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From November 1954 to March 1962 French troops fought in Algeria, in order to keep Algeria a part of France. This was a conflict which, in France, was not officially termed a war at all. The end result was the independence of Algeria under the control of the FLN (National Liberation Front), and the departure for France of 1 million French people who thought life would be impossible in Algeria under the new regime. This war was arguably the longest war of decolonization, and although French forces undoubtedly were better equipped and more numerous than the Algerian fellaghas, it still cost 35,000 French soldiers their lives. However, it has disappeared from collective memory. No agency of remembrance did work to commemorate the memories of this war. Jean-Pierre Rioux pointed out this fact effectively in a paper published in 1990: ‘Since 1962’, he wrote, ‘there is no French national memory of the Algerian conflict; this un-named war never received the honours of memory.’ This chapter deals with the reasons why in France there is no public memory of the Algerian War. The Algerian War Algeria was an integral part of France. During the Second World War, de Gaulle's provisional government moved from London to Algiers, where it was on French territory. It was divided into three départements and had roughly the same administration as others in metropolitan France. When needed, bureaucrats and teachers were appointed to Algerian selection boards and schools as well as to metropolitan ones by committees in the central administration. Many civil servants began their career there and later went back to France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For much of the twentieth century, constitutional and religious issues played a more prominent role in French politics than in most of the democracies of north-western Europe. In countries such as Britain and the Scandinavian kingdoms, politics have tended to be bipolarised on matters of social and economic policy and the distribution of income, whereas in France it is only in the last thirty years that socio-economic issues have not had to share public attention with major differences over the constitution and the place of religion in society. Hitherto, as Philip Williams said of the Third and Fourth Republics, ‘three issues were fought out simultaneously: the eighteenth-century conflict between rationalism and Catholicism, the nineteenth-century struggle of democracy against authoritarian government, and the twentieth-century dispute between employer and employed’. The Second World War and its aftermath saddled French politics with a fourth issue – a crisis of national self-esteem arising from the disintegration of empire. Overburdened, the Fourth Republic collapsed beneath the divisive weight of these four problems, each of which cut across opinion in a different direction – thereby making coherent governmental majorities increasingly difficult to find. The following decades, however, saw these debilitating issues virtually reduced to one – or so it seemed to many contemporaries. What is often called ‘the social contest over the distribution of the national income’ now dominated the stage; and observers claimed that French politics had belatedly come of age. France had taken her place among the advanced democracies, where power could be expected to alternate between the disciplined forces of Right and Left, taking their stance mainly on socioeconomic matters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]