Best Books on the Algerian War and French Decolonization

The Algerian War lasted from 1954 to 1962 and killed somewhere between 300,000 and one million people, depending on who is counting and what counts. It ended French Algeria, destroyed the Fourth Republic, brought Charles de Gaulle back to power, and left scars in both countries that have not fully healed. For decades France officially refused to call it a war at all, insisting on the bureaucratic euphemism of "events in Algeria." The books below confront what actually happened. ## Algeria as a French Colony Algeria was not simply a colony in the standard sense. It was legally incorporated into France in 1848, and more than a million European settlers, the pieds-noirs, had lived there for generations by the 1950s. They considered themselves French. They voted in French elections. They expected the French army to protect them. This made decolonization structurally different from the British withdrawal from India or the Dutch departure from Indonesia: there was no clean exit that left France intact. Alistair Horne's *A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962* (ISBN 978-0143037026) is the essential English-language account of the conflict. Horne interviewed participants on all sides, spent years in the archives, and produced a narrative history that is both comprehensive and readable. He does not look away from French torture, FLN terrorism, or the betrayal of the harkis, the Algerians who fought for France and were largely abandoned after independence. The book has been in print since 1977 because nothing else has matched its scope. ## The FLN and the Question of Violence The Front de Libération Nationale launched its uprising on November 1, 1954, with coordinated attacks across Algeria. The FLN was not a mass movement at the outset. It had perhaps a few hundred active fighters. What it had was organizational discipline, a willingness to use violence against both French targets and Algerians who collaborated with the French, and a claim to represent the Algerian nation that it eventually made stick. Frantz Fanon's *The Wretched of the Earth* (ISBN 978-0802141323), written in Algeria during the war and published in 1961, provided the most influential theoretical account of colonial violence and the psychology of decolonization. Fanon, a Martinican psychiatrist who had joined the FLN, argued that colonial violence was constitutive of the colonial relationship and that liberation required its inversion. The argument was and remains controversial, but the book shaped a generation of anti-colonial movements and continues to be read seriously. ## Torture, Memory, and the French State The systematic use of torture by French forces during the Battle of Algiers in 1957 became an open secret during the war and a source of continuing political controversy in France afterward. General Paul Aussaresses published a memoir in 2001 in which he confirmed not just that torture had occurred but that he had personally ordered and participated in it. The legal and political fallout from that admission continued for years. The French difficulty in coming to terms with what happened in Algeria, and in particular the slow path toward acknowledging torture as state policy, has been one of the central preoccupations of postwar French intellectual life. The historian Benjamin Stora spent his career mapping this reluctance, and his work is essential for understanding why the Algerian war remained politically alive in France half a century after it ended. ## Independence and Its Aftermath Algeria became independent in July 1962. The pieds-noirs departed in a mass exodus that was partly self-imposed and partly forced. The harkis who tried to stay were massacred in large numbers. The FLN established a single-party state that would govern Algeria, with varying degrees of repression, for the rest of the century. The 1990s saw Algeria descend into a brutal civil war between the government and Islamist insurgents that killed tens of thousands more. The shadow of the independence war lay over that conflict as well: both sides drew on the legitimacy claims and the methods of 1954 to 1962 in ways that made the earlier violence a permanent part of Algerian political life. ## Further Reading [Explore more history books on colonialism](/category/history) [Browse books on 20th-century France](/category/politics)