Again and again such punitive expeditions despatched into the Aurès came back empty-handed, and in the face of frustration General Spillmann’s instinct was to withdraw his undermanned forces and concentrate them on certain armed camps, like Arris, thus leaving the hills, temporarily anyway, to the rebels. Cherrière on the other hand was all in favour of the “fine-tooth comb”, the ruthless ratissage with resort to exemplary bombardments of suspect areas. But this was expressly forbidden by the Minister of the Interior. Finally it was agreed to bomb the douar of Ichmoul — on the condition that, well in advance, warning leaflets be dropped on the populace. Local administrators pleaded that the leaflets should on no account be dropped unless the bombing were definitely to take place, because of the loss of face that this would inevitably cause. Nevertheless, thousands of melodramatic warnings were cascaded on the douar:
APPEAL TO THE MUSLIM POPULATION
Agitators, among them foreigners, have provoked bloody troubles in our country and have installed themselves notably in your region. They are living off your own resources.…
SOON A TERRIFYING CALAMITY, FIRE FROM THE SKY, WILL CRASH DOWN ON THE HEADS OF THE REBELS. After which, the paix française will reign once more.
But, for all the trumpeting, there was no bombardment — called off after much argument. As predicted, the army gained the worst of both worlds, bringing down on itself as much ridicule as the fruitless ratissages that repeatedly let Ben Boulaid and his men slip through the teeth of the “fine” comb. And with such losses of face, combined with the inevitable rigours and humiliations imposed on the Auresians in the course of ratissages, a steady flow of the uncommitted began to join the F.L.N. — “more impressed by their cunning and agility than by our ineffectual power”, comments Leulliette.
The first paras arrive
Then the first of the vaunted French paras arrived, the 25th Parachute Division that Governor-General Léonard had called for on the day following the revolt. Leading its combat group was an already legendary colonel, Ducournau, a native of Pau who had distinguished himself as a commando during the 1944 landings in the south of France. Ducournau had recently returned from Indo-China, where he had narrowly escaped the catastrophe of Dien Bien Phu, and he had made a thorough study there of Viet-Minh tactics. With Ducournau the school of Indo-China arrived in Algeria. Setting up his headquarters in Arris, he immediately decided to pursue relentlessly the F.L.N. into the hills, living with the indigènes according to Mao’s often quoted principle of the “fish in water”, and taking with him as guides and trackers some of the loyal Chaouias that Jean Servier had recruited for the defence of Arris. On 29 November, after weeks of hard slogging and heartbreaking lack of success, a detachment of Ducournau’s paras was ambushed by an important rebel band in a cave-riddled ravine just north of Arris, and suffered several casualties. The colonel (who had already earned the sobriquet of “Ducournau-le-Foudre”) promptly rushed to the scene and personally took charge of operations. Pinning the rebels down with heavy fire, he encircled them in a swift and skilful turning movement. There was a fierce battle, at the end of which twenty-three dead F.L.N. were picked up, plus eighteen captives. The French lost four dead and seven wounded. Among the rebel dead — clad in an American uniform with two stars on his shoulder — was Belkacem Grine, one of the most celebrated and respected bandits d’honneur of the Aurès with a million francs on his head.
Hard months for the F.L.N.
The killing of Grine caused a considerable impact in the Aurès, and a serious blow to F.L.N. morale. It could be rated the first major French success of the shooting war so far; yet, in effect, it was something of a flash in the pan. The F.L.N., growing more experienced, wilier and more cautious about accepting combat with superior French forces, became like mountain sheep — always one ledge, one ridge higher up in the wintry mountains than their pursuers. The war in the Aurès began to bog down, to the deep dissatisfaction of Mendès-France and, even more, of the impatient pied noir leaders in Algiers.
