John Boonstra, review of Terrence G. Peterson. Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2024. 240 PP. Cloth $46.95. ISBN: 9781501776960.
In Rachid Bouchareb’s 2006 film, Indigènes [Days of Glory], an Algerian soldier named Larbi, fighting alongside his countrymen to liberate France during the Second World War, asks his older brother Yassir about their homeland’s history. When French soldiers massacred their entire family when he was little, he asks, “What did they call it?” “They called it,” Yassir responds in Algerian Arabic, pausing before switching to French, “pacification.”[1]
I thought of this scene as I read Terrence G. Peterson’s engaging and provocative study of the strategy adopted by the French military a mere decade after this fictionalized scene to suppress the armed anti-colonial movement in Algeria. Peterson’s argument in Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency is boldly counter-intuitive: the violence unleashed in response to the insurgency of the Algerian National Liberation Front [Front de Libération National, or FLN] in November 1954—which quickly expanded into a full-fledged revolution—was not merely a reactionary spasm from a threatened colonial authority, but rather itself a revolutionary act. In addition to a decolonial revolution, a diplomatic revolution, a Third-Worldist revolution, a feminist revolution, a geopolitical revolution, a racial and religious revolution, and even a viticultural revolution, then, the war was also a military revolution.[2] This revolution took shape, Peterson recounts, through a set of programs known, tellingly, as “Pacification.” Like the campaigns over the preceding century that slaughtered families such as Larbi’s and drove villagers to be “smoked out” in caves, the term concealed a paradox of colonial war: the more that France claimed to “pacify” Algeria, the more it turned to extraordinary means of violence to enforce its ever-unattainable control. Only when mechanisms of terror and torture were accompanied by supposedly “peaceful” methods, ironically, did France ultimately relinquish its hold over Algeria.
In charting the rise and fall (and rise) of “Pacification” during (and after) the war, Peterson divides his book into chronological chapters, bookended by an introduction and conclusion in which he clearly sets out the aims and stakes of his project. Each body chapter is named for a core principle from Maurice Challe’s 1959 Instruction for Pacification in Algeria, a key text both for Peterson’s study and for the doctrine of “revolutionary war.” Together, the chapters demonstrate how “Pacification” evolved from a relatively marginal and inchoate set of ideas on how to reshape French colonial Algeria into a military strategy implemented to ensure, with increasingly desperation, that Algeria remain French and remain colonial. Across the book, Peterson surveys a range of French actors, agencies, and initiatives that blurred the lines between civilian and military responsibilities in their efforts to “integrate,” “protect,” “organize,” “engage,” and “guide” the Algerian population not to independence, but toward an acceptance—if not an embrace—of continued French presence.
Indigènes is not necessarily the first film that comes to mind after reading Peterson’s evocative account of the doomed—and often self-defeating—French military efforts to quash the FLN while simultaneously diffusing its hold on the Algerian population. As the author notes in the book’s conclusion, Gillo Pontecorvo’s celebrated neo-realist classic, The Battle of Algiers, likewise details the protracted French military struggle to defeat an enemy that seemed everywhere at once, or even to distinguish FLN militants from civilians. Whereas the film underscores the stubborn violence and rampant torture with which the French army confronted FLN’s urban guerilla tactics during the battle for the capital (1956-57), Revolutionary Warfare is interested in the broader array of techniques deployed by France’s military apparatus, across the wider geography and longer chronology of the war (1954-62). These techniques, which fell under the mantle of what Peterson refers to alternately as “revolutionary war theory,” “armed colonial reform,” and, the military’s own term, “Pacification,” incorporated social and economic services, cultural programs, psychological propaganda, and community and family initiatives. All of these strategies were intended to transform colonial society from the bottom-up and to reorient the French military’s understanding of the conflict. The goal of this approach, which Peterson argues inaugurated novel and influential ways of waging twentieth- (and twenty-first) century warfare, was to win the “hearts and minds” of the indigenous population without losing authority over the Algerian départements.
The gambit that France could have its colony and defeat it, too, was ultimately unsuccessful. The social and psychological operations that Peterson tracks never replaced—and indeed were only ever intended to complement—the continued military campaign to root out FLN militants, often with astounding violence and mass displacement. What is most interesting, perhaps, is not that Algerians remained unconvinced of the French commitment to their welfare, but rather that French officials genuinely believed that they could win Algerians’ loyalty while also bombarding, torturing, and “disappearing” them into submission. This misplaced conviction coexisted with a stubborn reliance on overwhelming violence, Peterson rightly observes, due to the French military’s spectacular misreading of Algerians’ needs and fundamental misunderstanding of the diversity of Algerian societies and cultures. The central contradiction of this history is that “Pacification” was itself a form of colonial violence, one that both predated the Revolution—as Yassir’s remark in Indigènes attests, and as the work of Jennifer Sessions, Benjamin Brower, Assia Djebar, and others confirms—and was inherently conservative in its aims.[3] Even at the apogee of “Pacification,” after all, the Algerian War was referred to in French military and political circles not as a war, let alone as a revolution, but as “operations to maintain order.”[4] According to this logic, the conflict euphemistically referred to as “the events” in Algeria was marked by a lack or a loss of control, which the French sought to reimpose, whether by force of conviction or by force of arms, or, ideally, both. French intervention was thus meant to preserve a colonial status quo—even as it sought to revolutionize the means of doing so.
