ABSTRACT
The defence of its empire in Indo-China and North Africa proved a crushing burden for postwar France. The fall of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954 brought down another French government, but the new prime minister, Pierre MendèsFrance, was a politician in a different mould. He was, like Leon Blum, a Jew, tough, intellectual and at last ready to face realities – at least some of the realities. He fulfilled his undertaking to bring France out of the disastrous dirty war in IndoChina in July 1954 by agreeing to the peace terms of the Geneva Conference, and he negotiated Tunisian autonomy, but, ostensibly over weakness in dealing with North Africa, he was brought down in February 1955. The determination of the Gaullist right to maintain France’s colonial rule led to more falls of government until, in 1956, independence was conceded to both Tunisia and Morocco. But Algeria was different. Politicians of all parties – communists, socialists and conservatives – regarded Algeria, governed through the French Ministry of the Interior, as part of France. One million French settlers, the pieds noirs, from the wealthy to the hard-working fisherman or carpenter, who had lived in Algeria for a generation or more, saw themselves as the French of Algeria, not as French men and women living in a colony of France. All the French political leaders echoed Mendès-France when he declared, ‘France without Algeria would be no France.’