Although this could not be perceived by the French, the situation on the rebel side during that first winter was far from encouraging. In the whole country only the Aurès had responded enthusiastically to the F.L.N.’s call to rise, and there their plight became graver week by week as Ducournau’s paras harried them from one sanctuary to another. It was an exceptionally hard winter, and the civil population, itself badly short of food, was not always hospitable to Ben Boulaid’s men. Constantly on the run, they froze and starved; a week after the tracking-down of Grine, Mohamed Sbaihi, the killer of Guy Monnerot, was himself killed; by February, Ben Boulaid had been captured. The revolt touched bottom, reduced to little more than 350 active maquisards. About all there was to show for it in the Aurès was the capture of six French paras, whom Bachir Chihani contemplated offering in exchange for Ben Boulaid.
In Kabylia, Krim experienced a similarly grim period; unable to descend from the icy mountains, and with the Kabyle villagers showing themselves by no means entirely sympathetic, he and his band had restricted themselves to blowing up electric pylons and telegraph poles, and selectively liquidating Muslim “collaborators”. In Algiers, Bitat’s and Bouadjadj’s organisation had been broken within the first ten days by police arrests, and by the spring both leaders were themselves in prison. Mourad Didouche was dead, and much of the original top and secondary leadership had disappeared; this was, admitted Ben Bella, “a terrible hindrance to our movement”. If one could draw up a balance-sheet for that first winter of the war in terms of rebel manpower alone, on the debit side the “old guard” had been largely mopped-up; on the credit side there was a plentiful substitution of new recruits resulting from the indiscriminate mass arrests in the cities and overzealous ratissages in the bled. But this remained to some extent a potential, rather than actual, asset.
Most disappointingly of all perhaps for the F.L.N. was the fact that, after the initial shock of All Saints had subsided, the pieds noirs resumed their way of life as if absolutely nothing had happened; if anything, they had averted their gaze still further from the root causes of Algerian discontent. In metropolitan France, Mendès-France had not been deflected from carrying out his North American tour in mid-November, and it was still not yet considered necessary to decree a state of emergency in Algeria. Deadlock threatened. Says Pierre Leulliette: “Fear engenders cruelty; cruelty, fear, insanity and then paralysis. In the centre of Dante’s circle, the damned remained motionless.” This vicious circle now began in Algeria.
[1] The Algerian word for soldiers (singular Djoundi).
[2] Inevitably there was some dispute as to how deliberate, or accidental, had been the shooting of the Monnerots. The “execution” of Sadok had evidently been predetermined, and one early account suggests that the Monnerots were shot down getting back into the bus afterwards. In support of this, there were warnings received earlier that French teachers might be rebel targets; on the other hand, Ben Boulaid is recorded as having passed on the C.R.U.A.’s strict interdiction of attacks on civilian personnel. None of the F.L.N. principals survived the war; Sbaihi was killed a few months later; Chihani was liquidated the following October by his fellow-lieutenant, who then changed sides; Ben Boulaid was blown up by a booby-trapped radio in the Aurès in March 1956.
[3] One is here reminded of the line of Claude Rains, as the cynical Vichy police chief, at the end of that cinema classic, Casablanca: “Arrest the usual suspects!”
CHAPTER FIVE
The Sorcerer’s Cauldron:
February 1955–February 1956
Algeria! Divided most profoundly within herself, torn between the past and the future, quartered by desires and rancours, she discharged into my face, when I leaned anxiously over her, the ardent and heavy breath of a sorcerer’s cauldron. How could one not love her, especially in her ordeal. “When your son has grown up, treat him like your brother,” says the Arab proverb; it was certainly painful, but the son had become a man, our equal, our brother. That was what one h
ad to understand.…
Jacques Soustelle
Soustelle comes: Mendès-France goes
By the new year Mendès-France had decided that, in order to further his policy and break the deadlock in Algeria, he had to replace the incumbent governor-general, Léonard, by a more imposing figure. He needed a man who was a good liberal but at the same time tough; and not just a civil servant. He needed somebody with practical experience in the underground work of the Resistance, which would help in devising anti-terrorist strategy in Algeria; and also — when the moment came — in the highly delicate work of establishing clandestine contacts in advance of negotiations. One man seemed to fill the bill: Jacques Soustelle.
