French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  The équipe had eaten and there appeared to be a considerable amount left in the pot, so they called over a German and invited him to fill his tin mug. Just as he was about to put the cup full of soup to his lips one of the Spaniards, with a mighty guffaw, reached his hand into the cauldron and pulled out by the hair one of the Arab heads, which he had retrieved from the bushes. On looking up at the noise, one could see the scene and follow the story at a glance—the Spaniard stood there with the ghastly head dripping soup, dangling by the hair from his outstretched hand, while the German stood aghast, white as a sheet, frozen for a second, and then promptly turned and threw up. This gave rise to another guffaw from the Spaniard and his chums. . . . I must confess at the time I laughed like hell; so did we all—that is, except the fellow who had received the soup.22

  When Challe was recalled to France in April 1960, the only area that had yet to submit to the full force of his tactics was the Aurès. His plan appeared to have delivered quite spectacular results: FLN casualties had exceeded French ones by a ratio of ten to one, large numbers of arms had been recovered, and the proportion of prisoners to killed had risen from 27 to 42 percent, a sure sign of growing FLN demoralization. The FLN command structure had been seriously disrupted. “The military phase of the rebellion is terminated in the interior,” Challe could proclaim proudly. Army engineers moved in to construct roads, schools and clinics in areas that had been “no-go” zones for the French for five years. The army began to take great pride in its military accomplishments, came to feel a close identity of purpose with the mission of improving conditions in the Moslem communities, and developed a sense of proprietorial interest in the harkis who had played such an active role in its victories. The army, especially those “general reserve” forces of paras and legionnaires, believed that it had achieved victory, and for this reason was all the more baffled and then angered when de Gaulle appeared to throw away at the conference table the gains they had won with so much blood on the battlefield. This was at the heart of the rift between de Gaulle and his praetorians in April 1961.

  A more detached view of the situation in Algeria in the spring of 1960 following the Challe offensives was less rosy from the French perspective. In part, Challe's successes, while substantial, had been achieved because the FLN had simply not contested his offensives. Attacks upon the Morice Line the previous year had proved too costly. Had they elected to mount such offensives again, they might certainly have relieved some of the pressure on the wilayas by diverting French troops to the frontiers. But FLN headquarters in Tunis had largely written off the forces of the interior, and instead had elected to husband the army in their Tunisian sanctuary to serve as an effective symbol of continued resistance for the Moslem population within Algeria. Indeed, one of the paradoxical consequences of the Challe offensives was to settle the often-murderous power struggles in FLN ranks in favor of the hardliners. Inside Algeria, Challe had inflicted severe damage upon the FLN, but he had not destroyed it, and it remained, dormant and in embryo, awaiting more favorable times. Nor did the Challe offensives convince France that the war was won. One of the corollary operations had been a stepping-up of regroupement, with inhabitants of the operational zones uprooted and placed in resettlement camps in appalling conditions, which, when revealed by the conservative newspaper Le Figaro in July 1959, provoked an uproar across the political spectrum. Also, these operations again raised the specter of the use of torture, a revival of a controversial practice that elicited a rebuke from the Gaullist government. In short, military victory could not be an end in itself. It was obvious to de Gaulle that a political accommodation with the rebellion must be found.

