Algerian War

The Algerian War, also known as the Algerian Revolution, the Franco-Algerian War, or the Algerian War of Independence, was an armed conflict between France and the Algerian National Liberation Front from 1954 to 1962, which led to Algeria winning its independence from France. An important decolonization war, it was a complex conflict characterized by guerrilla warfare and war crimes. The conflict also became a civil war between the different communities and within the communities. The war took place mainly on the territory of French Algeria, with repercussions in metropolitan France.
Effectively started by members of the FLN on 1 November 1954, during the Toussaint Rouge, the conflict led to serious political crises in France, causing the fall of the Fourth Republic, to be replaced by the Fifth Republic with a strengthened presidency. The brutality of the methods employed by the French forces failed to win hearts and minds in Algeria, alienated support in metropolitan France, and discredited French prestige abroad. As the war dragged on, the French public slowly turned against it and many of France's key allies, including the United States, switched from supporting France to abstaining in the UN debate on Algeria. After major demonstrations in Algiers and several other cities in favor of independence and a United Nations resolution recognizing the right to independence, Charles de Gaulle, the first president of the Fifth Republic, decided to open a series of negotiations with the FLN. These concluded with the signing of the Évian Accords in March 1962. A referendum took place on 8 April 1962 and the French electorate approved the Évian Accords. The final result was 91% in favor of the ratification of this agreement and on 1 July, the Accords were subject to a second referendum in Algeria, where 99.72% voted for independence and just 0.28% against.
The planned French withdrawal led to a state crisis. This included various assassination attempts on de Gaulle as well as some attempts at military coups. Most of the former were carried out by the Organisation armée secrète, an underground organization formed mainly from French military personnel supporting a French Algeria, which committed a large number of bombings and murders both in Algeria and in the homeland to stop the planned independence.
The war caused the deaths of between 400,000 and 1.5 million Algerians, 25,600 French soldiers, and 6,000 Europeans. [|War crimes] committed during the war included massacres of civilians, rape, and torture; the French destroyed over 8,000 villages and relocated over 2 million Algerians to concentration camps. Upon independence in 1962, 900,000 European-Algerians fled to France within a few months for fear of the FLN's revenge. The French government was unprepared to receive such a vast number of refugees, which caused turmoil in France. The majority of Algerian Muslims who had worked for the French were disarmed and left behind, as the agreement between French and Algerian authorities declared that no actions could be taken against them. However, the Harkis in particular, having served as auxiliaries with the French army, were regarded as traitors and by the FLN or by lynch mobs, often after being abducted and tortured. About 20,000 Harki families managed to flee to France, some with help from their French officers acting against orders, and today they and their descendants form a significant part of the population of Algerians in France.

Background

Conquest of Algeria

The decision to capture Algiers was made by Charles X and his ministers in January 1830. An invasion had already been discussed throughout the French blockade of Algiers from 1827 to 1830 in part in reaction to Barbary corsair activities and their ransoming of Christian captives and slaves, and the refusal of Marseilles merchants to pay their debts to the Dey of Algiers. By early 1830 however, the real motive was to distract and assuage with a foreign conquest French opinion hostile to the increasingly authoritarian king.
On the pretext of a slight to their consul, the French attacked and captured Algiers in June 1830. In following years the conquest spread to the interior. Directed by Marshall Bugeaud, who became the first Governor-General of Algeria, the conquest was violent and marked by a "scorched earth" policy designed to reduce the power of the Abdelkader, including massacres, mass rapes and other atrocities. Between 500,000 and 1,000,000, from approximately 3 million Algerians, were killed in the first three decades of the conquest. French losses from 1830 to 1851 were 3,336 killed in action and 92,329 dying in hospital.
In 1834, Algeria became a French military colony. It was declared by the Constitution of 1848 to be an integral part of France and was divided into three departments: Alger, Oran and Constantine. Many French and other Europeans later settled in Algeria.
Under the Second Empire, the Code de l'indigénat was implemented by the sénatus-consulte of 14 July 1865. It allowed Muslims to apply for full French citizenship, a measure that few took since it involved renouncing the right to be governed by sharia law in personal matters and was widely considered to be apostasy. Its first article stipulated:

The indigenous Muslim is French; however, he will continue to be subjected to Muslim law. He may be admitted to serve in the army and the navy. He may be called to functions and civil employment in Algeria. He may, on his demand, be admitted to enjoy the rights of a French citizen; in this case, he is subjected to the political and civil laws of France.

