The Algerian War of Independence
For 37 years France would not call it a war. It named it one in 1999.
Open
This is not the story of a colony winning its freedom. Algeria was not a colony. In French law it was three departments of France itself, governed from Paris since eighteen forty eight, with its own deputies in the National Assembly.
So when the first attacks came in November nineteen fifty four, the French Interior Minister was not talking about a possession overseas. Algeria is France, he said, and the only negotiation is war.
France did not call what followed a war for thirty seven years. It named it one in June nineteen ninety nine.
Scene 1Three in the morning
Three in the morning, November first, nineteen fifty four. All Saints' Day.
Roughly thirty coordinated attacks hit police posts, barracks, and farms across Algeria at once. Seven people die.
From Cairo, a radio broadcast announces a new organization, the National Liberation Front.
The proclamation the National Liberation Front broadcast that night demanded one thing.
· Proclamation of November 1, 1954 · November 1, 1954
“The restoration of the Algerian state, sovereign, democratic and social, within the framework of Islamic principles.”
The government's answer came within days, from the Interior Minister, Francois Mitterrand.
“Algeria is France, and the only negotiation is war.”
To offer negotiation is to admit there is a territory to negotiate over. Mitterrand had just ruled that out.
Scene 2Setif, 1945
Nine years earlier, May eighth, nineteen forty five. VE Day. Celebrations in Setif turn into a rising, then into weeks of killing by the army and settler militias.
Algerian accounts count tens of thousands dead. The number is still contested, from fifteen hundred to forty five thousand.
A generation concludes that petitions get nothing. Men who will found the FLN date their conviction to that day.
Scene 3Algiers, 1957
January nineteen fifty seven. General Jacques Massu is handed police powers over the city of Algiers.
His paratroopers break the FLN's bombing network within eight months. They do it with mass arrests, electrodes, water, and the disappearance of thousands.
On June eleventh, a twenty five year old mathematician named Maurice Audin is arrested. The army says he escaped from a moving jeep. He is never seen again.
His friend Henri Alleg is taken the next day, to the same building. Alleg survives, and later writes down what four words Audin said to him before they were separated for good.
Audin's last words to Alleg, as Alleg recorded them, were flat and human.
· Last words to Henri Alleg, reported in La Question · 1957
“It is tough, Henri.”
Alleg's book sold sixty thousand copies in two weeks. Then the French state seized it, the first book seizure in France since the eighteenth century.
Scene 4Algiers, June 1958
Charles de Gaulle returns to power in nineteen fifty eight, carried by settlers and generals chanting for French Algeria. In Algiers, he speaks to the crowd from a balcony.
De Gaulle told the crowd four words, and they heard a promise.
· Speech from the Forum, Algiers · June 4, 1958
“I have understood you.”
He turned instead toward self-determination. The settlers who had brought him back formed the Secret Army Organization and answered with plastic bombs and a failed generals' putsch in April nineteen sixty one.
Scene 5Paris, then Evian
October seventeenth, nineteen sixty one. Paris police under prefect Maurice Papon attack a peaceful Algerian march. Men are beaten, shot, and thrown into the Seine.
The Evian Accords bring a ceasefire on March nineteenth, nineteen sixty two. A referendum on July first passes with ninety nine point seven percent.
On July fifth, nineteen sixty two, Algeria becomes independent.
Scene 6The dead were never agreed upon
Algeria's founding memory enshrines one and a half million martyrs. French and independent historians estimate the Algerian dead at three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand, alongside about twenty five thousand French soldiers killed.
Over two million rural Algerians had been forcibly relocated into camps during the war. Tens of thousands of harkis were killed in reprisals after it ended, and about one million pieds-noirs fled to France in nineteen sixty two.
Two states have never agreed on a single number since.
Five accounts
What this war was, and what it cost, is contested from five directions. Each gets its own case, in its own terms, before anything is said against it.
victorAlgerian National Liberation (FLN)
Algerian National Liberation (FLN)
The Algerian account starts with arithmetic. In nineteen fifty four, one hundred twenty four years after French troops took Algiers, roughly one million European settlers held the citizenship, the best land, and the vote. About nine million Muslim Algerians held little of either.
Setif taught the founding generation what petitions were worth. Men who would found the FLN dated their conviction to that single day.
