of Tunisian opposition and international pressure on France would create a political climate conducive to terminating French rule.”64 In March 1945, he traveled to Egypt to solicit help from the recently formed League of Arab States. The six nations in the League—Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Syria—were more focused on the Palestine question and thus unable to deliver the kind of support Bourguiba desired. However, the League’s mere existence coupled with the Palestinian crisis inspired a “strong sense of Arab and Islamic identity” and propelled Pan-Arabism.65 In 1947, Bourguiba joined forces with Moroccan and Algerian nationalists and created the Arab Maghrib Bureau in Cairo “with the purpose of coordinating propaganda and agitation against French rule,” a tactic the FLN would soon adopt.66 One year later, representatives from all three North African countries formed the Arab Maghrib Liberation Committee to carry out complementary initiatives. During the war for national liberation, the FLN relied on these regional connections for support ranging from material aid and arms to physical space to set up offices and organizations.
In the five years before the Algerian war, Algerian leaders witnessed armed struggle take off in the region. In 1949, the UN passed a resolution stating Libya would become independent, foreshadowing the important role the organization would play in decolonization. In 1950, Bourguiba attempted another round of political negotiations with the French administration when he presented it with the Neo-Destour’s proposal to redefine the Franco-Tunisian relationship and his vision for Tunisian independence. In December 1952, tensions reached an all-time high in Tunisia when French terrorists killed Tunisian trade leader Ferhat Hached, setting off union strikes across the Maghrib. In the summer of that year, Nasser launched a revolution in Egypt and in August 1953, the French exiled then Moroccan sultan Mohammed V, which sparked violent protests. The Maghrib was rife with instability and the French were losing their grip on power.
The Algerians were not the only ones struggling to cast off a European oppressor. They now had tangible examples and models from which to draw. The Vietminh’s struggle to oust the French in Indochina between 1946 and 1954 arguably served as the FLN’s direct inspiration when it launched its anticolonial movement in Algeria.67 The Vietminh fashioned itself as a revolutionary group committed to creating a new political, economic, and social order. Its leadership, including Communist Party head Ho Chi Minh and senior military strategist Vo Nguyen Giap, developed a multipronged strategy that relied on mobilizing the indigenous population, solidifying regional alliances, and obtaining aid (especially from the People’s Republic of China after 1949), which enabled them to strengthen their military efforts, construct a propaganda machine, and turn Cold War concerns into political gains. The FLN would emulate the Vietminh’s blueprint for success and add a few more elements to its particular recipe for victory over the French. The consequences of a French defeat in Indochina reverberated for years to come and influenced how the French and the Algerians engaged each other on and off the battlefield.68
When World War II ended, recently liberated France set out to rebuild at home and reassert its power internationally. Reconstructing the Indochina federation was part of the latter task. But French political and military leaders faced numerous setbacks in 1945 and 1946, most notably tumultuous political transitions in the territories of Indochina, a vicious famine that caused up to two million deaths, and Charles de Gaulle’s resignation as head of the French government, which splintered any hope of consensus on Indochina.
At the outset of the Franco-Vietminh war, which officially started on 19 December 1946, the French military unquestionably outnumbered and outperformed the Vietminh forces. However, by the conflict’s end, culminating in a devastating and humiliating military defeat at Dien Bien Phu in the spring of 1954, the Vietminh had reversed these dynamics. It did so by spending years honing the above-mentioned strategy. Vietminh forces also benefited from mounting opposition to the war in France. Initially, domestic public opinion did not pay much attention to the conflict. The French press did not cover the events, and the majority of those fighting were either private soldiers or colonial troops. By 1953, the new French government, under Joseph Laniel, faced a concerned citizenry that questioned the purpose and cost of the war.69 Dien Bien Phu was the last straw and eliminated any justification for France’s continued presence there. Little did the subsequent French government, under René Coty, know, it would soon encounter a comparable enemy, much closer to home, that had studied the Vietminh and refined its techniques.
International Transformations: Standardizing Health Care and Universalizing Rights
The domestic and regional contexts provided the FLN with the foundation to launch the war in 1954. But it was the international transformations and ensuing doctrines that emerged in the decade after World War II that furnished its leaders with critical tools for their winning strategy. International discourses on health care and welfare, so essential to the Algerian nationalists’ campaign, evolved significantly from the 1850s to the 1950s.
International Sanitary Conferences, the first of which took place in France in 1851 and the last in 1938, were among the first attempts to create health codes governing the human body that would reduce the spread of disease throughout the world.70 The League of Nations Health Organization, founded after World War I, represented a second attempt at formulating global health policy and introduced a common vocabulary about hygiene, which the FLN used during decolonization. Its efforts, along with those of the Epidemic Commission, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Pasteur Institute, yielded important biological and epidemiological discoveries, but, with the exception of malaria research, their combined work had a minimal effect on the daily lives of those living in the global South.71
During the 1920s and 1930s, language about the right to health and welfare of all people around the world was slowly crystallizing. In some cases, colonial representatives and missionaries brought ideas of health and disease control to rural areas and contributed to what Nancy Hunt calls “a colonial lexicon” that altered the ways in which African women understood reproduction and maternity.72 In other cases, a select number of local medical auxiliaries were trained to assist colonial physicians and to educate native populations about hygiene.73 These intermediaries were critical in connecting biomedical ideas with those of the native populations and helped create a hybrid form of medicine and care.74 But overall, imperial powers did not try to consistently educate the next generation of African physicians, nor did they focus on ways to improve the health of native populations over the long term as they discussed doing for their own populations at the League of Nations. Attempts to address disease-borne illnesses such as malaria and sleeping sickness were the most prominent health-care initiatives throughout colonial Africa. However, these targeted programs did not tackle social root causes and structural inequality that produced disease and ill health.75 In the immediate aftermath of World War I, health care in colonial contexts dealt almost exclusively with disease prevention and was connected with the civilizing mission. It was not yet inextricably linked with humanitarian crises.
French and British administrators were forced to think about health, and specifically colonial health, differently when they encountered a crisis in production in the 1920s and 1930s and had to increase the colonial workforce. Officials admitted that they would need to improve health conditions for laborers if they were going to be subjected to longer hours, dangerous migration patterns, and unsanitary urban dwellings. In Algeria, for example, the Muslim population in urban centers increased dramatically between the 1920s and 1940s. In twenty years it more than doubled from 508,235 to 1,129,482. Population growth in rural areas and in the southern regions of Algeria expanded at a smaller rate (15–25 percent).76 Despite the discrepancy, French administrators had to contend with the reality of sustained and close proximity of Algerians and settlers as well as the demand and pressure for improved health care. For the first time, officials had to address “the shortage and inefficiency of manpower due to debilitating diseases and unsanitary conditions” and quickly find ways to resolve the problem.77
In Algeria, this realization prompted administrators to prioritize the health of the natives, for
