The new statute granted by the French government to the. on 20 September 1947, in establishing that the Algeria constituted “a group of departments with civil personality, with financial autonomy and with particular organization”, proclaimed the effective equality between all French citizens of., whatever their personal status, and created an Algerian Assembly of 120 members (60 elected by the first college and 60 by the second college). A good number of the provisions of the new statute (vote of Muslims, suppression of mixed municipalities, independence of the Muslim cult, teaching of Arabic, etc.) were not applied or were incomplete. While the French administration justified the gradual application with the internal Algerian situation, the Algerian nationalists.
After the elections of 17 June 1951 for the choice of the deputies of the three Algerian departments (Algiers, Oran and Constantine) in the National Assembly, the three currents of Algerian nationalism, headed by the Ulema, to the Movement for the triumph of democratic freedoms, headed by Messali Hadj, and the Democratic Union of the Algerian Manifesto, led by Ferhat Abbas, decided to form together the Algerian Front for the Defense and Respect of Freedom, with the program: 1) to cancel the “alleged legislative elections of 17 June which led to the appointment by the administration of men to whom the Algerian people have not entrusted any mandate and to whom it denies the right to speak in its name” ; 2) to obtain from France the respect of the fundamental rights to vote, to freedom of conscience, of the press, of opinion, of assembly; 3) to reject any form of oppression and any administrative interference in the affairs of the Muslim cult. Nationalist demonstrations followed one another from then on more and more frequent and lively, sometimes accompanied by terrorist acts. The French authorities responded with arrests and trials which, however, had no other effect than to cause new accidents, sabotage and riots. These took on greater gravity after,
The forced removal of Messali Hadj from active politics had vast repercussions within the MTLD (Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Freedoms), with the clash between extremists (Moulay Merbah) and “centralists” (Kiouane and Lahoued), which resulted in a split, al congress of Liège of 14-16 July 1954. But in general, in the whole Algerian nationalist environment, the intransigent tendency tended to assert itself, in favor of a profound rebellion against France. Ben Bellah, former non-commissioned officer of the Algerian shooters and former head of the special organization of the MTLD, took over the direction of this trend, who took refuge in Cairo. In the Egyptian capital he promoted, together with Tunisian and Moroccan nationalists, including Allas el-Fassi, the creation (20 August 1954) of a “Maghreb Liberation Committee”. For Algeria 1998, please check constructmaterials.com.
The armed rebellion began in the night between October 31 and November 1, 1954 with a series of attacks in the eastern area of the department of Constantine and in the Aurès region, extending immediately to Kabylia, the Philippeville maritime area, the Algerian and Oranese. The French authorities immediately responded with the arrest of the secretary general of the former Algerian People’s Party and other left-wing politicians, with the ban on publication of the Algerian Communist Party in the weekly Liberté, with the dissolution of the MTLD and with the start of real military operations.
During 1955, the struggle of the nationalists increasingly assumed the character of insurrection, spreading to other areas of the country, with particular intensity in areas where the nature of the terrain favored guerrilla operations, and terrorizing the large inhabited centers with coups de hand, attacks, acts of sabotage that increasingly disturbed the orderly development of political and economic life and kept French authorities and population in constant alarm. The government of Paris tried to dominate the situation both with the sending of military reinforcements (up to a contingent of 400,000 men) and with the proclamation of a state of emergency (April 2), which involved the closure of premises, the ban on gatherings, house searches and preventive press censorship, and by striving to attract moderate nationalists with promises of reforms and large allocations to the Algerian economy. The new governor general J. Soustelle (appointed on January 28) was very active executor of this two-way policy, who in June drew up a detailed plan including municipal reforms (rural centers, rural municipalities), the separation of worship from the state, the teaching of Arabic and an agrarian reform. The Soustelle plan, however, started from the assumption of the integration of the to. in France, and therefore was immediately rejected by the who in June drew up a detailed plan including municipal reforms (rural centers, rural municipalities), the separation of worship from the state, the teaching of Arabic and an agrarian reform. The Soustelle plan, however, started from the assumption of the integration of the to. in France, and therefore was immediately rejected by the who in June drew up a detailed plan including municipal reforms (rural centers, rural municipalities), the separation of worship from the state, the teaching of Arabic and an agrarian reform. The Soustelle plan, however, started from the assumption of the integration of the to. in France, and therefore was immediately rejected by the National Liberation Front (FLN) formed in February as the supreme governing body of the revolt. Even the Muslim representatives in the National Assembly, the Council of the Republic, the Assembly of the French Union and the Algerian Assembly, meeting on September 26 under the presidency of Ben Gellul, rejected the “now outdated” integration policy, declared that “the overwhelming majority of the population is now loyal to the Algerian national idea”, and they decided to found a “Permanent Committee to coordinate the action of the elected”. A few months later, in December, the disintegration of the moderate strata of the Muslim population, on which the French government counted, began to manifest itself with the resignation of the municipal councilors, representing the second college,
On the other hand, the French of. they opposed the Soustelle plan by proclaiming that reforms were to be carried out only after the restoration of order. It was this intransigence of the French colonists that neutralized the tendency of some government circles in Paris in the following years, as the struggle widened and the possibility for France to restore order by force, to face with the problem of Algerian nationalism is more unscrupulous. This, between 1956 and 1957, strengthened its fighting efficiency both in the military field, with the strengthening of the National Liberation Army (ALN) with about 90,000 men, and in the political field, with the formation of a Coordination Committee. of execution (CCE) and with the support of numerous moderate nationalists, including that of Ferhat Abbas, both internationally, with the active solidarity of the Arab countries and with a vast movement of world public opinion in his favor. On the contrary, the French government found itself operating in an increasingly difficult military, political and psychological situation. The socialist-led government (Guy Mollet), formed at the end of January 1956, and the resident general R. Lacoste became entangled in a series of contradictory initiatives that accentuated divisions within the country and put French foreign policy in difficulty. In particular, the arrest of FLN leaders, including Ben Bella and Mohamed Khidder, who were on their way to a conference in Tunis in the wake of the Sultan of Morocco, in October 1956, it provoked the most violent reactions from the Arab states. With Tunisia then, on 11 January and 8 February 1958, two serious accidents occurred due to the bombing by French planes of the Tunisian town of Sakhiet Sidi Youseff where Algerian insurgents had taken refuge.
The launch of a new plan – the framework law of February 5, 1958 – which recognized the Algerian personality and established the autonomy of its various territories, did not succeed, like the previous ones, in unblocking the situation. It seemed that this could only be unlocked after the “revolt” of May 13 by the French of. caused the return to power of gen. Ch. De Gaulle in France. For more than a year, however, De Gaulle did not substantially depart from the usual program of integration of the French nationalists. The turning point in the problem finally came on September 16, 1959 with a declaration by De Gaulle which proposed its solution on the basis of the principle of self-determination. The reactions of the Algerian nationalists, who in the meantime had created an Algerian government in exile (September 19, 1958), were generally favorable, and the first unofficial contacts between Paris and the government of Ferhat Abbas began.
While they refused to accept the principle of unconditional surrender on September 28, De Gaulle secured another point in his favor in early February 1960 with the end of the second “revolt” in Algiers. This show of strength allowed Melun (25-29 June 1960) to start preliminary approaches between the emissaries of the Algerian provisional government and the French government, which failed due to the will of the French negotiators to maintain negotiations on a strictly military (and not political) in view of the termination of operations; then followed a new stiffening on both sides, while the armed struggle continued with no holds barred.
