A Savage War of Peace

Although war was never formally declared, the Algerian War lasted from 1954 to 1962. It caused six French governments to fall, led to the collapse of the Fourth Republic, brought De Gaulle back 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 state torture. The war made headlines around the world, and at the time it seemed like a French affair: Now, this brutal and intractable conflict looks less like the last colonial war than the first postmodern one--a full-dress rehearsal for the sort of amorphous struggle that convulsed the Balkans in the 1990s and that is now ravaging Iraq, and in which religion, nationalism, imperialism, and terrorism assume previously unimagined degrees of intensity.