Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (98 page)

The
FLN
strategy was, in fact, to place the mass of the Muslims in a sandwich of terror. On one side, the
FLN
killers replaced the moderates. On the other,
FLN
atrocities were designed to provoke the French into savage reprisals, and so drive the Muslim population into the extremist camp,
FLN
doctrine was spelt out with coldblooded precision by the Brazilian terrorist Carlos Marighela:

It is necessary to turn political crisis into armed conflict by performing violent actions that will force those in power to transform the political situation of the country into a military situation. That will alienate the masses, who, from then on, will revolt against the army and the police …. The government can only intensify its repression, thus making the lives of its citizens harder than ever … police terror will become the order of the day …. The population will refuse to collaborate with the authorities, so that the latter will find the only solution to their problems lies in the physical liquidation of their opponents.
The
political situation of the country will [then have] become a military situation.
¹¹⁰

Of course this odious variety of Leninism, if pursued ruthlessly enough, has a certain irresistible force. The French government in 1954 was composed, on the whole, of liberal and civilized men, under the Radical-Socialist Pierre Mendès-France. They shared the illusion – or the vision – that Algeria could become a genuine multi-racial society, on the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. Mendès-France, who had happily freed Indo-China and Tunisia, told the Assembly: The Algerian
départements
are part of the French Republic … they are irrevocably French … there can be no conceivable secession.’ On Algeria, said his Interior Minister, François Mitterrand, ‘the only possible negotiation is war’.
¹¹¹
Both men believed that, if France’s own principles were now at last fully and generously turned into an Algerian reality, the problem would be solved. They sent out as Governor-General Jacques Soustelle, a brilliant ethnologist and former resistance-fighter, to create this reality. What they did not realize was that the
FLN’S
object was precisely to transform French generosity into savagery.

Soustelle saw the
FLN
as fascists. He thought he could defeat them by giving the Arabs genuine democracy and social justice. He created 400 detachments of
Képis bleus
(SAS
) in remote areas to protect loyalists. He brought in dedicated liberals like Germaine Tillion and Vincent Monteil to set up networks of
centres sociaux
and maintain
contacts with Muslim leaders of opinion.
¹¹²
He sought desperately to bring Muslims into every level of government. His instructions to the police and army forbade terror and brutality in any form and especially collective reprisals.
¹¹³
It is unlikely that Soustelle’s policy of genuine integration could have succeeded anyway, once the French themselves realized what it involved: France did not want to become a half-Arab, half-Muslim nation, any more than most Arabs wanted to become a French one. But in any case the
FLN
systematically murdered the instruments of Soustelle’s liberal policy, French and Arab. They strove hardest to kill those French administrations who loved the Arabs; and usually succeeded. One such victim was Maurice Dupuy, described by Soustelle as a ‘secular saint’. At his funeral Soustelle was in tears as he pinned the
Légion
d’honneur
on the eldest of Dupuy’s eight orphaned children, and it was then he first used the word ‘revenge’.
¹¹⁴

In the summer of 1955 the
FLN
went a stage further and adopted a policy of genocide: to kill all French without distinction of age or sex. On 20 August the first massacres began. As always, they embraced many Arabs, such as Allouah Abbas, nephew of the moderate nationalist leader Ferhat Abbas, who had criticized
FLN
atrocities. But the main object was to provoke French army reprisals. At Ain-Abid near Constantine, for instance, thirty-seven Europeans, including ten under fifteen, were literally chopped to pieces. Men had their arms and legs cut off; children their brains dashed out; women were disemboweled – one
pied-noir
mother had her womb opened, her five-day-old baby slashed to death, and then replaced in her womb. This ‘Philippeville massacre’ succeeded in its object: French paratroopers in the area were given orders to shoot all Arabs and (by Soustelle’s account) killed 1,273 ‘insurgents’, which
FLN
propaganda magnified to 12,000. It was the 1945 massacre over again. As Soustelle put it, ‘there had been well and truly dug an abyss through which flowed a river of blood’. French and Muslim liberals like Albert Camus and Ferhat Abbas, appearing on platforms together to appeal for reason, were howled down by all sides.
¹¹⁵

