On 20 August 1955, the FLN attacked colon civilians in the Philippe-
ville Massacre, and colon reprisals resulted in the deaths of several thousand
Muslims. The year-long Battle of Algiers began in September 1956 with
FLN operative Saadi Yacef’s terrorist-style bombing campaign against colon
civilians. Meanwhile, other FLN leaders targeted governmental officials for
assassination. The FLN movement faced a setback on 22 October, however,
when Ben Bella was captured.
In December 1956 and January 1957, battle-tested French troops with
combat experience in Indochina arrived in Algeria to restore order in Algiers.
Among them were General Raoul Salan (commander in chief), paratrooper
commander Major General Jacques Massu, and Colonels Yves Goddard and
Marcel Bigeard, both of whom were adept at intelligence gathering and in-
filtration. Massu’s men made steady headway, and Goddard himself captured
Saadi Yacef in September 1957. The Battle of Algiers was now won. The
1965 film The Battle of Algiers, produced by Gillo Pontecorvo and Saadi Yacef
(with money provided by the FLN), garnered international support for the
FLN, as it depicted the French simply as brutal occupiers. The French
Algerian War
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Members of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) pose before their World War II surplus machine guns in the
mountains of Algeria on 6 June 1957. The rebel group was formed by Ahmed Ben Bella and other nationalists in 1954
to fight for Algerian independence from France. That goal was realized in 1962, following nearly eight years of warfare.
(Bettmann/Corbis)
employed torture to force FLN operatives to talk, while others were mur-
dered in the process. The FLN, on the other hand, also routinely murdered
captured French soldiers and colon civilians.
Despite victory in Algiers, French forces were not able to quell the
Algerian rebellion or gain the confidence of the colons. Some colons were
fearful that the French government was about to negotiate with the FLN. In
the spring of 1958, colon Ultra groups began to hatch a plan to change the
colonial government. Colon veteran Pierre Lagaillarde organized hundreds
of Ultra commandos and began a revolt on 13 May 1958. Soon, tens of thou-
sands of colons and Muslims arrived outside of the government building in
Algiers to protest French government policy. Massu quickly formed a Com-
mittee of Public Safety, and Salan assumed leadership of the body. Salan
then went before the throngs of protesters. Although the plotters would have
preferred someone more frankly authoritarian, Salan called for the return to
power of General Charles de Gaulle. Although de Gaulle had been out of
power for more than a decade, on 19 May he announced his willingness to
assume authority.
Massu was prepared to bring back de Gaulle by force if necessary, but
military options were not needed. On 1 June 1958, the French National
Assembly made de Gaulle premier, technically the last premier of the Fourth
Republic. Algeria had managed to change the political leadership of the
mother country.
De Gaulle visited Algeria five times between June and December 1958.
At Oran on 4 June, he said about France’s mission in Algeria that “she is here
forever.” A month later, he proposed a budget allocation of 15 billion francs
for Algerian housing, education, and public works, and that October he sug-
gested an even more sweeping proposal called the Constantine Plan. The
funding for the massive projects, however, was never forthcoming, and true
Algerian reform was never realized. It was probably too late, in any case, for
reform to impact the Muslim community of Algeria.
Algeria’s new military commander, General Maurice Challe, arrived in
Algeria on 12 December 1958 and launched a series of attacks on FLN posi-
tions in rural Kabylia in early 1959. Muslim troops loyal to the French guided
special mobile French troops called Commandos de Chasse. An aggressive
set of sorties deep in Kabylia made much headway, and Challe calculated
that by the end of October his men had killed half of the FLN operatives in
Kabylia. A second phase of the offensive was to occur in 1960, but by then
de Gaulle, who had gradually eliminated options, had decided that Algerian
independence was inevitable.
De Gaulle braced his generals for the decision to let go of Algeria in late
August 1959 and then addressed the nation on 19 September 1959, declaring
his support for Algerian self-determination. Fearing for their future, some
Ultras created the Front Nationale Français and fomented another revolt on
24 January 1960 in the so-called Barricades Week. Mayhem ensued when
policemen tried to restore order, and many people were killed or wounded.
General Challe and the colony’s governor, Paul Delouvrier, fled Algiers on
28 January, but the next day de Gaulle, wearing his old army uniform, turned
106
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the tide via a televised address to the nation. On 1 February, army units
swore loyalty to the government. The revolt quickly collapsed. Early in 1961,
increasingly desperate Ultras formed a terrorist group called the Secret Army
Organization (OAS) that targeted colons whom they regarded as traitors.
The Generals’ Putsch of 20–26 April 1961 seriously threatened de
Gaulle’s regime. General Challe wanted a revolt limited to Algeria, but Salan
and his colleagues (Ground Forces Chief of Staff General André Zeller and
recently retired Inspector General of the Air Force Edmond Jouhaud) had all
prepared for a revolt in France as well. The generals had the support of many
frontline officers in addition to almost two divisions of troops. The Foreign
Legion arrested the colony’s commander in chief, General Fernand Gam-
biez, and paratroopers near Rambouillet prepared to march on Paris after
obtaining armored support. The coup collapsed, however, as police units
managed to convince the paratroopers to depart, and army units again swore
loyalty to de Gaulle.
On 10 June 1961 de Gaulle held secret meetings with FLN representa-
tives in Paris and then on 14 June made a televised appeal for the FLN’s so-
called Provisional Government to come to Paris to negotiate an end to the
war. Peace talks during 25–29 June failed to lead to resolution, but de Gaulle’s
mind was already made up. During his visit to Algeria in December, he was
greeted by large pro-FLN Muslim rallies and Muslim anticolon riots. The
United Nations recognized Algeria’s independence on 20 December, and on
8 January 1962 the French public voted in favor of Algerian independence.
After the failed coup, a massive exodus of colons commenced. Nearly
1 million returned to their ancestral homelands (half of them went to France,
and most of the rest went to Spain and Italy). Peace talks resumed in March
at Évian, and both sides reached a settlement on 18 May 1962.
The formal handover of power occurred on 4 July when the FLN’s Pro-
visional Committee took control of Algeria. In September, Ben Bella was
elected Algeria’s first president. The Algerian War resulted in some 18,000
French military deaths, 3,000 colon deaths, and about 300,000 Muslim
deaths. Some 30,000 colons remained behind, including the socialist mayor
of Algiers, Jacques Chevallier. They were ostensibly granted equal rights in
the peace treaty but instead faced official discrimination by the FLN gov-
ernment and the loss of much of their property. The FLN remained in
power until 1989, practicing a form of socialism until changes in Soviet for-
eign policy necessitated changes in Algerian internal affairs.
William E. Watson
See also
Africa; Algeria; Anticolonialism; Arab Nationalism; Bandung Conference; De Gaulle,
Charles; France; Ho Chi Minh; Murphy, Robert Daniel; Nasser, Gamal Abdel;
North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Origins and Formation of; Salan, Raoul
Albin-Louis; Sétif Uprising
References
Horne, Alistair. A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954–1962. New York: Viking, 1977.
Kettle, Michael. De Gaulle and Algeria, 1940–1960. London: Quartet, 1993.
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