A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (102 page)

Meanwhile, in Madrid what threatened to be a rival command to the O.A.S. had set itself up, calling itself the “Direction Centrale de l’O.A.S.” and centred around Colonels Argoud and Lacheroy, and Pierre Lagaillarde. In a letter to Salan in August, Argoud extravagantly declared that the Algerian problem could not be resolved in Algeria; its solution was “global and governmental”. Salan replied by calling for Argoud to rejoin him in Algiers; Argoud’s answer was that Salan’s place was behind a safe frontier — he should come to Spain. On 2 September Salan tried to bring an end to all these divisions within the O.A.S. by issuing an “Instruction Particulière No. 1”. For the first time it recognised the existence of the “O.A.S./Métropole” organisation which Captain Sergent had left Algiers to set up in June.

At the same time, Salan designated under the code-name of “Verdun” a much more senior officer to be military leader of the O.A.S. in France. Then, almost immediately, there had followed the arrest of courier Gingembre, with all his incriminating despatches. “Verdun” — the code-name which Salan gave General Vanuxem, although in fact he had declined the O.A.S.’s tap on the shoulder — was arrested, together with most of the potential and actual network of “O.A.S./Métropole”. Sergent himself was identified and forced to go into deep cover, thereby severely curtailing his activities. On top of this, there were the various independent terrorist groupings affiliated with the O.A.S., but who neither informed Sergent of their operations nor took orders from him.[
6
] Predominant among these was the “Old General Staff” gang headed by the youthful renegade colonel, Bastien-Thiry, dedicated to the assassination of de Gaulle. On 8 September, the day after Gingembre’s arrest, Bastien-Thiry executed the most spectacular attempt to date, exploding a huge mine of plastic explosive and napalm at Pont-sur-Seine as de Gaulle’s Citroën passed on his way home to Colombey. Supplied from old Resistance stock, the explosive had deteriorated and evidently failed to detonate properly; de Gaulle’s chauffeur, handling the slewing car with exceptional skill, drove through the sheet of flame somehow managing to keep on the road. Though Sergent was totally ignorant of the plan, the O.A.S. was naturally held responsible for the outrage — lending an additional impetus to the mass arrest of suspects.[
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]

In sum, none of these factors in any way helped Sergent in his work. There were two further disadvantages; he himself, as a mere captain, was of insufficient stature to provide effective leadership; secondly, France — in sharp contrast to the cities of Algeria with their sympathetic
pieds noirs
— was a basically hostile territory in which to operate, becoming progressively more hostile as O.A.S. activities proliferated.

The O.A.S. in France

Accepting that from the beginning the dice were loaded against him, Sergent reckoned that “our only chance to swing in our favour a significant section of metropolitan opinion is to create a situation obliging the regime to react violently and discredit itself”. It was the traditional formula of the modern revolutionary terrorist, whether Tupamaros or Baader-Meinhof, and — as so often happens — it was to produce quite the opposite results from those desired by Sergent. Over the six months, culminating in February, that the main O.A.S. offensive in France lasted, it was to do as much as anything else to tilt French sympathies
towards
de Gaulle’s acceptance of a precipitate withdrawal from Algeria. Even without the O.A.S., an atmosphere of violence had been mounting in France, created between the police (now reinforced by
harkis
) and the Algerian community, which in itself had been progressively alienating liberal opinion. During 1961, in this savage little war no less than sixteen police were killed and forty-five wounded, most of them during the months of August and September. The police reacted with parallel brutality; according to Vidal-Naquet, “dozens of Algerians were thrown into the Seine and others were found hanged in the woods round Paris”. The
gégène
made its ugly appearance on the Parisian scene, and by January 1962
France-Soir
was lamenting that there was “something wrong with justice” as indicted torturers repeatedly escaped sentence. In mid-October 1961 some 25,000 Algerian workers from the
bidonvilles
(undoubtedly activated by the F.L.N.) had launched a mass demonstration against the harsh curfew and repressive measures imposed on them by the government. Though unarmed and reasonably pacific, the demonstrators were broken up by the police with a disproportionate violence that was shocking to Parisians. It was these already muddy waters that Sergent and his O.A.S. cells had now begun to stir.