The FLN called the Algiers bombings answers to the guillotine. France executed FLN prisoners, and the FLN carried the war to the settler city that demanded those executions.
Larbi Ben M'hidi, an FLN commander captured in nineteen fifty seven, was killed in French custody. The army called it suicide. Decades later, an army officer admitted he had him hanged.
Ahmed Ben Bella was seized in nineteen fifty six when France forced down his aircraft. He spent the rest of the war in French prisons, and emerged from them as independent Algeria's first president.
Its own revolutionary slogan put the claim of authorship in three words.
“One hero, the people.”
Independence, in this account, is not a gift granted. It is a reversal, earned in eight years for a dispossession that had lasted one hundred thirty two.
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Narrative
The Algerian national narrative begins with arithmetic. In 1954, one hundred and twenty-four years after French troops took Algiers in 1830, roughly one million European settlers held the citizenship, the best farmland, and the ballot. About nine million Muslim Algerians held little of any. The code de l'indigenat had made them subjects, not citizens, on their own soil. When Muslim Algerians voted at all, a colonial electoral college weighted a settler's vote many times over a Muslim's. This was not an accident of policy. It was the structure of settler colonialism.
Setif taught the founding generation what reform was worth. On May 8, 1945, as Europe celebrated victory, a demonstration in Setif carrying the nationalist flag turned into a rising and then into weeks of killing by the army and settler militias. Algerian accounts count tens of thousands dead. Men who would later found the FLN, among them Ahmed Ben Bella, dated their conviction to that day: that France would concede nothing to petitions.
The FLN was founded in 1954 by a small group of former Special Organization militants. Its proclamation of November 1 demanded a sovereign Algerian state and offered France negotiation. The Congress of Soummam in August 1956 gave the movement a structure and a doctrine, and asserted the primacy of the internal fighters and of politics over arms. The bombs placed in Algiers cafes in 1956 and 1957 were, in the FLN's account, answers to the guillotine: France executed FLN prisoners, and the FLN carried the war to the settler city that demanded those executions.
France called the fighters terrorists and bandits. The FLN called itself an army of national liberation waging a legitimate war against occupation, and it won the argument where it counted, at the United Nations and across the newly decolonizing world. Larbi Ben M'hidi, captured in 1957, was killed in French custody; the army called it suicide, and decades later Paul Aussaresses admitted he had him hanged. Ahmed Ben Bella was seized in 1956 when France forced down his aircraft, and spent the war in French prisons before emerging as independent Algeria's first president.
Independence came on July 5, 1962, the anniversary of the 1830 conquest, a date chosen so that the calendar itself would record the reversal. Algeria wrote the war into its foundation: one hero, the people, and one and a half million martyrs. The number is a claim about sacrifice as much as a count of the dead, and it anchors the legitimacy of the state the FLN built.
Arguments
- A settler minority of one million held the vote and the land denied to nine million Muslim Algerians
- Setif in 1945 proved peaceful reform was foreclosed and armed struggle was the remaining path
- The FLN framed the Algiers bombings as reprisal for guillotine executions and collective punishment
- Independence on July 5, 1962 reversed the July 5, 1830 conquest to the day
Sources
- A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962
- Le FLN, mirage et realite
- Histoire interieure du FLN, 1954-1962
- A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era
vanquishedFrench State and the Pied-Noir Settlers
French State and the Pied-Noir Settlers
For Paris, Algeria was not a possession to surrender. It was three departments of France, represented in the National Assembly since eighteen forty eight.
The pieds-noirs were not a planter aristocracy. The million European Algerians were mostly clerks, mechanics, and shopkeepers, many born in Algeria and knowing no other home. At Philippeville in August nineteen fifty five, FLN fighters killed around one hundred twenty Europeans, some of them women and children. To the settlers this was proof the FLN was a terrorist movement, not an army.
The army believed it had won. It broke the FLN's network in Algiers and sealed the border with the guerrillas' bases. By nineteen fifty nine the FLN inside Algeria was militarily broken. The war, in this account, was won on the ground and lost in Paris.
When independence came, the settlers' own slogan named the choice they said they faced.
“The suitcase or the coffin.”
On July fifth, the day independence was declared, hundreds of Europeans were killed in Oran while French troops under orders stood aside. To this account, that is French abandonment confirmed.
About one million crossed the Mediterranean within months, to a France that had made little provision for them.
