In sum, none of these factors in any way helped Sergent in his work. There were two further disadvantages; he himself, as a mere captain, was of insufficient stature to provide effective leadership; secondly, France — in sharp contrast to the cities of Algeria with their sympathetic pieds noirs — was a basically hostile territory in which to operate, becoming progressively more hostile as O.A.S. activities proliferated.
The O.A.S. in France
Accepting that from the beginning the dice were loaded against him, Sergent reckoned that “our only chance to swing in our favour a significant section of metropolitan opinion is to create a situation obliging the regime to react violently and discredit itself”. It was the traditional formula of the modern revolutionary terrorist, whether Tupamaros or Baader-Meinhof, and — as so often happens — it was to produce quite the opposite results from those desired by Sergent. Over the six months, culminating in February, that the main O.A.S. offensive in France lasted, it was to do as much as anything else to tilt French sympathies towards de Gaulle’s acceptance of a precipitate withdrawal from Algeria. Even without the O.A.S., an atmosphere of violence had been mounting in France, created between the police (now reinforced by harkis) and the Algerian community, which in itself had been progressively alienating liberal opinion. During 1961, in this savage little war no less than sixteen police were killed and forty-five wounded, most of them during the months of August and September. The police reacted with parallel brutality; according to Vidal-Naquet, “dozens of Algerians were thrown into the Seine and others were found hanged in the woods round Paris”. The gégène made its ugly appearance on the Parisian scene, and by January 1962 France-Soir was lamenting that there was “something wrong with justice” as indicted torturers repeatedly escaped sentence. In mid-October 1961 some 25,000 Algerian workers from the bidonvilles (undoubtedly activated by the F.L.N.) had launched a mass demonstration against the harsh curfew and repressive measures imposed on them by the government. Though unarmed and reasonably pacific, the demonstrators were broken up by the police with a disproportionate violence that was shocking to Parisians. It was these already muddy waters that Sergent and his O.A.S. cells had now begun to stir.
With their limited resources, the first operations of the O.A.S./Métropole had a somewhat boy scout flavour about them — especially compared with the handiwork of Degueldre’s Deltas in Algiers. Walls were covered with graffiti by night; fairly ineffectual bombs were placed to damage property while scrupulously avoiding any possible injury to life or limb; menacing letters were despatched to extort funds. But these last backfired more often than not, as when a letter demanding five million (old) francs from Brigitte Bardot simply ended up in L’Express accompanied by an indignant declaration: “for me, I’m not going along, because I don’t want to live in a Nazi country”. Already in September, says Sergent, he had given orders to cease all plastiques, because their “psychological effect could turn against us”. He dreaded “the accident which was going to cost the life of an innocent, a woman or a child”. But, rather pathetically, he claims: “We were not obeyed.” The bombings continued, and from here on it is extremely unclear as to who was actually responsible for each incident. In November the biggest bomb to date wrecked the “Drugstore” on the Champs Elysées, the aroma of scent from its smashed stocks lingering fragrantly on the pavement for some time afterwards. In December it was the turn of the newspapers; France-Soir was bombed, provoking little more than an editorial demanding “the French population has a right to be protected”; the editor-in-chief of Le Figaro was plastiqué twice. The black-and-white flag of the O.A.S. was impudently hoisted three times in a single day from the Gothic pinnacles of the Hôtel de Ville; but meanwhile, undeterred by the occasional blasting of masonry, de Gaulle all contemptuous went ahead with the meticulous cleaning of the façade of the Place de la Concorde, stage-managed by André Malraux.
