Terrence G. Peterson's "Revolutionary Warfare"

Terrence G. Peterson is Associate Professor of History at Florida International University. He researches and teaches on France, modern Europe, and their connections to the wider world, with a particular focus on war, empire, and migration.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency, and reported the following:

Page 99 puts readers right in the aftermath of key French military operation, known as “Pilote.” This operation wove together a range of new counterinsurgency practices the French Army had experimented on the ground between 1954 and 1957, and it quickly became the model for the French war effort against the Algerian National Liberation Front more broadly until Algeria gained its independence from France in 1962. Page 99 focuses on a particular new kind of unit, the all-female Itinerant Medical Social Team, which sought to capitalize on the dire need for medical care in rural Algerian villages to gain access to these communities. This page lays out some of the activities of these teams—first aid, hygiene lessons, infant care, sewing lessons, etc.—as well as their true function, which was to spread propaganda and gather intelligence.

Page 99 gives readers a good sense of the book’s overall arc, in part because it hints at the disconnect between how French authorities thought these teams would work and how Algerians perceived them. These teams eventually became an important tool for the French Army to attempt to win Algerian hearts and minds, in part because Algerians needed the sorts of medical care and social services the teams offered. But as readers might guess from the relative absence of Algerians themselves on this page and the following few pages, French officers’ perceptions that these teams won Algerians’ goodwill in a straightforward way were really rooted in their own misunderstandings of rural society.

As the book argues more broadly, such efforts to capture the loyalty of Algerians were a central part of the French war effort from the start, but they ironically helped push many Algerians to embrace independence. Through the rest of the chapter that page 99 sits within, these programs appear to work, inflating the confidence of French officers and sparking the interest of foreign militaries around the world, who sought to learn from the French Army’s apparent successes. In the following chapter, however, the bubble bursts as angry Algerians (including women targeted by these itinerant teams!) pour into the streets to express their frustration at the French Army’s violence and to demand their independence. One of the key aims of the book is to counter many of the myths that still persist about the efficacy of French counterinsurgency by showing the full arc of the war and Algerians’ role in shaping it.

Visit Terrence G. Peterson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue