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Chapter 1

The Long Road to War

On Monday, 20 August 1956, a warm summer day two years into the Algerian war, six National Liberation Front (FLN) leaders, Mohamed Larbi Ben M’hidi, Ramdane Abane, Amar Ouamrane, Belkacem Krim, Lakhdar Bentobbal, and Youcef Zighoud, gathered in northern Algeria, in the Soummam Valley, to convene the Soummam Congress and discuss the future of their struggle for national liberation. The previous twenty-one months had been disappointing for FLN leaders. They struggled to recruit participants, obtain vital arms and financial support, eliminate and absorb their political rivals, and simultaneously combat aggressive French military action and repressive policies such as the April 1955 State of Emergency and March 1956 Special Powers Law, both of which suspended civil liberties and granted the military carte blanche. The FLN needed revitalization and a renewed focus and the Soummam Congress was just the event to do so.

Ben M’hidi and Abane, two central FLN figures who did not live to see independent Algeria, worked together to create an agenda for Soummam.¹ The men prioritized ten major areas to cover throughout the day, including financial and political matters, administrative and material needs inside and outside of Algeria, engaging with the United Nations and negotiating cease-fire terms.² The wide variety of agenda items targeted local, national, and international dimensions that facilitated controlling the land and people within Algeria’s territorial borders and could yield external recognition of Algeria’s right to sovereignty.

Belkacem Krim, one of the six men who planned the 1 November 1954 attacks that began the war and whose name by the summer of 1956 had taken on a “quasi mythical dimension,” gave the first substantial regional report on Kabylia. He explained significant progress had been made in recruitment and finances. He claimed that the number of FLN soldiers had risen from 450 in November 1954 to 3,100 in August 1956. Krim shared similarly impressive financial increases for the same period, noting that at the start of the war Kabylia had one million francs, whereas at the time of the Soummam Congress, it held 445 million francs. He told the other five men that the people and combatants’ spirits were “very good,” but that “everyone is asking us for arms.”³ Amar Ouamrane, a former soldier in the French army who belonged to several political parties in the late 1940s and early 1950s before joining the FLN in 1954, delivered a report for the Algiers region that revealed miniscule soldier numbers in November 1954 (only fifty). But he presented the steady increase to one thousand in August 1956, and he boasted 200 million francs in the region’s war chest. Ben M’hidi gave the status update for the Oran region and, although the number of soldiers had not surpassed 1,500 in May 1956, he proudly conveyed “excellent” relations between the FLN-ALN and the people. Ben M’hidi echoed Krim’s words when he told the room that the people and combatants’ spirits were “very good.”⁴ They concluded the morning session by outlining their principal political tasks that lie ahead, organizing and educating the people and propaganda. They also reiterated the importance of “psychological war,” which the minutes explained as establishing “relations with the people, the European minority, and prisoners of war.”⁵ This revised political agenda would contribute to strengthening how the FLN operated, in general terms, in Algeria.

During the afternoon sessions, the nationalists discussed political structures and international efforts that would secure external recognition of their right to rule Algeria. They created the thirty-four-person National Council of the Algerian Revolution (Conseil National de la Révolution Algérienne, CNRA), which they wanted “to meet annually as long as the hostilities continue.”⁶ They also established the five-member Coordination and Execution Committee (Comité de Coordination et d’Exécution, CCE), made up of Ben M’hidi, Abane, Krim, Benyoucef Benkhedda, and Saad Dahlab, and granted it “the power to control the political, military, economic, and social organisms.”⁷ The congress participants specified “political primacy over that of the military” and the supremacy “of the interior over the exterior,” taking direct aim at FLN comrades abroad.

It was the Soummam Congress’s ninth agenda item, calendar of work, where Abane, Ben M’hidi, Ouramane, Krim, Zighoud, and Bentobbal revealed the depths of their political acumen and demonstrated an appreciation for the international political climate and mastery of acceptable codes of conduct. The men agreed that “only the National Council of the Algerian Revolution is authorized to order the cease-fire whose framework will be based on the United Nations platform…. The interior will have to provide all of the information we have to facilitate the task of our representatives at the United Nations.” They issued strict orders to soldiers regarding their treatment of civilians and prisoners and said, “no officer, no matter his rank, henceforth has the right to pronounce a death sentence … slitting throats is formally forbidden in the future, those sentenced to death will be shot. The accused has the right to choose a defense. Mutilation is officially prohibited.” They banned “the execution of prisoners of war” and advised that “a prisoner of war service be created in each wilaya [province],” for in their estimation, “it would be essential in popularizing the legality of our struggle.” In closing, they briefly mentioned the need to build up a health-services division and that “each new recruit undergo a medical visit, when possible.”⁸ The leadership’s attention to these particular matters suggests a fluency with the contemporary state of international laws of war, most notably the Geneva Conventions of 1949, and their desire to transform the FLN and ALN into modern entities their allies and opponents would have to recognize. They wanted to implement humane practices at every level and send a clear message that the FLN was committed to and capable of running a modern nation-state, even though it would not be internationally recognized as such for six more years.

This historic one-day event, initiated at the behest of Ramdane Abane, was one of the most important political developments for the Algerian nationalist side throughout the eight-year conflict. The Soummam Congress crystallized the direction of the party for years to come and influenced the shape and tenor of the liberation struggle until its conclusion in 1962. The summit’s positive outcomes, however, could not mask harsh political realities and internal conflicts within the FLN. Nationalist representatives outside of Algeria, notably Ahmed Ben Bella, future first president of independent Algeria, Mohamed Khider, future Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA) minister of information, and Hocine Aït Ahmed, future GPRA minister of state, were not present at Soummam. In fact, they had been deliberately excluded from the meeting’s proceedings and received a summary account after the fact. In an early fall 1956 letter, Ben Bella wrote to the internal FLN delegation and expressed his disappointment at having been marginalized from such a significant event. He asked that they “postpone the publication of [the Soummam] decisions until all points of view of all of the brothers … are considered.”⁹ Ben Bella’s wish was not fulfilled. On 22 October he was arrested when his plane, scheduled to fly from Rabat, Morocco, to Tunis, was intercepted over French airspace and he was imprisoned until the Evian negotiations six years later.

