It seems unlikely that this was just one isolated incident; French newsreels at the time showed one sequence of a young para shooting down an unarmed Algerian in a road, then casually reloading his rifle as the man lay, still agonising and clutching at his belly. Meanwhile, by way of explanation for the “liquidating” of the Muslim prisoners, Leulliette’s Chasseur added meaningfully: “the Europeans who had survived the massacre would never have forgiven us…. They’d have come and finished them off themselves.” And, indeed, in many instances they did. In what seems like a mistaken over-reaction, the administration allowed European settlers to arm themselves in self-defence—which had been expressly vetoed by Soustelle a few months earlier. The result was that in Philippeville, claims Edward Behr, pieds noirs formed “vigilante committees, summarily executed Muslims and buried them surreptitiously while armed civilians held over-inquisitive correspondents at bay”.
As always, there is a discrepancy in the casualty figures. Soustelle states that 123 were killed by the F.L.N.-led mob on 20 August, of whom seventy-one were Europeans; while 1,273 of the “insurgents” died, two-thirds during the actual attacks. He admits, however, that “our reprisals were severe”, and it will always be open to suspicion that a great many more innocent Muslims were killed in the backlash than was ever admitted; the F.L.N., giving names and addresses, claim as high as 12,000.
The conversion of Soustelle
Immediately on hearing the news, Soustelle flew to the scene of the massacre. Nothing was concealed from his gaze; the mutilated men, the disembowelled mothers, and in Constantine hospital he visited women and children survivors “groaning in fever and in nightmare, their fingers severed, their throats half-slit”. At the burial of the victims in Philippeville, grief and rage took over, with distraught relatives trampling on the flowers sent by the administration. “The bright gaiety of the August sun,” says Soustelle of that day, “looking down with indifference on all the horrors, made them even more cruel.” He returned to Algiers utterly nauseated, deeply affected and with despair in his heart. Though he has been at pains to deny it ever since, it does seem that Philippeville marked the turning-point in the conversion of Soustelle. Certainly, from this date on determination to crush the rebellion began to assume priority over any hopes of liberal compromise, while those close to him—like Mendès-France—detected an unmistakable hardening of line. And for the Algerians of both races it was a terrible Rubicon over which there was to be no return. “It was not only the sacked houses or the poor mutilated corpses that the fellagha left in their passage,” says Soustelle “it was confidence, hope, peace. A sombre harvest of hatred sprouted in the bloodshed. Terror dominated minds. Far from being brought together by the ordeal, human beings were going to divide themselves and tear themselves to pieces.”
Horrible as it was, there is no doubt that—on the principle set out by Carlos Marighela—for the F.L.N. this new Sétif was to prove a net gain. Though some Muslims may have recoiled in disgust, by October recruitment in the North Constantine area had risen to an estimated 1,400 “regulars”—almost the highest of any of the Wilayas—and from then on it was to remain throughout the war one of the most highly contaminated areas on the army “smallpox chart”. As Soustelle himself admitted, in the war of subversion the Philippeville massacre was a victory; for, between the two communities, “there had been well and truly dug an abyss through which flowed a river of blood”. What had hitherto been, in many respects, a “phoney war”—or drôle de révolution as some French called it—now became a full-blooded war to the end. August 1955 was the beginning of what Mitterrand termed the real cercle infernale in Algeria.
Returning in September, Soustelle recorded:
One could not imagine anything more lugubrious than the atmosphere prevailing at Philippeville. It was a season of storms, and sombre clouds filled the sky. The streets were almost deserted, with the exception of armed patrols. The Europeans saw terrorists in every Muslim, the Muslims feared reprisals by the Europeans….