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Narrative
For Paris, Algeria was not a possession to be surrendered but a part of France. Since 1848 it had been organized as three departments, with representation in the National Assembly and administration by the Interior Ministry rather than the colonial office. When the attacks came on November 1, 1954, Interior Minister Francois Mitterrand stated the doctrine plainly: Algeria is France, and the only negotiation is war. To concede independence was, in this reading, to amputate national territory.
The pieds-noirs were not a planter aristocracy. The million European Algerians descended from French, Spanish, Italian, and Maltese migrants, along with roughly 130,000 Jews made French citizens by the Cremieux Decree of 1870. Most were clerks, mechanics, vineyard workers, and shopkeepers who had been born in Algeria and knew no other home. They experienced FLN violence directly. At Philippeville in August 1955, FLN fighters and villagers killed around 120 Europeans, some of them women and children mutilated in their homes; the French reprisal killed thousands. To the settlers this was proof that the FLN was a terrorist movement, not an army, and that abandonment meant death.
The army believed it had won. The Battle of Algiers dismantled the FLN's urban network. The Morice Line, an electrified barrier along the Tunisian border, cut the guerrillas off from resupply. By 1959 the FLN inside Algeria was militarily broken. In this account the war was won on the ground and lost in Paris, by politicians who lacked the will to hold what soldiers had secured.
The sense of betrayal centered on de Gaulle. Settlers and generals had brought him back to power in May 1958 believing he would keep Algeria French; in Algiers he told them, I have understood you, and the crowd heard a promise. When he moved instead toward self-determination and then negotiation, part of the army and the settlers turned on him. The Secret Army Organization, the OAS, waged a campaign of assassination and plastic bombings in 1961 and 1962 and backed a generals' putsch in April 1961 that briefly seized Algiers before collapsing.
Independence left the pieds-noirs a choice their own slogan named: the suitcase or the coffin. In a matter of months about one million crossed the Mediterranean to a France that regarded them with suspicion and had made little provision for them. On July 5, 1962, in Oran, hundreds of Europeans were killed as French troops under orders stood aside, a final confirmation, in settler memory, of both FLN violence and French abandonment.
Arguments
- Algeria was constitutionally French territory in three departments, not a colony to be relinquished
- FLN attacks on civilians such as Philippeville in 1955 were terrorism, not legitimate warfare
- The army won the Battle of Algiers and sealed the frontier; the defeat was political, made in Paris
- De Gaulle's turn to self-determination betrayed the settlers and soldiers who had restored him to power
Sources
- A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962
- The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France
- Algeria: France's Undeclared War
vanquishedThe Harkis, Caught Between
The Harkis, Caught Between
Between one hundred fifty thousand and two hundred thousand Algerian Muslims served the French side, as harkis, moghaznis, and soldiers. Their reasons ranged from wages to family tradition to belief in a French Algeria. The Evian Accords promised them amnesty.
It was not honored. A nineteen sixty two government directive ordered officers not to bring harkis across the Mediterranean. Many were disarmed and left in place.
What followed was reprisal. The number killed is fiercely contested: French official figures suggested around ten thousand; harki associations have claimed as many as one hundred fifty thousand.
Some French officers defied orders and smuggled families out at their own risk. The roughly ninety thousand who reached France were interned in camps for years, apart from French society and despised by the pieds-noirs who had also fled. For sixty years no state mourned them.
In September twenty twenty one, President Emmanuel Macron spoke directly to harki families.
“I ask their forgiveness. We will not forget.”
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Narrative
Between 150,000 and 200,000 Algerian Muslims served the French side during the war as harkis, moghaznis, and regular soldiers. Their reasons were as varied as their number: wages in a devastated countryside, protection for a village, old feuds with the FLN, family tradition in the French army, or genuine belief in a French Algeria. Whatever the reason, the Evian Accords of March 1962 promised them amnesty. It was not honored.
De Gaulle's government feared a mass arrival of Muslim Algerians in France. In 1962 the minister responsible, Louis Joxe, issued directives ordering officers not to bring harkis across the Mediterranean and threatening sanctions against those who evacuated them without authorization. Many harkis were disarmed and left in place. What followed was reprisal: through 1962 and into 1963, harkis were killed by FLN units and by neighbors settling accounts, sometimes tortured and paraded before death.
