What to make of it? The lawyers are not sure. Smadja is the most definite: he’s not going to pardon him—the story about the soldier proves it. Do you think? Yes, quite certain, bet my life on it. Tomorrow, Wednesday, February 6, the High Council of the Judiciary will examine the case again.
By a certified letter in Nordmann’s handwriting, Fernand has received a report on the meeting. He immediately responds: I know that I can trust the people of France; please give them my fraternal regards at every chance you get, with my thanks and in the hope that I may do it in person some not too distant day. I believe, in view of the account of your visit to the President of the Republic in your letter, that I have some chance. And so I thank you with all my heart, with the conviction that I will see you again as a free man.
Saturday. Chikhi is free. He has served his sentence. He shakes Abdelaziz’s hand, puts his hand on his heart and hugs Fernand in silence. Don’t say anything, brother, he whispers, God will know what you have done for our country. He had assembled his belongings the day before. The guard waits for him and then closes the door. Four to five hours later, it opens again. A young Arab, not yet twenty years old, enters. Achouar. Another CAM. Arrested during a firefight with the French army, at Tighremt: he asked to be given the status of prisoner of war. The hunting rifle in his hands was still hot. His face is sweet, almost childish. Fernand asks him immediately if he knows anything about the death of Henri Maillot, eight months ago now, last June. No, nothing. He’s heard the name, everybody has, the Frenchman who fought side by side with Algerians, but that’s all.
They spend most of the night in conversation.
Ten in the morning. Time to go for a walk. Fernand follows his guard like he does every day, handcuffed, every damn day these last three prison-bound months. The CAM yard is smaller than that of other inmates. Fernand paces back and forth. Soles on gray cement. Several men are on watch. A few faces, occasionally familiar, are sketched out in stripes behind the window bars; Fernand waves at some with his hobbled hands. He goes back to the cell. Abdelaziz is doing abdominal exercises while Achouar meticulously cleans his shoes with toilet paper. The minute he comes in, sits down and picks up Les Misérables at the page he left it, Laînné and Smadja arrive. Fernand is glad to see them, and shows it. He tells them he has heard from Nordmann and dares to hope, even now, that he might be pardoned. Coty is sure to make the right decision. Isn’t he? Smadja tries his best to conceal his total lack of hope. Meaning to smile, he makes a sour face—which betrays him to the man he wants to fool. Laînné strives to be more reassuring, he shakes his bovine head: the president didn’t say anything one way or the other, but let’s hope so, indeed, cross our fingers while we wait for the verdict. Imminent. Any day now. None of the three lawyers have mentioned Coty’s story about the soldier who was executed for France … They withdraw for the lunch hour. Give my love to Hélène if you see her before she visits me, adds Fernand as he gets up to say goodbye.
The food is lukewarm today. Pasta and beef, like every Sunday. A sauce uncertain in color, opaque at depth. Fernand bolts the meal, eager to return to his reading. Jean Valjean was not dead. When he fell into the sea, or rather when he threw himself into it, he was not ironed, as we have seen. He swam under water until he reached a vessel at anchor, to which a boat was moored. He found means of hiding himself in this boat until night. At night he swam off again, and reached the shore a little way from Cape Brun … Two bombs tear into the afternoon in the Algiers stadiums of El-Biar and Ruisseau. Ten dead, thirty or so injured, blood everywhere, wounds and mutilations. Two random passersby, unlucky enough to be Arabs, were lynched by an angry mob. Night slips over the city, a thick veil of silent mourning. Jean Valjean watches Cosette as she sleeps, feeds her, protects her, teaches her to read. He has come to see the world and mankind differently since loving Cosette. Fernand bids his two companions goodnight. His tired eyes have trouble following the slack, wavering lines, but he means to keep on reading. Just a little more. Two or three pages. Jean Valjean knew no more where he was going than did Cosette. He trusted in God, as she trusted in him. It seemed as though he was also clinging to the hand of some one greater than himself; he thought he felt a being leading him, though invisible. However, he had no settled idea, no plan, no project. He was not even absolutely sure that it was Javert, and then it might have been Javert, without Javert knowing that he was Jean Valjean. Was not he disguised? Was not he believed to be dead? His eyelids won’t stay open. He puts the work down after bookmarking his page with a canteen coupon, then turns on his side, in the fetal position, since he never could (and always wondered how others did) fall asleep on his back, flat out, staring at the ceiling. He sinks after a few minutes, without even realizing it. And suddenly noise, lights. The adverb, in truth, does little more than conceal the confusion that seizes Fernand: he opens his eyes, not sure where he is, what time is it, what’s all this noise, is he dreaming or what? He turns his head, what time is it, I was sleeping, guards, guards, shit, what’s all this noise? Guards are standing over him, sure enough, against the