ABSTRACT
Marxists had long regarded an urban proletariat as the true basis for insurrection, but the success of Mao Tse-tung's principles of rural revolutionary war in China proved immensely seductive after 1945. However, there had been some recourse to urban terror by the Irgun and LEHI against the British in Palestine between 1945 and 1947. The wider lessons of Cyprus and Aden and the British army's experience of urban insurgency were somewhat muted through the kind of collective amnesia about counter-insurgency lessons noted already with respect to other British campaigns. Certainly, Indo-China had been a formative experience for the army, and many younger officers absorbed all they could of the Maoist insurgency they had faced in order to formulate a new counter-insurgency doctrine to replace that of tache d'huile. That doctrine was guerre révolutionnaire and was to be applied to the next major insurgency, that of the Front de Liberation Nationale in Algeria between November 1954 andjuly 1962.