The number killed is fiercely contested. French official figures suggested around 10,000; harki associations have claimed as many as 150,000; historians such as those who have worked the reprisal records place credible estimates in the tens of thousands. The uncertainty itself is part of the wound, because no state kept the count. Some French officers defied orders and smuggled families out at their own risk. Roughly 90,000 harkis and dependents reached France.
Arrival was not rescue. Harki families were interned in camps at Rivesaltes, Bias, and elsewhere, some for more than a decade, in conditions that kept them apart from French society and from the pieds-noirs who despised them. To independent Algeria they were traitors who had worn the uniform of the occupier, their name a slur. To France they were an embarrassment to be housed out of sight. Their children grew up French citizens carrying a history neither country would teach.
For sixty years the harkis had no state to mourn them. In September 2021 President Macron acknowledged that France had failed in its duty toward them and asked their forgiveness in the name of the Republic; a 2022 law offered a measure of reparation. The recognition arrived after most of the generation it concerned was dead.
Arguments
- Between 150,000 and 200,000 Algerians served France, and Evian promised them an amnesty that was not kept
- A 1962 government directive barred officers from evacuating harkis to France
- Reprisal killings, estimated from around 10,000 to 150,000, fell on men left disarmed
- Survivors who reached France were interned in camps for years, then forgotten by both nations
Sources
- The Harkis: The Wound That Never Heals
- Les harkis
- Algeria: France's Undeclared War
revisionistAnti-War Dissent and the Torture Debate
Anti-War Dissent and the Torture Debate
In January nineteen fifty seven, General Massu was handed police powers over Algiers. This account's central claim is about method: mass arrests in the Casbah, interrogation by electrode and water, and the disappearance of thousands never accounted for.
The case that reached metropolitan France was Maurice Audin's, a communist mathematician who died under torture at twenty five. His friend Henri Alleg survived and described what was done to him in a book seized by the state after it sold sixty thousand copies.
In September nineteen sixty, more than one hundred French intellectuals signed the Manifesto of the hundred twenty one, declaring the right of conscripts to refuse to fight an unjust war. Simone de Beauvoir and the lawyer Gisele Halimi took up the case of Djamila Boupacha, a young FLN militant raped and tortured in custody, and made it a public reckoning.
Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist who had treated both French torturers and their Algerian victims, resigned his hospital post and joined the FLN. He argued that colonialism was itself a permanent violence, and that decolonization was its reckoning.
“Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.”
To this account, the state's censorship of Alleg's book only confirmed the crime it was trying to bury.
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Narrative
In January 1957 the civil authorities handed General Jacques Massu full police powers over Algiers. His paratroopers broke the FLN's bombing network in eight months. They did it through a system: mass arrests in the Casbah, interrogation by electrode and water, and the disappearance of thousands who were never seen again. Around 24,000 people were detained; some 3,000 were never accounted for. The military called it success. Its critics called it what Pierre Vidal-Naquet would name the cancer of a democracy.
The case that pierced metropolitan France was Maurice Audin's. A 25-year-old communist mathematician at the University of Algiers, he was arrested on June 11, 1957. The army said he escaped from a jeep during a transfer. Vidal-Naquet's L'Affaire Audin in 1958 dismantled the story and showed he had died under torture. His friend Henri Alleg, arrested the next day and taken to the same building at El-Biar, survived. Audin's last words to him, before the two were separated for good, were flat and human: it is tough, Henri.
Alleg wrote what was done to him in La Question, published in 1958 in prose stripped of adjectives, which made it unbearable. It sold 60,000 copies in two weeks before the French state seized it, the first book seizure in France since the eighteenth century. Censorship confirmed the charge. Frantz Fanon, a Martinican psychiatrist who had treated both French torturers and their Algerian victims at the Blida hospital, resigned his post, joined the FLN, and in The Wretched of the Earth argued that colonialism was itself a permanent violence and that decolonization was its reckoning. Jean-Paul Sartre's preface pressed that logic to a hard and disputed edge.
Dissent organized. The Manifesto of the 121, published in September 1960 and signed by Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and scores of writers and academics, declared the right of French conscripts to refuse to fight an unjust war. Beauvoir and the lawyer Gisele Halimi took up the case of Djamila Boupacha, a 22-year-old FLN militant raped and tortured in custody, and turned it into a public indictment. The dissenters could not stop the war, but they forced France to see what was carried out in its name, and they made torture a permanent question inside the Republic rather than a rumor at its edge.
