Between midnight and 3am, different regions of the French colony Algeria were shaken by no fewer than 70 attacks, some of which deadly: 10 settlers lost their lives.
French authorities were taken by surprise... The colonial camp first maintained it was a "tribal uprising", probably "fomented in Cairo" by Pan-Arabists.
The attacks appeared coordinated, and the next day a high-level political manifesto appeared, the "Proclamation" of 1 November, with a call to local Muslim Algerians to enlist in the armed resistance.
The events revealed that groups among the Indigenous inhabitants of the territory were launching a popular and organised insurrection.
The responsibility for these attacks was soon claimed by the National Liberation Front (FLN), a new movement, but this was not taken seriously either by the political class or by the media right away.
Roots of anger
These bloody events were called in France the "Toussaint Rouge" (Red All Saints' Day).
They marked the beginning of the Algerian War, an expression that was not used in France until much later in the decolonial war, and only officially recognised in 1999.
There had been precedents to the attacks.
'Algerians' was by then a term reserved to the French and European settlers, now known as 'pieds noirs' (black feet).
But the natives had been expecting their demands for equality to be heard since at least the 1920s, after their involvement in the First World War.
According to the historian Charles-Robert Ageron, a specialist of colonial Algeria, this process even began at the beginning of the 20th century and was forged "in the dual movement of religious fundamentalism and revolutionary populism".
Actually, most historians have shown that, from the beginning of the French conquest in 1830, officers faced increased resistance from the Algerian population, later led by the famous Emir Abdelkader.
For another French historian, Bernard Droz, since the 1930s, the rise of the Muslim population, "the unspeakable misery of the rural masses", low wages and "family burden to underemployment or exodus", and the voice of a European counting ten times that of a Muslim, within the framework of the new status of Algeria voted in September 1947, elements for complaint were mounting.
In the space of five decades, Algerian demands evolved from assimilation to emancipation, including "political autonomy as a sovereign nation with the right of oversight of France", as demanded in his 1943 manifesto by Ferhat Abbas, a representative of moderate nationalism.
But in 1937, the Blum-Violette bill supposed to grant French citizenship to the Muslim elite, was rejected by the French in Algeria.
The successive French governments didn't succeed either in giving Algerians a greater voice in local and metropolitan political bodies,
Assimilationist hopes finally died with the Second World War.
According to Ageron, "the defeat of France and the republican ideal in which many Algerians had long placed their hope" and "the impotence of the Vichy state in the face of Nazi Germany" strengthened the Algerians in "stronger nationalist demands."
At the end of the war, Muslim fighters expected rewards and treatment showing their equal courage to the French troops.
But they didn't get heard.
On 8 May 1945, the day of the celebration of the Allied victory, a peaceful demonstration in Setif degenerated into riots, when the French police intervened.
In the following days, protests spread to the countryside, leading to attacks on farms and a hundred deaths among Europeans.
The repression by the police, joined by newly formed European militias, was violent and merciless, often striking innocent villagers.
Protesters were arrested, tortured and some executed. The toll was very heavy: some historians speak of 45,000 dead.
Historians have often described these riots of May 1945 as a "failed insurrection".
The 1946 elections were plagued by massive electoral fraud, which finally convinced young Muslim activists, eager to deal with French imperialism as soon as possible, of the dead end of the electoral path.
Messali Hadj emerged as a strong political figure, with his organisation named the Algerian People's Party (PPA).
It became the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties (MTLD) in 1946, and he, the first nationalist leader to unite the common Muslim people and members of the middle class around the ideals of democracy and egalitarianism.
The PPA's motto became: "Neither assimilation nor separation, but emancipation".
National liberation day
If 1 November 1954 remains in the memory of the French under the name of "Red All Saints' Day", for indigenous Algerians it is the day of the outbreak of the war of national liberation.
With its text, the liberation movement demands "the restoration of the Algerian state, sovereign, democratic and social, within the framework of the principles of Islam".
But for French authorities, unlike the rest of the empire, already largely dismantled in Africa and Asia by 1954, “Algeria is France!”, in the words of the then Interior minister, François Mitterrand, who chose repression.
Among the victims of 1 November 1954 were two French Algerians, four soldiers, a police officer, a forest ranger, a pro-colonisation Algerian, and a young teacher, killed by mistake.
As France chose to repress, the war unfolded with its share of massacres and crimes committed by the French army, supported by 'Harkis', Muslim who chose to cooperate with the colonisers.
The worst torture methods were applied under cover of French political authorities.
The war would end up lasting for eight years until 1962, causing more than a million deaths, colonisers and colonised included.
With the signing of the Evian Accords on 18 March 1962, a ceasefire was finally imposed between the belligerents, and Algeria regained its independence, putting an end to 132 years of French colonisation.
Seventy years after the Toussaint Rouge, the wounds of the conflict have not healed however, and still cast a shadow over the relationship between Algiers and Paris.
The trauma of the war has continuously strained ties between the two countries, whether because of disputes around archives, immigration policies, or political disagreements.
In July, Algeria even recalled its ambassador from Paris, when French president Emmanuel Macron openly supported Algiers' rival in the region, Morocco, in a dispute over the territory of Western Sahara.
To this day however, the legacy of the war and the battles around archives cause friction between French and Algerian authorities, while historians are still trying to mend the wounds by uncovering all its complexities.
