This month’s re-issuance of the British historian Alistair Horne’s seminal A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 is garnering its fair share of attention in the press, chiefly due to ostensible similarities between the United States’ current predicament in Iraq and France’s Algerian quagmire sixty years ago. The analogy seems apt on its face, but has been disputed on a number of grounds, most effectively by Christopher Hitchens, who noted that the presence of the French pieds noirs alone completely transformed the equation for French policymakers. I would also add that the prospect of sectarian violence was a nightmare not for the French during the Algerian conflict, but rather for the rebellious Front de Liberation Nationale, which had nationalistic goals wholly opposite those of Iraqi insurgents.

Rather than attempting to conform an analysis of a decades-old geopolitical crisis to a present-day one, it is perhaps more instructive to look at the French experience in Algeria in terms of its effect on modern French domestic and foreign policy, where the events of 1954-1962 have had a searing impact. Throughout the 1990s, French authorities had to contend with terrorist acts and threats which overflowed from strife in Algeria, while concomitantly dealing with massive influxes of Algerian immigrants. Now, five million persons of Algerian descent reside in France, and events in French banlieues in 2005 and 2006 have shown that the French were mistaken in thinking that the post-colonial divorce in 1962 was to be the ne plus ultra of the Algerian crisis.

Shadows of the Algerian conflict fall across most every aspect of France’s relationship with its oftentimes restive Muslim population. A few examples will suffice. The Blum-Viollette Bill of 1936, which was an attempt at encouraging Muslim assimilation into French society, failed at the time but was, in post-modern form, resuscitated in 2004 with the so-called “headscarf law.” The exploding birthrate of Algerian Muslims was a constant worry for French colonial authorities, and Horne informs us that

“Muslims were estimated to be breeding at ten times the rate of the pieds noirs – hence the very real basis of their fears of being demographically ‘swamped.’”

Similar fears are being expressed today, this time on the other side of the Mediterranean. In Algeria in the 1950s, one million Muslims were totally or partially employed, with two million more underemployed, leading Horne to note with dismay that fully one in nine in the total population lacked employment. This almost par for the course in contemporary France; one wonders what Horne would make of the 14% unemployment of foreign-born French citizens (far lower in the banlieues). Finally, the specter of torture committed fairly routinely by the French and pieds noirs police and military forces has factored into contemporary decision-making. The “gangrene” of torture that supposedly ate away at French society during the Algerian crisis is never to be repeated, French authorities hope, which has in turn led to sensitivity to US interrogation techniques in the War on Terror, as well as reluctance to fully prosecute rioters in the French suburbs.
 
As European politicians, journalists, and citizens mark recent or upcoming anniversaries of political import (e.g. of the Suez Canal crisis, or the Treaty of Rome), it is equally important that they mark the upcoming anniversary of the Battle of Algiers. With Alistair Horne as a guide, they may better evaluate the events of 1954-1962 which continue to affect quotidian life in profound ways. In part as a result of this sixty year-old crisis, France finds itself in a political and demographic dilemma, and, as Jonathan Swift wrote,
“A strong dilemma in a desperate case
To act with infamy or quit the place.”
France, and the rest of Europe, recalls with dread the infamy that attended the Algerian conflict, and yet it is no option to simply “quit the place.” A Savage War of Peace poses difficult questions in this regard, and thirty years after its original publication is just as relevant to contemporary French domestic politics as it is to American foreign policy in Iraq.