A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (73 page)

Two days after Massu’s recall, Challe himself flew to Paris to learn that Massu was never going to be allowed to return to Algiers. At a meeting in the Elysée on 22 January attended by Challe and Delouvrier, Premier Debré and the Minister of Defence, Guillaumat, General Ely, Chief of General Staff, and three of the top-ranking generals from Algeria, one after another pleaded the danger that the sacking of Massu could create. Pale with cold anger, de Gaulle was obdurate. When Challe, backed by Delouvrier, prophesied, “Blood will flow in Algiers”, he was told, “You exaggerate.” Leaving the Elysée, Challe offered his resignation to General Ely, and then returned to Algiers to await the worst. “When thrown into a red-hot boiler,” said the Brombergers, “a bucket of water does not appease the furnace. It unleashes an explosion of fire. The recall of Massu was the bucket of water thrown on to the Algiers furnace.”

Green light for Ortiz

Ortiz now had his green light. The moment the news came through on the evening of 22 January that Massu was permanently banished, the F.N.F. announced that a general strike would begin on Sunday, the 24th. It would be accompanied by mass demonstrations to centre, as usual, around the
monument aux morts
and the Plateau des Glières. At the time the impression was fostered that the insurrection of 24 January was a spontaneous outburst of rage on the part of the
pieds noirs
against the removal of their beloved Massu. It was, in fact, nothing of the sort, but a deliberately and long-prepared
coup-de-main
for which the
bombe Massu
was only a pretext; in any event, as Ortiz repeatedly made plain to his associates, he had little confidence in Massu himself as being a man who would go as far as he, Ortiz, wanted. On the morning of Saturday the 23rd, Sérigny published an emotionally charged valedictory to Massu, and already the khaki-shirted storm-troops of the F.N.F., wearing their Celtic cross brassards, and the U.T. de Choc in black berets, were to be seen mustering at their local centres in Algiers, all heavily armed.

The objectives of the “ultras” were, as before, short-term and shortsighted. Ortiz aimed, immediately, for a replay of 13 May 1958, but this time ending with a total and irreversible victory for the
pieds noirs
. (Susini, characteristically, went even further, declaring to the F.N.F.: “The hour to overturn the regime has struck. The revolution will start in Algiers and move to Paris.”) By taking up positions in arms in the heart of Algiers, Ortiz hoped to confront Challe with the cruel dilemma either to order the army to fire on fellow Frenchmen, or take sides with them. In this he had been powerfully encouraged by assurances from Colonels Gardes and Argoud that the paras, certainly, would never open fire. Having forced this confrontation, it was reckoned that de Gaulle would be obliged to go back on the abhorred “self-determination” principle; or, better still, to resign. Once again there was no thought in the despairing minds of the “ultras” of “what then?” Nothing revealed better the egoistic isolationism of their despair and the unreal world which it drove them to inhabit than Susini’s wild declaration at this time: “The irreversible process is now under way. Between the republic and Algeria, we choose
Algérie française
!” Characteristically, the possible reaction of fifty million metropolitan Frenchmen was simply not taken into account.

As the fateful Sunday dawned, there were but two shadows cast upon what, to the
bistrotier
, Ortiz, looked like complete mastery and abundant prospects of success. One was Lagaillarde. Because of his departure for the Chamber of Deputies, and his ensuing split with Ortiz, Lagaillarde had deliberately been excluded from all preliminary councils-of-war. According to Lagaillarde himself at his subsequent trial, he knew nothing of what was afoot until rumours reached him at a café on the Saturday morning. This was not strictly true. Typically Lagaillarde, the Quixotic loner, without consulting Ortiz and unconsulted by him, had already jumped the gun the previous evening by seizing a building within the university perimeter. With a handful of armed henchmen (and, apparently, impelled by the precedent of his martyred great-grandfather) he had turned this into a first barricaded camp, bluntly informing the authorities (as well as Ortiz) that if anyone approached within thirty metres he would be fired upon, and that he would not quit the university until de Gaulle had yielded. To his intense annoyance, Ortiz now saw some of his best troops being siphoned off to join the more disciplined and military camp of the ex-paratrooper. Henceforth, right through the following week, there would not be one but two leaders, and two camps, and to the very end Lagaillarde’s would prove the more orderly.

