A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (71 page)

For the
pied noir
population, Alain de Sérigny in the
Écho d’Alger
was, at first, surprisingly mild; in the 16 September speech, he found, “there was good and bad”. Far more virulent was Robert Martel who reacted “with shame and indignation against the proposal of secession, a veritable insult to our dead and a blot upon our French dignity”, and it was along these lines that the attitude of the militant
pieds noirs
was to develop. The reaction of the Muslims was also variable initially: Messali Hadj, along with what other “moderate” nationalists could still be numbered, welcomed de Gaulle’s initiative. What they had striven for over the whole of a generation had been obtained, but only after five years bloody fighting by their rivals, the F.L.N. The tone of the official F.L.N. spokesmen was suspicious, critical and reserved; but the G.P.R.A. greeted the principle of “self-determination” as a step in the right direction, and announced that it was ready, under certain conditions, to begin preliminary talks. But to the most simpleminded member of the G.P.R.A. it must have been self-evident that one of the most important rounds in the war had been won, on the brink of military defeat. To his hard-pressed
djounoud
of the interior, the F.L.N. Minister of Defence, Belkacem Krim, issued a communiqué declaring: “Your struggle has obliged the enemy to talk of self-determination, thus renouncing the oft-repeated myth of
Algérie française
. His retreat is the fruit of your efforts.” The principle of “self-determination” conceded, all the F.L.N. had to do now was to fight an obdurate battle to ensure that they, and no one else, would be the
interlocuteur valable
with whom de Gaulle would be forced to negotiate it.

[
1
] This expansion of the
harkis
, Challe stresses with maximum emphasis to the present day, was only to be achieved if the
harkis
could be assured that France would
never
abandon Algeria and leave them to face a night-of-long-knives at the hands of a triumphant F.L.N. Challe insists that de Gaulle’s
personal
guarantee was implicit.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Aux Barricades!”
:
September 1959–February 1960

No,
all
Algeria is not fascist,
all
the French are not “ultras”,
all
the army doesn’t torture. But Fascism, the “ultras”, and torture, they are France in Algeria.

Pierre Nora, 1961

The “ultras” inflamed: enter Susini and Pérez

ENTERING its sixth year, the Algerian war had already lasted longer than the First World War and longer than American participation in the Second. Now, as the new year of 1960 approached, it was about to bring with it events that would seal the fate of
Algérie française
. All that followed in the final two years of the struggle would be little more than a fore-ordained postscript. And the first notes of the tocsin would be sounded, not by the Muslims or the F.L.N., but by the
pieds noirs
themselves.

Since well before de Gaulle’s “self-determination” speech of 16 September, passions against him had been mounting among the ranks of
pied noir
“ultras”, increasingly distrustful of the policy of the man they considered they had brought back in May 1958. Already on the first anniversary of that 13 May, they had endeavoured, unsuccessfully, to turn it into a day of mourning; the “self-determination” speech, followed by another on 10 November in which de Gaulle had spelled out even more precisely his ceasefire programme, threw them into transports of rage and despair at what seemed like the certainty of his intent to sell out in Algeria. Lagaillarde, the swaggering, red-bearded ex-paratrooper, focal figure and would-be d’Artagnan of May 1958, had been elected to the Assembly that November, and had partially withdrawn from the Algiers scene. Some of Lagaillarde’s more extremist colleagues regarded this as tantamount to “collaboration” with a regime of which they increasingly disapproved. Madame Ortiz went so far as to slap his face. In Lagaillarde’s absence, Jo Ortiz, the noisy owner of the Bar du Forum, had moved in. Ortiz had chosen the fourth anniversary of the war, 1 November 1958, to launch a new body, the Front National Français (F.N.F.), embracing under one militant organisation “The Group of Seven” and all the other various “ultra” groupings. The political orientations of the F.N.F. were left in little doubt by the symbol which Ortiz, the Poujadist and admirer of Salazar, had chosen for it; the Celtic cross of the unashamedly fascist Jeune Nation movement. In the shadows behind Ortiz there now emerged a new and more effectual figure: Jean-Jacques Susini. Aged only twenty-five in 1959, Susini, who was of Corsican origin, had missed the great moments of both February 1956 and May 1958, when Ortiz and Lagaillarde had made their names with the mob, because he was still studying medicine in France. In contrast to his father, a Communist worker on the Algerian railways with pro-F.L.N. sympathies, young Jean-Jacques was as far to the Right as his father was to the Left. Returning to continue his studies in Algiers University, Susini showed an intellectual agility, an organising ability, and above all an outstanding capacity for persuading by rhetoric, that made him a natural to assume the role of student leader left vacant by Lagaillarde.

There could hardly have been more disparate figures than the two F.N.F. leaders. Ortiz, the burly, bonhomous bar-keeper with the hooked, prizefighter nose, whose swarthy features, bright ties and well-cut suits testified to his Spanish origins, epitomised the
pied noir
with his emotional vehemence. Born of poor parents, he had certainly shown no lack of physical courage, having fought in the French campaign of 1940, been taken prisoner but escaped, and then re-enlisted to fight again in Italy. His political philosophy, said
The Times
(of 27 January 1960), “in a woolly sort of way is authoritarian and neo-Fascist”; he was an unimpressive speaker, but a potent rabble-rouser through sheer volume of noise. On the other hand, Susini, sickly of physique and unprepossessing, with sparse fair hair and eyes of fire in a chalky face, was a frigid but brilliant political intellect and an impelling orator. The two were admirably complementary to each other. Then there was Dr Jean-Claude Pérez, also of Spanish descent, whose family had lived in Algeria ever since the Second Empire and had been driven out of the bistro they owned by F.L.N. bombing. A tall, good-looking man in his thirties, with wavy brown hair and an engaging smile, Dr Pérez was a general practitioner in Bab-el-Oued with wide contacts among the poorer Europeans there. He spoke their thick patois, and was highly sympathetic to their cause; a sympathy which he carried considerably beyond the normal prerogatives of a G.P.[
1
] Described by Yves Courrière as “made of dynamite”, Pérez, having finished his national service as a medical officer in 1955, had immediately organised one of the first urban anti-terrorist units in Algiers. The way these units worked was explained to the author by a prominent member of the O.A.S. who wishes to remain anonymous.

