Toussaint Rouge
Toussaint Rouge, also known as Toussaint Sanglante, was a series of 70 attacks committed by militant members of the Algerian National Liberation Front that took place on 1 November 1954—the Catholic festival of All Saints' Day—in French Algeria. It is usually taken as the starting date for the Algerian War which lasted until 1962 and led to Algerian independence from France.
Background
The National Liberation Front was started in June 1954. Members of the CRUA and former members of the Special Organization, the paramilitary branch of Messali Hadj's MTLD, decided to join together and move to armed struggle.Attacks
Between midnight and 2 am on the morning of All Saints' Day, 70 individual attacks were made by FLN militants against police, military and civilian pied-noir targets around French Algeria. Ten people were killed in the coordinated attacks.Reaction in Paris
After hearing of the attacks, François Mitterrand, then Minister of the Interior, dispatched two companies of the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité to Algeria. A total of three companies of paratroopers also arrived between 1 and 2 November.On 12 November 1954, Pierre Mendès France, President of the French Council of Ministers declared that the attacks would not be tolerated in a speech to the National Assembly:
The Mendes France government increased the number of soldiers in Algeria from 56,000 to 83,000 men to deal with the situation in the Aures mountains — the "main bastion of the insurrection," though the sending of the conscripts to Algeria did not occur until one year later after the Journée des tomates on 6 February 1956 under the Guy Mollet government.