For the F.L.N. the immediate consequence was to force it to face up to a serious defeat and completely review its strategy. Henceforth it realised that large-scale terrorism in the cities would have to be abandoned; and, moreover, the failure in Algiers led it to the appreciation that nowhere in Algeria was its military organisation, the A.L.N., strong enough to face any major armed confrontation with the French army. Thus, it would conclude, the war could really no longer be won inside Algeria itself. Through its defeat in Algiers the F.L.N. also lost important ground in the struggle for the souls of the uncommitted “third force” Muslims, now giving increased indication of war-weariness. Finally, as will be seen shortly, the Algiers defeat was to impose stresses on the leadership resulting in the gravest internal dissension to date. But all this was in the immediate present: in the longer term there were ways in which the Battle of Algiers was to prove a blessing in disguise (though, as Winston Churchill remarked of his electoral defeat in 1945, at the moment it may have seemed “quite effectively disguised”). First of all, by making the C.C.E. quit Algiers, the French would be assisting it to find a base of relative tranquillity in Tunis. Secondly, by pressing upon it the correct strategic conclusions it would help the C.C.E. turn a short-term defeat into a long-term victory. Thirdly, with utmost irony, the Battle of Algiers, by focusing the TV cameras, newsfilms and journalists of the world upon it, had probably done infinitely more to achieve the sought-for “internationalisation” of the war than all Ben Bella’s efforts in Cairo, or Yazid’s at the United Nations. Fourthly, through the reaction they produced both in France herself and elsewhere, the repugnant methods with which the paras had won in Algiers were materially to help bring victory from the outside.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 686