Buoyed by its hard-fought success in defeating the insurgency in Algiers, the French army renewed its effort to break the National Liberation Front in the countryside. In late 1956 the French initiated a policy of forcing Algerian peasants from their homes and farms into internment camps. The forced resettlement of rural Algerians gained pace after the Battle of Algiers. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were rounded up and forced to live under French surveillance in camps with no access to their farmlands or work. Rather than suffer these French measures, many rural workers fled to the cities, where they congregated in slums. Others sought refuge in Tunisia or Morocco. By war’s end in 1962, some three million rural Algerians had been displaced from their homes, many never to return. The French further isolated the FLN by closing the frontiers between Algeria and its neighbors with electrified fences and mine fields, thus preventing the migration of arms, fighters, and supplies from Morocco and Tunisia. In military terms, the French had contained and defeated the insurgency in Algeria by 1958. However, the FLN opened new fronts in its war of independence, bringing its cause to the attention of the international community. With support from Egypt and other countries of the Non-Aligned Movement, they succeeded in getting the Algerian question on the agenda of the United Nations General Assembly in 1957. The following year, the FLN declared a provisional government in exile based in its Cairo office, with veteran nationalist leader Ferhat Abbas as president. And in December 1958 the provisional government of Algeria was invited to send a delegation to the People?s Republic of China. Algerian nationalists were gaining international attention and support that served to isolate France politically even as it seemed to have won the war militarily. France itself was increasingly divided over the Algeria question by 1958. French taxpayers were beginning to feel the enormous cost of war. The French force in Algeria, only 60,000 men in 1954, had expanded ninefold to over 500,000 by 1956.⁸ This massive occupation force could only be sustained through conscription and extended national service—always unpopular measures. The young conscripts found themselves caught up in a war of unspeakable horror. Many returned home appalled by what they had witnessed and traumatized by what they had done: violations of human rights, forced resettlement, house demolitions, but worst of all, the systematic use of torture against men and women.⁹ French public opinion was shocked by reports of French soldiers resorting to methods associated with the brutal Nazi repression of the French Resistance in the Second World War. Leading French intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre grew increasingly outspoken against the war at home, while France suffered isolation in the international arena for the violence of an imperial war during an age of decolonization. The army and the settler community in Algeria were alarmed by the wavering French support for the Algerian colony. In May 1958 a group of French settlers rose in rebellion against the anemic government of French Premier Pierre Pflimlin, whom they suspected of seeking accommodation with the FLN enemy. Their slogan was “the Army to Power!” On May 13 the settlers overran the governor-general’s offices in Algiers to declare effective self-rule under a revolutionary “committee of public safety” with General Jacques Massu, commander of the elite paratrooper units, as its president. The French military in Algeria was in full sympathy with the settlers’ movement. General Raoul Salan, commander in chief of French forces in Algeria, had dispatched a long telegram to his superiors in Paris on May 9. Salan conveyed his officers’ concerns that “diplomatic processes” might lead to “the abandonment of Algeria.” He continued: “The army in Algeria is troubled by the recognition of its responsibility towards the men who are fighting and risking a useless sacrifice if the representatives of the nation are not determined to maintain Algйrie franзaise.”¹⁰ Salan warned that only determined government action to preserve French Algeria would prevent a military putsch—not just in Algeria, but in metropolitan France as well. The crisis in Algeria risked toppling the French republic itself. The settler insurrection sent shock waves through Algiers. Mouloud Feraoun captured the fear and uncertainty in his diary on May 14: “Atmosphere of revolution. People barricaded in their homes. Demonstrators march up and down the major arteries of the city, shops closed. The radio speaks of a Committee of Public Health that has taken all in hand and occupies the Governor General?s office and controls broadcasts.? The Muslims of Algiers recognized that this was a fight between the French that did not involve them. Feraoun questioned the Fourth Republic?s ability to withstand the pressure. ?At base, the Algeria War will prove a very hard blow for France, perhaps a mortal blow to the Republic. After which, no doubt, this blow will bring the remedy to Algeria and Algerians.?¹¹

