A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (30 page)

Throughout the turbulent course of French history, many a vital issue has been decided by the “street”, and 6 February 1956 was certainly to prove a red-letter day for the French citizens of Algeria. That night, it is recorded that Mollet — perhaps appreciating the genie that he had just unbottled — murmured miserably, “I should not have given in.” But it was too late; the Ortizes of Algiers now realised that they could bend to their will — or, possibly, even bring down — any government in Paris. There was nothing that street violence could not achieve — provided it was violent enough. The Forum itself would always, henceforth, wield a strange kind of mesmeric fascination upon the mob demagogue or would-be putschist. A leader of the student faction, one Pierre Lagaillarde, remarked to a colleague that day: “Now I know that we can effect a
coup d’état
here.” As far as the winning over of uncommitted Muslim hearts was concerned, 6 February sounded yet another defeat for France. A disgusted General Massu wrote: “The
indigénes
have an instinct of respect, of fear of the leader. They absolutely don’t understand the behaviour of the French who insult the head of their government, bombard him with tomatoes.…” But beyond this, F.L.N. propaganda was to contend, successfully, that there was no point in heeding all the French promises in this world if a Franch government would always capitulate to the least pressure by a European mob. Said Frantz Fanon bitterly: “From 6 February onwards, we could no longer turn our eyes towards France.…” And a remark made by a
pied noir
demonstrator to Ferhat Abbas may well have influenced his conversion to the F.L.N. of a few months later as much as it pointed the way ominously to future trends in Algeria: “The F.L.N. has taught us that violence is profitable for the Muslims. We are going to organise violence by the Europeans and prove that that too is profitable.”

Three days later — after Gaston Defferre, the Socialist leader from Marseilles, had refused categorically — Mollet announced that he was sending another good party man, his Minister of Economic Affairs, Robert Lacoste, to replace the unwanted Catroux. At the same time, in what seemed (at any rate to the F.L.N.) like another massive concession to the
pieds noirs
, he revealed his intention to increase the French forces in Algeria sharply to 500,000 by lengthening military service to twenty-seven months and recalling a whole class of reservists and despatching them and the conscripts to Algeria:
half a million men
, nearly nine times the total in Algeria on All Saints’ Day, 1954. On the internal scene of French politics alone this was a devastatingly radical act. During the electoral campaign of only a few weeks past, the outgoing premier, Faure, had assured young conscripts that “military service is out of date — just a few months of it will be enough”, and here now was a Socialist and pacifist by creed forced to do what previous “reactionary” French governments had never dared do in Algeria.[
2
] Mollet’s action meant, in effect, that he was espousing Soustelle’s “testament” and that the crushing of the rebellion would now take precedence over all else. Militarily, there were good enough reasons for it. Despite the considerable infusions of troops during Soustelle’s year, which had brought the total to nearly 200,000, the situation had steadily deteriorated. The “smallpox chart” had spread to cover most of the country; the Tunisian frontier had become a running sore, and establishment of a barrier there would take a long time to be completed. An increasing number of Tirailleurs were deserting — together with their even more valuable weapons — and now Moroccan units serving with the French had taken to refusing orders. Several senior French officers had resigned, pointedly, including one, General Zeller, Inspector-General of the ground forces, who would make his mark briefly five years later. In one of his last reports to Faure, Soustelle had stressed in January: “It would be pointless to pretend that the morale of the army is not at present at rock bottom. The general feeling is that we are going to ‘do a deal’ and that, consequently, present sacrifices are to no purpose.” This had later been backed up by the Commander-in-Chief, General Lorillot, writing to Mollet that the military situation was “disturbing” and concluding that: “It is inconceivable that the rebels will agree to lay down their arms in the present state of their success.”

Conscripts to Algeria; disaster at Palestro

The shipping of the conscripts — paid a paltry 10,080 francs (£8) a month — was not without problems. Reservists at the Gare de Lyon refused to board troop trains for Marseilles, or pulled the communication cord; 600 artillerymen near Rouen threw furniture out of the windows and staged a sit-down strike. Arriving on the quay at Algiers, the scruffy young soldiers in baggy uniforms that always looked several sizes too large gave a singularly unmilitary and unenthusiastic appearance. But, after a brief sojourn, the country worked its miraculous enchantment upon most of them: “
Algérie montait à la tête
!” Their arrival undoubtedly raised the morale of the
pieds noirs
, and it was soon having its effect within the hard-pressed army, too. Back on a
ratissage
of the Djurdjura, Pierre Leulliette records how “this time there were thousands and thousands of men with us, from every arm of the services, Parisians, Bretons and Landais. The whole of France was there that morning.…” The new weight of man-power made the operation a success — marred only by a green recruit shooting his sergeant in mistake for the F.L.N.

