A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (35 page)

Then followed the catastrophe of Dien Bien Phu; the most humiliating defeat suffered by any Western power since the Second World War and, in its context, as humiliating as 1940 to French army sensibilities in that the victors had been despised “colonials” and “little yellow men”. Analysing the French army’s determination to win the victory “which the French army desired with all its heart to put an end to the chain of humiliations” (a thesis he did not support), Raymond Aron, the historian, wrote in 1958: “The Algerian war offers one more occasion for the French to meditate on decadence. Algeria lost, and there is France on the slippery slope down which Spain and Portugal slid.” Just how passionately individual officers of the wartime generation could feel is well illustrated in the remarkable career of Colonel François Coulet. Escaping to London after 1940, Coulet had become a close aide to General de Gaulle and then — as the only air force officer sporting the
plaque à vélo
— set up an airborne commando. But, missing the Normandy landings, he felt he had “not done his bit”. After the war he rejoined the diplomatic corps and was Minister in Belgrade when the Algerian war began. Finding “anti-colonialist” passions in Yugoslavia intolerable, and motivated by a longing to “expunge the disgrace of Dien Bien Phu”, Coulet resigned, flew back to France, equipped himself with contact lenses to look more military, and through de Gaulle’s influence gained permission to create and lead to Algeria France’s one and only air force para commando — at the age of fifty. He also became the only reservist colonel of the paras in Algeria; trained under Bigeard, his commando of 140 men — the last of the “private armies” — acquitted itself nobly, especially when it came to close co-operation with air force strikes. For Coulet they were “the happiest years of my life” — until he was translated by de Gaulle for another mission.

On taking up the command in Algeria, General Lorillot had confided with grim emphasis to a political contact: “They made fools of us in Indo-China … They screwed us in Tunisia … We are being screwed in Morocco. But they will never screw us in Algeria, I swear to you. Let this be known in Paris.” Already by 1956 there was a strong feeling in the army that the politicians were a chief source of its misfortunes, and this was to grow from Suez until May 1958. General Jacques de Bollardière, a distinguished soldier who had fought in Norway, at El Alamein, with the maquis in the Ardennes as well as at Dien Bien Phu, and who was shortly to find himself seriously at odds with army policy in Algeria, criticises the professional army after Indo-China because: “instead of coldly analysing with courageous lucidity its strategic and tactical errors, it gave itself up to a too human inclination and tried — not without reason, however — to excuse its mistakes by the faults of civil authority and public opinion”. He was reminded of the young Germans of post-1918 seeking to justify a notion of a “generalised treachery”. The feeling ran deep; just on the eve of Suez a book was published by a young Frenchman that had a powerful impact on French opinion. Called
Les Taxis de la Marne
, by Jean Dutourd, it lambasted the middle-aged politicians of feeble will as being responsible for the collapse of 1940, praised de Gaulle as the only man of honour then alive, and demanded a recrudescence of the “Spirit of the Marne” to save France in its current dilemmas. De Gaulle himself sums up admirably the prevailing attitude of the army:

Taking upon itself not only the burden of the fighting but also the severity, and sometimes the beastliness, of the repression, closely in touch with the anxieties of the French population of Algeria and the Muslim auxiliaries, haunted by fear of another Indo-China, another military reverse inflicted on its colours, the army, more than any other body, felt a growing resentment against a political system which was the embodiment of irresolution.

Higher ideals

At lower levels of self-interest, the continued prosecution of the war in Algeria did of course represent a last chance of gracious living and of prospects of promotion to some officers, but beyond this and even the urge to avenge past “reverses” there existed a higher, though often woolly, ideal. In
The Centurions
, Jean Lartéguy has a fanatical para officer called “Boisfeuras”, an expert on psycho-political warfare who has spent his life in the Far East. “Boisfeuras”, explains Lartéguy:

had no feeling of nationalism; he was therefore unable to invoke the defence of his country, of “Mother France”. He needed a more universal cause; like many of his comrades, he believed he had found it in the struggle against Communism. Communism as he had known it in Camp One, deprived of all human substance by the Viet-Minh, could only result in a universe of sexless insects.…