From this point the Soustelle experiment collapsed. The war became a competition in terror. The focus switched to the Algiers Casbah, where every square kilometre housed 100,000 Algerians. It began with the execution of a crippled murderer, Ferradj, who had killed a seven-year-old girl and seven other civilians. The
FLN
commander, Ramdane Abane, ordered one hundred French civilians to be murdered for every execution of an
FLN
member. On 21–24 June 1956, his chief killer, Saadi Yacef, who controlled a network of bomb-factories and 1,400 ‘operators’, carried out forty-nine murders. The violence grew steadily through the second half of 1956 –
parallel with the build up to the Suez adventure. The French Mayor of Algiers was murdered, and a bomb carefully exploded in the middle of the funeral ceremony: Yacef secretly ordered all his operators out of the area in advance, to make certain that in the subsequent wild reprisals only innocent Muslims were killed.
¹¹⁶

The Suez
débâcle
was important because it finally convinced the army that civilian governments could not win the war. Robert Lacoste, Soustelle’s socialist successor, conceded the point. On 7 January 1957 he gave General Jacques Massu and his
4
,600 men absolute freedom of action to clean the
FLN
out of Algiers. For the first time all restraints on the army, including the banning of torture, were lifted. Torture had been abolished in France on 8 October 1789. Article 303 of the Penal Code imposed the death penalty for anyone practising it. In March 1955 a secret report written by a senior civil servant recommended the use of supervised torture as the only alternative to prevent much more brutal unauthorized torture. Soustelle had flatly rejected it. Now Massu authorized it, as he later admitted: in answer to the question: “was there really torture?” I can only reply in the affirmative, although it was never either institutionalized or codified.’
¹¹⁷
The argument was that successful interrogation saved lives, chiefly of Arabs; that Arabs who gave information would be tortured to death, without restraint, by the
FLN
, and it was vital for the French to make themselves feared more. It was the Arab belief that Massu operated without restraints, as much as the torture itself, which caused prisoners to talk. But non-Muslims were tortured too. One, a Communist Jew called Henri Alleg, wrote a best-selling book which caused an outburst of moral fury throughout France in 1958.
¹¹⁸
Massu claimed that interrogations by his men left no permanent damage. On seeing Alleg, looking whole and well, on the steps of the Palais de Justice in 1970, he exclaimed:

Do the torments which he suffered count for much alongside the cutting off of the nose or of the lips, when it was not the penis, which had become the ritual present of the
fellaghas
to their recalcitrant ‘brothers’? Everyone knows that these bodily appendages do not grow again!
¹¹⁹

But the notion that it was possible to supervise limited torture effectively during a war for survival is absurd. In fact, the liberal Secretary-General of the Algiers Prefecture, Paul Teitgen, testified that about 3,000 prisoners ‘disappeared’ during the Algiers battle. At all events Massu won it. It was the only time the French fought the
FLN
with its own weapons. Algiers was cleansed of terrorism. Moderate Arabs dared to raise their voices again. But the victory was thrown away by a new policy of
regroupement
of over a million poor
fellahs
, a piece of crude social engineering calculated to play into
FLN
hands. Besides, the Massu experiment set up intolerable strains within the French system. On the one hand, by freeing army units from political control and stressing the personalities of commanders, it encouraged private armies: colonels increasingly regarded themselves as proprietors of their regiments, as under the monarchy, and began to manipulate their generals into disobedience. In the moral confusion, officers began to see their primary obligation as towards their own men rather than the state.
¹²⁰

At the same time, news leaking out of what the army had done in Algiers began to turn French liberal and centre opinion against the war. From 1957 onwards, many Frenchmen came to regard Algerian independence, however distasteful, as preferable to the total corruption of the French public conscience. Thus the demand for the restoration of political control of the war – including negotiations with the
FLN
– intensified just as the French army was, as it believed, winning by asserting its independence. This irreconcilable conflict produced the explosion of May 1958 which returned General de Gaulle to power and created the Fifth Republic.