The chances were that, sooner or later, such greenness would inevitably lead to a graver disaster. On 4 May 1956 the 9th Régiment d’Infanterie Coloniale battalion of reservists raised in the Paris region landed in Algiers. Just two weeks later one of its platoons, commanded by a thirty-year-old second lieutenant, Hervé Artur, was on patrol at Palestro, a bare fifty miles south-east from Algiers. “What a thrilling and marvellous life!” enthused Artur in an unfinished letter to his parents: “We have to protect the
douars
, and it’s at night that the
fellaghas
visit them … I am stepping up the night ambushes.…” Operating in the area was Ali Khodja, an army deserter and Ouamrane’s most redoubtable lieutenant. He had recently benefited by a delivery of some of the arms inherited from the cache of Aspirant Maillot’s
maquis rouge
, and had successfully brought the local villagers under his sway. It was a rugged, beautiful country cut by deep gorges, prompting one of the reservists to write to his parents, in a letter that was never sent: “How good it would be to pass the holidays here!” Leaving the platoon sergeant behind at base, Second Lieutenant Artur set out for an isolated
douar
, Amal, with twenty-one men. Shortly after passing through Amal the platoon ran into an ambush well-prepared by Khodja’s men; evidently with the complicity of the villagers. Lying in wait behind rocks, they caught the reservists at point-blank range. Artur was killed immediately, and within a few minutes all but six of the platoon were wiped out. The survivors were dragged off by the F.L.N., but one by one the four wounded collapsed and were left by the wayside. The remaining two, Privates Dumas and Nillet, moved from pillar to post with Khodja’s band for the next five days. Meanwhile, when the patrol failed to return, the sergeant at base raised the alarm and that evening troops reached the scene of the massacre. At least two of the bodies had been atrociously mutilated; testicles cut off, disembowelled and the ventral cavities stuffed with stones. Further off one of the wounded was found, apparently despatched by the villagers, but no trace was ever found of the other three. The village itself was deserted.

From Algiers General Massu was sent with helicopters and seven battalions to mount an intensive search for Khodja and the missing reservists. On the fifth day the paras pinned down the band, killing seventeen. The unfortunate Nillet was also killed in the fight, and only Dumas survived to render account of what had happened. Another fifty dead villagers were brought in, but Ali Khodja himself escaped.

The ambush of the twenty-one roused a furore in France; these were the first reservists to die in the war, and it was the biggest single loss suffered by the army since the war began. Like all such events in war the Palestro massacre set off an immediate chain reaction. Like Soustelle after Philippeville, Lacoste was pushed into taking an even tougher stance. On 27 May 6,000 troops and 1,500 police and gendarmes surrounded the Casbah and gave it a ruthless combing through, arresting in the process nearly 5,000 people. On 19 June Lacoste went ahead with the guillotining of two condemned F.L.N., Zabane and Ferradj, whose deaths the “ultras” had been clamouring for ever since Mollet’s visit. The executions were bound to cause an uproar, and the archbishop of Algiers, Monsignor Duval, was among the religious leaders pleading for clemency — particularly as Ferradj, in prison ever since November 1954, was a cripple and blinded in one eye, having been badly wounded at the time of his arrest. According to the F.L.N. version, they were the detonators to the series of terrorist outrages that were to be the preliminaries to the Battle of Algiers. In another direction, however, Palestro proved a net, long-term gain for the F.L.N.; it brought home to France for the first time, and more sharply than anything else could, the cruel realities of the Algerian war, and in doing so strengthened the hand of those few then arguing for a negotiated peace.

