A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (8 page)

When the Muslims protest, you are indignant; when they approve, you are suspicious; when they keep quiet you are fearful.
Messieurs
, these men have no political nation. They do not even demand their religious nation. All they ask is to be admitted into yours. If you refuse this, beware lest they do not soon create one for themselves.

The still-born Blum—Viollette Bill was the ultimate plea for “assimilation”. It aroused the most glowing hopes among Muslim liberals, but when — like every other endeavour of reform between 1909 and 1954 — it was thwarted, they were replaced by black despair.

Growth of nationalism

Back in 1894 Jules Cambon, then governor-general, wrote to the Senate describing the consequences of the French policy of breaking up the great traditional families of Algieria,

because we found them to be forces of resistance. We did not realise that in suppressing the forces of resistance in this fashion, we were also suppressing our means of action. The result is that we are today confronted by a sort of human dust on which we have no influence and in which movements take place which are to us unknown.

It was a profound and far-sighted analysis. When France,
in extremis
between 1954 and 1962, was to cast around for
interlocuteurs valables
, moderate nationalist representatives with whom compromise solutions might be negotiated, among this “human dust” she was to find virtually none. On the other hand, from earliest days the colonial structure had so functioned as to impede and obviate the emergence of any concerted Muslim opposition body, and for long years it succeeded marvellously; yet again, when the ultimate disaster did occur, France would be taken by surprise, because — for the reasons suggested by Cambon — the resistance movements would be “unknown”.

Because of Algeria’s unique status as an integral part of France, which cut it off from undercurrents of Arab nationalism in the outside world more than its neighbours, one cannot easily state — as with other colonial territories — at what precise point a “resistance movement” began. In broad terms, three separate strands of Algerian nationalism have been defined, each identified with a particular leader. There was the religious movement, as embodied by the Association des Ulema of Sheikh Abdulhamid Ben Badis; the revolutionaries following Messali Hadj; and finally the liberals of Ferhat Abbas. Over the past century of French rule, French education and French culture, Muslim scholars consider that it was the religious doctrine which, more than anything, had kept alight the fires of nationalism in Algeria, and — although they were not the first in the field — it was probably the Ulema (founded in 1931) that provided the nationalists with their first momentum. Certainly their philosophic influence was of primary and inestimable significance, even remaining very much of a force in present-day Algeria. A Berber from Constantine descended from a family with centuries of tradition in political and religious leadership, Ben Badis was an ascetic and deeply conservative theologian who believed that Algerian regeneration could only be achieved by a return to the first principles of Islam. He remains the only one of the early nationalists who is still regarded as something of a national hero by most Algerians today. In their puritanism of outlook, the Ulema perhaps most resembled the Wahabi sect which, under Ibn Saud, had swept through the Arabian peninsula from the early 1900s onwards. They rigorously condemned alcohol, tobacco, dancing, music and sport, and one of their principal targets was the
marabouts
— or holy men and leaders of mystic orders — whom they accused both of corrupting the faith by their espousal of mysticism and of being the “domestic animals of colonialism”. The Ulema also campaigned, with patriotic motives, for the separation of church and state; their programme was cultural as well as religious; and in schools set up widely across the country the values of Arabic as a language, of Algeria as a national entity and of pan-Arabism as an ideal were pressed home with considerable effect. Stated in all simplicity, their creed was: “Islam is my religion, Arabic is my language, Algeria is my country.… Independence is a natural right for every people of the earth.…” The Ulema did more than any other body to rekindle a sense of religious and national consciousness among Algerians, but, tied up in their own theological coils, they failed to find pragmatic applications of their doctrines.