De Gaulle was not a colonialist. He thought the age of colonies was over. His body seemed in the past but his mind was in the future. He claimed that at Brazzaville in 1944, when marshalling black Africa behind the Resistance, he had sought ‘to transform the old dependent relationships into preferential links of political, economic and cultural co-operation’.
¹²¹
He saw the half-hearted continuation of French colonialism as the direct result of the weakness of the Fourth Republic’s constitution, which he despised, and the ‘regime of the parties’, incapable of ‘the unequivocal decisions decolonization called for’. ‘How could it’, he asked, ‘have surmounted and if necessary broken all the opposition, based on sentiment, habit or self-interest, which such an enterprise was bound to provoke?’ The result was vacillation and inconsistency, first in Indo-China, then in Tunisia and Morocco, finally and above all in Algeria. Naturally, he said, the army ‘felt a growing resentment against a political system which was the embodiment of irresolution’.
¹²²

The
coup
was detonated, probably deliberately, by the
FLN
decision on 9 May 1958 to ‘execute’ three French soldiers for ‘torture, rape and murder’. Four days later, white students stormed the government headquarters in Algiers. Massu asked Lacoste, who had fled to France, whether he had permission to fire on the white mob. He was not given it. That night, at a Brecht play attacking generals, a left-wing audience applauded deliriously.
¹²³
But not one was actually prepared to fight for the Fourth Republic. In Algiers, the generals took over, and called for de Gaulle’s return. Some 30,000
Muslims went to the government forum to demonstrate their approval. They sang the
‘Marseillaise’
and the army song,
‘Chant des Africains’:
a spontaneous demonstration in favour of French civilization and against the barbarism of the
FLN
. Massu said: ‘Let them know that France will never abandon them.’
¹²⁴
When the generals called for de Gaulle they were lying, for they saw him merely as a battering-ram, to smash the Republic and take power themselves. De Gaulle thought Algeria was untenable and would destroy the French army. Indeed, he feared even worse might happen. On 24 May a detachment from Algeria landed in Corsica. The local authorities fraternized. Police sent from Marseilles allowed themselves to be disarmed. De Gaulle took over to avert an invasion of France itself, which would probably have succeeded or, alternatively, produced civil war. He saw ominous parallels with the beginning of the Spanish catastrophe in 1936. It would, he thought, finally destroy France as a great civilizing power. If Paris was worth a mass, France herself was worth a few lies.

So, having taken power, he went to Algiers to deceive. On 4 June he told the howling
colon
mob in Algiers:
‘Je vous ai compris.’ ‘I
tossed them the words,’ he wrote, ‘seemingly spontaneous but in reality carefully calculated, which I hoped would fire their enthusiasm without committing me further than I was willing to go.’
¹²⁵
He had said the previous year, privately: ‘Of course independence will come but they are too stupid there to know it.’ ‘Long live French Algeria!’ he chanted publicly in June 1958; privately:
‘L’Afrique est foutue et l’Algérie avec!’
He called French Algeria ‘a ruinous Utopia’. Publicly he continued to reassure the
colons
and the army, independence? In twenty-five years’ (October 1958). ‘The French army will never quit this country and I will never deal with those people from Cairo and Tunis’ (March 1959). ‘There will be no Dien Bien Phu in Algeria. The insurrection will not throw us out of this country.’ ‘How can you listen to the liars and conspirators who tell you that in granting free choice to the Algerians, France and de Gaulle want to abandon you, to pull out of Algeria and hand it over to the rebellion?’ (January 1960). independence … a folly, a monstrosity’ (March 1960).
¹²⁶