“This gifted man, this brilliant intellectual, this passionate politician,” as de Gaulle termed him, was aged forty-three in 1955 and already had behind him a multiple career of academic, political thinker, administrator and man of action perhaps second only to André Malraux in his generation. After a meteoric university career he had established himself as an ethnologist of great distinction, deputy-director of the Musée de l’Homme and expert on the Aztec and Mayan civilisations. Born of working-class stock in Montpellier, Soustelle (like Malraux) had started off far to the left in his political ideology, and in 1935 he became one of the leaders of the “Vigilance Committee of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals”. On a cultural mission to Mexico in 1940, he was one of the first to rally to de Gaulle, who made him chief of the Free French secret service. Here Soustelle the academic showed both considerable talent for organisation and a perhaps surprising aptitude for cloak-and-dagger work. After the Liberation he became de Gaulle’s Minister of Information, then his Minister of the Colonies; since 1951 he had been a Gaullist deputy for Lyon, though still maintaining his left-wing orientations. Tubby and owl-like, with a meridional complexion, Soustelle, for all his intellectual brilliance and affinity for the conspiratorial, was far from being the traditional cold, steely-eyed intelligence operator; he was also a man of heart, generosity, capable of the emotions of a true “southerner”, and with an acute sense of humour — characteristics that were to shape his judgement over the ensuing crucial twelve months.
Ever loyal, Soustelle’s first act before accepting the post was to consult his old chief. “Why not?” said de Gaulle. On reporting to Mendès-France for his first briefing, Soustelle found the premier being shaved and was shocked to see how cadaverous and careworn he looked. “You will have to make the feudal forces that reign there give way,” he told Soustelle. “You will need courage to confront those big panjandrums in Algiers who, up to now, have decreed rain or shine.… Your mission will be difficult.” Above all, Mendès-France instructed him, works must be got under way to remedy unemployment, “this Algerian scourge”. Otherwise, noted Soustelle, the Mendès—Mitterrand so-called programme of reform comprised little more than total application of the 1947 statute — which “did not seem to differ very much from my own ideas”. Soustelle’s appointment was followed by long and heated discussion in the Assembly, accompanied by a vituperative whispering campaign — emanating from Algiers — in which it was suggested that he was, inter alia, a Soviet agent, a Jew like Mendès-France and his real name was “Ben-Soussan”. On 6 February, on the point of departing for Algeria, Soustelle was dismayed to learn that the Mendès-France government had fallen, torpedoed by René Mayer’s Algerian lobby and the enemies made during six brief but dynamic months in office, this time on a no-confidence vote of 319 to 273. Above the hubbub of the chamber, a defeated Mendès-France was heard to shout prophetically: “In North Africa…either there will be a policy of reconciliation, or the policy of repression and force — with all its horrible consequences.…”
Deeply bitter, Mendès-France now saw the complete collapse of his reforming radicalism. To this day he believes that, had he been enabled to continue, and backed by an Assembly of the left, he could have introduced reforms that might at least have prevented the ensuing slaughter and hatred, and have led Algeria along the evolutionary path to independence which had succeeded in Morocco and Tunisia. Who, with hindsight, can deny that he might have been vindicated? In Algeria, moderate nationalists greeted his demise with gloom; and the F.L.N. with joy, in that they regarded Mendès-France with his promises of liberal reform as the one French leader capable of achieving reconciliation and thus halting them short of their goal of total independence.
For three weeks France teetered without leadership, with various stars of the Fourth Republic failing to muster sufficient support to create a new government. Meanwhile, at a mass meeting in the “Vel d’Hiv”, a new threat to parliamentary equilibrium flexed its muscles; Pierre Poujade and his U.D.C.A. movement of militant small shopkeepers. As de Gaulle remarked with acid hauteur at the time, “In my day, grocers voted for solicitors. Today, solicitors vote for the grocers!” In Algeria there was no governor-general, Léonard having already departed to assume the presidency of the Cour des Comptes, and Soustelle was still hovering unconfirmed in limbo in Paris. By 15 February, however, it seemed certain that Edgar Faure — a more conservative radical, author of detective stories notable for their evasive endings, who in 1952 (when he had lasted forty days) had been the youngest prime minister (aged forty-four) to hold that office since the eighteenth century — would form the next government. His chosen Minister of the Interior, Bourgès-Maunoury, an old friend of Soustelle’s from Resistance days, told him that his appointment would be reconfirmed and that he should hasten to Algiers. Arriving inconspicuously in civilian clothes, instead of the regalia of office (the first governor-general to do so), Soustelle was greeted by an icily silent city: there was “not a cat on the streets”. He was “Mendès man”; or — almost as pejorative in pied noir eyes — “de Gaulle’s man”. Only Jacques Chevallier breached an implicit boycott. It was hardly an auspicious beginning.
