The Atlantic and Its Enemies (23 page)

The Israelis staged a very clever operation, carried out with panache. Four Mustangs, flying only twelve feet from the ground, cut Egyptian telephone connections, and a few hundred paratroops secured the essential desert pass. By 5 November the Israelis were on the Canal, occupying, also, the entrance to the Gulf of Aqaba from which their shipping had been banned. It no doubt helped that, on 31 October, the British bombed Egyptian air bases. The day before, Eden had told the House of Commons that the Israelis and Egyptians would be told to stop while an Anglo-French force occupied the Canal Zone. He even tried to claim that this was not ‘war’, but ‘armed conflict’, and of all absurdities suspended deliveries of arms to Tel Aviv. Almost at once, problems emerged. The dollar reserves were declining, and in any case mobilization was a very slow business: the British had put resources into nuclear weaponry, and had run down the effectiveness both of their army and of their navy. They could not get troops to the Suez area inside a month, and though they did have troops at a base in Libya, they shrank from using these, for fear of offending wider opinion. In fact the Chiefs of Staff objected to an immediate action, threatening resignation: they were just not ready. A British force did eventually leave from Malta and Cyprus - bases both too far distant, given that speed was so essential: the world, confronted by the fact on the ground of an immediate occupation, might have accepted it (as Dulles later said, ‘Had they done it quickly, we’d have accepted it’ and Eisenhower shook his head: ‘I’ve just never seen Great Powers make such a complete mess’). Four days’ delay occurred, while British and American diplomats had a public wrangle. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Mountbatten, showed his usual instinct for the possible, and was only narrowly stopped from resigning as he sensed the unfolding fiasco. The Americans became incensed at being told such obvious lies by men whom they imagined they could absolutely trust, and as the Anglo-French force steamed forth, the American fleet in the area disrupted its radio communications and used submarines to shadow it. Then disaster went ahead. The Canal was blocked by the Egyptians, and oil imports dwindled, prices rising. Junior Foreign Office people threatened mass resignation. The Americans at the United Nations denounced the expedition, and that body produced a resolution in which all countries but a faithful few condemned the British and French: Eden even received a letter from Moscow on 5 November, vaguely threatening retaliation, just as the paratroops at last landed. That was bluster, but a further move was not bluster. The pound sterling was an artificially strong currency, and now the Americans refused to support the pound. It fell - reserves dropping by $50m in the first two days of November, and by 5 per cent of the total in the first week. At that rate, there would be none left by the early weeks of 1957. The end was humiliating, as the American Secretary of State told the United Nations that he could not support his allies. Just as he said so, the landings at Port Said finally occurred on 5 November, but by then it was far too late, and a ceasefire had to follow by the evening of the next day. The broken Eden retired ill to the house on Jamaica where Ian Fleming wrote his James Bond books - one imperial fantasy meeting another. The conclusion at once drawn in London was that never again would the Atlantic link be risked.

