Editing Algerian War (section)

=== Lack of commemoration ===
As the war was officially a "[[police action]]", no monuments were built for decades to honour the about 25,000 French soldiers killed in the war, and the Defense Ministry refused to classify veterans as veterans until the 1970s.<ref name=Cohen/>{{rp|219}} When a monument to the Unknown Soldier of the Algerian War was erected in 1977, French President [[Valéry Giscard d'Estaing]], in his dedication speech, refused to use the words war or Algeria but instead used the phrase "the unknown soldier of North Africa".<ref name=Cohen/>{{rp|219}} A national monument to the French war dead was not built until 1996 and, even then spoke only of those killed fighting in ''Afrique du nord'' and was located in a decrepit area of Paris rarely visited by tourists, as if to hide the monument.<ref name=Cohen/>{{rp|226}} Further adding to the silence were the vested interests of French politicians. François Mitterrand, the French president 1981 to 1995, had been the Interior Minister from 1954 to 1955 and the Justice Minister from 1955 to 1957, when he had been deeply involved in the repression of the FLN, and it was only after Mitterrand's death in 1996, that his [[French Socialist Party]] started to become willing to talk about the war and, even then, remained very guarded about his role.<ref name=Cohen/>{{rp|232}} Likewise, de Gaulle had promised in the Évian Agreements that the ''pieds-noirs'' could remain in Algeria, but after independence, the FLN freely violated the accords and led to the entire ''pied-noir'' population fleeing to France, usually with only the clothes they were wearing, as they had lost everything they had in Algeria, a circumstance further embarrassing the defeated nation.<ref name=Cohen/>{{rp|232}}