After eight brutal years of guerrilla war, torture, and mass displacement, French negotiators and representatives of Algeria's National Liberation Front signed the Évian Accords, establishing a ceasefire and a path to Algerian independence. The agreement ended one of the 20th century's most violent decolonization struggles, though a referendum and formal independence would follow months later that July.
The Algerian War had torn apart French society as much as it devastated Algeria itself. French forces used systematic torture against FLN suspects, a scandal that split French intellectual and political life, while the FLN carried out its own campaign of bombings and assassinations. Charles de Gaulle, who had returned to power partly to keep Algeria French, gradually concluded that independence was inevitable and necessary.
Secret talks in Évian, a spa town on Lake Geneva, produced an agreement covering a ceasefire, protections for the roughly one million European settlers (pieds-noirs) in Algeria, and continued French access to Saharan oil reserves discovered a few years earlier.
The accords could not prevent a final spasm of violence: the OAS, a militant group of French settlers and soldiers opposed to independence, launched a bombing campaign, and hundreds of thousands of pieds-noirs fled Algeria in the accord's aftermath. Algeria formally became independent on July 5, 1962, but March 18 marked the day the guns, officially, fell silent.
Key people: Charles de Gaulle, Krim Belkacem