With the Tunisians besieging the French troops permitted to remain in the country after independence, the US offered to mediate. The Francophobe Robert Murphy represented the US, along with Harold Beeley of the British Foreign Office. It became apparent that Murphy was hoping to lever the FLN into the picture, expanding these talks into peace negotiations between the FLN and French. When in April 1958 the French government presented a much modified version of the US proposal to the National Assembly, it was defeated and forced to resign. The last but one of twenty-one governments since 1947 was formed on 16 May 1958. The last came just over two weeks later, when de Gaulle returned to power to wind up the hapless Fourth Republic.
The colons were caught in a crossfire. An increasingly fashionable Third World voice was the Martinique psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon, who served the FLN in a field hospital. On the basis of observing his own psychiatric patients, Fanon claimed that colonialism was responsible for crippling mental disorders, which could be purged only by the victims unleashing savage violence. In 1957 France’s greatest public intellectual, the Sorbonne sociologist and Figaro columnist Raymond Aron, openly questioned the value of overseas colonies, other than as a source of false pride, when the sums they were costing could have been better invested in modernizing France. He saw that Algerian nationalism was a passion, which was not susceptible to reasonable compromise. Besides, if France continued to cling on in Algeria, while making political concessions to the Muslims, the exponential rate of Muslim population growth would ultimately impact on politics within France itself. Two years later Aron was despatched to Washington to argue, to little effect, that the US should more fully commit to the French war effort, to avoid Fascist praetorians using Algeria to take over France itself.25
Resurrection?
The last governments of the Fourth Republic seemed to the American observer Cyrus Sulzberger to be practising gymnastics rather than ruling. Events in Algeria swept them away. An anti-government conspiracy was coalescing which truly menaced the regime. It consisted of disgruntled professional soldiers, soured by Indochina and Suez, Gaullist (and Pétainist) war veterans, supporters of Poujade and those whose persuasion was even further to the Fascist and anti-Semitic right. A young law student union activist turned Foreign Legionnaire called Jean-Marie Le Pen was an early Poujadist deputy, and a vocal supporter of Algérie française. This opposition to the Fourth Republic had links with some of de Gaulle’s most prominent political ‘barons’, men like Michel Debré, Jacques Chaban-Delmas and Jacques Soustelle, the former Governor-General, who found himself watched by up to ten secret policemen at a time to prevent his return to Algeria.
The object of their devotions was not in top shape: de Gaulle’s eyesight was dimming, he broke an arm in a fall, and he had fleshed out; but he was still an outstanding political poker player. He had little time for political soldiers since, apart from his own, he did not rate the intelligence or political acumen of generals. His views on Algeria depended on whether or not his policies succeeded or failed, and relied on deft use of innuendo which political innocents might mistake for firm pledges.26 In reality, De Gaulle used the colons and their military supporters in a temporary coincidence of interests which brought him back to power. They only gradually realized that they had been tricked.
After coming to power de Gaulle told the colons, from the balcony of the Governor-General’s residence in Algiers on 4 June 1958, ‘I have understood you.’ This could be, and was, interpreted to mean ‘I agree with you.’ At Mostaganem a few days later he grudgingly uttered, for the first and last time, the potent slogan ‘Vive l’Algérie française.’ In private, while he acknowledged the venerability of Moroccan or Tunisian statehood, his view was that Algeria had never been more than ‘a heap of dust’ (poussière). His initial policies suggest that he wanted to retain Algeria for France.27 But as time passed he became coldly realistic, realizing that it was a financial drain on France in an age when nuclear bombs rather than colourfully uniformed colonial soldiers were the true index of national power. Algeria rendered its last service to French military gloire on 13 February 1960, when France successfully tested its first nuclear bomb in the Sahara. Atmospheric tests continued there until independence, and underground tests until 1966.