Arguments
- French forces used torture as institutional method in Algiers, ordered up the chain of command
- The disappearance of Maurice Audin and Henri Alleg's La Question exposed it to metropolitan France
- Fanon reframed the war as a struggle against colonial violence itself, not a police operation
- The state's answer of censorship and book seizure confirmed the charge it sought to bury
Sources
- The Wretched of the Earth
- The Question (La Question)
- Torture: Cancer of Democracy, France and Algeria 1954-62
- La torture et l'armee pendant la guerre d'Algerie, 1954-1962
academicMemory Scholarship and France's Reckoning
Memory Scholarship and France's Reckoning
For thirty seven years the French state refused the word war. Officially, the conflict was operations to maintain order.
The historian Benjamin Stora diagnosed the silence in nineteen ninety one as the gangrene and the forgetting, a wound that never closed because France would not name it.
Scholarship filled what the state left blank. Army records showed torture had been institutional policy, not the excess of a few units. Historians reconstructed the October nineteen sixty one Paris massacre that a government commission had put at forty dead, and counted at least one hundred twenty.
Papon himself had organized deportations of Jews under Vichy, and was convicted of crimes against humanity in nineteen ninety eight, for that earlier crime, never for the Algerians.
Under Macron the reckoning accelerated: in twenty eighteen, acknowledgment that the state killed Maurice Audin; in twenty twenty one, that the Paris massacre was inexcusable, and an apology to the harkis.
But on the war itself, Stora drew a line the government would not cross.
“Apologising will not get to the heart of the issue.”
Recognition, in this account, arrived without repentance, on both shores. Algeria's own state guards a fixed number of martyrs it will not submit to a historian's revision.
Read the full account
Narrative
For thirty-seven years the French state refused the word. Officially the conflict was operations to maintain order, or simply the events. Not until June 1999 did the National Assembly vote to name the Algerian war, decades after the last soldier came home. The historian Benjamin Stora had already diagnosed the silence in 1991 as la gangrene et l'oubli, the gangrene and the forgetting: a wound that France would not name and that therefore never closed, festering instead through its politics and its suburbs.
The archive opened by degrees, and scholarship filled what the state had left blank. Raphaelle Branche's study of the army and torture, published in 2001, established from the military's own records that torture had been institutional policy in Algeria, not the deviation of a few units. Jim House and Neil MacMaster reconstructed the massacre of October 17, 1961, when Paris police under prefect Maurice Papon attacked a peaceful Algerian demonstration and killed dozens, perhaps more than a hundred, throwing bodies into the Seine. A government commission conceded 40 dead in 1998; historians count at least 120. Papon, it later emerged, had organized deportations of Jews under Vichy; he was convicted of crimes against humanity in 1998, for the earlier crime, never for the Algerians.
The reckoning accelerated under Emmanuel Macron. In 2018 he acknowledged for the first time that the French state had killed Maurice Audin, that his death was the product of a system France had built. In 2021 he called the 1961 Paris massacre inexcusable for the Republic, asked the harkis' forgiveness, and commissioned Stora to report on the memory of the war. The Stora Report recommended commemorations, a truth commission, and archival opening, but advised against an official apology, and Macron declined to make one. There would be recognition without repentance.
Memory is contested on both shores. Algeria's ruling party, the FLN's heirs, guards its own founding numbers and its own silences: the 1.5 million martyrs that scholars dispute but the state requires, and the fate of the harkis and of murdered rival nationalists that official history prefers to pass over. Todd Shepard has shown how France in 1962 rewrote its own story to make decolonization look inevitable and to forget that it had ever claimed Algeria as France. The war, in this reading, did not end in 1962. It moved into the archives, the school curricula, and the elections, and it is being fought now over what to call it and who is owed an apology.
Arguments
- France did not legally name the conflict a war until June 1999, thirty-seven years after it ended
- Scholarship established torture and the 1961 Paris massacre as documented state policy, not rumor
- Both states weaponize memory, France through delay and omission, Algeria through a fixed martyr count
- Macron's gestures on Audin, the 1961 massacre, and the harkis stopped short of an apology
Sources
- La gangrene et l'oubli, la memoire de la guerre d'Algerie
- Les questions memorielles portant sur la colonisation et la guerre d'Algerie (Stora Report)
- Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory
- A History of Algeria
The turn
None of these five is invented, and each has a gap it would rather not discuss.
