A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (74 page)

“Barricades Week” begins

Whatever the findings of any post-mortem, however, the fact of outstanding gravity was that, for France, a catastrophic frontier in the Algerian war had been crossed. For the first time Frenchmen had fired upon, and killed, other Frenchmen; to the historically minded the dreadful spectre of the 1940s and, farther back, of 1871 presented itself. Across the breadth of France would echo the dying words of one of the Algiers gendarmerie lieutenants: “For two years I’ve been fighting against the
fellagha
. Now I’m dying at the hands of people who cry
Algérie française
! I don’t understand…!”

Within an hour or two of the end of the fusillade, Challe and Delouvrier, however, were understanding all too well the full seriousness of the situation. Backed by a majority of his senior officers, General Crépin, Massu’s recently arrived successor, made it plain to Challe that there could be no prospect of breaching the barricades, especially the well-organised redoubt manned by Lagaillarde. Or was Challe prepared to use tanks and risk “a new Budapest”—the still fresh memories of which held particular horror for the French army? Moreover, the para colonels upon whom all depended let it be known that their regiments would do no more than set up a ring round the perimeter of the barricades. Shattered by events and by the realisation of his own impotence, Challe that night made a stern broadcast declaring a state of siege over the city. But it had a minimal effect on either the insurgents or the sympathetic para colonels, all of whom were now convinced that the day was won, and that de Gaulle would have to give way.

In the course of that first night, the deadly fusillade soon forgotten, some extraordinary scenes of fraternisation took place on the barricades. Arriving at the university, Captain Pierre Sergent of the 1st R.E.P. strode up to shake Lagaillarde by the hand, assuring him, “I’ll never have you fired upon.” Women of the F.N.F. men behind the barricades were allowed to come and go as they pleased, bringing supplies of croissants, thermos flasks of coffee and wine, which were readily shared out with the passively attendant paras. On the same barricades the barmen of the Saint-George and Aletti hotels, normally bitter rivals, were found jointly dispensing hospitality. As Lagaillarde remarked at his trial, the barricades “instead of dividing, united everybody”, and, for the first three days as the weird stalemate continued, a kind of picnic spirit prevailed in the unusually balmy January weather. But amid the fraternisation one important ingredient was still pointedly missing: the Muslims. With a big effort, a few pathetic handfuls of elderly veterans were drummed up, many of them maimed and of First World War vintage; but, on the other hand, large groups of Casbah urchins gathered to chant at a discreet distance: “
Algérie Arabe
!
À bas Massu
!”

Ortiz jubilant: but de Gaulle intransigent

On the Monday morning (25 January), Ortiz was comporting himself like a triumphant pocket Duce. There was a brief fiery exchange with Lagaillarde, who habitually referred in contempt to the restaurateur’s disorderly “command post” as
le café
; after which each retired to rule his own roost, and Ortiz was heard to proclaim jubilantly: “Tomorrow, in Paris I shall be the ruling power!” Certainly, from the point of view of the authorities in Algiers, it looked perilously as though Ortiz held all the tricks. Arriving hastily in the city, de Gaulle’s agitated premier, Michel Debré, found Delouvrier on crutches and Challe stricken with a bout of rheumatism, conducting operations, like Marshal Saxe at Fontenoy, from a truckle bed—both of them deeply pessimistic. At Challe’s headquarters five generals and eleven field officers from General Crépin downwards told Debré flatly that the army would not fire on the barricades. It was Colonel Argoud who dotted the
is
by declaring that the only possible solution was for de Gaulle to renounce “self-determination”; otherwise he would be replaced by General Challe. Upon which, Debré expostulated to Delouvrier, “But you have a soviet of colonels here!” On his way out of Algiers that evening the lesson was rubbed in as Debré observed groups of paras hobnobbing with Ortiz’s men over the barricade camp-fires.

But the jubilant Ortiz reckoned without the will of one man: de Gaulle.

