Empire: World History - 379. Algerian Revolution: Birth of Independence (Ep 4)

Episode Date: July 15, 2026

How did the French use systemic torture during the Battle of Algiers? Which army generals plotted to overthrow the French president? Why did the bloody birth of an independent Algeria herald further trouble to come? In the fourth episode of this series, William and Anita explore the bloody road to the declaration of Algerian Independence. They discuss France’s horrifying use of torture, the collapse of the Fourth Republic, and the historic 1962 Évian Accords. Try Attio for free at attio.com/empire Summer sale is here: get an annual Empire Club membership for an extra 20% off with code SUMMER26. That's ad-free listening, early-access, every bonus episode, and full access to our exclusive members' series. Sale ends August 31st, so grab it before summer's over. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Charlie Rodwell Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Duremberg. This is episode four of our Algerian series. Now, in the last episode, we saw how this nationalist military group, the FLN, brought terror into the heart of the French settler community in Algeria. With the Philippeville massacre, then the French response, which was even more brutal. And finally, the opening of a new front in the Casper of Algiers. In today's episode, we reach for the most famous and morally complex chapter of the Algerian War of Independence. The Battle of Algiers is one of the greatest political films ever made, and here we are exploring the true history that it's based upon.

Now, in the last episode, we introduced one of the key leaders of the FLN, Sadi Yasef. In the famous 1966 film, he actually played himself. As we said last time, Yasef was a former baker from the Casper, the medieval citadel, at the top of the city of Algiers. and he transformed the Casper's medieval warren of alleyways and flat-roofed mud houses into a genuine military asset, with hidden rooms and bomb factories concealed beneath ordinary workshops. And his most devastating tactical innovation was to use Algerian women dressed in French fashions to carry bombs past French checkpoints. But at the beginning of 1957, he was to meet a formidable new French.

adversary, the brutal General Massou. Yeah, let me tell you a bit about General Massou. So in January 1957, the French government handed police powers over the city of Algiers to General Jacques Massu and his 10th paratroop division. He was 50 years old. He was a veteran of the free French forces and Indo-China, Indochine, a bullneck man who believed the FLN's urban campaign could be broken by the application of sheer force. And if that didn't work, then more force.

That was his attitude. And his mandate granted by the socialist French government of Guy Moly was effectively unlimited. You can do what you want. That meant to him that his officers had carte blanche. And the kind of thing that they did, Willie, is shocking, frankly, isn't it? From those who are in uniform and who have a set of codes supposedly to live by, none of that was present in the response from him. Masu plays his first card when the FLN calls a general strike across Algiers in late January,

1957 to coincide with the United Nations debate on Algeria. Masu unleashes his paratroopers who break the strike in a way that leaves no one with any doubt on the nature of French authority. They drive armoured cars up to shuttered Muslim shops, rip off the shuttered, and then soldiers up into the apartments where they drag Algerian workers out of their homes and into trucks to force them to work.

The message was simple. The F&N does not control the city, we do, and we have demonstrated this. And then Masu turns to the harder problem of deconstructing the bombing network. Yeah, now, I mean, we already described how complicated this network is, and the only way you're going to crack the cells

or make people talk is torture. And Massu's powers, do exactly that. They systematically torture thousands of Algerians who they pick up in the Casbah. And look, the methods are awful. They're also well documented. You have this thing called a Jejen, which is a field telephone with one of those old ones with a hand crank that generates an electrical charge. And instead of being attached to any apparatus, they take those electrodes and they put them to victims' fingers, to their ears, to their genitals, frankly. then it is, you know, torture through electric shock. They also have this thing called the

Benoit, which is, you know, it's waterboarding. That's what we'd call it today, but it's simulated drowning. They hold the victims head underwater until they lose consciousness. Then they get them up, revive them, and they repeat and repeat and repeat. And some of it is really positively medieval, you know, suspending human beings in stress positions by, you know, with ropes, the kind of thing you would see in sort of old manuscripts and these things are being used. used on people. In the Spanish Inquisition. In the Spanish Inquisition, exactly what I was thinking.

