Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  Over Easter 1961, there were more plastic bombs in Paris, killing six and wounding fifty; a bomb in the men’s room of the Bourse injured thirty. Then, in April, came the gravest challenge to de Gaulle that the Algerian War was to bring. In Algiers on the 20th and 21st four disaffected senior generals raised the standard of revolt in the name of Algérie française—headed by a much respected airman, General Maurice Challe, and by the highly political and wily principal in the 1958 coup, General Raoul Salan. At a meeting of Cabinet ministers on the 22nd, de Gaulle predicted contemptuously that the Putsch would be “a matter of three days,” adding a scathing aside about “this army which, politically, always deludes itself.”

  De Gaulle’s premier, Michel Debré, issued somewhat hysterical instructions for “citizens” to go to any airfields where the paras might be dropping, and “convince the misled soldiers of their grave error.” Possibly the true hero of that day of utter stupefaction in Paris was Roger Frey, de Gaulle’s Minister of the Interior. With great decisiveness, he arrested a general and several other conspirators in flagrante, thereby wrecking an organized attempt to march on the capital. To this end some 1,800 lightly equipped paras had been assembled in the Forest of Orléans, and another 400 in the Forest of Rambouillet. They were to combine with tank units from Rambouillet and to move in three columns on Paris, seizing the Elysée and other key points of the administration. But, having been made leaderless by their general’s arrest, they received no orders until a detachment of gendarmes arrived and instructed them to disperse. Sheepishly, the powerful body of paras did as they were told.

  On Sunday, 23 April, Paris was an eerie place to be. Decaying Sherman tanks left over from the Second World War clattered into position outside the Assembly and other government buildings—some of them having to be towed after breaking down. No air movement round the city was allowed; buses, the Métro and trains stopped running, and even the cinemas were shut. Only the cafés stayed open, and they were packed. Then, at eight o’clock that night de Gaulle addressed the nation on television. Wearing his brigadier’s uniform once more, he spoke of his beloved army in revolt, of “the nation defied, our strength shaken, our international prestige debased, our position and our role in Africa compromised. And by whom? Hélas! Hélas! Hélas! By men whose duty, honour and raison d’être it was to serve and to obey.” At last it was time to exert his personal authority: “In the name of France, I order that all means, I repeat all means, be employed to block the road everywhere to those men … I forbid every Frenchman, and above all every soldier, to execute any of their orders.”

  In what became known as the “Battle of the Transistors,” an important essay in the power to influence via modern communications, all across Algeria French conscripts listened to de Gaulle’s speech—and heeded him. The vast majority refused to go along with their rebellious colonels and generals, and the 1961 Putsch was over. The elite Foreign Legion paras, the power behind the revolt, dynamited their barracks in Zeralda and marched out defiantly singing Piaf’s “Je ne regrette rien.” Challe, a thoroughly decent and honourable man, surrendered to French justice. He received a maximum sentence of fifteen years’ imprisonment, and loss of his rank, decorations and pensions—ruined by a commitment which had been pressed on him to “save the honour of the army,” and which he had never really wanted. Salan disappeared into hiding in Algiers, to emerge as titular head of the OAS—the Organisation Armée Secrète—that would spread indiscriminate and senseless terror across Algeria, and soon import it to Paris. De Gaulle had won again—just. But the divisions and weaknesses which the Challe revolt had displayed within the French army meant that any prospect of Algérie française was now dead. De Gaulle was forced to negotiate with the FLN rebels, and not on his terms. In May 1961, the first talks took place at Evian on Lake Geneva; by July they had failed, with the FLN holding out for total capitulation by de Gaulle.

  OAS

  In the course of the war over thirty separate attempts were made on de Gaulle’s life. On 8 September 1961, a disaffected young colonel, Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, carried out the most dramatic so far, exploding an enormous mine of plastic explosive and napalm at Pont-sur-Seine as de Gaulle’s Citroën passed on his way home to Colombey. Over the six months, up to February 1962, that the principal OAS campaign in France lasted, it was to do as much as anything to incline the French towards de Gaulle’s notion of an abrupt withdrawal from Algeria. Even without the activities of the OAS, a climate of violence had been growing in France, generated between the police and the Algerian community, a climate which in itself had been steadily arousing liberal hostility. This brutal sideshow resulted in sixteen policemen killed and forty-five wounded, most of them during August and September 1961.

