The way in which French high ideals about the Union degenerated into dirty dealing and extreme violence was just as stark in North Africa. In Algeria, the Democratic Union for the Algerian Manifesto (UDMA), led by Ferhat Abbas and demanding an autonomous Algerian republic within the French Union, triumphed in elections to the first Constituent Assembly. The PPA boycotted the election but Messali Hadj was released from prison in the summer of 1946 and the PPA fought the second election through a Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Freedoms (MTLD). But no autonomy and democracy was forthcoming. Algeria remained a part of metropolitan France, governed by the Ministry of the Interior, and while nine million Muslim males were given the vote, they were also corralled into one electoral college with sixty representatives, while a million Europeans and a thin stratum of educated Algerians elected the other sixty representatives in a separate college. As if this were not bad enough, the elections of April 1948 were rigged by the socialist governor-general in order to prevent the Muslim parties from gaining more than a few seats.50 ‘The rigging disgusted Algerians with what we dared call “democracy”’, said former wartime resister Claude Bourdet. ‘It explained the fact that young people and many others turned towards much harsher forms of nationalism, and ultimately to armed struggle.’51
While Algeria was ruled from Paris, Morocco and Tunisia were protectorates in which the local ruler remained but under the thumb of a French resident-general. In Morocco the nationalist Ishqlal party persuaded Sultan Mohammed V to take a more independent stance against the French. General Juin, born in Algeria and a veteran of the Army of Africa, returned in May 1947 to take over as resident-general. He was shocked by the change in the sultan, whom he had last seen at the Casablanca conference of 1943, but who addressed a nationalist audience in the internationalised city of Tangier on 10 April 1947 in tones that seemed pan-Arabist and Islamist.52 Juin just about kept the lid on the pot in Morocco and when he left in 1951 asked the government to appoint another hard-line general, Augustin Guillaume. In 1953 Guillaume deposed the unruly sultan and exiled him to Madagascar, provoking massive unrest.53
In Tunisia, the nationalist Neo Destour party was under the control of Habib Bourguiba, exiled by the French to Cairo, where he embraced Arab nationalism. In February 1945 a nationalist Tunisian front demanded ‘the internal autonomy of the Tunisian nation and democracy under a constitutional monarchy’.54 In 1947 the French resident-general put more Tunisian ministers on the ministerial council, and a Tunisian trade union movement emerged under Farhat Hached. Fenner Brockway was invited to Neo Destour’s congress in March 1951, but the French government then decided to halt progress towards reform. The resident-general who arrived in January 1952 – Jean de Hautecloque, an elder cousin of General Leclerc – immediately dismissed the Tunisian ministers, cancelled the nationalists’ congress and placed Bourguiba under house arrest. Farhat Hached was murdered by the French services on 5 March 1952, provoking riots across North Africa. Brockway ‘felt as though he had lost a friend’ and moved closer to founding the Movement for Colonial Freedom.55
Meanwhile France’s efforts to reassert itself as an imperial power in the Far East came to nothing. Her opponents were no longer the rebels confronted by Galliéni or Lyautey in the 1880s but a practised revolutionary army with popular support and Chinese Communist backing. French officers complained that formerly loyal black or North African soldiers were being seduced by Vietminh propaganda and vanishing into the jungle. The French occupied Dien Bien Phu in the north of the country, to build up as a strategic land and air base, in November 1953. But the Vietnamese under General Giap laid siege to the town and forced 10,000 French soldiers to surrender on 7 May 1954. They turned the concept of resistance against the French themselves. ‘The great Resistance War of our people’, Giap later wrote, ‘has eloquently substantiated a truth of our time: if a people, however weak they may be, rise up and fight resolutely for independence and peace, they have all possibilities to defeat the most cruel aggressive army of the imperialists.’56
Dien Bien Phu was a catastrophic military defeat for France and a massive blow to her pride as a colonial power. For many French people it revived cruel memories of the defeat of 1940: the same humiliation of the armed forces, the same rounding up of POWs (Figure 3.2), the same exodus of civilians fleeing the enemy. Marcel Bigeard, who had been a POW in 1940, escaped and joined the Army of Africa in 1943 before joining the French Resistance and serving in Indo-China as a parachutist, found himself in a Vietminh POW camp on 18 June 1954. ‘18 June 1954 […] 18 June 1940. What good was General de Gaulle’s call to arms? […] Here I am, a prisoner of those little Vietnamese who we in the army thought only fit to be nurses or drivers. Whereas these men with an extraordinary morale, starting from zero in 1945 with an ideal and a mish-mash of weapons, had only one goal: to get rid of the French.’57 Raoul Salan, who became commander-in-chief in Indo-China after the death of de Lattre de Tassigny, remembered ‘the horrible exodus of several thousand people. They held on to our lorries for dear life. They tried to follow us in their carts and to get onto our boats. Had we not told them that our flag would never be lowered in this land of Indochina? Had they not believed us?’58
Figure 3.2 The French Empire humiliated: French POWs escorted by Vietminh after the defeat of Dien Bien Phu, July 1954.
