In short
The start and escalation of the Algerian War of Independence, beginning with the FLN’s coordinated attacks on 1 Nov 1954 (Toussaint Rouge), followed by the Philippeville massacre (Aug 1955), the FLN’s reorganization at the 1956 Soummam conference, and the shift to urban warfare culminating in the Battle of Algiers (bombings in Algiers’ European areas and the Casbah).
Guest backgrounds
No podcast guests appear in the transcript; only hosts Anita Arnhem and William Durimple, plus references to historians and public figures (e.g., Benjamin Stora, Alastair Horne).
Key claims
French authorities initially downplayed the violence as a “joke revolution”; Mitterrand’s “Algeria is France” stance leads to a hardline approach; FLN brutality and French reprisals polarize Algerians, ending neutrality; Ramdani Abane restructures the FLN with civilian supremacy and rank limits; Saadi Yacef’s urban strategy uses the Casbah and female bombers.
Notable examples
Guy and Pauline Monarot killed on All Saints Night; failed gasworks plot in Algiers; Philippeville/El Halia killings and stadium executions; FLN leadership meeting in the Kabylia mountains; plane diversion/arrests of Ben Bolla and others; June 1956 guillotine reprisals and the Casbah bomb; Sept 1956 milk bar bombing by Zora Drif; Jamila Bouhired’s capture and torture; January 1957 police powers to General Jacques Massu.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOThe Onset of the Algerian Revolution
0:29 to 1:54
Discussion of the initial attacks that sparked the Algerian War of Independence.
“This is how the Algerian War of Independence began.”
The Reality of Revolutionary Actions
1:54 to 4:12
Exploration of the actual events and mythology surrounding the attacks of November 1954.
“Bombs, ambushes, raids on armories and police posts coordinated at midnight across six military zones by the newly founded Front de Liberation Nationale, or FLN, as we'll call it for the rest of the podcast.”
French Reactions to the Insurgency
4:12 to 7:58
Analysis of how the French government and military responded to the uprising.
“New recruits were sometimes required to assassinate a designated target, a young gendarme standing on a corner, for example, or a pro-French official.”
The Algerian Civilian Experience
7:58 to 10:05
Description of the dire situation faced by Algerian civilians amid the warfare.
“while sounding at this point like a declaration of strength, is the kind of red thread that will unravel the whole of the French Republic in due course.”
The Philippeville Massacre
10:05 to 12:55
Detailed account of the Philippeville Massacre and its impact on the conflict.
“that it's not going to touch them and they can just avoid having to make a decision.”
French Reprisals and Escalation
12:55 to 14:00
Examination of the brutal French reprisals following the massacre and their consequences.
“I think 102 Europeans die across the region.”
Collective Punishment and Its Impact
14:00 to 16:40
Learn about the devastating effects of collective punishment in Algeria's war.
“And these may be the people who are involved in those attacks or anybody, you know.”
The FLN's Turning Point
16:40 to 17:05
Explore how the FLN transitions from fractured insurgency to a unified rebellion.
“We're going to look at how a ruthless political mastermind takes control of the FLN and restructures what has gone before into a rebellion, a all out, full blown rebellion right under the noses of the French military.”
Leadership and Strategy Shift in the FLN
17:05 to 19:11
Discover the audacious strategies of FLN leaders amidst a chaotic backdrop.
“Well, in the summer of 1956, the FLN leadership does something of quite extraordinary audacity.”
Restructuring the FLN
19:11 to 22:05
Learn how Ramdani Abani organized the FLN into a more effective military force.
“He's a really ordinary background to him.”
Show all 19 chapters
Urban Warfare: The Shift to Cities
22:05 to 24:15
Understand the FLN's strategic move to urban areas and its implications.
“Now, you said this earlier on that, you know, people weren't taking it seriously at all because it was happening in the mountains.”
The Role of Women in the Revolution
24:15 to 27:15
Examine the crucial involvement of women in the Algerian liberation war.
“So the military commander who's in charge of this operation is a man called Sadi Yassif.”
The Milk Bar Bombing
27:15 to 28:00
Detail the infamous bombing that marked a turning point in the conflict.
