French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  The victory of the 10th Para Division over the FLN in Algiers was above all a victory of intelligence and energy. Employing a system that Massu called quadrillage offensif, Algiers was divided into squares, an elaborate system of files established for each person, with neighborhood and household heads required to be accountable for their residents. An FLN general strike called for January 28, 1957, was broken by paras, who literally ripped the shutters off of the closed shops, obliging shopkeepers to emerge to protect their exposed goods. The FLN retaliated with more bomb outrages. But the paras located the bomb factory on February 19 through the expedient of establishing a list of unemployed Moslem masons and interrogating them until they discovered the one who had constructed it. Then they turned to breaking up the remainder of the FLN network. In this, Massu claimed, they were aided by FLN weaknesses. One of the most flagrant security breaches was created by the FLN's tendency, curiously bureaucratic for a clandestine organization, to generate tremendous amounts of paper—reports on meetings or of operations in which the names of those who had performed especially well were cited for special recognition. As education in written Arabic had been utterly neglected in French schools, or because the FLN was divided between Berbers and Arabs, their common language of correspondence was French, which provided the paras with easy-to-read lists of suspects to be arrested and interrogated. The often-bitter divisions and rivalries within the FLN—personal, political, friction between Arab and Berber, or in one instance a scorned wife whose FLN husband had taken a mistress—also played into French hands, and on occasion led a suspect to spill the beans on his colleagues.6 Feeling the noose grow tighter around their organization, some of the FLN leaders fled Algiers. Although under pressure, however, Yacefs operatives were not yet out, and in early June more bombings of pied noir haunts were carried out.

  The final dismantling of the FLN network resulted from a tactic known as “la bleuite” that is, employing FLN turncoats who, dressed in common blue workingman's coveralls, mingled with the revolutionaries and pinpointed their hideouts. Yacef countered this tactic to a point by supplying French intelligence with his own “turncoats,” who could for a time throw them off the scent. But by August 1957, even he realized that the paras were closing in. The honor of taking the last and most sought-after leaders of the Algiers FLN fell to the 1er REP. On September 23, Yacef's main runner was picked up by the paras, and under interrogation revealed his bosses’ hideout at 3 Rue Canton, a narrow impasse in the Casbah. At five o'clock in the morning, Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Jeanpierre's 1er REP blocked off their lodgings. Yacef and his principal bomb carrier, Zohra Drif, had just enough time to slip into a cache constructed between the bathroom and a staircase. Trained to search for such hiding places by now, the Legion paras located it by tapping on the wall, and opened a hole with a pickaxe. Yacef threw a grenade that wounded three paras as well as the lieutenant colonel. However, when he was told that an explosive charge had been set to go off in ten minutes, he climbed, half-naked and coughing from the effects of the smoke of his burning papers, from his crevice.

  In their jubilation at the capture of Yacef and Zohra Drif, the Legion paras neglected to check 4 Rue Canton, where one of the primary FLN hit men, an ex-pimp and petty criminal, AH la Pointe, was hiding. It was not until October 8 that the REP tracked him down. When Ali la Pointe, Yacef's twelve-year-old nephew known as Petit Omar, and another FLN operative repeatedly refused summonses to emerge from their hiding place, the legionnaires placed a small charge meant to blow a hole in the wall. The resulting explosion, which apparently ignited Ali la Pointe's hidden bomb store, not only killed the fugitives and injured four paras, but also resulted in the deaths of seventeen Moslems in three neighboring houses that the legionnaires had neglected to evacuate.

  The death of Ali la Pointe ended the Battle of Algiers. It was a stunning victory for the paras, whose popularity soared to new heights among the pieds noirs, who could now go to the cinemas, shop and sit in the cafes along the chic Rue Michelet and attend sporting events free from the lingering fear of assassination. The FLN, having lost much ground among increasingly war-weary Moslems, was forced to abandon urban terrorism to go for victory in the countryside, even outside of Algeria. The defeat also placed strains upon their leadership, fractious at the best of times. Yet the defeat of the FLN was more apparent than real, for the methods employed by the paras to win the battle had probably done more than anything to discredit the cause of Algérie francaise in the eyes of both French and world opinion. For the issue upon which the swarms of journalists who had covered the Battle of Algiers for the world press had concentrated upon was that of torture.

  As has been seen, the use of torture by the army had been widespread in Indochina, as Massu admitted, although he claimed that it had been applied mainly by Vietnamese interpreters working for the French, using “ancient methods practiced among them, such as suspension by the wrists, perhaps followed by forced swallowing of water.”7 In 1949, the left-wing Catholic journal Témoignage chrétien called attention to the frequent use of electric-shock tortures by French officers there, and expressed concern that “It is permitted, recognized, and no one complains.” This caused a brief outcry in Christian Democratic circles, the Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP), but was forgotten in the debacle on the R.C. 4 and the advent of de Lattre.8 The use of torture in Algeria before 1957 was widespread enough to come to the attention of both Governor-General Marcel-Edmond Naegelen in 1949 and Jacques Soustelle in 1955, who expressly forbade it.

