preview

Algeria's National Identity

Decent Essays

After the Second World War, the great European Empires started to lose their colonial territories all over the world. England was losing its colonies in India and in parts of Asia while France had lost their South East Asian colony of Indochina. This defeat was terrible for France and to further exasperate the problem for the nation, the new independence of Indochina persuaded other French colonies such as Tunisia and Morocco to also revolt against their colonial oppressor and gain independence. However the biggest loss to France was its loss of their colony in Algeria. Algeria had been a French colony for the past 100 years and over a million French settlers, known as pied noirs, were currently living inside the colony (Lowe). In the eyes of France, the colony was not just another overseas territory but a part of mainland France even though the Arab people living there, who made up around 90% of the population, were not seen as equal to the white Frenchmen. This of course caused many ethnic and racial tensions to form in the region which would eventually …show more content…

They felt that it was part of the national identity and that without it France would not truly be itself. This strong identity of a French Algeria changed over the course of the war however, and eventually more and more French citizens were for the independence of Algeria and only a few number of the pied noirs and military elite held the idea that Algeria should remain part of France. It was this shift in the mentality of the French populous that influenced the French government, led by President Charles De Gaulle, to end the war and to grant Algeria its independence. To analyze this shift in French identity, the history of the colony needs to be understood along with the events of the war to be able to justify that the French people indeed has a change in their

Get Access