377. Algerian Revolution: The Battle of Algiers (Ep 3)

What really happened during the infamous Battle of Algiers? How did the Algerian War of Independence begin? Who was the radical mastermind who restructured the resistance movement under the noses of the French army? In the third episode of this series, William and Anita discuss the explosive start of the Algerian revolution. They discuss the guerrilla tactics of the FLN, brutal French reprisals, and the legendary female bombers of the Battle of Algiers. Summer sale is here: get an annual Empire Club membership for an extra 20% off with code SUMMER26. That's ad-free listening, early-access, every bonus episode, and full access to our exclusive members' series. Sale ends August 31st, so grab it before summer's over. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [email protected] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Charlie Rodwell Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 2:08Speaker 02

  Well, hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnim.

• 2:12Speaker 03

  And me, William Dribble.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  So this is episode three of our Algeria series. And in this episode, the Algerian revolution begins. So question first of all, how did a clandestine group of Algerian nationalists force the mighty French Republic into an all-out merciless war in the 1950s? This is how the Algerian War of Independence began. It's the night of the 1st of November 1954, or if you prefer, All Saints Night. It's past midnight. In the freezing Aurès Mountains of eastern Algeria, a bus is making its way along a winding mountain road and it is dark. Onboard are two young French schoolteachers, Guy and Pauline Monarot.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  And they're returning from their honeymoon. The bus stops. Armed men have blocked the road. The passengers are ordered off. The Monarots are pulled out. Guy Monarot is shot straight away. Pauline Monarot is shot. Guy dies on the roadside. Pauline, though badly wounded, manages to survive. These are the first European civilian casualties of a war that will last eight years and kill hundreds of thousands of people.

• 3:29Speaker 03

  The Monarot killings were one of around 70 attacks across Algeria that night. Bombs, ambushes, raids on armories and police posts coordinated at midnight across six military zones by the newly-founded Fronte de Libération Nationale, or FLN, as we'll call it for the rest of the podcast, the armed nationalist group that had been formed to fight the French for Algerian independence.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  Now, there's always mythology after a night like this. And in Algerian mythology, it is known as the Night of Blood or Toussaint Rouge. It's remembered as the night a nation rose as one, the dramatic unified opening of a national Liberation struggle.

• 4:13Speaker 03

  The reality, of course, was rather messier. In Algiers, nervous FLN operatives failed to blow up the city gasworks. A planned warehouse fire was abandoned when the cell leader called in sick. The attacks were wildly uneven in execution and many of them failed. The general public actually had no idea that a war had started.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  In our last episode, we did explain how Mohamed Boudièf convened the Committee of the Twenty-Two. Do you remember it sounded like a sales convention in June of 1954, where the neuf historiques, the nine historic leaders, christened the FLN. And then among them, they divided Algeria into six military zones called the vilayas. Now, that was only a few months before the start of the war. Willie, can you just tell me, I mean, what does the FLN look like when we get to November 1954? Because I'm not clear on that.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  No, well, I think no one was, and particularly the French weren't, because they were tiny. They were clandestine, but they were already very ruthless and very motivated. They numbered perhaps a thousand men. They had no fixed bases, no safe areas, no supply lines. And recruitment in the early months was almost entirely through families and personal networks. They were virtually unknown to the wider public. You could people you could absolutely trust because a single informer could wreck the whole project. And one broken cell could lead to an uncovering of a whole network. So the FLN enforced loyalty with a terrible brutality that's important to acknowledge honestly.