“And that's how they are able to cause such chaos and carnage.”
The Horrific Milk Bar Attack
28:00 to 29:22
Discover the chilling details of a bomb attack in a milk bar during the Algerian Revolution.
“And there's something quite horrific about thinking of a woman doing that to other women who are just feeding their kids on that day.”
The Fight for Freedom vs. Terrorism
29:22 to 31:40
Explore the complex identity of freedom fighters versus terrorists in Algeria's struggle.
“So, I mean, if that is explicitly what they want to do, you know, cause psychological distress on that level, they want to strike terror.”
The Legacy of Jamila Bouhidi
31:40 to 33:02
Learn about Jamila Bouhidi's resistance and the intellectual support she garnered.
“You cannot punish this woman for doing something which they say is heroic.”
French Response to the Algerian Struggle
33:02 to 33:41
Understand the brutal measures taken by the French in response to Algerian resistance.
“They handed police powers over to a guy called General Jacques Massoud and his paratroopers.”
French Response to the Algerian Struggle
33:57 to 34:10
Understand the brutal measures taken by the French in response to Algerian resistance.
“For a limited time only, we are running a discount on the Empire Club.”
French Response to the Algerian Struggle
34:15 to 35:11
Understand the brutal measures taken by the French in response to Algerian resistance.
“You get an extra 20 % off annual membership.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00William:If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.empirepoduk.com.
0:28Anita:Well hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnhem
0:33William:And me William Drupal
0:35Anita:So this is episode 3 of our Algeria series In this episode the Algerian revolution begins So question first of all How did a clandestine group of Algerian nationalists force the mighty French Republic into an all-out, merciless war in the 1950s? This is how the Algerian War of Independence began. It's the night of the 1st of November 1954, or if you prefer, All Saints Night. It's past midnight. In the freezing Ores mountains of eastern Algeria, a bus is making its way along a winding mountain road and it is dark. On board are two young French school teachers, Guy and Pauline Monarot, and they're returning from their honeymoon.
1:22Anita:The bus stops. Armed men have blocked the road. The passengers are ordered off. The Monarots are pulled out. Guy Monarot is shot straight away. Pauline Monarot is shot. Guy dies on the roadside. Pauline, though badly wounded, manages to survive. These are the first European civilian casualties of a war that will last eight years and kill hundreds of thousands of people.
1:50William:The Monorau killings were one of around 70 attacks across Algeria that night. Bombs, ambushes, raids on armories and police posts coordinated at midnight across six military zones by the newly founded Front de Liberation Nationale, or FLN, as we'll call it for the rest of the podcast. The armed nationalist group that had been formed to fight the French for Algerian independence.
2:17Anita:Now, there's always mythology after a night like this. And in Algerian mythology, it is known as the Night of Blood or Toussaint Rouge. It's remembered as the night a nation rose as one, the dramatic unified opening of a national liberation struggle.
2:34William:The reality, of course, was rather messier. In Algiers, nervous FLN operatives failed to blow up the city gasworks. A planned warehouse fire was abandoned when the cell leader called in sick. The attacks were wildly uneven in execution and many of them failed. The general public actually had no idea that a war had started.
2:55Anita:In our last episode, we did explain how Mohamed Boudieff convened the Committee of the 22. Do you remember? It sounded like a sales convention in June of 1954, where the neuf historiques, the nine historic leaders, christened the FLN. And then among them, they divided Algeria into six military zones called the Villayas. Now, that was only a few months before the start of the war. Billy, just tell me, I mean, what does the FLN look like when we get to November 1954? Because I'm not clear on that.
3:29William:No. Well, I think no one was, and particularly the French weren't, because they were tiny. They were clandestine, but they were already very ruthless and very motivated. They numbered perhaps a thousand men. They had no fixed bases, no safe areas, no supply lines. And recruitment in the early months was almost entirely through families and personal networks. They were virtually unknown to the wider public. You could be people you could absolutely trust because a single informer could wreck the whole project and one broken cell could lead to an uncovering of a whole network. So the FLN enforced loyalty with a terrible brutality that's important to acknowledge honestly.
