In the hours before dawn on All Saints’ Day, November 1, 1954, fighters of Algeria’s National Liberation Front struck seventy targets across Algeria — police posts, military bases, farms. Only a few hundred fighters took part that night, but their coordinated assault, the Toussaint Rouge — the Red All Saints’ Day — announced a war: Algeria’s fight for freedom had begun.

France answered with force, sending hundreds of thousands of troops to crush the uprising. The war raged for eight brutal years, and its shockwaves reached far beyond the battlefield — it shattered France’s Fourth Republic and, by the time it ended in 1962 with Algeria’s independence, left hundreds of thousands dead and redrew the map of North Africa.

That is why November 1 still matters. A night of seventy attacks by a few hundred fighters lit a fuse that burned for eight years — and ended with a nation’s freedom.