A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (13 page)

Furthermore, with its traditional emphasis on the grandiose liberal principles of the “Great French Revolution”, French education could hardly help but divert perhaps otherwise passive minds to the nobility of revolt. M’hamed Yazid, one of the more intellectual F.L.N. leaders, notes that school heroes for his generation included Mustafa Kemal, Gandhi and the Irish rebels of the First World War. At their best, the French schools provided an admirable breeding ground for revolutionary minds. In a novel by Mourad Bourboune,
Le Mont des Genêts
(1962), a French official tells a young Muslim
évolué
that he is now too French to continue to wear a burnous, and receives the devastating reply: “It’s not with you but against you that we are learning your language.”

The shrinking land
…

Without schools you cannot have industrialisation and, for all French endeavours to this end, agriculture remained the mainstay of Algerian life. But, successful as French technology had been at opening up new lands by drainage or irrigation, it continued to provide a precarious living of ever-diminishing returns. As the European slice of the cake grew, so, relatively speaking, the Muslim slice shrank. Since 1830 the area of cultivable land owned by Muslims had almost doubled; but the population trebled. In 1956 Germaine Tillion reckoned that the country could feed no more than “between two and three million”; and there were then almost nine million Muslims alone. By 1954 some twenty-five per cent of all the farming land was reputedly owned by only two per cent of the total agricultural population. (Of the country’s total wealth at that date, ninety per cent was accounted as held in the hands of ten per cent of the inhabitants.) With growing mechanisation and efficiency, whereas before the First World War over 200,000
pieds noirs
lived off the land, by 1954 the figure had sunk to 93,000; and, naturally, the numbers of Muslim labourers to whom they gave employment had shrunk correspondingly. At the same time, the size of the individual European holdings had increased markedly in size. In the Department of Oran alone, 750 Europeans owned between them 55,832 hectares, while on average the vineyard of Algeria was notably larger than its French counterpart. In contrast, as a result of hereditary governances, it was not unusual to find in over-populated Kabylia one fig tree owned by several families. The statistics (from reliable French sources) relating to the average Algerian farm holding in 1954 are eloquent:

The creation of the Algerian wine industry, following the phylloxera catastrophe in France, had only added to the agricultural imbalance. Although it had come to account for half of Algeria’s exports to France and had granted considerable economic power to the wine lobby (as personified by Senator Borgeaud), it hardly helped the economic predicament of the Muslims, providing him with but little steady work, and producing a crop which did not nourish him and offended his religion. After the Second World War acute and growing over-production set in, forcing the French treasury to intervene and subsidise surplus stocks, costing annually (according to
Le Monde
of 17 August 1955) a sum “equivalent to the total value of credits voted to Youth and Sports since 1946”.

The official Maspétiol Report of 1955, which deeply shocked the French government, revealed that nearly one million Muslims (or
one in nine
of the overall population) were totally or partially unemployed, and that another two million were seriously underemployed; in the country this meant that the agricultural worker worked no more than an average of
sixty-five days
a year — or
thirty-five days
if female labour were included in the reckoning. The human consequences of these bald statistics were devastating: before the war (admittedly in a time of famine) Camus had found in Kabylia families where only two out of ten children survived; he had seen children in Tizi-Ouzou fighting with dogs for the contents of a rubbish bin, and had reckoned that at least half the population was living on nothing but grass and roots. Since then, conditions had improved, but still a large proportion of the Kabyles could not support their large families on their meagre earnings, and lived themselves in grinding poverty at subsistence level. Malnutrition induces lethargy at work, which doubtless could to a large extent explain the commonly held
pied noir
notion that the Algerian worker was, by nature, indolent and idle.

