Part I: The Algerian Civil War, 1954-1962: Why Such a Bitter Conflict?
Chapter 1: The "Phony War" (November 1954-July 1955)
Chapter 2: The Open War (August 1955-December 1956)
Chapter 3: The Cruel War (1957)
Chapter 4: The War of the Algerians (1954-1958)
Chapter 5: De Gaulle and the War (1958-1959)
Chapter 6: The Wars within the War (1960-1961)
Chapter 7: The War and French Society (1955-1962)
Chapter 8: The Terrible End of War (1962)
Chapter 9:The War's Toll
At noon on March 19, 1962, the cease-fire, which had been agreed upon the previous day at the signing of the Evian accords, went into effect. It put an end "to the military operations and armed struggle throughout Algerian territory." So ended a ninety-two month war which had taken a very heavy toll on both sides.
In Algeria the conflict resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead, the displacement of millions of peasants, and the dismantling of the economy. In addition, it brought the FLN (Front de Liberation Nationale) to power, a group that presented itself as the sole heir to Algerian nationalism. Benefiting from extraordinary popularity among the Algerian masses in 1962, it subsequently took root as the only party and, for nearly thirty years, negated any political or cultural pluralism.
In France, although there were far fewer casualties, the trauma was no less intense. Do we need to recall that nearly 2 million French soldiers crossed the Mediterranean between 1955 and 1962, that is, most young people born between 1932 and 1943 who were eligible to be called up? An entire generation thus found itself embarked upon a war whose stakes it did not understand. Politically, the conflict led to the fall of six prime ministers and the collapse of one Republic.
The war of Algerian independence, then, was one of the two cruelest wars of French decolonization in this century; the other was the war in Indochina (1946-1954). How are 'we to understand the bitterness of the Algerian conflict?
When the insurrection of November 1, 1954, erupted, the motto of Francois Mitterrand, then minister of the interior in the cabinet of Pierre Mendes France, was: "Algeria is France." Algeria constituted three French departments. Thus it was much more than a distant colony like Senegal or a mere protectorate like Tunisia.
After the very deadly conquest begun in 1830, which translated into a dispossession of the Muslim Algerians' land, a large settlement colony took root (Stora 1991a). By 1954, nearly 1 million Europeans, who would later be called pieds noirs, had worked and lived there for generations. Not all of them were "big colons" overseeing their land holdings. Most had a lower standard of living than residents of the metropolis. That colony of proletarianized settlements was represented by the traditional major parties of the French Hexagon (on the left and the right), whose operations and conceptions were based on the model of Jacobin centralization.
In the late nineteenth century, Algeria was not administrated by the Ministry of Colonies, but rather belonged to the Ministry of the Interior. Therefore, it seemed out of the question to abandon a territory attached to France for the past one hundred and thirty years, even longer than Savoy (1860). In the course of the war itself, the discovery of oil and the decision to use the vast Sahara for the first nuclear or space experiments came to be added to these rationales.
France thus sent its soldiers to fight in a "southern" French territory that was demanding its right to secede. Nine million Muslim Algerians were sham citizens of a Republic that saw itself as assimilationist: since 1947, they had voted in a college separate from that of Europeans. The principle of equality, "one man, one vote," was not respected. The idea of independence, shared by a growing proportion of Algerians, seemed to be the only way to undo that contradiction.
When the war ended, people on either side of the Mediterranean labored to efface its real and bloody traces. In France, there was no commemoration to perpetuate the memory of the soldiers on all sides, and the succession of amnesties led people to forget a shameful conflict. In Algeria, a commemorative frenzy founded the legitimacy of the military state, dissimulating the pluralism and clashes that had existed between the pro-independence movements and within the FLN itself.
For a long time, however, the memories of seven years of war resisted effacement. The pain and rage of the drama's protagonists permeated the field of writing about that history. Nearly forty years later the war in Algeria has begun to be an object of historical study. New paths of reflection and knowledge are opening up regarding the war mentality, the deadly propaganda, the social practices, the confusion of civilians, the attitudes held in the regions of France and Algeria, and the shaky involvements and retreats of individuals and groups.
October, Eve of a War
In October 1954, France was living at the slow pace of the Fourth Republic, which had borrowed a great deal from the Third. Politics always took place in sealed offices; elected officials in the provinces rushed from banquets to inaugurations and from hollow speeches to obscure disputes. Rene Coty was in the Elysee Palace, and Pierre Mendes-France was premier in the Hotel Matignon. For nine years, Charles de Gaulle, having withdrawn from public affairs, had been biding his time in Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises. Guy Mollet, his spectacles at the tip of his nose, watched the omnipotent SFIO, one of the ancestors of the present-day Parti Socialiste, from the corner of his eye. The Communists were still shaken up over the death of Stalin, which had occurred twenty months earlier. Nasser was the strongman in Cairo, and his revolution of Arab nationalism was continuing.
Eisenhower was in the White House. He had just named a black man to be general of the U.S. Army's Air Force. He was the first. In London, Admiral Mountbatten was named First Sea Lord. In Stockholm, the Nobel Prize committee gave its award to a war writer, Ernest Hemingway. The decision was poorly received. Italian troops had just reentered Trieste, which the Yugoslavs had returned to them. Scenes of jubilation. In Paris, the Franco-German accords on the Saar were signed. People everywhere wanted to settle the accounts of World War n.
But how many dark spots were on the planet! In the USSR, the gulag did not die with Stalin; in Africa, decolonization was yet to come; whole stretches of Asia wallowed in poverty and underdevelopment. In China, the Communists had taken power five years earlier. The term "Third World" appeared and circulated to designate these impoverished zones. Franco still held Spain under his sway. And, in the United States, McCarthyism was raging. Batista was elected in Cuba; he would very quickly become a fierce dictator.
Officially, France was at peace. On the other side of the Mediterranean, in Carthage in July 1954, Pierre Mendes-France had promised an evolution toward autonomy for Tunisia and Morocco, which had been on the brink of a general rebellion for three years. The true war, the war in Indochina, was over. Bigeard and many emaciated, defeated paratrooper officers left the Viet Minh prison camps. They were reflecting on the causes of the military defeat of Dien Bien Phu on May 7, 1954, a terrible lesson they were not ready to forget.
The weekend of late October 1954 was deadly: thirty-four perished. The highways were beginning to kill in great numbers. France was confronting the problems of a nation at peace that was beginning to grow richer. Its victims, and its defeats, were now in sports stadiums. In the Parc des Princes, Puig Aubert had just led the XIII of France [a soccer team] to a victory over New Zealand. The stabilization of prices, achieved under the premiership of Antoine Pinay in 1952, was a major event. The old specter of price inflation that had so profoundly marked the postwar period was vanishing. This fact reduced "the diplomatic and colonial catastrophes to the rank of political mishaps, and thus comforted the French, who intended to take advantage of the fruits of the expansion once they had got on their feet by consolidating their purchasing power"(Rioux 1990).
Cultural news remained plentiful in 1954, however. People were reading the latest Prix Goncourt, Les Mandarins by Sirnone de Beauvoir, which was a fresco of a social milieu she knew by heart. That year, Francoise Sagan, a young new writer from a good family, published her first novel, whose title was borrowed from Paul Eluard: Bonjour tristesse. Jean Giono, who pub- lished Voyage en ltalie, was received into the Academie Goncourt. Nor was Albert Camus absent from that landscape. A collection of his texts con- tributed to the debate of ideas of the moment (Aauelles II), and a long prose text, haunted by flashes of insight and by worry, also appeared (L 'Ete). In October 1954, in darkened theaters film lovers could see rouchez pas au grisbi, by the great Jacques Becker, who was in a certain sense the heir to Jean Renoir; rant qu'il y aura des hommes, by Fred Zinnemann; Roman Holiday, by WIlliam Wyler, with Audrey Hepburn; On the Waterfront, by Elia Kazan; and Dial M for Murder, by Alfred Hitchcock.
On October 31 the deputies packed their bags, preparing to return to Paris, where the parliamentary session was set to reopen in two days. Pierre Mendes-France, the man who had made peace in Indochina, was preparing to leave for the United States. He was dreaming of reshuffling his cabinet. The previous week he had offered five Socialists a place in his government. The French stock market immediately dropped, then rose again, reassured. Edgar Faure would remain at Finances until the budget vote.
All Saint's Day 1954 began with a symbol. Very far away, in Pondicherry, the sun rose on a new flag. It was green, orange, and white. At sunset on the previous day, the French flag, still waving on the largest of the four trading posts, had been removed. The empire of French India no longer existed. Everything had gone well in Pondicherry.
The Outburst
Between midnight and two o'clock a.m. on November 1, 1954, Algeria was awakened by explosions. From Constantinois to Oranie, fires and commando attacks revealed the existence of a concerted, coordinated move- ment. In Algiers, Boufarik, Boulra, Batna, Khenchela, and on and on, thirty almost simultaneous attacks on military or police targets were perpetrated.
Very quickly, Francois Mitterrand, minister of the interior, placed three companies of state security police (CRS), that is, six hundred men, at the disposal of the Algerian general government; they flew from Paris in the early afternoon. A first battalion of paratroopers moved in under the command of Colonel Ducoumeau. Three others followed the next day. In fact, the war secretary was already in place in Algiers for a different reason: he was also a deputy and mayor of the city. This was Jacques Chevallier. The SFIO daily, Le Populaire, was upset: "The attacks came precisely at a time when France has a government whose comprehensive policy in North Africa is likely to bring calm everywhere there has been tension." The fact is, on that day, it was a hard fall for Paris. Hadn't Francois Mitterrand come back from his trip to Algeria some weeks earlier with the feeling that things were going better there?
The insurrection caused the death of seven people. The murder of the teacher Guy Monnerot in the Aures and of the pro-French kaid from M'Chouneche, Hadj Sadok, elicited strong emotion. But the attacks against the police stations, barracks, and industrial plants did not have the scope that the initiators of the November 1 attacks had hoped. In Algiers the net- work set in place was broken up by the police in less than two weeks. Only the Aures in Constantinois posed a real military problem: there, the "rebels" secured the cooperation of "bandits of honor" (in particular, the famous Grine Belkacem), who had been in the underground for years. There was also Great Kabylia, where several hundred men, trained in clandestine operations under the leadership of Amar Ouamrane and Krim BeIkacem, were ready for prolonged action.
On November 1 no one seriously thought that France had just entered a new war. The "events" made two columns in Le Monde. A single column in L'Express, dated November 6, violently denounced the "subversive schemes" of the Arab League and the old leader of the radical pro-independence cur- rent, Messali Hadj. Yet he was not the one behind the November 1 outburst; rather, it was other young leaders, in revolt against the French colonial pres- ence and the conservatism of their own party, which was torn apart by internal struggles.
The Men of November
On November I, 1954, an organization, heretofore unknown, claimed responsibility for all the military operations: the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN). That "rebellion" was conducted internally by six men: Larbi Ben M'Hidi, Didouche Mourad, Rabah Bitat, Krim Belkacem, Mohammed Boudiaf, and Mostefa Ben Boulald. The acts outside Algeria, in Cairo, were spearheaded by Hocine A:it Ahmed, Ahmed Ben Bella, and Mohammed Khider. All were from a single organization, the Parti du Peuple Algerien/Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Libertes Democratiques (pPA-MTLD), which had nearly twenty thousand militants in its ranks. For several years, all had been involved in the political struggle championed by the party.
It was on the basis of a claim for the autonomy of a "culture, heir to a long and glorious past, " and for an entitlement transmitted by history, that this movement worked to legitimate the demand for independence. In that sense, Arab Islamism appeared as a return to the source of ancestral ethics. A centralizing movement, it tended to struggle against particularism, especially linguistic particularism. This was clear in 1949 when the advocates of Berber culture, denounced as "Berber materialists," were discharged from their leadership posts. The PPA-MTLD championed a strategy of scission with the French presence. Its young activists, advocates of armed struggle, laid the foundations for the 1'1..N, and clashed violently with the old head of the PPA-MTLD, Messali Hadj, who founded the Mouvement National Algerien, or MNA (National Algerian Movement) in December 1954.
Within the leadership of this "activist" current, the youngest person (Omar Belouizdad) was twenty-six in 1954, the oldest (Mostefa Ben Boulald) was thirty-seven. Only one of these leaders, Mohammed Khider (age forty-two in 1954), who joined the group on the eve of November 1, was familiar with Etoile Nord-Africaine, the first pro-independence organization in 1936; he had been involved in the political holdup of the Oran post office, organized in 1949 by the OS (the branch of the PPA-MTLD charged with paving the way for a military insurrection, which was broken up by the French police in 1950-1951). This fact is not without importance. What united these men was that all of them, without exception and whatever their age, had been part of the OS, and had had to flee and hide to avoid repression. The orientation they gave to transmitting the legacy bequeathed by the pioneers of nationalism can be summed up in their recourse to direct action. Many activist cadres in the PPA who were called upon to playa "his- toric" role in the subsequent conduct of the Algerian revolution came from important families, themselves affected by the general downward mobility at work in Algerian society.
Hocine Alt Ahmed, born on August 20, 1926, in A1n-el-Hammam (formerly Michelet) came from a very important line of Marabouts from Kabylia. Larbi Ben M'Hidi, born in 1923, in the douar of El Kouahi in Constantinois, near A1n M'Lila, came from a family of Marabout notables from the high plains of Constantinois. Mohamed Boudiaf, born on June 23, 1919, in M'Sila in Hodna, was from a well-off family that had lost its status as a result of decolonization. Krim Belkacem, born on December 14, 1922, in the douar of Alt Yahia near Dra-EI-Mizan in Kabylia, was the son of a village policeman, Hocine Krim, who was eventually named a minor kaid. Extremely well known, these four leaders joined the PPA during World War II and rapidly obtained significant responsibilities. They had all gone to school: Alt Ahmed passed the first part of the baccalauriat (high school degree); Boudiaf went to the secondary school of Bou Sa ada; Larbi Ben M'Hidi studied the dramatic arts; and Krim Belkacem earned his certificat d'itUdes (primary,school diploma). These studies ended when the men entered politics and went underground.
Although the sons of important rural families were affected by pro-independence propaganda, there were also nationalists who belonged to the category of notables, beginning with the interwar period. These are particularly unusual examples, but they deserve to be pointed out as well, since they indicate the shift in the rural areas from a situation of resistance to foreigners to modern national feeling. A very well-known leader, Mostefa Ben Boula1d, is a telling example of the presence of that social category within the leadership of the pro-independence current. Born in 1917, he was the son of small landowners. He succeeded his father and became a miller by profession. Mobilized in 1939, he fought in the French army, was discharged after being wounded in 1942, then remobilized in 1943-1944 in Khenchela. As a chief warrant officer returned to civilian life, he became president of me guild of fabric merchants in me Aures, and established a small flour mill in Lambessa. At mat time, he obtained a license to operate a line of buses between Arris and Batna. The results of his life journey are well known: a member of me central committee of me MTLD and founding member, in Apri11954, of me CRUA (comite Revolutionnaire pour l'Unite et l'Action), which would give rise to me FLN, he died in combat in 1956.
The new political activists, living in the midst of varied activities, suspecting they might be able to escape their social conditions through me studies they had undertaken or me positions they occupied, discovered different ways of life, different possibilities for political action. They were more "critical," more "rational" man me veterans of me 1930s nationalist struggle; me search for a political shortcut predominated in their analyses. Slow, patient collective work seemed outdated to them. For them, the turning point of 1945, marked by me Setif massacre, served more as an accelerator man as a revelation, and precipitated me eclipse of me group built up around Messali Hadj in me interwar period. Hadj, who had been me impetus behind me first pro-independence organizations, was still me true charismatic leader of me national Algerian movement (Stora 1986). He was blind to me emergence of people no longer believing in classic political action (strikes, petitions, demonstrations). The "activists" in his party recommended recourse to armed struggle to escape me colonial impasse.
Reforms and Repression
"Algeria has been French for a long time. Therefore, secession is inconceivable." So asserted Premier Pierre Mendes-France on November 13 before the National Assembly. Minister of the Interior Francois Mitterrand added: "My policy will be defined by these three words: will, steadfastness, presence." As for the political bureau of the PCF, it declared on November 9 "that it could not approve of the recourse to individual acts likely to play into the hands of the colonialists, if, in fact, they were not fomented by them." Nevertheless, Communist militants, particularly in the Aures, joined the underground forces of November. Trotskyists and anarchist militants, very much in the minority, were the only ones in France to pronounce themselves resolutely in favor of Algerian independence.
How was it possible to believe, in that autumn of 1954, that this was a mere flare-up of violent crime, of isolated individual acts? The governor of Algeria, Roger Leonard in Algiers, and Jean Vaujour, the director of Surete (the criminal investigation bureau), had warned the government of the imminence of an insurrection. On November 20, 1954, Tunisia had its right to internal autonomy recognized. Contacts had already been made to re- turn the sultan of Morocco to his throne. The Arab, world was under the influence of the Nasserian revolution. The decisiveness of the official declarations concealed only poorly the tremors that were shaking the colonial empire. But, as far as Algeria was concerned, no one as yet in the French political class imagined any possibility of independence. The French government proved to be very steadfast in its repressive will. On November 5, 1954, the main pro-independence organization, the MTLD, was dissolved, its leaders ar- rested, and hundreds of militants forced to go underground. Most went on to swell the ranks of the first guerrilla groups. Military reinforcements were sent to Algeria. On February 2, 1955, in the Chamber, Francois Mitterrand declared:
Before the government was formed, that is, before mid-June 1954, there were 49,000 men in Algeria, including three companies of state security police (CRS). Before November 1, that is, in the first phase when, under the premier's authority, I was responsible for the Algerian affair, 75,000 men were sent as reinforcements. After November 1,26,000 were sent to Algeria, not including the goums trained on site. The figure today is 83,400 men. It is therefore 60 percent higher than what the government found in Algeria when it came to power.
On January 15, 1955, the main leader of the FLN in Constantinois, Didouche Mourad, was killed during a skirmish with the French army. A month later, on February II, the FLN leader in the Aures, Mostefa Ben Boulald, was arrested. But the sending of reinforcements and the military operations were accompanied by deep reforms. In January 1955, the government elaborated a program for Algeria:
-the creation in Algiers of a school of administration to give Muslim Algerians access to posts of responsibility in the public sector: of two thousand employees in the general government of Algeria, eight were Muslims; only 15 percent of Muslim children attended school; there was one European student for every 227 European residents of Algeria and one Muslim student for every 15,342 Muslim residents;
-a reduction of the gap between Algerian and European salaries: the gross income of the European in Algeria was twenty-eight times that of the Muslim;
-the initiation of major public works projects: entire zones had no roads, city hall offices, or post offices;
-the recognition of the state of economic poverty of many regions of Algeria and the difficulties caused by very strong demographic pressure: there were 850,000 under- or unemployed for an active population of 2,300,000 potential wage earners.
This program was little discussed, and for good reason. On February 5, 1955, the government of Pierre Mendes-France was overthrown. At five o'clock in the morning, at the end of a debate on North Africa, the result of the vote came in. By a margin of 319 to 273, the deputies delivered a no- confidence vote to the government. The right, the centrists, and the Communists applauded. The Catholics in the Mouvement Republicain Populaire, or MRP (popular Republican Movement, a centrist party) participated in that downfall, an attitude that the weekly Timoignage Chritien did not understand, judging that "we have concluded seven months marked by unquestionable innovation" (February 4, 1955).
