A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (111 page)

“In the year of grace 1962,” wrote de Gaulle in his memoirs, “France’s revival was in full flower. She had been threatened by civil war; bankruptcy had stared her in the face; the world had forgotten her voice. Now she was out of danger.” Though it was not true of his own life, as the O.A.S. assassins still lurked and skulked, France herself was indeed “out of danger” with the ending of the Algerian war. Life began to resume its course with customary celerity. The Brittany farmers were embarked upon an “artichoke war”; Academicians began to fret about the incursions of
franglais
; in the Assembly, what de Gaulle dubbed the “snarlers and grousers” were already raising their voices in anticipation of the end of the Fifth Republic and an electoral replacement of de Gaulle. He had served his purpose. But otherwise the title of the new Vadim—Bardot film,
Le Repos du Guerrier
, seemed to set the tone. Already in 1962 France’s gross national product was rising by 6.8 per cent in the year. Shed of the load of Algeria, her economy was to begin to show a miraculous blossoming from planting done in the latter years of the Fourth Republic and four years of Gaullism. France was, as de Gaulle had promised in 1960, beginning “to marry her time”. De Gaulle began to travel ever more widely, to remind the outside world of the sound of France’s “voice”. It was a sound not always harmonious to the ears of her friends as she broke completely with N.A.T.O., embarked upon her own go-it-alone
force de frappe
, and closed the door on Britain’s entry to the E.E.C.

As one distinguished American correspondent, C. L. Sulzberger, remarked, Salan had “become a symbol of the defeated past”. Once he and his comrades had been disposed of, the French army could finally put behind it the harrowing memories of so many tragic defeats, from 1940 onwards. It could purge itself of all the “bad dreams” of brutality and torture and self-division inflicted by the Algerian war, and — though the process would take a painfully long time — look toward the future, equipped with all the atomic panoply of modern warfare to distract it from the past. On 15 June 1964 the last French troops pulled out of Algeria, but already the technical modernisation dreamed of by de Gaulle was well under way.

In every aspect France was now, in the words of Dorothy Pickles, “free to look at France”.

A different ending?

Could it all have been otherwise? Could the Algerian war have ended any differently? The historian can record for the benefit of the leaders what went wrong, but — in his feckless and unhelpful way — he is not necessarily there to tell them how they could have got it right; nor is it the purpose of this book to enter into a lengthy dissection and critique of French and Algerian errors. Various points of no return in the war perhaps deserve to be recapitulated, and certain general observations made. To begin at the beginning, in November 1954 France was caught at a major disadvantage because, in contrast to Britain over India, no French politician, not even Mendès-France or Mitterrand, let alone the Communists, could contemplate any kind of French withdrawal from Algeria. Mollet the Socialist echoed Mendès-France the Radical: “France without Algeria would be no longer France.” Throughout those critical first years, when a compromise peace might have been conceivable, France was hobbled by the ball-and-chain of Algeria forming an integral part of French territory. From then on she was hobbled by what the army wanted, or would not permit. As Yves Courrière remarks at the beginning of his remarkable four-volume study of the Algerian war,

Nobody ever wanted to look the problem in the face. The metropolis was only interested in Algeria when European blood flowed. No one wanted to believe in the conflict. No one wanted to consider the conflict as a war. No one wanted to consider the Muslims as men. When they did, it was much too late.

When, in the early days, the priority was to institute the reforms claimed by moderate Muslims — and so badly needed — it was almost invariably a case of “too little, too late”.

In the second place, France was constantly and repeatedly hampered in her Algerian policy by the intervention (generally immoderate) of the hyper-articulate
pied noir
lobby. The
pieds noirs
were never strictly honest, even to themselves, as to what they
really
wanted. Despite all the brouhaha, it was not
Algérie française
; what the majority wanted was a
pied noir
Algeria, ranging between South Africa at its best and its worst, but under the umbrella of French protection. At various times in this book the author may seem to have been unduly censorious of the passionate and blinkered community that the
pieds noirs
, taken as a whole, represented. But it is essential to remember in the end that for every opulent
grand colon
, for every reactionary opponent of all reform, for every noisy “ultra”, for every violent counter-terrorist (and, later, Delta killer), there were perhaps a dozen hard-working and impoverished simple fishermen, small farmers, carpenters and
gardes-champêtres
, only relatively better off than their Muslim neighbours, and with but one desire: to be allowed to continue to live, and make a living, on the soil where they and their fathers had been born. The
grands colons
could (and did) afford to get out, write off their stake in Algeria, and start up somewhere else before the debacle of 1962. But not the
petits blancs
. Thus (not unlike the artisan class Rhodesians who backed Ian Smith), fear at losing all drove them progressively into hard-line reaction — finally, in desperation, into the arms of the O.A.S., which, in tragic paradox, was to make it impossible for any of them to remain at all in the native land. The other tragedy of the
pieds noirs
was that they were never able to produce a leader of stature — let alone anyone who could have treated in a statesmanlike manner both with the French government and the Muslim “moderates” while carrying his own community with him. Thus, by default, they were to become represented — and indeed symbolised — by the
bistrotier
, Jo Ortiz.

From the French army’s point of view, their tragedy was that at various points they could see with agonising clarity (and not without reason) that they were winning the war militarily. But (not unlike the American commanders in Vietnam) it was not given them to perceive that, at the same time, their chances of winning the war politically and on the wider world stage were growing ever slimmer. The army felt (again, not without reason) that it had been lied to, betrayed and abandoned by the man it brought to power; but the case may be put that, had their vision perhaps been less focused upon the immediate front, the deception could have been avoided — or at least avoided earlier — before the catastrophe of April 1961. As it was, until the army had been bent to his will — or broken, as tragically happened in April 1961 — de Gaulle could not risk proceeding with an acceptable policy of “self-determination”.

