Algeria’s loss permanently entrenched wartime executive powers in French law.

Evidence

Over the following months, the French government reached a ceasefire and then withdrew from a now independent Algeria. It took advantage of this process to redefine key aspects of the republic. During the fight to keep Algerian French, exceptional laws had temporarily authorized the violation of civil liberties (for example, press censorship; exceptional tribunals; police searches after sunset; mandatory ID cards); the need to leave Algeria (and fight the OAS) legitimated making these measures part of French law. Executive power to interfere in court decisions was extended. The marginalization of legislative power, and the affirmation of executive primacy, which most jurists and politicians had understood to be exceptional – linked, that is, to the Algerian emergency – became standard practice. This redefinition of the republic was accompanied by a reframing of the nation, as the French government, in violation of the Evian Accords that led to Algerian independence, stripped almost all Muslims of Algeria of their French citizenship; the ‘European’ minority, however, was allowed to hold onto theirs. — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 301

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how a crisis-threat becomes institutionalized: here the Algerian emergency legitimated permanent executive supremacy — a case of threat-hardening structures surviving the threat’s resolution. — connects to: the MOC “The Republic’s Impossible Embrace: How Universalism Turned Algeria from the Future of France into Its Undoing”