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Algeria
War of Independence
In the early morning hours of All Saints' Day, November 1, 1954,
FLN maquisards (guerrillas) launched attacks in various
parts of Algeria against military installations, police posts,
warehouses, communications facilities, and public utilities. From
Cairo, the FLN broadcast a proclamation calling on Muslims in
Algeria to join in a national struggle for the "restoration of
the Algerian state, sovereign, democratic, and social, within
the framework of the principles of Islam." The French minister
of interior, socialist François Mitterrand, responded sharply
that "the only possible negotiation is war." It was the reaction
of Premier Pierre Mendès-France, who only a few months before
had completed the liquidation of France's empire in Indochina,
that set the tone of French policy for the next five years. On
November 12, he declared in the National Assembly: "One does not
compromise when it comes to defending the internal peace of the
nation, the unity and integrity of the Republic. The Algerian
departments are part of the French Republic. They have been French
for a long time, and they are irrevocably French . . . . Between
them and metropolitan France there can be no conceivable secession."
Data as of December 1993
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