The stormy skies were symptomatic of the troubles pressing in on Soustelle from almost every side as 1955 drew to a close. The first, and perhaps most disappointing, blow came on 26 September when sixty-one Muslim second college deputies signed a statement repudiating “integration”. Denouncing “blind repression” and “collective responsibility” as a cause of their dissatisfaction, they declared the concept of integration to be “now out-dated”, adding: “The overwhelming majority of the population now supports the Algerian national idea.” The impact of Philippeville and its ensuing backlash was clear here, and moderate Muslim leaders had been left in no doubt that the assassination of Ferhat Abbas’s nephew had been intended as a warning for them. Next, Jacques Chevallier, in what seemed like a real stab-in-the-back to Soustelle, published a stinging criticism of his policy in Le Monde of 5 October, withdrawing his support from integration as now being “practically inapplicable”. In pain and anger Soustelle responded to the “Motion of the Sixty-one” by simply suspending the session of the Algerian Assembly. This in turn had its echo in the Palais Bourbon. For three days the National Assembly debated Algeria in mid-October; Premier Faure gave what looked like only a lukewarm support of integration, and there was increasing talk of a new solution—“federalism”. The government scraped by with 305 to 274 votes, but the only result of the prolonged debate was indecision. Another shock came from New York where, under pressure from Third World representatives and by a majority of only one in the General Assembly, the Algerian problem was tabled for the first time on the United Nations Assembly order of the day. The French delegation promptly withdrew, but it was, says Soustelle, “worth more than a convoy of arms” to the F.L.N. In the military sphere, forces at Soustelle’s disposal had now been inflated to the large total of 160,000, and towards the end of the year he claims the situation was beginning to look much brighter. A successful raid on the desert head-quarters of Bachir Chihani had produced a windfall of documents, giving the Deuxième Bureau its first clear view of the overall structure of the F.L.N. On the other hand, this had been offset by the disturbing news of the first significant desertions from Tirailleur units returned from Indo-China.
But, in Soustelle’s view, it was from Paris that the coldest wind blew. On 21 October, while inspecting army units near Constantine with Bourgès-Maunoury, the latter confided that he had to return to Paris that same night as Edgar Faure, under pressure of events in Algeria, wanted to discuss bringing the date of the forthcoming general election six months earlier. Soustelle was aghast. Flying to Paris, he pleaded with Faure that to hold elections and risk a change of government at this moment would have “lethal” consequences in Algeria. Faure was adamant, and the dissolution of the Assembly was decreed for 2 December. Time was fast running out for Soustelle.
Camus and the “civil truce”
The “Motion of the Sixty-one” and the defection of Chevallier signified that the “men of good will” of both races had got sadly thinner and thinner on the ground, as their liberal ideas became more and more diffuse and divergent. But towards the end of Soustelle’s term, however, a phenomenon occurred that kindled a brief flicker of hope; though, seen in retrospect, it was to be one of the last of its kind. The initiative had come from that great son of pied noir Algeria, and true liberal humanitarian Albert Camus. Born in 1913 of working-class petits blancs (his father was killed on the Marne the following year), Camus had made his name by the inspiring leaders he wrote in Combat, the underground newspaper he had helped found in Nazi-occupied France. After 1945 he had emerged as the intellectual conscience of the post-war generation of left-of-centre Frenchmen, had established his reputation as a major novelist, and had written a number of articles eloquently drawing attention to the plight of the indigenous Algerians. Through 1955 he had watched in anguish the escalation of atrocity and “collective responsibility” reprisal. “Everybody leans on the crime of the other to justify himself.” After Philippeville he wrote to an “Algerian militan
t” that he was “ready to despair”, adding his fear that unless there were restraints imposed by both sides “tomorrow Algeria will be a land of ruins and dead which no power in the world will be capable of resurrecting in this century”. The horrors of August decided Camus to launch a “holy war” of liberals himself, and on 16 December he proclaimed in L’Express—amid a forceful attack on Soustelle’s failure to effect “genuine reforms”—the opening of a campaign for a “civil truce”. His aim was to start by placing a limitation on the murderous character of the war through a “truce” that would outlaw all attacks on civilian non-combatants.
