The Suez and Algeria Problem as One: France and the FLN Contending with the Suez Crisis and its Immediate Aftermath
By Isa Rosario-Blake, University of Chicago
This article appeared in CJFP's Winter 2024 publication.
North Africa was changing rapidly in the year 1956. In March, both Morocco and Tunisia were granted independence from France. In July, the President of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser announced that he would be nationalizing the Suez Canal, throwing the West into a “crisis” that would be theorized and analyzed by international policy specialists for decades to come. The Algerian War of Independence is typically dated to 1954, when the military branch of the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties (MTLD), known as the National Liberation Army (ALN), split off into the National Liberation Front (FLN), formed by Aït Ahmed, Mohammed Khider, and Ahmed Ben Bella, among others. They desired a new strategic approach focused on targeting the international stage, and all three would go on to be key to the FLN’s diplomatic strategy. This paper will begin with a review of the existing analysis of French experience of the Suez Crisis and then the FLN’s. An analysis of relevant primary literature divided by each actor will follow, but they will ultimately be analyzed together, due to the interconnectedness of the aggravations and diplomatic efforts at this time. There is a divide in the secondary literature between literature focused on France and the Suez, and FLN history that engages with their relationship to Egypt and diplomatic efforts in this period. This paper intends to weave those two narratives together to better understand what role the Suez Crisis played in the foreign policy surrounding the Algerian War for Independence, dealing mainly with the Mollet administration.
Algeria was different from France’s other colonies for a few reasons. First, large portions of mainland French people had migrated to Algeria, and they were known as the “Pieds-Noirs,” or black feet, comprising about 10% of the population[1] but holding nearly 3.5 million hectares of land and benefiting from the colonial system.[2] Second, and in relation to the vast numbers of “Pieds-Noirs,” it was integrated into the administrative structure of mainland France as a “Département,” which is distinct from French rule in Morocco and Tunisia. These other parts of the Maghreb had a “Protectorate” status, which allowed slightly more local autonomy with France still dictating from top down. Finally, Algeria had valuable resources, as French settlers converted their land to various agricultural ventures, industrialized to an extent that was profitable for French companies, and most importantly, discovered petroleum in 1955-1956 under the Sahara.[3] At the same time, Guy Mollet became prime minister in 1956. As leader of the French Section of the Workers' International, Mollet was far more interested in left-wing domestic reforms than dealing with international affairs. However, when he appointed General Georges Catroux as the Minister Resident of Algeria, Mollet received strong backlash from Pieds-Noirs who suspected Catroux of being sympathetic for decolonization. This forced Mollet to rescind the appointment, replacing Catroux with Robert Lacoste, a socialist and former member of the De Gaulle government, and pivot to a hard line against Algerian independence, an issue that would plague the rest of his time in office.[4]
The Maghreb’s neighbors were also closely monitored by the French government. After King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 and Nasser became Prime Minister in 1954, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs Christian Pineau and Guy Mollet called Nasser “the new Arab Hitler” as an attack on his strong pan-Arab views.[5] Nasser provided arms shipments to the FLN, housed Ahmed Ben Bella, the FLN diplomat, and his rhetoric surrounding Arab identity was an effective anti-colonial unifier. When Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez, France’s international prestige was threatened by the Egyptian President’s refusal to honor promises made to Europe. Pineau is quoted saying: “[i]f Egypt were allowed to succeed in grabbing the Canal, the Algerian nationalists would take fresh heart.”[6] Mollet saw this as an opportunity to ally with the British, and respond with a show of force. In De Gaulle and Algeria, historian Michael Kettle writes that Mollet “abandoned all socialist scruples; and, reinforced by Lacoste’s dire warnings, and a surprisingly united Chamber, prepared for action.”[7] Robert Lacoste seemed to drive a lot of the more forceful decisions of Mollet’s government. While Mollet had tried to broker a deal with the FLN in Rome in September of 1956, Lacoste declared that “Suez and Algeria are one problem.”[8]
While the secondary French literature is separated from the FLN section in this essay, the two are still linked in understanding the experience of the Suez Crisis, even though existing literature fails to join the two perspectives together thoroughly. There is one piece of secondary literature that sets out to chronicle the same history as this essay, Geoffrey Barei’s “The Suez Canal Crisis of 1956 and its Linkage to the Algerian War of Independence,” however it includes no information from the Algerian perspective.[9] The secondary literature is generally limited as to its analysis of FLN opinions on the Suez Crisis and inner workings of the Algerian independence movement, but this essay will include more primary literature to attempt to make up for that lack. Lacoste clearly saw the necessity of Nasser’s defeat as a way to take control of Algeria.