• 5:51Speaker 03

  New recruits were sometimes acquired to assassinate a designated target, a young gendarme standing on a corner, for example, or a pro-French official. And they'd have to do this in front of a senior FLN figure, who would just kill the recruit if they even hesitated.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, which all just sounds like it's from The Godfather, you know, like those mafia hits and mafia recruitment and mafia loyalty. So, so Willie, what I'm really keen to know about is what the French reaction is to all of this. Because, you know, it's a nightmare for them, you know, cells just breaking out. No plan, no sort of connection, no way to get into these networks. I know the French historian Benjamin Stora referred to this period up to July 1955 as a phony war, which sort of makes me feel like they're not really taking it as seriously as they should.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  Well, they don't take it seriously and it's not really a nightmare for them because if you are in the main areas of French settlement like Oran or Algiers, you hardly notice anything's changed.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 6:49Speaker 03

  You know, a few small items in the bottom of the newspaper, but it's mainly in the rural hinterland, like where the poor couple got shot, that the early actions take place with any effect. Early on, the French still refer to it as the drôle de révolution, the joke revolution. But the French military commander in Algiers is still dismissing this violence as a tribal flash in the pan in the provinces. And the authorities in Algiers convince themselves that it's a minor plot and that it's probably orchestrated from Cairo, where Ben Boula is sometimes based and where the main support is coming from Nassr's Egypt. In metropolitan France, if you look at

• 7:31Speaker 03

  the newspapers, there's literally not a mention. No one knows anything has happened.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  Genuinely shocked by that, you know, sort of, you know, a young honeymooning couple, you know, you can imagine that would get acres of space. Okay, everyone's playing it down, but I do believe the French government do grasp the severity of the situation because you have the Interior Minister of France in November 1954. He's this 38-year-old socialist politician called François Mitterrand. You may have become familiar with that name.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  You may have heard of him.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  You may have heard of him. He will eventually become the longest-serving president of the Fifth Republic and one of the giants of European post-war politics. But in November 1954, Mitterrand is reacting to the first news of these FLN attacks on All Saints Night. And he sees there is something amiss and something that could grow. And he issues a declaration that will define France's entire subsequent approach to Algeria. He says, Algeria is France. From Flanders to the Congo, there is the law, one single nation, one sole parliament. So his reaction is. Crush it, crush it dead before it starts. I mean, that's, that's what he's saying.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  And that is the reaction once it really gets going. Though at the moment, you know, there's pretty little to crush as far as the French are concerned. But it's this idea that Algeria is France is both the kind of strength and weakness for the French position in Algeria. On one hand, it's, you know, laying down the gauntlet, this is part of our land, we, we're not going to give it up anymore. They're going to give up the, the Seine or Burgundy or Provence or whatever. On the other hand, it puts them into a terrific bind. And this becomes an issue which not only breaks the republic and which casts a shadow over thirty years, but also in, in, in a very

• 9:24Speaker 03

  real way, is still alive in, in the, in the next French election, which is coming up this year with Le Pen's party, which emerges from this war, as we'll see in future episodes. This is something which, while sounding at this point like a declaration of strength, is the kind of red thread that will unravel the whole of the French Republic in due course.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Okay. So I mean, you know, they want to obviously put a, a blanket over it in, in France and not alarm people and say, you know, that we're in control and there is one France and all of the messaging is very clear, don't panic. But in Algeria, where people see what's happening, where they hear about what's happening, I mean, what, what does it look like for them? And what is the kind of reaction that Algerian Muslims face in the wake of these attacks?

