As the fateful Sunday dawned, there were but two shadows cast upon what, to the bistrotier, Ortiz, looked like complete mastery and abundant prospects of success. One was Lagaillarde. Because of his departure for the Chamber of Deputies, and his ensuing split with Ortiz, Lagaillarde had deliberately been excluded from all preliminary councils-of-war. According to Lagaillarde himself at his subsequent trial, he knew nothing of what was afoot until rumours reached him at a café on the Saturday morning. This was not strictly true. Typically Lagaillarde, the Quixotic loner, without consulting Ortiz and unconsulted by him, had already jumped the gun the previous evening by seizing a building within the university perimeter. With a handful of armed henchmen (and, apparently, impelled by the precedent of his martyred great-grandfather) he had turned this into a first barricaded camp, bluntly informing the authorities (as well as Ortiz) that if anyone approached within thirty metres he would be fired upon, and that he would not quit the university until de Gaulle had yielded. To his intense annoyance, Ortiz now saw some of his best troops being siphoned off to join the more disciplined and military camp of the ex-paratrooper. Henceforth, right through the following week, there would not be one but two leaders, and two camps, and to the very end Lagaillarde’s would prove the more orderly.
A far darker shadow, however, from Ortiz’s point of view was the equivocal posture of the army. Partly egged on by the earlier assurance given by the dissident colonels, partly deluded by his own méditerranéen-et-demi optimism, Ortiz had persuaded both himself and his followers that, once they had moved, the army would give virtually total support. Now, at the eleventh hour, partly perhaps because they felt the movement was threatening to get out of hand, partly because of instructions from General Challe, Argoud and Gardes poured some cold water on Ortiz’s expectations. (The position of Gardes was by now an anomalous one; because of overplaying his hand during the past weeks he had just been posted away from the Cinquième Bureau to replace Bigeard in the field at Saida, but had as yet avoided taking up his new duties.) Ortiz was told that the feeling of the army in general was that they would not fire on him—but, on the other hand, it would not countenance a putsch. An added dampener was provided by that prominent figure from past conspiratorial occasions, General Faure, currently commanding in Kabylia, who warned Ortiz that the time was not ripe; that opinion at home was against the “ultras”, and that an insurrection now had no chance of success. Ortiz, however—pushed on by the impetus of the seething armed citizenry behind him, and driven to more precipitate action than he might perhaps otherwise have chosen by the knowledge that his rival, Lagaillarde, had stolen a march on him at the university—could not now go back. On the morning of the 24th he set up a “command post” in the elegant building of the Compagnie Algérienne, which fronted on to the main thoroughfare of the Boulevard Laferrière and Rue Charles Péguy, just across from the Hôtel des Postes. Surrounding him were 1,500 men of the F.N.F. and U.T., bristling with automatic weapons, some of them “appropriated” early that morning from an army depot.
Challe acts
Meanwhile Challe, at last appreciating the explosiveness of the situation, had taken his own precautionary measures. Realising that Lagaillarde could not now be dislodged from the university, nor Ortiz’s men disarmed without risk of bloodshed, he threw roadblocks across all the routes into the city to prevent armed reinforcements from being ferried in from the Mitidja. Under command of Lieutenant-Colonel Debrosse, all available gendarmes—totalling some two thousand—were to be concentrated in and around the Gouvernement-Général to prevent any recurrence of Lagaillarde’s coup of 13 May 1958. Reluctantly, he called for reinforcements from the 10th Para Division, currently fighting the F.L.N. in Kabylia, for what he scathingly called “a little local excitement”. At this point Challe was evidently not aware of the extent to which, through Argoud and Gardes, the paras had become implicated with Ortiz, for the 10th (now commanded by General Gracieux) was Massu’s old division, a number of its members were recruited from Algiers, and many others had sweethearts or close friends there, stemming from the days of the Battle of Algiers. Thus, ironically, both the impending insurgents and the forces of law and order were banking on the same paras as their trump card. In an attempt to calm Ortiz, at midday on the 24th Challe invited him to his headquarters and informed him of concessions that he had already “wrung” from de Gaulle; death sentences for terrorism to be resumed, “pacification” to be continued, and an assurance that there would be no political talks with the F.L.N. Ortiz found Challe munching a hasty ham sandwich at his desk, and took advantage of this to swell his esteem with his followers by boasting that he had “lunched with” the Commander-in-Chief. He also claimed that Challe had offered a “deal”, whereby if the Gouvernement-Général and other public buildings were not attacked the demonstrators would be left unharassed.
