Nearly 91 percent of French voters who cast ballots approved the Évian Accords, ratifying the end of 132 years of colonial rule in Algeria. The referendum followed a war that killed hundreds of thousands and had convulsed French politics, nearly triggering a military coup and toppling the Fourth Republic before Charles de Gaulle brought the conflict to a negotiated close.
The Algerian War, which began in 1954, had become one of the most traumatic conflicts of postwar France, marked by widespread use of torture, the displacement of over a million European settlers known as pieds-noirs, and a level of political violence within France itself that included assassination attempts against President Charles de Gaulle and a rebellion by elements of the French army.
De Gaulle, who had returned to power in 1958 partly on the promise of preserving French Algeria, gradually concluded that continued colonial war was untenable and opened secret negotiations with the Algerian National Liberation Front. Those talks produced the Évian Accords in March 1962, and de Gaulle submitted the agreement to a national referendum on April 8.
The French public, exhausted by nearly eight years of war and its associated terrorism on the home front from the pro-colonial Secret Army Organisation, voted with overwhelming clarity: about 90.7 percent of participating voters approved the accords. Algeria formally declared independence in July 1962, but the transition was marred by chaotic violence and the flight of nearly all the pied-noir population within months, a wrenching end to more than a century of French colonial presence in North Africa.
Key people: Charles de Gaulle