So, you know, and beatings and sleep deprivation and the extensive use of sexual violence against Muslim women. All of this to get them to talk, to tell them names, name names, name places. And by any means, they were going to get this information. And, Willie, some didn't make it through the torture, did they? Many didn't. Many die under torture. others, an estimated 3,000 in the Battle of Algiers alone, simply disappear.

They're held in secret, killed and buried with that record. And the parrars develop a new practice that they cheerfully nickname Big Eard's Prawns. When they take prisoners, they bind their arms and legs, and they drop them out of helicopters into the sea off Algiers where they drag. This is the kind of stuff that we hear, you know, from Pinnishay and others. You know, I mean, it's horrific. So you deny a person in their life and you deny the family, the wrong. right to mourn over a body. It's meant to strike terror into hearts. Masu's intelligence officer

is a man called Colonel Roger Trinkie. And he sets up an informer network. And this informer network covers every street in Algiers. So you get one informer per block mapping the entire social fabric of the city. And then he's got sort of these colleagues taking the intelligence and drawing up this vast pyramid chart mapping. the entire covert structure. Oranigram, they call it. They are Arranigram, very good, of the FLN network. And again, this also is reminiscent to me, Willie, of, you know, the way in which the Brits try to get information on the IRA and what the IRA were doing. You know, you take people in for questioning sometimes using methods that you

wouldn't want brought before Parliament and you that way sort of map. Who is the hierarchy? Who is where and where do you hit? Yeah, I mean, this is now the mid-1950s. This is exactly what the Brits are doing at the same time in Malaya. They'll do later in Cyprus, in Kenya. This has become a sort of post-war book, but the French seemed to be particularly brutal. In February 1957, they capture the FLN's political mastermind in Algiers,

Labi Ben Mahidi. He was secretly hanged by a French death squad in such a way that it looked like a suicide. And this is something the French government only acknowledged as recently as 2021. In September 1957, Yasef Sadi himself is finally captured, along with Zorozdrift, the woman that let off the bomb in the milk bar. A few weeks later, French forces corner a man called Ali Lapois. And this is actually Yosef's deadliest enforcer.

and has a really interesting background as well. Okay, so he's a former pimp. He's a street boxer. He is the man who Yassav sends out to terrify anybody who needs either dragging into line or is suspected of being an informer. And he's hiding in his Caspar hideout. When he refuses to surrender, they blow the entire building apart. So Ali Lepant dies in the rubble along with two associates

and a 12-year-old boy who's just been sheltering with them. And then 17 of his neighbours. The bombings stop as a result of this. So France declares that it has won the Battle of Algiers, but the world does not yet know about the atrocities that the French have committed. And that is going to be a shock to the system, the international system. The photographs and testes that do eventually leak out,

above all, Henri Alex, the question, published in 1958, a first-hand account of torture methods used on the Algerian community newspaper by French paratroopers is a book that is banned in France or is immediately, but sells nonetheless about hundreds of thousands of copies. And this is the thing that really galvanise opposition to the war among French intellectuals, French trade unions and the international community. Yeah, the philosopher Jean-Pont-Sartre wrote that every Frenchman who didn't oppose the war was complicit in this torture. you've got the Catholic intellectual, Françoisier, who publicly says that, you know, how could France condemn Nazi methods while behaving exactly the same way?

And within the French Army's officer corps, the Battle of Algiers produces something maybe even more dangerous than bad publicity. It's a conviction that France's politicians will never make an honest peace in Algeria. And that's really important because when you have this, this doubt, in the leadership, you have a crisis on the horizon and that crisis hits in May 1958. It's one of the most extraordinary political moments in modern French history, I would say, six prime ministers in four years consumed by the question of Algeria.

Yeah, this is what I suppose Brexit has been over the last 10 years in British politics, the way we now go through our prime ministers. And in this case, it's the whole issue. You have a million piad noir. It's not just simple question like the British in India of pulling out. No one in British India has got farms, vineyards, businesses. But that's not the case in Algeria. And the Piednoyars are an enormous force.