  In mid-October, 25,000 Algerian workers from the bidonvilles (incited by the FLN) gathered for a mass demonstration against the draconian curfew and other repressive measures imposed on them by the government. Though unarmed and largely pacific, the demonstrators were dispersed by the police with a level of violence that appalled Parisians. At the time it was rumoured that “dozens of Algerians were thrown into the Seine and others were found hanged in the woods round Paris”; it now seems that the number of fatalities was close to 200. At the same time the deadly device of torture used by the French army in Algeria, the gégène or magneto, appeared in all its ugliness on the Parisian scene, and by January 1962 France-Soir was complaining that there was “something wrong with justice,” because indicted torturers were repeatedly escaping sentence.

  Given their limited resources, and compared with the IRA or Palestinian suicide squads, the OAS were amateurs. Bombs, planted to hurt property rather than people, often did little damage. In November 1961 the largest explosion so far destroyed the Drugstore on the Champs-Elysées, infusing the pavement with the scent from its shattered stock. At the beginning of the following month a sinister one-eyed terrorist with the pseudonym Le Monocle, André Canal, who had settled in Algiers in 1940 and made a fortune out of sanitary equipment, took the lead in the Paris campaign—at the same time warring with other OAS factions. The Communist Party, as supporters of the FLN, came under fire. On 4 January 1962 the OAS machined-gunned French Communist Party headquarters in the Place Kossuth. Simultaneously, the homes of party functionaries were bombed. Later that month Le Monocle’s gang perpetrated a “festival of plastique,” exploding eighteen bombs in a single night. The following week another thirteen bombs went off, to celebrate the second anniversary of Barricades Week. One of these, on 22 January, was detonated in the Quai d’Orsay, killing one employee and wounding twelve others. Plans captured by the Paris police enabled them to prevent, just in time, the dynamiting of the Eiffel Tower and the setting off of another forty-eight bombs. But, apart from this, the police of metropolitan France seemed reluctant to arrest any of the terrorist leaders. By this time the French public was losing patience with the OAS.

  The plastiques against writers and leaders of the left became more frequent and more inept. A bomb intended for Jean-Paul Sartre’s apartment on the Rue Bonaparte was placed on the wrong floor; Sartre’s front door was blown out, but the apartments on the floor above were destroyed. On the morning of 7 February, one of eleven bombings that day was inflicted on the Boulogne-sur-Seine home of André Malraux, de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture. Malraux lived upstairs, and anyway was absent that day. The plastique was detonated on the ground floor, close to where the four-year-old Delphine Renard was playing with her dolls. Splinters of glass blinded her in one eye and badly disfigured her.*

  Although this outrage against Delphine would have attracted little attention in contemporary Algiers, where maimings and killings were commonplace, it provoked uproar in Paris. The next day the left organized a demonstration at the Bastille. Although the Minister of the Interior, Roger Frey, refused to lift a ban on political gatherings, some 10,000 demonstrators assembled in an angry mood—as much against the authorities for allowing such atrocities to go unpunished as against the OAS. T
he police were nervous and, as so often in Paris, overreacted. After two or three hours of skirmishing, they suddenly charged without warning. In panic, a number of the demonstrators sought to escape down the stairs to the Charonne Métro station, but found the gates locked. The police now lost control of themselves, flinging demonstrators over the railings on to the heads of those penned in below, and following that up by pitching heavy iron tree-guards and marble-topped café tables down on them.

  At the end of it all, eight demonstrators lay dead, including three women and a sixteen-year-old boy, and more than a hundred were injured (the police too suffered 140 casualties). On the following Tuesday, 13 February, a grim procession estimated at half a million strong followed the eight coffins to Père Lachaise Cemetery. In an excess of emotion, Simone de Beauvoir exclaimed in her diary, “My God! How I hated the French!” The crisis in the Algerian War had been reached. Algérie française was dead—killed by the OAS.