Getty Images / Bettmann / 514677668
In Paris, the government held responsible for the defeat was toppled on 11 June 1954. Pierre Mendès-France, a centrist politician of Jewish origin, who had escaped from a Vichy prison to join the Free French and attended the 1944 Bretton Woods conference which laid down the roots of postwar economic recovery, was invited to form a ministry. He was persuaded that France must modernise economically, socially and militarily within the framework of a new Europe and without the burden of colonial wars. From 1950 he urged France get out of the war in Indo-China and in June 1954 repeated that France must get out of this ‘bloody rut’.59 He negotiated directly with the Vietminh in Geneva and within a month, as he promised, made peace and extracted France from Indo-China, getting rid of what he called ‘the enormous material burden’ and ‘the heavy mortgage’.60 Mendès-France then acted swiftly to deal with the North African protectorates. On 31 July 1954, flanked by General Juin, he made a speech at Carthage granting Tunisia internal autonomy. In Morocco, he allowed the sultan deposed by the French government in 1953 to return, and independence was conceded. He suffered attacks as a capitulator and Jewish street-trader, selling off the Empire. Yet he reacted very differently when the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), emboldened by the success of the Vietminh, launched insurrection in Algeria on 1 November 1954. French Algeria was a red line. Mendès-France expressed this when he declared that ‘compromise is not possible when it is a question of defending the domestic peace of the nation and the unity and integrity of the Republic. The departments of Algeria are part of the Republic. They have been French for a very long time and are so irrevocably.’61
Reconciling Europe and Empire
It is often imagined that the process of decolonisation and the development of European integration went hand in hand. As colonies became less important, so Europe became more so. Empire was the past, Europe the future. Things were a good deal more complicated than this. In the first instance, no contradiction was felt for a long time between the possession of colonies and European integration. On the contrary, colonial power underpinned the greatness of European powers. That said, however, fear of losing sovereignty undermined the commitment to Europe both of France, which feared losing its army, and of Britain, which feared losing its empire.