4:12William:New recruits were sometimes required to assassinate a designated target, a young gendarme standing on a corner, for example, or a pro-French official. And they'd have to do this in front of a senior FLN figure who would just kill the recruit if they even hesitated.
4:27Anita:It all just sounds like it's from The Godfather, you know, like those mafia hits and mafia recruitment and mafia loyalty. So, Willie, what I'm really keen to know about is what the French reaction is to all of this, because, you know, it's a nightmare for them. You know, cells just breaking out, no plan, no sort of connection, no way to get into these networks. I know the French historian Benjamin Storer referred to this period up to July 1955 as a phony war, which sort of makes me feel like they're not really taking it as seriously as they should.
4:58William:Well, they don't take it seriously. And it's not really a nightmare for them, because if you are in the main areas of French settlement like Oran or Algiers, you hardly notice anything's changed. Oh, really? You know, a few small items in the bottom of the newspaper. but it's mainly in the rural hinterland, like where the poor couple got shot, that the early actions take place with any effect. Early on, the French still refer to it as the drôle de revolution, the joke revolution. But the French military commander in Algiers is still dismissing this violence as a tribal flash in the pan in the provinces.
5:37William:And the authorities in Algiers convinced themselves that it's a minor plot. And it's probably orchestrated from Cairo, where Ben Boulin is sometimes based and where the main support is coming from Nasser's Egypt. In metropolitan France, if you look at the newspapers, there's literally not a mention. No one knows anything has happened.
5:58Anita:Genuinely shocked by that. A young honeymooning couple, you can imagine that would get acres of space. Okay, everyone's playing it down. But I do believe the French government do grasp the severity of the situation because you have the Interior Minister of France in November 1954. He's this 38-year-old socialist politician called François Mitterrand. You may have become familiar with that name. You may have heard of him. You may have heard of him. He will eventually become the longest-serving president of the Fifth Republic and one of the giants of European post-war politics. But in November 1954, Mitterrand is reacting to the first news of these FLN attacks on All Saints Night.
6:39Anita:And he sees there is something amiss and something that could grow. And he issues a declaration that will define France's entire subsequent approach to Algeria. He says, Algeria is France. From Flanders to the Congo, there is the law, one single nation, one sole parliament. So his reaction is, crush it. Crush it dead before it starts. I mean, that's what he's saying.
7:05William:And that is the reaction once it really gets going. Though at the moment, there's pretty little to crush as far as the French are concerned. But it's this idea that Algeria is France is both the kind of strength and weakness of the French position in Algeria. On one hand, it's laying down the gauntlet. This is part of our land. We're not going to give it up anymore. We're going to give up the Seine or Burgundy or Provence or whatever. On the other hand, it puts them into a terrific bind. And this becomes an issue which not only breaks the Republic and which casts a shadow over 30 years, but also in a very real way, is still alive in the next French election, which is coming up this year with Le Pen's party, which emerges from this war, as we'll see in future episodes.
7:57William:This is something which, while sounding at this point like a declaration of strength, is the kind of red thread that will unravel the whole of the French Republic in due course.
8:07Anita:Okay, so I mean, you know, they want to obviously put a blanket over it in France and not alarm people and say, you know, that we're in control and there is one France and all of the messaging is very clear. Don't panic. But in Algeria, where people see what's happening, where they hear about what's happening, I mean, what What does it look like for them? And what is the kind of reaction that Algerian Muslims face in the wake of these attacks?
8:32William:So it's very different if you are a French Muslim peasant up in the mountains of the Orez or the Kabylia mountains in the east. Because now you really are feeling the presence of the Eiffelan who appear in your village at night, demand food and shelter. And then there's always some informer who will tell who gave the food and shelter the following morning. The French will turn up when the daylight comes, they'll arrest, there'll be torture. And so it's becoming an impossible sort of double game. You have to face the French during the day and you have to face the FLN at night. And the FLN realizes, in a sense, that the more it encourages the French to overreact, the more popular their revolution will become.
