# Algerian War **1 November 1954 – 19 March 1962.** The war that destroyed one French republic, created another, and manufactured the grievance the French far right has been running on ever since. France did not treat Algeria as a colony. It was constitutionally part of France — three *départements*, with roughly a million European settlers, the *pieds-noirs*, many of them families three or four generations resident. That legal fact is why the war could not be settled the way Indochina was, and why losing it felt to the losing side like an amputation rather than a withdrawal. ## The Course The FLN opened the insurrection on **1 November 1954**. France responded with a counterinsurgency campaign that reached its notorious form in the **Battle of Algiers (1957)**, when General Massu's paratroopers were given police powers in the city and used systematic torture — *la gégène*, waterboarding, disappearances — as a routine intelligence method. The campaign worked tactically and was catastrophic politically: the publication of accounts by Henri Alleg, Paul Teitgen's resignation, and the disappearance of Maurice Audin turned French opinion against the war faster than any battlefield result. **This is the war's most transferable lesson, and it is not a moral one:** the torture programme dismantled the FLN's Algiers network and lost France the argument at home in the same eighteen months. Effectiveness and legitimacy were not on the same axis. In **May 1958** settlers and army officers seized government buildings in Algiers, paratroopers took Corsica, and the Fourth Republic collapsed rather than face a coup. [[Charles de Gaulle]] returned to power, told the Algiers crowd *"je vous ai compris"* — I have understood you — and then spent four years moving toward Algerian independence. The reaction was insurrection against the French state itself: the **generals' putsch of April 1961**, and then the **OAS**, a terrorist organization of officers and settlers that bombed metropolitan France, murdered Algerians and *liberal* Europeans indiscriminately, and tried repeatedly to assassinate de Gaulle. The Évian Accords were signed **18 March 1962**; independence followed on 5 July. ## The Numbers, and the Fights About Them Casualty figures remain politically contested. French official estimates run to roughly 250,000 Algerian dead; Algerian state historiography claims a million and a half. Around 25,000–30,000 French soldiers died. Roughly **800,000 to a million *pieds-noirs* left for France in 1962**, most within a few months. The ***harkis*** — Algerian Muslims who fought for France, numbering in the tens of thousands — were largely left behind under the terms of the ceasefire and massacred in numbers that are still disputed. Those who reached France were housed in camps for years. **France did not formally acknowledge responsibility toward them until 2016, and compensated them by law only in 2022.** On **17 October 1961**, Paris police under prefect Maurice Papon — later convicted for his role in [[Vichy France]]'s deportations — attacked a peaceful FLN-organized demonstration in Paris, killing an unknown number of Algerians and throwing bodies into the Seine. The French state acknowledged the massacre only in 2012. ## Why It Sits at the Root of the Modern French Right Every component of the contemporary far-right argument in France exists, fully formed, in the *pied-noir* and OAS milieu by 1962: - **Betrayal by elites.** A metropolitan political class that gave away French territory and abandoned French citizens. - **The unassimilable Muslim.** A century of coexistence in Algeria reframed retroactively as proof that coexistence is impossible. - **Demography as destiny.** The settler minority's arithmetic anxiety, transplanted to the metropole and eventually renamed [[Great Replacement Theory]]. - **The state as accomplice in its own dissolution.** [[Jean-Marie Le Pen]] fought there as a paratroop officer, was credibly accused of torture, and founded the Front National in 1972 on precisely this coalition — *pieds-noirs*, OAS veterans, Vichy survivors and Ordre Nouveau militants. The [[National Rally]] is, in origin, an Algerian-war party. > [!note] The reusable finding > **Decolonization did not end colonial politics; it relocated them.** The war ended in 1962 and the coalition it created has contested every French presidential election since 1974. Any analysis that treats French anti-immigration politics as a response to post-1970s migration is starting sixty years late. ## See Also - [[Charles de Gaulle]] · [[French Fifth Republic]] · [[Jean-Marie Le Pen]] · [[National Rally]] - [[Vichy France]] · [[Great Replacement Theory]] · [[The Camp of the Saints]] · [[Islamophobia]] - [[French History Hub]]