Messali versus Abbas

To some extent, this gap was filled by the “revolutionaries” of Messali Hadj.[
7
] Born in 1898, the son of a shoemaker from Tlemcen near the Moroccan border, Messali received little formal education; he served in 1914–1918 in the French army, and then went to work in France. Here he married a Frenchwoman, who brought him for a short period into the ranks of the Communist Party (but the role played by the P.C.A. in the repressions at Sétif finally caused him to break with the Communists), Always studiously dressed in the traditional attire of djellaba and red fez, with his broad face and vigorous beard, Messali was an imposing figure and an inflammatory orator. A journalist of
Le Monde
visiting him in 1952 was reminded of “Rasputin of 1916, Gapon of 1905… a magus, a prophet, a miracle-worker”. In 1927 Messali became president of a political grouping recently formed from Algerian workers in the Paris area, called the Étoile Nord-Africaine, which under his lead soon became the most radical of all the nationalist organisations. Through the working-class origins of both Messali and its founding members, the Étoile came to have a proletarian character superimposed over its nationalist and religious doctrines. It differed from the Ulema both in a more modernistic interpretation of Islamic dogma and in its social demands, which included the redistribution of land among the
fellahs
. Much of Messali’s ideals of popularist socialism was later to be inherited by the F.L.N. and present-day Algeria. By 1933 Messali was already talking of “revolution”, and the Étoile programme declared for universal suffrage in Algeria, “a struggle for the total independence” of all three Maghreb nations, and confiscation of all property acquired by the French government or
colons
. Messali’s revolutionary zeal was to bring him several spells in prison or exile, and make him — until the outbreak of the war in 1954 — the best known of all the Algerian nationalist leaders. The Étoile was dissolved, then recreated by Messali in 1937 as the Parti Progressiste Algérien (P.P.A.), with roughly the same platform but concentrating its activities on Algeria alone; after 1945 the P.P.A. — banned again — assumed the more dramatic title of Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Libertés Démocratiques (M.T.L.D.).

The third strand of Algerian nationalism in the inter-war period, the liberal movement, is less easy to reduce to party terms than the other two, but can perhaps best be studied through the person of its central figure, Ferhat Abbas. His whole career is one of utmost relevance in this story, for it was symptomatic of how the liberal moderate — through successive disillusions — becomes superseded by the revolutionary extremist. Born in 1899, Abbas, like Ben Badis, originated from the Constantine area, but his father, unlike Messali’s, had risen from being the son of a
fellah
to be a
caid
and Commander of the Legion of Honour. To Abbas, his father’s career exemplified how the best of the French colonial system could be exploited to the advantage of the Muslim, and he himself rose successfully through the ranks of legislative posts that were open to him. He did his secondary studies at a French lycée in Constantine, then adopted the profession of pharmacist[
8
] in Sétif. Everything about Abbas was orientated towards the West, specifically France, and a bourgeois France at that. Linguistically, he never felt as at home in Arabic as he did in French, which he spoke with great skill and charm. He divorced his Muslim wife, and then, like Messali, married a Frenchwoman — a marriage that in itself was symbolic of his divided loyalties between France and Islam, where he could not support puritanical zeal to the same extent as Sheikh Ben Badis. In the Second World War, at the age of forty, Abbas promptly enlisted in the French army, but never received a commission.

It was during his time at Algiers university, however, that Abbas was first influenced by nationalist sentiment, through contact with other young
évolués
like himself. As president of the Muslim Students Association he entered the political arena and began ardently to pursue a goal of Franco-Algerian equality. Of pacific temperament, although he was a skilful debater, he was no rabble-rouser like Messali, and he and the proletarian supporters of Messali felt mutually ill at ease. To them, remarks one French writer: “he was a little like the cousin who had gone up to the big city, educated himself, and succeeded, but having forgotten his origins”. With his clipped moustache, long, cultured features and neatly sober dress, Abbas was the essence of the westernised, middle-class Arab
évolué
— and so were the majority of his followers. Until relatively late in his career he was a passionate protagonist of assimilation — in equality — with metropolitan France, and unlike Messali and Ben Badis he did not believe in an Algeria with a separate identity. In a much-quoted passage, he declared in 1936:

Had I discovered the Algerian nation, I would be a nationalist and I would not blush as if I had committed a crime.… However, I will not die for the Algerian nation, because it does not exist. I have not found it. I have examined History, I questioned the living and the dead, I visited cemeteries; nobody spoke to me about it. I then turned to the Koran and I sought for one solitary verse forbidding a Muslim from integrating himself with a non-Muslim nation. I did not find that either. One cannot build on the wind.