With their limited resources, the first operations of the O.A.S./Métropole had a somewhat boy scout flavour about them — especially compared with the handiwork of Degueldre’s Deltas in Algiers. Walls were covered with graffiti by night; fairly ineffectual bombs were placed to damage property while scrupulously avoiding any possible injury to life or limb; menacing letters were despatched to extort funds. But these last backfired more often than not, as when a letter demanding five million (old) francs from Brigitte Bardot simply ended up in
L’Express
accompanied by an indignant declaration: “for me, I’m not going along, because I don’t want to live in a Nazi country”. Already in September, says Sergent, he had given orders to cease all
plastiques
, because their “psychological effect could turn against us”. He dreaded “the accident which was going to cost the life of an innocent, a woman or a child”. But, rather pathetically, he claims: “We were not obeyed.” The bombings continued, and from here on it is extremely unclear as to who was actually responsible for each incident. In November the biggest bomb to date wrecked the “Drugstore” on the Champs Elysées, the aroma of scent from its smashed stocks lingering fragrantly on the pavement for some time afterwards. In December it was the turn of the newspapers;
France-Soir
was bombed, provoking little more than an editorial demanding “the French population has a right to be protected”; the editor-in-chief of
Le Figaro
was
plastiqué
twice. The black-and-white flag of the O.A.S. was impudently hoisted three times in a single day from the Gothic pinnacles of the Hôtel de Ville; but meanwhile, undeterred by the occasional blasting of masonry, de Gaulle all contemptuous went ahead with the meticulous cleaning of the façade of the Place de la Concorde, stage-managed by André Malraux.

“Le Monocle” steps up the bombings

At the beginning of December Sergent received an unexpected visit from an individual introducing himself under the pseudonym of “Le Monocle” (which Sergent regarded as absurdly melodramatic — and which also happened to be the name of the leading lesbian night-club of Paris in vogue at the time). His real name was André Canal, and it was his associates who had been responsible for the killing of Maître Popie before the O.A.S. had received its definitive form. Canal was a compact and muscular Frenchman in his mid-forties who had settled in Algiers in 1940 and made a fortune out of sanitary equipment. A car accident had caused the loss of his left eye, where he now wore a black monocle. To Sergent’s rage, “Le Monocle” presented his credentials in the form of a “Decision No. 14”, signed by Salan, in which the bearer was placed in charge of “France III” with the mission to “co-ordinate all the networks currently existing under the title of the O.A.S.” “Decision No. 14” ended: “All those who will not wish to place themselves under his authority, i.e. under mine, place themselves as a result outside the O.A.S.” Specifically, “Le Monocle” was to step up the tempo of the war in France. Sergent at once challenged his authority; nevertheless, under the impetus of “Le Monocle”, the bombings forthwith attained a new peak. From now on a state of rivalry bordering on open warfare would exist between Sergent’s and Canal’s groups, with each going its own way. Yet another division had opened up in the ranks of the O.A.S., and as far as the movement in France was concerned it spelled total anarchy.

Stung into greater activity by the challenge of “Le Monocle”, Sergent at the beginning of January launched into a fresh offensive; this time against the Communists. Sergent’s reasoning, echoing the self-deception that had haunted the French army all the way through the Algerian war, was that ever since 1954 the Communists had never ceased to be the principal ally of the F.L.N., and now “to live in peace with French Communism while carrying on the war with the Algerian rebels was and remains a nonsense or a treason”. A second, and perhaps even more naïve aim, was to force the Gaullists into an impossible position of either choosing to tolerate the angry reactions of the French Communist Party when attacked by the O.A.S., thus appearing as its accomplice, or to confront it and risk a breach with the Left. On 3 January a former leader of the Communist Party of Algeria was shot down at Alençon; the following day, one of Sergent’s commandos — profiting from a recent windfall of arms gained when a defecting army lieutenant had brought with him all his platoon’s weapons — machined-gunned French Communist Party headquarters in the Place Kossuth. Simultaneously, bombings were carried out on the private residences of party functionaries; but Sergent was disappointed because, for the time being, the Communists refused to react.

