A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (89 page)

The general situation is not favourable; we don’t think that France is
dans le coup
, and Paris will react badly. We don’t think we’ve got either the air force or the navy with us, and altogether it’s only an adventure that can lead to nothing. Go and give this negative response to General Jouhaud.

On relaying the message to the general, who took it with his head bowed, looking utterly crushed, Sergent remarks, “I felt as if I had my father in front of me, to whom I had just caused an immense pain.”

So ended the first projected military plot against de Gaulle. Though the full details of it were not known to the government until much later, enough suspicions were aroused for all the company officers of the 1st R.E.P. to be sent home to France. Posted “in penitence” to Chartres, Captain Sergent contemplated resigning. One thing was clear to all involved; as a leader of revolt Jouhaud had revealed himself to be as ineffective as he was lacking in allure. Somebody altogether more impressive had to be found.

Disaster for de Gaulle: triumph for the F.L.N.

Showing signs of exhaustion, de Gaulle cut short his visit by twenty-four hours, flying home from Bône. It was his last glimpse of Algeria. He appeared almost unaware of just how disastrous his visit had been, remarking that “everything seems quiet”, and congratulating Morin and Crépin for having been “strong enough to prevent a drama and human enough to limit it”. Returning to Paris, he found that police leave had been cancelled and tough Marine Commando units sent to stand-by in barracks round the city, in case of a revolt of which there had been unspecified rumours. As the rioting died away in Algiers and Oran, 120 dead were counted and nearly 500 injured. Revealingly, all but eight of the dead turned out to be Muslims, some of whom had been killed in an internecine settling of accounts by F.L.N. hatchet-men — including a well-known, pro-French trade unionist, Said Madani. Overnight the Casbah reverted, for the first time since the Battle of Algiers, to being a hostile enclave all but impenetrable to the forces of order. In the European quarters numerous arrests were made; all civil servants implicated in the riots were dismissed, and the F.A.F. was declared dissolved. Walking down the Rue Michelet in the wake of the riots, Bernard Tricot found a “sinister” atmosphere: little groups of men “hardly talking, arms dangling loose, with the air of people who have just received a terrible blow and no longer know where they are”.

In Tunis the G.P.R.A. were manifestly staggered by the snowball spontaneity and success of the demonstrations. A jubilant Ferhat Abbas broadcast telling the Algerians that they had achieved their object. Indeed, as far as scoring points at the United Nations was concerned, they had more than achieved it. To Ben Khedda, speaking many years afterwards, the Muslim demonstration of December 1960 represented the “decisive turning-point of the war”, and it is a view with which many French historians concur. To Albert-Paul Lentin it represented a “Dien Bien Phu of official propaganda”. At the time, Janet Flanner jotted down in her journal:

In Paris, it is considered that three myths died in Algeria over the weekend, these being the selfish myth of the white ultras that Algeria is French; the mendacious myth of the French army that only a fistful of fighting rebels in Algeria wanted independence in all those years of war; and the major, miracle myth that de Gaulle could make peace — though no one here, or probably anywhere, thinks that anyone else could make it.

De Gaulle’s second referendum

De Gaulle was as aware of these myths as anyone, and, once the lesson of December sank in, it was to exert a profound influence on his future policy for Algeria. But meanwhile he pressed on undeterred with his second referendum, scheduled to be held on 8 January. Once again the actual wording of the referendum was adroitly chosen: “Do you approve the Bill submitted to the French people by the President of the Republic concerning the self-determination of the Algerian population and the organisation of the public powers in Algeria prior to self-determination?” It amounted, in effect, to a
carte blanche
vote of confidence in de Gaulle, for him to negotiate as he might see fit with the F.L.N. Or, as some correspondents interpreted it at the time, there were two votes of confidence — one in France for de Gaulle, and one in Algeria for the F.L.N. The referendum campaign produced some forcefully opposing views in both territories. Soustelle and his colleagues of the Vincennes Committee declared the referendum to be unconstitutional, on the grounds that no one had the right to dispose of an integral part of France. From Madrid there came an impassioned plea to vote
non
signed by Salan, Lagaillarde, Susini and Ronda (another newly-arrived fugitive from the “Barricades Trial”). Two days later sixteen distinguished generals who had all served in Algeria addressed a “letter to the French” urging them to halt “the extension of Soviet influence in the Mediterranean”. Under the lead of Thorez, the Communists instructed their cohorts to vote similarly — explaining with some sophistry that they would not be supporting the “ultras”, but “voting against the war”. From Tunis Ferhat Abbas, broadcasting for the G.P.R.A. and, as ever, anxious that the initiative should in no way pass to de Gaulle, appealed to all Algerians to boycott the polling booths. Prominent among those campaigning for de Gaulle was a new body called the Mouvement pour la Communauté (M.P.C.) — its symbol of a figure with arms out-stretched in the shape of a V, superimposed upon the Cross of Lorraine, suddenly appeared plastered on walls throughout Algeria, accompanied by a large
oui
. The M.P.C. was a last attempt to rally the liberal “men of goodwill” of both races