Some French broke the barrier of segregation that separated French and Algerian natives in the metropole, and in these integrated circles, they became involved in the FLN. However, whether or not an individual French person was in support of colonization, the state still had a stake in the outcome of the Suez. 48% of the French oil supply relied on free movement through the canal, and the international waters of the canal represented the glorious age of colonialism for the French (and British) Empire. Napoleon himself brought a team of scholars to survey the area even before Lesseps began planning the canal.[10] Lacoste may have been intentionally incendiary when declaring the Algerian and Suez crises to be the same, but imperialism, particularly in the overseas departments that were considered a part of metropole France itself, was part of French identity and society. Mollet had been forced to contend with the end of an age of empires, and his administration’s efforts to partner with the British as another colonial empire came up against the United States. William Roger Louis writes that, “[t]he ideology of the American anti-colonial campaign was more than a reflection of self-interest…The essence of it was the belief that colonial subjects had the inherent right to become independent and to rule themselves.”[11] The US government’s policy stance against colonialism was both a cold war strategy and a widely-held belief among the administration and its citizens, and their increasing power after WWII complicated French diplomacy and gave the FLN a chance on the world stage.
This brings us to the FLN’s primary direct connection to the Suez: its indebtedness to its new ruler, Gamal Abdel Nasser. The memoirs of Fathi Al-Dib, the Egyptian official overseeing FLN policy, are revealing about the nature of this relationship. According to him, Egypt trusted Ben Bella, seeing him as the most competent of the FLN leaders, which fed into France’s impression that Cairo was the head of the FLN operation.[12] When Ben Bella, Khider, and Ahmed’s plane was intercepted in Algiers by the French, Ben Bella continued writing to Fathi Al-Dib. Nasser had been the FLN’s main foreign supporter, but in March 1956, he sat down with Pineau to discuss French arm shipments to Israel. At this time, arms shipments from Egypt to the FLN declined, and Ahmed and Khider noted less vocal support at the UN and Arab League for the FLN.[13] Then, when Le Monde released news on May 15 that France was sending jet fighters to Israel, Nasser stepped up his arms shipments to Algeria. The FLN was extremely frustrated by these fluctuations, whereas Nasser was frustrated that the Algerians were so demanding. Nevertheless, their collaboration continued, and Egypt continued supporting Ben Bella in captivity, spreading the news of his hunger strike to appeal to international sympathies.