Jacques Soustelle went to Algiers the day after the fall of the Mendes cabinet, which was replaced by that of Edgar Faure on February 11. The new governor of Algeria, an ethnologist and a Gaullist, had a justified reputation as an open, liberal man. He had the courage to include in his cabinet Major Vincent Monteil, a great Arabist, and the ethnologist Gennaine Tillion, a specialist on the Aures. Jacques Soustelle was poorly received by those in charge in Algiers. This Cevennes native of Protestant origin was baptized "Ben Soussan" [the implication was that he was Jewish-trans.) Was every- thing still possible in Algeria, even though the FLN had officially been recognized at the Bandung Conference of nonaligned nations in April? Jacques Soustelle met with the leaders of the ulama (religious reformists) and with Ferhat Abbas, who had his movement (founded in 1946), the Union Democratique du Manifeste Algerien or UDMA (Democratic Union of the Algerian Manifesto), participate in the district elections of April 1955.
Until mid-1955, Soustelle labored to understand the discontent of the Muslim population. His trips to the Aures and Kabylia revealed to him the under-administration of the regions agitated by Algerian nationalism, especially the Aures, and the futility of the military deployments, which en- circled nothing more than a vacuum. In March 1955, he asked the government for the right to adapt legislation to the conditions of that war, which still did not dare speak its name. On March 31, 1955, the National Assembly voted in a state of emergency that strengthened the powers of the army in the limited zone of the Aures, and authorized the displacement of "contaminated" populations to "settlement camps." A first camp opened in Khenchela, where one hundred and sixty people were confined. On May 19, the government recalled several annual contingents of soldiers. The army launched major sweeping operations in the second half of 1955. But these measures did not weaken the "rebellion." The authority of the FLN was demonstrated by the district elections in April: the abstention order it issued was followed by 60 percent of the voting population in Constantinois.
Jacques Soustelle promised "integration" and reforms. It was too late: everything fell apart on August 20, 1955, the anniversary of the deposing of the sultan of Morocco. The "phony war" ended, and the Algerian War began in earnest.
The Uprising of August 20,1955
On August 20, 1955, thousands of Algerian peasants revolted and rushed to attack cities in North Constantinois within the quadrilateral formed by Collo, Philippeville, Constantine, and Guelma. The initiative behind that large-scale action fell to Zighoud Youcef, Didouche Mourad's successor at the head of the FLN's North Constantinois zone, and on his assistant, Lakhdar Ben Tobbal. On that day, the FLN leaders intended to mark the second anniversary of the deposing of Sidi Mohammed Ben Youcef, sultan of Morocco, by the French. The war assumed its true face in Constantinois, where the coexistence of communities had always been tenser than in the rest of Algeria. Ten years after the "events" of Setif and Guelma in May 1945, an identical outburst of violence recurred, followed by an excessive and indiscriminate repression. At about noon several thousand fellahs (peas- ants, agricultural workers) moved into about thirty cities and villages. They were weakly organized by a few uniformed soldiers of the Annee de Liberation Nationale, or ALN (National Liberation Army, the armed branch of the FLN), and they attacked police stations, the gendannerie, and various public buildings. These peasants were agitated: a rumor of an Egyptian landing in Collo circulated. Many French people, but also Muslims, were murdered with axes, billhooks, picks, or knives. Political figures were attacked, including SaId Cherif, UDMA delegate to the Algerian assembly, and Abbas Alaoua, Ferhat Abbas's nephew, who was murdered in his pharmacy in Constantine. The death toll of the riots came to 123, including 71 in the European population.
The repression was terrible. The army set to work and, as in May 1945, private militias were formed. The official death toll was fixed at 1,273. After an investigation, the FLN put forward the figure of 12,000 victims, which has never been disproved. On August 20, 1955, the myth of "peacekeeping operations" in Algeria came to an end. France was going to war, and it recalled sixty thousand reservists. Jacques Soustelle, governor-general of Algeria, overwhelmed by the spectacle of mutilated European cadavers in Philippeville, now gave the army carte blanche. The time for reforms was past. On September 30, 1955, the "Algerian question" was on the UN's agenda. The pro-independence Algerians, via the August 20 uprising, succeeded in attracting worldwide attention to Algeria. The conflict entered its phase of internationalization.
In face of the developing nationalist insurrection in Algeria, the French government hastened to settle matters for the two French protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco. It negotiated with the nationalist leaders Habib Bourguiba and Mohamed \7; whom its predecessors had exiled and imprisoned; it granted internal sovereignty to Tunisia (independence would become effective in March 1956) and outright independence to Morocco in November 1955.
The Soldiers' Movement
After August 20, 1955, the repression in Algeria openly took on the look and
dimensions of a true war. The battalions of security police, gendarmes, legionnaires,
and paratroopers who were already in Algeria were supplemented by more conscripts.
On August 24, 1955, 60,000 young soldiers who had recently been liberated were
"recalled" to service, and on August 30 the government decreed that
180,000 "dischargeable" soldiers would re- main in the military.
Very quickly, those who were called back tried to oppose these measures, sometimes
with the support of their families and the general population. On September
I, at the Gare de l'Est in Paris, two thousand young people re- fused to board
the trains, shouting "Civilian life!" "No war in Algeria!"
and "Morocco for the Moroccans!" On September 2, six hundred of the
"re- called" in the air force demonstrated at the Gare de Lyons. Similar
events were repeated in Brives, Perpignan, and Bordeaux. The contingent demonstrated
to shouts of "The civilians are on our side!" But, in fact, that soldiers'
movement, which did not find support among the masses of "civilians,"
quickly ran out of steam because of individual lassitude and also a lack of
political prospects. The organizations and major parties proved to be more preoccupied
with the tumult of political life within France. On November 29, by a margin
of318 to 218, the Assembly passed a vote of no-confidence directed at Edgar
Faure's government, thus setting in motion its dissolution. Legislative elections
were set for January 2, 1956.
The Election and "The Day of Tomatoes"
Despite the dissolution of the Chamber, Jacques Soustelle continued the state of emergency. The government decided to postpone the elections in Algeria. The elected officials in Ferhat Abbas's Union Democratique du Manifeste Algerien decided to resign from the Algerian assembly, in the footsteps of the sixty-one Muslim elected officials who, on September 26, 1955, had opposed the integration policy championed by Soustelle. On December 20, 1955, L 'Express reproduced photographs taken in August depicting the execution of an Algerian "rebel" by an auxiliary gendarme. The electoral campaign proceeded against the background of the Algerian tragedy, and the left called for "peace in Algeria." The Socialists and Radicals formed a Front Republicain, which won the election on January 2, 1956. The major event of these legislative elections was the making of inroads by Pierre Poujade's movement, which won 52 of the 623 seats, including one for Jean- Marie Le Pen. Pierre Poujade's movement, the Union de Defense des Commercants et Artisans, or UDCA (Defense Union of Tradespeople and Artisans), campaigned against the "crooks" in the government and against the tax system. The Communists won 50 seats.
On February 1, the National Assembly invested the new government. Guy Mollet became premier, and General Georges Catroux, minister resident in Algeria. Jacques Soustelle, who had received such a poor welcome upon his arrival in Algiers, left a city in frenzy on February 2, 1956. More than 100,000 people, most of them Europeans, noisily demon- strated their affection, and stood in the path of the armored car that was trying to make its way to the port: "Don't go! Mendes in the Aures! Catroux in the sea!" Old general Catroux, a liberal, would never reach the Summer Palace in Algiers. On February 6, a demonstration of "ultras," proponents of French Algeria, shouted down the government's policy; various projectiles hit Guy Mollet. This event would become known to posterity under the name of "the day of tomatoes." The premier, still neutral, abandoned his policy, seeking peace in Algeria: the Republic had capitulated in the face of a few projectiles thrown onto this Glieres plateau of Algiers, which had become the cauldron of Algerian rage. Pierre Mendes-France resigned his post as state minister. The Socialist government was about to plunge into war.
The "Special Powers"
The extremist pieds noirs and the army demanded an increase in the number of soldiers, already 190,000 strong in February 1956, and the addition of helicopters to support the partitioning of the "bled." Robert Lacoste, former Resistance fighter and member of the SFIO, named minister resident in Algeria by Guy Mollet on February 9, 1956, introduced a legislative bill in the National Assembly, "authorizing the government to set in place a program of economic expansion, social progress, and administrative reform in Algeria, and enabling it to take all exceptional measures in view of reestablishing order, protecting persons and property, and safe- guarding the territory."
Via the decrees of March and April 1956, which would allow increased military action and the recall of reservists, Algeria was divided into three zones (a zone of operation, a pacification zone, and a forbidden zone), in which three specific army corps would move. In the zone of operation, the objective would be to "crush the rebels." In the pacification zones, the "protection" of European and Muslim populations was foreseen, with the army struggling against the deficiencies of the administration. The forbidden zones were to be evacuated, and the population assembled in "settlement camps" and placed under the control of the army.
On March 12, the Parliament (by a margin of 455 to 76) overwhelmingly passed that law on special powers which, among other things, suspended most of the guarantees of individual liberties in Algeria. The PCF voted for the law. The "special powers" constituted the real turning point in a war that France had decided to wage totally.
On April11, the recall of the reservists was decreed. Tens of thousands of soldiers crossed the Mediterranean. Prior to that application of the law, the directors of the journal Les Temps Modernes realized where it would lead and said so. "The left. for once unanimous, has voted for 'special powers,' powers perfectly useless for negotiation but indispensable for the continuation and escalation of the war. This vote is scandalous and runs the risk of being irreparable." It would in fact be so.
On March 16, 1956, four days after the vote on special powers, the first FLN attacks struck Algiers. Robert Lacoste imposed a curfew on the city, continuously crisscrossed by his patrols. In France, a few final spontaneous demonstrations took shape around train stations and barracks, against "the departure of the recalled reservists." Public opinion balked at the extension of military service to twenty-eight months. In Algeria, "the bled" continued to "rot, " and terrorism took root nearly everywhere. Oran was hit by FLN strikes in February, Algiers by similar strikes in May. The dissemination of the French troops and their mediocre training made them vulnerable to am- bushes: in Palestro, on May 19, twenty young recalled reservists from Paris fell during an attack by members of the "Ali Khodja" ALN commando, assisted by the general population. Five days later the sole survivor was rescued by paratroopers.
In July and September of 1956, discreet negotiations opened between the delegates of the FLN (M'Hamed Yazid and Abderrahmane Kiouane) and of the SFIO (pierre Commun) in Belgrade and Rome. The SFIO urged Guy Mollet to obtain a pause in the fighting through the intervention of the sultan of Morocco and of Habib Bourguiba, president of Tunisia, which had won its independence on March 20, 1956. Hocine Ait Ahmed, Mohamed Boudiaf, Ahmed Ben Bella, and Mohammed Khider discussed these prospects in Rabat on October 21, and flew off to Tunis the next day. But the Moroccan DC-3 carrying them was intercepted by the French air force and forced to land in Algiers. Robert Lacoste and the military, who did not miss that opportunity to "root out the rebellion," made it impossible for Guy Mollet to pursue the beginnings of a negotiation. The European population of Algiers, which had endured the nightmare of explosions in bars frequented by its young people, noisily demonstrated its confidence in Robert Lacoste, who was congratulated for his energy. But, in Algeria and the metropolis, attention was soon diverted from the fate of Ben Bella and his companions (they would remain incarcerated until the end of the war) by the Suez expedition on November 5 and 6, 1956.
Guy Mollet, haunted by the memory of the capitulation of Munich in 1938, and comparing Nasser to a "new Hitler," launched the foolhardy military expedition of Port Said. The Franco-British operation aimed to wrest the Suez Canal from the control of Egypt, which had nationalized the company in July. In the minds of the French general staff, the operation would serve to take down Nasser, who was considered the most active supporter of the Algerian insurrection. But the tactical success, acquired with the cooperation of the Israelis, who had attacked to the east, was transformed into a political rout: the Americans and the Russians made the troops depart again on November 15, and the UN put the Algerian question on its agenda.
The FLN took advantage of these events to make its presence known in the countryside and in the cities. In the late part of 1956, the Algerian War took a nasty turn. The army had increased in size from 54,000 to 350,000 men within two years. Several classes had to be recalled, and the length of military service was extended to nearly thirty months. The repression pushed thousands of young Algerians toward the guerrilla forces (students in particular, who organized a strike in March 1956). The French sector forces combed the territory with little zeal. The paratroopers and the Legion, constantly on call, suffered heavy losses. In late 1956, the ALN had tens of thousands of djounouds (warriors) in its ranks. Things were deterio- rating everywhere. Certain regions represented real sanctuaries for the FLN. Most of the Muslim elected officials, including Ferhat Abbas, joined the camp of Algerian nationalism.
Since autumn, Robert Lacoste had been calling for a new commander in chief. On November 15, 1956, Guy Mollet installed General Raoul Salan in place of General Henri Lorillot, who had been unable to respond to the guerrilla war, despite the reinforcements landing each month in Algeria. The arrival of Raoul Salan, a veteran of Indochina and a "strategist" of subversive war, opened a new chapter in the Algerian War, especially since the FLN had decided to change its field of operation: in January 1957, it took the war to the heart of Algiers, making repeated attacks and issuing the order for a general strike.
The "Battle of Algiers"
On December 27, 1956, Amedee Froger, president of the federation of mayors of Algeria and a virulent spokesman for the minor colons, was mur- dered in Algiers. The next day his funeral occasioned truly brutal ratonnades (Arab-bashings), which caused several Muslim casualties. Tension was ex- treme between the Europeans and the Muslim Algerians. Robert Lacoste's general government decided to react. On the basis of the "special powers" passed in March 1956, he entrusted the "pacification" of Algiers to General Jacques Massu, commander of the Tenth Paratroopers' Division.
On January 7, 1957, eight thousand paratroopers moved into the city, charged with a policing mission. The "battle of Algiers" had begun. On January 9 and 10, two explosions caused panic in two stadiums in Algiers. But the horror reached its peak on January 26. Within a few minutes of each other, two charges exploded, the first in the bar L'Otomatic, the second in the cafe Le Coq Hardi, in the very center of Algiers. Two Muslim Algerians were lynched by an agitated European mob. On January 28, to coincide with the United Nations debates, the FLN launched an order for an eight- day general strike. The army broke the strike. At every moment and at every location, helicopters landed on the terraces of the Casbah. The city was divided into sectors, and the Muslim neighborhoods were isolated behind barbed wire, under searchlights. General Massu, endowed with policing powers over the city, had the responsibility of restoring order, and broke apart the FLN's "autonomous zone of Algiers" (ZAA) which was located primarily in the Casbah and headed by Yacef Saadi. The FLN set up a true organization estimated at five thousand militants. Terrorism served to justify recourse to every means possible. Massu's men made massive arrests, systematically took down names, and, in the "transit and sorting centers" lo- cated on the periphery of the city, practiced torture. The leader of the FLN, Larbi Ben M'Hidi, was arrested on February 17, and subsequently was said to have "committed suicide." The "very exhaustive" interrogations produced results.
It was truly "blood and shit," as Colonel Marcel Bigeard said, a
horrendous battle, during which bombs blew dozens of European victims to pieces,
while paratroopers dismantled the networks by uncovering their hierarchy, discovered
caches, and flushed out the FLN leaders installed in the city. Their means?
Electrodes (known as gigene, a slang term for generator), dunkings in bathtubs,
beatings. Some of the torturers were sadists, to be sure. But many officers,
noncommissioned officers, and soldiers would live with that nightmare for the
rest of their lives. The number of attacks perpetrated fell from 112 in January
to 39 in February, then to 29 in March. The FLN's command center, run by Abbane
Ramdane, was forced to leave the capital. Massu had a first victory.
On March 28, 1957, General Paris de Bollardiere asked to be relieved of his
duties. He could not allow the use of torture, which he had experienced and
fought against during the German Occupation. The chaplain of the Tenth Paratroopers'
Division responded by declaring: "One cannot fight against revolutionary
war except with methods of clandestine action." General Paris de Bollardiere
was sentenced to sixty days in prison on April 15, 1957.
In early June the attacks resumed. On June 3, a bomb went off near a bus stop; onJune 9, the dance hall of a casino was targeted, causing 8 deaths and 92 injuries. The repression began again, aided this time by a network of "reformed" militants (called the "overalls"), who, under the leadership of Captain Uger, infiltrated the FLN and brought down many leaders. Yacef Saadi was arrested on September 24, 1957. His assistant, Ali La Pointe, finding himself surrounded, committed suicide in a cache to avoid arrest. The "battle of Algiers" was over. The European population rediscovered the pleasures of the beach and the restaurants, and worshiped its paratroopers. That idyll would continue on May 13, 1958.
The FLN networks had been destroyed, thousands of Algerians had been arrested or "disappeared." But that military victory was accompanied by a grave moral crisis. On September 12, 1957, Paul Teitgen, secretary general of the Algiers police, resigned in protest against the practices of General Massu and the paratroopers. He put forward the figure of 3,024 disappeared. The "question" of torture was about to divide France.
The Question of Torture
Torture, employed as an ordinary procedure of "pacification" during the "battle of Algiers," was certainly the great scandal of these Algerian years (Vidal-Naquet 1975).
As early as January 15, 1955, the writer Francois Mauriac had published an article in L 'Express entitled "The Question." At the same time, the journalist Claude Bourdet also denounced what he called "Your Algerian Gestapo" in France-Obseruateur. On March 2, 1955, Roger Willaume, an inspector general in the administration, remitted a report to Jacques Soustelle, governor-general of Algeria, which made it very clear that torture was commonly practiced on "suspects." On December 13, 1955, Premier Edgar Faure received a report prepared by Jean Mairey, director of Surete Nationale, that reached the same conclusion. Torture was being used by the ditachement opirationnnel de protection, or DOP (protective operation detail), special units of the army charged with "exhaustive" interrogations.
Beginning in mid-February 1957, the weekly Timoignage Chritien published the "Jean Muller dossier," by a recalled reservist in Algeria: "We are far removed from the pacification for which we were supposedly called; we are desperate to see how low human nature can stoop, and to see the French use procedures stemming from Nazi barbarism." In March 1957, a few recalled reservists put out a brochure, Des rappelis timoignent (Recalled reservists bear witness) under the aegis of the Comite de Resistance Spirituelle (Committee of Spiritual Resistance). In it, there are accounts such as this: "I was thinking of the kid, who I imagined terrorized at the bottom of the jeep trailer, where he had been shut up at night. Yet it was the kid they were torturing." In April, the journal Esprit published the wrenching ac- count by Robert Bonnaud, "The Peace of the Nementchas": "If France's honor can go along with these acts of torture, then France is a country without honor."
In September 1957, Paul Teitgen resigned his post as secretary general of the police in Algiers. He wrote: "In visiting the settlement centers, I recognized on certain detainees the deep marks of abuse or torture that I person- ally endured fourteen years ago in the basement of the Gestapo in Nancy." In November 1957, at the initiative of the mathematician Laurent Schwartz and the historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, the Comite Maurice-Audin was formed, named after a young mathematician who disappeared after being abducted by paratroopers and tortured. In January 1958, Henri Alleg's La question appeared, which troubled consciences and publicly revealed the torture. So began the "affair" that deeply divided public opinion, the Church, families, and the parties: Why did the French army practice large-scale torture? Many thought that torture could become an institution, first of the police, and then of the military.
The publication in newspapers and journals (L'Humaniti, Les Temps Modernes, Esprit, Viriti Pour) of works such as the Catholic writer Pierre- Henri Simon's Contre la torture (Against torture) got intellectuals involved; they soon formed into networks that fought against disinformation and human rights violations. Communist militants, writers, the Catholic intellectuals Francois Mauriac, Andre Mandouze, Pierre-Henri Simon, and Andre Frossard, and priests proved particularly active in the circulation of the war "secrets." Some belonged to the Mission de France, set up in Pontigny, Yonne, in August 1954, under the supervision of cardinal Lienart.
Despite the censorship and the shroud of secrecy covering Algeria, the French public gradually discovered the true nature of a conflict that, to be sure, no longer had anything to do with a mere "peacekeeping mission."
