A Savage War of Peace

"This is a brilliant book, possibly one of the best written in the 20th century. It’s about the Algerian War for Independence, a very violent case study. Horne crafts it into a rare combination of an excellent detailed historical book about a war that also brings along a thought-provoking and timeless strategic perspective. Although originally written in the early 1970s, its themes are directly relevant to today’s challenges, including the ethics of torture, the power of popular ideas, and the fraught relationship between military victory and political outcome. The French engaged in brilliant counter-insurgency tactics and militarily defeated the FLN (or Front de Libération Nationale) especially following the Battle of Algiers, yet France lost the war. Why? Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Horne is masterful in answering that question, making the complex very simple. He explains not just what was happening on the ground in Algeria—there are a number of other good books that do that—but also opens the lens to encompass political instability in continental France, sanctuary in Tunisia and Morocco, Arab nationalism in the region, pressure from other major powers, and even the vital role of the United Nations. I like to use his book with my students because it graphically demonstrates the dynamic interaction between ‘terrorism’ and ‘insurgency.’ It also paints a grand strategic picture beyond what was happening on the ground that helped to shape what it meant to win. This book will persist well into the 21st century."

"It’s the story of the Algerian War of Independence. It was a story that was still very new when Alistair Horne wrote this book. It’s a story that has become, in some ways, ever more central. Lots of people now work on Algeria and, obviously, there’s a huge Algerian population in France. There’s people like Zemmour who in some ways come from Algeria, without being Muslim Algerians. There’s a very strong sense of a move to world history, away from seeing France as a self-contained hexagon. Also, very importantly, from around 2000 the French began to talk about torture in Algeria. It became very much part of French public life, particularly because of the trial of Maurice Papon. He was, in fact, tried for offences committed under Vichy, but the trial slid into discussions of what he had done when he was prefect of Paris during the Algerian War when a demonstration of Algerians was very savagely put down. All those things have made the Algerian War more central than it was in the early 1970s. And Horne’s book continues to be significant. People still read it a lot. It’s not the kind of book people would write now. I’m very struck now that if you read French historians, or any historians writing about the Algerian War, we are so crippled by a kind of political correctness that we will often start out with huge discussions about vocabulary and whether one can use the word ‘European’—is that not an essentialized, racialized category? It’s always quite refreshing to read Alistair Horne who is magisterially politically incorrect. The whole book revolves around a title that he takes from the great imperialist poet, Kipling . He makes an outrageous remark at the beginning where he says that the Algerians, because they have this Islamic fatalism, have no interest in their own history. It’s complete and utter rubbish. Nonetheless, it gives him confidence to take the whole subject on. He’s also got very good contacts in the French military. He knows lots of the people he’s writing about, all these really major, and in retrospect rather sinister, people who were involved in the generals’ putsch against de Gaulle in April 1961. They are people who he presents as human beings because he’s known them as human beings. He’s very well connected, partly because his publisher is Macmillan. For Alistair Horne, Macmillan means Harold himself, who, of course, was still around and opened up lots of contacts for him. Harold Macmillan knew de Gaulle very well and had been in Algeria during the Second World War. He was prime minister during the Algerian War and features in Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal as a character. It’s always rather intriguing to me to think how much Harold Macmillan actually was pressing Alistair Horne to write this book, and how much Harold Macmillan saw it as a book that was politically live. He’s not exclusively a historian of France, although he is mainly a historian of France. He’s a popular historian, but being popular is not a bad thing. He never had an academic job, although I think much of his work, including A Savage War of Peace, would be taken seriously by academics. He was, I suspect, too wealthy and well connected ever to have needed an academic job. He eventually wrote the authorized biography of Harold Macmillan , which is his main exercise in non-French history."