Seven Ages of Paris (69 page)

During the long years since his abrupt departure from politics in 1946, de Gaulle remained in the wilderness, fretting at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, more and more sickened by having to witness men of the circus of the Fourth Republic seemingly dedicated to reducing France to a third-rate power. Then, just as it had been war which had brought de Gaulle to the forefront in 1940 and again in 1944, so it was war—the disastrous Algerian War—that brought him back again in May 1958. His return was precipitated by a crisis in Algiers, after the Fourth Republic had proved its inability to end the fighting in Algeria. Tempers had been rising among the military in Algiers since the beginning of 1958, and the last straw had come with the execution in Tunisia of three captured French soldiers, on charges of torture, rape and murder. Exasperated, the army staged a coup in Algiers, beginning on 13 May with the seizure of the Gouvernement-Général building, where resided the organs of civil authority. The redoubtable General Massu formed a Committee of Public Safety—a sinister-sounding name to Parisians with a sense of history. A series of plots and counterplots, on Corsica and the mainland as well as in Algeria, thrust forward an apparently reluctant de Gaulle, aged sixty-seven. De Gaulle played hard to get, calculating sagely that to acquire a modicum of legitimacy he should step forward only when a clear majority of Frenchmen seemed to want him. Over several anxious days, Paris braced herself for a possible descent from the skies of the paras from Algeria, tough and hard-fighting men fed to the teeth with the tergiversations and pusillanimity of civilian politicians.

Finally, on 28 May, Premier Pflimlin resigned. De Gaulle, returning late to his hotel, told the concierge, “Albert, j’ai gagné!” The left reacted violently, with a giant demonstration of perhaps half a million winding its way from the Place de la Nation to the Place de la République—though not nearly as violently as some had feared. President Coty intervened. De Gaulle agreed to form a government. Later he was to recall how at home that night “above my house I watched the twilight descend on the last evening of a long solitude. What was this mysterious force that compelled me to tear myself away from it?”

On 1 June, for the first time since he had departed in January 1946, he presented himself to the Assembly, and was accepted. The Communist deputies thumped their desks and shouted, “Le fascisme ne passera pas!” But within a short while 30 per cent of Communist electors had deserted the Party. (Bizarrely, industrialists and big business also opposed de Gaulle initially—on the ground that he stood for change.) Otherwise an audible sigh of relief descended on Paris. In September de Gaulle held a referendum to put to the nation his new constitution, which conferred formidable powers on the President. Sartre voiced the left’s opposition to “King Charles XI,” declaring, “I do not believe in God, but if in this plebiscite I had the duty of choosing between Him and the present incumbent, I would vote for God; He is more modest.” Nevertheless, de Gaulle won by a sweeping majority. After all the confusion of the last days of the Fourth Republic, the new authority and indeed majesty ushered in by him had the most immediate and galvanizing effect upon France as a whole.

In January the following year, shortly after his sixty-eighth birthday, de Gaulle became president. His only words to his predecessor, “Au revoir, Monsieur Coty,” seemed like a calculated snub to the Fourth Republic. The Fifth Republic, and the new Gaullist era, had begun. France’s allies felt encouraged. In Paris, the Académie got on with life, vigorously debating the correct sex of the automobile.

ALGERIA MOVES TO PARIS

With de Gaulle, authority moved back from Algiers and her rebellious factions to Paris, which once more became the capital of France. But at the same time, and for the next four years, the war in Algeria moved to Paris. Promptly in June 1958, de Gaulle flew to Algeria, where he stunned the pieds noirs with his “Je vous ai compris” speech—though it soon became apparent that he had understood them not in quite the way they had hoped. Valuable time was wasted; the impetus lost. Soon disillusion was renewed on all sides as it became apparent that even Charles de Gaulle had no simple formula for ending the war. It was going to defeat him just as it had the men of the Fourth Republic. Meanwhile, as more and more conscripts returned to tell their families what was going on in Algeria, and reports of torture multiplied, so anti-war sentiment mounted in Paris—and with it the demonstrations. With uncharacteristic indecision de Gaulle let eighteen months run through his hands before coming out with any clear-cut new policy for Algeria, and his attempts to achieve a ceasefire with the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) were rejected with a crushing snub. Meanwhile the “ultras” or diehards among the pieds noirs of Algiers were becoming steadily more violent in their opposition to de Gaulle.