From the beginning the odds were heavily weighted against this idealistic sortie by Camus, perhaps a more effective writer than a politician. In France, led by his old friends Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the Left had dismissed him as a “bourgeois” renegade because of his criticism of repression in Stalinist Russia; acidly Simone de Beauvoir remarked that his language “had never sounded hollower than when he demanded pity for the civilians. The conflict was one between two civilian communities.” In Algeria the Muslims felt (not entirely without reason) that he understood their predicament less well than that of his own petit blancs; while to a large body of the more conservative pieds noirs he was totally suspect. Worst of all, the two men whom Camus selected as the Muslim lynch-pin of his campaign—Mohamed Lebjaoui, a prosperous middle-class merchant, and Amar Ouzegane, leader of the Algerian Communist Party and an old friend of Camus from his Communist days—had both become, secretly and unknown to Camus, members of the F.L.N. They decided to “penetrate” thoroughly the “civil truce” organisation and use it for their own purposes as an instrument of F.L.N. propaganda.
Arriving in Algiers, Camus was immediately shocked by the virulence of anti-liberal sentiments among the pieds noirs. At his first public meeting on 22 January 1956, a hostile mob congregated outside the hall and their shouts of “Camus au poteaul!” were clearly audible inside. On the dais with Camus was Ferhat Abbas, in one of his own last appearances as a moderate nationalist. Eloquently Camus urged: “We can at least exercise some influence on the most hateful aspect of the fight; we can propose, without making any change in the present situation, that we refrain from what makes it unforgivable—the murder of the innocent.” If this were to fail, the only prospect would be one of “definitive divorce, destruction of all hope, and a calamity of which we have so far only the feeblest idea”. Though an F.L.N. militant present accused Camus of having spoken like “a soft sister” (bonne soeur), for a time he held his mixed Muslim and European audience in a unique mood of fraternal fervour that was not to be witnessed again in Algiers until, briefly, the euphoric days of May 1958. Then the mounting hubbub outside forced Camus to cut short the meeting. The inspired but perhaps hopelessly over-idealistic notion of the “civil truce” collapsed from the stresses within and without; and with it there also died the last hope of a liberal compromise in the war. Camus, bitterly disillusioned on discovering how he and the “civil truce” movement had been traduced and “used” by the F.L.N., wrote to a close friend: “I thought myself able to speak in the name of reason, but all that is out of date, and passion carries everything before it. One has to come here to understand.” From now on he withdrew into his shell. Breaking with L’Express, Combat and France-Observateur, he was to re-emerge to write only once more about Algeria, at the beginning of 1958, before his tragic death in a car accident two years later.
The failure of the “civil truce” campaign also coincided with the end of the year of Soustelle. As Soustelle had warned Edgar Faure, the febrile uncertainty generated by the French election campaign (during which Mitterrand received a bloody nose from a well-aimed pear) had produced disastrous reactions among both Muslim and pied noir communities. The F.L.N. had seized its opportunities, and 1956 began on a thoroughly bad note for the security forces. On 2 January twenty-seven million French went to the polls and returned an astonishing and disquieting result; Faure’s governing coalition of moderates lost some hundred seats, while the Communists gained fifty-two to make them the dominant party. But the biggest shock was the phenomenon of the virtually unknown Pierre Poujade, whose faction of militant small shopkeepers collected no less than two and a half million votes and fifty-two seats, to hold a balance of power in the new Assembly. Proclaimed by his hysterical supporters as “Jeanne d’Arc and Henri IV rolled into one”, the stationer from the Auvergne was also described as being “anti-Semitic, anti-Communist, anti-democratic, anti-parliamentary”; now he had hopped on the band-waggon of being pro-pied noir. The Bourse slumped fifteen per cent, the Eiffel Tower caught fire, Mistinguett died, and the Seine froze in the most bitterly cold winter since the war. For three weeks Faure struggled to form a new government, but on 24 January he resigned and two days later Guy Mollet, the secretary-general of the Socialist Party (S.F.I.O.) took office. One of his first moves was to announce Soustelle’s replacement by the seventy-nine-year-old General Catroux, the wartime High Commissioner in Algiers. Also in Mollet’s cabinet were Mendès-France and Mitterrand.
