Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency

The violent struggle for Algerian independence that erupted in 1954 fractured France’s empire and pushed the nation to the brink of civil war. Over its eight-year span, the war destroyed the legitimacy of colonial rule, rewrote the rules of international diplomacy, and helped launch the Third Worldist political project. And quietly, outside the spotlight cast by the more visible drama of these changes, the conflict also transformed the nature of modern warfare. The French officers and generals who struggled to contain the Algerian revolution did not do so in a vacuum. Shaken by the defeats of the Second World War and Indochina and confronted with a wave of revolutionary movements across the globe, French strategists aimed not just to counter their adversary the National Liberation Front (FLN), but to forge a new model of warfare better suited to the exigencies of the post-1945 world. Convinced that they faced a new era of global insurgency, French commanders set out to counter it by revolutionizing Algerian society. They drew inspiration from the tactics of communist guerillas as well as the promises of modernization theory and postwar social research. Armed with these insights, the French Army pioneered new techniques of surveillance and control that overflowed the boundaries of conventional combat. Warfare became more than just armed conflict: it became an exercise in social engineering.

Revolutionary Warfare offers a new narrative of the Algerian War and a new interpretation of the its global significance by tracing the origins and impact of this shift. While the army’s role in the conflict has long drawn the interest of scholars, most have focused on the political ruptures the war provoked: the collapse of the French Fourth Republic, the public outcry over the army’s use of torture, and the army putsch in 1961. These events are undoubtedly important, but the attention devoted to them has left the genealogy, strategic aims, and actual effects of the French war effort in Algeria largely unexamined. In 1945, the French Army responded to anti-colonial protest with brutal repression, killing tens of thousands in the regions of Sétif and Guelma. Ten years later, military commanders insisted that such repression could only succeed if paired with a campaign of armed social work. Hygiene and medical aid efforts, youth sports and education programs, and psychological warfare campaigns all attempted to win the loyalty of Algerians by transforming their daily habits and inserting them into new social structures tied more closely to the French state. By reconstructing the social, cultural, and institutional contexts that gave rise to these programs, this book reveals that French authorities did not attempt merely to preserve colonial rule unchanged, but instead sought to forge a new colonial society capable of enduring the challenges of decolonization. Revolutionary Warfare departs from conventional narratives by asking why, in a conflict also defined by forms of violence like torture and internment, armed social work came as never before to occupy such a central place in military strategy.

In answering this question, Revolutionary Warfare elucidates the connections between the Algerian War and the broader historical developments of global decolonization and the Cold War. As they honed their operational doctrines in Algeria, French military leaders looked abroad: not only to understand the war there, in North Africa, but to promote their own practices as a universal response to the social upheavals of the era. French officers eagerly shared their theories and practices with military officers from other nations such as Britain, the United States, Argentina, and even Iran, arguing that ‘modern warfare’ was as much about controlling civilian populations as defeating the enemy. In the process, they helped create a form of warfare that came to dominate the Cold War: counterinsurgency. The effects of this transformation were profound. The French Army doctrines that emerged from the Algerian War not only shaped conflicts of the Cold War era but continue to exert a deep and lasting impact on contemporary counterinsurgency.

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Praise for Revolutionary Warfare

“Revolutionary Warfare is a groundbreaking work on an overlooked aspect of the Algerian War: the extent to which the French military used novel strategies and tactics to fight a '"revolutionary'" war. Peterson combines wide-ranging and meticulous research with crisp, vivid prose to provide a compelling account of modern counterinsurgent warfare.”

—Mary Lewis, author of Divided Rule

“With Revolutionary Warfare, Terrence Peterson shows how the French pacification model placed a 'modernizing mission' at the heart of military doctrine. This significant and original historical analysis is a 'must-read' for scholars, military officers, and students of empire, military history, and the Cold War.”

—Brian Drohan, author of Brutality in an Age of Human Rights

“At the heart of Peterson’s book is a counterargument to traditional narratives of postwar social reform. The very same rhetoric that justified the construction of a supposed top-down progressive modernity after 1945 was simultaneously used to justify the entrenchment of colonial rule in North Africa. As Peterson reminds us, ‘the modernizing project at the heart of postwar reconstruction offered a compelling framework to understand and counter the collapse of colonial order.’”

—Charlie Taylor, for Jacobin magazine