Censorship, Prisons, Camps
The Algerian war brought about major restrictions on the freedom of the press, of publication, and of visual images. Censorship was set in place on a large scale. The law of Apri13, 1955, declaring "the state of emergency," allowed administrative authorities, the minister of the interior, the general government, and the prefects to "take all measures to ensure control of the press and of publications of all kinds, as well as radio transmissions, showings of films, and theatrical performances" (article II of the law of April 3, 1955, declared applicable by that law). The decree of March 17, 1956, within the framework of the "special powers," repeated a similar formula, extended to "every means of expression." Printed texts could be seized by the administration and the courts, or subject to police measures or additional penalties, as an attack on state security.
The many newspapers and books seized by the prefects came about by virtue of article 10 of the criminal investigation code, which became article 30 of the penal procedures code. That article allowed the prefect to temporarily seize books or periodicals that contained a press violation, as stipulated by the law of July 29, 1881, if it also constituted "an attack on state security." In its section on crimes and misdemeanors committed via the press, the law of July 28, 1881, restricted freedom of opinion by repressing incitement to crimes and misdemeanors against the body politic. Article 25 of that law, used many times during the Algerian War, "represses the incitement of military personnel to disobedience, even when it remains without effect." A decision of April 27, 1961, defined the grounds that could justify a ban: support of an act of subversion directed against the authorities or laws of the Republic, or the dissemination of secret information, military or administrative.
Under the Fourth Republic, certain newspapers, such as L'express, France-Observateu7; L'Humanite, Le Canard Enchame, La Verite des Travai//eurs, and Le Libertaire were particularly targeted. Nearly thirty works from the publishers Jerome Lindon and Francois Maspero would be seized under the Fifth Republic, between 1958 and 1962.
As of 1955, the police and the army championed house arrest for Algerian nationalist militants. Detention camps were established in Algeria by virtue of the law of March 16, 1956. Tens of thousands of Algerians were put into camps without due process, in Bossuet, Saint-Leu, and Lambessa.
The law of July 26, 1957, extended to France the provisions set out in the so-called special powers law. It stipulated the possibility of restricting to a detention center, in places located within the metropolis, any person convicted in application of the "laws on battle squads or private militias." Only one mode of application was envisioned for the detention thus set in place: internment in a guarded residence center. Between 1956 and 1959, then, four detention centers under guard were gradually established: Mounnelon-Vadenay (Marne), Saint-Maurice-l' Ardoise (Gard), Thol (Ain), and Larzac (Aveyron). The militants brought to these centers, after their sentences had been served, were those considered by the police to be "most active in the rebellion, whose return to freedom, that is, to separatist plots, poses a serious danger." The optimal use of these legislative provisions made it possible to obtain, within two years, the signing of 6,707 detention orders, of which 1,860 were executed.
The Fourth Republic was also a time of massive trials and death sentences. Ahmed Zabana, judged by the armed forces tribunal in Algiers, was the first to be sentenced to death; he was executed in the Barberousse Prison on June 19, 1956.
The Battles of the French Army
The bazooka attack committed on January 16, 1957, against Salan's office seems to have been separate from the "battle of Algiers": supposedly, the goal of the plot was to eliminate a general who was suspected of liberalism. In fact, Salan managed to straighten out the military situation. As it happened, in the bled, the combat methods of Colonel Jeanpierre's legionnaires, Bigeard's paratroopers, and others, paid off. The "rebels" bringing armaments from Tunisia and Morocco were intercepted and pursued into the interior of the sectors patrolled by conventional regiments. Helicopters and intelligence became the instruments of the troops, who were freed from policing Algiers in early summer 1957.
Despite a noticeable increase in its losses, the ALN was strengthened, than~ to the weapons and reinforcements that, in spite of everything, it received from Morocco and especially Tunisia, where it sent its recruits to be trained and armed. To isolate Algeria from these countries, Minister of Defense Andre Morice (a member of the Bourges-Maunoury government from June to September 1957) decided to build, behind the border lines, network of electrified and mined barbed wire (called the barrages or the "Morice Line"). In the desert zones, these were supplemented by batteries of cannons that would fire automatically when set off by radar. These obstacles could be breached, but as soon as they were, the break in the electrical current would send a signal to the military forces that someone had gone through.
In late May 1957, a very bitter skirmish occurred in wilaya IV between Bigeard's paratroopers and five hundred "fellaghas" (the name given the peasant insurrection movement in Tunisia) led by Azzedine, who escaped; ninety-six "rebels" were killed. At the same time, Salan undertook "social" pacification and dispatched SAS (special administrative section) officers to the bled: these men were paid to promote literacy and provide medical assistance, which also served as counterpropaganda and intelligence. In the rural areas, the relocation of the evacuated populations from the "forbid- den zones" and the SAS actions had a negative effect on the FLN-ALN's recruitment, supply operations, and intercommunications. The recruitment of harkis and other auxiliaries from the peasantry resistant to the authority of the insurgent leaders, and from former "rebels," facilitated the actions of the military forces (in 1962, a report sent to the UN estimated the number of Muslims who fought in the auxiliary units or in self-defense groups at 263,000).
In early 1958, the French command judged that the war was virtually won. Minister Resident Robert Lacoste kept repeating victory would come to the one who held out for "the last quarter hour." That entailed "forget- ting" the profound political and moral crisis permeating the Fourth Republic in 1957. In addition, the FLN leadership, installed outside the country, still hoped to win by combining an offensive of its troops from Tunisia and Morocco with diplomatic pressure on the UN, as a way to internationalize the conflict with an Algerian "Dien Bien Phu."
Crises in the Republic
In 1957, the conflict intensified throughout Algeria, outside the large cities. Soldiers of the contingent were now engaged in war, while in the metropolis more and more people were speaking out against torture. The UN demanded that France apply a "peaceful, democratic, and fair" solution to the Algerian problem. The American senator John F. Kennedy publicly declared himself in favor of this approach on July 2, 1957. In Paris, the Guy Mollet government, whose budget was reeling under the weight of heavy expenses incurred by the "peacekeeping operation" in Algeria, was over- thrown on May 28, 1957. The cabinet of Maurice Bourges-Maunoury succeeded it. It decided to focus on the Sahara, where oil had been discovered, and asked Robert Lacoste, who was kept in his post, to prepare an outline law that would bring a "new Algeria" into being. The international repercussions of the Algerian affair were obsessing the parties in the Front Republicain and, by September 1957, the gap had widened between the politicians and the military, between the metropolis and the pieds noirs, and within the left itself. A large proportion of "democrats" and "leftists" in the Federation de I'Education Nationale, or FEN (National Education Federation), the Force Ouvriere, or FO (Workers' Power), and the Ligue des Droits des Hommes (Human Rights League), spoke of "the indigenous populations" and of "the territories," not of peoples and nations. Individual oppression was recognized, not national oppression. The republican left (which had come into existence during the Dreyfus affair) with its passion for universalism and the principles of 1789, opposed nationalism (French or Algerian) and religious circles. Logically, it rejected the proclamations of the Algerian nationalists, which were "marked by Islamic religiosity." At the same time, it could not understand why the republican principle of equality had never really been applied to Algeria and the colonies.
The Algerian affair, in fact, legitimated a republican reading of the FLN as a "symbol of justice"; but a different reading saw the organization as the conveyor of an "archaic nationalism to be transcended." The PCF also proved incapable of deciding between these two readings. That failure led to the involvement of a significant faction of young people in a radical Third World movement against "National Molletism" and the PCF, considered obstinately faithful to Moscow. The largest aid network to the FLN was run by Francis Jeanson, a philosopher and managing editor of the journal Les Temps Modernes, who, with his wife, Colette, had published L'AIgirie hors-/a loi (Outlaw Algeria) in 1955. Jeanson had long hoped for a burst of energy on the part of the French left, which the "people" had brought to power in 1956 under the Front Republicain label; he was weary of meetings, placards, and the pious motions of a left that "continued to put the brakes to a movement that it prided itself on promoting." Observing that "none of the people who spoke of putting an end to the war, which they themselves declared absurd, conceded that one might help French young people refuse to become mired in it, " and that "they were denouncing colonialism, but considered criminal any sort of practical solidarity with the colonized," he came to the logical conclusion: provide direct aid to the FLN.
During this time, the Socialist Robert Lacoste was attempting to escape the political impasse. He prepared an outline law that included a "single college," which would get rid of the voting inequality in the two colleges (one European vote was worth seven Algerian votes, according to the statute drafted in 1947). On September 13, this proposal for an outline law was adopted in the Council of Ministers. But it was in turn shouted down by the majority of Europeans. It did not even manage to convince the National Assembly: on September 30, 1957, Bourges-Maunoury was overthrown. It was not until the following November 6 that the assembly awarded its confidence to the new government of the Radical Felix Gaillard. The outline law on Algeria, greatly watered down to reduce the influence of Muslim elected officials, was finally passed on November 29, and its application postponed until the end of the war. Funds were allocated to build the electrified barriers on the borders of Morocco and Tunisia, the "Morice Line" (named after the short-lived minister of defense). Robert Lacoste remained resident minister in Algeria, but his authority was gone. General Salan now exercised vast prerogatives, and intended to win the war with his spirited colonels.
November 1, 1954, the official date of the outbreak of the Algerian War, did not coincide with the imposition of a single leadership (the emergent FLN, for example) or with the collapse of all earlier political currents. As it turned out, the FLN was to structure and consolidate itself over two years, culminating in the Soummam Congress on August 20, 1956. In these two years, cadres were recruited and selected, the population trained, the idea of independence developed, channels established, and guerrilla warfare reinvented. But, above all, it took two long years to have the envied title of "authorized representative" recognized through the integration of all other currents into the FLN, with the exception of the proponents of the old nationalist leader Messali Hadj, who in December 1954 founded the Mouvement National Algerien (Stora 1985).
Differences among Nationalists
The dissolution of the MTLD by the Council of Ministers on November 4, 1954, led to the arrest of several hundred Algerian nationalist leaders and militants. Those who were not arrested had no choice: they had to go underground or join the guerrilla forces. The FLN took full advantage of the dissolution of the MTLD. It set structures in place to intercept the majority of disoriented Messalists and welcome them into the underground forces; they took possession of the stocks of weapons inherited from the O5, the paramilitary organization of the MTLD; and they initiated contact with the Tunisians and the Moroccans. A large number of immigrants joining the guerrilla forces were taken in hand by the FLN. But, in the first phase of the insurrection, it also suffered very cruel blows. On January 15 , 1955, Didouche Mourad, leader of Constantinois, died in battle; on February 11, Mostefa Ben Boulald, leader of the Aures, was arrested; on March 16, Rabah Bitat, who had organized the urban guerrilla war in Algiers, was also arrested.
Under these conditions of very active repression (between November 1954 and April 1955), efforts at reconciliation took place between "activists" (the members of the MTLD who had perpetrated the events of November 1, 1954), "centralists" (the majority of the former members of the central committee of the MTLD), and "Messalists" (the followers of Messali Hadj). During this period, the FLN was still seeking its identity, assessing its strength. In Algiers, in Cairo, and among the guerrilla forces, contacts and efforts at reconciliation took place between "Messalists" and "Frontists" (supporters of the FLN). That did not fail to promote confusion within the immigrant community in France, and in Algeria. To be sure, the grass-roots nationalist militants had to expend a great deal of effort disentangling the maze of triangular relationships among all the parties involved (Messalists, CRUA, centralists) and understanding the disputes, which were Byzantine in their view, in the period preceding and immediately following the insurrection of November 1, 1954.
Confusion was also at its height among the guerrilla forces. All currents, though not acting in concert, accepted the designation" ALN" as the sole military structure. A large portion of Messalist militants decided on their own to resort to weapons as soon as the November 1 operations became known. In certain regions of Algeria, particularly the Aures and Kabylia, armed groups formed independent of the existing leadership. They were "taken in hand" after the fact. Animated simply by patriotic desire, some were familiar with the FLN, while others embraced Messali. On November 1, 1954, the pamphlets clearly distinguished between the FLN, the movement's political organization, and the ALN, a military organization. But in the Aures, for example, the entire political side answered to the authority of Chihani Bachir, Ben Boulald's second in command. The Aures zone leaders did not see the usefulness of the distinction. They believed it was enough to proclaim open revolution and to train militants. In Kabylia, and especially in the Bowra region, the militants fought under the name" Armee de Liberation Nationale," which tended to create ambiguity regarding the designation "ALN," shared by the FLN and the MNA. Things came to a head politically in 1955.
The FLN-MNA War
In early 1955, the "activists" of the former MTLD, who had founded
the FLN, managed to pull the members of the "centralist" current along
with them. Conversely, the Messalists, heirs to a long political tradition,
and who did not believe exclusively in military action to achieve independence,
rejected the activist aims, which they judged simplistic. For Messali Hadj,
formed within the French left, the activists were the victims of an "infantile
disease." The two organizations, the FLN and the MNA, were about to en-
gage in violent confrontations.
On June 1, 1955, the murder of Saifi, an old PPA militant, whose hotel and restaurant on rue Aumaire, in the third arrondissement of Paris, harbored illegal aliens, precipitated the confrontation. In a pamphlet issued in late November 1955, Abbane Ramdane, assistant to Krim Belkacem and leader of the FLN in Algiers, called Messali Hadj "a shame-faced old man who holds the Angouleme front, at the head of an army of police officers, which assures his protection against the anger of the people." After various insults and accusations exchanged via pamphlets, weapons took the place of words. On December 10, 1955, in Algiers, Salah Bouchafa and Mustapha Fettal, FLN militants, executed Sadek Rihani, the leader of the MNA in Algiers. The test of strength had begun. For both organizations, the nature of the future independent Algerian society was not at issue. The violent rivalry took place at a different level: who ought to be, who could be, the exclusive representative of the Algerian people?
From 1955 to 1962, the "shock commandos" of the FLN and the MNA waged a long, cruel battle using every means possible: traps, betrayal, infiltration, and executions to serve as an example, all of them sowing fear. In Algeria, this internecine struggle was exemplified, in May 1957, by the FLN's bloody massacre of 374 villagers in Melouza, who were suspected of Messalist sympathies. The massacre spurred the MNA fighters, especially those of Mohammed Bellounis, to immediately join the French army. On March 20, 1962, the newspaper Le Monde published statistics on the scope of the confrontation between nationalists in France (the FLN versus the MNA): more than twelve thousand assaults, four thousand deaths, and more than nine thousand injuries. In Algeria itself, the toll of that civil war was very heavy: six thousand dead and fourteen thousand wounded. In total, in France and in Algeria, the number of victims rose to nearly ten thousand dead and twenty-five thousand wounded in the two camps.
The FLN would emerge victorious in this war within a war. But thousands of militants who had been trained for modem political life in the immigration movement in France, in particular, were killed in the process, and would be cruelly absent from the leadership of an Algeria at war, and then of an independent Algeria.
Converts to the FLN, the Soummam Congress
In 1955 and 1956, the FLN increased contacts and discussions with the other Algerian components. All the same, aware of the "bankruptcy" of the earlier parties, it expected them simply to dissolve and their members to join the FLN in a purely individual capacity. Following in the footsteps of the "centralists" (Ben Youssef Ben Khedda, Sa ad Dhalab, M'Hamed Yazid, and Hocine Lahouel), Ferhat Abbas's UDMA rallied behind the FLN in late 1955.
The FLN was to obtain this massive conversion of the "old elites," so avidly desired, from another organization, the ulama (a religious reformist movement that championed the rebirth of Islamic identity in Algeria). That religious organization, worried about its lack of control over the events, went over to the FLN camp during its conference on January 7, 1956, and glorified the "resistance to colonialism." Then there was the case of the Parti Communiste Algerien, or PCA (Algerian Communist Party). In May and June 1956, Ben Khedda and Abbane Ramdane, representing the FLN, and Bachir Hadj Ali and Sadek Hadjeres, representing the PCA, began protracted discussions. On July 1, 1956, the Algerian Communists-were inte- grated into the ALN.
The Soummam Congress, which was held on August 20, 1956, made official "the
bankruptcy of the former political organizations of the old par- ties,"
and noted that the "grass-roots militants" had rallied behind the
FLN, and that the UDMA and the ulama had been dissolved. With this congress,
held in the Soummam Valley in Kabylia, the "Algerian revolution" changed
its aspect. The long (twenty-day) debates culminated in a well-defined pro-
gram, the structuring of the FLN-ALN, and the affirmation of the primacy of
political over military action and of the domestic scene over the exterior (feguia
1984).
Initially planned for July 31 in the region of the Bibane, the congress did
not open until August 20 in a forester's cottage close to the village of Igbal,
on the western slope of the Soummam. Sixteen delegates participated; they very
unevenly represented the different regions of Algeria. In addition to the absence
of the external delegation, there was no representative of the Aures-their leader,
Mohammed Ben Boulald, had been killed, and his brother Omar could not come,
given the constant movements of the French anny. Oranais was represented only
by Larbi Ben M'Hidi. Six delegates came from Zone n (North Constantinois): Youcef
Zighoud, Lakhdar Ben Tobbal, Mostefa Benaouda, Brahim Mezhoudi, Ali Kafi, and
Rouibah. Four came from Zone III (Kabylia): Belkacem Krim, Mohammedi SaId, Amirouche,
and Kaci. Three came from Zone IV (Algerois): Amar Ouamrane, Slimane Dehiles,
Ahmed Bouguerra. And one came from Zone VI (the south): Ali Mellah. These fifteen
men were representatives of the combatants. The sixteenth, the only political
secretary, was Abbane Ramdane.
From the deliberations of this congress, three major concerns emerged:
This "counterstate" in gestation was justified by the suffocating power of the colonial state. According to that argument, the pursuit of the pluralist traditions of Algerian nationalism prior to 1954 appeared too feeble a means for breaking free of the ponderous weight of French tutelage (Slimane Chikh 1981).
Although the Soummam Congress, the only one in the FLN's history, was historic in the "legislative" work it accomplished, it also inaugurated the struggle for control in the highest echelons of the nationalist organization. On September 23,1956, Abbane Ramdane (a native of Kabylia) sent a letter to Mohammed Khider, informing him of the congress's decisions. When Ben Bella learned of the letter and received the minutes of the congress, he decided to compose a three-point response. He insisted on the "nonrepresentative" character of the congress. "The Aures, the external delegation, Oranie, and the eastern zones did not attend, nor did the Federation de France." He attacked "the questioning, once again, of the Islamic character of our future political institutions" and thereby demonstrated his rejection of the secularism of the state, and his refusal to make a place for the European minority. Finally, he denounced the presence of former leaders of parties within the leading organizations. This reply repeated word for word the themes of the leadership of the PPA-MTLD against "the Berberists" of 1949 (Stora 1991 a: 111 ). But did not Abbane also accuse Ben Bella "of distrusting them because they were Kabyles"? Part of the reason for the dispute over legitimacy can be found in a "regionalist" explanation.
The Battle of the Guerrilla Forces
The principal unit of the ALN was the katiba-the equivalent of a light company-which might reach the size of one hundred men, or the platoon, about thirty men. These men eked out an existence in the territory constituting their field of operation, which they knew intimately for having traversed it in every direction.
