Did Charles de Gaulle, summoned back in 1958 to meet France's constitutional crisis and end the Algerian war, realise all this?

ECONOMIST: Algeria then and now

"Go back and read history of the Algerian war and the French, " Mr. Kerry told the German students in Berlin on Tuesday.

WSJ: Kerry Hits Bumpy Road in World Diplomacy

He was prosecuted for signing the Manifesto of the 121, calling for French soldiers in the Algerian War to refuse orders to fight.

NEWYORKER: Witness

And it is interesting to speculate on what might have happened to his reputation if he had been given the interior ministry that he so coveted, and thus been responsible for the French police during the Algerian war or the events of 1968.

ECONOMIST: Intellectual adventurers

Although immigration from North Africa is a century-long phenomenon (170, 000 Algerians and 130, 000 Moroccans were recruited to fight for France in the first world war), what sticks in the memory is the bitterness of the Algerian war of 1954-62, when Frenchmen and Algerians killed and tortured each other with enthusiastic brutality.

ECONOMIST: France's Muslims

The implications were recognised by de Gaulle: if France were to be a power to be reckoned with in a world now defined by the cold war, it had to rid itself of the Algerian millstone whatever the objections of the settlers who would then have to seek refuge in France.

ECONOMIST: A conflict that still reverberates today