The view from Paris was that the restoration of law and order was the necessary prelude to political reform. How they did it was nobody else’s business as this was an internal French affair. The 1.2 million Algerian Europeans calculated that reform could be indefinitely deferred if they made their disapproval sufficiently vocal, for with parliamentary coalitions so tenuous the colonial tail was adroit at wagging the metropolitan dog. The pieds noirs were alert to any sign that they were going to be sold down the river, as they believed France had done to settlers in the neighbouring protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia, granted full independence in 1956. Both countries functioned as external bases for the FLN and gave passports to its couriers and diplomats. Safe havens were the sine qua non for any insurgency, providing in this case distribution points for the initially small flow of arms from Nasser’s Egypt, followed in due course by far larger shipments and training missions from Yugoslavia and the Soviet bloc.6
The pieds noirs were intensely suspicious of Jacques Soustelle, a respected ethnologist and close collaborator of General de Gaulle, when he was appointed governor-general of Algeria. Yet Soustelle believed that Algeria was as French as Brittany or Provence and urged the French Assembly to pass a series of emergency decrees which brought courts martial and extensive controls on the media. The British war movie The Bridge on the River Kwai was banned for two years – for depicting Europeans being humiliated by Asian Japanese – while Ill Met by Moonlight was permanently prohibited for showing Greek partisans abducting a German general.7
The pieds noirs were hard to like. The rich had the wherewithal to relocate to metropolitan France, but the bulk of the settlers, some of whom had originally fled Prussian-occupied Alsace after 1870, were determined not to flee again. There were also those with nowhere to run, such as the polyglot petit blancs of Algiers’ working-class Bab el-Oued (River’s Gate), a rough waterfront district known as the proletarian Riviera. There the colons were as likely to be Corsican, Italian, Maltese or Spanish as ethnically French. Before the war many of them voted Communist, which eased their later transition to temperamentally similar Fascism. They lived close by their Muslim neighbours, mixing penny capitalism with petty crime. By the early 1950s such people had discovered a new saviour in the movement created by Pierre Poujade, the voice of militant anti-state and anti-Semitic artisans and shopkeepers in the depressed southern departments of metropolitan France. Poujade’s pretty wife was from Algiers, which gave poujadism its entrée into France’s oldest colony.
Although many petits blancs were reflexively anti-Semitic, they had an unbounded admiration for Israel for demonstrating how to bash uppity Arabs around, a syndrome repeated among the Afrikaners of South Africa.8 There were also complex allegiances on the Muslim side, leaving aside those who served in colonial regiments of the army. Many Muslim caids did well out of the colonial regime, which was not true of the many poor and unemployed Muslims, especially those crammed into Algiers’ historic kasbah, where 80,000 people lived densely crammed into about forty acres. There was also the issue of vicious FLN sectarianism, which forced those who knew they were excluded into the arms of the French.9
One major problem in Algeria was of France’s own making. There were thousands of bureaucrats in Algiers and Oran, but hardly an official in sight out in the rural areas. Soustelle soon discovered that his own bureaucracy was permeated by colon collaborators, so that the switchboard operators always found technical reasons not to put through his calls to Paris. To correct these problems, some of Soustelle’s advisers, such as his fellow ethnologist Germaine Tillon, a Resistance heroine who had survived Ravensbrück concentration camp, encouraged him in a reforming direction. New sections administratives specialisées stationed Arabic-speaking teams of technical experts in remote villages, where they advised on farming methods and built roads, clinics and schools. These were implicitly intended to substitute for political reform. However, the teams had to live inside forts (bordjs) for safety and the guerrillas destroyed infrastructural improvements wherever they could, killing any Muslims who participated in the projects.
The work of the technical modernizers was also undermined by the army. As field maps recorded the inky spread of FLN terrorist incidents, so the army command resorted to indiscriminate air power, including the use of napalm, and collective reprisals against entire villages. A spiral of reflex violence ensued, for when French troops encountered atrocities, or just sullen hostility, they often responded by shooting anyone they suspected of FLN involvement or sympathies. Like Coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan half a century later, the French army also found itself vulnerable to lone actors among the ranks of its own indigenous troops, who might suddenly shoot their French comrades.
