Between 1954 and 1962, one of the most violent wars of decolonisation of the twentieth century took place. As French rule came to an end in Indochina in 1954, Morocco and Tunisia in 1956 and in West and Equatorial Africa in 1960, France clung on in Algeria, the oldest of its African colonial possessions. The Algerian National Liberation Front (Front de libĂ©ration nationale, jabhat al-tahrÄ«r al-watani, FLN) sought to chip away at French will to remain through rural and urban guerrilla warfare in both Algeria and mainland France, and by actively campaigning to persuade the international community that French rule in Algeria was illegitimate. In response, successive French governments sent a total of around two million soldiers, the vast majority of whom were conscripts, to fight a war through tactics which included aerial bombing, massive population displacement, army-led police operations and intensive propaganda efforts to âwin hearts and mindsâ within the local population.
The number of people killed during the war is subject to ongoing disagreement. French army losses are the least contentious as reliable records are available: they number around 25,000 men (Stora 2005, 23). European settler losses in Algeria have been evaluated at around 4000â4500 people (Stora 2005, 23), although some claim that many more European civilians were killed. The debate over this statistic is part of a wider controversy about what many former settlers see as the French stateâs âabandonmentâ of them in 1962. Indeed, in 1961, hardliner settlers and army officers who refused to accept the end of âFrench Algeriaâ formed a paramilitary organisation, the Secret Army Organisation (Organisation armĂ©e secrĂšte, OAS), which waged a campaign of assassinations and bomb attacks targeting the French army, the FLN and the wider Algerian population. Even more contentious are debates surrounding the number of Algerians who served as either soldiers or auxiliaries in the French army (today generically referred to as harkis) who were killed at the end of the war by other Algerians as âtraitorsâ. Harki community activists have put this figure as high as 150,000. Historiansâ estimates range from 15â30,000 people (Stora 2005, 24) to 60,000â75,000 people (Eldridge 2009, 92).
In Algeria, âone and a half million martyrsâ is the official number of Algerian combatants and civilians killed during the liberation struggle, and this figure has been central to the construction of Algerian national identity since 1962. Comparing different censuses before and after the war, researchers have calculated that 350,000â400,000 men, women and children were killed during the conflict, representing three per cent of the Algerian population at the time. Of these, up to 150,000 may have been combatantsâin 1974, this was the number of pensions being paid by the Algerian state to families of soldiers killed in combat (Stora 2005, 24â25). Beyond a war of numbers, what these statistics immediately foreground is that this anti-colonial struggle was much more complex than a straightforward confrontation between âthe Frenchâ and âthe Algeriansâ.
There is also no consensus about what to call the conflict. For nearly four decades after the end of the war, the official term in France was âoperations in North Africaâ, which was used alongside other euphemistic expressions such as âeventsâ, âoperations to maintain orderâ and âpacificationâ. This âwar without a nameâ was only officially recognised as a war by the French state in 1999, when a law was passed to rename âoperations in North Africaâ the âAlgerian Warâ (Guerre dâAlgĂ©rie). Yet this is not a neutral term either: instead it reflects a French national perspective, in the same way that Americans talk about the âVietnam Warâ whilst the Vietnamese talk about the âResistance War against Americaâ from the mid-1950s to 1973. More recently, the term âFrench-Algerian Warâ has emerged, which is also unsatisfactory, as it suggests a symmetrical conflict between two similar powers, when in fact the war pitched one of the largest and best equipped armies in the world against rural and urban guerrillas operating within a civilian population.
In Algeria, the war is officially celebrated as the âAlgerian Revolutionâ (al-thawra al-jazÄÊŸiriyya), and often referred to as the âWar of National Liberationâ. The terms ârevolutionâ and âliberationâ have been contested within and beyond Algeria, notably by those who question if a revolution took place after independence, and to what extent Algerians were liberated, given that colonial rule was followed by the creation of an authoritarian political system in which the only permitted political party was that of the FLN. Sylvie ThĂ©nault (2012, 14) has proposed the term âAlgerian War of Independenceâ as a neutral term which brings together different perspectives on the conflict. Todd Shepard (2015, 877) argues that this is too neat a package. For Shepard, the different terminology used to refer to the war should be used simultaneously to reflect the multiple ways in which the war has been understood and interpreted, both at the time and subsequently.