By mid-afternoon the Plateau des Glières was black with demonstrators—an estimated thirty thousand. Noticeably absent were any Muslims. Gone was the spirit of fraternisation of those May days of 1958; gone also was the good-natured atmosphere of fiesta that had prevailed at that time. In its place was a tougher and altogether more dangerous mood. At Ortiz’s “command post” there was chaos reminiscent of the headier days of the Paris Commune; everybody talked, gave orders and made speeches in an atmosphere dense with Bastos cigarette-smoke, the smell of sweat and beer. In the street below some young members of the F.N.F. began spontaneously to prise up paving-stones and create a barricade—again in the best tradition of the Commune. On Ortiz’s balcony Gardes, though now with no official function in Algiers, was seen to appear and survey the work on the barricade with evident approbation. The sight of a full colonel in uniform beside Ortiz was about all the crowd needed to endorse its belief that the army was “marching” with it. Meanwhile, just a couple of hundred yards higher up on the Forum it could see the hated mobile gendarmes and C.R.S., helmeted and equipped for mob-bashing, forming up in a threatening black line.
The fusillade of 24 January
Confronted by the challenge of the barricades now busily under construction (those thrown up simultaneously at the university by Lagaillarde already looked even more redoubtable), Challe had to act. After an angry call from Delouvrier noting Gardes’ presence with Ortiz, the dissident colonel was despatched out of Algiers to his new posting forthwith. Under Challe’s seal of approval a concerted operation was ordered whereby the demonstrators were to be herded, gently but firmly, like driven game towards the west of the city and Bab-el-Oued, whence most of them had come. It depended upon a triangular, precisely co-ordinated movement in which the gendarmes under Debrosse would advance down the steps from the Forum towards the sea (and Ortiz’s “command post”), while at the same time the paras of the 1st R.C.P. and the 1st R.E.P. (Foreign Legion) were to come in from the north and east. The two regiments were commanded respectively by Colonels Broizat and Dufour, both well known to be outspokenly sympathetic to the demonstrators. Broizat, an ex-theologian, managed still to give the (quite deceptive) appearance of a mild-mannered bishop; Dufour, at forty-seven was one of the toughest officers of the Legion who had spent much of his career in conflict with the Establishment, and of whom a general once remarked: “I have seldom met an officer as hard, even brutal, as you are towards your superiors.” To all three intervening forces, explicit orders were given that there should be no firing; weapons were to be carried unloaded, and those of the gendarmes were scrupulously checked by their officers. They were assured that their frontal advance would be covered by the paras moving up on their right flank.
At 18.00 hours the gendarmes began to move slowly down the steep slope from the Forum, into the Boulevard Laferrière with its lush central gardens. It was getting dark, and the F.N.F. camp seethed with intense excitement at the sight of the advancing gendarmes. Suddenly a couple of pistol shots rang out, fired in the gathering dusk by an unknown hand. As if it were a signal, volleys of automatic fire from windows and rooftops along both sides of
the Boulevard Laferrière opened up on the unfortunate gendarmes caught in the middle. One particularly deadly automatic rifle was spotted firing burst after burst from the balcony of Ortiz’s, “command post”, where Gardes had appeared only a few hours previously; at the fifth-floor window of another elegant apartment block Colonel Debrosse observed a woman in a dressing-gown—a modern pétroleuse—calmly emptying her revolver into the street below. Home-made bombs were dropped on the heads of the gendarmes, and tyres stuffed with plastique rolled out on to the boulevard and exploded. Caught at a terrible disadvantage, the gendarmes fell like flies before they could load up and fire back. Wounded men who crept into buildings out of the line of fire were viciously attacked by the F.N.F. within. There were horrible scenes as the catchword se payer un gendarme (“get yourself a cop”) ran round, and maddened pied noir youths mercilessly despatched wounded gendarmes in cold blood. One was found hanging by his feet in a stair well, while a para colonel witnessing the scene declared that he had never before seen wounded men so mercilessly machine-gunned as they crawled on the pavement. For three-quarters of an hour the massacre continued.
