This would, in effect, be the terrible renunciation of grace that Sékou Touré’s Guinée had chosen, alone of the French Commonwealth, in 1958. Then, secondly, there was the option of “out-and-out identification with France, such as is implied in equality of rights…Dunkirk to Tamanrasset”. i.e., the old principle of “integration”. Or, finally:
the government of Algeria by the Algerians, backed up by French help and in close relationship with her, as regards the economy, education, defence, and foreign relations. In that case, the internal regime of Algeria should be of the federal type, so that the various communities— French, Arab, Kabyle, Mozabite—who live together in the country would find guarantees for their own way of life and a framework for co-operation.
De Gaulle regarded the first option, secession, as
incredible and disastrous. Algeria being what it is at the present time, and the world what we know it to be, secession would carry in its wake the most appalling poverty, frightful political chaos, widespread slaughter, and soon after the warlike dictatorship of the Communists.
By the emphasis of his words, there was little doubt that de Gaulle’s own personal choice was the third, that of “association”. To the F.L.N. de Gaulle renewed his year-old offer of the paix des braves, adding an assurance of “unhindered return” on the path towards self-determination. At the same time he let it be known that any failure to grasp this new olive branch would rest squarely upon:
the work of a group of ambitious agitators, determined to establish by brute force and terror their totalitarian dictatorship and believing that they will one day obtain from the republic the privilege of discussing with it the fate of Algeria, thus building up these agitators into an Algerian government.
This last statement, coupled to his earlier emphasis that the key question would be “put to the Algerians as individuals”, seemed to convey an assurance that de Gaulle would never negotiate with the F.L.N. as a body, let alone hand over to them the future of the country. But with whom else could he, in the long run, negotiate? The bloody events of the preceding five years, as has already been seen, had gone far in destroying any viable “third force”, or what used to be known as an interlocuteur valable. Thus, once again, as in the previous autumn, de Gaulle’s future options were to some extent doomed to remain a prisoner of his own words. In a world of such rapid change it was also unreal to suggest that four whole years would have to elapse between any cease-fire and the referendum deciding, on de Gaulle’s three options. Given the precedent of past bad experiences with French government promises for the future, from Blum—Viollette onwards, it was asking a lot of trust and confidence from the Algerian Muslims of all political hues. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to believe (as does Edward Behr) that “Had such an offer been made in the first three years of the rebellion, it is virtually certain that it would have been immediately accepted by the rebel leaders.” It is also no exaggeration to regard de Gaulle’s “self-determination” speech of 16 September 1959 as one of the most decisive events of the whole war. Here was a true watershed; nothing that went before was any longer relevant, and nothing could be the same again. There could no longer be any convincing prospect of Algérie française. The genie was out of the bottle; once the fateful word “self-determination” was spoken, it could never be corked up again. In retrospect this was also, perhaps, the last moment in the war when there was a possibility of a compromise peace by which the pieds noirs could have remained in their beloved homeland, one way or another. If nothing else, certainly here was an end to indetermination.
First reactions
In metropolitan France de Gaulle’s speech evoked general approbation. Le Monde intoned, “De Gaulle has given France back her old prestige as the great liberal nation.” Wherever he referred to his decision, says de Gaulle, “the crowds went wild with enthusiasm”. On 16 October the Assembly passed a vote of confidence by a huge majority; only the extremes of Left and Right remained unpersuaded. But a great new gap now began to open up between metropolitan France on the one hand and the army in Algeria and the pieds noirs on the other. Two weeks later Challe wrote a sharp letter to Debré, noting that
One does not propose to soldiers to go and get killed for an imprecise final objective…. This is the difference, moreover, between the mercenary army and the citizens’ army. One can thus only ask of soldiers of the army of Algeria today that they die in order for Algeria to remain French.
At the end of October, says Challe, Delouvrier—whom he had “harassed”—returned from Paris with an assurance from Debré that “we can say both that the government wishes Algeria to remain French and that that is what the army is fighting for”. Although this seems to have been curiously at odds with the message of the “self-determination” speech, Challe was appeased—at least temporarily.
