ABSTRACT
In the words of the extreme-right historian François Duprat, the Algerian War of 1954-62 appeared to offer absolution from the ‘long penance’ imposed at the Liberation on the ‘Opposition Nationale’. The war provided a powerful mobilising cause, ‘appealing not just to nationalist but to simple patriotic sentiment’: the defence of ‘a major part of the national territory’ and refusal to submit to ‘the liquidation of the French colonial empire’.1 In the decade following Vichy, patriotic sentiment had been unequivocally on the left, the preserve of the Resistance and the Republic; now, the extreme right was able to reclaim the defence of national interest following its forfeiture in the years 1940-44.2 In the upper ranks of the army and in the French settler community of almost a million in Algeria, right-wing radicals found a ready audience for their intransigent nationalism, while the widespread sympathy in France for Algérie Française, in the early part of the conflict at least, gave it a resonance within the very mainstream of French public opinion.