Prior to 1870, fewer than 200 demands were registered by Muslims and 152 by Jewish Algerians. The 1865 decree was then modified by the 1870 Crémieux Decree, which granted French nationality to Jews living in one of the three Algerian departments. In 1881, the Code de l'Indigénat made the discrimination official by creating specific penalties for indigènes and organising the seizure or appropriation of their lands.
During World War II, under Vichy France, equality of rights was proclaimed by the ordonnance of 7 March 1944 and later confirmed by the loi Lamine Guèye of 7 May 1946, which granted French citizenship to all subjects of France's territories and overseas departments, and by the 1946 Constitution. The Law of 20 September 1947 granted French citizenship to all Algerian subjects, who were not required to renounce their Muslim personal status.
Unlike all other overseas possessions acquired by France during the 19th century, Algeria was considered and legally classified to be an integral part of France.

Algerian Nationalism

Both Muslim and European Algerians took part in World War I and fought for France. Algerian Muslims served as tirailleurs and spahis; and French settlers as Zouaves or Chasseurs d'Afrique. US President Woodrow Wilson's 1918 Fourteen Points called for "A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined." Some Algerian intellectuals, dubbed oulémas, began to nurture the desire for independence or, at the very least, autonomy and self-rule.
Within that context, Khalid ibn Hashim, a grandson of Abd el-Kadir, spearheaded the resistance against the French in the first half of the 20th century and was a member of the directing committee of the French Communist Party. In 1926, he founded the Étoile Nord-Africaine, to which Messali Hadj, also a member of the Communist Party and of its affiliated trade union, the Confédération générale du travail unitaire, joined the following year.
The North African Star broke from the Communist Party in 1928, before being dissolved in 1929 at Paris's demand. Amid growing discontent from the Algerian population, the Third Republic acknowledged some demands, and the Popular Front initiated the Blum-Viollette proposal in 1936, which was supposed to enlighten the Indigenous Code by giving French citizenship to a small number of Muslims. The pieds-noirs violently demonstrated against it and the North African Party also opposed it, leading to its abandonment.
In 1937, the pro-independence party was dissolved, and its leaders were charged with the illegal reconstitution of a dissolved league, leading to Messali Hadj's 1937 founding of the Parti du peuple algérien, which no longer espoused full independence but only extensive autonomy. This new party was dissolved in 1939. Under Vichy France, the French Sctate attempted to abrogate the Crémieux Decree to suppress the Jews' French citizenship, but the measure was never implemented.
In 1938, the nationalist leader Ferhat Abbas founded the Algerian Popular Union. In 1943, Abbas wrote the Algerian People's Manifesto. Arrested after the Sétif and Guelma massacre of May 8, 1945, when the French Army and pieds-noirs mobs killed between 6,000 and 30,000 Algerians, Abbas founded the Democratic Union of the Algerian Manifesto in 1946 and was elected as a deputy. Founded in 1954, the National Liberation Front created an armed wing, the Armée de Libération Nationale to engage in an armed struggle against French authority. Many Algerian soldiers who served for the French Army in the First Indochina War had strong sympathy for the Vietnamese fighting against France and drew on their experience to support the ALN.
France, which had just lost French Indochina, was determined not to lose the next colonial war, particularly in its oldest and nearest major colony, which was regarded as a part of Metropolitan France, by French law.

War chronology

According to historian Natalya Vince, the FLN leadership understood that they could not achieve Algerian independence through direct military victory over the powerful French army. Instead, they adopted tactics later recognized as asymmetric or revolutionary warfare, including guerrilla warfare and urban terrorism. Their strategy aimed to erode France's political will to continue the conflict, either by increasing the costs of war and exhausting public support or by exposing French repression and undermining its moral authority.
The FLN took inspiration from Chinese and Vietnamese revolutionary leaders, particularly Mao Zedong and Hồ Chí Minh, and maintained contact with them by 1959. They studied General Vo Nguyen Giap’s tactics at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, where the Viet Minh overcame French forces through strategic use of terrain and siege warfare. The FLN also embraced Mao's principle that guerrillas must integrate with the rural population, securing local support to sustain their movement and evade enemy forces.