The Will to Belong: The Myths of the Pieds-Noirs

Abstract

Abstract It was Pierre Mend às-France who, having only a few months earlier wound up the French army’s catastrophic Indo-Chinese campaign, first committed his country’s forces to the defence of Alg àrie francaise. This seemingly illogical reaction to the Algerian insurrection could, in fact, hardly be avoided, given the presence in the territory of some one million well-established settlers. Without the pieds-noirs there would have been no Algerian war: it was they who constituted ‘French Algeria’, and it was their entrenchment which made the 1954-62 conflict both so inevitable and so intractable.