Despite subsequent attempts to claim him as a British bulldog opposed to Europe, Churchill was in fact an early advocate of European union. As leader of the opposition he launched a United Europe committee in January 1947 and told a meeting of 10,000 in the Albert Hall on 14 May 1947:
We may be sure that the cause of United Europe, in which the mother country must be the prime mover, w
ill in no way be contrary to the sentiments which join us all together with our Dominions in the august circle of the British crown.62
The following year, in September 1948 British Foreign Minister Bevin met French Premier Ramadier to talk about a Western Union that would bring together the two countries and their colonial empires in Africa to constitute an economic and military third force in the face of the United States and the USSR. This was announced to Parliament by Bevin on 22 January 1948. The plan did not progress very far. As the Cold War intensified, Britain realised that it would have to stick close to the United States, which launched the Marshall Plan and encouraged the formation of an Organisation of European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) in April 1948 as a vehicle to implement it in Europe. In May 1948 Bevin failed to turn up to the Congress of Europe at The Hague, which later gave rise to the Council of Europe. Party-political reasons were in one sense to blame, since its honorary president was none other than Churchill. More important, however, was Bevin’s fear of losing the sovereignty that had been so stoutly defended in the Second World War and concern that ties with the Commonwealth would be endangered. In this he was more fearful than Churchill. At a meeting with French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman and American Secretary of State Dean Acheson on 10 May 1949, Bevin pointed out ‘the danger to our common policy if, through ill-informed criticism at home and abroad, the United Kingdom electorate were forced to choose between association with the Commonwealth and with Western Europe […] the United Kingdom – because of its overseas connexions – could never become an entirely European country’.63
At that moment Schuman was planning how to deal with the problem of German revival which, during two world wars, had been based on the coal resources of the Ruhr and, when it captured them from France, the iron ore resources of Lorraine. His solution was a supranational authority, in which France, Germany and the Benelux countries were represented, to control those pooled coal and steel resources. He announced this plan at a press conference on 9 May 1950, ahead of a visit to London. The British felt that they had not been adequately consulted and remained outside the treaty which was signed in April 1951. Meanwhile the Americans were pressing hard for Germany to be rearmed and included in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This time it was the French who were terrified by the spectre of the Wehrmacht returning only six years after it had left French soil. Defence Minister René Pleven proposed to evade the threat through a European Defence Community (EDC) which would rearm the Germans within a European army, without rearming Germany as a country. Britain did not express concern: it was always going to command its own armies alongside the EDC. The majority of the French, however, could not be reconciled to what looked like the dissolution of its own army. Charles de Gaulle argued that NATO would make France into an American protectorate and the EDU expose her to German militarism. ‘France can only be itself when it is the front rank’, he wrote at the opening of his 1954 war memoirs. ‘France cannot be France without greatness.’64 The statements of Édouard Herriot, now 82, made a different but equally powerful appeal: ‘The army is the soul of the fatherland. It is because the feelings developed by the French Revolution had such depth that they were able to give the men who fought on the Marne the courage to die in conditions we must not forget.’ The EDC was voted down by the National Assembly on 30 August 1954 to shouts of ‘Down with the Wehrmacht’ and chants of the Marseillaise.65
The European leaders returned to the drawing board and proposed a much less threatening Common Market. Ministers of the Six, including Italy, met to discuss this at Messina in Sicily in June 1955 and set up a committee under Spaak. Britain sent a representative but withdrew from the Spaak committee in November 1955. Fearing as usual a threat to its sovereignty and to economic ties with the Commonwealth, Harold Macmillan as Conservative Foreign Secretary, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, came up with an alternative which he presented in June 1956. This was the Plan G, which proposed a free trade area for all OEEC states, and free entry for all Commonwealth goods. Prime Minister Eden met his opposite number Guy Mollet in Paris on 27 September 1956. Eden said that Britain would ‘like to draw close to Europe but that we must contrive to do so without losing the Commonwealth’. Mollet expressed an ‘immense hope’ that the United Kingdom would ‘take her place in Europe and indeed lead the movement towards European unity’. Macmillan told the Conservative Party Conference on 12 October that Plan G was now government policy.66 At this point, however, everything was thrown into the air by the Suez Crisis.
The Suez Crisis
Between 22 and 24 October 1956 a top-level secret meeting was held at a villa in the otherwise unspectacular Paris suburb of Sèvres. The villa had been used as a safe house by French Defence Minister Maurice Bourgès-Maunory when he had been in the Resistance. With him on the French side were Foreign Minister Christian Pineau and Prime Minister Guy Mollet. On the British side was Anthony Eden’s Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd. Most unusual was the arrival of a delegation from Israel: Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, Director-General of the Defence Ministry Shimon Peres and Chief of Staff General Moshe Dayan, hero of the 1948 war. The parties signed a protocol for action on 24 October under which the Israelis would launch an attack on Egypt on 29 October and the British and French governments would issue ultimatums the following day, ordering the belligerents to cease fire. If either party rejected the ultimatums, British and French would themselves attack early on 31 October.67
For both France and Britain, the Suez intervention was a desperate attempt to shore up their empires. The balance of power in North Africa and the Middle East was tipped in 1952 when Gamal Abdul Nasser led a military coup that toppled the pro-British regime. In his Philosophy of Revolution he imagined Egypt at the intersection of three circles – the African, to which Egypt was the ‘northern gateway’, the Arab, and an Islamic circle stretching from the Near to the Far East. These were the energies on which he might draw in a showdown with the West.68 He negotiated a treaty with Britain on 18 October 1954 under which the British would withdraw their forces from the Suez Canal base by 18 June 1956, although they might return if Egypt was attacked by another country. Nasser had been invited to a congress of twenty-nine Asian and African countries held at Bandung in April 1955 by Sukarno, president of Indonesia, who declared that all the countries present were united by ‘the common experience, the experience of colonialism’. They did not have ‘serried ranks of jet bombers’ but were 1,400 billion strong and could exercise ‘the Moral Violence of Nations’.69 Nasser countered this lack by procuring weapons from the Soviet Union in September 1955, thus linking the challenges of decolonisation and the Cold War.