  Chapter 29

  THE ROAD TO REBELLION

  SOME SORT OF confrontation between de Gaulle and the paras was probably unavoidable, given the bitter memories of defeat and abandonment of allies in Indochina, the belief widespread within the sharp edge of the French army that the prestige and the future of France were bound up with the retention of Algeria, and that they had achieved “victory” there. However, the pill of Algerian independence might have been less bitter for them had France not turned over the store lock, stock and barrel to the FLN, although as has been suggested the paras proved to be fairly effective recruiting agents for the FLN and played their part in narrowing the political options for the Moslems. Nevertheless, the politicians, including de Gaulle, must accept a great deal of the blame for the outcome. The fall of the government of Mendès-France in 1955 removed the last politician of stature in the IVth Republic who might have been able to find a compromise with moderate Algerians. De Gaulle, too, failed to move quickly in 1958 to capitalize on the hope that his arrival in power raised among Moslems that a compromise peace might be reached. It appears likely that as early as 1957, de Gaulle concluded that Algerian integration into the French political system would unleash an avalanche of Moslem immigrants onto the French mainland, so that his retreat at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises might become Colombey-les-Deux-Mosquées. The General appeared to believe that time was on his side, that his prestige would be enough, when required, to persuade the Moslem majority to accept his terms. He also underestimated the singleminded commitment of the FLN to complete victory, assuming that the Challe offensives would convince the rebels of the futility of continued resistance, and persuade them to accept a negotiated peace.

  The combination of these factors made some sort of political collision likely, because the army was at first baffled and then increasingly angered by de Gaulle's outreach to the FLN. His trips to Algeria in June and July 1958 when he shouted “Je vous ai compris” (“I have understood you”) and “Vive l'Algérie française” to frenzied pied noir crowds at first assured his military supporters of his commitment to their pro-colonial views. However, doubts soon began to set in. His first political initiative came on October 3, 1958, with the Constantine Plan, which promised economic revitalization of Algeria and a large increase in Moslem representation in the French National Assembly as part of the full integration of Algeria into France. At the same time he made a direct appeal to the FLN, calling for a cease-fire, a paix des braves. All the FLN had to do was to wave “the white flag of truce.” These initiatives backfired badly. In France, those who began to do their sums realized that the full economic and political integration of Algeria would not only seriously retard improvements in the French standard of living, but would also swamp the Assembly with seventy-five Moslem deputies, therefore delivering to them the balance of power in a fragmented French assembly. For the pieds noirs, of course, “integration” meant a continuation of the status quo ante, or something fairly close to it. For the Moslems, after years of disappointments, “integration” was in the words of English historian Alistair Home “at best a romantic delusion, at worst a confidence trick.”1

  With his offer of a paix des braves, the Chief of State succeeded in infuriating both the army and the FLN—the army because it meant a recognition of and negotiations with terrorists who, in any case, were on the verge of defeat. The FLN, which two weeks before had established a government in exile, and their allies on the French left, led by Simone de Beauvoir, claimed that it was tantamount to capitulation before any of their political goals had been met, and especially resented the reference to the “white flag,” which they chose to interpret as a call to surrender rather than a truce. To emphasize their rejection, the FLN opened a new wave of terrorism.

  De Gaulle's next initiative came on September 16,1959, in the midst of Challe's “Opération Jumelles,” when he promised self-determination for Algeria:

  In the name of France and of the republic, by virtue of the power granted to me by our constitution to consult its citizens . . . I commit myself to ask, on the one hand, of the Algerians in their twelve departments, what it is they finally wish to be and, on the other hand, of all Frenchmen to endorse their choice.

  The menu offered the three choices of “secession,” “integration ... France [from] Dunkirk to Tamanrasset,” or an ass
ociation between France and a federal Algerian state in which all of its communities would be represented.2 Challe was enraged and wrote that, “One does not propose to soldiers to go and get killed for an imprecise final objective.”3 What de Gaulle had done was to hand the FLN a political victory—that is, placing the possibility of Algerian independence on the table—at the very moment that their katibas were being chewed into small fragments by the paras. Now all the FLN had to do was to ensure that they became the only recognized representatives of the Algerian Moslems. For Captain Pierre Sergent of the 1er REP, on September 16, “France just lost the chance to be a great nation.” He announced to his colonel that, “FOR ME, THE FLAG OF THE FLN FLIES OVER ALGIERS FROM THIS MOMENT. Algeria will be independent.... Only a revolution could reverse the course of events.... On 16 September 1959, I felt like a very old citizen of a very old country.”4

  With the tension mounting between Paris arid military and pied noir circles in Algiers, it required only one spark to set off some sort of confrontation. This was provided by Massu, who in an interview with a German newspaper announced that “I, and the majority of the officers in a position of command, will not execute unconditionally the orders of the Head of State.” Massu was yanked out of Algiers and given a personal dressing down by the Head of State in Paris before being sent to his new posting in Metz in Eastern France. For Massu, the war was over. Challe, too, offered his resignation over the Massu disgrace.

