I'm not sure exactly what to say about it, since I feel like... maybe it helps me to have a topic (like Algerian Rev) as "point A" and then another thing that's "point B" and then I figure out how to get from point A to point B but, here goes...

## Before the rev

Algeria was officially only a French colony from 1830 to 1848, because then the 1848 revolution happened and it was pretty radical so they gave all Algerians the same rights (citizenship, voting, etc.) as metropole French people. Meaning, Algeria was literally an official *département* of France just like Paris was[^departement] So like, in that sense it was p different from all the other colonial powers: people in India never had British citizenship, for example.

This "specialness" was kind of a big part of why the revolution was so bloody, though: on the one hand, in theory, it could have been a good experiment in cross-cultural exchange and whatnot, if France had truly embraced Algerians as equals in practice (like, in their day-to-day norms) to the extent that they made Algerians equal to them legally... To put it another way, the British made it *obvious* both legally and culturally that British ppl were "above" people in India, but in France it was more subtle, so that the revolutionary grievances were about the *attitude* that French ppl had towards Algerian ppl, not about the legal structure as such.

So, that's why it makes sense that Fanon, as the "theorist of the revolution", gave this very psychological account of French colonialism---if you read the Indian "equivalents" of Fanon, for example, they weren't psychiatrists and their anticolonial theories weren't really about the *psyché* of the colonized so much as... like concrete grievances about laws and taxes and economics, etc...

The part of all that which made it really bad, though, was also that unlike India, Algeria was France's main **settler colony**: by the time of the revolution there were about 1 million French settlers in Algeria, who were called *pieds noirs*[^pieds]. This is where the Palestine metaphor starts to enter in obviously, bc yeah settler colonialism.

And yet, it's also kind of weird and doesn't exactly fit as well as (say) Liberia or South Africa. Because, it's not like the *pieds noirs* had a theory of WE MUST TAKE ALL THE LAND AND VIOLENTLY PUSH THE ALGERIANS OFF OF IT AND SETTLE IT BC GOD AND THE BIBLE SAID SO... it was p much way way less brutal: I don't want to say *most*, but definitely *many* of the *pieds noirs* literally just saw it like, oh, this is just another part of France I can move to, for jobs and whatever other shit ppl move to different parts of a country for.

It's frustrating bc I can't exactly think of a metaphor with the US: Hawai'i and Alaska are close obviously but... not exactly, since like there were way more historical-cultural ties btwn France and Northern Africa (bc of Roman Empire) than there were between continental US and Hawai'i or Alaska. I know it sounds like I'm apologizing or excusing French colonialism or smth here but, really I'm just trying to point out why it's not the best metaphor for Palestine imo, since I think the later details can make it seem more similar than it actually is, if that makes sense?

Concretely, what really ended up happening was that the *pieds noirs* never settled much of the land, and also never really mixed with the native Algerian population much, so that by the 1900s the equilibrium was basically that *pieds noirs* lived in these little exclusive gated-off communities/neighborhoods in Algiers (the capital), while most of the native Algerians just went on with their lives as rural peasants in the vast majority of the rest of the country, though the "meeting" between them was in like the more slum-like parts of Algiers where the urban Algerian workers lived, including the "Casbah of Algiers" which is where the revolution started (hence the Clash song :O)

## The rev

Ok enough about that, tldr after WWII the sort of... "mythology" of French superiority wore off real quick since the world had just seen them totally prostrate themselves to the Nazis, surrenduring and collaborating with them and etc.[^nazis][^mandela] So there was that and then in 1952 there was a coup in Egypt where members of the pan-Arab movement (the main guy being Gamal Abdel Nasser) overthrew the British puppet king and like started agitating all over Africa+Middle East tryna get other Arab countries to do the same.

And then it's kinda weird bc, France pretty much *immediately* gave up Morocco and Tunisia, the two other French *départements* bordering Algeria, in 1956 (they weren't settler colonies, though, so that made it much easier for France to give them up). But with Algeria they were like, no, NO, Algeria is an "integral part" of France (literally the 1848 Constitution says *"L'Algérie fait partie intégrante de la France"* or something specifically along those lines), hence the *Front de Libération Nationale (**FLN**)* launched a guerrilla war in 1956 when they realized France wasn't gonna give up Algeria the way they gave up Morocco and Tunisia.

And so... yeah they fought like a brutal 7-year guerrilla war, where over 1 million Algerians died and I think ~25k French died. It was precursor to the US in Vietnam, military-strategy-wise, so tons of rounding Algerians up in camps, mass graves, etc. But since French people are slightly better at overthrowing their governments when they do fucked up shit, the brutality of the French army among a bunch of other things led them to overthrow the government to end the war, and the Communists were poised to take power but then Charles De Gaulle an old WWII anti-Nazi war hero came and said "nono, no Communism, plz, I'll come and be president and end the Algeria stuff rn and make everything better, as long as u don't let the Communists take over", so then he did and no Communism in France.