France’s war to retain possession of Algeria had not been going well. On 20 August 1955 the FLN intensified the conflict by massacring about 120 Europeans at Philippeville in the Constantine region, to which the French Army replied by killing between 3,000 and 5,000 Algerians. A state of emergency was declared across the country. Fearing a ‘Saint-Bartholomew of Europeans’ the pieds noirs settlers began to group in self-defence militias, such as the Union Française Nord-Africain of Robert Martel and Joseph Ortiz.70 Guy Mollet, the new socialist prime minister, visited Algiers on 6 February 1956 and was pelted with tomatoes by the settlers, who feared that he was going to make peace with the FLN.71 He capitulated to the settlers and on 12 March 1956 asked the National Assembly for emergency powers to deal with the crisis, which were agreed upon and voted through even by the Communist Party. Soldiers called up for National Service were sent out to reinforce the professional army and, even more controversially, those who had already completed military service were recalled to the colours. Riots broke out from Le Mans to Grenoble as soldiers protested at being loaded onto trains and crowds attempted to stop trains leaving in scenes reminiscent of attempts to stop forced labour convoys to Germany leaving in 1943.72
The French were convinced that the FLN was being supplied and supported by Nasser. Foreign Minister Pineau declared that ‘France con
siders it more important to defeat Colonel Nasser’s enterprise than to win ten battles in Algeria’, and the French began to supply Israel with arms, including Mystère jets, as another bulwark against Egypt.73 In anticipation that Egypt might be lost, the British built up their military base on Cyprus and dealt with Greek Cypriot opposition by declaring a state of emergency on 26 November 1955, later deporting their charismatic leader Archbishop Makarios to Mombasa.74 In the United States, President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles were obsessed by the threat of Soviet expansion in the Middle East and constructed against it a so-called Northern Tier of allies including Turkey, Iraq and Pakistan. When they discovered that Nasser was receiving weapons from the Soviet Union they withdrew funding from Nasser’s Aswan High Dam project. This provoked Nasser to nationalise the Canal on 26 July 1956. On the other hand the Americans had no time for colonial wars. Dulles was sent to London on 30 July with a message from Eisenhower to the British and French foreign ministers on ‘the unwisdom even of contemplating military force at this point’. Pineau replied to Dulles that ‘according to the most reliable intelligence services we have only a few weeks in which to save North Africa’, and that this ‘would then be followed by that of Black Africa’.75
Rather than thinking in Cold War terms, Britain and France were obsessed by the need to hold on to their colonies. They also seemed to be repeating the crises of the Second World War. They regarded humiliation by Egypt as a repetition of the humiliation of the 1938 Munich crisis, which by saving the peace appeased the dictators and handed them the opportunity for aggression.76 The British government was also under pressure from the Suez Group set up in 1953 to defend ‘Britain and Empire’ and in particular its ‘new Empire’ in the Middle East.77 ‘The people’, trumpeted The Times on 27 August 1956, ‘still want Britain great again’.78 The French were desperate not only to avoid Munich but to avert a defeat on the scale of 1940 that had ushered in the Vichy regime. Many of the key players on the French side, such as Bourges-Maunory and Pineau, had been involved in the French Resistance and were members of de Gaulle’s elite Compagnons de la Libération.79
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