Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

With the loss of Indo-China, French attention turned to North Africa. In one respect this was almost literally true—the Algerian insurrection began on November 1st 1954, just fourteen weeks after the signing of the Geneva accords. But North Africa had been at the center of Parisian concerns long since. Ever since the French first arrived in present-day Algeria in 1830, the colony there had been part of a larger French ambition, dating back further still, to dominate Saharan Africa from the Atlantic to Suez. Thwarted in the east by the British, the French had settled instead for primacy in the western Mediterranean and across the Sahara into west-central Africa. Outside of the far older settlement in Quebec, and some islands of the Caribbean, Northern Africa (Algeria in particular) was the only French colony in which Europeans had established themselves permanently in large numbers. But many