“Le Monocle” steps up the bombings
At the beginning of December Sergent received an unexpected visit from an individual introducing himself under the pseudonym of “Le Monocle” (which Sergent regarded as absurdly melodramatic — and which also happened to be the name of the leading lesbian night-club of Paris in vogue at the time). His real name was André Canal, and it was his associates who had been responsible for the killing of Maître Popie before the O.A.S. had received its definitive form. Canal was a compact and muscular Frenchman in his mid-forties who had settled in Algiers in 1940 and made a fortune out of sanitary equipment. A car accident had caused the loss of his left eye, where he now wore a black monocle. To Sergent’s rage, “Le Monocle” presented his credentials in the form of a “Decision No. 14”, signed by Salan, in which the bearer was placed in charge of “France III” with the mission to “co-ordinate all the networks currently existing under the title of the O.A.S.” “Decision No. 14” ended: “All those who will not wish to place themselves under his authority, i.e. under mine, place themselves as a result outside the O.A.S.” Specifically, “Le Monocle” was to step up the tempo of the war in France. Sergent at once challenged his authority; nevertheless, under the impetus of “Le Monocle”, the bombings forthwith attained a new peak. From now on a state of rivalry bordering on open warfare would exist between Sergent’s and Canal’s groups, with each going its own way. Yet another division had opened up in the ranks of the O.A.S., and as far as the movement in France was concerned it spelled total anarchy.
Stung into greater activity by the challenge of “Le Monocle”, Sergent at the beginning of January launched into a fresh offensive; this time against the Communists. Sergent’s reasoning, echoing the self-deception that had haunted the French army all the way through the Algerian war, was that ever since 1954 the Communists had never ceased to be the principal ally of the F.L.N., and now “to live in peace with French Communism while carrying on the war with the Algerian rebels was and remains a nonsense or a treason”. A second, and perhaps even more naïve aim, was to force the Gaullists into an impossible position of either choosing to tolerate the angry reactions of the French Communist Party when attacked by the O.A.S., thus appearing as its accomplice, or to confront it and risk a breach with the Left. On 3 January a former leader of the Communist Party of Algeria was shot down at Alençon; the following day, one of Sergent’s commandos — profiting from a recent windfall of arms gained when a defecting army lieutenant had brought with him all his platoon’s weapons — machined-gunned French Communist Party headquarters in the Place Kossuth. Simultaneously, bombings were carried out on the private residences of party functionaries; but Sergent was disappointed because, for the time being, the Communists refused to react.
The fatal error: Delphine Renard
Later in January there was another sharp confrontation between Sergent and “Le Monocle”, at which Sergent claims he warned his rival that his operations were going to bring disaster upon the whole organisation, “because you will end by killing a woman or a child”. “Le Monocle” left, promising to exercise more moderation. But the very next night Sergent was enraged to learn that the rival gang had indulged in a “festival of plastique”, setting off no less than eighteen bombs. Dubbed la nuit bleue by the Paris Press, though no one was killed, it was the worst outbreak of bombings to date. The following week saw another thirteen bombings, in celebration of the second anniversary of “the Barricades”. Among them, on 22 January, was a bomb set off in the Quai d’Orsay, which killed one employee and wounded twelve others, the most lethal incident in the O.A.S. campaign in France so far. Plans captured by the Paris police enabled them to forestall, just in time, attempts to dynamite the Eiffel Tower and to explode another series of forty-eight bombs. But otherwise, as in Algiers, the metropolitan police showed an extraordinary lethargy in arresting any of the terrorist leaders. A savage cartoon in Le Canard Enchainé depicted de Gaulle sleepwalking over the roofs of Paris while, to a crowd below waving banners of “Stop the O.A.S.!” and “O.A.S. Assassins!”, Premier Debré whispers, “Quiet! You wi
ll wake him.” By now the French public was becoming thoroughly fed up with the O.A.S., and it would require but one more outrage for something to snap. There now occurred what Sergent claims he had repeatedly warned against.
