Algerian War
The Algerian War, also known as the Algerian War of Independence, was a conflict between France and the Algerian independence movements from 1954 to 1962. The war resulted in Algeria gaining independence from France and marked the end of over a century of colonial rule. The conflict had significant political, social, and economic implications for both Algeria and France.
6 Key excerpts on "Algerian War"
eBook - ePub- James Ciment, Kenneth Hill, James Ciment, Kenneth Hill(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Algeria War of National Liberation, 1954-1962 TYPE OF CONFLICT: Anti-colonial PARTICIPANT: France The Algerian War of national liberation from France was among the most significant anticolonial wars of the twentieth century and represented the longest and most violent revolution in modern Arab history. Over 1 million Muslim Algerians and some 20,000 French soldiers died in the eight-year-long struggle. The ideas and tactics of the National Liberation Front (FLN, its French acronym) served as inspiration and a source of methods for revolutionaries throughout the developing world, as well as among black nationalists in the United States. At the same time, the war represented a watershed in post-World War II French history. With some 1 million French and other European settlers in Algeria, the French government and French society were ideologically torn apart, as leftists called for withdrawal and rightists demanded the continuation of "Algérie Française." Ultimately, the war brought down the fourth republic and led to the return of Charles de Gaulle to political life and the creation of the executive-dominated fifth republic. Historical Background Algerian history has always been dominated by invaders. Between the first millennium B.C.E. and the early nineteenth century A.D., this region of the North African coast has been conquered and occupied by the Phoenicians, the Romans, the Vandals, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Turks, and finally, the French. Of these various invaders, the two most important, in terms of the legacy they left in Algeria, were the Arabs and the French. The former brought their language and religion; the latter imposed a political system and the rudiments of a modern economy. Between these two conquerors were the Turks. With the collapse of Moorish Spain in the late fifteenth century, western North Af rica faced the threat of Christian invasion...
eBook - ePubOil Exploration, Diplomacy, and Security in the Early Cold War
The Enemy Underground
- Roberto Cantoni(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...This dilemma had repercussions on French-American relations during the entire war, a fact that adds to the importance of analyzing the Algerian War from a multilateral perspective. The Algerian War has long been a marginalized event in the history of French international relations. However, over the last twenty years, as the psychological taboo linked in particular with the French military’s frequent practice of torture on Algerian prisoners has begun to fade, an increasing number of studies have been published. The war deeply influenced French national and international politics, to the point that it was the main cause of a major change in France’s constitutional system in 1958. Algerian events have therefore been analyzed from many different points of view. The historiography of the Algerian War has tended to focus on political, diplomatic, military, and cultural aspects. 5 Not unexpectedly, analyses have come mainly from the French academic milieu, and have mostly focused on French–Algerian bilateral relations. However, in the last fifteen years international aspects of the war, as well as the involvement of third parties in it, have also been investigated by works in the history of international relations. Samya El Mechat, Irwin Wall, and Matthew Connelly have produced studies on French–American–Algerian diplomatic triangulations; Martin Thomas and Christopher Goldsmith have focused on Anglo–French wartime dynamics; Jean-Paul Cahn and Klaus-Jürgen Miller have worked on West Germany’s position during the War; and Bruna Bagnato has analyzed the evolution of Italy’s ambiguous standpoint over the same period. The multilateral focus is not unjustified: such was the extent of international involvement in the Algerian War that Connelly went so far as to define it as a ‘diplomatic revolution.’ 6 Indeed, Connelly has argued that the achievement of Algerian independence in 1962 was mainly the result of unofficial diplomatic actions carried out by the FLN around the world...
- R. F Holland, Robert Holland, Robert Holland(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The Origins of the Algerian War: The Reaction of France and its Army to the two Emergencies of 8 May 1945 and 1 November 1954 Jean-Charles Jauffret (Translated by Christina Watkins and Maria Sparling) On 22 November 1944, General de Gaulle, head of the temporary government of the Republic, enjoined the members of the Consultative Assembly in the following terms: 'Let us rebuild our power, from now on let it be our country's great crusade'. 1 At the heart of this ambition lay the colonial empire, whose new-found unity was to be a condition of French domination for a decade. The clearly nationalistic aspiration to retain the Empire, which even gained the support of the communists in 1944-45, was nevertheless accompanied by a desire for reform. In his Constantine speech on the 12 December 1943, General de Gaulle outlined the framework for greater assimilation of the three Algerian regions within the national community, while in January-February 1944 the Brazzaville Conference pointed to association as the way forward for the remainder of the colonial territories. However, these reforms were based first and foremost on the principle of loyalty, the 'Great Nation' alone having the power to determine to what extent its people were to be emancipated. The French State could not allow any form of armed conflict. Such an attitude set little store by the Second World War which accelerated the course of history, the hopes created by the Atlantic Charter and the inevitable movement towards decolonization, which reached the point of no return at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. On two occasions, 8 May 1945 and 1 November 1954, the Republic and its armed forces found themselves challenged by a Muslim Algeria impatient to throw off the shackles of colonization. How did the civil and military authorities react? The two events were very closely linked: the rebellion of 1954 was a direct result of the failed coup of spring 1945...
