The war (1954–1962) through which Algeria won independence from France — fought over territory France legally treated as part of itself, against a Muslim majority excluded by a European settler minority. It brought down the French Fourth Republic, exposed the systematic use of torture by a democratic state, and became the twentieth century's defining case of decolonization as both catastrophe and reckoning.
France did not call it a war. For years its official term was the 'events' in Algeria, or operations to keep order. The denial was not a slip. Northern Algeria was not treated in French law as an ordinary colony but as departments of France itself, which made surrendering it feel to many French officials and settlers like national dismemberment. So a struggle that killed hundreds of thousands of people was, on paper, a domestic policing matter. That fiction is the key to the whole story. It explains why France fought so hard, why it reached for torture, and why a democracy nearly destroyed itself defending an empire it refused to name.