The Gendarmerie in the Algerian War

What was the real impact of the Algerian War on the French armed forces?

Military operations, the means deployed, the evolving role of the army, failures, victories and internal divisions: all these subjects have already inspired countless memoirs and testimonies, and have been the principal or secondary focus of many studies. But within the broader ensemble of the security forces tasked with combating the "rebellion", what was the perception of the conflict? More precisely, how did the gendarmerie and the army — two complementary yet distinct components of that ensemble — experience these events?

Meticulously documented from the gendarmerie archives and drawing on a series of interviews with former officers who served in Algeria, this work sets out to answer these questions. It shows how the missions and the place of the gendarmerie within the armed forces — essentially in relation to the army — changed over the course of the conflict according to its intensity, the degree of integration of the gendarmerie into the army, their respective resources and, above all, the political environment. The latter evolved profoundly, from initial indecision to total commitment against the "rebellion" from 1956 to 1959, then to the progressively expressed will to withdraw from 1960 to 1962. While the circumstances of the counter-insurgency brought the two arms closer together until 1959, the government's shifting political stance regarding the territory's future subsequently generated tensions between them that clearly reflected their inherent differences in nature and role — differences that circumstances had momentarily obscured.