The FLN’s international strategy was not limited to the West and Egypt’s support, as seen with their appeals to the Arab League. In appealing to the Arab League or non-western states, there was a pressure to “arabize.”[14] Meynier Gilbert seems to extrapolate from Fathi Al-Dib’s memoirs that Nasser saw supporting Algeria as a way to assert pan-Arab ideology. Outside pressures to restitute Algerian identity separately from its relationship with France and the French colonial project were part of the Algerian independence movement’s inner conflicts since before the official start of the war. The MTLD had faced resistance from Berber Nationalists who did not want Algerian identity to be defined by religiosity or language. Modern conceptions, however, tend to follow the same line of thinking as Nasser, assuming Algeria was a unified people with a single national identity and history.[15] Whatever the complexities of Algerian identity, the FLN was savvy in aligning with Nasser’s pan-Arab agenda. Aside from Nasser’s direct support, the Suez Crisis shifted the power dynamics in North Africa and the Middle East. Between the time of Nasser’s decision to nationalize and the violent response, the rest of North Africa prepared for the dawn of a new power.[16] In Morocco, French police were expelled, the party representing French settlers was dissolved, and the government threatened the American bases with higher rent.[17] The Bourguiba administration in Tunisia was less forceful in their response initially, but by October, the Tunisian Army had begun helping the FLN in Tunisia.[18]
The Suez Canal Crisis revealed the diplomatic maneuvering of the “First World,” and the collaboration between Britain, France, and Israel in coordinating an invasion of the Suez solidified the limits of Algerian diplomacy. When Israel and France stuck together in their opposition to Nasser, Israel appeared to be siding with the enemy.[19] Nasser’s Egypt had retained the support of both the Soviet Union, who supplied weapons to Egypt, and the United States who threatened to sanction the French-British-Israeli alliance if they continued. France and Britain had gone into Egypt to prove that they were still able to command power in North Africa, and the crisis ended up an embarrassment for the former colonial powers in the Middle East.[20] Algeria’s relationship with the Suez did not end at the Crisis in 1956. Michael Laskier notes that in the Six-Day war in 1967, the Suez Canal would once again be a site of convergence of Algerian and Egyptian interests, when Boumedienne sent in Algerian reinforcements. France and Algeria’s relationship to Nasser signified their separate diplomatic goals, and Nasser’s victory ensured the FLN could continue fighting for self-determination in the international sphere. Nasser stood up to Western powers, which encouraged insurgence in other North African states.
The primary French literature provides insight into the international context the Mollet administration was operating under throughout the Suez Canal Crisis. Nasser was obviously a concern, but for complicated reasons. France was facing increasing pressure from allies to decolonize, and non-aligned nations were collaborating with Nasser. In the French diplomatic documents from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a heading reads “Interviews of Brioni (Nehru-Nasser-Tito), 18 July 1956.”[21] This includes a brief report of what was said on autonomy in the Middle East, where they rebuked the influence of foreign powers. While France may not have been viewed positively in the non-aligned movement, they found possible allies in other parts of North Africa. France noted that Tunisian Prime Minister Habib Bourguiba was more moderate than his neighbors, and thus was a possible ally in the region. Bourguiba’s reservations flowed from the fact that “he was less preoccupied with the actual fate of Egypt than the psychological reaction in the Arab World.”[22] Bourguiba was savvy, and thus, might be convinced to help the French. Ultimately, Bourguiba allowed the FLN to organize from Tunis, so clearly that did not materialize as a strategy. As was mentioned earlier in this essay, the slow reaction to Nasser nationalizing the canal is believed to have caused other North African countries to assume he was the new power in the region. Regardless of the reasoning, a later set of diplomatic documents from 1957 reveal that Bourguiba had called for a Mediterranean Conference on the Algerian question and was in contact with FLN members and Algerians in Tunis.[23]
An account by French historian Pierre Laffont of the history of Algeria reveals a French viewpoint that is nearly contemporary with these events (1968). Laffont begins his preface with a disclaimer about the variety of viewpoints on Algeria, asserting his objectivity. Yet, he reveals a kind of benevolent nostalgia common among French in the metropole during this time, writing that the loss of “three French departments that have existed for 124 years- one million French and situated less than two hours by plane from Paris” was “our Algerian Dien-Bien-Phu.”[24] Laffont’s account of the Suez Crisis is explicitly interested in the actions of the Egyptian President, describing his hold over the rest of the Middle East and ruminating on “If we had ousted Nasser” in a heading.[25] This desire to assert colonial power was the undercurrent of discussion in the domestic press, and a desire for a forceful response to the Suez and preservation of colonialism in Algerian spanned political parties. A headline in the Le Monde in October of 1956 read “The Radical Party and the M.R.P Demand that Policy Measures be Taken in Algeria.” The Christian Democratic and radical parties both wanted to maintain control of Algeria, although the radical party demanded reforms to “change the psychological climate.”[26] Ultimately, all vocal French politicians were unwilling to change their policies, even in the face of the Suez Canal Crisis. Their major concern with foreign policy was ensuring France’s prestige remained intact.