  The OAS broke up, the last plastique exploding in Paris in July 1963. Salan was captured in Algeria in April 1962 (and later narrowly escaped a death sentence). The last attempt against de Gaulle’s life, and the one that came closest to success, took place in August 1962 at the Petit-Clamart, just outside Paris. An OAS band equipped with machine guns and led once again by Bastien-Thiry ambushed the President’s car, with Mme. de Gaulle in the back, missing them both by a hair’s breadth, the bullets passing behind the General’s head and in front of the head of his wife. Never losing his composure, de Gaulle the soldier criticized the would-be assassins as “bad shots.” Bastien-Thiry was caught and executed, the first senior French officer to stand before a firing squad in many years. His death was to no avail. The second Evian talks had been concluded in March, with de Gaulle conceding everything to the FLN, including the recently discovered Algerian oil which France had fought so hard to keep. The tricolore was finally lowered in Algeria that summer. Amid tragic scenes one million pieds noirs left Algeria and the homes that had belonged to many of them for three generations. It was a miracle, owing almost entirely to the remarkable boom in the French economy under de Gaulle, that France was able to assimilate, almost overnight, so enormous an increment in her population. In independent Algeria, after brief intermissions of hope, the killings—now of Algerians by Algerians—would continue to the present day. In France the fiercely satirical, generally heartless magazine Le Canard Enchaîné took Parisians by surprise by printing in boldest letters, “To de Gaulle, from his grateful country: once and for all, MERCI!”

  * Three months later Le Monocle was arrested by the French police and charged with the Delphine Renard bombing. He was sentenced to death, but this was commuted to life imprisonment, and he was later amnestied.

  REVIVAL

  A century before, Napoleon III had described Algeria as “a cannonball attached to the feet of France.” Now that the cannonball, unshackled, was allowed to roll away, France was “free to look at France once more,” as de Gaulle put it in 1960, and to “marry her age.” Political reform followed political reform, with referendum upon referendum—until Parisians grew tired of having to troop to the polls yet again. In fact, there were few fronts on which de Gaulle was not attacking with determination and energy in his first six plenipotentiary months from June 1958. First and foremost there was the new constitution, involving a mountainous work of drafting and consultation. “I considered it necessary,” declared de Gaulle, “for the government to derive not from parliament, in other words from the parties, but, over and above them, from a leader directly mandated by the nation as a whole and empowered to choose, to decide and to act.” The executive would be greatly strengthened, with many of the characteristics that had weakened the Third and Fourth Republics expunged from the body politic. For the first time in nearly a hundred years, France had a president vested with authority. The debilitating wrangling of the parties was a thing of the past, and so was any kind of political corruption. For the next few years under de Gaulle France enjoyed remarkable stability, unknown since the heyday of Louis Napoleon. Critics might grumble at de Gaulle’s authoritarianism, that he was “Charles XI” or a new Bonaparte, but he was never a self-serving despot or a would-be dictator. In his mystical references to “une certaine idée de la France,” if there was any viable affinity it was with Louis XIV, with his overriding pursuit of one thing: “La grandeur de la France.” That was all that ever mattered to de Gaulle, and his every act was directed to that single end.

  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. The new year of peace, 1963, began with de Gaulle closing the door on Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community, with some brutality towards his old wartime colleague and loyal advocate Harold Macmillan. No sooner had he dealt this blow to his anglo-saxon former ally than he was off to Germany, amazing everybody by his German when he delcared “Long live Franco-German friendship!”—and wooing a receptive Dr. Adenauer, like him a product of the world pre-1914. In 1965, de Gaulle broke completely with NATO, explaining that France did not want to be drawn into any war not to her own liking. (From their Paris headquarters the departure ceremony of the fourteen NATO nations took place with admirable good humour, British army bands playing “Charlie Is My Darling”—a witty musical rebuke to the deliberately absent President de Gaulle.) The President embarked France upon her own go-it-alone, nuclear force de frappe. He recognized Mao’s Peking, and in 1966 visited Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, the first Western head of state ever to do so—to the consternation of les Anglo-Saxons. The Times observed that suddenly he seemed to be “the only active revolutionary in Europe.”