Their solidarity was that of combatants waging war for the duration of the conflict, without any thought of return, constantly facing the same dangers and the same privations, whatever their rank or duties: the officer was no less Spartan than the djoundi (soldier); the secretary, the medic, the radio operator if there was one, all engaged in combat. It was not military ritual that made for cohesion. The link that united the mujahideen (fighters) was the blood spilled, the cause served, the danger marking their existence. It was also the acquisition of a discipline that, if breached, might entail a punishment of death-for example, for indecent behavior or a weapon in poor condition. It was also the shared background of these men, almost all of whom were coarse, rural folk, trained for a hard life since birth. Each man carried his ration of semolina or couscous; as often as possible, oil, chick-peas, and onions were part of the daily menu, as were sugar and coffee. Mutton and fresh fruit appeared only rarely. The medic did not always have the medications needed for the ill and wounded. Whereas battle was an ordeal, marching was hardly so for a mountain dweller or a peasant. Once he had become a soldier, he was equipped by the ALN with lightweight laced boots, called "Pataugas," made of coarse canvas with rubber soles. His equipment was limited to the minimum. He had no change of clothes. Except for a few food rations and possibly a blanket, nothing counted more than his weapon and ammunition. The unit was moving more or less constantly. In the first place, it had to be present everywhere, at intervals close enough to keep the population aware of its strength.
Truly offensive action always required that the katiba (or platoon) move secretly and quickly from one point to another that was as far away as possible, since in guerrilla warfare nothing works like surprise. That meant that marches, except those in the forest, were usually done at night along ridges, in wadi beds, or at best over goat trails. The soldiers slept out in the open. Without warning, an SAS post would be assaulted with mortar; a rural bus would be attacked and burned; or an ambush, carefully set up at a bend in the trail, would patiently wait for the military convoy that informers in the neighborhood had said was likely to pass. A hand-made mine, camouflaged in the dust, would blow up a vehicle, block the convoy line, and set off machine gun fire; then came the assault. At every moment, the FLN leader's concern was to avoid the surprise of an unexpected encounter with the adversary in full strength, or the chance of having his unit spotted out in the open. In that respect, the ALN's conditions of existence varied markedly de- pending on the period and region considered. In some rocky, wild, or wooded massif, or one still barely penetrated by the French army, an ALN unit would have its cantonments, usually several of them, sometimes in shelters dug in the ground, sometimes in a relatively depopulated hamlet: between two changes of location or two interventions, it could rest there more or less at ease.
In that underground war, the ordinary world was closed off for the fighter, who had no means of escape except death or definitive peace. It was in the years 1956 and 1957 that the ALN (with about sixty thousand men) had its greatest successes against French army troops, thanks primarily to the weapon supplies from Morocco and Tunisia. Things would be different after the construction of the barriers at the Tunisian and Moroccan borders.
Immigration, the Second Front
The 1954 census listed 211,000 Algerians in France; the 1962 census listed 350,000. During the same period, the Ministry of the Interior put out the figure of 436,000. Apart from considerations regarding the delicate problem of nationality and citizenship (who, in effect, was Algerian in 1962, the year of the census in France and of Algerian independence?), one fact became clear: Algerian immigration to France had doubled between 1954 and 1962, the very years of the war.
Most of the immigrants were men age twenty to forty. Of all the upheavals that rural Algerian society had experienced between 1955 and 1962, those that had been caused by the relocation of the population were the most profound and the most consequential. In 1960, half the rural population, that is, a quarter of the total population, was brutally displaced.
In addition to the "displacements," let us mention that one million "men of working age" were unemployed in Algeria. One wage earner out of two worked fewer than one hundred days per year. In total, from 1954 to 1960 only 45,000 new industrial jobs were created, of which 25,000 were in construction and public works. Demographic pressure worsened the process leading to unemployment. The population of Muslim Algerians went from 4,890,000 in 1921 to 8,800,000 in 1954. The active male population in- creased by 385,000, which means that beginning in 1955 it would have been necessary to create 70,000 new jobs annually for the young men of working age. Since that was far from the case, immigration became the last hope.
The need to replace men of the French contingent sent to fight in Algeria and
the renovation of the internal French social structure are the two essential
elements allowing us to understand the paradox of the large number of Algerians
who emigrated to a country that was at war with them.
In examining the geographical distribution of Algerians in the metropolis, we
find that five departments continued to serve as centers of attraction; the
Seine; the Nord, with the Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing agglomeration, which had coal
mining and heavy industry; the Moselle, which was experiencing an industrial
boom; the Rhone, with Lyons; and the Bouches-du- Rhone, with Marseilles. There
were few Algerians engaged in agriculture; most were located in the industrialized
regions. Their concentration in the industrial zones only became more pronounced
in the years 1948-1955.
The FLN federation in the metropolis retained roughly the same structure as the MTLD, to which a large number of its members belonged. The FLN divided the country into five regions; the Paris region and the west {Paris); the northern and eastern region (Longwy); the central region (Lyons); the southeastern region (Marseilles); and the southwestern region, still unorganized in 1956. The organization had approximately eight thou- sand members in June 1956, but thanks to an improvement in recruitment the number of militants registered approached fifteen thousand in 1957 (Stora 1992).
The Algerian nationalist movements, applying the principle that the success of an enterprise is a function of the financial means its organizers possess, devoted their efforts to developing and increasing their sources of revenue. The high cost of weapons for the guerrilla forces, the requirements of diplomatic action, and the support of families of militants who had been detained or killed pushed expenses ever higher. The development of the clandestine organization also required installing new cadres paid by the parties.
To take the year 1961 as an example, given the number of paying members in the FLN (150,000) and the MNA (10,000), and the increase in membership fees to 30 francs per person, we obtain the figure of 58 million new francs total (about 400 million 1993 francs) for the single year 1961. Nearly 6 billion centimes raised for the single year 1961! In the seven years of war, approximately 400 million new francs (slightly more than 3 billion 1993 francs) were collected from the Algerian immigrants in France. An altogether substantial contribution, made by the "second front" of Algerian nationalism, a contribution obtained sometimes voluntarily and sometimes by force.
The FLN's Doctrine
The radical pro-independence movement drew its strength from the fact that it was located at the intersection of two major projects: that of the Socialist movement and that of the Islamic tradition.
Of the first aspect, that of the French influence, let us say first of all that the birthplace of the pro-independence movement (Paris in 1926) influenced its subsequent ideological development. The French experience taught the first radical Algerian militants the models of organization and the rudiments of socialist ideology by which they would analyze the situation of their nation and seek to understand the mechanisms and values of an alien world; in the end, that experience put them in contact with industrial and urban models of life. But once they had returned to Algeria, they could not realize their aspirations in the leftist unions or parties, which were dominated by the Europeans.
Regarding that "French influence," let us also note that most of the nationalist cadres in the FLN were rootless, cut off from their social origins and integrated in a way that often led them to become "professional revolutionaries." The movement had few peasant leaders or intellectuals. For the most part, however, these leaders were better educated and better informed than the majority of the Algerian people. Many had gone to French schools, and had completed elementary school. It is an irony of history that the French school system, which saw itself as assimilationist, in fact appears to have opened paths of criticism and liberation.
On the benches of French schools in the Third Republic, the republican credo and the episodes in the "Great Revolution" of 17891eft a lasting impression on the minds of the Muslim Algerians who become nationalists. Their curiosity about France's history was sustained by a hope; they took an interest in it because they felt at a loss about their own freedom. An abstract France wicl1 universal principles was contrasted to cl1e temporal France. That conception continued to be asserted during cl1e time of cl1e Algerian War, as this letter from prison attests, written by Mohammed Larbi Madi, an FLN leader: "1 confess to you cl1at I am less and less able to separate cl1e real France from cl1e statutory France. I am seeking cl1e France I learned of in school, and I find it only in a few French people, who, in fact, are embarrassed to be French where cl1e Algerian War is concerned" (Perville 1984).
Regarding the second principal factor, that of Islam, we must first of all explain that almost all Algerians in the first half of the twentieth century remained faithful to the religious customs of their ancestors. That fidelity was composed of social relics and habits, an attachment to practices where conformity played as great a role as personal conviction. Pro-independence politics reactivated cl1e religious factor. Islam was bocl1 a combat ideology and a social project. The reacquisition of the terms and rights fixed by time, the increasingly lost "paradise" of origins, became more and more vital through religion. The promised pro-independence revolution still had certain characteristics of revolts based on millenarian hopes, or of riots for subsistence. This type of nationalist ideology produced a refusal to compromise with the existing world. A central event, independence, was the long-awaited and un-hoped-for moment, the sense of a future and especially of a pure present. The Algerian militants experienced the colonial institutions in which cl1ey were destined to live not as founded in reason but as perfectly arbitrary.
The historical merit of cl1e leaders who set off cl1e insurrection in November 1954 was cl1at, through weapons, they unjammed the colonial status quo. They allowed the idea of independence to take on substance for millions of Algerians. But, as cl1e Algerian sociologist Abdelkader Djeghloul {1990) notes, "the war set in motion a process of destruction of cl1e capital of democratic experience and modern politics, which cl1e different political organizations had begun to accumulate before 1954."
The FLN, aware of the contradictions that permeated it, constantly bowed to the tactical emergency: draining off convictions, mobilizing the available energy in the cause of independence, while putting off until later any examination of the particulars. That conception of an undifferentiated society "guided" by a single party implied a particular vision of cl1e nation. After independence, an undecomposable bloc, the nation, was perceived as a unified and unanimous--indissociable-figure.
The theme of the "people united" reduced the threat of external aggression (Gallicization, assimilation) and internal disintegration (regionalism, linguistic particularism). The latter had to do primarily wicl1 the "Berber question," which was disregarded in the establishment of national institutions in the postwar period. The recourse to populism increased the rift between the real society, which was socially and culturally diverse, and the one-party political system, forged primarily during the second part of the war, between 1958 and 1962. In December 1957, the murder of Abbane Ramdane (the organizer of the Soummam Congress who had advocated the supremacy of "politicos" over the "military"), ordered by other FLN leaders, opened the way for the "border army's" political domination of Algerian nationalism. After the construction of the barriers along the Tunisian and Moroccan borders, the army was camped outside Algerian territory. Led by Houari Boumedienne, its importance and its role in- creased as of 1958.
The International Action of the FLN
The Algerian nationalists realized the risk of finding themselves face to face with the formidable French war machine. Very quickly, they became aware of the need to broaden their audience to the international level. The armed struggle was thus combined with political and diplomatic action. The objective was to heighten public awareness throughout the world of the cause of Algerian independence, to interest foreign governments, and to mobilize such international authorities as the UN and the Red Cross. That internationalization of the conflict, desired by the FLN, would allow it to find material support (deliveries of weapons, especially from Eastern countries), and moral support (pressure on France regarding its Algerian policy).
From the beginning of the conflict in January 1955, the members of the Arab League, especially Egypt and Saudi Arabia, directed the attention of the UN's Security Council to the gravity of the situation in Algeria. The Bandung Conference of nonaligned nations in April 1955 heard the communications of the Algerian leaders. In September of the same year, the UN placed the problem of the "events of Algeria" on its agenda for the first time. In July 1956, the Union Generale des Travailleurs Algeriens, or UGTA (General Union of Algerian Workers), a union organization linked to the FLN, was recognized by the ICFTU (International Confederation of Free Trade Unions) over its competitor, the Union des Syndicats des Travailleurs Algeriens, or USTA (Algerian Workers' Federation of Unions), run by MNA militants. At the same time, the Union Generale des Etudiants Musulmans Algeriens, or UGEMA (General Union of Muslim Algerian Students), actively participated in different worldwide cultural groups and developed an intense propaganda campaign (Perville 1984).
In that way, the Soummam Congress in August 1956 established the FLN's international actions: "Externally, seek out the maximum material, moral, and psychological support. Among the governments of the Bandung Congress, incite the intervention of the UN as well as diplomatic pressure ...on France." In 1956, when the UN once more put the Algerian question on the agenda (Gadant 1988), FLN delegations set off on a mission: to Eastern Europe (East Berlin, Prague), Western Europe (Bonn, Rome, London), the United States (New York), China, India, and Latin America.
The two events that accelerated and broadened the internationalization of the Algerian conflict were the hijacking of the plane of FLN leaders on October 22, 1956, and the French bombing of the Tunisian village of Sakiet-Sidi-Youssef on February 8, 1958, which had a particularly strong emotional effect on world opinion. On the eve of the Fourth Republic's fall, France found itself brought up on charges by the UN. Atlantic and European solidarity was very uncertain on the question of North Africa.
In waging war against France, the Algerian nationalists set in place "a diplomacy of guerrillas." Very early on, they constructed a diplomatic apparatus, an external presentation that would continue to function effectively after independence in 1962.
Toward the Fall of the Fourth Republic
On January 11, 1958, a platoon of draftees was ambushed near the Tunisian border. Four soldiers of the contingent were taken across and held captive. Salan appealed for the right to pursue, and the government consented. For its part, the navy seized a Yugoslav freighter, The Slovenija, off Oran on January 18. It was transporting 148 metric tons of weapons from Czechoslovakia to the ALN training camps in Morocco.
In fact, a number of countries were now aiding the FLN, including the United Kingdom and the United States, which delivered weapons to Tunisia. On February 8, Salan authorized bombers to pursue an ALN column into Tunisian territory. The village of Sakiet-Sidi-Youssef was targeted. Sixty-nine civilians were killed, one hundred thirty wounded. After that scandal, a true disaster for France's international image, the French government found itself obliged to accept an Anglo-American "goodwill" mission. That mission would study the problem of the French presence in Tunisia, and especially the Bizerte base, which Bourguiba was demanding be evacuated.
During these three months, the ALN pursued its efforts against the Morice Line: the electrified barrier demonstrated its utility and allowed the government to consider shortening the length of military service (to twenty-four months instead of twenty-six in 1957), and to cut back on the army's expenses. That was enough to aggravate the pieds noirs and the army, who were united against the parties supporting the government. The Courrier de la Colere, run by Michel Debre, who was close to General de Gaulle, lashed out against the use of the UN. On March 13, 1958, police officers violently demonsttated against the government in front of the Palais- Bourbon. On April 15, Felix Gaillard, who appeared to be ceding to the pressures of NATO and the "missionaries" Robert Murphy and Harold Beeley,1 was voted out by the coalition of Communists, Gaullists, and Poujadists. The government teetered on the brink (Winock 1985).
The crisis of the parliamentary government, the paralysis that set in within the administration, the fall of the franc, linked to France's loss of credit in the world market, the foreign trade deficit, and finally, the climate of powerlessness that was reaching the highest echelons of the state, which faced thorny problems raised by the Algerian War, joined together to make the Fourth Republic succumb to impotence. In Algeria, there was an ineluctable chain of events. The "centurions" in the paratrooper units, who had sullied their hands, the officers of the bled, and the SAS leaders who dreamed of resuming Lyautey's work, pledged their honor and their word. They could no longer tolerate the constant upheaval in the government, the secret contacts with emissaries of the FLN, the pres- sure from abroad.
May 13,1958
On April 26, 1958, several thousand demonstrators marched in Algiers to demand a government of public safety. The previous day General Salan had announced that the army would accept nothing less than the total de- feat of the "rebels," followed by the possibility of amnesty. For a month, the Parliament had proved incapable of finding a new premier. On May 8, President Rene Coty was at a loss and appealed to the centrist Pierre Pfimlin (MRP), who publicly announced his intention to open negotiations with the FLN. Salan officially protested and many leaders of the Europeans of Algeria denounced this "diplomatic Dien Bien Phu." The same day, the FLN announced the execution of three prisoners of the contingent. The situation had gotten away from Robert Lacoste, who was summoned to Paris on May 10.
In Algeria the army remained the sole authority; the "defense committees of French Algeria" and the veterans called for a mass demonstration on May 13 as a tribute to the executed soldiers, and to force a change of government in France. That day had extraordinary consequences. The students in Algiers who formed the shock troops of the supporters of French Algeria decided to gather on the Forum in front of the offices of the general government to attract the official procession paying tribute to the memory of the executed soldiers. The operation succeeded beyond the hopes of its various protagonists. The mob did not disperse and finally threw itself against the gates of the general government, defended by the state security police (CRS), which Colonel Godard quickly replaced with the paratroopers of Colonel Trinquier's Third Colonial Paratroopers' Regiment (RPC). A GMC truck belonging to this regiment providentially served as a battering ram for the most determined of the rioters, who were swept into the building beside the paratroopers. A few mo- ments later, the high command joined in the revelry. Stunned by the spectacle, Massu and Salan were trapped inside the building by the throng of demonstration leaders: Leon Delbecque, Lucien Neuwirth, Pouget, Pierre Lagaillarde, and Thomazo.
While the Pfimlin government, which was invested at night between May 13 and 14, asserted its will in the metropolis to defend French sovereignty by declaring a blockade on Algeria in reaction to the riot, General Salan took over the unplanned meeting of the "Committee of Public Safety," presided over by General Massu, who was head of the Tenth Para- troopers' Division. This committee, imitated by dozens of others, assigned itself the mission of facilitating General de Gaulle's accession to power. Salan proclaimed as much the next day in front of the crowd. For months, in fact, the rumor had been gaining strength. First a mere murmur, a hypothesis made by the jurist Maurice Duverger in the columns of Le Monde, an idea accepted by Rene Coty, who said he was ready to step down, the solution gradually took root everywhere: only General de Gaulle could pull France out of the Algerian quagmire. Would he be the champion of independence or of steadfastness? A skillful politician, he refused to commit himself so long as he did not have power. What he desired first was "to restore state authority," to join a new government tailor-made for him, endowed with strong presidential power.
General de Gaulle's Return to Power
After several weeks of urging by his supporters, General de Gaulle finally broke his silence by declaring on May 15 that "in the face of the ordeals once more mounting" in the country, he stood "ready to assume the powers of the Republic." The army, whose chief of staff, General Paul Ely, had resigned, no longer obeyed the government. The rumor spread that paratroopers were preparing to land in the metropolis to impose a government of public safety. On May 19, General de Gaulle, in front of the press summoned to the Palais d'Orsay, again asserted that he was at the disposition of the country. He declared that, at sixty-seven, he had no intention of "beginning a career as a dictator." Antoine Pinay, who had been premier in 1952, returned from his visit to Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises on May 22 with the assurance that General de Gaulle had refused to lead a coup d'etat fomented by the regular army. But the dissidence moved to Corsica on May 24, where the prefecture was besieged by the men of May 13, Thomazo and Pascal Arrighi in the lead, with the support of the paratroopers of the Eleventh shock troops in Calvi, which disarmed the state security forces (CRS) without encountering resistance. The population of Bastia gleefully witnessed the expulsion of the vice-mayor, who had remained faithful to the government.
At that moment public opinion in the metropolis was convinced that only General de Gaulle could resolve the crisis, eliminate the prospect of civil war, and end the Algerian War. The images of the May 16 "fraternization" in Algiers [when some pieds noirs went into the Casbah to demonstrate their sympathy with the indigeneous people, but not their support for independence-trans.] had spread the illusion that the Muslims wanted assimilation. Reconciliation seemed possible.
On the night of May 26-27, the officers' work finally paid off: Pfimlin and de Gaulle exchanged their viewpoints in a building in the park of Saint-Cloud in Paris. The premier was persuaded to resign. The next day, a press release from General de Gaulle announced that he "was beginning the regular process necessary for the establishment of a republican government capable of ensuring the unity and independence of the country." The Europeans of Algeria put out the flags: this time, the general had "spoken," as he had been invited to do on May 11 by the former Petainist Alain de Serigny, in his newspaper L 'Echo d'Algerie: The army and the pieds noirs witnessed the series of events with joy: Pfimlin's resignation, followed on June 1 by General de Gaulle's investiture by the assembly, despite the success of the demonstration held by the left on May 28 to "defend the Republic."
Between June 4 and 7, General de Gaulle took a trip to Algeria. He gave speeches in Algiers (with the famous "I have understood you"), in Mostaganem (where he shouted "Long live French Algeria," for which he would later be sharply criticized), to Oran, Constantine, and Bone, proclaiming that there were in Algeria "only Frenchmen through and through, with the same rights and the same duties." It was the end of the Fourth Republic and the advent of the Fifth. A new constitution was put forward that gave the president of the Republic a great deal of power. He could dissolve the National Assembly (article 12), he possessed full powers in case of grave events (article 16). In that constitution, the executive power was placed beyond the reach of Parliament, whose role was considerably reduced.