• 10:11Speaker 03

  So it's very different if you are a French Muslim peasant up in the mountains of the Orès or the Cabilla Mountains in the east, because now you really are feeling the presence of the FLN who appear in your village at night, demand food and shelter. And then there's always some informer who will tell who gave the food and shelter the following morning. The French will turn up when the daylight comes, they'll arrest, there'll be torture. And so it's becoming an impossible sort of double game. You, you have to face the French during the day and you have to face the FLN at night. And the FLN realises, in a sense, that the more It encourages the French to overreact.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  The more popular their revolution will become, the more alienated the people will come from French rule, the more impossible it will be to maintain French rule.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, go goad them into cruelty and then cruelty will itself inspire a revolution. It's a playbook. I mean, you see these things happening all over the world.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  I covered the Kashmir uprising in the 1990s and it was exactly the same there. You know, the the the revolutionaries would come out at night. They would extract stuff from the villages, expect loyalty and then, you know, there'll be informers turning up, grassing to the government by day and the whole thing would go on. But at this point, it's really, you know, there's one local official estimates the mood at the time and reckons that about 10% of the masses support the French, 10% support the rebels and a massive 80% at this point are still living, hoping that it's not going to touch them and they can just avoid having to make a decision. And the FLN understands this and wants to cast them off the fence into one position or the other.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  So I mean, I guess they're waiting for this moment where it reaches the tipping point, you know, where violence is escalated to the point where actually those people, you know, the prudent expectation group, the fence sitters, if you like, they're going to have to choose a side and they get that moment. That tipping point happens in August 1955. Now, this is one of the worst atrocities committed against French Algerians. The FLN military commander organised a coordinated uprising around the town of Philippeville in August 1955. And what does that mean? That means simultaneous attacks on European civilian communities right across the region. Tell us a little bit about it.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  So this is this is what's known as the Philippeville massacre. It's in August 1955 and it's this that really sets off the the trail of dynamite that leads to the powder keg that is the Battle of Algiers. In the summer of 1955, the FLN military commander in the Wallah of Constantine, a man named Zigoud Youssef, has a theory that the only way to break the deadlock of the phony war is to force a major confrontation so brutal that neutrality will become impossible, exactly as you said. And he has organised a coordinated uprising around the settler town of Philipville in August 1955, simultaneous attacks on European civilian communities across the

• 13:16Speaker 03

  region.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  And the most horrific violence occurs at El Halia. It's a small pyrite mining centre. There are about 130 Europeans, some 2,000 Muslims, living, working together, and they have been for years. And at noon on August 20, after local communications have been quietly cut sometime in the night, Muslim mine workers led coordinated groups from house to house mercilessly killing European men, women and children. And what makes this worse is when you hear some of the details of this, because the attackers, as they're sort of hacking away at these, you know, families, are urged on by chanting women.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  And in surrounding towns, we learn that local religious leaders are broadcasting calls to arms and praising the attacks. I mean, is it wrong to say it's almost like a jihadi cry that's going on here?

• 14:14Speaker 03

  It's exactly a jihadi cry. That's exactly the description. No, there is now, for the first time, a stirring among the Ulema, among the religious community. This genie's out of the bottle. This is something that will haunt independent Algeria as well as the Battle of Algiers. But at this point, it's still largely secular. But you do have on this night of the Philipville massacre, for the first time, the mullahs calling for the minarets, calling for blood. Now, Alistair Horn, who's the great historian of this in English, argues that the details of the event are the key to the potent and profound effect, that's what he calls, the Philipville massacre was to have on the Pierre de Noire and indeed on the whole subsequent history of the Algerian war. And he's right.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  I think 102 Europeans die across the region. And it's a massive shock to the settler community who have been, you know, dismissive in general of the Algerians and the Arabs, and particularly dismissive of this joke uprising. Now, suddenly, a hundred people are dead and they realise it's serious. And in order to make sure that it doesn't happen again, they decide to do the same back to the Algerians, but on a much greater scale.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  Do the same, but but more. I mean, the French reprisals were catastrophic. You've got the army, you've got the police, you've got settler vigilante groups all acting in concert. I don't think it's the wrong word, but to execute thousands of Muslims.

• 15:40Speaker 03

  It's exactly the right word. That's exactly what happens. They are their executions.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  And and these may be the people who were involved in those attacks or anybody, you know. So at El Haliya, you've got eighty Algerians who are shot on the spot. In Philipville, the army herds hundreds of Muslims into the local football stadium and just executes them. So no due process, no trial, no finding out whether they're involved or not. This is collective punishment on a on a grand scale.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  So, again, very much like the Israelis in Gaza, there is a deliberate determination that, you know, for every one death on their side, they're going to make a hundred more casualties. And the death toll at the end of this round is between, well, the lowest estimate is twelve hundred and the highest estimate is twelve thousand. And and the distance between those two figures is a measure of how little is done openly. A lot of it's done in the night, you know, bodies are buried and disposed where they can't be found. And it tells you about, in a sense, the polarisation of the war, that, you know, between twelve hundred and twelve thousand.