A far darker shadow, however, from Ortiz’s point of view was the equivocal posture of the army. Partly egged on by the earlier assurance given by the dissident colonels, partly deluded by his own
méditerranéen-et-demi
optimism, Ortiz had persuaded both himself and his followers that, once they had moved, the army would give virtually total support. Now, at the eleventh hour, partly perhaps because they felt the movement was threatening to get out of hand, partly because of instructions from General Challe, Argoud and Gardes poured some cold water on Ortiz’s expectations. (The position of Gardes was by now an anomalous one; because of overplaying his hand during the past weeks he had just been posted away from the Cinquième Bureau to replace Bigeard in the field at Saida, but had as yet avoided taking up his new duties.) Ortiz was told that the feeling of the army in general was that they would not fire on him—but, on the other hand, it would not countenance a putsch. An added dampener was provided by that prominent figure from past conspiratorial occasions, General Faure, currently commanding in Kabylia, who warned Ortiz that the time was not ripe; that opinion at home was against the “ultras”, and that an insurrection now had no chance of success. Ortiz, however—pushed on by the impetus of the seething armed citizenry behind him, and driven to more precipitate action than he might perhaps otherwise have chosen by the knowledge that his rival, Lagaillarde, had stolen a march on him at the university—could not now go back. On the morning of the 24th he set up a “command post” in the elegant building of the Compagnie Algérienne, which fronted on to the main thoroughfare of the Boulevard Laferrière and Rue Charles Péguy, just across from the Hôtel des Postes. Surrounding him were 1,500 men of the F.N.F. and U.T., bristling with automatic weapons, some of them “appropriated” early that morning from an army depot.

Challe acts

Meanwhile Challe, at last appreciating the explosiveness of the situation, had taken his own precautionary measures. Realising that Lagaillarde could not now be dislodged from the university, nor Ortiz’s men disarmed without risk of bloodshed, he threw roadblocks across all the routes into the city to prevent armed reinforcements from being ferried in from the Mitidja. Under command of Lieutenant-Colonel Debrosse, all available gendarmes—totalling some two thousand—were to be concentrated in and around the Gouvernement-Général to prevent any recurrence of Lagaillarde’s coup of 13 May 1958. Reluctantly, he called for reinforcements from the 10th Para Division, currently fighting the F.L.N. in Kabylia, for what he scathingly called “a little local excitement”. At this point Challe was evidently not aware of the extent to which, through Argoud and Gardes, the paras had become implicated with Ortiz, for the 10th (now commanded by General Gracieux) was Massu’s old division, a number of its members were recruited from Algiers, and many others had sweethearts or close friends there, stemming from the days of the Battle of Algiers. Thus, ironically, both the impending insurgents and the forces of law and order were banking on the same paras as their trump card. In an attempt to calm Ortiz, at midday on the 24th Challe invited him to his headquarters and informed him of concessions that he had already “wrung” from de Gaulle; death sentences for terrorism to be resumed, “pacification” to be continued, and an assurance that there would be no political talks with the F.L.N. Ortiz found Challe munching a hasty ham sandwich at his desk, and took advantage of this to swell his esteem with his followers by boasting that he had “lunched with” the Commander-in-Chief. He also claimed that Challe had offered a “deal”, whereby if the Gouvernement-Général and other public buildings were not attacked the demonstrators would be left unharassed.

By mid-afternoon the Plateau des Glières was black with demonstrators—an estimated thirty thousand. Noticeably absent were any Muslims. Gone was the spirit of fraternisation of those May days of 1958; gone also was the good-natured atmosphere of fiesta that had prevailed at that time. In its place was a tougher and altogether more dangerous mood. At Ortiz’s “command post” there was chaos reminiscent of the headier days of the Paris Commune; everybody talked, gave orders and made speeches in an atmosphere dense with Bastos cigarette-smoke, the smell of sweat and beer. In the street below some young members of the F.N.F. began spontaneously to prise up paving-stones and create a barricade—again in the best tradition of the Commune. On Ortiz’s balcony Gardes, though now with no official function in Algiers, was seen to appear and survey the work on the barricade with evident approbation. The sight of a full colonel in uniform beside Ortiz was about all the crowd needed to endorse its belief that the army was “marching” with it. Meanwhile, just a couple of hundred yards higher up on the Forum it could see the hated mobile gendarmes and C.R.S., helmeted and equipped for mob-bashing, forming up in a threatening black line.