They have many sympathizers in France. And on the 13th of May, 1958, Piednoyneur settlers stormed the French government buildings in Alger's furious at the execution of French prisoners by the FLN, convinced that the government in Paris was about to surrender to the nationalist. Yeah, and the army in Algeria is so shaken by all of this. They were now on the verge of a coup against the civilian government of France. So, you know, in Paris, it's felt, and it is true, the politicians capitulate. You've got General Charles de Gaulle, you know, the man who spent the war in London broadcasting to his Frenchmen to resist the Nazis.

during World War II. He's the one they turn to. They say, you know what, we don't trust this breed of politicians at all. We need you, General. We need you to come back. So just please take control because everything feels out of control. And with that, with de Gaulle coming back, the Fourth Republic, you could say is effectively over. And de Gaul, what he does is very interesting. He flew over to Algiers and he tells the Piaenois exactly what they want to hear. So he stood on the balcony of the Government General. building in Algiers on the 4th of June, 1958, looked out over this enormous crowd of European settlers and French soldiers who brought him to power and he says,

Je vouse-compris, I have understood you. And the crowd goes nuts. They go wild. Now, what they hear, you can kind of hear what you want to hear in that. It's not explicit, but what they hear is a promise that Algeria will remain French. De Gaul is one of them. He is, you know, the savior of the Piaigno. He'd understood them perfectly. But you know what? That is a really nebulous statement. I have understood you.

And they are about to find out that he didn't mean that at all. It's going to take four years and a great deal more blood, but their hearts will eventually be broken by Degaud. So we've got some very exciting news for you. We've sold out our first show, but we've got a second show at the rest is fest in September. And we have a brilliant line-up, incredibly topical one, two. We're calling it three Ayatollahs an Iranian dynasty.

Delighted to say we're going to be joined by a great friend of the show, Ali Ansari, one of Britain's foremost experts on Iranian history. He is an excellent storyteller. Ali, just tell us what are we going to be chatting about? Well, we will be exploring big questions like how is the influence of the Ayatollah shaped Iran since the 1979 revolution? Does the Islamic Republic's grip appear to be fracturing? And what role have other nations played in shaping Iran's fate? And we're going to unpack one of the most fascinating and urgent stories in the world right now. As the regime faces economic pressures, regional setbacks,

and a disillusioned younger generation, but in many ways a revitalised revolutionary guards call, what comes next for a great civilization that has outlasted many, many empires? Allie, we always, always love having you on this podcast. Cannot wait to have you join us on stage. And I can't wait to get into the discussion. You can expect sharp analysis. You can expect vivid storytelling. And of course, you can expect the usual chaos that comes about when we're on stage chatting to each other.

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Welcome back. Well, I suppose the next bit of the story is the whole episode of the Maurice line. Now, this is named after the French Defence Minister, Andre Maurice, and it is an electrified fence which runs nearly 400 kilometres along Algeria's borders with Tunisia and Morocco, heavily mined, is lit by floodlets, monitored by radar, patrolled continuously. And its purpose is to prevent the FLN's exterior army, the forces training and re-equipping in Tunisia, from reinforcing the fighters inside Algeria. And it effectively works. It does stop them getting through. And combined with General Maurice Charles' relentless military sweeps through the interior, the Fredge army by 1960 have killed or captured the great majority of the FLN's fighters inside Algeria.

So while France might have been winning the military war, the FLN and their provisional government, which is known as the GPRA, the provisional government of the Algerian Republic, it's winning something arguably much more important. It's winning international recognition. It's winning hearts and minds, if you like. And it's winning the argument with the United Nations, because all these stories of torture are coming out. You've got the lack of faith in French political leaders.