light of a white bulb. They tell him to get up immediately. Fernand does not understand. Abdelaziz is up, frowning: he understands everything. This way, Iveton. Your pardon was denied. Get up, now. Fernand complies. Stunned. Astounded. The brain still heavy with sleep. He is in his underwear and asks to put his pants on: one of the guards refuses, curtly. He is pushed. On the threshold he turns around and looks at Achouar and Abdelaziz. The first seems lost, haggard, perhaps even more so than Fernand; the second is grave, immovable, an ancient statue: his black eyes have severed at a stroke the fumes of sleep. Those sharp black eyes, beyond doubt, compel the convict to open his own, for good, this time. Brothers … says Fernand, but a hand is instantly clapped over his mouth, yanks him backwards. Panicking, Achouar asks what’s going on; Abdelaziz does not answer. He is looking at the ceiling, lying down on his bunk. Fernand is hustled through the corridor. Dawn stirs, shakes its yellow folds. It is almost five. Headlights outside, the sound of a moving gate, of vehicles … The prisoners of Barberousse sense that something unusual is afoot. As he makes his way, Fernand slowly begins, from scattered fragments, to piece it all together. Coty, Mitterrand, and the rest denied his pardon, his head will fall. He thinks of Hélène. Of Henri. Stand tall, like them. He hollers into the passageways: Tahia El Djazaïr (Long Live Algeria)! Once. He hollers so as not to collapse or cry. A second time. Tahia El Djazaïr! A guard tells him to shut it and holds a baton to his waist. Voices answer him already, voices which understand it all. He is taken to the prison registry. Yells, in Arabic, chants and slogans surround him, not that he is able to tell where they are coming from. They bounce behind him, sometimes a long way, bump together inside his beleagured head. The prison flexing its muscles. His temples buzz. Tahia El Djazaïr! Tahia El Djazaïr! The screws are suddenly dizzy, if not panicked: the prisoners, despite their confinement, are slipping away—their hopes knocking down the iron doors. There is no heart the state can constrain; dreams eat into its reason like acid. The registrar asks Fernand whether he has anything to say before the start of the proceedings. He answers that he would like to put on a pair of pants. He then tells this honest civil servant, so that he may write it down: “The life of a man, my life, matters little. What matters is Algeria, its future. And tomorrow Algeria will be free. I am convinced that the friendship between the French and the Algerians will be mended.” That’s all. The registrar thanks him. He is given a pair of pants and canvas shoes. He is putting them on when two Arab men enter, escorted by a few guards. Mohamed Lakhnèche, also known as Ali Chaflala, and Mohamed Ouenouri, alias P’tit Maroc. Fernand realizes that they are to be executed with him. The prisoners are hitting the walls of their cells with metal bowls and spoons. The prison’s lungs fill up, inhale, exhale. In the surrounding streets, women are now shouting from their windows, supporting the combatants. Ululations, patriotic chants, and nachîds. The three convicts enter the yard. The guillotine looms proudly on the cement
floor. There is the slanted blade, odious, there is the hole, round hole, perfectly round. Ululations submerge, overflow and saturate the area. Smadja, Laînné and Father Declercq are present. They were waiting. Fernand is surprised to see them—he does not know, in fact, that his lawyers were told the previous afternoon, by telephone. The air is not cold; it is even rather mild. Five o’clock. Laînné embraces Fernand, be strong, he whispers, it’s because of public opinion. You are French, you placed a bomb somewhere, to them that’s unforgivable: you are to die because of public opinion. Fernand’s stomach feels as if it is being lacerated, clawed, pierced by a thousand lead pellets. Fernand repeats it three times, public opinion public opinion public opinion. He finds it hard to breathe. The Casbah calls the sky to itself in screams and ululations, an unbroken thread of sound. He is brought to the executioner, who wears a hood. Fernand does not know that this masked man, nicknamed “Monsieur d’Alger,” is also called Fernand. The executioner, hearing the convict’s name uttered by the chaplain, catches himself flinching. As if death were finally embodied—after all the heads he’s dispatched with a most professional hand—in the sound of a first name which returns him, brutally, to their common humanity. Declercq asks him whether he requires the succor of religion; Fernand looks at him, tries to smile, fails, and answers no … no … freethinker … The guards bind his hands behind his back. I am going to die, he murmurs, but Algeria will be independent … Fernand goes first: custom dictates that the least “guilty” convict opens the proceedings, so that he need not witness others being put to death. His two lawyers withdraw to one of the corridors leading off the yard. Laînné kneels, bows his head, joins his hands together toward his Lord. Smadja stands, in tears, forehead against the wall. They do not want to look, they cannot. It is 05:10 when the head of Fernand Iveton, prisoner number 6101, thirty years old,
Hélène folds the letter in half. Then in four. Anonymous. Only a postscript, in which she learns that the author of this poem, written in memory of Fernand, is a European-Algerian woman, a militant for independence sentenced to five years in prison.
