Pied-noir: Encyclopedia II - Pied-noir - Exodus

Pied-noir - Exodus

In just a few months in 1962, 900,000 of these Europeans and Jewish people left the country, the first prior to the referendum (held in Metropolitan France and for which by an unprecedented decision of the de Gaulle government they were not allowed to vote), in the most massive relocation of population in Europe since the Second World War. The motto among the European and Jewish community was "Suitcase or coffin" ("La valise ou le cercueil"). The French government had not planned that such a massive number would leave; at the most, it estimated that prehaps 200,000 or 300,000 might choose to go to metropolitan France temporarily. Consequently, nothing was planned for their return, and many had to sleep in streets or abandoned farms on their arrival in metropolitan France, where the vast majority had never set foot in their whole life.

Some departing pieds-noirs destroyed their possessions before departure, in a sign of despair, but the vast majority of their goods and houses were left intact and abandoned. Tragic scenes of thousands of panicked people camping for weeks on the docks of Algerian harbors waiting for a space on a boat to France were common from April to August 1962. Some people who were refused the right to take their cars on board burned them on the spot in the docks. For most, departure was meant to be without an idea of return, and despair was general at leaving the land where they were born. The exodus accelerated after the massacre and kidnapping of 3000 Pieds-Noirs in the streets of Oran on the 6th and 7th of July 1962 by the ALN (Algerian Armée de Libération Nationale) entering the country from Morocco after the cease-fire decreed by the French army. By September 1962, cities like Oran, Bône, or Sidi-Bel-Abbès were left half empty. All administration, police, schools, justice, commercial activities stopped in a matter of 3 months. About 100,000 pieds-noirs chose to remain, but they gradually left in the 1960s and 1970s, to the point that in the 1980s there remained only one or two thousand pieds-noirs in Algeria.

On a smaller scale, a similar mass-flight of ethnic Portuguese settlers and mestiços occurred when Angola and Mozambique won their independence - with similar consequences for the administration and economy of these nascent nations.

After independence, most pieds-noirs and harkis fled the country and settled in cities across southern France where they assimilated into the local proletariat. However, many opted instead to migrate to New Caledonia integrating into the Caldoche community, or to Spain or North America. Some Algerian Jews eventually ended up in Israel, where they where granted instant citizenship and initial financial support from the Israeli state as olim.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Exodus", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki