Battle of Algiers 1957: Urban War in the Algerian Revolution

The Battle of Algiers was a campaign of urban warfare fought in the city of Algiers during 1957, at the height of the Algerian War of Independence. The National Liberation Front (FLN) waged a bombing campaign in the city’s European districts, and the French army’s 10th Parachute Division under General Jacques Massu crushed its network by October 1957. The French won the battle on the ground, but their use of torture and forced disappearances became one of the most damaging scandals of the war.

Background: the war comes to the city

The Algerian War of Independence began on 1 November 1954 with FLN attacks across the country. Algeria, conquered by France from 1830, was legally part of France and home to about a million European settlers, often called pieds-noirs, alongside some nine million Muslim Algerians who had far fewer rights.

At the Soummam Congress in August 1956, FLN leaders including Abane Ramdane and Larbi Ben M’hidi decided to take the war into the cities, believing that action in Algiers would draw international attention. Violence was already escalating: in June 1956 the French executed FLN prisoners by guillotine, and on 10 August 1956 European extremists bombed the rue de Thèbes in the Casbah, the crowded old Muslim quarter, killing many residents.

The FLN’s Autonomous Zone of Algiers, led by Yacef Saâdi with Ali Ammar, known as Ali la Pointe, organised the response. On 30 September 1956 young women carried bombs into the Milk Bar and the Cafétéria, popular with Europeans, killing three people and wounding dozens. The bombers included Zohra Drif and Samia Lakhdari, students who could pass checkpoints in European clothes; a third bomb, planted by Djamila Bouhired at the Air France terminal, failed to explode. The use of women made the FLN’s network much harder for the authorities to detect.

What happened: the paratroopers take over

On 7 January 1957 the French resident minister, Robert Lacoste, handed responsibility for order in Algiers to General Massu and his roughly 8,000 paratroopers, giving them police powers. Officers such as Colonel Marcel Bigeard, Colonel Roger Trinquier and Colonel Yves Godard led the operations.

The FLN called a general strike for 28 January 1957, timed to coincide with a United Nations debate on Algeria. The paratroopers broke it within days, forcing open shops and taking workers to their jobs by lorry. On 26 January bombs had exploded in three cafés in the city centre, and on 10 February bombs at two stadiums killed about ten people.

The army sealed off the Casbah, set up checkpoints and conducted mass round-ups. Trinquier organised a system of block wardens that tracked every household. Suspects were taken to interrogation centres, where torture, including electric shocks and water torture, was widely used to extract names. Many prisoners were never seen again.

Both sides targeted civilians. FLN bombs killed and maimed Europeans and Muslims who happened to be in cafés, buses and stadiums, while European militants carried out reprisal killings in the streets. The violence deepened the gulf between the two communities and left little room for moderates on either side.

On 23 February 1957 Larbi Ben M’hidi, one of the FLN’s founding leaders, was captured. The army announced in early March that he had hanged himself in his cell; in 2001 General Paul Aussaresses admitted that he had been killed by soldiers under his command. The lawyer Ali Boumendjel died in custody in March 1957, also falsely reported as a suicide.

Second phase: summer and autumn 1957

Bombings resumed in June 1957, including attacks on streetlamp bases near bus stops and on the Casino de la Corniche dance hall on 9 June, which killed several people and provoked violent reprisals by Europeans against Muslims. The paratroopers returned to Algiers and rebuilt their intelligence network, using captured FLN members as informers.

On 24 September 1957 Yacef Saâdi was captured with Zohra Drif in a hiding place in the Casbah. On 8 October paratroopers surrounded the house where Ali la Pointe was hiding with Hassiba Ben Bouali, the boy Omar Yacef, known as Petit Omar, and Mahmoud Bouhamidi. When they refused to surrender, the house was blown up and all four were killed. The FLN’s organisation in Algiers had been destroyed.

Key people

• Jacques Massu – commander of the 10th Parachute Division, given full powers in Algiers.
• Larbi Ben M’hidi – FLN leader who backed the urban strategy, killed in custody in March 1957.
• Yacef Saâdi – head of the FLN’s Autonomous Zone of Algiers.
• Ali la Pointe – Yacef’s chief lieutenant, killed in October 1957.
• Paul Teitgen – secretary-general for police at the Algiers prefecture, who protested against torture and offered his resignation in 1957.

Torture and its consequences

Reports of torture leaked out quickly. Teitgen calculated that some 3,024 of the roughly 24,000 people placed under house arrest had disappeared. General Jacques Pâris de Bollardière asked to be relieved of his command in protest. In June 1957 the young mathematician Maurice Audin was arrested and never reappeared, and the communist journalist Henri Alleg described his own torture in La Question, published in 1958 and banned in France. Djamila Bouhired, arrested in April 1957, was sentenced to death; an international campaign by her lawyer Jacques Vergès and others made her case famous, and she was released after independence.

These revelations divided French society and weakened support for the war. In the longer term, the army’s sense that politicians might abandon Algeria fed the crisis of May 1958 that brought Charles de Gaulle back to power and led to the Fifth French Republic. Algeria became independent on 5 July 1962.

Legacy

The Battle of Algiers has been studied by armies and insurgents ever since as a case study in urban guerrilla warfare and counter-insurgency. Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers made it world famous. Shot on location with many non-professional actors, it was not released in France until 1971, and it has since been shown to military officers studying insurgency. Massu himself said in 2000 that torture had not been indispensable and that he regretted it, while Aussaresses defended his actions in a memoir published in 2001. France has slowly acknowledged the abuses: in 2018 President Emmanuel Macron recognised that Audin died under a system of torture authorised by the state, and in 2021 he acknowledged that Boumendjel had been tortured and murdered by the French army.

Timeline

• 1956, 10 August: European extremists bomb the rue de Thèbes in the Casbah.
• 1956, 30 September: FLN bombs explode at the Milk Bar and the Cafétéria.
• 1957, 7 January: General Massu’s paratroopers receive police powers in Algiers.
• 1957, 28 January: The FLN’s eight-day general strike begins and is broken by the army.
• 1957, 23 February: Larbi Ben M’hidi is captured; he is killed in custody in early March.
• 1957, 9 June: A bomb at the Casino de la Corniche kills several people.
• 1957, 24 September: Yacef Saâdi is captured in the Casbah.
• 1957, 8 October: Ali la Pointe and three companions are killed when their hiding place is blown up.

Why it matters

The Battle of Algiers showed that a modern army could crush an urban insurgency, but also that victory won through torture could destroy the political case for a war. It shaped the end of French Algeria, the fall of the Fourth Republic and later debates over counter-terrorism and human rights.