9:16William:The more alienated the people will come from French rule, the more impossible it will be to maintain French rule.
9:22Anita:Yeah, goad them into cruelty and then cruelty will itself inspire a revolution. It's a playbook. I mean, you see these things happening all over the world.
9:31William:I covered the Kashmir uprising in the 1990s, and it was exactly the same there. The revolutionaries would come out at night, they would extract stuff from the villages, expect loyalty, and then there'd be informers turning up, grassing to the government by day, and the whole thing would go on. But at this point, it's really, you know, there's one local official estimates the mood at the time and reckons that about 10 % of the masses support the French, 10 % support the rebels, and a mass of 80 % at this point are still living, hoping that it's not going to touch them and they can just avoid having to make a decision.
10:09William:And the FLN understands this and wants to cast them off the fence into one position or the other.
10:13Anita:So, I mean, I guess they're waiting for this moment where it reaches the tipping point, you know, where violence is escalated to the point where actually those people, you know, the prudent expectation group, the fence sitters, if you like, they're going to have to choose a side. And they get that moment. That tipping point happens in August 1955. Now, this is one of the worst atrocities committed against French Algerians. The FLN military commander organised a coordinated uprising around the town of Philippeville in August 1955. And what does that mean? That means simultaneous attacks on European civilian communities right across the region.
10:50Anita:Tell us a little bit about it.
10:52William:So this is what's known as the Philippeville Massacre. It's in August 1955. And it's this that really sets off the trail of dynamite that leads to the powder keg that is the Battle of Algiers. In the summer of 1955, the FLN military commander in the Wallaya of Konstantin, a man named Zygoud Youssef, has a theory that the only way to break the deadlock of the phony war is to force a major confrontation. So brutal that neutrality will become impossible, exactly as you said. And he has organized a coordinated uprising around the settler town of Filimfil in August 1955. Simultaneous attacks on European civilian communities across the region.
11:38Anita:And the most horrific violence occurs at El Halia. It's a small pyrite mining center. There are about 130 Europeans, some 2 ,000 Muslims living, working together. And they have been for years. and at noon on August the 20th after local communications have been quietly cut sometime in the night Muslim mine workers led coordinated groups from house to house mercilessly killing European men, women and children and what makes this worse is when you hear some of the details of this because the attackers as they're sort of hacking away at these families are urged on by chanting women And in surrounding towns, we learn that local religious leaders are broadcasting calls to arms and praising the attacks.
12:30Anita:I mean, is it wrong to say it's almost like a jihadi cry that's going on here?
12:35William:It's exactly a jihadi cry. That's exactly the description. No, there is now, for the first time, a stirring among the ulema, among the religious community. This genie is out of the bottle. This is something that will haunt independent Algeria as well as the Battle of Algiers. But at this point, it's still largely secular. But you do have on this night of the Philippeville massacre, the first time the mullahs calling for the minarets, calling for blood. Now, Alastair Horne, who's the great historian of this in English, argues that the details of the event are the key to the potent and profound effect, that's what he calls the Philippeville massacre, was to have on the pied noire, and indeed on the whole Sanskrit history of the Algerian war.
13:18William:And he's right. I think 102 Europeans die across the region. And it's a massive shock to the settler community, who have been dismissive in general of the Algerians and the Arabs, and particularly dismissive of this joke uprising. Now, suddenly, 100 people are dead, and they realize it's serious. And in order to make sure that it doesn't happen again, they decide to do the same back to the Algerians, but on a much greater scale.
13:45Anita:Do the same, but more. I mean, the French reprisals were catastrophic. You've got the army, you've got the police, you've got settler vigilante groups all acting in concert. I don't think it's the wrong word, but to execute thousands of Muslims.
14:01William:It's exactly the right word. That's exactly what happens. They're executions.
14:04Anita:And these may be the people who are involved in those attacks or anybody, you know. So at El Halia, you've got 80 Algerians who are shot on the spot. In Philippeville, the army herds hundreds of Muslims into the local football stadium and just executes them. So no due process, no trial, no finding out whether they're involved or not. This is collective punishment on a grand scale.