On September 28, 1958, the Europeans and the Muslims (both men and women) voted overwhelmingly in favor of the constitution of the Fifth Republic. And, on October 3 in Constantine, they learned from General de Gaulle's own mouth of the future economic and social trans- formations that the government had committed itself to financing in Algeria: 15 billion francs in public works projects and urban development, and a gradual program for schooling young Muslims. On December 21, 1958, General de Gaulle was elected president of the French Republic and of the French Community.
General de Gaulle's Algerian Policy
In hindsight, there can be no doubt about General de Gaulle's will. The notorious "I have understood you" was a statement, not a commitment. There was also a "Long live French Algeria" in Mostaganem-but only one. Very quickly, the plan became clear. Between June and December 1958, General de Gaulle asserted his will to bring together the Muslims and the Europeans, but banished from his speeches the expressions "French Algeria" and "integration." Beginning on August 28, a sentence uttered during one of his trips to Algeria put the proponents of French Algeria on the alert: "The necessary evolution of Algeria must come about within the French framework." The pieds noirs began to worry. The obligatory departure of military personnel from all the committees of public safety and the notice they received that they were banned from running in the Algerian legislative elections managed to cast suspicion on General de Gaulle's intentions. At the same time, de Gaulle was decolonizing Madagascar and the rest of Africa. The press conference on October 23, 1958, shook the last souls clinging to the memory of May 13 and the Mostaganem speech: General de Gaulle offered "the peace of the brave" with no conditions other than that of leaving the "knife in the cloakroom." But the FLN, which formed the Gouvernement Provisoire de la Republique Algerienne, or GPRA (provisional Government of the Algerian Republic), on September 19, 1958, rejected that call for surrender and increased its actions in the metropolis. All the same, 1958 ended with goodwill gestures: a presidential pardon for convicts in the FLN, which in response, liberated French prisoners of war.
On the evening of September 16, 1959, General de Gaulle appeared on television. He explained that eighteen months after his return to power the economy was recovering. But then came the shock:
Given all the facts in Algeria, national and international, I consider it necessary that the recourse to self-determination be proclaimed beginning today. In the name of France and the Republic, by virtue of the power vested in me by the constitution to consult the citizenry, on the condition that God may grant me life and that the people may listen to me, I commit myself to asking, on the one hand, the Algerians in their twelve departments what they definitively want to be, and, on the other, all the French people to endorse that choice.
General de Gaulle did not set precise deadlines or a time line for a possible negotiation. He also asserted that, in case of secession, "all arrangements would be made for the exploitation, transport, and shipping of Saharan oil, which, be assured, is the work of the army and in the interests of the West as a whole, whatever may happen."
But, after five years of a cruel war, begun on November 1, 1954, a war that still did not dare speak its name, the taboo word had been uttered: "self- determination." The illusions and ambiguities of General de Gaulle's policy were now dispelled. The head of state, rejecting integration, which he called "Gallicization," offered the Algerians the choice between partnership and secession. That speech of September 16, 1959, marked a true turning point in French political life, which had been poisoned by the Algerian question. It implied open negotiation with the FLN, and granted the Muslim population (who had a nine-tenths majority) the right to decide Algeria's fate. The proponents of French Algeria immediately cried treason and shouted that they had been duped. They pointed out that the principles proclaimed in the days of May and June 1958 were being called into question, since French Algeria was no longer a matter of fact, but was becoming a referendum question. Following that speech, it was not long before the political battle set in motion revealed divisions within the Union pour la Nouvelle Republique, or UNR (Union for the New Republic): nine Gaullist deputies left the organization on October 8, 1959. On September 19, Georges Bidault created the Rassemblement pour I' Algerie francaise, or RAF (Union for French Algeria). In it were Christian Democrats as well as "Soustellian" Gau1lists and Algerian elected officials favoring integration. The only party that completely embraced General de Gau1le's position was the MRP. During the parliamentary debate of October 6, General Challe spoke of "integral pacification." That was the sign of a hardening of the army, which would not hear of "negotiation" and wanted to continue the war until victory was achieved.
On the other side, on September 28, 1959, the GPRA set out independence as the prerequisite to any negotiation. On November 20, the Algerian nationalists designated Ahmed Ben Bella and his fellow prisoners to negotiate with France, which rejected that suggestion. The Algerians' distrust can be explained in great part by the considerable scope the war had taken on under General de Gaulle's orders.
Under General de Gaulle, the War Continues
In 1959, in fact, General de Gaulle ordered the army to strike its harshest blows against the ALN, to force it to negotiate for the conditions set by France. Salan was transferred to Paris on December 19, 1958; General Challe replaced him.
In 1959, General Challe, with his 500,000 men, launched large-scale combined operations against the guerrilla forces of the ALN. His "hunt commandos" obtained conclusive results and broke up the katibas in the wilayas of Kabylia and the Aures, which were already weakened by internal purges incited by the poison introduced by the Second Bureau (the intelligence service). On March 28, Colonels Amirouche and Si Haoues, responsible for wilayas III (Kabylia) and VI (Sahara), respectively, were killed in battle. On July 22, a general military action, the "Jumelles" operation, which put more than twenty thousand men on the line, was set in motion in Kabylia under General Challe's control. Nevertheless, "pacification" remained spotty in these "thousand villages" where displaced populations had been assembled by force. But, among the officers, thanks to the major operations of General Challe, the impression prevailed that they were finally gaining ground: the FLN katibas were tracked down, and many were destroyed. Small, hungry groups holed up in the most remote of the mountainous massifs. It was a terrible war for the Algerians: more than 2 million peasants were displaced. On April 28, 1959, Michel Rocard, then a young high official, had sent a report to the minister of justice criticizing the re- settlement camps in Algeria. And, on January 5, 1960, Le Monde published the international commission's report on the internment camps in Algeria, which caused a great stir.
On January 18, 1960, the Gennan newspaper Siiddeutsche Zeitung published an interview in which General Massu declared that the army, "which has the forces" and "will call on them if the situation requires it," no longer understood General de Gaulle's Algerian policy. A denial was published, but Massu was summoned to Paris and was replaced on January 22 by General Jean Crepin as commander of the army corps in Algiers. Rumors of insurrection circulated. In April 1959, General de Gaulle had indicated, "The old Algeria is dead, and if you don't understand that, you will die along with it." In early 1960, the Algerian War entered a new phase, that of a Franco- French confrontation in which some would want to "die for Algeria."
Barricades Week
The pieds noirs knew that, since they were outnumbered nine to one, they were done for if France abandoned them. There had been too many deaths, personal assaults, acts of torture, and summary executions. The day "they" would come down from the Casbah or the mountains would be a massacre. "They" were already beginning to demonstrate in the cities, to the cries of "Long live de Gaulle," "Long live the FLN." For the residents of Bab-el-Oued, on the outskirts of Algiers, or of Oran, it was the beginning of the great panic. The time was past for tchatche (chitchat) that scoffed at the patos (metropolitans). Without their help, it was "the suitcase or the coffin."
On January 24, 1960, in Algiers, the pied noir activists clashed with the gendarmes. A shooting on boulevard Laferriere left twenty dead (fourteen gendarmes and six demonstrators) and one hundred and fifty wounded, be- fore the paratroopers intervened. Pierre Lagaillarde and Joseph Ortizl then set up an entrenched camp in the center of Algiers in the name of French Algeria. General Gracieux's Tenth Paratroopers' Division and the European community did not bring them the hoped-for support. On January 28, Paul Oelouvrier, general delegate in Algeria, launched an appeal to the army, the Muslims, and the Europeans, asking them to trust General de Gaulle. On January 29, in a televised declaration (this was at a time when he was appearing often on television), General de Gaulle formally condemned the rioters and, addressing himself to the anny, declared: "1 must be obeyed by all French soldiers."
Disheartened, the rioters in Algiers surrendered on February 1 and abandoned the barricades. Joseph Ortiz fled. Pierre Lagaillarde was transferred and incarcerated in the La Sante Prison. The next day, on February 2, the National Assembly, summoned for a special session, granted the government special powers for a year, "to keep the peace and safeguard the state." But "Barricades Week" had revealed some wavering in the command. General de Gaulle ordered changes: General Challe was transferred and re- placed by Crepin on March 30. Jacques Soustelle, an ardent supporter of French Algeria, left the government on February 5. And Alain de serigny, managing editor of L'Echo d'A/gerie; was charged on February 8 with conspiracy to attack the internal security of the state. The Algerian affair de- fined the shape of a true Franco-French confrontation under way. General de Gaulle tried to be reassuring, tried to head off the danger. From March 3 to March 5, he undertook a "tour of the canteens" in Algeria, and declared that the Algerian problem would not be settled until after the victory of French arms. He knew, however, that the question was political, and that a resolute change of course was needed.
Initiatives for an End to the War
In spring 1960, the French army believed it had won the war. The "pacified" Oranie was cited as an example: civilian vehicles could now circulate without escort in the rural areas. The leaders of wilaya IV, that of Algerois, judged that the battle was lost, and made contact with French officers. They were secretly brought to the Elysee Palace: this would be "the Si Salah affair," named for the nationalist Algerian leader who met with General de Gaulle on June 10, 1960. His real name was Mohamed Zamoum and, unbeknownst to the FLN leaders in Tunis, he intended to undertake direct negotiations with France.
Would there finally be the peace of the brave with those who had fought so fiercely in the field? No. De Gaulle had already begun the negotiation with the FLN "politicos," who possessed the beginnings of international recognition and the notorious "border army," which had never been able to cross en masse the two electrified barriers isolating Algeria from Tunisia and Morocco (as for "Si Salah," he would be executed on June 20, 1961, by special units of the French army).
The first talks between the FLN and the French government opened in Melun on June 25, 1960. They were a failure, but the negotiation created enormous hope in France: peace and the return of the contingent seemed at hand. The Algerian leaders Ferhat Abbas and Lakhdar Ben Tobbal traveled the world to gather votes for the forthcoming UN debate. The recognition of the FLN's representativeness grew among France's African allies. On August 3, 1959, a conference of nine independent African states had invited France to recognize the Algerian people's right to self-determination. In the metropolis, the leftist organizations publicly affirmed their solidarity with the" Algerian cause." On June 2, 1960, fifty-three youth movements, taking a common position for the first time, expressed their desire to see the Algerian War end. On June 9, the Union Nationale des Etudiants de France, or UNEF (National Union of Students in France) met with one of the leaders of a dissolved organization, the Union Generale des Etudiants Musulmans Algeriens (UGEMA), and demanded a cease-fire and self-determination. On June 30, the Confederation Generale du Travail, or CGT (General Confederation of Labor), the Confederation Francaise des Travailleurs Chretiens, or CFrC (French Confederation of Christian Workers), the FEN, and the UNEF signed a joint declaration affirming their desire to see negotiations truly begin between the French government and the GPRA.
Just as the trial of the members of the FLN's support network, called the "Jeanson network," was getting under way (September 5), 121 major figures made public a "manifesto on the right to insubordination" (published by Fran~ois Maspero) on September 6, 1960. Several indictments followed. An order published on September 29 in the Journal Officiel set out particular sanctions for the signers who were government employees, and a ban on radio or television appearances for all signers. On October 1, fifteen of the accused in the "Jeanson network" were sentenced to ten years in prison. In spite of that act of repression, the antiwar protest movement grew. On October 27, UNEF held an important demonstration at the Mutualite "for peace through negotiation."
In Algeria the Europeans and the high command had their minds made up. The old Algeria was truly dead, and the FLN had recovered through politics and diplomacy all the ground lost by the use of force. On November 4, 1960, General de Gaulle tried to precipitate a resolution of the affair: he used the expression" Algerian Republic" and announced a referendum on the principle of self-determination in Algeria. In December 1960, General de Gaulle's trip to Algeria was the pretext, in Algiers and Oran, for violent demonstrations by Europeans. But the important new fact was the massive uprising of the urban Algerian masses. The demonstrators shouted "Muslim Algeria!" and "Long live the FLN!" Gendarmes and state security troops (CRS) fired on them. The official death toll was 112 Muslims in Algiers.
On January 8, 1961, General de Gaulle's Algerian policy was submitted to a referendum vote. In the metropolis 72.25 percent and in Algeria 69.09 percent voted yes. The success of this referendum, even in Algeria, where only the large cities voted no, demonstrated to the diehards of French Algeria that they had to make haste. Georges Pompidou, in the name of the Debre government, led a secret diplomatic mission to Switzerland. The day after the meeting between General de Gaulle and Bourguiba in Rambouillet, on February 27, a relieved France learned that negotiations would open in Evian on April 7. It was then that General Salan, banished from Algeria, believed that the moment had come to plan a kind of counterrevolution with the help of the regular army, disheartened by the fighting, and of panic-stricken Europeans. Contacts were established in the metropolis. The Organisation Armee Secrete, or OAS (Secret Army Organization), was created. The revolt against General de Gaulle did not mobilize only fanatics dreaming of an impossible Algeria. Barricades Week in January 1960 had already shown the crisis of conscience within certain units.
The Generals' Putsch
During a press conference on April II, the head of state confim1ed his new orientation: "Decolonization is in our interest, and, as a result, it is our policy," said General de Gaulle. Thereafter, a few of the most highly placed people in the French am1y decided to organize a putsch against him. To hold onto French Algeria, General Challe, who arrived secretly in Algiers, launched the adventure of a coup d'etat against the Republic, along with Generals Jouhaud, Zeller, and Salan.
At midnight on Friday, April 21,1961, the Green Berets in the First Foreign Regiment of Paratroopers marched on Algiers and seized the general government, the airfield, the city hall, and the weapons depot. Within three hours the city was in the hands of the putschists and in the morning Algiers residents could hear over the airwaves this communique, which had fallen into the am1y's hands: "1 am in Algiers with Generals Zeller and Jouhaud, and in contact with General Salan to keep our pledge, the am1y's pledge to keep Algeria."
In Paris the government confined itself to announcing that it was "taking the necessary measures" and decreed a state of emergency. Moreover, the anny was not moving to rally behind the putschists. General de Gaulle al- ready seemed persuaded of the failure of the military guerrillas. At five o'clock p.m. in the Council of Ministers, he commented: "The grave thing about this affair is that it is not serious."
But as Salan was being cheered by the mob in Algiers, Paris was in fear of a military coup d'etat and a disembarkation in the capital. De Gaulle decided to apply article 16 of the constitution, which conferred nearly all powers on the president of the Republic. On Sunday evening, he spoke on television in a peremptory tone. He denounced "the attempt of a smattering of generals on the retired list," who possessed "a hasty and limited know-how" but saw the world "only through their delirium."
For the soldiers of the contingent, who made up the greater part of the troops stationed in Algeria, the effect was devastating. Heard on transistor radios that the officers had not managed to confiscate, the speech legitimated the resistance of those who opposed their "Challist" officers and led the contingent to go over to the putsch's opposition. In Paris, Prime Minister Michel Debre was nevertheless panic-stricken and appeared on television at midnight to ask everyone to walk or drive out to the airport to prevent a possible action by the putschist generals.
In Algiers on Tuesday, April 26, the generals were cheered one last time on the balcony of the general government. Then Maurice Challe surrendered, as Algiers cried treason. The putsch had failed. On April 28, a decision was made to set up a military high tribunal charged with judging the insurgents. General Marie-Michel Gouraud, then Generals Pierre-Marie Bigot and Andre Petit were charged and committed to La Sante Prison. On April 30, General Jean-Louis Nicot, a participant, like the others, in the "generals' putsch," was put in state prison. On May 3, the Council of Ministers decided to dissolve the Algiers Bar Association and to ban L 'Echo d'Alger indefinitely. Former General Zeller fell into the hands of Algiers authorities on May 6. But R. Salan and E. Jouhaud fled and went underground. The OAS now took their place.
The Era of the OAS
From before the April 1961 putsch, the acronym OAS (Organisation Armee Secrete} was known to the European population of Algiers and Oran. It was a small underground movement, probably founded in early 1961, for which Pierre Lagaillarde, who had taken refuge in Madrid, always claimed paternity. All the same, its numbers barely exceeded two or three hundred militants, and it coexisted with other "activist" groups that had tried for several months to mobilize the European population of Algeria via violent action in the cause of French Algeria: the underground Front de I' Algerie Francise, or FAF (Front of French Algeria}, Reseau Resurrectionpatrie (Homeland Resurrection Network, the movement of the Vintner Robert Martel}, Etudiants Nationalistes, and so on.
In any case, it was under the acronym "GAS" that, in May 1962, General Paul Gardy, Colonels Roger Gardes and Yves Godard, Lieutenant Roger Degueldre (who had deserted on April 4), Doctor Jean-Claude Perez, and Jean-Jacques Susini chose to meet in Algiers. An "GAS leadership committee" was constituted, and contact was established with Generals Raoul Salan and Edmond Jouhaud, who were wandering in the Mitidja (the great plain of Algerois) under the protection of Martel's networks; General Salan was given the supreme command. A first organization chart, inspired by the ex- ample of the FLN and the lessons on psychological action by the military bureaux, was set up by Colonel Godard, a veteran of Vercors, and tasks were distributed. Colonel Godard was assigned intelligence; Colonel Gardes, "the organization of the masses"; Doctor Perez and Lieutenant Degueldre, direct action; Jean-Jacques Susini, propaganda and psychological action.
The objectives were simple: remain faithful to the spirit of May 13, 1958, resist the policy of Algerian "disengagement" conducted by the Gaullist government, construct a new "fraternal and French" Algeria. For the immediate future, the only plan was to prepare for popular insurrection in Algiers and perhaps in Gran. That, it was believed, would break up the negotiation process begun on May 20, 1961, in Evian, between the French government and the FLN. That in turn would construct an insurmountable obstacle to continuing the Fifth Republic's Algerian policy.
The opening of negotiations between the FLN and the French government ushered in a period marked by every sort of danger. The FLN, which wanted to undertake negotiations from a position of strength, increased the number of actions, which produced 133 deaths between May 21 and June 8. During the same period, the OAS practiced a worst-case policy and a series of terrorist actions. The organization's commandos attacked Muslim trades- people, and government employees in the tax administration, law enforcement, and education. Its control over the European population of Algeria gained strength, and General de Gaulle, who was nicknamed la Grande Zohra ["Zohra" is a common woman's name in Arabit-trans.], was now shouted down and despised. The pieds noirs were disappointed when they learned he had escaped an assassination attempt on September 9, 1961, at Pont-sur-Seine.
For the OAS the autumn of 1961 was the season of hope. In terms of internal organization the movement had definitively discovered the conditions for its unity and cohesion. The authority of General Salan and his staff was no longer disputed. In the large cities of Algeria, nearly the entire European population, often with tumultuous enthusiasm, awarded the organization its participation or complicity. Large collective demonstrations-the day of pots and pans (September 23), the day of streamers (September 25), the day of traffic jams (September 28)-the proliferation of pirate radio broadcasts, and the "lightning operations" that struck hard at the leaders of political repression, stoked the fire of the pied noir common people and mobilized their ardor and their faith. On October 9, 1961, General Salan was able to announce that, before the end of the year, he would possess an army of 100,000 "armed and disciplined" men.
Algerian Determination
The Gouvernement Provisoire de la Republique Algerienne (GPRA) came into being on September 19, 1958. It was headed by Ferhat Abbas and replaced the Comite de Coordination et d'Execution, or CCE (Coordination and Execution Committee), the first centralized FLN leader- ship. A year later, in December 1959, an ALN general staff was instituted, under the direction of Colonel Houari Boumedienne. Despite the contradictions that would emerge between them, these two structures at first planned to be complementary: the task of the GPRA was to win support on the international political scene and to undertake any eventual negotiations with France. The mission of the general staff, by contrast, was to reorganize the ALN, which had been weakened in 1958-1959 by the offensives of the French army quartered on the Moroccan and Tunisian borders.
