WI: France keeps bits of Algeria

So according to the 1960 census, Algeria had 1,050,000 civilians of European descent, making up around 10% of the population.

According to this (page 11), in 1954 80% (around 800k people) of non-Muslims lived in an urban area, representing around 1/3 of the total urban population.

This is how they were spread out in 1921:
algeria.jpg
(I think it's safe to assume this more or less continued into the 1960s)

When the country achieved independence, around 250,000 Muslim were considered to have been loyalist who fought for the French (of these, only 90.000 escaped to France, whilst many thousands of those who stayed were murdered, lynched etc). Thus, along with their dependents and people who were overall neutral, I think it's fair to say 1/5 to 1/4 of the total population could be considered 'reliable' for the French, with these people generally being concentrated into 3 main areas around Oran, Algiers and Constantine.

Given this, how practical is an attempt by France to try and hold enclaves around the major coastal cities, perhaps consolidated by means of population transfers? How would this affect future course of events?

algeria.jpg
 
They get harassed to no ends by the Arab League most likely,you might see terrorists raids similar to the IRA as well I guess.
 
Maybe a Sovereign Base Area type deal for the naval base around Mers El Kebir. The Evian Accords gave France 15 years basing rights there. They abandoned the base after 5 but maybe the 15 year rights with options to renew ...
 
They get harassed to no ends by the Arab League most likely,you might see terrorists raids similar to the IRA as well I guess.

Given the level of military involvement France had in Algeria OTL, I think the borders of these enclaves would probably be some of the most well-defended in the world.

Coupled with a pro-French civilian majority and extensive security, I can't see terrorist attacks being more than a nuisance.

The key I think is to find a way to ensure public support, perhaps framing the entire thing as defending a population willing to remain French from an external threat.
 
Fast forward to today, the European enclave would probably have a strong economy with hundreds of thousands of land-less African economic-refugees be begging to be allowed into that French enclave on the North Coast of Africa.
 
Maybe a Sovereign Base Area type deal for the naval base around Mers El Kebir. The Evian Accords gave France 15 years basing rights there. They abandoned the base after 5 but maybe the 15 year rights with options to renew ...

With a post-1900 POD, this probably the extent of it (if you had a pre-1900 pod, such as Spain colonizing Algeria instead, the dynamic changes).

French Algeria will either be too small to be viable (unless we are just talking about a Navy base) or too large for Algeria to ever accept. Even if a partition was done (which the Algerians wouldn't accept), chances are that the European zone is abandoned within a few decades at most.
 
I think Oran had the biggest portion of Pied-Noirs and other pro-French peoples. Maybe an enclave in the city and the surrounding countryside?
 
Any enclave-type is not sustainable.

Algerian independence movement was very keen about independence for the whole of Algeria.

If such thing would have been tried (basically handwaving the deep political refusal of attempting something like this IOTL), Oran would have become a mix between Gaza and North Ireland, a financial gap with quite an important exile flux (that began in the 50's to France) and eventually inhabited mostly by Army, Arabs and Pieds-Noirs of all Algeria that didn't went in France and overcrowd a small area that would rely essentially on metropolitain supplying.

Strategically, economically, politically, it would be a nightmare.

Would it be only to remove this financial and strategic gap, you'd have a real popular metropolitan incitative to get rid of this. As Pieds-Noirs weren't really well seen in metropolitain France to begin with (not really by anti-colonialism : violent anti-arabism was as much widespread, often with the same people), nobody would really mind.

Maybe a Sovereign Base Area type deal for the naval base around Mers El Kebir.
Giving what happened in Tunisia, I see few odds to have something like this happening.

The Evian Accords gave France 15 years basing rights there.
Evian Accords were paper scrap : French govenment knew it, and what was more important, Algerian government knew it. These were basically ignored quickly, and France had no real possibility to enforce these.
 
I'll quote a post Captain Polar made in a thread a few years back about the French rebel forces making a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1961.

It has actually been envisioned by either prominent Gaullists (namely Alain Peyrefitte) and OAS members, who even discussed it, AFAIK, with moderates from the provisional Algerian Government in mid-1962, before the Pied-Noir exodus.

The idea, born after the failure of the 1961 putsch, was to "Israelise" not all of Algeria, but the Oranais zone (Oran being a city with a European majority). The Pieds-Noirs and Algerian Jews (who were French citizens by law, unlike the Muslims), were to gather in the Oran-Tlemcen-Sidi-Bel-Abbès zone, ensure they would have a demographic majority, and organise themselves as a European stronghold, either within France proper (it was Peyrefitte's idea) or, more probably after a solid majority in France favoured Algerian independence, as an independent country.

Actually, Oran was a rather industrialized zone (less that Algiers, arguably) and one of the more prosperous agricultural area in Algeria and, economically, the idea was not totally stupid. I also suppose that the leaders of the Oranian solution would have been reinforced by rebel officers, either condemned or ousted from the French army after the Putsch, and some right-wing radicals from France (and maybe a few French colonists from Sub-Saharan Africa). Oh, and Harkis, too.

This said, a White rump Algeria would probably survive only for a few years, and probably not after 1975.