Lacoste: “le dernier quart d’heure”

In many ways fifty-seven-year-old Robert Lacoste was ideally suited for the post of governor-general. He had fought in the last battles of the Great War, would reminisce warmly about “old Clemenceau in 1918, when I was in Champagne, saying ‘Hold on!”’, and was imbued with a deep pride in the French army which he retains to this day — even to the extent of defending some of its more questionable actions and brushing aside allegations of torture. During the Second World War he distinguished himself with the Resistance, and while Lacoste was with the maquis in Savoy his father was shot as a hostage by the Nazis. From the time of de Gaulle’s first post-war government up to his appointment as Mollet’s Minister of Economic Affairs, he was repeatedly in and out of office, generally dealing with industrial or economic matters. A squat, stumpy figure whose ample chin seemed to grow straight from the shoulders, he came to be nicknamed
Bébé lune
(or Sputnik) — probably for his physical appearance, because he was nobody’s satellite. Both he and Guy Mollet were, and looked, of the old school of French Socialists, and with their shapeless, baggy trousers both would have blended equally well into the Transport House of Ernie Bevin. In fact, there were many characteristics that Lacoste shared with Bevin; he was tough, quick-tempered, vigorous, stubborn and courageous, with an acute political nose; and though a man whose human warmth came across strongly after the briefest conversation, he did not suffer from the disadvantage of being as subject to emotion as Soustelle.

Intellectuals complained that it was easier to argue with an earthquake than with Lacoste, and indeed he consistently turned a deaf ear to any argument that France should abandon Algeria. But there was an engaging, no-nonsense forthrightness about the man that came out vividly in the earthiness of his language. His favourite expression was
Je ne me laisse pas emmerder
, and to him demonstrators were always
ces jeunes cons-là
— which he would never hesitate to point out to even the most menacing mob. To American journalists critical of conditions in Algeria he would hit back reflexively with acrid comments about Indians and Negroes. Edward Behr, who watched him in action, notes that (as Bevin did when handling foreign affairs) he “approached Moslems and Europeans alike more like an S.F.I.O. bigwig oozing bluff self-confidence among a group of Socialist party members.…” Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. But, adds Behr, “Lacoste met only those Moslems whom his subordinates wished him to meet.…” If he had another fault, it was perhaps his excessive optimism. It would always be held derisively against him that he had quoted a famous wartime forebear, “We are at
le dernier quart d’heure
.”

Lacoste’s reforms

Immediately, Lacoste was shackled by the top priority that Mollet had prescribed and that he had himself endorsed — “First win the war”. There was an unmistakable element of contradiction apparent in Mollet’s policy; for, although his Socialist government was prepared to go further than any other, and at the risk of international complications, to win the war, he was at the same time dropping hints — very secretly — to the F.L.N. that a compromise might be possible. Thus on the one hand he seemed to be demanding “unconditional surrender” and on the other offering conditions; a contradiction that could only confuse, and thereby offer the F.L.N. additional excuse for intransigence.

Meanwhile, on the social scene Mollet’s priorities inevitably limited Lacoste’s freedom of manoeuvre, relegating vital reforms, as so often in the past, to second place. Nevertheless, with his customary energy Lacoste pushed ahead with measures that were largely the mixture as before; once again the implementation of the basic promises of the 1947 statute, now nearly ten years out of date. On the economic front Lacoste’s most striking early move was to raise, by decree in March 1956, the Algerians’ wretched guaranteed minimum daily wage from 340 to 440 francs (2
s
. 9
d
. to 3
s
. 6
d
.). This was followed up by a series of decrees affecting agriculture; cork and alfalfa production was nationalised (a hard blow at the monopolists Borgeaud and Blachette); credit and share-cropping terms for Muslim farmers were improved; and the redistribution of certain government-leased lands was accelerated. Optimistically, it was hoped that 10,000 landless families might be settled on 150,000 hectares, but this first timid attempt at agrarian reform, well-intentioned as it was, played disastrously into the hands of the F.L.N. Jean Servier recalls how, after a parcel of land had been handed over to a
fellah
, he “immediately found himself condemned to death. A few days later a patrol found the body of the happy proprietor with his throat slit in his own field.” As a result few Muslim peasants henceforth had the courage to come forward to accept the French bounty. In Servier’s view it would have been more sensible to redistribute the land to communities instead of individuals — because then the F.L.N. would be forced to kill a whole village, and the villagers might have been encouraged to protect the land collectively.