The French diplomatic documents record Nehru writing a letter to Tito of Yugoslavia telling him that Nasser would make a useful ally to the non-aligned movement. In the aftermath of Israel invading the canal, the French Ambassador to Brussels wrote in a letter to Pineau, “The success of our operation depends essentially on the result that can be obtained, that is to say, the fall of Nasser.”[27] Belgian and Canadian French allies wanted to avoid the appearance of an Anglo-French alliance with Israel after the failed invasion. Western powers had to balance the desire to assert their dominance with an appearance of support for the Third World and self-determination. In December of 1956, John Foster Dulles and Pineau met, and the notes indicate that Dulles “had no desire to support Nasser.”[28] However, the Americans felt that force was not useful and needed to maintain friendly relations in the Middle East. Pineau made a point to remind Dulles that if there was not an American presence in the Middle East and North Africa, there would be a Soviet one. In December of that same year, Mollet announced at a banquet that he and his ministers were ensuring the United States held up their side of their alliance, and promised to usher in a new era of Europe.[29]
As revealed above in the Radical Party’s demands to the Mollet administration, France thought it was possible to reform colonization in Algeria. Ironically, Mollet announced that “there would not be European neocolonialism,”[30] even as he was proposing Western methods of “modernisation” and free market economics onto colonies or fledgling nations. This tactic of addressing the surface of concerns over Algerian colonization was an attempt to save face internationally, and using the language of progress, or even acting on it, was a way for Western powers like the US to continue to support France even as they attempted to make friends with newly decolonized states. Ultimately, the clever maneuverings of the Mollet administration simply delayed the crisis. A headline in Le Monde after his resignation read, “The Revival of the Suez Affair Hardly Reduces the Difficulties met by the Assembly.”[31] Ultimately, Mollet’s administration was overwhelmed by the diplomatic crisis the nationalization of the canal caused. Not only did Nasser threaten the hegemony of western powers, he was funding the FLN while doing it. The article on his resignation sympathetically wrote that “For 10 months, he braved the hostility of the United States, the hesitations of Great Britain, and even more so, the distrust from the events from the beginning to the end of the Suez Canal Crisis.”[32] Thus, the Suez Canal Crisis was, at the time, identified as one of the causes of the end of the Fourth Republic.
While the core of FLN financial military support was geographically limited, the diplomatic efforts of the FLN reached across the globe, and the internal conflicts during and in the near aftermath of the Suez Crisis shaped these efforts. The relationship between Nasser and the FLN is frequently flattened in French accounts, because they were both evidently friendly enough for Nasser to continue its support. On the one hand, an article in El Moudjahid, the FLN newspaper, writes that Nasser is attempting to force European powers to atone for the damage they caused Egypt. They write that “the exploitation was a shower of gold for western capitalists, but did very little for the countries it took from.”[33] However, it asserts that associating the Algerian resistance with support from Egypt is a strategy to undermine Algerian autonomy. This underlines the distrust of Nasser and critique of Ahmed Ben Bella in other letters, because of the fear of being seen as Nasser’s puppets. According to Fathi El-Dib’s memoirs, Nasser and Egyptian officials often judged the Arab-ness of Algerians, particularly Ben Bella, who would speak with Egyptian diplomats in French. Considering they were both participants in the Arab League, this kind of division may not have only been judgemental, but strategic. By asserting Egyptian Arab-ness as a kind of measure, Nasser could assert a cultural hegemony in addition to his political one.
