Wars, politics & history

Algeria becomes independent from France

5 July 1962

On 5 July 1962, two days after the result of a referendum in which 99.7 per cent of those voting chose independence, Algeria became an independent state after 132 years of French rule. The war that began on 1 November 1954 with attacks by the National Liberation Front (FLN) was marked by torture, massacres and terrorism by both sides, and killed several hundred thousand Algerians, according to Algerian figures 1.5 million, and some 25,000 French soldiers. The Evian Accords of March 1962 brought a ceasefire. About 800,000 European settlers, the pieds-noirs, fled to France. The war brought down the French Fourth Republic in 1958 and put Charles de Gaulle in power.

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