The specific aim of this book, then, is to examine the major role that French colonial wars in North Africa have played in the worldwide process of decolonization. Torture, collective killings and ethnic cleansing were all deployed by the French in North Africa as weapons of war. On the Muslim side, insurgency, terrorism, and assassination were legitimized as tools against the European oppressor. From this point of view, this book becomes the new story of an old nation whose identity as the world capital of liberty, equality and fraternity is at every step challenged and confronted by antagonisms with its cultural opposite – the secular Republic against the politics of … Continue reading Andrew Hussey