  But for the paras in Algiers in 1957, torture appeared to offer a quick and effective way to break up the FLN infrastructure. “In Algeria, the problem was completely different [than in Indochina],” Massu claimed in the defense of his command's methods.

  It was imperative that we obtain urgent operational intelligence, upon which depended the lives of innocent human beings, deliberately sacrificed by the F.L.N, to gain its objectives. Such cruelty did not inspire one with the desire to spare those whose confessions could interrupt a fatal course of events. Therefore, practically speaking, if to make them “cough up” it was necessary “to rough ‘em up a bit,” the interrogators were obliged to submit suspects to physical pain, whose violence was graduated to achieve the confession.

  While Massu conceded that accidents could happen,

  this was nothing more than a physical pressure, even violent, used to get quick information and which did not degrade the individual.... The procedure most often employed, beyond slaps, was electricity, by using the generators of field radios ... and the application of electrodes on different points of the body. I experimented on myself... and most of my officers did so as well.

  Massu required unit commanders to exercise a close surveillance because torture “was a morally dangerous practice and one which could not be carried out for long. Also, I quickly understood that one must not prolong the tours of regiments in Algiers, but turn them over alternating with a tour [of operations] in the countryside.”9 In the 1er REP, Lieutenant Colonel Jeanpierre, who had survived deportation to Mauthausen during the German occupation of France, rejected the suggestions of an old comrade that the paras were performing the same role as that once played in France by the Gestapo, and insisted that his duty was to prevent terrorist attacks by any means. He offered any officer who objected to torture the possibility of leaving the regiment, but none did. Even the para chaplain, Father Delarue, defended the practice as necessary to save lives: “There is no clean war,” he claimed, pointing to the Allied use of terror bombing in World War II. “Sometimes it is a combat of one good against another good, if not an evil against another evil.”10

  The arguments made by the para officers in defense of their use of torture appear fairly compelling, especially when placed in the context of the atmosphere of fear and retribution of Algiers in 1957. Not only did torture work as a military tactic, but also the casual brutality of the FLN entitled them to no sympathy from anyone with a hint of civilized standards. Onl
y left-wing intellectuals were capable of performing the required moral gymnastics to justify FLN excesses while at the same time condemning French countermeasures. Massu and others realized the importance of the Battle of Algiers as a test of power with the FLN. Certainly, had the FLN managed to dominate Algiers, it would have gained enormous prestige and reaped a bumper harvest of recruits throughout Algeria. Without torture, Massu and others claimed, the FLN network there could not have been broken. Torture, in fact, won the Battle of Algiers. However, two questions have been asked of the paras’ methods: First, was torture in fact effective? And second, what were its long-term consequences?

  Albert Camus, himself a pied noir, believed that the usually indiscriminate way in which the paras rounded up suspects and tortured them to find “un bon,” one real FLN runner or money collector, often created more terrorists than it snagged in the long run, men who would simply kill another time. While one will never know how many FLN activists the French actually created by torturing innocent people, at the very least one may conclude that such methods earned them little sympathy from the Moslem population. Even from his perspective as a Legion private, Simon Murray noted in his diary in August 1960 that the policies of regroupement and torture, about which he had heard “terrible stories,”

  must have lost them many friends.... With all the good results ... [there] was a steady build-up of hatred against the French—a hatred that comes from living in fear and terror. And this antagonism drew the Arabs, so often before divided among themselves, into a common cause; it made them feel the necessity of combining for survival and it made them finally aware of their own strength. The French became the foreign intruder and the concept of nationalism was born in the Arabs, which was never there before.... We mercenaries fight for a lost cause—a cause that will be buried in the French political arena, not here. The heap of dead bodies gets higher each day and the white crosses mark the pathway to the inevitable end; for the end is inevitable.... I wonder how many more crosses must be struck before the end comes—the end for the French, when a new nation will be born, conceived entirely through French misunderstanding.11

  A second objection to torture is that, for the most part, it simply produces a plethora of false information, men talking to stop the pain. Such had obviously been the case with the Arab killed by Simon Murray's Legion paras—faced with the possibility of immediate death in a flaming mechta, and that of prolonging life with the possibility of escape by claiming to know the location of an arms cache, the Arab, obviously, offered to talk. But all the paras got out of his confession was a long hike and a pointless death, one more small tack pushed into the coffin of French rule. Antoine Ysquierdo of the 1er REP obviously had similar experiences. In his novel about the war, an Arab tells his captors, “Captain, if you hit me, I talk because I am afraid ... but what I say is not true, because I know nothing .. ,”12 Certainly, torture did produce some useful information. But most positive intelligence appears to have come out of the bleuite, the use of turned FLN operatives, than out of torture. Indeed, one of the greatest successes of the war was achieved by French intelligence in 1958–59 when, through planted documents, they managed to convince the leaders of three wilayas—ALN regional commands—that they had been seriously contaminated by the bleuite. This set them on a reign of terror during which they tortured confessions of guilt out of perhaps thousands of their innocent followers.13 It is possible that in the purges that followed the suspicious FLN leaders murdered up to four thousand of their own fellouze.

