A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (21 page)

[
3
] One is here reminded of the line of Claude Rains, as the cynical Vichy police chief, at the end of that cinema classic,
Casablanca
: “Arrest the usual suspects!”

CHAPTER FIVE
The Sorcerer’s Cauldron:
February 1955–February 1956

Algeria! Divided most profoundly within herself, torn between the past and the future, quartered by desires and rancours, she discharged into my face, when I leaned anxiously over her, the ardent and heavy breath of a sorcerer’s cauldron. How could one not love her, especially in her ordeal. “When your son has grown up, treat him like your brother,” says the Arab proverb; it was certainly painful, but the son had become a man, our equal, our brother. That was what one had to understand.…

Jacques Soustelle

Soustelle comes: Mendès-France goes

By the new year Mendès-France had decided that, in order to further his policy and break the deadlock in Algeria, he had to replace the incumbent governor-general, Léonard, by a more imposing figure. He needed a man who was a good liberal but at the same time tough; and not just a civil servant. He needed somebody with practical experience in the underground work of the Resistance, which would help in devising anti-terrorist strategy in Algeria; and also — when the moment came — in the highly delicate work of establishing clandestine contacts in advance of negotiations. One man seemed to fill the bill: Jacques Soustelle.

“This gifted man, this brilliant intellectual, this passionate politician,” as de Gaulle termed him, was aged forty-three in 1955 and already had behind him a multiple career of academic, political thinker, administrator and man of action perhaps second only to André Malraux in his generation. After a meteoric university career he had established himself as an ethnologist of great distinction, deputy-director of the Musée de l’Homme and expert on the Aztec and Mayan civilisations. Born of working-class stock in Montpellier, Soustelle (like Malraux) had started off far to the left in his political ideology, and in 1935 he became one of the leaders of the “Vigilance Committee of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals”. On a cultural mission to Mexico in 1940, he was one of the first to rally to de Gaulle, who made him chief of the Free French secret service. Here Soustelle the academic showed both considerable talent for organisation and a perhaps surprising aptitude for cloak-and-dagger work. After the Liberation he became de Gaulle’s Minister of Information, then his Minister of the Colonies; since 1951 he had been a Gaullist deputy for Lyon, though still maintaining his left-wing orientations. Tubby and owl-like, with a meridional complexion, Soustelle, for all his intellectual brilliance and affinity for the conspiratorial, was far from being the traditional cold, steely-eyed intelligence operator; he was also a man of heart, generosity, capable of the emotions of a true “southerner”, and with an acute sense of humour — characteristics that were to shape his judgement over the ensuing crucial twelve months.

Ever loyal, Soustelle’s first act before accepting the post was to consult his old chief. “Why not?” said de Gaulle. On reporting to Mendès-France for his first briefing, Soustelle found the premier being shaved and was shocked to see how cadaverous and careworn he looked. “You will have to make the feudal forces that reign there give way,” he told Soustelle. “You will need courage to confront those big panjandrums in Algiers who, up to now, have decreed rain or shine.… Your mission will be difficult.” Above all, Mendès-France instructed him, works must be got under way to remedy unemployment, “this Algerian scourge”. Otherwise, noted Soustelle, the Mendès—Mitterrand so-called programme of reform comprised little more than total application of the 1947 statute — which “did not seem to differ very much from my own ideas”. Soustelle’s appointment was followed by long and heated discussion in the Assembly, accompanied by a vituperative whispering campaign — emanating from Algiers — in which it was suggested that he was,
inter alia
, a Soviet agent, a Jew like Mendès-France and his real name was “Ben-Soussan”. On 6 February, on the point of departing for Algeria, Soustelle was dismayed to learn that the Mendès-France government had fallen, torpedoed by René Mayer’s Algerian lobby and the enemies made during six brief but dynamic months in office, this time on a no-confidence vote of 319 to 273. Above the hubbub of the chamber, a defeated Mendès-France was heard to shout prophetically: “In North Africa…either there will be a policy of reconciliation, or the policy of repression and force — with all its horrible consequences.…”

Deeply bitter, Mendès-France now saw the complete collapse of his reforming radicalism. To this day he believes that, had he been enabled to continue, and backed by an Assembly of the left, he could have introduced reforms that might at least have prevented the ensuing slaughter and hatred, and have led Algeria along the evolutionary path to independence which had succeeded in Morocco and Tunisia. Who, with hindsight, can deny that he might have been vindicated? In Algeria, moderate nationalists greeted his demise with gloom; and the F.L.N. with joy, in that they regarded Mendès-France with his promises of liberal reform as the one French leader capable of achieving reconciliation and thus halting them short of their goal of total independence.

