Algerian War

The Algerian War was fought from 1954 to 1962 between France and the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), which sought independence for Algeria after more than a century of French rule. Marked by guerrilla warfare, terrorism, torture and reprisals, it brought down France's Fourth Republic, returned Charles de Gaulle to power, and ended with Algerian independence in July 1962. Its death toll remains disputed, with estimates of Algerian deaths ranging from about 400,000 to 1.5 million.

France invaded Algeria in 1830 and conquered it over several decades of often brutal warfare. Unlike most colonies, Algeria was later treated as an integral part of France, divided into French departments. By the 1950s about a million European settlers, known as pieds-noirs, lived there alongside some nine million Muslim Algerians, who had far fewer political rights and much less land and wealth. In May 1945, an uprising at Sétif was followed by French reprisals in which thousands of Algerians were killed, with estimates ranging from about 6,000 to many times that figure.

On 1 November 1954, the FLN launched coordinated attacks across Algeria, an event remembered as the Toussaint Rouge, or Red All Saints' Day. France, which had just lost the war in Indochina, answered that Algeria was France and sent large numbers of troops, eventually some 400,000 or more. The war spread from the mountains to the cities. In August 1955 FLN-led attacks near Philippeville killed civilians, and French forces and settler militias responded with reprisals that killed many more.

In 1957 French paratroopers under General Jacques Massu broke the FLN's bombing campaign and organisation in Algiers. Their success depended heavily on the systematic use of torture and on disappearances, which became a scandal in France and remains a painful subject. Across the countryside the army moved around two million rural Algerians into regroupment camps and fenced the borders with Tunisia and Morocco. Militarily the FLN's armed wing was greatly weakened, but support for independence grew, and the FLN won international backing.

In May 1958 settlers and army officers in Algiers, fearing a negotiated withdrawal, seized power locally and threatened Paris. The crisis brought de Gaulle back to power and led to the Fifth Republic. To the dismay of many who had supported his return, he moved step by step towards self-determination for Algeria. Opponents of independence rebelled in Algiers in 1960, and a group of generals attempted a putsch in April 1961, which failed. The Organisation armée secrète (OAS), formed by diehard supporters of French Algeria, then waged a campaign of bombings and assassinations in Algeria and France. In Paris, police violently suppressed a demonstration by Algerians on 17 October 1961, killing a disputed number, perhaps dozens or more. The Évian Accords, signed in March 1962, brought a ceasefire on 19 March. Referendums in France and Algeria approved independence by large majorities, and Algeria became independent on 5 July 1962.

Around 900,000 pieds-noirs left for France within months. Many harkis, Algerian Muslims who had served with the French, were killed in reprisals after independence; estimates of their deaths vary enormously, from several thousand to many tens of thousands, and those who reached France were often placed in camps. French military deaths are put at about 25,000. Estimates of the total Algerian dead differ sharply: the Algerian state has long cited about 1.5 million, while many French historians give figures of roughly 400,000 to 700,000.

The FLN ruled independent Algeria as a one-party state for decades. In France the war was officially called "operations to maintain order" until 1999, when the term "Algerian War" was formally recognised, and debates over torture, the harkis and colonial memory continue on both sides of the Mediterranean.

Our 1945 and 1960 maps show Algeria as French territory, and our 1985 map shows it as an independent state.