The pieds noirs had developed some of their own peculiar customs, some borrowed from the Muslims. There was the traditional outing on Easter Monday, a picnic centred around the ceremonial “breaking of the mouna”, a hemispheric and sickly sweet cake scented with orange-blossom. But essentially their life and pleasures were those of the true Mediterranean being: the old women knitting and gossipping on shaded park benches, the men arguing and story-telling over the long-drawn-out pastis outside the bistros; the protracted silence of the siesta; then the awakening in the cool of the evening, the games of boule in dusty squares, under trees populated with revivified and chattering birds. It was a good life, with not too many cares. For the affluent there was the Algiers Yacht Club, the Golf Club, the Club Anglais and the Club Hippique, and skiing up at Chréa in the winter; for the petits blancs of Algiers there was the racecourse at Hussein-Dey and football at the Belcourt stadium. The heavy red wine of Algeria was both plentiful and cheap, and above all there was the beach. “The Outsider” of Camus, who perhaps personifies the pied noir mentality better than any other fictional character, describes his anguish of privation while in prison, awaiting the guillotine:
I would suddenly be seized with a desire to go down to the beach for a swim. And merely to have imagined the sound of ripples at my feet, and then the smooth feel of the water on my body as I struck out, and the wonderful sensation of relief it gave, brought home still more cruelly the narrowness of my cell.
On the beaches nearest Algiers, the young of the poorer whites would spend their entire week-end splashing joyously in the sea, then dancing under the stars to the music of a juke-box. The slang they used — se taper un bain, “indulge in a swim”, rather than “go for a swim” — was perhaps suggestive of the sheer sensuality of their attachment to the sea.
“I learned not to separate these creatures bursting with violent energy from the sky where their desires whirl,” says Camus of his fellow pieds noirs. The sea and sun, these were factors that were all-conditioning, responsible for their best as well as their worst characteristics. In contrast to the Cartesian rationale in which the northern Gaul so prides himself, the meridional pied noir was first and foremost a creature of the senses. Everything was excess: excessive exuberance, excessive hospitality, excessive affection — and excessive hate. “Stopping to think and becoming better are out of the question,” claims Camus. “The notion of hell, for instance, is merely a funny joke here. Such imaginings are allowed only to the very virtuous. And I really think that virtue is a meaningless word in all Algeria.…” Under the implacable sun the pied noir married young and was burnt out young. For as well as nurturing and stimulating life, the sun society also caresses death. It was quite customary for a murderer — whatever the rights or wrongs of his case — to be referred to, compassionately, as “the poor fellow”, and the acceptance of violence and death lay never very far beneath the surface. Among his pieds noirs, Camus himself was mystically aware of a “merciless tête-à-tête with Death, this physical fear of the animal who loves the sun”. The conditions of Algerian life bestowed upon the European there a sense of mortality, of transience, which, writing even before the Second World War, Camus was able to discern in some remarkably prophetic passages:
he is born of this country where everything is given to be taken away … here is a race without past, without tradition … wholly cast into its present lives without myths, without solace. It has put all its possessions on this earth and therefore remains without defence against death. All the gifts of physical beauty have been lavished on it. And with them, the strange avidity that always accompanies that wealth without failure.…
The sentiments of the pied noir towards metropolitan France (for so many not their mother country at all) were compounded of resentment, love, disdain and an inferiority complex with the undertones of superiority that so often accompany it. For “The Outsider”, Paris was “A dingy sort of town, to my mind. Masses of pigeons and dark courtyards. And the people have washed-out white faces.” The women of Bab-el-Oued found it hard to understand how, without a “true sun”, the laundry would ever dry in Paris. If the pied noir loved France, it was with a love that sought constant reassurance: “The French of Algeria would like to be reassured that…” was a theme frequently to be found in Press editorials. For his part, he felt that he had well deserved France’s love through his sacrifices in two world wars. “Where is our promised land?” one of the rebel generals of 1961, Edmond Jouhaud, was to demand: “I think we have paid for the right to be French, by the blood that we shed from 1914 to 1918 and from 1939 to 1945.” It was an argument with which Britons were made familiar early in the Rhodesian crisis. Perhaps because so many pieds noirs, or their antecedents, had come to Algeria after a vie manquée in Europe, there was a residual misgiving that the metropolitan Frenchman regarded him as a second-class European, and this inferiority complex could manifest itself in a display of extreme sensitivity: “the least reserve about the climate is to say that their mistress is one-eyed,” comments Pierre Nora sardonically; “to permit a remark about their manner of overtaking an automobile and running over pedestrians is an insult to their virility.…” Again, it was an attitude that some Britons may at times have encountered in countries of the old Commonwealth, and its inversion was an isolationist, separatist sense of superiority that could vest the pied noir with a vastly over-inflated notion of his own weight in world councils. With a feeling of just pride the pieds noirs recalled that, in 1914, it was Bône and Philippeville that had drawn the first German naval salvoes; and, once more, Camus seems to strike a chord of utmost fidelity when, at the conclusion of The Outsider, he reveals that the last wish of his anti-hero was to occupy the centre of the stage: “for me to feel less lonely, all that remained was to hope that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration”.