These initial glimpses into the FLN leadership present an alternative narrative about the nationalist movement. They raise questions about how the FLN ultimately became the nationalist party that diplomatically defeated the French, as Matthew Connelly has shown, and claimed sovereignty of Algeria. The FLN of 1962 was not the only party vying for power and its vision for how to achieve liberation was not the only course explored.

The long history of French colonial rule in Algeria is littered with instances of violence, legal and political inequality, a small but extremely influential European settler population, and repeated failure by innumerable colonial administrators to implement meaningful reform. Beginning in the 1920s, Algerian elites began formulating political groups, and for the next thirty years before the official start of the war for national liberation they pursued avenues ranging from assimilation to a Pan-Islamic ‘umma (community). Important moments in Franco-Algerian relations during the 1930s and 1940s further strengthened nationalist sentiment, yet I argue World War II outcomes—the 1941 Atlantic Charter, the American presence in Algeria beginning in the fall of 1942, the May 1945 Sétif and Guelma massacres, the creation of the United Nations and its charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Geneva Conventions of 1949—were the most critical developments for Algerian nationalists. The texts provided a new discourse about rights from which anticolonial activists drew liberally, depending on the time and place.

By 1954 when the FLN announced itself as the leading nationalist group, its representatives, many of whom had been active in politics for several decades, used these changes to the international system to their political advantage and started cultivating their winning strategy of deploying universal rights rhetoric in order to appeal to an international audience. Despite their uneven use of rights discourse, Algerians most certainly relied upon the concepts of self-determination and international law to build their case for national sovereignty. The nationalists combined this international approach with an equally important local strategy in Algeria. Their quest for national liberation from France could not, and did not, hinge solely on the international arena, as some historians suggest.¹⁰

Origins of Nationalism, 1900–1940

The French began colonizing Algeria in June 1830. Close to forty thousand troops landed on the northern coast thirty miles from Algiers, under the pretext of avenging an alleged fly-whisk incident, which caused outrage in diplomatic circles. This inauspicious beginning led to one of the longest and most unique instances of colonialism.¹¹ Throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century the nature of French rule changed frequently. During the period of military rule (1830–1870), officials employed extreme violence to quell resistance and passed a series of laws, such as the 1846 Land Ordinance and the Senatus-Consulte of 14 July 1865, which were quite detrimental to the Algerian population.¹² Civilian rule (1870–1940) further segregated Algerians from settlers and Jews and solidified French political control of Algeria.¹³ By the turn of the century, after seven decades of French colonial rule, the Algerian population had been marginalized in virtually every aspect of life and faced acute hardship. With educational opportunities curtailed and no political rights to speak of that would have enabled meaningful change in Algeria, their options for social and economic advancement were routinely hampered.

Beginning in 1910 several groups emerged that asked for varying degrees of reform from the French colonial state. The Young Algerians, who numbered no more than 1,200, were the first such group. These educated elites aspired to assimilate with France and its political institutions.¹⁴ The 1912 Young Algerian Manifesto was among their most political acts.¹⁵ In it, they requested that Algerian servicemen be treated the same as French soldiers. Furthermore, they asked for more Algerian representation in the Algerian assemblies and equitable taxes.¹⁶ The Young Algerians only alluded to French citizenship and at no point did they demand independence. They wanted political recognition for risking their lives alongside French soldiers.

In World War I, 173,000 Algerian men fought for France. Of that total number, 25,000 were killed and roughly 60,000–70,000 men were wounded.¹⁷ Those years were formative ones for many Algerians and other colonial conscripts throughout the European empires.¹⁸ Their mass mobilization initiated a political awakening that extended beyond the educated elite. However, the Young Algerians remained the mouthpiece for reform after 1918. Even though governor-general Charles Jonnart was amenable to increasing political rights for a certain Algerian (male) demographic, he struggled to placate the vocal settler lobby that vehemently opposed additional rights for the Algerian population. He passed the Jonnart Law of 1919, which expanded the Muslim electorate to 425,000 but still did not define a clear path to French citizenship and was a meek reflection of what the Young Algerians demanded.

President Woodrow Wilson’s 8 January 1918 address to Congress, which later became known as the Fourteen Points, also had a profound impact on Algerian educated elites and anticolonial activists. Wilson’s Point 5, “A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined,” was likely the most inspiring for Third World leaders.¹⁹ It gave them hope that they would be able to choose their form of government.

Historian Erez Manela has described the “Wilsonian Moment” as the months from the fall of 1918 to the spring of 1919, when the American president made speeches and public pronouncements about the right to self-determination.²⁰ These ideas circulated globally and elites in India, Egypt, Korea, French Indochina, and China thought Wilson would support their demands for self-rule, when, in fact, Wilson had no intention of doing so. His rhetoric, at best, was intended for European allies, not colonized peoples in the Third World. Some Maghribi elites, including Tunisian professors Salah Cherif Ettounsi, Mohammed Elkhedir Ben el Houssine, and Emir Khaled, an Algerian who served in the French army in World War I but refused to be naturalized before the French implemented meaningful political reforms, wrote about Wilson’s Fourteen Points. They criticized the French government for agreeing to them while still maintaining colonies.²¹ As the Paris conference drew near, groups became disillusioned as they realized that Wilson would not take up their cause in the French capital. Their disappointment sowed the seeds of colonial discontent and sparked nationalist movements.

Despite their firm assimilationist and secular agenda, the settler lobby in Algeria demonized the Young Algerians for “nationalist” and “dogmatic” tendencies and, by the end of the decade these educated elites were no longer the only group endorsing reform and change in Algeria. By the 1920s, Algerian veterans, workers, and the educated elite were disillusioned by the nominal political changes in Algeria, and they began seeking alternative ways to unite and advance their goals, but still within a French-Algerian context. In the three decades before the FLN emerged as the nationalist leader, over ten bona fide political parties and visions were tested and refined as they struggled to live within an increasingly contradictory and restrictive Algeria.²²

Two men in particular, Ferhat Abbas and Messali Hadj, represent the two most influential political courses explored during the 1920s and 1930s. Ferhat Abbas, born in the eastern village of Chahna in 1899 to a prominent local family, received a degree from Algiers University and had early contact with other Algerian évolués (educated elites). He spoke fluent French and was a product of a French colonial education as put on display in his 1931 book, The Young Algerian, in which he argued for assimilation with France.²³ His ideas were an extension of the Young Algerians. He believed that political lobbying would be more successful than mass action, and during the 1920s and early 1930s he participated in local politics around Sétif and was elected municipal councillor and Financial Delegation (Délégations Financières) representative in Algiers.²⁴ He served in other political positions in which he continued to work toward an assimilationist agenda. After the 1927 creation of the Federation of Elected Muslims, Abbas and another elite, Mohamed Salah Bendjelloul, co-led the organization and attempted to bridge the gap between colonial officials’ repressive policies and the federation’s desire for reform.

