Europe 1945 to present: Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962)

Algeria had been at least partially under French control since 1830, and in the century or so afterward, the country became an integral part of the France. By the years after World War II, there were about a million Europeans living in Algeria. Many had been born in Algeria (an Algerian of French descent was called a "pied-noir," which means "black foot" in French) and had never so much as visited Europe. As the decolonization process gained momentum worldwide after World War II, native Algerians gained hope that they might receive independence. Algerian soldiers had fought in both World Wars, but Algerians were treated as second-class citizens in France and, in effect, were second class citizens in Algeria itself. This made independence desirable to them. At the same time, pieds-noirs feared independence because it would upset their place in Algerian society and the economy, and they also had more connections and influence with the government in France.

The National Liberation Front (FLN), a nationlist party that leaned toward socialism, was created in 1954, and that same year, on November 1st, FLN guerillas began attacks against various colonial institutions in Algiers. France had just resigned itself to the loss of Indochina; it was not ready to lose Algieria as well. Within a few years, there were several hundred thousand troops in Algeria, and the military and police often resorted to torture to try to get information about the FLN. Henri Alleg, a pied noir who had been the publisher of a Communist newspaper but was not a member of the FLN, published an account of his experience being tortured in his book, La Question. The revelation that the French government was using torture against its own citizens and FLN terrorists further caused the war to lose popularity among the mainland population. The war also was one of the main reasons for the downfall of the Fourth Republic and de Gaulle's return to power. Yet even De Gaulle's position in power was threatened by his actions with respect to the War. When it became clear that Algeria would likely be granted independence under de Gaulle, a group of French military officers joined together to form the Organization of the Secret Army (OAS) whose goal was to prevent Algerian independence and whose motto was ""Algeria is French and will remain so." Members of the OAS conducted at least two direct attempts to remove de Gaulle from power, one of those being an assassination attempt. On May 18, 1962, France and the FLN signed the Evian Accords, which brought an end to the war (despite terrorist acts conducted by the OAS in Algeria during the months after the Accord to try to incite the FLN to break the cease-fire). In the following months, the electorates in France and Algeria voted overwhelmingly for Algeria's independence. Afterwards, many of the pieds-noirs went to France, and the harkis - the Algerians who had fought for France - also tried to leave Algeria.

The Algerian conflict is still a sore spot in French politics today. It took until 1999 for the French government to acknowledge the massacre of scores of the thousands of Parisians protesting the war in October of 1961. More recently, the Paris riots in the fall of 2005 were the result of frustrations felt by the generally poor, often unemployed 2nd- and 3rd-generation descendents of North African immigrants who live in the suburbs of Paris. (In France, it's a general rule that richer people live in the city and poorer people live in the suburbs.) The handling of the riots by Nicolas Sarkozy, then France's Minister of the Interior, played a large role in his election as president in 2007, despite, or maybe because of the fact that he referred to the rioters as "scum."

The racial undertones of the French-Algerian relationship have also been reflected in French popular culture, most notably in the work of Albert Camus, a pied-noir himself. His novels L'Etranger and L'Hote, in particular, are set against the backdrop of the conflict. More recently, the Austrian director Michael Haneke filmed the movie Cache, starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil, whose plot is driven by the memory of events that took place during the conflict. Indigenes (English title: Days of Glory), a film about a troop of Algerian soldiers who fought for la patrie (the motherland, i.e., France), in World War II, was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars earlier this year. "The Battle of Algiers," which was released in 1966, was directed by an Italian, so it is technically not French, but it remains a classic movie about the conflict.

Sources:

Group:
Meghan Anderson (ande3607)
Julie Koch (koch0190)
Julia Thieschafer (thie0048)

Europe 1945 to present

Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962)

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