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Alistair Horne

A Savage War Of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 Paperback – Illustrated, 15 December 2006

by Alistair Horne (Author)

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The Algerian War lasted from 1954 to 1962. It brought down six French governments, led to the collapse of the Fourth Republic, returned de Gaulle to power, 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 repressive torture.

Nearly a half century has passed since this savagely fought war ended in Algeria's independence, and yet--as Alistair Horne argues in his new preface to his now-classic work of history--its repercussions continue to be felt not only in Algeria and France, but throughout the world. Indeed from today's vantage point the Algerian War looks like a full-dress rehearsal for the sort of amorphous struggle that convulsed the Balkans in the 1990s and that now ravages the Middle East, from Beirut to Baghdad--struggles in which questions of religion, nationalism, imperialism, and terrorism take on a new and increasingly lethal intensity.

A Savage War of Peace is the definitive history of the Algerian War, a book that brings that terrible and complicated struggle to life with intelligence, assurance, and unflagging momentum. It is essential reading for our own violent times as well as a lasting monument to the historian's art.

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Product details

ASIN : 1590172183
Publisher : NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS; 1st edition (15 December 2006)
Language : English
Paperback : 624 pages
ISBN-10 : 9781590172186
ISBN-13 : 978-1590172186
Dimensions : 13.54 x 3.56 x 20.47 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 85,395 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 5 in History of Algeria
- 60 in History of North Africa
- 434 in History of France (Books)

Customer Reviews:
207 ratings

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"He brings a long historical perspective and six decades of experience to bear on the affairs of the day." -Salon.com

"First the Pentagon plugged the movie, now President Bush is reading the book...A Savage War of Peace, British historian Alistair Horne's celebrated 1977 account of the [Algerian] war...Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who recommended A Savage War of Peace to Bush, said recently on PBS' Charlie Rose Show that he did not believe 'that the French experience could be applied precisely to the United States. But I thought there were enough similarities and enough complexities and enough tragedy for the president to gain a perspective on his own period.'" --Associated Press

"Anyone interested in Iraq should read this book immediately." --Thomas Ricks, The Washington Post

"[Horne's] tome is so well written it reads more like a novel but is, in fact, a work of superior historical narrative...There are few historical works that provide so comprehensive a treatment of revolutionary and counterinsurgency warfare, domestic and international politics, and economics and ideology." -Marine Corps Gazette

"When Horne's book first appeared, it seemed to be an account of one major, but now largely closed, chapter in the history of postwar decolonization. Subsequent developments-in Algeria and elsewhere-have made the past prologue. [It] has become a de facto textbook for American Military officers facing time in Iraq..." --Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed

"This thirty-year-old history, written before the Iranian revolution, the Algerian civil war, and Al Qaeda, captures a contingent moment in the conflict between the West and the Arab world, when present-day dogmas were hardly imagined by most. It provides a much needed reminder that modern history is not made by the 'clash of civilizations' but by people." --Harper's Magazine

"The present conflict in the Middle East is frighteningly similar, making this book a good volume to have on library shelves. Horne provides a new preface."--Library Journal (Classic Returns)

"[T]he read of choice for many U.S. military officers serving in Iraq...[this] universally acclaimed history...should have been mandatory reading for the civilian and military leaders who opted to invade Iraq" --The Washington Times

"There is enough to make this the most complete history of the Algerian war yet written, one which will be indispensable for future historians. It is compelling reading, filled with intimate detail about characters and situations that have served as inspiration for a dozen novels from The Day of the Jackal on." -The Los Angeles Times

A "highly readable, toughly edited history that blends the pace and sweep of a work of fiction with a relentless pursuit of every main actor still alive and willing to talk about the war."-The Washington Post Book World

"Alistair Horne is one of the best writers of history in the English speaking world. A Savage War of Peace shows him at the peak of his powers."-The Financial Times

"An awesome and superlative piece of historical narrative...Mr. Horne has a terrible and tremendous tale to tell, one full of omen for posterity."-The Times (London)

"An accomplished historian of earlier French wars has written an admirably impartial, lucid and readable book...as full and objective a history of the Algerian war as we are likely to see for some years." -The New York Times Book Review

"A book of compelling power...magnificent. It has the poetic sense of place without which no great work of history can be written."-The Spectator

"...brilliantly and compassionately told by an historian whose mastery of this subject is complete."
-The Washington Post

About the Author

ALISTAIR HORNE is the author of eighteen previous books, including A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954--1962, The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916, How Far from Austerlitz?: Napoleon 1805--1815 and the official biography of British prime minister Harold Macmillan. He is a fellow at St. Anthony's College, Oxford, and lives in Oxfordshire. He was awarded the French Legion d'Honneur in 1993 and received a knighthood in 2003 for his work on French history.

