Toussaint Rouge


Toussaint Rouge, also known as Toussaint Sanglante is the name given to the series of attacks that took place on 1 November 1954—the Catholic festival of All Saints' Day—in French Algeria. It is usually taken as the starting date for the Algerian War which lasted until 1962 and led to Algerian independence from France.

Background

Attacks

Between midnight and 2 am on the morning of All Saints' Day, 30 individual attacks were made by FLN militants against police and military targets around French Algeria. Seven people were killed in the attack; all except two were French colonists.

Reaction in Paris

After hearing of the attacks, Francois Mitterrand, then Minister of the Interior, despatched two companies of the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité to Algeria. A total of three companies of paratroopers also arrived between 1 and 2 November.
On 12 November 1954, Pierre Mendes France, President of the French Council of Ministers declared that the attacks would not be tolerated in a speech to the National Assembly:
The Mendes France government increased the number of soldiers in Algeria from 56,000 to 83,000 men to deal with the situation in the Aures mountains — the "main bastion of the insurrection," though the sending of the conscripts to Algeria did not occur until one year later after the Journée des tomates on 6 February 1956 under the Mollet government.

Public reaction

The political reaction notwithstanding, the Toussaint Rouge attacks did not receive much coverage in the French media. The French daily newspaper Le Monde ran a single short column on the front page, and L'Express gave it just two columns.