Abbas’s foray into politics during this period proved eye-opening and frustrating because his aspirations for large-scale integration were never realized. On an individual level, Abbas achieved political and personal success, but he repeatedly confronted French officials’ unwillingness to reform their discriminatory policies toward the rest of the Algerian population. In an unfinished book titled “My Political Testament,” likely written in the 1930s, Abbas wrote about the need to elevate the Algerian peasantry, for without their emancipation Algeria would never become modern. He explained that “it is the fate of this man, his happiness or his misfortune, which will determine Algeria’s future. It is not the problem of the elite … if it were, it would be so easy to resolve! Rather it is the problem of the masses, of the continually uncultivated, miserable bankrupt masses, [and] when that mass understands its condition [it will be] frightening in its explosions of hatred and anger.”²⁵ He understood his privilege did not extend to the masses and that Algeria’s future depended on uniform efforts to cultivate and educate the population. By 1936, after nearly fifteen years in politics, Abbas’s assimilation resolve began to waver. In failing to offer meaningful reform, French administrators started losing a dedicated advocate, whose longtime political philosophy was “La France c’est moi.”

Abbas never outright supported revolutionary violence, which a considerable portion of FLN members practiced between 1954 and 1962. But beginning in the late 1930s and especially after World War II, his political views crept more and more toward Algerian independence. In January 1956, fourteen months into the war for national liberation, Abbas gave an interview to the Tunisian newspaper L’Action in which he described his political evolution and deference to the FLN. “My role today is to defer to the leaders of the armed resistance. The methods I have defended for fifteen years—cooperation, discussion, persuasion—proved ineffective.”²⁶ Shortly thereafter, he spoke with the Swedish press and outlined four essential points to achieving Algerian freedom. For him, obtaining the recognition of popular sovereignty was the most important point among them.²⁷ Abbas’s advocacy for Algerian independence and support of the FLN was a marked departure from his earlier beliefs. While he maintained that any political solution required negotiation, he was open to pursuing other avenues that he would not have twenty years prior.

The Young Algerians and Ferhat Abbas represent efforts to implement reform in Algeria during the first three decades of the twentieth century. But the first group to articulate a nationalist agenda was the North African Star (Étoile Nord-Africaine), cofounded by Messali Hadj in 1926 in Paris.²⁸ Messali Hadj, a twenty-eight-year-old former World War I conscript who was born in Tlemcen in 1898, had long opposed French colonial rule and built a coalition based on a trade union. In the wake of the Young Algerians’ failure to achieve concrete political advances, he pursued a mass mobilization approach, based on the tenets of the French left and the French Communist Party. The North African Star quickly attracted members in Paris from the growing emigrant population from Algeria. By the mid 1920s, nearly 100,000 Maghribi men fleeing poverty lived in Paris and were looking for work, and it was this group of people, socially and culturally isolated from their home, that formed the backbone of the party. His rise in politics and strand of nationalism “called for independence from France, withdrawal of the army of occupation, building of a national army, abolition of the [Native Code], freedom of press and association, an Algerian parliament chosen via universal suffrage, and municipal councils chosen via universal suffrage.”²⁹ Historian Emmanuel Sivan maintains that the North African Star was the first movement “dedicated to the idea of Algerian independence,” an important distinction from Messali Hadj’s contemporaries, and given the nature and total reach of French colonial rule in Algeria and the absorption of the indigenous elite class, it makes sense to him that the ideas would originate outside of Algeria.³⁰

It took ten years for Messali Hadj’s ideas to reach across the Mediterranean and spread through Algeria. But long before Messali Hadj had the opportunity to return to Algeria for this purpose, the French cabinet under André Tardieu banned the North African Star in 1929. He resurrected the party as the Glorious Star in France in 1933, but once again it was short-lived and lasted only one year. Undeterred, Messali Hadj recreated the party a third time in 1936, this time in Algeria, and called it the Algerian People’s Party (Parti du Peuple Algérien, PPA). During the summer and fall months of that year, he toured the country and taught people about the need for Algeria’s total independence from France. The PPA motto, “Neither assimilation nor separation, but emancipation,” was by far the most radical and threatening to the French authorities, which accounts for his numerous arrests in 1939 and 1941. Messali Hadj’s prominent rise represented a turning point in the emergence of nationalism. Starting with the Young Algerians, the majority of political leaders were educated elites who had studied and/or worked abroad. When Messali Hadj returned to Algeria in 1936 he helped encourage and inspire a new generation of local activists with more ties to the Algerian people who adhered to his independent Algeria aspirations.

However, eighteen years remained between Messali Hadj’s 1936 arrival in Algeria and the 1954 FLN attacks that launched the war. Several key moments—the failure of Popular Front reforms, World War II, and severe French colonial repression in Sétif and Guelma in the spring of 1945—eroded the possibility of compromise and reform and hardened previously amenable leaders, such as a Ferhat Abbas, to the point where they embraced national independence.

Between 1935 and 1937, during a rare moment of political unity in France that would have significant implications on Algerian politics, French socialists, communists, and radicals came together and formed the Popular Front “to build,” writes Martin Evans, “the broadest possible coalition against Fascism.”³¹ As part of a symbolic demonstration of this new alliance, men from the various groups gathered in the streets of Paris on 14 July 1935 and were joined by North African Star members, including Messali Hadj, who, according to Evans, “expected a future left-wing government to satisfy their [political] aspirations.”³² The coalition strategy worked. In May 1936, Léon Blum became the first Socialist prime minister of France. Algerian reformists, educated elites, and proto-nationalists eagerly awaited Blum’s political rise, given their heartfelt frustration over former governor general Maurice Viollette’s failure in 1930 and 1931 to increase Algerian political representation and grant citizenship to a limited and highly educated sector of the population who would not have been required to renounce their Muslim status.³³