And where were the paras?
It was 18.45 before the advance guard of Dufour’s 1st R.E.P. arrived, having taken the best part of an hour to cover six hundred yards. The shooting slowly died away; but when the casualties came to be counted there were six dead and twenty-four wounded among the civil demonstrators, and no less than fourteen dead and 123 wounded in the ranks of the gendarmes. A violent exchange now took place between Dufour and an outraged Debrosse, with the latter demanding why the paras had not turned up on time, and Dufour riposting that the gendarmes, by opening fire, had breached Challe’s “pact” with Ortiz. To this day, despite the lengthy hearings of the “Barricades Trial” later in 1960, the two essential questions of who fired first, and why the luckless gendarmes were left to face the heavily armed myrmidons of Ortiz on their own, have never been satisfactorily answered. There were dubious allegations of an unknown agent provocateur (possibly of the F.L.N.?) firing those first fatal revolver shots, and Ortiz—not unnaturally—claimed that the gendarmes were to blame. But all the evidence, added to the disparity of the casualties, indicates that the culprits lay among the trigger-happy band of Ortiz, firing with or without orders. Challe in his memoirs admits that the manoeuvre of the gendarmes was a “gross error”. The excuse offered by Colonels Broizat and Dufour (unsatisfactorily vague even in their testimonies before the “Barricades Trial”) was that their two élite regiments had been held up by Lagaillarde’s barricade in the university. But in fact Broizat’s line of march ran through the tunnel that passes underneath the university buildings, out of reach of the barricade, while Dufour’s lay well clear of the whole area. It was plain from both the preceding and subsequent events that the colonels’ disastrous tardiness stemmed from a desire to avoid at all costs any clash with the insurgents.
“Barricades Week” begins
Whatever the findings of any post-mortem, however, the fact of outstanding gravity was that, for France, a catastrophic frontier in the Algerian war had been crossed. For the first time Frenchmen had fired upon, and killed, other Frenchmen; to the historically minded the dreadful spectre of the 1940s and, farther back, of 1871 presented itself. Across the breadth of France would echo the dying words of one of the Algiers gendarmerie lieutenants: “For two years I’ve been fighting against the fellagha. Now I’m dying at the hands of people who cry Algérie française! I don’t understand…!”
Within an hour or two of the end of the fusillade, Challe and Delouvrier, however, were understanding all too well the full seriousness of the situation. Backed by a majority of his senior officers, General Crépin, Massu’s recently arrived successor, made it plain to Challe that there could be no prospect of breaching the barricades, especially the well-organised redoubt manned by Lagaillarde. Or was Challe prepared to use tanks and risk “a new Budapest”—the still fresh memories of which held particular horror for the French army? Moreover, the para colonels upon whom all depended let it be known that their regiments would do no more than set up a ring round the perimeter of the barricades. Shattered by events and by the realisation of his own impotence, Challe that night made a stern broadcast declaring a state of siege over the city. But it had a minimal effect on either the insurgents or the sympathetic para colonels, all of whom were now convinced that the day was won, and that de Gaulle would have to give way.
In the course of that first night, the deadly fusillade soon forgotten, some extraordinary scenes of fraternisation took place on the barricades. Arriving at the university, Captain Pierre Sergent of the 1st R.E.P. strode up to shake Lagaillarde by the hand, assuring him, “I’ll never have you fired upon.” Women of the F.N.F. men behind the barricades were allowed to come and go as they pleased, bringing supplies of croissants, thermos flasks of coffee and wine, which were readily shared out with the passively attendant paras. On the same barricades the barmen of the Saint-George and Aletti hotels, normally bitter rivals, were found jointly dispensing hospitality. As Lagaillarde remarked at his trial, the barricades “instead of dividing, united everybody”, and, for the first three days as the weird stalemate continued, a kind of picnic spirit prevailed in the unusually balmy January weather. But amid the fraternisation one important ingredient was still pointedly missing: the Muslims. With a big effort, a few pathetic handfuls of elderly veterans were drummed up, many of them maimed and of First World War vintage; but, on the other hand, large groups of Casbah urchins gathered to chant at a discreet distance: “Algérie Arabe! À bas Massu!”
