The exiled Ben Bella, along with Belkacem Krim, became one of the nine founder leaders of a revolutionary action committee. In November 1954 this adopted the nom de guerre of FLN with an armed wing called the ALN. Just as France’s defeat in 1940 had contributed to the first stirrings of Muslim Algerian nationalism, so the loss of fifteen thousand French (and Muslim Algerian) troops at Dien Bien Phu in Indo-China directly influenced the decision in favour of armed revolt, especially since the victorious Viet Minh were not slow to ask Muslim Arab captives why on earth they were fighting fellow victims of French colonialism halfway around the world.27
The FLN distributed its limited and poorly armed forces in five Wilayas or major military districts which were subdivided in turn down to individual cells. A separate organisation would be built up in Algiers. Consciously restricting themselves to targeting the police, military and communications infrastructure, for the experience of Sétif made an anti-European pogrom inadvisable, the FLN commenced its revolt on All Saints Day, 1 November 1954, with a series of low-level attacks on barracks and police stations, as well as the destruction of telegraph poles, or cork and tobacco stores. An attack on oil tankers failed when the bomb did not explode. Despite the desire to avoid civilian casualties, two young liberal French teachers were dragged off a bus, shot and left to die on the road, an act which the FLN did not disavow. The FLN’s opening ‘Toussaint’ campaign seemed patchy and ineffectual, with the fighting in the remote countryside making little or no impression on the urban European civilian minority who continued their sun-filled life by the sea.
Heavy-handed deployment of police or soldiers against entire civilian populations has invariably been one of the best recruiting mechanisms for terrorist organisations. No one appreciates armed men kicking the door down, manhandling women and rifling through possessions, let alone blowing up one’s home. That the FLN survived its first dismal winter was due to indiscriminate French responses, including the destruction of entire villages as reprisal for nearby attacks; this propelled yet more resentful Algerians into the movement’s ranks. A guerrilla war acquired terrorist characteristics as some FLN commanders decided to get the Europeans’ attention, for hitherto the fighting had seemed abstract and remote from them.
The commander of Wilaya 2, Youssef Zighout, consciously decided to treat all Europeans, regardless of age or gender, as legitimate targets. Terrorism would provoke intensified and indiscriminate repression which would boost FLN support, for much of the FLN’s efforts were directed to mobilising a nationalist movement. Terror would psychologically force Arabs and Europeans into mutually antagonistic camps. There was no room either for ambiguous identities or dual loyalties, as can be seen from the fact that in its first two-and-a-half years of existence, the FLN killed six times as many Muslims as it did Europeans. Anyone who served the French administration or worked for Europeans became a target, as did those who consumed alcohol or tobacco. The former had their lips cut off, the latter their noses, by way of warning; repeat offences resulted in the ‘Kabyle smile’, the dark term for having their throat cut, a deliberate indignity otherwise inflicted upon sheep.
Anti-European terrorism was first demonstrated in several coastal towns in the Constantois in August 1955. On the 20th of that month the town of Philippeville was attacked by a large FLN force that had infiltrated the city, emerging to throw grenades into cafés patronised by colons and to drag Europeans out of their cars in order to hack and slash them to death with knives. The French military intelligence officer Paul Aussaresses, a former wartime secret agent, who had accurately read the signs that this attack was imminent, joined four hundred French troops who emerged to engage the FLN in a ferocious gun battle. When the FLN attackers retreated, they left 130 of their own dead and over a hundred wounded.28
Elsewhere, the FLN struck with truly shocking effect. At a pyrites mining settlement located in a Philippeville suburb called El-Halia, groups of FLN-supporting miners burst into the homes of European workers where they and their families were settling down to lunch out of the intense midday sun. Men, women and children had their throats cut, to the encouraging sounds of ululating Arab women. Miners who had not made it home were found stabbed in their cars. Children kicked in the head of an old woman already dying in the street. The ages of the victims ranged from five days to seventy-two years. This was not some frenzied occurrence but the result of deliberate planning, with phone communications cut and the local policeman abducted before he could fire a flare to alert nearby troops. The arrival of French paratroopers led to an extended bloodbath. After failing to restore order with warning shots, they opened fire on every Arab, mowing down batches of prisoners afterwards. There were so many corpses, and the ground was so solid, that bulldozers were used to bury them. In a further indication that the government was losing control not only of its own soldiers, but of the French colonial population, armed pieds noirs tracked down any Muslims who survived the paratroopers’ lethal ire. Anywhere between twelve hundred and twelve thousand Arabs perished, the obvious disparity representing French government and FLN statistics. Perhaps more importantly what had been too lightly described as the drôle de rebellion would now be fought across what the reforming governor-general Jacques Soustelle called a ravine of spilled blood.
During this period, the FLN surreptitiously elaborated a network of institutions, courts, taxes, pensions and welfare provision, to refocus the loyalties of the Arab and Berber population away from the colonial power, at the same time killing those foolhardy enough to continue to work for the French administration in any capacity. People with complex identities, like the Kabyle educator Mouloud Feraoun who kept a remarkable journal of these years until he was murdered by settler terrorists in 1962, felt themselves torn apart by this insistence upon people conforming to crude political labels. Never blind to the atrocities committed by the French, Feraoun also acknowledged and condemned the tyrannical pathologies beneath the rhetoric of liberation used by the FLN:
Has the time for unbridled furor arrived? Can people who kill innocents in cold blood be called liberators? If so, have they considered for a moment that their ‘violence’ will engender more ‘violence’, will legitimize it, and will hasten its terrible manifestation? They know that the people are unarmed, bunched together in their villages, immensely vulnerable. Are they knowingly prepared for the massacre of ‘their brothers’? Even by admitting that they are bloodthirsty brutes – which in any case does not excuse them but, on the contrary, goes against them, against us, against the ideal that they claim to defend -they have to consider sparing us so as not to provoke repression. Unless liberation means something different to them than it does for us. We thought that they wanted to liberate the country along with its inhabitants. But maybe they feel that this generation of cowards that is proliferating in Algeria must first disappear, and that a truly free Algeria must be repopulated with new men who have not known the yoke of the secular invader. One can logically defend this point of view. Too logically, unfortunately. And gradually, from suspicions to compromises and from compromises to betrayals, we will all be declared guilty and summarily executed in the end.29
At its clandestine Soummam Valley Congress in the autumn of 1956, the FLN established the primacy of the political over the military, and of the internal leadership over those exiled abroad. This was achieved by preventing the external leaders from attending the Congress by holding them in Tripoli until it was over. The French themselves delayed this politics of the underhand developing into murderous internecine rifts. For in October a plane carrying Ben Bella and four colleagues from Rabat to Tunis was forced down at Oran, and the external leaders landed in a French prison. This act of air piracy hugely antagonised the newly independent governments of Morocco and Tunisia, which became safe havens for FLN regular forces. The FLN skilfully exploited international opportunities by forcing their grievances into the limelight of the United Nations. This undermined French efforts to treat Algeria as a domestic issue involving FLN ‘criminals’ leading astray otherwise placid Muslims, through terror or such devices as giving them hashish, a claim that sat ill with the FLN’s grim vestiges of Islamic puritanism.
The French increased their forces in Algeria from eighty thousand in 1954 to nearly five hundred thousand two years later, the level of commitment