Algerian War
The 1954 to 1962 independence war that killed hundreds of thousands, destroyed the French Fourth Republic, and put de Gaulle in power.
Algeria was not a French colony. In French law it was three departments of France, as much part of the republic as Brittany, settled since 1830, and home to about a million Europeans living among nine million Muslims who were French subjects without being French citizens. That is why the war to end it was so savage, and why it destroyed a French republic. France could not grant Algeria independence the way Britain granted it to Ghana. It had to cut off part of itself.
The National Liberation Front, the FLN, announced itself on 1 November 1954 with a set of coordinated attacks. Paris called it banditry. Within three years it was a war involving close to half a million French troops, and the French state did not officially use the word war until 1999.
Torture and the Battle of Algiers
In 1957 the FLN brought the war into Algiers with a bombing campaign against cafes and public places. The government handed police powers in the city to General Massu and the 10th Parachute Division. They mapped the FLN network by systematic torture, mostly electricity and water, and they broke it. They also lost the war by doing it, because the accounts came home. Henri Alleg, a newspaper editor, published a short book in 1958 describing his own torture by French paratroopers; it was banned and read anyway. Conscripts came back and talked. A country that had been occupied by the Gestapo fifteen years earlier had to decide what it thought about its own army.
On 13 May 1958 settlers and paratroop officers seized government buildings in Algiers and demanded a government that would keep Algeria French. The Fourth Republic, which had produced more than twenty governments in twelve years, could not answer, and it fell. Charles de Gaulle came out of retirement, took emergency powers, and wrote the constitution of the Fifth Republic that France still uses. Standing in Algiers before an enormous crowd of settlers, he told them he had understood them, a sentence vague enough that everyone heard what they wanted to hear.
What he had understood was that Algeria was unaffordable. He moved in stages toward self-determination, and the people who had brought him back turned on him. Settlers built barricades in 1960. Four generals attempted a coup in April 1961 and failed when the conscripts refused to follow them. The survivors formed the OAS, which bombed targets in Algeria and France and tried repeatedly to kill de Gaulle.
The end, and the bill
The Evian Accords were signed on 18 March 1962. Algeria voted for independence on 1 July and de Gaulle recognized it two days later. Then the country emptied. Around 800,000 Europeans, most of whom had never set foot in France, left within months, mostly through Marseille. The harkis, roughly a quarter of a million Algerians who had served in the French forces, were largely abandoned. Perhaps 40,000 reached France, where many spent years in transit camps. Tens of thousands of those left behind were killed.
The death toll is contested and political. French figures put Algerian dead at around 400,000. Careful historians tend to estimate 300,000 to 500,000. The Algerian state says one and a half million martyrs, a figure that is now part of the national story rather than an estimate.
The war outlived itself in both countries. France got the Fifth Republic, a presidency designed for a strong man, and decades of official silence that only began to break in the 2000s, when presidents started acknowledging the torture, the abandonment of the harkis, and the night in October 1961 when Paris police killed Algerian demonstrators and threw bodies into the Seine. Algeria got a state run by the army that won the war, a claim to legitimacy based on that war that has outlasted almost everyone who fought in it, and a civil war in the 1990s when a new generation tried to vote that state out of office.