In the event, the referendum in Algiers was held in a thick fog, symptomatic, some observers thought, of the obscurity of the political issues surrounding it. When the ballot was counted the result was another overwhelming
oui
for de Gaulle of seventy-five per cent. But four in ten voters had abstained, particularly in Algeria where Muslims had been faithful in obeying the G.P.R.A.’s appeal this time. Thus the true majority there was just over fifty-five per cent while Algiers with its preponderance of
pieds noirs
had registered a resounding seventy-two per cent of “
nons
”. De Gaulle, however, took the results as a convincing endorsement for “self-determination”. To his Minister of Information, Louis Terrenoire, he confided:

Up till now I have made numerous speeches.
It was a question of progressively preparing opinion for what must come
[Terrenoire’s italics]. Now it’s becoming serious, one will have to keep quiet, for there will be contacts with the F.L.N.…Let’s not recommence the misunderstanding of Melun. All we know about them [the F.L.N. leaders] is that they are divided.

Towards the end of January the Swiss government was relaying to de Gaulle fresh overtures from the G.P.R.A. for peace negotiations. De Gaulle promptly detailed his old friend, Georges Pompidou, director of Rothschild’s Bank, to take up the thread with the utmost discretion.

Then, on 25 January, the French Armed Forces were shocked to hear of General Maurice Challe’s resignation at the tender age of only fifty-six, the announcement of which had been held over from before the referendum at de Gaulle’s express request.

[
1
] Feraoun, on the other hand, was noting at the end of November that it was the French who were “seized with lassitude. The Muslims are regaining hope and appreciate that deliverance is close. A deliverance that will stem from this lassitude…. Yes, I believe it will be victory.”

[
2
] In fact, the next “contact” the two were to have would be at Jouhaud’s court martial.

[
3
] “Long live!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Generals’ Putsch:
April 1961

L’ambition dont on n’a pas les talents est un crime
.

Talleyrand

It’s a very strange characteristic of my life that I have always been obliged to fight against those who have been my friends.

Charles de Gaulle

Rebels in search of a leader

All but one of the familiar smells are back in autumnal Paris [wrote C. L. Sulzberger in December 1960]. There is the fragrance of dead leaves, of dank seaweed in the oyster stalls, and of sweet nougat and sugared nuts in the booths of itinerant vendors. And there is that oddly agreeable odor of mist and coal smoke. The only missing smell is the smell of danger. Now this is curious because, normally, when there is danger in the air of Paris you can almost sniff it.

But the absence of this particular smell was deceptive. The new year of 1961 certainly offered no brighter horizon for de Gaulle than 1960 had done. At home social unrest was growing; February came in with a strike by French teachers, followed up by railway workers and postmen; March brought a general strike of civil servants. An attempt by Debré to halt inflation through pegging wages provoked an angry clamour from the unions. There were ugly murmurs of corruption in high places concerning the building industry. In a winter of discontent one of the few bright reliefs was the triumphant and rather pathetic resurrection of Edith Piaf, with a new song which touched the heartstrings of all France: “
Je ne regrette rien
”.

Momentarily, Algeria seemed to recede from the limelight, but meanwhile, all the time, unseen pressure from the
syndicalistes
and the “respectable” Left was mounting for de Gaulle to initiate peace negotiations in earnest with the F.L.N. The growth of war-weariness in France was becoming particularly apparent; that is, apparent to all but those army leaders now bent upon eliminating de Gaulle so as to continue the struggle to “save” Algeria. For, inept and ineffectual as it had been, the would-be coup in December 1960 had marked a crossing of the Rubicon. Sections of the French army were now irretrievably committed to revolt against the head of state in all his authority, and to all that so grave a commitment signified. It but remained to splice together the various disparate, often discordant and geographically distant strands of conspiracy, and — above all — to find a leader capable of getting them all to pull in the same direction. Finally, a D-Day had to be appointed.

