LECTURE: Friends of the Library talk

From the establishment in 1605 of Port Royal in what is now Canada, France’s colonial empire ebbed and webbed in size and significance over the following centuries. If the French empire has a birth date it also has a date when its death became inevitable: 1954, the battle of Dien Bien Phu in Indochina. Whereas around that time some countries got their independence relatively peacefully (equatorial Africa for instance), a traumatic ‘War without a name’ was waged both on Algerian and French soils. After a brief survey of the extent of the French colonial empire, this lecture will look at the decolonisation process in Algeria, its actors, main events, and legacy in today’s France.