French Foreign Legion
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Faced with this growing disorder, Sergent was deeply disappointed with the reluctance of the conspirators to act. Two of the para colonels hesitated to take the lead. Only Colonel Georges Masselot of the 18e RCP, a pied noir, offered his unequivocal support to Jouhaud. Sergent believed that Jouhaud failed to rise to the occasion, for instead of pumping up their morale with a blistering speech on the necessity to keep Algeria French, in the manner of a Legion recruiting sergeant, he merely told them to reflect before taking a final decision and give their answer to Sergent in the morning. Having slept on it, even Masselot decided that “the general situation is not favorable, we think that France is not ready and that Paris will react badly. We think that neither the navy nor the air force is with us, and that all this is an adventure which will lead to nothing.” When Sergent carried this news to Jouhaud, the general thanked him. “We must wait for another occasion,” he said.9
At last the military conspirators had been handed their Dien Bien Phu in Algeria. These Moslem counterdemonstrations, whose apparent spontaneity and size surprised even the FLN, which had orchestrated them, made a deep impression on the United Nations, which had begun to debate the Algerian question on December 6. The contention of the army and the pieds noirs that the demands for Algerian independence were the work of only a handful of Moslem militants was scuppered without a trace. The FLN saw December 1960 as the major turning point in the war. Not only did it show that de Gaulle no longer retained the power to make peace in Algeria, but also the United Nations on December 20 recognized Algeria's right “to self-determination and independence,” an important political victory in a recognized forum of international opinion.
These demonstrations also revealed the contradictions and naive assumptions upon which the conspirators, led by Sergent, had founded their faith in Algérie française. Their support of French Algeria can certainly be explained in professional terms—a desire to conserve the first significant victory for French arms since 1918, or loyalty to dead comrades. A feeling that they had given their word to loyal Moslems that France would remain also played an important role. Strategic considerations, the fear that “Africa is at stake, decolonization is the tactic,” and more specifically that the important naval station at Mers el Kébir would become a Soviet base also played a large part. Yet their commitment to Algérie française was also philosophical and moral. Most were profoundly colonialist and could not imagine French greatness without colonies. Sergent believed that what was required was an assimilation of French culture by the Moslem elite, combined with a massive program of economic reform, “des solutions d'avant-garde,” which would benefit the lower classes.10 This was, in retrospect, a rather ironic championship of Franco-Algerian integration, as in the 1980s Sergent became one of the main standard-bearers of the National Front, whose main platform is opposition to Moslem immigration into France.
Even putting aside the question of whether a Moslem elite cared to turn its back on a rich Islamic and Maghrebian heritage to embrace a French one, or whether France was prepared to make the substantial economic sacrifice required to bring the Maghreb into the twentieth century, the flaw in the conspirators’ plans remained the pieds noirs. The Algerians of European extraction had no desire to grant the Moslems equality, which was one reason why Algeria had reached its political impasse. What they wanted was a Maghrebian South Africa under French protection. Indeed, according to one account, the possibility of a “Mexican” solution—giving the Legion to a quasi-independent Algeria under pieds noir leadership— was also discussed in late I960.11 The military conspirators could not both make plans against de Gaulle with the ultras of Algérie française and also hope to win over the Moslem community. The Moslem backlash of December 1960 forced them to make a choice between the pieds noirs and the Moslems, a dilemma Masselot realized when he told a militant pied noir leader calling for military intervention, “I too am a pied noir, and get it into your head that there cannot be any Algérie française without the Arabs!” In the end, they chose the pieds noirs, who ceased their attacks on the police and, together with the paras, defended their property and lives against the Moslem insurrection.12
Government retribution following the December demonstrations fell especially heavy upon the 1er REP, which it realized was a principal hotbed of ultra sentiment in the army. All the company officers were returned to France, including Pierre Sergent, who was sent to cool his passions in Chartres. Sergent, far from contrite, discovered that his new military colleagues were completely out of sympathy with his devotion to French Algeria, insisting that the future of France lay in Europe and that of the army with modernization, not in continuing to fight a low-tech war to retain a backward country. But for Sergent this simply confirmed his belief in their lack of vision and essentially philistine outlook, and he continued to plot. While his fellow conspirators were not to be found exclusively in the 1er REP, that regiment furnished a solid core of military plotters led by Sergent, Dufour, Lieutenant Colonel Hélie de Saint Marc and Lieutenant Roger Degueldre. It would also prove to be the regiment that offered the most solid support to the “Generals’ Putsch” of April 22-26, 1961.