Guerrilla strategy was to provoke the French into brutal retaliation to polarize the sympathies of a Muslim population whose loyalties were undecided, and to this end, in August 1955, nationalist fighters in the Constantine area carried out horrific atrocities on Europeans of all ages and sexes, notably at a pyrites mining settlement at El-Halia near Philippeville. There, thirty-seven Europeans were murdered with knives and bill-hooks, including ten children under fifteen. Elite French paratroops who rushed to the scene rounded up anyone they thought responsible and machine-gunned them. Enthusiastic pied noir vigilantes simultaneously ran amok lynching any Arabs they encountered. The official death toll was of 1,200 Muslims slaughtered, although the FLN claimed ten times that number.
Soustelle acknowledged that the struggle had become a guerre à l’outrance, ‘for there had been well and truly dug an abyss through which flowed a river of blood’. After visiting the wounded in hospital, he became an implacable opponent of the FLN. A change of government in Paris meant that in early 1956 Soustelle was recalled before his reforms had had much discernible effect. He would return as a committed supporter of the pieds noirs. By that date, the French security forces had lost 550 dead, as against guerrilla losses of 3,000. The civilian death toll was 1,035 Europeans and 6,352 Muslims, for the brunt of guerrilla violence was still directed at fellow Muslims who were deemed collaborators with the colonial power.10
As more battle-hardened leaders moved to the top of the FLN, it acquired greater discipline and even more ferocious purpose, although internal organization remained chaotic. By the summer of 1956 it had a rudimentary newssheet, El Moudjahid, and an external broadcasting service, the Voix de l’Algérie. It tried to impose its own parallel administration, marginalizing the village caids through whom the French habitually worked. At a twenty-day summit held in a cabin in Kabylia’s Soumman Valley, the FLN leadership established a military chain of command, reaching from small sections via companies of over a hundred men, with the highest rank that of colonel. Overall coordination of the wilayas reposed in a Committee of Nine, while in emulation of the wartime French resistance political control was vested in a thirty-four-man Conseil National de la Révolution Algérienne. The leadership’s view was that ‘one corpse in a jacket is always worth more than twenty in uniform’, which meant a preference for well-publicized killing of European civilians in the cities, attracting the attention of the global media in ways that clashes in mountain villages could not.
In February 1956 the pacifist Socialist Prime Minister Guy Mollet arrived in Algiers to anoint Soustelle’s successor, the seventy-nine-year-old General Georges Catroux, who had held the same post in 1943. General Jacques Massu’s 10th Colonial Parachute Division, distinctive in a spotted camouflage kit known as tenue léopard, augmented Mollet’s security detail. The pieds noirs decided that Catroux was a liberal and, in a first spectacular demonstration that the European settlers had a mind and will of their own, they declared a general strike, while 20,000 veterans – led by the limbless, the blind and the much decorated – marched in silence to ‘welcome’ Mollet when he laid a wreath at the main war memorial in Algiers, a statue of Joan of Arc. On arrival he was pelted with cabbages, eggs and tomatoes, and screams of ‘Mollet au poteau!’
(the post to which those to be executed by firing squad are tied). They pursued him into the Governor’s official residence while the police did nothing.
Poujadist storekeepers and right-wing Gaullist elements dominated settler opinion. The leading figures were the restaurateur Jo Ortiz, the Corsican lawyer Jean-Baptiste Biaggi and a student leader called Pierre Lagaillard, who dressed like a paratrooper. They were almost as hostile to the Fourth Republic as towards the FLN, for many of them had been sympathetic to the pre-war right-wing Action Français and had been supporters of Marshal Pétain. Mightily impressed by the fact that the sort of people who would have voted for him in France nearly lynched him in Algiers, Mollet caved in to settler opinion in a speech which endorsed all their demands and rescinded Catroux’s appointment before the General had even reached Algiers. The message to the more hot-headed settlers was clear: ‘We are going to organize violence by the Europeans and prove that that, too, is profitable.’
