A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (11 page)

The
pieds noirs
had developed some of their own peculiar customs, some borrowed from the Muslims. There was the traditional outing on Easter Monday, a picnic centred around the ceremonial “breaking of the
mouna
”, a hemispheric and sickly sweet cake scented with orange-blossom. But essentially their life and pleasures were those of the true Mediterranean being: the old women knitting and gossipping on shaded park benches, the men arguing and story-telling over the long-drawn-out
pastis
outside the bistros; the protracted silence of the siesta; then the awakening in the cool of the evening, the games of
boule
in dusty squares, under trees populated with revivified and chattering birds. It was a good life, with not too many cares. For the affluent there was the Algiers Yacht Club, the Golf Club, the Club Anglais and the Club Hippique, and skiing up at Chréa in the winter; for the
petits blancs
of Algiers there was the racecourse at Hussein-Dey and football at the Belcourt stadium. The heavy red wine of Algeria was both plentiful and cheap, and above all there was the beach. “The Outsider” of Camus, who perhaps personifies the
pied noir
mentality better than any other fictional character, describes his anguish of privation while in prison, awaiting the guillotine:

I would suddenly be seized with a desire to go down to the beach for a swim. And merely to have imagined the sound of ripples at my feet, and then the smooth feel of the water on my body as I struck out, and the wonderful sensation of relief it gave, brought home still more cruelly the narrowness of my cell.

On the beaches nearest Algiers, the young of the poorer whites would spend their entire week-end splashing joyously in the sea, then dancing under the stars to the music of a juke-box. The slang they used —
se taper un bain
, “indulge in a swim”, rather than “go for a swim” — was perhaps suggestive of the sheer sensuality of their attachment to the sea.

“I learned not to separate these creatures bursting with violent energy from the sky where their desires whirl,” says Camus of his fellow
pieds noirs
. The sea and sun, these were factors that were all-conditioning, responsible for their best as well as their worst characteristics. In contrast to the Cartesian rationale in which the northern Gaul so prides himself, the meridional
pied noir
was first and foremost a creature of the senses. Everything was excess: excessive exuberance, excessive hospitality, excessive affection — and excessive hate. “Stopping to think and becoming better are out of the question,” claims Camus. “The notion of hell, for instance, is merely a funny joke here. Such imaginings are allowed only to the very virtuous. And I really think that virtue is a meaningless word in all Algeria.…” Under the implacable sun the
pied noir
married young and was burnt out young. For as well as nurturing and stimulating life, the sun society also caresses death. It was quite customary for a murderer — whatever the rights or wrongs of his case — to be referred to, compassionately, as “the poor fellow”, and the acceptance of violence and death lay never very far beneath the surface. Among his
pieds noirs
, Camus himself was mystically aware of a “merciless
tête-à-tête
with Death, this physical fear of the animal who loves the sun”. The conditions of Algerian life bestowed upon the European there a sense of mortality, of transience, which, writing even before the Second World War, Camus was able to discern in some remarkably prophetic passages:

he is born of this country where everything is given to be taken away … here is a race without past, without tradition … wholly cast into its present lives without myths, without solace. It has put all its possessions on this earth and therefore remains without defence against death. All the gifts of physical beauty have been lavished on it. And with them, the strange avidity that always accompanies that wealth without failure.…