14:26William:So, again, very much like the Israelis in Gaza, there is a deliberate determination that, you know, for every one death on their side, they're going to make 100 more casualties. And the death toll at the end of this round is between the lowest estimate is 1 ,200 and the highest estimate is 12 ,000. And the distance between those two figures is a measure of how little is done openly. A lot of it's done in the night. You know, bodies are buried and disposed where they can't be found. And it tells you about, in a sense, the polarization of the war, you know, between 1 ,200 and 1 ,12 ,000. But historians agree that, you know, the sheer scale of the blind French revenge forces those 80 % of Algerians who had hoped to sit on the fence.
15:15William:This is the moment that they finally choose to change sides and they commit themselves to the revolution and to independence. This is the thing that changes everything.
15:24Anita:I mean, and it always works like this. If you do collective punishment and if you kill people in such large numbers, what ends up happening is that you will have every family who knows somebody who has been killed and therefore they're in it. Now they're in it because they've lost someone that they love, right? So you could say, you know, Zygur Yusuf's strategy has worked with an extraordinary, cold, calculating precision. He draws the line and he draws the line in blood between the colonizers and the colonized. But what he's trying to do more than anything else is signal to France that this is no phony war.
15:59Anita:If you think this is a phony war, a joke revolution, think again, because we're here and we're here in great numbers.
16:05William:Even the French governor general at the time, Jacques Sustel, admits that a complete abyss, as he calls it, has been dug between the two communities that he's governing and that it is filled by what he calls rivers of blood. This is a phrase that is born in the 1950s. The conflict was rapidly escalating now into an all-out merciless war. But to sustain this violent momentum, the FLN could no longer operate as a fractured regional insurgency.
16:37Anita:Yeah. So where do they go from here? I mean, that's a really good question. And we'll try and answer it after the break. We're going to look at how a ruthless political mastermind takes control of the FLN and restructures what has gone before into a rebellion, a all out, full blown rebellion right under the noses of the French military.
Read the full transcript
17:05William:Welcome back. Well, in the summer of 1956, the FLN leadership does something of quite extraordinary audacity. They hold a major conference, and it's in the heart of French-controlled territory, in a forester's cottage deep in the Chester forest of the Kalbelia Mountains in the Sumam Valley. And the senior leadership doesn't just sort of, you know, meet overnight quickly and sort of shake each other's hands. they convene for 20 days under the noses of a supposedly pacified French army. Now, although the rebels get away with that, they don't get away with the next thing, which is something we referred to in our Suez series.
17:49William:Do you remember, Anita, when we talked about the hijacking by the French government of a plane in which Ahmed Ben Bolla is flying? There is intelligence that he's in the air. This is the exiled leader of the FLN. There are four of them, Hossein Ahmed, Mohamed Boudaif, Mohamed Khidda, and Muzaffar Lasharaf. And they've been in Rabat in King Mohamed V of Morocco's conference in Tunis, wanting to internationalize the Algerian question. And this is obviously a very important moment politically for them, and they all go there. and they then fly back on a flight from Rabat to Tunis. And they fly via Palma de Mallorca to avoid French airspace over Algeria and they think themselves safe.
18:38William:But French military intelligence have been tracking them and basically, to cut a long story short, we told this story in full in the Suez episode. The French aircraft force the Algerian leader's plane down and they arrest them all. So on one hand, you've got the internal leadership meeting in the forest and getting away with it directly under French noses. And you've got the external leadership who've been caught in a single go and are now popped in a French prison. We should talk about the leader of the event in the forest.
19:14Anita:Ramdani Abani, who is a Kabila. He's an indigenous Berber. He's a really ordinary background to him. Son of an ordinary family. He's worked as a municipal clerk. He's spent years in French prisons where he actually takes the time to educate himself, reading Marx, Lenin and Mein Kampf. Equal opportunity dictators are available. I mean, he's a short, chubby faced man. He's got sort of those lively eyes.
19:43William:He looks quite tough in the picture I've got in front of me there.