At the time of the projected Blum—Viollette reforms, a pied noir financier remarked to Viollette: “Monsieur le Gouverneur-Général, you reason in the French of France, but we reason in the French of Algeria.” It was not at all the same language, as was to become tragically plain later, and in order to understand events from 1954 onwards it is necessary to accept the existence of three totally distinct peoples — the French of France, the French of Algeria, and the Muslims of Algeria.
In the outer world, the most obvious kinsmen to the pied noir are the whites of South Africa, Rhodesia and the “Deep South” of the United States. In terms of the numbers of generations that had come to regard Algeria as “home”, and had absolutely nowhere else in the world to go, he stood somewhere between the Afrikaaner and the Rhodesian. At the opposite ends of the social scale, comparisons in their way of life and attitudes could be made between the grands colons and the plantation owners of the “Old South”, while the least privileged elements of Bab-el-Oued or Belcourt bore a marked affinity to the “poor whites” of Faulkner, coexisting uneasily alongside the blacks in the torrid, over-crowded American cities of the same epoch. In Algeria, however, there was no form of segregation so overt as apartheid, or “Jim Crow” laws on buses; on the other hand, there was nothing resembling the miscegenation of Brazil, or even Mozambique.
An Arab, but dressed like a person.…
If the pied noir attitude to the indigenous Algerian could be summed up in a word, it was, simply, indifference. He was regarded, says Pierre Nora, “as an anonymous figure of whom it sufficed to know that one provided his welfare, so that one had no need to be concerned about him”. In so far as he supplied the labour essential for exploiting the country, he was simply “a part of the patrimoine immobilier [real estate inheritance]”. At best he would be treated with paternalism, fairness and a kind of formal acceptance of his different religion and culture. But too often he was regarded with disdain, and from a vantage of superiority; which manifested itself in many different ways, and more insidiously among the poorer levels of whites where the frictional contact was
closest. Bicot, melon, figuier, sale raton[2] — there was a plethora of derogatory slang for an inferior race that sprang all to readily to the lips. Equally a host of preconceived inherited notions about the Algerian were accepted uncritically, without examining either their veracity or causation: he was incorrigibly idle and incompetent; he only understood force; he was an innate criminal, and an instinctive rapist. Sexually based prejudices and fears ran deep, akin to those elsewhere of white city-dwellers surrounded by preponderant and ever-growing Negro populations: “They can see our women, we can’t see theirs”; the Arab had a plurality of wives, and therefore was possibly more virile (an intolerable thought to the “Mediterranean-and-a-half”); and with the demographic explosion spawned by his potency, he was threatening to swamp the European by sheer weight of numbers.
The pied noir would habitually tutoyer any Muslim — a form of speech reserved for intimates, domestics or animals — and was outraged were it ever suggested that this might be a manifestation of racism. Commenting on this, Pierre Nora (admittedly a Frenchman often unduly harsh in his criticism of the pieds noirs), adds an illustration of a judge asking in court:
“Are there any other witnesses?”
“Yes, five; two men and three Arabs.”
