of decolonization at a moment when it was also engaged in post-war reconstruction and the building of the Fifth Republic. The pied-noir community and its political allies resisted any acknowledgment of wrongdoing. The military resisted any examination of torture and extrajudicial killing. Communist and leftist political forces had their own complicated relationships with the war's history. And de Gaulle's Fifth Republic had been founded, in significant measure, on the fiction that France had a clean conscience because de Gaulle himself had given Algeria its independence.

Partial reckonings came gradually. President Jacques Chirac acknowledged that France was responsible for deporting Jews during the Second World War, in a 1995 speech that demonstrated it was possible for France to confront painful historical truths. In 2000, a retired general named Paul Aussaresses published a memoir in which he admitted, without apology, that he had ordered and participated in torture and executions during the Battle of Algiers. The book caused a national scandal and led to legal proceedings, but it also forced a more open public discussion of what French forces had actually done.

In 2018, President Emmanuel Macron declared, while visiting Algeria, that French colonialism had been a crime against humanity, a statement that went further than any previous French leader. In 2021, a commission of historians appointed by Macron and led by Benjamin Stora produced a report recommending further steps toward recognition and reconciliation, including fuller archival access and joint commemoration programs. The report stopped short of recommending an official apology.

Algeria, for its own part, has maintained a state narrative of the revolution that emphasizes heroism and martyrdom and has been slower to examine the FLN's own use of violence against Algerians during the war. The complex truth of the Algerian war, with its atrocities on multiple sides, its betrayals, and its long aftershocks, continues to be a work in progress for both countries.

Algeria Today: Legacies of War and Independence

Algeria today is a country still shaped, in fundamental ways, by the experience of the war of independence. The FLN, as the party of independence, became the ruling party of independent Algeria and has governed the country, in various forms, since 1962. The state narrative of the revolution, with its emphasis on the one million martyrs and the heroism of the ALN, has been a central pillar of political legitimacy for six decades.

In the early years of independence, Algeria under Ahmed Ben Bella and then Houari Boumediene pursued a socialist development model, nationalizing French oil and gas interests in 1971 and using hydrocarbon revenues to fund ambitious industrialization programs. The country was seen as a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement and of Third World solidarity. Algiers was a sanctuary for liberation movements from across Africa and the Americas, hosting Palestinian liberation fighters, Black Panther exiles from the United States, and numerous other groups.

The economic model eventually faltered. A demographic explosion, a crash in oil prices in the 1980s, and the structural failures of state socialism produced an acute economic crisis by the late 1980s. Popular protests in October 1988, harshly suppressed by the army, forced the FLN regime to open the political system. Multi-party elections were held in 1991, and the Front Islamique du Salut, the Islamic Salvation Front, won the first round of legislative elections by a large margin.

The military cancelled the elections before the second round, triggering a civil war between the state and Islamist insurgent groups that lasted from roughly 1992 to 2002 and killed, by various estimates, between 100,000 and 200,000 Algerians. This conflict, known in Algeria as the Black Decade, has left its own deep wounds in Algerian society.

Algeria today has a population of approximately 46 million people. The country remains heavily dependent on hydrocarbon revenues, and its political system remains dominated by the military and a civilian political establishment that traces its legitimacy to the revolution. The constitutional referendum of 2020 and the elections that followed were marked by low turnout and widespread public cynicism. The Hirak protest movement, which began in February 2019 when millions of Algerians took to the streets to demand political change, represented the largest popular mobilization since independence and demonstrated the depth of popular frustration with a system that many Algerians see as having betrayed the ideals of the revolution.

The cultural and intellectual legacy of the war of independence remains vivid. Algerian literature, much of it written in French, has produced works of world importance, including the novels of Mohammed Dib, Mouloud Feraoun (who was killed by the OAS on the eve of independence), Kateb Yacine, and Assia Djebar. The use of French as a literary language in Algeria is itself a product of the colonial encounter, a fact that carries its own complex weight.

The relationship between Algeria and France has remained one of the defining preoccupations of both countries. Millions of Algerians have emigrated to France, where the Algerian diaspora is the largest in the country, numbering several million people including many of the children and grandchildren of those who came in earlier decades. Questions of identity, belonging, memory, and discrimination continue to define the experience of this community. In France, the children and grandchildren of Algerian immigrants have produced major figures in culture, sport, literature, and politics, including some of France's most celebrated football players. The Algerian war is embedded in the consciousness of this community in ways that connect present-day France with the history of colonialism and decolonization.

The question of official French recognition of colonialism's crimes remains unresolved and politically contentious in France. The debate over historical memory, over what should be acknowledged and commemorated and how, is not merely an academic dispute but a live political question that intersects with debates about immigration, integration, and French national identity.