19:46Anita:I mean, it looks like a mugshot. And in the mugshot, you sort of get an idea of what he's really like, because he's said to have this ferocious intellect, but a really ferocious temper as well. And it's made worse, we later understand, by severe stomach ulcers. So, you know, one who's basically in a bad mood most of the time. Some contemporaries compare him to Robespierre, such was the terror that he inspires. And others say, actually, you know what, he's Algeria's Mao. That's who he is. He's certainly the first person in the FLN's leadership who thought like a politician rather than a guerrilla leader.
20:22Anita:And that's very significant.
20:24William:So what he achieves at Somal in that wooded valley that month shapes the entire revolution. He reorganizes the entire FLN. He structures it into a kind of military organisation with clear chains of command. And each chain of command has as its boss someone who gets the rank of colonel explicitly to prevent any single military figure from accumulating power to dominate the revolution and also presumably to mean that if the French do capture anyone, they're only capturing one tiny part of its chain of command. And not the whole leadership. And he imposes two rules that define the FLN's character.
21:06William:Civilian political leadership holds supremacy over the military. And the fighters in Algeria, the ones bleeding on the ground, hold supremacy over the exiled leaders in Tunis and Kira. Now, as most of them are now in a French prison, that's something that is very easy to establish. This is a huge coup because people like Ben Boulat, who've been left stranded outside Algeria, are the main founders of the movement. And so, in a sense, it's a kind of internal putsch.
21:38Anita:Yeah. I mean, the movement's grown bigger than them. And they may be the historique, but they also remain in history because now the future is with somebody else.
21:48William:Yeah.
21:48Anita:What I think is really interesting is that while Habani is restructuring the movement in the mountains, you also have the FLN doing other things that, you know, perhaps those in prison don't even know about, have no idea about until they read it in the newspapers because they open a new front in the city. Now, you said this earlier on that, you know, people weren't taking it seriously at all because it was happening in the mountains. It was happening in rural areas. You know, people were losing their lives on dark, twisty roads in a mountain pass. But now the FLN brings the violence to the cities.
22:21Anita:And this is where we arrive at what arguably is the most famous chapter of this entire conflict. And it's immortalized in the movie that we have talked about a number of times since starting this series, that 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers.
22:37William:We should say, if you haven't seen this movie, it is a great watch. And it's very long, but it is completely gripping. It's a classic. It won the Leondon at Venice that year. And it's one of the great political movies of all time. And so if you haven't seen it, go straight away and watch it. Now, this is an important moment because I think far more than the normal history perhaps acknowledges, it has been up to this point a rural movement. My friend Farah, when I was talking to her for the bonus episode, felt very strongly that the rural uprising at the beginning had not been given its due. It's partly because I think, you know, the movie version is so firmly focused on the city.
23:20William:But this is the moment that this city, the Algiers Casbah, now becomes the main center of attention. So it all begins in June 1956, and the French authorities guillotine two FLN prisoners in Algiers. The FLN responds by shooting European civilians in the streets. Then European extremists answer by planting a massive bomb in the Casper, the densely populated Muslim quarter at the top of the city, right up at the top of the mountain, killing up to 70 civilians. It was this bomb that convinced the FLN leadership to make the decision that would define the next year and indeed the subsequent revolution.
24:06William:they would take the war into the city, into the European quarters, into the spaces where the international press was watching.
24:15Anita:So the military commander who's in charge of this operation is a man called Sadi Yassif. And he's a former baker, but very, very street smart. That's the thing to know about him. He's a brilliant urban tactician. And he joins the FLN in 1954. So, one of the first sign-ups. And he's the one who's going to transform everything, isn't he? Because he sees the Casbah, really, as a fortress. More than anything else, this is a fortress that can be protected.
24:43William:So you should really understand the topography to understand this. Algeria is obviously a port. The port is at the bottom of the hill. There's an area around that that is the posh French area with the boulevard and bits that look like a slightly orientalised version of Paris. You then have above this on the mountain, this Casper, this bazaar with flat roofs, mud houses, huddled up the hill, right up to the top of the mountain. And this is transformed into a fortress of secret passages, underground bomb factories and hidden rooms. There are no French living there. It's just Algerians. And so it's the ideal command center for the new revolution that's moved to the city.