Then the cock crowed
This morning they dared to
They dared to murder you.
In the fortress of our bodies
May our ideal live on
Mingled with your blood
So that tomorrow they won’t dare,
They won’t dare to murder us.
In the historiography of François Mitterrand
and the Algerian War, Iveton remains a cursed
name. […] One has to wonder how President
Mitterrand could own up to it. I must have
uttered the name [of Iveton] two or three
times in front of him, always to his terrible
unease, which then turned into eructations.
[…] One had run into the raison d’État.
B. Stora and F. Malye,
François Mitterrand et la guerre d’Algérie
Guillotined on February 11, 1957, Fernand Iveton is the only “European” to have been executed by France during the Algerian War. In its coverage of his death, France-Soir, a leading newspaper, described him as a “killer.” Paris-Presse, another mainstream organ, called him a “terrorist.”
Two days after Iveton’s beheading, Albert Smadja was arrested and taken to the Lodi internment camp, set up to “silence those who may denounce the repression, get in contact with arrested militants, support their families and friends, or hamper the prosecution during their trials”:1 he was liberated toward the end of 1958. Two years later, that is. In March of that year, Jean-Paul Sartre published a text to the memory of Iveton in Les Temps modernes.2
André Abbou, author of Albert Camus, entre les lignes,3 claims that the novelist “intervened” to try to save him.4 The Guerroudj couple was pardoned by de Gaulle—Jacqueline died in Algiers at the age of ninety-five (a few weeks before the start of the writing of this book). Hélène Iveton and Fernand’s father left Algeria without delay; she died on Sunday, May 10, 1998 in Arcueil. Joë Nordmann discussed the case in his memoir, Aux vents de l’histoire.5
In his Coups et blessures, the socialist politician Roland Dumas maintains that if François Mitterrand moved to abolish the death penalty in 1981, as soon as he came to power, it was in order to “redeem” himself for the decisions he took during the Algerian War, including Iveton’s execution.6
These pages could not have been written without the patient investigative work of Jean-Luc Einaudi. He has left us, but I thank him here. He reported that throughout his investigation he was met with nothing but “the silence of the State.”7
_______________
1 See Nathalie Funès, Le Camp de Lodi, Stock, 2012.
2 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Nous sommes tous des assassins,” Les Temps modernes 145 (1958).
3 André Abbou, Albert Camus, entre les lignes, Séguier, 2009.
4 “But it is too late, and all that is left to do is either repent or forget. Of course, we forget. Society, however, is no less affected. Unpunished crimes, according to the Greeks, infected the city-state.” Albert Camus on Iveton, in “Réflexions sur la guillotine,” Nouvelle Revue française 54 and 55 (June– July 1957).
5 Joë Nordmann, Aux vents de l’histoire, Actes Sud, 1999.
6 Roland Dumas, Coups et blessures, Le Cherche-Midi, 2011.
7 See Jean-Luc Einaudi, Pour l’exemple. L’affaire Fernand Iveton, L’Harmattan, 1986.
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