Ortiz jubilant: but de Gaulle intransigent
On the Monday morning (25 January), Ortiz was comporting himself like a triumphant pocket Duce. There was a brief fiery exchange with Lagaillarde, who habitually referred in contempt to the restaurateur’s disorderly “command post” as le café; after which each retired to rule his own roost, and Ortiz was heard to proclaim jubilantly: “Tomorrow, in Paris I shall be the ruling power!” Certainly, from the point of view of the authorities in Algiers, it looked perilously as though Ortiz held all the tricks. Arriving hastily in the city, de Gaulle’s agitated premier, Michel Debré, found Delouvrier on crutches and Challe stricken with a bout of rheumatism, conducting operations, like Marshal Saxe at Fontenoy, from a truckle bed—both of them deeply pessimistic. At Challe’s headquarters five generals and eleven field officers from General Crépin downwards told Debré flatly that the army would not fire on the barricades. It was Colonel Argoud who dotted the is by declaring that the only possible solution was for de Gaulle to renounce “self-determination”; otherwise he would be replaced by General Challe. Upon which, Debré expostulated to Delouvrier, “But you have a soviet of colonels here!” On his way out of Algiers that evening the lesson was rubbed in as Debré observed groups of paras hobnobbing with Ortiz’s men over the barricade camp-fires.
But the jubilant Ortiz reckoned without the will of one man: de Gaulle.
When the first news reached France, because of army censorship in Algiers, compounded with distraction by their own surfeit of crises at home, ordinary Frenchmen did not at first take in just how deadly was the predicament in Algeria. The country was seized by a bad bout of la grippe; a quarter of the population of Metz was reported stricken. In Paris the spring collections were beginning, amid much speculation about slipping waistlines and vanished sleeves. In New York General Douglas MacArthur was about to celebrate his 80th birthday in his retreat atop the Waldorf Towers, still fuming at his dismissal by Truman at the beginning of the decade. In England the Queen was about to give birth, Princess Margaret to get married, and Aneurin Bevan was dying, while fifty-six year-old Dr Barbara Moore was half-way on her walk from John O’Groats to Land’s End, accompanied by a mile-and-a-half line of cars. At the other end of Africa, Prime Minister Macmillan, greeted by riots in Nyasaland, was also having his “little local difficulties”.[2] At 1 a.m. on Monday, the 25th, the current Minister of Informa
tion, Roger Frey, told journalists in Paris, “By the end of the day there will be no more barricades”, words that were soon to stick in his throat.
De Gaulle had first been alerted shortly before nine o’clock on the Sunday evening, at Colombey, and was at the Elysée by midnight, displaying, from the very first, the same Olympian calm as during the explosive days of May 1958, or, indeed, as at any time of extreme crisis. In a short, unbending broadcast to the nation, he accused the Algiers insurgents of striking “a stab in the back for France, before the world.” He adjured them to return to order, adapting words that had rung out in 1940: “Nothing is lost for a Frenchman when he rejoins his mother, France.” He had been brought back to lead the country, to find for Algeria “une solution qui soit française” (a phrasing that drew growls of rage at its ambiguity in Algiers), and he intended to carry through this responsibility. He closed with an expression of his “profound confidence” in Delouvrier and Challe (a confidence that, in fact, he was far from feeling as in private he criticised both for their “irresolution”). Like Challe’s, the speech made little impact in Algiers.
The following afternoon a meeting of the cabinet was held at the Elysée in a febrile atmosphere. There were rumours of a putsch in preparation in Paris. Tempers frayed. When the old revolutionary, Malraux, declared that he could not believe “there were not four thousand men with tanks” capable of suppressing the barricades, Soustelle sneered, “Since we’ve got an atomic bomb, why not use it? Let’s drop it on Algiers, instead of at Reggane!” Less impassioned, the thirty-three-year-old Secretary for Finnance, Giscard d’Estaing, advised that any “brutal action” would simply extend the uprising all over Algeria. Over it all de Gaulle reigned aloof and unyielding. In his memoirs he wrote: “I was determined to lance the abscess, make no concessions whatever and obtain complete obedience from the army.”
A Savage War of Peace Page 53