Within the FLN and ALN there was disagreement over Ben Bella’s proximity to Nasser, and in a 1955 letter, Ramdane Abbane accused Ben Bella of plotting with Nasser, questioning his legitimacy as FLN diplomat. Ben Bella retorted that it was because of Egypt that they had gained such international support.[34] Relying on Nasser as a benefactor may have been controversial at times, but in the face of the Suez Crisis, El Moudjahid noted that Nasser was the only person willing to stand up to Britain. While Nasser was one of their first benefactors, the FLN was swiftly gaining allies. Another extract from El Moudjahid reads “The People of Latin America Renew their Sympathy for our Cause.” In Chile and Argentina, Pineau faced protests from citizens and he refused to address Chilean reporters’ questions on Algeria.[35] The FLN countered France’s considerable power and financial capabilities with a deluge of diplomatic maneuvering. By 1957, the FLN had made diplomatic connections in London, Rome, Switzerland, Madrid, and Stockholm. These various “militant-diplomats” as Redha Malek termed them, were based in Cairo.[36] Thus, a Cairo free of French influence, or at least influence tempered by a President who was not under control of the West, was useful to the FLN cause.
This essay has already chronicled the ways domestic politics and the opinion of the French people influenced Mollet’s foreign policy, but the relationship between the FLN and the Algerian people also guided revolutionary aims. Within Algeria, the FLN had to negotiate with other factions of the revolutionary movement. In a set of correspondences with the Algerian Communist Party, they asked to keep their collaboration secret. The FLN was well aware of the need to maintain an anti-communist stance in order to ensure the possibility of future collaboration with capitalist states in the west. The FLN would take support wherever they could find it, and by allying with the Algerian Communists, they could preserve sole control of the fight for independence within the country.[37] Opinion among everyday Algerians not engaged in the fight for independence is hard to come by without access to private correspondence or interviews, but the reports from the French governor general at the time will have to suffice. Before the Suez Crisis, he writes that the Muslim population were sympathetic to the cause of the rebels, but ultimately not moved to particular action.[38] However, by November of 1956, rebels had set up outlawed schools to teach Arabic to boys and girls,[39] and it seems political action was souring the population to French occupiers.[40] Even this early in the war, Algerians had begun to place some trust in the FLN, if they were allowing their children to be taught in illegal schools.
The idea to go directly to people’s most everyday concerns of educating their children seems to be a common thread in how the FLN thought about connecting with Algerian people. In an article in El Moudjahid, the reporter recounts an old man telling him the story of the destroyed village he came upon in the Akbou region. “Houses have been destroyed, women and children massacred, properties devastated, the honor of pure and noble women sullied.”[41] The article goes on to account for all the atrocities committed by the French in the region. Beyond Algeria itself, the FLN used its allies and popular revolutionary movement to gain support outside of their country, and even just their region. The sources on discussions within Africa during the Mollet administration are sparse, but the FLN had contacts within the Maghreb from the beginning. In 1955, Mohammed Khider sent a telegram to the Secretary General of the Istiqlal party in Morocco. Upset that Morocco and Tunisia were willing to accept independence granted from France while Algeria remained a colonial holding, he wrote that “the base compromises to which [political agreements with France] will give rise and cause misfortune to all Arab peoples in the Maghreb instead of ensuring them unity and independence.” [42] Despite this initial frustration at their neighbors, the FLN continued to communicate with both Moroccan and Tunisian leaders, and from 1954-1955, Egypt, Tunisia, and Iraq all helped FLN leaders obtain fake passports. Furthermore, when Ahmed Ben Bella and four other members of the FLN were captured by the French in Algiers, Bourguiba called back his ambassador from France.[43]
The members of the Arab League had supported the FLN from early on, as Egypt, Syria, and Iraq all sent arms in 1954, and Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia all allowed them to use their countries as bases at various times.[44] The FLN would not expand diplomatic efforts further throughout Africa and into Asia and the Communist world until De Gaulle took power. However, the Libyan representative at the African Conference of Casablanca in 1961 reflected that they are “convinced that the war in Algeria has helped Morocco, Tunisia and other countries to gain independence…. Libya is in solidarity with Algeria and she considers the Algerian affair like our own problem.”[45] Like the majority of South America, newly liberated African countries saw the Algerian struggle as intimately connected with their own. The FLN leveraged their connections in the Arab world at the United Nations while continuously making contacts in the West, Global South, and to a more limited extent, Asia and the Communist bloc. When Nasser nationalized the canal, he challenged international diplomatic norms and showed North Africa, the West, and the broader global south that France and Britain were not capable of maintaining their colonial power in the new world order. The US was unwilling to appear so strongly against the non-aligned states, and thus did not back France and Britain’s alliance with Israel to use force in the Suez.
