A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (12 page)

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 south 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.

The Jews

There remains, finally, one other important minority group to be identified — the Jews of Algeria. Comprising approximately one-fifth of the non-Muslim population, they — rather like the unhappy Asians of East Africa — tended to find themselves in the tragic position of being caught between two fires: between the European and the Muslim world. Many could trace back their antecedents to the expulsions from sixteenth-century Spain; some even claimed them to pre-date the invaders who had surged out of the Arabian peninsula during the eleventh century. Thus they could argue that only relatively were they later arrivals than the Muslims. However, by 1830 the Algerian Jews had become an under-privileged community, fallen into backward squalor, and the advent of the French gave them an opportunity to improve their status. The Crémieux Decrees of 1870, conferring automatic French citizenship, attracted more prosperous Jews from outside Algeria; while at the same time they provoked a sense of unfair prejudice among Muslims. However, it was not the Muslims but the Catholic Maltese, Spanish and Italian
pieds noirs
who, at the turn of the century, launched a minor pogrom against the Jews, smashing up their shops in protest against the competition of this new class of
petits commerçants
. (Analysing the various degrees of disdain in Algeria, a
pied noir
journalist, Albert-Paul Lentin, observed how “the Frenchman despises the Spaniard, who despises the Italian, who despises the Maltese, who despises the Jew; all in turn despising the Arab.” In the Second World War, Pétain’s anti-Semitic regime repealed the Crémieux Decrees, and Jewish teachers and children alike were summarily flung out of European schools; the whole community was menaced with deportation to Nazi camps.[
3
] Yet during all this time (so several Algerian Jews averred to the author), there was barely a breath of anti-Semitism from any Muslim quarter. By the 1950s the Algerian Jews were tugged in several directions; the least privileged tended still to identify themselves with the Muslims rather than the
pieds noirs
, and many were members of the Communist Party, while the wealthiest had developed distinctly Parisian orientations. Perhaps typical of the latter was Marcel Belaiche, who had inherited a large property fortune from his father; politically, however, he leaned strongly towards the liberal camps of both Chevallier and Ferhat Abbas, and away from the Borgeauds and Schiaffinos. After 1954 a significant proportion of the Jewish intellectual and professional classes was to side with the F.L.N.

[
1
] Today a commemorative plaque is still kept attentively burnished, the Algerians counting the overthrow of Vichy by the Anglo-Americans an important milestone on the road to independence.

[
2
]
Bicot
, opprobrium of unknown meaning, or origin;
melon
, slang for “a simpleton”;
figuier
, “fig tree”, because the Algerian peasant allegedly spent his day sitting under its shade;
sale raton
, “dirty little rat”; hence, later, the odious expression
ratonnade
, rat-hunt, or Arab-killing (not to be confused with
ratissage
).

[
3
] Following the Anglo-American arrival in 1942 the Pétainist measures were swiftly reversed.

CHAPTER THREE
In the Middle of the Ford

In this admirable country in which a spring without equal covers it with flowers and its light, men are suffering hunger and demanding justice.

Albert Camus, 1958

France’s gift to Algeria — education

THERE was never a shortage of motives for political discontent among the Algerian Muslims to explain the Sétif explosion of 1945, but close behind them always lay equally cogent economic factors (and, associated with them, those of training and education). These were to become acutely aggravated between 1945 and 1954. Before one dissects the deficiencies, however, one needs briefly to pay tribute to the truly remarkable material achievements that France had wrought in Algeria during the course of her tenancy of a century and a quarter. Even a decade after the ending of France’s rule, a visitor to Algeria could not help but be impressed by the depth of the roots her civilisation left behind; an excellent network of roads often as good in quality as those of France, and over terrain as difficult as anywhere in the world; modern railways and airfields; great cities and a score of ports; electricity and gas and a (slightly less efficient) telecommunications system. She created a medical service and imposed standards of hygiene where none had existed. In agriculture, she increased the 2,000 cultivable square miles of 1830 to 27,000 in 1954; with her capital and know-how, she dug mines and set up vast industries that would not otherwise have existed; she provided jobs in France for several hundred thousand Algerian immigrant workers, and subsidised some eighty per cent of the country’s budget deficit.

Perhaps the greatest of France’s gifts to Algeria, however — as elsewhere in her sprawling empire, and, indeed, anywhere caressed by her culture — was education. And yet, paradoxically, both at its strongest as at its weakest points, French education tended to bolster her opponents at France’s expense. At its weakest, it was simply a matter of too few schools, too few teachers, and too little money to provide them. As far back as 1892, while the budget earmarked 2½ million francs for the schooling of European children, only 450,000 francs was allocated for the vastly more numerous and illiterate — and therefore more needy — Muslims. Over the years the situation showed little change; except that the numbers of the Muslims and their educational needs expanded ever more dramatically. By 1945, the picture was as follows:

Europeans: 200,000 children of school age at 1,400 primary schools.

Muslims: 1,250,000 children of school age at 699 primary schools.

By 1954 it was estimated that, of the Muslims, only one boy in five was attending school, and one in sixteen among girls (though in some country areas the ratio could rise as high as one in seventy); illiteracy (in French) was set at ninety-four per cent for the males, ninety-eight per cent for the females. Sometimes, also, the priorities of the funds actually spent on education looked bizarre; in 1939 Camus acidly criticised the construction in Kabylia of magnificent school buildings, costing the taxpayer up to one million francs apiece, yet seemingly designed chiefly to impress “tourists and commissions of enquiry”, and which, because of lack of space, had to turn away one in every five applicants.

Excellent as was the general standard of French education, its content sometimes struck Arabs and Berbers as painfully incongruous: as for instance the history text-books beginning “Our ancestors, the Gauls.…” And then they were sooner or later confronted by the inevitable factor of discrimination; Ahmed Ben Bella recalls that in his childhood at Marnia he “did not feel the difference between Frenchmen and Algerians as much as I later did at Tlemcen”, because in the first football teams were integrated, whereas in the latter Europeans and Muslims each had their own. The little French learning was also dangerous, in that it aroused a powerful appetite for more; and it threatened (because of economic problems) to create a class of “literate unemployed”. In words that could have applied to more than just education, an old Kabyle complained sadly to Germaine Tillion: “You’ve led us to the middle of the ford, and there you’ve left us.…”