For France to regain what de Gaulle believed with religious fervour was its historic mission in the world, outmoded burdens like Algeria had to be shed, particularly as integration meant swamping metropolitan France with Arab immigrants. For the essence of Gaullism was to restore France to the first rank of nations and to deliver it from ‘subordination’ to an Anglo-Saxon-dominated NATO. In June 1960 he said: ‘It is altogether natural to feel nostalgia for what empire was, just as one may yearn for the soft light of oil lamps, the splendour of the sailing ship navy, the charm of the horse and buggy era. But what of it? No policy is valid apart from the realities.’28 The ease with which he made the transition is partly to be explained by his origins and outlook. He had never served in North or sub-Saharan Africa, or Indochina, though he had been in Lebanon and Syria during the 1930s and had close wartime knowledge of French possessions in West and Equatorial sub-Saharan Africa. He was a man of Lorraine, and German was the only foreign language he spoke.29 He certainly did not speak the sing-song language of Algeria’s meridional colon demagogues and ended up hating them. ‘They are not French,’ he said. ‘They do not think like us.’30 Nor did he relish the prospect of his beloved home town of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises becoming Colombey-les-Deux-Moschées.31
What he thought did not matter much until he was in power, put there by soldiers who did not like or trust him. On 9 May 1958 the FLN announced that it had executed three French prisoners of war it had held for eighteen months. Angry settlers called for a massive demonstration to coincide with the formal inauguration of Pierre Pflimlin’s ephemeral new government in Paris. On the same day, the four senior army commanders in Algeria, who included Salan and the Admiral commanding the navy, gave Governor-General Robert Lacoste a text to transmit to the Chief of Staff Paul Ely, warning that ‘the French Army would, to a man, consider the surrender of this part of the national heritage to be an outrage’. On the 13 May a vast crowd of colons made its way to the administrative centre of Algiers, sacking the American Culture Center en route. Cars streamed into the city, honking their horns to mimic the cry of AL-GÉR-IE FRAN-ÇAIS. They used a truck to force the iron gates of the seat of government, bursting into its offices and throwing the contents of filing cabinets out the windows. Armed paratroopers did nothing to stop them. The unpopular Salan and the highly popular Massu appeared and announced a committee of public safety. This eventually included seventy-four members, including three token Muslims to represent nine million of their co-religionists. Salan cabled Paris, ‘The responsible military authorities consider it an imperative necessity to appeal to a national arbiter with a view to constituting a government of public safety . . . A call for calm by this senior authority is alone capable of re-establishing the situation.’ Remarkably, 30,000 Muslims joined the demonstrations in an open display of unity that belies the FLN’s narrative of these events.
De Gaulle took advantage of what was almost but not quite a military coup, while never aligning himself explicitly with the mutinous soldiers or the frantic colons.32 Two vocal camps were marshalling their forces, one in Algiers and the other on the streets of Paris, where a brief revival of the ‘they shall not pass’ spirit among the left restored some of the government’s missing courage. Instead of capitulating Pflimlin won a vote of confidence in the National Assembly, which left the rebels in Algiers facing the prospect of charges of seditious mutiny, although Pflimlin confused things by conferring full local powers on Salan.
As for de Gaulle, on a visit to Paris he was asked about events in Algeria. ‘What events?’ he coolly replied. Although Salan did not care for de Gaulle, on 15 May he was encouraged to add ‘Et vive de Gaulle’ to the patriotic litany he declaimed from an Algiers bal
cony. This resulted in an expression of willingness to assume power from Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises. De Gaulle benefited from Pflimlin’s reluctance to risk full-blown civil war, which seemed real enough. There were well-founded rumours of paratroopers being flown from Algiers to metropolitan France, where they would join with other mutinous formations in Toulouse who were similarly bent on overthrowing the government. Crafted by Massu, the operation was initially codenamed Grenade until a phrase in a speech by de Gaulle on 19 May afforded Operation Resurrection.
While the government filled Parisian boulevards with trucks loaded with black-clad riot policemen, and opened internment camps for right-wingers in Languedoc, de Gaulle grandly announced: ‘I am the man who belongs to no one and belongs to everyone.’ He posed as a Gallic Cincinnatus, reluctantly dragged from his rustic idyll to save France. Affirming that at sixty-seven he was too old to play the dictator, he signalled his readiness to take power if it were formally ceded to him by a government whose writ was atrophying by the day. His pitch allayed US fears that he would lead a coup, although Washington took the precaution of explicitly warning the military leaders in Algeria that it would support Morocco and Tunisia against any attack, even one purporting to be in pursuit of FLN guerrillas.