Why was the unprecedented fury against the government so strong in the 1er REP? The légionnaires of the 1er REP had probably seen more of the fighting than men in other regiments because it was forbidden to rotate to France, and because it experienced far less personnel turnover even than other para regiments, which were half to three-quarters made up of short-service conscripts. Some Legion officers had been in combat almost constantly since 1940, while the presence in the ranks of légionnaires like Janos Kemencei who had battled through Indochina and Algeria were not uncommon. The scars left by that fighting, both physical and psychological, were only too apparent—memories of lost battles, dead comrades, loyal Indochinese abandoned to the mercies of the Viet Minh, French indifference and governmental betrayal. That fighting had also included the politically controversial Battle of Algiers. In fact, the regiment's headquarters at Zeralda placed it in permanent contact with the overheated political climate of the first city of Algeria. Legionnaires and their officers fraternized in the cafés of the Rue Michelet with pied noir militants, inhaling the city's atmosphere, which was thick with revolutionary defiance.
This would have been a heavy historical and psychological legacy for any group to digest, especially when the arrival of de Gaulle conjured up a strong feeling of déjà vu among veterans of Indochina. However, the members of the 1er REP, especially its officers, were probably less able than others to adjust to the loss of Algeria. For generations the Légion, in common with other colonial regiments, had offered an attractive career option for men who not only sought a life of adventure, but who also were out of step and unsympathetic with republican institutions and practices, as well as some of the ideologies and attitudes of their countrymen. Many of these men, like Hélie de Saint Marc or Pierre Sergent, boasted a very strict moral sense, a tendency to see issues very much in clear-cut black-and-white terms.
Claude Paillat, who covered the Challe offensive for the magazine Paris-Match, found that the officers of the 10th Para Division, led by Saint Marc,
made me think of the children of the French Revolution: they bring liberty, they were going to regenerate people. They saw themselves as pure, a little like American missionaries in China, sometimes naïve, but fantastically generous. They came out of the shadows and said: We are going to remake a society different from these slightly rotten colonies. They had an unthinkable, superhuman dream. French society got a sense of them, but did not understand. They fell into an adventure that crushed them.13
Indeed, their singleminded adherence to an ethical code at the top of which were courage, loyalty and honor, notions uncontaminated by political realities, was one of the elements that made them such redoubtable warriors. For them, the Legion offered a refuge, an environment sympathetic to their outlook and prejudices, a world of manly sentiments and uncomplicated emotions.
