oject, not only in Asia but also in the South Seas and in Algeria, right through World War II--indeed, right though the cracks in the European imperialist edifice. The fact that Britain lost its jewel, India, in 1948, might have been instructive, especially sine the principal agent of Indian independence was a man Churchill contemptuously and most unpresciently referred to as a "seditious middle temple lawyer" and "fakir . . . striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal Palace." There was also the example of the mare's nest of geopolitical morality that appeasers and collaborationists such as the Vichy turncoat minister Laval had constructed for the French during World War II (Cole 65 et passim).
The momentum of World War II more generally, as an Allied project of liberation, might have suggested that French colonialism could not long hold after the war. Anglo-American, not French, military forces took North Africa from the Germans and then occupied it after 1942, and in 1941 Free French forces had traded promises of independence to Syria and Lebanon for support against the Axis. But Algeria was France's colonial showcase. Algeria was embedded with France in a deeper and more complex way than was the case with Indochina. Dine (52) cites "the juridical incorporation of Algeria into the body of the French nation in 1848 as three departements--administered, at least in theory, by the Ministry of the Interior, just like any other French province."
Thus it was that in May of 1945, after the Allied victory in Europe, a poorly organized attempt to declare independence in provincial Setif that fostered a Muslim massacre of European settlers was met by "ratissage," or an "indiscriminate" military response from French authorities that suppressed all dissidence and led to 1,800 deaths (Barbour and Brown; Metz) and little international response. Only in Vietnam would the poverty of France's recourse to military solutions be "exposed" (D...