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FictionLover

Algeria's war for independence - a terrific account by an Englishman in the know

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 June 2019

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I bought Alistair Horne’s book as research for a novel I was writing that touched, tangentially, on the war for Algerian independence 1954-1962 and the ‘pied noir’ community of a million white French colonists who ruled ten times that number of Algerians and who treated them poorly in the extreme.
All I wanted was some colour, some feel for the ebb and flow of the struggle that I had first learned about from Frederick Forsyth’s Day of the Jackal as a teenager, but not much more. But oh dear, no: Horne’s book pulled me in. I could not tear myself a way, despite the frequent accounts of violence between the FLN and the French army groups, violence that escalated in the final months of the war into daily death tallies that were so large as to defy belief, hundreds killed, murders in the streets of Algiers and Oran, and in Paris, throats cut, machine guns stolen by renegade French army group the OAS used to cut down people and buildings, and the use of ‘plastique’ bombs that made my own country’s experience (that’s Britain) of the IRA’s bombs seem quite tame by comparison.
But Horne, who passed away in 2017 (pity, I’d have liked to have e mailed him or spoken on the telephone, so personally did I feel I got to know him) was an extraordinary man and a great historian. So many of his sentences begin or end ‘. . . as he told me . . .’ He was granted exceptional access to the Algerian revolutionaries and the renegade army officers who tried to tear Algeria to bits under the ‘Algerie Française!’ banner, make it ungovernable, keep it forever French.
And always with de Gaulle there at the centre of the spider’s web. I came to a new respect for that inflexible, obdurate old relic. He could change the French nation’s mood in one televised speech. And he did, several times.
But the war was always going to end with France losing control, although it cost (and estimates vary wildly and according to what side is offering them, so I won’t name figures) a huge number of lost-lives before the French departed. Deprived of everything, the poorest pieds noirs sat in the baking summer sun of 1962 on the docksides waiting for ships to take them away forever. The rich ones, the so-called ‘grands colons’ they did OK. They got their money out and moved off to pastures new.
‘Pied noir’ would appear to come from the black boots the first colonists wore – presumably in stark contrast to the sandals and bare feet of the Algerians – after the country was annexed, i.e. stolen by the French in 1830. The history of the colonisation is itself very interesting and Horne is/was a great story teller. But colonial regimes bleed their subjects dry and eventually the indigenous people get their country back, always.
Horne’s book deserves all of its 5 stars. It is a thoughtful, definitive chronicle, sometimes recounting events month to month, even day-by-day during extreme periods. Horne revised the original 1970s edition in the 1990s and had been able, therefore, to show the reader how Algeria fared in the years following its final separation from France. For me, one of the most fascinating aspects of Horne’s continuance was the ‘where are they now? And ‘whatever happened to . . .?’ end notes, both the rival Algerian factions and the soldiers, many of high rank and great valour in the service of France and who formed the all-out ‘ultra’ OAS (Organisation Armée Secrète) who almost brought France down in a coup d’état. Yes, it almost happened and Horne’s description of being in Paris when ancient Sherman tanks of WW2 vintage were trundled out of retirement and ranged around government buildings. Frightening.
For anyone seeking the truth about France and its North African colonies there is no better resource than this book.

7 people found this helpful

N. E. M. Goulder

Completely outstanding

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 October 2017

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Alistair Horne's awesome narrative of the Algerian War of Independence is compelling reading, for everything that it illuminates about the folly of colonialism in all its guises. It's surely something every senior US politician and military strategist (and many of our own UK MPs) ought to be forced to read. It's 566 pages long but the narrative is fluent. Horne obtained impressive access for personal interviews with large numbers of key players. Indeed, he had amazingly privileged interviews with senior figures all the way up to de Gaulle. There's an element of detective work in figuring out what truly happened; and there appears to be true determination to be objective regardless of the scope for participants to want the story to be told with their own slant. Inevitably he struggles a bit with the hopelessly long roll-call of people with important but still minor parts. But in the end the story emerges compellingly and casts a dynamic light upon (1) the absurdity of colonialism (2) specifically the collapse of the Fourth Republic if you did not already have that in good focus (3) the importance of stepping away and leaving former colonies to find their own destiny (4) the folly of attempting to superimpose western values, priorities and attitudes upon people whose roots lead them to think and feel completely differently and (5) the completely negative consequences (aside from the war criminality) of the use of torture.