For three weeks France teetered without leadership, with various stars of the Fourth Republic failing to muster sufficient support to create a new government. Meanwhile, at a mass meeting in the “Vel d’Hiv”, a new threat to parliamentary equilibrium flexed its muscles; Pierre Poujade and his U.D.C.A. movement of militant small shopkeepers. As de Gaulle remarked with acid hauteur at the time, “In my day, grocers voted for solicitors. Today, solicitors vote for the grocers!” In Algeria there was no governor-general, Léonard having already departed to assume the presidency of the Cour des Comptes, and Soustelle was still hovering unconfirmed in limbo in Paris. By 15 February, however, it seemed certain that Edgar Faure — a more conservative radical, author of detective stories notable for their evasive endings, who in 1952 (when he had lasted forty days) had been the youngest prime minister (aged forty-four) to hold that office since the eighteenth century — would form the next government. His chosen Minister of the Interior, Bourgès-Maunoury, an old friend of Soustelle’s from Resistance days, told him that his appointment would be reconfirmed and that he should hasten to Algiers. Arriving inconspicuously in civilian clothes, instead of the regalia of office (the first governor-general to do so), Soustelle was greeted by an icily silent city: there was “not a cat on the streets”. He was “Mendès man”; or — almost as pejorative in
pied noir
eyes — “de Gaulle’s man”. Only Jacques Chevallier breached an implicit boycott. It was hardly an auspicious beginning.

Soustelle’s reforms

At his first meeting with the Algiers Press, Soustelle stated: “To instruct and construct, to assist to live better, to accelerate the tempo of progress already imprinted by France upon this province which is so dear to her, these are our objectives.” Next, almost immediately, he set off on a tour of the crisis zone of the Aurès. Quickly he realised both that poverty was far more dire and that the revolt was far more serious than metropolitan France yet appreciated. “Terror had taken hold. No one spoke,” he wrote later. “The population as a whole, without throwing in its lot with the rebels … remained frightened and noncommittal.” He also saw the futility of General Cherrière’s grandiose and elephantine
ratissages
, the ill-named Operations “Véronique” and “Violette” that were then under way, and agreed with the analysis Vaujour prepared for him on his return to Algiers: “To send in tank units, to destroy villages, to bombard certain zones, this is no longer the fine comb; it is using a sledgehammer to kill fleas. And what is much more serious, it is to encourage the young — and sometimes the less young — to go into the maquis.” No less overweight than the military effort was the administration, with its several thousand officials concentrated in Algiers, while areas half as big as France were left in charge of one French administrator and a handful of gendarmes. Everything, Soustelle found, was in need of change.

Making his début in the Algiers Assembly on 23 February, Soustelle began by reassuring the
pieds noirs
with the firm assertion that pacification would be his first aim. “France is at home here…,” he declared like Mitterrand and Mendès-France before him, “or rather, Algeria and all her inhabitants form an integral part of France, one and indivisible. All must know, here and elsewhere, that France will not leave Algeria any more than she will leave Provence and Brittany. Whatever happens, the destiny of Algeria is French.” So far, so good. Then Soustelle introduced a new concept: “This means that a choice has been made, and this choice is called ‘integration’. It is to make Algeria each day more completely a province, different from the others, certainly, but fully French.” Elaborating, later, on the difference between his new policy of “integration” and the old Blum—Viollette ideal of “assimilation”, Soustelle explained that it was much the more “realist”; that it recognised the original “personality” of Algeria; that, in economic terms, it aimed at sweeping away “obsolete legacies of an imaginary autonomy affording Algeria no other privilege than that of her misery”; and that, in political terms, it was to be based upon the “immutable equality of all its inhabitants”.