Though it is always dangerous to become enmeshed in the “might-have-beens” of history, a number of turning-points in the war may be suggested. First, there was the fall of Mendès-France in 1955, after which the best hope of reforms and a gentle slope towards an Algerian solution that might have been acceptable to the majority of Muslim moderates diminished, if not vanished. Then there was the wasted opportunity of that period of hope and euphoria on all sides which followed the advent of de Gaulle during the summer of 1958. Finally, for France, there was the slim hope of a
paix des braves
as represented by the Si Salah episode of 1960. Seen from the F.L.N. point of view, the red-letter dates from November 1954 onward might begin with the Bandung Conference of 1955, internationalising the “Algerian problem”; followed by the Soummam Conference of 1956 and the self-defeating error by France, which shortly succeeded it, of sequestrating Ben Bella and his colleagues; then came de Gaulle’s admission of the principle of “self-determination”, a real watershed in the war. In January 1960 “Barricades Week” ended with de Gaulle triumphant, but the cause of
Algérie française
ruined. December of the same year saw de Gaulle’s policy of “association” ruined by the Muslim demonstrations in Algiers and victory at the United Nations, while the generals’ putsch of April 1961 — the most dangerous moment both for de Gaulle and the Western world — marked the inevitability of de Gaulle being forced to negotiate bilaterally with the F.L.N. Finally, the O.A.S. campaign opening in the summer of 1961 was to signify the collapse of any hope of a
pied noir
future in independent Algeria.

On the other hand, even if the O.A.S. had never raised its ugly head, the extraordinarily rigid consistency of the F.L.N.’s demands ever since the earliest days leads one to question whether, once the last hope of a compromise with the “third force” Muslim moderates had been peeled away, any solution could have been reached that would have guaranteed the survival of the
pied noir
minority in Algeria indefinitely. Taking into account the huge discrepancy in wealth, property and land between the two communities — nine-tenths belonging to one-tenth — the excruciating land hunger of the Algerians coupled to their soaring birthrate, racial stresses and
pied noir
intolerance, and — perhaps above all — the accumulated hatreds of seven and a half years of war, could the Europeans realistically have remained more than a few additional years at best?[
3
] Without the O.A.S. the departure of the
pieds noirs
could probably have been “phased out” more gently, less tragically, over a period of years and months rather than days. But, just conceivably, the verdict of history may be that the enactment of so brutally sharp and absolute an exodus was more realistic — possibly even more merciful — in the long run. Was Boumedienne’s, rather than Krim’s more tolerant, line the right one after all in 1962?

Then there is the role of the Communist world in the Algerian war. At many points in the war it has been seen how cautious was the moral support given the F.L.N. by the French Communist Party, when not actively hostile, and how limited and tardy were the arms shipments it received from the Soviet Union. The poor Soviet performance was to set up resentments that would continue to influence Algerian policies three decades after the war. On the other hand, the Eastern bloc did furnish throughout a lever, without which the F.L.N. would probably have been unable to manoeuvre de Gaulle into negotiating, finally, on their terms.

One is left with the controversial role of de Gaulle, criticised both for going too slow and too fast. As far as the latter reproach goes, in the last stages of negotiations he suffered from the lesson not learned by Kissinger in Vietnam, or perhaps by the Israelis
vis-à-vis
the Arab world, or by the South Africans; namely, that peoples who have been waiting for their independence for a century, fighting for it for a generation, can afford to sit out a presidential term, or a year or two in the life of an old man in a hurry; that he who lasts the longest wins; that, sadly, with the impatience of democracies and their volatile voters committed to electoral contortions every four or five years, the extremist generally triumphs over the moderate. Just keep on being obdurate, don’t deviate from your maximum terms, was the lesson handed down by the F.L.N. and remains as grimly valid today — whether for Northern Ireland or the Middle East or southern Africa. One after another de Gaulle saw his principles for peace eroded in the face of the F.L.N.’s refusal to compromise. As his disillusion grew, so did his resolve to liquidate the war with all speed. In this final haste injustices were perpetrated, such as the exclusion from the peace talks of any representative Algerian faction (e.g. the M.N.A.) other than the F.L.N. Yet de Gaulle
did
liquidate that savage war.

When all is said and done, de Gaulle’s achievement was immense, and the gratitude owed him by France as well as the Western world no less. As ex-Premier Debré remarked to the author, “It was a miracle that we didn’t collapse into civil war after Algeria; and this we owed to de Gaulle.” The prosperous stability of post-1962 France stems to an important extent from the consequences of de Gaulle’s coolness and sense of timing in May 1958, and his steadfast refusal then to come back as the army’s man. If he had been strictly “straight” with the Massus, Challes and Salans all along, could the disastrous putsch of 1961 have been avoided? On the other hand, recalling the dangerously delicate balances of May 1958, might not such blinding honesty simply have brought about de Gaulle’s over-throw and replacement by a military junta in 1959 or 1960, or even late 1958 — leading possibly to civil war in France itself? Had de Gaulle lost his deadly game with the army, France might well have undergone an experience similar to Portugal’s — a right-wing military dictatorship, followed by collapse and left-wing ascendance, when it was at last realised that the “colonial” war in Algeria could never be won. His sibylline secrecy and ambiguities, his dubious promises and his cautious timing, may have prolonged the war and increased the uncertainty of the
pieds noirs
, and the way he extricated France from Algeria may not have been done well — but certainly no one else could have done it better. Perhaps the best summing up came from the aged leader of those other dark days of 1940, Paul Reynaud: “The war did not end in favourable conditions, but in the only conditions that were possible.”