A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (19 page)

The balance for All Saints’ Day

Slightly more encouraging results had been achieved in Kabylia where Belkacem Krim’s outlaws were both the most experienced and also familiar with the terrain. Telegraph poles were felled and communications cut in numerous areas; barracks and gendarmeries attacked, and cork and tobacco stores fired. Total damage was assessed at 200 million francs. But, all in all, for the immense effort, risks and hopes that had gone into launching the All Saints revolt, it had achieved precious little in material terms. Nowhere had it aroused anything approaching immediate popular support — with the possible exception of the Aurès. Therefore, on the face of it, the clarion terms of the F.L.N.’s initial proclamation, beamed out by Cairo radio and scattered in pamphlets across the country, seemed more than a little presumptuous:

To the Algerian people,

To the militants of the National Cause!

… After decades of struggle, the National Movement reached its final phase of fulfilment.

… a group of responsible young people and dedicated militants, gathering about it the majority of wholesome and resolute elements, has judged that the moment has come to take the National Movement out of the impasse into which it has been forced by the conflicts of persons and influence, and to launch it into the true revolutionary struggle at the side of the Moroccan and Tunisian brothers.…

Our movement of regeneration presents itself under the label of:

FRONT DE LIBÉRATION NATIONALE

thus freeing itself from any possible compromise, and offering to all Algerian patriots of every social position and of all parties … the possibility of joining in the national struggle.

GOAL: National independence through:

1. restoration of the Algerian state, sovereign, democratic, and social, within the framework of the principles of Islam;

2. preservation of all fundamental freedoms, without distinction of race or religion.

INTERNAL OBJECTIVES:

1. political house-cleaning through the destruction of the last vestiges of corruption and reformism, the causes of our present decadence.…

EXTERNAL OBJECTIVES:

1. internationalism of the Algerian problem;

2. pursuit of North African unity in its national Arabo-Islamic context;

3. assertion, through the United Nations Charter, of our active sympathy towards all nations that may support our liberating action.

MEANS OF STRUGGLE:

… by every means until the realisation of our goal … action abroad to make the Algerian problem a reality for the entire world, with the support of- our natural allies … the struggle will be long, but the outcome is certain … in order to limit bloodshed we propose an honourable platform for discussion with the French authorities.…

1. recognition of Algerian nationhood by an official declaration;

2. opening of negotiations … on a basis of recognition of Algerian sovereignty, one and indivisible;

3. … liberation of all political prisoners.…

IN RETURN FOR WHICH:

1. French cultural and economic interests will be respected, as well as persons and families;

2. all French citizens desiring to remain in Algeria will be allowed to opt for their original nationality, in which case they will be considered as foreigners, or for Algerian nationality, in which case they will be considered as Algerians both in rights and duties;

3. the ties between France and Algeria will be defined by agreement between the two powers, on a basis of equality and mutual respect! Algerians! We invite you to meditate on our Charter set out above. It is your duty to associate yourselves with it to save our country and to give it back its liberty. The FRONT DE LIBÉRATION NATIONALE is your front, its victory is yours.…

Excessively grandiloquent as it may have sounded at the time, the truly remarkable feature of the F.L.N. proclamation as a document was that its basic principles were to be adhered to with absolute fidelity during seven and a half years of war, right through to the final settlement.

Certainly on that 1 November 1954 few at the Gouvernement-Général treated it with the respect it deserved. One of the immediate consequences of the ineptness with which the previous night’s operations had been executed (which paradoxically would possibly aid the F.L.N. in the long run) was to persuade the authorities that the revolt was less serious than it was, and that it could soon be crushed with recourse to swift and draconian repressive measures. At a first emergency conference summoned by Léonard early on the morning of the 1st, he, Vaujour and General Cherrière, the Army Commander-in-Chief, all agreed that, from the evidence already available, it was a question of isolated incidents rather than of any general insurrection. Equally it was agreed (thus giving roots to the fateful legend) that all must have been decreed from Cairo, and not set up within Algeria itself. The general — nicknamed “Babar” Cherrière because of an elephantine physique and manner — maintained that it was another “tribal uprising” such as France had experienced many times in her North African past, and grumbled angrily that the “loyal” Muslim leaders had been faithless in not tipping off his Deuxième Bureau. The Aurès looked by far the most dangerous area, and Cherrière was instructed to despatch all available army units there, with the particular aim of clearing the road through to beleaguered Arris. Cherrière pointed out that he had 57,000 men in Algeria but that most of these were garrison troops, or units in transit that had been sent there awaiting despatch to Indo-China; he could muster at most 3,500 fighting troops, and with great difficulty. Reporting to Paris what had happened, Léonard called for the urgent despatch of the 25th Airborne Division, then training in the Pyrenees, but otherwise described the situation as “disturbing but not dramatic”. For the rest, it was a matter of police action.