When he was able to find a day’s work, the Algerian agricultural worker would often earn no more than 100 (old) francs a day (about 2
s
. or 22¢), and in other walks of life the prospects were not much rosier. For a Muslim average earnings throughout Algeria were estimated at 16,000 francs a year — whereas the European equivalent was 450,000 francs, or nearly thirty times as high. At the same time, the taxes he paid on his meagre pittance seemed unfairly weighted. It was reckoned that the 100,000 most impoverished Algerian families might be milked of twelve per cent of their incomes; while at the other end of the scale the 14,000 best off (of whom 10,000 were European), with incomes five times higher than the average for French families, were called upon to pay only twenty-nine per cent of earnings vastly larger than those of the Muslims. But at the same level in France they would have paid thirty-three per cent. Nevertheless, to escape from a life that held little prospect on the land, as in the poorer countries of Latin America the Algerian peasantry gravitated increasingly towards the cities. Here they found that nearly half of all available jobs in industry were firmly occupied by the
pied noir
eleven per cent, while twenty-five per cent of the urban Muslims were unemployed. The results were that during the twelve years between 1936 and 1948, as an example, the population of Algiers soared by forty-two per cent and with it the mushrooming of wretched
bidonvilles
and the simmering of new kinds of urban discontent.

The next logical haven for the agrarian jobless was France herself. The largest numbers came from Kabylia, the most overcrowded region of Algeria and where land-hunger had long been most acute; in 1912, only 5,000 Kabyles left for France; by 1924 they had risen to 100,000. But after 1945 economic adversity pushed the immigrant waves to new heights, and by the outbreak of the revolt the total of Algerian workers in France was over the half-million mark. Economically they were a godsend to Algeria; the wages they sent home equalled about a third of those of the whole agricultural labour force in Algeria, and at home they sustained some million and a half of otherwise indigent dependents. Equally, for France they provided a source of cheap labour for the work of reconstruction in the less agreeable tasks — such as road-building, ditch-digging and rail-laying — where a Frenchman might be more choosy. But usually they were forced to live in the worst city slums of Paris or Marseilles, in family-less celibacy and dispiriting isolation in overcrowded tenement houses. Their contacts with French life would often be limited to members of the Communist Party and other disgruntled proletarian militants, so that when they returned to Algeria they brought with them seeds of more coherent discontent, awaiting germination.

…
and exploding birthrate

The most ineradicable cause of all Algeria’s economic woes from 1945 onwards, the factor constantly nullifying any French ideal or scheme of improving things had one simple, insoluble root: the net Muslim birthrate. At the time of the conquest the indigenous population stood at somewhere less than three million; then a combination of war, disease and disastrous famine reduced it by fifty per cent. But by 1906 it had re-established itself at 4,478,000, and from then on it began to take off, as European medical prowess made its impact. Such population inhibitors as malaria, typhoid and typhus all but disappeared; infant mortality shrank to a percentage not far from that of metropolitan France; penicillin became known as “the drug that brings children”, for it stamped out venereal diseases causing sterility. According to figures cited by Robert Aron, if between 1830 and 1950 the population of France had risen at the same rate as that of Algeria, it would by then have reached more than 300 million. As it was, by 1954 the Muslim Algerians numbered nearly nine million, and were increasing in a geometrical progression. Over the previous twenty years the urban population had more than doubled, and it was reckoned that it would double again over the next twenty years — which, but for the war losses, it probably would have done.[
1
] With one of the highest net birthrates in the world, the Muslims were estimated to be breeding at
ten times
the rate of the
pieds noirs
— hence the very real basis of their fears of being demographically “swamped”, for they could reasonably reckon that, within the next generation, instead of representing eleven per cent of the total population they would have shrunk to a mere five per cent. Here also, by extension, lay one of the root sources of opposition in metropolitan France to a policy of “assimilation”, or “integration”; for, by the end of the twentieth century, what kind of France would there be if she were wedded inextricably to an Algeria by now of almost equal population, and increasing more rapidly, and with equal rights and representation in all her councils?

As a summing up on how Algerians viewed the material benefits bestowed on them by France in 1944, the words of Messali Hadj strike a relevant note: “The achievement of France is self-evident. It leaps to the eyes, and it would be unjust to deny it; but if the French have done a lot, they did it for themselves.” Or, phrased perhaps even more succinctly by a Frenchman, Robert Aron: “France did much for Algeria, too little for the Algerians.”