Whil
e such attitudes were to be found elsewhere in the forces, especially in the paras and commando units, the fact that the Legion was a corps of foreign mercenaries served to insulate these men even more from the world of practical politics. Already the Legion possessed a developed sense of its separate identity. This had continued to grow in Algeria, as the Legion was able to measure itself both professionally and in its attitudes toward the war against the units of conscripts next to which it served. Perhaps the most obvious indication that the Legion's notion of superior status had achieved dangerous proportions came during the installation of Lieutenant Colonel Dufour as head of the 1er REP on May 1, 1959. In the traditional change-of-command ceremony, the inspector general of the Légion, General Paul Gardy, who was to play an active role in the April 1961 Generals’ Putsch, altered the address traditionally delivered on this occasion—instead of instructing légionnaires to obey their new commander “in the interest of the service, the execution of military regulations and the respect for the laws,” Gardy replaced the final clause with “the interests of the Foreign Legion.” When this was pointed out to him, he merely replied in a dismissive manner, “Oh! You know, the respect for the laws!”14
The high monastic walls thrown up by the Legion's sense of corporate identity and professionalism made that unit especially attractive to a certain type of personality. The Légion, while hard physically, was intellectually the easiest of worlds, one where orders were obeyed without question by slightly inscrutable but unquestionably loyal légionnaires. The peace of their barracks was never troubled by discussions or even debates with a rank and file of “electors” who needed to be persuaded about the utility of France's Algerian policy. Even commanders of other para units that participated in the putsch or who were sympathetic to it, like Masselot of the 18e RCP, discovered that their conscript soldiers were not prepared to follow them into rebellion.15
Nor does this growing indignation among Legion officers over de Gaulle's Algerian policy ever seem to have been shaken by the intellectual challenges of French military education, which appears to have reserved no place in its curriculum for a discussion of the function of the army within the state. These men seemed to have no real notion of strategy in a Clause-witzian sense, that the purpose of the armed forces was to serve the policy of the government (granted, that policy was often confused, nebulous or even nonexistent). It is also true that French professionals had every right to feel that they had done everything expected of them in a military sense, and that the government was in the process of squandering their hard-earned military victories in the political arena. But de Gaulle had to remind them in his Olympian manner on more than one occasion that it was not “their” war, that they had no proprietorial claim to the Algerian conflict merely because they fought and died in it. The function of the forces was to serve the interests of the state as defined by its political leaders.
But this view sold poorly in the Légion, where officers had never grasped the advantages of being able to see both sides of a question. To do so could, in fact, become dangerous because it could threaten sacrosanct regimental solidarity. The strong opinions of men like Sergent, Degueldre, or Dufour certainly dominated discussion in the mess. However, those of Saint Marc, who was interim commander of the 1er REP in April 1961, were critical in throwing a divided regiment into the opposition camp. Saint Marc had earned immense respect in the 1er REP for the almost priestly purity of his views. Once he opted to join the General's Putsch, all discussion ceased: “It was Hélie who led and ennobled the movement,” one officer testified. “Thanks to him, the putsch became a moral leap.” Two of the seven company commanders in the 1er REP had serious reservations about the decision to join the putsch.16 But once the regimental consensus had been reached, it was considered the height of disloyalty to opt out, to express a dissenting view, to elect a different course of action. This attitude had exercised a strong influence on the decisions of the officers of the 6e étranger in Syria to remain loyal to Vichy in 1941. It also played a role in keeping Legion officers who had reservations about torture during the Battle of Algiers in line, even though in theory Jeanpierre had offered the option of leaving. But requesting a transfer out of the 1er REP, probably the most prestigious regiment in the French army, was unthinkable.
Antoine Ysquierdo recounted the delicate manner with which the issue of torture had been treated by “Colonel Gypey,” his character modeled upon Jeanpierre: “I give you eight days to flush out something for me,” the colonel tells his assembled company commanders.
I know that some among you dislike this “dirty job,” or that they consider it such. Know that, as far as I'm concerned, I consider this a mission like any other, that we must complete efficiently and in a very short time. Each officer must be devoted to intelligence gathering; if it were otherwise, I would consider that some have no place in my regiment and that they are unworthy to command men like ours. No questions? . . . You're free to go!17
This solidarity was deepened by the Legion cult of the anciens and loyalty to, even veneration of, dead comrades. “Mon Colonel,” Massu had uttered at the burial of Jeanpierre, killed in action in May 1958, “we swear to you that we will die rather than abandon Algérie française.”18 This helps to explain why the funeral for the ten dead paras at Zeralda in November 1960 became such an emotional event.
