A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (6 page)

For all the general ignorance in metropolitan France of what happened at Sétif, the impact on Algerians was incalculable, and ineradicable. Kateb Yacine, the liberal poet, records that it was at Sétif

that my sense of humanity was affronted for the first time by the most atrocious sights. I was sixteen years old. The shock which I felt at the pitiless butchery that caused the deaths of thousands of Muslims, I have never forgotten. From that moment my nationalism took definite form.

Of more direct significance was the disembarkation, shortly after Sétif, of the 7th Regiment of Algerian Tirailleurs, a unit that had distinguished itself in battle in Europe. Many of its men came from the Constantine area and were utterly appalled by the stories they heard. A number of these returning soldiers were subsequently to become leaders of the F.L.N. Among them was a much-decorated sergeant, Ben Bella, who wrote: “The horrors of the Constantine area in May 1945 succeeded in persuading me of the only path; Algeria for the Algerians.” The Algerian liberal leader, Ferhat Abbas, had condemned the wanton slaughter of Europeans by declaring, at the beginning of the uprising, “those who have urged you to rebellion betray you”. But, on his way to congratulate the Governor-General on the Allied victory, he — like 4,500 of his followers who had had nothing whatever to do with the uprising — was arrested and, later, was forced to admit that Sétif “has taken us back to the days of the crusaders”. It was indeed hardly an exaggeration to describe it, as did Edward Behr while the war was still in progress, as

an event which, in one form or another, has marked every Algerian Muslim alive at the time.… Every one of the “new wave” of Algerian nationalists prominent in the National Liberation Front today traces his revolutionary determination back to May 1945 … each of them felt after May 1945 that some sort of armed uprising would sooner or later become necessary.

The reaction of the European
colons
, a mixture of shock and fear, was to demand further draconian measures and to suspend any suggestion of new reforms. “When the house is on fire,” wrote the
Écho d’Alger
, “when the ship is about to sink, one calls for neither the insurance company nor the dancing-master. For the house, it’s the hour of the fireman; for the ship, the hour of the lifeboat. For North Africa,
c’est l’heure du gendarme
.” With remarkable prophetic accuracy the French divisional commander, General Duval, who had already been responsible for much of the “gendarme” action in the immediate aftermath of Sétif, reported to Paris: “I have given you peace for ten years. But don’t deceive yourselves.…” In fact, the precarious peace was to last nine and a half years; but, in effect, the shots fired at Sétif represented the first volley of the Algerian War.

The conquest, 1830

Though immediate causes, such as hunger and the years of deprivation of the Second World War, may partly explain the fateful explosion at Sétif, for deeper motivations one needs to skim back swiftly over 115 years of the
présence française
in Algeria.

In 1830, the country lay nominally under a loose suzerainty of Turkish military rule. Successive generations of French historians have, for fairly obvious reasons, claimed that a state approximating tribal anarchy prevailed. This view is now contested by “neutral” as well as Arab historians. In 1847 de Tocqueville declared to the French National Assembly that “The Muslim society in North Africa was not uncivilised; it only had a backward and imperfect civilisation.” He went on to claim “we have rendered Muslim society much more miserable and much more barbaric than it was before it became acquainted with us”. Even some of the early French conquerors paid tribute to signs of Algeria’s civilisation, however rudimentary, with one general noting in 1834, “nearly all the Arabs can read and write; in each village, there are two schools”. What is indisputable, however, is that in 1830 Algeria was suffering from acute political instability internally and therefore presented a feeble exterior to the world outside. It was indeed quite difficult to establish a national identity for a territory that had been little more than a corridor for successive conquerors, and known little but turbulence over many previous centuries. The Carthaginians had ruled for some seven centuries; they had been followed by the Romans; who had in turn been followed by the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Spaniards and the Turks. In the early nineteenth century the trouble-someness of corsairs operating out of the rugged Algerian coast had provoked thoughts of occupation among various European powers, and even troubled the United States. Back in the sixteenth century, the first European consul to El-Djezair, as the city was then called, had been a Frenchman, and Napoleon I had himself cast covetous eyes in its direction. From then on French merchants had become progressively involved in a series of complex and tangled trade details, and it was during a row provoked by one of these that, in 1827, the reigning Dey of Algiers (half of whose twenty-eight predecessors are said to have met violent ends) lost his temper with the French consul, struck him in the face with a fly-whisk, and called him “a wicked, faithless, idol-worshipping rascal”.

France waited three years before avenging the insult. It then presented a useful pretext for Charles X’s regime which, increasingly unpopular, adopted the time-honoured formula of distracting minds from domestic problems by the pursuit of
la gloire
abroad. There were at once voices raised against the Algerian “adventure”, arguing that it was a deviation from France’s essential interests in Europe (“I would gladly”, declared one deputy, “exchange Algiers for the most wretched hole on the Rhine”). And in fact the Algerian entanglement was to play an important role in bringing down the regime — not for the last time in French history. Marching to plans based on a Napoleonic project, the French expeditionary force landed at Sidi-Ferruch, a sheltered beach some twenty miles west of Algiers. The enterprise was accompanied by a touch of the
fête galante
, with elegant ladies booking accommodation aboard pleasure boats to observe the naval bombardment of Algiers. A few weeks later the city fell, taking with it Dey Hussein; but too late to save the restored Bourbons in France.

