Postwar

by Tony Judt

  The world war, however, had wrought greater changes in the colonies than most Europeans yet understood. Britain had lost its East Asian territories to Japanese occupation during the war, and although these territories were recovered after the defeat of Japan the standing of the old colonial power had been radically undermined. The British surrender in Singapore in February 1942 was a humiliation from which the British Empire in Asia never recovered. Even though British forces were able to prevent Burma and thence India falling to the Japanese, the myth of European invincibility was shattered for good. After 1945 the colonial powers in Asia would face growing pressure to relinquish their traditional claims.

  For the Netherlands, the oldest colonial power in the region, the consequences were particularly traumatic. The Dutch East Indies, and the trading company that had developed them, were part of the national myth, a direct link to the Golden Age and a symbol of Dutch commercial and seafaring glory. It was also widely assumed, especially in the gloomy, impoverished post-war years, that the raw materialsof the Indies—rubber especially—would be the Netherlands’ economic salvation. Yet within two years of the Japanese defeat, the Dutch were once again at war: the Dutch-held territories of South-East Asia (today’s Indonesia) were tying down 140,000 Dutch soldiers (professionals, conscripts and volunteers) and the revolution for Indonesian independence was generating admiration and imitation throughout the remaining Dutch imperium in the Pacific, the Caribbean and South America.

  The ensuing guerilla war lasted for four years and cost the Netherlands more than 3,000 military and civilian casualties. Indonesian independence, unilaterally asserted by the nationalist leader Sukarno on November 17th 1945, was finally conceded by the Dutch authorities (and a tearful Queen Juliana) at a conference in The Hague, in December 1949. A steady stream of Europeans (actually many of them were born in the Indies and had never seen the Netherlands) made their way ‘home.’ By the end of 1957, when President Sukarno closed Indonesia to Dutch businessmen, Dutch ‘repatriates’ numbered many tens of thousands.

  The experience of decolonization had an embittering effect on Dutch public life, already hard hit by the war and its sufferings. Many ex-colonials and their friends pressed what became known as ‘the Myth of Good Rule’, blaming the Left for the Dutch failure to reassert colonial authority following the interregnum of Japanese occupation. On the other hand conscripted soldiers (the overwhelming majority) were just glad to be home in one piece, after a colonial war of which no-one was proud, in which many felt that military success had been impeded by UN insistence on a negotiated transfer of power, and that was very quickly consigned to a national memory hole.

  In the longer run the enforced Dutch retreat from the colonies facilitated a growing national sentiment for ‘Europe’. World War Two had demonstrated that the Netherlands could not stand aside from international affairs, particularly those of its large neighbors, and the loss of Indonesia was a timely reminder of the country’s real standing as a small and vulnerable European state. Making a virtue of necessity, the Dutch retooled as ultra-enthusiastic proponents of European economic and later political integration. But the process did not just happen painlessly, nor was it an overnight switch in the collective sensibilities of the nation. Until the spring of 1951, the military calculations and expenditures of post-war Dutch governments were targeted not for European defense (despite Dutch participation in the Brussels Pact and NATO) but to hold on to the colonies. Only slowly, and with some suppressed regret, did Dutch politicians pay undivided attention to European affairs and abandon their ancient priorities.

  The same was true, in varying degrees, of all the colonial and ex-colonial powers of Western Europe. American scholars, projecting the experience and preoccupations of Washington onto the rest of the West, sometimes miss this distinctive feature of post-World War Two Europe. In the United States, the Cold War was what mattered and foreign and domestic priorities and rhetoric reflected this. But in The Hague, in London or in Paris, these same years were much taken up with costly guerrilla wars in far-flung and increasingly ungovernable colonies. National independence movements were the strategic headache for much of the 1950s, not Moscow and its ambitions—though in some cases the two overlapped.