The sentiments of the
pied noir
towards metropolitan France (for so many not their mother country at all) were compounded of resentment, love, disdain and an inferiority complex with the undertones of superiority that so often accompany it. For “The Outsider”, Paris was “A dingy sort of town, to my mind. Masses of pigeons and dark courtyards. And the people have washed-out white faces.” The women of Bab-el-Oued found it hard to understand how, without a “true sun”, the laundry would ever dry in Paris. If the
pied noir
loved France, it was with a love that sought constant reassurance: “The French of Algeria would like to be reassured that…” was a theme frequently to be found in Press editorials. For his part, he felt that he had well deserved France’s love through his sacrifices in two world wars. “Where is our promised land?” one of the rebel generals of 1961, Edmond Jouhaud, was to demand: “I think we have paid for the right to be French, by the blood that we shed from 1914 to 1918 and from 1939 to 1945.” It was an argument with which Britons were made familiar early in the Rhodesian crisis. Perhaps because so many
pieds noirs
, or their antecedents, had come to Algeria after a
vie manquée
in Europe, there was a residual misgiving that the metropolitan Frenchman regarded him as a second-class European, and this inferiority complex could manifest itself in a display of extreme sensitivity: “the least reserve about the climate is to say that their mistress is one-eyed,” comments Pierre Nora sardonically; “to permit a remark about their manner of overtaking an automobile and running over pedestrians is an insult to their virility.…” Again, it was an attitude that some Britons may at times have encountered in countries of the old Commonwealth, and its inversion was an isolationist, separatist sense of superiority that could vest the
pied noir
with a vastly over-inflated notion of his own weight in world councils. With a feeling of just pride the
pieds noirs
recalled that, in 1914, it was Bône and Philippeville that had drawn the first German naval salvoes; and, once more, Camus seems to strike a chord of utmost fidelity when, at the conclusion of
The Outsider
, he reveals that the last wish of his anti-hero was to occupy the centre of the stage: “for me to feel less lonely, all that remained was to hope that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration”.

At the time of the projected Blum—Viollette reforms, a
pied noir
financier remarked to Viollette: “Monsieur le Gouverneur-Général, you reason in the French of France, but we reason in the French of Algeria.” It was not at all the same language, as was to become tragically plain later, and in order to understand events from 1954 onwards it is necessary to accept the existence of three totally distinct peoples — the French of France, the French of Algeria, and the Muslims of Algeria.

In the outer world, the most obvious kinsmen to the
pied noir
are the whites of South Africa, Rhodesia and the “Deep South” of the United States. In terms of the numbers of generations that had come to regard Algeria as “home”, and had absolutely nowhere else in the world to go, he stood somewhere between the Afrikaaner and the Rhodesian. At the opposite ends of the social scale, comparisons in their way of life and attitudes could be made between the
grands colons
and the plantation owners of the “Old South”, while the least privileged elements of Bab-el-Oued or Belcourt bore a marked affinity to the “poor whites” of Faulkner, coexisting uneasily alongside the blacks in the torrid, over-crowded American cities of the same epoch. In Algeria, however, there was no form of segregation so overt as apartheid, or “Jim Crow” laws on buses; on the other hand, there was nothing resembling the miscegenation of Brazil, or even Mozambique.

An Arab, but dressed like a person
.…

If the
pied noir
attitude to the indigenous Algerian could be summed up in a word, it was, simply, indifference. He was regarded, says Pierre Nora, “as an anonymous figure of whom it sufficed to know that one provided his welfare, so that one had no need to be concerned about him”. In so far as he supplied the labour essential for exploiting the country, he was simply “a part of the
patrimoine immobilier
[real estate inheritance]”. At best he would be treated with paternalism, fairness and a kind of formal acceptance of his different religion and culture. But too often he was regarded with disdain, and from a vantage of superiority; which manifested itself in many different ways, and more insidiously among the poorer levels of whites where the frictional contact was closest.
Bicot, melon, figuier, sale raton
[
2
] — there was a plethora of derogatory slang for an inferior race that sprang all to readily to the lips. Equally a host of preconceived inherited notions about the Algerian were accepted uncritically, without examining either their veracity or causation: he was incorrigibly idle and incompetent; he only understood force; he was an innate criminal, and an instinctive rapist. Sexually based prejudices and fears ran deep, akin to those elsewhere of white city-dwellers surrounded by preponderant and ever-growing Negro populations: “They can see our women, we can’t see theirs”; the Arab had a plurality of wives, and therefore was possibly more virile (an intolerable thought to the “Mediterranean-and-a-half”); and with the demographic explosion spawned by his potency, he was threatening to swamp the European by sheer weight of numbers.