Among these Horne is particularly lucid on the use of torture. He makes plain that it was used to excellent effect at the tactical level, and indeed for much of the middle-to-late period of the war France had substantially won it at the purely military level thanks to intelligence extracted by torture. But Horne is equally clear that the battle to create a world in which Algerians could be happy under French sovereignty could never be won while anyone who had suffered torture lived to tell the tale, something de Gaulle understood far more clearly than his putsch-prone army.

This is an outstanding volume. It’s a remarkable achievement in a genre of the telling of very recent history where far too many writers inflict their own distortions, wilfully or otherwise. But above all it is a warning to all leaders to keep away from other nations, of whose worlds they are almost always woefully ignorant.

12 people found this helpful

Vincenzo Valentini

50 years ago...very little changed in the minds of the West

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 26 November 2010

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The real meaning and outcome of France colonial rule in Algeria, the events and the ways of Algerian independence are still very sensitive issues in France, as proven by the recent harsh debates on an Algerian movie on the subject of FLN fighters. Speaking with Frenchmen one has at times the impression that they do not speak easily and gladly of this story and that they are all bound to a kind of eerie pact of silence: the feeling is of something very touchy swept hastily under the carpet but still not fully digested.
This book explains more than a thousand television debates and articles the difficult, disturbing and finally deadly relationship between old and new Western colonists and the Islamic world. Two visions of the man and the world that are destined to meet and doing so to collide. Algerian war was a kind of foretaste for many of the things that we nowadays are forced to experience and anticipated the continuing failure of Western rulers to manage social and religious unrest, their tendency to ignore the role played by economic considerations in any demand for self-government, their willingness to impose systems of rules and values alien to these countries. It is somewhat tragic that the country that gave us the Droits de l'Homme and the Enlightenment, failed so terribly to manage and to bring to a less deadly conclusion the self government demands of Algerians. Of course the author masterfully explains the complex weave of forces in France and abroad that confronted themselves on this issue, the Cold War and Panarabism both played an important role in this struggle, but finally it was France itself that decided to let Algeria free and doing so destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of pieds noirs et harkis. The role if the aging president De Gaulle was instrumental in this rip off and his management of the Algerian crisis cannot be considered as one of his highest achievements. Where the book misses some details is in the story of OAS members and their international connections, it is a pity because this is also a foretaste of today's dirty ops proudly presented by Western democracies in Middle East and Asia. This is but a small miss in any case and the book is an absolute read for anybody wishing to get a grasp of Mediterranean history.

14 people found this helpful

J. J. Bradshaw

Has an immediacy and heartfelt passion for his subjects

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 December 2013

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Horne's work has both the advantages and disadvantages of a contemporary or near contemporary work of history in that he writes with a great passion and sympathy for his subject and benefits from access to many of those about whom he writes which gives his book an immediacy and sense of feeling which is hard to replicate in works which are removed from their subject. The downside to this is that over time judgments and historical perspectives change and the post war history of Algeria is scarcely less tragic than the war of independence from France. Horne was a dedicated Francophile yet his love of France and the people of France was never uncritical or unquestioning, the book is at once almost reverential of the French influence in North Africa yet recognised the essential injustice of the colonial regime and he also writes with great warmth of the Algerian's. The book has a sense of fairness and whilst at times he can fall into sounding apologetic for certain actions or policies the overall tone is one of balance. The story is one which is sadly almost unknown to most English speaking people (or indeed, most people not from France or North Africa) and events in Korea and Indochina/Vietnam have always received much greater prominence. This is sad as it is a story which still has resonance and lessons for the world, not least in terms of the dilemma that the actions which could lead to military success were often at odds with the policies which could have led to longer term political/diplomatic progress and perhaps most powerfully the morally corrosive effect upon those of both sides who sought victory at almost any price and saw themselves descend into committing the most awful atrocities. The book has both depth and breadth, combining attention to detail with a broad historical sweep. The sections dealing with the political convulsions in France and the OAS bring an altogether different tragedy from the story of the war itself and in a way is a salutary warning for any country which allows military formations to go out of control of their democratic political masters. Yes, the years have changed some of the judgements which were opined by Horne and in areas it feels a little dated but overall it is a magnificent book that I believe stands above the authors better known works "To Lose a Battle" and "The Price of Glory", very strongly recommended.

One person found this helpful

Nico

Tremendous

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 May 2014

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This is a really tremendous book that is much more than a military history of the Algerian war of independence. Alistair Horne skilfully combines relevant political and social content to provide a wonderfully entertaining and readable account of events both in Algeria and France during the period. This is done so in an impartial manner so you get to understand the weak and vacilitating French Politicians (until De Gaulle came along of course), the frustration and disillusionent of the French Soldier, the fear and hysteria of the Pied-Noir' community, the anger and defiance of the Casbah and the strength and endurance of the Independence movements.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in the history of Algeria.

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