He is compared by the author to those Roman centurions who “tried to maintain the outposts of the Empire while the people back in Rome were sinking back into Christianity, and the Caesars into debauchery”. In real life “Boisfeuras” had his opposite number in Colonel Antoine Argoud, another para whose extremity in belief and deed were to bring him notoriety later on. “We want to halt the decadence of the West and the march of Communism,” declared Argoud in court during the Barricades Trial of November 1960: “That is our duty, the real duty of the army. That is why we must win the war in Algeria. Indo-China taught us to see the truth.…” To men like “Boisfeuras” and Argoud the war against Communism was a permanent and unceasing phenomenon; while nationalism, in the Indo-Chinese and Algerian context, was largely equated with Communism. Theirs was a doctrine, says Edward Behr, “which, if carried to its logical conclusion, would have led to fascism not only in Algeria but in France as well”. Certainly, in the army’s contempt for the men of the Fourth Republic and the sense of its destiny to restore the
grandeur
of France, it was to be led close to destroying the nation’s democratic functions.

If the Indo-China experience had succeeded in cementing the unity of the French professional army, says Behr also, it was to do so “only at the expense of turning it into a ‘band of brothers’ isolated from the French nation as a whole”. The isolation also extended, to some extent, to the
pieds noirs
with whom the army had a prickly relationship. The dashing paras skimmed the cream of the girls on the beaches but — as usual in such circumstances — there were not enough to go round for the rest, and not every
pied noir
home was open to the army. “They made them pay for everything, and they never did anything to defend themselves,” says Colonel Coulet, reflecting a popular view in the army. In one small rural settlement, Leulliette recalls the frightened
pieds noirs
angrily blaming the soldiers for the menace of the F.L.N.: “It’s you who attracts them here!” As time went by the officers as well as the men became less and less sympathetic to protecting the interests, or property, of the
grands colons
. “We have not come here”, declared Radio-Bigeard, the paras’ own station: “to defend colonialism. We have nothing in common with the rich
colons
who exploit the Muslims. We are the defenders of liberty and of a new order. While we were fighting in Indo-China, while we were suffering in Viet-Minh prisons, men liberally paid betrayed us…. Here you will not be betrayed.…” In general, the attitude towards the Muslim population tended to be one of reforming liberalism; though often, perhaps, with a distinctly paternalistic flavour. Yet, as Servan-Schreiber notes, there was a “symbiosis” gradually growing up between the regulars and the
pieds noirs
, based on accepting each other’s policy — because there was no other. That policy was, simply, the waging of war
à outrance
against the rebels. But, in the policy of common interest, each had different objectives that, at the very end, would bring them into tragic conflict; for one, it was to survive in the order of things as before; for the other, chiefly to win a military victory.

The coming of Salan

In December 1956, the same month that Castro landed in Cuba aboard the
Granma
, the French Commander-in-Chief in Algeria, General Lorillot, left for home after seventeen months in command. A bachelor and a dedicated, monk-like soldier, Lorillot had become profoundly depressed. Although the troops at his disposal had doubled since Soustelle’s day, and virtually all his demands had been satisfied, the rebellion had continued to prove uncontainable and almost nowhere in Algeria could be described as definitively “pacified”. The debacle at Suez had been the last blow for Lorillot, and it was clearly time for him to be replaced by someone with a fresh outlook. On 14 December the new commander arrived, a figure who from now on would be central to the whole drama of Algeria right through to the end.