Some of his subordinates, however, immediately placed a much less favourable view on de Gaulle’s intent. At the 1st Para Regiment of the Foreign Legion, encamped next to Challe’s headquarters in the Djurdjura, Captain Sergent told his commanding officer, Colonel Dufour: “For me, the F.L.N. flag is floating over Algiers from now on. Algeria will be independent.” Dufour replied, “You’re much too pessimistic.” But at this moment Sergent says he asked himself, “What was the point any more?…on 16 September 1959 I felt myself the very old citizen of a very old country.” Up on the Morice Line, Jules Roy met a disgruntled captain who declared: “The French intellectuals want peace. We don’t have much faith in the French intellectuals; they give up too easily.” Later the captain added: “I think the army will obey. But I also think you had better not ask me to do anything more for the West.” One senior officer who reacted even more passionately was forty-five-year-old Colonel Jean Gardes, now running the Cinquième Bureau (psychological and political warfare) as a successor to Colonel Godard. On his hearing de Gaulle’s “self-determination” broadcast, Yves Courrière, the author (who was present at the time), records that Gardes “exploded”. There and then “he had made his choice”—and it was not one of the three recommended by President de Gaulle.
For the pied noir population, Alain de Sérigny in the Écho d’Alger was, at first, surprisingly mild; in the 16 September speech, he found, “there was good and bad”. Far more virulent was Robert Martel who reacted “with shame and indignation against the proposal of secession, a veritable insult to our dead and a blot upon our French dignity”, and it was along these lines that the attitude of the militant pieds noirs was to develop. The reaction of the Muslims was also variable initially: Messali Hadj, along with what other “moderate” nationalists could still be numbered, welcomed de Gaulle’s initiative. What they had striven for over the whole of a generation had been obtained, but only after five years bloody fighting by their rivals, the F.L.N. The tone of the official F.L.N. spokesmen was suspicious, critical and reserved; but the G.P.R.A. greeted the principle of “self-determination” as a step in the right direction, and announced that it was ready, under certain conditions, to begin preliminary talks. But to the most simpleminded member of the G.P.R.A. it must have been self-evident that one of the most important rounds in the war had been won, on the brink of military defeat. To his hard-pressed djounoud of the interior, the F.L.N. Minister of Defence, Belkacem Krim, issued a communiqué declaring: “Your struggle has obliged the enemy to talk of self-determination, thus renouncing the oft-repeated myth of Algérie française. His retreat is the fruit of your efforts.” The principle of “self-determination” conceded, all the F.L.N. had to do now was to fight an obdurate battle to ensure that they, and no one else, would be the interlocuteur valable with whom de Gaulle would be forced to negotiate it.
[1] This expansion of the harkis, Challe stresses with maximum emphasis to the present day, was only to be achieved if the harkis could be assured that France would never abandon Algeria and leave them to face a night-of-long-knives at the hands of a triumphant F.L.N. Challe insists that de Gaulle’s personal guarantee was implicit.
CHAPT
ER SEVENTEEN
“Aux Barricades!”:
September 1959–February 1960
No, all Algeria is not fascist, all the French are not “ultras”, all the army doesn’t torture. But Fascism, the “ultras”, and torture, they are France in Algeria.
Pierre Nora, 1961
The “ultras” inflamed: enter Susini and Pérez
ENTERING its sixth year, the Algerian war had already lasted longer than the First World War and longer than American participation in the Second. Now, as the new year of 1960 approached, it was about to bring with it events that would seal the fate of Algérie française. All that followed in the final two years of the struggle would be little more than a fore-ordained postscript. And the first notes of the tocsin would be sounded, not by the Muslims or the F.L.N., but by the pieds noirs themselves.