In record time, the FLN managed to unify or neutralize all the Algerian political organizations and social categories. The hegemony it had achieved over Algerian society constituted its decisive advantage in the final negotiations with the French government. They opened in Melun in 1960, then proceeded in Evian in 1961. The FLN's monopoly on representing the Algerian people was difficult for the French government to accept. It is true that, in the major urban demonstrations, the obvious support for the GPRA in 1960 contributed toward establishing that legitimacy.
In the second part of the war (beginning in 1958, when General de Gaulle came to power in France), a heroic history was forged that presented "a single hero, the people," joined together behind the FLN alone. Isolated individuals were transformed into a collective being, the people, the sole hero for the new nation, and erected into supreme legitimacy as the sole actor of the revolution to be achieved. In El Moudjahid (the central newspaper of the FLN) on November 1, 1958, Krim Belkacem wrote, "Our revolution is be- coming the melting pot where men of all conditions-peasants, artisans, workers, intellectuals, rich and poor-mingle in such a way that a new type of man will be born from that development." In that version, the violence of the colonizer sets in motion a dynamic of unity, of liberarion, by a unanimous people. Frantz Fanon, a West Indian doctor who joined the camp of Algerian independence, theorized that approach in 1959, in his L'an V de la rivo/ution algirienne (Year 5 of the Algerian Revolution). He mentions the need for colonial peoples to shake off foreign oppression by force and violence, which were to be used not only as military techniques, but also as an essential psychological precondition for the march toward independence.
All the same, as a result of the strikes of the French military operation led by General Maurice Challe, the wi/ayas of the interior collapsed in the years 1959-1960. On March 27, 1956, after the death of Mostefa Ben Boulald, who had escaped from the prison in Constanrine a few months earlier and became the victim of a booby-trapped package, dropped by parachute by the French Second Bureau, the guerrilla forces in the Aures could not manage to reorganize. In wi/aya in Kabylia, Amirouche toyed with the idea of a re- Structuring of the organization that would restore the primacy of the "interior" over the exterior. Si Haoues, the head of wilaya VI (the Sahara), shared Arnirouche's concerns: he too protested the lack of weaponry and the isolation of the wi/ayas of the interior. But Amirouche and Si Haoues died in an ambush on March 28, 1959. Their deaths further demoralized the fighters in the interior and led to attempts at separate negotiations with France, con- ducted in particular by Si Salah in June 1960 in the name of those fighters.
All the same, France was isolated at the international political level. The FLN, which continued to fight to maintain the integrity of Algerian territory within the framework of the colonial borders, would prevail politically. On September 5, 1961, General de Gaulle recognized the Algerian character of the Sahara. On March 5, 1962, the Evian negotiations would open, now with the GPRA as the sole interlocutor of the French. In that final phase, when the one-on-one dialogue with the colonial state came to an end, the leadership of the FLN imploded. The image of unity, forged in war, could no longer stand up when the possibility of taking power became imminent.
In late 1960, the GPRA accused the general staff of abandoning the wi/ayas in the interior, and demanded it enter Algeria before March 31, 1961. That set off a crisis. The general staff refused to comply, submitted its resignation on July 15, 1961, and itself installed an interim leadership. During the meeting in Tripoli between August 6 and 27, 1961, of the Conseil National de la Revolution Algerienne or CNRA (National Council of the Algerian Revolution), Ferhat Abbas's replacement by Ben Youssef Ben Khedda aggravated the crisis. The general staff left the CNRA. Ben Khedda failed in his attempt to reorganize the army by dividing the command in two (Morocco and Tunisia). In the test of strength, "the border army" displayed its unity behind its leader, Colonel Houari Boumedienne. It received the support of three of the "historic chiefs" imprisoned in Aulnoy: Ahmed Ben Bella, Mohammed Khider, and Rabah Bitat. Who would lead the future national government, me advent of which seemed very close at hand? The general staff suspected mat me GPRA, which was conducting me negotiations with France, wanted to oust it.
In spite of these divisions, me determination of me majority of Algerians to achieve independence was growing. And me repression continued in late 1961, especially for Algerians living in France. As of October 4, an eight o'clock p.m. curfew was imposed on them in Paris. On October 17, thirty thousand protested. The repression, headed by Prefect of Police Maurice Papon, was savage; me police made nearly twelve thousand arrests, and close to two hundred demonstrators were killed. The number of injured was in the thousands (Levine 1986; Einaudi 1991).
In Algeria, me ALN took advantage of the moment when negotiations were getting under way and attempted to reconstitute its forces. But the barrier of the "Morice Line," still impenetrable, precluded any possibility of a military Dien Bien Phu. The guerrilla forces in the interior were exhausted, but the French army abandoned major operations. The "hunt commando" had a period of respite while the contingent was bored to death. On October 2, 1961, General de Gaulle announced "the institution of the sovereign and independent Algerian state via self-determination," and softened his position on the Sahara and the French military bases in Algeria (Lacouture 1986). Indeed, me Saharan question had profoundly hindered negotiations. In the course of the war itself, the Sahara represented a twofold interest for France: it was the location of the first nuclear tests, and the site of major fossil fuel deposits. The Algerian nationalists thus continued to reject any possible partition of me "southern territories" envisioned by the French authorities.
French Public Opinion:
Between Misunderstanding and Indifference
French public opinion became roused, thundered, and fumed. Compared to the war that had just ended in Indochina, the Algerian War seems at first sight to have been a time of intense consciousness-raising and scissions: the turbulence of a strong pied noir community and of the army; the antiwar involvement of intellectuals and trade unionists; the glorification of France's "civilizing mission" and the apologia for French Algeria; the vehement denunciation of colonialism and the mobilization for "peace in Algeria." Was the Algerian War a new Dreyfus affair? It would be tempting to believe so, in view of the rage and passion unleashed.
A careful examination of the reality, however, obliges us to nuance this assessment. "The events of Algeria," as they were called at the time, did not really rouse the public until 1956, the year of the "special powers" and the large-scale dispatch of the contingent. The campaigns directed against the use of torture did not truly begin until 1957, in the aftermath of the terrible battle of Algiers (thanks to the Comite Maurice-Audin in particular), that is, three years after the start of the war. The major student demonstrations for peace took place in late 1960, that is, a year and a half before Algerian independence. And the first large, impressive demonstration-more than 500,000 people-to rouse the French people against a war that had lasted for seven long years took place on February 13, 1962, on the occasion of the funeral of the victims of the Charonne metro, all Communist militants (see chapter 8), barely a month before the signing of the Evian accords that put an end to military combat. Let us add that between two hundred and three hundred rebellious or insubordinate soldiers, plus (merely) a few thousand militants, organized networks of sympathy with the Algerians; though they bear witness to the courage of a minority, they did not really constitute "French resistance" to the Algerian War (Ramon and Rotman 1979).
If we consider, among other sources, the changes in the opinion polls between 1955 and 1962, we realize above all that the majority of French people were not as attached as is sometimes believed to maintaining Algeria within the framework of a French nation. As the historian Jean-Pierre Rioux observes, that is no doubt because France had never made colonization "a collective project on a broad social, ideological, and moral plane" (Rioux 1990). Hence the "passive acquiescence" to decolonization. That point of view is shared by another historian, Charles-Robert Ageron: "The colonial impulse was the act of only a small minority. ...The colonial vocation was always rare and imperial consciousness came late. Was France colonial?"
In late 1955 the Front Republicain was victorious after an electoral campaign centered on "peace in Algeria." In February 1958, according to a poll by the Institut Francais d'Opinion Publique, or IFOP (French Institute of Public Opinion), the Algerian War placed sixth in the concerns of the French people. In October 1960, in an opinion poll in Paris for the newspaper Afrique-Action, 59 percent of individuals queried thought that "de Gaulle cannot return peace without negotiating with the FLN"; 24 percent were of the opposite view. Public opinion, eager to be done with the matter, designated the FLN as the Algerian interlocutor.
In May 1962, the filmmaker Chris Marker made Joli Mai, a documentary that shows the climate reigning in France on the eve of the Algerian declaration of independence. No one questioned in the film said that the essential event of May 1962 was the end of the Algerian War. And, in another opinion poll in September 1962, when pieds noirs and harkis were arriving en masse, only 13 percent of French people still maintained that "the Algerian tragedy" constituted a real concern.
In the face of such indifference, we might ask ourselves another question: might that attitude not be explained by a misunderstanding? Did the French know what was going on in the Aures or in Kabylia? Yes, necessarily, through the mass of soldiers involved in that conflict. Nearly 2 million! Thus thousands of families were affected, accounts and stories were later told at home, in the neighborhood, at the factory, in the village. In addition, there were committees, newspapers, and books that despite the censorship managed to divulge the "secrets" of an unacknowledged war. More than sixty thousand copies of Henri Alleg's La question, which brutally raised the problem of torture, were sold in 1958, before being seized (the book would continue to circulate under the counter).
France engaged in a cruel war against the Algerians, but society refused to live in a state of war. The majority of the French people took refuge behind the moral certainty that their country, fresh from fighting for its own liberation in 1944, would not be in the position of oppressing and torturing. To look lucidly at the course of the Algerian War was to run the risk of revisiting the dark Vichy period. That would be reason enough not to speak of either period. One ought not to conclude, however, that the period of the Algerian War was not auspicious for political involvement of all sorts, or that it was not a very important moment for a true cultural "reconstruction."
Cultural Changes, Intellectual Involvement
The years 1956-1957 witnessed the sudden rise of the LP and the introduction of Bach, Beethoven, and Vivaldi to mass consumption. Through the transistor, which would be useful to the contingent in its refusal to follow the generals' putsch, the noise of American rock arrived: Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, the Platters. In terms of film, in 1957 Fellini made Nights of Cabiria; in the United States, Brigitte Bardot triumphed with And God Created Woman. (Roger Vadim's film earned twice the receipts of Around the World in Eighty Days.) However, 1959 was the real turning point for the silver screen. A fine foursome was shown at the Cannes film festival: Hiroshima man amou7; Les cousins, Black Oryheus, and, above all, Francois Truffaut's Les quatre cents coups (The Four Hundred Blows), which was awarded the Palme d'Or. The "new wave," an expression coined by the journalist Francoise Giroud for a survey in L '&press of eighteen- to thirty-year-olds, was launched. In 1960 the true shock came with Jean-Luc Godard's A bout de souffle (Breath- less): a hero, mirroring the tragedy that France was living through, marches toward his ineluctable destiny. It is clear that everything has been deter- mined from the first sequences, but a carefree atmosphere reigns. A bout de souffle tells the story of those who were going to the Aures, and it became a mirror for youth in the contingent. In these " Algerian years," other images appeared on the small screen. And, on December 14,1956, readers saw in L'express: "Already at the present time, with the four hundred thousand officially declared sets, RTF [Radiodiffusion Television Francaise, the French television system] touches millions of French people, for whom it has replaced recreation and serious newspapers. In the hands of a government resolved to use it shamelessly in its propaganda, television may become another unsuspected weapon of power."
In 1957, with Alain Robbe-Grillet, the author of La jalousie (]ealou.sy) and literary editor at Editions de Minuit, a new literary school called the "nouveau roman" appeared. It was Roger Vaillant, however, who won the Prix Goncourt with La Ioi (The Law). On the intellectual scene, Jean-Paul Same and Albert Camus dominated. Camus, who "ached for Algeria," reasserted his solidarity with the Algerian people as a whole in the columns of L 'express, a newspaper with which he had become affiliated in order to be able to support Pierre Mendes-France, the only man, in his view, capable of solving the crisis while avoiding the worst outcome.
With the approach of the January 1956 elections, Camus launched an appeal for a reasonable compromise whereby the French would admit the failure of assimilation, and the Algerian nationalists would renounce their intransigence and the temptation of pan-Arabism. On January 22, 1956, that appeal was repeated in Algiers. But it was too late: already the voices of those holding liberal opinions could no longer be heard. Pacification took on the aspect of war. Camus did not approve of the radical position of the French of Algeria, but he also did not accept the idea of one day becoming an alien in his own country. He went through a period of doubt tinged with bitterness. The writer decided to be silent, once and for all. Only one sentence was needed, however, to bring about his downfall. They were simple words, almost dragged out of him by an Algerian student challenging him during a lecture given in Stockholm after Camus had received the Nobel Prize for literature in December 1957: "1 believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice." This line, often distorted, was only the touching confession of an intellectual in the grip of the uncertainty and confusion brought on by an outcry on the left. Camus the "traitor" was said to have definitively rallied behind the camp of French Algeria. Camus returned to his solitude. He died in a car accident on January 4, 1960. In contrast to Camus stood Jean-Paul Same. On January 27, 1956, the Comite d'Action des Intellectuels contre la Pour- suite de la Guerre en Afrique du Nord (Action Committee of Intellectuals against the Continuation of the War in North Africa) held a meeting in Salle Wagram. Jean-Paul Same, who was part of the committee, spoke: "The only thing we can and must attempt, but it is the essential thing to- day, is to struggle beside both the Algerians and the French to deliver them from colonial tyranny." In 1958, he wrote an article on Henri Alleg's La question, in which he tried to show that torture was not an epiphenomenon but a necessary method in the type of war France was waging, and that one had to "put an end to these vile and dreary advances." Torture and terrorism, democracy, the rights of a people, and human rights: it was not the time for consensus, but for involvement.
With Frantz Fanon's works, which were banned, "Third World" ideology was asserted: to discover new "wretched of the earth," apart from a French working class still controlled by the PCF, was to rediscover a historical force embodying the revolution. The 1959 Cuban revolution reinforced that conviction. But that swing to extreme involvement, clandestine activities, or marginality was not found exclusively on the left. The refusal to abandon French Algeria pushed many intellectuals, whether pieds noirs or metropolitans, toward dissidence against the state, and into the OAS. A few days after the Manifesto of the 121 in October 1960, a countermanifesto was published, bearing three hundred signatures by political personalities on the right. Among the signers were Roland Dorgeles, Andre Francois-Poncet, Henri de Monfreid, Roger Nimier, Pierre Nord, Jules Romains, Michel de Saint- Pierre, and Jacques Laurent. They condemned both the subversive activities of the Algerians and the practice of torture. The "trial of the barricades," which opened on November 3, 1960, was the occasion for the supporters of French Algeria to publicly set forth their theses. The anti- Third World ideologies for "the defense of the West" against "Muslim fanaticism" took shape. Thanks to the Algerian War, a generation, primarily belonging to the student world, entered politics and took a position in one camp or the other. The historian Jean-Francois Sirinelli, however, raises the question of that "war of writing" conducted by the French intelligentsia:
Did not the shock of the photos in Paris-Match, with its readership of 8 million French people, carry more weight than the words of intellectuals? And, as of January 1959, what was the impact of the televised reports of Cinq colonnes a la une [Five Columns on the Front Page], some of which have remained much more firmly rooted in the collective memory than one petition or another by intellectuals? This was a "war of writing," then, but also a period of change, when pictures and sounds continued their rise in power within French society. (Sirinelli 1992)
Sociological Upheaval
In the brief period before and after the Algerian War, a period combining crises, tears, and violence, France set out on the path of the most extraordinary development it had ever known. The French people, who between the change of government and the threats of civil war did not have time to be bored, did not see that upheaval. And yet, the face of the country changed more in fifteen years (1950-1965) than it had in a century.
Between 1950 and 1960 the number of motor vehicles on the road would increase
from 2,150,000 to 7,885,400. The number of airline passengers increased fivefold.
It was the era of the Caravelle airliner. Trans-Europ-Express began service
in early 1957. Between 1950 and 1960 the total length of electric lines doubled.
In 1950 there were only 92 kilometers of highways; in December 1955, the Ministry
of Public Works planned the construction of 2,000 kilometers of highways, a
plan that was realized within ten years. Thanks to the large electrical dams,
blackouts became nothing but a bad memory for the French people. And, in 1957,
the EDF began work on its first nuclear plant in Avoine, near Chinon. The natural
gas processing plant in Lacq began operation in May 1957; thanks to that production,
by 1960 there were only 182 coal-fired power stations remaining, of the 546
existing in 1945. The examples could be multiplied: they constitute the signs
of a massive introduction into the modern era. The construction of Europe was
advancing and took a decisive turn with the signing of the Treaty of Rome. On
July 9, 1957, the National Assembly, by a vote of 512 to 239, authorized the
ratification of the Common Market treaty.
In these decisive years, France definitively wrested itself from its rural character.
But it was ill prepared for that enormous upheaval. The peasant worldview found
itself radically transformed. The older and younger generations disagreed on
the methods of production, but also on the very values of that society. The
majority of peasants' sons who waged war in Algeria came back changed.
The war waged in a distant land awakened and reinforced the peasant's sense of belonging to his "little homeland," his village, his region. For the young peasants, the Algerian War also symbolized the end of economic competition from the colonies. The retreat to the Hexagon favored the rise of regionalism, which manifested itself in the 1970s in Brittany, the Basque region, and Corsica. Now people no longer spoke of peasants, but of farmers. These farmers were supposed to think in terms of productivity, investment, depreciation, and not simply in terms of savings. They confronted a radically different mode of production and sale. The structural transformation that was taking root would "kill" the weakest members. Traditional farming was fated to evolve or to die. "The Dominici affair," which held France enthralled at the time, was also a symbol of the putting to death of the rural world (Gaston Dominici, found guilty of a triple murder in Lurs, was sentenced to death on September 18, 1954).
Finally, in the background of these changes, the urban landscape was profoundly changed. The end of the" Algerian years" meant the construction of tract housing, the growth of the suburbs, and a new (poor?) way of life. The first "hypermarket" (Carrefour) was opened in Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois in 1963, while the suburbs developed, with Sarcelles (1961) as their emblem. Refrigerators and television sets (800,000 sets in 1958, 3 million in 1962) proliferated in homes.
Within that whirlwind, how could those who had "trudged" through the djebels, or who clung to the memory of a lost land, make themselves understood? Within the euphoria of "progress," everyone gave in to the pressure of the immediate, caught up in the avalanche of novelties and consumption.
How Distant the Aures
Only ten years after the end of the Occupation, political space was deter- mined less by ideological markers than by sociological ones: the upheaval of the agricultural landscape and end of the peasant world, the urban explosion on the periphery of the cities, the massive intrusion of television into homes, the beginning of the nuclear revolution. That nascent modernity concealed the issues born of the II Algerian years. "
The attachment to the brand new comfort that this old country now enjoyed, the memory of two gigantic blood-lettings (the two world wars), whose traces were still visible, if not on the French landscape, then at least on every village square: everything joined together to lead to an entirely new approach to the problems of a war waged outside the Hexagon. Society knew, but was content to keep, the secret of an undeclared war. The relation to death was wholly private and excluded from public life: no funeral orations, no specific tombstones, no particular inscriptions on city and village monuments celebrated the merit of those killed "over there." That tendency to exclude and conceal death led people to renounce the effort to come to terms with that war. The age of consumer society and the society of the spectacle had sounded.
At the same time, the war served as a revelation. What was being born under the thick mask of indifference was hostility toward the man living in or coming from the south. That mysterious "other" had resisted, had wanted to obtain a nationality of his own; here was a man whose life, hopes, and history no one took the trouble to find out about. How very distant and strange the Aures and their inhabitants seemed to the French. With the Algerian War, colonial racism began its crossing of the Mediterranean.
