Mere months after the July 1954 signing of the Geneva Accords confirmed France’s withdrawal from Indochina, France found itself embroiled in “police actions” in yet another part of its empire. The November 1954 attacks on French military and police positions across Algeria would usher in a second war of decolonization, characterized by exceptional violence on both sides, including the use of torture and terrorist tactics. This undeclared war not only pitted colonizer against colonized, but also provoked deep divisions within the metropolitan French, settler, and Algerian communities.

Scholarship on the war, in both French and English, has proliferated in the past twenty-five years. Topics have ranged from the role of French intellectuals in antiwar resistance, to the civil war between Algerian nationalist factions, to the use of torture by the French army, among others. What has been lacking, however, is a comprehensive archive-based English-language survey. Enter Martin Evans’s Algeria: France’s Undeclared War. The description of the book in the preface as a “chronological narrative of the Algerian War’s origins, intensifications, and consequences” (xi) is deceptively simple, and does not do justice to this thorough, and thoroughly engaging, examination of the political, social, and cultural dimensions of the conflict. Organized into three parts—covering the era from the violent conquest of Algiers (1830) to 1945, the era from the protest and repression of May 1945 to de Gaulle’s acceptance of the possibility of Algerian self-determination in September 1959, and the era of dénouement from 1959 to 1962—the book is also structured around three central analytical threads. These threads provide not only the backbone of Evans’s argument, but also a framework for exploring the complexities of the colonial period, the Algerian independence movement, and the contradictions inherent in the French Left’s commitment to colonial reform, on the one hand, and to the so-called civilizing mission on the other.

The first of these analytical threads concerns the “long hatreds” resulting from French conquest and colonization. In a 2007 review of Alistair Horne’s newly reissued A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 (NYRB Classics, 2006 [1977]), long the standard English-language survey of the war, Irwin Wall posed a critical question about the 1955 Philippeville massacre of European settlers: “What, if anything, does the barbarity of the massacre by Algerians tell us of the rage provoked by French colonialism?” (H-Diplo, May 26, 2007). Whereas Horne fails to engage fully with this question, Evans places the issue of anti-French resentment at the center of his study. Although the impact of colonization was uneven—Algerian Muslims living in areas with few Europeans did not face the daily reinforcement of their inferior status that some of their compatriots did elsewhere—the French conquest had radical economic, social, and political consequences for the indigenous population. Indeed, French Algeria was characterized by an ever-widening gulf between “two societies exist[ing] uneasily in conditions of mistrust, segregation, and mutual incomprehension” (xi).

The second analytical thread is closely linked to the first: the emergence of a modern Algerian nationalism beginning in the 1920s. Far from constituting a single all-encompassing movement, Algerian nationalism ranged from the assimilationist agenda of Ferhat Abbas and the Fédération des élus, to the Ulema movement’s demands for independence on the basis of a distinct Muslim identity, to the radical political nationalism of Messali Hadj and the revolutionary politics of the Algerian Communist Party. As a result of the French state’s failure to engage fully with any of these groups—and worse, its outright repression of many of their leaders—the possibilities for a negotiated solution were slim. Ultimately, armed force was perceived as the only means of securing independence from the French, and the National Liberation Front (FLN) emerged as the frontrunner.

The consequences of the policies pursued by the French government are the foundation of Evans’s third and final analytical thread. Specifically, Evans emphasizes the consequences of “third-way reformism,” a reference to the French Left’s attempts to negotiate an alternative to the extremes of both hard-line settler attitudes and those of Algerian nationalists. First advanced formally by Minister of State Maurice Viollette in 1938, the goal of retaining sovereignty over French Algeria through political, economic, and social reform characterized left-wing policies through the end of the Fourth Republic. For Viollette, the key to a stable French Algeria was the assimilation of Muslim elites by extending full political rights to them; later left-wing leaders would adopt different approaches while conforming to the same general principles.

These three analytical threads all contribute to Evans’s overarching argument that the policies pursued by the French Left—and particularly by the socialist Guy Mollet and the Republican Front from 1956 to 1958—were responsible not only for intensifying the war, but also for ensuring that the FLN and its “culture of the gun” (335) would emerge as the strongest voice for Algerian independence. The Republican Front’s combination of reforms that never went far enough to appease Algerian nationalists (though often going too far in the eyes of many settlers) and repression of Algerian nationalist political organizations “ensure[d] that politicians were marginalized” (335) in favor of those willing to use force. This approach had consequences not only for the course of the war, but also for Algerian politics after independence, including the brief civil war that erupted between competing FLN factions. Significantly, while Charles de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958 is generally considered to represent a radical break with the Fourth Republic, Evans argues that there was some continuity between Mollet’s prosecution of the war and de Gaulle’s approach, even if the latter did not acknowledge it. Both sought to negotiate an end to the war from a position of military strength; both tried to maintain French control over the Sahara and its oil reserves; and both tried to conquer “hearts and minds” through economic investment and social programs. The major difference, however, was that de Gaulle came to accept the possibility of Algerian self-determination, whereas Mollet did not.

Evans’s thorough analysis of the political dimension of the war is balanced by keen attention to its social dimension. He examines the impact of the strategies of the FLN, the OAS, and the French army on civilians, Muslim Algerians, and Europeans alike, and he explores the violence that lasted well past the official ceasefire of March 19, 1962. Additional depth is provided by his engagement with the specificities of the Algerian Jewish experience from the colonial era through the process of “repatriation” to France after 1962, and by the incorporation of personal testimonies, including those of well-known historians such as Mohammed Harbi and Benjamin Stora. Algeria: France’s Undeclared War will interest specialists and nonspecialists alike, and it will be essential for teachers of North African and French colonial history.