When the first news reached France, because of army censorship in Algiers, compounded with distraction by their own surfeit of crises at home, ordinary Frenchmen did not at first take in just how deadly was the predicament in Algeria. The country was seized by a bad bout of
la grippe
; a quarter of the population of Metz was reported stricken. In Paris the spring collections were beginning, amid much speculation about slipping waistlines and vanished sleeves. In New York General Douglas MacArthur was about to celebrate his 80th birthday in his retreat atop the Waldorf Towers, still fuming at his dismissal by Truman at the beginning of the decade. In England the Queen was about to give birth, Princess Margaret to get married, and Aneurin Bevan was dying, while fifty-six year-old Dr Barbara Moore was half-way on her walk from John O’Groats to Land’s End, accompanied by a mile-and-a-half line of cars. At the other end of Africa, Prime Minister Macmillan, greeted by riots in Nyasaland, was also having his “little local difficulties”.[
2
] At 1 a.m. on Monday, the 25th, the current Minister of Information, Roger Frey, told journalists in Paris, “By the end of the day there will be no more barricades”, words that were soon to stick in his throat.

De Gaulle had first been alerted shortly before nine o’clock on the Sunday evening, at Colombey, and was at the Elysée by midnight, displaying, from the very first, the same Olympian calm as during the explosive days of May 1958, or, indeed, as at any time of extreme crisis. In a short, unbending broadcast to the nation, he accused the Algiers insurgents of striking “a stab in the back for France, before the world.” He adjured them to return to order, adapting words that had rung out in 1940: “Nothing is lost for a Frenchman when he rejoins his mother, France.” He had been brought back to lead the country, to find for Algeria “
une solution qui soit française
” (a phrasing that drew growls of rage at its ambiguity in Algiers), and he intended to carry through this responsibility. He closed with an expression of his “profound confidence” in Delouvrier and Challe (a confidence that, in fact, he was far from feeling as in private he criticised both for their “irresolution”). Like Challe’s, the speech made little impact in Algiers.

The following afternoon a meeting of the cabinet was held at the Elysée in a febrile atmosphere. There were rumours of a putsch in preparation in Paris. Tempers frayed. When the old revolutionary, Malraux, declared that he could not believe “there were not four thousand men with tanks” capable of suppressing the barricades, Soustelle sneered, “Since we’ve got an atomic bomb, why not use it? Let’s drop it on Algiers, instead of at Reggane!” Less impassioned, the thirty-three-year-old Secretary for Finnance, Giscard d’Estaing, advised that any “brutal action” would simply extend the uprising all over Algeria. Over it all de Gaulle reigned aloof and unyielding. In his memoirs he wrote: “I was determined to lance the abscess, make no concessions whatever and obtain complete obedience from the army.”

Stalemate in Algiers

Tuesday, 26 January, began on a note of at least negative good news for the government; the army had not crossed the Rubicon, no putsch had started in either Algiers or Paris; there had been no reaction by the Muslims in Algeria, or by the F.L.N. which remained curiously and attentively passive. But Debré reported back from Algiers, thoroughly shaken by what he had seen and heard, and warning that the least false step would lead to formation of a military junta in Algiers. During an emotion-charged
tête-à-tête
between two old soldiers, de Gaulle, who had just buried his brother, told Marshal Juin: “I am an old man. I too am going to die soon.” Then, before the Marshal could wipe the tears from his eyes, in an abrupt change of tone, de Gaulle declared: “Whatever happens, I cannot give in. I will not give in to a riot…. If I did, I should be nothing more than a marionette and within a fortnight I would have a new uprising, a new ultimatum on my shoulders.” Before the end of the day, both Debré and Guillaumat, the Minister of Defence, had joined Soustelle in offering their resignations—and had them brusquely rejected. De Gaulle also refused to accede to pressure to advance the date of a television address he was to make to the nation, already fixed for Friday, 29 January. Even the loyal courtier, Bernard Tricot, admits that at the time he felt de Gaulle’s intransigence was due more to “pride than to careful calculation”. The whole entourage was in despair at what seemed like de Gaulle’s withdrawal from reality. Yet, in fact, events were to prove that it was de Gaulle who was instinctively, and accurately, in touch with the mood of France. With the passing of each successive day of the crisis, it became evident that public opinion—from Left to Right—was setting solidly behind de Gaulle, solidly against the Algiers insurgents and their dissident allies in the army.

