Few observers would have concluded that the thirty-odd, poorly executed and mostly bungled attacks undertaken by the FLN on 1 November 1954 marked the advent of an insurgency with global reverberations. Hardly anyone had heard of the FLN, but to the small group of conspirators who launched the Algerian war, the time was ripe for armed resistance. Reforms had failed for years to address the inequities of the colonial state. In 1954, Algeria counted a Muslim population of 8,546,000 and a European population of 984,000. With Muslim birth rates 2.5 times higher than European birth rates and among the highest in the world, 52.6 per cent of the population was under the age of thirty. Neither agricultural production nor limited efforts at industrialisation could cope with the demands of this rapidly expanding population. Around 70 per cent of Algerian Muslims lived on less than 10 hectares of land, below the average required to stave off malnutrition. The most fertile soil had long been in the hands of French settlers or colons. Regardless of metropolitan surpluses or Algeria's predominantly Muslim culture, wine production constituted almost three-quarters of Algeria's harvest, encompassing 72 per cent of cultivable land. The consequence of this agricultural crisis, where half of the working rural population was jobless, had been a rapid rise in urbanisation. In the cities, meanwhile, rampant unemployment further pauperised the Muslim population, which had become ghettoised in squalid shanty towns. Political inequalities merely compounded these socio-economic disparities. The failure to apply the Algerian Statute of 20 September 1947 meant that Muslims continued to face political discrimination. Underrepresented in the civil administration (due, in part, to their limited access to education) and in the Algerian Assembly (where elections took place through two disproportionate colleges), Muslims also faced widespread vote rigging, which ensured the political dominance of the colons.

If the domestic situation had reached an impasse in 1954, internationally, the tide was turning against the colonial powers. British troops were evacuating the Suez Canal and fighting anti-colonial insurgencies in Malaya, Kenya and soon also Cyprus. French forces suffered a humiliating defeat against the Vietminh at Dien Bien Phu and battled sedition in Morocco and Tunisia.