The Knife, The Bomb, And the Spoken Word: Psychological Warfare And the Origins Of French Counterinsurgency In Algeria, 1954-1962

Abstract: In November 1954, French Algeria erupted in violence.  Confronted with a growing nationalist revolution, French authorities turned to not only to repression, but to a radical program of social reform aimed at capturing Algerian Muslims’ hearts and minds.  Why, beginning in the 1950s, did the French Army come to see its task not only as conventional combat, but also social engineering?  Historians often focus on the violence employed by the French Army during the war, but in so doing, they have missed both the full scope and the novelty of the French state’s strategy of “Pacification.”  Drawing on archival research and oral interviews, I show that French commanders did not simply seek to preserve colonial rule, but to radically remake Algerian society along French lines.  French civil and military leaders sought to discover an alternative model of decolonization –one capable of immunizing Algeria against subversive Cold War threats and guaranteeing its future as part of France.  In the process, they transformed the norms of modern warfare, and laid the foundations of the postcolonial relationships between Europe and the Muslim world.

About the Speaker: Terrence Peterson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC for 2015-2016, where he is working on the development of French and international counterinsurgency theories during the period of decolonization.  He earned a PhD in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015.  Entitled “Counterinsurgent Bodies: Social Welfare and Psychological Warfare in French Algeria, 1956-1962,” his dissertation examines the French Army’s efforts to counter a nationalist revolution by combining population development projects and mass psychology techniques to ‘modernize’ Algerian Muslims and remake them in the image of Frenchmen.  Fulbright grantee to France for the year of 2012-2013, his current research focuses on the intersections between the Cold War, decolonization conflicts, and the development of counterinsurgency doctrines.  In addition to several articles under way, his article “The ‘Jewish Question’ and the ‘Italian Peril’: Vichy, Italy, and the Jews of Tunisia, 1940-1942” appeared in the Journal of Contemporary History in April 2015.