France distracted

But if she stands accused of doing “too little for the Algerians”, it would be only fair to consider the problems — beyond the ever-present nightmare of Algeria’s demographic explosion just discussed — confronting France from 1945 onwards. The world has become so accustomed to a strong, rich and politically stable France as it was under de Gaulle that it is easy to forget the prolonged malaises of the Fourth Republic (which in so many ways resembled those of Britain of the mid-1970s); equally one forgets her quite spectacular feats of reconstructing an economy gravely mauled by war, and of uniting a broken Europe. In 1945 de Gaulle warned his countrymen that it would take “a whole generation of furious work” to resuscitate the nation, and his estimate proved to be remarkably accurate. In his
Memoirs of Hope
he describes how “a few months after victory, the State was on its feet, unity re-established, hope revived, France in her place in Europe and the world”. But then, “the parties had reappeared, to all intents and purposes with the same names, the same illusions, and the same hangers-on as before. While displaying towards my person the respect which public opinion demanded, they lavished criticism on my policies.” Exasperated by the wheeling and dealing identical to that which had so disastrously undermined the Third Republic during the inter-war years, on 20 January 1946 he suddenly resigned the premiership with that hauteur, just tinged with the irresponsible, which characterised both his earlier and later career. He had not, he remarked with crushing causticity to one of his ministers, liberated France “to worry about the macaroni ration”.

Though, like its predecessor, the Fourth Republic was born as a consequence of military defeat by the Germans, the constitution it gave itself started with what looked like a bright enough image. Its preamble led off that: “It… solemnly reaffirms the rights and freedoms of man and citizen as set forth in the Declaration of Rights of 1789” and went on to declare that: “France, together with the overseas peoples, forms a Union founded upon equality of rights and of duties, without distinction of race or of religion.” France would, it stressed, “never employ its forces against the liberty of any people”. Yet already France was fighting the nastiest of all colonial wars, which would drag on for another eight weary and debilitating years, in Indo-China. Politically, the components of the new republic were unpromising from the very start; in the words of that highly astute American observer, Janet Flanner, it was “like a woman with three hands, two Left and one Right”. The former were constituted by the Socialists and the alarmingly powerful Communist Party, the latter by the Catholic, moderate conservative Mouvement Républicain Populaire (M.R.P.). In the running conflict between these elements, “whose simultaneous presence in government”, said the veteran Léon Blum, “is at once indispensable and impossible”, agreement on any decisive issue could seldom be reached. As de Gaulle justly complained, the old political life of the Third Republic resumed; governments came and went, twenty of them between 1945 and 1954; M. Pleven succeeded M. Queuille, who then replaced M. Pleven, who in turn pushed out M. Queuille — all in the space of thirteen months.

Strikes endlessly paralysed the economy; many were politically motivated, others sparked off by incredibly trivial causes. One such was the strike of August 1953, set off by two postmen who inadvertently did a Watergate on an incomplete draft of a government economic project which, they noticed, appeared specifically to omit postmen. They brought out all the postal workers who, twenty-four hours later, were followed in sympathy by two million other government employees. Soon four million Frenchmen were on strike, and the country was at a standstill. In a miraculous way, year after year, the farmers and the middle-classes, as well as the very rich, somehow avoided paying taxes with impunity. Inflation ran wild, resulting in a regular devaluation of the franc. In 1951 (so Edgar Faure, premier for just two months, told the Assembly), France’s cost of living rose thirty-nine per cent, compared with only twelve per cent in Britain, while spiralling prices and an overvalued currency had dragged exports down twenty per cent and pushed imports up thirty-six per cent; and there was only three days’ worth of reserves left in the coffers. By 1953 prices stood at
twenty-three times
their pre-war levels, and while, on a basis of comparison with 1929, United States industrial production had doubled, Britain’s had risen by fifty-four per cent,[
2
] and war-shattered Germany’s by fifty-three per cent, France’s had expanded by a mere eight per cent. Everything conspired to lower morale: an alarming number of Frenchmen sought refuge in acute alcoholism (which sometimes caught in its sinister embrace nine-year-old Normandy schoolchildren), and this in turn slashed at productivity.