The country is bound to maintain a large, standing army to protect itself from a probably very hostile Algeria, from Muslim dissent within the country (assuming, of course, The Oranais didn't expelled, or worse, non-loyalist Muslims). Relations with France will be horrible. I'm pretty sure that the Oranais would back every Anti-Gaullist terrorist organisation in France proper, and France, shifting to the 1960's industrial and European policies, would do everything to distance from people who would be as popular ad the radical Afrikaners in South Africa. The Oranais would have no support from the Socialist Bloc (duh), but, aside from ultra-conservative circles, I doubt the US would do anything favourable to a colonialist regime who would arguably be a troublesome element for Western strategy in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. The only help the Oranais could hope for would come from Francoist Spain, Portugal, South Africa and probably Israel (and maybe military dictatorships in Greece and Latin America). Morocco, having very bad relations with Algeria, might be a favourable neutral.

However, deprived from real economic perspectives, being a pariah state with, I suppose, few democratic features, under the permanent pressure of hostile neighbours and without any real, powerful ally to balance it (not to mention any legitimacy), especially after the Carnation Revolution in Portugal and Franco's death in Spain, I guess the country would collapse. You would have, either a transitional French mandate to set everything ready for retrocession to Algeria, or a violent collapse, the Oranais fleeing either to Israel (for the Jewish population), Spain, maybe South Africa. I doubt many would reach France, given the hostility between the two countries.

Now if this is the French government doing it then that helps things a fair bit since they'll have support, trade, and not be a mostly unrecognised state but it doesn't overcome all of the problems. The security situation is going to be tough, it'll be expensive keeping the number of troops required for security under arms, relations with the independent Algeria with be sub-zero, and it's likely to destroy French relations with the rest of the Arab states as well. Considering how dirty the Algerian war got in our timeline I would definitely expect to see forced relocations, under the guise of population swaps, of locals considered to have questionable loyalties being forced out and replaced by Harkis and their families. How long the whole thing survives I couldn't say.
 
Now if this is the French government doing it then that helps things a fair bit since they'll have support, trade, and not be a mostly unrecognised state but it doesn't overcome all of the problems.

There's no way in cold Hell that you could end with a French government supporting this. It was regularly proposed since the beggining of the war, and systematically rejected with a "Are you ****** nuts?" answer. As said above, it would be unsustainable, and would ask France to take from other useful and important projects to keep Oran under an umbilical cord for a piece of land that would be more and more deserted by Pieds-Noirs (they began to leave in the 50's because of a massive insecurity, this is not going to make things more secure).

Even assuming one government attempts that, there would be so massive outcry that it would be repelled at the first election, if not before.
 
Any enclave-type is not sustainable.

Algerian independence movement was very keen about independence for the whole of Algeria.

The Irish independence movement was keen for independence for all of Ireland as well, but NI has managed to survive (even if it is rather unstable and an economic basket case..) so it's not totally impossible for a similar colonial enclave in Algeria to survive, it just depends on how willing the French are to sustain it.
 
The Irish independence movement was keen for independence for all of Ireland as well, but NI has managed to survive (even if it is rather unstable and an economic basket case..)
Mostly because UK managed to score, militarily-speaking, enough to enforce; because you had more popular and regional support for this solution you ever had in Algeria and eventually because Irish nationalists were divided when FLN basically shoot every other group that disagreed.

Oran, in spite of having a large PN population before the war, was still an Arab majority which didn't exactly lowered with time going on.

it just depends on how willing the French are to sustain it.
Again, they were not : not the government and even less the population.
 
Oran, in spite of having a large PN population before the war, was still an Arab majority which didn't exactly lowered with time going on.

And that Arab population I don't think considered themselves as French, which is unlike say, the Muslim population in Ceuta...
 
Even assuming one government attempts that, there would be so massive outcry that it would be repelled at the first election, if not before.

If De Gaulle tries this, and bets his entire political career on it (he came to power after all on the promise of keeping Algeria French), how long do you think France could keep it up?
 
If De Gaulle tries this, and bets his entire political career on it (he came to power after all on the promise of keeping Algeria French), how long do you think France could keep it up?

Years at best and I don't thing De Gaulle would have tried it, as by the time this sort of idea was on the table (after 1960) he accepted that Algeria was a lost cause,that was only going to suck in more troops and lead to more french deaths. You'd probably need either the generals coup to succeed or an OAS victory in France very early on. Even more so than most Colonial conflicts France won every battle in Algeria but they lost the war because the French people had had enough of seeing their boys die. Also the Algerian population as a whole wanted out and no amount of massacring was going to change that.

Assuming a UDI situation it probably lasts a few years propped up by people like Apartheid South Africa. The irony is that sooner or later France itself would probably have to go in and crush the resulting regime. It would be much like Rhodisia, an unrecognised rogue state where sooner or later the colonial power would have to clean up the mess. Also if the secular resistance isn't seen as succeeding this could lead to a Jihadist movement evolving a few decades early with all the attendant hell that would cause.
 
If De Gaulle tries this, and bets his entire political career on it (he came to power after all on the promise of keeping Algeria French), how long do you think France could keep it up?

At very best an handful of years : everyone would be pissed about this.
Far-right and "Algérie Française"-supporter would call an unlawful division, Algerians would ignore it and still claim and act to unify all Algeria (even more so now they would have almost all Algeria was a rear base), Anti-colonialist would be against this...

His political and military support would certainly melt as pocket change under a fiscal sun.

It would be quite weird from De Gaulle, IOTL, he was one of the main detractors of such solution (mostly because "Pieds Noirs doesn't deserve such solution : metropole is doing all the work").
 
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