• 16:43Speaker 03

  But historians agree that, you know, the sheer scale of the blind French revenge forces those eighty percent of Algerians who had hoped to sit on the fence. This is the moment that they finally choose to change sides and they commit themselves to the revolution and to independence. This is the thing that changes everything.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  I mean, and it always works like this. If you do collective punishment and if you if you kill people in such large numbers, what ends up happening? Is that you will have every family who knows somebody who has been killed. And therefore they're in it. Now they're in it because they've lost someone that they love, right?

• 17:18Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  So, so you could say, you know, Zigeor Yusuf's strategy has worked with an extraordinary cold, calculating precision. He, he draws the line and he draws the line in blood between the colonizers and the colonized. But what he's trying to do more than anything else is signal to France that this is no phony war. If you think this is a phony war, a joke revolution, think again because we're here and we're here in great numbers.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  Even the French governor general at the time, Jacques Chousteau, admits that a complete abyss, as he calls it, has been dug between the two communities that he's governing and that it is filled by what he calls rivers of blood. This is a phrase that is born in the 1950s. The conflict was rapidly escalating now into an all out merciless war. But to sustain this violent momentum, the FLN could no longer operate as a fractured regional insurgency.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. So where do they go from here? I mean, that's a really good question and we'll try and answer it after the break. We're going to look at how a ruthless political mastermind takes control of the FLN and restructures what has gone before into a rebellion, a all out, full blown rebellion, right under the noses of the French military.

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• 19:44Speaker 03

  Welcome back. Well, in the summer of 1956, the FLN leadership does something of quite extraordinary audacity. They hold a major conference and it's in the heart of French-controlled territory in a forester's cottage, deep in the Chester Forest of the Kalbilla Mountains in the Sumam Valley. And the senior leadership doesn't just sort of, you know, meet overnight quickly and sort of shake each other's hands. They convene for 20 days under the noses of a supposedly pacified French army. Now, although the rebels get away with that, they don't get away with the next thing, which is something we referred to in our Suez series.

• 20:28Speaker 03

  Do you remember, Anita, where we talked about the hijacking by the French government of a plane in which Ahmed Ben Boula is flying? There is intelligence that he's in the air. This is the exiled leader of the FLN. There are four of them: Hossein Ahmed, Mohamed Boudaif, Mohamed Kida, and Musafa Lasharif. And they've been in Rabat in King Mohammed the Fifth of Morocco's conference in Tunis, wanting to internationalize the Algerian question. And this is obviously a very important moment politically for them, and they all go there. And they then fly back on a flight from Rabat to Tunis.

• 21:11Speaker 03

  And they fly via Palma de Mallorca to avoid French airspace over Algeria, and they think themselves safe. But French military intelligence have been tracking them. And basically, to cut a long story short, we told this story in full in the Suez episode, the French aircraft force the Algerian leader's plane down, and they arrest them all.

• 21:34Speaker 03

  So on one hand, you've got the internal leadership, meeting in the forest and getting away with it, directly under French noses. And you've got the external leadership, who've been caught in a single go and are now popped in a French prison. We should talk about the leader of the event in the forest.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Ramdani Abani, who is a Kabyle, he's an indigenous Berber. He's really ordinary background to him. Son of an ordinary family, he's worked as a municipal clerk, he's spent years in French prisons where he actually takes the time to educate himself, reading Marx, Lenin and Mein Kampf. Equal opportunity dictators are available. I mean, he's a short, chubby-faced man. He's got sort of those lively eyes.

• 22:22Speaker 03

  He looks quite tough in the picture I've got in front of me there.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  I mean, he looks, it looks like a mugshot. And in the mugshot, you sort of get an idea of what he's really like, because he's said to have this ferocious intellect, but a really ferocious temper as well. And it's made worse, we later understand, by severe stomach ulcers. So you know, you don't want to be basically in a bad mood most of the time. Some contemporaries compare him to Robespierre, such was the terror that he inspires. And others say, actually, you know what, he's Algeria's Mao, that's who he is. He's certainly the first person in the FLN's leadership who thought like a politician rather than a guerrilla leader. And that's very significant.

