The Age of Decolonization: How Colonial Empires Ended After World War II

# Algeria: The War That Tore France Apart

Algeria was not a colony in the standard sense. It was, legally and administratively, a department of France — as much a part of the French republic as Normandy or Provence. One million European settlers (the *pieds-noirs*) had lived there for generations and regarded Algeria as their home. The French army, which had fought in Indochina and lost, was not prepared to accept another withdrawal.

The Algerian War of Independence, which began in November 1954 and lasted until 1962, was the most violent of the major decolonization struggles. The FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) launched a guerrilla campaign that escalated to urban terrorism; the French military responded with counterinsurgency tactics that included systematic torture, collective punishment, and the regroupement of rural populations into controlled settlements that displaced roughly two million Algerians.

The Battle of Algiers in 1956–57 — the FLN's urban bombing campaign and the French paratroopers' response — became the war's iconic episode and a case study in counterinsurgency ethics that's still studied at military academies. The French army broke the FLN urban network through intelligence gathered under torture. It was tactically effective and strategically catastrophic: the international condemnation of French methods, including from the United States, made Algerian independence a question of when rather than whether.

The political crisis the war created in France was as significant as the military situation in Algeria. The Fourth Republic collapsed in 1958, in part because of the Algerian crisis. De Gaulle returned to power, established the Fifth Republic, and — to the outrage of the army and the *pieds-noirs* who had brought him back — eventually negotiated Algerian independence through the Évian Accords of 1962.

The independence that followed was accompanied by mass exodus: nearly a million *pieds-noirs* left Algeria in a matter of months. The harki — Algerians who had fought for France — were largely abandoned; tens of thousands were killed in reprisal after French withdrawal.

*Algeria's independence cost more lives than any other decolonization conflict outside of Southeast Asia, and the wounds on both sides of the Mediterranean remained raw for decades.*

Algeria: The War That Tore France Apart

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