25:26William:And his clever move and his masterstroke is to recruit a network of young Algerian women who at this point in history are still in traditional dress and very much sort of home based. And contrary to everything the French expect, these become the most famous operatives of this entire liberation war, the female bombers.
25:50Anita:So I've seen a photograph of four of these women and they could be out on a picnic. This is the real cognitive dissonance about this photograph is they are smiling. They're not dressed in veils. They're dressed in skirts, long skirts, conservative skirts and Polonex. And they're laughing together, except one of them happens to be holding what looks like a machine gun. So this is a network of young women. Some of them are from the middle classes. Some of them are from daughters of the Casbah. So it's like, you know, crosses across economic threshold. The one that's really important to we should talk about is Zora Drif.
26:27Anita:And you also have, I think, shall we talk about three of them? Zora Drif, I'm completely obsessed with.
26:33William:Zora Drif is still alive. I've heard her being interviewed.
26:35Anita:So I did the Google on her and I can't believe she's still alive and talks about these days actually quite fondly. Jamila Weard is another. Samia Lakhdari is another. and what they do is they answer the call. So if they were wearing traditional veils, they put them aside and they start dressing in these sort of European styles so that the French military, you know, once they get to a French military checkpoint, they look at them and say, you know, these are not, they're not like those Muslims. They're fine. Let them through. And that's how they get through checkpoints and they are carrying deadly explosives in pretty beach bags, you know, as if they're going to go and sunbathe somewhere or read a book.
27:15Anita:And that's how they are able to cause such chaos and carnage. It's a masterstroke in guerrilla warfare, but it has a bloody toll, doesn't it?
27:25William:It certainly does. And this is one of the most famous scenes in the movie where it is very exactly reproduced. On the 30th of September 1956, three enormous bombs go off in crowded European establishments in Algiers. The milk bar, the cafeteria and the Air France terminal. And it's the 22-year-old, very glamorous Zora Drief, who plants the bomb in the milk bar. And this is a popular cafe filled with mothers and children. It's a completely non-military target.
28:00Anita:It's the softest of soft targets. And there's something quite horrific about thinking of a woman doing that to other women who are just feeding their kids on that day.
28:10William:She walks in. She buys a milkshake. she puts a bag under her table and then she walks out and a minute later the bomb goes off to get out she even flirts with a french guard to pass through the military barricade and years later after spending five years in french prisons she would go on to become a successful lawyer and secretary general of the algerian école nationale d 'amministration uh so she's i mean she's now a famous figure in algeria and regarded as one of these sort of you know iconic revolutionaries but there's no question that this is a bloody event.
28:45Anita:Yeah, I mean, you know, actually when we were chatting about this with our producer, she said this sounds a lot like, you know, the troubles in Northern Ireland where those who, you know, might have made bombs, planted bombs, shot guns, then end up being the establishment and the political figureheads of what comes next. But back to that attack in the milk bar, we should tell you what happens. Three people are killed and over 50 are injured on that day in September. The FLN leadership has circulated a directive stating explicitly, a bomb causing the death of 10 people is the equivalent on a psychological level to the loss of a French battalion.
29:22Anita:So, I mean, if that is explicitly what they want to do, you know, cause psychological distress on that level, they want to strike terror. But they would reject, Willie, you know, any kind of terminology saying they were terrorists. You know, even if they're saying we want to strike terror because they would, what, characterize themselves as freedom fighters.
29:41William:This was something that my friend Farah said she wrestled with as a Berber Algerian growing up in Paris, where following Sarkozy's changes to the curriculum, these figures were explicitly referred to as terrorists in French school textbooks. And she said these are people she'd grown up with all her life being heard of as the great iconic firefighters, just like people in India, you know, remember Subhash Chandra Bose, who also embraced violence. And some of these women, you know, are not just figureheads. They are at the center of things. And this is also true of Jamila Bouhild. She's born in the Casper and she becomes a messenger.
