But not the one you think.

Writing of Pierre Boulle’s Planete des singes, Laurence Porter says:

It was published in 1963. France had just lost nearly all her overseas empire between 1945 and 1962, ending with the bitter uprooting of a million French “pieds noirs” in Algeria, and nearly provoking, in France, a civil war between the hawks and the doves. The story of a “superior” race (the humans: read, the French Caucasians) losing its resolve and vitality, and being taken over by an “inferior” one (the apes: read, the North African Arabs, the black Africans, the Vietnamese in Southeast Asia), must have resonated powerfully in the political unconsciousness of a French person of 1963, all the more so since France’s open immigration policy must have appeared to some—as it does so tragically today—to threaten the French with being soon overrun by alien hordes at home.