Often an F.L.N. cell would be detected, and the boss known, but the police would do nothing about it. So we acted as
franc-tireurs
; we threw a grenade or bombed an apartment; then the police had to do something, so they came along and rounded up the whole F.L.N. network. Our best operation was when we placed a bomb in the Place de Lavigerie U.G.T.A. headquarters in 1956—it blew off the legs of a couple of F.L.N. operators, and it was revealed they were making plans for seventy-three bomb attacks. Well, that was a real success; you can’t tell me that the loss of two F.L.N. wasn’t worth stopping what might have led to the deaths of hundreds of European women and children, in scenes like the Casino.

Like Ortiz, Pérez had been imprisoned briefly on suspicion of involvement in the “bazooka” case, and on charges of counter-terrorism, but subsequently released. Together with Susini they shared to the full one of the commoner and less attractive characteristics of the
pied noir
, that capacity for reflex violence and brutal action so penetratingly exemplified by Camus’ “Outsider”.

Ortiz’s troops

In 1959 Pérez’s principal function was to be recruiting master for the tough para-military militia Ortiz had created to give the F.N.F. teeth. These were lavishly equipped with hardware, which they kept at home, and towards the end of the year they had appeared in public for the first time, reminiscently clad in khaki shirts and brassards bearing a Celtic cross. In addition, there was the 1,200-man U.T. de Choc, an elitist offshoot of the Unités Territoriales, the
pied noir
Home Guard, created by Colonel “Nez-de-Cuir” Thomazo, which had readily put itself at the disposal of Ortiz and his F.N.F. Volunteers trained to be ready to move into action in the Algiers area at an hour’s notice, the members of the U.T. de Choc also kept their weapons under the bed; meanwhile, over the preceding months there had been ominous disappearances of grenades and ammunition from the Territorial arms depots. In mid-December, when the right-wing former premier, Georges Bidault, who had formed a new grouping in France called the Rassemblement de l’Algérie française, came to Algeria to speak against de Gaulle’s policy, Ortiz provided his meetings with an imposingly disciplined corps of strong-arm men 1,500 strong. All this backing of force gave the stentorian Ortiz new power and self-confidence. He raised the heat among his already fiery supporters with such incendiary exhortations as:

We shall go right to the end of the line, even with arms in our hands, to defend
Algérie française
….

The determination of the French of Algeria will conquer the self-determination of de Gaulle. Algiers may become Budapest, but we shall remain….

For us, henceforth, it’s either the suitcase or the coffin!

“The suitcase or the coffin!”—confronting the
pieds noirs
with the Hobson’s choice that to yield to majority rule would inevitably mean leaving Algeria either as corpses or refugees, the slogan was to acquire a particularly sinister significance in 1962. Another orator who cried “We need a Charlotte Corday!” was also loudly applauded; while the tone of Sérigny’s
Écho d’Alger
was growing daily more hostile to de Gaulle.

One of the more surprising aspects of this period was the way in which the army command permitted the creation of such a Frankenstein monster as the F.N.F., under its very nose. Harking back to an earlier period of French history, there is a curious parallel between this and the arming of the National Guard in Paris to help defend the city during the siege of 1870; the siege over, and the Prussians having withdrawn, the unruly National Guard then turned and rent the hand that had created it, setting up its own revolutionary Commune de Paris. Ultimately blame must attach to General Challe for allowing such a concentration of armed power to build up under the sway of someone like Jo Ortiz.

Meanwhile, as the F.L.N. sought to reassert itself in the wake of the military defeats imposed upon it by Challe and the political threat presented by de Gaulle’s “self-determination” initiative, a new wave of bombings and terrorism was unleashed. A bomb detonated outside Algiers University during the celebration of its fiftieth anniversary killed and wounded several students; between 1 December and 10 January there were twenty-two assassinations in the Algiers vicinity, while the papers were filled with horrible details of the violation and throat-cutting of wives and children of
pied noir
farmers out in the
bled
. The F.L.N. found that such hit-and-run acts of terrorism would do more to prove to the world their continued existence than trying to mount major efforts in the Wilayas, where their forces were so sorely pressed by Challe. As a result, in response to
pied noir
pressure, forces had to be diverted from Challe’s current offensive to provide new protection. In an attempt to calm
pied noir
feelings, Delegate-General Delouvrier released these figures by way of proving that terrorism was, despite appearances, decidedly on the wane:

Nevertheless, this recrudescence of terrorism helped reinforce in the
pieds noirs
a sense of outrage that the Paris government should even contemplate negotiating with spokesmen of those capable of such crimes. As Alain de Sérigny notes of Algiers around Christmas 1959, “The psychological climate there was detestable. I had the impression that the least spark would be enough to set off a general conflagration.”