The bombings had continued against writers and leaders of the Left — in fact, all those considered to be anti-Algérie française — with increasing tempo and increasing incompetence. A bomb destined for Jean-Paul Sartre’s apartment on the Rue Bonaparte was placed on the wrong floor; Sartre’s front door was torn off its hinges, but the apartments on the floor above were totally wrecked. On the morning of 7 February, among ten other bombings that day, an O.A.S. commando set out to bomb 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 a four-year-old child, Delphine Renard, was playing with her dolls. It drove splinters of glass from the windows into her face, blinding her in one eye and threatening the sight of the other, and painfully disfiguring her. Although the atrocity against Delphine would have been regarded as little more than an everyday event in contemporary Algiers, and would probably have soon been forgotten even in London of the 1970s under the far more brutal bombing outrages of the I.R.A., in the less hardened Paris of 1962 it provoked a wave of horror and condemnation of the O.A.S. Even the normally pro-Algérie française French newspapers ran huge blow-ups of little Delphine’s bloodied face and her shattered nursery. “France Wants No More of This”, intoned one editorial headline. It was the last straw; as Pierre Sergent admits: “I felt that something had definitely broken between public opinion in France and the Organisation.”[8]
Massacre in the Métro
The next day the Parisian Left exploded in rage. A demonstration was hastily organised to take place at the Bastille. Perhaps mistakenly, the Minister of the Interior, Roger Frey, refused to lift the ban currently in force on all political gatherings, but some 10,000 demonstrators gathered nevertheless. Chanting “O.-A.-S. As-sas-sins!” the crowd was in an angry mood — as much against the authorities for allowing such outrages as the bombing of Delphine to occur unpunished as against the O.A.S. The police were nervous; and, as often occurs in France, when nervous they overreact. For two or three hours there were skirmishes of clubbing as the police tried to herd the demonstrators away from the Bastille. Then, without warning, they charged. In panic, some of the demonstrators tried to seek refuge down the stairs to the Charonne Métro station, but found the gates locked. The police now appeared to go quite berserk, hurling demonstrators bodily over the railing on top of the trapped mob below, and then followed this up by heaving heavy iron tree-guards and marble-topped café tables down on to the terror-struck melée. When it was all over eight dead were picked up — including three women and a sixteen-year-old boy employed by L’Humanité. Over 100 were injured; but the police also suffered 140 casualties. On the following Tuesday, 13 February, a silent and solemn procession bearing wreaths and estimated at half a million strong marched behind the eight coffins to Père Lachaise cemetery, the sanctum of the martyrs of the French Left from the Commune of 1871 onwards. Nothing like it had been seen in Paris since the bloody days of civil revolt of February 1934; some reckoned the funeral procession to be the biggest street turnout since the Liberation. In a surfeit of emotion, Simone de Beauvoir remarked to herself, “My God! How I hated the French!” But the sense of outrage and wearied disgust at the Delphine Renard and Charonne incidents, and at the ever-escalating O.A.S. horrors in Algíers, was no longer limited to just the French Left. The crisis in the Algerian war had been reached in metropolitan France. Algérie française was all but dead — killed by the O.A.S. Almost universally there was a feeling: “Il faut en finir!”
[1] Lagaillarde continued to remain in Spain, but — according to Susini — declared his readiness to return to Algeria and join the O.A.S. provided its senior leaders would “write him personally an invitation in good and correct form”.
[2] After the collapse of the O.A.S. with Algerian independence in 1962, the “treasury” — then still totalling several hundred million (old) francs — “disappeared”. Though various allegations have been made since, the fate of it remains a mystery to this day, and (as will be seen) provides a curiously parallel story to the fate of the F.L.N. funds left over from the war — which have also never been recovered by the Algerian government.
[3] His son was murdered by the F.L.N.
[4] In fact, the Pont-sur-Seine attempt turned out to be the work of an autonomous group, affiliated to the O.A.S., and calling itself “The Old General Staff”, under the orders of Lieutenant-Colonel Bastien-Thiry — the only senior officer actually to be executed for his activities.
[5] Slang for “false beards”.
[6] In conversations with the author, Salan claimed that he had no control over O.A.S./Métropole; “There was no real chief in France, but I was prepared to accept all responsibility for what happened.”
[7] Salan in fact sent a letter to Le Monde, published on 15 September, in which he dissociated himself from the attempt, declaring melodramatically: “I would not besmirch my military past or my military honour by ordering an assassination attempt against a person whose past belongs to our nation’s history.” Quoted at his trial the following year, it may well have tipped the balance in saving him from execution.