• 23:03Speaker 03

  So what he achieves at Sumar in that wooded valley that month, shapes the entire revolution. He reorganizes the entire FLN. He structures it into a kind of military organization with clear chains of command. And each chain of command has its boss, someone who gets the rank of Colonel, explicitly to prevent any single military figure from accumulating power to dominate the revolution. And also presumably to mean that if the French do capture anyone, they're only capturing one

• 23:35Speaker 02

  Tiny part of it.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  Chain of command, yeah, and not, and not the whole leadership. And he imposes two rules that define the FLN's character. Civilian political leadership holds supremacy over the military. And the fighters in Algeria, the ones bleeding on the ground, hold supremacy over the exiled leaders in Tunis and Cairo. Now, as most of them are now in a French prison, that is, that's something that is very easy to establish. This is a huge coup because people like Ben Boula, who've been left stranded outside Algeria, are the main founders of the movement. And so in a sense, it's a kind of internal putsch.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the movement's grown bigger than them. And they're, you know, they may be the historique, but they also remain in history because now the future is with somebody else.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  What I think is really interesting is that while Abani is restructuring the movement in the mountains, you also have the FLN doing other things that, you know, perhaps those in prison don't even know about, have no idea about until they read it in the newspapers because they open a new front in the city. Now, you said this earlier on that, you know, people weren't taking it seriously at all because it was happening in the mountains, it was happening in rural areas, you know, people were losing their lives on dark, twisty roads in a mountain pass. But now the FLN brings the violence to the cities. And this is where we arrive at what arguably is the most famous chapter of this entire conflict. And it's immortalized in the movie that we have talked about a number of times since

• 25:11Speaker 02

  starting this series, that 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers.

• 25:16Speaker 03

  We should say, if you haven't seen this movie, it is a great watch. And it's very long, but it is completely gripping. It's a classic. It won the Leandor at Venice that year. And it's one of the great political movies of all time. And so if you haven't seen it, go straight away and watch it. Now, this is an important moment because I think far more than the normal history perhaps acknowledges, it has been, up to this point, a rural movement. My friend Farah, when I was talking to her for the bonus episode, felt very strongly that the rural uprising at the beginning had not been given its due. And it's partly because I think, you know, the movie version is so firmly Focused on the city.

• 26:00Speaker 03

  But this is the moment that this city, the Algiers Casbah, now becomes the main centre of attention. So it all begins in June nineteen fifty six. And the French authorities guillotine two FLN prisoners in Algiers. The FLN responds by shooting European civilians in the streets. Then European extremists answer by planting a massive bomb in the Casbah, the densely populated Muslim quarter at the top of the city, right up at the top of the mountain, killing up to seventy civilians. It was this bomb that convinced the FLN leadership to make the decision that would define the next year and indeed the subsequent revolution.

• 26:45Speaker 03

  They would take the war into the city, into the European quarters, into the spaces where the international press was watching.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  So the military commander who's in charge of this operation is a man called Sadi Yassif. And he's a former baker, but very, very street smart. That's the thing to know about him. He's a brilliant urban tactician. And he joins the FLN in nineteen fifty four. So, you know, one of the first signups. And he's the one who's going to transform everything, isn't he? Because he sees the Casbah, Willie, as a fortress. More than anything else, this is a fortress that can be protected.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  So you should really understand the topography to understand this. Algeria is obviously a port. The port is at the bottom of the hill. There's an area around that that is the posh French area with the boulevard and bits that look like a slightly orientalised version of Paris. You then have above this on the mountain, this this Casbah, this bazaar with with flat roofs, mud houses, higgledy piggledy up the hill, right up to the top of the mountain. And this is transformed into a fortress of secret passages, underground bomb factories and hidden rooms. There are no French living there. It's just Algerians. And so it's the ideal command centre for the new revolution that's moved to the city. And his clever move.