Possibly there was such a plan, but instead the revolt spread to garrisons in Corsica, bringing the threat very much closer to France. The government’s nerve cracked and Pflimlin tendered his conditional resignation. Neither the Assembly nor a sizeable public demonstration by defenders of the Republic indicated that de Gaulle was on the home run. Indeed, when a deputation of senior Assembly figures met him they rejected his demands for a simple transfer of authority, prompting him to return to Lorraine with a Parthian shot: ‘If parliament agrees with you I will have no alternative but to leave you to have things out with the parachutists and go back into retirement, with grief as my companion.’33 President René Coty was not prepared to run the risk and announced his readiness to call on de Gaulle to save France from civil war. De Gaulle had been quietly cultivating Socialist deputies such as the former Prime Minister Guy Mollet, and on 1 June 1958 a majority of 320 to 224 deputies in the Assembly confirmed his appointment as prime minister. De Gaulle’s supporters had no less quietly established the goodwill of the Eisenhower administration, even as the CIA station in Algiers was reporting rebel troop movements to the Pflimlin government. On 3 June the Assembly voted the new government the authority to draft a new constitution, and another law granted it the power to rule by decree for up to six months, except on matters related to the basic rights of citizens. The new, presidential constitution was overwhelmingly approved in a referendum on 28 September and the Fifth Republic came into being on 4 October.
Throughout, de Gaulle said a minimum about Algeria. During his 4 June trip to Algiers, the first of five, he contrived (as we have seen) to leave the colons, the Muslims and the army with the pacifying impression that he ‘understood’ them. He confirmed Salan as delegate-general and commander-in-chief in Algeria, then ‘promoted’ him to inspector-general before forcing him into early retirement. Salan was replaced by the air force General Maurice Challe, and Massu was appointed prefect of Algiers.
Challe embarked on the most ruthless attempt yet to extirpate the FLN. Instead of merely responding to each FLN incident, he focused his forces on a sector at a time, pinning down ALN units and using air power and mobile reserves to pulverize them. He recruited large numbers of indigenous harkis to lend local expertise to the fight. Their logic was irrefutable. As one harki explained:
You get up one morning and you discover that your neighbour has had his throat cut during the night. You, you know him, your neighbour, for a long time. You do not understand why he has been killed. You understand only that you must not ask questions. So, in the beginning, you say to reassure yourself: ‘It is astonishing but the moudjahidin know undoubtedly what they are doing. The men killed were perhaps playing a double game.’ And then after a while, with all these deaths, the old people, the youngsters of fifteen or sixteen years of age, you say to yourself there is something not right here, that tomorrow it could be your turn, like that, for nothing.34
The ALN body count rose dramatically, although that was an unreliable index of progress. At the same time huge areas were denuded of their inhabitants, corralled in strategic settlements to enable the army to kill at will anyone remaining. The carrot took the form of the simultaneous Constantine Plan, in which billions of francs of investment would build industry and infrastructure. The idea was to create 400,000 new jobs in four years, including a giant oil refinery and steel mill. Homes for a million people were to be built. The entire scheme was to be run by a committee of European and Muslim experts, but it depended on private sector French investment, which was not forthcoming. There was therefore an imbalance between extremely costly military operations – some of which involved up to 25,000 troops operating in the field – and a failed hearts-and-minds campaign.
The New York Times correspondent Cyrus Sulzberger visited Algeria in March 1959, affording vivid snapshots of ordinary people in each camp or none. He met an elderly colon, whose farmhouse amid 200 acres resembled an armed camp. Up on a hill, the farmer gestured: ‘See there: burned. Over there, burned and the vineyards cut. And there, burned; the owner égorgé (his throat cut). In that field my neighbour was égorgé while he was working, just two years ago. Last week an officer was shot on this slope. That farm was burned one Sunday while the patron played at bowls. There is my nephew’s farm, burned. And we have been here since 1858.’