The conclusions drawn in France were rather different. She had entered upon Suez because she blamed Nasser for problems in North Africa: he supported, and inspired, an Arab nationalism there, and especially in Algeria. French governments after the war faced colonial troubles. Burke had remarked that political life was a partnership of the dead, the living and the yet unborn, but in France the dead predominated. The theory - very theoretical - behind French republicanism had been that, regardless of origin, all citizens of the republic were French. This was very far from being senseless, and even went back to the Revolution itself, when Robespierre had declared that the colonies might perish, provided that justice survived. The rising socialist François Mitterrand himself talked of a France ‘from Flanders to the Congo’, and representatives of the overseas departments or colonies sat as of right in the chamber, sometimes attaining cabinet rank. Determined, after the terrible experience of German occupation and liberation by the Americans and the British, to reassert France’s status in the world, post-war governments let themselves be dragged into a hopeless struggle to retain Vietnam. That ended with the defeat of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, after which a (brief) sensibly run government, under the Radical Pierre Mendès France, gave up. But far worse was to come in Algeria. North Africa had been taken over by the French at various stages. Tunisia and Morocco were taken over in 1881 and 1912 as protectorates, their native rulers kept intact, though controlled by the French. They were not colonies in the strict sense, nor were there many French colonists. For France to give independence in return for useful economic and cultural links was therefore not very difficult, and in 1956 this duly happened. Algeria was different. French rule went back to 1830, and the country at that time had been both vast and empty. It was also quite varied in composition, and the French could divide and rule easily enough. They developed the country, and by 1950 there were a million colonists, known as
pieds noirs
, apparently because their feet, after trampling the grapes for the wine harvest, turned black. Many of these
pieds noirs
were not French at all but came from all over the Mediterranean coasts and islands. There was much Arab immigration as well, and as medical improvements got under way, that part of the population greatly expanded (as it has continued to do). In republican ideology, Algerians were French citizens, but on the ground matters were very different: the natives - by origin in many cases no more native than the
pieds noirs
- had far less political weight, and in the 1930s French governments were dilatory about reform. In effect they were captured by the
pieds noirs
, and very few of these were prepared to concede anything to the Algerians. As often happens in such situations, from the United States through Ottoman Greece and British India, the opponents of change did have some right on their side: once the empire went, the way would be open to slavery, or ethnic cleansing, or absurd religious divisions. In any case, almost all Frenchmen were convinced that they were carrying out a civilizing mission in Algeria, and even the Communists supported
Algérie française
, though of course expecting that differences between Moslems and others would be vastly reduced in scale once the revolution applied, as in the Soviet Union, its solutions to the national question. Governments in Paris were overthrown just for suggesting reform, which came tardily. Riots and repression followed and educated Algerians, rebuffed, looked to Arab nationalism, to the example of Egypt, where Nasser had established himself at Anglo-French expense in 1952.

In any case, the collapse of the French position in Indo-China showed what might happen: Dien Bien Phu was rapidly followed by a revolt in Algeria, which started with a characteristic atrocity on All Saints’ Day. On 1 November, La Voix des Arabes from Cairo announced, ‘Today, on the fifth day of the month of Rabii of the year 1374 . . . at one o’clock in the morning, Algeria has begun to live an honourable life . . . A powerful group of free children of Algeria has started the insurrection of freedom against the tyrannical French imperialism in North Africa.’ What had happened was that, in a remote part of the country, a bus had been ambushed, a protesting village headman machine-gunned, a French schoolteacher shot dead and his wife badly wounded. The ambushers waited around for a while, in order to shoot any rescuers who arrived, but since none did, they left. The French followed this with severe repression, harassed relatively moderate Algerians, dropped bombs, and sent in troops who were only too anxious to avenge the defeat in Vietnam (where the French lost some 90,000 men). Mendès France had been sensible over Vietnam but even he reacted, in the first instance, with an ‘Ici c’est la France.’ But it was not so simple. Now, the ‘National Liberation Front’ was in a much stronger position than had been Algerian rebels in the old days, when Foreign Legionaries could romantically hold desert forts against camel-riding raiders. Several of the rebels had fought in the French army; arms could be supplied across the Tunisian border, or even as it turned out from Yugoslavia, where Tito was in full leader-of-unaligned mode; Nasser was bidding for leadership of the Arab world; and the Americans especially were not in sympathy with French colonization (on a later occasion, the American cultural centre in Algiers was burned down by enraged
pieds noirs
). Algiers itself was the scene of a foul battle in 1957, when random terrorists provoked retribution, and the French parachutists, under an implacable general, Jacques Émile Massu, restored order. One method was torture. By 1958 the army had in its way won, but the cost was enormous - in fact, a degree of hatred between the two sides (and among the Algerians themselves) that made a solution impossible. The
pieds noirs
were possessed of a collective rage, and so was much of the army. Meanwhile in Paris the politicians, facing condemnation even from allies, were facing the headache of paying for the unending war, and some of them knew that in an era of decolonization there were other ways of saving France’s position in Algeria. Oil had been discovered in the Sahara and that could be obtained easily enough through collaboration with an independent Algeria. In mid-April one government fell and a moderate, Pierre Pflimlin, took the succession. At the very hint of compromise, Algiers exploded. On 13 May the
pieds noirs
, who all along felt that metropolitan governments were not nearly harsh enough against the rebels, struck; the governor-general’s palace was stormed and sacked; parts of the army clearly sympathized; even, Massu was asked to set up a ‘Committee of Public Safety’, an emergency institution that went back to the days of the great Revolution when France had been invaded. A few days later, a parachute unit from Algeria seized the island of Corsica. There was strong pressure in Paris for a return of de Gaulle, the supreme national figure, and the Algerian French supposed that he would impose an
Algérie française
. There were enormous demonstrations in Algiers (in which a great number of Moslems joined: as ever, in such situations, the Algerian revolt was itself a civil war, and even more Moslems were killed by Moslems than by the French, whose own losses - 30,000 - were surprisingly limited for an eight-year war of this savagery).