[8] Sergent points out that the commando was not acting on his orders. Three months later André Canal, identified as the leader of “France III”, was arrested by the French police and charged with the Delphine Renard bombing. He was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment at the same time as General Jouhaud’s, and he was later amnestied.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Exodus:
January–July 1962
The whole coast is ready for departure; a shiver of adventure ripples through it. Tomorrow, perhaps, we shall leave together.
Albert Camus, 1939
De Gaulle’s “right-about turn”
“Il faut en finir!” Already, well before the O.A.S. campaign and its ugly climax, the outlook towards Algeria of the French majority had passed through phases of disenchantment and cynicism to reach one of pure apathy. By the latter part of 1961 it was approaching that of the “don’t-want-to-know” British over Northern Ireland in the mid-1970s. Algeria had been in the headlines just too long; the country was fed up with rebellious generals, raucous pieds noirs, murderous fellaghas, anti-French diatribes at the United Nations and fruitless peace talks. Once again there were many more immediate problems at home demanding attention. There was more discontent on the social scene. Because of the rate of inflation, the syndicats were angered by a wage increase limited to only 2.25 per cent, and December saw a new spate of strikes in the public sector. Manifesting that political restlessness so characteristic of it, the nation was becoming bored with its government, bored with the pudgy, vehement features of Michel Debré. Though only sixteen out of twenty-seven of his original team of ministers still remained, he had survived more than a thousand days — out-distancing the previous record set up by Waldeck-Rousseau at the turn of the century. The nation was also becoming a little bored by de Gaulle; his new year address of 29 December (though, in fact, it contained some quite dramatic clues to the way ahead) was dismissed by the Partie Socialiste Unifié as his “hollowest speech” and — more cruelly — by Le Monde as “self-satisfaction”. The O.A.S. outrages now transformed indifference into an angry impatience.
De Gaulle was, as usual, well-attuned to the country’s mood. His own gloom following the collapse of the Evian-Lugrin peace talks had been reinforced by the Pont-sur-Seine attempt on his life — potentially the most lethal of a dozen previous endeavours to assassinate him. Though shaken by the fiery blast, de Gaulle showed his customary composure at the time, but the incident undoubtedly provided one more straw to his already intolerable burden.
“I have seen many brave men in the course o
f two wars,” wrote Harold Macmillan in retrospect, “but I have seen few who had such outstanding physical and moral courage as Charles de Gaulle”. Nevertheless, by the end of 1961, believes Macmillan, “it had begun to get him down”. More than by any sense of personal fear, de Gaulle was probably most affected by the conviction (and not without reason) that he was indispensable to France. As ever, only he could cut the Gordian knot of Algeria, and ahead there still lay the daunting programme he had set himself for the renouvellement of his beloved France. None of this could be got on with so long as her gaze was distracted and her resources drained by the presence of 600,000 troops on the wrong side of the Mediterranean. And he was now seventy-one.
In the autumn of 1961 de Gaulle performed what his fellow statesman and friend, Macmillan, described as a “right-about turn”. At the time of Evian he had still believed that the Sahara could be retained for France. Since then the Bizerta debacle had taken place; with it was forfeited Bourguiba’s goodwill and any support which de Gaulle hoped for among the “riparian” states for his notion to share out the Sahara on a “community” basis. All the neighbours had become apprehensive of falling out with an independent Algeria. Now, brusquely, de Gaulle wrote off the Sahara. During his Élysée Press conference of 5 September he declared that in Algeria “it was now a matter of disengagement”, going on to declare blandly that at Evian “the question of the sovereignty of the Sahara has not been considered, as indeed it must not be by France”. For Debré, committed publicly as well as privately to retention of the Sahara, the carpet had been given a brutal tug beneath his feet. To his distressed protests de Gaulle simply replied: “This separate Sahara was an artificial construction. One must give it up.” At about this same time de Gaulle received a memorandum from a counsellor whose advice he seldom disregarded, Bernard Tricot, recently returned from his latest visit to Algeria. Shocked by the animosities he had found, Tricot wrote:
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