Algeria: France’s Undeclared War by Martin Evans (review)

Mere months after the July 1954 signing of the Geneva Accords confirmed France’s withdrawal from Indochina, France found itself embroiled in “police actions” in yet another part of its empire. The November 1954 attacks on French military and police positions across Algeria would usher in a second war of decolonization, characterized by exceptional violence on both sides, including the use of torture and terrorist tactics. This undeclared war not only pitted colonizer against colonized, but also provoked deep divisions within the metropolitan French, settler, and Algerian communities.

Scholarship on the war, in both French and English, has proliferated in the past twenty-five years. Topics have ranged from the role of French intellectuals in antiwar resistance, to the civil war between Algerian nationalist factions, to the use of torture by the French army, among others. What has been lacking, however, is a comprehensive archive-based English-language survey. Enter Martin Evans’s Algeria: France’s Undeclared War. The description of the book in the preface as a “chronological narrative of the Algerian War’s origins, intensifications, and consequences” (xi) is deceptively simple, and does not do justice to this thorough, and thoroughly engaging, examination of the political, social, and cultural dimensions of the conflict. Organized into three parts—covering the era from the violent conquest of Algiers (1830) to 1945, the era from the protest and repression of May 1945 to de Gaulle’s acceptance of the possibility of Algerian self-determination in September 1959, and the era of dénouement from 1959 to 1962—the book is also structured around three central analytical threads. These threads provide not only the backbone of Evans’s argument, but also a framework for exploring the complexities of the colonial period, the Algerian independence movement, and the contradictions inherent in the French Left’s commitment to colonial reform, on the one hand, and to the so-called civilizing mission on the other.

The first of these analytical threads concerns the “long hatreds” resulting from French conquest and colonization. In a 2007 review of Alistair Horne’s newly reissued A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 (NYRB Classics, 2006 [1977]), long the standard English-language survey of the war, Irwin Wall posed a critical question about the 1955 Philippeville massacre of European settlers: “What, if anything, does the barbarity of the massacre by Algerians tell us of the rage provoked by French colonialism?” (H-Diplo, May 26, 2007). Whereas Horne fails to engage fully with this question, Evans places the issue of anti-French resentment at the center of his study. Although the impact of colonization was uneven—Algerian Muslims living in areas with few Europeans did not face the daily reinforcement of their inferior status that some of their compatriots did elsewhere—the French conquest had radical economic, social, and political consequences for the indigenous population. Indeed, French Algeria was characterized by an ever-widening gulf between “two societies exist[ing] uneasily in conditions of mistrust, segregation, and mutual incomprehension” (xi).

The second analytical thread is closely linked to the first: the emergence of a modern Algerian nationalism beginning in the 1920s. Far from constituting a single all-encompassing movement, Algerian nationalism ranged from the assimilationist agenda of Ferhat Abbas and the Fédération des élus, to the Ulema movement’s demands for independence on the basis of a distinct Muslim identity, to the radical political nationalism of Messali Hadj and the revolutionary politics of the Algerian Communist Party. As a result of the French state’s failure to engage fully with any of these groups—and worse, its outright repression of many of their leaders—the possibilities for a negotiated solution were slim. Ultimately, armed force was perceived as the only means of securing independence from the French, and the National Liberation Front (FLN) emerged as the frontrunner.

The consequences of the policies pursued by the French government are the foundation of Evans’s third and final...