And with de Gaulle back on the same. seen, you've got a new man and a new mind in charge. And he understands something that, you know, other soldiers haven't been able to bring themselves to accept. You might get a military victory. You might do that. But a military victory is not the same as a political victory, and it is not the same as settling this issue. This issue will never go back to what it was. You're never going to have Algerians content with being this sort of satellite vassal state of France. It's not going to happen anymore that genie's out of the bottle. So in 1959, De Gaulle makes a really big decision.

De Gaulle announces on television that Algerians would have the right of self-determination, the right to choose their own future. And I think his recognition is that, such as the polarization in the country, that you cannot have one-tenth of the country ruling over nine-tenth majority. He just thinks that that is not sustainable. It was fine while many Algerians were sitting on the French, as we saw in the last episode, and were not committed one way or the other. But the sheer brutality, the killings,

the extrajudicial murders and torture have turned all Algerians against France and nine-tenths of a country will not accept the government of the one-tenths. So he announced in self-determination and the reaction, of course, from the Pied-Dois and from the army officers who brought him to power was that De Gaulle had committed an act

of pure undiduted betrayal. Well, I mean, he's kind of cut their hearts out. You know, that's not what they heard him say from the balcony. They feel angry. That's not what they heard. So in January 1960, these furious pianos, they rise up. And you've got barricades going up in Algiers. You've got French gendarmes being shot.

And for a week, it looked as if the settlers might succeed in reversing de Gaulle's policy just by sheer force of violence. But you know what? This violence is short but sharp. It lasts about a week and then it collapses. And the generals tried to rebel too. In April 1961, four retired generals seized Algiers, a proper coup d'Otta. For 48 hours, it appears that France is about to experience its first successful military coup since the French Revolution.

De Gaulle appears on television in uniform, his voice controlled and contemptuous. And he addresses the young conscripts directly. This, of course, is a great gamble. He says, I forbid every Frenchman and above all, every single soldier to execute any of their orders. He carries a transistor radio into the camera shot. The young conscripts in Algeria had their transistor radios and they heard their president. The pooch collapses in just 48 hours and the four generals go underground. I think it's worth pausing before we get to this final bit.

the end game of the revolution to take stock of what this war is actually costing the French. Because the numbers, when you add them up, will explain why even those who wanted to win were beginning to understand why that winning was impossible. Yeah, I mean, sort of in the height of the conflict, you've got 500,000 French troops being deployed in Algeria to fight a guerrilla war. And that is expensive. You know, you don't send these people out with their equipment and transport and billeting and everything else. cheap. So I think the annual budget deficit, which was already severe after the war, it grows by 30% during this conflict with the Algerian uprising. So, you know, you've got, I think it's sort of

at one point reaches some 925 billion francs per year. That's how much it costs. So, you know, what does that do back at home in France? Well, it makes everything more expensive. You know, retail prices are going up. People, you know, grumbling about getting food in the markets that it cost so much. And we did already touch on the fact, Willie, that, you know, the political cost was even more dramatic, you know, six prime ministers swallowed up by this one issue. And you've got, you know, sort of no faith in the political classes from a country. This is what's really interesting. It's a country that has just thrown off the Nazis, that is just re-establishing what it is and what it is to be free French. Now what does it mean? So you've got almost a nervous

breakdown in identity. What are we? What are we? What are we? And how much is that? You know, all of that stuff completely combined into a crisis. And of course, no country likes to see its reputation tarnished. And for people to be aware suddenly that a military is committing atrocities, that the prisons are full of torture. We've seen a similar thing with Israel since the last couple of years. It's a massive reputational damage that a massive campaign of repression and torture

inflicks on a country. It gives a country a bad, bad name. You see this, for example, in the United States, which had initially supported France, switching to abstaining on UN votes about Algeria. France's closest allies grew increasingly embarrassed by the association. The FLN has understood from the beginning that the war would be won not in the mountains of Kabilia by guerrilla warfare at night, but in the court of international opinion. And every French trotty was for them a victory. One thing we should talk about, though, Anita, and this is the true story behind the Day of the Jackals. Tell us about the OAS. Okay, so the OAS is the Organization of the Secret Army, the OAS, which will spend the final months of French Algeria committing acts of violence that, you know what, made the FLN look like Boy Scouts, to be honest with you.