Immediately after his election, Blum appointed Viollette as minister of state of the Popular Front, and they embarked on another round of reform efforts that were not dissimilar in nature from Viollette’s five years earlier. Both men firmly believed in the “necessity of integrating the Algerians” into France and their Blum-Viollette Bill, which proposed expanding the Algerian electorate by 25,000, reflected that.³⁴ But once again, the settler lobby, especially at the local and municipal levels in Algeria, vehemently rejected the bill. Several newspapers published inflammatory headlines claiming that if one voted for the “Viollette project, it’s voting for civil war,” and the “Viollette project, it’s a new anti-France wing.”³⁵

In reality, the Blum-Viollette Bill was moderate and, had it succeeded, would have represented the possibility of a different political course, rather than an actual change in course. For that reason, explains John Ruedy, “it assumed enormous symbolic importance both for the Algerian opposition and the colon administration that was trying to hold the line.” Overnight, the bill became “a litmus test,” for both sides, “of the Popular Front’s intentions regarding the Algeria question.”³⁶ Its defeat and that of the Popular Front in 1937 permanently altered the climate of Algerian politics. The optimism and willingness of Ferhat Abbas, the ‘ulamā, and the Young Algerians to explore assimilation, reform, negotiation, and Algerian-French coexistence began to unravel, and a new generation of nationalists, many of whom fought in World War II, eclipsed the earlier guard and set their sights on total independence. This progression mirrored what then governor-general Maurice Viollette cautioned against in 1926 when he wrote to the minister of the interior about the educated elite, or évolués, claiming that “six out of ten … are ready to adopt the French fatherland without second thoughts, but if the French fatherland rejects them, raises itself so high that they cannot reach it, they will make their own fatherland, and we will have willed it.”³⁷

World War II: Expanding the Political Discourse

World War II erupted on the heels of the recently dissolved Popular Front and its Algerian counterpart, the Muslim Congress, a 1936 coalition between the élus, the ‘ulamā, and the communists that worked with the Blum-Viollette government. It aroused a political hard-line and permanent disillusionment with French colonialism. By 1939, repressive French policies successfully weakened Algerian political parties by forcing them underground, arresting prominent figures such as Messali Hadj and banning the printing and circulation of newspapers advocating communist, leftist, or anticolonial views. Colonial suppression, however, did not halt nationalist pursuits. For example, Dr. Lamine Debaghine, clandestine Algerian People’s Party (PPA) leader while Messali was in prison and future Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA) minister of foreign affairs (1958–1959), and additional members Filali Abdallah, Ahmed Bouda, and Ahmed Mezerna continued pursing Messali’s anticolonial objectives.³⁸

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, setting off a firestorm of territorial expansion throughout Europe, including the Nazi invasion of France in the summer of 1940. The German occupation and resulting Vichy regime (1940–1944) under Marshal Philippe Pétain temporarily suspended colonial authorities’ cracking down on Algerian political parties. Reflecting on “France’s misfortunes of 1940,” Algerian leaders Ferhat Abbas and Mohamed Bendjelloul, another advocate of Franco-Algerian integration, wrote that they thought “the settler [colon] … would reconsider the Algerian problem.” But “no more than the 1918 victory,” they lamented, “does the metropole’s defeat” inspire self-reflection.³⁹ Even when faced with a humiliating foreign occupation, French administrators were unwilling to acknowledge their contradictory position on empire and claim to Algeria.

Beginning in November 1942, Algerian nationalists, spanning the full political spectrum, received an unexpected boost from the British and American presence in Algeria. The Allies’ landing in North Africa, aimed as a staging ground to attack Germany, had a huge impact on the future revolutionary guard, such as M’hamed Yazid, PPA member and GPRA minister of information (1958–1962), Ramdane Abane, Soummam Congress architect, and Benyoucef Benkhedda, second GPRA president (1961–1962), for not only did they encounter political alternatives and Western generosity, but they formed important contacts with foreigners upon which they later relied.

Hocine Aït Ahmed, a founding FLN member who traveled to New York in the late 1950s in preparation for United Nations sessions and served as GPRA minister of state (1958–1962), recalled in his memoirs the impact of the Allied landing. “One can say that opinion, as a whole, moved on to the Allied side … the population sympathized with the American army. There was a democratic side to the way in which the officers and soldiers behaved.”⁴⁰ At the time, Ferhat Abbas thought the Americans would make Algeria “an American protectorate that Roosevelt would emancipate at the end of the war.”⁴¹ Their presence in North Africa inspired a spirit of optimism among Algerian leaders who hoped the Americans would at the very least support the idea of an Algeria federated with France. They would soon be disappointed to learn defeating Germany was the Allies’ priority, not liberating the Maghrib from the throes of French colonialism.⁴²

In the ensuing fifteen months, a broader coalition of Algerian activists produced three critical documents that increasingly articulated a position for separation and independence. In December 1942, Ferhat Abbas, a former proponent of assimilation, and twenty-four other Algerian leaders wrote a “Message from the Algerian Muslim Representatives to the Responsible Authorities” to protest the governor-general’s conscription preparation, and they presented it to the Allies and French government officials. In it, Abbas recalled “the American President’s commitment to the liberation of peoples, drawing attention to the unfree status of Algerians, and calling for a Muslim conference to draft a new economic, social, and political status for Algeria. In return for its implementation,” the Algerian Muslim Representatives “committed Algerians to sacrifice themselves wholeheartedly for the liberation of metropolitan France.”⁴³

The language Abbas included in this “Message” referenced American president Franklin Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill’s August 1941 Atlantic Charter. These towering wartime figures met to discuss postwar goals, which included limiting territorial expansion, economic cooperation, disarmament, and international peace and security. Yet, for anticolonial activists around the world, the charter’s most relevant and useful principle was number three, that the United States and the United Kingdom respect “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.”⁴⁴ The Atlantic Charter targeted Western Europe and the United States, but as would become a frequent problem with post–World War II international doctrines, the language was vague. Therefore, African nationalists appropriated the content in these doctrines and argued that they applied to them, as well as to Europeans and Americans.⁴⁵

Even though Abbas did not specifically cite the Atlantic Charter in his 1942 message, he reminded Allies and French government representatives that the Algerian people remained under forced colonial domination. Therefore, according to the charter’s third principle, they should be working toward Algerian self-government and sovereignty. Abbas’s appeal, based on a set of widely circulated and supposedly universal ideas at the time, shows the antecedents of the FLN’s strategy. By the mid-1950s, the FLN had additional universal discourses and international charters to choose from, as well as prominent international organizations at which to address their claims.