In place of Catroux, Mollet appointed his fifty-seven-year-old Minister of Economic Affairs, Robert Lacoste, a man with the bluff manner of Ernest Bevin. François Mitterrand, now Justice Minister, invested Lacoste with sweeping dictatorial powers which gave the army the right to arrest, detain and interrogate suspects. Troop numbers in Algeria were boosted from 100,000 in 1955 to 200,000 in 1956 and 500,000 by 1957. This involved lengthening the period of military service, and making use of conscripts and reservists, a decision fraught with potential problems for the French state as well as its armed forces. Not long after Lacoste’s appointment a platoon of reservists was ambushed at Palestro, with the loss of all but one of twenty-one men. Massu’s Paras were despatched to track down the perpetrators, while Lacoste ordered police and troops into the Algiers kasbah. He also went ahead with the guillotining of Abdelkader Ferradj, a farm worker convicted of arson because his bicycle was found near where a farm had burned down, and of Ahmed Zabane, a senior FLN officer who had tried to shoot himself in the head when trapped, succeeding only in blowing out his left eye.11
The FLN commander in Algiers, a former baker called Saadi Yacef, responded by despatching teams of gunmen to shoot Europeans, leaving notes reading ‘Zabane and Ferradj, you are avenged’ pinned to their victims’ chests. These included four guards from the Barberousse prison, where nationalist detainees were routinely tormented.
Lacoste sought to combine toughness on terror with enlightened reforms. Half of civil service posts were opened to Muslims, and attempts were made to grant Muslims land owned by the state. Highly secret talks were opened with the exiled FLN leader Mohamed Khider as a preliminary to talks with Ahmed Ben Bella. French intelligence derailed the talks when in October 1956 Khider, Ben Bella and Ait Ahmed were skyjacked while en route from Rabat to Tunis, with the French pilot landing at Algiers instead. Although Mollet and Lacoste were appalled, it was politically impossible to release the kidnapped leaders. The opportunity to exploit division between the colonels who ran ALN operations in Algeria and their external political representation was forfeit, since the imprisoned Ben Bella felt tricked and threw his considerable prestige behind the internal military leaders.
Worse was to follow. Massu’s Paras had been sent on the Anglo– French Suez escapade, mainly because the French had convinced themselves that Nasser was arming the FLN, whereas in reality his assistance was as modest in practice as it was extravagant in rhetoric. Not only did the failed Suez expedition lead Nasser to hand over to the FLN huge stocks of Lee Enfield rifles abandoned by the British, but the Suez debacle added a further grudge among professional soldiers against their government, to accompany the wound of Dien Bien Phu. This was a French version of the ‘stab in the back’ legend that undermined Weimar Gemany in the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, with frequent changes of government in Paris and long querulous intervals in between, the disgruntled military became the principal actors in Algeria, performing their own redemptive drama.12
Recapturing the Night
The French Commander-in-Chief in Algeria was General Raoul Salan, a fifty-eight-year-old five-star general and the most decorated soldier in the French army, whom we last saw in Indochina. He was of medium height, with a straight back and the profile of a Roman proconsul. Known as Le Chinois, his skin had a jaundiced hue, which some attributed to opium smoked during nearly two decades in Asia, and he was also noted for an inscrutable, supposedly oriental serenity.
His immediate subordinate was the fifty-year-old General Massu, a tall, extremely fit man who went around with a pair of wolfhounds. His wife Suzanne called her husband ‘Cro Magnon Man’. His motto was ‘When you are not fighting, you’re training.’ While Massu used his 6,000-strong 10th Parachute Division to crush the FLN in Algiers, his wife went about doing good deeds among the Muslims, adopting two Arab orphans as part of the Massu family. She was also responsible for a decree issued by her husband that the troops should no longer use the familiar tu when speaking to Arabs.