General Raoul Salan was France’s most decorated soldier; it was even rumoured that he went to bed wearing his
bananes
, which included the British C.B.E. and the American Distinguished Service Cross, awarded when commanding de Lattre’s old 14th Division. No Frenchman of his generation — in fact, few soldiers anywhere — had fought as much as Salan. Leaving St Cyr as an officer cadet, he had seen the last fighting on the grim field of Verdun in 1918 at the age of nineteen. After being seriously wounded in the Levant campaign of 1920–1, Salan made his debut in Indo-China as a young captain, lived in the outback, learned Laotian, fought river pirates and local warlords, and joined the Deuxième Bureau. From now on his character was shaped by the twin influences of the colonial army and clandestine intelligence work, the intrigues of which he found far from unappealing. In 1939 he was sent on an undercover mission to Italian-occupied Ethiopia, ostensibly as a correspondent of
Le Temps
, to gauge the possibility of a native uprising against the Italians. Recalled to France, he found himself commanding a battalion of Senegalese Tirailleurs thrown in to stem the German panzers on the Somme in June 1940. In 1942 he was at Dakar as head of the A.O.F. (Vichy) Deuxième Bureau, then switched to the same job with Free French Headquarters in Algiers. In 1944 he landed on the Riviera, liberated Toulon and had a street named after him by grateful citizens of a neighbouring town. Fighting his way northwards, he ended the war on Lake Constance as a general. Almost immediately afterwards he was despatched to Indo-China, becoming de Lattre’s second-in-command in 1950. The marshal thought highly of Salan’s capacity for detailed planning, but was perhaps critical of his excessive prudence, commenting, “He never goes on board without a lifejacket.” On de Lattre’s tragic death in 1952 Salan took over the command. It was remarked then that he “launched an occasional blow against the Viet-Minh ‘so daring that de Lattre himself might have thought twice about undertaking it’; but then he relapsed into periods of indolence”. Then, in 1954, it was Salan who had to preside over the humiliating end of the
présence française
in Indo-China.

Accompanying him on his arrival in Algiers was Madame Salan, nicknamed
la biche
(the doe), the quintessence of the loyal army wife, indefatigable in welfare work with both the troops and Muslims, and inseparable from her husband in all his campaigns. In Algiers their small son was to die and be buried. Though only of medium height, physically Salan cut an impressive figure as he stepped off the plane; a chest well developed for bearing the countless rows of
bananes
; blue eyes and swept-back silver hair tinted with just a touch of blue; and a handsome profile that made journalists think of a “Roman pro-consul”. But the blue eyes masked an impenetrable and complex personality. Salan was known as
le Mandarin
or
le Chinois
, but less on account of his long sojourn in the East than for the impassive mysteriousness with which he surrounded himself — and which gave rise to a multitude of rumours about him. He was, they said, a Freemason and a Protestant (in fact, he was a lapsed Catholic); he was a Socialist (in fact, though his father had been, he never was); he was an opium smoker and (according to Claude Paillat) had exploited the drug traffic in Indo-China to the benefit of French Intelligence — charges which he waves aside with a derisory gesture. During the Second World War he had managed to be “neither Pétainist, nor Gaullist; just anti-German”; a detachment which fellow-officers, who as a rule had come down heavily on one side or the other, found baffling.

What was certain about Salan was that he was highly intelligent but susceptible to flattery; ambitious; and — in contrast to his much more straightforward subordinate, Massu — an extremely well-developed political animal. Yet, at the same time, as a soldier he was a man of simple tastes, eschewing the glitter of receptions and public functions, and preferring to be at his desk or out visiting units, where he was generally to be seen in rolled-up shirtsleeves instead of the more formal attire worn by other senior “brass”. There was also no doubt that, within a short time, Salan, by his energetic policy of pressing the attack home on the enemy, giving him no respite night or day, did put a new spirit into the army in Algeria.

But somehow people instinctively did not trust Salan. De Gaulle (who, when writing his memoirs, could not be regarded as quite unprejudiced) says of him: “there was something slippery and inscrutable in the character of this capable, clever and in some respects beguiling figure”. In December 1956 the
pieds noirs
were certainly not “beguiled” by the new Commander-in-Chief. To them he was the left-wing general who had sold out in Indo-China and was now coming to do the same in Algeria. They reacted to his appointment with the same irrational, ill-founded rage with which they had greeted first Soustelle, then Catroux. This time, however, some of them were prepared to go much further to demonstrate their mistrust.