When asked about this year’s presidential election, French historians often draw a comparison that could initially seem outlandish.

The war that France fought in Algeria, they said, cleaved French society, opening crises of identity and integration that still drive politics, much as the Civil War lurks within the racial and regional politics still roiling the United States.

“The Algerian war was a French civil war,” Benjamin Stora, the conflict’s foremost historian, said in a recent interview from his home in Paris.

In Algeria, independence groups fought to end 130 years of French rule. Within France, Mr. Stora said, the war was an ideological conflict over “two conceptions of the nation,” one that saw France as an empire and Algeria as core to its greatness, and another that rejected colonialism. The war also became a struggle over whether French identity could expand to include the mostly Muslim Algerians.