As it increasingly appeared that Algeria would be cut free from France, unit loyalty and solidarity became an important factor in determining attitudes, foremost among them the feeling that without Algeria there could be no Legion. As has been noted, Algeria and Sidi-bel-Abbès had certainly not been considered sacred ground by Rollet in 1919. However, the official consecration of Sidi-bel-Abbès as the ville sainte of the Legion in 1931, followed by the withdrawal in 1956 from Tunisia and especially from Morocco, led many to cling to Algérie française as the only way to guarantee the survival of the Legion. One such man was Charles Hora: “I was for Algérie française with all my heart,” he wrote, “because the Legion could only disappear with its disappearance.”19 And while ultras could be found in many regiments, their professional reasons for supporting Algérie française were seldom as strong as those of the légionnaires. Loyalty to a numbered regiment was, after all, only temporary, and even regular para officers could envision the possibility, however impoverished, of life after Algeria. The spirit and continuity of the once-proud Armée d'Afrique had been interrupted in 1940 and had declined seriously after 1945. Besides, units in France could be designated to “carry on the traditions” of the zouaves or spahis. Even “la coloniale,” never historically a North African formation in any case, could avoid undue psychological trauma in the postcolonial world by returning to its original title of “infanterie de mariner”.
But in its own mind, one softened and shaped by its rich mythology, the unique spirit of the Legion might never survive the emigration from Algeria. In November 1961, following the failed coup of April, the commander of the 1er étranger reported that morale had been seriously undermined by fears for the future of the Legion.20 Before 1962, imaginations vivid enough to visualize the Legion adapting to the cramped barracks life of “la régulière” in Nîmes, Orange or Castelnaudary, carrying out with dignity and solemnity the ceremonies of Camerone in a Marseille bedroom community, or repatriating their dead saints Rollet and Aage to a corner of a municipal cemetery in the shadow of Mont Saint-Victoire near Aix-en-Provence simply did not exist. North Africa was considered the only stage sufficiently grand to contain such a distinguished troop of players. The irony was that through their attempts to preserve the Legion by challenging de Gaulle over Algeria, they furnished the best arguments possible for its abolition.
Therefore, to many légionnaires for whom the Legion offered a career and even a lifetime, Algeria appeared to be the last throw of the dice. They had nothing to lose, and men with a gambler's mentality were not lacking in the Légion, especially in the 1er REP, which was composed entirely of men whose métier was to take risks.
These challenges also appealed to a small thug element in the regiment, most prominent among whom was Lieutenant Roger Degueldre. Degueldre, a huge, square-jawed rock of a man, had worked his way through the ranks in Indochina, where he distinguished himself at Tra Vinh, Cochinchina, on January 21, 1950, by saving a wounded Captain Hervé de Blignières who, through Degueldre's influence, became one of the link men in the military conspiracy against de Gaulle. Degueldre deserted when he was transferred from the 1er REP to the 4e étranger, although some of the para officers continued to hide him while he helped to found the Organisation Armée Secrète, which announced its presence on January 25, 1961, with the assassination of the liberal pied noir lawyer Maître Pierre Popie. Degueldre continued to carve out a reputation as a particularly vicious terrorist as head of the OAS's Delta Force until he was dispatched, not without difficulty, by a French firing squad at Paris's Fort d'Ivry on June 28, 1962.
What the plotters who gathered in Algiers from April 20, 1961, under the leadership of none other than Maurice Challe, perhaps required was less moral purity and rather more hardheaded planning. Because Generals Challe, Jouhaud and Zeller were indignant about de Gaulle's abdication in Algeria to the FLN, they assumed incorrectly that their indignation was widely shared. Challe, who enjoyed a reputation as a left-leaning republican, was most out of place with the odd assortment of muddled military intellectuals from the army's counterinsurgency 5e bureau, hardened Legion paras trembling with readiness for adventure, spiritual advocates of Franco-Moslem unity and quasi-fascist pied noir mob orators, but he seemed to believe that a decisive demonstration of military discontent would cause a change of policy in Paris. He was dead wrong. Why Challe and his fellow conspirators who had so loathed the pusillanimous IVth Republic expected de Gaulle to react in a crisis with the same lack of backbone as most politicians of that little-regretted régime is not clear. As a man with some experience of de Gaulle, he should have realized that when challenged, the general simply dug his heels in deeper.