French reactions

On the ground, the physical reaction — or over-reaction — was predictable. It was predictable, not specifically because of the
pied noir
mentality, but because this is the way an administration caught with its pants down habitually reacts under such circumstances; whether it be the British in Palestine, Cyprus or Northern Ireland, the Portuguese in Mozambique, or the French in Indo-China. First comes the mass indiscriminate round-up of suspects, most of them innocent but converted into ardent militants by the fact of their imprisonment;[
3
] then the setting of faces against liberal reforms designed to tackle the root of the trouble; followed, finally, when too late, by a new, progressive policy of liberalisation.

The first obvious police target was Messali’s M.T.L.D. At dawn on 1 November its secretary general, Moulay Merbah, was arrested in his bed, totally unaware of the night’s events. On first hearing of the F.L.N. revolt, Messali Hadj himself flew into a violent rage; but, astute politician that he was, promptly let the word percolate down the bush-telegraph that his men had been responsible. As a result, on 5 November the M.T.L.D. was outlawed, its files confiscated and its supporters arrested. The police net swept wide. Bouadjadj was caught at dawn on the 5th; Bitat’s Algiers network was effectively broken up, and he himself tracked down the following March; while in Oran thirty-eight of the All Saints activists were rounded up. On the other hand many innocents fell into the bag. Ben Youssef Ben Khedda, a pharmacist whose hands were clean, wrote a joint letter to the
Alger Républicain
complaining about the blind arrests. Two days later he too was in prison, followed shortly by his fellow signatories; immediately he was released, five months later, he joined the F.L.N.

The reactions of the
pieds noirs
were, predictably, sharp — mixed with a strong element of “I told you so”. In the
Dépêche Quotidienne
, Senator Henri Borgeaud demanded that: “The evil must be pursued where it is to be found and the ringleaders routed out where they are.… The security measures must be reinforced.…” More outspokenly, the Conseil-Général for the department of Algiers, at an extraordinary session called on 2 November, voted unanimously:

(a) that order be firmly and rapidly restored

(b) that the guilty, whoever they are, be exemplarily punished

(c) that, henceforth, no weakness be tolerated

(d) and that French policy … be founded upon the healthy elements of the population.

Clause (c) could well have been adopted from a rallying-cry at the Battle of Verdun; altogether it meant, as liberals like Jacques Chevallier at once feared, a setting back of the clocks on any suggestion of reform. There could be no question of implementing the statute of 1947 now, let alone of conceding electoral equality to a Muslim community that could murder young French teachers, and certainly not before order was fully restored.

The prevailing mood was made explicit on 26 November when Ferhat Abbas had wanted to make an eloquent but moderate statement in the Algerian Assembly, which included these words:

at no moment in the history of Algeria, has the Algerian
fellah
felt so scoffed at, so scorned.… If only the statute had been applied, if, for example, the
commune mixte
of Arris … had been abolished and substituted by municipalities which would have permitted the inhabitants to conduct democratically their own affairs, I say that perhaps we should not have had a maquis and maquisards.…

But he was prevented by Lauière, the President of the Assembly, from taking the floor. Where the conservative
pieds noirs
placed the blame for All Saints was made quite explicit by François Quilici, Deputy for Oran:

when M. Mendès-France proclaimed Tunisia’s internal sovereignty and turned the government and Tunisia itself over to the Néo-Destour [Bourguiba’s party], he showed that terrorism paid off.… The evil is spreading. The admirable Algerian peace, French peace in Algeria, is ruined, for … weakness always encourages new adventures.

