BY ROBERT MAISEY In https://www.jacobinmag.com/

Tabula Rasa

In France, public opinion was war-weary. Undergoing an era of dramatic domestic economic progress, the average Frenchman was increasingly disinterested in the colonial aggrandizement of the ruling class. The diehard pied noirs (the name by which colons were often referred to) had become an embarrassing and destabilizing force in domestic politics, even attempting a coup against President Charles de Gaulle, who was elected with a democratic mandate to bring the war to a close.

In 1962, despite overwhelming military superiority in the Saharan interior, the French position collapsed. The French were caught between the FLN’s relentless diplomatic assault, which had succeeded in creating continuous urban unrest in both Algeria and in France, and a well-equipped Algerian army under the command of the ruthless Colonel Houari Boumédiène, massing behind the border fences.

Newly released from a French prison, Ahmed Ben Bella rapidly established himself as a popular and energetic national leader supported by Boumédiène and the military establishment. The war had swept away the old French colonial state along with the traditional Algerian way of life, so Ben Bella and the FLN set to work translating their revolution into a new nation state.

Ben Bella fit perfectly into the mold of a Third World revolutionary statesman. Personally charismatic and ideologically nimble, Ben Bella committed Algeria to social revolution at home and an activist policy abroad. As the pied noirs voted with their feet and left the country in droves, their vast agricultural estates, factories, and businesses were occupied by the Arab population. Recognizing that worker control was de facto establishing itself across much of the agricultural and industrial sectors, Ben Bella kept the FLN at the crest of the revolutionary wave by formally recognizing and endorsing these popular takeovers.

The rapid transition to a fully socialized economy delighted the Soviets, who saw Algeria following in Cuban footsteps on a developmental path that bypassed capitalism altogether. It also caused great excitement among the intellectual left more broadly, who saw Ben Bella’s recognition and encouragement of popular control of industry as a fulfillment of socialism’s more democratic aspirations.

Algiers was also rapidly becoming a thriving diplomatic hub for all the revolutionary currents of the wider world. The close relationships the FLN had fostered with other liberation movements during their years of struggle were formalized, with groups like the Viet Cong, the African National Congress, and even the Black Panthers opening offices and embassies. The Algerians made no secret about aiding subversive forces across Africa, facilitating the exchange of everything from ideas to armaments. Algiers in the 1960s was a place where Arab nationalists, Angolan guerrillas, French Trotskyists, and Yugoslav diplomats passed in the streets, rubbed shoulders in cafés, and made covert assignations in hotel bars.

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