Or again: “It was an Arab, but dressed like a person.…”
With shame, Jules Roy admitted:
One thing I knew because it was told me so often, was that the Arabs belonged to a different race, one inferior to my own… “They don’t live the way we do.…” The sentence drew a chaste veil over their poverty.… Yes, their happiness was elsewhere, rather, if you please, like the happiness of cattle… “They don’t have the same needs we do…,” I was always being told. I was glad to believe it, and from that moment on their condition could not disturb me. Who suffers seeing oxen sleep on straw or eating grass?
Later on, he confesses: “It came as a great surprise to realise — little by little — that the figuiers were men like ourselves, that they laughed, that they wept, that they were capable of such noble sentiments as hatred or love, jealousy, or gratitude.…”
Even great-hearted Camus, who was among the first to expose the dreadful economic plight of the Algerians, both shortly before and after the Second World War, occasionally reveals a curious blindness, almost amounting to indifference, towards them as human beings. His Oran of La Peste appears to be devoid of Muslims; although he writes so sensitively (albeit often censoriously) of his kindred pieds noirs, his vendors selling lemonade for five sous a glass on the Algiers streets, his Oran shoe-shine boys (“the only men still in love with their profession”) seem to be accepted as part of the essential, touristique backdrop, without his pausing to question the penury that must inevitably accompany the “profession” he believes them to be in love with. Again, in The Outsider he seems oblivious to the other victim of tragedy, the Arab girl whose lover beats her up and whose brother is killed while trying to avenge her. It is as if Camus, too, cannot be bothered to understand this “anonymous figure”, this portion of the patrimoine immobilier.
Petits blancs and grands colons
But how difficult it is to generalise about a people so diverse as the pieds noirs! Apart from their mixed racial origins, they represented a wide spectrum of political hues, and the span between the top and bottom of the economic scale was even wider. At one end of the political spectrum there were the diehard conservatives, both rich and poor, some of them later to become known as “ultras”, who stubbornly resisted all change; at the other end, various kinds of liberals supporting reform of one sort or another. By the 1950s, these latter were reckoned to comprise twenty to twenty-five per cent of the overall population, loosely embracing the European professional classes; these figures also include the Muslim évolués and a large section of the Jewish community. But the liberals had little or no proletarian support. Many of the petits blancs were failed farmers who had gravitated towards the cities, and this in itself was to grant them a collective political consciousness not to be found among the more rural settlers of Morocco and Tunisia. Like the poor whites of Rhodesia, they could not afford to be liberal, but tended to be either Communist or reactionary; and, curiously enough, these two opposing forces were largely at one, at least where liberalisation for the Muslims was concerned, as has already been noted at the time of the Sétif uprising. Between the top and bottom of the economic scale, the span was even wider. On the whole, earnings were lower than in France; perhaps as many as eighty per cent of the pieds noirs were merchants or salaried employees, and among them a father of three might earn less than half that of his metropolitan opposite number (on the other hand, it would buy benefits inaccessible to the latter, such as the cheap domestic services of an Algerian fatma). Yet the prosperity gap between very rich and very poor in France was less than that between the handful of most affluent grands colons of Algeria and the petit blanc; while between the latter and his Muslim competitor, the differential was, in contrast, extremely slender.