The crisis in Algeria and the threat of an army putsch against the government itself at least put an end to the preposterous government crisis. De Gaulle had been thinking. The almost universal belief was that the colonial crises were causing the paralysis of the State. De Gaulle came to the belief that this order should be reversed - that the institutions had to be radically changed for some sensible solution to these interminable conflicts to be found, as after all the British had, more or less, managed. Vietnam stood in very stark contrast to Malaya, where the British had had to fight a long and difficult war but had been very careful to cultivate local allies who were essential to the winning of it. The fact was that a great many of the politicians more or less agreed that the institutions were absurd, and asked only to be put out of their misery in a dignified way. There was some screeching alarmism. The president of the Council of Europe, a standard-issue Belgian socialist, set the tone for many such pronouncements in the future and announced that ‘I am struck by the analogy between the Algiers insurrection and the beginnings of Franco in Spain.’ Some French opponents, and the official Communist Party, spread alarms as to a new version of the Second Empire or even of Vichy France. To that, de Gaulle had an easy answer: he was sixty-seven, not an age at which a man aspires to be dictator. In fact he was soon joined by great numbers of politicians from several parties. He agreed, for form’s sake, to address the existing assembly, did so briefly and to the point: there was crisis in everything. A new constitution was needed, with a strong executive. He was given full powers. A referendum in September endorsed what he did, and the ‘yes’ vote included about one third of the Communists’ usual number.

Changing constitutions - as French experience showed - is not always worth the effort. As Benjamin Constant, one of the many wise defeated liberals whom France produced, remarked, ‘on change de situation mais on transporte dans chacune les tourments dont on espérait se délivrer’. But in this case the constitution also represented a France that was becoming very different indeed from the France of the nineteenth century and of the interwar period. There were children; the rural masses were being broken up; industry could develop even with German competition and there were new sources of energy to supplement France’s none-too-many and none-too-rich coal mines. The historic problem, that the Right was divided, was being overcome. With de Gaulle, a conservative element became united enough at last to form a stable government (though the name of the party changed, over and over again, from UNR (Union pour la Nouvelle République) to RPR (Jacques Chirac’s Rassemblement pour la République) and whatever). It had its dissidents, but the power of the presidency was such that the spoils of office which had made governments so unstable before were now transferred in effect to the Élysée Palace and a coterie round presidents. Spoils of office remained, but at least there was governmental continuity.

Given as much, the Algerian problem was solved in so far as its abolition can be described as a solution: the
pieds noirs
, almost all of them, left in 1962. When he went to Algeria, de Gaulle had given a strong impression that he would fight for
Algérie française
, and he proclaimed economic measures that would contain some of the disastrous unemployment that came partly from the sheer terror of the war, and partly from the demographic explosion on the Moslem side. But after a year he was outlining a new policy: Algeria for the Algerians. At that, the army started to rebel again and de Gaulle produced another of his masterpieces: a television address - he practised his quite extraordinary style with much care, to be fondly remembered ever after by caricaturists - in which he began, ‘Eh bien, mon cher et vieux pays’, appealing for popular support. The army leaders were isolated in Algiers, much of the army dissociating itself, and they backed down. In control, de Gaulle could now move towards a settlement with the Algerian rebels, with whom there had been secret negotiations in Switzerland. He could always threaten that, if they went too far, the country could be partitioned, the French retaining a coastal strip. In the event, in July 1962, France recognized Algeria, retaining some rights over the Sahara oil. There had been a final outburst from the unrelenting elements in the army, four senior figures carrying out a putsch in 1961 and then going underground, striking out brutally and almost at random. But they had no future: nor perhaps did they want or expect one. In the summer of 1962, under a broiling sun, a million French settlers now left, leaving Algeria to an unhappy future.