Editing Algerian War (section)

=== English-language historiography ===

One of the first books about the war in English, ''A Scattering of Dust'' by the American journalist Herb Greer in 1962, depicted very favorably the Algerian struggle for independence.<ref name="Brett">{{cite journal |last=Brett |first=Michael |year=1994 |title=Anglo-Saxon Attitudes: The Algerian War of Independence in Retrospect |journal=The Journal of African History |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=220–1 |doi=10.1017/S0021853700026402 |s2cid=154576215}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Greer |first=Herb |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=KDYMAQAAIAAJ |title=A Scattering of Dust |date=1962 |publisher=Hutchinson |language=en}}</ref> Most work in English in the 1960s and 1970s were the work of left-wing scholars, who were focused on explaining the FLN as a part of a generational change in Algerian nationalism and depicted the war as a reaction to intolerable oppression and/or an attempt by the peasants, impoverished by French policies, to improve their lot.<ref name=Brett/>{{rp|222–5}} One of the few military histories of the war was ''The Algerian Insurrection'', by the retired British Army officer [[Edgar O'Ballance]], who wrote with unabashed admiration for French high command during the war and saw the FLN as a terrorist group. O'Ballance concluded that the tactics which won the war militarily for the French lost the war for them politically.<ref name=Brett/>{{rp|225–6}}

In 1977, the British journalist [[Alistair Horne]] published ''A Savage War of Peace'', regarded by some authors as the leading book written on the subject in English, though written from a French, rather than Algerian perspective.<ref name=Brett/>{{rp|226}} Fifteen years after the end of the war, Horne was accused of not being concerned about "right or wrong" but rather about "cause and effect".<ref name=Brett/>{{rp|217–35}} Living in Paris at the time of the war, Horne had condemned French intervention during the [[Suez Crisis]] and the French bombing of the Tunisian village of Sakiet Sidi Youssef in 1958. He'd argued that the "inflexibility" of the FLN had won Algeria independence, creating a sense of Algerian national identity, and leading the Front to rule over authoritarian but "progressive" FLN regime.<ref name=Brett/>{{rp|217–35}}

In a 1977 column published in ''The Times Literary Supplement'' reviewing the book ''A Savage War of Peace'', Iraqi-born British historian [[Elie Kedourie]] attacked Horne as an "apologist for terrorism" and accused him of engaging in the "cosy pieties" of ''bien-pensants''. Kedorie condemned the Western intellectuals who excuse terrorism when committed by Third World revolutionaries.<ref name=Brett/>{{rp|217–35}} Kedourie claimed that far from a mass movement, the FLN were a "small gang" of "murderous intellectuals" who used brutal, terrorist tactics against the French citizens and military, and against any Muslim loyal to the French. He further claimed that the Front had been beaten by 1959.<ref name=Brett/>{{rp|217–235}} Kedourie charged that de Gaulle had cynically sacrificed the ''colons'' and the ''harkis'', as he had chosen to disregard his constitutional oath as president to protect all Frenchmen and ensure that "the French withdrew and handed over power to the only organized body of armed men who were on the scene – a civilized government, thus, acting for all the world like the votary of some Mao or Ho, in the barbarous belief that legitimacy comes from the power of the gun".<ref name=Brett/>{{rp|227}}

In 1992, American historian John Ruedy, the focus of whose research was the history of the [[Maghreb]] and French colonialism in Algeria, published ''Modern Algeria: Origins and Development of a Nation''.<ref name=Brett/>{{rp|232–3}} Ruedy wrote that under French rule the traditional social structure had been so completely destroyed that when the FLN launched its independence struggle in 1954, the only way of asserting one's interests was through "the law of the gun", which explains why the FLN was so violent not only in regards to its enemies but also within the movement. The FLN, thus, according to Ruedy, formed the basis of an "alternative political culture", based on "brute force" that has persisted ever since.<ref name=Brett/>{{rp|233}}