The best books about Algeria

Not a book that covers the legion directly but the war in Algeria is a big part of the Legions history, and notably the Legion’s 2e régiment étranger de parachutistes. The Algerian War lasted from 1954 to 1962. It came close to provoking a civil war on French soil. For those interested in the Putsch, then get into this book. More than a million Muslim Algerians died in the conflict and many European settlers were driven into exile. Above all, the war was marked by the unholy marriage of revolutionary terror, and repressive torture. 

This is an astonishing memoir, told by one of the women bombers, Zohra Drif, so memorably portrayed in Gillo Pontecorvo’s film Battle of Algiers. A retrospective account, first published in French in 2013 to great acclaim and great controversy, Drif explains her motivations in clear and direct prose. She traces why and how she becomes a member of the National Liberation Front, willing to go to the most extreme lengths to liberate her country from colonial oppression. As such this memoir is full of telling historical details, not least in terms of the daily drip-drip violence of settler colonialism and the huge mirror violence this engendered. More specifically, this memoir provides us with a remarkable insight into the thoughts and emotions of the Battle of Algiers in 1956 and 1957, when small tightly organised groups of FLN fighters confronted the French paratroopers in the Casbah of Algiers: a key… show more.

A History of Algeria by British historian James McDougall is one of the most original books I have read on Algeria. It takes a fresh new look at the history of contemporary Algeria and avoids the classic chronological approach. The style is exquisite, and the scientific rigor is impeccable. It is a must-read for anyone who wants to know more about the history of Algeria, and Algerians. 

In this book, Werenfels explains how elite dynamics and tactics work in the Algerian political system and how they have led to the lack of significant political change since the country returned to the democratic process in 1995. Werenfels analyses the coping mechanisms of the highly opaque authoritarian elite in a shifting local and global environment building on evidence from extensive research. This book planted the seed of an idea for what the topic of my own book would be and how I wanted to structure it. 

I read voraciously as a kid and this is one of those early books that influenced me most.

Once I’d started writing fiction—late, in my thirties—I focused on mavericks and oddballs. They don’t match our familiar categories. They’re exotic - richly different. They may have intriguing and startling inner lives. They have a deal to say about identity, sense of self, and motive. They also highlight convention, albeit in negative image. And they share a stance with writers themselves, who are often detached, peering in on life from the outside. 

It might have been many other writers, but it was Camus (through The Outsider and The Fall) who first impressed me with confessional voice and narration. It’s all established in the opening lines, slapping you with Meursault’s chilling, oddball indifference. “My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.”

Cushny wanted to join the royal air force but was barred due to his eyesight. Instead he joined up with the French foreign legion in Algeria. He barely escaped with his life after serving in one of the fiercest moments in its history, the 1920 wars against moroccan separatists and berbers. It paints a shocking portrait of service in the legion.

This book begins with cholera and the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and vampire novels, and then moves forward in time to examine the longstanding continued use of epidemic disease as a metaphor to describe political revolt and terror. Kolb argues that the colonial state has long positioned itself as a hygienic "doctor" treating political "disease," and shows clearly why understanding political activity within the frame of disease is so damaging. Moving through the mid-twentieth century with Camus and Algeria, to Rushdie, 2001, and the shameful history of the US torture memo, Kolb's argument is both historically sweeping and persuasive.   

For most of us, the greatest enemy isn’t from without, but from within. This is true today and was just as true nearly two millennia ago when Saint Augustine of Hippo wrote his Confessions, the first autobiography. His struggles with sin and vice should be relatable to us all, especially his difficulty in abandoning his worldly desires. Would most of us be so brave as to abandon our wants for something far greater?

This is a powerful memoir. First published in French in 2016, one year after Mokhtar Mokhtefi’s death, it is an eyewitness account of twentieth-century Algeria, tracing his political journey from a poor village south of Algiers, through to the French secondary education, one of the few Muslims to do so, and his eventual engagement in the FLN in 1957. Graphically portraying the anger and disaffection that drives Algerians to rebel against French rule, the book is equally unsparing about the divisions and authoritarianism which riddle the National Liberation Front and shape post-independence Algeria. Beautifully translated by his widow, the writer and anti-imperialist activist Elaine Mokhtefi. 

This is not only a beautifully written book, it is an important one. Why? Because it poses challenging questions about the promise of post-independence freedom for Algerian women through a collection of short stories written between 1959 and 1978. First published in French in 1980, the writing style is at once innovative, lyrical, and unsettling as Assia Djebar explores the condition of Algerian women across the pre-colonial, colonial and immediate post-colonial periods. The inspiration for the book is Eugène Delacroix’s 1834 painting of women in an Algerian harem because, as Djebar explains in the post-face, this picture leads her straight to the conundrum of 1970s Algeria: “What would Delacroix see if he entered into contemporary Algerian apartments?” And for her the depressing conclusion is that he would still find women locked up and shut away just as in the 1830s. One of the most significant voices to emerge from Algeria,… show more.

Psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, Frantz Fanon is born in Martinique in 1925 and comes to work in French Algeria in 1953 as a doctor in a hospital in Blida, just south of Algiers. Angry at the way in which treatment of Algerian patients is shot through with institutionalised racism, Fanon resigns his post in 1956 and joins the FLN in Tunisia. Working as a journalist, his writings are a piercing attack on French colonialism which feed directly into A Dying Colonialism. Published in 1959, the fifth year of the Algerian Revolution, each chapter analyses how the liberation struggle is transforming Algerian society at every level, from attitudes to technology and medicine through to the role of women—perspectives that decisively frame Gillo Pontecorvo’s depiction of the Algerian War in his 1966 cinematic masterpiece Battle of Algiers. 

