"The National Liberation Front (FNL) uprising presented nationalist groups with the question of whether to adopt armed revolt as the main course of action. ...
On the political front, the FLN worked to persuade — and to coerce — the Algerian masses to support the aims of the Independence movement through contributions. FLN-influenced labour unions, professional associations, and students' and women's organizations were created to lead opinion in diverse segments of the population but here too violent coercion was widely used. Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist from Martinique who became the FLN's leading political theorist, provided a sophisticated intellectual justification for the use of violence in achieving national liberation. He stated that only through violence could an oppressed people attain human status. …"
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As the FLN campaign of influence and terror spread through the countryside, many European farmers in the interior (called Pieds-Noirs) sold their holdings and sought refuge in Algiers and other Algerian cities. After a series of bloody, random massacres and bombings by Muslim Algerians in several towns and cities, the French Pieds-Noirs and urban French population began to demand that the French government engage in sterner countermeasures, including the proclamation of a state of emergency, capital punishment for political crimes, denunciation of all separatists, and most ominously, a call for 'tit-for-tat' reprisal operations by police, military, and para-military forces. Colon vigilante units, whose unauthorized activities were conducted with the passive cooperation of police authorities, carried out ratonnades (literally, raton-hunts, raton being a racist term for designating north african people) against suspected FLN members of the Muslim community. The FLN terror and intimidation campaign gave these hunts strong motivation and starting points. ….
To increase international and domestic French attention to their struggle, the FLN decided to bring the conflict to the cities and to call a nationwide general strike. The most notable manifestation of the new urban campaign was the Battle of Algiers, which began on September 30, 1956, when three women placed bombs at three sites including the downtown office of Air France. The FLN carried out an average of 800 shootings and bombings per month through the spring of 1957, resulting in many civilian casualties and inviting a crushing response from the authorities. The 1957 general strike, timed to coincide with and influence the UN debate on Algeria, was largely observed by Muslim workers and businesses.
General Jacques Massu was instructed to use whatever methods seemed necessary to restore order in the city. Using paratroopers, he broke the strike and then in the succeeding months systematically destroyed the FLN infrastructure in Algiers. But the FLN had succeeded in showing its ability to strike at the heart of French Algeria and to rally and force a mass response to its demands among urban Muslims. Later Massu's troops punished villages that were suspected of harboring rebels by attacking them with mobile troops or aerial bombardment and gathered 2 million of the rural Muslim population into fortified villages under French military control. The publicity given to the brutal methods used by the army to win the Battle of Algiers, including the systematic use of torture, a strong movement control and curfew called quadrillage and where all authority was under the military, created doubt in France about its role in Algeria. This doubt was strongly communicated to France by French sympathisers in Algiers who supported the idea of independence morally, financially and materially. What had been originally thought of as a simple "pacification" or "public order operation" had turned into a fully fledged colonial war to block the influence of the guerillas and had resulted in the systematic introduction of torture.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerian_War
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