On the night of October 31 into November 1, 1954, the newly formed National Liberation Front (FLN) launched dozens of coordinated bombings and attacks against French police, military, and infrastructure across Algeria. The uprising, remembered as 'Toussaint Rouge' (Red All Saints' Day), marked the start of the Algerian War of Independence, an eight-year conflict marked by brutal counterinsurgency and terrorism that ultimately ended 132 years of French colonial rule in 1962.
Just after midnight, FLN cells struck roughly 70 targets simultaneously across Algeria, from police barracks to communications lines, using crude weapons and improvised explosives. The attacks killed several people, including a French schoolteacher, and the French government responded by rushing troops and declaring the movement's aims illegitimate, dismissing Algeria's independence movement as mere banditry rather than a genuine national struggle.
What began as a fragmented and militarily weak insurgency escalated over eight years into a war that would consume hundreds of thousands of lives, topple France's Fourth Republic, and bring Charles de Gaulle back to power in 1958. French forces used torture, forced relocations, and mass internment in their counterinsurgency, tactics later documented in works like Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers.
The war ended with the Évian Accords in 1962, granting Algeria independence and triggering the exodus of nearly a million pieds-noirs, European settlers who had lived in Algeria for generations. Toussaint Rouge, the 'Red All Saints Day,' is still commemorated in Algeria as the war's founding moment, a night when a scattering of poorly armed rebels set in motion the unraveling of a French empire.