A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (93 page)

“What are you going to do, then, Joxe?”

“I suppose go to Algeria, somehow.”

“
Bien
….”

Joxe says that de Gaulle then summoned him to the Élysée, “but only to shake me by the hand, say
au revoir
, and tell me, ‘You have all powers.’ ” There were no more detailed instructions. Accompanied by the new Chief-of-Staff to the Armed Forces, General Jean Olié, Joxe flew off courageously into the unknown.

To his first meeting of cabinet ministers on the 22nd de Gaulle is recorded as declaring contemptuously, “
Ce qui est grave dans cette affaire, Messieurs, c’est qu’elle n’est pas sérieuse
…!” It was “a matter of three days”, he reckoned, grumbling acrid asides about “this army which, politically, always deludes itself”. To Tricot he remarked a short time later, with a gesture of weary cynicism, “If they want to land in France, they will land. That’s up to them. There won’t be much to stop them. What will happen? Oh, it’s not difficult to guess: these are men of narrow vision; they will very soon be faced with problems that will be beyond them….”

Possibly the true hero of that first stupefying day in France was Roger Frey, de Gaulle’s Minister of the Interior. Acting with speed and vigour, he swooped to arrest the sporting General Faure and several other conspirators
in flagrante
, thereby nipping in the bud an attempt to march on the capital. For this purpose, on the evening of the 22nd some 1,800 lightly equipped paras were waiting in the Forest of Orléans, and another four hundred in the Forest of Rambouillet. Joining up with tank units from Rambouillet, they were to move in three columns on Paris, seizing the Élysée and other key points of the administration. But, organised by Godard, the whole venture had a strongly amateurish note about it, with some of the waiting putschists apparently unaware even of the codeword
Arnat
(a simple elision of
Armée
and
Nationale
). Once they were rendered leaderless by Faure’s arrest, no orders came through until a detachment of gendarmes appeared in the forest and gave a brusque order to disperse, with which the powerful body of paras sheepishly complied. Meanwhile, from Germany General Crépin had signalled the wholehearted loyalty of the troops under him, and similar messages of fidelity were reaching de Gaulle from all over France. A state of emergency was declared, and with it was invoked Article 16 of the Constitution enabling the authorities to hold without charge any suspect for fifteen days.

The Caravelle bearing Joxe and Olié had meanwhile touched down in Oranie unintercepted. General Pouilly asserted his loyalty but could not be sure how long he would remain at liberty, and urged de Gaulle’s delegates not to tarry. Hedge-hopping at a dangerously low altitude, they then flew on to Telergma near Constantine, which Joxe reckoned would be the key to the situation. There they temporarily won over the wavering Gouraud, but as the Caravelle took off in darkness for Bône and home it narrowly escaped capture by a para column converging on the airfield. Late the following night Morin, the Government-Delegate, and the other captives in the Palais d’Été were flown for “safe-keeping” to the desert outpost of In-Salah. It gave Colonel François Coulet a queasy sensation that perhaps they were all going to end by being shot.

That Sunday, 23 April, Paris began to present an extraordinary spectacle under the warming spring sunshine. Elderly Sherman tanks of Second World War vintage rumbled out from retirement to take up positions outside the Assembly and other government buildings. Discouragingly, some broke down and had to be towed across the Concorde. Compared with the modernity of equipment in Algeria, it was painfully plain that — as de Gaulle had remarked to Tricot — there was not “much to stop them” should Challe’s paras make a determined bid to land in France. All air movement round Paris was halted; buses and trains stopped running, and even the cinemas closed down; only the cafés remained open for business, and they were crammed with Parisians discussing the latest turn in the crisis. At eight o’clock that night all France clustered round the television as de Gaulle addressed the shaken, anxious nation. Once again, as during his broadcast at the time of “the Barricades”, he was dressed in his brigadier’s uniform. There were dark circles round the eyes which visibly filled with pain as he spoke of his beloved army in revolt. Scathingly he dismissed the rebel leaders as a “
quarteron
[
7
] of generals in retirement”. But here was “the nation defied, our strength shaken, our international prestige debased, our position and our role in Africa compromised. And by whom?
Hélas! Hélas! Hélas!
By men whose duty, honour and
raison d’être
it was to serve and to obey….” With utmost forceful emphasis, striking the table with his fist to reinforce his words, he then enjoined: “In the name of France, I order that all means, I repeat
all means
, be employed to block the road everywhere to those men…I forbid every Frenchman, and above all every soldier, to execute any of their orders….” No excuses or extenuating circumstances whatever for disobeying this order would be accepted. Finally, he ended with one of his impassioned, personal appeals: “
Françaises, Français!
Look where France risks going, in contrast to what she was about to become.
Françaises, Français! Aidez-moi!
” Among many thousand others, Janet Flanner rated the speech de Gaulle’s “greatest speaking performance of his career”: “When he cried three times ‘
Hélas! Hélas! Hélas!
’ it was the male voice of French tragedy, more moving, because anguished by reality, than any stage voice in
Britannicus
….”