Since well before de Gaulle’s “self-determination” speech of 16 September, passions against him had been mounting among the ranks of pied noir “ultras”, increasingly distrustful of the policy of the man they considered they had brought back in May 1958. Already on the first anniversary of that 13 May, they had endeavoured, unsuccessfully, to turn it into a day of mourning; the “self-determination” speech, followed by another on 10 November in which de Gaulle had spelled out even more precisely his ceasefire programme, threw them into transports of rage and despair at what seemed like the certainty of his intent to sell out in Algeria. Lagaillarde, the swaggering, red-bearded ex-paratrooper, focal figure and would-be d’Artagnan of May 1958, had been elected to the Assembly that November, and had partially withdrawn from the Algiers scene. Some of Lagaillarde’s more extremist colleagues regarded this as tantamount to “collaboration” with a regime of which they increasingly disapproved. Madame Ortiz went so far as to slap his face. In Lagaillarde’s absence, Jo Ortiz, the noisy owner of the Bar du Forum, had moved in. Ortiz had chosen the fourth anniversary of the war, 1 November 1958, to launch a new body, the Front National Français (F.N.F.), embracing under one militant organisation “The Group of Seven” and all the other various “ultra” groupings. The political orientations of the F.N.F. were left in little doubt by the symbol which Ortiz, the Poujadist and admirer of Salazar, had chosen for it; the Celtic cross of the unashamedly fascist Jeune Nation movement. In the shadows behind Ortiz there now emerged a new and more effectual figure: Jean-Jacques Susini. Aged only twenty-five in 1959, Susini, who was of Corsican origin, had missed the great moments of both February 1956 and May 1958, when Ortiz and Lagaillarde had made their names with the mob, because he was still studying medicine in France. In contrast to his father, a Communist worker on the Algerian railways with pro-F.L.N. sympathies, young Jean-Jacques was as far to the Right as his father was to the Left. Returning to continue his studies in Algiers University, Susini showed an intellectual agility, an organising ability, and above all an outstanding capacity for persuading by rhetoric, that made him a natural to assume the role of student leader left vacant by Lagaillarde.
There could hardly have been more disparate figures than the two F.N.F. leaders. Ortiz, the burly, bonhomous bar-keeper with the hooked, prizefighter nose, whose swarthy features, bright ties and well-cut suits testified to his Spanish origins, epitomised the pied noir with his emotional vehemence. Born of poor parents, he had certainly shown no lack of physical courage, having fought in the French campaign of 1940, been taken prisoner but escaped, and then re-enlisted to fight again in Italy. His political philosophy, said The Times (of 27 January 1960), “in a woolly sort of way is authoritarian and neo-Fascist”; he was an unimpressive speaker, but a potent rabble-rouser through sheer volume of noise. On the other hand, Susini, sickly of physique and unprepossessing, with sparse fair hair and eyes of fire in a chalky face, was a frigid but brilliant political intellect and an impelling orator. The two were admirably complementary to each other. Then there was Dr Jean-Claude Pérez, also of Spanish descent, whose family had lived in Algeria ever since the Second Empire and had been driven out of the bistro they owned by F.L.N. bombing. A tall, good-looking man in his thirties, with wavy brown hair and an engaging smile, Dr Pérez was a general practitioner in Bab-el-Oued with wide contacts among the poorer Europeans there. He spoke their thick patois, and was highly sympathetic to their cause; a sympathy which he carried considerably beyond the normal prerogatives of a G.P.[1] Described by Yves Courrière as “made of dynamite”, Pérez, having finished his national service as a medical officer in 1955, had immediately organised one of the first urban anti-terrorist units in Algiers. The way these units worked was explained to the author by a prominent member of the O.A.S. who wishes to remain anonymous.
Often an F.L.N. cell would be detected, and the boss known, but the police would do nothing about it. So we acted as franc-tireurs; we threw a grenade or bombed an apartment; then the police had to do something, so they came along and rounded up the whole F.L.N. network. Our best operation was when we placed a bomb in the Place de Lavigerie U.G.T.A. headquarters in 1956—it blew off the legs of a couple of F.L.N. operators, and it was revealed they were making plans for seventy-three bomb attacks. Well, that was a real success; you can’t tell me that the loss of two F.L.N. wasn’t worth stopping what might have led to the deaths of hundreds of European women and children, in scenes like the Casino.