The Franco-French War
In late 1961, the government of the Fifth Republic seemed to be running up against increasingly serious obstacles in the application of its new policy. The negotiations with the FLN ran aground over the Saharan question and had to be momentarily suspended. At the National Assembly on November 8, 1961, during the debate on the Algerian budget, several deputies in the center and on the right defended the idea of the OAS's representativeness and of the government's need to take its presence into account. The next day, during a study of the military allocations, the so-called Salan amendment received eighty votes. In certain circles of the police, the army, and the administration, it was well known that the organization benefited from multiple and sometimes significant acts of complicity. According to Police Superintendent Jacques Delarue, who was part of the struggle against the OAS, "we even know there was a mole in the Elysee Palace."
But, within Algeria itself, the OAS had to face repression conducted by law enforcement-hesitant at first, then increasingly firm-and especially, the actions of the parallel police networks (the notorious "secret agents" (barbouzes), who began to arrive in Algiers in October 1961) and the FLN networks. Often working together, they carried out a great number of individual attacks, answered terror with terror, and, in particular, resorted to abductions. The climate of violence became more acute, but, in the game of terrorism and counterterrorism, the OAS saw its very small ranks of combatants dwindle and its actions became more radical.
Lagging behind Algiers but using the same means, the OAS in Oran also got involved in terrorism, in spectacular strikes (bank or business holdups to procure funds), and in bloody expeditions against the Muslim Algerians. Thus, on January 13, 1962, six OAS men disguised as gendarmes appeared at the Oran prison where they got three FLN militants who had been sentenced to death released to them. They executed them a few moments later. The next day four other FLN prisoners escaped. The OAS gave chase, found them, and executed them. The activist organization produced pirate radio broadcasts, and, on February 6, published twenty thousand copies of a counterfeit issue of L'Echo d'Oran, condemning "de Gaulle's policy of abandonment." The OAS general staff could no longer count on the government to yield. The dream of a repetition of a "May 13"-type operation was now out of the question. Only one option remained: armed insurrection, which by maintaining a revolutionary situation might prevent the conclusion of the negotiations under way with the FLN.
In France the fresh outbreak of plastic explosive attacks in January and February
1962 may serve to illustrate that rise in violence: 40 attacks between January
15 and 21 (including 25 in the Paris region, 18 on the single night between
January 17 and 18), 33 between January 22 and 28 (23 in the Paris region), and
34 between February 5 and 11 (27 in the Paris region). In Algeria, 801 attacks
by the OAS, the FLN, and the anti-OAS were recorded between January 1 and 31,
1962, causing 555 deaths and 990 injuries, with 507 attacks recorded in the
first two weeks of February, causing 256 deaths and 490 injuries (Kaufer 1986).
On February 5, 1962, General de Gaulle referred to these "incidents"
in a speech and declared that, ''as odious as they might be," they had
only a "relative" importance. Nevertheless, he stated clearly that
the OAS agitators "must be cut off and punished." The metropolis was
proving increasingly hostile to the OAS: did these European insurgents want
a French Algeria, or a pied noir Algeria on the model of South Africa?
The attack in Andre Malraux's apartment building, which cost a four- year-old girl, Delphine Renard, her eyesight, came on the heels of an attack on Jean-Paul Sartre and incited the indignation of a French public that had lost its patience. The left denounced "the fascist danger" and, on February 8, called for a demonstration of "republican defense."
At the appeal of the unions (the CGT, the CFTC, the FEN, and the UNEF) and the parties (the PCF, the Partie Socialiste Unifie, or PSU [Unified Socialist Party], and Jeunesses Socialistes [Socialist Youth]), five processions formed, headed for the Place de la Bastille. They collided with an imposing deployment of police. That morning, the Ministry of the Interior had reminded everyone that all demonstrations were banned on public thoroughfares. As during the Algerian demonstration on October 17, 1961, Maurice Papon was the prefect of police in Paris who coordinated the actions of law enforcement. That evening, the Charonne metro station be- came part of the collective memory of the left (as the Wall of the Federates had once been). The mob, panic-stricken, rushed into the metro entrance; a half-closed gate caught up the bodies of those who stumbled. On that human pileup, which completely blocked the entrance, witnesses saw a group of helmeted policemen "set to work." These officers struck at the pile with bidu/es (long wooden billy clubs, literally "thingamajigs", and threw a cafe table and sections of cast iron tom from the fences protecting the trees. Amidst the shouts, the moans, the layers of tangled injured, eight dead bodies were pulled out. On Tuesday, February 13, the funerals of the eight victims of Charonne were attended by an impressive crowd estimated at 500,000. A general strike that day stopped trains, closed schools, and left the newspapers silent (Alleg 1981).
When on March 7, 1962, the new Evian talks began, the OAS commandos escalated their boldness and violence on Algerian soil: there were bazooka attacks on the barracks of mobile gendarmes, and booby-trapped cars caused havoc in Muslim neighborhoods. Horror followed upon horror. Algiers, and especially Oran, lived with death, as it had once lived with the Bubonic plague, as depicted in Albert Camus's novel La peste. On March 15, 1962, in Algiers, an OAS group murdered six leaders of the social education centers, including Mouloud Feraoun, a writer and friend of Camus. He had noted in his journal on February 28: "I have been locked inside my home for ten days to escape the Arab-bashing."
The Evian Accords and the "Scorched-Earth" Policy
On March 19,1962, a cease-fire was proclaimed in Algeria. It was "peace" at last! The news spread over the telephone wires and the radio waves. Krim Helkacem affixed his elaborate signature next to those ofLouisJoxe, Robert Huron, and Jean de Hroglie, the negotiators named by General de Gaulle. Four weeks earlier, in a Council of Ministers, after Louis Joxe had given an account of the conclusion of the secret negotiations with the GPRA, Prime Minister Michel Debre had declared: "We are reaching the end of a painful ordeal. Malraux spoke of victory, but it is instead a victory over ourselves. Now everything will depend on what France will become" (Stora 1991a).
In Evian, the negotiators for the GPRA made a few concessions regarding the rights of Europeans (dual nationality for three years, then the option of Algerian nationality or the status of privileged resident alien), control of the Sahara (preferential rights for French companies in the distribution of re- search and exploitation permits for six years, payment for Algerian fossil fuels in French francs), and the military bases (Mers el-Kebir was to remain French for a period of fifteen years and the installations in the Sahara for five years). In exchange, France declared itself willing to offer its economic and financial aid to independent Algeria, in particular, by continuing to carry out the Constantine plan launched in 1958, and to develop cultural cooperation. On October 3, 1958, General de Gaulle had chosen Constantine, a Muslim city for the most part, to make known the main lines of a new five-year economic and social program. He had then enumerated the provisions decided upon: the granting of sixty-two thousand acres of new land to Muslim farmers; the establishment of major metallurgical and chemical blocks; the construction of housing for a million people; regular employment for 400,000 new workers; schooling for two-thirds of children, with, in the next three years, schooling of all Algerian youth; and salaries and benefits equal to those in the metropolis.
Of the 93 pages of the Evian accords, of its 111 articles complemented by countless parts, sections, and appendices, the metropolis retained two pas- sages in particular. First: "a cease-fire is established. It will put an end to the military operations and to the armed struggle throughout Algerian territory at twelve hundred hours on March 19." The war was thus acknowledged at the moment when the treaty marking its end was signed. And second: "The French citizens of Algeria will participate in public affairs in a fair and genuine manner. ...Their property rights will be respected. No measure of dispossession will be taken against them without their being granted equitable compensation that has been fixed in advance."
But the signing of the Evian accords did not mark the end of the Algerian war (Ageron 1991; Perville 1991). In the aftermath of the negotiations between the GPRA and the French government, the OAS leaders, in a tract on March 21, 1962, proclaimed that the French forces were considered "occupation troops" in Algeria. The activist supporters of French Algeria took control of Bab-el-Oeud. They transformed the district into an enormous Fort Chabrol and attacked military trucks. The "battle of Bab-el-Oeud" produced 35 deaths and 150 injuries.
In the morning of March 26, the O.AS command declared a general strike in greater Algiers. It appealed to the Europeans to gather, on principle unarmed, on the Glieres plateau and at Laferriere Square. The objective was to then head for Bab-el-Oued to break through the encirclement around the district. Lieutenant Ouchene Oaoud led the blocking of rue d'Isly, banning access to Bab-el-Oued from the center of Algiers. The orders from Paris were clear: do not yield to the disturbance. When Ouchene Daoud and his superiors asked under what conditions they might make use of their weapons if necessary, the reply came to the headquarters of the Tenth military region: "If the demonstrators persist, open fire." At 2:45 p.m., a burst of Bren gun fire rattled toward the troop from the bal- cony of 64, rue d'Eisy. The regiment's command post gave the order to re- ply. At the corner of boulevard Pasteur and rue d'Isly, the machine gun mowed down the demonstrators. Forty-six dead and two hundred wounded (twenty of whom did not survive) were counted, almost all Algiers civilians. Mter the fusillade of rue d'Isly, the OAS began to recede. In Apri11962, the Europeans of Algeria began to leave their native land en masse, headed for the metropolis (Lacouture 1985).
While Algiers was enduring these bloody hours, Oran was in a state of shock:
General Edmond Jouhaud and his assistant Camelin were under arrest.
On March 28, Abderrahmane Fares, president of the Algerian "provisional
executive body" set in place after Evian, settled with his team from the
"administrative complex of Rocher-Noir." On April 8, a massive referendum
vote held by the Elysee Palace (90.7 percent of voters approved the referendum,
with 24.4 percent of eligible voters not participating) gave the president of
the Republic the legal capacity "to establish accords and take measures
on the subject of Algeria, on the basis of the government declarations of March
19, 1962." Far from appeasing the OAS command, the results of that referendum
pushed it toward a frenzied escalation, the "scorched-earth policy."
In Oran on the morning of April 24, the OAS attacked a clinic belonging to Doctor Jean-Marie Larribere, a Communist militant who was very well known in the city. Two women, one of whom had just given birth, managed to escape the complete destruction of the building. The attacks by plastic explosives and machine gun occurred at a deadly pace. Mobile gendarmes were assaulted, and armored vehicles counterattacked with 20 and 37 mm cannons. Strikes occurred at random against buildings inhabited by Europeans. Airplanes joined the fray with their heavy machine guns. On April 23, 1962, the Oran Bar Association published a press release denouncing "these attacks against a civilian population, which would be contrary to the The Hague convention in wartime. ...In peacetime, and among French people, they boggle the mind" (Paillat 1972).
In spite of OAS orders that prohibited the Europeans from leaving the country (the travel agencies were under surveillance), the exodus toward the metropolis began. On Apri115, Le Chanzy disembarked a first contingent of the "repatriates" coming from Oran. The organization's attacks did not end. Terrorism can even be said to have been increasing in violence, with the murder of individual Muslims, manhunts, plastic bombs going off, mortar fire.
In late April, a booby-trapped car exploded in a market that was much frequented by Algerians in that holy month of Ramadan. It was the first of its kind (on May 2, the same method was repeated: a booby-trapped car exploded in the port of Algiers, causing 62 deaths and 110 injuries, all among Muslims).
In Oran in May, ten to fifty Algerians were slaughtered by the OAS on a daily basis. Things became so ferocious that the people who were still living in European neighborhoods left them in haste. They all barricaded themselves, protected themselves as they could. Some Muslims left Oran to join their families in the villages, or in cities that did not have a large European population. Others organized themselves into a sort of autonomous group in the Muslim enclave. Political representatives of the FLN surfaced, and a means of survival was set in place (supply operations, garbage collection). But, in this deadly cycle that went on and on, with bursts of automatic weapon fire reverberating here and there, day and night, what was to be- come of the European population, especially after the proclamation of independence, when the ALN troops would penetrate the city? The FLN leaders found it increasingly difficult to hold back an exasperated Muslim population which wanted to strike back.
However, the OAS leaders who were still free knew they had lost the struggle. The French army did not swing in their favor and morale was at its lowest after the arrests of Salan, Jouhaud, and Degueldre, and the failure of an OAS underground force in the Ouarsenis. Moreover, there was nothing to be expected from abroad. Then, too, there was the continuing exodus, the hemorrhaging. Beginning in late May, eight to ten thousand people, those who would later be called pieds noirs, left Algeria, hastily taking their most precious possessions with them.
June 7, 1962, was one of the culminating points of "the scorched-earth policy." The "Delta commandos" of the OAS burned the Algiers library, and set its sixty thousand volumes ablaze. In Oran, the city hall, the municipal library, and four schools were destroyed by explosives. More than ever, the city, where total anarchy reigned, was split in two: not a single Algerian moved around the European city any longer. The decision by Paris to open the border to ALN fighters stationed in Morocco caused even more panic among Europeans. In a state of fantastic disorder, Algeria was emptied of its managers and technicians. Worried about the general paralysis threatening the country, A. Fares decided to negotiate with the OAS through the intermediary of Jacques Chevallier, former vice-mayor of Algiers.
The accord with the FLN, signed in Algiers on June 18 by Jean-Jacques Susini in the name of the OAS, was rejected in Oran. On June 25 and 26, in a city covered with smoke from fires, OAS commandos attacked and robbed six banks. Following the announcement of Colonel Dufour (former leader of the First Foreign Regiment of Paratroopers and head of the Oranie OAS) that the OAS should lay down its weapons, it was making preparations to flee. On trawlers loaded down with weapons (and money), the last OAS commandos went into exile. During this time, the Europeans leaving Oran reached the scope of a tide of humanity. Thousands of distraught, bewildered people waited for the boats in a state of total destitution. Now that Algeria had been transformed into a hell, they had to flee as quickly as possible a country to which they would remain attached with every fiber of their being.
The Abandonment of the Harkis
In the June 1962 state of emergency, the embarkation of the pieds noirs took on the appearance of a stampede. But the ones who were truly for- gotten, truly absent from that hasty exodus, were the pro-French Muslims, who would be designated by the general term harki. The first harka (an Arab word meaning "movement") had been formed in the Aures in November 1954.
Before March 19, 1962, SAS officers had been preoccupied with transferring those who were threatened to the metropolis. But a telegram (no. 125/IGAA) of May 16, 1962, ordered them to stop: "The minister of state-Louis Joxe-calls on the high commissioner to remember that all individual initiatives tending to settle the Muslim French in the metropolis are strictly prohibited." Another directive from the same state minister, dated July 15, 1962, stated: "The auxiliary troops landing in the metropolis in deviance from the general plan will be sent back to Algeria." These officers later said: "We lost our honor with the end of that Algerian war" (Le Mire 1982).
How many of these "auxiliaries" to the French army were there? On March 13, 1962, a report transmitted to the UN assessed the number of pro-French Muslims at 263,000 men: 20,000 career soldiers; 40,000 soldiers of the contingent; 58,000 harkis, auxiliary units formed from the civilian self-defense groups, sometimes promoted to "hunt commandos," units that, provided at a ratio of one per military sector, were constituted in Kabylia, in the Aures, and in the Ouarsenis; 20,000 moghaznis, police units constituted at the local level and placed under the orders of the SAS leaders; 15,000 members of the groupes mobiles de protection rurale, or GMPR (mobile groups of rural protection), later called mobile security groups and assimilated to the state security police (CRS); 60,000 members of civilian self-defense groups; and 50,000 elected officials, veterans, and functionaries.
The geographical area of recruitment, enlistment, and participation in the activities and operations of the French anny by the auxiliary Muslim units was not confined to a single French department of Algeria, but ex- tended into every region, constituting a heterogeneous space. Were these Algerians "manipulated" by French officers? Did they mobilize themselves spontaneously for the defense of French civilization in Algeria? Was that in- volvement only an aspect of the "wars" families waged among themselves, within a single village (one relative in the guerrilla forces, another in the hnrkas)? No doubt there was a bit of all that (Roux 1991).
In fact, the history of the harkis is inseparable from the fate suffered by the Algerian peasantry during the Algerian War. The work of Abdelmalek Sayad and Pierre Bourdieu (1963) has revealed the profound upheavals that marked traditional rural society during these years of war: the massive displacement of populations (more than 2 million rural people), the impoverishment, the marked disaffection with the peasant condition, the shift from a barter economy to a market economy, the withering of the peasant spirit, the high value given to nonagricultural jobs. The new psychological fragility born of social poverty and rootlessness made the concern to pre- serve one's patrimony, one's land, all the more keen. That dimension ex- plains in great part the enlistment in the harkis and the rise in the ALN guerrilla forces: one's land had to be protected or recovered. At first sight what was at issue was not positive loyalty to a flag (French or Algerian). Violence, murder, the "settling of accounts" (sometimes within peasant families themselves), in short, the dynamic of war, hardened behavior and commitments. Then people got caught up in a chain of events. The Algerian nationalists needed to denounce the existence of "collaborators" to legitimate their conception of the unanimous nation; French officers needed harkis to show the loyalty of the now "pacified" native populations. In either case, the Algerian peasants found themselves transformed against their will into "faithful servants of France" or "absolute traitors" to the Algerian homeland. Several tens of thousands of them were massacred after Algerian independence, while others encountered enormous difficulties in becoming integrated into French society, living as outcasts.
The Algerian Victory, and the Divisions
The Evian accords marked a new stage in Algerian history. Independence was won, victory imminent. Yet, paradoxically, the period that followed the cease- fire of March 19, 1962, showed the weakness of the ALN- FLN within the country. The FLN leaders in the territory did not manage to control financial dealings, and a considerable volume of lands and buildings changed hands in the mass exodus of the European minority. Within a few weeks, the number of Algerian artisans and small tradespeople rose sharply, from 130,000 to 180,000. A few initiatives here and there attempted to check the speculative process, particularly via the creation of "management committees" on the lands left vacant by the colons. But, above all, the wi/ayas of the interior, which had no more than a few thousand "djounouds" before the Evian accords, subsequently "swelled" in record time.
The crisis within the FLN erupted publicly at the Tripoli Congress, held between May 25 and June 7, 1962. Nevertheless, a program was adopted unanimously there, almost without discussion, by the "Parliament" of the victorious nationalist movement, the CNRA (Harbi 1980).
In its principal points, the program subscribed to the populist ideology already expressed at the Soummam Congress in August 1956:
The creative effort of the people has manifested itself largely through the organs and instruments it has forged for itself under the leadership of the FLN, for the general conduct of the war of liberation and the future construction of Algeria. The unity of the people, national resurrection, the prospect of a radical transformation of society, such are the primary results that have been obtained as a result of seven and a half years of armed struggle.
On the political level, the primacy of the FLN was reaffirmed against the GPRA, "which, with its birth, became confused with the FLN leader- ship, and contributed to weakening both the notion of the 'state' and that of the 'party.' The amalgam of state institutions and of FLN authorities has reduced the latter to nothing more than an administrative apparatus." This was a barely veiled attack against the GPRA, which had negotiated the Evian accords: "The Evian accords constitute a neocolonialist plat- form that France is preparing to use to establish and harness its new form of domination."
Thus, one current, formed around Ben Bella, and especially, around the general staff of the ALN, headed by Houari Boumedienne, stood opposed to the leaders of the GPRA: it proposed to transform the FLN into a party, and to create a political bureau. For their part, Ben Khedda and his friends wanted to preserve the GPRA until things were set up in Algiers. At night, between June 5 and June 7, 1962, Benkhedda left the CNRA without warning. The other participants dispersed in the confusion. On June 30, on the eve of the referendum, the GPRA met in Tunis, minus Ben Bella, who had hastily gone abroad. The GPRA then decided to dissolve the general staff, to officially dismiss Colonel Boumedienne and his two assistants, Ali Mendjli and Kald Ahmed. It ordered the wilayas "to tolerate no infringement on its authority by irresponsible elements whose activities can only culminate in fratricidal struggles."
