In May 1961, the French government and the GPRA (the FLN’s government-in-exile) held peace talks at Évian, France, which proved contentious and difficult. But on March 18, 1962, the two sides signed an agreement called the Évian Accords, which included a ceasefire (that came into effect the following day) and a release of war prisoners; the agreement’s major stipulations were: French recognition of a sovereign Algeria; independent Algeria’s guaranteeing the protection of the pied-noir community; and Algeria allowing French military bases to continue in its territory, as well as establishing privileged Algerian-French economic and trade relations, particularly in the development of Algeria’s nascent oil industry.
In a referendum held in France on April 8, 1962, over 90% of the French people approved of the Évian Accords; the same referendum held in Algeria on July 1, 1962 resulted in nearly six million voting in favor of the agreement while only 16,000 opposed it (by this time, most of the one million pieds-noirs had or were in the process of leaving Algeria or simply recognized the futility of their lost cause, thus the extraordinarily low number of “no” votes).
(Taken from Algerian War of Independence – Wars of the 20th Century – Volume 4)
However, pied-noir hardliners and pro-French Algeria military officers still were determined to derail the political process, forming one year earlier (in January 1961) the “Organization of the Secret Army” (OAS; French: Organisation de l’armée secrète) led by General Salan, in a (futile) attempt to stop the 1961 referendum to determine Algerian self-determination. Organized specifically as a terror militia, the OAS had begun to carry out violent militant acts in 1961, which dramatically escalated in the four months between the signing of the Évian Accords and the referendum on Algerian independence. The group hoped that its terror campaign would provoke the FLN to retaliate, which would jeopardize the ceasefire between the government and the FLN, and possibly lead to a resumption of the war. At their peak in March 1962, OAS operatives set off 120 bombs a day in Algiers, targeting French military and police, FLN, and Muslim civilians – thus, the war had an ironic twist, as France and the FLN now were on the same side of the conflict against the pieds-noirs.
The French Army and OAS even directly engaged each other – in the Battle of Bab el-Oued, where French security forces succeeded in seizing the OAS stronghold of Bab el-Oued, a neighborhood in Algiers, with combined casualties totaling 54 dead and 140 injured. The OAS also targeted prominent Algerian Muslims with assassinations but its main target was de Gaulle, who escaped many attempts on his life. The most dramatic of the assassination attacks on de Gaulle took place in a Paris suburb where a group of gunmen led by Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, a French military officer, opened fire on the presidential car with bullets from the assailants’ semi-automatic rifles barely missing the president. Bastien-Thiry, who was not an OAS member, was arrested, put on trial, and later executed by firing squad.
In the end, the OAS plan to provoke the FLN into launching retaliation did not succeed, as the Algerian revolutionaries adhered to the ceasefire. On June 17, 1962, the OAS the FLN agreed to a ceasefire. The eight-year war was over. Some 350,000 to as high as one million people died in the war; about two million Algerian Muslims were displaced from their homes, being forced by the French Army to relocate to guarded camps.
Aftermath On July 3, 1962, two days after the second referendum for independence, de Gaulle recognized the sovereignty of Algeria. Then on July 5, 1962, exactly 132 years after the French invasion in 1830, Algeria declared independence and in September 1962, was given its official name, the “People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria” by the country’s National Assembly.
In the months leading up to and after Algeria’s independence, a mass exodus of the pied-noir community took place, with some 900,000 (90% of the European population) fleeing hastily to France. The European Algerians feared for their lives despite a stipulation in the Évian Accords that independent Algeria must respect the rights and properties of the pied-noir community in Algeria. Some 100,000 would remain, but in the 1960s through 1970s, most were forced to leave as well, as the war had scarred permanently relations between the indigenous Algerians and pieds-noirs, forcing the latter to abandon homes and properties under the threat of “the suitcase or the coffin” (French: “la valise ou le cercueil”). In France, the pieds-noirs experienced a difficult period of transition and adjustment, as many families had lived for many generations in Algeria, which they regarded as their homeland. Moreover, they were criticized and held responsible by French mainlanders for the political, economic, and social troubles that the war had caused to France. Algerian Jews, who feared persecution because of their opposition to Algerian independence, also fled Algeria en masse, with 130,000 Jews leaving for France where they held French citizenship; some 7,000 Jews also immigrated to Israel.
The harkis, or indigenous Algerians who had served in the French Army as regulars or auxiliaries, met a harsher fate. Disarmed after the war by their French military commanders and vilified by Algerians as traitors and French collaborators, the harkis and their families faced harsh retaliation by the FLN and civilian mobs – some 50,000 to 100,000 harkis and their kin were killed, most in grisly circumstances. Some 91,000 harkis and their families did succeed in escaping to France under the aegis of their French commanders in violation of the orders of the French government.
The bitter effects of the war were felt in both countries for many years. Throughout the conflict, France described its actions in Algeria as a “law and order maintenance operation”, and not war. Then in June 1999, thirty-seven years after the war ended, the French government admitted that “war” had indeed taken place in Algeria.