Soon after, Pfimlin’s government fell, and the hero of the French resistance in World War II, General Charles de Gaulle, was returned to power by public acclaim in June 1958. Within three months, de Gaulle submitted a new constitution to plebiscite and in September 1958 launched the Fifth Republic. One of de Gaulle’s first acts was to fly to Algeria to face the rebellious settler community. In a famous speech delivered in Algiers, de Gaulle calmed the restive army and settlers by promising that Algeria would remain French. “I have understood you!” de Gaulle reassured the rapturous crowds. He put forward an ambitious reform platform to develop Algeria and integrate its Arab citizens into the commonwealth of France through industrial development, land distribution, and the creation of 400,000 new jobs. De Gaulle’s proposals were clearly intended to reassure the army and settlers in Algeria and bring an end to General Salan’s Committee of Public Safety. However, his comments demonstrated how little he understood the nationalist movement behind the FLN’s war. Reflecting on de Gaulle’s pronouncements, Mouloud Feraoun wrote bitterly: “Algerian nationalism? It doesn’t exist. Integration? You’ve got it.” It was as though de Gaulle were going back to the idea of assimilation as first set out in the Blum-Violette proposals of 1930. Assimilation might have held some appeal even as late as 1945. By 1958 it was an irrelevance. To Feraoun, it was as if de Gaulle were saying: “You are French, old man. Nothing else. Don’t give us any more headaches.” In the face of stubborn FLN resistance, de Gaulle was forced to come to terms with Algerian demands for total independence. In spite of his early promises, de Gaulle reversed his position and began to prepare his countrymen for Algeria’s secession from France. In September 1959 he spoke for the first time of Algerian self-determination, provoking a round of violent demonstrations by settlers in Algeria in January 1960. De Gaulle persisted and in June 1960 convened the first direct negotiations with the provisional government of the Algerian Republic in Evian. Hard-liners in the settler movement and their allies in the army began to see de Gaulle as a traitor. They formed terrorist organizations, like the Front of French Algeria and the notorious Secret Armed Organization, better known by its French acronym, the OAS, and actively plotted de Gaulle’s assassination. The OAS also unleashed a violent terror campaign within Algeria that inflicted random violence on Arab civilians. The Evian negotiations, combined with the breakdown in public security, provoked a political crisis among the settlers and military in Algeria. In January 1961 the French government held a referendum on self-determination in Algeria, which carried with a resounding 75 percent vote in favor. In April 1961 the Foreign Legion parachute regiment in Algiers mutinied in protest against the French government’s moves to concede Algerian independence. However, the mutiny did not gain wider support among the French military, which remained faithful to de Gaulle, and the coup leaders were forced to surrender after only four days. As the settlers’ position in Algeria grew more tenuous in 1961 and early 1962, the OAS stepped up its terrorist violence inside Algeria. “Now it seems that the OAS doesn’t warn anyone,” Mouloud Feraoun noted in one of his last journal entries, in February 1962. “They murder in cars, on motorcycle, with grenades, with machine-gun fire, with knives. They attack cashiers in banks, post offices, companies . . . with the complicity of some and the cowardice of all.”¹² Feraoun’s brave voice of reason was silenced by OAS guns on March 15, just three days before the signing of the Evian Accords. While violence continued to rage in Algeria, the FLN and de Gaulle’s government made steady progress in their negotiations in Evian. On March 18, 1962, the two sides signed the Evian Accords, conferring full independence on Algeria. The terms of the accords were put to public vote in a plebiscite held in Algeria on July 1. Algerians voted in near unanimity for independence (the vote was 5.9 million in favor, 16,000 opposed). On July 3, de Gaulle proclaimed the independence of Algeria. Celebrations in Algiers were delayed for two days to coincide with the anniversary of the French occupation of the city on July 5, 1830. After 132 years, the Algerians had finally driven the French from their lands. Ongoing terror and an uncertain future drove the French community from Algeria in massive waves—300,000 left in the month of June 1962 alone. Many settler families had lived for generations in North Africa. By the end of the year, only some 30,000 European settlers remained in Algeria. But most destructive was the bitter fighting that swiftly broke out between the internal and external leadership of the National Liberation Front in a desperate bid to seize power in the country they had fought so hard and sacrificed so much to win. For the battle-weary Algerian people it was too much. The women of Algiers took to the streets to protest the fighting between their own freedom fighters, chanting “Seven years, enough is enough!” It was not until Ahmed Ben Bella and Houari Boumedienne secured Algiers in September 1962 that the fighting came to an end. Ben Bella took his place at the head of government; a year later, after the ratification of the constitution in September 1963, he was elected president. Three years later, Boumedienne displaced him in a bloodless coup, reflecting the continued factionalism within the FLN leadership. For many, independence proved a hollow victory—particularly for Algerian women. After their courage and sacrifice, they were appalled to hear FLN leader Mohamed Khider insist that women should “return to their couscous.” Baya Hocine, one of the veterans of the Battle of Algiers who suffered torture and years in prison, reflected on the mixed emotions that came with independence:1962 was a black hole. Before then it was a great adventure and then . . . you found yourself all alone. I don’t know how the other sisters felt, but I had no immediate political objectives in mind. 1962 was the greatest comfort, the end of the war, but at the same time it was the great fear. In prison, we so believed we would . . . get out, that we would make a socialist Algeria.... And then we saw an Algeria made practically without us . . . without anyone thinking about us. For us, it was worse than before, because we had broken all of the barriers and it was very difficult for us to go back to that. In 1962, all of the barriers were restored, but in a terrible way for us. They were put back in place to exclude us.¹³