Each faction had armed forces, militant troops on which it could rely. The war against the colonial power was followed by the war between factions of the FLN. Safe within its stronghold of Ghardimaou, on the border of Tunisia and Algeria, the general staff called the GPRA's decision "illegal" and "null and void." On June 28, 1962, Colonel Houari Boumedienne ordered his men-21,OOO in Tunisia, 15,000 in Morocc0--"to prepare to enter Algeria, in units formed within the region designated by the general staff." The first men and their heavy equipment would penetrate the country in the days that followed. The alliance between Houari Boumedienne and Ahmed Ben Bella managed to take root in the acquisition of power. Boumedienne finally thrust aside Ben Bella in a military putsch on June 19, 1965.
Independence
"Do you want Algeria to become an independent state cooperating with France under the conditions defined by the declaration of March 19, 1962?" On Sunday, July 1, 1962, in Algeria, 6 million voters answered yes to that question; a mere 16,534 said no.
The results, made public on July 3, showed a yes vote from 91.23 percent of registered voters, 99.72 percent of those actually participating in the poll. General de Gaulle drew the lesson of that predictable result. During a brief ceremony on July 3, at the administrative complex of Rocher-Noir, near Algiers, Christian Fouchet, high commissioner of France, handed over to Abderrahmane Fares, president of the "provisional executive body" formed after the Evian accords, the general's letter, which recognized Algeria's independence:
France has taken due note of the results of the July 1, 1962, poll on self- determination and the application of the declarations of March 19, 1962. It has recognized the independence of Algeria. As a result, and in accordance with section 5 of the general declaration of March 19,1962, the powers relating to the sovereignty over the territories of the former French departments of Algeria are, beginning this day, transferred to the provisional executive body of the Algerian state. In this solemn circum- stance, Mr. President, I want to express to you in all sincerity the good wishes that I, along with France as a whole, have for Algeria.
"Seven years are enough!" That slogan, true for the majority of Algerians, spread through the cities and the countryside. They demanded an end to the bad times. The excesses, the bloody purges, the fighters-to-the-end, and the rumors of differences at the top were troubling. But nothing could spoil the return of peace and freedom. After the war, after the suffering and humiliation, victory entitled them to be joyful, and hence to forget.
Oran, the Final Tragedies
With the official end to the war, did the blood finally stop flowing? On July 5, 1962, there was a tragic event in Oran. A mob from the Muslim neighborhoods invaded the European city at about eleven o'clock a.m. The first shots were fired. No one knew the causes of the gunfire. According to the reporters from Paris-Match present on the scene, "there is talk of an OAS provocation, of course, but that seems unlikely. There are no commandos left, or almost none, among the Europeans who stayed in Oran after July 1, which, in fact, is considered a date at least as fateful as 1940." In the suddenly empty streets, the hunt for Europeans was on.
On boulevard du Front de Mer, there were several dead bodies. Near boulevard
de l'Industrie, shots were fired at motorists, one of whom was hit and collapsed
at the wheel as his car crashed into a wall. One European woman who had come
out onto her balcony on boulevard Joseph-Andrieu was killed. At about three
o'clock p.m., the gunfire increased in intensity. Near the "Rex" cinema,
one of the victims of that massacre could be seen hanging from a meat hook.
The French, panic-stricken, sought refuge where they could, in the offices of
L 'Echo d'Oran, or fled to the Mers el- Kebir base, held by the French army.
During that time, General Katz, commander of the military installation in Oran,
was having his lunch at the La Sebia air base. Alerted of the events, according
to the historian Claude Paillat, he replied to an officer: "Let's wait
until five o'clock to decide what to do." The French troops stood by, weapons
at their feet, since the Ministry of Armies had prohibited them from leaving
their quarters. At precisely five o'clock, the gunfire quieted down. In the
days that followed, the FLN regained control of the situation and proceeded
to arrest and execute rioters.
The toll from July 5 was high. According to the figures given by Doctor Mostefa Nalt, director of the hospital complex in Oran, 95 people, including 20 Europeans, were killed (13 were stabbed to death). In addition, 161 were wounded. The Europeans told of scenes of torture, pillaging, and, above all, abduction. On May 8, 1963, the secretary for Algerian affairs declared at the National Assembly that 3,080 people had been listed as abducted or missing: 18 were found, 868 freed, and 257 killed {throughout Algeria, but especially in Oranie).
So ended the French presence in that "jewel of the empire," French Algeria. On July 12, 1962, Ahrned Ben Bella moved into Oran. Another battle began-the battle for power in Algeria.
On the other side of the Mediterranean, those who were henceforth to be called pieds noirs were preoccupied with finding their place in French society and with seeking out the sites of the lost memory of French Algeria. The "patroness" of Oran, Our Lady of Santa-Cruz, accepted the hospitality of the humble church of Courbessac, near Nimes.
Human and Material Losses
In his press conference on April11 , 1961, General de Gaulle declared: " Algeria is costing us-that is the least one can say-more than it is bringing in. ...Now our great national ambition has become our own progress, the real source of power and influence. The fact is, decolonization is in our interest, and, as a result, it is our policy." We know, particularly through the work of the historian Jacques Marseille (1989), that, as the Algerian War was unfolding the colonial question was tending to become "a burden" for certain branches of French capitalism. The development of new forms of production, the pressure of international competition, the end of the peasant world, and the opening-up of the economy to the outside were all shifts that led certain participants in economic life to want to stop squandering considerable capital in the empire without any benefit. Yet there was an op- position between the "political" realm, which intended to maintain the strength of an empire, and the "economic" realm, which was more concerned with yield and efficiency.
That is why the Algerian War was still more costly to the French economy, even operating as a brake on the rapid modernization of society as a whole. That dimension cannot be included within the "accounting" of the war. The dispersed nature of the budgetary allocations and the indeterminate criteria for calculation make any assessment of the financial costs very problematic. In a study published in Le Monde on March 20, 1962, Gilbert Mathieu gave an estimate, solely for the duration of the war, of between 27 and 50 billion francs, that is, 10 to 18 percent of the gross domestic product of 1961. But ought we to consider only the military expenses incurred between 1954 and 1962? The various contributions of the French treasury to the Algerian budget, the "Constantine plan," which represented a financial commitment on the order of 2.5 billion new francs, and the responsibility assumed for the hundreds of thousands of repatriates between 1962 and 1965, estimated at a cost of 7.2 billion, must also be taken into account. And, above all, if we wish to establish an economic and social toll, how are we to "tally up" the cost of that war for Algerian society, via the massive displacement of populations, the impoverishment of the peasantry, and the destruction of economic potential by the "scorched-earth" policy?
During the early part of the war (1954-1958) the French army was con- tent to string together long lists in press releases, conceived as veritable psychological campaigns of demoralization and attrition against the ALNIFLN. Its newspaper Le Bled regularly published lists of "rebel losses" in men and equipment (lists reprinted by part of the mainstream press). Hence, General Salan announced that for the first week of February 1957, "more than seven hundred rebels have been killed, and nearly two hundred taken prisoner; four machine guns, two mortars, several pistols, and five hundred war rifles were recovered during battles." For the same month, Robert Lacoste stated that "2,512 rebels [were] killed." This was the great era of an imminent and ineluctable military victory, the "last quarter hour." Let us note in passing that the number of wounded and captives was much lower than the number of dead.
The French army did not publish figures on its military losses. For ex- ample, there is not one line in Le Bled on the deadly ambush in Palestro on May 18, 1956, during which nineteen French soldiers were mutilated and massacred. It was not until General de Gaulle's press conference on October 23, 1958, that the first official war figures appeared:
You should know that, in the last four years in Algeria, about fifteen hundred civilians of French descent have been killed, whereas more than ten thousand Muslims-men, women, and children-have been massacred by the rebels, almost always by having their throats slit. In the metropolis, for the seventy-five people of French descent who lost their lives in attacks, one thousand seven hundred and seventeen Muslims fell to the killer's bullets or knives. How many lives, how many homes, how many harvests did the French army protect in Algeria! And to what slaughter would we be condemning this country if we were stupid and cowardly enough to abandon it! That is the reason, the merit, the result, of so many military actions in the form of men and exertions, of so many nights and days on guard, of so many reconnaissances, patrols, skirmishes. Alas! Seventy- seven thousand rebels have been killed in the fighting.
In his press conference on November 10, 1959, General de Gaulle gave different
indications of the number of casualties. At that date he listed, "since
the beginning of the rebellion," 171,000 dead: 13,000 French soldiers,
145,000 "rebels," 1,800 "civilians of French descent," and
12,000 Muslim civilians.
Thus, in one year, between October 1958 and November 1959, more than 6,000 French
soldiers and 68,000 "rebels" were supposedly killed, that is, as many
as during the first phase of the conflict. That hardly seems likely, despite
the ferocity of the military campaigns (the "Jumelles" operations).
A year later, on November 25, 1960, General de Gaulle declared to the man- aging
editor of L 'Echo d'Oran, "We have already killed 200,000, we are killing
another 500 every week."
At the time the Evian accords were signed in March 1962, the total figure of French losses in Algeria was estimated by military authorities as follows:
-Killed: 12,000, including 9,000 of French descent, 1,200 legionnaires, and
1,250 Muslims. In addition, the auxiliary forces count 2,500 dead.
-Wounded: 25,000, including 18,500 of French descent, 2,600 legionnaires, and
2,800 Muslims, in addition to 3,500 wounded among the auxiliary forces. Moreover,
accidents produced 6,000 dead, including 4,500 of French descent, 800 legionnaires,
and 900 Muslims, and 28,700 wounded, including 22,000 of French descent, 2,000
legionnaires, and 3,900 Muslims.
-A total of 198 persons of French descent are still listed as missing. Nearly
7 ,000 wounded rebels are being cared for in French medical facilities.
Before moving on to the number of "rebel casualties," let us spend
a moment on one figure, that of "accidental deaths." According to
the official figures, one-third of French soldiers killed during the Algerian
War died in accidents and not in combat. The accidentally injured represented
two-thirds of the wounded. This included accidents of all kinds: mishandling
of weapons, sentries who had fallen asleep, firing at random, mistaken targets,
and, above all, motor vehicle accidents. Several campaigns were conducted by
the military newspapers in particular in an attempt to reduce the rate of the
slaughter.
The indications provided in a note from Renseignements Generaux (General Information
Service) on March 9, 1962, based on French military sources, are the most surprising
in terms of the" Algerian rebel losses." They are estimated at 141,000!
That is, 4,000 fewer than in the figure given by General de Gaulle in his press
conference held two and a half years earlier. At the time, no one noted the
"anomaly."
The French army broke down the "Muslim losses" into two categories:
disabled ALN/FLN troops and Muslim Algerians killed by the FLN/ ALN .
As for the civilian population, there are no figures known for after March 19,
1961.
With these civilian figures, the total of Muslim Algerians killed by March
19, 1962, would thus rise to 243,378, according to the official French figures.
At the Tripoli Congress in June 1962, the FLN released the estimates that would
be taken as definitive: "One million martyrs fell for the cause of Algerian
independence." The Chant d'Alger (Algiers Charter, published by the FLN
in 1964) certified that there were 300,000 war orphans, including 30,000 who
had lost both father and mother, at the time of independence (p. 81), and "more
than I million martyrs, nearly 3 million people forced from their homes and
villages to be penned up in specialized centers created to that end, 400,000
refugees, primarily in Tunisia and Morocco, 700,00 mi- grants to the cities
from the rural areas."
According to the most plausible estimates, the conflict produced nearly 500,000
dead (all categories combined, but particularly Algerians).
In the months following Algerian independence, the massacre of tens of thousands
of harkis, the abduction of Europeans (especially in Oranie), the clashes for
power between wi/ayas, added considerably to the already heavy toll of that
"nameless war."
The Loss of the Empire
and the Crisis of French Nationalism
Forty years after the end of hostilities, the toll of the Algerian War continues to raise other problems of assessment and interpretation for historians, in particular, the crisis of French nationalism and the emergence and setting in operation of a "strong state" born of that war.
In his press conference on June 14, 1960, General de Gaulle emphasized that one had to turn one's back on the past: "It is altogether natural to feel nostalgia for what the empire was, just as one may yearn for the soft light of oil lamps, the splendor of the sailing-ship navy, the charm of the horse-and- buggy era. But what of it? No policy is valid apart from the realities." And he explained that the end of the Algerian War was an opportunity for France to point out a new path, to help the countries of the South. But that new epic was proposed at a moment marked by demographic uncertainty, industrial anxiety, and doubt about the nation's founding values. The end of the Algerian War weakened the army (eight hundred senior officers were discharged between 1961 and 1963); it divided the Church and broke the consensus resulting from the Resistance.
Only ten years after World War II, the kinship and participation in that unique history called "the Resistance" and "the Liberation" had been shattered. The rejection of the 1940 defeat and of the Vichy episode had restored the patriotic values that had fallen by the wayside. With the Algerian War, the pact on appropriate memories was broken. The Algerian War caused a true crisis in French nationalism, that is, in a certain conception of France, its role, its "civilizing mission" in the colonies. It led to this paradox: although the period brought about the construction of a strong state in 1958, it culminated in the crisis of French nationalism, of its centralized, Jacobin tradition. The approaching moment of Algerian independence accelerated the process of consciousness-raising and increased doubts. Traditional French nationalism found no way to express itself except as "the resistance to abandonment, " the rejection of "decadence." In Algirie francaise, published in 1959, Andre Ficeras wrote: "As long as we still have Algeria, we are great, we are strong, we are long-lasting. We have an incomparable destiny there."
Beginning in 1959, General de Gaulle, essentially through the magic of language, played a role in liberating public opinion from the haunting memory of "decadence" and "humiliation" and in leading the public to approve and accept Algerian independence. But the collapse of the empire in a climate of Algerian civil war led to a French crisis of conscience when the French were obliged to accept a decisive displacement of the French community. And this came at a time when the construction of Europe, still in its embryonic stage, was not having success in harnessing the fervor, the energy, left available by the end of the colonial adventure. In the tragic events that tore apart political, cultural, and intellectual "families," the French entrusted their harsh fate to the supreme magistrature. There was an insistent demand to resolve the tensions, to return to the Bonapartist tradition. The traditional French left also emerged seriously weakened by the Algerian War. A leftist government associated with the practice of torture and war; the distrust of a large portion of intellectuals, most of whom had embraced the left after the Liberation; the deterioration of the SFIO, which "rejected the false right of peoples to dispose of themselves in the name of human liberation" (in the words of Marc Sadoun); the true beginning of the internal crisis of the PCF, which did not allow itself to recognize any particularism apart from Communism- the profound upheavals experienced by the left at the time portended a real redefinition of its political values. That crisis weakened the foundations of republican ideology, the point of reference for the French socialist and Communist left. And finally, between 1954 and 1962, successive waves of French soldiers, more than 2 million of them, went to Algeria to fight a war. During these seven years, one Republic had fallen and an- other had replaced it, hundreds of thousands of Algerians had died the victims of that conflict, and 1 million pieds noirs had left the country where their families had lived for generations.
Amnesty and Amnesia
French society rapidly assimilated the Algerian War era, much more rapidly than had been the case after World War II (when it was necessary to rebuild, to live with ration coupons, to find housing). It did so at the risk of disturb- ing, or even dislocating, the axis linking the present to the immediate past. The memory of the Algerian War became encysted, as if within an invisible fortress, not in order to be "protected," but to be dissimulated, like the un- bearable face of a Gorgon. The succession of amnesties came to endorse that dissimulation of the "Algerian tragedy" within a climate of indifference. Things had to end one day: the remorse, the doubts, the painful shadows that haunted the memory had to be dispelled.
On December 17, 1964, the first amnesty law associated with the "events" in Algeria was passed. On December 21, 173 former OAS members received a presidential pardon as a Christmas present. It would not be until 1968 that "the account was closed." After the general strike on June 7, 1968, all OAS members were pardoned. In the following days, they returned from exile (Georges Bidault), or left prison (Raoul Salan). On July 24, 1968, the National Assembly passed a law that eliminated criminal penalties associated with the "events" in Algeria. But this law did not stipulate any reintegration into public duties (civilian or military), or the right to medals. On October 24, Jacques Soustelle returned to France after a period of exile resulting from his activities for French Algeria. The law of July 16, 1974, eliminated all convictions that had occurred during or after the Algerian War. The law of November 24, 1982, passed under a leftist government did not confine itself to amnesty; it rehabilitated the cadres, officers, and generals convicted or sanctioned for having participated in subversion against the Republic. The putschists of April 1961 once more became part of the French army.
Algeria, after enduring a terrible war, acceded to its independence. The historical merit of the leaders who set off the insurrection in November 1954 is that they unjammed the colonial status quo through the use of arms. They allowed the idea of independence to take shape among millions of Algerians. But, as the sociologist Abdelkader Djegehloul notes, "the war set in motion a process of destruction of the capital of democratic experience and modern politics, which the different political organizations had begun to ac- cumulate before 1954." The strategies of exclusion, authoritarianism, and hegemony took root within Algerian nationalism.
At the time of independence, hundreds of thousands of rural people, who had just recently left the resettlement camps, filled Algerian cities. They moved into the apartments that had been left vacant. This "peasant wave" profoundly transformed the face of Algerian cities, and in a lasting manner. In Le jleuve ditoumi (The Diverted River), the writer Rachid Mimouni describes the return of the soldier who opened his eyes to a new, alien world: the troubling chaos, the keen lucidity, a new Algeria overwhelmed, the river of its tradition diverted. Between an obedience to the former colonizer and an anonymous and collective submission to the new "administration," between the river diverted by foreign paratroopers or changed by autochthonous soldiers, was there any hope for a happy balance? The loss of a sense of duration accompanied the loss of political responsibilities. The economy seemed to dominate everything: battles about collectivization and self-management; the method of buying up and managing lands taken back from the French colons (the last lands were taken on October I, 1963); the regulation and control of Algerian emigration to France, with the accords of May 29, 1963 (on family migration), April 25, 1964 (the first efforts to cut off immigration), and December 27, 1968 (the quota system); the nationalization of petroleum and natural gas product distribution companies, in none other than May 1968. Petroleum revenues and the various allocations of resources to parties favored by the regime allowed the latter to earn the goodwill of a large portion of the public. "Modernization," founded on industries difficult to master, sacrificed agriculture, hydraulics, and equipment.
Suddenly, Algeria's colonial past was completely transformed into a foil, a point of reference for the self-justification the social present needed. Everything about that past that was precarious, sordid, and merciless toward human life and labor was willingly pointed out. The reminder of all these defects served as camouflage; they helped to exorcise the traumatic changes and dissimulate the wounds of the present. Algeria wanted to advance, set aside the hundred and thirty-two years of French presence, undertake the construction of a new society. It wanted to maximize the resources and mobilize everyone: economic populism complemented political populism. Thus a state of mind gradually spread, one that contrasted a dark prewar colonial period to the just-ended reality of the glorious war and the hope for a radiant future.
Between 1962 and 1968, in both France and in Algeria the loud din of "modernity" that invaded the world also covered up the era of the Algerian War: the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, then that of his brother Robert in 1968, the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. that same year, the impact of the Cuban revolution and the figure of Che Guevara, the police repression and the emergence of the youth movement in Europe and the United States, the Six-Day War (1967) and the invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968), the need to mystify history and the need to de- mystify it, the end of colonialism in Asia, and the shift to the war in Vietnam, which ended in 1975. These were years when history seemed to have vastly accelerated, with men who walked on the moon and the events of May 1968; the first oil crisis and the Yom Kippur War in 1973; "stagflation" in 1975; the coup d'etat in Poland in 1981, and the beginning of the end for Stalinist Communism.
Under these conditions, how can we fail to understand that the emergence from the Algerian "trauma" brought on a loss of consciousness, followed for a time by a confusional state? Yet, the poor "stockpiling" of memories never signified total amnesia, the massive forgetting of the facts.