• 28:08Speaker 03

  And his masterstroke is to recruit a network of young Algerian women who, at this point in history, are still, you know, in traditional dress and and very much sort of home-based. And contrary to everything the French expect, these become the most famous operatives of this entire liberation war, the female bombers.

• 28:29Speaker 02

  So, you know, I've I've seen a photograph of four of these women and, you know, what, they could be out on a picnic. This is the the real cognitive dissonance about this photograph is they are smiling, they're not dressed in veils, they're dressed in skirts, long skirts, conservative skirts and and polo necks. And they're laughing together, except one of them happens to be holding what looks like a a machine gun. So so this is a network of of young women. Some of them are from the middle classes, some of them are from daughters of the Casbah. So it's like, you know, crosses across economic threshold. The one that's really important too, we should talk about is Zora Drif. Um, and and you also have, I I think, shall we talk about three of them? Zora Drif, I I'm completely obsessed with.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  Zora Drif is still alive. I've heard her being interviewed.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  So if I I I I did the Google on her and I can't believe she's still alive and talks about these days, we're actually quite fondly. Jamila Wiyad is is another, Samia Lakhdari is another. And what they do is they answer the call. So if they were wearing traditional veils, they put them aside and they start dressing in these sort of European styles. So that the French military, you know, once they get to a French military checkpoint, they look at them and say, you know, these are not, they're not like those Muslims, they're fine, let them through. And that's why how they get through checkpoints and they are carrying deadly explosives in pretty beach bags, you know, as if they're going to go and sunbathe somewhere or read a book. And that's how they are able to cause such chaos and carnage.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  It's a masterstroke in guerrilla warfare, but it has a it has a bloody toll, doesn't it?

• 30:04Speaker 03

  It certainly does. And this is one of the most famous scenes in the movie, uh, where it is very exactly reproduced. On the 30th of September 1956, three enormous bombs go off in crowded European establishments in Algiers, the Milk Bar, the Cafeteria and the Air France Terminal. And it's the 22-year-old, very glamorous Zoradreef, who plants the bomb in the Milk Bar. And this is, you know, a popular café filled with mothers and children. And it's a completely non-military target.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  It's the softest of soft targets and there's something quite horrific about thinking of a woman doing that to other women who are just, you know, sort of feeding their kids on that day.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  She walks in, she buys a milkshake, she puts a bag under her table and then she walks out and a minute later the bomb goes off. To get out, she even flirts with the French Guard to pass through the military barricade. And years later, after spending five years in French prisons, she would go on to become a successful lawyer and Secretary General of the Algerian Ecole Nationale Dommunistation. So she's, I mean, she's now a famous figure in Algiers and regarded as one of these sort of, you know, iconic revolutionaries. But it's, there's no question that this is a bloody event.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you know, actually, when we were chatting about this with our producer, she said, it sounds a lot like, you know, the troubles in Northern Ireland where those who, you know, might have made bombs, planted bombs, shot guns, then end up being the establishment and the political figureheads of, of what comes next. But, but back to that attack in the Milk Bar, we should tell you what happens. Three people are killed and over 50 are injured on that day in September. The FLN leadership has circulated a directive stating explicitly, "A bomb causing the death of 10 people is the equivalent on a psychological level to the loss of a French battalion." So, I mean, if that is explicitly what they want to do, you know, cause psychological

• 32:08Speaker 02

  distress on that level, they want to strike terror, but they would reject, Willie, you know, any kind of terminology saying they were terrorists, you know, even if they're saying, "We want to strike terror" because they would, what, characterize themselves as freedom fighters.