By the 27th, realisation of this vital fact began to dawn upon the colonels in Algiers, with the more radical among them, such as Argoud, assessing that they had now missed the boat in not launching a full-scale putsch during the first hours of the barricades. There had been gestures of solidarity with the insurgents in other centres, such as Oran, where barricades had also been erected, largely distinguished by the entertainment of a famous clown, Achille Zavatta, who happened to be in the city at the time; but all had swiftly crumbled. Bored with the discomfort, indiscipline and empty rodomontades behind Ortiz’s barricades, some of his forces had already begun to fritter away, while the civilian population was also getting fed up with the inconvenience of closed shops and uncleared garbage. Lagaillarde, always in his para’s “leopard” battle-denims and red beret, continued to maintain strict military discipline in his camp; “passes” had to be applied for by “troops” wishing to sleep out in the town; “courts martial” were held, and one actually passed a mock death-sentence on a badly frightened journalist. It was also Lagaillarde who, on the 27th, pulled off a minor coup by liberating from prison Philippe Castille and three accomplices serving sentences for the
affaire du bazooka
of three years previously. Confidently he declared to the Press: “The Third Republic was born at Sedan and died at Sedan. The Fourth was born in Algiers and died in Algiers. The Fifth is born in Algiers.” But still there was no news that a single senior officer, let alone unit, of the army in France or Germany had come out in support of the insurgents. Headed by Argoud, as always the most articulate, the “soviet of Colonels” now made an ultimate bid, in the presence of Delouvrier, to persuade Challe to join their cause, to force de Gaulle to conform or go.

Delouvrier and Challe withdraw

The thinly veiled threat that he and the Commander-in-Chief might soon find themselves little better than prisoners in their own headquarters helped decide Delouvrier to take a dramatic step: to leave Algiers, together with Challe. At first Challe demurred, on the grounds that it would look like desertion, but later the hitherto extraordinarily close partnership that they had enjoyed reasserted itself, and he agreed. On Wednesday 22 January, Challe broadcast a radio address aimed at the disaffected elements of the army, in which he declared emphatically that “it will continue to fight for Algeria to remain definitively French, otherwise there can be no sense in its struggle…. I repeat: the French army is fighting in order that Algeria shall remain definitively French.” Coming from someone with Challe’s reputation for integrity, the words carried considerable weight among the large majority of French officers; they were never disclaimed by de Gaulle, and the fact that Challe was permitted to utter what was later, in his eyes, revealed to be a lie would have a vital influence on his own conduct the following year.

After four gruelling days of unremitting crisis, with which he was not designed to cope either by disposition or by his training as a technocrat, Delouvrier was near the end of this tether. Late that night he sat down and drafted a highly emotional, and what afterwards seemed a faintly ridiculous, speech, which he taped and left to be broadcast after he and Challe had slipped discreetly out of Algiers the following day. He was leaving behind as hostages, he declared, his wife and son of a few weeks, Mathieu, in the hopes that he would “grow up a symbol of Algeria’s indestructible attachment to France”. Pointing out the folly of the insurrection, he warned the rebels: “In rejecting de Gaulle, you will sink yourselves, you will sink the army and France as well.” But if they would only see sense, said Delouvrier, deferentially describing Lagaillarde’s stronghold as the “Alcazar of the University”, he would go there and shake Lagaillarde and Ortiz by the hand: “Then, together we shall all go to the
monument aux morts
to pray and weep for the dead of Sunday, dead in the faith that Algeria should remain French and that Algeria should obey de Gaulle….” That day, Thursday the 28th, travelling incognito in a black Citroën, he left Algiers to set up headquarters with Challe at a modest air force base in Reghaia, some twenty miles east of the city.

The turning point: de Gaulle speaks

In Paris de Gaulle was infuriated by the speech and Delouvrier’s offer to shake the rebel leaders by the hand; as with those before him, it looked as if Algiers had “gone to the head” of Delouvrier. But, in fact, the speech and the news that the “authorities” had withdrawn from Algiers together produced an unexpectedly powerful effect on the insurgents, and were to mark a turning-point in “Barricades Week”. The insurgents were dumbfounded by the inexplicable withdrawal, which reminded some disquietingly of the tactics of the Soviet army during the Budapest uprising,
reculant pour mieux sauter
, then returning to smash ruthlessly the surprised freedom fighters. More of the
pied noir
militiamen began to disappear from Ortiz’s barricades. In Algiers the wind had changed in more ways than one; on Friday the 29th the skies darkened and rain started to patter down on the over-heated citizenry.