Like Ortiz, Pérez had been imprisoned briefly on suspicion of involvement in the “bazooka” case, and on charges of counter-terrorism, but subsequently released. Together with Susini they shared to the full one of the commoner and less attractive characteristics of the pied noir, that capacity for reflex violence and brutal action so penetratingly exemplified by Camus’ “Outsider”.
Ortiz’s troops
In 1959 Pérez’s principal function was to be recruiting master for the tough para-military militia Ortiz had created to give the F.N.F. teeth. These were lavishly equipped with hardware, which they kept at home, and towards the end of the year they had appeared in public for the first time, reminiscently clad in khaki shirts and brassards bearing a Celtic cross. In addition, there was the 1,200-man U.T. de Choc, an elitist offshoot of the Unités Territoriales, the pied noir Home Guard, created by Colonel “Nez-de-Cuir” Thomazo, which had readily put itself at the disposal of Ortiz and his F.N.F. Volunteers trained to be ready to move into action in the Algiers area at an hour’s notice, the members of the U.T. de Choc also kept their weapons under the bed; meanwhile, over the preceding months there had been ominous disappearances of grenades and ammunition from the Territorial arms depots. In mid-December, when the right-wing former premier, Georges Bidault, who had formed a new grouping in France called the Rassemblement de l’Algérie française, came to Algeria to speak against de Gaulle’s policy, Ortiz provided his meetings with an imposingly disciplined corps of strong-arm men 1,500 strong. All this backing of force gave the stentorian Ortiz new power and self-confidence. He raised the heat among his already fiery supporters with such incendiary exhortations as:
We shall go right to the end of the line, even with arms in our hands, to defend Algérie française….
The determination of the French of Algeria will conquer the self-determination of de Gaulle. Algiers may become Budapest, but we shall remain….
For us, henceforth, it’s either the suitcase or the coffin!
“The suitcase or the coffin!”—confronting the pieds noirs with the Hobson’s choice that to yield to majority rule would inevitably mean leaving Algeria either as corpses or refugees, the slogan was to acquire a particularly sinister significance in 1962. Another orator who cried “We need a Charlotte Corday!” was also loudly applauded; while the tone of Sérigny’s Écho d’Alger was growing daily more hostile to de Gaulle.
One of the more surprising aspects of this period was the way in which the army command permitted the creation of such a Frankenstein monster as the F.N.F., under its very nose. Harking back to an earlier period of French history, there is a curious parallel between this and the arming of the National Guard in Paris to help defen
d the city during the siege of 1870; the siege over, and the Prussians having withdrawn, the unruly National Guard then turned and rent the hand that had created it, setting up its own revolutionary Commune de Paris. Ultimately blame must attach to General Challe for allowing such a concentration of armed power to build up under the sway of someone like Jo Ortiz.
Meanwhile, as the F.L.N. sought to reassert itself in the wake of the military defeats imposed upon it by Challe and the political threat presented by de Gaulle’s “self-determination” initiative, a new wave of bombings and terrorism was unleashed. A bomb detonated outside Algiers University during the celebration of its fiftieth anniversary killed and wounded several students; between 1 December and 10 January there were twenty-two assassinations in the Algiers vicinity, while the papers were filled with horrible details of the violation and throat-cutting of wives and children of pied noir farmers out in the bled. The F.L.N. found that such hit-and-run acts of terrorism would do more to prove to the world their continued existence than trying to mount major efforts in the Wilayas, where their forces were so sorely pressed by Challe. As a result, in response to pied noir pressure, forces had to be diverted from Challe’s current offensive to provide new protection. In an attempt to calm pied noir feelings, Delegate-General Delouvrier released these figures by way of proving that terrorism was, despite appearances, decidedly on the wane:
civilians killed wounded kidnapped
June 1958 259 308 242
A Savage War of Peace Page 51