  In Algiers, militant pieds noirs used the bombe Massu as an excuse to activate a prepared rebellion, which, they assumed naively, would spread to Paris. On January 24, 1960, they took to the streets. Challe called out the two regiments of paras, including the 1er REP, who with the police were given the task of driving the demonstrators out of their positions in the center of town. As the gendarmes approached at six o'clock on the evening of January 24, the pieds noirs demonstrators ambushed them with a deadly hail of rifle bullets and homemade bombs. The 1er REP, barely six hundred yards away, did not lift a finger to help the police, a lapse that provoked a heated exchange between Lieutenant Colonel Henri Dufour of the Legion paras and the “gendarmerie” commander, one that has never received a satisfactory explanation. The most likely is that the paras’ well-known sympathy and even open contacts with the militants of Algérie française made them disinclined to intervene.

  This is certainly the attitude they adopted subsequently, with the commanders of most of the other units informing Challe that they had no intention of breaking down the barricades thrown up by the students. On the contrary, there were scenes of fraternization, with Captain Sergent assuring the activists that his men would never fire on them. De Gaulle decided to wait them out, allowing the demonstrators to tire and drift off and French public opinion gradually to demonstrate their support for his firm stance against the agitators. Finally, on the night of January 29, de Gaulle went on television to declare that he would never abandon the “Frenchmen of Algeria” and remind them that “It is I who bear the country's destiny. I must therefore be obeyed.... Law and order must be reestablished ... your duty is to bring this about. I have given, and am giving, this order.” Hardly had he gone off the air than declarations of loyalty were pouring in from army units offering to crush the rebellion. Sergent tried to convince his colonel to order the 1er REP to join the insurgents, but he refused. “I hesitated to act against the opinion of my superior, but, finally, I thought it impossible to be more Algérie française than he and all the colonels who, for six days, fought for her. I backed down.” The colonels began to discuss what they would do if ordered to attack the barricades. Colonel Favreau of the 5e étranger suggested marching forward, the band in the front and rifles pointed toward the ground, convinced that the militants “would never fire on the Legion.”5 In the end, they did not have to. Under conditions negotiated by Lieutenant Colonel Dufour, the insurgents were allowed to march out of their bastion with their arms, and were accorded full military honors by the 1er REP.

  The military supporters of Algérie française realized that they had missed a golden opportunity to attempt a putsch. Moreover, they had revealed for all to see a yawning rift in the French camp. The FLN was strengthened at a time when their military fortunes were in steep decline, because they could calculate that de Gaulle had to choose between negotiating with them or caving in to the “ultras” on the right. De Gaulle began to transfer those who seemed most reluctant to follow his orders back to France, including Challe.

  In Algeria, however, things went from bad to worse. In the spring of 1960, the commander of wilaya 4, Colonel Si Salah, contacted the French to say that he was willing to negotiate with them on the basis of de Gaulle's call for a paix des braves. After talks in Algeria, Si Salah and two of his staff were flown to Paris on June 9 for a meeting with de Gaulle. It came to naught. On June 14, de Gaulle made a direct appeal to the FLN government-in-exile. The Algerians returned to their wilaya, where they were purged by FLN headquarters in Tunis, who apparently learned of their treachery from a leak in the French government. Alistair Home speculates that de Gaulle used the threat of treating with Si Salah to get the FLN to the negotiating table.6 If so, it did not work, because brief talks held between the FLN and the French at Melun on June 25-29 quickly collapsed. De Gaulle had been outmaneuvered, for he had sacrificed Si Salah while at the same time recognizing the FLN as the de facto spokesmen of the Moslem community in Algeria. Whether or not Si Salah could have become the nucleus of a viable “Third Force” in Algeria has been hotly debated. What is important is that military leaders, especially General Challe, saw de Gaulle's failure to do business with Si Salah as the great missed opportunity of the war and as nothing short of the betrayal of the army.