Abbas and his coauthors failed to receive the response they wanted and continued to lobby the colonial authorities for change. In February 1943, Abbas wrote the “Manifesto of the Algerian People,” a nine-page reflection on the realities of colonialism and the Algerian condition. He reminded his readers that “in his declaration [the Atlantic Charter],” President Roosevelt gave assurances that in a postwar world “the rights of all peoples, big and small, would be respected.”⁴⁶ Based on Roosevelt and Churchill’s words, Abbas called for the “condemnation and abolition of colonization” and an Algerian constitution that guaranteed:

1. The absolute freedom and equality of all its inhabitants without distinction as to race or religion.

2. The abolition of feudal property by a major agrarian reform and the right to well-being of the immense agricultural proletariat.

3. The recognition of the Arabic language as official on the same basis as French.

4. Freedom of press and association.

5. Free compulsory education for children of both sexes.

6. Freedom of religion for all inhabitants and the application to all religions of the principle of separation of church and state.⁴⁷

For Abbas, these were basic freedoms to which all people in Algeria, regardless of their ethnic or racial origins, were entitled. Even though the manifesto did not state independence as the ultimate goal, its language indicated that Abbas was quite knowledgeable about rights and liberties enjoyed by French citizens and that his political vision demanded more and more equal measures between French and Algerians, a concession Marcel Peyrouton, the governor-general of Algeria, was still unwilling to grant. Moreover, he tried to hold President Roosevelt and his allies accountable to the ideas within the Atlantic Charter by highlighting that Algerians did not choose nor did they want “the form of government under which they lived.”⁴⁸

Angered over its dismissal, Abbas gathered additional signatures and verbal support from Messali Hadj who was still in prison, and wrote what is commonly referred to as “An Addition to the Manifesto” (Projet de réformes faisant suite au Manifeste). This document, which demanded “the political autonomy of Algeria as a sovereign nation with droit de regard by France and Allied military assistance in case of conflict” after World War II, went farther than the two previous ones in articulating a desire for Algerian sovereignty, distinct and separate from France.⁴⁹ The addition to the manifesto also represented a rare moment when Abbas and Messali worked together, highlighting how once disparate Algerian political agendas were starting to converge.

Newly appointed governor-general Georges Catroux rejected the manifesto. General Charles de Gaulle, head of the Comité français de libération nationale, tried to appease the activists by passing a 7 March 1944 ordinance that granted citizenship to 65,000 Algerians. Furthermore, he abolished the Native Code that had been in place since 1881. Although de Gaulle’s initiative still focused on preserving and strengthening the colonial relationship, it also marked the first significant political reforms in Algeria since 1919. Despite de Gaulle’s marginal concessions, many Algerian political activists, including Ferhat Abbas, Messali Hadj and his followers, and the reformist ‘ulamā rejected the ordinance as inadequate.

Exactly one week after the 7 March 1944 ordinance, Abbas founded the Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberté (AML), another attempt to build a broad coalition between the ‘ulamā and the Algerian People’s Party followers. He envisioned a more popular movement working toward “an Algerian nation,” an “autonomous republic federated to a new, anticolonial, and anti-imperial French republic.”⁵⁰ According to the AML statute, Abbas created the group to “familiarize and defend the ‘Manifesto of the Algerian People’ in front of French and Algerian public opinion and to reclaim the freedom of speech and expression for all Algerians.” A second and related goal, Abbas wrote, was for the Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberté to “participate in the birth of a new world,” which would respect human dignity.⁵¹

During the spring of 1944, Abbas moved closer toward Messali Hadj’s political position of total separation from France. For example, on 22 May 1944, at a meeting in Constantine, Abbas announced that he was against “the politics of annexation and assimilation,” and on 15 June, he discussed “forcing the French hand, to make them understand our will.”⁵² This rhetoric was not that of the same man who led the Federation of Elected Muslims in the late 1920s. By the end of 1944, the Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberté counted 500,000 members, thanks to Messali Hadj’s open support. And yet, tensions between the two ideologues persisted; Abbas wanted to keep working with American president Franklin Roosevelt and French moderates to achieve a peaceful solution to the Algerian question, whereas Messali Hadj increasingly called for insurrection. The AML dissolved by 1 May 1945 and seven days later, after a series of tragic events, radical Algerian nationalists received an unexpected boost in men willing and eager to pursue independence at any cost.

One of the most violent and significant episodes in colonial Algerian history occurred while many people in Algeria and France celebrated the end of the war on 8 May 1945. In the eastern Algerian city of Sétif, 8,000–10,000 Algerian protesters carrying homemade banners and Algerian flags gathered in the streets. A scuffle erupted between them and the police, and by the end of the day twenty-nine Algerians were dead.⁵³ A similar scene played out in Guelma, a nearby town in the Constantinois close to the Tunisian border. However, a major distinguishing factor between the two cities is that settler militias carried out the reprisals in Guelma.⁵⁴ Threatened by what they considered to be a nationalist uprising and with the support of local subprefect André Achiary, the 4,000 settlers in Guelma organized themselves and killed 1,500 Algerians, mostly men between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, by the end of the month.⁵⁵ The number of Algerians arrested soared in the weeks that followed. One estimate claims 5,560 individuals were rounded up for questioning.⁵⁶ Sétif and Guelma were turning points in solidifying nationalist sentiment. They hardened the political line for both French and Algerians and were a chilling indicator of the war to come. For advocates of Algérie française, Achiary’s militias demonstrated the lengths they were willing to go to protect themselves and their interests. For anticolonialists, these events represented a definitive rupture in assimilationist policies. AML members recalled “the fallen innocent victims” who died as a result of “criminal acts” and vowed to push for stronger democratic reforms.⁵⁷ Be that as it may, I do not agree with historians such as Jean-Pierre Peyroulou who argue that May 1945 started the war for national liberation. To be sure, it was a defining moment in the evolution of Algerian nationalism. However, important domestic, regional, and international developments that contributed to the FLN’s winning strategy for claiming sovereignty of Algeria had yet to take place.