Three hours later, as an acute anti-climax, there appeared on the screens the haggard, ill-shaven face of Premier Debré, speaking in jerky sentences and as nervous as de Gaulle had seemed sternly composed. Rebel paras were poised to drop from the skies, he warned: “As soon as the sirens sound, go on foot or by car and convince these deluded soldiers of their grave error. Good sense must come from the soul of the people and let everyone feel himself a part of the nation.” Once the danger was past, Debré’s melodramatic appeal was long the subject of a barrage of ridicule. However, all through that night “volunteers” flooded the Ministry of the Interior to offer assistance. Like Henry V before Agincourt, André Malraux stalked through their ranks, rekindling in his own mind Teruel, Guadalajara and other epic moments of the Spanish Civil War. Uniforms and helmets were issued — but no weapons. The next day (Monday, the 24th) a highly successful general strike of an hour’s duration was promoted by the Left in protest against the putsch; the trade unions called in unison for “arms for the people”; while the Communists, reinforcing this call, claimed they could mount some 15,000 combat-worthy militiamen to meet the crisis. It was all much more impressive than the demonstrations mounted in May 1958, and suddenly the government found itself facing not merely the threat posed by a “
quarteron
of generals in retirement”, but the ugly spectre of civil war at home.

Monday, 24 April

In fact, an invasion of metropolitan France was never on the hard-pressed Challe’s programme, while events of the 24th were to render it physically impossible anyway. On Sunday morning Challe — full of self-assurance — had proclaimed, “Yesterday we were nothing…. Today we are the greater part of Algeria…General Olié is in flight.” But twenty-four hours later the situation looked radically different. Challe had not slept for three nights, keeping himself alive on tobacco. The whole headquarters reeked with the sour odour of stale smoke. Deepening troubles were crowding in on him. Perhaps the most humiliating blow to his prestige as an air force general was that — like the “god Hercules” deserting Mark Antony before Alexandria — Nicot and the air force had started defecting from the rebel cause. At the beginning of the putsch there had been forty-five big Noratlases and various other transports capable of ferrying two regiments, but one by one these now slipped off to France. Mystère fighters were sent up to patrol the Rhône valley, with orders to force down any rebel aircraft attempting to head for Paris. By Tuesday the 25th Algeria was virtually denuded of troop-carrying aircraft, even down to the hospital transports. Meanwhile, more and more ground units were denying their support. In the Constantine sector it was clear that the vacillating Gouraud, though braced up temporarily by Zeller’s petulant visit on the Sunday, was being less than wholeheartedly obeyed. The situation in Oranie was worse, and at General Gardy’s request Challe had despatched Colonel Masselot’s and Colonel Lecomte’s para regiments to seize power there. But disquietingly enough even two of Lecomte’s three companies refused to move against the fortress of Mers-el-Kébir. To avert a tragic situation where it looked as if French troops were within an ace of firing on each other, General Pouilly, the loyal commander of Oranie, flew to Algiers for a remarkable confrontation with Challe. Knowing how Challe (who had been in his term at St Cyr) would shrink from any such danger, Pouilly put to him squarely just how close was civil war within the armed forces. For his pains, Pouilly was sent off to join the other government prisoners in the desert at In-Salah. But Challe took the hint, pulling back his flying columns of paras and deciding to concentrate all on the region round Algiers. At the same time he announced that any conscripts who wished to opt out would be freely repatriated back to France — but how? There would be no naval ships available, and soon no air transports.