The
pied noir
would habitually
tutoyer
any Muslim — a form of speech reserved for intimates, domestics or animals — and was outraged were it ever suggested that this might be a manifestation of racism. Commenting on this, Pierre Nora (admittedly a Frenchman often unduly harsh in his criticism of the
pieds noirs
), adds an illustration of a judge asking in court:

“Are there any other witnesses?”

“Yes, five; two men and three Arabs.”

Or again: “It was an Arab, but dressed like a person.…”

With shame, Jules Roy admitted:

One thing I knew because it was told me so often, was that the Arabs belonged to a different race, one inferior to my own… “They don’t live the way we do.…” The sentence drew a chaste veil over their poverty.… Yes, their happiness was elsewhere, rather, if you please, like the happiness of cattle… “They don’t have the same needs we do…,” I was always being told. I was glad to believe it, and from that moment on their condition could not disturb me. Who suffers seeing oxen sleep on straw or eating grass?

Later on, he confesses: “It came as a great surprise to realise — little by little — that the
figuiers
were men like ourselves, that they laughed, that they wept, that they were capable of such noble sentiments as hatred or love, jealousy, or gratitude.…”

Even great-hearted Camus, who was among the first to expose the dreadful economic plight of the Algerians, both shortly before and after the Second World War, occasionally reveals a curious blindness, almost amounting to indifference, towards them as human beings. His Oran of
La Peste
appears to be devoid of Muslims; although he writes so sensitively (albeit often censoriously) of his kindred
pieds noirs
, his vendors selling lemonade for five
sous
a glass on the Algiers streets, his Oran shoe-shine boys (“the only men still in love with their profession”) seem to be accepted as part of the essential,
touristique
backdrop, without his pausing to question the penury that must inevitably accompany the “profession” he believes them to be in love with. Again, in
The Outsider
he seems oblivious to the other victim of tragedy, the Arab girl whose lover beats her up and whose brother is killed while trying to avenge her. It is as if Camus, too, cannot be bothered to understand this “anonymous figure”, this portion of the
patrimoine immobilier.

Petits blancs and grands colons

But how difficult it is to generalise about a people so diverse as the
pieds noirs
! Apart from their mixed racial origins, they represented a wide spectrum of political hues, and the span between the top and bottom of the economic scale was even wider. At one end of the political spectrum there were the diehard conservatives, both rich and poor, some of them later to become known as “ultras”, who stubbornly resisted all change; at the other end, various kinds of liberals supporting reform of one sort or another. By the 1950s, these latter were reckoned to comprise twenty to twenty-five per cent of the overall population, loosely embracing the European professional classes; these figures also include the Muslim
évolués
and a large section of the Jewish community. But the liberals had little or no proletarian support. Many of the
petits blancs
were failed farmers who had gravitated towards the cities, and this in itself was to grant them a collective political consciousness not to be found among the more rural settlers of Morocco and Tunisia. Like the poor whites of Rhodesia, they could not afford to be liberal, but tended to be either Communist or reactionary; and, curiously enough, these two opposing forces were largely at one, at least where liberalisation for the Muslims was concerned, as has already been noted at the time of the Sétif uprising. Between the top and bottom of the economic scale, the span was even wider. On the whole, earnings were lower than in France; perhaps as many as eighty per cent of the
pieds noirs
were merchants or salaried employees, and among them a father of three might earn less than half that of his metropolitan opposite number (on the other hand, it would buy benefits inaccessible to the latter, such as the cheap domestic services of an Algerian
fatma
). Yet the prosperity gap between very rich and very poor in France was less than that between the handful of most affluent
grands colons
of Algeria and the
petit blanc
; while between the latter and his Muslim competitor, the differential was, in contrast, extremely slender.