Algeria

In March 1962, in the eighth year of the Algerian War, the French government signed off on the Evian Accords, which established a ceasefire as well as a process that led to the July 5 proclamation in Algiers of independence—one hundred and thirty-two years to the day after the Ottoman ruler of that city had surrendered to French invaders. Few people were surprised—the only surprising thing was that ending the French occupation took so long. The end was, after all, inevitable, or so it can seem in retrospect. But the war was long, and its violence was shocking to contemporaries both in its forms—the French Armed Forces’ systematic use of torture on suspected nationalists and the embrace of terrorism by the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN)—and its effects: the dead numbered some 17,000 French soldiers, about 3,500 French civilians, and (according to current estimates) between 250,000 and 578,000 Algerians, the vast majority of whom were noncombatants.

Two of the most well-known windows into this moment—the on-screen events in Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers and the account and analysis in Frantz Fanon’s book The Wretched of the Earth—stop in 1961, just before the FLN’s final victory. Looking out from the mountain top, just before the promise of independence has been achieved, gives the undeniable pleasure of being certain of what will happen. Comparing that promise with the ledger of post-independence disappointments (the economic, political, and ideological failures; the still-present threat of terrorist violence; the intense desire of so many North Africans to emigrate to Europe) provides grounds for commentaries, both smug and despairing. Such reflections can seem particularly meaningful because, in today’s history books, the Algerian revolution often stands in for the era of decolonization writ large, with the war’s exceptional violence magnifying the hopes inspired by “Third World revolutions” as well as the doubts about the West’s “civilizing mission.” Focusing on how the French withdrawal from Algeria actually happened offers a different perspective.

Skipping over the messy details, it turns out, was an impulse widely shared at the time. Already in early 1962, though few French people could imagine how the Algerian conflict would finally end, they knew that it would. All the better, as most of them had other things to do. In the photo-weekly Paris-Match, the year’s first editorial, “Snow and Fascism,” noted that “between Christmas and these first days of January, 900,000 Parisians put on hold their rendezvous with History and rushed off to the slopes!” In the final months of 1961, French politicians hesitantly had begun to prepare their country for Algerian independence. The minimal coverage the mainstream press now accorded Algeria was occupied by a fierce debate over the merits of splitting Algeria into mini-states, one “francophile,�...