The Suez Crisis put immediate pressure on the Mollet government to create foreign policy, despite Mollet mainly being interested in domestic policies. The pressure put on him by his own ministers, internal political parties, and Western allies guided his actions during and after the crisis. Contemporary sources directly cite the Suez affair as having been a factor in him resigning his office, and it remains one of the most memorable events of his career. The French government resisted Algerian decolonization for so long despite the loss of prestige during the Suez crisis, because colonialism in Algeria was such an integral part of French culture and economy. Furthermore, the Pieds-Noirs continually put pressure on the Mollet administration to maintain the status quo in Algeria. On the FLN end, they used the momentum after the Suez Crisis to forge new alliances. When appealing to Arab nations and newly independent states, Algeria played into tropes around Algerian Arab identity. While the diversity of Algeria was far more complicated, it was easier to unify people around the idea of Muslim-Arabness and a unified Algerian history. Even as there was internal conflict over the role of Nasser in their support and diplomacy, they still used that alliance to forge friendships across the Arab world, in the United Nations, and eventually across the global south. Redha Malek wrote that “the simple presence of an El Moudjahid correspondent… was enough to disarm… and transform the press conference into a disaster.”[46] The Suez Crisis played a role in the diplomatic machinations and internal conflicts of both parties, as the Mollet administration was marred by the diplomatic difficulties during and after the nationalization of the canal, and the FLN struggled with relying on Nasser yet also gained allies from this partnership.
[1]Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991, 323.
[2] Phillip C. Naylor, “A Reconsideration of the Fourth Republic’s Legacy and Algerian Decolonization.” French Colonial History 2 (2002): 159–80. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41938127.
[3] Naylor, 165.
[4] Martin Evans, The Memory of Resistance: French Opposition to the Algerian War (1954-1962) (Oxford: Berg, 1997), 28.
[5] Gilbert Meynier, Les Algériens vus par le pouvoir égyptien pendant la guerre d'Algérie d'après les mémoires de Fathi al Dib, In: Cahiers de la Méditerranée, n°41, 1, 1990, États et pouvoirs en Méditerranée (XVIe-XXe siècles), Mélanges offerts à André Nouschi, Tome I, 91.
[6] Robert R. Bowie, International Crises and the Role of Law: Suez 1956 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974), 26.
[7] Michael Kettle, De Gaulle and Algeria, 1940-1960: From Mers El-Kébir to the Algiers Barricades (London: Quartet Books, 1993), 62
[8] Kettle, 64.
[9]Geoffrey Barei, “The Suez Canal Crisis of 1956 and Its Linkage to the Algerian War of Independence,” The Maghreb Review 44, no. 1 (2019): 3–15, https://doi.org/10.1353/tmr.2019.0017.
[10]Zachary Karabell, Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal (New York:
Vintage, 2004), Chapters 1-4, 7.
[11]William Roger Louis, Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez and
Decolonization (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 593.
[12] Gilbert Meynier, Les Algériens vus par le pouvoir égyptien pendant la guerre d'Algérie d'après les mémoires de Fathi al Dib. In: Cahiers de la Méditerranée, n°41, 1, 1990. États et pouvoirs en Méditerranée (XVIe-XXe siècles). Mélanges offerts à André Nouschi. Tome I, 91.
[13] Meynier, 91.
[14] P. J. Vatikiotis, “Tradition and Political Leadership: The Example of Algeria,” Middle Eastern Studies 2, no. 4 (1966): 330–66. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4282174, 335.
[15]Marisa Fois, “Algerian Nationalism: From the Origins to Algerian War of Independence.” Oriente Moderno 97, no. 1 (2017): 89–110. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48572292, 103.