Fanon dies of cancer two years later, shortly before independence, but this book, translated… show more.

This was ‘the book’ that ultimately led to my joining the Legion to attain the 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment (2e régiment étranger de parachutistes). 

I had the distinct honour to interview Mr. Simon Murray, and discuss his meaningful book. Mr. Murray's compelling first-hand account of his time with the REP during the Franco-Algerian war (1960s) is the example of what a Legionnaire represents. Mr. Simon Murray, CBE is a British Hong Kong-based businessman, adventurer, and author.

For decades, Holocaust denial was widespread in Arab countries. That’s beginning to change, and Sansal’s harrowing novel – inspired in part by a Nazi officer who escaped to Algeria and became a hero in the war for independence – aids in writing that history back into consciousness. We gain extraordinary intimacy with two brothers as they contend in different ways with the challenges of North African immigrant life in France, the massacre by the Algerian military that claims the lives of their parents, and the discovery of their father’s horrific past. Sansal was attacked for comparing Islamist fundamentalism to the Holocaust and for visiting Israel, but I think it’s clear his intent is to condemn any ideology based on an unyielding and violent intolerance of difference.   

This is one of my all-time favorites. One of those books that you read every other year or so.

For me, this story is the peak of the existentialistic movement or awakening or whatever it was. Alienation par excellence. Mersol is a very strange man.

He is a stranger in his own society, unable to relate to other people or function properly. I don’t know about you, but I felt strange as a kid and as a teenager. I felt different. That feeling has faded but not gone away.

Reading about someone you can understand or relate to can be both satisfying and scary, even painful – especially if that person is as strange as Mersol.

But why is Mersol so “strange”? Is something wrong with him? Or is he just trying to cope in a cold and hostile World?

Is he a wrongdoer or a victim? Human or a… show more.

One of my favorite books of its kind and I do not think I have read a better book about this topic ever since. It explains the critical role that the military plays in stabilizing authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Algeria, and until recently, Turkey. It also analyses how informal politics can restrict formal democratic institutions. In this book, Cook perfectly grasps how the military works in these countries and explains it in a clear and accessible style. The book is simply captivating and a must-read. 

Owen White’s excellent book has given Algerian wine the place it deserves in the wine history of both Algeria and France. Wine production, introduced to Algeria by French settlers in the late 1800s, was an anomaly because the majority Muslim population of the colony did not drink. But it became essential to the French wine industry because it was commonly blended with the then-anemic wines of southern France to make wines with colour and strength. Even so, many French wine producers regarded Algeria as a rival and there was a constant tension between producers who needed Algerian wine and those who resented it. It was resolved when Algeria won independence from France and the wine industry there went into steep decline. 

In this book, Lowi examines why Algeria's domestic political economy disintegrated in the mid-1980s and how the regime eventually reclaimed power and hegemony. Miriam Lowi discusses the significance of leadership decisions for political outcomes and extends her theory to explain the diversity in stability among oil-exporting states in response to economic shocks. Comparing Algeria to Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia, she inquires as to why certain regimes fail and endure regime change while others remain stable or are able to regain stability after a time of turmoil.

I like this book because it is based on a qualitative investigation into the politics of authoritarian states. It contends that political outcomes in dictatorships are mostly the result of relations between leaders and elites, and the internal structures that influence the dynamics of these relations. The book analyses the differences between several authoritarian regimes and their political ramifications. Process in personalist, military, one-party, monarchical, and semi-authoritarian regimes are examined. The book explains what dictatorship entails and how authoritarian politics function. 

Discovered and first published by W.H. Ainsworth, ‘Ouida’ – named from a childhood mispronunciation of ‘Louise’ – went on to become a prolific and bestselling novelist. Her style was melodramatic, intense, and bodice-ripping, her novels usually set against a society or military background. She wrote forty-five novels, Under Two Flags being the most successful. She remained popular until the early 1890s and, like Ainsworth, was granted a Civil List pension for her services to literature. Also like Ainsworth, she is not much read nowadays. In the novel, the profligate hero fakes his own death to avoid gambling debts and exiles himself to Algeria, joining the Chasseurs d’Afrique, the forerunner of the French Foreign Legion. A long way from the moralising tone of much Victorian fiction, ‘Ouida’ always keeps it racy and swashbuckling. 

This intensely personal diary conveys the savage day-to-day reality of this colonial conflict like no other and is a must-read for anyone interested in Algerian perspectives. By November 1954, the moment when the National Liberation Front (FLN) launches the armed national liberation struggle that will achieve independence eight years later, Mouloud Feraoun is already a very well-established novelist, writing while simultaneously working in the French education administration in French Algeria. Through his journal entries, therefore, he tries to make sense of the cycles of violence and counter-violence as they unfold around him which means that the diary is not a dry, detached account.

It is written in the very eye of the storm and brilliantly conveys how ordinary Algerians sought to navigate one of the most brutal episodes of the whole decolonsation process. Assassinated by a right-wing terrorist group, the Secret Army Organisation (OAS), just days before the official cease-fire… show more.