Decolonization 1169
and desirable. In February 1956, French residents in Algiers rioted against
the government when French Premier Guy Mollet (1906-1975), who had at
first been willing to negotiate with the FLN, came to introduce his newly
appointed governor of Algeria. In October, the newly crowned king of
Morocco met with leaders of the FLN, enraging the French right. Mollet,
fearing the political consequences of the war, then ordered the kidnapping
of Ahmed Ben Bella (1919- ), a leader of the Algerians, and launched a
repression in France of critics of the French Algerian policy. In November
1956, France joined Britain in the ill-fated Suez expedition in part because
of French anger at Egyptian support for the Algerian insurrection. French
troops undertook a brutal campaign that included torture against militants
and civilians alike, culminating in “the battle of Algiers’’ fought in the Arab
quarters of the Algerian capital. In France, the left increasingly demanded
an end to the war; intellectuals, like the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and
the novelist Camus, denounced the torture of Algerians by the French army.
In the meantime, casualties mounted in the French army (which, unlike the
French war in Vietnam, included conscripts). Throughout the Algerian war
of independence, the FLN successfully played off Cold War rivalries, using
mass communication and building support in Algerian communities abroad,
while winning international support. Their campaign helped isolate France
internationally.
After humiliating defeats at the hands of the German army in 1940 and
by the Vietnamese at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, some French military officers
French riot police throw back stones, as well as tear gas bombs, at demonstrators in
Algiers in 1960, during the Algerian war of independence.