Two months later Ben Badis riposted fierily that he and the Ulema sages had also “examined History”, and had indeed discovered a “Muslim Algerian nation”, which “has its culture, its traditions and its characteristics, good or bad like every other nation of the earth. And, next, we state that this Algerian nation is not France, cannot be France, and does not wish to be France.”

The schism within the nationalist movement was wide open, a prelude to those that were to plague the Algerian revolutionary movement throughout its existence. In June 1936 a “Muslim Congress” was convened in Algiers for the first time, but the display of unity it produced was short-lived. The Blum-Viollette proposals of the same year themselves provided the root cause of a fresh split. While Ferhat Abbas and the liberals warmly welcomed them, they were attacked by Messali in violent terms as “a new instrument of colonialism aimed at dividing the Algerian people, by the usual French methods of separating the élite from the masses”.

When the Blum-Viollette Bill collapsed, however, an impossible predicament confronted the liberals: on the one hand, they saw themselves looked on as renegades by Messali and the Ulema; on the other, they were rejected by the French. It was a bitter personal disillusion for Abbas, who, from this moment, began to move away from the ideal of assimilation towards some form of autonomy for Algeria. Thus, at least ideologically, he and his supporters were brought a long step closer to the “revolutionaries” — a progression, tragic for France, that was to be repeated each time “moderate” Algerian nationalists found their overtures repulsed by the government of France, or by the
pied noir
lobbies. Modest as were the reforms it would have introduced, the abortion of the Blum-Viollette Bill undoubtedly marked a vital turning-point for the Algerian nationalist movement. At the same time it also bestowed on the
pieds noirs
a first dangerous awareness that they could call the tune on
any
reform initiated by a government in Paris.

Impact of the Second World War

The Second World War came, and with it France’s crushing defeat in 1940. To Muslim minds, particularly sensitive to prestige and
baraka,
[
9
] the humiliation made a deep impression. The reaction of many was: “France has had it; so why not pay our taxes to the Germans, instead of to France?” For the
pieds noirs
, circumstances were austere but not impossible: “there were restrictions, shortage of oil, and chickens on the balconies to lay eggs. Life was tolerable, we all more or less had a photograph of the Maréchal in the dining-room, but simply because he had a fine head of an old man,” recalls a Jewish resident of Algiers. But discrepancies with the Muslim population were marked; economic severance from the mother country, with its 100,000 Algerian wage-earners there, and successive famines caused standards of living to sink acutely. As Harold Macmillan noted in his wartime memoirs:

It is as if the Irishmen in the U.S.A. and Great Britain were to cease sending money home, and at the same time no Irish labour was going over to England for the harvest, etc., and earning money in that way.

The population is therefore very poor, and the food and clothing position among the people has caused us all a lot of worry.

On top of the humiliation of defeat was compounded the confusion of not knowing what authority represented the true France. After 1940, while the French colonies in Equatorial Africa went over to de Gaulle, Algeria remained pro-Vichy; thus, within three years, Algerians found their loyalty invoked first to Pétain, then to Darlan, then Giraud and finally de Gaulle. But even after the rise to eminence of de Gaulle, it was the shadow of the Allied colossus in the background that constantly obscured the rekindled, feeble light of the
présence française
in Algeria. Landing — once again at Sidi-Ferruch — in November 1942, the Anglo-Americans with their overwhelming weight of war material and the power and riches that this implied, in contrast to the puny resources of the Vichy French, made a powerful impact on the Algerian nationalists. They were also soon aware of the anti-colonialist creed of Roosevelt’s America, and Abbas had several meetings with Bob Murphy, the President’s personal representative in Algiers, to explore the possibility of applying the Atlantic Charter to Algeria.