The fatal error: Delphine Renard

Later in January there was another sharp confrontation between Sergent and “Le Monocle”, at which Sergent claims he warned his rival that his operations were going to bring disaster upon the whole organisation, “because you will end by killing a woman or a child”. “Le Monocle” left, promising to exercise more moderation. But the very next night Sergent was enraged to learn that the rival gang had indulged in a “festival of
plastique
”, setting off no less than eighteen bombs. Dubbed
la nuit bleue
by the Paris Press, though no one was killed, it was the worst outbreak of bombings to date. The following week saw another thirteen bombings, in celebration of the second anniversary of “the Barricades”. Among them, on 22 January, was a bomb set off in the Quai d’Orsay, which killed one employee and wounded twelve others, the most lethal incident in the O.A.S. campaign in France so far. Plans captured by the Paris police enabled them to forestall, just in time, attempts to dynamite the Eiffel Tower and to explode another series of forty-eight bombs. But otherwise, as in Algiers, the metropolitan police showed an extraordinary lethargy in arresting any of the terrorist leaders. A savage cartoon in
Le Canard Enchainé
depicted de Gaulle sleepwalking over the roofs of Paris while, to a crowd below waving banners of “Stop the O.A.S.!” and “O.A.S. Assassins!”, Premier Debré whispers, “Quiet! You will wake him.” By now the French public was becoming thoroughly fed up with the O.A.S., and it would require but one more outrage for something to snap. There now occurred what Sergent claims he had repeatedly warned against.

The bombings had continued against writers and leaders of the Left — in fact, all those considered to be anti-
Algérie française
— with increasing tempo and increasing incompetence. A bomb destined for Jean-Paul Sartre’s apartment on the Rue Bonaparte was placed on the wrong floor; Sartre’s front door was torn off its hinges, but the apartments on the floor above were totally wrecked. On the morning of 7 February, among ten other bombings that day, an O.A.S. commando set out to bomb the Boulogne-sur-Seine home of André Malraux, de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture. Malraux lived upstairs, and anyway was absent that day. The
plastique
was detonated on the ground floor, close to where a four-year-old child, Delphine Renard, was playing with her dolls. It drove splinters of glass from the windows into her face, blinding her in one eye and threatening the sight of the other, and painfully disfiguring her. Although the atrocity against Delphine would have been regarded as little more than an everyday event in contemporary Algiers, and would probably have soon been forgotten even in London of the 1970s under the far more brutal bombing outrages of the I.R.A., in the less hardened Paris of 1962 it provoked a wave of horror and condemnation of the O.A.S. Even the normally pro-
Algérie française
French newspapers ran huge blow-ups of little Delphine’s bloodied face and her shattered nursery. “France Wants No More of This”, intoned one editorial headline. It was the last straw; as Pierre Sergent admits: “I felt that something had definitely broken between public opinion in France and the Organisation.”[
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]

Massacre in the Métro

The next day the Parisian Left exploded in rage. A demonstration was hastily organised to take place at the Bastille. Perhaps mistakenly, the Minister of the Interior, Roger Frey, refused to lift the ban currently in force on all political gatherings, but some 10,000 demonstrators gathered nevertheless. Chanting
“O.-A.-S. As-sas-sins!”
the crowd was in an angry mood — as much against the authorities for allowing such outrages as the bombing of Delphine to occur unpunished as against the O.A.S. The police were nervous; and, as often occurs in France, when nervous they overreact. For two or three hours there were skirmishes of clubbing as the police tried to herd the demonstrators away from the Bastille. Then, without warning, they charged. In panic, some of the demonstrators tried to seek refuge down the stairs to the Charonne Métro station, but found the gates locked. The police now appeared to go quite berserk, hurling demonstrators bodily over the railing on top of the trapped mob below, and then followed this up by heaving heavy iron tree-guards and marble-topped café tables down on to the terror-struck melée. When it was all over eight dead were picked up — including three women and a sixteen-year-old boy employed by
L’Humanité
. Over 100 were injured; but the police also suffered 140 casualties. On the following Tuesday, 13 February, a silent and solemn procession bearing wreaths and estimated at half a million strong marched behind the eight coffins to Père Lachaise cemetery, the sanctum of the martyrs of the French Left from the Commune of 1871 onwards. Nothing like it had been seen in Paris since the bloody days of civil revolt of February 1934; some reckoned the funeral procession to be the biggest street turnout since the Liberation. In a surfeit of emotion, Simone de Beauvoir remarked to herself, “My God! How I hated the French!” But the sense of outrage and wearied disgust at the Delphine Renard and Charonne incidents, and at the ever-escalating O.A.S. horrors in Algíers, was no longer limited to just the French Left. The crisis in the Algerian war had been reached in metropolitan France.
Algérie française
was all but dead — killed by the O.A.S. Almost universally there was a feeling: “
Il faut en finir!”