On 24 January 1960, there was a fresh eruption in Algiers which rocked Paris. Well-armed “ultras” started building barricades, in the best Communard tradition; gendarmes were brought in to clear them and firing broke out. The result was six dead and twenty-four wounded among the demonstrators, but no fewer than fourteen dead and 123 wounded among the unfortunate gendarmes caught in a deadly crossfire. For France it was the ugliest moment in the five-year-old war to date—Frenchmen were killing Frenchmen for the first time. The spectre of the 1940s, and, further back, of 1871, presented itself. Equally ominous was the spectacle of the elite paras manifestly siding with the demonstrators on the barricades. As Barricades Week dragged on, in Paris there was a grim sense that, once again, revolution was in the air.

Then, on the evening of the 29th, the weather took a friendly hand: in Algiers the skies opened on the overheated citizenry. That same night de Gaulle appeared on television across France, dressed—with deliberate effect—in the uniform with its two stars familiar to so many in the army who could recall 1940 and the historic promenade through Paris in August 1944. It was as a soldier as well as head of state that he ordered the army in Algeria to obey him and not to side with the insurrection. He ended on an imploring note: “Finally, I speak to France. Well, my dear country, my old country, here we are together, once again, facing a harsh test.” Though saying nothing new, it was one of his finest speeches, a performance of tremendous power. De Gaulle won. Under an icy rain in Algiers the would-be insurgents broke up and went off home.

Yet 1960 was to offer increasingly little comfort to de Gaulle, bringing less support and fresh enemies, as it brought the FLN new allies, both in the outside world and within France herself. In a remarkable summer entente, the Communist and non-Communist trades unions joined together to plead for successful peace negotiations, with threats of a general strike “as an answer to any insurrection or coup d’état.” Among Parisian youth the Algerian War was now dubbed “The Hundred Years War.” The discovery of Jean-Paul Belmondo and the impact of the nouvelle vague French cinema—especially of Roger Vadim’s Les Liaisons dangereuses, which seemed then as daring as it was embarrassing to the puritanical Gaullists— suggested which way domestic interests were turning. More and more articles were appearing in the press by young national servicemen returning from Algeria shocked by the “immoral acts” in which they had been forced to participate, or had seen or heard about. Out of all this inflammation of liberal sentiment there emerged in September in Paris a powerful “Manifesto of the 121,” which incited French conscripts to desert. The 121 signatories were all celebrities, including Sartre, de Beauvoir, Françoise Sagan and Simone Signoret. At the same time the “Jeanson Network” physically aided the underground activities of the FLN in France, running funds for it and helping FLN terrorists in hiding.

Over Easter 1961, there were more plastic bombs in Paris, killing six and wounding fifty; a bomb in the men’s room of the Bourse injured thirty. Then, in April, came the gravest challenge to de Gaulle that the Algerian War was to bring. In Algiers on the 20th and 21st four disaffected senior generals raised the standard of revolt in the name of Algérie française—headed by a much respected airman, General Maurice Challe, and by the highly political and wily principal in the 1958 coup, General Raoul Salan. At a meeting of Cabinet ministers on the 22nd, de Gaulle predicted contemptuously that the Putsch would be “a matter of three days,” adding a scathing aside about “this army which, politically, always deludes itself.”

De Gaulle’s premier, Michel Debré, issued somewhat hysterical instructions for “citizens” to go to any airfields where the paras might be dropping, and “convince the misled soldiers of their grave error.” Possibly the true hero of that day of utter stupefaction in Paris was Roger Frey, de Gaulle’s Minister of the Interior. With great decisiveness, he arrested a general and several other conspirators in flagrante, thereby wrecking an organized attempt to march on the capital. To this end some 1,800 lightly equipped paras had been assembled in the Forest of Orléans, and another 400 in the Forest of Rambouillet. They were to combine with tank units from Rambouillet and to move in three columns on Paris, seizing the Elysée and other key points of the administration. But, having been made leaderless by their general’s arrest, they received no orders until a detachment of gendarmes arrived and instructed them to disperse. Sheepishly, the powerful body of paras did as they were told.