Sulzberger asked him why he stayed: ‘Some call us oppressors, feudal lords, exploiters . . . this is false. My Moslems like me, but they are archaic and need a tribal leader, me. They are like tractors or like donkeys. You must mount them to make them work. Otherwise they do nothing. They don’t plant trees; they cut them; they let their goats devour saplings and move on . . . We are the pioneers who understand and made this country. Our bones are in its cemeteries.’35
The American journalist next visited the gourbi or peasant hut of a Muslim family. The man’s chief worry was having enough food. He was plagued by ALN mujahedeen who threatened to cut throats if they did not receive free provisions. If he obliged, they would be plagued in turn by the harkis, the irregulars employed by the French, but this would virtually guarantee that the mujahedeen would one night cut their throats. ‘Nobody leaves us alone,’ said the farmer. Finally Sulzberger spent a night with some tough-looking boys from a guerrilla unit. They were capable of marching forty miles a night, for they had to lie up to avoid spotter planes by day. Every man had a personal reason to fight the French, from having taken part in a strike to seeing a French patrol kill his entire family. A sergeant explained: ‘We have paid a great price for our liberty. But we thirst for human dignity and freedom. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can defeat us.’ Both the French army and the FLN were agreed on one point: too much blood had been sacrificed to throw in the towel.36
Though by mid-1959 the ALN appeared to be a shadow of its former self after the pummelling it had taken from Challe, this was misleading since the FLN had become a major diplomatic presence on the world stage. Moreover, de Gaulle’s abandonment of closer integration of Algeria as future policy created the impression that he was preparing to give Algeria independence. In a national radio address delivered on 16 September 1959, de Gaulle unequivocally offered Algerians self-determination, he hoped in future association with France. This was followed by a mass amnesty for nationalist prisoners and the commutation of all death sentences.37
This tipped the more extreme colons over the edge, with elements in the armed forces eager to follow them. When in January 1960 General Massu made some disloyal comments to a German journalist, de Gaulle had him transferred to France. Organized colon groups responded by attempting to bring Algiers to a halt. Ominously, elements of the Colonial Parachute Division colluded in this so-called Barricades Week by opposing the riot polic
e sent to break it. For a week a colon mob occupied the heart of government in the capital.38 While de Gaulle said nothing in public to indicate his ultimate choices, if he had to choose between Algeria plunging France into civil war and splitting the army, or letting Algeria go, he would choose the last. By spring 1960 a military putsch had found its leaders: active General André Zeller and air force General Edmond Jouhaud – and Salan. After retiring to Algeria, a series of provocative public statements led to Salan’s expulsion and exile in Franco’s Spain, home to many unrepentant Nazis and Fascists. Although the Franco regime was usually careful to maintain good relations with France because of the threat posed by a large number of Spanish Republican and Basque exiles on the other side of the Pyrenees, it was Franco’s brother-in-law Ramón Serrano Suñer who smuggled Salan out of his hotel and back to Algiers.
The crucial recruit to the putsch was Challe, who had been unjustly forced into early retirement for being too popular with the troops. He became the rallying figurehead for the mutinous colonels and captains who spearheaded the putsch. Like the rest, he had little understanding of politics or even of normal civilian life. Such intelligence, in both senses of the word, possessed by the plotters was supplied by ex-Para Yves Godard, Director-General of the Sûreté in Algeria, who had been Massu’s indispensable chief of staff during the battle of Algiers. When, in April 1960, de Gaulle presented a cost-benefit case for abandoning Algeria, the plotters deplored his ‘shopkeeper’s approach’. But by now their political aims went far beyond Algeria. They wanted to halt France’s slide into decadence, its reduction to medium-power status, and what they regarded as the spread of the red menace across the southern shore of the Mediterranean.39
De Gaulle played a complex game, fitfully insisting that he would not negotiate with the nationalists, whose leadership was torn between politicals led by Ferhat Abbas and military hardliners under Houari Boumédiène, with whom the imprisoned Ben Bella would eventually side. On 14 June 1960 de Gaulle spoke on television: ‘in the name of France, to the leaders of the insurrection. I declare to them that we await them here to find with them an honourable end to the fighting that drags on.’ Although the French army had scored many notable successes against the ALN, de Gaulle knew that the FLN was fully supported by Moscow and Beijing and that Boumédiène was committed to a long war of attrition, using cross-border artillery and mortar attacks to keep large numbers of French troops pinned down on the Tunisian frontier, while the ALN in the Algerian interior avoided combat. In the major cities, there were just enough terrorist attacks to keep the colons and any would-be Muslim collaborators in a state of insecurity.
Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965 Page 41