The Guillotine and Summary Execution

Among the brutal instruments of French counter-insurgency in the Algerian war was the guillotine. Algerian militants captured by French forces and tried before military tribunals were subject to the death penalty under military law. Over the course of the war, France executed 45 Algerians by guillotine, including militants who had been convicted of attacks that had killed French civilians or soldiers.

The executions became a major political issue, particularly as the condemned men were celebrated as martyrs in Algeria and in the international press. The most famous case was that of Ahmed Zabana, the first Algerian militant to be guillotined, on June 19, 1956. His execution, and the simultaneous execution of Abdelkader Ferradj, triggered a wave of FLN reprisals and inflamed opinion across Algeria and the Arab world. Larbi Ben M'Hidi, one of the historic founders of the FLN and a senior FLN leader, was captured during the Battle of Algiers in February 1957. He was officially reported to have committed suicide by hanging in his cell. Subsequent evidence, including testimony from French military personnel, strongly suggests he was tortured and then strangled by French paratroopers on the orders of senior officers.

The use of the guillotine against Algerian militants who regarded themselves as soldiers in a war of liberation created powerful moral and political questions about the nature of French justice and the relationship between legality and legitimacy in colonial contexts.

Conclusion: the War That Changed Two Worlds

The Algerian War of Independence was a conflict of eight years that changed two worlds irreversibly. For Algeria, independence was won at an enormous cost in human life and suffering, and the new nation was born battered, its rural economy devastated by years of fighting and forced displacement, its social fabric shredded by internal violence and the flight of the European professional class. The challenges of building an independent state were compounded by the political and military structures inherited from the revolution, which prioritized loyalty to the FLN and the army over the institutional development of a democratic state.

For France, the war ended a century and a third of colonial presence in Algeria and forced a painful confrontation with the nature of the French civilizing mission, revealing it, in the eyes of many, as a project of domination justified by a self-serving myth. The experience of the Algerian war shaped French politics for generations, contributing to the rise of the far right, to tensions around immigration and integration, and to an ongoing battle over national memory and identity.

The war produced literature and art of enduring power, from Pontecorvo's film to Fanon's philosophy to the memoirs of survivors on all sides. It generated scholarly debates that continue to evolve as archives open and new generations of historians on both sides of the Mediterranean bring fresh perspectives. And it left behind hundreds of thousands of families on both sides marked by loss, displacement, and unresolved grief.

The Algerian war is, in the end, a story about the fundamental human contradictions of empire: a system built on exploitation and maintained by violence, which could be sustained for a time by superior force and the suppression of memory, but which ultimately could not withstand the will of a people determined to be free. The men and women of the FLN who launched their revolution on a cold November morning in 1954 could not have known whether they would prevail. They knew only that the price of not trying was the permanent surrender of any claim to dignity and self-determination. Their struggle, and the enormous cost at which it was won, remains one of the twentieth century's great stories of human resilience in the face of overwhelming power.

Sources

https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/setif-and-guelma-may-1945.html https://www.carnegiecouncil.org/media/series/ethics-on-film/ethics-on-film-discussion-of-the-battle-of-algiers https://adst.org/2016/10/algerias-struggle-independence/ https://www.countryreports.org

The War in the Countryside: Regroupement and Rural Devastation

While the Battle of Algiers and the urban phase of the conflict captured the most international attention, the war in the Algerian countryside was, in many ways, even more devastating in its long-term consequences. The ALN drew its strength primarily from the rural population, the peasant farmers and shepherd communities of the mountains and plains who provided fighters, food, intelligence, and shelter. The French military understood this connection and devised strategies aimed at breaking it.

The most consequential of these strategies was the regroupement, or forced resettlement, policy. Beginning in 1957 and accelerating through 1960 and 1961, French military authorities forcibly relocated approximately two million Algerians, nearly one-fifth of the entire Algerian population, from their ancestral villages into controlled settlements. The ostensible purpose was to deprive the ALN of its logistical base in rural communities. The actual effect was to uproot the village-based social structure that had sustained Algerian rural life for generations.

The regroupement camps were often poorly planned and inadequately supplied. Peasant families accustomed to maintaining small farms and herding livestock were crowded into settlement zones with insufficient land, water, food, and medical care. Mortality rates in some camps were appalling. Traditional agricultural knowledge was disrupted and often permanently lost. The social bonds of village communities were broken, and the psychological toll of displacement was enormous.

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who conducted fieldwork in Algeria during the war years and in the years immediately following independence, documented the social disruption caused by regroupement in remarkable detail. His studies showed how the forced transition from a rural, agricultural way of life to the conditions of the settlement camps and subsequently of urban migration undermined the cultural and social systems that had organized Algerian life. The experience of regroupement was not only a military measure but a radical and brutal social transformation imposed by colonial power.

