Towards Revolution

France considered Algeria simply as a department of metropolitan France and was profoundly opposed to its independence. It was not until 1999 that the French government admitted that a "war" had taken place, as opposed to terrorism.

In May 1945, Europe celebrated victory over the Axis powers, later known as VE Day. On the same day in Algeria, a group of independence activists demonstrated in Sétif and elsewhere. French settlers suppressed these demonstrations with spectacular violence. While the precise figures of killed continue to be debated, the message sent was very clear: the defeat of fascism is not the defeat of colonialism--here, affairs will continue as before.
The Algerian revolution began in 1954 and ended with the accomplishment of independence in 1962.

Revolution

The active violent contestation of power in Algeria ran from 1954 to 1962. After the first efforts by the FLN, French settlers bombed the Casbah. In turn the FLN launched bomb attacks on French civilians. By present-day standards, the bombs were small but the shock was far greater. The conflict quickly attracted international attention.

A central reason for the controversy was that, almost at once, the French police and later the military resorted to torture in order to breach the solidarity of the Algerian population. Less than a decade after the end of World War II, this seemed to cast a pall on the "West" and its "freedom," making the war at once a polarizing Cold War issue.

It changed France and Algeria in radical ways and more generally sent shockwaves around Europe and Africa. According to some local estimates, close to one million Algerians died in the conflict, compared to 27,000 French fatalities. French estimates suggest about 250,000 Algerian deaths, widely assumed to be too low. However, the French Fourth Republic collapsed over the issue, with eight Prime Ministers being forced to resign and six administrations collapsing, until General de Gaulle imposed the Fifth Republic and the independence of Algeria. The decision to end French occupation provoked a furious backlash from settlers and their right-wing allies.

Resources

Time magazine has created an archive of its reporting from Algeria in the period that is a useful measure of changing public opinion in the West.

This French television documentary gives the history of the war from the French point of view.

From the Internet Archive, a Peter Batty documentary about the war dubbed into French. All five parts are on the Internet Archive.

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