  “In the year of grace 1962,” de Gaulle was able to write 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.” Indeed, so it seemed, with the ending of the Algerian War. Life began to resume its usual course. The Brittany farmers embarked upon an “artichoke war,” to the discomfort of Parisians. Academicians began to fret about the incursions of franglais. The title of the new Vadim-Bardot film, Le Repos du guerrier, seemed to characterize the era. The politician Debré was replaced at the Matignon by the banker Pompidou. France’s gross national product rose by 6.8 per cent in the course of 1962. Free of the burden of Algeria, France’s economy at last began to demonstrate a miraculous blossoming as a result of the thoughtful planning carried out during the latter years of the maligned Fourth Republic and the first four years of Gaullism. Entering its seventh year, in 1965, the Fifth Republic showed its sudden miraculous fiscal prosperity with official reserves reaching $5 billion—unequalled in all Europe except at the Bundesbank.

  Nevertheless, in the sunshine of France’s sudden climb to prosperity, the old shadows were not entirely banished. The serpent of Communism was still very much alive and wriggling in its opposition to de Gaulle and his dirigiste guidance of the economy. In October 1965 Paris was hit by a transport strike, with L’Humanité noting grandly, “In Thursday’s absence of traditional transportation, the workers took their cars to go to the factories.” It was surely the first time the Communist press had conceded that French workers were now paid well enough to own cars, rather than simply assembling them. Two years later, Paris was paralysed by what the media recorded as the greatest strike by the greatest number of workers France had ever known. Accompanied by slogans of “Down with Pompidou!” and “No Government by Decree!,” it was not a strike for wages, but a purely political strike for purely political reasons. A hundred and fifty thousand workers paraded for three hours from the Bastille to the République. As one foreign correspondent observed, “Only the sun and the moon continued their movements.”

  The style with which de Gaulle conducted his presidential life at the Elysée, seated right in the heart of Paris, reflected the style of a highly personal government and his mystical n
otion of “une certaine idée de la France.” Privately, neither de Gaulle nor his wife, Yvonne, was ever entirely happy there. Indeed, the General felt himself a prisoner. Life as head of state was entirely dedicated to the state. Excursions outside in Paris were few: to the dentist, to visit Marshal Juin dying in hospital. De Gaulle never dined in town, and after a while gave up his walks in the Bois de Boulogne, so as not to be besieged by the “curious.”

  BUILDING

  As, under the impetus of de Gaulle’s advent, all the economic and industrial plans laid under the Fourth Republic bore fruit, so too did the architecture of Paris, so long dormant, begin to burst into flower. Like the two Napoleons before him, de Gaulle showed considerable interest in plans for the city’s development, frequently intervening. As with them, every proposition was subordinated to the one overriding question—did it promote the grandeur de la France? Like Napoleon I, de Gaulle looked forward to the day when a magnificent new Paris would become the wonder, if not the formal capital, of Europe. By 1962 population figures reached seven million for greater Paris, though the central city declined to 2.7 million from the 2.9 million of 1911. It was still overcrowded—with 353 people per hectare compared to 106 in London.

  With his lofty objective in mind, de Gaulle made the inspired choice of appointing André Malraux as his Minister of Culture, a post he held until 1969—charged with taking Paris in hand. Under this remarkable man, ten years younger than de Gaulle—writer and artist, philosopher, aesthete and man of action, fighter with the Republicans in Spain, convert from Communism; scourge of both left and right, and member of the Resistance, whose life resembled a novel that might have been written by Malraux himself—the stones of Paris came to life again. It was Malraux who was responsible for the blanchissage of Paris, for digging out the lower floor of the Louvre’s Cour Carrée and returning it to its pristine glory, and restoring the Marais with the Place des Vosges, dilapidated almost to the point of total destruction, as its pièce de résistance. The cleaning of Paris by blanchissage transformed much of the capital. A secret anti-viral formula (made in Germany) was employed on the fabric of buildings, rubbed on like a paste, left to dry, then rinsed off with water. It was toothbrushing on a vast scale that filled Paris with workers in oilskins, just at the time when other buildings were being plastiqué by the OAS.