30:21William:She uses her good looks and her beach bag and her low cut French dress to pass messages around Algeria. And at one point, she is captured and they find on her person a correspondence from Yasef. So this central figure. And this is found. When she is caught, she tries to escape. She's shot. She's taken to a hospital where she's operated on. There's a wound to her shoulder. And out of the hospital, she's then taken directly to a torture chamber. And she is brutally interrogated. and she's given electric shocks. We know all this because she writes a very full description of it before she is sentenced to death, and she describes electric shocks.
31:12William:Her wound deliberately torn open, her arm forced in positions that aggravated the injury, beatings, cold water in winter, and this bath, a form of waterboarding that they drown you in. And she will not reveal Yasef Saadi's whereabouts, not one detail.
31:31Anita:But what makes this really extraordinary is that, you know, the torture is one thing, but when she's sentenced to death, it's the kind of people who actually come and stand by her side. And I think scholars have called this the Jamila phenomenon, because as soon as people heard about, you know, what she'd gone through, what she was saying she was doing it for, you know, the freedom of her people, you've got people like Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and basically the entire French intellectual left who rallied to her side and say, you know what? You cannot punish this woman for doing something which they say is heroic.
32:05Anita:She's fighting for her people. She's fighting against oppression. So, you know, she's got quite the fan club.
32:12William:I don't think it's so much that it's a fan club. What Sartre and de Beauvoir are objecting to is that the French are using what they call Nazi tactics.
32:24Anita:They also sympathize with the fact that she was doing something from a conviction point of view. I mean, they do say that as well. They do. They do.
32:30William:But their focus of attack is that we French revile the Nazis for using torture and extreme interrogation. And we are behaving like the Gestapo. That's the line that the French left tend to take.
32:45Anita:And that's a very powerful thing to say in France, because France still has very fresh memories of what the Gestapo did. You know, let's not forget. So that's going to hit all sorts of nerves. So tell us how the French really respond to this bombing campaign.
32:59William:So it's brutal. In January 1957, with the FLN calling for a general strike to coincide with the United Nations debate in Algeria, the French government takes a step that would decide the war's moral outcome, even as it won the military one. They handed police powers over to a guy called General Jacques Massoud and his paratroopers. And that is the story that we'll be telling next time. And it's a super brutal one.
33:26Anita:So that's next. The battle for Algiers escalates. More stories of institutional torture, military mutinies, a dramatic collapse of the French Republic on the road to Algerian independence. If you can't wait for that, you know what you have to do. Join our club. But till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand.
33:48William:And goodbye from me, William Durimple.
33:56William:A quick word for our Empire listeners. For a limited time only, we are running a discount on the Empire Club.
34:05Anita:We totally are. It's our summer sale. It's live now and from now until the end of August. All you need to do is head to empirepoduk.com, empirepoduk.com. Use the code SUMMER26, SUMMER26. You get an extra 20 % off annual membership.
34:22William:This sizzling summer, we would love you to join our Empire Club and we know you will love being a member of our community. You'll get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series and much more.
34:34Anita:And your summer trips provide you that perfect opportunity to dive into our archives and catch up on all the exclusive content you might have missed before joining. So you can listen to our interview with Yung Chang, our Willy's fabulous bonus on Vermeer's Girl with the Pearl Earring and our exclusive four-part member series covering the scandal that shaped partition.
34:57William:So make the most of the deal before it ends at the end of August 2026. The code is SUMMER26 to be used on our annual membership at empirepoduk.com. We'd love you to become a member of our club, and it's brilliant even if we say so ourselves.
From the publisher
What really happened during the infamous Battle of Algiers? How did the Algerian War of Independence begin? Who was the radical mastermind who restructured the resistance movement under the noses of the French army?
In the third episode of this series, William and Anita discuss the explosive start of the Algerian revolution. They discuss the guerrilla tactics of the FLN, brutal French reprisals, and the legendary female bombers of the Battle of Algiers.
Summer sale is here: get an annual Empire Club membership for an extra 20% off with code SUMMER26. That's ad-free listening, early-access, every bonus episode, and full access to our exclusive members' series. Sale ends August 31st, so grab it before summer's over.
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