The deforestation and burning of crops that accompanied French military operations in the Aures mountains, the Kabylia region, and other zones of intense guerrilla activity added to the rural devastation. The ALN's strategic zones in northern Algeria, the wilayat, or administrative districts into which the FLN had organized liberated territory, were subjected to aerial bombardment, artillery fire, and ground sweeps that destroyed not only fighters but the economic basis of entire communities.

The Morice Line and the Battle on the Borders

One of the French military's most ambitious responses to the ALN's ability to receive supplies and reinforcements from Tunisia and Morocco was the construction of a massive fortified barrier along Algeria's eastern border with Tunisia. Named for Andre Morice, the French minister of defense under whose authority it was built, the Morice Line was completed in 1957 and extended approximately 460 kilometers from the Mediterranean coast to the edge of the Sahara.

The line combined electrified fencing with minefields, radar installations, guard posts, and rapid-reaction forces capable of interdicting any infiltration attempt. It was engineered with considerable technical sophistication and was, by the standards of its time, highly effective at its stated purpose. ALN units attempting to cross the border were detected, fixed by artillery and air strikes, and destroyed. Thousands of ALN fighters were killed attempting to cross the Morice Line during 1957 and 1958.

The Morice Line effectively cut the ALN's internal forces, those actually fighting inside Algeria, off from the external forces, the large and well-equipped ALN units that had built up in Tunisia and Morocco. The external forces were unable to reinforce the internal fighters in any significant way during the final years of the war. This isolation of the internal ALN contributed to French military success in suppressing guerrilla operations, though it could not end the political will of the Algerian population or the international diplomatic pressure on France.

The existence of the external ALN also created political complications within the independence movement. The leadership of the provisional government in exile, the Gouvernement Provisoire de la Republique Algerienne established in 1958 in Tunis, was based outside Algeria and negotiated the peace from that position. The internal fighters who had borne the brunt of the fighting were not always comfortable with the political decisions made by an exile leadership they sometimes viewed as insufficiently tested by direct experience of the war.

The Role of Algerian Women in the Revolution

The Algerian revolution was, to a degree unusual for its time and its social context, a movement in which women played significant and varied roles. This was particularly evident in the urban context, where FLN women operatives served as couriers, bomb-planters, nurses, and organizers in ways that exploited the assumptions of French security forces, who were less likely to search women or to suspect them of revolutionary activity.

The most celebrated of the female FLN militants were Djamila Boupacha, Djamila Bouhired, Zohra Drif, and Djamila Bouazza. Bouhired and Drif were among the operatives who carried out the bombings of the Milk Bar and the Cafeteria in September 1956. Drif later wrote a memoir of her experiences. Bouhired was captured, tried, convicted of murder, and sentenced to death, though she was not executed and was released under the terms of the Evian Accords. Her case attracted major international attention, with the Egyptian singer Fairouz writing a famous song about her.

Djamila Boupacha's case was particularly significant in exposing French torture practices. Captured in 1960 and subjected to systematic torture, including rape, her case was taken up by the feminist lawyer Gisele Halimi and by Simone de Beauvoir, who published an article about the case in Le Monde and later co-authored a book about Boupacha with Halimi. The case brought international attention to the use of torture by French forces and to the specific use of sexual violence as an instrument of interrogation.

The independence movement held out formal promises of equality for women, and the FLN's 1956 Soummam Platform and subsequent statements formally declared commitment to equal rights regardless of sex. After independence, the reality was more complicated. Algerian women gained rights in some areas, including access to education, but the 1984 Family Code codified a conservative interpretation of Islamic family law that restricted women's legal status in matters of marriage, divorce, and inheritance. Algerian feminists have continued to struggle for fuller equality against a political culture shaped by both revolutionary nationalism and conservative religious forces.

The Impact on French Military Doctrine and Ethics

The Algerian war had profound effects on French military doctrine, on the structure and culture of the French army, and on the ethical debates within French institutions about the limits of state violence in the service of political goals.

The use of systematic torture in the Battle of Algiers was not universally accepted within the French military. Significant numbers of French officers and soldiers were deeply troubled by what they were ordered to do or witnessed being done. Some refused to participate. A small number refused orders or resigned. General Jacques Paris de Bollardiere, a decorated resistance hero of the Second World War, publicly protested against the use of torture and was relieved of his command and sentenced to sixty days arrest.

The debates within the French army about torture and counter-insurgency produced a body of thinking about irregular warfare, la guerre revolutionnaire, that influenced military doctrine not only in France but in other Western military establishments. The French methods, including the extensive use of intelligence networks, population control measures, psychological operations, and torture, were studied by military establishments in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere. Some of these methods found applications in later conflicts, most controversially in the United States' conduct of the Iraq war after 2003, when the Defense Department screened The Battle of Algiers for senior officials and officers.