  The worst aspect of torture from Massu's point of view was that, even if it gained a temporary tactical advantage for the French in Algiers, ultimately it contributed to the loss of the war. And here the moral question became a primary one. For when the news broke in France about the widespread use of torture, the conscience especially of the important and vocal French intellectual community was deeply disturbed. For a country whose memories of the German occupation were barely a decade old, stories of the death of Ben M'hidi, the first important FLN leader to be captured in Algiers, in mysterious circumstances in March, followed by the disappearance of Maurice Audin, a young Algiers University lecturer and militant Communist, in the hands of the paras in June, brought unpleasant memories surging back. Quite predictably, the intellectual left, led by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, condemned it in no uncertain terms. This came as no surprise to the army, and could be dismissed by them as the bleatings of intellectuals who traditionally opposed any military enterprise. In the eyes of the military, the fact that these protesters opposed Algérie française in any case made their condemnation of torture appear a tactic rather than a legitimate expression of moral concern.

  But the moral concern was real, the feeling that all means were not justified to achieve even the laudable ends of extinguishing FLN terrorists, that restraints must be exercised even in a war as angry as that in Algeria. The sad fact was that the objections to torture met with incomprehension in an army at least part of which had been cut off from its parent society for almost a generation, which had grown apart from its values, aspirations and even ethical standards. This became apparent when protests began to be heard from others who could not be dismissed as opponents of the army. General Jacques de Bollardière, sector commander at Blida in 1956, who as a captain had fought with the 13e DBLE at Narvik and remained with the Gaullists throughout the war, confronted Massu personally over the methods used by his men. When this failed to produce any concessions from Massu, de Bollardière wrote a blistering letter on March 27, 1957, denouncing torture and protesting the Moslems who had “disappeared in the night” after being arrested by Massu's paras, that was published in the widely read French weekly L'Express. This earned for de Bollardière a posting back to France, a punishment of sixty days “fortress arrest,” and provoked his eventual resignation from the army. De Bollardière's protest was followed by the resignation of Paul Teitgen, a devout Catholic and resistance hero, from his post of secretary-general of the Algiers Prefecture, where his special duties included supervision of the Algiers police. Teitgen resigned, he said, because he no longer exercised the power to prevent what he called Massu's “war crimes.”

  Perhaps the most agonized and thoughtful condemnation of torture came from French writer Pierre-Henri Simon. Writing as a French patriot, Simon acknowledged that the French army in Algeria was not dealing with “the disciples of Ghandi, the apostles of non-violence,” but very brutal and vicious men. He fully understood the enraged reaction of a unit ambushed with the connivance of the local population, or whose members had been murdered and savagely mutilated by the fellouze. Nevertheless, to Massu's defense that the vicious atrocities of FLN terrorists were far worse than a little gentle persuasion practiced by the paras, Simon countered that basic humanity must be preserved, especially in the face of the brutal provocations of the FLN: “If really we are capable of a moral reflex which our adversary has not, this is the best justification for our cause, and even for our victory.” He chided the army for abandoning the “hearts and minds” traditions of Galliéni and Lyautey, which they claimed to hold dear. “Even if the torture of an Arab paid off,” he believed, “I would still say that it was criminal,” a spot on the honor of France and of the army, and a moral defeat.14

  The issue of torture was to have two long-term consequences. First, the realization that the paras were willing to sacrifice legality for expediency did much to contribute to the loss of faith in France in the war, and, because this was carried out before the world press, it also helped to undermine the French position in international opinion. It was proof, once again, of the Clausewitzian dictum that military action cannot be divorced from its political context. In a country that was growing increasingly war-weary, that was disturbed and frustrated by the lack of any apparent solution in Algeria and by the increasing turmoil that the war visited upon French political institutions, whose reluctant conscripts and reservists longed to return home and resume their normal existence, torture add
ed yet another dimension of distaste. While perhaps only a minority were genuinely concerned about the moral implications of torture, the publicity given to its existence dampened further what little enthusiasm the French public still retained for the war. It meant that, even though the FLN in the end would lose its military battles against the French army, it would be victorious on the most important front—the political one. Paul Teitgen was of the opinion that Massu won the Battle of Algiers, “but that meant losing the war.” Rather, with the advantage of hindsight, it was the FLN who emerged as the real winner of the Battle of Algiers.15