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A Savage War of Peace

Algeria 1954-1962

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A Savage War of Peace

By: Alistair Horne
Narrated by: James Adams
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About this listen

 The Algerian War lasted from 1954 to 1962. It caused the fall of six French governments, led to the collapse of the Fourth Republic, and came close to provoking a civil war on French soil. More than a million Muslim Algerians died in the conflict, and as many European settlers were driven into exile. Above all, the war was marked by an unholy marriage of revolutionary terror and state torture.

At the time, this brutal, intractable conflict seemed like a French affair. But from the perspective of half a century, it looks less like the last colonial war than the first postmodern one: a full-dress rehearsal for the amorphous struggle that convulsed the Balkans in the 1990s and that now ravages the Middle East, struggles in which religion, nationalism, imperialism, and terrorism assume unparalleled degrees of intensity.

©1977 Alistair Horne (P)2008 Blackstone Audio, Inc. Africa France Military War Imperialism Refugee Morocco French Revolution Crusade

Critic Reviews

"[This] universally acclaimed history...should have been mandatory reading for the civilian and military leaders who opted to invade Iraq." ( Washington Times)

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it's good, but not being French doesn't help.

I enjoyed the audio book but I found the untranslated French passages going straight over my head.

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Hard going but great lessons.

it's a dense read/listen but rewarding in its lessons. The author slips in some French and some older references that I didn't understand but on the whole it was accessible and felt like a deep discussion of the war.

Great book for consideration of ct methods and action.

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Completely Eurocentric perspective

This book is incredibly well researched, exhaustive and well worth listening to. Be warned however that it is no way an objective treatise. The author provides a completely Eurocentric perspective of one of the most brutal colonial projects of the twentieth century. At no point does Horne bother to consider the humanity, intelligence or agency of the Algerian population in comparison to the intimate details given over to the French military and Pied Noir. At best it is paternalistic, at worst it demonstrates the deep rooted racist bias disguised as dispassionate 'history'. If you can stomach the shocking generalisations, wilful misrepresentation of the Algerian people and casual disregard of the trauma, victimisation and violence suffered at the hands of one of the worlds best equipped and financed modern armies, this book is an amazing insight into one of the great struggles of the colonised world to find independence at great cost.

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