Algeria has lots of grievances. Algeria’s world is an unjust place where wrongs abound. Sometimes the frequency of Algeria’s complaining makes it easy to dismiss its complaints: it’s a day that ends in “y” and Algeria is upset again. But Algeria does have legitimate grievances. And the legacy of France’s nuclear tests in the Algerian Sahara that began 65 years ago last week is among the most legitimate.
France in 1960 was acutely insecure. It had only been liberated from the humiliating Nazi occupation 15 years earlier. Its economy was booming but so was the cost of living. A seminal 1959 study of inflation was based on the French economy in the 1950s. France’s empire was disintegrating from southeast Asis to North Africa. It lost Vietnam in 1954 and Morocco in 1956. And its war to keep ahold of Algeria was in its sixth bloody year. Paris was desperate to get the bomb: being a nuclear power meant it would never lose another war ever again. And the bomb would restore France’s battered pride.
Colonies under modern empire were always metropoles’ laboratories. Seats of empire could experiment in their colonies in ways they wouldn’t at home. They could try everything from repressive urban planning to educational indoctrination and experimental reproductive health. If it worked, youpi!. If not, n’importe quoi. The colonized were not really people. Or at least not people of the same caliber and worth as the colonizer. So, experiment away.
Algeria had the unlucky fortune of being both France’s last colony and its absolute biggest.
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