  The French Empire, like the British, had benefited from the re-distribution after 1919 of Asian and African holdings seized from the defeated Central Powers. Thus in 1945 liberated France ruled once again over Syria and Lebanon, as well as substantial swaths of sub-Saharan Africa and some island holdings in the Caribbean and the Pacific. But the ‘jewels’ in France’s imperial crown were her territories in Indo-China and, especially, the old-established French settlements along the Mediterranean coast of North Africa: Tunisia, Morocco and most of all Algeria. In French history texts, however, the place of colonies was perhaps more ambiguous than across the English Channel—in part because France was a Republic in which imperial dominion had no natural place, in part because so many of France’s early conquests had long since been taken over by English-speaking rulers. In 1950 there were still millions of French men and women who remembered the ‘Fashoda Incident’ of 1898, when France backed down from a confrontation with Britain over control of Egypt, Sudan and the Upper Nile. To speak of Empire in France was to be reminded of defeat as well as victory.

  On the other hand French schoolchildren were insistently presented with the image of ‘France’ itself as a trans-oceanic continuum, a place in which the civic and cultural attributes of Frenchness were open to all; where elementary schools from Saigon to Dakar taught about ‘nos ancêtres les Gaulois’ (‘our ancestors the Gauls’) and proclaimed—if only in principle—the virtues of a seamless cultural assimilation that would have been quite unthinkable to the administrators of British, Dutch, Belgian, Spanish or Portugese colonies.100 Only in France could the metropolitan authorities seriously treat their most valued colonial possessions not as foreign soil but as administrative extensions of France itself. Thus ‘Algeria’ was but a geographical expression; the area it denoted was administered as three departments of France (in which, however, only its European residents enjoyed full civil rights).

  During the war, the French, like the British and Dutch, had lost their prized South-East Asian colonies to the Japanese. But in the French case the Japanese occupation came late—until March 1945 French Indo-China remained under the tutelage of the Vichy authorities—and was anyway incomparably less traumatic than France’s own defeat at home in 1940. France’s humiliation in Europe accentuated the symbolic significance of its overseas empire: if the French were not, in their own eyes, quite reduced to a ‘helpless, hopeless mass of protoplasm’ (Eisenhower’s description of them in 1954) this was in large measure due to their continuedcredibility as a leading colonial power, which was thus a matter of some importance.

  In Africa, De Gaulle had re-established France’s presence at the Brazzaville Conference of early February 1944. There, in the capital of French Equatorial Africa across the river from the Belgian Congo, the leader of the Free French had given characteristic expression to his vision of France’s colonial future:

  ‘In French Africa, as in every land where men live under our flag, there can be no true progress unless men are able to benefit from it morally and materially on their native soil, unless they can raise themselves little by little to a level where they can partake in the management of their own affairs. It is the duty of France to bring this about.’

  What exactly De Gaulle meant is—as so often—unclear, perhaps deliberately so. But he was certainly understood to be referring to colonial emancipation and eventual autonomy. The circumstances were propitious. French public opinion was not inhospitable to colonial reforms—André Gide’s excoriation of forced labor practices in his Voyage au Congo (1927) had raised pre-war public awareness of European crimes in central Africa—while the Americans were making ominously anti-colonial noises. US Secretary of State Cordell Hull had recently spoken approvingly of the prospect of international control fo
r the less advanced European colonies and early self-government for the rest.101

  Reformist talk in impoverished, isolated francophone Africa was cheap, especially before metropolitan France itself was even liberated. South-East Asia was another matter. On September 2nd 1945 Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese nationalist leader (and a founder member of the French Communist Party, thanks to his youthful presence at its December 1920 Congress in Tours), proclaimed the independence of his nation. Within two weeks British forces began to arrive in the southern city of Saigon, followed a month later by the French. Meanwhile the northern districts of Vietnam, hitherto under Chinese control, were restored to the French in February 1946.

  At this point there was a serious prospect of negotiated autonomy or independence, as the authorities in Paris opened talks with nationalist representatives. But on June 1st 1946 the French admiral and local plenipotentiary Thierry d’Argenlieu unilaterally proclaimed the separation of Cochin China (the southern part of the country) from the nationalist-dominated north, sabotaging his own government’s tentative efforts to reach a compromise and breaking off government conversations with Ho. By the autumn of that same year the French had bombed Haiphong harbor, the nationalist Vietminh had attacked the French in Hanoi and the first Vietnam War had begun.