- Major Michael J. Lackman(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Normanby Press(Publisher)
...CHAPTER 3 — A CASE STUDY OF THE FRENCH ALGERIAN CONFLICT: 1954-1962 As thou canst [sic] observe, under colonialism Justice, Democracy and Equality are only a snare and a delusion designed to deceive thee and plunge thee day by day into the poverty thou knowest only too well. {51} — A note found on the body of a terrorist killed on All Saints Day The note above confirms the deep commitment of the Algerian insurgents to their goals and objectives. The French military waged an effective campaign against the Algerians fighters. They killed the insurgent leadership, separated the terrorist from the support base, cut off external support, and initiated social reforms. However, after eight years of conflict, the French signed a peace treaty granting the Algerians independence and self-rule. The French experience during the Algerian War for Independence provides context and historical examples for developing a contemporary counterinsurgency plan. The purpose of this chapter is to use the French military actions in Algeria to conduct an analysis of counterinsurgency doctrine, policies, and programs. The analysis will not create a checklist to follow when developing a counterinsurgency plan. However, the analysis will generate concrete examples and discernable patterns that enable a military planner to develop an integrated counterinsurgency strategy. There are limitations to this case study. The European colonial population in Algeria wielded great influence in the French parliament and they represented an important segment of the population but the roles of the European colonialists are not central to the thesis. The Battle of Algiers was an important part of the French war in Algeria. {52} The Battle of Algiers is not covered because the subject is well documented in film and text. The last aspect of the war not covered in this thesis is psychological operations. Both the French and the Algerian insurgents practiced psychological warfare...
eBook - ePubCinema and the Algerian War of Independence
Culture, Politics, and Society
- Ahmed Bedjaoui(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...The aphorism of “the end of the Algerian War” to mean “the independence of Algeria,” even if, implicitly, that is what it was, does not mean much historically, except as a play on words, not entirely devoid of ulterior motives. “The end of the Algerian War,” just one episode among many others, takes no account of the slow impatience in a turbulent river, of the Algerian people for their liberation. It started on a certain day, the fourteenth of June 1830 – to be more precise when Count de Bourmont set foot on the shore of Sidi-Ferruch, and ended on July 3, 1962 – with the official proclamation of the independence of Algeria. 72 The Algerian writer, Mouloud Mammeri, describes very accurately the iconographic acculturation operated on Algerians by colonization. “Slowly, but surely, we were trained to forget ourselves. To redesign our appearance and break this work of disfiguration, we needed to get hold of the tool of the image.” When the first of November announced the end of occupation, the photographic image, the cinematic image, the images that were offered by our great painters of the liberation, Issiakhem, Khadda, Mesli, Ali-Khodja, Yellès, and many others, brought to combative Algeria this capacity to represent itself that was so cruelly lacking in 1830, when faced with the painters/reporters of the colonial invasion. Once freed, I am not sure our cinema took up the historic challenge that was set by the dream of freedom and justice, established by the liberation war. Redha Malek considers that in the cinema, “we have not done enough to do justice to what happened in Algeria...
eBook - ePub- Britannica Educational Publishing, Amy McKenna(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Britannica Educational Publishing(Publisher)
...Military territories in the south would be abolished, and Arabic would become the language of educational instruction at all levels. The law was poorly implemented, however, and the subsequent elections were widely held to have been manipulated to favour the French. Most of the reforms laid down by the statute were never enforced. In spite of this, Algeria remained quiet. The principal change had been the fact that some 350,000 Algerian workers—five times as many as in the post-World War I period—were able to establish themselves in France and remit money to Algeria. T HE A LGERIAN W AR OF I NDEPENDENCE Nationalist parties had existed for many years, but they became increasingly radical as they realized that their goals were not going to be achieved through peaceful means. Prior to World War II the Party of the Algerian People (Parti du Peuple Algérien) had been founded by Messali Hadj. The party was banned in the late 1930s and replaced in the mid-1940s by the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties (Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Libertés Démocratiques; MTLD). A more radical paramilitary group, the Special Organization (Organization Spéciale; OS), was formed about the same time, but it was discovered by the colonial police in 1950, and many of its leaders were imprisoned. In 1954 a group of former OS members split from the MTLD and formed the Revolutionary Committee of Unity and Action (Comité Révolutionaire d’Unité et d’Action; CRUA). This organization, later to become the FLN, prepared for military action. The leading members of the CRUA became the so-called chefs historiques (“historical leaders”) of the Algerian War of Independence: Hocine Aït-Ahmed, Larbi Ben M’Hidi, Moustapha Ben Boulaid, Mohamed Boudiaf, Mourad Didouche, Belkacem Krim, Mohamed Khider, Rabah Bitat, and Ahmed Ben Bella. They organized and led several hundred men in the first armed confrontations. The war began on the night of Oct. 31, 1954...
