1954 — Algeria's War for Freedom Begins

In the early hours of November 1, 1954, fighters of the newly formed National Liberation Front, the FLN, launched coordinated attacks across Algeria against military installations, police posts, warehouses, communications facilities and public utilities. From Cairo, the FLN broadcast a proclamation calling on Muslims in Algeria to join a national struggle for the restoration of the Algerian state, sovereign, democratic and social, within the framework of the principles of Islam.

That night, remembered as the Toussaint Rouge, opened a war that lasted nearly eight years. It ended with the Evian Accords of March 1962, and Algeria won its independence that July — a freedom announced, from the first, in a single night of fire.