  France’s post-war struggle to re-establish its authority in Indo-China was a politicaland military catastrophe. Ho Chi Minh received double credit among the French domestic Left, as a fighter for national independence and as a Communist revolutionary—two identities as inextricably intertwined in his own thinking as they were in his burnished international image.102 Sending young men to fight and die in a ‘dirty war’ in Indo-China made little sense to most French voters; and letting Hanoi take over was not obviously more ill-advised than supporting the palpably inadequate Bao Dai, whom the French established as the country’s new ‘emperor’ in March 1949.

  The French officer corps, on the other hand, was certainly keen to pursue the struggle in Vietnam; there, as later in Algeria, France’s martial heritage (or what remained of it) seemed at stake and the French High Command had a point to prove. But the French economy could never have sustained a long drawn out war in a far-flung colony without significant external aid. France’s war in Indo-China was funded by the Americans. At first, Washington’s contribution was indirect: thanks to US loans and aid, the French were able to divert considerable resources to an increasingly expensive and unsuccessful struggle to defeat the Vietminh. In effect, the USA underwrote post-war French economic modernization while France dedicated its own scarce resources to the war.

  From 1950, American aid took a more direct form. Starting in July of that year (one month after the outbreak of war in nearby Korea) the US sharply increased its military assistance to French forces in South-East Asia. The French bargained hard before consenting to support the doomed European defense project and conceding West German membership in NATO: what they got in return (for allowing the US to protect them, as it seemed to aggrieved Washington insiders) was very substantial American military aid. Of all the European states France, by 1953, was by far the most dependent on US support, in cash and kind alike.

  Only in 1954 did Washington call a halt, rejecting increasingly desperate French pleas for airborne help to save the doomed French garrison at Dien Bien Phu. After nearly eight years of fruitless and bloody struggle, it was clear to Washington not merely that the French could not re-establish their former authority in Indo-China, but that they were no match for Ho Chi Minh’s regular and guerilla forces. In America’s view the French had frittered their money away and were an increasingly risky investment. When Dien Bien Phu surrendered on May 7th 1954 and the French requested a cease-fire, no-one was surprised.

  The fall of French Indo-China precipitated the collapse of the last of the French coalition governments that had tried to hold it, and the succession to the premiership of Pierre Mendès-France. Led by ‘PMF’ the French negotiated an agreement, signed at Geneva on July 21st 1954, under whose terms France withdrew from the region, leaving two separate entities—‘North’ and ‘South’ Vietnam—whose political relationship and institutions were to be determined by future elections. Those elections were never held, and the burden of sustaining the southern half of France’s former colony now fell to the Americans alone.

  Few in France were sorry to see Indo-China go. Unlike the Dutch, the French had not been in the region very long; and even though America paid for the first Vietnam War (something of which very few Frenchmen were aware at the time), it was French soldiers who fought and died there. French politicians of the Right in particular castigated Mendès-France and his predecessors for their failure to prosecute the war more effectively, but no-one had anything better to propose and almost all were secretly pleased to put Vietnam behind them. Only the French Army—or more precisely the professional officer corps—harbored continuing grievances. Some younger officers, notably those who had first served in the Resistance or with the Free French and acquired there the habit of independent political judgment, began to nourish inchoate but dangerous resentments. Once again, they murmured, French troops in the field had been ill served by their political masters in Paris.

  With the loss of Indo-China, French attention turned to North Africa. In one respect this was almost literally true—the Algerian insurrection began on November 1st 1954, just fourteen weeks after the signing of the Geneva accords. But North Africa had been at the center of Parisian concerns long since. Ever since the French first arrived in present-day Algeria in 1830, the colony there had been part of a larger French ambition, dating back further still, to dominate Saharan Africa from the Atlantic to Suez. Thwarted in the east by the British, the French had settled instead for primacy in the western Mediterranean and across the Sahara into west-central Africa.

