Discuss the circumstances leading to the French exit from Algeria in 1962.

Answer:

France's withdrawal from Algeria in 1962 came only after a long and exceptionally bitter war of independence, for the depth of French settlement and the sheer ferocity of the conflict made Algeria by far the hardest and bloodiest of all France's decolonisations.

The Algerian war of independence

• The National Liberation Front (FLN) launched an armed struggle for independence in 1954.
• The presence of about a million European settlers, the pieds-noirs, made France determined to hold Algeria.
• The war was marked by guerrilla struggle, brutal repression, torture and terrorism on both sides.

The road to withdrawal

• The war's cost and brutality deeply divided France and brought down the Fourth Republic in 1958.
• De Gaulle, returning to power, gradually accepted that Algerian independence was inevitable.
• The Evian Accords of 1962 ended the war, and a referendum confirmed Algeria's independence.

Circumstances that forced the exit

• The Battle of Algiers (1957) won militarily but cost France dearly in world opinion.
• Revelations of torture divided French society and alienated intellectuals like Sartre.
• The OAS revolt of settlers and generals threatened France with civil war.
• International opinion and the UN increasingly favoured Algerian self-determination.
• Nearly a million pieds-noirs left Algeria after independence.

The French exit from Algeria in 1962 was thus the outcome of a costly war that France could neither win nor sustain. As historians note, de Gaulle's realistic acceptance of the inevitable, against fierce settler and military opposition, finally brought to an end one of the most traumatic episodes of European decolonisation.