Algeria, he declared, is ‘France’. His Interior Minister, François Mitterrand, said the same: ‘Algeria is France and the only negotiation is war.’ War it was to be. What made the case of Algeria so complicated was that administratively it was not a colony but part of France, as it had been ever since the French arrived there in 1830. In reality, however, the population of nine million Muslims did not enjoy equal rights with other French citizens. All attempts to introduce democratic reforms were subverted by the European population, popularly known as pieds noirs. The pieds noirs formed a
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