Most of the fighting in Algeria took place out in the bled, the scrub- and rock-strewn mountains of Aurès and Kabylia. The French army brought a variety of experiences to the conflict, with tactics determined as much by institutional tradition and individual psychology as by painfully acquired tactical doctrine on a case-by-case basis. Not for nothing has a recent study of counter-insurgency warfare or COIN compared it to attempting to eat soup with a knife.13
The French counter-insurgency warfare expert, David Galula, last encountered with the People’s Liberation Army in China, and then as an observer in Malaya and the Philippines, was stationed in Algeria from 1956 onwards as a battalion commander in the predominantly Berber Kabylia region. French strategy for dealing with FLN hit-and-run tactics in open country included attempting to interdict the flow of weapons and men across the open border with Tunisia, while a grid system was imposed on Algeria itself. Some field commanders, including Galula, sought to exploit in-depth knowledge of local society to win the hearts and minds of uncommitted Muslims. The army had to work with the grain of village society, notably the councils of elders which were prominent in Kabylia, through whom French orders and Muslim grievances were mediated. Anyone using cigarettes or alcohol were another potential ally, given that the FLN cut the throats of those found using either.
Galula identified former members of the French armed forces as possible counters to the covert FLN apparatus, and contrived tests of wills, including making individual householders responsible for anti-FLN posters, which the guerrillas would deface or tear down. A compulsory census enabled the French to pin down the population by name and residence, making it easier to identify suspicious strangers. More and more information on each inhabitant of a village was added to index cards by way of what anthropologists call ‘thick description’. This enabled Galula to identify the FLN’s peripatetic tax collectors and extortionists. Building on his own experience of detention by the PLA in China, Galula believed in trying to turn captured insurgents, although he was not above locking them inside a dark bread oven to focus their minds. Physical improvements to the villagers’ miserable lives were also important, notably rudimentary health clinics or schools which educated girls up to the age of thirteen, when they customarily married.14
As in many counter-insurgency wars, this quasi-anthropological approach (which has no greater success rate than any other) had to be undertaken in an overall institutional culture which rewarded naked aggression with decorations and promotions, and in which the warrior ethos was paramount. In the Constantine area, the Indochina veteran General André Beaufre divided his territory into densely occupied zones de pacification, where the population was subject to indoctrination allied with improvements to their quality of life, and zones d’interdites, from which the population was cleared to make it a free-fire zone, which was to be repeated on a larger-scale version by the air force General Maurice Challe a few years later.
For most of the twentieth century, following the discrediting of militarism by the fin de siècle Dreyf
us Affair, in which a Jewish officer had falsely been convicted of treason, the army was known as ‘the Great Mute’, because of its ostentatious eschewal of grubby politics. The war in Algeria brought nearer to home praetorian features already evident from the war in Indochina. The elite French troops were warriors pure and simple. The most feared formations deployed in Algeria were the red-bereted colonial parachute regiments and the green-bereted Foreign Legion, with recent service in Indochina.
One of the most outstanding commanders was Colonel Marcel Bigeard, the son of a railway worker from Toul who had left school aged fourteen. After a good war, by the early 1950s he was commander of a colonial parachute battalion, which in 1954 was dropped into Dien Bien Phu. He led the defence of the hills Eliane 1 and 2, and survived six months of captivity by the Viet Minh. On arrival in Algeria he weeded out misfits and then took his troops on a two-month training expedition into the bled, from which they returned super-fit and wearing long-peaked sun caps, which led to the appellation ‘lizards’. Bigeard was a tall man with a big nose, a shaven head and extremely powerful hands. In July 1956 he was shot in the chest while on operations near the city of Bône. No sooner had he recovered than in September he was shot in the back while jogging by the city’s harbour. Bleeding from wounds near the liver and in his right arm, he tried to stop a car. The colon driver sped off, saying ‘You’ll stain my seat.’15
By early 1957 the atmosphere in the Algerian capital was febrile. In mid-January, settler extremists attempted to kill Salan by firing a bazooka into his office. His chief aide was killed and Salan’s ten-year-old daughter Dominique was hit by flying glass as she did her homework in the flat above. The reason for the attack was that the settlers had convinced themselves that Salan had been sent to Algeria to organize withdrawal.
Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965 Page 39