  Nowhere had the resentment against de Gaulle achieved a more concentrated force than in the 1er REP. Their enthusiasm for the fight with the FLN declined proportionately with their increasing political activism. While operating on the Morice Line in 1960, Sergent's company was prevented by higher authority from pursuing and destroying an FLN force it had driven back over the Tunisian border. In disgust, he refused to carry out an order for a subsidiary and useless operation: “For the first time in my career, I refused to obey,” Sergent wrote.7 At the same time, the commander of the 1er REP, Lieutenant Colonel Henri Dufour, a légionnaire of the old school who had served his apprenticeship fresh out of Saint-Cyr in 1934 in the 3e éttanger under the redoubtable Lieutenant Colonel Maire, made contact with General Andre Zeller, a retired chief of staff of the armed forces and a fierce partisan of Algérie française, to propose that the 1er REP capture the Delegate General and his entourage as it marched past the reviewing stand on July 14. This was to be coordinated with the imprisonment of de Gaulle and his government by troops marching down the Champs Elysées in Paris. On July 13, Dufour received word from Zeller that things were not prepared in Paris, so the plan was abandoned.

  The conspiracies continued, however. On November 14 a funeral at Zéralda, the 1er REP's base about twenty miles from Algiers, for ten paras killed on operation turned into an emotional political demonstration. “Following the tradition,” Sergent wrote, “the colonel bade a last adieu to his men: ‘It is not possible that your sacrifice was in vain. It is not possible that our compatriots in the metropole remain deaf to our cries of anguish.’ ” Father Delarue, divisional chaplain of the 10th Paras, declared: “You die at a time when, if we believe in the speeches we hear, we no longer know why we die.” This funeral led to Dufour's recall to France. But Dufour conspired with the militant officers in his regiment, led by Sergent, to go into hiding, stealing the regimental standard in the process so that the transfer of command to a new colonel could not take place, and he would remain, in Sergent's words, “le patron moral” of the 1er REP.8

  The paras were clearly not prepared to write off Algeria as they had Indochina, as another unfortunate accident of policy on the way to complete decolonization. Algeria had witnessed no Dien Bien Phu, the FLN had been virtually pushed out of Alger
ia, but despite all this, de Gaulle appeared intent upon giving away the store. To prevent this, Sergent and General Edmond Jouhaud, a die-hard pied noir who had commanded the air force in Indochina before becoming air force chief of staff, conspired with the colonels of the 18e and the 14e régiments de chausseurs para-chutistes (RCP), who like the 1er REP were stationed around Algiers, to take advantage of the massive demonstration planned by Algérie française militants during de Gaulle's visit to Algeria in December. The plan was vague at best, which was just as well because the results of de Gaulle's visit were completely unforeseen.

  Pied noir militants set off their demonstrations, which quickly turned to riots in Algiers and Oran. The first thing that went wrong for the conspirators was that de Gaulle avoided Algiers altogether, and by changing his itinerary managed to evade at least four assassination attempts that had been laid for him. The second miscalculation of the Algérie française “ultras” was that their anti-Gaullist demonstrations produced a massive Moslem backlash. Prompted by the FLN, which had managed successfully to reconstruct its network in Algiers, Moslems poured out of the Casbah waving green and white FLN flags, chanting, “Algérie algérienne! Algérie musulmane!” and, whipped up by the ululations of their veiled women, began to clash with the pieds noirs. Violence was also visited on the Jewish community, and some pro-French Arabs were assassinated.