The fusillade of 24 January

Confronted by the challenge of the barricades now busily under construction (those thrown up simultaneously at the university by Lagaillarde already looked even more redoubtable), Challe had to act. After an angry call from Delouvrier noting Gardes’ presence with Ortiz, the dissident colonel was despatched out of Algiers to his new posting forthwith. Under Challe’s seal of approval a concerted operation was ordered whereby the demonstrators were to be herded, gently but firmly, like driven game towards the west of the city and Bab-el-Oued, whence most of them had come. It depended upon a triangular, precisely co-ordinated movement in which the gendarmes under Debrosse would advance down the steps from the Forum towards the sea (and Ortiz’s “command post”), while at the same time the paras of the 1st R.C.P. and the 1st R.E.P. (Foreign Legion) were to come in from the north and east. The two regiments were commanded respectively by Colonels Broizat and Dufour, both well known to be outspokenly sympathetic to the demonstrators. Broizat, an ex-theologian, managed still to give the (quite deceptive) appearance of a mild-mannered bishop; Dufour, at forty-seven was one of the toughest officers of the Legion who had spent much of his career in conflict with the Establishment, and of whom a general once remarked: “I have seldom met an officer as hard, even brutal, as you are towards your superiors.” To all three intervening forces, explicit orders were given that there should be no firing; weapons were to be carried unloaded, and those of the gendarmes were scrupulously checked by their officers. They were assured that their frontal advance would be covered by the paras moving up on their right flank.

At 18.00 hours the gendarmes began to move slowly down the steep slope from the Forum, into the Boulevard Laferrière with its lush central gardens. It was getting dark, and the F.N.F. camp seethed with intense excitement at the sight of the advancing gendarmes. Suddenly a couple of pistol shots rang out, fired in the gathering dusk by an unknown hand. As if it were a signal, volleys of automatic fire from windows and rooftops along both sides of the Boulevard Laferrière opened up on the unfortunate gendarmes caught in the middle. One particularly deadly automatic rifle was spotted firing burst after burst from the balcony of Ortiz’s, “command post”, where Gardes had appeared only a few hours previously; at the fifth-floor window of another elegant apartment block Colonel Debrosse observed a woman in a dressing-gown—a modern
pétroleuse
—calmly emptying her revolver into the street below. Home-made bombs were dropped on the heads of the gendarmes, and tyres stuffed with
plastique
rolled out on to the boulevard and exploded. Caught at a terrible disadvantage, the gendarmes fell like flies before they could load up and fire back. Wounded men who crept into buildings out of the line of fire were viciously attacked by the F.N.F. within. There were horrible scenes as the catchword
se payer un gendarme
(“get yourself a cop”) ran round, and maddened
pied noir
youths mercilessly despatched wounded gendarmes in cold blood. One was found hanging by his feet in a stair well, while a para colonel witnessing the scene declared that he had never before seen wounded men so mercilessly machine-gunned as they crawled on the pavement. For three-quarters of an hour the massacre continued.

And where were the paras?

It was 18.45 before the advance guard of Dufour’s 1st R.E.P. arrived, having taken the best part of an hour to cover six hundred yards. The shooting slowly died away; but when the casualties came to be counted there were six dead and twenty-four wounded among the civil demonstrators, and no less than fourteen dead and 123 wounded in the ranks of the gendarmes. A violent exchange now took place between Dufour and an outraged Debrosse, with the latter demanding why the paras had not turned up on time, and Dufour riposting that the gendarmes, by opening fire, had breached Challe’s “pact” with Ortiz. To this day, despite the lengthy hearings of the “Barricades Trial” later in 1960, the two essential questions of who fired first, and why the luckless gendarmes were left to face the heavily armed myrmidons of Ortiz on their own, have never been satisfactorily answered. There were dubious allegations of an unknown
agent provocateur
(possibly of the F.L.N.?) firing those first fatal revolver shots, and Ortiz—not unnaturally—claimed that the gendarmes were to blame. But all the evidence, added to the disparity of the casualties, indicates that the culprits lay among the trigger-happy band of Ortiz, firing with or without orders. Challe in his memoirs admits that the manoeuvre of the gendarmes was a “gross error”. The excuse offered by Colonels Broizat and Dufour (unsatisfactorily vague even in their testimonies before the “Barricades Trial”) was that their two élite regiments had been held up by Lagaillarde’s barricade in the university. But in fact Broizat’s line of march ran through the tunnel that passes underneath the university buildings, out of reach of the barricade, while Dufour’s lay well clear of the whole area. It was plain from both the preceding and subsequent events that the colonels’ disastrous tardiness stemmed from a desire to avoid at all costs any clash with the insurgents.