Who in fact were the grands colons, the men of power, in Algeria by 1954? Three names, Borgeaud, Schiaffino, Blachette, were the big entrepreneurs of Algeria, between them controlling the greater part of the economy, and, pari passu, wielding immense political power. Top of the list was Henri Borgeaud, a Swiss by origin (two generations back), a big man in his mid-fifties who looked like a jolly farmer from the Auvergne and who was proud to proclaim himself a pioneer of the soil. Centre of the Borgeaud empire was the magnificent mansion of La Trappe at Staouéli, close to Algiers, which had passed to the Borgeaud family after its founders, the Trappist monks who gave it its name, were dispossessed during France’s secular “war” in 1905. La Trappe embraced 1,000 hectares of the best land in Algeria, producing regularly four million litres of wine per annum. But if wine was the chief source of the Borgeauds’ fortunes, it was only one of many interests; they were major food producers, and owned Bastos cigarettes (the Gauloises of Algeria); while the name of Henri Borgeaud appeared on the boards of, inter alia, the Crédit Foncier d’Algérie et de Tunisie bank, the granary Moulins du Chélif, the transportation Cargos Algériens, the Lafarge cement works, the Distillerie d’Algérie, the cork industry, the timber industry, etc., etc. Hence came the popular saying: “In Algeria, one drinks Borgeaud, smokes Borgeaud, eats Borgeaud, and banks or borrows Borgeaud.…” In addition he was senator for Algiers, and had powerful allies in the form of Comte Alain de Sérigny, the conservative owner of the Écho d’Alger, and, at the Palais-Bourbon, the deputy Réné Mayer who headed an influential pro-pieds noirs lobby. The archetype of a paternalist seigneur, he apparently enjoyed the affection of many of the Muslims among his 6,000 employees, who were (relatively speaking) both well-paid and well cared-for. But politically Borgeaud was a deep-dyed conservative. At the Evian peace negotiations in 1962, one of the F.L.N. leaders, Ben Tobbal, claimed to Favrod, the Swiss journalist: “Henri Borgeaud deserves the title of national hero. Without him and those like him, there would never have been a united Algeria.”
Then there was Laurent Schiaffino, who controlled probably the biggest fortune in Algeria, including most of its shipping. Although a third-generation Neapolitan, Schiaffino revealed few of the extrovert characteristics one might have expected; with a greyish complexion, he was a cold and retiring personality with a meticulous knowledge of the marine world, but seldom seen outside family or business circles. He too was a senator for Algiers, and owner of the Dépêche Algérienne, which held a reputation principally for being “anti”, that is to say, “anti” any measure of liberalisation. (Yet, after 1962, because of the efficiency and indispensability of his marine fleet, he was the only one of the grands colons to be invited to stay on by the new Algerian republic.) Third among the triumvirate of pieds noirs tycoons was Georges Blachette, whose family, originating from the Midi, were among the earliest pioneers of Algeria. A small, rotund figure with a delicate stomach and said to live on Evian water, Blachette was known as the “king of alfalfa”. In the area s
outh of Oran his alfalfa fields reached the horizon on every side; most of his crop was earmarked for British paper mills, and it provided the source of no less than twenty per cent of all Algeria’s foreign earnings. In addition, Blachette had fingers in a number of other agricultural and industrial pies; he owned the Journal d’Alger, was elected deputy to the Assembly in 1951, swiftly proved himself a skilled lobbyist there, and was even considered by Mendès-France for a ministry. In contrast to Borgeaud and Schiaffino, however, Blachette set out to be a liberal and progressive. Nevertheless, it could not be overlooked that the Muslim alfalfa workers were among the most poorly paid in the country.
As a liberal — and a sincere and dedicated one — Blachette’s principal ally was Jacques Chevallier. In his mid-forties, Chevallier swiftly achieved a kind of La Guardia reputation as mayor of Algiers, with his slogan of “a roof for everybody” which he had put into action by the construction of impressive numbers of low-cost housing units for the city poor. But he was to be constantly torn in his liberalism between responsibility for the Muslims and for the poorer pieds noirs. Also a deputy, in 1954 he accepted from Mendès-France the portfolio of Secretary of State for National Defence declined by Blachette. Finally there needs to be mentioned, briefly, among the powerful conservative adversaries of Chevallier and the liberal lobby three other figures: Raymond Laquière, President of the Algerian Assembly, a shrewd political operator, with an eroded face, utterly dedicated to European supremacy and going as far as to aspire to be leader of a separatist Algeria; Amédée Froger, mayor of Boufarik and president of the Federation of Algerian Mayors; and, finally, Comte Alain de Sérigny. A tall, nervous, fast-talking aristocrat of roughly the same age as Chevallier, de Sérigny was deeply proud of his colonial ancestry; he could trace it back to Le Moyne who had colonised Hudson Bay, and other forefathers who had fought against the Spaniards in Florida, or struck roots in Louisiana. Brought up in Algiers, he became a journalist in 1941 only after escaping from a German prisoner-of-war camp. As the fire-eating editor of the ultra-conservative Écho d’Alger, founded in 1912, and the most influential pied noir paper, he was to play an important role.
A Savage War of Peace Page 8