The army officers who had fought in Algeria, and who believed they had been betrayed by politicians who negotiated away their military success, constituted a dangerous political force in the early Fifth Republic. The OAS represented their most extreme expression, but the broader political culture of Gaullism had to manage the tensions between the army's institutional interests and the imperatives of political normalization. De Gaulle ultimately prevailed, but the scars remained.

The Algerian War in Literature and Culture

The Algerian war generated a rich and complex body of literature, produced in both French and Arabic, by writers from both sides of the conflict. This literature has been a crucial vehicle for the processing of collective trauma, for the articulation of identities formed in violence, and for the exploration of moral ambiguities that official histories tend to obscure.

Among the most celebrated Algerian writers associated with the war era was Kateb Yacine, whose novel Nedjma, published in 1956, drew on the traumatic experiences of Setif, which Yacine had witnessed as a teenager, to construct a complex, modernist portrait of Algerian identity under colonialism. Mohammed Dib's Algeria trilogy, published in the 1950s, depicted working-class Algerian life with realism and empathy. Mouloud Feraoun, a Kabyle writer whose journals of the war years were published posthumously as Journal 1955-1962, was assassinated by the OAS on March 15, 1962, just days before the Evian Accords, a senseless act of political terror that killed one of the most humane observers of the war.

On the French side, writers grappled with the war and its moral implications in works ranging from journalistic exposure to fiction and memoir. Henri Alleg's La Question, Albert Memmi's Portrait du colonise, and the literary and philosophical responses of Sartre and de Beauvoir were crucial in shaping French and international opinion. Albert Camus, the Algerian-born Nobel laureate who was himself a pied-noir, struggled with the conflict in ways that were politically controversial, refusing to endorse either French colonialism or FLN violence and speaking of his love for Algeria in terms that his critics on the left found inadequate to the moral demands of the situation.

The post-independence generation of Algerian writers, including Assia Djebar, whose work explored the lives of Algerian women through history, and Tahar Djaout, who was killed by Islamist gunmen in 1993, continued to grapple with the legacies of colonialism, revolution, and the contradictions of independence. The literature of Algeria remains one of the richest bodies of work in the francophone world, precisely because it is rooted in experiences of such historical depth and such human complexity.

Memory, Commemoration, and Reconciliation in the 21st Century

The question of how France and Algeria remember and commemorate the Algerian war entered a new phase in the twenty-first century, driven by the maturation of the first and second generations born after independence, by increased archival access, by political pressures on both sides, and by efforts on the part of political leaders, historians, and civil society organizations to create new frameworks for historical dialogue.

In France, November 5 was established in 2002 as a national day of tribute to the French soldiers who died in the Algerian war and in other North African conflicts. The designation was controversial because it was seen by some as focusing exclusively on French losses without acknowledging the broader human costs of the conflict. The subsequent establishment of March 19, the date of the 1962 ceasefire, as the official national day of commemoration for the Algerian war was equally contentious, opposed by veterans' groups and pied-noir associations who objected to the choice of a date associated with French defeat and withdrawal.

In Algeria, official commemoration has centered on November 1, Revolution Day, celebrated as a national holiday, and on the figure of the one million martyrs. The Algerian government has repeatedly called on France to apologize formally for the crimes of colonialism, a call that has been received with varying degrees of responsiveness by successive French governments.

The most significant diplomatic gesture came in 2017, when Emmanuel Macron, then a presidential candidate, visited Algiers and declared that French colonialism had been a crime against humanity, a statement that electrified Algerian public opinion. After becoming president, Macron commissioned the Stora report, which recommended a series of confidence-building measures, including the return to Algeria of skulls of resistance fighters that had been held in French museum collections as trophies of the colonial conquest, a practice that itself speaks to the depth of colonial dehumanization.

The skulls of approximately thirty Algerian fighters, including Abd el-Kader's nephew, had been held in the collection of the Musee de l'Homme in Paris. Their repatriation to Algeria in 2020 was a significant symbolic gesture, though many on the Algerian side felt it was insufficient and that a formal apology was still owed.

The work of reconciliation continues, slowly and imperfectly, on both sides of the Mediterranean. The Algerian war's history is embedded in too many families, too many communities, too many identities, on both sides, to be resolved by any single gesture or proclamation. But the increasing willingness of both French and Algerian historians, politicians, and citizens to engage with the complexity of that history, to acknowledge what was done and who did it, represents a slow but real progress toward a reckoning with the past that both societies need and deserve.

The story of the Algerian war is ultimately a story about what happens when a political system built on the denial of human equality and dignity eventually confronts the unbending insistence of those it has denied. It is a story about the extraordinary lengths to which power will go to maintain itself, and about the equally extraordinary capacity of the powerless to endure, organize, sacrifice, and ultimately prevail. It is a story that belongs not only to Algeria and France but to the broader human record of struggle against colonial subjugation and for the recognition of common humanity.