• 32:20Speaker 03

  This was something that my friend Farah... Said she wrestled with as a Berber Algerian growing up in Paris where following Sarkozy's changes to the curriculum, these figures were explicitly referred to as terrorists in French school textbooks. And she said, these are people she'd grown up with all her life being being heard of as, as you know, the great iconic freedom fighters, just like people in India, you know, remember Subash Chandra Bose, who also embraced violence. And some of these women, you know, are not just figureheads. They are at the center of things. And this is also true of Jamila Bouhir. She's born in the Casper and she becomes a messenger. She uses her good looks

• 33:01Speaker 03

  and her beach bag and her, her low cut French dress to pass messages around Algeria. And at one point, she is captured and they find on her person a correspondence from Yasef. So this central figure, and this is found. When she is caught, she tries to escape, she's shot, she's taken to a hospital where she's operated on, there's a wound to her shoulder, and out of the hospital, she's then taken directly to a torture chamber. And she is brutally interrogated. And she's given electric shocks. We know all this because she writes a very full description

• 33:46Speaker 03

  of it.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 33:47Speaker 03

  Before she is sentenced to death. And she describes electric shocks.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:51Speaker 03

  Her wound deliberately torn open, her arm forced in positions that aggravated the injury, beatings, cold water in winter, and this bath that they, you know, a form of waterboarding that they drown you in. And she will not reveal Yasef Saudi's whereabouts, not one detail.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  But what makes this really extraordinary is that, you know, the torture is one thing, but when she's sentenced to death, it's the kind of people who actually come and stand by her side. And I think scholars have called this the Jamila phenomenon, because as soon as people heard about, you know, what she'd gone through, what she was saying she was doing it for, you know, the freedom of her people, you've got people like Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. And basically, the entire French intellectual left, who rally to her side and say, you know what? You cannot punish this woman for doing something which they say is heroic. She's fighting for her people. She's fighting against oppression. So, you know, she's got quite the fan club.

• 34:51Speaker 03

  I don't think it's so much that it's a fan club. What Saad and de Beauvoir are objecting to is that the French are using what they call Nazi tactics.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  They also sympathise with the fact that she was doing something from a conviction point of view. I mean, they do say that as well.

• 35:08Speaker 03

  They do.

• 35:09Speaker 02

  They do.

• 35:09Speaker 03

  But their focus of attack is that we French revile the Nazis for using torture and extreme interrogation. And we are behaving like the Gestapo. That's the line that the French left tend to take.

• 35:24Speaker 02

  And that's a very powerful thing to say in France because France still has very fresh memories of what the Gestapo did. You know, let's not forget.

• 35:30Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  So that's going to hit all sorts of nerves. So tell us how the French really respond to this bombing campaign.

• 35:38Speaker 03

  So it's brutal. In January 1957, with the FLN calling for a general strike to coincide with the United Nations debate in Algeria, the French government takes a step that would decide the war's moral outcome, even as it won the military one. They handed police powers over to a guy called General Jacques Massou and his paratroopers. And that is the story that we'll be telling next time, and it's a super brutal one.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  So that's next. The battle for Algiers escalates. More stories of institutional torture, military mutinies, a dramatic collapse of the French Republic on the road to Algerian independence. You can't wait for that. You know what you have to do? Join our club. But till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Anand.

• 36:27Speaker 03

  And goodbye from me, William Derumpel.

• 36:36Speaker 03

  A quick word for our Empire listeners. For a limited time only, we are running a discount on the Empire Club.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  We totally are. It's our summer sale. It's live now. And from now until the end of August, all you need to do is head to empirepoduk.com, empirepoduk.com. Use the code SUMMER26, SUMMER26. You get an extra 20% off annual membership.

• 37:01Speaker 03

  This sizzling summer, we would love you to join our Empire Club. And we know you will love being a member of our community. You'll get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series and much more.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  And your summer trips provide you that perfect opportunity to dive into our archives and catch up on all the exclusive content you might have missed before joining. So you can listen to our interview with Yong Chang, our Willie's fabulous bonus on Fermier's Girl with the Pearl Earring, and our exclusive four-part member series covering the scandal that shaped partition.

• 37:36Speaker 03

  So make the most of the deal before it ends at the end of August 2026. The code is SUMMER26 to be used on our annual membership at empirepoduk.com. We'd love you to become a member of our club and it's brilliant, even if we say so ourselves.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 38:23Speaker 05

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, do you want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing.

• 38:37Speaker 05

  We would need to understand the policy context. All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO. A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia? Yes.

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