Algerian National Liberation (FLN)
The Algerian account leaves out the Melouza massacre of nineteen fifty seven, the purges of rival nationalists, and the one party state the FLN built once it had won.
From the record
FLN killings of rival Algerian nationalists, including the Melouza massacre of 1957Internal purges and the coercion of the Muslim population by the FLNThe one-party authoritarian state that the FLN built after 1962French State and the Pied-Noir Settlers
The French account leaves out the legal inequality that made Muslim Algerians subjects, the army's own institutional torture, and Setif and the Paris massacre both.
From the record
The settler colonial expropriation of land and the disenfranchisement of the Muslim majorityThe code de l'indigenat and the systematic legal inequality it enforcedThe army's institutional use of torture during the Battle of AlgiersThe Setif killings of 1945 and the Paris massacre of 1961The harki account leaves out that some harkis carried out abuses of their own, and that poverty, not conviction, drove many to enlist.
From the record
Harkis who took part in abuses against fellow Algerians during the warThe coercion and poverty that drove many to enlist rather than convictionThe FLN view of the harkis as auxiliaries of a colonial occupying armyAnti-War Dissent and the Torture Debate
The dissenters' account leaves out the FLN's own terror against civilians and rival nationalists, and how readily its intellectuals romanticized the violence they defended.
From the record
The FLN's own use of terror and mutilation against civilians and rival nationalistsThe tendency of Fanon and Sartre to romanticize revolutionary violenceThe moral complexity faced by French conscripts caught in the warMemory Scholarship and France's Reckoning
The memory scholars leave out the lived suffering underneath their own careful politics, and the migrants who carry this history home with them still.
From the record
The emotional immediacy of victims' testimony in favor of memory-politics analysisThe lived suffering of the war years themselvesThe daily human legacy carried by migrants and their descendants
Each one omits exactly the part that would cost its own side the most.
Close
On July fifth, nineteen sixty two, Algeria became independent.
French troops had first entered Algiers on July fifth, eighteen thirty. Independence landed on the same day, one hundred thirty two years later.
The record
By the numbers
- Span
- 1954
- Killed
- 1.5MContested: French estimates ~350,000-400,000 total…
- Displaced
- ~2Mrural Algerians forcibly relocated into camps; ~1 million…
- Place
- Algeria
Key figures
- Ahmed Ben BellaFLN founding leader, imprisoned by France 1956-1962, first President of independent Algeria1916 to 2012
- Frantz FanonMartinican psychiatrist and FLN theorist, author of The Wretched of the Earth1925 to 1961
- Charles de GaulleReturned to power in 1958, shifted from French Algeria to Algerian self-determination1890 to 1970
- Jacques MassuGeneral given police powers in the 1957 Battle of Algiers, oversaw systematic torture1908 to 2002
- Larbi Ben M'hidiFLN founder and Battle of Algiers commander, killed in French custody in 19571923 to 1957
- Maurice PaponParis police prefect during the October 17, 1961 massacre; later convicted for Vichy-era crimes1910 to 2007
- Maurice AudinCommunist mathematician who died under French torture in 1957, the emblem of the torture debate1932 to 1957
- Benjamin StoraHistorian of the war and its memory, author of the 2021 report commissioned by Macron1950 to ?
Primary sources
· Proclamation of November 1, 1954 · November 1, 1954
“The restoration of the Algerian state, sovereign, democratic and social, within the framework of Islamic principles.”
· Speech from the Forum, Algiers · June 4, 1958
“I have understood you.”
· The Wretched of the Earth · 1961
“Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.”
· Elysee statement on the 60th anniversary of the October 17, 1961 massacre · October 16, 2021
“The crimes committed that night under the authority of Maurice Papon are inexcusable for the Republic.”
Threads
- The Scramble for AfricaFourteen nations met in a Berlin conference room in 1884. Not one African was invited. By 1914, Europeans controlled 90% of the continent.
- The Arab SpringA fruit vendor set himself on fire in a town of 40,000. Within 60 days, three presidents had fallen.
- The Vietnam WarThe Pentagon Papers showed the government knew by 1967 it couldn’t win. The war continued for eight more years. 2.1 million more people died.