France’s Failed Attempt to Save Its Empire
In the 1950s, France engaged in an ambitious effort to modernize its empire by embracing local customs and promoting limited home rule. Revolutionary Warfare by Terrence Peterson outlines this failed attempt to create a modern ideology for colonialism.
Police face off against a crowd in Algiers in 1960, during the Algerian War. (Dominique Berretty / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Two years into America’s invasion of Afghanistan and at the start of its campaign in Iraq, the Pentagon’s special operations staff screened Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1965 film The Battle of Algiers for its employees. A flier accompanying the screening explained that it provided an insight into how the French military could “win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas.” In the eyes of the US Department of Defense, an inability to win over the hearts and minds of the Algerian population had undone the perceived military success of French counterinsurgency efforts against the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). As a direct result, the war appeared doomed from the very beginning.
Such an interpretation of the Algerian conflict has often held sway within the Anglophone historiography of the revolution. However, as historian Terrence G. Peterson shows in his new book Revolutionary Warfare, the notion of a military victory preceded by a political loss was perpetuated by the French army itself. This was in no small part due to the proactiveness of French military officers in promoting and theorizing about the Algerian War as a major transformation in the rules of global conflict in the 1960s. Cold War paranoia, imperial decline, and a multitude of apparent communist threats combined into a toxic cocktail. Under its influence, partisans on the Right proved incapable of getting any rational purchase on the war. Anti-colonial and liberation movements from Vietnam to North Africa asked new and fundamental questions of the remnants of the French colonial state. How do you wage a war against an enemy that hides in the shadows, is abetted by rural communities, and is constituted through geographically disparate uprisings?
How Not to Save an Empire
A completely new doctrine of counterinsurgency emerged largely in response to these questions. Peterson argues that the French state, contrary to its own propaganda, was not necessarily a purely reactive power helplessly trying to claw back its imperial possession in the face of a mobilized underground movement. It had instead redesigned the very remit of the military’s role over Algerian society. This was not simply a war to subdue Algerian insurgents, but an attempt to transform Algerian society in the image of the metropole. The view of the French colonial administration was that the only way to maintain their country’s interests was to use the sword to mobilize and transform Algerian society.
This article is for subscribers only. Please login or subscribe to access our full archives and beautiful print and digital magazine starting at just $3 a month.