Anticolonial Influences: North Africa and Indochina

In 1946, Ferhat Abbas and Messali Hadj continued to dominate the domestic political scene and a new generation of Algerian nationalists still had a choice between Abbas’s recently formed Union Démocratique du Manifeste Algérien (UDMA) and Messali Hadj’s latest political party, the Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Libértés Démocratiques (MTLD).⁵⁸ World War II radicalized Abbas, and even though both men wanted the same outcome for Algeria, independence, they did not agree on the approach and pace at which this was to happen. Abbas and his reformist supporters thought a gradual timeline achieved through diplomatic and democratic steps was the best way to attain independence from France, whereas Messali Hadj thought military action would yield the most successful results. Due to Messali Hadj’s unwillingness to compromise, according to former FLN member Mohammed Harbi, by 1953, he was squeezed out of the MTLD by allies who were drawn to the UDMA’s gradual approach.⁵⁹

On the eve of 1 November 1954, three major political strands competed for power: the Messalists who advocated for independence through armed struggle; the centralists who attracted students and intellectuals with their message of political pluralism; and, last, the men who founded the FLN on 23 October 1954, who wanted to take up arms against the French colonial regime immediately.⁶⁰ One might notice that the Messalists and the FLN had extremely similar goals. They differed on one small point. Messali Hadj wanted to unite the various nationalist coalitions before initiating violence because he believed they stood a better chance of defeating the French. The FLN did not think that step was necessary and went ahead without the support of all Algerian nationalists. This rupture between the nationalists and lack of consensus reverberated into the early years of the struggle for national liberation as evidenced by the internal FLN divisions debated at Soummam in August 1956. It was also suggestive of the violent process by which Algerian nationalist “consensus” was established. Despite his being one of the most influential and experienced nationalist leaders dating back to the 1926 North African Star, Messali Hadj was marginalized by the FLN and postcolonial Algerian literature and relegated to the periphery of Algerian nationalist history. His charismatic personality and thirty years in Algerian politics threatened to undermine the FLN’s message of unity under one party supported by the entire Algerian population. As a result, he was largely written out of the nationalist record until the late 1980s.⁶¹

In the decade after 1945, the Maghrib underwent considerable political changes that influenced Algerian nationalists and expanded their political options.⁶² Immediately after World War II, Tunisian, Moroccan, and Algerian nationalists met to discuss pan-Maghribi action against French imperialism. Algeria’s “wings,” both French protectorates, were embroiled in similar nationalist mobilizations.⁶³ In Tunisia, Habib Bourguiba, the leader of the Neo-Destour Party and future first president, was convinced that “only a combination of Tunisian opposition and international pressure on France would create a political climate conducive to terminating French rule.”⁶⁴ In March 1945, he traveled to Egypt to solicit help from the recently formed League of Arab States. The six nations in the League—Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Syria—were more focused on the Palestine question and thus unable to deliver the kind of support Bourguiba desired. However, the League’s mere existence coupled with the Palestinian crisis inspired a “strong sense of Arab and Islamic identity” and propelled Pan-Arabism.⁶⁵ In 1947, Bourguiba joined forces with Moroccan and Algerian nationalists and created the Arab Maghrib Bureau in Cairo “with the purpose of coordinating propaganda and agitation against French rule,” a tactic the FLN would soon adopt.⁶⁶ One year later, representatives from all three North African countries formed the Arab Maghrib Liberation Committee to carry out complementary initiatives. During the war for national liberation, the FLN relied on these regional connections for support ranging from material aid and arms to physical space to set up offices and organizations.

In the five years before the Algerian war, Algerian leaders witnessed armed struggle take off in the region. In 1949, the UN passed a resolution stating Libya would become independent, foreshadowing the important role the organization would play in decolonization. In 1950, Bourguiba attempted another round of political negotiations with the French administration when he presented it with the Neo-Destour’s proposal to redefine the Franco-Tunisian relationship and his vision for Tunisian independence. In December 1952, tensions reached an all-time high in Tunisia when French terrorists killed Tunisian trade leader Ferhat Hached, setting off union strikes across the Maghrib. In the summer of that year, Nasser launched a revolution in Egypt and in August 1953, the French exiled then Moroccan sultan Mohammed V, which sparked violent protests. The Maghrib was rife with instability and the French were losing their grip on power.

The Algerians were not the only ones struggling to cast off a European oppressor. They now had tangible examples and models from which to draw. The Vietminh’s struggle to oust the French in Indochina between 1946 and 1954 arguably served as the FLN’s direct inspiration when it launched its anticolonial movement in Algeria.⁶⁷ The Vietminh fashioned itself as a revolutionary group committed to creating a new political, economic, and social order. Its leadership, including Communist Party head Ho Chi Minh and senior military strategist Vo Nguyen Giap, developed a multipronged strategy that relied on mobilizing the indigenous population, solidifying regional alliances, and obtaining aid (especially from the People’s Republic of China after 1949), which enabled them to strengthen their military efforts, construct a propaganda machine, and turn Cold War concerns into political gains. The FLN would emulate the Vietminh’s blueprint for success and add a few more elements to its particular recipe for victory over the French. The consequences of a French defeat in Indochina reverberated for years to come and influenced how the French and the Algerians engaged each other on and off the battlefield.⁶⁸

When World War II ended, recently liberated France set out to rebuild at home and reassert its power internationally. Reconstructing the Indochina federation was part of the latter task. But French political and military leaders faced numerous setbacks in 1945 and 1946, most notably tumultuous political transitions in the territories of Indochina, a vicious famine that caused up to two million deaths, and Charles de Gaulle’s resignation as head of the French government, which splintered any hope of consensus on Indochina.

At the outset of the Franco-Vietminh war, which officially started on 19 December 1946, the French military unquestionably outnumbered and outperformed the Vietminh forces. However, by the conflict’s end, culminating in a devastating and humiliating military defeat at Dien Bien Phu in the spring of 1954, the Vietminh had reversed these dynamics. It did so by spending years honing the above-mentioned strategy. Vietminh forces also benefited from mounting opposition to the war in France. Initially, domestic public opinion did not pay much attention to the conflict. The French press did not cover the events, and the majority of those fighting were either private soldiers or colonial troops. By 1953, the new French government, under Joseph Laniel, faced a concerned citizenry that questioned the purpose and cost of the war.⁶⁹ Dien Bien Phu was the last straw and eliminated any justification for France’s continued presence there. Little did the subsequent French government, under René Coty, know, it would soon encounter a comparable enemy, much closer to home, that had studied the Vietminh and refined its techniques.