Debates about the origins, course and legacies of the war are inextricable from the wartime and post-independence politics of Algeria and France. The conflict is in many ways a textbook example of how interpretations of the past are shaped by the political demands of the present. In both France and Algeria, this past provides a seemingly endless source of easily accessible controversies, which reach far beyond the community of historians, and through which public debates can take place about pressing issues in the present such as political legitimacy, national identity and immigration. Whilst the Algerian War/the Algerian Revolution, and French colonial rule in Algeria more generally, remains âusefulâ in this way, there is little chance of it becoming a historical object that can be dispassionately discussed.
Understanding the underlying, and often unspoken, arguments about the present which loom behind ostensibly historical debates is a demanding task, notably for English-language readers new to Franco-Algerian history. The first challenge is to get to grips with the history of a country which has had relatively little visibility in the English-speaking world and on which the majority of research is not published in Englishâalthough one of the first overviews of the conflict, a vivid account titled A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954â62 (1977), was written by a British journalist and historian, Alistair Horne. The second challenge is understanding how the history which has followed the period under examination has profoundly shaped the interpretations which we have at our disposal. This task is enriched but also made more difficult by the explosion in the quantity of internet content about the war in the past 20 years and the emergence of social media. This has created an online space for debates which are often even more virulent than those which take place in the local and national press, and on television and radio. Put âAlgerian War of Independenceâ (or one of its other names) into a search engine and millions of hits immediately appear. Some of these are balanced chronological overviews by trusted academic sources, others are in-depth and not always easy-to-understand research articles on specific aspects of the war, others still are personal accounts or forthright demands demanding recognition and reparation from the French or Algerian state for âcrimes against humanityâ. The latter in particular contain, in differing doses, fascinating nuggets, highly partisan views and outright false information. This excess of information, and, in particular, this excess of information which rarely explicitly declares its political leanings, makes acquiring a broad overview of the topic, identifying a hierarchy of arguments and locating and analysing a sourceâs biases more of a challenge.
The aim of this book, then, is twofold. Firstly, it aims to provide an overview of the key approaches to and debates about the events of the Algerian War/the Algerian Revolution. In particular, it focuses on how these debates have been revisited in the most recent scholarship. Secondly, it seeks to provide insights into the contexts in which these approaches have emergedâthat is, how debates about the past are connected to present concernsâin order to provide readers with tools to navigate and decode the increasingly vast quantities of information available at their fingertips. This, then, is also a book about historiography, and its central importance in our supposedly globally connected information age, as hierarchies of knowledge production are both flattened and reinforced.
Key Features of Colonial Algeria
Not a Colony But DĂ©partements (Provinces) of France, a Large Settler Population, âthe Civilising Missionâ and the Language and Lessons of 1789
In order to understand the origins, course and legacies of the Algerian War / the Algerian Revolution, an understanding of some of the key features of colonial Algeria is essential. Algeria was part of the French empire from 1830 to 1962. At its highpoint in 1930, this empire spanned most of North, West and Equatorial Africa as well as Madagascar, Indochina (modern-day Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos), Syria and Lebanon (Fig. 1.1). Algeria had a unique status within this empire. Legally, from 1848 onwards, Algeria was not considered a colony. Instead, its north region constituted three départements (provinces) of France: the Oran region, the Algiers region and the Constantine region. Like all the other provinces in metropolitan France (see Glossary), these Algerian provinces came under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior not the Ministry for Colonies. The less populated territories of the south in the Sahara were under military rule. In the course of the Algerian War of Independence, the three départements of Oran, Algiers and Constantine were reorganised into smaller administrative regions, and the territories of the south were a...