[16]Kettle, 63.
[17]Kettle, 63.
[18]Philippe Bourdrel, La Dernière Chance De L'Algérie Française: Du Gouvernement Socialiste Au Retour De De Gaulle, 1956-1958, Paris: Albin Michel, 1996, 79.
[19]Laskier, 2.
[20]Bowie, 102.
[21]Commission de publication des documents diplomatiques français, “Documents Diplomatiques Français. 1956, 2, 1er Juillet - 23 Octobre / Ministère Des Affaires Étrangères, Commission De Publication Des Documents Diplomatiques Français,” June 21, 2021. ark:/12148/bd6t53270602, 830.
[22]Commission de publication des documents diplomatiques français, “Documents Diplomatiques Français. 1956, 3, 24 Octobre - 31 Décembre / Ministère Des Affaires Étrangères, Commission de Publication Des Documents Diplomatiques Français,” Gallica, January 1, 1990, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bd6t53270683/f172.item.r=la%20crize%20du%20suez%201956%20juillet%20%C3%A0%20octobre#, 118.
[23] Commission de publication des documents diplomatiques français, “Documents Diplomatiques Français. 1957, 2, 1er Juillet - 31 Décembre / Ministère Des Affaires Étrangères, Commission de Publication Des Documents Diplomatiques Français,” Gallica, January 1, 1991, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bd6t5327062t/f88.image.r=mediterraneen, 24.
[24] Pierre Laffont, L'Expiation, [Paris]: Plon, 1968, 13.
[25] Laffont, 13.
[26]Jacques Fauvet, "Le Congrès Radical Et Le M R P. Demandent Que Des Mesures Politiques Soient Prises En Algérie: Ils Critiquent l'Attitude Occidentale Dans La Crise De Suez Mais Ne Souhaitent Pas La Chute De M. Mollet." Le Monde (1944-2000), Oct 16, 1956. http://proxy.uchicago.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/le-congrès-radical-et-m-r-p-demandent-que-des/docview/2500586642/se-2.
[27] Documents Diplomatiques Juillet-Octobre, 160.
[28] Documents Diplomatiques Juillet-Octobre, 508.
[29]"L'EVOLUTION DE L'AFFAIRE DE SUEZ: M. GUY MOLLET: NOUS NE POUVONS ÊTRE CONSIDÉRÉS COMME DES ALLIÉS FIDÈLES EN EUROPE ET JUGÉS QUELQUE PEU COMPROMETTANTS EN AFRIQUE." Le Monde (1944-2000), Dec 15, 1956. http://proxy.uchicago.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/levolution-de-laffaire-suez/docview/2502012799/se-2.
[30] Le Monde, Dec 15.
[31] Jacques Fauvet, "La Relance De l'Affaire De Suez Par M. Mollet De Réduit Guère Les Difficultés Rencontrées à l'Assemblée," Le Monde (1944-2000), May 17, 1957. http://proxy.uchicago.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/la-relance-de-laffaire-suez-par-m-mollet-réduit/docview/2500705793/se-2.
[32] Fauvet, Le Monde.
[33] El Moudjahid, De Suez à Algérie, 30.
[34]Mohammed Harbi and Gilbert Meynier, Le FLN, Documents et Histoire: 1954-1962, 781–83. Paris: Fayard, 2009, 336.
[35] El Moudjahid, “Les peuples D'Amérique Latine ont renouvelé leur sympathie pour notre cause,” 156.
[36] Le FLN, 752.
[37]Mohammed, Harbi, Les Archives de la révolution algérienne: Rassemblées et commentées par Mohammed Harbi, Paris: Editions jeune Afrique, 1981, 111.
[38] FLN, 167.
[39] FLN, 172.
[40] FLN, 173.
[41] El Moudjahid, “La ‘ralliement’ des villages dans la Soummam”, 39.
[42] Le FLN, 764.
[43] Fauvet, Le Monde.
[44] Le FLN, 780.
[45] Les Archives, 475.
[46] FLN, 753.