Soustelle’s reforms
At his first meeting with the Algiers Press, Soustelle stated: “To instruct and construct, to assist to live better, to accelerate the tempo of progress already imprinted by France upon this province which is so dear to her, these are our objectives.” Next, almost immediately, he set off on a tour of the crisis zone of the Aurès. Quickly he realised both that poverty was far more dire and that the revolt was far more serious than metropolitan France yet appreciated. “Terror had taken hold. No one spoke,” he wrote later. “The population as a whole, without throwing in its lot with the rebels … remained frightened and noncommittal.” He also saw the futility of General Cherrière’s grandiose and elephantine ratissages, the ill-named Operations “Véronique” and “Violette” that were then under way, and agreed with the analysis Vaujour prepared for him on his return to Algiers: “To send in tank units, to destroy villages, to bombard certain zones, this is no longer the fine comb; it is using a sledgehammer to kill fleas. And what is much more serious, it is to encourage the young — and sometimes the less young — to go into the maquis.” No less overweight than the military effort was the administration, with its several thousand officials concentrated in Algiers, while areas half as big as France were left in charge of one French administrator and a handful of gendarmes. Everything, Soustelle found, was in need of change.
Making his début in the Algiers Assembly on 23 February, Soustelle began by reassuring the pieds noirs with the firm assertion that pacification would be his first aim. “France is at home here…,” he declared like Mitterrand and Mendès-France before him, “or rather, Algeria and all her inhabitants form an integral part of France, one and indivisible. All must know, here and elsewhere, that France will not leave Algeria any more than she will leave Provence and Brittany. Whatever happens, the destiny of Algeria is French.” So far, so good. Then Soustelle introduced a new concept: “This means that a choice has been made, and this choice is called ‘integration’. It is to make Algeria each day more completely a province, different from the others, certainly, but fully French.” Elaborating, later, on the difference between his new policy of “integration
” and the old Blum—Viollette ideal of “assimilation”, Soustelle explained that it was much the more “realist”; that it recognised the original “personality” of Algeria; that, in economic terms, it aimed at sweeping away “obsolete legacies of an imaginary autonomy affording Algeria no other privilege than that of her misery”; and that, in political terms, it was to be based upon the “immutable equality of all its inhabitants”.
After so frigid a welcome on his arrival, Soustelle was encouraged by the initial warmth with which his “integration” programme was received by the Assembly in Algiers. At top speed, and fortified by a vastly expanded budget promised by Premier Faure, he pressed ahead with his basic reforms. The administration was to be decentralised by creation of several new departments, and a dramatically increased number of Muslims was to be brought into positions of responsibility. Some of the deeply resented electoral inequities of the two-college system were to be expunged; among such reforms Muslims in the towns were to be granted parity of representation. The equally resented communes mixtes (which Soustelle saw as being “the heart of the political problem” in Algeria) were to be suppressed and broken up into elected rural communes; while to remedy the acute problem of under-administration whereby many an Algerian never encountered a representative of France, Soustelle created an entirely new corps, the Sections Administratives Specialisées or S.A.S. On the cultural scene, Arabic was to be made an official, obligatory language in Muslim schools, and the school-building programme was to be doubled. In agriculture, an embryo agrarian reform was to be initiated; while on the industrial scene a credit of five milliard francs ($148 million) was to be earmarked for the creation of public works, aimed at achieving Soustelle’s top-priority goal — “to breach the front of misery”.
A Savage War of Peace Page 15