More than any other single factor, however, what really decided the issue on that Monday, 24 April, was the remarkable impact that de Gaulle’s speech of the previous night had had upon the conscripts and reservists in Algeria. In their tens of thousands they huddled round their transistor radios (the rebel generals having failed, as with so much else, to jam broadcasts from France), listening to the President’s uncompromising call for obedience and loyalty to the state. It was, says one expert on the French army, Paul-Marie de la Gorce, “the first time in French military history that a chief of state appealed to troops over the heads of their rebellious superiors”. Unconsulted by their officers, many of the rank-and-file had felt at least apathetic towards the putsch in the first place; there were also many, in inverted snobbery, who bore a resentment against the braggadocio of the paras — who got all the girls, the decorations and the fame, and tended to treat the “line” regiments with all the arrogance of elitism. Now de Gaulle’s clearcut orders to use “
all means
” to stop the rebels, with their underlying threat of civil war, gave them essential moral reinforcement in their opposition. The President had absolved them of all disciplinary requirements to obey their seniors. To the waverers, here was an excuse now to be firm, and they in turn carried along those of their officers who had hitherto vacillated. Like wild-fire a kind of passive resistance spread. All over Algeria slogans appeared painted on the walls and roofs of army barracks, warning: “Don’t count on the rank-and-file!” Signal units refused to pass on messages between the rebels; in Constantine arms depots were seized; in one rebel regiment a grenade was actually thrown into the colonel’s command post. By the afternoon, as the exhausted and unhappy Challe noted, “failure was developing with a chain reaction”. It was no exaggeration to call this turning-point of the putsch the “victory of the transistors”. Once again de Gaulle, with his uncanny sense of timing and feel for the nation’s pulse, had wrought a miracle.

Challe gives in

Meanwhile, in Challe’s immediate circle there were bitter grumblings at the way things were going, at the former Commander-in-Chief’s apparent irresolution and absolutely steadfast refusal to undertake any measure that might lead to bloodletting between French soldiers. There were serious thoughts among the
à outrance
faction — Susini, Pérez, Degueldre and Sergent — to stage a putsch within a putsch; to seize Challe and replace him with Salan at the head of a new Committee of Public Safety. Susini proposed setting up “tribunals” to impose summary justice on all “officials guilty of sabotage”. Another prominent member of the O.A.S. claimed afterwards that he wanted to kill de Gaulle and added: “If Salan had been in command, there would have been killing, because Salan — in contrast to Challe — would not have hesitated to reduce by force any units hostile to the putsch; there would have been a much more revolutionary approach.” But events were moving altogether too fast. After snatching a few hours’ sleep for the first time on Monday night, Challe awoke on Tuesday morning to the conclusion that all was lost. He would give himself up — but alone. Godard angrily protested, interjecting an invidious comparison that the previous year Lagaillarde with less than a thousand men had “held the government in check for a whole week, and we with two divisions, are we going to give up after four days? I can’t accept it!” Zeller, as usual, flew into a rage. But, temporarily, it was the all-persuasive Susini who managed to argue Challe round, on the grounds that it would be an unspeakable crime now to abandon the civil population. Bravely, in the face of worsening news flowing in from all quarters, Challe struggled to keep the revolt going the rest of the day. Then, at midnight, he and his three colleagues in rebellion appeared for the last time on the historic balcony of the Gouvernement-Général. Almost symbolically, the microphone failed to work, and for a moment Challe wrestled with the connection. Then, says Captain Sergent, watching from the crowd, “the shadow lifted its arms in a great sign of impotence”. Sergent heard an old
pied noir
woman close to him sob, “
Ce n’est pas vrai! Ce n’est pas vrai!
” Like four Chinese silhouettes, without voice or substance, the generals disappeared, for the last time.