But despite initial French optimism, the fighting continued in the interior. In 1832 there arose a fierce and dedicated Algerian resistance leader, Abd-el-Kader, then aged only twenty-five. With intermittent cease-fires, Abd-el-Kader waged war against the French occupation over the next fifteen years. Though winning remarkably wide support in western and central Algeria, he was never able to unite totally the warlike Algerian tribes which, traditionally, were little more inclined to submit to his authority than they were to the French. In the context of the nineteenth century the weight of colonialist France was, in any event, altogether too great for Abd-el-Kader to have achieved anything resembling a united, modern nation. Militarily, the struggle assumed forms that were to become painfully familiar. Ill-prepared French troops would freeze to death in the harsh mountains in pursuit of an elusive foe, or fall into well-laid ambushes. Little quarter was given. The French army retaliated with scorched-earth reprisals; on one occasion French public opinion was deeply shocked to learn how fires had been lit at the mouth of a cave where 500 men, women and children had taken refuge, asphyxiating all but ten of them. “It was not a pretty war, nor an amusing war,” wrote one military commander. A legendary figure in French nurseries, Père Bugeaud, pressed operations ruthlessly to a conclusion, and in 1847 Abd-el-Kader finally surrendered— to spend the rest of his life in honourable exile in Damascus. In December the following year, a time when the U.S.A. had admitted little more than half its eventual complement of states to the Union, the Second Republic declared Algeria an integral part of France, transforming its vast territories into three French departments. It was a historic, indeed unique, step, and one which thereby set up for successive French republics a deadly trap from which they would find it well nigh impossible to escape.

La présence française

Pari passu
with Marshal Bugeaud’s “pacification”. French colonisers steadily took root in Algeria. Said Bugeaud in a renowned statement before the National Assembly in 1840: “Wherever there is fresh water and fertile land, there one must locate
colons
, without concerning oneself to whom these lands belong.” By 1841 the numbers of such
colons
, or
pieds noirs
as they came to be called,[
2
] already totalled 37,374 — in comparison with approximately three million
indigènes
. There were a number of sources from which French administrations furnished the necessary land; the state domains which the French government had inherited from its Turkish predecessor (some one million hectares — nearly 4,000 square miles), forestry domains (much of which was in a condition of neglect), and agricultural land simply expropriated because it lay uncultivated, or for punitive measures. One such example of the last was 500,000 hectares seized from the Kabyles in 1871 in reprisal for their revolt against the pressures of French colonisation (about a quarter of this was later handed back as being
inutilisable
). On top of this there came the land which the
colons
acquired through direct negotiation with the owners. Various laws were passed to protect Algerian property from land-greedy
colons
, but all too often they were easily circumvented.

Napoleon III, who was perhaps one of the first French leaders to concern himself seriously with the Algerian plight, in 1863 passed a law aimed at “reconciling an intelligent, proud warlike and agrarian race” in which was stipulated,
inter alia
, that “France recognises the ownership by Arab tribes of territories of which they have permanent and traditional benefit”. As so often with the more liberal acts of this well-intentioned ruler, however, their execution did not match up to his ideals; while a decade earlier he had himself pushed the floodgates of immigration ajar with his own political exiles and the unemployed of the Parisian ateliers. In his constant search for fresh funds abroad, he had also sold to the Compagnie Genevoise some fifteen thousand hectares of the best land round Sétif; but in the long run this would benefit neither France (in that the substantial income off it flowed into the pockets of Swiss bankers) nor Algeria (in that, contrary to Louis-Napoleon’s intentions, its intensive operations offered but little employment for land-hungry peasants), and in itself was to provide one of the contributory causes to the 1945 events. Another subsequent piece of protective legislation was the Warnier Act of 1873, which aimed at preventing the sub-division of Muslim lands, but left loopholes whereby such scandals as the following could occur: near Mostaganem a Jewish lawyer’s clerk acquired 292 hectares, which was tenanted by 513
indigènes
, for no more than 20 francs. The costs imposed on the “vendors” somehow amounted to 11,000 francs, and they now became the purchaser’s labourers at starvation wages.

In France voices continued to be raised against the colonisation of Algeria; Clemenceau bitterly attacked the “colonialist” Jules Ferry on the grounds that he was serving the designs of Bismarck by helping distract France from her destiny in Europe; agronomists feared that, because of the lower wages paid the Algerian peasants, French farmers and vine-growers would be threatened. But still the European immigrants arrived in their various waves. There were the unemployed and unwanted from the revolution of 1848, who hardly formed the best material for breaking the stern soil of Algeria; after 1871 (when immigration first began on a large scale) there came industrious and efficient Alsatians, refugees from the provinces forfeited to a triumphant Prussia. There came Spaniards, Italians and Maltese in their thousands; so much so that by 1917 only one in five of the non-Muslim population was said to be of French origin. As Anatole France muttered angrily: “We have despoiled, pursued and hunted down the Arabs in order to populate Algeria with Italians and Spaniards.”

Undeniably, however, much of the land colonised by the
pieds noirs
had been carved out of insalubrious wilderness, some of which may have been used as migratory grazing grounds, rather than grabbed directly from Muslim farmers. This was especially true of the mosquito-ridden marshes of the Mitidja, inland from Algiers. Its reputation in the early colonial days was so bad that anyone with a face rendered sallow by fever was said to have a “Boufarik complexion”, but under French expertise it was rapidly to become Algeria’s richest farming area. In 1843, Trappist monks introduced the vine to the Mitidja; thirty-five years later the coming of phylloxera to France launched the Algerian wine industry, and by the mid-twentieth century it had grown to be one of the Mediterranean’s biggest producers. Thus in the all-important realm of agriculture, as indeed in that of industrial development later, the
colons
could reasonably claim that they had created the country out of virtually nothing. But it was the old, old story of the Europeans with their superior technique, resources and aggressive vigour progressively assimilating the best lands, while at the same time the more numerous
indigènes
were being pushed out on to the more peripheral lands.