On Sunday, 23 April, Paris was an eerie place to be. Decaying Sherman tanks left over from the Second World War clattered into position outside the Assembly and other government buildings—some of them having to be towed after breaking down. No air movement round the city was allowed; buses, the Métro and trains stopped running, and even the cinemas were shut. Only the cafés stayed open, and they were packed. Then, at eight o’clock that night de Gaulle addressed the nation on television. Wearing his brigadier’s uniform once more, he spoke of his beloved army in revolt, of “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.” At last it was time to exert his personal authority: “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.”

In what became known as the “Battle of the Transistors,” an important essay in the power to influence via modern communications, all across Algeria French conscripts listened to de Gaulle’s speech—and heeded him. The vast majority refused to go along with their rebellious colonels and generals, and the 1961 Putsch was over. The elite Foreign Legion paras, the power behind the revolt, dynamited their barracks in Zeralda and marched out defiantly singing Piaf’s “Je ne regrette rien.” Challe, a thoroughly decent and honourable man, surrendered to French justice. He received a maximum sentence of fifteen years’ imprisonment, and loss of his rank, decorations and pensions—ruined by a commitment which had been pressed on him to “save the honour of the army,” and which he had never really wanted. Salan disappeared into hiding in Algiers, to emerge as titular head of the OAS—the Organisation Armée Secrète—that would spread indiscriminate and senseless terror across Algeria, and soon import it to Paris. De Gaulle had won again—just. But the divisions and weaknesses which the Challe revolt had displayed within the French army meant that any prospect of Algérie française was now dead. De Gaulle was forced to negotiate with the FLN rebels, and not on his terms. In May 1961, the first talks took place at Evian on Lake Geneva; by July they had failed, with the FLN holding out for total capitulation by de Gaulle.

OAS

In the course of the war over thirty separate attempts were made on de Gaulle’s life. On 8 September 1961, a disaffected young colonel, Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, carried out the most dramatic so far, exploding an enormous mine of plastic explosive and napalm at Pont-sur-Seine as de Gaulle’s Citroën passed on his way home to Colombey. Over the six months, up to February 1962, that the principal OAS campaign in France lasted, it was to do as much as anything to incline the French towards de Gaulle’s notion of an abrupt withdrawal from Algeria. Even without the activities of the OAS, a climate of violence had been growing in France, generated between the police and the Algerian community, a climate which in itself had been steadily arousing liberal hostility. This brutal sideshow resulted in sixteen policemen killed and forty-five wounded, most of them during August and September 1961.

In mid-October, 25,000 Algerian workers from the bidonvilles (incited by the FLN) gathered for a mass demonstration against the draconian curfew and other repressive measures imposed on them by the government. Though unarmed and largely pacific, the demonstrators were dispersed by the police with a level of violence that appalled Parisians. At the time it was rumoured that “dozens of Algerians were thrown into the Seine and others were found hanged in the woods round Paris”; it now seems that the number of fatalities was close to 200. At the same time the deadly device of torture used by the French army in Algeria, the gégène or magneto, appeared in all its ugliness on the Parisian scene, and by January 1962 France-Soir was complaining that there was “something wrong with justice,” because indicted torturers were repeatedly escaping sentence.

Given their limited resources, and compared with the IRA or Palestinian suicide squads, the OAS were amateurs. Bombs, planted to hurt property rather than people, often did little damage. In November 1961 the largest explosion so far destroyed the Drugstore on the Champs-Elysées, infusing the pavement with the scent from its shattered stock. At the beginning of the following month a sinister one-eyed terrorist with the pseudonym Le Monocle, André Canal, who had settled in Algiers in 1940 and made a fortune out of sanitary equipment, took the lead in the Paris campaign—at the same time warring with other OAS factions. The Communist Party, as supporters of the FLN, came under fire. On 4 January 1962 the OAS machined-gunned French Communist Party headquarters in the Place Kossuth. Simultaneously, the homes of party functionaries were bombed. Later that month Le Monocle’s gang perpetrated a “festival of plastique,” exploding eighteen bombs in a single night. The following week another thirteen bombs went off, to celebrate the second anniversary of Barricades Week. One of these, on 22 January, was detonated in the Quai d’Orsay, killing one employee and wounding twelve others. Plans captured by the Paris police enabled them to prevent, just in time, the dynamiting of the Eiffel Tower and the setting off of another forty-eight bombs. But, apart from this, the police of metropolitan France seemed reluctant to arrest any of the terrorist leaders. By this time the French public was losing patience with the OAS.