lion had been brutally quieted, at least until the cataclysm of
1955 – 62 , the Algerian war.^2
The revolt of native Algerian Arabs against French rule
was inevitable, given their oppressed status. A French govern-
ment report of January 1955 revealed that the average gross in-
come of a European settler in Algeria was twenty-eight times
that of a Muslim; that among two thousand government em-
ployees, only eight were Muslim; and that only fifteen percent
of Muslims attended school.^3 When the rebellion finally ar-
rived, it came with unbridled rage on the part of the colonized
masses.
For about a year, beginning in 1954 , there were murmurs
of revolt among the Arabs. In October 1954 , terrorists attacked
the French police and military. Then, in August 1955 , respond-
ing to the cry “slaughter the French” that was issued from
Nasser’s Egypt, the Algerians rose. As muezzins gave the signal
from their minarets, pied-noir men, women, and children
were mutilated, their throats cut, their bodies thrown in the
streets.
The Algerian war took its horrifying path, with atrocities
on both sides. The French army’s widespread use of torture
against Arabs still haunts France today. In 1961 , Maurice
Papon, the Vichy collaborator who had become the Paris pre-
fect of police, ordered the Paris massacre: two hundred Alger-
ian protestors were shot and their bodies cast into the Seine.^4
But the tide had already turned against French occupation.
The following year the French finally gave in, and Algeria at-
tained its independence. In the summer of 1962 , three quarters
of the pieds-noirs departed for France.
Jackie Derrida left Algeria as a nineteen-year-old in 1949 ,
years before the war of independence. But the earlier rebellion
of 1945 shook him and his family. In neighboring Libya, over a
From Algeria to the École Normale 19