Algerian War of Independence

The Algerian War of Independence was fought from 1 November 1954, when the National Liberation Front launched a coordinated string of attacks across French Algeria, to a ceasefire on 19 March 1962 under the Evian Accords, which French and Algerian voters overwhelmingly ratified in referendums that spring. It was a brutal and often clandestine conflict fought across French Algeria and, through terrorism and repression, in metropolitan France itself, marked on the French side by the systematic use of torture and internment and, on both sides, by attacks on civilians; a French settler and army faction, the Secret Army Organisation, waged a campaign of violence against the peace process itself in its final phase. Estimates of Algerian dead vary enormously by source, from the low hundreds of thousands to as many as one and a half million by later Algerian government reckonings, against a few tens of thousands of French military and settler dead. Algeria's independence, formally declared on 5 July 1962, ended 132 years of French colonial rule and became a defining reference point for anti-colonial movements across Africa and the wider world.