Whether this form of warfare—as a contest between liberating Algeria and keeping it “French”—qualified as revolutionary or reactionary may depend on the perspective of its combatants (if not also of its historians). It may also depend on one’s chronological perspective. Peterson’s genealogy of counter-insurgency practices in the Algerian War does not discount their ideological predecessors—notably the politically outmoded but still influential notion of a racialized “civilizing mission”—but is especially interested in their immediate effects and future legacies. Political strictures before and during the war, mutatis mutandis, effectively excluded Algerian “natives” from religious and racialized categories of French citizenship as well as European civilization. “Pacification,” Peterson’s analysis stresses, was both an attempt to reconceptualize the unequal foundations of colonial rule and a prescient adaptation to an era of asymmetrical warfare. By harnessing the impulse toward modernization and “development” after the Second World War, Peterson proposes, French military strategists aimed to reinvent and rehabilitate colonial Algerian society. Their investments ensured neither a political nor a military victory, but their methods arguably shaped the trajectory of counter-insurgency operations across the globe and into the next century, from the post-colonial conflicts of the Cold War to the neo-imperial “war on terror.”
French officials were slow to learn that increasing investment in social services did not lessen the military’s reliance on overt violence over the course of the war. Algerians also appeared consistently intractable in political matters, understandably more interested in aid packages and soccer matches than in colonial propaganda, to speak nothing of hostage-taking and interrogations. A community in the bled [countryside] would be unlikely to support French overtures, for instance, when the very brothers, husbands, and sons of women targeted for sewing classes, leaflet campaigns, and indoctrination sessions were being hunted down, tortured, and murdered. Amidst this staggering violence, a campaign urged European settlers, obtusely, to “Make A Muslim Friend.”[5] At its most patently delusional, “Pacification” sought to implant its vision of a peaceable—and peaceably French—Algeria onto its inhabitants, by force if and as necessary. But “[e]ven at its most developed,” Peterson writes, “the army’s Pacification apparatus remained a far cry from the fantasy of total control” in which its adherents believed.[6] A colonial revolution, like the fiction of a “French Algeria,” was only ever a European phantasm, projected onto the Algerian population with dire seriousness and deadly consequences.
Beyond such glaring contradictions, though, Peterson emphasizes that “Pacification” programs fundamentally misunderstood both Algerian society and their own disciplinary function. French military ethnologists, for instance, assumed that Algerian families were subject to uniquely patriarchal gender norms, with which they then sought to forcibly reconstruct “traditional” societies and households. Operating with flawed premises, the appeal of military social services could be no more than transient and superficial. French attempts to appease a restive population through medical, hygienic, alimentary, and social assistance were not simply ancillary to the army’s pursuit of the FLN. Rather, the coercive politics of aid deployed technologies of surveillance, knowledge, and control to map Algerian populations onto grids of military authority. If Algerian peasants demonstrated a “deep and abiding reticence to engage in the political projects of the colonial state,” this was likely due less to the contents of the projects themselves than to their compulsory nature, embedded in and enacting an epistemic form of colonial violence.[7] The “lofty promises” of French propaganda, as Peterson puts it, “reflected a fantasy vision of renewed empire rather than anything Algerians had demanded.”[8] French administrators and Algerian subjects, in other words, inhabited two different worlds of colonialism, one eminently defensible and the other inherently illegitimate.
Straddling these two worlds, the concept of “Pacification” was an incarnation of postwar Orwellian doublespeak. Its integral violence, literal as well as symbolic, was bound up in French colonial Algeria from the origins to the unraveling of an imperial fantasy. The novelty of “revolutionary warfare,” as Peterson’s work compellingly demonstrates, was its proposition to revolutionize colonialism itself. That it offered too little, too late to do so may seem obvious, but misses the point. The demise of “Pacification” by the war’s denouement was both slow and swift; its evident successes—at least in the eyes of its practitioners—appeared empty by 1960, when Algerian self-determination seemed suddenly inexorable. A number of its programs were shunted into a new, so-called “Human Problems” section of the army, whose title aptly articulated both the objects and the obstacles of revolutionary warfare: humans seen as problems to be solved, by and for a ruling class. As much as “armed social work” failed to retain—or remake—Algeria as French, Peterson suggests, its example set a model for future counter-insurgency campaigns. From Vietnam to Iraq, these would be plagued by the same phantasmatic assumptions of (neo)colonial hubris. Underlying the notion of “Pacification” was essentially a twinned fantasy: that Algeria was French, and that revolutionary aims could be suppressed by revolutionary means. That the first proved hollow has not prevented subsequent regimes around the world from adopting the methods of the second, to their own and to many humans’ detriment.
[1] Rachid Bouchareb, dir. Indigènes [Days of Glory]. 2006; New York: Weinstein Company Home Entertainment, 2007. Scene from 41:48-42:12.
[2] Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Jeffrey James Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization and the Third World Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Natalya Vince, Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, Memory and Gender in Algeria, 1954-2012 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); Megan Brown, The Seventh Member-State: Algeria, France, and the European Community (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022); Naomi Davidson, Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); Muriam Haleh Davis, Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria; Owen White, The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021).
[3] Jennifer Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the conquest of Algeria (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Benjamin Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844-1902 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, trans. Dorothy Blair, (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993); and Djebar, Children of the New World: A Novel of the Algerian War, trans. Marjolijn de Jager (New York: Feminist Press, 2005).
[4] Natalya Vince, The Algerian War, The Algerian Revolution, (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
[5] Peterson, Revolutionary Warfare, 113.
[6] Peterson, Revolutionary Warfare, 140.
[7] Peterson, Revolutionary Warfare, 86.
[8] Peterson, Revolutionary Warfare, 80.
John Boonstra is Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. A historian of gender and empire in the modern Mediterranean, his work focuses on French colonial interventions in the Middle East and North Africa before, during, and after the First World War. He has published articles in German History, the Journal of World History, and French Politics, Culture, and Society (forthcoming), and is currently at work on two projects: one on French colonial soldiers stationed in Europe, and the other on ideas of the “Near East” in the French imperial imagination.