Algeria — The Exception

CHAPTER 4 · 1954–1962 · The Decolonization of Africa, 1945–1994

Ghana was the rule; Algeria was the exception — and understanding why is the key to this whole map. A settler colony is a different equation. Algeria was not a protectorate or a possession but, in French law, part of France itself: three départements with a million European settlers — the pieds-noirs — who owned the best land and could not imagine leaving. There was no metropole to withdraw to; they were home. So the same demand that opened doors elsewhere hit a wall of concrete here, and the result was one of the twentieth century’s most terrible colonial wars. Its overture had come already,

The turn: The Battle of Algiers, 1957 — victory as defeat.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.