  Outside of the far older settlement in Quebec, and some islands of the Caribbean, Northern Africa (Algeria in particular) was the only French colony in which Europeans had established themselves permanently in large numbers. But many of the Europeans were not French in origin but rather Spanish, Italian, Greek or something else. Even an emblematically French Algerian like Albert Camus was part-Spanish, part-French; and his French forebears were very recent arrivals. It was a long time since France had had an excess of people; and unlike Russia, Poland, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Scandinavia, Germany, Ireland, Scotland (and even England), France had not been a land of emigrants for many generations. The French were not natural colonizers.

  Nevertheless, if there was a France-outside-France it was in Algeria—confirmed, as we have seen, by Algeria’s technical presence inside France as part of the metropolitan administrative structure. The closest analogy elsewhere was Ulster, another overseas enclave in a former colony, institutionally incorporated into the ‘mainland’ and with a long-established settler community for whom the attachment to the imperial heartland mattered far more than it did to the metropolitan majority. The idea that Algeria might one day become independent (and thus Arab-ruled, given the overwhelming numerical predominance of Arabs and Berbers in its population) was unthinkable to its European minority.

  Accordingly, French politicians had long avoided thinking about it. No French government except Léon Blum’s short-lived Popular Front of 1936 paid serious attention to the grievous mis-rule practiced by colonial administrators in French North Africa. Moderate Algerian nationalists like Ferhat Abbas were well known to French politicians and intellectuals before and after World War Two, but no-one really expected Paris to concede their modest goals of self-government or ‘home rule’ any time soon. Nevertheless, the Arab leadership was initially optimistic that the defeat of Hitler would usher in long-awaited reforms, and when they issued a manifesto on February 10th 1943, in the wake of the Allied landings in North Africa, they took great care to emphasize their loyalty to the ideals of 1789 and their affection for the ‘culture of France and the West that they had received and cherished’.

  Their appeals went
unheard. The government of liberated France showed little concern for Arab sentiment, and when this indifference resulted in an uprising in the Kabylia region east of Algiers in May 1945, the insurgents were uncompromisingly crushed. For the following decade Parisian attention was turned elsewhere. By the time these years of pent-up anger and thwarted expectations culminated in the outbreak of organized insurrection, on November 1st 1954, compromise was no longer on the agenda. The Algerian FLN—Front de Libération Nationale—was led by a younger generation of Arab nationalists who scorned the moderate, Francophile strategies of their elders. Their objective was not ‘home rule’ or reform but independence, a goal that successive French governments could not contemplate. The result was eight murderous years of civil war.

  Belatedly, the French authorities proposed reforms. The new Socialist government of Guy Mollet granted independence in March 1956 to the neighboring French colonies of Tunisia and Morocco—the first surrender of colonial power on the African continent. But when Mollet visited Algiers, a crowd of European settlers pelted him with rotten fruit. Paris was caught between the implacable demands of the clandestine FLN and the refusal of Algeria’s European residents, now led by a Committee for the Defense of French Algeria (l’Algérie française), to accept any compromise with their Arab neighbors. The French strategy, if it merits the name, was now to defeat the FLN by force before putting pressure on the settlers to accept political reforms and some power-sharing measures.

  The French army duly undertook a bitter war of attrition against the guerrillas of the FLN. Both sides regularly resorted to intimidation, torture, murder and outright terrorism. After a particularly gruesome series of Arab assassinations and European reprisals in December 1956, Mollet’s political representative Robert Lacoste gave French paratroop colonel Jacques Massu a free hand to destroy the nationalist insurgents in Algiers by whatever means necessary. By September 1957 Massu was victorious, having broken a general strike and crushed the insurgents in the Battle of Algiers. The Arab population paid a terrible price, but the reputation of France was irrevocably sullied. And the European settlers remained as suspicious as ever of Paris’s long-term intentions.103