Oh, so it's true? Was it really very violent there? Interesting.
Hopefully not everything was like this. But yeah, for those who, both side, were standing on the extreme, it's what they did. And of course, each time a side goes that way, the other side felt more entitled to also use such extremes ; "they did it first".
I've heard that this is a sore subject in France. I don't know why. Maybe because you lost the war. Or because you did very dirty things there. What do you think?
Oh, the reason is relatively simple, Algeria wasn't a colony, but a full time part of the country. There were a sea between us, but it wasn't an oversea territory. By example, Morocco share a border with Algeria, but it was just under French administration, "we" would have lost it with less regret and probably less fighting.
To take an example that will talk more, Algeria was to France what Alaska or Hawaii are for the USA. So, when the independence war started, on the french side it was perceived as a civil war. And there's still too many people who continue to perceive it that way.
But I think that most of the anger come from the present more than the past.
Algeria expect France to apology for all the atrocities, what I agree with, but still refuse to acknowledge that there were from their side too. It's hard to take. We were colons, and a part of us did terrible things, but honesty mean that we can't be the only one to get the blame when we aren't the only one at fault.
And of course, there's all those Algerians who, now that they are independent and live in a wrongly ruled country that can't benefit from its own resources, decide to come live in France. It's not the same than migrants coming from other countries, those ones fought hard to kick us out of their country, to now come live in ours...
Add to this that, being a war that wasn't considered as it (for a long time here it was called a "police operation"), we haven't fought it just with military forces. Any one who did it's military service during that time had a chance over two to be sent in Algeria, what mean that around 75% of the population had a family member who fought in Algeria. It's not like Indochina, that happened far away and for which around 95% of the population weren't concerned.
Personally I don't care, well, except for the apology part, that is more a sore spot because I've known people who directly suffered from the atrocities coming from the Algerian side. But I can understand how some peoples easily impressionable can be tricked and fall for the "Algerians are the worse of the worse" that a part of the far right try to propagate.
This said, one shouldn't be lured by that. They target Algerians because of what I said above ; it give them "a good excuse" to say bad things about them. But they are just racists who would target another minority if they couldn't talk about Algerians.