After so frigid a welcome on his arrival, Soustelle was encouraged by the initial warmth with which his “integration” programme was received by the Assembly in Algiers. At top speed, and fortified by a vastly expanded budget promised by Premier Faure, he pressed ahead with his basic reforms. The administration was to be decentralised by creation of several new departments, and a dramatically increased number of Muslims was to be brought into positions of responsibility. Some of the deeply resented electoral inequities of the two-college system were to be expunged; among such reforms Muslims in the towns were to be granted parity of representation. The equally resented
communes mixtes
(which Soustelle saw as being “the heart of the political problem” in Algeria) were to be suppressed and broken up into elected rural communes; while to remedy the acute problem of under-administration whereby many an Algerian never encountered a representative of France, Soustelle created an entirely new corps, the Sections Administratives Specialisées or S.A.S. On the cultural scene, Arabic was to be made an official, obligatory language in Muslim schools, and the school-building programme was to be doubled. In agriculture, an embryo agrarian reform was to be initiated; while on the industrial scene a credit of five milliard francs ($148 million) was to be earmarked for the creation of public works, aimed at achieving Soustelle’s top-priority goal — “to breach the front of misery”.

Of all these measures, the most ambitious — as well as the one that was to leave the most lasting imprint of Soustelle’s regime — was the formation of the S.A.S. corps. Their aim, essentially, was to take into their protective net populations in the remoter
bled
that might otherwise become subject to the rebels, or buffeted by the army — or both. Some 400 S.A.S. detachments were created, each under an army lieutenant or captain who was an expert in Arabic and Arab affairs and could deal with every conceivable aspect of administration; from agronomy, teaching and health, to building houses and administering justice. The
képis bleus
, as they were affectionately called, were a selflessly devoted and courageous band of men, who made themselves much loved by the local populace, and for that reason were often the principal targets of the F.L.N., suffering the heaviest casualties of any category of administrator. Foreign journalists who saw them at work in the remoter
bled
, isolated and in constant danger, never ceased to be impressed. Unfortunately, there were always too few
képis bleus
with all the numerous qualifications that the job required; and, inevitably, there were the bad ones who transformed the S.A.S. into “intelligence centres” where torture was not unknown.

Soustelle’s “liberals”

Soustelle soon found himself instinctively with considerable sympathy for the predicament of the
petits pieds noirs
, but with little for the “feudal” bosses against whom Mendès-France had warned him. At the beginning he was influenced by two liberals who comprised the so-called “left wing” of his office — Germaine Tillion and Commandant Vincent Monteil. Madame Tillion was one of those remarkable and heroic Frenchwomen who had gone through hell for her passionate liberalism. In 1940 she had founded a Resistance group in Paris, which, among other acts, had helped British prisoners-of-war to escape after Dunkirk. Arrested by the Gestapo, she was the only one of four leaders of the group to survive torture, deportation and three years in the appalling women’s concentration camp of Ravensbrück. For her wartime record she was awarded the Croix de Guerre,
avec palme
, and made Officer of the Legion of Honour. Before 1940 Germaine Tillion, an ethnologist like Soustelle, had just spent six years in the Aurès — living a fourteen-hour horseback journey from the nearest European, at Arris. There was no Frenchwoman who knew the region better. At the beginning of the revolt she had been in New York, working on an official commission on war crimes — German and Russian. Returning to France, she was asked by Mitterrand to go back to the Aurès that winter to report on conditions. Immediately she had been “deeply shocked to discover how much the level of life had sunk since I had been there fourteen years previously”. It was not so much the fault of the French — “because they simply weren’t there” — but the sheer harsh facts of population pressure. In that grim winter of 1954 she had observed the Aurès peasants “watch their goats dying for want of a little fodder … or starving workers eat their grain seed, their hope for the following year”. She had been equally shocked by the heavy-handedness of the army’s counter-measures.