[The Critic] Empire by Way of Europe

A new book places the quest to keep Algeria French squarely at the center of European integration.

The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community. By Megan Brown. Harvard University Press; 345 pages; $29.99.

When West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer told his counterpart across the Rhine Guy Mollet, in the wake of the 1957 Franco-English embarrassment at Suez, that “Europe will be your revenge”, he could have just as well used the present tense. Mollet’s France had clearly not been waiting, to prop up its war-torn empire through other means, on British PM Anthony Eden to cancel the two countries’ operation to retake the canal from Egyptian strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser (the likely backstory to Adenauer’s apocryphal quote). Already by 1957, and headlong into negotiations that would culminate the year after in Rome with the signing of the namesake treaty, the crisis-struck French Fourth Republic labored to get even with an emergent world order that was fast questioning the status of its satrapies. This came to a head in Algeria, a settler’s colony that France considered fully part of its territory, where a war it feigned wasn’t happening (calling it “the events of Algeria”) had been in fact raging for three years with the borderline terrorist Front de Libération Nationale (FLN).

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