International Transformations: Standardizing Health Care and Universalizing Rights

The domestic and regional contexts provided the FLN with the foundation to launch the war in 1954. But it was the international transformations and ensuing doctrines that emerged in the decade after World War II that furnished its leaders with critical tools for their winning strategy. International discourses on health care and welfare, so essential to the Algerian nationalists’ campaign, evolved significantly from the 1850s to the 1950s.

International Sanitary Conferences, the first of which took place in France in 1851 and the last in 1938, were among the first attempts to create health codes governing the human body that would reduce the spread of disease throughout the world.⁷⁰ The League of Nations Health Organization, founded after World War I, represented a second attempt at formulating global health policy and introduced a common vocabulary about hygiene, which the FLN used during decolonization. Its efforts, along with those of the Epidemic Commission, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Pasteur Institute, yielded important biological and epidemiological discoveries, but, with the exception of malaria research, their combined work had a minimal effect on the daily lives of those living in the global South.⁷¹

During the 1920s and 1930s, language about the right to health and welfare of all people around the world was slowly crystallizing. In some cases, colonial representatives and missionaries brought ideas of health and disease control to rural areas and contributed to what Nancy Hunt calls “a colonial lexicon” that altered the ways in which African women understood reproduction and maternity.⁷² In other cases, a select number of local medical auxiliaries were trained to assist colonial physicians and to educate native populations about hygiene.⁷³ These intermediaries were critical in connecting biomedical ideas with those of the native populations and helped create a hybrid form of medicine and care.⁷⁴ But overall, imperial powers did not try to consistently educate the next generation of African physicians, nor did they focus on ways to improve the health of native populations over the long term as they discussed doing for their own populations at the League of Nations. Attempts to address disease-borne illnesses such as malaria and sleeping sickness were the most prominent health-care initiatives throughout colonial Africa. However, these targeted programs did not tackle social root causes and structural inequality that produced disease and ill health.⁷⁵ In the immediate aftermath of World War I, health care in colonial contexts dealt almost exclusively with disease prevention and was connected with the civilizing mission. It was not yet inextricably linked with humanitarian crises.

French and British administrators were forced to think about health, and specifically colonial health, differently when they encountered a crisis in production in the 1920s and 1930s and had to increase the colonial workforce. Officials admitted that they would need to improve health conditions for laborers if they were going to be subjected to longer hours, dangerous migration patterns, and unsanitary urban dwellings. In Algeria, for example, the Muslim population in urban centers increased dramatically between the 1920s and 1940s. In twenty years it more than doubled from 508,235 to 1,129,482. Population growth in rural areas and in the southern regions of Algeria expanded at a smaller rate (15–25 percent).⁷⁶ Despite the discrepancy, French administrators had to contend with the reality of sustained and close proximity of Algerians and settlers as well as the demand and pressure for improved health care. For the first time, officials had to address “the shortage and inefficiency of manpower due to debilitating diseases and unsanitary conditions” and quickly find ways to resolve the problem.⁷⁷

In Algeria, this realization prompted administrators to prioritize the health of the natives, for not only would their well-being effect production but also it stood to boost the metropolitan economy. Certain progressive administrators such as Albert Sarraut believed that Algerian workers would work harder if they were granted some measures of protection, but his was not a widely held position in the 1930s. Not all men in power at the time envisioned benefits from what would have been a significantly different policy approach.

Reluctance to standardize health and labor conditions in the colonies changed after World War II. Empires presented both a challenge and a solution to the crisis of capitalism. On the one hand, the colonies contained an endless supply of laborers who could work toward more production and greater profit. On the other hand, those individuals needed to be healthy to work and required infrastructure to support their transportation and housing needs. Aiming to resolve this particular conundrum, colonial administrators and development experts throughout the French and British empires devised numerous five- and ten-year plans to expand schools and hospitals, build new roads, improve public facilities, and grow industry.⁷⁸ Although more attention was paid to native health and improving nutrition, colonial officials did not address the social roots of inequality.⁷⁹

The accelerated pace of development between 1945 and 1955 did not last nor did it generate the sought-after capital to revitalize the French and British metropoles. But the decade-long push created a universal set of terms about health care, development, and modernity that Algerian nationalists were quietly absorbing.⁸⁰ They observed postwar health-care debates and armed themselves with a fresh understanding of international language. They soon deployed this language to articulate political claims and demonstrate their ability to care for the Algerian population, discussed in depth in Chapters 3 and 4.

Western European and American officials did not anticipate the use by Third World actors of medicine and health care terminology, and that was not the only area from which their language would be appropriated. The rise of international organizations that promoted human rights and a revised commitment to the principles of humanitarianism after World War II fundamentally altered international politics and rewrote the rules of political engagement. Human rights and humanitarianism provided universal ideas that were devoid of race, gender, or religious preferences and therefore were easily transferable to whoever had knowledge of them. These words were disseminated through radio broadcasts and newspaper headlines that the entire world could consume. This was not the first time in the twentieth century that anticolonial actors appropriated Western rhetoric. However, two important features distinguished the 1940s and 1950s: first, the volume of charters and agreements produced, as well as the number of signatories, far exceeded the interwar period, and, second, the level of anticolonial sentiment was at an all-time high.⁸¹

The severity and extreme violence of World War II left many Western nations vulnerable and their leaders eager to find solutions that would prevent that scale of war from ever repeating itself. For the second time in twenty-five years, international cooperation became their focus as exemplified by numerous rights-based declarations, including the Atlantic Charter, the UN Charter, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, and the Geneva Conventions of 1949.⁸² However, these documents were intended to ensure Western security and European power, not enfranchise the entire world.

The United Nations, created in 1945, was the cornerstone of this internationalist spirit and served as the foundation for the ideals of global governance.⁸³ There had been three prior comprehensive attempts at international treaties: the Peace of Westphalia (1646), the Congress of Vienna (1815), and the Treaty of Versailles (1919), none of which were able to definitively resolve the tension between international cooperation and domestic jurisdiction.⁸⁴ These agreements also disproportionately favored Western European nations and the United States, a trend that bristled against the sweeping changes that decolonization introduced to international politics after World War II. The geographic span and the number of people affected by the war instilled a sense of urgency to work together, and notably every continent except Antarctica was represented in the original UN membership in 1945. But this unprecedented level of representation also meant that national delegates each had their own vision and priorities for the organization and they struggled to agree on the contents of the charter.