In this period that prefaced open rebellion an intense subterranean activity was seething within the depths of the army. Among the élite formations that had borne the brunt of the fighting in Algeria, the lieutenants were to be found working upon the captains, and captains upon the majors and colonels — though the colonels needed little enough pressurising. As in May 1958 and January 1960, it was they, not the generals, who provided the true dynamos of revolt. Insouciantly little emphasis was placed on the views of the rank and file. There were good enough reasons of security for this omission; it was later to prove, however, the Achilles’ heel of the whole movement. Among the junior officer “activists”, just to mention a few names, there was Captain Sergent of the 1st R.E.P., sent to Chartres in “penitence” after the December troubles, but remaining in close contact with his kindred spirits in metropolitan France; and there was Lieutenant Roger Degueldre of the same regiment. A sombre giant of a man who had risen from the ranks, Degueldre like Sergent had acted as “liaison officer” with the F.A.F. in December, but afterwards he had simply deserted rather than be transferred out of the way to the Sahara. It was a fairly comfortable desertion, however, with Degueldre continuing to be fed and housed by officers of the 1st R.E.P. — all of which was suggestive of just how far disaffection in that regiment had gone — and apparently encountering no difficulties in his frequent travels back and forth. Degueldre is described by all who knew him as having a quite exceptional influence over all who entered his sphere, whether junior or senior. As a twenty-year-old sergeant-major in Indo-China, by 1950 he had already won three citations and a recommendation, and that same year saved from almost certain death a wounded captain, Hervé de Blignières. An aristocratic Saumur cavalryman who had escaped from the Germans (and been recaptured) no less than seven times during the Second World War, de Blignières re-encountered Degueldre eight years later in Algeria — he now a colonel and regimental commander, the latter a lieutenant. Falling under his junior’s spell, de Blignières in the winter of 1961 became a leading co-ordinator and recruiter of senior militants in France.

Linked by de Blignières, many old familiar faces reappeared, meeting in such places as the office of Colonel Lacheroy in the École Militaire or provincial garrisons to which they had been banished. There was that expert on political in-fighting sometimes called the Fouché of Algiers, Colonel Yves Godard, who — under a cloud after “Barricades Week” — had applied with extraordinary lack of realism for the post of military attaché to Poland. Although he had served there in 1939, it was hardly probable that he, with his well-known detestation of Communism, would have been acceptable in the Warsaw of 1961; so Godard had been sent to moulder in Nevers. Then, tucked away in Metz, there was his successor as chief-of-staff to General Massu, Colonel Antoine Argoud, who had organised France’s first atomic age brigade and was considered to be “the ardent and secret soul” of the “Colonels’ soviet”, a man of extraordinary physical energy, often walking twenty-five miles a day for relaxation into the Algerian
djebel
, and of exceptional toughness when dealing with captured rebels. There was Colonel Dufour, the absconder with the 1st R.E.P.’s colours, currently exiled to the Black Forest; Colonel Broizat, the monk-crusader whose paras, together with Dufour’s, had occupied the centre of the stage in “Barricades Week”; their fellow para colonels, Masselot and Lecomte, recruited during de Gaulle’s December visit; and General Jacques Faure, the rugged mountaineer who had been the first to conspire against the political establishment back in 1957. A new acquisition was the acting regimental commander of Dufour’s old 1st R.E.P., Major Élie Denoix de Saint-Marc. A member of an old Bordeaux family, at nineteen he had been deported to Buchenwald for his involvement in the Resistance, and had later fought in Indo-China, at Suez and in the Battle of Algiers — where he had voiced the strongest opposition to torture. With the face of a tormented ascetic, Saint-Marc was literally worshipped by his tough, pragmatic Legionnaires, who recognised and accepted the purity of his idealism. One day he was heard to exclaim, after a number of whiskies: “I’ve had enough, enough, enough! One day I shall commit a
connerie
, an enormous
connerie, une connerie grande comme çal
” And he did.