But one of the things that made it so awful was that, even when De Gaulle pulled them out of France (and had to like, found an entirely new republic, the French Fifth Republic, with a new constitution to basically ensure No Communism), a small but super-heavily-armed and super-well-trained French army commando groups in Algeria rebelled against De Gaulle and declared their own independence, the OAS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisation_arm%C3%A9e_secr%C3%A8te so then the FLN had to fight against them to fully end the war. And, this "second round" of the revolution basically meant that there was not gonna be any leniency for the *pieds noirs*, so like the minute the FLN won that "round" these ~1 million ppl fled en masse back into France.

## Post rev

So then, things were lookin real good for the Wretched of the Earth at the beginning, and Algeria became this "capital of Third World liberation" for a few years, but then the original post-rev leader Ahmed Ben Bella was overthrown in 1965 and a dude named Houari Boumédiène came to power, who was less radical and like the revolutionary energy slowly fizzled out and it basically became this oppressive one-party state. Which was really really bad because, unlike other one-party states which were COMMUNIST so that the one party at least did a bunch of good stuff for poor people, the Algerian one-party state was just like purely Nationalist which really means "we have absolutely no ideology beyond overthrowing the colonial power, so we're gonna just run this country into the ground for the next 30 years". And... that's p much what they did lol. They were still better than like Morocco next door which was a brutal monarchy and basically did an Israel to the Western Sahara:


Whereas yeah Algeria were def the good guys here, they supported the Polisario https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polisario_Front who were fighting back against the Moroccan shitheads who were ethnically cleansing them, so I give them full credit for that, but yeah besides that kinda not much good to say tbh :/

## 90s

The real real bad shit started to happen in... ok this timeline is kinda hard to construct and goes all over the map, but basically a ton of the Mujahideen fighters that the CIA trained in the late 70s and throughout the 80s, when they finally drove the Soviet troops out of Afghanistan in 1988, they were like ok what do we do now. And there was a big underground political-Islamic movement in Algeria that was suuper super repressed bc Algeria from the revolution onwards was avowedly secular and socialist and the FLN used violence to prevent religion from ever becoming a force that could challenge them (Saddam Hussein / Bashar al-Assad style). But the Mujahideen were like, hey ok let's go over there and get rid of these other godless heathens (the FLN) now that we've successfully pushed the OG godless heathens (the USSR) out of Afghanistan.

So yeah in 1988 they started streaming into Algeria from Afghanistan and formed an org called the **FIS** (*Front Islamique du Salut*/Islamic Salvation Front). And for 4 years from 1988-1992 the FLN brutally repressed them and their organizing and community service through mosques and whatnot, which just made the whole population like them more and more (like how Palestinians like Hamas for their community service and for resisting instead of just... doing nothing).

So in 1992 the Mujahideen-infused group (FIS) actually won the general elections (once again, just like Hamas), but unlike in the Hamas case where they took power, in Algeria the FLN was like FUCK NO and dissolved the democracy and put the whole country under martial law and it descended into horrific civil war again from 1992 until 2002. And the whole time the US was backing the FLN, but yeah it ended in 2002 bc once 9/11 happened the US just like poured as many bombs as possible into the FLN's arsenal (Algeria in the 90s, to the US, was the "practice run" for the full-on War on Terror of the 2000s), and so the Mujahideen groups were like ok fuck this we're gonna go to Iraq and Syria cya, and so the FLN won after 200,000 more Algerians died in the 1992-2002 civil war. And they went back to ruling the country as just a shitty repressive military dictatorship, which they do to this day. Sad stuff tbh.

[^departement]: Paris itself is kind of a confusing example since it's a *département* and also a city, so maybe an easier example is: I lived in a suburb of Paris called Fontenay-aux-Roses, which is in the Hauts-de-Seine *département*, so yeah *département* $\neq$ city...

[^pieds]: It turns out that like, it's unclear why this word caught on... it literally means "black feet", but there are a bunch of totally different theories about why they would be called "black feet" (some having to do with dirtiness, right, but others that are the opposite, like that Algerians were barefoot but French were "civilized" and thus wore black boots so they wouldn't get their feet dirty... so, the opposite of the first theory)

[^nazis]: I think it's pretty interesting, tbh, that although metropole France gave up and joined the Nazis, big parts of the French empire in Africa continued fighting the Nazis and like hosted the minority of the French (i.e., the Communists) who continued to resist the Nazis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_French_Africa

[^mandela]: Also I stole that phrase "mythology of white superiority wore off" from Nelson Mandela, bc that's how he described his reaction to Cuba bodying the South African army in Angola/Namibia :O