And in France
.…

In France, however, the revolt in Algeria did not arouse the greatest public interest. Janet Flanner, who seldom missed an important “story”, does not even mention it in her journal; recording instead the death of Matisse and the runaway sell-out of de Gaulle’s first volume of war memoirs.
L’Humanité
, on 9 November, wrote condemning acts of terrorism but supporting “the Algerian people in their mass struggle against repression and for the defence of their rights”. Leading off with news on the United States congressional elections,
Le Monde
devoted no more than two columns to the events (compared with three for the American elections), under the bland caption “Several Killed in Algeria in the Course of Simultaneous Attacks on Police Posts”. The Mendès-France government, for whom the news could hardly have come at a worse time, was immediately unequivocal in its condemnation of the revolt, and its zeal to repress it. In a fighting speech to the Assembly on 12 November, Mendès-France declared:

One does not compromise when it comes to defending the internal peace of the nation, the unity and the integrity of the Republic. The Algerian departments are part of the French Republic. They have been French for a long time, and they are irrevocably French.… Between them and metropolitan France there can be no conceivable secession.

This must be clear once and for all, in Algeria and in metropolitan France as much as in the outside world. [Applause from left, centre, right and extreme right]. Never will France — any French government, or parliament, whatever may be their particularistic tendencies — yield on this fundamental principal.

Mesdames, Messieurs
, several deputies have made comparisons between French policy in Algeria and Tunisia. I declare that no parallel is more erroneous, that no comparison is falser, or more dangerous.
Ici, c’est la France!

It was an uncompromisingly forthright, fatefully binding statement, and Mendès-France the radical was more than backed up by his Socialist Minister of the Interior, François Mitterrand. He had equally refuted any parallel between French policy in Morocco and Tunisia on the one hand and Algeria on the other at a session of the Assembly’s Commission de l’Intérieur on 5 November, adding the challenge that here, in Algeria, “the only possible negotiation is war”. On the 12th he rose in the Assembly to declare with his leader, “Algeria is France. And who among you,
Mesdames, Messieurs
, would hesitate to employ every means to preserve France?”

In a vote of confidence on the 12th, Mendès-France scraped home with 294 to 265, saved, in effect, by the score of votes controlled by René Mayer’s pro-
pied noir
lobby. Such subsequent “hawks” as Bidault, Soustelle, Mollet and Lacoste all voted for the government. No ultra-conservative imperialist could have been much more forthright than Mitterrand, and in view of his subsequent career his statements may seem additionally surprising. But in November 1954 the unyielding gospel of
l’Algérie, c’est la France
very much represented French political opinion of almost all hues; on the other hand, Mendès-France also had reasons of internal politics for making quite such bellicose noises. The fate of his reforming government was at stake. The initial charisma acquired by his liquidation of the Indo-China war in the summer had waned; the Assembly was suspicious (as it had shown on 12 November) of his dealing in Tunisia and Morocco, and it disliked the way he had simply shrugged off responsibility for the torpedoing of the European Defence Community in August; the vocal bistro-owners were up in arms at his worthy but much derided campaign to replace alcohol by milk. Mendès-France was, however, profoundly a reformer and, privately, he was pledged to introduce a “new deal” for Algeria. To him it was clear that colonial rule in Algeria would have to end ultimately, as it was about to do in Morocco and Tunisia. The question was, when? And with whom to negotiate? In Indo-China, Tunisia and Morocco there had been the leaders who were present on the spot — the Ho Chi Minhs and Bourguibas. But in Algeria, because a century and a quarter of francisation had destroyed the native cadres, there existed no ready-made
interlocuteurs valables
with whom Mendès-France could negotiate, if and when he so wished. Therefore, although initially he would have to act unilaterally, with his incisive intelligence he grasped what it would take his successors another five years to realise; namely that, sooner or later, contact would have to be taken up with Algerians who were, to some extent or other, associated with the revolt. But All Saints had struck him a
mauvais coup;
if he were now to start implementing the 1947 statute and instituting honest elections (as he desired) — let alone negotiating with any Algerian nationalists — then the
pied noir
lobby would cause his government to fall overnight. Thus order had first to be restored. He found himself clad in an “iron maiden” that successive French governments after him — left, liberal and conservative — would be forced to don.