French rule in Algeria ended in Paris as much as in Algeria. The National Liberation Front, or FLN, did not win militarily in Algeria. It won, as the historian L. Carl Brown put it in Foreign Affairs, diplomatically in France, once Charles de Gaulle led the country towards Algerian independence. De Gaulle had first been the hope of French hard-liners, and he ended the occupation by negotiating peace with the insurgents.
The war ran from 1954 to 1962. It was among the bloodiest colonial struggles of the 20th century.
Why France would not let go
France did not treat Algeria as a colony in name. It declared the territory an “integral part of France” and kept the best land for European settlers. Jacobin describes that status as a legal fiction that made Algeria a province like any other, with the Mediterranean in place of a river.
The settlers were one reason Paris held on. About 1 million Europeans, the pieds-noirs, lived in Algeria when the fighting began, according to Foreign Policy. Most Arab Algerians were subjects rather than citizens. They could gain French citizenship only by giving up Islamic law.
How the war began
On the night of 1 November 1954, bombs and attacks went off across Algeria within an hour or two of each other. The Guardian’s Paris correspondent counted about thirty incidents and seven deaths that night. Fifty years on, the BBC put it at some 60 attacks and a dozen dead. The governor-general asked France for reinforcements at once, and about 600 security guards and three battalions of paratroops were sent.
Why France could not win it
France committed more than half a million troops. They secured the crowded coast but never firmly controlled the mountains and desert inland. Left largely to its own devices, the army turned to torture, and Foreign Policy calls its use systematic. The FLN escalated a campaign of terrorism, and killed settlers, rivals, and Algerians it saw as collaborators.
The FLN also fought abroad. From its earliest days it sought international support to press France into granting independence.
The cost came home. The war set off a major political crisis in France and a mutiny by army units opposed to independence.
What it cost
The BBC estimates about 500,000 deaths and some two million people driven from their homes. Foreign Policy counts hundreds of thousands of Algerians and about 25,000 French troops dead.
The exodus that followed reshaped France. By the end of 1962 it held more than a million returned pieds-noirs and 150,000 harkis, Algerians who had fought for France, with their families. The harkis’ organisations still want France to admit it disarmed them and left them to the FLN.
