A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962
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Written by Alistair Horne.
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The Algerian War lasted from 1954 to 1962. It brought down six French governments, led to the collapse of the Fourth Republic, returned de Gaulle to power, and came close to provoking a civil war on French soil. More than a million Muslim Algerians died in the conflict and as many European settlers were driven into exile. Above all, the war was marked by an unholy marriage of revolutionary terror and repressive torture.Nearly a half century has passed since this savagely fought war ended in Algeria’s independence, and yet—as Alistair Horne argues in his new preface to his now-classic work of history—its repercussions continue to be felt not only in Algeria and France, but throughout the world. Indeed from today’s vantage point the Algerian War looks like a full-dress rehearsal for the sort of amorphous struggle that convulsed the Balkans in the 1990s and that now ravages the Middle East, from Beirut to Baghdad—struggles in which questions of religion, nationalism, imperialism, and terrorism take on a new and increasingly lethal intensity.
A Savage War of Peace is the definitive history of the Algerian War, a book that brings that terrible and complicated struggle to life with intelligence, assurance, and unflagging momentum. It is essential reading for our own violent times as well as a lasting monument to the historian’s art.
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Dale Brayden thinks this book is Good.
A Savage War of Peace is the definitive history of the Algerian war of independence, fought from 1954 to 1962. This is a book that the neo-con overlords would have been well advised to have read before they embarked on their adventure in Iraq - but, sadly, none of the hard-won lessons of Algeria ever seeped into the feeble brains of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Rice. We've all paid the price of their fact-free theorizing.
If you want to know, in exacting detail, how Algeria won its independence and how the French government was torn apart in the process, this is the book for you. You will come away with the knowledge that there were no 'good guys' in that war; that a war of national liberation is not a glorious thing; that colonialism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction; and that terrorism is a deliberate tactic with specific political aims (and not, as our present government would have you believe, a mythological force of 'evil'). And you will come away with a clearer understanding that even in the extremely rare cases when torture can offer a short-term victory, it leads to long-term defeat; its costs outweigh its putative benefits.