Algerian War of Independence

The Algerian War of Independence was fought from 1954 to 1962 between the National Liberation Front, or FLN, and French colonial authorities and settlers over Algeria's status as a French territory rather than a colony proper, a distinction that made the conflict especially bitter and politically destabilizing for France itself. The war combined FLN guerrilla and urban terrorist tactics with brutal French counterinsurgency methods, most notoriously during the Battle of Algiers in 1956 and 1957, when French paratroopers under General Jacques Massu dismantled the FLN's urban network in the capital through widespread and later well documented use of torture. The war's political cost in France, including the collapse of the Fourth Republic and Charles de Gaulle's return to power in 1958, eventually outweighed its military course, and negotiations produced the Evian Accords in March 1962, which ended the fighting and led to a referendum confirming Algerian independence that July. The war's end triggered a mass exodus of nearly a million European settlers, known as pieds-noirs, from Algeria to France.