And Frederick Forsyth's 1971 novel, The Day of the Jackal, is based on a real event in which this organization, the OAS, so incensed by the betrayal of de Gaulle, contracts a professional killer to take him out. I had no idea that this was. Did you know this was based on a true story? I didn't. I did. I did know this. But you know what? But I didn't realize just how organized the OAS was, you know?

So they are organized. They planted bombs across Algeria and France, targeting anybody who was sympathetic to the FLN. And that included, by the way, French officials, you know, so their own countrymen, they're blowing them up. They are attempting to destroy anything that might survive independence. They have this horrible, horrible motto, the suitcase or the coffin. You know, we are going to do this or we're going to die trying. And in the final weeks before what is known as the Evian, Accords where, you know, this kind of negotiated peace and withdrawal is actually made real.

The OAS goes into overdrive. They are, they're scorching earth wherever they go. They're burning universities, libraries, infrastructure, and there are just indiscriminate killings of Muslim Algerians in the street at random. It is like a rampage of violence and terror. So peace is finally agreed in 1962, after New York. nearly two years of on and off negotiations, this piece is signed at Evian Leba, where Evian Water comes from, on 18th of March, 1962. France recognizes Algerian sovereignty,

including over the Sahara, which is something they wanted to hold on to, because oil had just been found there. After an eight-year campaign, tremendous violence, blood and coin spent in such, I mean, extraordinary and horrific amounts, a line is drawn. But it's not a line. is it? It's more of a dotted line. It's a very jagged line. So again, this is something that I didn't know until I did the reading for this series. And to me, this is the single most fascinating thing of the whole story. Because on a plane to Algiers in 1962, at the end of this episode of the story,

is a certain young paratrooper, a 34-year-old soldier named Jean-Marie Le Pen. He boards the plane at Algiers, and he brings with him the resentments of an entire generation that believes France have betrayed its soldiers and settlers. He also brings with him the political ambitions of a man who has already served in the National Assembly and knew precisely what to do with the moment that was gathering among the Piedneur, who are now flooding back to south, finding themselves in poor suburbs of France. Some of them finding their way to the south coast, which is the kind of landscape they'd left behind, in Algeria and the story of what Le Pen builds and what his daughter is continuing to do today

as we speak as the new election comes into view. So I mean, you're talking about Marine Le Pen, Marine Le Pen, who is standing and is gaining a lot of momentum. Now, this is the subject of our final two episodes in this series. And I have to say that when I was originally planning this series, I thought we were going to be ending it with the end of the Battle of Algeria's, but actually the most important and the most fascinating parts of the story lie ahead. A referendum, of course, follows on the 1st of July, 1962.

Algeria's vote for independence by nearly 6 million votes to 16,000. That's how polarized things have become by this stage. And on the 5th of July, 1962, the anniversary of the 1830 French invasion, Algeria is finally independent. The celebrations in Algiers were enormous, and uncontrollable. The eight-year war was over. Yeah, but, you know, despite the celebrations, you know, Algeria is going to suffer some more because the FLN immediately begins its own civil war,

if you like, about who's going to be in charge, who's going to be running this new state. And we'll explore that in more detail in the next episode. If you don't want to wait, if you want to hear that episode right now, just head to the link in the bio and join the Empire Club. you'll get early access, you'll get special bonus episodes. And if you want extra insights into this really fascinating period of history, join the Empire Club because you will get a very special bonus episode on the experience of Algerians who are living in the banos of Paris. So I really honestly urge you to listen to that.

It's a fantastic listen. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William Durember. A quick word for. our Empire listeners. For a limited time only, we are running a discount on the Empire Club. We totally are. It's our summer sale. It's live now. And from now until the end of August, all you need to do is head to Empirpoduk.com, Empirepoduk.com. Use the code summer 26. Summer 26. You get an extra 20% of annual membership.

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