Like his patron, Mendès-France, Soustelle had been removed from office by the caprices of French politics before anything but a superficial portion of his reform programme could be enacted. In advance of his departure he addressed to the government an important and prophetic “testament”, warning it of three main dangers ahead. First, he feared lest the morale of the army might break: “disquiet, discouragement and disgust among the military is at its peak, especially in the lower echelons, that is to say those who get themselves killed feeling that France has no gratitude for them”. Secondly, there was the danger of announcing publicly an intention to negotiate with the rebels; this would “suffice to convince the population once and for all that the rebels are winning and to induce it, for fear of reprisals, to take refuge in the camp of the victors”. Thirdly, it would be disastrous to attempt to negotiate a settlement through an ad hoc Algerian Assembly acting as an interlocuteur valable because rebel terror would swiftly reduce such a body to subservience, and it would then inevitably opt for secession from France.
On 2 February, as Soustelle made his way to the port of Algiers to embark finally for France, there took place one of those extraordinary displays of volatile and passionate emotion of which the méditerranéen-et-demi pieds noirs were capable. Tens of thousands thronged the streets shouting, “Ne partez pas!” “Revenez!” and “Soustelle, Soustelle, avec nous!” At the harbour the police lines broke and Soustelle was engulfed in a raging human sea, in which here and there a general’s kepi or an admiral’s white cap could be seen bobbing on the surface. Soustelle had to be rescued and transported to the ship on the front of an armoured car: “It took us nearly an hour to cover the 200 metres which separated us from access to the quay.” Never before, or afterwards, had any French official had such a send-off as the despised “Ben-Soussan” whom, just a year ago, the pieds noirs had received in such icy silence as the figure appointed by Mendès-France to sell them down the river. With tears in his eyes, Soustelle watched “the bay and city of Algiers in its unforgettable majesty” as it receded into the wintry haze. “But it was man, that day, who held the foreground of the scene, the people of Algiers massed on the Corniche and on the quays, their voice dominating that of nature. Ce n’est qu’un au revoir, the crowd sang.” He was deeply, passionately stirred. Never in his life before had he tasted such popularity, such a warmth of human affection. For Soustelle at this moment—and henceforth: “Algérie montait à la tête.”
CHAPTER SIX
The F.L.N.: from Bandung to Soummam:
1955–1956
It is easier to fight one’s enemies than to get on with one’s friends.
Cardinal de Retz
The F.L.N. consolidates
From the point of view of the F.L.N. leadership, the period of 1954 to 1957 has aptly been called the “heroic years”. It falls roughly into three phases; first there is that of establishment and survival, over the cruel win
ter of 1954—the truly “heroic” days. Then comes the time of consolidation: new recruits, new leaders—and with them new policies and new discords—were now acquired. Falling into several distinct categories, the new recruits included a large body from previously uncommitted Muslims; the wholesale “conversion” of Messali’s rival M.N.A.,[1] and the absorption of members of the Algerian Communist Party (P.C.A.) and desertions from the Algerian units serving with the French army; and the support of pro-Muslim individuals among the European and Jewish communities.
This expansion of the F.L.N. was by no means uniform. There were times when the affairs of one Wilaya would prosper while another would falter and almost collapse. Sometimes such faltering came about as a direct consequence of French military pressure, but much more often it was related to internal dissension among the local F.L.N. leaders, or to a combination of both. Throughout the war internal dissent and personal animosities were the F.L.N.’s single greatest enemy; on the other hand, its greatest strength was the secrecy which (like the mutinies in the French army of 1917 that the Germans never learned about until too late) prevented the French from seizing an advantage.
Various reasons have already been suggested for the F.L.N.’s recruitment successes in 1955. There was, first of all, the anger provoked by the excessive zeal of French repressive measures, in disregard of Machiavelli’s axiom, “An enemy should be destroyed or bought—and never made a martyr.” Then, perhaps more important still, there was the success of success itself: the mere fact that the F.L.N. had survived through that first winter against all the might of France was in itself a most potent recruiting agent. In the eyes of a people regarding baraka as a heaven-sent attribute, this was also greatly increased by the sheer audacity with which the moudjahiddine carried out their forays, made their proclamations and struck down those earmarked for liquidation. And there was the weapon of terror, which, with the escalation of savagery, with new leaders and new policies, was to become accepted as a technique of proven efficacy.
A Savage War of Peace Page 18