Algerian nationalist Ferhat Abbas closely followed the UN proceedings. On 29 April 1945, he publicly stated that “the United Nations conference assured the liberty of all people,” which he thought would soon translate into Algerian independence.⁸⁵ But neither the charter nor the representatives who met in California that spring guaranteed independence, and the colonial question dominated internal debates for years to come. For example, in an effort to clarify the UN’s position on anticolonial movements, several committees debated the rights of non-self-governing territories in the early 1950s, an issue the General Assembly revisited year after year.⁸⁶ Members struggled to include a colonial policy clause that, on the one hand, supported the right of all people to self-determination as articulated in Article 1(2) of the UN Charter and, on the other hand, permitted colonial governments to run their own affairs.⁸⁷ By the end of the decade, as “anti-colonialism gathered momentum,” the UN had no choice but to adapt itself despite “objections from the Western powers involved.”⁸⁸

Western countries tackled the conundrum of trying to ensure peace without dissolving their right to rule within their borders by intentionally omitting enforcement mechanisms.⁸⁹ For instance, in a private meeting, Eleanor Roosevelt, a U.S. representative at the United Nations, who also played a critical role in writing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, reportedly explained that the best way “to deal with Resolution A [on self-determination] was to amend it so that neither the timing nor the means of applying the principle would be automatic or rigid.”⁹⁰ Even an eminent leader in the fight to protect all people acknowledged the interests of imperial nations behind closed doors. None of the agreements were legally binding nor could any member state or fellow signatory require that another party follow the prescriptions. Meaningful assistance and intervention of any kind were nearly impossible under these conditions often leading the Great Powers to use their commitments to human rights and humanitarianism as a weapon against each other rather than as a firm anchor to protect individuals.⁹¹

The United Nations and its charter became a prominent feature of postwar politics. Their architects had no control over who and how they were appropriated. The French did not intend to extend political rights to their empire, and colonial officials were unprepared when nationalists started articulating claims to French representatives and international organizations couched in the same terminology. But this is precisely what Algerian FLN members did. As discussed in Chapter 6, the FLN appealed to the United Nations, which provided a physical and theoretical stage for them to be heard by a broad audience and where colonial inequalities were mitigated.⁹² The General Assembly floor in New York, and, by extension, international organizations, temporarily removed the preeminence of state sovereignty and leveled the political playing field. Algerian nationalists expressed their grievances and publicly exposed what sovereigns previously strained to keep private, transforming international organizations and the nature of political power and authority in the twentieth century.

The revised Geneva Conventions of 1949, what historian David Forsythe calls “a moral pillar for international relations after 1945,” were a third international development upon which the Algerian nationalists later relied to claim their sovereignty.⁹³ Between 1946 and 1949, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) led a team of international jurists, Red Cross delegates, and state government representatives in updating the three existing Geneva Conventions and ensuring better protection for civilians during times of war.⁹⁴ The prestigious international organization, a beacon of moral authority in world affairs, recognized a need for broadening the scope of its humanitarian safeguards and embarked upon a contentious process during which officials struggled to balance national sovereignty and more rigorous international laws.⁹⁵

State power and global security often interfere with one another, as national delegates discovered in San Francisco when they met to create the United Nations. However, ICRC neutrality was supposed to eliminate politics and national interests from the equation. But, as Mark Lewis has shown, that was not the case during the Geneva Convention revision debates.⁹⁶ “The revision project,” he writes, “was dominated by a European/North American perspective, reflecting both post-war imperial politics and the ICRC’s Eurocentric perspective.”⁹⁷ In light of the ICRC’s overall neglect of the Jewish population during the war and the harsh criticism it received for this, in 1946, acting president Max Huber was interested in revising the conventions in order “to gain enhanced powers to inspect prisons and camps, improve the rules for the treatment of POWs, establish baseline rules for the treatment of detained civilians, and strengthen the ICRC’s legal and practical ability to deliver food and clothing to POWs.”⁹⁸ The legal parameters set out in the final version of the Geneva Conventions did not pertain to civil or internal conflicts, technically what the French colonial administrations called the Algerian war. Yet, they provided a legal framework that was respected by its signatories and recognized worldwide as an ideal to strive for. Algerian nationalists would work both of these angles, especially after 1957. The FLN and the Algerian Liberation Army became well versed in the Geneva Conventions and tried to hold the French government, a signatory of the 1949 conventions, and its military accountable to them, while also claiming to recognize and follow the prescribed guidelines for proper codes of conduct in war. This post–World War II text laid out a how-to guide for nonstate actors to engage in diplomatic, military, and humanitarian negotiations with powerful army leaders and representatives from the renowned ICRC.

Conclusion

The evolution of nationalism in Algeria was a competitive forty-year process, the results of which could not have been predicted even in 1950. FLN members in 1954 lived through numerous iterations of political parties and failed reforms and most felt they had exhausted every viable option for achieving their aims. The FLN had a firm agenda for complete independence and was in a unique position in November 1954 to set off coordinated attacks throughout Algeria. However, as the opening vignette on the 1956 Soummam Congress showed, not all Algerian nationalists agreed that the FLN was the sole party capable of winning the war for the Algerian people, and, beyond that, there were massive divisions within the FLN reflecting decades of ideological sparring. The nationalist leadership continued to work through these differences that threatened to derail their ultimate objective.⁹⁹ In spite of these differences, the FLN managed to keep a firm grasp on dissenters and detractors and forge ahead in its mission of attracting international attention and support for its cause.

But for all of the nationalists’ ingenuity and creativity, other tectonic shifts at the regional and international levels enabled them to attain their position and experience an unprecedented degree of success in shaping public opinion and forcing the French to recognize Algerian sovereignty. FLN representatives explored numerous diplomatic and military strategies. But, as the following chapters demonstrate, it was their appropriation of medicine and health-care, humanitarianism, and rights discourses, all products of World War II, that yielded the most successful results. The nationalists deliberately used them as political tools and selectively deployed them depending on the moment and target audience. The FLN mastered these rhetorics and built a comprehensive strategy that operated at the local, regional, and international levels and could not be ignored. We now turn to the first layer of the FLN’s plan of attack, constructing a wartime health-services division and battling the French over winning the hearts, minds, and bodies of the population.